permaculture

[Saor Stetler <saor@ycbtal.net>]

The oil is going, the oil is going! Today's Paul Reveres of "peak oil" 
aren't waiting for Washington to save us from apocalypse. They're 
already planting gardens and drafting city plans for the days when oil 
is gone.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Mar. 22, 2006 | Matt Savinar, 27, once aspired to own a Hummer. He 
studied poli sci at the University of California, Davis, before going on 
to get his law degree at U.C. Hastings in San Francisco. He was into 
bodybuilding. Today, Savinar doesn't own any car, much less a Hummer, 
and he doesn't practice law, although he's licensed to do so. Frankly, 
he doesn't think that driving or the legal profession, with the 
exception of maybe bankruptcy law, have much of a future. Instead of 
buying a car, Savinar walks, takes the bus and catches rides with 
friends, but not because he's trying to save the world, he assures me.

Savinar doesn't drive because he's saving the money he'd spend on a used 
car to buy land; he's not sure exactly where yet, but somewhere with a 
supply of fresh water, arable soil, low population density and that's 
far from military bases. He's starting to get back into bodybuilding 
again, too, all the better to be healthy and in shape to till the earth 
and grow food, when the time comes. "I happen to think that we're going 
straight to hell, and I'm trying to figure out how to be in the least 
hot place of hell," he told me recently on an incongruously balmy 72 
degree February afternoon in sunny Santa Rosa, Calif., at a restaurant 
just a few blocks from the apartment where he lives.

For a young, quick-witted, able-bodied man with an advanced degree, 
living in the most prosperous country in the world, Savinar has a pretty 
dim view of his -- and all the rest of our -- prospects. He believes 
that many if not most of the trappings of modern American life are 
endangered species and he's trying to figure out how not to become one 
of them. So Savinar has become a full-time prophet of "peak oil," 
spreading the word about how the world's oil production will soon peak 
and global demand will outstrip supply.

When that happens, he imagines that all the ways Americans now depend on 
oil will become rudely apparent, as the price of everything from filling 
up at the pump to fruits and vegetables in the supermarket shoots up. 
Cities and towns will start to struggle to provide basic services like 
police, firefighting, school buses, water and road repair. Office 
workers will lose jobs because they can't afford to commute to work from 
their suburban homes. Even if they could get to the office, there'll be 
fewer white-collar jobs, as businesses flounder under the strain of a 
flailing global economy. Yet suburbanites will be grateful for those big 
backyards to support vegetable gardens, if they can just keep their 
hungry neighbors from sneaking in at night and stealing their harvest. 
All that is before we even consider the possibility of an oil war with 
the likes of China, where, incidentally, so many of those cheap goods 
that we've come to depend on are manufactured.

But here's what really drives Savinar crazy. As our whole world is about 
to go hurtling, sickeningly, down the other side of peak oil, we cling 
to the vain hope that better fuel efficiency, more conservation and 
alternative energy will step in to save the day. He can't believe our 
ignorance. Just look at his lunch: chicken fajitas with red and green 
peppers, brown rice and green salad. Sound wholesome and healthy? No, 
Savinar reminds me, it's brought here courtesy of cheap energy.

"It's fossil fuels -- petroleum, coal, natural gas -- that have been 
converted into food," he says. Then, there's the wooden table he's 
eating it on, which was built god-knows-where and likely shipped here 
inexpensively courtesy of fossil fuels. Then, there's the financial 
system underpinning the bank loan that the owner of this restaurant 
likely got to open the joint, which is predicated on the idea that the 
economy will grow in the future, not shrink precipitously when oil 
prices spike. Then there's the asphalt on the four-lane of traffic 
outside, and the cars, trucks and, oh yes, SUVs zipping along on top of 
its smooth surface, as well as the concrete of the sidewalk bordering 
the mall across the street, where Ann Taylor and Talbots sell clothes 
surely imported from halfway around the world.

But Savinar isn't rollerblading while the oil burns. From his modest 
apartment, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, he parses the latest 
energy news and fulminates on his Web site, Life After the Oil Crash. 
<http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/> "Dear Reader," he welcomes 
visitors to his site, "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end 
soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse 
bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the 
scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected 
geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are 
rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely 
terrified by a phenomenon known as global 'Peak Oil.'"

