ENDGAME - so what's it about?

This book attempts to make the case that "civilization" as a concept is evil and unsustainable, and will ultimately destroy the planet and all the other "non-human" inhabitants along with our human selves... To make the case requires 20 (yes, twenty) premises... Anything that requires 20 anythings can never be easy to understand (or as my instructor informed our class when learning to disable the ejection seat in the F4-D Phantom, that anything that requires 10 safety pins can never REALLY be safe); but regardless, for this review, I'll boil them down to what appears to be the essential points:

• People need resources to survive (food, air, water, etc) and those things come from the environment you live in... The "land base"
• When you concentrate too many people into an area where they no longer can get their stuff from the environment they live in, they go abroad to get stuff, and they take it by force... Our ability to get resources depends on a willingness to use violence to get them
• Humans have some kind of growth death wish where if "you ain't growing, your dying" and they are consuming all available resources all over the planet and eventually we are going to overshoot our ability to continue to consume and then its really going to hit the fan...

Interspersed throughout is a bunch of stuff on how people are evil, "they" (note: "they" are generally assumed to be corporations and politicians as far as I can tell) are only interested in economics and increasing their own power and consumption, and so on and so on, and oh by the way, WON'T SOMEONE BLOW UP A DAMN DAM! I think Derrick is inclined to do it, but as he informs us, a) he doesn't really know how and b) he might get caught and thrown in the clink by the damn industrialists; so its kind of a non-starter for him...

He also has some folks he likes, including all manner of fishes and beasts, as well as "indigenous people" whom I presume are not like "normal" people in some important way that I've still not fathomed yet.

But anyway, he basically points out the obvious fact given current course and speed we are going not be able to "sustain" our current mode of living as it is powered by cheap and abundant fuels that are being drained from the planet at an alarming pace and in our quest to burn and destroy all the available fuel, we are laying waste to the planet, ourselves, and the non-human co-habitants that are along for the ride. He then spends the bulk of the book shooting down any alternative other than "taking down" civilization. He fully acknowledges that this also means having a few billion less people running around, and that's OK as given the lack of sustainability of the current models, its going to happen anyway. You want to get there the easy way or the hard way? And oh by the way, WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE BLOW UP A DAM!

Enough for now, you basically have the outline of the book above, and I must now go help my 16 year old daughter with her Chemistry so as she can get out of high school someday, and perhaps with enough sense to go out and help with this whole civilization thing...