Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil
By Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl
434 pp. New Society Publishers – Mar. 2010. $26.95.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

Transport Revolutions presents an ambitious vision of a world, 15 years from now, that is well on its way to kicking oil and being run on renewably produced electricity. The book’s authors, internationally recognized transport policy experts Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, readily acknowledge the enormity of this challenge, with transport worldwide currently 95 percent dependent on oil. They have no illusions that the transition would be painless. But they nonetheless insist that it could be done. And they seem to have sold a lot of people on their vision: both editions of their book so far have been bestsellers.

The book will appeal especially to those who appreciate the gravity of peak oil—the point at which global oil production begins to irreversibly decline—but who believe that there’s still time to do something about it. It will disappoint the so-called doomers among the peak oil crowd, those who equate dwindling oil production with the end of civilization as we know it. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, it won’t register at all with those who think that peak oil poses no threat and will be obviated altogether by market forces and human ingenuity.

Gilbert and Perl’s analysis excels on several fronts. First, it does a superb job of clearly, systematically defining key terms and concepts. For example, it defines a transport revolution as “a substantial change in a society’s transport activity that occurs in less than 25 yrs.” And it defines “substantial change” as a shift in which “something that was happening before increases or decreases dramatically, say by 50 percent; or a new means of transport becomes prevalent to the extent that it becomes a part of the lives of ten percent or more of the society’s population.”

The book also makes great use of figures, tables and statistical analysis—though this technical material gets a bit too dense in a few places, where it probably would have been better consigned to appendices.

A third strength of Transport Revolutions is its originality. Rather than focusing exclusively on passenger transport, a common oversight by transport scholars at large, the authors note, it includes lengthy discussions of freight transport as well. And in its survey of past transport revolutions, it looks not only at periods of increased transport activity but also at dramatic slowdowns in transport. For instance, it uses the World War Two mass curtailment of motorization to illustrate how quickly and sharply people can reduce their automobile usage when the need arises.

Transport Revolutions’ thesis is that, with the coming of peak oil, the world is on the eve of revolutions that will utterly transform how people and freight move. And the best hope for an en-masse transition away from fossil fuels, the book argues, lies in a monumental campaign to electrify motorized land transport—coupled with drastic curtailment of energy usage—across the developed world. Gilbert and Perl point out that in nations where concerted government efforts have been undertaken to curb oil consumption, electricity-driven solutions are the ones that have overwhelmingly prevailed. However, they take issue with these efforts’ almost complete focus on battery electric and hybrid automobiles. They see far more promise in transport systems that rely on grid connection while in motion.

Grid-connected vehicles include electric trains, trolleys and streetcars, and they draw their electricity directly from the grid through rails or overhead wires. They offer truly amazing efficiency gains over other types of electric vehicles, not only because they’re freed of having to lug around heavy batteries but also because they don’t have to contend with the efficiency losses entailed in charging a battery, which can be as high as 37 percent.

In addition to land transport, the authors also discuss the likely future changes to marine transport and air travel/air freight. They foresee wind energy increasingly supplementing the use of bunker fuel to power oceangoing ships, and both air travel and air freight movement declining precipitously because of how oil-intensive they are.

In the book’s final section, Gilbert and Perl sketch out in profound detail what they believe the state of motorized transport could resemble in 2025. They chose 2025 as a counterpoint to the present mainly because they feel that it is “near enough to provide a meaningful close target date that could motivate action,” and is also “a sufficient period within which to attain significant results from redesigning transport systems.” In the future that they describe, world oil production is down 17 percent from its 2007 level, and the United States has stayed well ahead of depletion by cutting its consumption by more than 40 percent. China, on the other hand, is still increasing its oil consumption—but not at the rate that current projections would suggest, since its days of runaway economic growth are over.

The authors focus on the United States and China in this discussion because they believe that these two countries “present the most challenging cases among what are now richer countries and poorer countries that are striving to become affluent.” America’s challenges lie in the fact that it generates far more transport activity, and uses more oil per capita in doing so, than does any other rich nation. China’s challenges stem from its status as the largest and most populous of the poorer countries striving to become affluent, and also from the fact that it is motorizing more quickly than any of these other poorer nations. Because the United States and China are extreme cases, they bring into sharp relief the challenges and potential rewards of a shift to renewably produced electricity.

The authors are cautious about making specific predictions about our transport future, but they do have many specific, in-depth recommendations. Above all, they stress that all existing highway and airport expansion programs must be terminated immediately. They also suggest that government take a central role in the transition ahead. They believe that through fiscal mechanisms such as investing in infrastructure and taxing oil used for transport, the federal government could relieve much of the pain of the transition.

These federal efforts would be presided over by a new agency called (the authors suggest) the Transport Redevelopment Administration, or TRA. The TRA’s board would be chaired by the U.S. vice president and would also include the secretaries of Energy, Defense, Transportation and Treasury, as well as members representing state, county and city governments. In addition to helping fund transport redevelopment projects, the agency would also be involved in planning and overseeing them.

This book represents a passionate, intensely argued assessment of the world’s prospects as it moves into the post-peak-oil era. I personally find its proposal to be a bit too optimistic, since it ignores the findings of the Department of Energy’s “Hirsch report” (this document, well known among peak oilers, concluded that peak oil mitigation efforts must begin at least two decades prior to peak, i.e., by the early nineties, in order to avert catastrophe). But whatever your particular spot on the continuum of peak oil opinion, this book certainly offers analysis and insights that will prove invaluable during future transport revolutions.

Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
By Riki Ott
561 pp. Produced for Dragonfly Sisters Press by Lorenzo Press – Jan. 2005. $24.95.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

At just before 10 p.m. on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, the Transocean Ltd.-owned and BP Plc.-operated floating oil rig Deepwater Horizon was boring an exploratory well in the Macondo Prospect—about 40 miles southeast of the Louisiana coast and nearly a mile underwater—when it exploded without warning from a well blowout. For more than a day the inferno raged without respite, killing 11 crew members and injuring 17 others, sending the rig’s remains plunging to the bottom of the ocean and leaving the broken seafloor well to spew millions of gallons of crude oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico. BP has tried repeatedly to stop the flow, to no avail. (As of this writing on Tuesday evening, July 13, it remains to be seen whether the well cap installed last night, a Band-Aid pending completion of the long-awaited relief wells next month, will actually work.) The spill’s magnitude has beggared description or belief. By mid-June it was four to eight times the size of Exxon Valdez and had earned the title of worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. By the beginning of the current month it held the record for biggest offshore spill in world history, according to high-end government estimates.*

And as dire as the Deepwater Horizon spill is already, its harm could be magnified still further by a bungled or ill-considered cleanup response. That’s exactly what happened with Exxon Valdez, argues marine biologist and oil spill activist Riki Ott, who has been aptly called the Erin Brockovich of that earlier disaster. Ott has written two books showing how gross misconduct on the part of Exxon (now Exxon Mobil Corp.) in the wake of Valdez created a secondary disaster that was just as damaging as the first one. These books, titled Not One Drop and Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$, exhaustively document how Exxon’s actions compounded the oil’s harm and destroyed the health of thousands of cleanup workers, in many cases permanently. In the interest of helping current spill victims, both books have now been made available online for free as ebooks. Ott is presently in the Gulf Coast area, sharing her expertise and prior experience with Valdez to try to make sure that BP doesn’t get away with the same shenanigans as Exxon did.**

