Ok, for all those really feeling hopeless about peak oil, etc, it has finally come home to me exactly how depressing you are finding The End of Suburbia.  Please let me emphasize that there are more optimistic takes that still encompass the same message of a need for drastic change in the overall amount of energy and resources we consume.  I don't know whether it is something in my own mental make-up or the fact that I have training as a designer, but where a lot of people see a recipe for hopelessness, I see lots of things that need to be changed significantly, starting now, and want to know when we plan to get going on it.

To help with your own re-visioning of the future, please consider seeing "The Power of Community:  How Cuba Survived Peak Oil," or reading Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach or Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson.  The former is a documentary, the last two are speculative fiction, but all are equally informative about the possibilities for a green and bright future.

The problem lies in continuing business as usual and pursuing alternative technologies with the idea that they might allow us to continue business as usual.  We should not be leaping into personal internal combustion vehicles several times a day; we shouldn't have to and we shouldn't expect to.  We shouldn't be transporting most of what we consume half-way around the world from where it was made; again, we shouldn't have to or expect to.  We shouldn't be generating and using power at such a profligate rate that we don't even notice when we've poured a kilowatt down the drain or lost it to inefficient distribution... 

However, there is hope.  IF we both drastically change the way we have structured our lives, economies, communities, etc, AND we make significant investments in a wide range of new energy technologies, we can come out of all this stronger, healthier and saner.  The gloom and doom only holds if we keep being obsessed with using energy literally as if there were no tomorrow (thereby ensuring that there won't be).

If we start thinking along different lines, within a different paradigm, the future actually looks rosy.  Imagine: local energy production across a wide portfolio of technologies that are locally appropriate, healthy local economies that produce most of local needs, rationally organized development patterns that encourage community and minimize energy waste, solid and modest housing that uses little to no fuel for heating, using scarce resources like water and fuel for life  rather than frivolous and pointless things, etc. 

How to get from here to there?  That's where you all come in.  Each of us can (and should) make some small incremental changes, but we need to work as a community and eventually as a force within our larger surroundings to educate people about what kinds of changes are most productive, effective, efficient, worthwhile, and fun.

We will all have opportunities to learn more about sustainability and our own potential in the coming months, through programs this group will offer like the Northwest Earth Institute discussion course on sustainability and Environmental Action Teams.  There will also be a public showing of The Power of Community in late August/early September.

In the meantime, another title to be recommended is The consumer's guide to effective environmental choices : practical advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists by Michael Brower.   It provides useful and strategic prioritization for where to focus our personal energy for environmental change -- rather than getting bogged down in hopelessness.  There is a copy of this in the BU library and LAN has donated another to the Public Library for Union County.

Cheerily,
Sam Pearson