New Southerner interview of Albert Bates

Interview with Albert Bates

INTERVIEW

The Good News about Oil Depletion:
Albert Bates discusses how life can be simpler and happier for generations to come


BY DAVID M. BUCHANAN

When an ice storm hit Tennessee on Super Bowl Sunday a few years ago, all of Summertown lost power. But the game went on for sports fans at The Farm's ecovillage, where solar batteries provided the power to watch TV.

Life at The Farm is often this sort of mix — living, as Albert Bates puts it, "with one foot in the last century and one foot in the next." Bates has been director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and The Farm's Ecovillage Training Center since 1994, where he has taught sustainable design, natural building, permaculture and restoration ecology to students from more than 50 nations.

We sat down in his one-room home, constructed of straw bale and plastered with stucco, to talk about his new book, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (New Society Publishers, 2006).


David Buchanan: Rather than treat oil depletion as an apocalypse, you take a positive approach in your book, embracing what you call "The Big Change." When and how did you decide this could be a positive thing for society?

Albert Bates: It's the product of a lifetime experience. Over the last 30 years, I‘ve been living a much simpler lifestyle, and I've found it better in a variety of ways for a lot of different reasons. I've found that living simpler is actually more pleasurable, more enjoyable than the frenetic pace of life that most people live today. As we move from a society based on intensive use of energy to one that has to live within a resourced budget, we will find that we can go to more elegant styles of living that consume much less but are also much more fun.

DB: Talk of the oil crash seems to have died down over the past few months. What would you say to keep people interested in and aware of this issue?

AB: I think it's going to go up and down depending on the price of gas at the pump. One of the things we saw last year was a shortage that happened coincidentally in a presidential election year. Then the price went down just before the election. And it's going slowly back up now. I think we're going to see those kind of fluctuations from time to time. Peoples' interest in peak oil may go up and down too. But unfortunately, that price change is not the worst of it. What's coming is a shortage, not just for oil. It's for a whole lot of resources that we use and take for granted that are reaching their finite limits on a finite planet.

DB: Your book says we're reaching critical mass with the oil issue. However, some analysts say the peak-oil theory is flawed. Some claim global oil production will not peak before 2030, and with the technology and opening of new frontiers, it's unlikely that oil production will peak in the next 60 or 70 years. How do we know who to believe?

AB: Yeah, we heard this about tobacco, and we heard this about radioactivity. And we heard this about climate change. I think the number of experts keeps going down — the ones that say we don't have a problem here. We have a problem. We have reached a point now at 85 million barrels a day in production … and despite the best efforts of Saudi Arabia to push that up, they've not been able to. We've seen the decline of Mexico's largest oil field, which is now dropping 15 percent per year in production. This is happening all over the world . We're getting to the stage now where, with the demand up from China and India and others, we should be producing more oil, and we're not. We're producing less. That's going to begin to change things. It's going to change the prices, and it's going to change the availability of a lot of consumer goods that we take for granted.

DB: Do you think high gas prices are really an indication of oil depletion? If not, what's your theory?

AB: High gas prices are caused by lots of different things. You've got a lot of players in the supply chain who can jack up the prices at each stage. So it's not necessarily a clear indication. But I think we're coming to the point where none of those players can reduce the price of gasoline below the threshold level that crude oil costs. And that price must needs go up as we get to the bottom of the barrel. You know, up 'til now, we've had images of oil coming out of the ground like spindle toppies — Texas gushers just spewing oil into the sky. That's what happens at the very early stages of production when you have a lot of pressure and very light sweet crude that comes to the top of the well like cream rising in a pail of milk. Instead, now we're getting to the tars and sludges and the really thick gooey stuff. That stuff is not only hard to get out of the ground, but it costs a lot more and takes a lot more manufacturing to get it into things like gasoline and plastics. What we're actually experiencing now is the back end of a hundred-year-long process, and we're going to start seeing a change in the economy that we built up around an era of light sweet crude.


DB: Assuming there is an end to oil, what are some of the immediate solutions you propose for surviving an energy crisis? What's the most basic thing that a person or family can do to prepare for life without oil?

