Hi There!

Hey folks! I guess I should say hi and introduce myself. I've been reading LATOC since '05, and lurking on the forums for about a month now.

First off, some serious props are in order. LATOC is responsible for initiating the same sort of complete shift in my perspective that I'm sure many of you have experienced in the past few years. I've since expanded my peak-related info sources to other sites, with The Oil Drum being chief among them, but this place was the start - the seed that grew into my admittedly still rudimentary understanding of the real world. Big ups to Mr. Savinar - it's entirely conceivable that I will eventually owe my life to the information presented here, so "thank you" seems seriously insufficient to express my gratitude. Damn my limited vocabulary!

Anyways, as to where I sit on the doom continuum, I've been all over the map the past few years. I first received the link from someone at college (do I ever wish I could remember who!) and began as a debunker I guess you could say. I figured it was all tinfoil-hat fare and would be pretty easy to refute, so I started fact-checking the concept, intending to show whoever sent me the link that it was all paranoia. It was during this initial exploration that I had the first of many "oh shit" moments, as it became rapidly apparent that we really were in trouble. Thereafter followed a period of intense research into energy, climate and many similar and related topics generally related to the unsustainability of consumer-industrial civilization. I then made a sort of peace with the whole thing, having convinced myself that decline rates post-peak would be shallow, and still harbouring naive illusions that our governments were there to help us and would spring into action in time. Then I read Twilight In The Desert. That clued me into the effect of "elephant field" depletion and it's effect on aggregate decline rates. That, and a growing understanding of the real machinations of the political system led to a certainty that our way of life was not only headed for collapse (for a number of mutually-reinforcing reasons, not just peak oil) within my lifetime (I'm turning 30 in feb), but that the most likely reaction by government would be a desperate, all-out and ultimately futile attempt to defend the status quo. So I suppose you could say I'm now a "proper" doomer, in that I think the entire system will fall and have to be re-engineered from the ground up along different lines, whether we like it or not, and that it's now too late for even a globally coordinated massive mitigation program to avert the crash.

By the beginning of '06 or so I had reached this understanding and the result was predictable and I'm sure quite common among those on this board - I got horribly, cripplingly depressed. Eventually with great effort and talking it over a lot with close friends I decided that lifeboat building was the only constructive thing I could do. I really wanted to do that with close friends, rather than strangers, but the pickings were slim there. A couple of my closest friends were at least willing to listen to me rant, though they remain to this day completely unworried, and steadfastly unwilling to read anything about it or do any investigation of their own (they, along with my family members, know nothing about the topic and are determined to keep it that way). On the bright side, a couple friends had their own non-peak-related reasons for being interested in going off-grid and dropping out of the rat race, so we banded together and created "The Project". This was essentially a plan to move from the Vancouver area to a town called Prince Rupert on the northernmost pacific coast of BC, find some land, and start up an ecovillage! It was a great idea in theory, and I tried like hell to get it going (even going so far as to spend most of '07 volunteering on an organic farm to learn to grow food), but without that drive and sense of urgency that comes from a doomer perspective, my friends lost interest the second they figured out how much work was involved. Late last year it was getting to the point where even returning project-related emails fell into the "too much effort" category for these guys, so sadly I had to pull the plug.

Not wanting to give up yet, I spent most of this year WWOOFing around an area of southeastern BC known as the Kootenays, trying to find some like-minded people, thinking that if I can't turn my friends into people who understand, I'd have to locate some people who already understand and turn them into friends. I met some cool folks, and had a fun time exploring the area around Nelson BC, but I didn't meet any fellow doomers there, and didn't see any evidence of ecovillage development in the area.

So, at this point I'm kind of lost. I feel like I'm on the Titanic and can see the iceberg ahead, but I can't lift a lifeboat into the water by myself and I can't convince any of my friends or family to help. Hell, I can't even get them to turn around and look at the berg. All I get for my efforts is the equivalent of "I don't have to look, I just *know* there's no iceberg. And even if there was, this ship is unsinkable anyway. Quit moping, come inside and party!" I've stopped trying to convince them.

I've moved to Vancouver Island to be closer to my family, and landed a job stocking shelves at a grocery store - the consumer economy is collapsing, but people still have to eat, so I'll likely be employed until things get so bad that the food isn't even being delivered anymore, and at that point all bets are off anyway. I'm currently re-orienting my preparations toward a lone-wolf style bug-out capability based on wilderness survival and bushcraft. It's probably a futile and suicidal plan, but at this point I've become too much of a misanthrope to bother trying to convince others to prepare with me.

So that's my life story, or at least the last few peak-related years of it. Wow, that turned into a bit of a novel didn't it? Guess I needed to vent a bit!