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):
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
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):
- The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
- It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
- It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
- It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
- If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
- It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
- It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
- It should come from a small, private owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
- It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
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
posted by Kevin Anderson K9IUA at 11:30 PM
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