Far from being ignored or dismissed as the hyperbolic rantings of an 
underemployed twentysomething California attorney, his Web site (which 
has about 6,000 visitors a day, and which sells books, DVDs and soon 
solar-powered ovens) has been quoted 
<http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/FloorOfTheHouse.html> in the U.S. 
House of Representatives by members of the Congressional Peak Oil 
Caucus, 
<http://www.tomudall.house.gov/display2.cfm?id=11447&type=Issues> like 
Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett from Maryland. He's been name-checked in 
Fortune magazine in a recent profile 
<http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/12/26/8364646/> 
of one of Bush's billionaire buddies, who claims to have read Savinar's 
site every day since last September, and is keeping $500 million of his 
fortune in cash just in case Savinar and other peak oil doomsayers, like 
James Howard Kunstler, 
<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/14/kunstler/> are right.

Savinar has given public speeches about peak oil but he says he prefers 
to do his Paul Revere-ing virtually so he doesn't have to see the look 
in people's eyes when they get it. "This is like the worst news that 
people have ever heard, other than maybe a death in the family, because 
you're basically finding out that your entire model of the world is 
based on bullshit," he says. He does not relish being the bearer of bad 
news: "People who want the Hummer or the three-bedroom home, or they 
want their kid to go to college, and grow up to be an attorney or a 
doctor -- all that, everything that they've based their lives on -- 
you're telling them that that's all out the window."

Critics debate the degree of doom to attach to peak oil, but Savinar is 
right: Scientists don't deny it's coming. The only question is when. 
Some geologists say we're already on the downslope while others put the 
peak at around mid-century. Regardless, thousands of people of various 
professions aren't waiting for the exact date of the bad news to be 
pinned down. They've seen the polemical documentary "The End of 
Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream," shown 
at countless house parties, community centers and city halls across the 
country. Or, maybe they've been frightened by truly alarmist Web sites, 
such as Die Off, <http://www.dieoff.com> that predict billions -- yes, 
that's right, billions -- of deaths globally because of peak oil. Or 
they've read the Hirsch report, 
<http://www.hilltoplancers.org/stories/hirsch0502.pdf> a paper 
commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, in which professional 
energy analysts found that it would take at least a decade to prepare 
for peak oil, yet they don't see their government exactly leaping into 
action.

The peak oilers believe that by the time we know for sure that peak oil 
has come and gone it will be much too late to prepare to live without 
the 21 million barrels of oil a day that the U.S. is now accustomed to 
consuming. They aren't leaving anything to chance, let alone to the 
federal government, particularly with George W. Bush at the helm. To 
them, real change begins at home, where they're taking matters into 
their own hands. They're planning and preparing, and even lobbying their 
local governments to envision life with less oil. Some are hopeful they 
can make changes now in their own communities to mitigate the impact of 
the oil shocks to come.

To David Fridley, a scientist who works on energy efficiency at Lawrence 
Berkeley National Laboratory, and who worked in the oil industry for 15 
years, the increasing concern about peak oil tells us a lot about the 
shape of people's assumptions. "Those who come from an environmental 
point of view see peak oil as an opportunity to disrupt the never-ending 
growth of our reliance of fossil fuels," he says. "Then there are those 
who see our ultra-consumerist society as flawed, and peak oil is the 
disruption that will bring an end to that. Then there are the people who 
believe technology can save us, who are delving more into what solar and 
water power can do." It's a pretty motley crew all trying to get a bead 
on the future at once. What about him? Is he part of the peak-oil 
movement? The mustachioed, bespectacled scientist says, "The facts are 
too compelling not to be involved."

A posh conference room on the 33rd floor of a skyscraper in downtown San 
Francisco is an elegant if ironic perch from which to ponder the 
uncertain future of life as we know it. One entire wall of the room is 
made of glass, a giant window offering a sweeping nighttime view of the 
Bay Bridge all lit up, sparkling with the orderly lights of the 
post-rush hour cars and trucks streaming across the bay into San 
Francisco. Yet the 20 people assembled around the golden conference 
table for the February monthly meeting of the San Francisco Post Carbon 
<http://www.postcarbon.org/groups/sanfrancisco> group believe that 
sooner rather than later that stream of cars and trucks will falter, if 
not actually stop, altogether. And as the geopolitical and economic 
dominoes start to fall in the wake of climbing oil prices, some wonder 
with macabre humor how long it will be before they'll have to climb 33 
flights of stairs if they want to make it to this room.

