To prepare for the implications of pak oil, first we must understand the scope of the predicament.

The Local Motion Film Series continues its Summer Season showings this Thursday with A Crude Awakening, Life After the Oil Crash. This award-winning movie tells the story of peak oil, or the phenomenon where worldwide demand for oil begins to outstrip supply.

Unlike what some Pollyannas and business or politically-motivated persons would have us believe, bringing supply in line with increasing worldwide demand is not simply a matter of more drilling, baby. Our technology and bald geologic facts make clear that we wont be able to drill our way into turning a finite resource into an infinite one. Similarly, with almost every single thing we do, make, consume, or trade having something to do with fossil fuels along the way, from manufacture to transport,we cannot assume that “technology will save us”. Technology itself is dependent on fossil fuels.

A second arresting fact is that while clean energy and renewables are desirable, their capacity to provide the kind of magic ratio of energy delivery that fossil fuels have done is severely limited. With all this context in mind, it becomes urgent as world oil supply peaks (the U.S. already peaked in the 70s) to utilize remaining resources to strategically plan for a much lower energy future where we can at the same time remain a vibrant society with a high quality standard of living and trade.

Scary, huh? While the cold, hard facts of fossil fuel decline are inevitable, how we respond to it is in our hands. Re-imagining our communities, finding new and exciting ways to do business and develop important infrastructure, all offer opportunities for localities, regions, nations, and the world to innovate, develop business, create jobs, and define how we live. But first we must begin with understanding the predicament.

A Crude Awakening is a compelling documentary on the energy industry, and one well worth seeing to begin to confront the implications of peak oil.

Presented by Transition Staunton Augusta in conjunction with Staunton Green 2020, A Crude Awakening plays this Thursday, August 19, 2010 at Mockingbird Restaurant and Roots Music Hall at 7:00p.m. The film is free and the doors to the Mockingbird open at 5:30p.m. for pre-moving dining.To make diner reservations (advised as the films are usually packed), please call 540. 213.8777.

After the film, Anthony Smith, a former oil futures trader and current clean energy entrepreneur will take questions and share comments. We hope to see you there.

A better prescription for downtowns, and its not a bitter pill!

Yesterday I woke up precipitously ill, with strange enough symptoms that, in a rarity for me, I went to the doctor. As a general rule I take a broadly preventative approach to health care focused mainly on diet, exercise, and the use of traditional herbs and roots, along with yoga and meditation.

I even gave birth at home using a midwife over fifteen years ago, when such a choice had even less support than it does today. Perhaps this arose from curiosity about long-standing health practices, or perhaps from something more mundane, such as a coping method after not having had insurance for most of my adult life.

All this is to say how truly unusual it is for me to go to a doctor for anything. But I schlepped out to the top quality County hospital yesterday because it is the final ace in the hole when, once a decade, I feel truly crummy. I don’t have anything against doctors, or Western medicine, generally speaking. It is fair to say that I find some of the gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, skyrocketing costs, and pencil pushing interlocutors an impediment rather than an enhancement to patient care, but who doesn’t. Be that as it may, my real gripe today is about location.

As historic downtowns look to infill empty storefronts and increase residential occupancy they often turn to the great hope of tourism. Plying their cultural organizations to the forefront, they seek market share against myriad other small towns competing for the same slice of the pie. To a greater or lesser extent, they build this out with local restaurants and the appearance of local retail. By appearance I mean that in all but the most hyper-local self manufacturing operations most “local retail” acts as a front end for the distribution of superfluous goods manufactured abroad, usually in China.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Tourists are in the market to get away from it all and finally do some spending, so from where goods originate is often of little concern to them and, if complimentary to the overall strategic positioning of the little cultural town that could, such as Staunton, means reliable sales when travelers come for enjoyment.

The hitch comes when we realize the vulnerabilities that come with this global front end outlet. Volatile world markets and volatile energy costs affect not only the traveler, but the cost of goods shipped. Struggling small retailers increasingly shuttering the doors to their tchotchke shops means less for the traveler to enjoy, less revenue for the town, fewer upgrades and services to make the place soar, and hence less of the “whole package” to sell the traveler on. And when one area starts to fail, you can bet other parts are not far behind.

So, what does this have to do with my going to the doctor? Well, I would have loved to hobble downtown yesterday to go to a doctor within walking distance of my downtown home. On peppier days I’d love to skip downtown to the dentist. I’d like a green dry cleaner and a New York size deli-scale grocer, and a working hardware store within a few blocks. Essential services, the basics, need to be more a part of any downtown revitalization because revitalization depends not just on what is imported from without–tourists–but on what grows within–the community.

This is not intended as a swipe against economic developers by any stretch. It is intended as a call to doctors and dentists, specialists, child care centers and service providers of many stripes to also consider yourself a part of the new urbanist entrepreneurial class. You don’t need to think that the first route to success is hanging your shingle on a strip mall with adequate parking. The walking resident wants you!

To truly revitalize small downtowns means first of all to strengthen the community enough to support a broad range of products and services within the local economy. Doctors, as much as anyone enjoying small town amenities want to be able to walk to work, to have their kids walk to school. People working and living downtown want to be able to get to appointments without having to slog out the car and fight the roadways in between meetings or other activities.

The point here is to think strategically about transition culture in such a way that the local economy can somewhat inoculate itself against a declining global and national economy by girding up its core infrastructure from within, in addition to orienting it outward. Magic wands and wishful thinking wont move someone to travel from another town to our town to indulge in its cultural pleasures. That “sell” takes a vast convergence of powerfully positioned marketing undergirded by a web of connections and relationships, collaborations, partnerships, and the individual efforts of given organizations. This can result in great successes, though it almost always rests on significant vulnerabilities. For small towns, and the long arc of small town success, dependency on a stream of outside revenue acts only as a counterweight to what is built from within.

That’s where small town culture and big city life differ greatly. Cities have their own vulnerabilities, of course, but diversity acts as a bulwark against the more immediate exposures that threaten small towns. Here’s where job seekers and prospectors can find their niche.

As urban escapees increasingly seek to downshift toward more localized economies, they can take a page from small town life by getting involved in local government, industry boards, citizen alliances, and independent groups. All these offer avenues to help shape the small town using proven elements from larger cities, such as dense downtown buildouts that support multiple fronts in the viability game. It also meets the crucial (read de rigeur) X factor in small town culture–living where you work and participating in the life of the community.

Part of this involves agitating for fair pricing on the part of owners–a cute town with too many empty storefronts should be lowering rents or negotiating pricing structures that match mutually beneficial performance indexes. Indeed, City government can even penalize absentee landlords with unfilled space through fee structures that motivate renting if its citizens support such a plan.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to think you need $300k in import inventory and a risk the size of Texas to become a relocated entrepreneur. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of empty storefronts across the country just waiting to be filled by emerging entrepreneurs offering an array of products and services, including small scale local manufacturing. They key is to find a truly necessary niche, often found in our traditional services, and fill it. The other piece is getting involved to shape the community you want to live in and be a part of building its resiliency and strength.

Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook is available for sale online, or locally, at The Sacred Circle.

Funny to finally be tackling the question, What is Transition? after having been a part of this worldwide movement since last December, officially so since Transition Staunton Augusta became the 61st US group this past March.

In part because much of the work we do is self-evident in its intent, and covered in our About Us page, we did not feel a pressing need to remark on the more sweeping historic factors driving the imperatives behind the transition movement.

But consistently being a part of this movement, researching more and more, getting involved and talking to others both locally and in the online community, has now compelled us to address those factors in helping our own community learn more about why we’re doing this, and why we’re doing this now.

The Transition Movement, begun by a permaculture teacher, Rob Hopkins, who is also a writer and profoundly gifted community organizer, takes as its starting point a response to the energy crisis known as “peak oil“.

Essentially a technical term, peak oil refers to the highest point on the bell curve of oil extraction, meaning that point when we’re pumping more of the stuff out of the ground than we ever will again. Peak oil happens not only in individual wells, when the max output occurs and then the rest of the well basically empties out, but also in individual oil fields, when the max comes out of the whole field and then supply goes downhill from there. Similarly this occurs in whole regions, say the United States for example, which, in spite of what the Sarah Palins and Rush Limbaughs of the world would have you believe,  hit the peak of its production in the 1970s. Peak oil also refers to worldwide peak oil–that point when we’re pumping the most out that we possibly can on a global scale, and then after that, we’re on the downward resource slope, never again able to get as much oil out as we once did. Oil is a finite, nonrenewable resource after all. You can’t pump the same well twice.

Add to this peak an increasing worldwide competition for oil due to its nearly magical exponential power output, and we have the twin problems of increasing demand and decreasing supply. Oil is so “magical” in fact, that, however much we must embrace clean energy, nothing green will ever take the place of oil.

That’s the short story of peak oil on what is already becoming too long of a post. You can read more about it in books such as Richard Heinburg’s The Party’s Over and Peak Everything, James Howard Kustler’s The Long Emergency, and John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent, to name a few of my favorites (and the most readable).

Suffice it to say that while peak oil is an undeniable geologic fact its not a topic that government and “leaders” have the stomach for, particularly as they remain beholden to business interests rather than exhibiting the vision and action necessary for the long term arc of success in the broader economic organization of societies. Similarly, the main stream media has better things to talk about, such as Lindsay Lohan’s recent court-ordered  jail time, the merits of Lady Gaga, and LeBron James’ relocation choices.

In the end, the Transition movement is about people who aren’t waiting for government to step up to the plate, for business to “self-correct” in response to market imperatives, or for broadcast media to get the word out about a coming shift in society’s most basic common resource denominator–energy–and the way this affects EVERY aspect of how we live and how we will live going forward.

The Transition movement offers one response to the crisis of peak oil, and is among the most positive responses in that its key feature rests on the involvement of ordinary citizens to strengthen their communities through shared ideas, plans, and actions that relocalize their areas for resilience. By that I mean to address local economy, food, production and manufacturing, transportation issues, water quality and many other of the infrastructural elements undergirding localities. The model could in fact broaden to include states, regions, countries, and the globe, but for now its defining feature is the local nature of the project as expressed in citizen groups throughout the world.

Hopkins built a model for nurturing and developing local involvement, and his founding group, Transition Town Totnes, released a comprehensive Energy Descent Plan governing their local infrastructure that could be a model for localities worldwide. It is our aim to engage the Staunton-Augusta community to produce one for our area. An energy descent plan is considered necessary to transition groups because resource depletion requires a cogent response. If we’re used to living one way, utterly dependent on a fuel source, a sole crop, or any other central infrastructural feature, its absence requires that we adapt to a new reality and craft a workable response so that we can preserve life and social stability.

There’s ten million other things that can be said about peak oil and the Transition Town response model, but this is just one blog entry designed to deepen the conversation at the local level and broaden transition outreach where we can.

One thing worth addressing is the sense of looming catastrophe and social collapse that some in the peak oil movement believe is immanent. That view is not one taken by the Transition movement, which looks to respond with positive local solutions to the predicament of peak oil.

There is no getting around, however, that a permanent decline in a finite resource suggests that the paradigm under which industrial society has developed stands to change. At Transition Staunton Augusta, we’re not in the crystal ball business. Although the transition model engages with scenario planning, looking at a variety of responses and their degree of effectiveness, it does not purport to entirely know the future. In the face of positive planning, there may yet be (and likely will be) mini scenarios that aren’t pretty, whether in the form of disease, safety and security threats, scarcity, and perhaps worse. There are also overly optimistic responses not grounded in physical reality, such as technology saving us with its ever-renewing discoveries. This response fails to acknowledge advanced technology’s complete dependence on fossil fuels, and the role of fossil fuels in the deployment of vast new infrastructure for a giant global population.

In our group we aim to take the middle way approach, planning for the best, preparing for the worst. This is a must do in response to an entire shift of the economic and energy paradigm as we know it today. And while this may take a century or more to fully play out, precipitating events along that trajectory suggest that we can’t wait to begin planning the response. If we look at how vast our given infrastructure is now, in its current state, it does not take much intelligence or insight to recognize that a comprehensive response will take time–the idea that things shift on a dime is a foolish approach.

I hope this small primer helps folks in the Staunton Augusta area (and others reading this online) to begin to think about the pervasive quality of energy in our lives, and the essentially hidden aspect of its role in how we live now, and how we are likely to live going forward. I view this as an opportunity, not only for humanity but frankly, for business.

In my view peak oil is the most serious crisis modern civilization has ever faced, the extent of which will touch all of our lives and, even more, the lives of our descendents. I take the transition to the next paradigm as a moral imperative calling us to engage as stewards, responsible, caring, and committed to the best that can be realized in our human relationships as social creatures at a specific time in history. This is what Transition is about, building the resilience that allows us to advance humanity in a manner that goes beyond current views of progress, and into the unknown, with open hearts and minds, willing hands, individual initiative, and community strength. I hope you’ll join us on this journey.

A clarion call, time to wake up.

In passing glances the occasional journalist points in the direction of us all, suggesting that it is not just rogue oil companies, in-bed government agencies, or an administration on auto-pilot who are responsible for the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. They suggest, perhaps a bit sheepishly, that two other culprits may be to blame here. Those two being you, and me.

