By Burdock
Author's 2009 Preface: much of this article appeared in Pangaia. Blessings and thanks to my editors, Elizabeth Barnette and Anne Newkirk Niven for the rights of electronic republication. All rights for print republication are held by BBI Publishing; e-rights are held by the author. You may send blessings and brickbats to the author at burdockgardener -at- gmail -dot- com
In working this piece again, I have revised it to include information from the most recently available sources as well as to correct several points, including an earlier prediction of an imminent peak in natural-gas supplies. External links are given in-text, and they will kick open a new tab on your browser. Internal links go to my backnotes in this document.Being a pagan who engages more in weighing a variety of sources, rather than succumbing to magical thinking, I tend to modify my claims when the evidence slants away from them. A foolish consistency, as Emerson put it so well, is indeed the hobgoblin of little minds.
On other fronts, 2009 is oddly darker than was 2006-7, when I worked on this piece. Pangaia has merged with BBI's New Witch to become Witches and Pagans, a sythesis that seems drive by the gradual erosion of all print media. Concurrently, and despite the welcome change in US governace, climate talks seem to have broken down, and the reigning mantra about energy in my part of the nation seems to be "drill here! drill now! pay less!" This is magical thinking, that infinite drilling will produce a string of Saudi-Arabian-sized oilfields just off the US East Coast. The evidence from early exploration suggests that all of the worlds "super giant" fields have been found. The reality of this will not, I fear, sink into the popular imagination until very late in the day, when Peak Oil is already an event in the rearview mirrors of scientists and energy executives.
But, as Carl Sagan was fond of saying, I could be wrong. Perhaps we will enter the sort of ecologically balanced, sustainable future I love to envision, when pagans and other faiths will join hands to protect Mother Earth. Chairman Mao was not always correct when he (reportedly) said that "it's always darkest before it gets completely black." It was very dark in the Bush years, for environmental progress and awareness of Peak Oil. We may see change on both fronts before the oceans lap inland and plentiful oil remains a distant memory. For our civilitzation to survive, we must.
Bright Blessings,
Burdock, Mabon 2009
Imagine yourself decades from now, as a trusted elder in a community that worships the old gods. You are working in the village's canning kitchen where you teach young people how to store the harvest. It's the end of a long summer's day, and all morning you were working the hives and teaching children how to rob the bees so the village can have honey.
A bold adolescent asks you, "So, eld, what was it like in the old days when food came from stores and the old roads hadn't crumbled?" You might get a wistful look in your eyes and stare out, imagining a time of highways and 400-horsepower V8s grumbling along them. You might clutch an imagined steering wheel and say,
I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. . . . When the world was powered by the black fuel. And the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel, they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped.(1)
This chilling narration begins the 1981 film The Road Warrior. For many of us in the early 1980s, as the Cold War dragged on this post-apocalypse vision didn't seem like science fiction. The narrator's words seemed just what survivors--if any did survive--would say around campfires in a few generations. For "Mad Max" and George Miller's other characters, losing their gas-powered mobility completed a slide into barbarism. This film appeared just before gasoline prices began a long (if temporary) retreat.
Today, however, the narration lingers in my head as I type with 21st century technology and, ten feet away, prepare home-canned tomatoes with technology at least 100 years old: a boiling-water bath. That radical contrast seems logical to me. I use what is appropriate from the present era, while I keep alive an older craft that might come in handy were our machines to sputter, even stop. I'm not a wild-eyed, heavily armed survivalist, but a phenomenon I have been studying troubles me more, even, than climate change. Neo-pagans walking an earthwise path might want to see The Road Warrior today. It offers insights into something the director and most neo-pagans of my acquaintance have not considered: an impending "peak" in global oil production that will have profound consequences for how we all live. Many writers have explored and debated Peak Oil, but few have seen light in the gathering storm-clouds; fewer still have looked at its spiritual implications. Yet both hope and spiritual renewal will be possible when the crisis comes.
Peak Oil may prove the key to two ways of life depicted in Miller's film: a plundered wasteland full of barbarians murdering for a precious last tank of gas, or a new society where like-minded individuals re-make communities connected to nature and the seasons. That second type of future would be a paradise for neo-pagans, a life far removed from today's lonely, isolated individuals moving in metal chariots, looking past us to listen and speak to tiny boxes.
