Pericles, you mention Maslow's hierachy of needs. Isn't that what this article would want you to re-examine? We are talking of needs here, not wants. Wanting to keep up with what society tells you you require in order to be successful and happy doesn't necessariy equate with Self-actualization and happiness. It's interesting that 'rich' nations have a high number of suicides, troubled adolescents and high rate of depression.

Here's the Hierachy:

5. Self-actualization
4. Esteem: Respect
3. Belonging: Family and Friends
2. Safety: Shelter and Security
1. Physiological: Food and Water.

With the way things are going we're going to be flat strap managing rung one. The plasma TV, beautiful cars, plastic surgery, fabulous large home and empty swimming pool isn't going to make more water or fresh food.

I think there's a lot of vested interest to keep us scared of becoming more self sufficient with power and water and more frugal using this.

Anybody who's lived on tank water and used grey water, like we have, or been dependent totally on solar power and gas to run computer and everything else, like a good friend of ours, knows it is possible without going backwards at all.

In fact, I'd say, that on a human evolutionary level, re arts, making music, eating/cooking and conversing/debating with friends, acquiring or making beatiful works of visual art, theatre and books can be done very, very well without being dependent on large corporations supplying electricty and water.

By the way, we're not hippies. I like my fine clothes, my comfortable house and living in a city, but we've stepped off the race track and made some changes.

Very up to date article, Peter, so much needed in the minds of most everyone these days, even us oldies who go back to the days of kerosene lamps and mallee root fires.

Happy enough though, even during the Great Depression, and even glad to leave school early to drive a wagon team carting grain.

Yet wagon teams go back three thousand years, so young 'uns don't want to even think about it, as well as putting old great-grandpop that far back as well.

But now old grandpop has become really spoilt with wide-screen TV and most of the mod-cons, worrying that if there really is an afterlife how in the hell us new/oldies can ever put up with it.

So it is a fact that we've all been caught like a child in a room filled with new gadgety toys - finally going out in the backyard and playing in the dirt.

Aaa, ha, that last clause maybe tells us the story that the change that seems so sure to come about, could be doing the coming generations good, having to go out in the dirt for awhile to start again, maybe even replanting our forests, living in bark huts, our cereals coming from ever-green shrubs whose yearly prunings will supply power, with magnifiers so huge set up on our saltlakes, even a single one able to burn a hole in the earth on a hot summer's day, a hundred meters deep.

There is saying out on the farm about a farmer's wife who told her husband she would leave him if he cleared more
trees out to grow more crops. The answer from the ambitious young farmer was usually well if I've cleared too much, well I can always fix it.

Well, can you just, was the answer, knowing you, it will be all about f-ing it.

That's what all our future schools must be all about, us former idiot husbands showing our wives and kids we really now look to the future of our world rather than to ourselves