Greener Pastures

I FIRST HEARD the idea of "peak everything" a couple of years ago when Paul Hawken mentioned it in a speech. He spoke in a gentle, almost hypnotic cadence. It was as if he was chatting among friends, saying, "Of course it's not just peak oil, but peak everything ... peak fish, peak soil, peak water and so on."

Did we all know? The idea had the quality of a brilliant insight that is extremely difficult to achieve. Yet when it is reached, it seems obvious to everyone. Later I found out that Richard Heinberg had written a book about it, called Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines.

Heinberg visited Toronto recently, and we met in the appropriately named Sunshine Room at the Centre for Social Innovation. He is a slender, intense man in his late 50s with a "good-professor" vibe. I asked him about his fear of systemic collapse – that our society will face frequent power-grid failures very soon and a food crisis within this generation. "I am very concerned that technological collapse could occur within the next 20 years," said Heinberg. "I'm not predict- ing that it will, but I think the potential is very clearly there. I think the collapse would be defined more by the failure of the electricity grid than by anything else. Because when the grid goes down, essentially modern life ceases." …