I've often asked myself just how healthy, in a spiritual sense, is our current way of life? Too many of our fellow humans have no relationship to the natural world and its wonders. Being in nature might consist of a round of golf for the more active, a walk from the car to the office or family-room for others. In a nation plagued by obesity, allergies fueled by breathing re-circulated air, an eerily named "Nature Deficit Disorder" among children and "Eco-Fatalism" among teenagers, it is time for a change, even a sharp lesson about the danger of acting as if nature did not matter and that limits do not apply to human activity.
That is not to say that the lesson will be pretty or painless. As a neo-pagan, however, I'm accustomed to seeing darkness differently and to see in destruction the potential for renewal. That's the case for Peak Oil as well, but we must begin a transition to a saner, more sustainable way of life soon. In some respects, we neo-pagans, who keep close ties to the earth and will endure hardships to practice our faith, may thrive.
The Science: Coasting to the Top
Any serious measure of oil exploration shows fewer and smaller discoveries in the past three decades, even as global demand skyrocketed. Production from existing wells has, consequently, accelerated.
If oil were in infinite supply and burning it didn't alter the climate, we could simply pump it faster to meet demand. As my chart shows, US Energy Information Administration optimistically says production will keep up (barely) with estimated growth in demand through 2030.[2] More realistic figures, from OPEC and writers studying Peak Oil, show demand outstripping production.[3] I've tipped in a chart I made to illustrate the scope of the challenge.
Until the financial panic of 2008 struck, Chinese consumption alone had been growing more than 7% annually, helping to push the world average over 3%.[4] If the gap between consumption and production--impossible to close with alternative fuels alone--were not bad enough, over time we will also be getting less oil from all existing wells. This tipping point will occur when half of the world's oil supply has been burned. One may reasonably ask, "but half the oil, many billions of barrels, would still be in the ground, right?" Unfortunately, the cheapest to refine light and "sweet" (lowest sulfur) crude gets pumped first. The remaining heavier oil in the lower reaches of a reservoir is more energy-intensive to extract and refine. A point comes when oil is no longer worth extracting at any price, because, to quote James Howard Kunstler, it is "an act of futility" to burn a barrel of oil to get a barrel, and "an act of madness" to burn two barrels to get one.[5] Long before that, the effects on everyday life would be harsher than a few more dimes per gallon at the gas pump.
Even though the global recession has led to a drop in oil consumption, ominous signs of a global peak remain at hand. Old wells can be partially revitalized by injecting salt water to bring the pressure back up. The Saudis--the only producers with enough spare reserves to turn on the spigots and lower global prices--are now injecting water into major reservoirs and will not publicly state how much oil they have left. They dare not admit what petroleum experts like Matthew Simmons believe: the vast Arabian oil fields are declining.[6] That could trigger a cataclysmic rise in the price of oil and cripple the world economy. In November 2005, Kuwait announced that its production had peaked and it would never again reach its current level.[7] Simmons, who has made millions in the business of finding and extracting oil, predicts that Saudi Arabia will be close behind.
Nothing I have read makes me doubt these ideas. The father of Peak Oil, M. King Hubbert, accurately predicted US production to peak in the 1970s, followed by a decline resembling the downslope on a bell curve.[8] The respected geologist's ideas were dismissed, until, as predicted, US domestic production maxed out in 1970. It has declined ever since. Hubbert also predicted a global peak for the 1980s, but major finds in the North Sea and a decrease in demand after the 70s oil shocks put off our day of reckoning. Though the respected historian Daniel Yergin has denied an impending peak and a few wishful theorists believe that oil is continually created beneath the earth, other informed writers and mainstream media put the time ahead of us in blunt terms.[9] The truth will out, as it has for climate change.
What's most frightening to this writer is that the concept is not the creation of Luddites dreaming of life in a cave or radical environmentalists trying to scare SUV owners into buying hybrids. It's also not a New-Age belief based upon an alignment of the planets or ancient prophecy. Peak Oil comes from an array of oil-industry experts and geologists, many of them independent or retired. Those warning us are also bipartisan, politically. Simmons, a life-long Republican, served on Vice-President Cheney's controversial Energy Task Force.
Luckily, Peak Oil is not some made-for-Hollywood distaster that happens in a day. It's a gradual adjustment to new circumstances. As Kunstler has tried to explain, time and again after some reductive "running out of oil" story that cries wolf until gas prices drop:
Of course, it hardly need be said that Peak Oil story has never been about "running out of oil" per se, but rather about declining flows, geopolitical management of flows, and the effects of depletion on industrial economies -- in particular the effect on regular, expected, cyclical "growth" of the type that financial markets utterly depend on to power the trade in investment paper.
