[Colorado-Valley]

"Editor,

Over the past 50 years, the world has blown through almost a trillion barrels of oil, about half of the world's supply. In the next few years, we'll pass the peak of world production. Prices will skyrocket and petroleum society — especially in the United States — will begin to starve to death as cheap energy becomes a thing of the past.

It will hit us here in the West particularly hard, since much of the region is built up with vast tracts of sprawling suburbia, jobs and stores reachable only by car and most of our food grown far away and trucked in only because cheap oil has made that possible up until now.

President Carter tried to warn us in the 1970s that if the country didn't change the way it used energy, we'd face a crisis in a couple of decades. Now we're there, spending trillions of dollars militarily trying to control oil pipelines in hostile lands half a world away. That path will only lead to national bankruptcy.

We should be using this money instead to rebuild our country's economy and infrastructure -- away from subdivisions and chains stores and toward small towns and local agriculture. An excellent article in this month's Harper's Magazine describes how Cuba was able to make the transition from an oil-and-tractor-based economy to a nation that is able to feed itself with thousands of small farms and urban gardens. The country now has 500,000 teams of oxen and a growing expertise in small, low-input production gardening.

The cities and towns of the Western Slope should start planning for the end of cheap oil now, while there are still resources to invest, rather than continuing to build more highways and subdivisions which will probably become worthless in a few years anyway.

The coming decade is going to be about learning how to grow food and make things again on a local level. This will be a truly daunting task. I believe anything we do now to plan for a post-petroleum world and a small-farm economy will pay for itself many times over in the years ahead."