CORRESPONDENCE RECEIVED TODAY AND MY REPLY, POSTED BELOW:

Gratia supponit et perficit naturam. St. Thomas Aquinas

Grace presupposes Nature and brings it to perfection.

Dear Receiver:

1. As you may have recognized, 24 November 2005 has been designated the world peak oil day. This has been done by Princeton retired Kenneth Deffeyes, former colleague of M.K. Hubbert, who formulated the principle of oil depletion. (You may google with "Deffeyes" and "Thanksgiving".)

2. Oil is our premium source of energy and thus a requirement for our global industrial civilization, with all its travel, leisure, welfare and warfare.

3. To date, science and technology have provided no substitute energy available with the versatility, and the hitherto abundance and cheapness of oil. And nobody has given promise for such a substitute in the foreseable future*.

4. Liebigs Law of The Minimum also applies to homo sapiens. Thus, the World Peak Oil Day will also be the most appropriate Global Civilization Turnover Day.

On Thursday 24 November 2005 at 12.00 GMT, I will mark our predicament with one minute standing silent. On the same date as Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859.

Please tell your Friends and join, wherever you are!

Regards
Reiel Folven

Lundamo, Norway

PS
*For 40 years I have worked with people toiling with technology.

MY REPLY:

Dear Sir -

I'd be interested to learn more of what Liebig's Law of the Minimum is. I am very concerned about Peak Oil and have been following this news for the past five years. However, please permit me to express my dismay that you are commemorating Dr. Deffeyes Thanksgiving Date of Oil Peak with Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species.

I say that Darwin is not appropriate here. Repentance is. Sorrow and repentance for our profligate and heedless ways. Darwin is appropriate in his place - but it is largely due to Darwinian thinking that we have gotten ourselves into this situation.

For additional reading I refer you to my website, particularly the following passage from my essay, "Prophetic Literature of Oil Depletion" : http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495hz/id17.html

    "

I call this literature "prophetic" or "apocalyptic" because only [then can one be] ... sufficiently awake to the multiple overtones of irony now besetting our modern condition. Indeed irony may kill us in the end. The age of cheap oil enabled us to transcend the normal human condition of scarcity and need on almost every level, but we used the new freedom to drive home the point -- in our science, in our education, in our literature -- that mankind is a species like any other. And so we acted like a species -- we over-fed, over-harvested, over-populated, we filled every niche. But the carelessness of mankind was not exactly comparable to any other animal species with the possible exception of the dinosaur.

In short, our carelessness was human, not animal. But calling ourselves animals relieved us from the burden of having to exert the effort to sustain a civilization, either spiritually or materially. And it is amazing, is it not, how neatly and how conveniently complacency came to rule all the old virtues, to stand them on their head...

The 'Animalic Era' -- for such was the materialist philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries -- failed to get to the metaphysical roots of human nature. No wonder that cheap oil was the coup de grace for the civilizing instinct in man. . . . "

I urge you to retract your commemoration of Darwin and replace it with the concept of repentance as taught in Christianity, which understood long ago the relationship between moral and physical energy.

Sincerely,