Last fall,
Jason Bradford of Willits, Calif., slaughtered a lamb. It’s
the first time the mild-mannered research scientist had ever
bloodied his hands to put food on the table, but Bradford suspects
he may be doing it regularly in the future. He believes that in the
next few years gas prices will skyrocket, long-distance shipping
will become less viable, and people will have to rely more on local
food sources.
Bradford, who has a Ph.D. in biology, had
done plenty of dissections before, but never with a hacksaw. After
the lamb’s throat was cut, blood from its still-beating heart
spurted 20 feet into the air.
“It was pretty gory,
and I felt a little guilty about the poor lamb,” Bradford
said later. “But it was a good lesson in how the world really
works. One of the basic principles of biology is that for some to
live, others have to die.”
Bradford, 37, is a
full-time organizer for Willits Economic Localization (WELL), a
post-oil planning group in this community of 14,000 nestled in the
Little Lake Valley, 40 miles from the ocean. Similar groups are
springing up across the Pacific Northwest. They’ve taken on
the daunting task of trying to persuade people in an affluent
society that they’ll soon have to make do with less and
depend more on what can be produced in their own communities.
It’s a message that has been largely ignored by the
mainstream media, dismissed as impractical — the ranting of
doomsday crazies.
But it’s a message that’s
been reinforced by other voices that are harder to ignore:
“Without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and
political cost (of rising fuel costs) will be unprecedented,”
the U.S. Department Of Energy warned in a report issued in 2005.
“Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil)
were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and
revolutionary.”
“Oil peaking” refers to
predictions by industry experts that world oil production is about
to peak. U.S. production has already done so, back in 1971. As
production declines, producers must drill deeper, extracting
harder-to-refine oil to meet surging worldwide demand. Gas prices
are about to go into a permanent upward spiral, these experts warn.
Some say the spiral has already begun, others give us 20 years or
more.
For more than two years now, activists like
Bradford have been working at the grassroots level to lay the
groundwork for a post-oil future. They’ve established
community gardens and pushed grocery stores to use “locally
grown” labels. “Locavores,” they call themselves,
people committed to getting as much of their food as possible from
local sources. Some have gone so far as to give up chocolate
To help spread the word, the folks behind this fledgling
movement are forging links with some unlikely allies. Willits is
home to an interesting mix of aging hippie back-to-the-landers and
self-proclaimed rednecks, many of them descendants of refugees from
the post-Civil War South. There’s been a good deal of
mingling and marrying between the two groups, resulting in what the
locals call “hipnecks” or “rippies.” The
post-oilers have continued this trend by working closely with the
local farming community, holding events and joint fund-raisers at
the Little Lake Grange Hall. At a recent Harvest Festival there,
members of the local Mormon Church showed up to demonstrate
techniques for storing and preserving food. The chamber of commerce
has climbed on board, passing out its own “I Shop
Local” stickers.
“Our message really crosses
over political boundaries,” comments Freddie Long, one of
WELL’s outreach volunteers. “Keeping money in the
community, supporting local businesses, that’s something that
has universal appeal in a small town.” In presenting that
message, Long keeps her big-box rants to a minimum, and carefully
avoids progressive buzzwords like “anti-corporate.”
Some local governments are jumping on the peak-oil
bandwagon. Last October, Oakland, Calif., became the first U.S.
city to formally declare its intention to become “oil
independent.” It’s not exactly clear what that means
— a citizens’ task force will figure out the details
— but Oakland is part of an international movement: A number
of towns in Great Britain, as well as the country of Sweden, have
made similar declarations.
Other municipalities are
taking more tangible steps. Willits plans to run its water
treatment plant with solar power. The city council in Sebastopol, a
small town just north of San Francisco, has authorized the
conversion of city vehicles to biodiesel. Beginning later this
year, Portland will require all the city’s gas stations to
include some ethanol or biodiesel with the gas they sell.
Portland has just come out with its own citizens’ task force
report, calling for the city to reduce its oil consumption by 50
percent over the next 25 years. It’s a laudable goal, but
even believers acknowledge it may be hard to achieve, given the
general lack of awareness that a problem even exists. Randy White,
a member of Portland’s task force, admits with chagrin that
even his wife doesn’t take his concerns about “peak
oil” seriously.
In a nation that uses more than 20
million barrels of petroleum each day, post-oil activists have
their work cut out. Jason Bradford talks with frustration about the
“disconnected” behavior of his county government: Even
as it joined an international organization that aims to combat
global warming, it is planning two new major highway projects.
But Bradford and his cohorts, undaunted, have just
launched a major new outreach effort that will include speaking
before church groups, the Rotary, just about any group that will
have them.
“We’re sowing our seeds wherever
we can,” says Brian Weller, another of WELL’s
volunteers. “We realize that what we have to say challenges a
lot of the values of contemporary American society. We’re
telling people that things in a post-oil world are still going to
get better, but in a much different way, through people in our
community working closely together, doing something very unusual in
this modern era: consciously creating, at the grassroots level, the
kind of future we want.”
Tim Holt is an
environmental writer who lives in the Mount Shasta region of
Northern California.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sans petrol.
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