Meeting in plush digs donated by a foundation for the occasion, San 
Francisco Post Carbon is a kind of combination study group, support 
group and citizens' action committee. Among their accomplishments is 
having produced a slick poster <http://www.oilposter.org/> that depicts 
the history -- and possible future -- of the oil age, which they've 
distributed to every member of Congress. At least the lawmakers won't be 
able to say that they weren't warned! This post-carbon group is one of 
six such groups that meet regularly in the Bay Area. But it's hardly 
just a California obsession. There are groups 
<http://www.postcarbon.org/groups> around the world affiliated with the 
Vancouver, B.C., Post Carbon Institute, <http://www.postcarbon.org/> 
most of them in North America.

Over red wine and a potluck dinner of hummus and salads, the peak 
oilers, who tonight include a computer programmer, a consultant, a 
teacher, a retired engineer and a recent college grad, listen intently 
to the first speaker: Alice Friedemann, a systems analyst for a large 
transportation company. She's been studying the history of agriculture 
in California and learning sustainable farming techniques.

"As energy gets more expensive, food will get more expensive," 
Friedemann says, citing a stat that's often mentioned in peak-oil 
circles: In our era of industrial agriculture, it takes 10 calories of 
fossil-fuel inputs for fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment and 
transportation from natural gas, oil and coal to produce one calorie of 
food. The fear is that the rising price of oil will drive us to rely on 
other fossil fuels, draining those as well, and destroying the 
atmosphere in the process.

Friedemann remarks that there are home-court advantages to being so 
close to California's fertile Central Valley. "The good news is we're 
near the food," she says. "But the bad news is people are likely to come 
here not just because of the food but because it will be too hot or cold 
where they live." Grapes of wrath, anyone?

Still, the prospects for growing a lot of food locally, à la the victory 
gardens <http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/crops_02.html> 
during World War II, in these parts don't look good to her, given the 
built environment and population density. Even assuming "bio-intensive" 
farming methods, where just 4,000 square feet of land can produce enough 
food to feed a vegetarian diet to one person, there's nowhere near 
enough land in Oakland, where she lives, that's not in the shade of 
homes or buildings, covered in concrete, or on steep parkland with poor 
topsoil.

How bad does Friedemann really believe things are going to get? "I 
believe that we're going back to the 13th century at some point," she 
tells me. Her grandfather was a geologist who knew the geophysicist M. 
King Hubbert, <http://www.hubbertpeak.com/> who first posited the theory 
of peak oil, predicting the peak of U.S. production in the '70s. Having 
studied alternative energy for years, Friedemann says she just doesn't 
believe that there is anything that's going to replace oil, or even come 
close. "We won't appreciate what oil really did for us until we have to 
go back to muscle power," she says. The question that clearly both 
appalls and fascinates her is what happens next?

"How do you reengineer society to go backward? How do you carve up 
container ships and turn them into sailboats? We can't go back to steam 
engines burning wood because we burned all that wood when we were 
clearing the fields for farms," she says. And even going back to beasts 
of burden, using the muscle power of horses for transportation, isn't 
straightforward, not when horses and people are competing for local, 
arable land.

"On average, a horse needs six acres of pasture," she says. "So you 
can't use that for food if you're growing the food to feed the horses." 
At an upcoming meeting of the East Bay peak oil group, she'll be 
teaching a class on milling your own grain and cooking it. "These are 
skills that would be useful to have. I suspect that there'll be oil 
shocks and food shortages but grain is something that keeps for years 
and years and years. It's something that you can have at home as the 
grocery store shelves empty. It's going to be more Third World-like and 
people are going to need to cope."

At the meeting, it's time for a report on efforts to lobby the San 
Francisco Board of Supervisors to consider what impact peak oil might 
have in the city. Last year, a formal request to hold a hearing on peak 
oil died in committee. In the past few weeks, some of the post-carbon 
members have met with staffers from several supes' offices, some of whom 
were more sympathetic to their issue than others. "They looked at us and 
smiled," says Dennis Brumm, 53, a former middle manager at a produce 
company, now retired on disability, who devotes himself to activism. 
"Most of them didn't smile," chimes in Allyse Heartwell, 24, a recent 
college grad, drawing knowing chuckles from the rest of the group. The 
post-carbon group realizes that theirs is a very tough problem to get 
politicians excited about, given they can't in good conscience suggest 
an obvious way to fix it. "It's very difficult to go and say, 'We have a 
problem that has no real solution, and we are trying to mitigate what 
will happen to culture,'" says Brumm.

