The road ends in post-petro future

Like many Americans, I came of age in the era of cheap gas, cross-country vacations, the family station wagon and the Beach Boys croonin’ while I spent my high school years cruisin’.

Later, warming in the fumes of JP-4 on U.S. Air Force flight lines and relocating cross-country and around the world — to Florida, South Korea, Washington state, Virginia, Michigan and finally Indiana — mobility on the cheap was something I took for granted.

At a party during the 2004 election campaigns, I even said (aloud), “I don’t give a damn about the environment.” OK, what I meant was I didn’t give a damn about it as a campaign issue among what I thought were weightier concerns like the war and civil liberties.

And when Hoosier Environmental Council activists tapped on my door a few years back with their petition to stop I-69, I told them I was not opposed to it. New construction is the quintessential “can’t-please-everyone” issue. There will always be tree huggers prostrating themselves before bulldozers. If they had their way every time, nothing would ever be built.

Then I heard the phrase “peak oil production” at a presentation by self-confessed tree hugger Scott Russell Sanders at last year’s Spirit & Place Festival. And it occurred to me that those words I’d heard many times before had fallen on deaf ears until that moment.

IndyStar.com