When I started preparing this presentation, I figured I could go in many different directions.

But I realized that today I don't want to be a critic. Maybe I'm just too young to have lost all hope. I'm not going to point out the shortcomings of this movement, how limited it is in scope or small it is in number. I'm not going to lament who's not in the room and I'm not going to say we're only preaching to the choir. I'm not going to talk about how much worse things have gotten for the world this year, how much Arctic ice has melted, how much more dependent on fossil fuels we've gotten, how little time we may have left to prepare. These thoughts plague me, and perhaps some of you, often enough.

Instead, let us be thankful for who is in this room. Let's recall how much we've done this year, who we've reached, how we've changed, and how we've changed the world. Now more than ever we need to be careful how use our personal energy. The more we dwell on the bad news, the more energy we spend sulking, worrying, fearing, despairing, feeling overwhelmed and under-prepared, the more certain our most feared future becomes.

So I'd like for us to take a moment to share with each other the good news of what's happened this year. If you would, please turn to a neighbor and tell them one thing you've done this year that's made a difference. It can be something you've done to reduce your personal energy use, or something you've done in your community. Also, share one thing that you're planning to do, perhaps something you've learned this weekend that you're going to take home with you.

Don't you feel better already? I'm always so inspired by what you've all done, and this conference really motivates me to keep on this path and to keep working for a better world. I hope it does the same for you.

They say we're the doom and gloom crowd, but there is always so much excitement and fun at these conferences. There are always great stories about gardening mishaps and energy reduction experiments gone wrong, stories of getting banned from talking about Peak Oil at family events. So it's inspirational and also a lot of fun.

As you can probably tell, conference time is always an intense time for us at Community Solution. Really, it marks the marks the end of another year for me. There's the solar year, and there's the Peak Oil year. So I've been reflecting on what I've seen and heard and what I've learned since our last annual conference. And I've seen a real shift in the way people are responding to our message. To many groups I no longer really have to sell the message that the way we're living is threatening the Earth and future generations. People are getting it everywhere. Someone said to me that they keep hearing that their children will live more like their grandparents than their parents.

We know intuitively that something is wrong, that life as we know it just can't go on. Widening disparities of wealth, growing species extinction, a changing climate, the demise of financial security...the world is falling apart, and these are causing huge shifts in our consciousness, in our understanding of ourselves. Its no wonder we have this obsession in our culture with end times, armageddon, apocalypse, as if we can sense a great and unprecedented change coming.

Yet in the face of this, as we approach a new world, or at least the chance for a new world, we're stalled. People get climate change, whether from Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Gore, and they get that oil is finite and prices are mostly going to keep going up. But many people are still not acting, they're not changing. They're not internalizing the problems, making it personal, seeing how it affects their life, their habits, their home and community, and making the change there. Instead, we externalize and we blame others, like those inept government officials and corrupt CEOs. Many times we don't see the problem as the whole system, so we don't see the solutions as making radical changes to our system or creating a new system.

But beyond indicting the whole global industrial paradigm as the problem, I think we also need to offer a more clear and valid alternative vision. Sure, we can describe it, and it sounds great, but how many of our words are based upon actual reality? In short, it's not clear enough for many people that it's going to work. That it's going to feed them and take care of their families. It's fuzzy, built upon tenuous concepts that often lack practical manifestation – words like green, sustainable, and local. It fades in and out, its inconsistent. It sometimes feels too uncomfortable, too radical, too flaky.

So how can we expect people to take the leap when they don't even know that they'll land on solid ground? Besides, it's a pretty far leap, and often takes a bit of preparation to be able to make it. So without this alternative vision, and in the presence of these huge global threats, people end up hanging on more tightly to the current paradigm, which is mostly an illusion, but provides momentary security for them and their families. As a result, this illusion grows stronger, even as its foundations of depleting energy resources and ethically questionable economic principles are revealed.

The only way we can make this vision more real is by living it. That's why this conference is so important and unique. Because it's not just words, it's not just intellectual explorations about possibilities, detached from our daily actions. Everything that these speakers have talked about is fundamentally rooted in their way of living.

