Book: Energy of Slaves, The: Oil and the New Servitude

[Dara Shayda]

A radical analysis of our master-and-slave relationship to energy and a call for

change.

Ancient civilizations routinely relied on shackled human muscle. It took the

energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. In the early

nineteenth century, the slave trade became one of the most profitable

enterprises on the planet, and slaveholders viewed religious critics as

hostilely as oil companies now regard environmentalists. Yet when the abolition

movement finally triumphed in the 1850s, it had an invisible ally: coal and oil.

As the world's most portable and versatile workers, fossil fuels dramatically

replenished slavery's ranks with combustion engines and other labour-saving

tools. Since then, oil has transformed politics, economics, science,

agriculture, gender, and even our concept of happiness. But as Andrew Nikiforuk

argues in this provocative new book, we still behave like slaveholders in the

way we use energy, and that urgently needs to change.

Many North Americans and Europeans today enjoy lifestyles as extravagant as

those of Caribbean plantation owners. Like slaveholders, we feel entitled to

surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But

endless growth is an illusion, and now that half of the world's oil has been

burned, our energy slaves are becoming more expensive by the day. What we need,

Nikiforuk argues, is a radical new emancipation movement.

SALAAM

http://www.untiredwithloving.org/qoshairi_9_zohd.html

WE, NORTH AMERICANS, ARE TAKING THE REST OF THE PLANET AS SLAVES

Dara