[Dvanharn]

I'll never forget the summer when I was 17 years old and working at a camp on the shores of southeastern lake Michigan near Saugatuck. My parents drove up from Chicago to visit me, and dad said come up to the parking lot, I have something to show you. We walked through the woods to the visitor parking area, and I immediately spotted a brand new gleaming black (sorry, couldn't find a picture of a black one) Pontiac Star Chief four door hardtop and knew it was dad's. As I approached, I saw the "Tri-Power" emblem on the front fender, and realized that it was the special edition with Pontiac's most powerful engine for that year except for the very limited Bonneville Fuel Injected model. It's three 2-barrel carburetors (hence the "Tri-Power" designation) and 315 horsepower made it one of the fastest production sedans of it's day. I already had my driver's license, and this was a great car for dates!!



1958 was the era of chrome-laden, ever increasing horsepower monsters from Detroit's big 3 automakers. It was the Eisenhower era, and although we practiced ducking and covering under our desks or in the hallways of our schools in case Russia attacked us with nuclear weapons, it was a giddy time for America. We had the most powerful economy and productive industry in the world, recently built to help win the second world war while our European allies' industry and economies were torn to shreds in the actual theaters where the war was fought. America could do no wrong, and the whole world envied us - or so we thought!

This was the era in which I grew up. I was born a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor when the U.S. joined in the fighting of WW2, which put me about 4 years before the beginning of the "baby-boomers."

When I went to high school in Chicago, only a few families had more than one car, and cars for high school students were quite rare - usually a few hot-rodders or basic car nuts. I took the bus and the "El" when I traveled around the city, and in retrospect, it was a good way to travel in a large metropolis. But the interstate highway system was being built, and petroleum madness was taking over our society.

In 1962, I dropped out of college and joined the Navy. Although I was recruited to be a nuclear power electronics technician, my slight color vision problem ended up shifting me over to becoming a Hospital Corpsman or "medic." As soon as I finished training and got a long term assignment at the Oakland Hospital facility, Soon thereafter, I went shopping for a car, and have never been without one since.

So, fellow "peak-niks", I was not only raised in the dead center of the mad rush to rampant petroleum consumption, I actually lived it to the fullest. (Although I hated commuting by car, and avoided it as much as possible.)

A few years ago, I discovered www.dieoff.org and saw the truth in the information there, although that web site seems to not be updated much any more, It opened my eyes to the near-term inevitability of peak oil. I bought Kenneth Deffeyes book "Hubbert's Peak," earlier this year, met Richard Heinberg at Earth Day and read his book "The Party's Over," discovered the ASPO web site and this set of forums. What I have learned about the high probability of a peak in oil sooner than later has motivated me to join the peak/post-peak planning community as an activist - and finally make use of my 1976 U.C. Berkeley degree in Conservation. I have already started eliminating some of the "frivolous" hobbies and interests from my life - like selling my collection of energy-wasting vacuum-tube audio gear and my participation and moderation duties at www.audioasylum.com, and preparing my windsurfing gear for sale because each day's sailing now requires an 80 mile round trip. I will be spending my spare time over the next few weeks trying to connect with other peakniks in the community, and setting up organizations to plan and hopefully get ready for the first wave of economic impacts from the petroleum plateau and peak

I think that we will see the both the best and the worst in human nature expressing itself as the peak becomes a downhill economic reality. I appreciate the opinions and insights from both optimists like Jay Morrison and pessimists like Matt Savinar (a local whom I am in the process of hooking up with for peak and post-peak issues and planning.) The issues we face are extremely complex and full of very frightening possibilities. I hope that others will tell some of their personal stories here as we grow into an on-line force that will blossom into a network of community and regional activists and leaders.

Please excuse the long rant, but I am feeling very motivated. I am extremely impressed with the level of intelligent discussion here at www.peakoil.com, and hope to contribute in a more focussed and broadly applicable manner starting immediately as I begin to do something useful in peak/post-peak planning - with mostly MUCH shorter posts. I went to a men's seminar a few years ago where the theme was purpose - purpose in life. When you are motivated to do something that is useful and beneficial to your friends and community, and even mankind in general, life is much more fulfilling, I look forward to the challenge of post-peak life, and hope to help the younger people of today - and future generations - face a reality that my generation never had to face.