Our approach is two-fold. First, we need to take energy away from the destructive global industrial paradigm. To participate by not participating. The best strategy for this is curtailing or cutting our consumption of resources, starting with the most damaging, fossil fuels. This dramatically reduces our dependence upon the industrial system, which we'll crash along with if we don't disconnect from it eventually. But it's equally important we contribute to its alternative, to strengthen the vision of a low energy future, which we describe as community.

I'm going to begin with curtailment. It isn't a word you hear too often – you hear mostly about its more mild-mannered cousins, conservation and efficiency. Professor Princen did a good job of exposing the problems with an efficiency mindset last night, and most conservation measures just don't go far enough. We need on the order of a 90-95 percent reduction, if there is any chance we'll make this transition equitably and without unbearable amounts of human suffering.

Yet most of the so-called "solutions" to the energy and climate crisis don't get us close to this 90-95 percent reduction. Many of them, such as hybrid vehicles, actually make us more dependent on unsustainable systems. These mostly government and corporate solutions placate our fears and keep us complacent and consuming. We're told that the credentialed or self-proclaimed "experts" will come up with something to save us, and we believe them, because it's easier to do so than to change our own habits. But I invite you to ask the question – whose solutions are those? They are not for us. They do not serve us, and they do not empower us.

I'm not offering the easy low-hanging fruit, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs and other token measures. If we add up all of the low-hanging fruit, who knows how much energy we would really save – one percent? ten percent? We need to look at the places where we're consuming the most energy to make the most impact.

Where we're consuming the most energy is in housing, transportation, and food. This conference has focused a lot on the energy used in housing, because buildings in the U.S., both residential and commercial, consume about half our total energy, including the construction, demolition, embodied energy, and maintenance of buildings. This is more than for our food or transportation. Worldwide, though the U.S. produces one-quarter of the global CO₂ emissions, buildings in the U.S. generate 42 percent of the world's CO₂ emissions from buildings.

Size is a major factor. The average size of a new home in the U.S. today is about 2,200 square feet, or 800 square feet per person. In 1950 homes were less than half the size at 1,000 square feet and about 300 square feet per person. Compared with Europe and Japan, our residences are twice as large and consume 2.4 times the energy.

The dominant solution we hear about for buildings is in new construction, in so-called "green building," which includes programs like LEEDs certification, solar houses, zero energy, passive solar, Energy Star and the like. On average these programs save about 15% – 30% of the energy used in a typical new building. But these green buildings account for only two percent of new construction, which is itself only a tiny one-to-two percent of total buildings. This is too little, too late.

Yet so entrenched is our growth-oriented society that all we can focus on is applying innovations to brand new buildings rather than making what we have more energy efficient. Again, there's this ridiculous notion of consuming more to consume less.

We can make a bigger impact in curtailing energy use by retrofitting the existing 90 million residential structures and 5 million commercial buildings we have in the U.S. Community Solution has several model home-retrofit projects underway, including a retrofit of an old barn built in 1910, a retrofit to our office building, where we're building interior walls, and partnering with Linda Wigington and Affordable Comfort to determine what the most effective structural and lifestyle changes are to reducing home energy use. We're also developing an Energy Databook to measure these changes.

Similarly with transportation we as a nation are putting all our efforts (and all our hope) into making more energy-efficient new cars. Well, hybrids have been on the market for 10 years now, and there are 1 million of them on the roads, out of the 750 million vehicles in the world, and where 75 million new vehicles are added each year. We're told that next will come pluggable hybrids, fuel cells cars, electric vehicles, and the like. And if these don't materialize, then we can just use bio-fuels to keep our cars running.

At some point we have to admit that the personal car was a huge mistake – it devoured the planet's most useful finite energy resources. We need to look for ways to reduce the number of vehicles on the road to curtail energy use, as well as to make transportation itself more efficient. We at Community Solution have a plan to use existing vehicles and current cell phone technology to start a ridesharing system we call the "Smart Jitney," which aims to increase vehicle ridership from the current 1.5 persons per vehicle to 4-5.

Unfortunately in the short-term, cars are the only viable transportation option for our very decentralized infrastructure, but in the long run revamping local and regionally economies, living, working and shopping in the same area, we'll be able to utilize the more sustainable options of walking, bicycling, and mass transit.