James Howard Kunstler "Season of the Witch"
So what can we do before a declining flow of oil changes every aspect of daily life?
The Challenge: Before We Start Downhill
If at some point you shouted "Yes! End of the carbon-driven climate nightmare!", you might hold on to your bottle of champagne.
Do this experiment I often use when talking about Peak Oil: look at the space you inhabit. Take note of everything made with petroleum or dependent upon it for transportation, packaging, or storage. Then imagine the price of oil doubling after a geopolitical disaster. The scope of the problem facing even neo-pagans becomes crippling. As Kunstler states, "we'll have to reduce motoring drastically, and make other arrangements for virtually every aspect of daily life, from how we get food, to how we do business, to how we inhabit the landscape."[10]
Prayer and spell-work are not going to affect Peak Oil, no more than they would to make a hurricane change course. Oil depletion, like natural disasters, remains indifferent to us. We can and should conserve fuel, but eventually the peak will come. Luckily, prayer and spell-work might change our consciousness so we can make reasoned choices, and those will be sorely needed in the coming years.
Some readers may have begun already, by running a diesel car on grease from a burger-joint or purchasing renewable energy. These are laudable acts, if only a start. Our energy consumption is so vast that alternatives to oil will never sustain our current way of life. Were we to reuse every drop of fryer grease in the nation for fuel, we'd account for a tiny fraction of America's fuel consumption. We would have to put into production every acre of arable land, including that now used to grow food, to produce enough corn-based ethanol to run our current fleet of vehicles. Meanwhile, natural gas faces a global peak even sooner than oil.
Correction for 2009: The discovery of shale-gas in much of the South and Midwest buys us important time, and natural has has a carbon-footprint half that of coal. A remaining question is whether all that gas can be extracted without massive damage to the environment, from the chemicals added to the water that fractures shale.
My favorite alternatives to fossil fuels, solar and wind power, are not feasible in all places or able to deliver power on a reliable enough schedule to keep our sprawling mega-cities humming along as they now do. I run an electric fence with a solar charger, and I plan to run a few lights in a retirement cabin that way. But with wind and solar alone, even with improved solar cells and a personal windmill, I'd never be able to power the web of electronic appliances and toys that are in my current home. Never.
In any case, I'm not sure how comfortable I'd feel in a warm, well lit home as neighbors looked angrily at me while freezing on a cold, dark night when the gas company cut deliveries and the power company's gas-fired plant went offline. The US almost reached this impasse during a brutal cold snap in March and April 2003, when Northeastern utility managers actually planned a triage of gas to help only those most needing it.[11]
Our options are grim if we do not face such mounting difficulties with the courage, wit, and wisdom that characterize what's best about modern paganism. Writers Richard Heinberg and Michael Klare speculate that nations could slip into an unending series of wars, large and small, to secure remaining resources.[12] As a community neo-pagans should join with other enlightened people to avoid what Heinberg calls a "Last One Standing" option, even though some in power would do anything to secure access to oil, all the while telling us that we have enough to last centuries.[13] We must summon the courage to challenge that, as we challenge other dominant errors of our time.
The difficulties we face should not make us toss up our hands about deploying alternative energy quickly and finding a peaceful way to avoid resource-wars. Each of the alternative energy sources mentioned earlier, plus new ones such as cellulosic-based ethanol or controversial older ones I mistrust, such as coal or a new generation of nuclear reactors, may help dull the pain of transition.
Kunstler, Heinberg, and others can be overly pessimistic about human ingenuity in the face of adversity. While I'm with Heinberg in thinking it futile to wait for a miracle fuel to replace gasoline, I find it a moral challenge to my paganism to rise to this occasion, to show others how to "make do" while we re-create our lives to be in greater harmony with the earth. Neo-pagans celebrate nature's gifts yet accept an inevitable decline that is a part of the Wheel of the Year. This should make us sensitive to declines that are not temporary or seasonal, such as a gradual loss of easy mobility or an endless stream of cheap consumer goods.
The Magic: Life on the Downslope
A popular restaurant closed briefly here, an early casualty of high oil prices. It had specialized in serving absolutely fresh fish flown in from around the world. One day, when the owner saw that one $500 bill he received for fish contained $300 in shipping costs, he closed his doors. A talented entrepreneur, he reopened to serve gourmet pastas and sauces made on the premises with many locally produced ingredients.