If anyone else has stories about how they came to recognize the inevitability of peak oil, and their backgrounds and motivations for becoming peak-oil activists, I would enjoy reading about it. When push comes to shove, life is a very personal thing.

Dave van Harn

[Jack]

Interesting post! Thanks! :D

[Leanan]

LOL! What a car.

I missed out on those behemoths. I was born just after the baby-boom, and so my childhood was colored by the oil crisis of the '70s. Everyone said then that the oil would last about 40 more years. Of course when you're a kid, that seems like forever. I didn't worry about it, any more than I worried about getting gray hair or heart disease.

My dad is an agronomist. His specialty is international agriculture, so I've lived all over the world, including places where we had to adopt a low-energy lifestyle, whether we wanted to or not. The reason he went into the field was because he believed in Malthus' Doom. It's not what you'd expect from someone who's politically right of Reagan, devoted to Fox News, etc. But he's a scientist, and if presented with adequate evidence, he will believe.

He told me about Malthus when I was a kid, and I didn't believe him. I watched Star Trek, and was sure we'd develop that kind of neat-o technology that would get us off the Earth and on to new resources. I used to have long arguments with him. Basically, using all the arguments Jay uses now. But he warned me that the Green Revolution didn't disprove Malthus' theory, it just delayed it.

And now that I'm older, I've come to realize that he's right. Technology is not going to save us. Technological development has slowed down; investment in R&D doesn't return the profits it used to. Many expected we'd have colonies on other planets by now. Instead, we've never even been back to the Moon. We won't get off this planet before the oil runs out, and we won't find another energy source, either. Even if we did, we can't keep growing forever. Just look at the graphs - population growth over time, say - and it's clearly unsustainable.

The imminence of peak oil was driven home to me when someone posted a link to the "Olduvai Theory" page at DieOff.org in another forum I post in. The idea wasn't new to me, exactly, but I hadn't thought about how close we were to the cliff. Even though I consider Olduvai a worst-case scenario, and possibly avoidable, it is certainly sobering.

Unfortunately, it's going to be difficult for me to adjust to a powerdown at this point. I'm an engineer, and most of my hobbies are for the 21st century. (A lot of computer skills, including CAD, CGI, web page design, digital video editing, etc. Keeping tropical fish. In the Northeast!)

But my plans for the future have changed. I was planning to retire to Hawaii, where my family is. But by then, I suspect a rock in the middle of the Pacific won't be the best place to ride out the crisis. My financial planner told me not to buy a house; he thinks people without kids are better off renting and putting their money in the stock market. I was happy to hear this at first, because I didn't want the responsibility of caring for a house, let alone a large lawn. But now, I'm planning to get a little farm somewhere. (Amazing, for someone who didn't even want a lawn to mow last year.)

At the moment, my plans are somewhat in limbo, because my employer is going to move their offices somewhere else. Don't want to buy anything until I know where. I'm pulling for someplace rural, where land is cheap.

So right now I'm sitting tight, saving money, and hoping the crash holds off until I'm ready to make my move.

I'm also trying to acquire skills that would be useful in a post-peak world. Instead of taking courses in Macromedia Flash Animation or Adobe Illustrator at my local community college, I'm going to take courses in solar technology, gardening, etc. I figure it can't hurt, right?

[Malone_LaVeigh]

My first car was a '59 convertable T-bird, bought for $300 and in need of a lot of work when I got it in 1969. I was 15 at the time, and my little brother wrecked it before I ever got it fixed up, but that was the extent of my muscle-car experience. A couple of years later, we had Earth Day, consciousness changed, and I more or less did without cars until I married a woman with a Corolla in 1984.

While most of my life I've been very conservative about energy use, a few years ago, I became aware of peak oil and since then have pretty much put my efforts into getting ready for the bad times rather than thinking there's anything I can do through my personal behavior to change things. If the country had listened and made need changes after that first Earth Day and the Club of Rome report, then maybe something could have been done to make the landing easier. As it is, I guess Cheny was right when he labeled conservation nothing more than a personal virtue.