Sharon Astyk tells us why we should be paying attention, and thinking about peak oil and climate change in the present tense.
So I thought it might be good to do a post not so much on what peak oil is (if you scroll down there’s some resources in the sidebar that can help there) but on why it is better to know what’s going on than it is to not, even when it is scary and overwhelming. And it can be. But there are a lot of resources out there to help you. And the truth is that we need people to screw up their courage and look hard at difficult stuff – because the problems caused by Peak oil, and the related crises (yup, they all go together) of climate change and the financial collapse are not something any of us can afford to ignore.
My guess is that most people reading this have some investment in the future – maybe in their own personal future, maybe in the future of their children or grandchildren, or the children of someone they know and care about, maybe in their dedication to the good of humanity. The truth is that you are needed, right now, to safeguard your own future, and the future of our posterity – that’s not campaign rhetoric, or storytelling – that’s simple truth. If you don’t participate in creating a decent future, we won’t have one. We need you, and you need you to take as hard edged a look as you can.
A lot of what you read about Climate Change, Peak Oil or economic crisis focuses on the future. Their goal is to motivate you to action by describing what may happen. I do some of that, but over the last year or so, more and more I’ve found myself replacing the future tense with the present, describing not what might happen, but what is. Unfortunately, the hard times I’m talking about do not lie in the conveniently distant future but have begun already. The only question is whether you or I have felt them yet.
We need to be building the society that we want, and that is sustainable. Peak Oil and climate change are disrupting the world as we have grown up in, we can either keep our heads in the sand and let politicians define the new reality, or we can take whatever steps we can to survive and work towards a fair world.
When I realized that everything was going to change, I was at first afraid. Because, I thought, if my government or public policy or other choices weren’t going to fix everything, what could I possibly do? What hope was there, if I had to take care of myself, if my community had to take care of itself?
But when I began looking for solutions that could be applied on the level of ordinary human lives, that involved changes in perspectives and pulling together, the reclamation of abandoned ideas and the restoration of strong communities, I began to feel hopeful, even excited. Because I realized that when large institutions cease to be powerful, sometimes that means that people start being powerful again.
Civilisation has always been based on slavery and exploitation. Industrial civilisation has enslaved the world and exploited everything. The machine, though, has to be stopped, if we are to stand any chance of living a sustainable life.
