There is a bumper sticker that says, “Unions: The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend”. The truth is probably far from it. It should be “Oil, Gas, and Coal: The Fuels That Brought You the Weekend”. Indeed, if you follow the history of workers rights in our country, it would be closely linked to the expansion of fossil fuel use. Mechanization, powered by fossil fuels, allowed people to work less and work with better working conditions. People need not do difficult work anymore, fossil fuels will do the work for them.

The advent of oil, coal, and natural gas, meant that materials became cheap and human labor became expensive. Humans became a scarce resource, while materials became plentiful. You could always mine more materials, but at the same time you couldn't exploit people as much as governments created new labor laws to provide a sense of fairness, and because such levels of human exploitation was no longer seen necessary with the event of cheap energy.

This is best demonstrated in old versus new building techniques. Buildings built prior to 1900 emphasize labor over material. They tended to have intricate designs, including complicated Today's modern buildings built since the 1950s tend to emphasize material over labor. Modern buildings tend to have massive facades of concrete or other materials, they impress by their size of unique materials, and not by the detail in design. Brutalism is probably the essence of modern design in it's crudest level.

Just as the flaws and ugliness of Brutalism has been pronounced in public, and it's style largely denounced, cheap energy has had many negative effects on our society. Cheap energy has lead to a plainess in society, and mass production. Communities have been forgotten and destroyed by the automobile. People telecommute to the reality that we want to live in – they don't have live in the real world. The automobile allows people to speed away from ugliness, and demands massive infrastructure, rather then beautiful and artfully implemented architecture.

Everybody agrees, nobody should be required to work in unreasonable conditions. Yet, liberating conditions of fossil fuels has made modern man lazy and changed his whole world not necessarily for the better. Fossil fuels have seriously polluted the environment, and made it possible to consume massive amounts of non-renewable resources at levels that we never imagined possible. Fossil fuels have made the world ugly, in uncountable ways.

As energy gets more expensive as global demand for fossil fuels increases, our world will change. I believe that it will force us to reconsider how we organize our society, and that labor will deminish in importance to material and energy. Designs of the future will be less material intensive and massive, but will involve more people, more handicraft and ability.