I had thought to raise a few questions today, but the time is short, so I'm going to have to proceed straight to the answers.

I've been thinking recently about the hundred-year party sponsored by cheap readily-available oil and, now that the party is over, about the "long emergency" that follows--the situation in which we try to reconstitute life without that cheap readily-available oil. I've been trying to look long and hard at the crude platform on which every aspect of our lives is built, and I think it fair to say that we are generally unconscious of how much our lives depend on oil, that students are generally ignorant of--or apathetic toward--their abject dependency on it, that both of these are real problems, and that higher education has had little to say about either of them. I�ve gone so far as to wonder whether general education should include a whole course on oil, or whether such a course, given the crisis and the extent of our utter dependence, should be a graduation requirement. This is part of a larger question I have been asking myself for some time now concerning ecological literacy, which is pretty abysmal. Ecological illiteracy is an unselective pestilence, as likely to claim a frat boy as a full professor or a Phi Rho or a football player. But in and of itself the end of oil strikes me as the sort of thing we could usefully consider at such a place as this, which it seems to me bears a striking resemblance to that clueless guest at the end of The Great Gatsby who after Gatsby's death shows up one night unaware that that the party is over.

I have attempted something like this recently with a group of students who are alleged to have read Jim Kunstler's book, The Long Emergency, which, not surprisingly, is about the long emergency--that is, the world after peak oil, which is to say the one we live in right now and will forever more, the world in which oil is scarce and the people who need it fight over who gets to have it. The industrialization of China means only that there will be more claimants, which is to say more combatants. Kunstler's book gives a decent, not to mention highly readable, account of the history of oil, its geopolitics, its uses, the methods we use to get it, and the reasons that, knowing all this, we're still likely to go sleepwalking into the future until we find ourselves trying to run a world made by oil and for oil but that doesn't have any oil left in it--a world, we should note, with a population artificially inflated like some wartime boom by that very oil that from here on in will be in steady irreversible decline. The global population could never have reached what it is right now apart from all that black gold, and without the oozing magic the population will thin out pretty decidedly--and unpleasantly.

I won't deal with it here, but the question of what happens to the "excess" population gets us right into the problem of who the excess people are. So think of heavy traffic. Heavy traffic is always other people. When you say "traffic was terrible" you're never talking about yourself.

I don't want to paint a scenario that's too detailed here, because that will take too much time, and I have other things to say. But for starters forget happy motoring. Forget about that tremendous waste of time and resources known as the "family vacation," during which an obscene amount of crap is pinched from the house and moved in a minivan to some other place where everyone is "having fun"--that strange mode of being and consciousness, as Thomas Merton said, measured in hours and extended by gadgets--gadgets also made, by the way, with oil. So forget the motoring. Think instead about eating. Those who want to eat in the long emergency but who still think that food comes from stores are in for some lean times. Our dependence on the food system, which is run by oil from top to bottom, will waste no time teaching us a few things about how incompetent we are. The denizens of the modern university or college, who have spent their lives living only by thought, will be among the first to starve, and, pardon me, but they'll get what they deserve. They were the abettors of an idea about education that simply dismissed the value of the domestic arts and sent graduates out into the world of surrendered skills and purchased necessities. They said that education would allow graduates to rise above the drudgery of work. They said, "here: major in upwardly mobility." "Leave your benighted homes." "Go lots of places and belong to none of them." "The machines and the ungraduated will supply you with what you need." In other words the intellectual elites said, "do as we do." For they, the elites, are among the most placeless and irresponsible members of society. They are the itinerant vandals who chase the grant money wherever it leads their inflated egos. Aspiring to be citizens of every place, they have become citizens of no place, which is to say they are not citizens at all but parasites.

This is why I can't really get excited about what the putative and self-named academic superstars call standards. These are standards that measure worth in conference papers, grants, research trips, and publications; back of them is the assumption that the purpose of education is to serve the private enrichment of the individual professor, who is "producing knowledge" in order to pad his CV and inflate the dirigible of his own self-esteem. None of that alleged knowledge will feed or clothe anyone, which is why I would much rather see a standard applied to schools--to students and faculty members alike--that measures merit and success in the health of communities, in the health of the air, the watersheds, and the topsoil--on which all of us are as dependent as the hoot owls are. We don't think we're as dependent, but that's because for too long we have lived at a great distance from the sources that sustain us. Thus abstracted, and blinded by the short-term benefits of cheap oil, we have forgotten our own contingency. We think that if we have money we'll be okay. Not in the long emergency we won't. Money doesn't bring forth food, and only the most superstitious among us--the Gung-Ho Free-Marketeers--could possibly think so.