This restaurateur was forced to do something more respectful of the planet. Even before costs for shipping the fish soared, many of the species served were essentially robbed from dwindling stocks in the oceans, with catastrophic effects on the entire web of marine life.[14] Likewise, a post-peak world would mandate similar acts of "doing differently" and "doing less," period; in a quip from the Canadian documentary The End of Suburbia, Kunstler pokes fun at the imminent demise of "the three-thousand mile Caesar salad."
To help imagine life in a post-peak age, try a second experiment. Visualize living, as I did after Hurricane Isabel, for 11 days without any electricity. How would you spend your time? Then imagine that when the power came back, you only got four hours of current a day, forever. What would you do when darkness fell? How would you entertain yourself? Stay warm or cool? Choose food to eat?
So, instead of downloading music, you might have to gather with friends, pick up instruments, and make the music yourself. You'd put in a garden and share the hard work of growing, harvesting, and storing the food with others. Kunstler hypothesizes such post-peak life as "intensely local" in how we work, live, recreate, and eat.
This sort of scenario commonly appears in Peak-Oil literature, because our systems of lighting and power might no longer provide current levels of service once parts of the network fail faster than they can be repaired. Our infrastructure is already more fragile than we might imagine. In July 2006, thunder storms have put hundreds of thousands in the dark in St. Louis in the midst of a killing heat wave.[15] Such outages happen frequently in summer, though thankfully not on the same scale as in August 2003. That cascading failure, putting millions in the dark for many days, may have been caused by system overload and not a tree-branch, as utility companies claimed.
We may be tempted to see such events as a defensive response from an angry Mother Earth, tired of our wantonness. If that fills a spiritual need for you, so be it. I'm not fond of angry deities, whatever their gender. For my part, I see these disasters as the chiming of a global alarm clock that, gods willing, will awaken us all.
In such a time, there's an important next step for those like us. By providing examples without being smug, neo-pagans can make a difference in changing others' perceptions about comfort and convenience. Some of my co-workers now bike to work, because I showed them how easy it can be to use our city's bus-mounted bike racks. It's another small gesture, but in such ways we can be leaders to help others in an age of forced simplicity. As Simmons puts it, " No step is too small, but small steps barely begin to address the magnitude of the challenge."[16]
Right now, we may still be playing games of denial by consuming energy, goods, and services just as wastefully as our neighbors do. Little in our culture prevents taking the easiest path when it comes to feeding, clothing, and moving ourselves about. We can, however, make a difference. Dare I say that we can build a better society?
Here are a few ideas, ones not limited to neo-pagan practice, though each has spiritual implications by making us more mindful of the world around us and how we use or abuse its bounty. Nearly all of them would reduce one's carbon-dioxide emissions, an important side-effect of an ecological response to Peak Oil:
* Drive less: My family purchased a used truck for farm work, and I can do much of the mechanical work myself. We're pleased that this gas-thirsty vehicle only racks up 6,000 miles annually on its odometer. I now walk, bike, or carpool to work. I recommend buying a good used car or a fuel-efficient new one to send a message to manufacturers.
* Remake suburbia or leave it: America's suburbs force residents to drive many miles daily to work, shop, and socialize. Unless suburbanites can re-engineer how they live to include ample cottage gardens, public transit, telecommuting, local recreation, and walkable shopping, suburbia will be an early casualty of Peak Oil. A moral, and for neo-pagans, spiritual imperative becomes what we can all do now, no matter where we live, to slow sprawl and make existing cities and suburbs sustainable.
* Invest in alternative energy: While alternative energy cannot fill all of the gaps ahead, living more simply with solar, wind, and wood will help. A family's home could at least remain warm and lit. The small farming community of Reynolds, Indiana provides an example by declaring itself a "Bio-town," hoping to use renewable resources to generate all its power, heat, and fuel.[17] In building such communities some compromises with deeply held eco-pagan principles may be necessary, especially if the alternative means human death and suffering. While I intensely dislike factory tree-farming and the carbon dioxide released from wood stoves, I prefer them to freezing to death during an outage in the regional supply of natural gas.
2009 Update: Sadly, this vision of sustainability had a short life. Plans for Reynold's biofuel plant appear to have been shelved in the fall of 2007, and the maker, Verasun, was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy two years later. Our system of commerce cannot sustain itself without profit, even when a greater good is at stake.
