For now I won’t try to record the conference proceedings here (they’ll be on DVD soon), but I have a number of blog entries in the works. If you’re interested in hearing about some of what I learned, I’ll also be covering it in a talk on Thursday, November 15th at 12 PM in a session called “Going Local: Building a Self-Reliant Richmond, Indiana.” Join us if you can.

To complement Diana’s whirlwind tour, it was great to hear next from Liz Walker, one of the founders of the EcoVillage at Ithaca. If you’re reading this and have a pre-conceived notion of an ecovillage or intentional community as a place full of dirty hippies living in a run down barn, you should definitely check out the photos of the Ithaca setup – such an impressive place, and such thoughtful, interesting people behind it. Liz talked about the numerous adventures and barriers they came across in creating it – finding the land, how to lay it out, creating a balance of privacy and community, designing a common house, cooperative decision making, publicity and community relations, etc. Cool stuff!

Megan Quinn talked next about Agraria, “a small community being designed for a post-Peak Oil world.” Because there is so much detailed info about Agraria at the website I linked to, I won’t repeat it here, but it was great to hear about this great project being carried forward in my region. Megan concluded with a great quote from R. Buckminster Fuller that I’m sure is repeated in these circles a lot: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

The three morning presenters held a panel together to answer questions about creating alternative communities, and there were some reasonable questions, a subset of which there was time for thorough answers. All of these speakers emphasized that creating intentional communities is a journey and a path you go down, not a destination or a place you build. From talking to the people I know who have lived in these communities, I can say their experiences back that up – even when you have the physical space fully built, you can be a long way from a complete community.

After lunch, we went into our final sessions for the conference, with a theme of “Going Local – The Journey Home”. The first speaker was Robert Waldrop, a loud and hilarious guy who had started the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, an impressive web-based service that connects family farms in Oklahoma to those wanting to buy food locally. He had great stories to tell us about how he got this entity up and running, and how rewarding it has been to connect people to the land and the food they eat more directly. He also mentioned that they would soon be releasing the software they use to run this service under the GPL so that other cooperatives can use it for free. Two quotes were “doing it yourself *is* instant gratification,” and “Food shouldn’t be cheap, but it should be valued!” He got the whole room riled up with his success and his passion for what he does.

The conclusion was made by Richard Heinberg, who accurately noted that after so much had been said, it would be difficult to add anything new. But he successfully put this conference and the topics we’d discussed into the larger context of current events – the hurricanes bearing down on the gulf coast, oil production, the Iraq war, economic downturn, etc. He noted that when looking at Peak Oil from cultural anthropology perspectives, the opportunities for cultural change are profound, and that the people who think about and act on these ideas are the ones who can help shepherd those opportunities into a better world.

After applauding all of the speakers and the organizers of the conference, it was time to go. We gathered our things, said goodbye to some of the nearby participants who weren’t such strangers anymore, and hit the road. As we dropped Dayna at the airport and Frank and I rode back west, I think we experienced that weird sensation of being at once overwhelmed and energized by the things we’d learned and heard through the weekend. Not only was it a lot to digest, but it’s information and imperatives that apply directly to all of us on a personal, local level.

And though the overall theme of the conference was one of hope and possibility, as I returned to Richmond, I definitely felt intimidated by the uphill battle that I would have if I were to try to bring this information and these opportunities to this particular local community. Coming into town, Frank drove us past the strip malls and the Hayes Arboretum with its newly fallen trees making way for more chain stores, and it was hard to fight off despair and an urge to move. It’s not that the people here don’t want what’s best for our city and our people, but the conversations around just what that is have become so muddled and confused that it’s hard to have hope for a positive driving vision to emerge, especially in the context of “external pressures” like an energy crisis.

But if I took one thing away from the conference, it’s that our local communities and making changes in our own lives *are* all we have to turn to in the face of global issues like peak oil, and that they can be places of hope for creating solutions to problems that otherwise seem insurmountable. Whether it’s Richmond, Indiana or any of the cities in any of the 39 states and 5 countries represented by participants at the conference, I’m excited to know that there are people out there working hard in their communities toward a sustainable, healthy, happy life together.

