CHAPTER 5
Beginnings: The Convergence of Global Crises
In early 2005, I was sitting with Marshall Vian Summers (then a virtually unknown spiritual teacher) in his backyard in Boulder, Colorado. In the midst of a casual and pleasant conversation, he suddenly became very serious and said, “What do you know about peak oil, and what are you doing to prepare?” A strange question from a spiritual teacher!
His words stung, and my mind snapped to attention. I knew that this was going to be one of those moments in which everything would change.
I was embarrassed to admit that I knew little about the topic, although I had seen it discussed peripherally during our exploration of the Y2K crisis. “I suggest you do your homework,” he said flatly. Clearly he had done his own—and he wasn’t talking about just fossil fuel depletion, but a host of related issues that together amounted to an evolutionary threshold for humanity.
I left his home reeling, with nothing to do but share this directive with Lynette Marie Hanthorn (my decades-long partner and cocreator),14 remembering that Marshall once had said, “The purpose of a spiritual teacher is to throw the student into chaos.”
We knew how to do our homework by then; we had most recently honed those skills as we researched the possibility of a cascading system breakdown after Y2K. We had learned enough in 1998–1999 to know Y2K was a real crisis, that major corporations were spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a race with the clock, and that programmers around the world were terrified that they might not be able to get the job done in time. We had learned just how fragile the systems were that ran almost everything in our modern world and how warnings about this computer flaw had been ignored for decades until it was very likely too late to fix it.
Y2K turned out to be a nonevent, but it had been a close call. The lessons of this near-disaster had been swept away by a tide of ridicule and relief. Ironically, nary a book was published on how the Y2K bug had been fixed (an army of eager and poorly paid programmers in India rose to the occasion—and birthed the outsourcing industry in the process).
In the run-up to Y2K, we had a quiet but persistent intuition that a catastrophic breakdown would be averted, even though we didn’t quite know how. But this premonition was accompanied by a much more disturbing feeling: that our learning, our preparation, and the workshops we created were somehow all part of a warm-up exercise for something much bigger, yet to be revealed. This feeling never left us, and when the clock struck midnight at the end of 1999 and virtually nothing happened, we realized that we were entering uncharted territory.
Along the way, we had developed a weekend workshop, “Y2K: The Opportunity of a Lifetime,” which was designed to move people through their unconscious fears about change and get them out of paralysis and actively reconnected with their life purpose. Many found this workshop useful. We had even published a book, Just in Case: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Y2K Crisis, an anthology of essays from some of the most important thinkers of the day, including Tom Atlee,15 Meg Wheatley,16 and U.S. Senator Robert Bennett.
So yes, we knew how to do our homework. But confronted with peak oil, we were starting nearly from scratch. We dug deep and wide, and it didn’t take us long to realize that fossil fuel depletion was merely the presenting symptom of a world careening into catastrophic crisis, a converging set of circumstances for which there was no solution and instead demanded radical and urgent adaptation. The more we learned, the worse the situation appeared. Of course, it was not just peak oil; it was Peak Everything—an unprecedented convergence of global crises. This was, we realized, the overarching crisis for which we had been preparing all our lives.
One of the seminal pieces of journalism we were moved by in those days was Dale Allen Pfeiffer’s 2003 essay “Eating Fossil Fuels.”17 Actually, a friend of ours, architect and private pilot Harry Jordan, had sent us a battered printout of the essay in 2004, but somehow we had never taken the time to study it thoroughly. This time, however, we were paying attention.
Some brief excerpts from Pfeiffer’s essay:
In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold. Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation … modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.…
The U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy. This disparity is made possible by nonrenewable fossil fuel stocks.…
Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate.… Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from U.S. agricultural soils every year. Much of the soil in the Great Plains is little more than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers in order to produce crops.…
As the population expands, an estimated one acre of land will be lost for every person added to the U.S. population. Currently, there are 1.8 acres of farmland available to grow food for each U.S. citizen. By 2050, this will decrease to 0.6 acres. 1.2 acres per person is required in order to maintain current dietary standards.…
Does our present lifestyle mean so much to us that we would subject ourselves and our children to this fast approaching tragedy simply for a few more years of conspicuous consumption?
