The peak oil and Transition movements are up in arms, and rightly so, about their marginalization in the U.S. main stream media. As Erik Lindberg of Transition Milwaukee points out in his excellent response to the story, a serious NY Times article about peak oil would have brought out the arsenal of experts “in the context of the likely and impeding peak and decline of world oil production.”

Yes, maybe the NY Times article only entertained the masses for a day with “a personal interest story about a vaguely kooky and self-deprecating “doomer” who’s latest “obsession” has mainly managed, it appears, to annoy her co-workers and alienate her husband.”

That’s not my whole story, doggonnit. The paper painted what they wanted and threw out the rest. Maybe I was marginalized and the most important things I said may have been left on the cutting room floor.

But it could have been worse – some of the more damaging things said could have also been left on the cutting room floor.

And where were the facts and why didn’t they use them?

I feel that if the whole story about peak oil AND renewable energy’s ability to replace oil, with facts and only the facts, came out tomorrow in the U.S. from an authority like the President or the respected main stream media, our ancient lizard brains that kept us out of the jaws of saber tooth tigers would say ‘oh no, we’re screwed! Panic!’. I would like to be wrong about that – the people deserve to know the truth. But I experienced this panic firsthand.

Are our lives in danger tomorrow because of peak oil? I would guess that the official panic button is only saved for imminent emergencies lest the third time the authorities cry ‘Wolf’, no one listens and people are seriously hurt.

Take a look at the not-so-publicized US Military Joint Commission Report’s first paragraph about energy on p26:

To meet even the conservative growth rates posited in the economics section, global energy
production would need to rise by 1.3% per year. By the 2030s, demand is estimated to be nearly 50%
greater than today. To meet that demand, even assuming more effective conservation measures, the
world would need to add roughly the equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s current energy production every
seven years.

Panic! Or quick, hope that clean energy and smart people will save us! Oh, it won’t? Panic and be angry!

Facts are cold and lifeless and they don’t give a shi-poopy about you or your family or your job. They freak people out and cause knee-jerk reactions. They crash markets and stir the urge to horde and speculate. The greedy turn them into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And other greedy people won’t tell the truth anyway about how much oil we really have, so the facts about the exact amount of oil we have and exactly when we might run out of it are all mixed up in a human mess of emotion.

The Transition Movement does an amazing job of making the facts that we do know accessible, of telling the story, and of providing a positive vision.

I didn’t have the Transition Movement when I started this journey. I had scary facts and scary books. When a mother or anyone who would step in front of an oncoming bus for a child catches wind of possible collapses or ‘die outs’, she in her state of panic will dig relentlessly until she figures out how to save her family.

If you don’t stop with just the facts and go on to help this mother through the panic and anger and if she then starts to sit quietly, observing her own ego, questioning reality and making connections, she will be a force of nature. I was ultimately lucky enough to have several (Rob C., Carolyn, and Andre) of those people come into my life.

If you want to reach those amazing but busy mothers and you are the main stream media, you need stories – real stories, messy stories, inspiring, relate-able stories. Maybe a story about a mother who saw a presentation about Peak Oil that said that if all of that clean energy were brought online asap (which is what we mothers have all been hoping for, right?) it would never, ever equal the amount of energy the world needs and gets from oil. And with out oil, our entire way of life is a mirage. And on top of that, the use of oil and coal is killing the planet.

This mother who had recently moved to a new, expensive city and was renting until they decided where to live, this mother of a beautiful, sweet 4 year-old boy who just wanted more time with her, a back yard and a dog, stayed up late every night for a year sifting through endless stories so that she could do what was best for her family and not make a stupid buying decision with such a large amount of money for what would evidently be the only house they would ever have. But most of those stories never seemed to give her an actionable plan. And as for a house, there were too many variables and uncertainties to figure out what would weather the coming storm. And she still couldn’t find a real story in the mainstream media to prove that this was all true.

In between bouts of inspiration, denial and depression, her solutions alternated between saving humanity herself, heading to the hills with her family or having faith in humanity and community. She wasn’t a scientist or economist and was usually too exhausted to remember the exact facts that people were demanding of her when they wondered why she was so worried, and she couldn’t point to any stories from mainstream newspapers, so after a year she ultimately kept her mouth shut about every amazing new thing she was learning or experiencing because it was less painful than looking crazy.

