It's All About Me!!

I need a restructuring of how I live. I need a reduction in energy consumption, a commitment to a zero carbon lifestyle, and a learning of new skills and techniques that replace the global industrialized set of assumptions that passed as "knowledge" in the Age of Oil.

Not Them, not We, not You. Them-We-You will never do it.

I. Me.

I can't waste time railing at anyone else, or waiting for anyone else to do this, or merely enjoy writing and reading the position papers on oil peak and global warming. I can't read another book about peak oil that would tell me anything new, or learn more about global warming. The U.N. and the Fourth Assesment Report defines our dilemma quite clearly. I can't live in the problem any longer.

What I can do is discover and connect with the people who are in my community who see the twenty year timeline of disruptive changes, people who understand that the storm clouds on the horizon, the storm of Peak Oil and the hellfire of global warming, are not going to dissipate but are getting darker and headed right this way. These people are not on a web site in Australia, not on Stephen Gaskin's Farm, but right here in Altadena. Surprisingly, there are a number of us, and even more in the greater Los Angeles area. People who are finished with the discussion and are now quietly going about the business of building the future.

This industrial economy with its waste, over-consumption, and non-sustainable development took 100+ years to put together, using the best minds of the time, and a lot of really cheap energy. It is going to take some time to tear it apart, to back it off, to retreat and rethink. It is quite possible that we don't have that time, but a beginning must be made nevertheless.

A beginning, for me, is made by shopping locally, supporting carbon trading, CFL's, gardening, building community, learning new skills, reducing my own consumption of everything, reusing whatever I can, and working the inner game of adjusting to a low energy life by questioning most of the premises I was taught and by not accepting this insane destruction as normal life.

For those of us unable at the moment to install a PV array or buy a hybrid, either economic or logistic, there are carbon offsets which can be purchased until you can get there yourself. I am buying 10,000kwh from Native Energy for my household use, and some TerraPass offsets for my vehicles. These credits go towards purchasing audited wind and solar electrons that are put on the grid, offsetting my electrons I get now from natural gas.

It's not a get out of jail free card - I still need to get the bio-diesel vehicle, or pluggable hybrid, and my solar PV, 400 sq ft of it. I still need to achieve the goal of an elegant lifestyle with zero carbon, but until I can get those components in place, I can offset and support and promote carbon reduction schemes. And I can continue on a daily basis to commit to changing my habits and thinking, commit to my project plan, and thus build the future.

Humans created this consumer/industrial nightmare day by day since 1860, put it on steroids since 1970, and now are at warp speed it seems in 2006. The last great crescendo. Humans can tear it apart day by day just as well and build it anew on our new found premises of sun and wind and the very certain knowledge that that which destroys Life, destroys us.