Pfeiffer’s question haunts me to this day. And from an objective viewpoint, today’s answer is not especially hopeful.
Michael C. Ruppert, author of Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, who originally published the essay on his website, From the Wilderness, called it, “the single most frightening article I have ever read and certainly the most alarming piece that [we have] ever published.”
Pfeiffer himself wrote at the end of his essay,
This is possibly the most important article I have written to date. It is certainly the most frightening, and the conclusion is the bleakest I have ever penned. This article is likely to greatly disturb the reader; it has certainly disturbed me. However, it is important for our future that this paper should be read, acknowledged and discussed. I am by nature positive and optimistic. In spite of this article, I continue to believe that we can find a positive solution to the multiple crises bearing down upon us. Though this article may provoke a flood of hate mail, it is simply a factual report of data and the obvious conclusions that follow from it.
We would come back to this essay (and the book it later inspired18) again and again over the years. But I must admit that at the time, the essay, even with its discussion of food, did not immediately compel us to focus on food. We felt that localizing the food supply would simply be a part of a much broader relocalization effort. I would even say that we initially overlooked the significance of what Pfeiffer was pointing to. It would take us some years to come to realize that food localization is perhaps the most urgent and important issue of our time and, furthermore, that addressing it opens the pathways to resolving our collective human predicament.
Because of what we were learning in early 2005, we almost immediately began reorganizing how we lived, reducing our carbon footprint, downscaling, and simplifying. We even moved from the large suburban home we were renting to a mobile home in Boulder.
We also dusted off our emergency Y2K rations, which we had bought from a writer friend in early January 2000—she had convinced herself that there was no longer a reason to be prepared, that it had somehow all been a huge mistake.
After a few months of reorganizing our lives, all the while deepening our research, we felt a terrible tension building. It was apparent that peak oil was but the beginning of what would be a massive course-correction in human evolution, and we struggled to understand how we might be able to respond in any truly meaningful way. We sensed that something greater than lifestyle changes could be asked of us.
Several months later, I had a follow-up conversation with Marshall. With all the passion I could muster, I explained what we had been learning and what we had been doing to make new arrangements in our lives to prepare for the coming crisis. He listened quietly, not even nodding—with no reaction at all. I had expected that he would be pleased.
He waited patiently until I finally stopped talking. “That’s fine,” he said quietly. “But what are you doing to prepare your community?”
I may never be able to explain what happened for me in that moment—the burning in my chest, the flood of images from childhood dreams, memories of intimations of this time, the regret of missed opportunities. But that moment in Marshall’s backyard was a profound turning point in our lives.
The rest of that conversation remains lost to me, and I don’t even remember going home to tell Lynette Marie what had happened. But I do know that we immediately united our lives around this calling. I’m sure we talked for days, attempting to grasp what it all meant and how we should proceed.
Marshall had suggested that we might form some sort of organization to begin the process of preparation, focusing on developing public education, creating a community plan, and producing a replicable neighborhood preparation model. But because we were in Boulder, a mecca of environmental activism, we felt that a better strategy might be to join one of the many local groups who surely were already working on it. To our dismay, we quickly learned that apparently no organization in Boulder was even discussing peak oil or converging global crises, let alone preparing for what was coming. This was a terrible shock, for we realized that we would have to form a group to begin organizing a massive preparation effort in an environment where almost no one was talking about these issues. We felt inadequate to take on such a challenge.
Failing to find a local group, we began searching online for a national or international organization focused on these issues and quickly stumbled upon the Post Carbon Institute in Vancouver, Canada, founded by Julian Darley. To our delight, not only was Darley developing an international Relocalization Network, but he was also the coauthor of Relocalize Now! Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil.19 Darley’s words were encouraging.
Bearing this knowledge on one’s own is a heavy burden. If we are to have any chance of changing the course of civilization, we must work together to build a global and locally grounded movement. The outpost program offers a way for you to collaborate with people in your community and in a worldwide network to raise awareness and work for a better, more local future. Should you decide to take this on, our intent is to support you in making an immediate positive difference in your community and having an enjoyable and rewarding experience. It won’t be easy, but the potential upside—a future worth living for ourselves, our children and life on the planet—merits our every effort and deepest commitment.
