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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Apocalypse Later? I’m Going Local Now.
Doug Fine, The Washington Post
I’ve spent the past three years trying to get petroleum out of my life and live locally. Where I differ from many locavore cruncholas is in my determination to do these things without giving up digital-age comforts — you know, the ones that allow me to file this essay from a solar-powered ranch 23 miles from the nearest town.
I was plugging along, burning about 80 percent less oil than I did before overalls became my fashion mainstay, when the world financial system nearly collapsed. Now climate change exists again (officially), and there’s talk that a green-tech economy might somehow emerge from the ashes of the one torched by derivatives.
But no one’s sure. What if the Earth’s supply of oil is half gone, with the masses in India and China just now latching on to the consumption teat? What if “cap and trade” and plug-in hybrids don’t get here in time?
Suddenly the end of globalization and other apocalyptic visions of the planet’s near future, once the purview of Idaho survivalists, are prime-time stories on CNN. Mainstream suburban friends of mine who used to say that my experiment in neo-rugged-individualism was radically subversive have abruptly changed their minds. Now they just say it’s radically unfeasible. Yet everyone seems to sense that 69-cent plastic garden buckets might one day be difficult to come by.
I have a fiancee and a son to provide for, so I decided to take a hard look at our prospects for survival if our consumer safety nets went away. For now, my green lifestyle choices at my remote 41-acre outpost in the American Southwest are optional. You know, growing lettuce instead of buying Chilean. Using organic cotton diapers instead of buying Pampers. But what if one morning in, say, 2049, I wake up to milk my goats and find out that supplies are no longer streaming in from China and California? What would I do if both big-box stores and crunchy food co-ops suddenly were no more?
In other words, I’m examining my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society 40 years in the future…
(9 August 2009)
Suggested by Linton Hale, who passed on these words from EB contributor Shephed Bliss:
The concerns of the Peak Oil, Transition Intiative, and Climate Change movements are increasingly making it into the mainstream, including its media. Here is a first person account in the Washington Post of someone “trying to get petroleum out of my life and live locally.” We are truly in a fast-moving, rapidly-changing situation.
Shepherd
I love all these articles that we have received lately about future visioning, a practice much beloved of the Transition Towns initiative (see the Transition Timeline and Transition Tales). However, what I would find more useful is not how to set up your own self-sufficient and sustainable ranch, farm, eco-town, intentional community, what-have-you but how to create resilient communities where people already live in cities, small towns, etc. Can we have more of those? -KS.
Local Future: Peak Oil, Climate Change & the Economic Crisis
Aaron Wissner, Local Future
The future will be local, because the peaking of various resources will force the contraction or collapse of our global economic system.
The future should be local, because only on a local level can sustainability be achieved and maintained indefinitely.
The 30-minute presentation is intended for a general audience. It examines climate change, peak oil, the unsustainability of the global economic system, the reasons that the future will be local, efforts being made to move towards self-sufficiency, and places to learn more about the future.
The presentation is divided into six semi-autonomous segments:
1. the overall challenge & greenhouse effect
2. oil prices and peak oil
3. economic crisis, money creation & money destruction
4. the state of the US economy
5. preparing for a local future
6. resources for transition, relocalization, and understanding the current situation
Aaron Wissner, founder of Local Future, assembled this presentation for use with community groups to help them get up to speed on the reasons that the future will and should be local. This recording was made during a lunchtime meeting of a local Rotary Club.
The video is online in playlist form here:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D36C51DB1CD38379
The entire video of the presentation is available for download via bit torrent here in 1280×720 high definition:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5031157/Our_Local_Future_-_Climate_Chang…
The complete set of PowerPoint slides are available here:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?jljznd2okgl
(10 August 2009)
EB contributor Aaron Wissner is the founder of Local Future, which organises annual conferences every year around peak oil, climate change, and the economic crisis.
LOOK: Lanefab Microhousing
Patrick James, Good Magazine
Neighborhoods in Vancouver tend to facilitate walking, biking, and public transit with greater ease than the the vast majority of U.S. cities and suburbs, but they also happen to be comprised of systems of laneways, or alleyways, which connect houses to their garages and parking spots. The resulting configuration means that a good deal of the city’s most desirable real estate is being used to house cars, rather than people.
That could change, however, as the combination of recent legislation (legalizing the conversion of garages and laneways into secondary housing) and a new company called LaneFab will make it possible for residents to convert their garages and lanes into small, attractive, efficient houses for family members or renters, thereby contributing to a denser, lower impact, more resilient city for all.
Lanefab is the brainchild of the carpenter Mat Turner and the designer Bryn Davidson. The units were inspired by Davidson’s personal experiment in small-footprint living: the RAO/D Pod, a 360-square-foot condo that he and his wife gutted, renovated, and transformed into a beautifully efficient—if remarkably small—home. In the Pod, where the couple currently lives, there lies an exciting conceptual blueprint for Lanefab’s low-impact designs, which make great use of tiny spaces, and which could enable many more people to rent homes in the city’s central, walkable, and otherwise pricey areas…
(3 August 2009)
From the website:
See images and blueprints floor-plans of Lanefab prototypes here
