Commentary: Peak Oil TeachersSomething truly remarkable is happening in a thousand places all over the world. It is happening in classrooms – university graduate classrooms and Montessori kindergartens, in formal learning sites at venerable institutions and in newer educational sites such as distance learning programs and in impromptu classrooms put together by churches, book clubs and after school programs. It is happening across disciplines – in classrooms teaching hard sciences, of course, but also in the arts, through the lens of history, in writing and business classes. Engineers and poets, philosophers and economists, undergrads and sixth graders – all of them are learning about Peak Oil.
While the vast majority of people may not yet understand Peak Oil issues, the cumulative effect of offering the knowledge that we cannot go on as we have been is enormous. Like many disciplines that emerged under pressure of new worldviews, whether computer science or women’s studies, it is presently still self-organized, and most of us working on these issues are outside of our fields in some measure – we may have been trained in geology, but the political and economic implications of our geology stretches us in new directions. Or perhaps we are struggling to catch up with the mathematics, but are intimately familiar with the historical experience of societies pushed into contraction, and how those histories might play out in our future.
Like most of the thousands of teachers who do this work, we are working in part out of our own primary disciplines, inventing frameworks for new ideas as we go along, and working in comparative isolation. While our colleagues in other fields have the benefit of idea sharing, collaborative teaching with many fellows who have at least broad familiarity with the framework of their area of expertise, most of us doing Peak Oil education at every level find ourselves with only a few nearby colleagues to work with, with no formal support from departments that may be led by people who themselves don’t grasp the issues. The larger field that explores the implications of depletion for the world, and its intersection with related environmental crises is still emerging – indeed, all of us teaching these issues are creating it.
The first is what Sharon has dubbed “The Klingons/Cylons dilemma” (and framing it that way tends to help students grasp the issue). The choices offered up by our culture have never included the conceiving of a middle space between technological utopia where things keep getting better, bigger and more resource intensive, and apocalypse. Thus, when students are confronted by the hard science of climate change and depletion they tend to leap immediately to apocalyptic scenarios – either becoming depressed or accusing the teacher of offering no hope. The problem here is not one of presentation – their very failure to grasp this middle space has made clear to us how much of the teacher’s job initially is simply establishing the existence of a category that is neither fantasy nor certain doom.
I'm very encouraged by this spread of PO education - it gets us past the perception that the movement consists of just a few wild-eyed curve-fitters. I also like the idea of finding a middle ground that recognizes the serious potential of the problem but doesn't fall victim to panic and doomsaying (at least not until post-peak events have unfolded a little more :evilgrin:).
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