Peak opportunity

…The Opportunity that Peak Oil awareness provides is to focus the mind on the inevitability and immediacy of the changes in our economic systems that will force each of us and the whole system to change very soon. It seems to me that although there is certainly a proportion of environmentally aware people who have always responded well to the


It seems to me that this in never likely to work. What has a chance of being far more effective- if articulated in the right way- is to focus on what fundamentally will motivate all of us: personal well-being and survival. Peak oil tells us that the current system will come to an end, not in some far-distant time after we are gone, but in the very near future, and that we will be forced to change our lifestyles very dramatically to survive. So dependent are we on an over-bloated globalised system of food and energy production that few of us can really imagine the changes that will be necessary as fossil fuels become unfordable, or the time it will take us to make the changes necessary.

I am often accused of being a negative gloom-and-doomer for spelling out the message the way I see it, but I just feel that half measures will not do. You cannot be a little bit sustainable. The small changes that everyone can do -change the light-bulbs, cycle to work-are important, but will never be enough unless the really major strategic changes are required are taken seriously: how will my community really manage to feed itself? What sort of jobs will there even be in the future? What kind of survival or emergency skills should I learn? What sort of Energy Descent Plan should my locality adopt?

Zone 5