His talk was to be about “changing our lives and the direction of society”, but I have to say that I’m not quite sure that he made it around to a central point. He talked about his history as an activist and some of his recent activities, and generally went on about the poor state of the world as a result of petroleum’s role in it. He showed us a short Global Public Media film, “Our Synthetic Sea” (which you can view online). Lundberg’s bottom line was “we need to abandom petroleum,” and while I think a lot of folks in the audience resonated with his thinking, he didn’t really give us a lot of new information or insight to chew on. (To be fair, he was the post-lunch speaker in a long day of speakers, and he didn’t have any visuals, and the lights were low, and his voice was sort of deep, and….you get the picture.) A lot of the Q&A that followed was about “the collapse” – the event or series of events when modern petroleum based civilization can no longer support itself, and collapses. Folks wanted to know about how to deal with the chaos and nightmare scenarios they had dreamed up in considering what that event might look like. Here, Lundberg’s answers were more positive and clear: if you can create a lifestyle for yourself now that uses less petroleum and brings you joy – through walking, biking, being more efficient, eating healthier, etc., then you will help to mitigate the pain of any collapse that does happen.

The next segment was a video presentation of “Peak Oil, Cuba and Community,” a film that documents Cuba’s response to its “artificial peak oil” experience after the fall of the USSR in 1990, when it lost 60 percent of its oil supply. The film was introduced by the producer, Faith Morgan, who was excited and emotional to be showing it to this audience. She noted that peak oil is something that we don’t have a precedent for in the existence of humankind, and so we need examples that will guide us through it, and Cuba is one such example. The film, despite being unfinished and in need of some polish, was a great look at the cultural and structural changes that Cuba underwent as a part of this massive shift. It described the initial “special period,” where there was a great deal of confusion and suffering and despair, and then walked us through the ways that Cubans have adapted and survived. Rooftop gardens, community building, mass transport, conservation, etc. were all impressive to see. The film was followed by a panel discussion about the subject and Q&A from the audience. I missed out on some of this as I needed a break from sitting in the same room all day long.

After a break, the floor was opened up to an “open forum,” where the various participants could tell us about their background, interests, and questions. As I complained about from Saturday morning, there was still a general lack of sensitivity on the part of many people who rose to speak, thinking they each had 20 minutes to give us all a life history, when the forum facilitator (who was excellent in tone, phrasing, and method, BTW) had made it clear that they were to be brief and to the point. As a result, there were again a few nuggets of wonderful insight and questioning, but mostly it was a time to blurt something out and then be cut off, without much dialogue. Oh well.

After dinner, we had a really great presentation by Michael H. Shuman, author of Going Local, on “Buying Our Future: How Consumers Can Lead the U.S. to the Post-Petroleum Economy.” (Pardon the irony of linking you to Amazon for that book – buy it locally if you can!) I found Shuman’s talk to be particularly inspiring and motivating because it spoke to a lot of the issues and interests I’m dealing with in pondering the future of Richmond, Indiana, my local community. As with Jon Ikerd’s talk, I’ll just repeat the aspects of his talk I was able to write down, knowing you can check out his book for more.

Shuman presented two common mindsets that small communities tend to adopt when it comes to economic development. The first is “TINA: There Is No Alternative”, which aims to bring a Toyota plant into its back yard, focusing on exporting of goods to a global alternative. The second is “LOIS: LOcal ownership / Import Substituting,” which focuses on locally owned and operated economic entities and finding substitutes for good and services that might otherwise be imported. Shuman showed that, in the fight of LOUIS vs. TINA, LOIS tends to be a better deal. For one, TINA has a lower cost per job because of the enormous subsidies and tax abatements that are usually come with TINA.

Why is locally owned important, asks Shuman? 1) There tend to be little or no “destructive exits” with local businesses – an entity pulling up all its roots and extracting itself from the community. 2) They build long term wealth in the community, instead of shipping that wealth off someplace else. 3) Create higher standards of living – the locally owned entities have to be a part of rising labor and environmental standards (again, because they tend not to just exit when they don’t like those rising standards). 4) Greater economic multipliers – dollars circulate internally, reducing the cost of doing business locally.

Shuman also talked about why self-reliant communities in the LOIS model tend to be stronger and better in the long run: 1) They are less vulnerable to sudden shocks / destructive exits happening as a part of the larger economy, 2) they tend to have more skills and diversity, which makes them able to adapt better to changing environments, 3) they can diversify their exports instead of being subject to the health of a single employer/producer/product, and 4) they are easier and cheaper to build and maintain. In the context of a post-petroleum economy, Shuman also said there were a few key ways in which LOIS would prevail, namely it serves as an inoculation against shocks coming from changes in oil production. As energy costs rise, TINA becomes less productive: distribution costs go up, oil costs go up, environmental impact increases, etc.

LOIS requires a couple of key kinds of initiatives. Find the leaks in your city and plug them – find the places where dollars are leaving the economy and where self-reliance can be increased…more local banks, home ownership, retail. Find training (higher education and supporting entrepreneurs), support local investing and purchasing, etc. He noted that most pension plan dollars are going outside the local economy, and suggested setting up programs to create shareholder interest in local businesses. These allow owners to exit gracefully when the time comes because the community has an interest in the continuance of those businesses, increases the value of the business for the entrepreneur, and increases accountability.

