My friend Jan Lundberg writes about oil in his mid May Internet column, Culture Change, as he indeed used to write about oil on 'the other side of the fence' for the oil companies as co-publisher/editor of the Lundberg Letter. He reports in the current Culture Change on three peak oil conferences, his own in Washington, DC on 'Petrocollapse,' a somewhat more mainstream conference, also in Washington three days later called 'Peak Oil and the Environment' and one held New York City in April on peak oil.

None of them looked at reshaping the metropolis, cities and towns around ecological principles. None studied major land uses to fit today's for-better-or-worse enormously high human population, nor the reality of the single largest most damaging element in oil addiction, climate change and extinction of species: the city in its present form. And none of them ventured to explore how that present form can be reshaped, how cities can be redesigned. Though I wasn't there and am not positive on this particular I would be fairly confident none of them covered the tools such as ecocity mapping, transfer of development rights and ecological demonstration projects that could transform cities into enormously energy and land conserving entities and actual tools in their own right to reverse the destruction of biodiversity on Earth.

Jan writes about Lester Brown's self-canceling wind power/hybrid car solution, the positive of wind energy cancelled by the negative of the car. But then he, as one of the conference organizers, and the other peak oil organizers are wrong about something Lester's wrong about, too: virtually ignoring the piece of the puzzle which is the reshaping of the city, town and village. The small start with ecovillages is something, but far from enough to prevent a disastrous debacle on the future side of the peak oil slope.

Practically nobody puts the pieces together with the foundation for our architecture, technologies and lifestyles: the arrangement of the built enviornment. Without that, the powerdown will really be bad. The badder it is the less of that rosy post peak oil future some wistfully imagine will be possible. Strange to me, but not only the establishment but the peak oil movement is missing that piece of the puzzle too.