peaknix

I tend to ruminate on peak oil most on the weekends (don’t we all – too busy holding on to the edge the rest of the week). I usually check on my YouTube subscriptions on Sunday in the morning and that usually means checking to see what has been posted by Peak Moment (PeakMoment on YouTube. This week is an interview of Molly Brown (of Alliance for a Post Petroleum Local Economy – APPLE Shasta) by Janaia Donaldson.

Molly describes nicely the reaction of one real person to learning about Peak Oil and then stepping up to impact her world.

We are so numb in our odd little multi-media cocoons as we learn about peak oil and societal collapse in the abstract – we read mass media opinion leaders like Kunstler and we read the PO blogs and we imagine that there is some specific way it will “go down” and that there will be some best-fit response or some most likely outcome in terms of how it will effect our lives.

We do not realize that the very multimedia lives that we live and use to learn about these meta-phenomena themselves is part of our peak world – it will fall away and we will be left with what we only really have, our immediate environment. It wont matter what Kunstler opined -our own collapse realities will be our own and it will reflect our own world view and how that informs our reaction to collapse.

So, for some, it means hiding from the zombies – and they will. For others, it means being the zombie, and they will. For yet others, it will be about dominating others to harness resources – and they will. And yet others, it will be about choosing the positive outlook. Not because they are simple/uninformed or because that is the 100% “correct” choice nor because they are naive and can not conceive of the evil way – no. I think they (and I think I am one of those) will choose a positive world outlook (eg., the Holmgren green life boat) because we understand how we choose our world every moment of the day and that we choose to strive for and live in harmony.

Transition will be individualized – it cant be otherwise.

To be able to survive and thrive in the descent, a person, family, community, and society needs to have persistent resilience. Thats not about effective gardening so much as being able to build a mindset that keep you interested in getting up in the morning day after day, year after year, and doing the hard work of subsistence living.

It wont be like pioneering days because we will not becoming from some developed context to conquer a new land with open possibilities. We will be dealing with the massive negative impact of loosing those open possibilities – that paradise lost. Our cultural psyche is not about just getting buy, its about dominance and time’s arrow pointing toward our American Dominance in some rosy future.

With the energy descent – that simply will not exist. People who can not let that particular fantasy go, along with its well understood success metrics will not be able to summon and sustain the resilience to make it through the transition.