Ott holds a Ph.D. in fisheries and marine toxicology, and even long before Valdez was a prominent public figure and salmon “fisherma’am” in the spill’s epicenter of Cordova, Alaska. The Valdez spill was a calling for Ott. She decided to make it her life’s work to expose the truth behind the corporate line that Exxon was toeing (and that most people still believe, she feels) regarding the spill and its aftereffects. To that end, she has conducted extensive scientific research, testified at hearings, drafted legislation aimed at preventing future spills—and incorporated all of this research and activism into her two books, which are nothing short of heroic. Written with as much feeling as rigor and investigative enterprise, these books are required reading for anyone affected by either Valdez or the current Gulf spill. I reviewed the more recent of the two, Not One Drop (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), last year for Energy Bulletin. Here I review the earlier but equally important Sound Truth, a pioneering piece of scholarship that forces us to rethink our notions about how toxic oil and the chemicals used to clean it up really are.

Oil is much more toxic than scientists used to think—that is Ott’s consistent refrain throughout the book. According to the old understanding of oil toxicity, impacts from oil spills should be entirely short-term. Since for the most part oil is non-water-soluble, scientists reasoned that it must not be that harmful to aquatic life and that whatever harm it does cause happens early on as the oil is shedding its highly volatile compounds. Thus, the old thinking goes, any oil that doesn’t weather away completely after a certain amount of time is harmless, even if it remains visible in the environment for years after a spill. But studies done in the years since Valdez have shown these notions to be sadly mistaken. Oil actually becomes more, not less, harmful the longer it remains in the environment, because the weathering process exposes increasingly toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—which Ott says “may well be the DDT of the 21st century.”

And it’s clear that Exxon had much more of an inkling about oil’s true toxicity than it was willing to admit, even long before the findings discussed above had come to light. Ott proves this using some of Exxon’s own documents, serendipitously obtained when company lawyers weren’t quick enough at the draw to have them barred from scrutiny. Ott’s other sources include medical records, court depositions, unpublished government reviews, academic journal articles and workers’ ledgers and travel logs. The portrait that emerges from this mosaic is sordid indeed. Ott shows how Exxon abused the legal system by exercising constitutional rights originally intended for people; covered up the devastation caused by its disaster with skewed scientific studies and a skillful propaganda campaign; and went ahead with a PR-driven cleanup that it knew was fouling the environment with additional toxins, eradicating beach life spared by the initial oiling and poisoning workers by exposing them to dangerous levels of hazardous chemicals.

To begin with the impacts on wildlife, Sound Truth documents the huge losses that fish, birds and marine mammals endured as a result of the spill. The populations of numerous species crashed precipitously, and some animals began having trouble producing viable offspring or evading predators in their own native habitat. And this harm was all occurring at far lower PAH concentrations than those that scientists had long deemed to be safe, and that were permissible under existing state and federal laws. One study found significant effects in young salmon exposed to PAH concentrations that were 60 times lower than those permitted by federal law. In light of this evidence, Ott concludes that current regulatory standards for PAHs in water “are grossly under-protective of aquatic life.”

These findings couldn’t have been more at odds with those reported by Exxon-funded scientists. Exxon’s scientists detected far lower PAH levels and harm to wildlife than did government-funded scientists. A subsequent report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) concluded that this is because Exxon scientists used analytical procedures that were 10 to 100 times less likely to pick up PAHs than the procedures used by their government counterparts. Exxon’s scientists also did studies purporting to assess the recovery of numerous animal species. Among the tricks that they used to make it look like beaches had recovered, Ott relates, was the use of inappropriate control beaches. Instead of choosing unoiled beaches that hosted a similar wildlife makeup to that of the oiled beaches, Exxon’s scientists chose beaches that were naturally barren due to their harsh, glacial conditions. Compared to these glacial beaches, even heavily oiled beaches looked like they had fully recovered and were flourishing once more.

Indeed, Ott dissects in great detail many cases of Exxon scientists skewing their studies so that they “tuned out” inconvenient findings. In support of her assessment, she cites Darrell Huff’s seminal book How to Lie with Statistics, as well as a journal article identifying 18 differences in study design between government-funded studies and Exxon-funded studies that dramatically biased the latter’s results. And she laments that government scientists were unable to counter these boisterous claims by Exxon with findings of their own, due to a gag order imposed on account of pending litigation. Ott contends that by the time this gag order had expired and public-trust scientists could finally publicize their findings, it was too late: Exxon’s version had become the popular understanding of the spill and its environmental effects.

Besides the discovery of crude oil’s extreme, persistent toxicity, the other half of Exxon Valdez’s legacy, believes Ott, is the terrible saga of thousands of people cut down in their primes by exposure to noxious cleaning agents that should not have been used. (The warnings on numerous chemicals stated that they shouldn’t be permitted to drain into watercourses, which obviously meant that they shouldn’t have been allowed to drain into Prince William Sound.) In an ominous omen for cleanup workers, Exxon’s primary cleanup contractor had been cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only a year earlier for failing to maintain proper records related to hazardous wastes or adequately train personnel working around these wastes. In another ominous omen, Exxon paid workers to sign a waiver stating that they would not sue the company for any health-related problems that they might subsequently develop. Further, several cleaning solutions used during the cleanup contained an organic solvent called 2-butoxyethanol, which was on the EPA’s list of “janitorial products to avoid.” Prolonged exposure to these chemicals along with oil mists led to 6,722 recorded cases of upper respiratory infection among spill response workers. Exxon’s trick for not reporting these health claims to the government was to lump them under the heading of cold-and-flu-like “infections,” which don’t need to be reported, as opposed to occupational illnesses, which do.

As this book poignantly reveals, the Valdez tragedy also shed light on a previously little-known disease called chemical sensitivity. People with this sickness are extremely sensitive to everyday chemicals that never used to give them problems in the past (for example, cosmetics or gas fumes) because of some past exposure to dangerous levels of hazardous chemicals. Chemically sensitive people can have life-threatening reactions to even trace levels of common chemicals. From court documents, personal journals and other sources, Ott pieces together the stories of some former Valdez cleanup workers who went on to develop chemical sensitivity. Because the illness was such a recently recognized phenomenon, many people faced tremendous challenges in trying to obtain diagnosis and treatment. To their immeasurable frustration, they often wound up being diagnosed as hypochondriacs or prescribed antidepressants because their doctors thought that it was all in their heads.

One of Sound Truth’s greatest strengths is that it goes way beyond merely uncovering the scandal of Exxon’s corporate myths. It also provides clear, well-informed suggestions aimed at reducing the likelihood of future spills and better handling the spills that still will inevitably occur. Ott recommends, among other things, the enactment of federal legislation requiring spillers to pay for their cleanups but prohibiting them from being in charge of cleanups. She points out that this policy of “federalizing” spill responses has been tried in other countries and has worked well. Because those in charge of such cleanups are beholden to the public interest rather than shareholders, they have no incentive to cut corners and merely sweep the problem under the rug while doing further environmental damage.

