Peak Oil Task Force Report - City of Bloomington - State of Indiana

CONCLUSION
The peaking of production in liquid fuels and other energy sources in the near future will
reshape our everyday lives. It will profoundly affect our community most in the areas of
sustenance, transportation, land use, housing, and municipal services. We must all begin
now to build other, more resilient supports for our common life. These supports will
consist of understandings, agreements, assumptions, physical structures, and cultural
practices that will recognize lower energy availability not as a problem, but as an
opportunity and a condition to which we must adapt ourselves individually and
collectively.
Many of us need to become part‐time farmers and water harvesters, to learn some effective
health practices, and to notice and become responsible for collecting and conserving
organic matter everywhere. Many of us must learn how to insulate our homes better. Many
of us will have to learn how to better navigate public transit. Many of us will ride our bikes
to work and carpool with neighbors to the grocery. Many of us will be required to continue
on the path of vigilant resource conservation. The City of Bloomington will have to intensify
its already‐active efforts to foster sustainable community well‐being by re‐thinking the way
it provides services to residents.
Some of these forms of adaptation will be familiar or recognizable from past eras. Others
have never been applied. In all cases, the answers require us to take greater responsibility
for self‐provision, for thoughtful cooperation with those around us, and for greater
attention to the resources and possibilities of our homes, our neighborhoods, and our
community.
Report of the Bloomington Peak Oil Task Force 218