Deeper Than a Mud Puddle

Hi friends - here is a great little story someone sent me. It takes place in the not too distant future. I will post it in short installments. I think it is too long for just one post:

Deeper than a mud puddle

By Brandon Marshall
The following story is told from the point of view of a farmer living in an intentional community in a post-Peak Oil world several years from now. The details change as it continues to evolve in my mind, but in all its versions it sticks to one general assumption. The gap between energy demand and supply widens, and at some point in the future various aspects of our social and economic institutions begin to break down in earnest. Here is today's version…


Before settling here several years ago, I was a bit of a floater. The casual observer might have seen an aimless wanderer but there was always a direction, always an encompassing method. That method was largely determined by my own vision of what energy descent might be like. I would move somewhere to take a job that I thought might teach me a useful trade, or attend a class or two at a local college, and move on when I had learned the fundamentals or saw the returns starting to diminish. That path has meant wearing many hats, but my farming hat, which is really many hats in itself, has always fit the best.

When I first started looking to settle somewhere, some places ranked higher on the list than others - arable land and rainfall versus desert, for example. But my search became based more on the "who" rather that the "where". I didn't know it at the time, but I was thinking in terms of my own personal "thrival". Thrival is a word that has been added to the vernacular since we passed the Peak. Like a lot of the new language, it was probably being used locally somewhere to describe some aspect of social adaptation and then gradually spread. Thrival is sort of the opposite of rival. I've heard it described as cooperative survival. It sprang up about the same time the international intentional community and ecovillage movements were becoming popular.

The community here has grown into a small town in recent years. It is starting to reap the rewards from its early efforts at promoting diversity. The result has been a local, needs-based economy where people enjoy self-reliance with regard to food, water, and energy. We also enjoy a strong social network. This network has kept us flexible when the inevitable hiccups occur.

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