In the Washington Post OpEd, “End of the Open Road -The Land of the Perpetual Frontier Meets $4-a-Gallon Gas,” dated 23 June, 2008, by Bill McKibben, Mr. McKibben discusses a few of the impacts of the high price of oil: automobile use is down, airlines are cutting routes, food costs are higher, and more people are gardening, presumably, growing vegetables. He notes that “local farmers markets are the fastest growing part of the food economy” and “in many areas the number of small farms is on the rise for the first time in a century.”
I have been thinking for years that I would like to get out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Ideally, I’d like to relocate to Upstate New York or Vermont. I would like to live in a smaller community where we provide more for ourselves rather than relying on huge chains of grocery and department stores to which goods have to be shipped from the four corners of the globe. We, as humans and communities, have to become more self-reliant and less dependent on “world-trade.”
I don’t have the sources immediately at hand to prove what I am about to say but, though it may not happen in my generation or the next, fossil fuels will soon become so scarce and so expensive that the mobile life we now know, be it in our own cars or in planes, trains, and ships for vacation or transportation of goods, will not exist. We may be able to maintain some semblance of the life we currently know through nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal power but that is likely to provide power only for homes, businesses, and telecommunication systems…not transportation. Accordingly, we will have to be able to provide sustenance for ourselves and each other locally and regionally.
The bottom line for me is that beginning next year…should have started this year…I will try to grow some of my own vegetables wherever I might find myself. And if I have more than I can use, I’d be glad to trade them for some local product or service that someone else can provide for me.