But they don’t push it. It’s not part of the marketing plan.

Instead, we get finger pointing, show trials with execs taken to the C-Span woodshed, ritual firings, new policy proposals, and anger at the administration for lacking both a crystal ball and a magic wand. Deserved perhaps, but…

In what amounts to a recapitulation of President George W. Bush’s post 9-11, “…just go shopping” advice, in the wake of the Gulf Gusher, we citizens and consumers are not once asked about our role or our culpability in the economic, environmental, and resource fiasco that the oil economy has become. Instead, we’ve got our regular cast of characters, evil but necessary, to glower over while they continue to run the diabolical show. Didn’t we just play the passive chorus when the great bank heist of 2009 was perpetrated in plain sight and then we handed the thieves a second bag of cash?

Wake up time, kids.

With fossil fuels on the decline, vanishing jobs, a stacked house for a financial system, an economy deep in the toilet, and leadership unwilling to speak the hard truths of our times, its no surprise that we should assume the Durkheimian position of tribalism. “If only they hadn’t done this to us, those corporate types, those greasy politicians.”

My advice? Its a little bit of performance art I like to call Narcissus, Awake! Broadcast one hour with just a mirror on the screen of every channel on TV, of every Internet site in all the world. Gather pals, and gaze.

Until we consumers and citizens share the blame for a resource gambit so dangerous, ultimately useless, and finally catastrophic, the conversation won’t move an inch.

Until we begin participating, really participating, beyond updates on our own Facebook pages and groundbreaking tweets that we imagine will form the final connective tissue of the whole matrix of change, but really, really, really getting engaged with it all, breaking into self consciousness in a way that transcends our imagined impotency and takes on our historical moment, we will again and again simply play the victim and finger point in response, getting nowhere fast with increasing asthma and widening lard asses.

This is just the beginning, the Gulf spew nothing but a clarion call. No executive, no elected official, no government policy, no war, and no new technology will stop the inverse gusher coming our way in the form of fossil fuel decline, the potential disaster of which could make the Gulf crises look like nothing more than a big swimming pool with suntan lotion BUILT RIGHT IN!

Wakey, wakey folks. No one is doing this to you, or at least, not without your consent. It may be learned behavior, but at some point it comes down to you…and me. The first step is admitting you have a problem. I’ll take the lead here.

My name is Lindsay Curren and I am addicted to oil. Its running out and I don’t know what to do. I just know I can’t do nothing and I can’t live like I have. I have to take responsibility for myself and my family. I have to do something. I won’t live with the lies anymore. I wont stop until we are all talking honestly about peak oil and what it means for today and for the future of our country. I am powerful to change this thing, and with truth on my side, I will.

You?

It's riskier now NOT to invest in clean energy.

Today a Washington Post writer assailed President Obama’s call for clean energy as unrealistic, arguing that there is no merit in investing in unproven technology.

While the beneifts of clean energy are largely overstated in relation to what fossil fuels provide, to brush them aside wholesale reveals a worse ignorance. I responded to Ramesh Ponnuru’s post on his blog Right Matters today, lambasting his myopic view while laying out a plan of action going forward. What follows is the text of my post on washingtonpost.com with some slight edits added:

While it might make sense to use a cheap, readily available fuel source, in spite of its myriad problems (pollution, externalized costs, environmental disasters that kill off livelihoods, ecosystems, and food sources) that source is still only as good as it is available.

Perhaps Ponnuru missed a key moment in Obama’s speech. OIL IS A FINITE RESOURCE. Anyone living today should know this (mandatory if they are providing commentary) and frame all of their analysis accordingly, particularly when we have an exponentially growing global population all chomping at the bit to get a slice of the cheap energy pie.

Does Mr. Ponnuru believe that continuing to consume a finite resource at an increasing rate is going to lead to some…miracle down the line? That’s an improbable approach at best, a feckless and irresponsible response at worst.

To transition to the clean energy economy we first must conserve, recognizing that elements of conservation will lead to (areas of) economic contraction. But the notion of endless economic growth was always a fool’s game (or an evil geniuses’, if we count Wall Street playing by its own negative rules).

After conservation, we must invest in transportation and clean energy. First, a nationwide rail infrastructure including freight, passenger, and local light rail. This is non-negotiable if we think we are going to move goods and people in the future. We also need an updated smart grid, and more distributed power to localize energy, adding to our national and local security. Finally, our building projects must be dense new urbanism, infilling our cities and towns with development, and the cultivation of green belts around those cities to provide food without it having to travel long distances.

