An alternative reading
I am not your usual peaknik (I think). I have not seen An Inconvenient Truth or read the book. I have actually not read any of the peak oil books.
I was exposed to the idea of peak oil back in 2005 when I visited DailyKos. It was a pretty hot topic. It was all too academic to me then and a lot of the diaries were pretty darn wonkish and jargony for someone not in the oil industry or the peak oil community.
I really didn’t need a whole lot of convincing. Seemed like a “duh” moment, intuitive once you took a step back.
NOTHING will last for ever, including oil. Like anything, its all about the timing.
I used to reconcile this with thoughts like “We will have enough time to find alternatives” but then I realized that no amount of wind or sun farms or hybrids or misbegotten biofuels would ever be able to replace gasoline in a meaningful way, meaningful way
Whereas 10 years ago I built a house in the exurbs predicated on the concept of big commutes, I didn’t really plan on the concept of NO cheap gas. I figured I would pay the price out of my own pain (mind-numbing drive times, aching legs, lost family life).
We all know this was not the best calculation in terms of oil consumption but its excellent for what we are doing now (see Humble Garden)
If we could have afforded to live closer to Boston, we may have built the house closer.
Thing is, we didn’t want to live too close for when the urban centers began to fail. We figured that collapse would be from global warming flooding or some such. We also figured it would be further in the future.
Instead of reading the misogynist racist writings of Kunstler, I am searching for a peak oil narrative that is pro-female, pro-male, pro-rational in nature.
I get inklings here and there as I cruise the blogosphere.
Amanda (see her blog Amanda Kovattana) seems to be leading an interesting life, the complexity of which I have yet to fully grasp. I get the sense that she is actualizing as she moves (has moved?) into the peak-oil world. She has a fresh multicultural female viewpoint that I can identify with (being multicultural and female myself). Her root non-American culture is Thailand while mine is Colombia.
She sees solutions to the transition in the older self sufficient culture in Thailand. I likely would find the same in Colombia. She sees how the oil dynamics of the developed world has impacted her homeland, I know too well how it affects Colombia.
I am hoping to find more kindred souls, people I can learn from, people who may surprise me with neat new ideas and solutions.
I am looking to stay well away from dogmatic and depressive voices that have mostly a nihilistic worldview because those qualities are the ones I dislike most in myself!
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