And then one day, she decided to take a class with other people who had been experiencing the very same thing, and her feelings were validated! She addressed her grief and anxiety! She started learning how to garden anyway without the yard of her dreams and started blogging about it. Her tentative courage to speak up was encouraged! She stopped worrying about losing her job or looking crazy and started talking to her neighbors and co-workers about how she felt, and they finally had real conversations!

And amazingly, she was featured on the home page of the New York Times! And even though it was a short and silly story, she wrote a response, spilling the entire contents of her skeleton closest onto the internet, and she sent it to everyone she knew in what she felt was a potentially colossal act of stupidity but hey, the cat was out of the bag. Her friends called her an amazing person and the new activists she met thanked her for setting aside her fears to speak up. And her husband, her dear sweet husband who agreed with her crazy plans all along because he loved her finally started to research and question the facts for himself.

But most importantly, what started for her as a self-centered prepping for peak oil – she wanted to maintain a lifestyle of comfort, and maybe if that wasn’t possible, just save her family – has changed into something entirely different and more unselfish. Virginia Woolf says it best:

“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”

— Virginia Woolf

Once that story is told, you had better support it with rock hard indisputable evidence that this woman isn’t, after all, crazy.

It’s too bad that story wasn’t told because I only had the presence of mind now, in this crucible of attention, to tell it. And it’s a darn shame that the evidence never surfaced.

Bygones!

I’m glad the Transition Movement is fighting the ‘doomer’ label that was so carelessly dropped near their name in a newspaper read by millions. I represented the average American reacting to all of the available peak oil literature. It wasn’t a pretty process. It still isn’t. I still don’t have time between a full-time job and a commute to attend the transition meetings that are 45 minutes from me, much less try to start a group in my town. I can’t just change my life overnight and neither can the rest of America. But I am inspired to do more every day because I know that large communities of really smart people exist who don’t think I’m crazy for being scared about peak oil, climate change, and everything we’re doing to slowly but surely destroy ourselves. I’m taking Sharon Astyk’s ‘Adapting in Place’ class and am working on a real plan. (No, that wasn’t my stockpile of food! That was just my latest trip to CostCo, sheesh.)

And I don’t think the story was a total loss, I think it was a spark. I think it was a lesson. And I think it was an opportunity for you smart (and funny) people like the Transition movement and Sharon (Thank you for pointing out that I am not threatening!) to respond and set us all straight.

Read: New York Times on Peak Oil…and the Problem of History

Any maybe everyone in the community should take a moment to read Tim Ferriss’ 7 Great Principles for Dealing with Haters

More than just change, I feel that the mainstreaming of the peak oil problem (see the Peak Oil Primer) is stirring what Eckhart Tolle calls the flowering of human consciousness.  

Donangelo ‘The Spiritual Adventurer’ says this (and so many great things!) in ‘All You Need to Know’:

#6. When we identify ourselves as consciousness, all else becomes input – all our instincts, emotions, thoughts, fantasies, physical sensations. Consciousness can thus evaluate the input without becoming captive to it. A natural space is created between the desire and decision to act, so that we can act mindfully and from the heart in view of our values. In time, this process becomes automatic.

By speaking up about my fears over peak oil, I only dared to dream that it would send up a spark of consciousness, that we could collectively release our grip on fantasies of endless growth or apocalypse and move forward together, hand in hard-working hand, towards a positive vision of a future that doesn’t involve continuous growth.

But do I seriously think that NY Times article about prepping for peak oil sparked this consciousness? Eh, hard to tell since it was just a short human interest story. Though the NY Times has incredible readership and it was, at one point, the fifth most popular story, it would be wishful thinking on my part to hope that the article made a huge difference. But because of my appearance in it, I have found some cool new people, learned new things, and have felt encouraged to keep talking. Others say they are encouraged to speak up, too, and that’s amazing. The spark, the ‘speaking with consciousness,’ is what matters. How dare I trivialize the amazing connections I’ve made – yes, I think the article made a difference. “No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.” — Ts’ai Ken T’an

I have Carolyn and Andre to thank for the courage to tell my story. Let’s stand together with courage now and change the world through storytelling.

So what’s up with the coming-out of peak oil? What I think is happening is this: Many of us are now realizing, with horror, that an oil well exists in the deepest part of the ocean because a)we need oil to fuel our lifestyles and b)there must not be much more easy oil to be had. And an even more troublesome realization: it doesn’t even seem possible to quit the oil addiction cold turkey. Our lifestyles are fashioned in such a way that oil is woven throughout every waking minute in countless unseen ways.

But as with any addiction, acknowledging that you have a problem is the first step, and many of us didn’t know that our problem was hurting others until we felt the pain of the oil spill in the gulf.

Even though many of us don’t live in the gulf, we feel the pain of this oil spill because the Gulf is part of our collective memory – I have so many happy visions of the days spent in those beach towns and on those barrier islands with friends and family, don’t you?

Collective tragedy as a pathway to change
It took an oil spill and tragedy in the San Francisco Bay in 1971 for John Francis, a leader of the environmental movement, to radically change his life.  From the Yes! Magazine article about walking away from oil:

I tell my students, “If you are moved to such a degree that you feel the pain, and that you can feel the tears running down your face, then you’re looking at an opportunity to make a change, to make a difference in the world.”

Each of us has to have that moment when we know that we have to do something.

In this pain, we can find our opportunity to change.

It is sad that it took a tragedy of this magnitude but I’m seeing the flowering of human consciousness happen because of it.

Mainstream media opens the gateway to positive change
Thank you, writers and editors in mainstream media, for helping humanity to move forward in a positive direction.  Keep flirting if you must, but you should really go out to dinner with this topic and get to know your feelings about it like these writers did.

Boston Globe: Rethinking our oil-drenched lifestyles by Joanna Weiss

LIKE MANY people, I spent a good portion of last week looking at pictures of oil-drenched birds and marveling at the chutzpah of BP. The company’s ads are contrite on the surface but brazen underneath, filled with images of pristine beaches and industrious volunteers, suggesting that soon, all will be well in the Gulf of Mexico so offshore drilling can start again. Just buck up, America, and have faith! Stiff upper lip and all that.

Pity the birds; hate the company. But I couldn’t help but wonder how much I should hate myself, too. My life, after all, is one giant petroleum glut, from the diapers and diaper rash ointment for my son to the toothpaste in my bathroom to the Lycra in my jeans. Oil gets me to work and back, puts food on my plate, gets pumped into the tank in my basement every winter. Imagining a world without it is next to impossible.

But there are some people who are trying.

Newsweek: Boycott BP?  Don’t bother by Sharon Begley

BP and the 32 other operators of deepwater wells in the gulf are there not because they find it technologically interesting to see how deep they can drill, or because their roustabouts like the view from the rigs. They’re drilling because of America’s—and the world’s—insatiable lust for oil. The U.S. consumes 800 million gallons of petroleum per week, according to the Energy Information Agency. The only way to make this the last oil spill in the gulf is to make oil obsolete.

Huffington Post (huge readership = mainstream to me): Limit our oil consumption, drive less by Craig K. Comstock

Can we find a response to the peak of global oil production (and to increasing demand from Asia) other than economic depression in the U.S.?

Building lifeboats, finding tribes – what about everybody else?

I can’t look into the eyes of a suffering person or creature, feel their pain, and say “see ya, you’re on your own” because I believe that we are all connected, we pay it forward, our good deeds will come back to us in unexpected ways. My greatest hope against hope is not that we have to build lifeboats but that those of us who have awakened can help humanity collectively evolve, even those who do not know that they need to be helped.

Changing everything quickly seems complex and, well, impossible. Maybe lifeboats and tribes are meant to be the spark.

Tim Ferris says “It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do.”

