New Age Lemons

Artwork © - Jonathon Earl Bowser

I spoke with a friend recently about Peak Oil. As I was bringing up the facts and figures in support of it, she cut me off and said, “Look, I’m okay with dying.” The statement effectively ended the conversation but I wondered how many others out there had similar feelings.

I’m not ok with dying. My friend was coming from the point of view that spirit is immortal and why not drop the body when it gets to be too much? It is a sentiment I understand because she and I came from the same New Age school of logic; reincarnation, white light, angels etc. It may all be true, although as I drift closer to Zen Buddhism with the passing years, I am less inclined to believe so. Regardless, there are appropriate times to ‘drop the body’; theists and atheists alike will shout, “Let me go!” after a few months of bone metastasis. Peak Oil, however, is not bone metastasis.

For me, this desire to live comes from seeing this event as a daunting yet interesting puzzle to be solved. Peak Oil is a threat, no (non-metastasized) bones about it. It is a threat to the way we have lived for at least a few generations, and because of this generational complacency, it is a threat to our very lives. That being true, we can still meet this challenge; certainly a few hundred million of the willing.

The evidence is compelling that four of the six billion people currently on the planet are here only through the magic of cheap energy. Time for an analogy. We have all looked into the depths of our refrigerator and spotted the forgotten lemon way in the back and said, “I have to use that soon,” and then days later, noticing the green cast on the rind said, “I have to get rid of that soon.” The mold penicillium digitatum, had wandered into a cheap and easily accessible energy source, a lemon rind. Its peak population quickly became billions or trillions of times the size of the original inoculation set, but its days were numbered. Soon the entire rind was spongy and the lemon began to dehydrate. Before too much longer, what remained of the lemon is a dry and dusty little ball. Did any of those active spores know that the end was near? Hell no, they were in full party mode when the rind supply ran out, and when it did, they died-off. ‘Die-off’ is a commonplace occurrence in the bacteriological, plant and animal kingdoms. It is what Thomas Malthus was hinting at 200 years ago. It is so common that many microscopic organisms (including mold) have evolved endosporulation, a process whereby they put themselves into hibernation, until the next big lemon rind comes along. We are in the same boat folks, our lemon rind is running out but we do not have the luxury of hibernation.

Rather than be spores that are ‘okay with dying,’ I am proposing that we figure a way to drift from lemon to lemon; that we survive. How, you ask? Well, that is going to be a discovery process with me a blogging, mold-spore guinea pig. My ideas have to do with primitivism, so if you were hoping for me to gradually reveal plans for a free energy device that would ensure that our way of life would go on and on, I'm sorry. There are quite a few free energy sites already out there.