May 3, 2006--This past weekend I attended three packed days of 52 presentations, speeches and streams of consciousness offered by geologists, nuclear physicists, architects, economists, farmers, energy consultants, urbanists, alternative transportation experts, relocalization supporters, financial analysts and writers at the Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma Conference regarding the problem of declining natural resources or perhaps more to the point declining cheap resources.  A phrase commonly used to define or label this issue and coined by M. Hubbert King is Peak Oil and the conference was organized with the intention of educating the public about it.  About 250 people attended the conference over the course of the three days with nary a mainstream journalist in sight.

Honestly, so much information was shared that it has taken me several days to even begin to process it.  My first impressions are: 

a)We need to start thinking in terms of alternative transportation, buying locally, local job markets and community building in general so that we can sustain ourselves.  Technology is not the answer, changing the way we live is;

b)Obesity will cease to be a problem in this country as food shipped long distances will become scarce and dependence upon locally grown, seasonal food becomes a necessity;

c)Will people become unruly when cheap resources become scarce and how will politicians handle their responses? 

One of the speakers that made an impression was:

Megan Quinn of The Community Solution who along with colleagues Pat Murphy and Faith Morgan made the film Power of Community about Cuba's efforts to survive their cutoff of oil when the Soviet Union fell in 1990.  The film is so powerful that I invested in a copy.  The Cubans now have such a successful agricultural economy that farmers are the equivalent of what engineers used to be.  They have food, they have money, they have stature.  Cubans now produce so many doctors that they send them all over South America to help poorer nations.  They grew their universities from the four they had before their Peak Oil experience to over 50 now.  They ride bicycles and mass transportation and are healthier for it.  They are also honest enough to say that they wish they could have an easier life, but their ingenuity has enabled them to survive and thrive.  

Regardless of whether you subscribe to the theory of oil peaking or the theory of cheap oil peaking, thinking about how we will live in a country with limited resources available to all is an issue to be carefully considered and planned for.