Shuman talked about a “hierarchy of purchasing”, the guiding principle of which is encouraging, not requiring, folks to think about buying local, asking the question “could I buy an equivalent, good, comparatively priced product locally” before buying elsewhere. The specific hierarchy is:

• Don’t buy anything at all (“Can I do without this product?”)
• Use a product with local ingredients, locally manufactured, or locally sold
• Buy it from a local vendor
• Buy it from a regional vendor
• Buy it through a process that encourages fair trade
• “The Rest” – buy it from whomever has it

He went on to make some specific recommendations for ways we can all as individuals work toward creating more self-sustaining local communities, the top three of which were 3) eat locally, 2) cut your automobile use in half, and 1) own your own home (or at least make sure your renter or mortgage lender are locally based).

Shuman’s talk was received with standing applause, and there was an inspired Q&A session afterwards. I don’t really think I did the talk justice here, but I’ve since obtained his book, and it looks to be a much better coverage of these ideas, so I’ll refer you to it for more.

After a long day, they had set up an evening gathering complete with a wide selection of delicious pies baked by an apparently famous “pie lady” in Yellow Springs. A few of the presenters/participants played music together, but we didn’t stay around too long after sampling the pie and catching up a bit with an Antioch student I’d met a few years ago in Cincinnati. We fell asleep soon after our arrival back at the hotel.

The first speaker was Steve Andrews, a Denver based energy consultant and writer (and cast member in the film The End of Suburbia), who’s been involved in organizing a number of peak oil conferences and is planning a few coming up, including one in Denver in November. Steve walked us through the various alternatives to oil being proposed and their viability. He cautioned against spouting speculative predictions about the timeline and impact of peak oil, and made his point by showing a number of predictions from the 60s through the 90s (including his own) that have turned out not to be true (sometimes in a sigh-of-relief sort of way, and sometimes in a it-got-worse-faster-than-we-thought sort of way). Of note was Daimler/Chrysler’s promise that they would have 100,000 fuel cell cars on the road by 2004 – didn’t happen.

Steve referred back to the Hirsch Report that Richard Heinberg mentioned last night, and again affirmed it as the most important document/tool in convincing public officials to take this issue seriously. “Print it out!” he said. He also hinted that a particular U.S. governmental agency is actively but quietly looking at Peak Oil, and he’s meeting with them in a few weeks.

Steve went on to talk about the various specific alternatives to oil that are on the table. His criteria for even considering a technology/resource as an alternate were 1) the solution had to acknowledge the net energy story, 2) it has to look at the potential equivalent quantities to match the energy provided by petroleum, 3) you have to be able to determine a timeline for deploying the technology, 4) you have to have an accounting of the barriers to implementing that technology, and 5) the environmental impacts have to be clear. He showed that, while most all of them have some positive contribution to make in some context, none are suitable as a true substitute. In particular, he noted that oil shale, which has been held up by a number of energy companies as promising, has as much energy density/output to offer as baked potatoes. Similarly, hydrogen powered cars, while a great technology, are a long way off – Honda says they’re at least two decades away.

The next speaker was John Ikerd, an agrarian economist and author of Sustainable Capitalism, who also seemed to have a past life as a Baptist preacher. I have never seen or heard an economist belt out thoughts about current economic models, sustainable energy, and solutions toward a positive future in such a passionate and engaging manner. He was *on fire* as he talked, and I can’t do him justice here, but I’ll try to jot down a few of the things he said, which focused on the philosophies of sustainability (moving beyond the science that we’d been hearing about).

He said that the current dominant philosophy of industrialization is unsustainable; its fundamental principles revolve around productivity, always increasing inputs, outputs, profits and growth, and that this is by definition not sustainable. Sustainability focuses on permanence, balance, harmony – maintaining, restoring, and regeneratinig resources.

Ikerd noted that a key problem is the public’s lack of awareness of “basic principles of thermodynamics,” saying that an understanding of conservation/conversion of matter, entropy, dissipation would do wonders for improving the discussion and awareness of these issues. As a result, we’re all fine with the fact that industry as we know it is so good at extracting energy, but not good at restoring it unless it can be re-used during the lifetime of the relevant decision-makers. Economics says that it’s wasteful to restore energy – he suggested that we also apply this to human relationships and “social energy,” too; just as industry tends to destroy quality of life in an environmental sense, he said we need to acknowledge the need to build positive restorative relationships with others, to have positive contact with other things that make up our environment. Ikerd was adamant that our knowledge of the lack of rightness of our relationship to others and our environments is itself something that diminishes our quality of life. “We’re not sustainable as individuals, but we can be as a community.

