As of September 2008 we’ve officially entered the end of the oil age. Our economic system based on infinite growth has run into the limits of the physical world. Now that our social systems must rapidly adapt to a new reality of energy scarcity, we must pay special attention to the humans within those systems. Thom Hartmann’s Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight is a particularly lucid roadmap to a new social order by focusing on the actions an individual can take in the context of our ecological crisis.

Even though I’m sufficiently aware of the information behind Peak Oil and the oil age’s connection to rapid global population growth, I found Hartmann’s summary of this topic to be one of the best introductions available. Representing the world as varying forms of ancient sunlight is a powerful analogy that can introduce even the most encapsulated thinkers to holistic systems thinking. It reminded me of the idea that innovation can either be built on success of the past or borrowed from the future. Hartmann provides all the facts and figures necessary to demonstrate that the majority of our current lifestyle is dependent on the ancient sunlight of the past, stored in dense forms like oil and coal. Our depletion of this resource has borrowed even the most basic support systems from the future.

Yet, how can we be in a situation that is so dire yet everything looks so good? (Even though a lot of this has changed since Hartmann updated the book in 2004, because in 2009/2010 things are starting to look quite bad.) Ancient Sunlight explains that our modern industrial civilization is living off its startup capital, like a company that is building a lavish office without pushing a sustainable business model. We are blind to problems underlying economic systems and infrastructure because we don’t have to as long as we are growing, much like the enthusiasm behind a ponzi scheme before it falls apart. The severity of this situation cannot be iterated enough. An example is in human slavery, the dense form of energy we have now gives us access to hundreds of energy slaves that can drive our cars and light our houses, without this it would take many humans to do equivalent work. Coupled with collapses in biodiversity, water shortages, widespread desertification because of climate changes, and massive cutbacks in forest cover are presenting our species with a decade of significant change afoot.

Analyzing how we got here is a useful way to build a model for the future. By looking at historical examples of global cultures Ancient Sunlight draws a distinction between Younger Cultures and Older Cultures. Hartmann explains how younger cultures are warlike, agressive and obsessed with superiority while older cultures are filled with respect, integration and conservation. A poignant example is how the two cultures handle diversity, younger cultures seeking integration and dissolution of ” the other” while older cultures respect and encourage individual expressions of a cultural identity.

The younger culture is a culture of control, gaining power through its current incarnations with the powerful drugs of television and general entertainment, just two of the things that completely disconnect us from our natural environment and our birthright as humans. Hartmann provides an all encompassing look at the stories we tell ourselves about our culture, i.e. that we are separate from the world, that it is our destiny to subdue the world, get yours before anyone else can. Constrast these examples with the older culture stories, i.e that we are part of the world, that we must cooperate with the rest of nature.

Much of this comes from our view that natives were lazy and stupid, falsehoods that are overturned by even a cursory study of the accounts from ethnographers, whether of brilliant pharmacological solutions to illness in the Amazon or of the technology of the !Kung tribes which allowed them to work less than 20 hours a week. Cooperation is revealed as the basis for a new paradigm, a better society encompassed by this statement from Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Ultimately Hartmann concludes that our private practices of raising awareness and informing ourselves of these problems can lead to an empowered group ready to provide leadership as our industrial civilization loses its control. After practicing years of meditation myself, I couldn’t agree more on a better way to start. Quiet time for reflection has led me to immense personal and universal truths. After reading The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight I can see this practice has done the same for Hartmann.