Life or Death Decision

While peak-oil activists foment panic, the ‘Transition’ movement sees a graceful evolution back to the Stone Age

FOR THE PAST couple of years, California has seen an uprising of activists who are training themselves and others to grow food and preserve it, to make soap, weave fabrics, build homes and master other essential tasks. They are learning to do the work that we abandoned to the factories and machines in the late 1800s, when the power of burning oil turned life into a leisurely vacation from reality.

That vacation is now ending, they say, and we must get back to work.

Some are reminiscent of survivalists, while others sound like ’60s utopians, but they share one belief: The era of oil is over.

“Peak oil” describes a theoretical yet already unfurling scenario in which the easy days of oil-based society have reached an end. Its adherents see a scenario in which global oil production has peaked, and every barrel of crude oil drawn from the earth from this point forth is more difficult to extract than the barrel prior. According to the peak oil theory, the time is approaching when the effort and cost of extraction will no longer be worth the oil itself, leaving humanity without the fuel to power our transportation, factories, farms–society.

How exactly peak oil will affect our world is a question now being asked by thinkers and activists in Silicon Valley and around the globe. Some predict the end of the world as we know it, while others believe we are at the breaking dawn of a better, sustainable society.

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