Desperation or Inspiration?

Last night we attended a lecture at the Natural History Museum on the necessary transition to sustainable agriculture. Part of their ongoing Sustainable Planet:Food lecture series, the speaker was Dave Henson, Executive Director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in Sonoma. With a frightening collection of graphs and statistics, Dave highlighted how our current lifestyles are completely unsustainable. Our human population explosion, mass species extinction, pending climate crisis and toxic dead zones are a reflection of our inability to live in tune with nature. With peak oil now a reality, our ways will change- it's now just a question of how messy that transition must be. We could follow the model held up by OAEC and learn how to restore our ecosystem through sustainable farming techniques and the like, or we can continue down the path most of us are blindly following today, which ecology 101 teaches leads to inevitable crash.