The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times

This book is great intro to all the issues relating to peak oil and our other looming crisis; water, food, transportation, economics, etc., with hints, tips, sidebars, recipes, quotes, so it's not really heavy going. In a fairly non-apocalyptic way, it covers all sorts of stuff, for example: bug out bags, various alternative fuels, lists of things to stockpile, ecovillages and community, humanure, chart of bean cooking times, a first aid guide. Nothing in a huge amount of depth - it's just one book; but mostly practical and down to earth information, and while I don't agree with everything (he's too optimistic about ethanol, and that compost tea will be anaerobic) on the whole it seems balanced and accurate. For anyone who's just coming to learn about peak oil, especially in the early panic stages, I particularly recommend this book; there are so many books that will just scare and overwhelm you, while this book has a practical and less we're-all-doomed approach. If you're a peak oil old-timer and have been simplifying your life for a while it is probably all stuff you know already.

The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and cookbook by Albert Bates is an intriguing and well constructed look at what every citizen in the oil addicted world should know and begin to move toward if any kind of survival is possible when oil is no longer readily available. Bates begins by giving convincing evidence that the availability of plenty of oil and gas is not in the world's future. But the book is not a dooms day end of the world account. After explaining the supply/demand situation for the world relying mainly on oil and gas as the key source of energy, he then goes on to spend most of the book detailing ways in which the average consumer can begin to do things in a daily way that will make everyone less dependent on petroleum as the main energy source. The book details everything from creating one's own energy supplies to food preparation and storage to the way to save in transportation. The margins of each page of the book contains menus of dishes that help to form a more energy efficient approach to cooking. The book is well written with good explanations of approaches the author feels are key to beginning the change to living in a world without abundant petroleum supplies

For many years, friends, fans and even publishers have been asking me for another Living on the Earth. I really, really wish I could have accommodated them. The truth is that I haven't been living communally in an ecovillage, nor have I really been keeping up with innovations in sustainable technology and permaculture. I've been recording and performing original music, caring for my elders in a big city, and writing/illustrating other things that are closer to my actual experience. Happily, the person most qualified to write the new Living on the Earth has stepped up and written it. That would be Albert Bates, a founding member of the Farm, which is the largest and most influential hippie commune ever, and also Director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology. He travels the world teaching sustainable design, natural building, permaculture and restoration ecology. He's also argued cases before the Supreme Court. Like Living on the Earth, The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook (New Society Publishers, 2006) is eclectic. It can scare the bejesus out of you with worst case scenarios, and then invite you into the kitchen to sample grasshopper quesadillas (if you don't have one hundred grasshoppers, you can substitute locusts, crickets, or corn smut). Albert's definitely written more of a guy book. He explains with charts how to build things like root cellars, dehydrators, solar cookers and composting systems (now, that's my kind of Prince Charming). He lists what you need in your fallout shelter (I'm pleased to report that musical instruments are included). And he envisions as a benefit of the post-petroleum age, the opportunity for "creative loafing" including "leisurely love-making." (Yes!) You and everyone you know definitely need this book. Hopefully later rather than sooner, but it's never to soon to be prepared.

Intentional community pioneer Albert Bates on surviving peak oil by Erik Curren Albert Bates doesn't think that either peak oil or global warming will usher in the apocalypse. Nor does he advise citizens to start stockpiling firearms and Krugerrands. "There's a contingent of peak oilers who are survivalists at heart," Bates told me. But he isn't one of them. "We don't need to think of defending ourselves from packs of feral animals, we need to think of getting together quilting bees and sowing bees to make things. "Honestly, what I think is coming is a good change. We'll find that we have more time. What we've really lost in the last century of development is that we've become slaves to the clock. We waste a lot of time we spend commuting over highways and stuck in traffic snarls in cities. As we begin to shift back to a more nature-based life rhythm, following the seasons and the flow of the day, we're going to find we have more time. We'll have time to do skills like painting, knitting and art that we have lost. It's going to create a happier population." Last year, Bates, a civil rights and environmental attorney who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court who reinvented himself as a pioneer in the intentional communities movement, published The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (New Society, paperback, 237 pp., $19.95). This is not a book for survivalists. Though Bates does briefly write about "Defending from Warlords," he does not give advice on how to recruit your golf buddies for a neighborhood militia or turn your basement into a secure bunker. Instead, he writes, communities should have well trained law enforcement. "This might even be a good use for some of your gun nuts, as long as they owe their first allegiance to the community and don't come to think that they are in charge." As for families: "Learn and practice nonviolence and instill it as a value in your children." Ideas for Urbanites from the Farm What Bates's book does deliver is a concise summary of the problems of peak oil and climate change followed by chapter after chapter of ideas to prepare yourself and your family to live more self-sufficiently. Some ideas are practical ones that you might want to try now, like collecting rainwater or getting a kit to convert your car to run on biofuels. Other ideas you may want to save for later, such as quitting your job. But two things make The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide stand out from the legion of recent tomes on simpler living, energy-efficiency or peak-oil preparation. First, Bates peppers his text with dozens of actual recipes for cooking food. When Bates' s mother died in 2003, she left him twenty cookbooks, from which he drew for his own book. I cooked his recipe for split-pea soup, and found it more fool-proof than others I've tried. I have not yet tried his recipe for grasshopper quesadillas and probably need to work up more courage before I will. But many of his other re

I bought the book for a gift but ended up reading it myself. It is a great book with lots of information in it. There are also some fine receipes. Albert Bates is an author who has researched his information carefully and he presents it in an easy to understand manner. I would recommend this book to everybody.