We never, ever, ever talk about these things on po.com. There certainly isn't an entire forum devoted to this concept. Not here. No sirree!

I know about the "what to do" forum. I said I was on a soap box and I do have a habit of talking a lot. As for us, we have 60 acres, thousands of trees for fire wood, a greenhouse, am getting a solar powered pump for the well, and don't really give a damn about going into town.

Our biggest concern is forest fires.

Ahhh yes...stand replacing crown fires...scorching 100's of thousands of acres...silting in rivers, lakes, creeks, and streams.

Yes -

You will not read alot about forest fires here and how they interface with those that run off to the hills to a remote cabin...

Or even those who do not live by the scorched earth, but wonder why their stream no longer has water or fish in it.

Yes -

Fighting these herculian dragons takes MASSIVE amounts of fossil fuels...MASSIVE amounts of man-power and MASSIVE amount of military coordination and precise strategical positioning and attacks.

Yes -

Truth is - the forest will burn to the ground...150 years of supressing fires and we went from 5 tons per acre of fuel loading on the forest floor to 500 tons per acre.

Yes -

If you live in the sticks and rely on surface water...you will quickly understand the errors of your ways.

Yes - forest fires...you will not read much here about them, because most don't think much about them.

I was told when I was a young wildland forest fighter that man very seldom has tamed these dragons...

Believe it.

This is probably off topic but we do believe it. We just experienced a 14,000 acre forest fire which had two crown fires associated with it. The first of baout 3,000 acres did not really impact on us but we were told it would be prudent to evacuate which we did. The second crown fire which occurred four days after we returned to our house was a glimpse into the medieval depiction of hell. A wall of flame, 100-200 feet high, three miles long, and with a 60 mile an hour wind blowing directly towards us. We had less than 30 minutes to get out. We were fortunate. The wind shifted about 1/4 of a mile from our property and so we were spared. There were about 90 families who were not so lucky.

And yes we now are in a dangerous flooding area by being on a major watershed from the mountain. There are several groups evaluating the entire area to devise some plan for flood control when the monsoon season hits in August.

Maybe that is why I am so frustrated with the many posters to these forums. They have not witnessed a community dying because the communal well has dried up, they have not witnessed the devastation from not preparing for a natural disaster, the vast majority of them simply talk about what to do, how to do, and then go down to McDonald's for more fat grams.

Anyway, this is my last post for quite a while. We are going to expand on our carbon footprint to travel to the grandson's graduation.

Have fun with the doomers. The only thing I will regret when PO turns the lights out is the loss of the Internet, however I do have a library of approximately 8,000 books which should entertain me for many years.

That's leaping to a huge conclusion! How do you know this to be a fact?


Well anyway, have fun.

"US will be lucky to sustain anything close to the life we now live in as little as 5 years at that rate of decline. Think no air conditioning in most places. It was so in 1950, not so long ago"

Lucky indeed. Remember that, hard as life was then, this was when very few people lived in the US or on the globe compared to today. And we have been very, very busy in the intervening years:
--destroying topsoil,
--killing off fish stocks in streams, lakes and oceans
--dumping toxins into land, water and air
--pushing the planet into runaway global warming with GHG's
--pushing species to extinction at ten- to one hundred-times the background rate

The earth is now a far more fragile, less resilient place, and we are a far heavier burden withour both our numbers and our rates of consumption.
Hey, maybe it will all work out, but on every front, things are starting to unfold at a much more rapid pace than most even here anticipated: The Artcic Ice Cap came the closest it has ever come since modern humans evolved to disappearing last summer, and it likely will this summer or in one of the next few; Oil prices reached $135 a few days ago, higher than all but the gloomiest and doomiest predicted for this year...

Maybe these trends will slow down or reverse themselves, but most of those here who have been most accurate in their predictions so far present good reasons why they are likely to accelerate from here on out.

Ahem, I believe Ludi was refering to the Conservation and Efficiency forum.

It should be noted that this by itself is mostly an artifact of overpopulation, not oil consumption. In other words, if we had fusion or matter antimatter reactors or some other magic energy source that output no CO2s and never depleted, the above problems would continue unabated until die off. That's why peak oil is really not even seeing the big picture. Oil might be the reason we overpopulated but now overpopulation is the root problem and that's why most here are torn between fearing the oil running out and seeing how it would be a good thing in the long run for humanity to get smacked down by the invisible hand. You can't create a sustainable society without reducing population. Certainly reducing consumption and adopting more of a permaculture way of doing things would help bridge the gap, but it's probably not enough to eliminate overshoot.

Welcome monkeydust. Just like you im new to this whole thing too.

When i first started reading about PO i was quite optimistic too but the more i read and think about it the more pessimistic i get. We have been creating massive problems even when there hasnt been any actual problems so how do we react when we actually have a real problem in our hands? 50 years of abundance in the western world and we havent done anything to solve the worlds problems. Why would we suddenly do that when we have problems of our own?

Things like resource wars and world wide famine sound like some wierd fantasy untill you start thinking about it and realise that we're already there. And it hasnt even really started yet. Before Iraq i would have probably shared your optimism.

Anyway, this lifestyle has to end someday so it might aswell be now.

(Is it just me or is this forum REALLY slow atm?)

We all remember the four bucks a gallon at the pump but how much damage did it really do to the economy? I know there is other factors such as the credit crunch but from what i have seen the price at the pump caused more problems for people that led to unpaid mortgages and so on especially people living in suburbia. I think we are just now seeing the result of the surge at the pump. When oil gets that high the damage is far worse than you can imagine, the money that fuels the economy is sent to other countries that do not have a balanced trade system the money simply vanishes causing havoc on our economy. The result from all this mess is what you see now demand destruction at its finest. If peak oil is the root cause the market will never recover to the old glory days with the dow at 15k, the markets might recover somewhat then stabilize at a lower level, oil in my opinion tells the market were its gonna be and not the other way around.

I'm not certain that the price of Gasoline (which I think is the proper measure rather than Peak Oil - which is really more of a concept - and when it occurs will be mostly evident in retrospect) is a direct cause of the recession. Rather I view it as a trigger - it made people re-evaluate their expenses, which in turn led to some extra forclosures, whcih in turn lead to the realization that the morgage derivitives were un-valuable, which in turn lead to the credit crunch, which in turn.....


well, you get the picture.

Peak OIl/ gas prices in and of themselves didn't cause the recession, they just pulled the trigger.

Just as Guilermo Princep (?spelling) didn't start WWI, he just shot the Archduke.

I think that higher food and fuel prices were a significant part of this problem, but for sure not the only cause. However I do think that things might have been able to go a while longer BAU if it were not for $4 gas and higher food prices.

Energy is at the root of our collective dilemmmas. Don't let the current financial crises distract you.

It's still all about energy!

Hydrocarbon : I agree. That's what I try to explain to family/friends : It's not just about finance, it's oil scarcity which kills growth/capitalism/business as usual. Our oil addictive civilization was doomed to fail since the beginning as we use a non renewable ressource at exponential rate.
Add to that global warming and population overshot and you have a perfect strom coming right to us. For the moment, we just see the black clouds and a gentle breeze. Look far, you see a twister as large as a continent heading to us.

Politics gave us umbrellas to face that.

i think it depends on what your interpretation of 9-11 and the Iraq War are, and the effect that those had on the US economy.

i think this is a MOSTLY pre-peak oil financial crunch. chickens coming home to roost, a financial crisis related to the popping of the real estate bubble & the associated derivatives bubbles, and the disappearance of the "use your home as an ATM" practice.