I also sometimes wonder if we might create a slower buy culturally deeper and more contemplative civilization without the crystal meth that is fossil fuel.
But then again maybe not. Maybe we'd never overcome the activation energy for innovation. You can't do true experiments in history.
'Culturally deeper'? Western civilisation is the most complex culture the world has ever known.
There seems to be this strange idea that 'culture' means 'has a religious festival' or somesuch. You hear of some traveller lionising a travel destination as being so culturally deep because they happened to visit when a festival was on. Then, because the home country doesn't have that festival or ritual, it's seen as culturally bereft.
There is a ridiculously wide assortment of activities you can get involved in when you're not a scratching at the earth for subsistence - including debating the difference in what 'culture' means with someone on the other side of the world. Whether you're seeing a movie, running a fantasy football league, doling out soup in a soup kitchen, filibustering to stop some random law, fishing through your credit cards for one the plane's entertainment system will accept, chewing the fat with a passerby while sitting on your stoop on a hot night, spending a Saturday doing a gastro-tour of a great vineyard region... pretty much any activity you can think of, right down to submitting your tax forms... these are all culture. The more different kinds of people you throw together, the greater the variety of cultural activities available.
The idea that we are culturally bereft is just plain wrong. We may not have our priorities right with certain aspects of our culture, but we are drowning in culture. I just don't see how culture would be 'deeper' with less interaction between people from the removal of fossil fuels - we had that for human history up until a couple of hundred years ago, and culture was both slow to change and quite unfair, without being any deeper than it is now.
Nature is opportunistic and, to some degree, utterly immoral. The "pollution" of cyanobacteria creating an Oxygen rich atmosphere or of lignin rich trees littering the world with their branches, trunks, and stumps that wouldn't be biodegradable for tens of millions of years, all of that pales in comparison to the raw brutality of the food chain. Organisms murder one another in cold blood to steal the nutrients of their bodies. It doesn't get more opportunistic and selfish than that, but that's nature. It's only since mankind got the upper hand on nature that it's been possible to view nature in any other light than primarily harsh and uncaring (like a supernova or volcano). Humanities tendencies towards selfishness and opportunism are perfectly natural, asking us to be different is actually asking humans to be unnatural.
Which I think is justified, but we should make clear what is being asked and not painting humans as being something their not (i.e. uniquely exploitive, violent, selfish, etc.)
The biodegradability thing is pretty funny too, again human waste absolutely pales in comparison to trees and lignin, at least water bottles can't reproduce.
I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not, but I'd just like to point out that while not perfect we have 1) intelligence as individuals and 2) political mechanisms as a species that would enable a change of course (if one is possible to begin with) whereas the cyanobacteria lacked both of those things.
It's the satirization of the idea that 'mother nature' is some kind of right thinking steward of life on this planet that you commonly find amongst people who call fossil fuels meth.
Similar to the way one might satirize traditional marriage by pointing out that tradition advocates a lot of things that traditional marriage people would find abhorrent, if you take a view of tradition that extends past the start of the industrial revolution.
I don't think fleitz was being sarcastic per se - certainly I didn't read it as suggesting human evolution was a 'bad thing'.
Rather pointing out that (at the time) oxygen in the atmosphere was hostile to more complex forms of life. As we know, oxygen is a pretty unpleasant element in its raw state - but we managed to work around that particular problem.
But then again maybe not. Maybe we'd never overcome the activation energy for innovation. You can't do true experiments in history.