Given the fact that a Post commentator and moderator seems to either be wildly uninformed or willing to misinform his readers, perhaps the first step requires more than admitting our addiction to oil, but rather, coming to terms with its finite nature. Coming to grips with what we’re facing is key. Now, perhaps the right will choose to squander our future by playing political ball over this as they have with climate change. But peak oil and its ramifications are far more immediately evident than climate change is at this stage. No amount of wishing will change that oil is a finite resource.

We have to face that we will not be living the Jetsons life down the line, nor even a life like we live now. We will be scaling back, but we can do it in a smart way. If we fail to plan, we will plan to fail.

Yet, there is a way in the short term to have a boom amidst this–and that is when we change the nature of commodities and products, when we research, develop, and implement new solutions, we roll out new production, we naturally create jobs, and demand for new products and infrastructure. That is a stimulator.

Anyone who refuses to believe in the declining fossil fuels future is signing the death warrant on our fate. It is time for the U.S. to come together, get past the petty bickering of the past 20 years and make this transition. The fate of our nation hangs in the balance.

If Obama failed at anything on Tuesday night it was in NOT impressing enough how this is a pivotal moment, with irreversibly dire consequences if we fail to act. Of course, folks don’t want to hear that, and political strategists advise against saying it. But it’s true anyway.

Join us

Narrated by Barrie Zwicker. Featuring James Howard Kunstler, Peter Calthorpe, Michael Klare, Richard Heinberg, Matthew Simmons, Michael C. Ruppert, Julian Darley, Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes, Ali Samsam Bakhtiari and Steve Andrews. Directed by Gregory Greene. Produced by Barry Silverthorn. Duration: 78 minutes

Offshore oil spill despoils water.

Looking at pictures of the Gulf spill, the dirtiness of oil becomes abundantly clear. Its not like we don’t know that already. Oil and gas reek, and a splash of it on skin, stings. No one would debate its toxicity in raw form. After all, billions are being spent to clean up the Gulf. You don’t “clean up” clean things. But start talking about how equally filthy fossil fuels are when burned, what kind of impact they make on water, air quality and health, and all of the sudden it’s considered a debatable “political” issue.

Why?

Having built a national and global economy on the abundance of cheap oil and coal, energy corporations convince us that we’re unavoidably wedded to the stuff. To go in another direction now sounds the alarm against an unholy divorce. That’s to be expected. Why would they want it another way while their profits soar?

Yet myriad problems come with the oil economy, from its pollutant “externalities” to its role in geopolitical tensions. Oil dependence and centralized delivery create energy insecurity while prompting resource wars.  Apparent oil abundance stokes overconsumption while entrenching unsustainable economic expectations. Call it the dirty underbelly, the hidden side of fossil fuels.

Burning oil and coal takes solid filth and through a kind of alchemy conceals its true nature as it disappears into a hidden circuitry, such as billions of sparklingly clear plastic water bottles perennially in reach at precisely 40 degrees. Its MAGIC! Convenient then that we don’t have to look at the repugnant dump pile of discards floating out at sea or the dangerous coal ash slurry ponds surrounding mountaintop removal sites..

Oil subsidies underscore the dirty dealings more, with a ghost balance sheet standing in for the real costs of business.

When alternative energy and clean energy advocates call for a new direction on energy its not because we’re contrary or ungrateful for our standard of living. Nor is it necessarily born out of a hippie-penchant for idealism. Simply put, the oil economy proves itself unsustainable with every gallon used. To seek an alternative is to be grounded in reason and driven by an urge toward lasting economic projections in a sustainable balance.

It might be hard to have confidence in new ideas or even in humanity and nations in a world seemingly dominated by war, gluttony, neglect and the sideshow of a media revealing our collective depravity in high def 24/7. But to call for a new energy model, to urgently advocate for its development and roll out, is to call for a whole new chapter in our material relationship to almost everything. What doesn’t energy touch, or fuel? It touches everything! The kind of energy we use and the world we create with it reveals microcosm as macrocosm. It reminds me of a Biblical verse: By their fruits ye shall know them.

It may not seem very logical for me to call on a spiritual note, but there is reason in faith, however contradictory that may appear.

Some argue that God put coal in them thar hills and oil gushers in land and sea so that we would have them to exploit for our abundance, all part of the Dominionist plan. Then we propose a costly (and currently only theoretical) sequestering system to capture the untenable pollution that burning fossil fuels creates and marvel at our own cleverness. To me, that just sounds like an expensive shell game, and a desperate lie. Perhaps instead God already sequestered fossil fuels and uranium and other toxic magic, burying it deep in the earth to give us an abundantly clean world? A regular Garden of Eden.

