Good evening. It's a pleasure to be with you.

This is my first talk before a concert. My role is perhaps to share with you some ideas which will hopefully stir up some thoughts within you to sit with as you listen to and journey with the tonight's music.

My message is twofold. First, I will talk about some of the root causes of the Earth crisis and secondly, I'll share with you the hope and possibility that there is in addressing this crisis. I will not offer cheap hope, a blind faith that somehow, someway, everything will turn out all right. I can offer hope that is grounded in action and manifestation of the changes that we need to make, personally and in our communities.

For the past 4 years, I've made it a personal mission to spread the message of peak oil. Peak oil refers to the point in time when oil production in the world reaches its maximum and begins its irreversible decline toward exhaustion. Each year after the peak, less and less oil will be available for us to consume.

Peak oil, as you can see, represents a fundamental change in our relationship with the fossil fuel energy upon which that we've built our entire society. Oil is the oxygen for industrial society, and every year since the first oil well in the 1850s we've had more and more of it available to us. It has fueled the private car culture, increasing urbanization, surbanization, and industrial agriculture, expanding globalization, and continuous economic growth.

Today we're consuming about 85 million barrels per day, and our use is increasing at a rate of about 2% per year. Peak oil spells an end to all of that, and its coming sooner than you might think.

As oil discoveries dwindle and the production from existing fields begins to decline, the peak is rapidly approaching. Already 33 of the 48 major oil producing nations in the world are in decline. Objective estimates put the peak sometime between now and 2010.

Its important to remember that Peak Oil, like climate change, is not the problem unto itself, but a symptom of a much greater and far deeper problem – that is, our relentless, voracious consumption, a devouring of the Earth's resources at a rate far beyond a level which the Earth can sustain.

We are no longer living off of nature's annual interest to us, but depleting its capital. We overdrew this capital 23% in the year 2002 alone. Talk about living unsustainably – we're basically committing suicide.

So what is all of this consumption for? In the past consumption was the name of a deadly infectious disease, tuberculosis. Now it's our national aspiration – the pinacle of success. It is the very thing by which we measure the health of our economy and society. Clearly it must be making us happier and more fulfilled people.

Actually, despite a tripling of global consumption since 1950, a smaller number of us say we're very happy or happy when asked in surveys, we have fewer friends, less community and citizen engagement, we have more stress, less time to spend with our friends and family, and our health is worse. Search your own experience – what in your life really brings you joy and satisfaction? Are they objects? Material possessions? Things which rely on burning fossil fuel energy? For most of us here, probably not. Most of us think of relationships in their many forms –interpersonal and intrapersonal, inter-species. Have these relationships been strengthened or undermined by society's single-minded focus on consumerism?

So why have we gone in this direction? Well the system, though failing miserably at taking care of the environment and the well-being of the majority of its people, has been very successful at enriching a small few. Today the richest 1% own 40% of all global assets. The next 1% own 11%, while the poorest 50% own only 1%.

Now it would be easy to just blame those few percent who are profiting so much off of the Earth and the rest of us. But really, we, the vast majority, are the ones supporting and legitimizing the system every single day with the decisions we make. The decisions of how to feed and clothe ourselves, how to keep ourselves warm in the winter, how to provide for our survival.

In this, we are completely dependent upon distant sources of non-renewable energy and the corporate and government production and distriubtion infrastructure, to grow our food, to transport us from place to place, and to heat and cool our homes. By breaking this dependence, we can not only save the Earth, we can save ourselves. Americans talk a lot about freedom and independence, but its only when we become producers instead of just consumers – and only when what we need is provided for us within the smaller and more sustainable circle of our community, that we are truly free.

That's why its so critical that our hope is rooted in personal and communal action. In the media we hear a lot about solutions to our energy woes – we hear that wind, solar, biofuels, hydrogen, increased efficiency will save us. But whose solutions are those? They are solutions to make us content and complacent. They tell us that we don't have to do anything or that we only have to do small things like change a lightbulb. They tell us that we don't have to change our lifestyle.

But there is no hope in those solutions because no combination of renewables will allow us to continue to consume the way we've been consuming. And if there were free energy out there, then say goodbye to fresh water, forests, and arable land – and all of the other non-renewable resources we're using unsustainably.

But I did promise you some hope. Vandana Shiva said, "The uncertainty of our times gives us no reason to be certain of hopelessness." It can be so difficult when we wake up to the pain of the world to not be utterly hopeless, and to dwell in despair at the sheer magnitude of the crisis we're facing. But thankfully, when we wake up to the pain of the world, we wake up to its beauty – to the miracle of life.

