I'm Megan Quinn, the Outreach Director of Community Service in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Community Service, Inc. is a 65 year-old organization that has advocated for small, local community as the most ideal way for humans to live. Living in small community, or living within our ecosystems is the only way we can achieve ecological sustainability, equity, democracy, and meaningful social interactions and relationships.

Unfortunately the world went the other direction, and we've instead chosen industrialization, urbanization and recently suburbanization, due to cheap, abundant fossil fuels, particularly oil. Results not good: environmental degradation, social alienation, and the highest inequity in history, to name a few. It is becoming clear that today we need to cultivate this earlier way of life more than ever. Peak Oil an opportunity to do so.

We publish a quarterly report called "New Solutions," organize an annual peak oil conference in the United States which attracts 300 – 400 participants from around the country and abroad, and produced a film The Power of Community. In a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund Cuba was noted as the only nation in the world to meet the minimum standards for both human well-being and sustainable development.

The timing of this meeting is auspicious – we're bridging the Winter, a time for strategizing, reflecting, and planning and the Spring, a time for renewal, action and manifestation. Action is always the challenging part. It's hard enough to help people understand the predicament we're in, but even harder to get them to act to change it. How many of us have even had a hard time integrating our knowledge and values into our lifestyle.

Our strategy is to inform and inspire positive personal action to reduce energy use and CO₂ emissions, particularly through using less, cutting back, curtailment. It's not enough to provide education and tools, you have to inspire as well. This trip, which is burning 2 barrels of oil, the amount a Bangladeshi uses in an entire year, has inspired me to cut energy in other parts of my life.

I'll contrast our plan for personal, low-energy solutions which we call Plan C with the so-called "green" solutions most frequently discussed in the mainstream, which somehow always involve increasing consumption rather than reducing.

Most environmental talks I attend and articles I read describe accurately and without restraint the massive destruction of the earth. I cringe at the solutions. They're always offered as a miraculous panacea coming just in time to save us. They always depend upon technology and market forces, are government and corporate-based, and usually require little if any action from individuals. The message is "Don't worry; the scientists will come up with something."

We are put into a role of helpless children, with the experts taking care of us. This is very irresponsible. So we become increasingly dependent upon centralized energy and resource production to maintain our consumptive ways. Soon we start to accept unending resource wars, mountaintop removal for coal production, carbon sequestration, anything to keep the industrial system going, because the fate of this system is now our fate. One day we may look back and see when we had a chance to choose another future for the planet. That time is now.

So we need to disconnect from that system, which has doomed itself. We have to move from the corrupt, centralized structures to decentralized, democratic structures if we are to survive on this planet in an equitable & sustainable way.

Of course any government actions aimed at emissions caps, rations on consumption, and encouraging conservation can be constructive, though our government has done so little that even corporations are asking for government intervention.

Yet even if our government did respond in rational ways, we still need solutions which people and communities conceive and implement independent of outside authority. These solutions empower us rather than disempower us, and may determine whether lifestyles changes can be sustained. If people perceive forced deprivation, then there may be a backlash, and the changes may be short-lived. But if people feel actively part of an exciting movement to benefit themselves and the planet, there is a better chance of lasting change.

So instead of treating people like helpless children, we think we should start treating people like adults, with the same honesty about the viability of the proposed solutions as we now do with the severity of the problems.

We need honesty about just how much renewables will be able to provide, honesty about their limitations, how long it will take to scale them up, honesty about the energy requirements, honesty about the environmental impacts, and most importantly, honesty about our role, about the difficult choices that we'll have to make, the necessary sacrifices and trade-offs.

We don't shy away from such words. When the trade-off is our lifestyle or a habitable planet, it seems like a pretty easy sacrifice. Then you throw in the other advantages of a low-energy lifestyle like more time, less stress, more community, happiness, fulfillment, and satisfaction, I think we could do pretty well in the debate.

I'll now move on to more specific solutions.

In our recent paper entitled Plan C, we noted that in the U.S. we use 56 barrels of oil equivalent per year, or BOE, in Europe this number is 30 BOE, and in the Rest of World the average is 8 BOE. We further broke down energy consumption into the primary areas of housing, food, and transportation.

Housing

For housing, we calculate that buildings consume 48% of the energy used in the U.S., including embodied energy and maintenance, more than agriculture or transportation.

Worldwide, the U.S. produces 25% of global CO₂ emissions, while buildings in the U.S. generate 42% of the world's CO₂ emissions from buildings.

