Less than a century ago our main transport was the horse. One of the major urban problems was the massive volume of manure and removal. A positive benefit to cities was the extensive planting of trees and civic fountains we still to an extent enjoy today which offsets the heat from concrete and asphalt. These weren't put there for our aesthetic pleasure, but for the horses. Very few civic planners worry about horse manure today. Both history and prehistory are replete with cultural binges of one resource or another, Pliestocene megafauna, forests, the great fish stocks, each other and now fossil fuels. We have adapted each time, from substituting short faced Cave Bears with Jupitor, Jesus and John From as dieties to technological placebos that merely increase the chasm between humanity and nature. Maybe the collapse of fossil fuel will finally wake us up to the limits of materialism versus the limitless options of being true caretakers of our world. The irony is a far more critical shortage is looming allready- water. Maybe Aron Ralston should give motivational speeches about that, having symbolically drunk what world 'leaders' are doing to their constituents <img src="/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />