More on what I have in mind

As I begin to type this, I'm watching the news program, BBC World, on my local public television station, seeing the images of New Orleans with the flooding after the levees had failed. All these people, all this damage. Yet in many respects an excellent example of why I'm working on this blog - the hope that people will learn to live within and work with the limitations of nature itself.

I don't mean to lessen this tragedy, but in many ways this could have been prevented, or at least minimized, with respect to damages and lives hurt/lost if people had not been living along the coast like they have with these cities. In a very simplistic way of looking this - this tragedy is the result of people ignoring the limits of nature. And the potential for flooding is not done - the rain that has also fallen north of there, in the Ohio River Valley, will have to drain as well - down the same Mississippi River that flows past New Orleans again. Another example of geographic connectedness.

To survive in a future without petroleum - in other words, within the renewable resources and carrying capacity of the Earth, including the local variations - means we must collectively and individually understand how nature works - understand that the sun is our ultimate (and only) renewable source of energy, from which comes our weather, climate, rain, water resources, trees, plants, animals, etc.

Most introductory physical geography courses start by teaching about the Sun, and its energy cycle. We look at how the composition of the atmosphere, and the tilt and daily/seasonal rotation of the Earth about the sun, affect the amount of this sunlight able to reach to the ground or be absorbed into the atmosphere. How this solar energy drives the water cycle in the atmosphere, on the ground, and in ocean circulation. How this energy and gravity combine to provides the forces that mold and shape the Earth's surface, or drive plate tectonic activity underground. How vegetative patterns respond to spatial variations in soil and climate. And so on.

All driven by the Sun. All limited by the Sun.

To ignore these forces and patterns is to ignore the very knowledge you need to successfully live on this Earth without needing to using artificial (and ultimately finite) resources such as petroleum or natural gas.

In other words, we need to relearn what centuries of people and societies knew before oil, and which we have conveniently now for over 50 years have carelessly chosen to ignore or forget.

In the short term I'd like to create a series of lectures (and their printed or online equivalents) that teach people about these subjects of environmental living. I imagine a series of potential lectures that one could give if they have only 15 minutes to speak on a subject, only an hour to speak on a subject, only a morning or afternoon at a workshop on a subject, or, with the luxury of time, over the length of a semester or entire weekend.

In other words, build the pieces of a new educational curriculum that will serve to prepare tomorrow's leaders and doers.

My goals are two fold: to prepare these lectures and course materials in order to provide such lessons myself, but also to publically share the lecture design, if not the course content itself, to the public domain so that all can benefit. Think of it as the "open source software" equivalent for environmental education. This blog will be where I intend to share ideas from and carrying on conversations; there will likely be at some point a separate distribution website created to house the actual content for access by others.

We will see how far I actually manage to get on this project. After all, my doing this is in addition to my having a regular full-time job and a family. So what gets accomplished is what I can do in evenings and weekends.

I look forward to sharing this project, and in getting feedback and suggestions from you, the reader who will benefit.

BBC World is done for the evening, and now I'm watching the News Hour by PBS Television. More on the hurricane damage due to Katrina. I wish the best for everyone down there and feel profound sorrow for the families who have lost loved ones and possessions. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

More to come....

Part of my PeakOil Story (Part 3) - The Rest of the Story

Let me see if I can finish my PeakOil story, describing how I came to accept that big changes are coming in our future. There are more formative events, particularly readings that were influencial, to make note of.

In Part One, I brought us up to 1999, when I was getting ready to leave my job at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a planner and GIS specialist.

On my annual spring trips to New Hampshire to teach GIS for the Corps, I had plenty of late afternoon and evening walks along the Connecticut River, given me reflective time for thinking. During most of the time my thoughts focused on environmental living and appropriate use of technology. I often also used my evenings to read various books on related topics or material that I would research on the Internet. It was during one of those trips that I discovered the book, Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the Electronic Revolution, edited by Bill Henderson (Pushcart Press, Wainscott, New York, 1996), a collection of essays, letters, cartoons, and commentary "on how and why to live contraption-free in a computer-crazed world." It was also on these trips that I first read Clifford Stoll's book, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (Doubleday, 1995), who had an essay in the Minutes book.

It was also through the Minutes book that I was introduced to Wendell Berry, an English professor and farmer, who has written numerous books and essays on various topics, many revolving around appropriate use of agricultural technology, education for environment living, emphasizing local community, and so on. For instance, Wendell Berry's essay, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," which he has published in various places, was included in the Minutes book, providing the following standards for adopting technological innovation (p. 38):

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, private owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Often on my walks along the Connecticut River I was pondering this and other thoughts.

Another pertinent book that I discovered about this time was Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader's History, by Linda Tatelbaum (About Time Press, Appleton, Maine, 1997), which I heard about when Linda was interviewed on the environmental public radio program, Living on Earth.

Finally, with respect to my Corps of Engineers years, I should add the fact that my wife started seminary in September of 1998. You see, she discovered a few years earlier (she claims having told me way back in my graduate school years, but I don't honestly remember) that she was called to the ministry. So starting that fall, she started her Master of Divinity degree program, spending week days a little more than an hour to the north of where we lived, living in a dormitory room at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque. I stayed behind in the Quad Cities with our kids, then in 6th and 3rd grades respectively. While this was a new struggle for us, living apart for five days a week, it was also in the end a good time. You see, it was during this year, 1998-1999, that I realized that I didn't need to stay at the Corps, that I was going to eventually be forced anyway, with meeting the needs of my wife's education and later her calling to a church as a pastor, to move on to something else. It was actually a freeing feeling.

And so, when in the summer of 1999 it became apparent that the college I used to teach at was going to be in need of finding a one-year replacement due to the sudden departure of a person who held my previous teaching post, and the department and Dean were willing to give me another try, I jumped at the chance to leave the Corps and go back to full-time teaching. It was perfect - it would be for only one year, the 1999-2000 school year while they get their act together for another faculty search - and the end of the year coincided with when my wife would finish her first two years of seminary and be required to leave anyway in 2000-2001 for a twelve-month internship.

This, the 1999-2000 school year, turned out to be my most fun year of teaching! I still had all my notes from the last time I was teaching, and I would be teaching essentially the same classes as before, so I was able to "walk right in" to the job. (That is in large part why the college hired me again - they knewI could do the job with minimal fuss and in already understanding the character and expectations of the place and its students.) Plus this time I had all kinds of practical and applied experience, what I lacked the first time around and one of the reasons why I was tempted to leave teaching when I did in 1994 for the Corps. And I felt more free to begin to weave into my courses some of newer thinking and concerns with the environment.

My environmental changing did indeed continue to change during this year of teaching. For instance, late in 1999, my wife heard an interview with Alan AtKisson on the public radio show, Living on Earth, where Alan was plugging his just published book, Believing Cassandra: An Optimist Looks at a Pessimist's World (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 1999). My wife bought me a copy of the book, which she gave me in January, along with a copy of another book she discovered in the seminary bookstore, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson (Yale University Press, New Haven, Ct., 1996). AtKisson's book reintroduced me to the Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth (which I mentioned in Part One of first hearing about, but not really reading, during my graduate school years). AtKisson reaquainted me (reminding me of what I read in Rifkin's book, Entropy, back in 1990) with the issues of the pending Hubbert Peak in oil, the exponential growth of world population, the huge use of resources, and global warming. At the same time, the Vitek and Jackson book, helped me bring a local dimension back into these same discussions, worrying about the future changes with the value of preserving, even enhancing if possible, the local social fabric and support mechanisms. Thoughts that were also prevalent in Tatelbaum's book, Carrying Water.

In the summer of 2000, we sold our house in Rock Island (Illinois, part of the Quad Cities) and move the entire family, including our two cats and all our possessions, to Bismarck, North Dakota, where my wife was to complete a twelve-month internship as a pastor in a Lutheran church. I was lucky in that I was able to find employment as GIS specialist in the planning department of the North Dakota Department of Transportation. They had just lost one of their GIS persons, and with my experience with the Corps - exactly the same experience the DOT needed - they found me just the right person for the position. Besides, the DOT needed someone for only a year, which is exactly the time I had available before we would need to return to seminary in Dubuque for my wife's final year. It was almost a perfect year - a good church for my wife to gain her pastoral experience in, a good place for me to work, a fascinating (albeit dry and cold) environment, and filled with good people.

My reading and explorations into PeakOil and environmental living didn't end during this year. I read lots of Wendell Berry (search Google for lots of essays and books that have been reviewed). Three good book collections to read are The Unsettling of America (1996), Another Turn of the Crank (1994/1995), and What are People For (1990). It was during this period that I discovered the "deep ecology" writings, such as Deep Ecology: Living as if nature mattered, by Bill Devall and George Sessions (1985). Finally, it was also during this Bismarck period that I discovered the writings of Robert Gilman and the Context Organization, in particular their journal, unfortunately no longer published, In Context, a quarterly journal of humane sustainable culture. Alan AtKisson had introduced me to the latter writing, as he used to be an editor for In Context, and mentions several times this work in his Cassandra book. You can read most of the articles in In Context, as they are fortunately published online at http://www.context.org/, or you can do as I did, and buy copies of most (but not all) of the journals at a great price (see the website for details). In Context is where you can find essays by all of the noted authors who had any input at all on the various environmental issues, and their related global social relationships.

In July 2001, the family returned to Dubuque, Iowa. None of us wanted to leave Bismarck really, but we had to if my wife was going to complete her seminary education. And this desire not to leave Bismarck was also after experiencing the longest, coldest December and January on record for the number of days with temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (with many nights with wind chills down to minus 40 and below).

My wife had one more year of academic study (her Master of Divinity degree was a four-year degree, including the internship). To keep myself busy, and to help put food on table, I took a job on the seminary campus as a secretary (yes, I was the faculty's secretary) and we lived in seminary housing. We were anticipating, in the summer of 2002, to be moving somewhere else (back home to Minnesota where we grew up is what we were hoping for) for my wife's first call to a church as a Lutheran pastor.

I kept up with my readings during this year of waiting, although they took on a more religious or spiritual direction for awhile - after all I was living on a seminary campus, and I was surrounded by theological education. During this year I discovered Thomas Berry, the Catholic brother, professor, and writer on environmental living. One book worth reading is Befriending the Earth: a reconciliation between Humans and the Earth (Twenty-Third Publications, 1991). An even better book, I believe, would be The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (Bell Tower, New York, 1999). In this last book, Thomas Berry ties together Peak Oil and population concerns with education, ecology, politics, and environmental issues and spirituality (including new thoughts for mainline religions) in trying to weave a path to a viable future after oil. It was also during this year that Jay McDaniel visited Clarke College in Dubuque, giving a talk on similar topics as Thomas Berry. McDaniel, an environmentalist, ecumenist, professor of religion at Hendrix College (Conway, Arkansas), and a proponent of process theology, is also trying to bring us to this future of limited oil and other changes, but, like Thomas Berry, with a religious backing that will help provide the spiritual energy to get through the changes. (See for instance, McDaniel's book, Earth, Sky, Gods, and Mortals: Developing an Ecological Spirituality, Twenty-Third Publications, 1990).

It was during this year, 2001-2002, that many interesting and unexpected challenges unfolded - after all, this is the fall of September 2001 (9/11). Besides my wife finishing her seminary studies, forces at work also led to the fact that three years later, I am still living in Dubuque and still working for the seminary. You see, I am now the Registrar for the same seminary my wife graduated from and that I worked at for a year as a secretary I won't bore you with these final details other than to say: My wife is serving a church as a pastor, my oldest son just started at the state university, and my twins are in high school. And if all goes well, Dubuque is where we will continue to face the changes that will come with PeakOil and other environmental and population issues that are just around the corner. Those details will unfold, I'm sure, in future posts to this blog.

Let me end my background story here, and shifts my thoughts to what I really want to accomplish with this blog, posts that I hope will help you understand, accept, and begin to prepare for what is coming.

Kevin Anderson
Dubuque, Iowa

Part of my PeakOil Story (Part 2) - An Interlude of Thoughts...

In part one of my PeakOil Story, I suggested that I have been on a 25-year journey to accepting the Hubbert Peak of oil. Actually it has been longer than that, with a whole bunch more small pieces of the story to add in here on reflection, starting back to when I was a youth in the 60s and up to the near present.

One of my first favorite books (outside of the Rick Brant and Hardy Boys series) in my youth was My Side of the Mountain, the medal winning book by Jean Craighead George. The courage and skill of a city kid to adjust to living in the Catskills was most enticing.

I used to read about Native American Indians and wanted to be one (I'm Scandinavian by ancestry) - not the Tonto style of earlier images, but what I thought at the time was more realistic (but no doubt simplified in the books I read). I read about their religion, hunting methods, seasonal migration, and other aspects of life.

I used to dream of living in the mountains of Colorado or New Mexico, staring for hours at maps and trying to imagine what a place really looked like (I grew up in Minnesota).

After reading in high school Jack Kerouac's story about being a fire watcher in the West, I was attracted by the dream of similarly being a fire watcher, surrounded by and in solitude with nature, above the world, but still very dependent on it for survival. (I never did do that.)

After reading the High Adventure of Eric Ryback in high school about his solo high along the entire Pacific Crest Trail, I used to day dream of either that or hiking the Appalachian Trail or biking the width of the country (or all of the above). (So far I haven't done any of those, although I have canoed twice in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.)

In college, in my first geography class, I became fascinated about the closer spacing of towns and the organizing of economic activities in central places in Europe and earlier U.S. settled areas along the more human scales of walking, horse-drawn travel, and early railroad settlement. Also the scale of earlier cities, again largely at walking-scale as modified by streetcars. And the idea of hinterlands and "milksheds" surrounding cities, providing resources by train from the local areas to feed the city. In contrast, while I find the "newness" of suburbs somewhat "exciting" (I grew up outside the Twin Cities and lived in Minneapolis and St. Paul for five years), I've never been really excited about living in suburbs. (My more recent readings of James Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere have only confirmed to me what I couldn't name before, that of why I didn't then and still don't like suburbs.)

In this same first college geography class, I discovered the photographic works of David Plowden, particularly those pictures documenting the decline of previous industrial achievments and towns, as collected in his books such as The Hand of Man on America and Bridges: The Spans of North America. There was a sadness that affected me significantly.

In a philosophy of history course, I became enamored by the early notions of time as circular, with so many cultures philosophies, religion, and life style revolving around repeating, seasonal nature.

I became fascinated by railroads, and still am.

Also in college I read John Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, which became another favorite book of mine that I read again every few years. It provides a marvelous human scale journey through part of the American social and physical landscape.

In graduate school, I read about the planned communities and "garden city" utopian ideals of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ebenezer Howard. And then traveled to Europe to see these places in person, like Lelystad and Biljemeer in the Netherlands, and Milton Keenes and Bracknell in the U.K., with their walking scale and local neighborhoods, yet connected to other places by railroads. And then comparing these places with nearby cities of London and Amsterdam, again walking cities at their core, ending a day's observation with discussion over a wonderful pint of beer at the pub.

In the 1980s, my favorite British comedy on public television was Good Neighbors (originally titled The Good Life when aired in Britain on the BBC). This is a story about a 30-something couple with no kids who decide to quit jobs and make a go at a sustainable life in their suburban home.

Coming a bit closer in today:

I've always been interested in older technology, particularly the telegraph (see Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet, for a fascinating account on its history and its social and economic impact on the world), the early telephone system based on human operators and, later, stepper-based switching, and with radio (particularly shortwave radio). It will be simpler technologies that we may very well be returning to in the future when petroleum is not available, electricity is unreliable, and we won't have computers like we do today.

Similarly, I am fascinated by the early history of computers and the attempts to network them together - UUCP peer-to-peer networks, Fidonet, and the amateur radio packet network. It may very well be grassroots, community based, cooperative networks that will keep what communications we will have going in the future.

I've always been fascinated by the 1940s. Originally in the study of World War II military history (air force activities have always fascinated me), but more recently in study of what is really an exciting period of time - the last vestiges of a largely pre-petroleum era way of living. Life on the "Home Front", with its adjustments to food and fuel rationing, the industrialization of the military response, and the post-war rebuilding (e.g., the Marshall Plan) are all interesting, providing examples how people can respond, at least in the short term, to significant changes and interruptions.

Finally, at least for this post, the reading in 2000-2001 of the book, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, by William Straus and Neil Howe. The book helped me understand that I am clearly a "Baby Boomer" (I was born in 1959, which makes me one of the last, but nonethelesss I do qualify for that categorization), and that it is alright that I am an idealist - after all, that is the major characterization of Baby Boomers and their equivalent generations in the past. The book also helped me understand the role that baby boomers could play in providing the leadership and guidance to solving a major crisis of change (such as Peak Oil might bring) in the same way that my earlier equivalents of the Missionary generation (F.D.R.'s generation) did in leadership during World War II as more commonly fought by the G.I. Generation. (I am not dissing the G.I. Generation - I hold them in high regard. I am hopeful that the modern equivalent, the Millenial Generation that my children belong to, will be equally helpful and focused for the future changes that are coming.)

Enough for today...more to come later.

Part of my PeakOil story....

Let me provide a bit of my background, particularly how I came to accept that the Hubbert Peak of Oil has or will shortly come and be past, but also some of my understanding of the Earth and system theory. For most people, learning about PeakOil is a journey, a series of events that unfold that bring one to accept the concepts - my history is no different. Only in hindsight do I see that I've been on a 25-plus year journey to understanding, with each step along the way adding a critical piece or two.