Especially during this time of re-birth, we are aware of the tremendous possibility that exists. We are all here tonight because of this possibility – and it is from this posssibility that we can act, that we can create the world we wish to see.

So what can we do? Well, I think it's clear by this point that the situation requires nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our way of life. Changing the lightbulbs and recycling just won't be enough this time.

We talk about Plan C – Curtailment and Community. By community we mean the need to live more locally and cooperatively in our neighborhoods and towns. By curtailment we mean the need to become conservers instead of consumers, stewarding the resources of the Earth instead of depleting and destroying them. This begins where we are, how we are consuming energy.

Housing
Nationwide, we consume 48% of our energy in buildings for heating, cooling, lighting, water heating, cooking, and our various appliances. A big factor is the size our homes – the average size of a new home is 2,200 square feet, or 800 square feet per person. Compared with Europe and Japan, our houses are twice as large and consume 2.4 times the enery.

Downsize if you can, and if you can't, retrofit your home for energy efficiency. Seal cracks, replace or cover your windows on cold winter nights, lower your thermostat at night and when you leave. And if you have a few thousand to spend, add insulation, or attach a greenhouse.

Food
After housing, food is next largest consumer of energy. We are consuming 10 calories of fossil fuel energy with every calorie of food energy we eat in our industrial food system. Tremendous amounts of energy are expended in the plowing, harvesting, and manufacturing of our food, not to mention the oil-based pesticides and natural gas-derived fertlizers which we spread on the fields. Then the average piece of food travels 1,300 miles to get to our plate.

Local, organic, small-scale agricultural production is the only truly sustainable system. If you don't get your food from your own backyard, a local farmer, farmer's market, or CSA (community-supported agriculture) you're contributing to perhaps the greatest cause of environmental destruction on the Earth today. A recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations pointed out that more greenhouse gases are generated from livestock production than from transportation.

But it's not only about the way we produce food, its about what we're eating. About 85 % of the cultivated area in the U.S. is devoted to four crops – corn, hay, soybeans, and wheat, most of which is feedcrop 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, probably in the form of french fries. So we need to look at eating more vegtables and little or no meat and processed foods.

Transportation
Finally, is transportation. Petroleum is fully 95% of all transporation fuel, so this sector will be greatly affected by peak oil. We hear a lot about hybrid cars, but after 10 years, we have one million hybrids out of 750 million cars in the world, with 75 million new cars per year.

Instead of making cars more efficient, how about making the transportation system more efficient. For example, we currently have only 1.5 persons per vehicle. If we could increase that to 4 or 5 persons per vehicle, we could take three-quarters of the cars off of the road. We have a proposal for a cell-phone based ridesharing systems called "The Smart Jitney."

Localization
In the long term, our goal should not be endless consumption, but revamping local and regional economies, including production and distribution systems so we can transport necessities much shorter distances and employ people a lot closer to their homes. This is the vision of re-localization. Today, we don't know our neighbors and rely on cheap energy to bring everything we need to us. Because we won't have cheap energy, we need to again living interdependently with our neighbors on a local level, and live consuming far less energy.

Now, many of you may be thinking – most Americans would have a hard time getting a car with a stranger, keeping their thermostat at 55 degrees, and changing their diet. Why is this? I don't think its because we love to destroy the Earth. In fact, I think most people's values are more in line with our own that we would think.

Remember when President Bush said we are addicted to oil? Well, there are valuable lessons to from addiction and change models. From motivational interviewing they've learned that people change when they reach a discrepancy between their values and actions, contrary to the popular refrain, "people only change when they have to."

What the problem is, I think, is that people don't know that their actions conflict with their values – they don't see the impact that their actions are having on the Earth, on other people, and on future generations. They have not woken up to the earth, and its pain. How do we wake them up?

Well, I've found that shoving frightening articles in front of their face or chiding them for their consumptive habits aren't very useful strategies. Instead, we can be lifestyle leaders ourselves, modeling a more reasonable way to live on the earth. And we can begin to develop the de-centralized infrastructure that will flourish in a post-peak oil world as long-distance energy transmission declines. We have to be the change we wish to see in the world. There is no other choice.

I'd like to end with the wisdom of the Hopi Elders.

"You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the hour.

There are things that must be considered:
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know our garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

But this could be a good time! There is a river flowing now, very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold onto the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart, and will suffer greatly.

Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above water.

See who is in there with you, and celebrate!

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration: We are the ones we've been waiting for."

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