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If you tend to take solace in being depressed, either occasionally or continually, you might want to curl up with Mr. Pogany’s prediction of our world in days to come. His book, published posthumously, predicts a future inexorably aimed at darkness before light shall rise again. It is not a doomsday scenario, but rather a warning and a clarion call for a new mode of thinking about how man, his environment, and all the things that spring from that association, must interact in decades to come.
The first thing the author suggests is that you not simply think of your world as the particular planet you happen to be living on. He would have you consider what he refers to as the Terrestrial Sphere, which consists not just of Earth but also of our sun, our moon, all the things that inhabit the earth, all the things that are produced from Earth’s inhabitants, plus the atoms that are responsible for the elements or groups of elements that make up one thermodynamic isolated Sphere. It is how man thinks and behaves within this Sphere that will dictate how well or how badly humanity deals with the inevitable consequences that are to come.
Mr. Pogany postulates that things were relatively sanguine up until World War I. The chaos it created, followed by the post World War II productivity boom, set the planet on a course of economic expansion and environmental conquest that is simply unsustainable. He would remind us that as is noted in the small type at the bottom of financial prospectuses, "past accomplishment is no guarantee of future performance. A belief that the global economy has no scale limit is both wrongheaded and dangerous. It’s not all gloom and doom however, and if you’re up for some mind-expanding forays into economics, physics, philosophy, and more, HAVOC just might be a peek at tomorrow you’ll find absorbing today.