The group wants San Francisco to undertake a study to gauge what peak 
oil will mean to the city's economy, food distribution, transportation 
and tourism. "I want to see Golden Gate Park planted with community 
gardens," Heartwell tells me later. Heartwell, who studied international 
environmental issues in college, says that she's never been an activist 
but she's recently become obsessed with peak oil and reads sites like 
Energy Bulletin <http://www.energybulletin.net/> and the Oil Drum 
<http://www.theoildrum.com/> religiously. "Honestly, I don't think that 
it's likely that we're going to make smart choices in the next 10 or 20 
years. It's hard but I personally don't see anything to be done but 
keeping at it," she says of the lobbying efforts. "Five years down the 
road, 10 years down the road, I would be kicking myself if I didn't do 
something, unless I'm starving, in which case, I would probably be 
kicking myself even more."

Some members of the group are trying to lower their personal energy 
consumption -- in the peak-oil vernacular, "powering down." One man has 
cut his gas consumption in half on his daily commute by buying a hybrid 
car. Several don't own cars. Some have solar panels on their homes and 
sensors so that the lights turn off when they leave the room. One chose 
to travel by train rather than plane on a trip to visit family in Texas 
over the holidays. But while they support the idea of taking individual 
action, they're aware that their own efforts are drops in the global 
bucket, and while they believe in setting a good example about a 
lower-energy lifestyle, they know just how hard it is to get anyone to 
listen when you're sounding this kind of alarm.

"The public doesn't understand how integrated oil is into every aspect 
of our lives," says Richard Katz, 55, who is fond of bringing oil 
industry newspaper ads to group meetings and giving a gallows-humor take 
on them. "The American spin on the world is that there is always some 
new technology or new answer that's around the corner. Standard 
economics says that there is always something to replace whatever is 
rare. But what we're talking about here -- oil -- is the product of 
millions and millions of years of distilled sunlight. How do you get 
people excited about living with less?"

Fridley of the Lawrence Lab rises out of his seat to tell us about "the 
myth of biofuels." He argues that the likes of ethanol, fuel drawn from 
crops like corn or plants like switchgrass, are not going to save the 
day. "Once you get past the media hype about ethanol, the reality scares 
you," he says. Fridley fears that in the search for cheap liquid fuel to 
replace oil we'll end up overmining the soil. By his calculations, the 
long-term potential of biofuels is low, yet it's draining federal 
dollars from wind and solar, about which he's more optimistic.

Finally, a documentary filmmaker working on a project called "Everybody 
Loves Oil" <http://www.pillearrings.com/oilmovie/> shows a preview and 
makes a plea for funds, while everyone passes around a glass mason jar, 
decorated with an apple, grapes and a pear, and filled with oil that was 
pumped out of a well in Bakersfield. It's a reminder that the slimy gunk 
that brought us together tonight is about to tear our whole world apart.

Plenty of social critics see the peak oilers as the latest horsemen of 
the environmental apocalypse. Take "J.D." (the only name he would give 
me), a 44-year-old American living in Japan who runs the blog Peak Oil 
Debunked. <http://www.peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/> "Clearly, the 
radical environmentalists and primativists love peak oil," he writes in 
an e-mail. "It's like a dream come true for them." To the "doomers," 
peak oil is the "deus ex machina that will fulfill their long-cherished 
dream of bringing down 'growth' and modern, globalized, corporate, 
industrial society."

The fact is, though, the Cassandras of peak oil are not all wearing 
fleece and Birkenstocks, and using peak oil as a convenient reason to 
rekindle back-to-the-land fantasies. They are geologists and energy 
experts in governments, universities and think tanks. And many of them 
echo the core conviction of the activists: Oil-drunk America has to go 
on the wagon or it will soon be heading into a dauntingly thirsty future.

Experts point out that U.S. domestic oil production peaked in the early 
'70s. The world is expected 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/business/08cnd-opec.html> to consume 
85 million barrels of oil per day this year, with the U.S. guzzling some 
21 million of that. Even Chevron admits <http://www.willyoujoinus.com/> 
that the era of oil that's easy to extract -- "the easy oil" -- is over. 
The question of when exactly global production will peak and then slide 
down the bell curve, with demand outstripping supply, is disputed by 
geologists, but some believe that it's already here and the world is 
already experiencing the fallout.

