2012 alt op #2 More gloom and doom with a ray of hope.

             Was I gloomy or what last week? Actually in my opinion (and that’s what this article is anyway, right) I wasn’t being gloomy! I was just being honest. Absolutely everything we do now days is either made of or fueled by oil. Most often it’s both! Even our economy is dependent on it! Why? Because everyone, top down to you and me, has wrongly assumed that we could just keep making more and more of everything, selling it and then taking home an ever increasing paycheck. That whole idea is based on the assumption, also false, that there will always be an ever increasing supply of three things: 1. Cheap energy, 2. Cheap material, and 3. People to make products at low cost and buy products at a high cost. Here’s a clue for you. Every one of those things depends on cheap oil! 

            Now, if you did your homework assignment that I gave last week, you already know that living out here in the sticks we are in big trouble when the oil runs out. No more delivery trucks showing up at our local grocery store or restaurants. No more gas delivered to the two local gas stations or the prepackaged foods they sell there either. Even the DG will run out of stuff because the folks who sell them the stuff they sell us can’t make anything or even manage to send out what they have made!

            Yeah, I know. Seems I’m just making it worse aren’t I. Well that’s cause I think we all need to decide right now what we want to do when oil gets so pricy we can’t afford to use it. Are we going to crash and burn right along with the economy or are we going to survive?

            I vote survive.

            Here’s how. Stock up now on the one thing that energy we are using so lavishly can get us that can be used and used well after that energy dries up like our ponds did last summer. That one thing is knowledge. Not how to shoot guns and kill folks but how to grow food and feed people without chemicals of any kind. You won’t have a choice about doing it organically because all those chemicals, fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides almost all come from oil. Heck I can’t even think of any non-organic things like that that DON’T have petroleum products in them somewhere! Even some so called organic products do!

            Where can you get this knowledge? There are lots of places on line (like permies.com) and then there’s the library here in town and the ones in the other towns nearby as well as the big one up in Commerce on the TAMU-C campus. In fact on Jan, 28^th at the Rockwall library from 10am to 4pm there will be a little get together where you can swap seeds and watch some video’s about how some other folks have already survived the oil suddenly not being there and how to grow lots of food in an urban environment without all the chemicals. If we start doing this kind of thing NOW we might not even notice when the oil does dry up. Next month I’m planning on showing even more videos here in Lone Oak on ways to grow organically and cheaply just about anywhere. I’ll tell you when and where later, when that’s all ironed out.