And that brings us back to BP and its spill in the Gulf. Some commentators have taken heart from BP’s prompt admission of responsibility, its pledge to clean up the oil and its agreeing to set up a $20 billion damage claims fund. But stacked against these seemingly altruistic gestures are hints of Exxon-style negligence and secrecy, including security guards barring journalists from beaches, animal carcasses and other potential crime scene evidence mysteriously disappearing and spill response workers going without protective respirators.† Regardless of which reports reflect BP’s true colors, there’s one PR move BP chiefs could make that couldn’t possibly go wrong: putting a copy of Sound Truth into the hands of every cleanup worker, and taking care to read it long and hard themselves. It would be an honorable gesture, ensuring that workers are properly informed and outfitted—and giving us BP’s word that it intends to succeed where Exxon failed on the social/environmental responsibility front. Fortunately, however, we don’t have to wait for BP to disseminate this vital information. Anyone can access Ott’s books online for free.

_{* Background on Deepwater Horizon gathered from the following sources: “New Oil Estimates Show Spill Rate Much Higher,” Morning Edition, NPR, Jun. 11, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127760703 (accessed Jun. 27, 2010); Ken Hoffman, “Despite spill, a few birds get a chance to live,” Houston Chronicle, Jul. 4, 2010, http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/7093979.html (accessed Jul. 5, 2010); “What do we know about the Deepwater Horizon disaster?, BBC News, Jun. 22, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10370479.stm (accessed Jun. 27, 2010); NPR Staff and Wires, “Transocean Seeks To Limit Liability For Oil Rig Blast,” NPR, May 13, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127760703 (accessed Jun. 21, 2010); “Anadarko Refuses to Pay Costs of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill,” Environment News Service, Jun. 18, 2010, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2010/2010-06-18-091.html (accessed Jun. 21, 2010); Tommy Dickey, “A Brief Introduction to Ocean Oil Spills,” University of California, Santa Barbara, http://www.opl.ucsb.edu/tommy/pubs/Oil_Spill_2010_vers6.pdf (accessed Jul. 12, 2010); Associated Press and Miami Herald, “BP spill hits a somber record as Gulf’s biggest,” Seattle Times, Jul. 1, 2010, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2012259363_oil02.html (accessed Jul. 13, 2010).
** The Erin Brockovich comparison comes from: “Chelsea Green Bookstore: Nature & Environment: Not One Drop,” Chelsea Green, http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/not_one_drop:paperback/praise/ (accessed Jun. 28, 2010). Not One Drop’s release as a free ebook was reported in: “Chelsea Green Partners with Scribd on Oil Spill Book,” Publishers Weekly, May 18, 2010, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/43213-chelsea-green-partners-with-scribd-on-oil-spill-book.html (accessed Jun. 21, 2010). Sound Truth’s free ecopy is at: http://www.rikiott.com/pdf/Sound%20Truth.pdf.
† Riki Ott, interview with Keith Olbermann, “Countdown,” MSNBC, New York, Jun. 14, 2010, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/37697092#37697092 (accessed Jun. 21, 2010); “Has BP been attempting to erase evidence? Shocking video of security guard confrontation,” World News Network, Jun. 16, 2010, http://article.wn.com/view/2010/06/16/Has_BP_been_attempting_to_erase_evidence_Shocking_video_of_s/ (accessed Jun. 21, 2010).}

Links to ecopies of Sound Truth and Not One Drop.

Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society
By Andrés R. Edwards
227 pp. New Society Publishers – Feb. 2010. $17.95.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

The more research you do into the subject of sustainability, the more you realize that talking about sustainability is like talking about matter. It’s so wide-ranging, multifaceted and pervasive a topic that it’s hard even to know where to begin. “Sustainable development” is often equated with environmental protection and conservation, but it’s actually far broader than that, encompassing economic, political and sociocultural concerns as well. Defined simply as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,”* sustainable development is more a general approach than a specific set of practices or policies. And it can be applied across literally all sectors of human endeavor, from education to enterprise—and from fine arts to the physical sciences.

Given what a sweeping category sustainability is, author and noted sustainability expert Andrés Edwards is to be commended for distilling it down into two easily digestible volumes for lay readers: The Sustainability Revolution and Thriving Beyond Sustainability. The first book, released in 2005 by New Society Publishers and subtitled as a “Portrait of a Paradigm Shift,” showed how large numbers of individuals and organizations across the world had come to recognize the failings of the industrial “growth” economy fast undermining its own ecological foundations, and had begun to forge pathways toward a sustainable future. Their grassroots efforts, Edwards predicted, would prove to be vital guideposts along the uncertain course ahead for humanity. This first book was mostly a theory study; Edwards recalls that he didn’t get a chance to flesh out its concepts with tangible examples to the extent that he would have liked. Hence the need for this new book (also from New Society), which he says is intended to share “the stories of the people and organizations undertaking this important work.”**

The method of Thriving Beyond Sustainability is straightforwardness itself: the book simply gathers together pointed examples of several key themes long at the core of the global sustainability conversation. The first chapter, titled “Lessons from Our Ancestors,” reminds us of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond’s case, articulated in his bestselling book Collapse, that human civilizations often decline largely as a result of having despoiled the natural capital on which they depend. Edwards poignantly demonstrates how the modern developed world stands to learn as much from the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island, who went into steep decline after they over-harvested their trees and marine life, as it does from the Inuit, who have managed to thrive for centuries in the Earth’s North Polar regions. Some other notable chapters include those on regenerative design, saving ecosystems, going “glocal” and the evolution of the corporate world’s new “triple bottom line”—which requires that companies heed social and ecological concerns in addition to economic imperatives when making decisions.

In a vision that will please technological optimists but will seem like blatant pie in the sky to the more pessimistic among the environmental crowd, Edwards insists that with the right approach industrial society can attain a state not only of sustainability, but of “thriveability.” Edwards never gives a clear-cut definition of thriveability but he does eloquently describe how it differs from sustainability. “Sustainability,” he writes, “separates us from nature and envisions us ‘getting by’ by limiting our negative environmental impacts over the long term.” Thriveability, in contrast, represents a “shift from ‘less bad’ solutions to solutions that energize us and improve our quality of life through our connections with all life forms.”

Edwards asserts that if we citizens of the developed world are to successfully meet our biggest challenges as a civilization (which he deems to be ecosystem decline, energy transition, population growth, economic disparity and climate change), then we must drastically change our entire worldview so that it reflects a thriveability perspective. He says that before beginning any new sustainability initiative we must first evaluate the extent to which it is “Scalable, Place-making, International, Resilient, Accessible, [and] Life-affirming,” as well as whether or not it promotes “Self-care” (these criteria go by the acronym SPIRALS). We must also follow the precautionary principle, which states that if there is any doubt as to a proposed initiative’s potential risks, we must err on the side of caution and forego implementing it until we have better information.