"The World Trade Center, the first Iraq war, the second Iraq war, high 
gasoline prices and enormous volatility in price," reels off Kenneth S. 
Deffeyes, <http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/current-events.html> an 
emeritus Princeton professor who calculates that the world passed peak 
last December -- Dec. 16, 2005, to be exact. "When supply and demand are 
closely matched, something as small as two hurricanes makes the price go 
wild; we saw gasoline go up almost a dollar. Political troubles in 
Venezuela, labor strikes in Nigeria make the oil price flap."

If Deffeyes turns out to be anywhere close to right, this is prescient 
news indeed. Even strategic advisors to the Bush administration's 
Department of Energy believe it would take a good 20 years and trillions 
of dollars of investment in infrastructure for the nation to avoid 
liquid fuel shortages, when peak passes. A 91-page report released in 
February 2005 by Science Applications International Corp. 
<http://www.saic.com/> played out three scenarios for the Department of 
Energy. Titled "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and 
Risk Management," it's come to be known as the Hirsch report, 
<http://www.hilltoplancers.org/stories/hirsch0502.pdf> after one of its 
authors. <http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/hirsch_bio.htm> Those three 
scenarios: Wait until the peak occurs to transition to other fuels, plan 
for the transition a decade in advance, plan for the transition 20 years 
in advance. In the first case, they predict significant fuel shortages 
globally and economic upheaval. Only in the third scenario do the 
report's writers conclude that major liquid fuel shortages could be 
avoided.

The report predicts that peaking will result in much higher oil prices, 
which will cause "protracted economic hardship in the United States and 
around the world." Yet it argues that impact can be mitigated if efforts 
are made on both the "supply and demands sides."

Deffeyes concurs. He believes that our short-term energy future would 
have been different, if we'd, oh, say, listened to Jimmy Carter and 
started preparing decades ago. "We'd be in great shape now. But we 
didn't. We've driven off the cliff without anyone putting their foot on 
the brake."

But even if Deffeyes is wrong, and peak is still 20 or 30 years off, 
peak oilers are skeptical that an orderly transition to alternative 
energies can be made. They worry that the alternatives to oil will not 
scale up to provide the amount of energy that we're used to consuming, 
and only by changing our consumption habits can we adjust. Some believe 
that making the transition won't just take a rough five or 10 years, but 
that it will mean a meaningful permanent decline in how much energy we use.

Richard Heinberg, author of "Power Down: Options and Actions for a 
Post-Carbon World," one of the peak-oil gurus, runs down a list of 
possible alternatives: coal to liquids, gas to liquids, ethanol, 
methanol, bio-diesel, not to mention getting oil from tar sands, shale 
oil and heavy oil from Venezuela. "Each of those alternatives has 
inherent constraints in supply," he says. "You can't increase the amount 
that you can produce to any arbitrary level by throwing money at the 
problem. There are practical constraints."

The fear is that even if the U.S. were throwing all the billions that 
we're spending on things like fighting the war in Iraq into a 
moon-shot-like effort to transition to alternatives, which we're 
obviously not doing now, despite the president's recent lip service 
<http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/02/01/switchgrass/index.html> to 
ethanol, we would not be able to produce the amount of energy that we 
now get from 21 million barrels of oil a day.

Like Fridley, Heinberg asserts that biofuels are not the answer. He 
notes that they appeal to environmentalists 
<http://www.nrdc.org/air/transportation/biofuels.asp> because they could 
be produced in a carbon-neutral way, as well as to patriotic 
conservatives because American farmers can help solve the problem, while 
lessening our dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East. "We don't 
have oodles and oodles of agricultural land that's not being used for 
growing biofuels, and the energy payoff is very low compared to what 
we're used to from oil," he says. "The net energy being produced is 
going to be very costly."

Of course, there are always techno-optimists, and in this case they are 
led by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, co-author of 
"Winning the Oil Endgame." <http://www.oilendgame.com/> Lovins argues 
that ethanol, for instance, can be produced without using cropland, but 
from woody, weedy plants, like switchgrass, on currently idle 
conservation reserve land. He quotes Sheikh Yamani, a leading figure in 
OPEC for 25 years, who said, "The Stone Age did not end because the 
world ran out of stones, and the Oil Age will not end because the world 
runs out of oil."

