Stop everything: be still and listen

There's lots of exciting action at the moment: governments are running around like headless chooks, economists are saying stupid things, ordinary folk are bewildered and don't know what the hell is going on but somehow in dear little remote Australia it's possible to believe we're all in some kind of movie with a happy ending.

The terrifying summer is suddenly gone, it rained like hell on the weekend and the crowds at the Mossvale Park Music Festival dug it all, celebrated the 3" downpour and had a good time anyway. Sales at our nursery are up again, not to a great level, not where they would have been if it were Business As Usual, but not the disaster of a few weeks ago. Wilsons Promontory is reopening for tourists on a limited basis in the next few days after more than half of it burnt in a massive weeks long blaze. Plans are in place to revive our battered local economy. At one of the committees of which I'm a member, the South Gippsland Transport Connections Partnership Group we were told that public transport to our area is to receive a huge boost with services doubling.

But to quote one of the great monsters of the twentieth century, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, these ups and downs are of momentary interest. The real story of taking place in various inhospitable and mostly unpopulated locations around the world, some distance below the surface. At The Oil Drum where the editorial staff are usually a fractious lot, a staff survey shows that most agree World Oil Production Peaked in 2008.This is news that cannot be spun and brushed aside as something of secondary importance. The fate of our Industrial Civilisation can be read on the up and down slopes of this graph…click on it for a larger image