Ok, this week I'm cheating a little.

I wrote this piece a few years ago while taking a class on peak oil with Annie Dunn Watson, founder of the Vermont Peak Oil Network, an internet resource for Vermonters concerned with our growing energy problems.

But honestly, it's a good piece that I'm proud of, and I think it fits in well with the theme of my blog, although perhaps it is a tad bit more satirical than what I tend to write for Shift Happens.  I think it's important, though, to find the humor in what could otherwise depress us deeply.

Please feel free to respond, even if you're not Rob Williams!

Maybe Peak Oil Isn't Such a Bad Thing...

A few weeks ago, I was pushing a shopping cart through the produce section of my local grocery store, when I noticed something strange that I had never before been aware of. I must have been absent-mindedly zoning out, which I do on occasion when I have to run errands.  My eyes were gazing at some spot slightly higher than the rows and rows of fruits and vegetables, when suddenly my view snapped into focus on a sign I found both ironic and depressing.  Scrawled in thick, block letters above the vegetables, it read: “Farmer’s Market.”  Odd, I thought, considering it was nothing of the sort.  I looked around some more.  Over the bakery, I saw, was another sign, which I think was meant to look like it came from some quaint village bakery, though it appeared as counterfeit as the produce section’s insignia.  The sign read: “Fantasia’s Cakes.”  Interesting, I thought, considering probably no one named “Fantasia” worked in the grocery store bakery.  Over at the deli, I was not surprised to find “Village Deli” in block letters over the meats and assorted salads.

What a sham.

I should note that this local grocery store I mentioned is actually a national chain called Hannafords, though it is in fact one of only two grocery stores within a five mile radius of where I live, the other being a Shaws.  And indeed, there are other grocery stores not too far off in the next town over, but they are likewise either Hannafords or Shaws.  No doubt they too have faux-signs over their delis that say something along the lines of “Village Deli” or even “Papa Romano’s Family Delicatessen,” which may seem a bit over the top but is regardless just as fake and oxymoronic—emphasis on the moronic—as any of these big business faux-signs. 

Maybe no one else notices them, but I have to wonder, have we really become so ignorant as a culture that we would accept such falseness in our surroundings?  Well, to answer my own question, yes.  Which brings me back to the title of my paper: peak oil isn’t such a bad thing.  At the very least, it will open our eyes—hopefully—to our own bogus culture.
I think the town I live in, Williston, really does justice to the notion of our bogus culture, at least by Vermont’s standards.  What other town boasts a Wal-Mart across from a Home Depot next to a Petsmart and down the street from a Best Buy?  One of our more recent big-box additions came in the form of Maple Tree Place, a set of large, brick buildings designed to mimic the feel of a town center and failing miserably.  Somehow, the addition of brick and colonial-style entrances is supposed to key us in on the fact that these are somehow small-town big-box retailers, making it a small-town Christmas Tree Shop and a small-town Staples.  See the brick?  That’s how you know they’re local.

On top of all this is the insistence on a bit of green-space.  According to the falsely-environmental concept of green-space, any retail store being built must provide a minimum of grassy spots and shrubbery to somehow balance out the loss of land.  At the same time, it is believed, the bushes serve to remind us of quainter days gone by, when we used to see fields and trees instead of Starbucks and Botox clinics.  The epitome of this green-space logic is the sprawling patch of mud and grass that stands as the town-square of the Maple Tree shopping plaza.  Surrounded on all sides by parking and businesses, this area was recently considered for a landscape design contest in an attempt to truly capture the feel of small-town phoniness.  The irony is that this green-space serves no purpose but to reinforce our own delusions; it’s not as if there are deer grazing on this patch of land squashed between a movie theater and a Quiznos.  If anything, it is a hindrance to the driver, who must search in vain for a parking space on a busy Saturday afternoon, all the while cursing this prime piece of land for being a green-space, and thus being ineligible to be paved over in the pursuit of better parking.

Back to Peak Oil.  What does this mean for my big-box community?  I have tried to explain it to my boss, who is an avid fan of Target but avoids Wal-Mart like the plague.  “Mike,” I have told him, “all of this is unsustainable.  Even a small spike in the price of oil could lead to huge consequences for all these retailers and grocery stores whose merchandise must travel thousands of miles—by truck, by plane, by ship—to reach their shelves.  Don’t you see that this can’t go on forever?” 

“But Target is just so much classier than Wal-Mart, that’s why I shop there,” he replies, and I can see that Mike has missed my point entirely.  While it is true that Target is indeed classier than Wal-Mart, they are both one in the same when it comes to Peak Oil.  They, along with their cousins K-Mat and Sam’s Club, will ultimately fall faster than you can say “Holy shit!  Twelve packs of Fig Newton’s for a dollar!”

Good riddance, I say.  As Jim Kunstler once said: “What's bad about sprawl is not its uniformity, but that it is so uniformly bad.”  We need the Peak to wake our culture up from this imitation of the Good Life, because it isn’t good that we all shop at the same places no matter where in America we live.  It isn’t good that we don’t know where our clothes were made, whether they were sewn by well-paid Americans or by Bangladeshi children.  It isn’t good that we pave over our fields and forests and then plant a few shrubs around big-box retailers in penance.  I could go on, but it’s all just too negative.  Together, we must focus on the positive: Peak Oil.  This catastrophic change will usher in a new era of living, in which notions of the Good Life will change.  Instead of: “Golly, I can buy a new home theater system, pick up my prescriptions, and do my groceries all within the same store!” it will be “Gee, I can heat my home this week—that’s cool.”  Humbling, I think.  And, perhaps, more than a little bit necessary if we are to ever save the soul of our culture from the greedy hands of the big-box stores and suburban development. 

So yeah, maybe Peak Oil isn’t such a bad thing.