I discovered the discipline of geography in my first semester of college in 1977. That year I took a course called "Landscape Appreciation," which provided me with an overview of various topics of what I came to know as the subdisciplines of human geography. The passion that my instructor exhibited was contagious, drawing out my desire to learn more about patterns on the earth, its physical environment, distribution of human activities, and the importance that location and spatial relationships play - the "where" is as important as the "why" and "how." Before the first college year was out, I had added geography as a second major in addition to the computer science degree I had already planned to earn. I further surprised my girlfriend (who became my wife before I graduated) by declaring that I wanted to go on for graduated studies in geography.

Eight wonderful years in the early and middle 1980s were spent at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis getting first a M.A. degree, and then a Ph.D., in geography. My Masters study focused on urban geography and urban historical geography, under the supervision of John Borchert, reading about the morphology of cities, their role as central places, their internal structure and regional economic importance, the relative locational advantages, particularly transportation, that favored the development of cities at different periods of history, and so on. But before that degree was earned, my interests began to shift to that of physical geography, particularly water resources. At the same time I was refining my interests in geographic information systems, the use of computers and techniques of spatial analysis for applications of planning and mapping.

The doctoral work that followed had three components - (1) that of completing a dissertation, (2) that of working for two years as an assistant on a state-funded research project, a multidisciplinary water resources project with the goal of developing recommendations and standards for enhancing the State of Minnesota's GIS data system to better monitor, map, analyze, and management water resources; and (3) that of working as the assistant to my advisor on his capstone research just before retirement on a comprehensive economic and historical analysis of the Upper Midwest. My doctoral dissertation had the typical lengthy descriptive title of a disseration - "GIWRSM: A Geographically Integrated Water Resources Similation Model with Application to the Twin Cities." It's 300 pages described the math, theory, data, and application behind a 20,000 line FORTRAN-based computer model intended to simulate the hydrology of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area (then over 2 million people) in order to tabulate the likely extent of environmental change to water resources, paticularly soil moisture and groundwater recharge, due to urban expansion. You could say this dissertation was my first formal exploration in to the affects that humans were having on the Earth's resources, and our interdependence with these resources. With this model I wanted to look forward, and backwards, to the human role in environmental change. [If you are interested in my modeling work, you might want to read the one refereed journal article I managed to publish out of the research: "Spatial Changes in the Hydrology of Portions of the Twin Cities, Minnesota: A Simulation Study," Physical Geography 12:147-166, 1991.]

It was during the research for my dissertation that I can claim to have first become aware of the infamous Club of Rome report, Limits of Growth, that first warned people of the significantly changes that were coming. But I must also admit that at the time I did not actually read the complete book. I reviewed pieces of it only for the modeling approaches they used - the World model they developed - and I actually had ignored their conclusions. If only I would have known at the time.

I should also add that during graduate school, I was an excellent student at learning the fine art of being a purely objective scientist. It was drilled into us, formally and informally, that as scholars and professors we were to remain objective. Our task was to expand knowledge, and teach that knowledge to others, but to keep emotions and personal feelings out of it. And when teaching, we are not to take advantage of our position to "convince" students to think a particular way - only to present the skills and information necessarily for the students to make their own decisions.

In September 1988 I began full-time teaching of physical geography at a four-year private liberal college in the Midwest, a post I was to hold until the summer of 1994. My role in the three-member geography department was to teach introductory courses in physical geography (weather, climate, landforms), upper level meteorology and water resources, cartography, spatial statistics, remote sensing, and geographic information systems. I was also the map library curator, college weather observer, and local coordinator for an affiliation with the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois. It was a busy, intense time that also coincided with the births of my second and third children (twins). But it also represented a period of my life with lots of inter-reflection.

I can date the first significant change in my global and environmental thinking to the summer of 1990. That summer I read the book by Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World [Bantam Books, original edition 1980; revised edition 1989]. I had received a copy of that book gratis from its publisher, who was hoping I would select it for a coursebook. Rifkin opened my eyes and mind, allowing so many aspects of my education and teaching to come together. While focusing on global warming, he pulled together population, resource use, biomedicine, economics, and a variety of other aspects and issues. As the title implies, Entropy, of particular importance is the laws of thermodynamics, that the use of any resource involves energy and reduces the future usefulness of the resource, with the energy essentially lost. Rifkin also did a very good job of exposing the affect of exponential growth in population in negating any savings that efficiencies might bring. An example that he uses several times in the book is that of more fuel efficient automobiles, pointing out any savings gained in fuel savings were quickly overtaken by increased fuel being consumed by all the more automobiles on the highways due to population increases. To paraphrase the book, therefore, "It is not how to create a more fuel efficient automobile, but how to do without the automobile in the first place."

