By Diane Chiddister
Over the weekend Yellow Springs hosted the largest conference on peak oil in the world to date, according to Pat Murphy, executive director of Community Solution, which sponsored the second “U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions.” The conference took place Friday through Sunday in Kelly Hall on the Antioch College campus.
“The knowledge of peak oil has arrived and is spreading through the country like wildfire,” Murphy said on Monday. “People are no longer talking about what it is. They’re forming activist groups all over the country.”
Peak oil is the point when world oil production begins to decline. Estimates vary as to its probable date, but they currently range from the end of this year to 2015, with a likely date of around 2007, according to Megan Quinn, outreach director of Community Solution, which is a program of Community Service, Inc. Experts estimate that peak oil, with declining fuel supplies and resulting instability in prices for oil and gas, will lead to significant disruption in the American lifestyle. Increased fuel prices, government reports acknowledging the likelihood of peak oil and concern over the effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on oil supplies have sparked new interest in the topic, Quinn said.
The conference attracted almost twice as many participants as last year, Murphy said. The 360 participants hailed from 39 states and five foreign countries. Some participants are already involved in the sustainability movement, in areas such as intentional communities or co-housing, but most represented a broad spectrum of society, Murphy said.
“It was a tremendous mix of people,” Murphy said. “There were teachers, professors and in general a wide mix of concerned citizens at professional and activist levels.”
People who attended the conference do not think that government will respond in a timely way to the pending crisis, according to Murphy. “People think they have to fix it themselves,” he said.
One first-time participant, Phillip Bogdonoss of Washington, D.C., said he came to the conference because he has become increasingly interested in the peak oil issue, and the Yellow Springs conference is the only one that focused on community-based solutions to the issue.
An obvious response to a decline in fuel supplies is that more people will choose to live in smaller communities to decrease the amount of money they spend on transportation to work, school or shopping, Murphy said. That likelihood has given a spotlight to the benefits of living in a small community, and fits in well with the philosophy of Arthur Morgan, who founded Community Service in 1940 to promote small community living, Murphy said.
“That message resonates with the people who came to our conference,” Murphy said.
The value and necessity of living in a small, self-sustaining community when oil supplies decline was one of the messages presented by Jan Lundberg, who gave a talk on “Changing Our Lives and the Direction of Society” on Saturday afternoon. Lundberg, the former editor of “The Lundberg Letter,” an oil industry analysis, is the director of the nonprofit organization Culture Change, which publishes a newsletter on the collapse of petroleum civilization.
Lundberg, who lives in California, forecast a “complete economic collapse” after peak oil hits, because “energy dependency is shot through our daily lives.”
“It will amount to a new culture,” he said of the post-peak oil society. “There will be a lot of upheaval and painful change.”
Lundberg described the projected energy crisis not as peak oil but as “petro-collapse.” Lundberg said that he foresees a sudden societal disruption as fuel supplies dwindle, along with public disorder, failure of goods and services and economic collapse.
“The transition may be rapid,” he said.
Those who fare best will be people who have prepared for the fuel shortage by living together in small communities, growing their own food and becoming self-sufficient to meet their daily needs, he said.
“We’re going to have to relocalize and contract,” he said.
As part of his talk, Lundberg presented a short film, “The Synthetic Sea,” about the effects on wildlife of small pieces of plastic that have been dumped, or found their way, into the ocean. Fish and birds often eat the plastic, which they may mistake for plankton, the film said. Recent research has shown that there are six pounds of plastic pieces in the ocean to every one pound of plankton.
Fish and birds that consume plastic have high levels of TCBs in their tissues, which cause illness and a disruption in reproductive systems, according to the film.
“We have a public health catastrophe that people don’t want to face,” Lundberg said after the film.
Other conference speakers included Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies; Michael Shuman, the author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age; Steve Andrews, cofounder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil; Diane Leafe Christian, the editor of Communities magazine; Murphy, Quinn and Faith Morgan, a member of the Community Solutions/Community Service, Inc. board of trustees and producer of the film Peak Oil, Cuba and Community, which was shown at the conference.
According to Murphy, Community Solutions has identified seven target areas in which to implement strategies for addressing the peak oil problem. At the conference, organizers requested that interested persons volunteer to take leadership roles in addressing the target areas. The seven areas are:
• agraria, the development of neighborhoods designed for a post-peak oil world in which residents integrate housing, work and food growing
• ride sharing, in which people carpool to cut down on the use of gasoline
• window covers, a strategy for reducing the more than one million barrels per day of energy lost through poorly insulated windows
• energy budgeting system, a data base that allows people to understand the energy use associated with everyday purchases, services and fuel usage
• appliance analysis, an effort to determine energy usage of different kinds of appliances
• an energy coaching program, which would train people to advise those who want to make rapid energy changes in their lives
• and peak and post-peak oil trainers, the development of a group of local trainers who can teach people and communities about changes needed to address peak oil.
Those interested in volunteering for any of these target areas, or those who want more information, should contact Murphy at 767-2161.
Megan Quinn Bachman 