“It’s critical in social media, as in life, to have a clear objective and not to lose sight of that,” Ferriss says. He argues that if your objective is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people or to change the world in some small way (be it through a product or service), you only need to pick your first 1,000 fans — and carefully. “As long as you’re accomplishing your objectives, that 1,000 will lead to a cascading effect,” Ferriss explains. “The 10 million that don’t get it don’t matter.”

For collapse-aware people seeking a community, here are some ideas:

Transition Towns USA – Providing inspiration, encouragement, support, networking, and training for Transition Initiatives across the United States.

CollapseNet – Just launched today by Michale Rupport.  Building lifeboats so that we are advocates of the ultimate survivors, those who have not been born yet.

What ideas do you have? How about launching this green real estate model ASAP?

Why breaking through our fantasies of apocalypse and facing the reality of collapse matters
Excerpt from Alex Steffen’s essay “Night, Hoover Dam.” Alex is the founder of Worldchanging.org and author of Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century

…

And sitting there by the slack and dirty water, I had one of those moments of scorching self-vision. I realized that I’d been hiding underneath the skirts of the apocalypse for decades now. I’d daydreamed disasters as a way of not wanting too much, not caring too much; keeping safe from the fear too much knowledge of current events tends to tattoo on your brain.

But real apocalypses are sordid, banal, insane. If things do come unraveled, they present not a golden opportunity for lone wolves and well-armed geeks, but a reality of babies with diarrhea, of bugs and weird weather and dust everywhere, of never enough to eat, of famine and starving, hollow-eyed people, of drunken soldiers full of boredom and self-hate, of random murder and rape and wars which accomplish nothing, of many fine things lost for no reason and nothing of any value gained. And survivalists, if they actually manage to avoid becoming the prey of larger groups, sitting bitter and cold and hungry and paranoid, watching their supplies run low and wishing they had a clean bed and some friends. Of all the lies we tell ourselves, this is the biggest: that there is any world worth living in that involves the breakdown of society.

I sat there and felt foolish. Another boat went droning by in the distance. First light was breaking to the East. And, whatever happened, I decided, planning for failure was no longer an option. I still couldn’t tell you what success looked like, but I knew then that I was long past childhood, and done with thinking like a twelve year-old boy. I wanted to look the future square in the face, and not look away, ever again.

A breeze was picking up. Dawn was not far off now.

Night, Hoover Dam

My friends, it’s time to come out of our ego houses and into the collective consciousness.

Hi all, I’m Jennifer Wilkerson of Oakton, VA! And boy am I ever humbled to have been featured in the New York Times story ‘Imagining life without oil, and being ready.’ I took a class from an amazing spiritual teacher along with people who are doing great things in the world. I’m just a hard-working citizen who is on a journey of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. I have a long way to go. I still have stacks of paper towels and packaged food in my kitchen – I’m not ‘no impact woman’ (yet), but I am trying to do more today than I did yesterday to become a good citizen of the Earth.

Why do I prepare for this? Because to me, it means being a good citizen.
I would rather be prepared than not – for the same everyday reasons of uncertainty about the future I have a spare tire and renters insurance. If I could predict the future, I would be very wealthy. I only know that the people who have predicted collapse have also predicted the things that are currently happening in the economy, so I think I’ll listen to them.

I worry about people who will become afraid and allow themselves to be taken advantage of by buying, for example, a survival capsule of seeds that wouldn’t be viable anyway after so many years. (The best way to keep a line of heirloom vegetables going is to actually grow them year after year.) Likewise, to keep a skill alive, even if it is never needed, we need to pass it on to our children before the knowledge is lost.

This is why I chose to learn gardening. I don’t expect to produce enough food on my deck to feed a family of four – what I’m doing is logging experience. When should I start seedlings? What’s eating my eggplants? How can I avoid using pesticides? I read about it for long enough – but by actually doing something, even a little something, I’m learning much faster. And at the end of all this learning, what then? Do I sit and wait for the world to collapse with my canned goods tucked away in the basement? I hope not!

