User Profile

I’m Bodi Lane and by way of introduction, I want to tell you how come I got hooked up with World Without Oil and particularly as a podcaster. It’s unexpected and surprising that I’m broadcasting at all since I’ve always been happy to get my news second-hand for the most part: and… I liked the story about the family who went on a month-long radio fast and started remembering songs they hadn’t sung for years.

I think there’s something inherently dire about the news genre we’ve inherited and for that reason my favorite YouTube laugh is Live News Bloopers.

Anyway, as the Oil Shock news broke, I had the most intense night of dreaming; every kind of scenario that epitomized “not safe”, the streets were no longer familiar and the general mood felt decidedly ugly. I’m not prone to nightmares but I had one of those nights.

I woke strangely late for me, to the simultaneous sound of gushing water outside and a man’s voice: “Oh shit… better call 911”. Out the window I could see the gas & electric guys.

So they screwed up… but me coming out of an unnerving night, the whole thing spooked me even more.

… But then, very next thing, I saw a couple people emerging from their houses with cameras and my mood changed as I realized it was a great photo-opportunity. I was out of bed and excited as I grabbed my camera, now not want to miss getting a picture.

Before I made it out the door, I could hear that particular kind of kid-energy you get when it snowed in the night. A gaggle of kids had gathered and they were having FUN.

Then along comes this cycler dude and he’s grinning at the sight of an impromptu urban geyser and he’s totally in the groove of that kid energy. He’s goes, “What did you do?! Did you do that??!! And the kids pile around his bike all trying to tell him something at the same time. One’s doing jumping-jacks she’s so excited. Well that’s energy, I thought, pure energy; exhilarating and effervescent, the water hydrant and the kids are in the same mode.

The whole thing just shifted me, got me to see that how we respond now will shape this unfolding reality in unimagined ways. I determined right there I want to be a pro-active part of World Without Oil.

The Oil Shock Crisis is a big deal. The whole scene could have been handled so differently obviously, but it’s not like we didn’t know something was looming. You could say the writing was on the wall and we just weren’t willing to catch all the tell-tale signs.

The shadow foretelling “Peak Oil”, and remember Peak Oil means we’ve peaked on our oil supplies and the world’s oil reserves are now in irrevocable decline, “Peak Oil”; that shadow fell across our lives, those of us old enough to remember, in the 70s and it did lead to a wave of dialogue, one thread of which was; that fossil fuel could run out in our lifetime “ushering in the permanent oil shock era”. That was a very real scenario.

So finding ourselves in a Peak Oil global crisis now, we can’t exactly say that we were blind-sided, unless you want to define blindsided as

the side away from which one is directing one's attention.

And I’m not saying it’s not scary but you know the whole scene of baby strollers on sidewalks with car exhaust fumes level with their faces – when I let myself think about that, it always makes me think of The Tudors in 16th century England:
Queen Elizabeth’s face ending up full of potholes from lead; the lead make-up she was plastering on her face to give her that attractive white death-mask look that was all the rage in Elizabethan England.

So we know this stuff. We know that fossil fuels are toxic when they’re burning. We know they’re the primary cause of global warming.

I always like that web definition of fossil – it says… dodo;
dodo - someone whose style is out of fashion;
So I figure we better wake up else we’re going the same way as the dodo…

So what about me? I love my bike. I ride it a lot, and, share a relatively small car, which I only use when I need to go a distance. I’ve always cared about fuel consumption from a cash-flow point of view, long before environmental issue was in-your-face.

But I fly; I fly long haul flights. What else can you do when your family lives 6,000 miles apart. The cost of a ticket has always been a dig deal but no one was saying it cost the Earth to fly; no one ever pointed out that all planes have always been entirely exempt from all environmental laws. And why have they? Because everybody who mattered agreed; airplanes could never ever comply.

I don’t think that’s true; I think we could design clean planes but in the meantime I do feel weird that I’m committing “climate crime” every time I visit my mum. My favorite bumper sticker is: “America Needs an Oil Change”. I don’t personally have the expertise to bring this about but I believe We do.

Anyway, to wrap up I'll just say I really like spending hours and hours on my own, not having to relate to telephone, not having any social obligations, not having any particular structure except what I'm inspired to create on an inspiration. That's how come I'm gregarious when I do emerge; that's the trick.

I like it a real lot that these days I have access to a swimming pool in the community. I can do crazy online hours and then go swim at 3am before I crash if I want.

I like playing with time warping, projecting out to 2015 or so and kind of reeling it in in all its glory, you know, best case scenario; reeling it in. I call it dreaming each other awake.

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