Little more than a year later, prolific peak-oil writer Sharon Astyk would say, after she met Julian Darley, that he seemed like “one of the most overextended people in human history.” That certainly described him well. “Despite that,” she wrote to us, “he’s very nice. Much, much, much nicer than I could be if I had as many balls in the air as he did, and as many people who want to add more balls. And he handled his overextension astonishingly well—not only are all these balls in the air, but he’s juggling with both hands and feet.” I have come to identify with that description a little.
We were also encouraged to read that Richard Heinberg (author of Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World) had proclaimed Post Carbon Institute to be “clearly the first medic on the scene, the first organized response to Peak Oil.”20
We quickly connected with Darley and his wife, Celine Rich, and began exploring how our nascent organization could form an official affiliation with the institute’s Relocalization Network. The tag line for their organization in those early days was “Reduce consumption, produce locally.” Some took that as a kind of tough love. This early movement was driven by people whom Darley called “the walking worried.”
The literature of peak oil in 2005 was rich and provocative. One of the key themes was expressed by James Howard Kunstler in an interview about his book The Long Emergency.
There are at least two major mental disturbances in the collective American mind these days that can be described with some precision. One is the Jiminy Cricket syndrome—the idea that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. This is largely a product of the technological achievements of the last century, which were themselves a product of cheap energy: namely, things like our trip to the moon, combined with the effects of advertising, Hollywood and pop culture. We have now become a people who believe that wishing for things makes them happen. Unfortunately, the world just doesn’t work that way. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or so-called renewables will allow us to run the U.S.A.—or even a substantial fraction of it—the way that we’re running it now.…
There’s another mental disturbance that Americans are suffering from. It’s the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing—unearned riches, free energy, perpetual motion—and it’s exemplified by Las Vegas. Combine the Jiminy Cricket syndrome and the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing and you end up with a population that’s thoroughly deluded and unable to deal with reality. That’s precisely where we’re at.21
The concept of the Jiminy Cricket and something-for-nothing syndromes gave us a handle on grappling with the overwhelming denial we knew we would experience as we moved into the work. For us, Kunstler remains one of the true thought leaders in the relocalization movement, and his World Made by Hand novel series continues to stimulate productive contemplation and discussion among his readers.
In those early days of our peak-oil journey, a crucial source of in-depth information, which we relied upon almost daily, was The Oil Drum, a massive website “devoted to analysis and discussion of energy and its impact on society,” founded (we learned much later) by Kyle Saunders, a political science professor at Colorado State University, who wrote under the pen name “Prof. Goose.” We were particularly struck by what he wrote in an essay in July 2005.
People will never spontaneously take action themselves unless they receive social support and the validation of others. Governments in turn will continue to procrastinate until sufficient numbers of people demand a response. To avert further problems will require a degree of social consensus and collective determination normally only seen in war time, and that will require mobilization across all classes and sectors of society. For all these reasons, the creation of a large and vocal peak oil movement must be an immediate and overarching campaign objective. People will not accept the reality of the problem unless they see that others are engaging in activities that reflect its seriousness. This means they need to be confronted by emotionally charged activities: debate, protest, and meaningful, visible alternatives. Anyone concerned about this issue faces a unique historical opportunity to break the cycle of denial, and join the handful of people who have already decided to stop being passive bystanders. The last century was marked by self-deception and mass denial. There is no need for the 21st Century to follow suit.22
This was helpful, for we were beginning to realize that a major part of the job ahead would be breaking the cycle of denial that held our society in its grip—especially in the United States. However, we were skittish about the prospect of debate and protest; we would later carefully consider those confrontational avenues and reject them to focus on what Prof. Goose called “meaningful, visible alternatives.”
About a month later, as Hurricane Katrina was roaring through the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans, a handful of volunteers (Marshall Summers among them) fanned out into a north Boulder neighborhood with flyers inviting residents to attend “a special educational Peak Energy event” presented by the newly formed ad hoc group Boulder Valley Relocalization. This group was a new “outpost” of Post Carbon Institute’s Relocalization Network, which was convening “an ongoing global conversation on relocalization strategies and action among and within communities” (we were the fourteenth organization in the world to join, as I recall). The invitation of our flyer said, “Join North Boulder neighbors as we explore the end of cheap energy, the end of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad—and the future of Boulder Valley.”