In the chapters that follow, Edwards presents a thorough analysis of how individuals, corporations, national and regional governments, nonprofits and international organizations, among countless others, are currently undertaking projects that espouse SPIRALS ideals. For example, he highlights the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, as an exemplary model of the place-making dimension of SPIRALS. The project aims to transform intersections into lively public squares dubbed “Share-It Squares,” which foster community and help reclaim public spaces. Edwards points out that crime rates in these repaired sections of the city fell by 10 percent following their conversion into public squares, as reported in the Journal of Public Health. And he cites the environmentally responsible forestry practices of lumber company Menominee Tribal Enterprises (MTE) as a prime example of SPIRALS’ intergenerational component. MTE embraces the “seventh generation” thinking of traditional Native American ethics, which requires that today’s decisions be made with a view toward how they might affect people living seven generations from now. Under this directive, the Menominee Forest’s total timber volume has not dwindled but rather has steadily grown from 1.3 billion to more than 1.7 billion board feet over the past century and a half.

Where Edwards’ analysis falls short, however, is in attempting to illustrate the scalable and accessible aspects of the SPIRALS framework. Compared to the others, these two sections seem overly brief and light on specific examples. For instance, Edwards provides only one concrete example of a present or emerging initiative demonstrating the scalability part of SPIRALS. And that one example, a nationwide infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs) as envisioned by the EV service provider Better Place, is patently of dubious scalability, as anyone can tell you who has bothered to look into the daunting obstacles that impede wide-scale EV adoption. Further, Edwards sometimes seems to be hammering an example into a particular subset of the SPIRALS framework, when in fact it could just as easily fit into a completely different one, or even multiple subsets.

But these are relatively minor flaws in what is, for the most part, a comprehensive, prodigiously studied panorama of today’s sustainability landscape. Drawing on its author’s considerable knowledge of ecological design, sustainable business, environmental education and community development projects, Thriving Beyond Sustainability is sure to be one of the authoritative desk references on sustainability for some time to come.

_{* The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43.
** Andrés R. Edwards, Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2010), ix.}

Like most of you perhaps, I have been watching the BP oil rig disaster and oil spill with growing horror. It appears unforgivable lapses in backup operating and safety procedures were committed by the rig operators including BP, Transocean and Haiburton staff in a challenging physical situation that is testing the limits of petroleum extraction technology. In addition, everyone involved from BP to the media to the Federal government has been lying to the public about the extent and quantity of oil being released into the Gulf.

Reports are now saying that outflow rates from the leaks were unreported by a factor of a magnitude, instead of the still terrible 5,000 bpd or 210,000 gallons, of basically toxic crude oil, the actual rates is probably more than 50,000 bpd or more than 2,000,000 gallons ever day. This poisonous flow is dumping itself into one of the richest biological ecosystems in the world, one that supports multi-billion fisheries that provide food for millions of people. Massive wildlife and environmental devastation is possible – uh, likely and is probably happening at this very moment.

Now it is almost impossible to write down the hyperbolic language equal to the ecological damages being wrought, so here are some web sites for further research:

Here what the Center for Biological Diversity is saying: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/energy/dirty_energy_development/oil_and_gas/gulf_oil_spill/index.html

Deepwater Horizon Response Team – Official Unified Command:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/

British Petroleum efforts at stemming the leaks:
http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=40&contentId=7061813

It looks like this could be a disaster in which nobody wins and that the technological capabilities of British Petroleum, the Gulf of Mexico oil response industries, the US Coast Guard and all the departments of the Federal Government may be inadequate to deal with the problem. Surely some ideas like burning the oil on the water and spraying tons upon tons of a chemical dispersant seem to reflect a lack of intelligence and concern for the greater environment and perhaps more than a bit of desperation.

So what is a concerned citizen to do, what can be done for a crisis that threatens to leave a wondrously productive bioregion devastated? Fortunately the Southern working man, maligned as he is in stereotype and image, has come up with a solution.

See these web sites for demonstrations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SxX2EntEo

Now I was raised on a commercial dairy farm and grew up baling hay. The eldest son of an insanely hard working man, I spent my summers loading and unloading wagons and stuffing hay barns, moving at least 5,000 bales a year at least three times per bale.

As soon as I seen the video, I recognized that this was a practical idea, one not only likely to be effective in capturing oil residues, but also likely to be cheaper and easier to implement than most any other spill mitigation strategy. On our farm, we used straw for exactly this purpose, we would cover spills of diesel fuel, which happen occasionally when you use multiple tractors and other power equipment, with straw. Then we would trample over it, rake it back and forth over the spill, let it sit and remove the oil residue covered debris. This works.

This concept has already been submitted by me to the Deepwater Horizon Response Team through their web interface form, the following is a slightly edited version of that suggestion. Because of the importance and urgency of the GOM oil spill situation, you are getting this suggestion in rough form. I hope to add blog posts in the next week that will elaborate on how the US farming and fishing communities can come together to use hay and straw bales as an solve the GOM crisis themselves.

Hay/Straw bales as solution

Alfalfa hay and grain straw are an extremely abundant resource throughout the farming belt which includes all of the Southern states afflicted by this massive oil spill. There are many ways in which hay and straw bales can be deployed to protect beaches, reefs and marshes and to soak up the oil spill in the water. Bales of hay and/or straw can be used to soak up oil and tar balls floating on the water or stacked in a line onshore to protect beaches, marshes or wetlands.

Consider some of the methods – our overwhelmed – to say it mildly – authorities have or are using to combat the spreading oil spill. They skimmed a portion of it and lit that on fire, but weather conditions fought against this year. Presently they are doing massive aerial spraying of some type of detergent dispersant that regular news reports describe as toxic, with unknown effects to the food chain and web of life. So, our formal strategies to solve an almost unbelievably huge pollution crisis are to create more air and water pollution with possibly worse effects than the oil spill.

Now a positive solution is to soak up the oil as easily deployable and inexpensive as possible in a way that the oil residue is recoverable for its thermal (and/or chemical feedstock) value. Bales are compact and can be deployable in a multitude of ways according to the environmental conditions. The great things about using hay bales to collect oil are that they are organic, are simple and easy to apply, are relatively low cost and are regionally abundant.

This is a very simple concept, but it is one that may prove more cost-effective in soaking up the spill and capturing most of the oil for recovery as fuel than any other mitigation strategy available. Since the complex technological solutions hasn’t yet stopped the oil spill (nothing might until the relief wells are drilled and completed), our culture and country would be wise to apply simple solutions that offer possibilities of working well and that can/would involve large numbers of interested people in the mitigation and restoration processes.

Now let’s take the hay/straw bale solution one step further. After the bales are placed onshore or in the water where they have soaked up oil, we then pick them up to capture and utilize the petroleum. Processes can be set up to collect these bales of alfalfa hay or straw when saturated, replacing them with clean bales and transporting the oil soaked bales to either modified coal power plants for electrical generation or to biomass gasification units.

What’s Required

Standard hay/stack bales bought from regional farms, possibly floated down Mississippi on barges.