My teaching began to change from that summer of 1990 onward. It was also about this time that I began showing the BBC Science program, After the Warming, by James Burke, which was also a focus on global warming. I began to question my objective-only role as a professor, although I only started with "baby steps" to changing too much.

By 1994 I was burning out. I also began to question the fact that up until now I have only been a student, and now a teacher of students, without much actual practical experience in my own field. So when the opportunity came up to go to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a planner and GIS specialist, I took the chance. Thus began a period of five years as an applied geographer, working 40 hours a week as a civil servant. What drew me in particular to the position I assumed in September 1994 was the fact that I'd be playing a key scientific role in a major environmental project, using my GIS and analytic skills to help engineers and project managers evaluate the role of further commercial navigation on the Upper Mississippi river system, and in particular the environmental changes taking place. This was an opportunity in part to return to the research I started in graduate school. At the same time was serving as the coordinator of GIS data for the district serviced by the Corps of Engineers office I worked for, coordinating and sharing information with other state and Federal agencies. And as it turned out, I wasn't done with teaching, as I was selected as one of the instructors for annual courses on GIS taught with the Corps and the Department of the Army, taking me out New England for four weeks a year. I was even blessed with the opportunity to twice travel to St. Petersburg, Russia, to teach GIS to Russian Navy personnel as part of a joint U.S.-Russian environmental cleanup project involving aged nuclear power facilities of the Russian Navy.

My years with the Corps, which lastest almost five years exactly, provided the practical experience and education that I was looking for when I left teaching. But at the same time, I came to seriously question the "engineering approach" to problem solving that I was experiencing. In particular, the focus on small, incremental corrections only, through small environmental projects that always involved manipulation of a local environment through some engineered structure, without a clear "big picture" view and understanding. I was not seeing how significant changes or improvements were taking place by this approach. So I also chose to move on.

The story continues in Part II, which will come later....

Some of my past blog posts on the subject...

For a brief time in late 2004 and early 2005, I had a blog (my first blog really) on Hamblog.com, a site for amateur radio operators. About half the posts that I put on that site were on amateur radio, and half were on PeakOil. A few months ago the administrator of the Hamblog.com decided to rebuild the site, putting on newer software and reorganizing things. As a result, all previous members were removed, and their blog posts wiped out. I had thought I had lost what I had typed. But through the help of Google, I found that all my posts up through January 1, 2005, were cached by Google, and I have subsequently retrieved those posts.

So that they are not entirely lost a second time, let me reproduce them here. Here are two posts I had earlier written on the subject of Peak Oil and the changes that are coming:

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25 November 2004:

The Coming End of the Oil Age

As I alluded to in my introduction on HamBlog, the end of the Oil Age is coming. Some say it is already here, in that we are at (or have already passed) the midpoint in availability of readily accessible oil. From now on (or from soon to be and after), oil will quickly become more expensive and not as available. Eventually (likely in this century, possibly even by mid-century) it will run out. Life as most of us know it is going to take a drastic turn.

Our entire economy is dependent on oil - transportation, plastics and other products, food production, medicine and health care, etc. Food production = Oil production. Even our cities have been designed and built over the last 60 years in a way that is heavily dependent on transportation. When this all changes, we are in trouble. And in the meantime we are told to be consumers, drive our vehicles, eat food, etc., because our economy depends on it. (A conflict of interest, perhaps?)

A slippery slope is ahead. How steep? No one knows for sure. But soon [very?] life is going to change in ways that very few of us, at least in the heavily developed parts of the world (in particular the U.S., but also Europe), are prepared to deal with. Many deaths will occur (some say up to 80% of the population) because we won't have the resources to feed people, nor to provide necessary care to fight illness - because both are now dependent on petroleum. And no substitute "miracle" fuel will have the same energy production or portability as oil currently does - and may likely require energy (which we won't have) to produce energy. Entropy will trip us up.

"A change is coming, and we won't be able to avoid this one, I'm afraid, Bunky."