AB: Petroleum is the basis of so much in our society that you could almost say it's the whole basis for Western civilization at this stage. Over the last 100 years, we've gotten rid of our railroads. We have gone into big-box stores that are essentially warehouses on wheels. The supply chain stretches clear around the planet to China and India. All of that has to change. All of that's become obsolete. Our interstate highways are becoming obsolete. What comes next is relocalization …. getting smaller. It's having local production of food and water and basic resources, things you need for living. If I were an individual, I would look and see, How dependent am I? Most of us would have to admit we're addicted. We need the next fix, and we're almost prepared to do anything to get it. What we really need to do is see how to get off of that, how to sober up. That might mean producing our own energy. It might mean producing our own food. If I were living in a city, I'd be looking at boxed gardens on my balcony or rooftop. If I were living in suburbs, I'd be thinking about container gardens and cold frames and turning my lawn into soybeans and corn. If I were living in the countryside, I'd be thinking about producing some crops that could be made into fuel.

DB: Why should people even care about it?

AB: It's going to affect us. But more importantly, it's going to affect our children and our grandchildren. There's a proverb in Saudi Arabia: My grandfather rode a camel. My father drove a car. I ride a jet plane. My son will ride a camel. I think that's indicative of what we need to think about in the near future. What's life going to be like for our children? We've grown up with a paradigm of constant growth, constant expansion, things always getting bigger and better. Now we have to change paradigms. We need to think about shrinking, about having a smaller world population, about having limits on how much we can travel and how expensive things are. We're going to be going through a change and our children are going to go through a change, and we all need to be preparing for that, not just some of us.

DB: How do local economies fit into this picture, and why is supporting local economies such a good thing, particularly for a world without oil or other natural resources?

AB: You might be getting your food from 3,000 miles away. You might be getting your shoes from Italy or your belt from Brazil. So you need to think about how these things come to you and how long a distance they travel. It might be more effective and efficient to have production locally, like belts and shoes in your town. You might find that there's a lot of time and money to be saved by repairing old things rather than buying new things.
I think that as we go through the coming years, life will actually become better. We'll find that we have more time for the kinds of things that we enjoy than we currently spend in traffic jams waiting to get to work. Or in various different pursuits that are necessary to produce an income to pay off a mortgage, to pay back college loans and so forth. What we really need is to be able to garden and grow our own food and have our own local economies.

People sometimes hold out places like the Farm as a model. I don't think we see ourselves that way. We're just normal folks. We're living with one foot in the last century and one foot in the next century. We're having to buy stuff at big-box stores just like everybody, and we have to try to adjust and make changes as we can afford them, just like everybody. Not everybody can afford to have solar cells on their roof or rooftop water catchment. But as you can invest in that, you try. I don't think there's any need to hit people over the head for their slowness or their lack of greenness. Whether you're muddy brown or iridescent green hardly matters in the scheme of things. What you really need to be doing is trying to improve your footprint to be lighter on the planet.


DB: What do you say to a generation of young people who pooh-pooh the move toward more self-sufficient living and environmentally sustainable practices — who see these ideals as old-fashioned and repressive?

AB: I don't know if you can categorize all young people that way because a lot of young people come to us to see how we do things. In fact, that's part of the main solution to the problems that lie ahead: Changing the attitudes of youth, looking at the ways we educate our children. What needs to happen now is that the grownups need to catch up to some of the ideas that the kids have about how things should be. We can live on a planet that has a carbon balance so we're not increasing global warming. We can live on a planet that has a resource balance so we're not emptying the seas of fish and the soils of nutrients. I think the kids have an intuitive understanding of this, and we just need to be able to follow that intuition and help them do what they're going to need to do.

DB: Do you think it's possible for our current global economy and transportation system to survive in the face of oil depletion? Or is it inevitable that these systems will collapse and everyone will be forced to start over? How do you see this whole oil depletion situation panning out? What kind of scenario might we see, and when do you think it might start?

AB: It's very difficult to predict how this will all unfold because so little is know about what the actual resource in the ground is or how soon or how easily it can be brought to market. I see four possible scenarios. Plan A is business as usual, and to some extent that involves a global strategy of last one standing, the idea being that we will just dominate the world and take over whatever resources we need to feed ourselves. I don't think that's viable. That's not going to last. Plan B is something you might hear from Al Gore or Amory Lovins or some of the advocates of green technology. I think Lester Brown is a good example of that. That you have technologies that will come along and enable us to maintain our lifestyle with very little change. I don't think that's very realistic either because that still assumes this exponential growth, which is never sustainable. So then Plan C is more like the Amish. It's curtailment. It's living more simply, using less resources. Plan D is what we're trying to avoid — that's the die-off. It's nuclear war. It's the idea that James Loveluck propounds that the world is getting so hot in such a short amount of time that we'll soon become warring tribes fighting over the last habitable areas of the arctic. I don't foresee that either. I categorize myself as somewhere between Plan B and Plan C. I see us finding elegant ways to simplify, reduce our consumption and scale down.