Ancient civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the
energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities.
Nineteenth-century slaveholders viewed critics as hostilely as oil
companies and governments now regard environmentalists. Yet the
abolition movement had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world's
most versatile workers, fossil fuels replenished slavery's ranks with
combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil
has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our
concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly
as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and
rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is
an illusion.
What we need, Andrew Nikiforuk argues in this provocative new
book, is a radical emancipation movement that ends our master-and-slave
approach to energy. We must learn to use energy on a moral, just, and
truly human scale.
Based on Gabor Maté’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and
his groundbreaking work with the severely addicted on Vancouver’s skid
row,
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts radically reenvisions this
much misunderstood field by taking a holistic approach. Dr. Maté
presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an
unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout
(and perhaps underpins) our society; not a medical "condition" distinct
from the lives it affects, rather the result of a complex interplay
among personal history, emotional, and neurological development, brain
chemistry, and the drugs (and behaviors) of addiction. Simplifying a
wide array of brain and addiction research findings from around the
globe, the book avoids glib self-help remedies, instead promoting a
thorough and compassionate self-understanding as the first key to
healing and wellness.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts argues
persuasively against contemporary health, social, and criminal justice
policies toward addiction and those impacted by it. The mix of personal
stories—including the author’s candid discussion of his own
"high-status" addictive tendencies—and science with positive solutions
makes the book equally useful for lay readers and professionals.
Lynn says:
"Alright.
I admit it. I'm a geek in the peculiar reading genre of fossil fuels.
Why? Well, because fossil fuels present an addiction like no other.... I
mean, the topic easily insinuates itself into so many other fascinating
subjects; economics, politics, agriculture, sustainability, travel,
empire, ecology, geology, human psychology (especially addiction and
denial)- not to mention spirituality and cultural anthropology or
history.... the list goes on and
on! Prized enough to be deemed as so essential (as the very air we
breathe or the food we eat) that we fight wars to secure access to or
control over fossil fuels, we live as though the oh-so-temporary energy
sources that bring comfort and light into our lives were not subject to
physical laws. Trouble is, they are finite.
2012 has been a great year
for books on the subject; Tom Wilber's Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes & the Fate of the Marcellus Shale and Steve Coll's Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power among them. The latest one
to floor me with its insights into our learned (and masterfully
facilitated) helplessness is Canadian author Andrew Nikiforuk's new The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude. After reading
Nikiforuk's book on the Tar Sands in Alberta, I was eager to see what
he'd come up with this time. Information dense and spellbinding in its
call for an ethical approach to our energy dilemmas, Energy of Slaves
pierces through to the crux of our addiction and contextualizes it
historically and culturally. Which is why, I suppose, I found myself
simultaneously reading Vancouver physician, Dr. Gabor Mate's (what is it
with these
Canadians!?) slightly older but still very incisive In the Realm of
Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction which gives an in-depth
look into addictions from heroin to alcohol to compulsive shopping on
the personal level to oil on the global level, and does so with an
engaging blend of neuroscience and compassion for our nature/nurture
quandaries around addiction's causes, the 'war on drugs' and addiction
harm-reduction.
Aside from the Canadian connection, I hadn't
even
noticed until nearly done with the second book that both books have a ball
and
chain in their cover art. Both are calls in their own ways to living
within our means and backing away from the massively
scaled globalized monoculture that would make of our lives a
fossil-fueled machine- and, instead, moving toward the impartial
observer in our minds that can
free us from our personal and collective addictions with the sobriety of
the 12 steps deeply contemplated. Whether prisoners to the combustion
engine or to cocaine, workaholism, eating disorders, smoking or other
reactive behaviors,
we all have in common the aversion/attraction dualism that would
require, well... a couple books, to better explain. These two, in my
opinion, are real treasures as embodiments of the spirit of that first
step toward recovery... you know, that one with the admission that our
lives have become unmanageable due to our addiction? Anyway, I hope both
books find a wide readership, as they provide useful traction to take
on the other 11 steps."