Lovins thinks that oil will go the way of whale oil as alternatives are 
perfected. Besides, he contends, nobody knows who is right about peak 
oil, given that 94 percent of oil reserves are held by sovereign 
governments that have no incentive to reveal how much recoverable oil 
they actually have, even if they know themselves. He says an oil 
shortage is far more likely to be caused by an attack on a Saudi oil 
processing plant, or a natural disaster demolishing a key refinery. 
Ultimately, Lovins says, we will get much more out of the remaining oil 
by tripling the efficiency of cars, trucks and planes. "The rest of the 
oil," he states, "can then be displaced by a combination of saved 
natural gas and advanced biofuels." So, pessimists, chill out.

At a gathering at Berkeley Ecology Center, there's a vision of Utopia 
over the door. It's a painting, in which the rays of a huge sun beam 
down on a dark-skinned woman on her hands and knees gardening while a 
yellow butterfly flutters above her hands. A child holding a cornucopia 
of fruits and vegetables looks directly out from the painting. Over this 
pastoral tableau looms the slogan "Another World Is Possible."

This is a kind of community center where visitors can buy reusable hemp 
coffee filters, get info on local seed swaps and learn about the best 
source of worms for composting. From the magazine rack, the cover lines 
on Permaculture magazine shout: "Prepare for Life Without Oil. Find Your 
Own Wild Winter Food."

At the front of the room, David Room, director of municipal response for 
the Post-Carbon Institute, holds up his 3-year-old daughter to a 
microphone, and asks her to repeat the first word she ever said: 
"Organic!" she proclaims, drawing appreciative laughs from the crowd of 
80. Later, Aaron Lehmer, another post-carboner, asks the assembled: "How 
many people believe in the next couple of years that we are at the 
threshold of peak oil?" Half the hands in the room go up. The purpose of 
this meeting is to recruit volunteers and raise money for an effort 
called Bay Area Relocalize. <http://bayarea.relocalize.net/>

The goal is to do a citizen's assessment of West Oakland and a 
to-be-determined neighborhood in San Francisco to see how much of the 
energy and goods used there are produced locally. Likely answer: not 
very much. Then, to try to determine what could be produced locally if 
it had to be from food to energy to goods. Using Google Earth, and by 
walking around neighborhoods, the group wants to determine: How big are 
backyards? What roofs could be turned into rooftop gardens? What 
resources does this community have? Bethany Schroeder, a former Berkeley 
resident, who has relocated to Ithaca, N.Y., and speaks about a similar 
effort <http://www.ibiblio.org/tcrp/doc/project.htm> there, explains 
that everyone must understand Ithaca is way to the left of Berkeley. 
"You can't get into Ithaca and buy a house without a copy of 'The End of 
Suburbia' in your DVD file," she says. The Ecology Center event draws 
pledges of $1,100, and signs up 30 volunteers.

Room, who studied electrical engineering at Stanford as an undergrad and 
has a master's degree in engineering economic systems, used to do risk 
analysis and assessment for a consulting firm. Now he's in the nonprofit 
world where he believes he can help people reduce the great risks facing 
them from peak oil by making their local communities less dependent on 
the rest of the world.

"We believe that we're on a treadmill to tragedy," Room says. "We're 
headed for disaster but we're not there yet. We don't have time to 
lament about it, or to panic about it, we just need to act," he says. To 
him, that means each community taking steps to reduce its own 
vulnerability by "relocalizing." (He and others from the Post-Carbon 
Institute have written a forthcoming book called "Relocalize Now! 
Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil.")

An example of a community that's on its way is Willits, Calif., where 
Jason Bradford, 36, armed with a copy of "The End of Suburbia," launched 
a movement. Willits is a small town in Mendocino County, where just 
5,100 people live within the city limits of 2.8 square miles. Yet there 
are about 13,500 people in the surrounding area of 322 square miles. 
Bradford, 36, a professional biologist, was so galvanized when he 
started to learn about peak oil in early 2002 that he and his wife, a 
doctor, moved to Willits with their twins in July 2004.

"I essentially wanted to find a small town where I could try to 
transform it politically and the infrastructure," Bradford says. He 
showed "The End of Suburbia" at the local library, at the high school 
cafeteria, at the charter school. He showed it for eight months, twice a 
month, at city council chambers. Thus was born the Willits Economic 
Localization Project, <http://www.willitseconomiclocalization.org/> an 
effort to make the whole ZIP code as energy and food self-reliant as 
possible.

