The Need For Change

Modern science has begun to understand what many people have long known intuitively:  that through over-consumption and wastefulness we are living beyond the means of the planet’s limited resources.

Today, to support the lifestyle of the average person in Britain, it would require 5.4 Earths.  For an American, it would require 9.5 Earths.  But we have only 1.  So what this means is that our present way of living is unsustainable; we simply cannot keep it up forever.

The impacts of living with such high levels of consumption have already begun to materialise on both local and global scales.  Many people will have heard of and perhaps seen the effects of environmental issues such as habitat loss, desertification, toxic waste, the ozone hole, wildlife population collapse, and air and water pollution.  These issues cannot be addressed individually, but are of course interrelated.  Likewise, they are deeply connected to the many social implications of living in an industrial, globalised economy:  loss of community cohesion, identity and power; fluctuating food prices and shortages; resource wars and economic instability; resource poverty of many developing nations, magnified by corruption and exploitive policies; and loss of a sense of deeper wellbeing, meaningfulness and happiness. 

However, the most concerning, and most pressing outcome related to the way we live is almost certainly:

Climate Change. 

Since the onset of the wide-spread use of fossil fuels we have continued to see rapidly elevating levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting in changes in temperature and climatic conditions that science has now, nearly universally, recognised as being beyond the bounds of “normal” fluctuations (for more info on climate science, click here).  The impacts of unmitigated Climate Change would threaten to destabilise and worsen many of the environmental and social issues mentioned above, and it is likely that we have only a small window of opportunity to take evasive action. 

All of these issues lead us to the conclusion that we should change the way we act to secure the best possible future.  However, there is another, lesser-known issue that suggests we will have to change:

Peak Oil.

The industrialisation and globalisation mentioned above has been made possible largely due to the availability of a cheap, easy power source.  Namely:  Oil. 

Oil is an incredibly potent energy source and it enables our society to do between 70 to 100 million times more work than would be possible without it[1].  Today we consume energy at historically unprecedented levels.  The amount of energy needed to maintain the average U.S. citizen is roughly equivalent to 50 people pedalling furiously on bicycles in their back yards all day and all night[2].  The global economy is driven by the accessibility and affordability of oil, from transportation to heating and energy production, to the manufacturing of anything from running shoes, Aspirin, DVDs, plastic bottles, bicycle pumps, lipstick.... the list goes on and on.  In some sense, oil has been an incredible gift, allowing for development of infrastructure, science, medicine and useful technologies.  However...  

The problem is that the very source of our power, on which we have become utterly, often blindly dependant, is rapidly running out, and it seems very unlikely that another source will be able to fill its shoes. 

Most models now show that the peak of global oil production has now passed or is soon going to[3].  While demand and cost continue to rise, supply continues to dwindle and we will be forced to contract our consumption over the next 50 years.  The problem is that we are presently doing very little to prepare for this inevitability and as many of our institutions are dependant on a globalised infrastructure (take the contents of your local super market for easy example), we are finding ourselves very vulnerable to the impacts of this transition (for more information on Peak Oil, click here). 

Thus, there is an emerging understanding that we should change the way we live and, ultimately, we will have to move away from an energy-intensive, carbon-based society.  But the question is:  how do we make this transition?

Resilience!

[1] FEASTA (2007) The Great Emissions Rights Giveaway.  www.feasta.org

[2] Heinberg, R. (2003).  The Party's Over:  oil, war and the fate of industrial societies, Clairview Books, p. 31.

[3] Hopkinds, R. (2008).  The Transition Handbook:  From oil dependency to local resilience, Green Books.