(yes, I'm still alive.  just had a lot going on over the past week.)

For those of you who have been living under a rock these last few years, Lord of the Rings is an epic story by English don J.R.R. Tolkien; it is set in an imaginary world peopled by fairy-tale beings and beset by demonic evil. At least once a year I re-read it, enchanted by the tautly-told tale of small, stout-hearted people who, though perpetually on the brink of disaster, manage to snatch an improbable victory in the face of overwhelming odds though courage, loyalty, stealth and guile. By no means the least of their strengths is that they inhabit a higher moral plane than their terrible enemy. Thus when I learned of Peak Oil a few months ago, it was all very familiar.

I have no doubt that we humans are on the brink of a great change, or perhaps even a great disaster. As in Tolkien's book, the world as we know is coming to an end, for better or worse. Within my lifetime, what is left of it, most of what I have grown to know, if not love, will pass away, forever. I may not survive this change. You may not. Nothing is certain. On one side lies disaster, on the other only hope: Gandalf's `fool's hope' perhaps, but hope nonetheless and while there is hope we must struggle and perhaps, just perhaps, we will come at last, if not to the Quays of Avallone in the Undying Lands then to our warm and comfortable Hobbit-hole in the Shire.