When I talk about the apocalypse with my parents, they never believe it’s going to happen. They are part of the baby boomer generation, and when they were growing up, they thought an apocalypse would happen too. I mean, the Cold War did have the potential to be the end. There was a lot of crazy stuff happening. Then again, there’s always tons of crazy stuff happening all the time. The invention of the internet gave us faster access to information, faster communication, which I imagine would have provided us with more accessible reasons and theories to believe that the apocalypse is coming.
A couple summers ago, I worked at the Long Now Foundation, this non-profit foundation dedicated to Long Term Thinking. The idea of this organization is to help promote a conceptualization of time that allocates 200 years to the present moment, that is, a couple centuries in the past and the future, in hopes that people will live and plan for the future differently. The host lectures on all sorts of topics related to technology and long term thinking, and the foundation is definitely a reaction to the short sightedness that have speeded up the humans’ march to their own demise. Since then, I’ve been picking up pretty consistent crumbs of knowledge all with the kind of “oh shit, guys, look!” message attached to it. It’s like I’m Gretel following the trail of crumbs to the witches house where she’s got the child-stew pot all hot, ready, and full of carrots.
The most recent crumb I’ve discovered came in the form of this documentary I saw a couple weeks ago called “The End of Suburbia.” In this documentary, they explain in detail what is happening with oil production in the world, and then puts it into our American cultural-historical context, taking our current and past oil usage into account. To make a long, complicated, really-you-need-to-watch-this-movie story short, oil production has been increasing for a long time. We have become used to it being plentiful. The point of peak production, however, is upon us, and may have already happened. This means that there will be less and less oil every year until it’s gone, which in turn will have ramifications that hit all parts of society. This wouldn’t be a problem if we had alternative, sustainable sources of energy, but we don’t, and it seems as if it’s too late to invent enough ways of producing it to make up for all the oil we won’t be able to afford. Take a moment, and think about all the things in the world that depend on oil to operate. What will happen when transportation, food, all imported products are prohibitively expensive? How will we eat? How will we get around? What is life going to look like?
Needless to say, this documentary made me nervous. I’m optimistically apocalyptic, but the cast of experts didn’t leave very much light at the end of the tunnel. I felt helpless. If all this crazy stuff is going to happen, and we know it’s going to happen, what could we do to prepare? How should we change our lifestyle now so that the imminent future is less of a shock?
Most of all, I wondered what the very experts on this documentary were doing. They seemed to know what the situation was. And sure, they dedicated their work to spreading the message of what is happening all over and trying to help find solutions. But what are these experts doing to prepare for the coming era? What kind of precautions is they are personally taking? What are they doing daily and in the long term to brace themselves for the dark days that seem to be ahead of us?
So I asked them. I sent out emails to the members of the cast of the documentary, and guess what? I got a few responses. Below are the responses I received.
From James Howard Kunstler- New urbanist, lecturer and author of Home From Nowhere, The Geography of Nowhere and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, and The Long Emergency:
“I'm not doing anything heroic or stupendous, Arianna. I made my most important long-term decision thirty years ago when I moved to a classic "main street small town” in upstate NY. I have gardening skills. I have deployed my savings for "capital preservation."
“Anyway, I've already outlived Babe Ruth, Mozart, MLK, and Jesus Christ.
“IMO, one of the most important decisions a young person can make is where to live. For example -- check the "no" box on Phoenix or Las Vegas. I'm not to keen on the whole sunbelt, in fact. Then, of course, you need to think about a vocation that will make you useful to your fellow man, preferably something direct, hands-on.
“Seems to me that most of these things are self-evident. What's more of a problem may be that many young people lack experience and confidence in their ability to cope. That can only come from accomplishing the things you set out to do and demonstrating to yourself that you are a competent grown up -- especially that you know the difference between wishing for stuff and making things happen.
From Randy Udall- Director Emeritus of the Aspen, Colorado based Community Office for Resource Efficiency, CORE, promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency:
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
“Look.... just think of this as a dance. Kunstler is right, it will be a long emergency, but no one has defined "long". It may take decades to fully play out. At least you will have read one of the advance "scripts," so you will have some idea what is happening. But a great deal of it is unpredictable, literally can't be predicted. So, I think young people have to be light on their toes. Acquire useful skills, keep learning, and preserve a sense of humor. More expensive energy is not the end of suburbia, or the end of anything. It's just a turning point, a fateful one to be sure. So, again, it will be a dance, with some heartache and some joy. Trust me, Steve [Andrews] and I would love to be around long enough to see what the world is like in 2050. We won't. You will.”
From Kenneth Deffeyes- Petroleum geologist, researcher for Shell Oil and author of the definitive analysis on Peak Oil: Hubbert's Peak; the Impending World Oil Shortage. Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.
“Two suggestions:
“Look at www.princeton.edu/hubbert/ and click on Current Events. I posted that yesterday.
“When I was a graduate student (50 years ago) I was working in the Nevada basins and had a terrible fear of rattlesnakes. I read Kauber's two-volume work on rattlesnakes and it helped enormously to handle the problem. (It wasn't just a neurosis, Nevada did have rattlesnakes.) Become an oil-peak guru. It doesn't solve the problem, but it helps to handle the problem.”
From Richard, the guy who clears the info box and works for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in Ireland (He responded to the inquiry I sent to Colin Campbell, convener and editor of ASPO):
“So, you've opened Pandora's box and are wondering how to put everything back in? We in the business call it your 'peak oil moment'. I had mine while visiting a friend in San Francisco at the end of 2004 when he gave me a copy of Richard Heinberg's book 'The Party's Over'… My discovery of peak oil prompted me to do a masters in sustainable energy last year and another one this year on environmental policy.
“Check out www.youtube.com/aspo6”
Receiving the responses has been comforting, though it seems there’s not a lot of drastic measures you can take. No one knows what is actually going to happen, but I feel better knowing that I’m doing something at all. To be informed and to inform others is one of the best ways of preparing, though if I lived in a place like Pheonix, I’d look into moving some land on which it was maybe a little easier to farm. This spring, I’m planting a vegetable garden. You gotta start somewhere.