About thirty people showed up at the meeting hall, across the street from a run-down trailer park colloquially known as Dogpatch. They were treated to poignant clips from the startling but little-known documentary, The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream, which was largely inspired by James Howard Kunstler’s blockbuster 2004 book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century. We also presented a hard-hitting video interview with prominent researcher Richard Heinberg, describing a path of self-restraint, cooperation, and sharing: “the comprehensive downscaling, rescaling, downsizing, and relocalizing of all our activities, a radical reorganization of the way we live in the most fundamental particulars.”24 For several people in the audience, the evening was a life-changing experience.
At that first meeting, we were able to fairly accurately predict the sudden escalation of oil and gasoline prices that Katrina would cause, which perhaps made us seem like prophets. But in reality, we were simply following the data, tracking the hurricane’s path through the Gulf of Mexico, carefully watching the projections of weather experts, petroleum geologists, and market traders, and noting the systematic shutdowns of oil platforms and refineries well in advance of the storm.
We had no real way of knowing what would happen after this first gathering, of course, but early on we decided we would hold regular public meetings to discuss the implications of peak oil and peak energy and to begin mounting a community response. We asked attendees to bring friends, neighbors, and coworkers to subsequent meetings, and by the end of September, we were able to attract more than two hundred people to a public awareness event at the University of Colorado’s Fiske Planetarium. It helped greatly that Katrina had knocked out much of oil production in the Gulf—just as we had predicted—driving gas prices to $6 per gallon in some places. Our keynote speaker was Steve Andrews, one of the cofounders of the U.S. branch of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), which was preparing to host a World Oil Conference in Denver a couple of months later.
In the audience that evening was the eminent Al Bartlett, a retired physics professor from the University of Colorado, who we discovered had a reputation for giving more presentations about peak oil and related issues than anyone else on the planet. I felt both intimidated and honored by his presence, but mostly I was rattled to have him there.
At the end of the evening, Steve Andrews introduced me to Bartlett, who said, “You didn’t talk about the population problem.” This was exactly the kind of feedback I was dreading, and I tried to explain that it was just not possible to address every important issue in such brief public presentations.
Bartlett was unrelenting. “You don’t understand. You need to talk about population in every presentation you give!”
Later, when I had gotten over my defensiveness, I realized he was right. Population is the issue that we are most reluctant to take head-on. I made a commitment that I would do my best to follow his admonition ever after.
A month or so later, Bartlett sent out an email with a warning.
A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH
If any fraction of the observed global warming
can be attributed to the activities of humans,
then this constitutes positive proof
that the human population, living as we do,
has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth.
THIS SITUATION IS NOT SUSTAINABLE!
AS A CONSEQUENCE,
IT IS AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
THAT ALL PROPOSALS OR EFFORTS TO SLOW GLOBAL WARMING
OR TO MOVE TOWARD SUSTAINABILITY
ARE SERIOUS INTELLECTUAL FRAUDS
IF THEY DO NOT ADVOCATE
REDUCING POPULATIONS TO SUSTAINABLE LEVELS
AT THE LOCAL, NATIONAL AND GLOBAL SCALES.
In my own presentation that night, I introduced the theme that would form the foundation of our work for years to come.
This is a defining moment for our species, for our communities, and for each of us individually. Our legacy—and the future of our planet—will be determined by how we respond to the challenges and opportunities of peak oil and peak energy.
What’s at stake here is human freedom and sovereignty. If we are dependent on distant sources and foreign powers for our essential needs, we will have no choice but to pay whatever price we must in order to survive. Thus freedom will be sacrificed for survival.
The only viable alternative is to learn how to meet our needs from our own local communities; the process of developing community self-reliance is called relocalization. In the face of the energy crisis (and the attendant crises it has spawned), this process has now become necessary. It’s an awesome task, and it will require making it our first and foremost priority.
This is not simply about changing lifestyles or becoming more energy-efficient. This is about moving from species adolescence to adulthood, beginning to accept responsibility for life on this planet, understanding that our collective life has purpose and meaning.
How we spoke about relocalization and the human predicament was markedly different from most other writers and speakers at that time, although I don’t think we realized just how great that difference was. We were informed by a perspective that included an ethical, moral, and spiritual framework that was largely missing from public discourse.