"We're just trying to do as much as we can as fast as we can and hope 
for the best," says Bradford. Citizens have already done the kind of 
assessment 
<http://www.willitseconomiclocalization.org/Papers/EnergyIndependencePlan.pdf> 
that the San Francisco post-carbon group is lobbying its government to 
undertake, and the Bay Area Relocalize group is just beginning. The city 
has put out a request for proposals asking contractors to bid to supply 
all its electricity with renewables. Bradford is leading an effort to 
convert one acre of the backyard of his children's elementary school 
into a farm, in hopes of bringing healthy food to the cafeteria. There 
are plans to put a three-acre farm next to a proposed hospital. A 
gleaning club is working with local orchardists to take the fruit that 
isn't market-worthy to food banks, and divide it among themselves.

Bradford is optimistic about finding local sources for electricity, like 
solar, biomass such as wood, and even hydropower from creeks in the 
local hills. Yet, like most of the rest of the United States, the area 
consumes much of its energy in transportation. "Over 50 percent of the 
energy consumed in the Willits area is in transportation -- oil and 
diesel for people's cars and trucks," Bradford says. "That's a common 
percentage around the country. It's very hard to replace that." And 
right now the ecologist says he does not see any easy, long-term 
solution for our car-mad consumption of oil.

South of Willits, the slightly larger city of Sebastopol, population 
7,800, is also taking official government action to try to grapple with 
the post-peak future. Already, the city gets about a sixth of its energy 
from solar energy, <http://www.solarsebastopol.com/> and the majority of 
the members of its city council are affiliated with the Green Party. So, 
last October, a town-hall meeting starring "Power Down" author Heinberg, 
discussing peak oil and energy vulnerability, drew 200 citizens, and led 
to the formation of an official 11-member Citizen's Advisory Group on 
Energy Vulnerability.

Gas in the area is currently selling for about $2.40 a gallon but the 
group, which includes an economist and alternative energy experts, is 
now trying to imagine what will happen to city services if gas goes to 
$5 a gallon, $8 a gallon, $12 a gallon, as well as what if electricity 
went to 25 cents a kilowatt hour, 50 cents a kilowatt hour and so on. 
"We could see $5 a gallon gasoline within a year or two, or it could be 
10 years off," says Larry Robinson, the former Green Party mayor of 
Sebastopol, who sits on the city council. "I want to be prepared for 
that, not saying: 'Oh my god, how are we going to pump water to provide 
for all these households.'"

The group is working on contingency plans so that the city will be able 
to maintain public safety, public facilities, streets, parks, water 
delivery and sewer services should the spikes in energy prices come. 
It's also exploring how the same energy increases would affect citizens, 
from transportation to education, food supply and even social cohesion, 
and it's arranging a meeting with pols from the four surrounding 
counties -- Marin, Napa, Lake and Mendocino -- to formulate a regional 
response to energy vulnerability.

"I think that a lot of people have their head in the sand about this," 
says Robinson. "Some believe that the market will solve the problem, and 
ultimately, it will, but markets aren't anticipatory. They're more 
reactive. If we wait for a market solution, it's going to come probably 
in the midst of a lot of disruption and unnecessary suffering."

But the Sebastopol City Council member also sees some silver linings in 
the slide down Hubbert's Peak. First, he believes that savvy local 
entrepreneurs will be able to create new businesses and local jobs, 
manufacturing shoes and clothes, when transportation costs make it 
prohibitively expensive to import them from halfway around the world. 
Beyond that, he sees peak oil as providing a kind of wholesale 
referendum on the American way of life.

"I think that we can adapt, but our adapting may not be so much 
technological, as sociological, and maybe even spiritual," Robinson 
says. "It really comes down to the question of the place that we see for 
ourselves in the world and what we need in order to live a meaningful 
life. For quite a while now, a meaningful life in America has meant 
acquisition of things and cheap energy, and we associate that with 
freedom. We do not see that it's really a form of dependence and 
slavery. So, I see the potential for a much greater level of freedom and 
spiritual fulfillment and social cohesion, and restoration of balance 
with the natural world. This is one of the great possibilities that I 
see on the other side of the crisis, and whether we get to that is a 
question of the choices that we make now."

-- By Katharine Mieszkowski