Even science is not going to come through on this one in the 11th hour. There is just too much population on this Earth -- any savings or efficiencies are lost the next day by the sheer increase in demand or use from population increase alone. A delay in the coming is possible, and maybe some decrease in the severity of change, but this change in life is still coming.

I'm not happy. In fact I'm pissed. I feel very sorry for my kids. It is a little too late to stop it completely from happening. But at least I'm aware, hopefully, of both the problem and the likely changes that are coming. I would like you (any reader of this post) to also become aware of what is coming, even though we cannot say with certainly exactly when or how bad.

You can become aware, first of all, by reading about this. For instance, the book, The Oil Age is Over, is a pretty good one. See the website http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ for more information about this book, or plug this title into Google to find online pieces of the book. The author, Matt Savinar, brings together many of the facts and questions many of the assumptions (or miracles) that people think will save us. A must read in my mind!

Another good site is http://www.culturechange.org/. Jan Lundberg used to work in the oil industry (was one of the founding editors of the Lundberg Letter). While Jan goes off on tangents at times, most of what he says is spot on and persuasive.

The website, http://www.dieoff.org/, is also good, pulling together all kinds of facts, figures, charts, and diagrams.

An older site, but one that still contains a lot of other good information and ideas about how to create or live in a "humane sustainable culture" is http://www.context.org/. This website contains an online archive of all the articles from the issues of In Context, a previously published quarterly journal on the subject.

A good dead-tree book on the subject is Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future, by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. This is an update of the original study, Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome report from the early 70s that alerted people to this coming problem. Dana and Dennis Meadows were two of the authors of the original report. Criticised then, the City of Rome report is in fact coming true!

There are other online sites and books to read as well -- these just happen to be my favorites. Plug "peak oil" into Google or your favourite search engine and you'll get hits on plenty of books and websites on the topic.

An online community discussing all this is the RunningOnEmpty2 group on Yahoo Groups. You may want to join this group and join in the conversation.

Most of all, read and become aware yourself. And lets keep talking and speading the word.

Kevin
Dubuque, Iowa

======================

3 December 2004:

It is a Population Problem, but....

In my earlier post, The Coming End of the Oil Age, I brought up how we are facing the end of easily accessible oil, and how our world is now going to begin to drastically change.

A commentor on my post asked if this wasn't in fact a population problem: "However, is it just me or does anyone else around realize what the problem really is. It's not the oil, pollution,over fishing,resource limitations, and rapid species extinction, but PEOPLE. Five Billion of anything is just way too much for a small rock to support for eons...."

I agreed with him that it is. Let me say more:

This is most definitely a population problem. No doubt about it.

The estimated carrying capacity of the Earth is thought to be somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people. We passed that point some time ago (1804 in the case of 1 billion people, and 1927 in the case of 2 billion people). These numbers are based on a size of people able to be supported by the Earth's resources by a long-term, sustainable and renewable rate of use. The oil-based industrial era started in earnest about 1930. (A good website on population issues is http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/.)

But in the short term this is also very much an oil problem. We exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth in large part *because* we used oil. We substituted oil, and all its by-products and related advances, for "normal" resources that the Earth provided, creating a population that is not sustainable.

In a simple way of looking at, over 4 billion to 5 billion people are here today largely because of oil.

And it will be the loss of oil that will bring about the expected dieoff of people, as population will once again have to adjust downward to match the carrying capacity of the Earth.

So it is more than just a population, as it is also a result of decisions made on how "modern society" should live. And the dependencies (which didn't need to have happened) that are in place because of our reliance on technology.

What adds to the severity of the oil age ending is what is called the Olduvai Theory, and an expected phenomenon that is variously call the Olduvai "Cliff" or "Gorge" (depending on the rapidity of change). A good paper on this subject is http://dieoff.com/page224.htm, which is a presentation by the scientist, Richard C. Duncan. It is not only the coming end to accessible oil, but the timing also of similar endings to accessible natural gas, along with the related ramifications of oil.

For instance, without low-cost or accessible oil, we won't have an economical means to mine coal and ship it to power plants. This affects the ability to generate electricity, and certainly affects its price. Blackouts will likely result as power generation becomes less predictable. Without electricty, you can't pump or transport natural gas. At the same time the demand will go up for natural gas to be used to fuel auxiliary electric generation plants, which in turn will reduce supply, changes the priority of use, and puts in jeopardy the availability for natural gas for home furnace and cooking use. Similarly, the production of liquid propane (also a common fuel for home heating and auxiliary power generation) will also end, or get significantly more expensive, as it takes electricty to create liquid propane. And this list goes on.... A snowballing effect. Hence the prediction of a cliff or gorge-like descent into a very stressed world.