The equipment needed would just be that to find, buy and transport the hay or straw bales from the farmers and ranchers inland to the shorelines and water area afflicted by the oil spill. This would be existing and possibly underemployed barges, ships, fishing boats, trucks, wagons and possibly the rail infrastructure. Barges and truck to transport the bales to the sites they are needed at, barges are probably most cost-effective

Bale barriers along shoreline

Placing bales of alfalfa or straw on the beach can be done by anyone, property owners, community groups, National Guard and volunteers. There can be a concerted effort to enlist volunteers, community groups and paid workers to place bales in lines along beaches, marshes and the complete shoreline exposed to the growing oil spill.

Bales may be stacked in ways that protect shorelines from waves pushing the oil inside into the reefs and marshes. The bales may need to be strapped down onshore with wire or rebar metal poles to hold the bales onto the ground on the shorelines and wetlands.

People will protect what is theirs and what they love, in this case their homes, their land, their seashores. There are huge numbers of ready workers and volunteers to place and strap down the bales on the shorelines and wetlands.

It may take less than 2,000,000 bales to protect more than 1,000 miles of shoreline, beaches and marshes. Even if the bales were replaced when saturated with oil or damaged by the elements several times over the duration of this oil spill, this is doable and affordable.

Bale boons

Bales of hay and straw will float on the water to absorb the oil sheen of the spill. Using the bales as absorbent boons may be as simple as strapping them together with some non-corrosive wire. We can create floating absorbent boons by tying bales together as with corrosion resistant wires and dropping them off from ships-barges-fishing vessels on top of the oil spill in the water.

Boats, perhaps fishing boats that have wrenches and cranes to pull up trolley and drag lines. These boats can be employed to both drop bales and bale boons onto the oil spill and to retrieve the oil saturated bales.

There is also the possibility of stringing dozens of bales together and pulling them by boat through the oil spill, although this may be very consumptive of fuel for the boats.  Dragging the boons of hay/straw bales may not be much more effective than dumping the bale boons off the barge or ship and letting them passively drift with the oil spill absorbing what they can as waves push them toward shore.

Perhaps the most expensive part of the process will be retrieving the oil soaked bales, which may require much physical labor by workers in protective gear. However many fishing boats would have the cranes, wrenches and drag lines to retrieve the strings of bales simply.

Because the bales are so abundant and inexpensive, they can be replaced on a regular basis when they are saturated with oil. Mitigating the spill effectively with hay/straw bales will require monitoring their pick up of petroleum residues and hauling them onto collector ship when saturated.

Hay/straw info – some comments about supply

Standard bales of alfalfa hay or possibly the straw of grains like wheat, oats, barley, flax, etc. typically weigh 50 to 70 lbs. and are approximately 3′-4′ x 2′ x 12″-15.” They are a widely sold and traded agricultural product in the beef raising parts of the USA, which included much of the farming belt.

Hay bales are abundant and we are just beginning baling seasons with the grain harvest and straw baling about a month to two months away. The first cutting of alfalfa for the year is probably starting to happen now in the southern states most afflicted by the oil spill. Alfalfa hay bales or straw bales can be sourced from farmers and ranchers throughout Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and the Mississippi basin.

Hay bales are relatively cheap, less than $3 a bale for a 50 pound bale of alfalfa based upon current US prices: http://future.aae.wisc.edu/data/monthly_values/by_area/2053?tab=feed

Straw is probably less than 50% the cost of hay.

Possibly more than 50,000,000 bales could be bought off the agricultural market before the supply of livestock feed increases the price of beef.

Bales can be purchased from commercial hay brokers, loaded onto barges in quantities from 500 to 10,000 or more and floated down the Mississippi River to wherever they are needed in the GOM oil spill.

Biomass Gasification

The ideal goal is to recover the lost petroleum residue from the environment to save its remaining value as a thermal fuel source or chemical feedstock. With the hay and straw bales being plant material, they have the advantage of being burnt with the oily residues as power plant fuel or gasified into syn-gas feedstock. The chemical and thermal value of the oil residue, if recoverable by gasification, will help pay the cost, at least a portion, of retrieving the bales and the surrounding environmental restoration.

Oily bales may be a combustible hazard, so rapid transport to centralized collection points for biomass gasification or burning for power plant fuel will be necessary. So to reclaim the thermal or chemical values of the oil-soaked bales, centralized locations to collect the oil saturated bales will need to be set up, before shipment to power plants or biomass gasification units to gasify the oil hay into syn-gas for chemical processing or producer gas for clean up into natural gas usage-pipelines.

Major investment would be the biomass gasification units to harvest whatever value is in the recovered oil. These biomass gasification units can be built for not only this emergency, but as future power sources in gasifying biomass. Modular gasification units that can be build and deployed quickly are necessary. If the biomass recovery gasification units may prove more difficult to attain or build in time, the oil saturated bales may be used as fuel in coal generating plants.

Social and Political Considerations

There is another advantage to supporting a groundswell response from the grass root communities afflicted upon by this disaster. This is a public relation advantage to the government and oil industry in that thousands of farmers and small truckers could be contracted with to supply the bales. BP had suffered immense bad publicity from the job losses to the maritime community this oil spill causes. Contracting with farmer suppliers for the hay bales to soak up the oil would be putting money back into the working communities of the region.

This low tech spill control strategy has the potential to create many temporary labor jobs and involve whole communities in constructive responses to the calamity of the oil spill.  Placing and retrieving the bales could become temporary employment for men and women who have lost their jobs in the fishing and tourism industries. The putting back of restoration money into the communities and working people of the afflicted communities could help alleviate the bad publicity and public anger over the spill.

Call to Action

To those of us looking at resource depletion consequences it is becoming blatantly obvious how water and watershed issues will prove more critical and important than energy depletion for our long term survival. It is imperative that our society makes its long-term decisions regarding energy, land-use and industrial development based upon
how the extraction industries will affect the permanent sustainability, safety and security of our water sources, ground tables and regional watersheds.

The urgent, absolutely important demand is that we as individuals, communities, peoples, cultures need to think beyond just confronting the realities of resource depletions, climate change, and the predations of nation-states, military industrial complexes and armed thugs to about how we - as people, society, culture and bioregion can get from where we are to a sustainable future. Even though, we as a generation are facing perhaps the greatest challenges in human history.

We need to ask ourselves these questions and then to abide by the answers however harsh or frightening:

What would a perennial culture(s) that would last 100-200-500-5000 years look like and what can we as citizens alive in the richest and most prosperous era in history do to make this happen?”

What can we as a people and a culture do today to ensure that humans, animals, forests and ecosystems, salmon and orcas, rivers and fresh water, fertile soil, alive cities, machines and technology, literacy and scientific knowledge will still be here 50, 200, 500 and 5,000 years from now?

We need to understand that the real underlying shortages are fresh water, soil fertility and biological diversity. Recognize that certain energy and resource extraction industries are extremely environmentally destructive and leave devastated waste lands, poisoned soil, depleted aquifers and distorted, polluted watersheds in their wake. Among the villains are coal companies, tar sand mining/processing industries, ethanol fuels from corn production and possible deepwater offshore oil field development as witness by the magnitude of this oil spill.

