What a year it has been. Prices have risen another 30% or so since this time last year. Peak oil has gone semi-mainstream, in particular it seems the NY Times Editorial Board (or at least Richard Stemple)sort of gets the idea. Katrina showed the basic incompetency of the Federal government in even one of the most long anticipated natural disasters. It also showed that nature and climate change can destroy a city much easier than a terrorist could. Lady Liberty is now being run on 100% wind power, within 8 months of my original post about it. And I have started building a small urban environmental movement in my powerful local area.

In some ways, I'm much more optimistic about how we will handle peak oil and in other ways I have become more pessemistic. But almost everything I have learned suggests to me that every local area of this large and diverse country/world will respond differently to Peak Oil and the solutions will be as diverse as the country/world we live in.

That is why I have started to engage in local political action to build social capital within the community while fighting for positive solutions like local food greenmarkets/CSAs and transportation alternatives like bike lanes/BRT/electric trams. For quite some time I have been using this space to highlight my personal local activism, which made sense up to a point. I wanted to share my experiences of local activism to help show TOD readers one potential path toward taking positive action beyond writing frustrated letters to the editor and pleading with cynical/apathetic friends and neighbors to take peak oil seriously.

Now I plan to return this page to discussions of the whole city, all of it's neighborhoods, all its colorful people and institutions, all the issues big and small related to transportation/energy/land use/green housing/etc that would impact our ability to handle peak oil and make NYC more sustainable. I'll also occasionally write posts of national/international importance.

And so that I don't spread myself too thin, I'm renewing my call for anyone who would like to take a shot at writing some pieces for TOD:NYC to please write me an email outlining your interest area. Interloafer, Super G and Yankee will still probably post a few stories now and then, but I'm looking for someone willing to do at least 1 post a week.