Beyond Fuels 1: New Living and Old Learnings

We need to learn to live without fossil fuels. (Or nuclear fuels, for that matter.) Whether you look at peak oil (and Peak Everything--see my post of 7/20/08), or climate change, or all the pollution these fuels cause, or what the industrial world is doing to our lives, it's clear (at least to me) we need something different.

I wrote about Walking Away (8/23/11) and taking The First Step (9/3/11) a few months ago. While there is no way to accurately describe or predict where we are going and what lies in a world beyond fuels, in this series I want to point to some resources that give some general directions on where we're headed (or could be headed).

A lot of this will be looking at re-learning the tools and skills from times before nuclear energy and fossil fuels. There's a lot of good stuff that we've abandoned--and not just from a long time ago. Some of this series will also talk about things developed in those heady times in the sixties and seventies when we began exploring alternatives that seemed to have been dropped for our current high tech, high stress lifestyles.

I also want to point to new things that are being created. The future is not going to look just like the past, even if there are similarities. We've learned more than a few new things that don't require fuels to make them work.

The future will be built on what we can harvest from the sun and wind and water and muscle. And it will be built on having less and enjoying it (and each other) more. It will probably be harder, but it could be more fun.

Quote of the Day: "The transition to a post-carbon, post-growth future means relocalizing and reinhabiting certain places, learning where we're at....
"With careful, concerted action on and help from nature's phenomenal capacity for regeneration, the transition beyond fossil-fuel-dependent industrial civilization to a stable world of flourishing, land-based communities may find our descendants inhabiting a planet that still hosts a variety of life and culture." -Stephanie Mills