Whatever the case or cause or origin, the dirty and hyper-problematic fossil fuel economy is on a dying trend and something must replace it.

To call for an alternative energy paradigm is an economic necessity as much if not more than a quasi-cultural predisposition for “natural things.” Hell, oil is natural. Its production and use is just not harmonious, creates more problems than it solves and, because of its finite nature, must give way at some point or another to the next thing. Far better to build that next thing while we still can, than find ourselves in some Mad Max scenario down the road, or The Road.

Look at the mess we’re in. The dirty mess of the filthy oil economy. Do we really think that one blow out day on Wall Street among a den of short-sighted me-first gaming thieves is going to turn it around? Or that once BP employs enough swiffer jets it’ll be back to business as usual with a clean, fresh Gulf and oceans more to drill, baby, drill?

By their fruits, ye shall know them. We need a better crop.

Developing rail offers key to recovery.

News that China leads the world in high speed train production and railway deployment inspires envy. While the U.S. has dedicated some funds to reinvigorating rail, the amount remains paltry in comparison to China’s huge layout, and small in relation to our continued investment in roadway infrastructure.

Whatever situation we may find ourselves in now relative to current rail beds and railway infrastructure matters little. The preconditions should not inhibit America, Virginia, or localities from taking the initiative now to move forward on rail projects both large and small. Crafting legislation, proposing incentives, and evaluating the network arteries for rail offer significant first steps. From there, lay, baby, lay…tracks that is. Start manufacturing shops in the most out-of-work areas to make needed parts. Get this engine running.

The unflinching reality of Peak Oil and its myriad implications demand that we look closely at the architecture of our future lives. Done right, trains allow communities and nations to move goods and people cheaply and efficiently. Just as we have carved a constitution with the noblest aims, expanded westward, overcome slavery and segregation, built a national highway system, sent a man to the moon, and drilled from semi-submersibles three miles into the earth, we can also envision a nationwide train grid, manufacture its parts, and deploy its infrastucture all while crafting the single largest jobs creation initiative in history. If ever there was a way out of our collective financial morass, this is it, and right on time.

"Coal Country," Thurs, Feb. 18 at 7pm at the Mockingbird in Staunton.

We’re starting a new film series and our first showing is Coal Country.

Every third Thursday at the Mockingbird in downtown Staunton we’ll show films on energy, food, and other hot topics to prepare for the economy of the 21st century.

Coal Country is the story of America’s leading energy source and the people and communities in Appalachia who pay the biggest price for our addiction to fossil fuels.

The film is as much a story of people as it is of bad business:

Passions are running high in the mountains of Appalachia. Families and communities are deeply split over what is being done to their land. At issue is the latest form of strip mining called “mountaintop removal,” or MTR. Coal companies blast the tops off mountains, and run the debris into valleys and streams. Then they mine the exposed seams of coal and transport it to processing plants. Coal is mined more cheaply than ever, and America needs coal. But the air and water are filled with chemicals, and an ancient mountain range is disappearing forever.

Coal moves today’s economy just as it powered the world of Charles Dickens and Ulysses S. Grant.  Anyone who turns on a light or buys a product made with electricity at any point in its creation or distribution uses coal and the dirtiest of all fossil fuels provides America with about half of our electricity.

In the Appalachians, including parts of southwestern Virginia, a particularly nasty form of strip mining has developed in the last couple decades that has made coal cheaper than ever but with lots of collateral damage — 8 out of 10 coal miners have lost a job since 1950 and coalfield communities have had to endure poisoned water, air, and land, along with other dangers such as floods of toxic waste and even the occasional avalanche.

Coal is an issue for America and the world, but those of us who live in Appalachia have a special connection to coal. Coal Country will help you to see your connection to coal, get you riled up about what the coal companies have done to our mountains, and help inspire you to follow the example of the people in the film who are standing up for their communities and for the future of us all.

Screening of Coal Country

• Thursday, February 18 at 7pm
• Free and open to the public

Afterwards, stay for a short performance by musicians featured in the film’s score. And why not stop by Mockingbird beforehand — doors open at 5:30 — for dinner? The food is great, and it’ll be a chance to meet folks who share your interest in moving beyond fossil fuels and building a better world, starting right here in Staunton and Augusta County.