by John Michael Greer
The Archdruid Report (November 12 2008)
Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society
The weekend before the election, as I mentioned in last week's post
here, I went to Michigan to attend a peak oil conference: the Fifth
Annual Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions, to give it its
full moniker. In more ways than one, it provided me with a wide-angle
snapshot of one end of the peak oil movement; since the peak oil story
is as much about human responses to geological realities as it is about
the realities themselves, the trip - and it was a trip, in several
senses of the word - may be worth recounting here.
Archdruids are a bit thin on the ground these days, and so the five
years since my election to that office have made air travel a larger
part of my life than I'd prefer. (My carbon offset consists of not
owning a car.) The drill is almost second nature at this point: pack
light and fast, reach the tiny local airport well before sunrise, down a
cup of tea and try to ignore the blaring television in the lobby while
people going elsewhere file out onto the tarmac and head for turboprops
and small jets. For entertainment, I had a volume of Gregory Bateson to
read and a volume of thirteenth-century Latin sorcery to translate - in
case you were wondering, yes, there are indeed species of geek other
than the computer variety, and I plead guilty.
I spent the flight staring out the window at half a continent's worth of
scenery while trying to fit my head around Bateson's take on systems
theory or the tangled syntax of some scrap of atrocious medieval Latin,
and spent the ride from the airport to the hotel in suburban Auburn
Hills taking in glimpses of Detroit: long-abandoned factory buildings in
ruins, gritty slums with colorfully named churches and every third house
boarded up, posh suburban neighborhoods with ostentatious yards, huge
office buildings breaking the skyline, and then the huge mass of
Chrysler's headquarters complex looming up beside the freeway like a
pharaoh's tomb. I half-expected to see an inscription out of Shelley's
Ozymandias there:
My name is Iacocca, CEO of CEOs;
Look on my works, ye bankers, and despair!
Then we arrived in Auburn Hills. It was the sort of suburb built for
cars rather than people, where strip malls crouch back from six-lane
boulevards as though hoping that their vast parking lots will shield
them from the traffic, city hall looks like one more corporate office
building, and reader boards on the same restaurants you'd find a
thousand miles away struggle to project a pallid imitation of bonhomie
into empty space. The sidewalks - where there were sidewalks - had been
there long enough that grass poked up here and there through cracks in
the edges, but I never saw anyone using them but me. Drivers on their
way into parking lots gave me goggle-eyed looks, as though they'd
thought pedestrians were as mythical as hippogriffs. It was a strange
place for a peak oil conference; given the equally surreal luxury-hotel
setting of this year's ASPO-USA conference, I started to wonder if some
hidden cosmic law requires the biggest possible contrast between the
subjects of these conferences and their physical setting.
Still, Oakland University, where the conference actually took place, was
pleasant enough, with buildings in late 20th century academic brickwork
separated by wide grassy lawns that will make good vegetable gardens in
another decade or two. By Friday lunchtime, attendees had started to
gather, conversations sprang up, and a curious sort of temporary
community took shape, centered on the challenges and possibilities of a
world that doesn't exist yet: the world on the far side of peak oil.
If I recall correctly, it was Randy Udall who pointed out some time ago
that the peak oil community divides along a fault line between “suits”
and “sandals” - that is, the people who come to peak oil from a
background in business, government, and the academy, on the one hand,
and the people who come to it from a background in activism and
alternative culture, on the other. The annual ASPO conferences are for
the suits, while the Peak Oil and Community Solutions conference caters
to the sandals; at the latter, community organizers, permaculture
designers, and ecovillage residents greatly outnumbered university
professors, petroleum engineers, and investment advisers.
One of the things I took away from the conference, oddly enough, is that
the divide is a source of strength rather than a sign of weakness. None
of the presentations at either conference would have been well suited to
the other, which meant that between them, the conferences offered a much
broader image of the state of the world's energy predicament and the
options for dealing with it. In the space between the number crunching
of the geologists and the visions and strategies of the activists,
something useful takes shape. I think the peak oil movement needs both,
for much the same reasons that vertebrates have two eyes instead of just
one.
By nearly any calculation, though, archdruids fall well into sandal
territory, and so it will probably not surprise any of my readers that I
found the weekend in Michigan more congenial than that earlier weekend
in Sacramento. High points included Dmitry Orlov's progress report,
delivered with his trademark dry wit, on the stages of collapse; a slide
show by Shane Snell on ecovillages he'd visited while touring North
America in a biodiesel-powered camper; lively conversations with a
couple of solar energy techs at the Green Living expo; and three trips
to local green hotspots - a charter school's environmental classroom, a
sustainable restaurant in a nearby town, and the Upland Hills Ecological
Awareness Center, one of those classic Seventies earth-bermed passive
solar structures with big round PV cells above the flat-plate collectors
and a wind turbine turning lazily overhead.
This last was particularly welcome, because I came of age in the years
when this latter sort of structure counted as cutting-edge tech, and I
still have the same sort of nostalgic regard for it other people have
for their high school football team or the music that was playing on the
radio during their first date. If our society had made the right
collective choices at the end of the Seventies, buildings and programs
like Upland Hills might be as common as, well, shuttered car plants in
Michigan are today; even after the mistakes of the last thirty years,
the survivors of the species still have quite a bit to teach.
I don't propose to claim that all the presentations at the conference
were useful or all the speakers inspiring; there were inevitably some
slow moments and some ground familiar to everyone present rehashed for
the dozenth time, and a few glaring false notes - in particular, a
presentation on the Transition Town movement that was as glib and pushy
as a pyramid scheme sales pitch, and succeeded mostly in replacing my
generally positive take on that movement with hard questions I haven't
yet been able to resolve to my own satisfaction. Still, questions are at
least as worth taking home as answers, and often more so.
The night after the conference closed, as I packed for the flight home,
I certainly had plenty of questions to take with me. Some of them - the
next moves in oil production, the outcome of the upcoming election, the
future course of the financial crisis on Wall Street and Main Street -
had been buzzing through the conference all weekend. I'm not sure that
others got asked at all, but they were implicit in everything we had
been doing. From beginnings in a handful of internet sites and email
lists a decade ago, the peak oil movement has grown and diversified
dramatically, and has begun to find an audience beyond the small circles
of worried professionals, green activists, and eccentrics who formed its
backbone for so many of its formative years.
At this point nearly all the near-term predictions central to the
movement in its early years have proved themselves, while the
conventional wisdom that dismissed those predictions out of hand is much
the worse for wear. As peak oil proponents claimed, petroleum production
worldwide hit a plateau in the first few years of the century, and has
never been able to break above it; oil prices have spiked well up into
three digits; and the raw impact of energy costs has been implicated by
more than one scholar as a trigger for the financial unraveling still
going on around the world. The words “peak oil” are starting to find
their way more and more often into the mainstream media and the wider
public dialogue about our future.
The possibility of opening a window of opportunity for significant
change, the theme of my main talk at the conference, can't be rejected
out of hand any more. The question that I couldn't shake that night is
whether any part of the peak oil movement - suits, sandals, or any
combination thereof - is ready to deal with the possibilities and
problems that will have to be faced if that happens. That question, too,
I have not yet been able to answer to my own satisfaction. I hope other
peak oil proponents are thinking about it too, because we may all have
to confront its implications in the fairly near future.
_____
John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/11/facing-peak-oil-in-motown...
