Peak Oil and the Forest

This spring I was at the Midwest Renewable Energy Association's Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair (the world's largest renewable energy fair) and I attended the two sessions on permaculture put on by Midwest Permaculture. Between the sessions Bill Wilson inserted a short metaphor for peak oil which really struck me.

"When an animal dies in the woods and is not consumed by a larger animal, the biological activity in the immediate area explodes as insects, their larvae, bacteria and other organisms devour the carcass. This may only last a few days until all the organic material is consumed at which time the activity will slowly cease until it returns to its normal state. Since the late 1800’s, when oil was discovered on this planet, the activity and population on this planet has exploded with a liquid source of fuel that holds massive amounts of energy (ancient sunlight) in a very condensed form. Half the oil on this planet has been consumed. What will the nature of human life be like as we consume the balance?"

How will we make this transition? How might we do so while maintaining a good quality of life and without loss of life?

In his post on limits, Alex Stefen said

"Space ain't the final frontier. The physical frontier is closed -- as Norman Mailer puts it "shut, damn shut, shut like a boulder on a rabbit burrow" -- and we live now, and probably forever (at least in culturally meaningful terms) in a world of physical limits."

Combining this idea of a world with hard limits, within which me must live and the image of the coming energy descent as we use up the fossil fuels which have driven the industrial and information ages, presents a very different kind of future. I see a future with fewer things, but more connections, where people are not enriched by buying the latest gadget, where 'keeping up with the Joneses' has necessarily fallen by the wayside (at least in its present form), where the focus is less on acquiring more things, and more on deepening the pool of human knowledge and strengthening the webs of culture which bind individual into communities and enriching the human experience.

The Challenges We Face

In our quest for a bright green future we must overcome obstacles.

Me must:

-Learn to live in a world of physical limits. This was discussed in a post by Alex Steffen at Worldchanging.com.

-Face peak oil and energy descent and confront it gracefully, minimizing its human, cultural, social, and environmental toll. This is one of the goals of permaculture and is discussed extensively in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren.

-Lengthen our time horizon so that we see beyond the immediate crisis and avoid creating more problems with our solutions.

-Build the natural, built and social structures that will support a high-quality, low-energy life for all the world's people and future generations.

-Enrich our lives while consuming fewer resources.

-Increase our natural capital including, landscape storgages of water, healthy soils, functioning ecosystems, and biodiversity. (See principle #2 Catch and Store Energy in Permaculture by David Holmgren.)

-Increase our social capital of meaningful relationships, interpersonal connections, cultural traditions and human knowledge.

-Confront the current environmental crises of global warming, biodiversity loss, habitat degradation, soil loss, and water resource depletion.