I need to ensure that I have well fed neighbors! If people in my community also have some skills of self-sufficiency, they will be less afraid and hopefully less likely to react irrationally to any ‘rebalancing’ that could happen now that ‘the party’s over’, as the IMF puts it. Once we have the basics of food, shelter and safety under control, we would be free to focus on the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I don’t hope for collapse. I hope for the best – I hope we transition off of fossil fuel by getting radically local. I hope I gain some muscles from working in the garden. I hope I snack on tomatoes instead of packaged candy bars. I hope I can be part of a greater web of local resilience. And I hope I can make a difference in the lives of others and in the preservation of our planet’s gifts because we are all connected.

We have always seen ‘boom in doom’ I feel like Andre’s classes at Post Peak Living are taught in the spirit of helping people to become resilient – FEMA and the CDC say all the time that we should be prepared for emergencies but many of us, including myself, are not prepared for anything other than a three day disruption of food, water and power. If many natural or economic calamities happen at once, I feel like the government and our emergency response systems could be overwhelmed and I am doubtful that the government could ‘bail me out.’ While I would be grateful for their assistance if they could help me, I would feel like a better citizen and more empowered if I could take care of my own needs (put on my own oxygen mask first) so that I could turn around and help my neighbors. What Andre, Carolyn, and others are teaching is resilience, community, compassion and respect for the forces that are greater than us. It is a labor of love for them and I wish them all the best success.

What I really want people to know is that they are not crazy or delusional for worrying about peak oil, climate change, or economic collapse. These are very real fears and you must process and understand these fears before you do anything else. It is important to work with a practitioner, group or church who can validate your fears, not dismiss them as ‘generalized anxiety.’ I am pretty sure that I experienced ‘existential depression’ after learning about peak oil and I feel like a mainstream therapist would have put me on ‘happy pills’ without acknowledging my fears as being valid or real and I would have never had the opportunity, like I did with Carolyn, to address my grief. I feel that her book Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse is so important because it doesn’t trivialize my awareness-related anxiety. You may have a hard time with this book if you haven’t been initiated into the idea of collapse. (I wish we could call it ‘rebalancing’ instead of ‘collapse’!) Check out the books and links in my sidebar for a balanced set of information.

I think that people who are unaware of peak oil will not understand what’s happening to them over the coming years. They will or are experiencing their own personal financial collapse. They will see gas prices rise and then fall due to lower demand, only to rise again, and so on. I saw a story in the Washington Post over a year ago about a couple where the man killed his wife and then committed suicide because they were losing their house. I cried for them because I felt both helpless to do anything for them and guilty for having a good career. I wished so greatly that they knew it was ok to feel so much grief, and I wished that there were a place for them to go. I had visions of setting up an organic farm for people like them – it would have had sustainable housing and teachers to show them new skills like permaculture so that they could be with nature, start a new livelihood, and feel safe, empowered and peaceful. I want to do good things for people, communities and our planet, but first I have to deal with my own feelings of shame, fear, and sadness so that I don’t burn out as I did last year. The people who are doing the hard work of environmental and economic clean-up, social work and sustainable design are, I feel, at risk for burning out or being very depressed if they do not find tools for dealing with their emotions.

I also need to find people like me who are more aware of the state of the world. I censor my words all the time partially because I feel others will label me a ‘doomer’, though that’s been taken care of thanks to the Times. I originally didn’t want to talk to the Times because I have such a great fear now of others seeing me as insane for thinking that I need to prepare for collapse. But I decided that Carolyn’s work is too important for my own fears and my own ego to stand in the way. I find it hard not to care about fitting in with the norms prescribed to my by society, but as a result of this class I have realized how self-centered my thinking can be and I am learning to let go so that I can do the work that needs to be done, so that I can discover my true purpose, and so that I can be fully open to uncertainty.

By taking Carolyn’s class, I found a way to free my mind from worry and replace it with compassion and action. I was suddenly able to look at my whole life and see what I had been ignoring because I was so absorbed with worry about collapse. I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I wasn’t taking care of my health. I wasn’t paying off enough debt or saving enough money. I wasn’t being ‘present’ with my family because my thoughts were occupied with worry.

Now I’m actually working on my garden, losing weight, spending time with my family, and getting out in the community. I’m going to an Urban Farming Summit on Friday!

