Community Response to Peak Oil

Unleashing Abundance as a Community Response to Peak Oil:
Designing Energy Descent Pathways By Rob Hopkins

Traveller, there are no roads. Roads are made by travelling. (Spanish proverb)

There is an emerging consensus now that we are either very close to or have passed the peak in world oil production. As someone who has been involved in environmental issues for 16 years, and permaculture for 13 years, I have to ask myself how I didn't see this one coming (although I know some of you did!). The implications are profound. No longer is it in any way appropriate to say 'we need to recycle,' when the processes of recycling require transporting recyclable waste long distances. We have to look much deeper at the whole waste question. An excellent recent report by Tim Lang and Jules Pretty, 'Farm Costs and Food Miles: An Assessment of the Full Cost of the UK Weekly Food Basket,' argued that food could only be called sustainable when it is grown and consumed within a 20-mile radius. We have to build a local food economy from an almost totally non-existent base. There has been no time in history when anything less than 70% of the population were involved in some way in the production of food. Nowadays it is more like 6% (here in Ireland, for example), and of those, a high proportion would have lost much of that knowledge.

"Green" building that relies on imported "ecological" materials from other countries will no longer be viable, leading to our needing to rethink how we will actually construct energy-efficient shelter in a lower energy near future. We are looking at the need for a rapid process of re-localisation, of looking at what is essential to our lives (food, warmth, shelter, water) and rebuilding the local economy in such a way that it is actually able to supply these. The process of dismantling our diverse and complex local economies over the last 50-60 years was a disastrous one. It was easy to take apart but it will be incredibly hard to rebuild.

The recent award winning film The End of Suburbia (reviewed in the [Permaculture]Activist issue #58) takes a very sobering look at the whole peak oil issue. It makes very clear that the problem is of a scale that is almost unimaginable, and that the solutions are really not in place at all, or indeed anywhere near being so. We are so dependent on oil for every aspect of our lives, that its gradual (or rapid, depending on who you listen to) but steady disappearance from our lives will force us to redesign everything about our communities and our own lives. We need to relearn the skills that sustained our ancestors: crafts, local medicines, the great art of growing food. This is the biggest challenge.