Finally, food. In a way, our energy-wasteful food system can be seen as a metaphor for our entire industrial system – that of disconnection from nature and life. Sharon Astyk and Pat Murphy did a great job exposing the ridiculousness of our current food system, how unsustainable it is, and the effect it's having on the Earth, on our health, and on our communities.

Of the many solutions for food, we talked about changing our diets, changing how we grow food, and changing what we grow. We talked about the need for more full-time farmers, and the need for all of us to produce some food, which is really the most efficient, sustainable, and secure agricultural system. This could have a transformative effect on our culture, and hopefully would change the way we view farming and farmers. The farmers of the future must be respected above all, for theirs is the work of healing the Earth from industrial destruction, restoring the integrity of natural systems, renewing our long-damaged relationship with nature, and creating a new way of inhabiting the planet.

We have a design for a community called Agraria, which would pioneer a new way of living, where food production and energy conservation are intimately connected with daily life. It is a model low-energy neighborhood-community we're looking to build in Yellow Springs which would incorporate passive house building design, clustered housing to preserve land, and the community producing much of its own food through common gardens and several full-time farmers. It will be based on interdependent social and economic relationships both within the neighborhood, and within the greater community. Perhaps most importantly, we envision it as a educational and cultural center to transform of our small town of 3,700. We've purchased an option on some land to make this demonstration project a reality.

Which brings me to the all-important issue of community-level change. Community is the alternative vision we're building, as we curtail away from the dominant destructive culture.

Community is becoming a buzz word itself these days. In many ways, it can be like trying to define the word "love." We've all felt and experienced community, but it's hard to clarify it. We describe it as a vision of the future where we conserve and share scarce local resources rather than deplete, destroy and battle over seemingly abundant distant resources. It is a vision where we consume far fewer resources, but have a better life, filled with valued relationships rather than valued possessions.

Arthur Morgan, the founder of our organization, defined the most important kind of community as small, local community. Small refers to a more realistic scale of human habitation, which is less centralized and operates more as a web of interconnections between people, allowing more meaningful relationships to develop. Local refers to the necessity of being in close proximity with those whom you have economic relations – which is very important.

Part of the reason we can continue to allow and contribute to the ecological genocide of the planet and growing misery of the worlds poor through our daily economic decisions is that we are separated from this reality by so much distance. Everything and everyone who provides us what we need to survive is an abstraction. We consume brand names, not resources and people. If we could see the sweatshop workers and the falling forests, we could not morally continue to treat them with such disregard for their well-being.

So in re-developing more face-to-face economic relationships we will come to have more respect for those who provide our necessities, by making sure they have a fair wage and safe working conditions. In turn, they will make sure that our health and safety is provided for. This mutual relationship serves to improve everyone's well-being, including the well-being of nature, not just corporate profit.

So community is a compelling alternative vision of society. But it's also a practical means to a lower-energy way-of-life. By coming together in groups we can address these problems much better than we can as individuals.

Consider this study from Arizona State University – They tested various displays at hotels encouraging guests to reuse their towels. The messages "Help save the environment" and "Help save resources for future generations" both got only about 30 percent of guests to reuse their towels. However, the message "Join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment" including the statement that nearly three-quarters of guests used their towels more than once got a 44 percent participation rate, and saying "Seventy-five percent of the guests who stayed in this room used their towels more than once," got close to 50 percent.

So even though we so value our personal freedom and our ability to have our towels washed every day, curiously, we also value joining together with our fellow patrons, especially those who slept in the same bed as us, for a more important cause.

As we go out to preach our message of personal and community change, let us not lose sight of this. There is a danger to over-individualizing the problem, of making it only an issue of personal "lifestyle," a curious word conjuring up images of fashion rather than matters of necessity. In addition to being a personal obligation, this is also crisis of our Earth community, it's our generation's imperative, and it is great challenge for our local community.

But I believe that the change will take place not from above, but from within – from individuals and communities and eventually entire nations pioneering a better way to live on this planet, and planting the seeds of a sustainable future.

I begin the next Peak Oil year encouraged and ready for the next step. Let's show the world that there is another way to live, and it can be much more fulfilling and meaningful as well as be healthier and more sustainable. We owe it to future generations, and we owe it to ourselves.

Thank you.

– Megan Quinn Bachman is the outreach director of The Community Solution, a program of Community Service, Inc.