Size is a major factor. The size of a new home in the U.S. is about 2,200 square feet, or 800 square feet per person. In 1950 it was 1,000 total 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 for buildings in the U.S. is so-called "Green building," including LEEDs certification, solar houses, zero energy, passive solar, Energy Star and the like. On average these programs save about 15% of the energy used in a typical building, and account for a 2% of new construction, which is itself about 1 – 2 % of total buildings. Yet these are the success stories, this is where the money is going, and this is what the public hears about.

Instead the discussion should be on the retrofitting of the existing 90 million residential buildings and 5 million commercial buildings we have in the U.S. Yet how typical of our growth-oriented society to apply our innovations to brand new buildings rather than making what we have more energy efficient.

Transportation

The same is true for transportation, where the focus has been on innovation for new cars. After 10 years, we have one million hybrids out of 750 million cars in the world. Think of how many decades it would take to replace all the cars at this rate. Next we have Pluggable Hybrids, fuel cells, electric vehicles, and the like where we're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars. And of course, we look at keeping our cars and just replacing the fuel with bio-fuels, which is already proving to be a disastrous mistake.

Instead, why don't we make transportation, instead of just cars, more efficient? Community Solution, for example, has a plan to use existing vehicles and current cell phone technology to start a national ridesharing system, which we call the "Smart Jitney." It's available on our website. The goal is to increase from the current 1.5 persons per vehicle to 4-5. Europe, by the way, has about the same amount of persons per vehicle as the U.S.

Or in the long-term why don't we revamp local and regional economies and distribution systems to transport necessities much shorter distances and employ people a lot closer to their homes?

Food

And now to our food system, arguably the most absurd and tragic scheme humans ever devised. Nothing speaks so profoundly to our disconnection from nature and life as our agriculture, but nothing provides such a profound opportunity to re-establish a humane way of living on the earth.

It's clear that we're literally eating oil and fossil fuels, making our food system extremely vulnerable to shortages of these resources, that we've done incredible damage to the soil, water, and life of the planet, that we've harmed our health, and destroyed our farming communities and the lives of hundreds of millions of farmers worldwide – this just to name a few of the impacts of our food system.

Yet the most common so-called solutions for food include "buying our way out of it" by choosing industrial organic food instead of industrial non-organic food. Anything that challenges the fossil-fuel intensive industrial system is discounted because America "feeds the world," which is just puffery.

But the real solutions are much more difficult. Fossil fuels replaced human labor, and we will have to now replace fossil fuels with human labor again. With this I know we will expose the absurdity of the contemporary views of farming, that it was and is "mind-numbing, back-breaking labor." Re-ruralization in the Global North is mentioned in our draft manifesto, and perhaps we should also say that the South needs to stay rural where it is. But food will not only come from farmers in the future, it will come from everyone. Because it's not only about reducing our personal consumption, it's about increasing our personal production as well, and food is one of the easiest and most obvious places to start.

But it's not only about changes in how food's grown and by whom – it's also a matter of what we eat. About 85 % of the cultivated area in the U.S. is devoted to four crops – corn, hay, soybeans, and wheat, most of which is feed crop for livestock or processed into manufactured food products with little nutritional content. In the American diet about 5% of our calories come from vegetables, and half of that is potatoes. So dietary changes – including eating more vegetables and little or no meat and processed foods – are an absolutely necessary part of the solution. But if you think it's difficult to try to get people to reduce their energy use, try to make people change their diet.

Further, a recent report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization entitled "Livestock's Long Shadow" reveals that more CO₂ equivalent is generated by livestock production than from transportation. This includes methane from waste and deforestation, but I cannot overstate the massive quantities of land devoted to grazing and raising crops for livestock – it accounts for 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the terrestrial surface of the planet. The average person in the world consumes three times the amount of meat as they did in 1960, with the global North consuming three times the amount of meat per capita than the global South. It's estimated that the average American consumes 1/3rd more than the recommended caloric intake. So the answer is curtailment for food as well.

It is only when we understand and accept that solutions based upon increasing consumption are insufficient will we be able to see clearly the path of viable solutions and ways of living. American writer Mark Twain said "It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble; it's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Today the average person knows for sure that technology and human ingenuity will solve all of our problems and somehow keep industrial civilization going. These are illusions, along with the illusions of eternal progress and infinite growth. I'd like to end with a poem entitled "The Paradox of our Age" by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, which I think illuminates our situation quite well.

We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness;
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet
the new neighbor.
We built more computers to hold more
information to produce more copies than ever,
but have less communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods
but slow digestion;
Tall man but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It's a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.

Thank you.

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