Stopped in at the town office today to check out what dates the rec hall is available for rent and then contacted some people from the Parkland Institute to see about speakers. Felt a little dumb on the phone when I introduced myself as someone who works for the Post Carbon Institute and proceeded to explain who we were after the lady I was talking to explained she knew who we were and that someone from the PCI was going to be speaking a Parkland's Energy forum this November.

If this is going to happen in the next little while it'll be sometime between the middle of August or the middle of September. As was pointed out to me the middle or end of August will probably not be the best time to gain an audience seeing as most people will probably be on vacation.

Last October I attended a showing of the End of Suburbia doc at Red Deer College where provincial NDP MLA and energy critic David Egan came and spoke a little after the show. I think sticking to a simple format like that is the best way to go. Just show the film, have someone from Parkland come and speak and then have whoever is speaking answer some questions from the audience. Hopefully given that I'm working for the town this summer as a summer student I'll be able to convince some of the higher ups around town to take a stop by and see some of the show and talk.

We’ll see how this all shapes up in the next month or so.

Hmmmm, 6 weeks, five days and absolutely nothing to show yet for the network, not even a blog entry. Atta boy Dan, at least you're consistent on your productivity. I figured an entry here was the least I could do.

Obviously since this is my first posting an introduction is in order (sorry I don't have a better imagination folks). I'll try not to make this too boring.

Since my name is already posted at the top I won't bother repeating it. Ummm, where to start then? Perhaps the beginning? Yeah, the beginning sounds good. I'm pretty sure the first time I was introduced to the topic of peak oil was from a link to LATOC.net from a Canadian musician's site who goes by the name of Matthew Good. When the site was first posted I refused to visit it. I remember at the time I was 18 something and was really quite disillusioned with a lot of things in the world as far as politics and world issues go. As I'm sure most of the older folks reading this know, becoming acclimatized to the fact that there are certain things in the world that are not exactly the way they should be takes more than just a couple years to get used to (that or I'm just an oddball). When I finally did visit the site I was...well, actually I suppose words would probably fail to describe what I felt. Shocked would be much too light a word. Let me state right now for the record that I do not take everything on that site as the gospel. The future has always had a strange way of trumping predictions people make of its ever changing shapes. Making claims of undeniablity only serves to make you like an ass when you turn out to be wrong. Not to mention the fact that there are no MLA citations on the info given on his site and that Amazon won't stock his book, which could mean a lot of things that I won't get into here. But, as they say: 'Better safe than sorry'.

Look at me, I'm getting of topic as usual.

The main point is that my life changed the day I came across the issue of peak oil. The amount of personal, political, sociological and economic thinking it has brought me to do is both a blessing and curse of sorts I suppose. It has been a blessing of course because if all the warnings from Campbell and Heinberg turn out to be true I will have been able to hopefully have helped myself and many other be prepared for this. It's somewhat of a curse because well, lets face it, this isn't exactly what you would call pleasant material to be researching.

My goals in the short term (the short term being this summer) include getting a public showing of "The End of Suburbia" at the Rec Hall here in Ponoka and creating a sort of stock option idea based on Steven Leeb's book "The Coming Economic Collapse: How you can thrive when oil cost $200 P/BB" for different Post Carbon groups around the world to use for the benefit of their respective communities (I'll talk more about this in later posts). Long term goals within the next year include holding some kind of a public walk/run event for peak oil awareness and renewable energies (pretty much the same as a MS or Terry Fox run) and, if I'm really ambitious and have a semi open schedule, booking some type of a music festival for next summer to raise more awareness about the issue.

Wish me luck.

Hope this is at least somewhat acceptable for a first post. Any more stuff you want to know about me as far as the semi personal realm goes can be found here: http://cornucopiaoverrun.blogspot.com/

Cheers,

Daniel