For I will be told, as I often am, that if such an emergency does occur, the market will take care of it. But this is deeply superstitious. Saying the market will take care of things is like saying "Trust Jesus." There�s little difference between the Jimminy Cricket economist who thinks he can suck unendingly on the plump tit of the affluent society and the Falwellian fundamentalist who thinks the Lord Jesus Christ is up there at the right hand of God the Father Almighty waving the flag and singing God Bless America. (Nor should we neglect to note, parenthetically, that this same Falwellian fundamentalist will also say that the important questions don�t concern what happens to us here but what happens to us after we die. This is exactly the kind of nonsense you get when your view of grace is separated from nature. It's what we call bad theology, or evangelical Protestantism.) But the market is not a sentient, and certainly is not a moral, creature, and it won�t tell us how to maintain a platform built on, and made to be maintained by, an energy source that's gone. "Yes, but someone will think of something." Oh really? You can't plug a bulldozer into the wall socket and hope to move so much as an ant hill with it. You can't fix a bridge on the interstate with a crane that has a little wind turbine on it. You can't move the average food item 1,500 miles on ethanol. In fact you won't have to move it at all, because ethanol won't fuel the enormity that American farming has become--on which, by the way, we all depend.

Should anyone be granted a diploma who doesn't know this? Should any pollyanish undergraduate be sent chomping out into the grim future who can't describe what the artwork on the wall will look like when the fecal matter hits the fan? I sometimes get the feeling that with one hand our colleges and universities are teaching students to fiddle and with the other hand they're setting fire to Rome.

We don't have any business, for example, erecting a building on this campus made to be run on energy sources that won't be available during the building's lifetime. Doing so sends a seriously flawed message to students, and it complicates the work of those in the classroom who are trying to turn water to wine. (Reminder: we've hit global peak oil, but America reached its peak production of natural gas 35 years ago.) A student center, whether new or remodeled, built on a north-facing slope (as ours most certainly will be) will represent the biggest mistake among the many mistakes we've made here in the last twenty years. All that free energy in contemporary sunlight up there, and we keep acting as if the ancient or prehistoric kind will last forever--even as it slows to a trickle. The name for this kind of behavior is insanity.

Later today (as I'm cleaning out my office) I will be told, as I always am after making such a crack, to shut up, because it is the board, not the faculty, that owns the college. Yes, I know. But the trustees, whatever their love for this place (and I do not question that love), are absentee owners. They don't hear the science building sucking down energy every day, and they won't hear the student center doing the same. Absenteeism is absenteeism no matter where you find it; it is a condition that conduces to abuse. I did not say "necessarily leads to abuse"; I said "conduces to abuse." It is easier to love a place well if you also live in it. Whoso doubts this should go to bed at night with the sermons of Jonathan Swift in his lap or the history of imperialism on his mind.

But since the student center is a done deal, let's focus on something else. Let's focus on mirrors. I favor placing a full-length mirror next to every elevator on campus. This would be a much better use of resources than all the apparatus that goes into bleached stationery and "brand" management. Such mirrors so placed would allow all of us to take a good long hard look at our fannies before we push a button and use prehistoric, rather than contemporary, sunlight to get from the first to the second floor. It bears repeating, though I haven't said this in polite company for a while, that we're very close to being a nation of fat asses and skinny fingers, because we refuse to do anything more than push buttons. Then we flap our gums about the rising cost of health care and how hard it is to keep the weight off.

(I should add that a machine that replaces the work of the body--the elevator is one such machine--sets the body at a discount, and that whatever sets the body at a discount betrays a heretical tendency. It's the result of more bad theology. So save theology; use the stairs.)

It will be said that I'm being critical. Actually, I'm doing what the brochures promise I will do: preparing students for the "world of tomorrow." Maybe one small difference between the brochures and me is that I'm talking about the real world of tomorrow, not the false one in which everyone is a "leader" in a "rewarding career" and whose reality check has apparently been lost in the mail. Smart people in colleges all across the country are making the same mistake the rich man in the parable made: they are preparing for a future in which they will be prosperous, not for a future in which they will be dead. For anything not built to proper scale--colleges, universities, cities, suburbs--is going to fail in the long emergency. The splat you'll hear will be the sound of colleges--this one and others--as they fall like poisoned vultures from the sky. The parental suburban borrowing power that has sustained us for a short time won't hold out. It has allowed us momentarily to tell our favorite lies--especially that one about how the party's never going to end--but I think we should probably get out of the prevarication business and concern ourselves now with the truth.

The grand irony as I see it so far as education is concerned is that colleges, which now are a means of escaping the so-called drudgery of real work, like providing for yourself, are going to disappear, and schools will pop up again whose mission is to teach those very skills that our own system has neglected. In other words, people will go to school to learn what we have taught them to ignore. We will be witnessing the revival of the true land-grant college--not the land-grant college we have right now, which is the favorite whore of agribusiness. The professors at these new colleges will be part time professors, because they're going to be Amish farmers. There will be much less back-biting in these schools, much less pettiness and chest-thumping, because these are not Amish values. Amish values will help us survive the long emergency that our own "values" will have caused.

Unless of course we change those values. We should have a large highly-visible vegetable garden on this campus, and as many people as like to eat should tend it. We should be composting table scraps from the cafeterias so that we can begin to pay our debt to the soil--a debt we've been deferring payment on at least since the invention of the garbage truck. We should have faculty members who are committed to dismantling the vast system of technological dependencies that has accumulated over the years, and these faculty members should commit themselves to living defensibly and responsibly and competently before their students. The college itself should serve insofar as it can only local foods; it should otherwise attempt to shorten the distance between producer and consumer. (In fact these changes are already afoot.)

That is, we should begin making other arrangements. And above all, we should renounce the way of life, the standard of living, the "lifestyle" (which is always the wrong word) that is directly responsible for the war in Iraq, a war that has required nothing of us in the way of sacrifice. We could even start a few Victory Gardens and observe a self-imposed wartime speed limit and live like the greatest generation Tom Brokaw's ghost writer was so keen on.

The problem is that we're like that free-loader in Gatsby who doesn't know the party's over. But it is. The party sponsored by cheap readily available oil is over. There are skills and values available to us, and they're there for the taking. They certainly aren't being grabbed up by the world's (and college's) many absentee owners, who have been living off the capital of someone else's skills and values and are pretty likely to be SOL. They and, unfortunately, everyone currently running for president of these sorry United States are like the mayor in Jaws--remember him?--who, notwithstanding a giant shark prowling the waters off of Amity Island, wants to keep the beaches open and the summer dollars flowing. "I don't think either of you are familiar with our problem," he says to Hooper and Chief Brody, whereupon Hooper breaks in and says: "Uh, I am familiar with the fact that you are going to ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites you in the ass."

When I found out recently that the board, which owns us, wants only a five-year return on energy investments, I said publicly that we should probably send the board back to college. The problem is, we can't send them here. The values I'm talking about are not honored by our faculty, nor are they honored in our curriculum, nor do they have a place of honor in our mission statement or our faith commitments or our strategic plan. Yes, I know: there are a few sentences here and there that pay lip service to these values. But recent buildings projects on this campus show, and the next building project will show, just how empty those sentences are.

Someday someone is going to read the history of this college and wonder at its colossal misallocation of funds--dare I say spent by ecologically illiterate absentee owners?--on buildings built to be run on ancient sunlight, just as whatever people who survive the long emergency will marvel at the colossal misallocation of money that went into building suburbia. I simply want the record to show that someone issued a warning. Copies of this will be available for purchase as you leave the library, also known as the building with the elevators. (But check your derrière before you use one.)

I don't think we can ignore the problem of ecological illiteracy much longer. It must become a curricular concern of ours. David Orr says no one should graduate from high school without thoroughly mastering the fundamentals of thermodynamics. I say no one should graduate from here who doesn't know what topsoil is, and how it accumulates, and what it does for us, and what we must do for it, and what oil did for us--and especially what it did to us. A good senior inquiry project would be a Master Plan for living gently. And, like a master plan, it should be a done deal pretending to solicit consensus. And I don't think it should say one thing but allow its author to do another. The word for that kind of behavior is hypocrisy.

A good place to start--I have tried to make it my own--is with Dostoevsky: All men are guilty, and I am the most guilty of all.