by Mike Bendzela

Around the year 2005 I stumbled upon a rather disturbing website called DieOff.org, which is no longer extant. (Don’t try to go there: The url now leads to porn.) Run by the late Jay Hanson, it provided a wide-lens view of humanity’s future based on such physical realities as ecology, mining and minerals depletion and, most importantly, declining energy resources, in particular the fossil fuels. It seemed our species’ prospects were rather stark and dim (hence the site’s name). There I discovered an important article by geologists Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere called “The End of Cheap Oil,” first published in Scientific American in 1998.

I immediately recognized that I was re-encountering some of the lessons I learned in an influential college course I took in 1980 called Geology and Human Affairs, taught by professor Mark J. Camp at the University of Toledo in Ohio, co-author of Ohio Oil and Gas. I had just dropped my geology major, simply because I couldn’t hack the math and chemistry, but even as a humanities major I wanted to keep taking science courses. Camp’s course was listed as being for non-majors, so I enrolled, thinking I would be learning about historic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and perhaps about the uses of precious gems and minerals and such. Happily, I turned out to be very mistaken. It was a course I would never forget.

Camp’s course was a tour (and tour de force) through modern humanity’s dependence on the fossil fuels and other planetary energy resources. Read more »