Conclusion

Because of the flexibility of using bales of alfalfa or straw to soak up the oil spill, we should consider using them as one of our central and primary ways to mitigate the potential environmental consequences of this oil spill. Hay bales are readily available, are not a complex, unproven technology, require no hard to source material and are low cost. They should be in the front line of Deepwater Horizon’s spill mitigation strategy.

The Biochar Debate: Charcoal’s Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility
By James Bruges
120 pp. Chelsea Green Publishing – Jan. 2010. $14.95.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

It’s called biochar, and if you believe its most ardent supporters, then this unassuming, fine black powder is a vital tool in the solutions to some of humanity’s most urgent ecological threats, including climate change, peak oil, soil degradation and water pollution due to agrochemicals. However, if you side with biochar’s staunch opponents, then it seems like a fledgling, poorly understood technology with real risks, including the displacement of entire communities and the serious jeopardizing of world food security and biodiversity. Which view is correct? That’s the question that sustainability expert James Bruges, who is cautiously optimistic about biochar, investigates in his book The Biochar Debate.

Biochar is essentially charcoal made through a process called pyrolysis (which involves burning organic material in the absence of oxygen), and then finely crushed and worked into the earth as a soil amendment.* The pyrolysis process has two byproducts, syngas and bio-oil, which can be used for generating heat and power, hence biochar’s appeal to alternative energy enthusiasts. And once the biochar is in the soil, it has an amazing ability to retain nutrients and moisture due to its unbelievably porous structure (a single gram can have twice the surface area of a tennis court). This enables it to dramatically boost crop yields and reduces the need for industrial fertilizers. Thus, biochar has the potential to simultaneously ensure our future food supply and wean croplands off of the poisons in which they must be doused in order for today’s mineral-depleted soils to sustain production. Another advantage of biochar is that it can be made from virtually any organic material (from manure to wood to switchgrass), meaning that there would be no shortage of suitable feedstocks, and biochar production could double as a waste recycling scheme.

Most important of all, however—assuming that climate scientists have called it correctly with their warnings of an imminent, irreversible climate tipping point—is biochar’s ability to pull substantial quantities of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and trap them underground effectively forever, in human terms. Biochar’s oft-repeated sales pitch is that it isn’t merely carbon-neutral, it’s “carbon-negative.” And this capacity for sequestering carbon could, conceivably, allow us to return atmospheric CO₂ to pre-industrial levels within our lifetimes.

The technology certainly has backing from serious heavyweights in the environmental community. One of these backers, Bill McKibben, founded the 350 campaign, which advocates reducing atmospheric CO₂ from its current concentration of nearly 390 parts per million (ppm) to its safe upper limit of 350 ppm. Also strongly in favor of biochar is James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory (which says that the Earth is one complex, self-regulating system—a single organism, if you like). Moreover, some of the main beneficial properties of biochar have been documented in a growing body of scientific literature. But biochar has also raised deep concern among many other environmentalists and environmental groups. These groups include the Climate Outreach and Information Network (U.K.), Biofuelwatch (U.K.), the Organic Consumers Association (U.S.), the Rainforest Action Network (U.S.) and, ironically, even the Gaia Foundation (U.K.)—the namesake of biochar-supporter Lovelock’s aforementioned theory—among nearly 150 other organizations in several dozen countries. These organizations have questioned many of the claims that have been made about biochar’s potential (including, most damningly, its very carbon sequestration benefit), and have branded it as “a new big threat to people, land, and ecosystems.“**

Bruges freely acknowledges the need for much additional research into the workings of biochar—as well as more conclusive proof of all the claims made on its behalf. He also acknowledges biochar’s potential risks, though he claims that they’re acceptable considering the urgent need to reduce atmospheric CO₂ levels. And he makes a compelling case that this could be done using biochar. He takes heart from the following two calculations by Craig Sams, a former chairman of the U.K.’s Soil Association: first, that devoting all of the world’s productive land to biochar production would return atmospheric CO₂ to pre-industrial levels (280 ppm) within just a year; and, second, that giving a mere 2.5 percent of the world’s productive land over to biochar production would bring CO₂ to pre-industrial levels by 2050. The first of these scenarios obviously isn’t a viable option, since it would leave us no land for growing our food. However, Bruges shows that the second scenario is easily doable, in light of a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showing that an additional 4 billion acres could be added to the world’s existing 3.5 billion acres of cropland.

Clearly geared toward a lay readership, The Biochar Debate begins by succinctly summing up climate change, peak oil, peak phosphorus and other important issues related to the Earth’s ecological limits. Then it gets into somewhat less familiar territory: biochar and its fascinating history. It is only within the past decade that biochar has really begun to show up on the radar screen, but its roots are ancient, going all the way back to fifth century B.C. South America. There, in the deep jungles of the Amazon Basin, one of the great, thriving agrarian societies in our planet’s history devised a sustainable agriculture involving the use of human-made charcoal to enrich the Basin’s naturally thin, infertile soils.

Today, locals refer to this ancient soil as terra preta, or “black earth.” We know that it’s human-made because it contains shards of ancient pottery, indicating a great deal of human handling during its formation. And even now, five centuries after the disappearance of that great Amazonian civilization, terra preta continues to retain its amazing fertility and carbon content, and in fact is commercially harvested and sold to local farmers. This has promising implications for modern-day biochar, which, once added to the soil, should continue to improve fertility and retain its sequestered carbon for hundreds or even thousands of years to come. (Lacking the original recipe, however, soil ecologists have thus far been unable to precisely replicate terra preta—and critics often point this out when calling biochar’s viability into question.)

Again, Bruges readily acknowledges biochar’s potential risks, in spite of how strongly he feels in favor of it. The main risks that he foresees have to do with letting market forces, rather than government oversight, regulate biochar’s production. Bruges believes that if regulation is left to the market, then companies may try to capitalize on the fuels that come as byproducts of biochar, rather than on the biochar itself, if these byproducts prove more profitable (with obvious implications for the climate). He also fears that crops for making biochar and its associated fuels could begin to supplant food crops, if corporate profits dictate this action. (This point seems frighteningly valid in light of the soaring food prices that went hand-in-hand with the height of the ethanol craze.) Further, Bruges warns that if policies are enacted that allow farmers to earn carbon credits for their biochar, then big agriculture, in its haste to cash in on the bonanza, may set up large-scale, environmentally destructive monocultures of grass and fast-growing trees to be used as biochar feedstocks.

In addition to orienting lay readers with regard to climate change, peak oil and other important background facts, describing biochar’s science and fascinating history, weighing its merits against its potential pitfalls and presenting a compelling case for its immediate, large-scale use, The Biochar Debate discusses at length the various pilot schemes that have been conducted with biochar to date. Some of these pilot schemes are inspiring success stories, while others serve as instructive examples of things that can go wrong. To take one example on the success story side, Bruges describes a banana plantation in India where, following the introduction of biochar, yields per tree have risen by 44 percent, the bananas keep longer and apparently taste better, the farmer is able to get a better price for them than before and the amount of time spent each day irrigating has been cut in half. And as an example of what not to do, Bruges takes us to a tiny village in Ghana where biochar is having a hard time taking off because the farmers lack secure rights to the land that they cultivate. Most of the farmers don’t own their farmland—instead they rent it, and then only for a year or two at a time—and thus they have little incentive to invest in the soil.

