Lifestyle changes prepare locals for energy changes
By Cindy Sutter
Friday, September 28, 2007
Michael Brownlee wants to help you change your life.
The head of Boulder Valley Relocalization has a radically different view of the future, one in which the daily gridlock on U.S. 36 would be a thing of the oil-guzzling past, where farms would dot large swathes of Boulder County open space, Kentucky bluegrass would give way to food crops in suburban yards and businesses would plant rooftop gardens. Solar panels and other renewable energy would supply a large portion of the community's energy. Local businesses would meet many more of the citizenry's daily needs, and customers could even choose to use a local currency.
"We advocate a reduction of energy consumption of about 80 percent," Brownlee says.
Those who want to get a look at Brownlee's different world order may do so at a festival being held today through Sunday at Planet Bluegrass in Lyons. The event, called "A Renaissance of Local" and sponsored by the Post Carbon Institute, will feature speakers on various aspects of sustainability from all over the country and about 60 exhibitors and entertainers.
Sunday will be devoted to food, with lectures on permaculture and preserving the harvest, with the day culminating in a dinner for 500 sponsored by Boulder's Slow Food convivium. Brownlee hopes the event will draw 1,500 people.
While the festival — billed as a nearly zero waste event — is designed to be fun with music and food, its intent is serious: to help the community reorganize in a more sustainable way. Brownlee and others like him are not working out of sunny idealism, but rather out of a grim conviction that the world's oil supply will at some point begin an inexorable decline that will necessitate huge changes in the way we live our lives.
The catch phrase for this point of view is "peak oil." Brownlee defines peak oil as the point at which every barrel of oil that comes out of the ground will be more difficult and expensive to extract. Brownlee calls it a watershed moment in modern history as oil grows more scarce and expensive than before.
"(After the peak), fossil fuel will no longer be so cheap and so widely available. Probably this era of very rapid industrial growth will come to an end."
A peak, but when?
By Continued...