Ikerd talked specifically about farming practices as horribly inefficient. He suggested that most of the energy in modern agriculture is lost in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), and that if we got rid of them, production could go *up* by 50-100% if animals were raised in free-range settings. He said that sustainable agriculture can serve as a metaphor for the rest of society, as a nurturing way of managing natural living systems. The current system has no internal controls, and is a perversion of economic theories put forth by Adams and Malthus, who cared about ethics and relationships, but those aspects, said Ikerd, have been stripped from modern economics, which only care about numbers and the pursuit of wealth. The current economic system places no value on the future beyond 10-15 years – you can even buy the right to be unethical!

Ikerd said we *can* go back to where we went wrong and move forward in a new and positive way. He suggested that we need to look at the fundamental laws and policies that govern our society, and revise them so that future generations, which can’t be present to fight for their interests, have equal rights. He said that the government reflects the people it governs, and so change must come in the hearts and minds of the people – fundamental change.

As I noted above, by the end of his talk Ikerd had built a crescendo to a full blown sweaty yell, and when he finished the auditorium erupted in applause. I think that even those who might have disagreed with any of his points would have still been applauding his energy and style alone.

I was also annoyed at the pervasive lack of communication skills when it came to asking questions during the various Q&A sessions. About 75% of the folks who stood up to ask a question A) didn’t seem to care that they’d been asked to keep their remarks short, B) didn’t listen to what other question-askers had said, often overlapping, C) seemed to see the time as an opportunity to introduce themselves and tell us their life history and get laughs, and then ask a totally unrelated question. This continued throughout the event and made those sessions, except for a few rare shining moments, rather un-useful.

The next speaker was Pat Murphy, Executive Director of Community Service and The Community Solution. Pat talked about “Global Inequity and Conflict or Community Solutions.” I won’t go into a lot of detail about his talk here, mostly because I’m exhausted and can’t. In general he talked about the political and social context of various conflicts around the world related to oil (historical and present day) and how the current state of things in that regard is almost always making the peak oil situation worse. Pat believes that outright war that is explicitly over fossil fuels is likely in the near future, and that the results of this will be catastrophic. But Pat emphasized that we don’t have to choose “armageddon,” and that we can choose “Eden,” by shifting world views, using fossil fuels less, becoming less dependent on automobiles, and rebuilding social relationships that we currently put aside for television and indirect/vicarious experiences. He specifically suggested that we 1) forget trying to convince *current* politicians to change and focus on becoming the future politicians, 2) forget trying to make inroads with the *current* corporations (he said all post 1980′s CEOs are heartless) and build new responsible corporations instead, 3) forget the *current* American Dream and pursue a better one, 4) replace the current consumer society with a conserver society, and 5) we can’t wait, we must start now.

Pat’s talk was very positive, and despite offering some stark numbers and history about oil-related conflict in the world, his was a message of hope about the possibility of turning things around before it’s too late. He reinforced this with lots of great personal stories and examples of communities doing just that.

After what had felt already like a full day, we broke for lunch. I’ll say here that throughout the conference I met a number of people to whom I had various connections – folks who have hung out on IshCon.org, an Antioch student I’d met up with in Cincinnati while living there, another participant from Richmond, and some other folks who I recognized but couldn’t place. I met Joe Schriner, who is running for president in 2008. Perhaps most surreal was meeting Trina Paulus, author of Hope for the Flowers, a book that was fairly important to me in younger years. She was wearing a “Hope for the Flowers” shirt and we ended up eating dinner together later!

The introduction was by Pat Murphy, who is involved in the community service organization that put the conference together. He noted that predictions about when the availability of cheap, easily produced oil will run out vary widely – everywhere from 2010 and beyond to 2007 to later this year. One expert predicts that Thanksgiving Day of this year will be the due date – yikes. In response, he noted that we need nothing less than the equivalent of movements like those to end slavery, win recognition of civil rights for the oppressed, etc. A new paradigm, a new metaphor of creation. He talked about community solutions as those grounded in the notion that people hold relationships to each other and their environment above the importance of possessions. In general the introduction set a great tone and reaffirmed my hopes that I mentioned yesterday that I was participating in a coming together of folks interested in positive local solutions to very serious global problems.

Heinberg took the stage and was clearly excited to be there. He travels around the country and the world talking to groups small and large about peak oil and what it means for their organizations and communities. I think he must have been energized to be talking to a group of people who, on the whole, probably didn’t need to be convinced that peak oil is an issue *worth* talking about, and were ready to get focused on exploring it further and talking about solutions.