A good webpage the summarizes these energy issues is http://www.dieoff.org/synopsis.htm.

As fuel production = food production, medicine, etc., population will be stressed. Hence the predicted dieoff of population back to levels that can be potentially sustained by the carry capacity of the earth. Some predict that the dieoff of population might actually result ultimately in only 500,000 or so survivors before it might rebound back up to the Earth's carrying capacity.

And then there is the threat of nuclear war as countries fight to retain power and resources, and maybe decide that if they can't have it, why should someone else. (They may be asking, "What do we have to lose?", at that point.) Or the ardent conspiracy theorists think that governments themselves may decide to get into the act of killing their own population in the attempt to save what's left for the "elite" or deserving.

I don't know what will come. But I am concerned about what is coming, and want as many people as I can let know hear about these changes that are coming. Better to be aware now, than be caught futher unprepared. And I don't mean this in a "survivalist" or bastian mentality. But instead in concern for people, and hope for communities of people coming together to help each other weather the changes that coming.

Besides, we might (I hope) continue to affect further preemptive changes in our lifestyle that will lessen the effect and make us better able to handle the harder life, and associated death around us, that is very likely coming.

Thanks for reading. Again, feel free to comment or let others know about this.

Kevin, K9IUA
Dubuque, Iowa

===================

That's it. The rest of my earlier posts on Hamblog.com on the subject of PeakOil appear to be lost. However I do recall typing at least one more blog post on the subject, announcing the fact that Representative Bartlett (from Maryland) had spoken on the subject in the House of Representatives. You can read his speeches and other material he is presenting on this website page: http://www.bartlett.house.gov/EnvironmentalProject.asp.

Well, more to come I hope.

Kevin Anderson
Dubuque, Iowa

First Post - Here is what I have in mind...

Let me talk briefly in this first post on what I have in mind for the Post_Oil_Geography blog site.

As I say in the description to this blog site, big changes are coming. We won't be able to avoid these changes, although we may be able to mitigate the extent of change if we begin to act now.

Oil is going to run out. It is a finite resource. So is natural gas. Experts say that we may have already passed the point of what is known as the Hubbert Peak (named after King Hubbert, who researched this subject in the 1950s), or simply identified as "Peak Oil." This peak is the point at which most known (and likely unknown) sources of oil have been found, and the point after which we are extracting more oil that is being added by additional wells and discoveries. In other words, less oil will be available in the future than has been available and used up until this point. If we haven't passed the peak for oil for the world, then it will be soon.

So much of the U.S. and world economy has been based on oil as a ready resource. Besides its use as a very powerful and portable fuel for transportation is its use in manufacturing, farming, chemicals, and a myriad of other uses. Much of our food is the result of the heavy use of petroleum - in many respects, we eat petroleum, or at least food products that are largely dependent on petroleum for their growth, processing, and shipping. Although it started earlier, our petroleum-based economy has been going full swing for about the past 80 to 100 years, with particular growth since World War II.

At the same time we have a huge population (over 6 billion) on an Earth that experts claim otherwise has a carrying capacity of only 1.5 to 2 billion at its maximum. We passed the 2 billion population mark back around 1930. In other words, since 1930, the additional 4 billion people we've added to this earth have largely been as the result of good health, food, and economic resources made possible by the use of petroleum products.

Is it a coincidence that these two periods overlap - the oil-based manufacturing economy and population beyond the Earth's carrying capacity? I don't think so. We will now be headed into an economy of decline.

But the importance is not on focusing on this past, or even the present, but in looking toward the future. How are we going to live tomorrow after the oil that we've come to rely on becomes too expensive to use, let alone is even available? How many people will be able to live when the resources they are depended on to survive are removed from their grasps? Good questions. And there are many more that can be asked.

Through this blog site I hope to explore this future, the geography and way of life that will be there in this post-oil future. I hope to have discussion and present papers, lectures, and possibly even courses, that will explore the skills and knowledge we will need to know to deal with this new world. I do not plan to talk too much about how we got to this point, or in trying to prove that peak oil has happened - I leave that to historians and to scientists to do - except in how this information could help others accept the situation we are now in.

I look forward to many good discussions on this topic as we explore what to do and how we will live.

Kevin Anderson
Saturday, 20 August 2005
Eastern Iowa