The End Of Oil
When there is no more energy, when the supply chains are broken and the telecommunications networks cut, when the cars have neither petrol nor battery, what will people think about? Posting an outraged comment on their dead screens? No.
They will think about surviving — the common lot of humanity before the industrial revolution. They will flee the cities like rats. They will want land. Land to live on and to feed themselves.
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Man has peeled the Earth as one peels an orange. He has removed its zest. All that remains is a pebble with silvery glints.
Of course, to hide this immense fault, we maintain the illusion by pouring on fertilisers every year and growing GMO maize. The city-dwellers drive past and see fields rippling in the wind; they are content. Yields dropping a little? Give it another spray.
And then one day, in a few decades — that is, one second on the geological scale — there will no longer be enough oil for all their chemistry. Then we will discover that there is no soil left. The yields, those dear yields that were supposed to grow to infinity, will not decline: they will collapse. Nothing, zero quintals per hectare. The emperor has no clothes. Whom will they feed with this soil hard as concrete? No one.
They will say: what if we put some earthworms back in there? Good luck, my friends. Earthworms do not like being rushed, you see. By the time you convince them, it will be famine. The food apocalypse.
Climate change, tidal waves, droughts and floods — that is an appetiser; it does not touch the essential. What makes our humanity is not the temperature. It is the soil. Imagine a summer when the cereals refuse to grow. When the seeds stay all shrivelled in the bunker we still call a field. Just one summer. The cows, sheep, chickens — all our meat on the hoof will be the first sacrificed. Vegetarian menu for everyone. Grumbling from the people. The silos will be emptied to make bread. When the reserves are exhausted: riots. A few vegetables will remain under greenhouses: people will kill each other over a leek. Imagine the following winter, when rainwater no longer seeps through a soil turned mineral. You turn on the tap: nothing left. You go and see the neighbour: nothing there either — strange. You wait a day. Not two. The cities will empty in a few hours in indescribable chaos. There will be no one left to maintain the telephone, Internet and electricity networks. The planet will plunge into darkness. The masters of the world — those who own a vegetable garden and a well — will fend off the pilfering hordes of executives, engineers and workers driven out of the cities.
The Romans knew it well: Homo comes from humus. Homo lives from humus. Then Homo destroyed humus. And without humus, no Homo. Simple.
We are still enjoying, dead drunk, the reprieve granted us by the last drops of oil. Organic matter decomposed over 300 million years in the sedimentary basins, and drunk down in 2 centuries, in great gulps.
HUMUS - Gaspard Koenig (in French, no English edition yet)