All in all, The Biochar Debate is a spirited yet critical look at a controversial emerging technology that could potentially go a long way toward mitigating climate change, restoring depleted soils and maintaining our food security into the future. Besides being extremely knowledgeable about biochar, Bruges is also quite opinionated about it and has many thoughts on how its subsidization, oversight, certification and research and development might best be handled. And he backs up all of these opinions and recommendations with solid evidence and real-world examples from his many travels to places around the world where biochar is being used successfully. The book also does a good job of pointing readers toward resources for further reading, as well as describing small ways in which each of us can be contributing something to the cause. And Bruges’ conviction that successfully heading off a climate catastrophe is worth taking some calculated risks with biochar—or with any number of other climate change mitigation technologies that may yet emerge—is certainly well-taken.

_{* For an excellent, detailed description of the pyrolysis process, see the following Web page: Amelia Harnish, “Is Biochar a Quick Fix for Global Warming?,” iamgreen™, Aug. 12, 2009, http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/biochar-charcoal-global-warming-460709?click=main_sr. (accessed Apr. 29, 2010).
** Harnish, “Groups Against Biochar,” iamgreen™, Oct. 16, 2009, http://sayiamgreen.com/blog/2009/10/groups-against-biochar/ (accessed Apr. 29, 2010); “Declaration: ‘Biochar’, a new big threat to people, land, and ecosystems,” Rettet den Regenwald, Mar. 26, 2009, http://www.regenwald.org/international/englisch/news.php?id=1226 (accessed Apr. 29, 2010).}

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
By Robert Charles Wilson
413 pp., hardcover. Tor Books – Jun. 2009. $25.95.

Crossing the Blue: A Post-Petrol, Post-American Road Trip
By Holly Jean Buck
328 pp. – Aug. 2008. $17.00.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

This year promises to be a big one for novels set in a world beyond oil. Peak oil icon James Howard Kunstler comes out with The Witch of Hebron, a follow-up to his astonishing, critically acclaimed World Made by Hand, in September. And while the anticipation for Kunstler’s book is building, two more post-oil novels are due out next month, Afterlight by Alex Scarrow and Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. Of these last two, the one that I’m really excited about is Ship Breaker. It’s the second novel of the accomplished, Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning young talent Paolo Bacigalupi, who is known for his evocative post-industrial dystopias.

The present year will also see the paperback release of last year’s post-oil-novel event, Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock. This paperback release provides a good opportunity to review Julian, along with Holly Jean Buck’s remarkable Crossing the Blue, another recent addition to the post-petroleum literary canon. Both are fine novels, though they seem to have been written with divergent purposes in mind. Buck clearly intended her book to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of ignoring peak oil. Wilson, on the other hand, appears content to have used his post-oil setting as merely an interesting backdrop against which to tell an entertaining story.

Wilson’s Julian opens in the winter of 2172, in what is today northern Alberta, Canada, but in this fictional future constitutes part of an expanded union with sixty states. America once again has the feel of a bustling nineteenth-century frontier as it muddles back toward prosperity following a series of devastating catastrophes brought on by the depletion of the world’s oil reserves. Our present-day automobile fleet, mass media, postal service, and modern science and medicine, among many other fixtures of early twenty-first century life, are things of the distant past. Illiteracy is commonplace, and paper currency unheard of in many parts. The detritus of the industrial age—crumbled roads, concrete foundations where homes once stood, desecrated human skeletons—lies strewn about everywhere. However, steam-powered train travel and transport have made a comeback, international trade is just beginning to pick up again, and there are plenty of places that still have (strictly rationed) access to lighting and electricity.

The Americans of the late twenty-second century harbor a deep-seated resentment toward their ancestors from the industrial era, whom they commonly refer to as the Secular Ancients. These ancients presided over a disastrous period in history now known as the Efflorescence of Oil, during which they squandered the earth’s once-immense store of fossilized sunlight, at the expense of future generations and all other life on the planet. People today have taken on religion in a big way—they’re ruled over by a religious authority known as the Dominion, and a new constitutional amendment grants one the right to worship at the Dominion-approved church of one’s choosing. In general, people fundamentally distrust the knowledge and beliefs of their hedonistic ancestors.

The nation’s capital is now Manhattan, New York, and the presidential “palace” is located in present-day Central Park. Elections are still held regularly, but they seem like little more than a sham, since a single family, the Comstocks, has ruled the nation for the past thirty years like some kind of dynasty. The current president, Deklan Comstock, is by all accounts a brooding, murderous dictator who had his own brother, the late, popular General Bryce Comstock, killed because he believed that he posed a threat to presidential power. And now Deklan has his sights set on his hapless nephew, and Bryce’s son, Julian Comstock.

Julian is presented to us as a memoir of “the life and adventures” of Julian Comstock, told in the first person by his closest friend, Adam Hazzard. Julian and Adam first meet at the age of seventeen, in Adam’s hometown of Williams Ford. Adam is an aspiring writer who learned the art of literacy from his seamstress mother (his father, a commoner, is illiterate). Julian, a newcomer to Williams Ford, is staying as a guest at a local country estate, where his mentor Sam Godwin seeks to shelter him from the malevolent intentions of Deklan. Recognizing that Julian needs to cultivate some friendships with people his own age, Mr. Godwin encourages the friendship between Julian and Adam, and he also persuades Adam’s parents to let him take Adam on as a second student.

Adam’s parents are reluctant at first, fearing that Julian, who is notorious for his heretical beliefs, may corrupt Adam. In so many ways, Julian is a man of our times, born a century and a half too late. He believes that humans once landed on the moon, and that the human race originated in Africa. He believes in evolution and the existence of DNA. He is either an atheist or an agnostic (the novel never works out which), at a time when churchgoing is the norm. He also has a flair for theater and loves to shock people with his blasphemies. And with his gentle, effeminate manner and the amount of time he spends with Adam, it is widely suspected that he is gay, and that Adam might be his lover—and indeed, Julian does remain a lifelong bachelor, while Adam gets married and starts a family. Eventually, however, Adam’s parents relent and Sam takes Adam under his tutelage.

The book chronicles the next few years in the lives of Julian, Adam, and numerous other people who have an influence on them during these formative young adult years. During this time, they bravely serve together in the Army (fighting the Dutch over possession of Labrador), become famous together (Adam as an author and Julian as a war hero-turned president), and even collaborate on the production of a motion picture about the life of Charles Darwin. (The primitive, soundless movies that play in theaters these days are reminiscent of the silent films of the nineteen twenties.)

