The following is the prepared text for a talk I gave in the city hall of Eugene Oregon the evening of Feb. 17, 2010. It was organized by two Lane County commissioners and the city mayor and is part of a series on Food Security. My role was to discuss food security in the context of peak oil. This speech is similar to one I gave last year that was also posted on The Oil Drum. At the end I recommended people look up The Post Carbon Institute and affiliates for good leads on what ideas and actions are happening in response to our predicament.

My presentation has 4 parts. First, I will connect what is going on in the economy right now with natural resources and the environment. Second, I will explain why oil is an especially important resource and what is meant by peak oil. Third, I will discuss the implications of economic decline and peak oil for the food system. And fourth, I will suggest what families and society can do given our predicament.

This is a guest post by Captain Michael Kellick. Captain Kellick has been serving in tall ships for fifteen years, sailing all along the west coast of North America, to Hawaii and across the Caribbean. He is presently working with the Los Angeles Maritime Institute and studies Art as Moral Action with American opera director Peter Sellars at UCLA. He attended the 2009 ASPO conference in Denver last October.

Dave Rollo of the Bloomington, Indiana Peak Oil Task Force sent me links to the material prepared by the task force, and wanted me to let others know about the work they have been doing. The main piece of work the group produced was a Final Report of the Task Force.

In this post, I thought I would share with you the executive summary of the final report, including a list of vulnerabilities and strategies identified by the Task Force. The latter includes a fairly detailed list of suggested actions which I thought readers might be interested in discussing. Are these reasonable actions? Which ones surprise you?

It seems like discussions of gardening are often focused on growing fruits and vegetables. The question that comes to me is, "What do we do about staple carbohydrate foods?" like wheat or corn (maize) or potatoes. These foods are ones that store well, and supply a large portion of the calories of the diets of most people around the world. In the US, wheat has tended to be a staple, but it is not easy for a home gardener to grow, and it requires processing that is more easily done by commercial equipment. So the question I have is, "How should we plan to get our staple carbohydrate foods going forward?"

I can think of several answers: