Carl Etnier: Survival 101

They don’t teach that is most colleges, an that there’s a dilemma

Can a young person risk going to college these days?_ That’s a question nagging me after reading Zachary Nowak’s “Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil.” Nowak urges us to apply home-insurance reasoning to a future with less energy. Homeowners generally think the likelihood of their house burning down is tiny, but they pay thousands of dollars to have the resources for rebuilding in case it is destroyed by fire.

Similarly, Nowak exhorts his readers to prepare for severe impacts of peak oil. Not just the end of cheap oil, but the end of oil in any meaningful quantities. We now eat food and use goods from all over the world; prepare for a world in which the ships stop steaming and the trucks stop rolling.


How dependent are we on global trade? Consider the buttons on your shirts. According to a National Public Radio report, 60 percent of the world’s buttons are manufactured in a single Chinese city, Qiaotou. At a more fundamental level, around 95 percent of what we eat in Vermont is shipped in from out of state.

While Nowak doesn’t argue that rapid collapse of long-distance trade is the most likely future scenario, he says it’s possible. If it comes to pass, we will need a lot of skills that aren’t taught on the soccer fields of suburbia.

If you’re 18 and college-bound, you may be skilled at computers and driving a car; know how to take the second derivative of a quadratic equation in calculus and have learned about electron orbits in chemistry; and may be able to discuss Shakespeare and “To Kill a Mockingbird” intelligently. But do you know how to kill and dress a chicken, or find and prepare wild edible plants in every season, or keep a goat healthy so it produces milk and meat?

Rutland Herald