The Path Beyond Petroleum:
Twelve ThesesBy Peter Goodchild
25 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
"Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed." (Gen. 19:17)
1. Oil production in the year 2025 will be half that of the year 2000. If we combine those figures with those of world population, we find a ratio of 5 barrels of oil per person per year in 2000, but only 2 barrels of oil per person per year in 2025.2. Alternative sources of energy have been a failure because of an extremely insufficient energy return on energy invested (EROEI).
3. Because the entire world economy is tied to petroleum for manufacture, transportation, and communication, there will be an increasing problem of high prices and low wages. Such economic struggles could in turn result in a lack of investor confidence, and a sudden collapse of the currency market and stock market.
4. The shortage of oil will continue to result in warfare, which will be increasingly global in nature.
5. The above events - and their further consequences, such as pestilence - will cause considerable mortality. Population expansion, in other words, will be followed by population contraction.
6. The conventional news media and the politicians will not state the problems. It is bad business to deliver bad news, and always has been - e.g., during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
7. Solutions on a global scale are impossible, because there is no responsible governing or decision-making body for all those billions of people, or even for a large segment of those people. There are no Illuminati. Nor can one hope for a great deal in terms of more-subtle or more-indirect influences from the scientific or academic community, since there are about 5,000 languages, and most people are basically illiterate.
8. Nevertheless, planning for post-oil survival must be on a scale larger than that of the individual person. Anthropological studies indicate that the working group (i.e. the group that collectively performs most daily activities) in most societies is about 100 people. Groups of that size may be impossible at first, of course, but the number provides an ideal to be kept in mind.
9. Since the Industrial Revolution, most people in developed countries have increasingly lost touch with the concepts of home town and family. They have not "followed the plow" but rather the factory, which is built or rebuilt wherever the owners find it convenient to do so. Returning to those earlier concepts will therefore be difficult, but it will be necessary.
10. Survival in the country will be easier than survival in the city, because cities require the importation of food, water, heating fuel, and other materials.
11. The modern world has been characterized by an elaborate infrastructure (transportation, communication, etc.) and an elaborate division of labor. The basic skills for providing food, clothing, and shelter have therefore been largely forgotten, but they must be relearned.
12. Present texts on country living contain a great deal of misinformation, because of decades of cribbing: much on the topics of permaculture, organic gardening, and intensive gardening fits into this category. Relearning will therefore be largely a matter of getting one's hands dirty and doing much experimentation. The simple life is, for most people of the modern world, not simple at all: even a supposedly simple task may require, for the uninitiated, an apparently infinite number of sub-tasks, which will often require methods of learning beyond that of following written texts.
FURTHER READING:Ashworth, Suzanne. Seed to Seed. Decorah, Iowa: Seed Saver, 1991.
Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly. 6th ed. Boston: Beacon, 2000.
Bailey, L.H. The Principles of Vegetable-Gardening. New York: Macmillan, 1921.
Blainey, Geoffrey. Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Aboriginal Australia. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1976.
Bradley, Fern Marshall, and Barbara W. Ellis, eds. Rodale's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. Emmaus, Pennyslvania: Rodale, 1992.
Broadfoot, Barry. Ten Lost Years 1929-1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression. Toronto: Doubleday, 1973
Brown, Lauren. Grasses. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
Bubel, Mike and Nancy. Root Cellaring. Pownal, Vermont: Storey, 1991.
Campbell, Colin J. The Coming Oil Crisis. Brentwood, Essex: Multi-Science, 1997.
Carter, Vernon Gill, and Tom Dale. Topsoil and Civilization. Rev. ed. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1974.
Catton, William R., Jr. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Champaign, Illinois: U of Illinois P, 1980.
Davis, Adelle. Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
Deffeyes, Kenneth S. Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
Ellis, Barbara W., and Fern Marshall Bradley, eds. The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control. Emmaus, Pennyslvania: Rodale, 1992.
Emery, Carla A. The Encyclopedia of Country Living. 9th ed. Seattle, Washington: Sasquash, 1994.
Faust, Joan Lee. The New York Times Book of Vegetable Gardening. New York: Times, 1975.
Gardner, Sandra. Street Gangs in America. New York: Franklin Watts, 1992.
Gever, John, et al. Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 1986.
Gibbons, Euell. Stalking the Wild Asparagus. New York: David McKay, 1962.
Goodchild, Peter. Survival Skills of the North American Indians. 2nd ed. Chicago Review Press, 1999.
Gowdy, John, ed. Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment. Washington, D.C.: Island, 1998.
Greenwood, Pippa. Pests and Diseases. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2000.
Guillet, Edwin C. The Pioneer Farmer and Backwoodsman. Toronto: Ontario, 1963.
Hopkins, Donald P. Chemicals, Humus, and the Soil. Brooklyn, NY: Chemical Publishing, 1948.
Jacob, Jeffrey. New Pioneers. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997.
Kaplan, Robert D. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia - A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. New York: Random, 1996.
King, F.H. Farmers of Forty Centuries, or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. 1911. Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Organic Gardening, n.d.
Klare, Michael T. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
Langer, Richard W. Grow It! New York: Saturday Review, 1972.
Lappé, Frances Moore. Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Ballantine, 1971.
Logsdon, Gene. Homesteading. Emmaus, Pennyslvania: Rodale, 1973.
-----. Small-Scale Grain Raising. Emmaus, Pennyslvania: Rodale, 1977.
Mack, Norman, ed. Back to Basics. Montreal: Reader's Digest, 1981.
Meadows, Donella H. et al. The Limits to Growth: a Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. 2nd ed. New York: Universe, 1982.
Nearing, Helen and Scott. Living the Good Life. New York: Schocken, 1982.
Niethammer, Carolyn. American Indian Food and Lore. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
Pimentel, David, and Carl W. Hall, eds. Food and Energy Resources. Orlando: Academic, 1984.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995.
Scher, Les. Finding and Buying Your Place in the Country. 4th ed. New York: Collier, 1996.
Schumacher, E.F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Seymour, John. The Guide to Self-Sufficiency. New York: Popular Mechanics, 1976.
Solomon, Steve. Water-Wise Vegetables. Seattle: Sasquatch, 1993.
Soros, George. The Crisis of Global Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 1998.
Tresemer, David. The Scythe Book. Brattleboro, Vermont: Hand & Foot, 1981.
Vivian, John. The Manual of Practical Homesteading. Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale, 1975.
Weatherwax, Paul. Indian Corn in Old America. New York: Macmillan, 1954.
Widtsoe, John A. Dry-Farming. New York: Macmillan, 1920.
Peter Goodchild can be reached at: peter.goodchild@sympatico.ca
Leave A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Get CC HeadlinesOn your Desk Top