What started it all: worrying about where to buy a house
A lot of my worry was stemming from deciding where to live. Our main criteria is that we only buy a house we can afford on one income in the event that one of us loses a job. When I first read the peak oil and ecological collapse literature last March, my knee jerk reaction was to set up a farm in the country where there was plenty of water. I rationalized that I could set up a non-profit farm to help others reskill and learn permaculture, then sell the food at local farmers markets.

Not only did I not have enough money to buy a farm in Northern Virginia, I also don’t know how to farm. So this was a bit of a fantasy that was dispelled by my personal economic conditions and by Joel Salatin’s book You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise. While I probably ‘could’ farm, I would be doing it by myself while my husband worked and I couldn’t be sure that, 20 years from now, my son would want to stay near the farm to help. I decided I would be happy with a little garden, and have since decided that I would even be ok signing up for a CSA. (I do really want to learn how to garden, though, because it makes me happy.)

Last summer I visited a local Virginia eco-village. We could afford a plot in this community (we were unsure how we would afford to build a house, though), and was it ever beautiful! The people are so nice. When I visited, I only heard birds, no highway or air-conditioner hum. The houses were LEED certified with passive solar designs and solar hot water systems. The new straw bale house they’re building had a grey water system that was the first of its kind in this state. They plan to build a community house and hire an organic farmer. It was just a beautiful, peaceful place to visit. We decided against living there because I would have to take a 2 hour train ride to work, and my husband’s career is now so far from this place that it would be a 3 hour commute each way.

I have to say that my dear, dear husband has been the most patient man through all of this. Yes, there were many times at the dinner table when he was tired of hearing the latest news about peak oil, climate change or economic collapse – most people do. But when I said I wanted a farm, he said ‘let’s do it.’ When I said I wanted to live in a Yurt, he thought it sounded like a cool idea. When I said I didn’t want to buy a typical box of a house in the exurbs just to cash in on the tax credit, he understood. But I’ve had to do a heck of a lot of talking about these issues to get my family to understand because the cognitive dissonance is just too great. Ultimately, we both just want our family to be together and safe and he just wants me to be happy, and for that I am blessed.

For now, we have renewed our lease on a townhouse near Vienna, VA. It’s not off the grid and I would be worried about the price of heating and cooling the place in the future, but for now, it’s a good deal. We pay much less in rent than what we would have to pay if we had bought the place. We’re in an excellent school system in a strong community with bountiful sidewalks, bike trails and farmer’s markets. We’re not far from a Metro stop. I have a tiny farm on my deck and in my courtyard. My neighbors are very nice people.

If I won a million dollars, we would buy a few acres close to where we live now and build a passive house or buy and retrofit an existing house. I would set up a teaching market garden so that others can learn new skills. Since winning the lottery is unlikely (especially since I don’t play), I’m playing a waiting game to see what happens with the housing market.

I would love to see Community Solution’s Agraria idea take off: If it were in a town like Vienna, VA, I would move into one of these places in a heartbeat!

I am lucky and humbled to work for an international company with sound finances and a history of changing course or innovating when needed. With as much as I’ve learned, I haven’t been spooked away from this company. In fact, working here has made me more aware of global issues and has made me a better person! I am surrounded by compassionate people and the company has an honest commitment to social and environmental responsibility.

I am frustrated by my complete lack of time to do anything other than commute, work, and sleep. Of course I would rather spend the day with my son, garden and bike around town and meet other transition groups than have a long commute and sit in a cube like I do now, but I have debt to pay off and a low-carbon lifestyle to save for, so if I have to work right now, this is a great place to be working and I am grateful to have the opportunity to learn and grow with my co-workers.

My plan for the coming year is to keep learning how to grow veggies, get in shape, get rid of the stuff in our house that we don’t need, pay off debt, keep learning new skills like mad (starting with Sharon Astyk‘s Adapting in Place class), stop buying stuff that has a lot of embodied energy or uses energy when possible, get involved in my community, and relax into the flow of whatever comes next.

‘Oceans’

I have a feeling that my boat
Has struck, down there in the depths,
Against a great thing.
And nothing happens!
Nothing, silence, waves
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
And we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?

— Juan Ramon Jimenez