Well, that depends upon the message. Is ours a message of fear? Is it fantasy? Is it a message of hope? Is it a call to action?

Here's an option to consider: Lamentations begone!

Way back then

My seventh grade teacher would habitually give us her backhanded praise, "Light dawns upon darkness," as we went through our lessons. In Sunday School I had learned the difference between truth and lies (not to be confused with fact and fiction).

I learned another important lesson in the Boy Scouts. We were taught to leave the campground better than we found it. It meant a little extra work to pick up after ourselves ... and the unconscious souls who had been there before us, leaving a big mess in their wake.

Fast forward...

Fast forward a half century. Without a doubt I now live in a world that is a lot more complex than the campgrounds of my youth. Leaving a better world for the next batch of campers isn't quite as easy as it once seemed. My Scoutmaster would be arrested today if he were driving to Yosemite with 30 kids in the back of that stake-side truck. Nor had I noticed at the time that the truck's exhaust was causing the climate to change, nor that the global fuel tank gauge was dropping fast.

Where do we stand now?

So here I sit today, hanging out with a bunch of savvy folks, imagining a world beyond oil. It's a little scary at times.

Some of the savvy folks are imagining a dystopia. It's hard to fault them for that. All you have to do is look out your window at the world, and you will readily see lots of things falling right apart. Some places are flooding worse than ever; other places are burning, with record highs. Low down depression lurks behind many a paycheck... and it attacks mercilessly where once there was plenty.

More than a million people die in traffic accidents every year; ten million and more are seriously injured. Turf wars (over oil and minerals for cars) add to the numbers and the suffering. In simple terms, the so-called autonomous vehicle ("automobile") has degenerated into a very bad design. Clearly Karl Benz and Henry Ford had the best of intentions, and their inventions served humanity well for a century. But just as the car rolled the horse off the streets a century ago, so must the car be driven out of town in this new century... or pushed all the way to the junk yard when it runs out of fuel. Keeping the same form (an artifact of the oil age) while switching from fuel to electricity might be likened to changing the horse's feed from hay to kerosene so it might run faster. What's wrong with this picture?!

Transferring the American dream to China and Indian is about to turn into a nightmare as both countries compete to see which can gobble up, one-time-only, more natural resources than the other. And they think it's only fair for us to sit on the sidelines to watch them go at it. We have our troubles; these countries will be unfettered to mimic us and chase after their own troubles.

Archeologists have uncovered enough of the past to realize that humans evolved to form a primitive society known as the Stone Age. That hasn't changed very much, realistically. Future archeologists no doubt will call ours the Burn Stone Age.

This race to the bottom is getting pretty insane. Is there any way out?

A Better World

At a recent talk in San Francisco, John Reed, Chairman of the MIT Corporation, former Chair of CitiGroup and the New York Stock Exchange, was asked, "There are a number of young alumni here ... [asking] ... how can they be successful in their careers?"

John Reed replied, "I always could dream. I had a sense of where we wanted to go. And I greatly believed that if you can interpolate it is much better than extrapolating.

"Most managers sorta say, 'Where are we today?' Then they sort of extrapolate, and say, 'We could be a little more efficient; we could gain a little market share; we could do a little this; we could do a little that.' And they spend their life trying to extrapolate from some core to, you know, being somewhat better.

"... I think you gotta have a vision of where you'd like to be and then you've gotta say, 'I'm gonna use my efforts to get from here to there.'

And I must say it served me well in my business career. I think it served the institutions I was working with well and if I had any recommendations for a younger person, it would be, "Dream enough, be realistic, figure out what it is you would love to be, and then figure out how you're gonna get there. Don't just try..."


To leave a brighter world for our descendants, we must begin envisioning a better way to live. We can't dwell incessantly on what a miserable mess we are leaving for them. That's self-indulgence, at a time when we need all hands on deck. A persistent example is to see so many wringing their hands about the intermittency of renewables. This is a bit like complaining that there weren't enough oars on the Titanic's lifeboats.

Since it will be a world without oil (coal, gas), we must envision that: a world beyond oil (coal, gas). What might that world look like? As John Reed said, let's create a vision of where we'd like to be and then let's interpolate -- figure out how to get there. Dwelling on the past and extending that model into the future (extrapolating) isn't going to get us very far. We might consider our accomplishments or lack thereof in light of our core message.

At the dawn of the World Wide Web in 1994, I staked a claim to my vision of a better world -- www.Ecotopia.com -- building upon Ernest Callenbach's vision of an ecologically sound utopia. Once we abandon the unwieldy and outmoded artifacts of the fossil fuel era, I envision a world that is comfortably powered by solar energy. I envision a world where expectations have changed such that we have learned to do more with less in order to meet the needs of all people, accepting the challenge to find ways to stretch natural resources ten-fold, and to stop burning rocks like tenants burning the landlord's picket fence to stay warm through the cold winter. Let the sun shine in!!

If we as peak oil aware folks want to gain market share, we will envision a better future.

[And I reiterate my challenge. I'm all ears to hear about any alternative to my vision which is constructive, plausible and durable. No "over unity" schemes in defiance of the Second Law. No fair kicking the can down the road. Belly to the bar.]

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A vision without a task is a dream; a task without a vision is drudgery; a vision with a task is the hope of the world. (Inscribed on the wall of a church in Sussex, England, circa 1730, posted at http://www.ecotopia.com/ecosystems/mission.htm )