Julian’s story is absolutely absorbing; its fictional world is richly, vividly realized; and its depiction of Julian, truly one of the great, arresting historical figures of this post-oil era, is fascinating and unsentimental, though ultimately tragic. The writing has an ingratiating charm to it, born of Adam’s youthful innocence and inspired by the work of a now-obscure mid-nineteenth-century author named William Taylor Adams, who wrote many popular Civil War novels for boys under the pseudonym Oliver Optic. Wilson has long admired Optic’s work, and he modeled Adam Hazzard after him. (The inspiration for Julian’s character came from historian Edward Gibbon’s account of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate.) And in crafting the book’s post-oil milieu, Wilson borrowed from one of the best peak oil thinkers out there, James Howard Kunstler. He says that he “freely borrowed much of the worst-case scenario” that Kunstler presents in The Long Emergency.¹

The one caveat that should be made regarding Julian is that it might not be the best novel to use for introducing someone to peak oil for the first time. Above all a first-rate storyteller, Wilson never resorts to blatantly spelling out the book’s themes—and while this may be good storytelling technique, it also means that many of these themes will be lost on readers who aren’t already familiar with peak oil. For Wilson, peak oil seems to have been merely an intriguing setting for a novel; and writing Julian, a purely intellectual exercise rather than an attempt at environmental activism. That isn’t to say, however, that Wilson isn’t concerned about peak oil, because judging from interviews, he clearly is.
 
Wilson is one of the most distinguished science fiction authors now working, having received numerous prestigious awards within the field. He won the venerable Hugo Award for Spin, a brilliant, genre-bending, epic rhapsody on time, the meaning of human existence, and the ultimate purposes of whatever alien beings may inhabit the universe along with us. Julian, while ironically set in a degenerative future and eschewing the very science that informs science fiction, is nonetheless a welcome addition to this impressive oeuvre.

Holly Jean Buck, unlike Wilson, did write her post-oil novel in an effort to raise awareness about peak oil. “I wrote this book,” she says, “to help Americans imagine what the future might look like if we continue to be carefree or careless about it.”² The self-published novel, titled Crossing the Blue, follows the adventures of a young man named Blake as he shakes the proverbial dust off his feet and sees the world. A lifelong resident of Coral Heights, a small town in what used to be Florida, Blake has never traveled outside of the “Florida islands” up to this point in his life. (The United States no longer exists in this unspecified future era.) Buck uses Blake’s naïveté as a device for introducing general readers to peak oil.

Blake’s journey begins one night with the discovery of a mysterious young woman sneaking around the house that he and his family share with two other families. He is uncommonly struck by her, for one almost never comes upon a stranger within the fenced community of Coral Heights. The town is presided over by an authoritarian, gun-running general, referred to simply as “the General,” who keeps everyone in line and supplied with basic necessities. No one dares cross the fence around Coral Heights; but this fierce, agile, dangerous-looking woman has done it anyway, and now she’s demanding that Blake help get her away as quickly as possible. She is obviously being hotly pursued, and Blake gathers, is in mortal danger. And so Blake, scared but also thinking that he’s being a good Samaritan, helps her slip out of his family’s subdivision and then gets her to a safe remove from the island on his boat.

It isn’t until after they’ve set off on the water together that Blake learns why she was in such a hurry to leave: it’s because she has just assassinated the General. She tells him that she’s an emissary from someplace in the Pacific Northwest known as Cascadia. She has spent more than the past year traveling to the Florida islands from there, and she killed the General as a favor for some people nearby who needed him eliminated. “It was a matter of survival,” she explains. The woman has an exotic, “mestiza” look about her and an accent that Blake has never heard before, and she introduces herself as Juliet.

Blake and Juliet stay on the run together, initially out of fear that Blake could be incriminated in the General’s assassination—and also because Juliet could use someone to sail the boat while she sleeps—but before long they drop these pretenses and stay together out of a mutual fondness for each other’s company. Blake has issues in his home life, and little attachment to Coral Heights, and so it’s easy for him to make an impulse decision to follow his heart and go with Juliet back to Cascadia.

Blake and Juliet sail across the now-underwater Florida Panhandle, veering off-course into the dreaded and reputedly haunted Submerged City. They also hitch a ride on a garish gaming ship left over from the days of vice and excess, trek alongside the Mississippi River, survey the desolation of Louisiana, and cross over the Great Plains and the Rockies. They live off the land and obtain bed and board from a couple of farming families in exchange for their labor.

Blake knows little of the outside world or the history that led up to the deindustrial present, and so Juliet keeps having to stop and provide involved explanations of peak energy, climate change, corporate personhood, and other menaces that contributed to the collapse of the old order. Through these exchanges between Blake and Juliet, Buck is also educating the uninitiated reader about these concepts.

What I like most about Crossing the Blue is its astute, droll contemplation of the ordinary details of our modern-day lives, which seem startlingly out of place when carried over into this post-oil future. Some examples include spray painted graffiti, bullet holes in signs, and signs that read “Colorado Welcomes You” and “FREE WIRELESS ACCESS POINT,” no matter that neither Colorado nor the Internet still exists in this post-oil future. The novel also makes great use of unexpected juxtapositions. For example, Blake and Juliet stop at a market that sells organic fruits and vegetables alongside electrical wires scavenged from a long-retired streetlight, and they also meet a young man who insists on playing the video game Space Invaders during his share of the meager electricity quota allotted each person per day in his community.

My only beefs are that Blake’s ignorance of the outside world seems contrived at times (I couldn’t quite swallow a scene in which he has to ask Juliet what it means to go “from here to there”), and many of the supporting characters are a bit thinly developed. But perhaps a certain lack of character development is inevitable in a road trip story in which so many people are coming and going. And anyway, these are minor gripes with what, overall, is an admirable and largely successful attempt to spread the word about peak oil through a work of fiction.

Holly Jean Buck is one interesting lady. She has traveled through forty-eight of the United States and has lived overseas for a great part of her twenty-nine years. Following postgraduate studies at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she spent time in many countries around the world, including Wales, England, Ireland, Greece, Kosovo, Columbia, and Japan. She has been a correspondent on international affairs related to the environment and green living—as an intern for Toronto’s Walrus magazine—and also has experience in mapmaking, permaculture, managing invasive forest species, and cataloguing antiquities. Crossing the Blue is her first novel³; and, on the strength of it, I am eagerly awaiting her second.

Notes

_{1 Midge Bork, “An interview with Robert Charles Wilson: Axis,” Curled Up With a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/intrcwil.htm (accessed Mar. 19, 2010).
2 “An Interview With Holly Jean Buck,” create. destroy. enjoy, www.createdestroyenjoy.net/crossingtheblue/abouttheauthor.html (accessed Mar. 19, 2010).
3 “about the author,” charting sustainability, www.charting-sustainability.org/writings/author.html (accessed Mar. 19, 2010; site last updated Jan. 14, 2010); “Holly Jean Buck: Shades of Green,” Walrus, Sept. 14, 2008, www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/category/green/ (accessed Mar. 19, 2010); Holly Jean Buck, “download my C.V.,” charting sustainability, http://www.charting-sustainability.org/writings/CV_Holly_Buck_2009_general.pdf (accessed Mar. 19, 2010; site last updated Jan. 14, 2010); Buck, “Can Bacteria Juice Save the World?,” Walrus, Oct. 24, 2008, http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/10/24/can-bacteria-juice-save-the-world/ (accessed Mar. 19, 2010); Buck, “about the author,” in Crossing the Blue: A Post-Petrol, Post-American Road Trip (© Holly Jean Buck, 2008), 327.}