Petroleum Depletion, Economic Development, and the Concept of Terracentrism: New Directions in Critical Hermeneutics, Involving a Study of Official Publications from the UN and the OECD from 1975 to 2005

This is a study of policy statements from the UN and OECD. I explored conceptual linkages between petroleum depletion and economic development, with particular emphasis on Third World debt. Petroleum has served as the primary feedstock for the vast majority of commercial and industrial products used in modern society; however, its role has often been poorly understood. The era of relatively cheap petroleum is now over. Findings in the literature indicate that sensitivity to petroleum's socioeconomic role fluctuate in inverse proportion to its availability; moreover, the discourse on economic development varied, depending upon whether or not core or peripheral states were involved. There was no universal standard by which all states were measured. Currently, society has neither the adequate conceptual tools nor the vocabulary for construing this new challenge on a global scale. To this end, using petroleum depletion as the focus, the new theoretical approach of Terracentrism is presented as a first step toward developing a new, more Earth-centered vocabulary. The fundamental idea behind Terracentrism is to incorporate non-human, ecological, Earth-based elements into the analysis of all large-scale human and organizational systems.