"Running on empty" @ ATHICA

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Inc.proudly presents:

Running on Empty: the fossil fuel addiction

curated by Bart King

with featured artist:
Christoph Gielen from New York City/Bonn, Germany

Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 31
7:00 - 9:00 p.m.
-with yummies provided by White Tiger Gourmet

ATHICA's 30th exhibition brings you artwork and industrial products
inspired by the energy crisis we face, and by the solutions that could
help us survive.

Running on Empty includes photography, print, large-scale painting,
mosaic, video, installation, digital imaging and more by 17 artists and
groups selected from more than 50 submissions from across the U.S., South
America, Europe and Asia.

The exhibit runs
January 31-March 22, 2009

More info.

James Kunstler speaking at UGA on 10/21

Renowned author and commentator James Howard Kunstler will be speaking at UGA next week.

Kunstler was the keynote speaker at our inaugural Tour de Sprawl event in 2000.

Event details and flyer below:

James Howard Kunstler
Tuesday, 10/21, 4 pm
The Chapel on UGA's north campus
FREE!

Kunstler: wishing vs doing

James Howard Kunstler has an editorial in the Washington Post that neatly summarizes the dangers of our addiction to (rapidly disappearing) oil. Excepts below:

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

...

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

...

Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.

...

We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.

"Peak Oil"? What's that?

A story from the Columbia Journalism Review investigates why you might not have heard of peak oil:

Oil has always been a big story for obvious economic, environmental, political, and technological reasons. For decades, Americans have read about tanker spills, rising oil prices, shortages at the pumps, and delicate trade relations. More recently, the press has swarmed the story of prices topping $100 a barrel and OPEC’s refusal of President Bush’s request to increase production. But throughout the history of oil reporting, there has been one major aspect that the press has remained largely silent on: peak oil.

"Bicycle nomads, Texas utopianism, and the post-petroleum era"

An interesting piece from Orion magazine:

"Send in the Clowns: Bicycle nomads, Texas utopianism, and the post-petroleum era"

Excerpt:

GIVEN THE UNSETTLING STATE OF THE WORLD, I’ve spent the last few years shopping around, as it were, for my own little handbasket to ride into hell. In New York City, at Critical Mass rallies and with radical bicycle gangs like Black Label, I’ve begun to discern the contours of a movement of mostly young people who believe that the American pursuit of happiness has taken a decidedly wrong turn somewhere on the interstate and gotten lost among the tract homes dotting the subdivisions of Eden. For the radical few, the bicycle is an important part of the solution. The bicycle, that technological throwback from the nineteenth century, is for them a literal and metaphorical organizing principle for a new vision of the world, one that stands not simply against the most obvious form of petro-consumption, the automobile, but that heralds and celebrates—in advance of its actual arrival, and with bright little bicycle bells and radical cheers—a new, post-petroleum era.

Click the link above for the whole article.