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.