* Get out of debt: In a turbulent economy after the peak becomes common knowledge and oil prices soar, banks and other lenders will do whatever it takes to stay afloat. Energy-related expenses will also consume ever more of our disposable incomes. Now, in a time of relative prosperity, neo-pagans would do well to have no debt hanging over their heads. We should also make each purchase a conscious choice and have some savings available, because a money economy will likely be around for a long time.
* Support local agriculture: Small farms have a tough time, but in a petroleum-starved world, the tables will turn quickly. Agribusiness, with its fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and escalating shipping costs, may go extinct rapidly. By choosing local produce and fighting to preserve rural land near cities, we can do a lot to weather the storms ahead and honor our neighbors who tend the land. I've decided, for instance, that I'd rather buy a locally grown vegetable than an organic one that has been shipped across the continent. That's a radical decision to some of my environmentalist friends, but I balance the possible risk of eating fewer organic meals with the probable one of losing local agriculture, then having no local sources of food down the road. Besides, many of our small farmers are now switching to organic practices. It's time to invest in their investments.
* Eat seasonal foods: This is one of the toughest choices to make, but as several experts on organic gardening have demonstrated, one can grow fresh vegetables all winter in a greenhouse. For my part, I've adopted a seasonal menu, enlivened it with home-canned or pickled foods, then spiced things up with dried herbs and spices I've grown. We've enjoyed home-grown lettuce, in the midst of a January snowstorm, picked from our cold frame.
* Re-learn crafts ancient and modern: Commercial life today depends upon goods transported cheaply across the continent, if not the ocean. What would happen if many of these jobs vanish? I recommend taking time (it's there--turn off the TV and you'll steal enough time back) to practice gardening, saving seeds, composting, raising farm animals, cutting hay and straw, beekeeping, printing, paper and candle-making, learning carpentry, mechanical, or electrical repair, sewing, spinning, and weaving. The Foxfire books from the back-to-the-land 1970s contain a wealth of knowledge.[18] The rewards are manifold for neo-pagans who learn to do more on their own and depend less upon technological commerce.
* Don't try to be an island: No one can practice all of the crafts I've mentioned. If the money economy does fail, be prepared for a barter economy by getting very good at one or two practical skills, then swapping goods and services with others. This gave vitality to life in pre-industrial villages, and neo-pagans, who are accustomed to seeking out community, could be role-models to others when the lights start going out more often than they stay lit.
* Get a little, but not a lot, scared: disruptions and some crime will occur when, say, gasoline jumps to $6.00 a gallon and stays there. I noticed that within days of the last spike, my auto-parts dealer sold out of locking gas-caps. Do a quick check of your home. Have you any emergency supplies handy such as non-perishable food, extra medicines, and a water filter? Do you and your family, friends, or coven-members have plans to stick together in times of trouble? Luckily, you can make arrangements without acting alarmist, if you live in an area prone to the increasingly violent weather brought on by climate change.
All of this amounts to a long list. Heinberg refers to such strategies as "building lifeboats," ones we hope we don't ever need.[19] My experience has taught that that Neo-pagans can show great strength, as a spiritual community, and will make sacrifices for the good of others and our earth. Surely we can weather this quiet crisis as well.
During a local meeting with faculty and students, Kunstler and I discussed his own sacrifices to survive the difficult times we both foresee.[20] He moved to a small town and out of New York City, rides a bicycle or walks, and lives simply. One of the producers of The End of Suburbia took up beekeeping, a pastime he finds useful and meditative (it is).[21] When I told Kunstler about my honing rural skills such as canning, gardening from seed, and keeping bees, he nodded. "Stock up on canning lids," he said, a troubled look coming over his features. "You're going to need lots of them."[22]
It won't hurt to stock up on canning lids, or perhaps I'll learn the art of sealing pickled and canned goods with beeswax. Already a Ball jar of July-harvested tomatoes means much more to me when I open it during the first snow. Those bright-red jars in my pantry signal that spring will come again, with seed-time and planting. And food that was the labor of my hands just tastes better. It becomes a small re-enchantment of the world. For those who adapt and thrive, a few, carefully tended possessions will become more treasured, entertainments more rewarding, food more sustaining, and our earth more honored. It will be much harder to plunder her bounty mindlessly, as we tell our children about the bad old times when the black fuel ran out.