He did talk some about the background of peak oil and how we got here. “Imagine pushing your car for 20 miles. You can use ropes and pulleys, but no motors, no electricity. That’s the hard work that we pay $3 a gallon for.” The appeal of replacing labor with machinery that could be run by cheap oil was what transformed American culture and spurred on the Industrial Revolution. In the energy crisis of the 70s, we learned to conserve resources, speed limits were lowered, people made sacrifices. According to Heinberg, in the Reagan years, the U.S. worked out a deal with the Middle East oil producers so they would flood the market with oil and destroy the Soviet economy as a part of a cold war strategy. It worked – the downside of this is that oil became so readily available again and we forgot how to conserve it – the demand ever increasing.

He talked about Chevron’s recent campaign acknowledging peak oil and asking us to “join them” in addressing this issue – see appropriately named website willyoujoinus.com. Heinberg speculated that their motivation for this action was primarily public relations – that when things start to get bad related to the availability of oil and the related environmental impact, they’ll be able to say that they’ve been “working on it” for a while now. Hmm.

He also talked about the importance of the Hirsch Report on peak oil, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy and paid for by taxpayers. The report concludes, “The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.” A decade – yikes! Heinberg noted that this report has been almost completely ignored by politicians and decision makers everywhere, and yet it could be used as quite an important tool in making politicians consider action on this issue.

I was struck by his use of the impact of Hurricane Katrina as a metaphor for the impact of Peak Oil: there was plenty of notice, not enough preparation, a poor response even after it happened, and responsibility for action and solutions had to be taken at the local level. Heinberg said we must mitigate the effects of peak oil by doing what those in charge of preparing for the hurricane didn’t. He did talk about the impact of recent weather events on oil production, but noted that we should be careful about always looking at changes in oil production and pricing as tied to a particular recent events – these things just help us to ignore the trends, not explain them.

Heinberg proposes a protocol for addressing peak oil that could be adopted by each oil consuming/exporting/importing nation: 1) No country will produce oil above it’s current depletion rate (defined as the annual production as a percentage of the estimated amount is has left to produce), and 2) each importing country shall reduce its imports to match the current world depletion rate. Only with these kinds of protocols in place, Heinberg said, do we have a hope of making the transition to a post-petroleum world without, um, armageddon. If we don’t, he said, the current competition for oil will turn into conflict, and the inability for any given company or nation to budget for the future because of the volatility of energy prices will wreak havoc on everyone.

At the local level, Heinberg suggested these as community priorities in addressing peak oil, and gave various examples of each:

• Ensure local food, water, and energy security
• Reduce the need for transportation
• Support your local economy
• Foster the local manufacturing of essential goods
• Plan for long-term emergency services

In giving some specific suggestions about community preparedness, he included these as great action points that can be taken on now:

• Create car sharing and car co-op programs
• Build local food networks of producers and consumers (especially like Community Supported Agriculture programs)
• Assess local needs and vulnerabilities – form committees
• Learn from other communities also preparing

On that last point, Heinberg said we really need to have a clearinghouse of knowledge, solutions, ideas, etc. that folks can learn from each other as they trry out these various approaches. He offered up a number of useful sites to that end, including newcollege.edu, postcarbon.org, oildrum.com (ahhh, that turns out to be an adult site, try this one instead…nothing like pointing your audience to a porn site!), energybulletin.net, and his own museletter.com. He said there are lots of examples (mostly outside the U.S.) of people living in strong healthy communities with significantly lower energy consumption.

The above may make the talk sound like a lot of doom and gloom, but it really wasn’t – Heinberg was one of those speakers that commands your respect because of his knowledge of the subject, but also your admiration because of his ability to present it in such a positive, hopeful tone that leaves possibility and excitement in the air. The standing ovation was impressive. He took some questions from the conference participants, and from those we could all tell that it will be a weekend full of great inquiry, intense discussion, and important knowledge sharing. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve got my own questions to get answered at this event, but if you’re following along and have any you want me to throw out while I’m here (or want to talk about when I return), just post a comment below.

You’ve seen the bumper sticker, “think globally, act locally,” and though it’s cliche, I think it holds great promise, at least for how I devote my own energies. Regardless of why one might be invested in strong local communities working to create sustainable local economies, the outcomes can only be positive. It will be great to interact with others from around the country to see what they’re doing in their own communities.

I hope to post updates from the conference here, perhaps even with a photo or two. And if you’re interested in this stuff (you know, the future of humanity, pshh), I’m always up for a dialogue about it.