Looking Back From The Future, Part 1:

A Cargo Cult Shrine...

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2007-2009 jim otterstrom

...to the Myth of Unlimited Fossil Fuels.

As oil became scarce and expensive, toward the end of the brief but fantastic 200 year Petroleum Age, people built shrines to the oil and automobile culture, continuing to drive their gas-guzzlers in the belief that some new technology would soon produce a cheap replacement for the once abundant fossil fuels which made such extravagance possible.

Unfortunately, they were wrong...

The historical photograph above was made at an actual working tire and wheel store, in one of the 10 most affluent well-educated counties in America, during the early years of the 21st Century.

Such folly seems unimaginable today as those of us who remain scavenge the grotesque ruins of that addictively consumptive oil-addled civilization for tools and materials to help make our humble lives of meager subsistence a bit easier.

But even now, scattered on the fringes of crumbling cities, there are deeply religious and highly volatile cargo cults who maintain vigils and conduct Sunday Prayer Services in ancient Gasoline Station Temples (This custom is rooted in practices beginning as early as 2008, as archived here and here).

Devotees can sometimes keep electric lights on, during sunny days, with scavenged jury-rigged solar panels and the few, dim but priceless, still working LED bulbs they've managed to scrounge.

These poor souls will explain to you, with a desperate distant gleam in their eyes, that they must keep the places "open for business" as much as possible because nobody knows for sure when the big tanker will return to fill their underground reservoirs again.

Twice a year, in late December and early April, you'll see hundreds of the devout, chanting and singing, as they make their sacred pilgrimages to distant rusted out refineries, or long dead oilfields, where they burn effigies of M. King Hubbert.

It's a pitiful and somewhat scary experience to encounter these fanatical groups who cling so mindlessly to obsolete mythologies.

But don't ever ridicule or make fun of their beliefs and rituals, they are known to become violent when confronted with conflicting viewpoints.

Anonymous journal entry

December 12, 2163

© 2009 jim otterstrom