Endnotes:
[1]George Miller, dir., The Road Warrior, Kennedy Miller Productions, 1981.
[2]US Energy Information Agency, World Oil Markets, Washington, DC: EIA, 2005, pages 2-3. Data for my chart are taken from EIA estimates given in this report. It and other reports can be found at www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/forecasting.html. Reference taken on 11/14/06.
3Organization of Oil Producing and Exporting Countries. Annual Statistical Bulletin: Summary Tables and Basic Indicators, Oil & Gas Data. OPEC, 2004, pages 31-32. This and other reports are available at opec.org. Reference taken on 11/165/06.
4Sources vary greatly in projecting China's thirst for oil. The highest estimate for annual growth that I could locate outside the Peak-Oil literature was 7.5%, from the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a nonprofit whose advisors include senior retired military leaders and policy makers. See their "The Future of Oil," www.iags.org/futureofoil.html. Reference taken on 11/14/06. All sources agree that China's consumption has slowed dramatically since 2005. To this writer, that demonstrates either the heavy hand of a "mixed" economy or some creative accounting in the data China releases, given the large number of cars being sold in China each month and China's continued use of oil for heating and power generation.
5James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
2005, page 24.
6Matthew R. Simmons, Twilight in the Desert, Hoboken: Wiley, 2005. An interview with Simmons, as well as his slide-show presentation about Saudi oil depletion and its consequences, can be found at www.twilightinthedesert.com/
7"Kuwait Oil Field Exhausted,"13 November 2005, AME Info. www.ameinfo.com/71595.html. Reference taken on 11/13/06. The Kuwaiti report was widely covered in industry publications, by reporters covering the energy sector for Bloomberg.com, and in the Kuwait Times.
8Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over, Gabriola, Canada: New Society, 2003, pages 87-92. Most texts about oil discuss Hubbert's predictions. Hubbert himself published Resources and Man, National Academy of Sciences and National Rearach Council, 1969.
For a contemporary study by the US government that takes Hubbert's mathematics seriously, see Westervelt, Eileen T. and Donald F. Fournier. Energy Trends and Implications for U.S. Army Installations. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Sept. 2005. www.peakoil.net/Articles2005/Westervelt_EnergyTrends__TN.pdf. Reference taken on 11/14/06. Be forewarned: this is perhaps the most frightening of all the readings listed here, as advisors to our military predict the same "resource wars" as Michael T. Klare in Resource Wars, New York: Metropolitan, 2001.
9Daniel Yergin, The Prize, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, pages 779-781.
10James Howard Kunstler, "Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle Archive," blog entry for 6/26/06 at www.kunstler.com/. Reference taken on 11/13/06.
11Kunstler, The Long Emergency, pages 105-106.
12 Richard Heinberg, Power Down, Gabriola, Canada, 2004.
13Heinberg, Power Down, page 55.
14Boris Worm, Edward B. Barbier,et al, "Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services," Science, 3 November 2006, pages 787-790.
15"St. Louis struggles without power," 7/24/06, CNN Web site, http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WEATHER/07/23/st.louis.blackout/. Reference taken on11/13/06.
16Simmons, Twilight in the Desert, page 353.
17Monica Davey, "A Farm Town Strives for Energy Independence Using Local
Resources," New York Times 6/4/06, page 22.
18Eliot Wigginton & His Students, Eds. Foxfire New York, Anchor Books, 1972. Twelve volume of the Foxfire series are now in print. For more information, visit the Foxfire Foundation at foxfire.org. Reference taken on 11/16/06.
19Heinberg, Power Down, page 139.
20Kunstler, personal interview, October 2005.
21Gregory Greene, dir., The End of Suburbia, Toronto: Electric Wallpaper Co., 2004.
22Kunstler, personal interview, October 2005.
Sources:
Adaptation Blog. blog.adaptationzine.com/. Reference taken on 11/13/06.
Hirsch, Robert L. et al. "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk
Management." www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/the_hirsch_report.pdf and "Peaking Oil Production: Sooner Rather Than Later?" Issues Online in Science and Technology. Spring 2005. www.issues.org/21.3/hirsch.html. Reference taken on 11/13/06.
Lovins, Armory et al. Winning the Oil End-Game. Rocky Mountain Institute, 2006.
www.oilendgame.com/. Reference taken on 11/14/06.
The Wolf at the Door: The Beginner's Guide to Peak Oil.
http://watd.wuthering-heights.co.uk/. Reference taken on 11/10/09.