Imagine you are driving on a pitch-black winter’s night on a long stretch of remote highway. You look down at the fuel gauge, and notice it is half full.
Would you turn back toward safety? Or put the pedal to the metal, betting that the cheerful lights of a gas station will appear somewhere up ahead? What if you had a carload of kids asleep in the back seat?
Our society faces a similar dilemma. Within a decade or three, a replacement for oil and gas will need to be found. And if current oil prices are any indication of how scarcity will play out, we’ll have a lot of reasons to shrug off our dependence on the “devil’s excrement,” as a Venezuelan oil minister once put it.
Read Also
Growth plates are instrumental in shaping a horse’s life
Young horse training plans and workloads must match their skeletal development. Failing to plan around growth plates can create lifelong physical problems.
My daughter, who is eight, and I were talking about the future. I thoughtlessly let it slip that when she gets to be my age, there might not be any gas left. She started to cry. I felt terrible.
I was able to cheer her up by suggesting that she could get a nice little pony and ride it everywhere. All she would have to do is brush its mane and feed it a little oats and hay. It would have little foals, and when the foals grew up, her babies could ride them, too. Wouldn’t they be a sight, all of them riding to school on their lovely ponies?
In Saudi Arabia, there’s an old joke: “My grandfather rode a camel, I drive a Rolls-Royce, my son has a private jet, and my grandson will ride a camel.”
Our grandfathers farmed with horses. Some were glad to be rid of them, once tractors began appearing. Others were sad to see them go, and kept a team around just for the joy of seeing them in harness.
If we had to turn back the clock, would it be so bad? Sure, we’d have to go from dawn to dusk again, pitching hay, stooking sheaves and milking our own cows. There wouldn’t be as much time for TV. I’ll bet the need for sleeping pills would vanish, and probably a lot of “clinical depression” too.
Of course, there is a good chance that “they” – who exactly, I’m not sure – “will come up with something” to keep our wheels turning. Maybe they’ll figure out how to make biodiesel from algae.
Or maybe nuclear-powered tractors the size of Trident submarines will someday be rolling across the landscape, operated by remote control from corporate headquarters in New York.
I’ve never been much of a gambler, so I’ll stick with the things that I know: iron, wood, leather and good, stout horses. With those four simple ingredients, and a little gentle instruction, I figure my descendants could be proudly farming for the next thousand years.
The oil isn’t going to run out tomorrow. But if we start planning now, maybe the kids won’t even notice that the car is out of gas.
