People in the Peak Oil movement chafe at the label of doomer, but many of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of major websites and books quickly brings up titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash. com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of Suburbia, and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Peak Oil writings are awash with predictions that billions will die, civil order will collapse, and civilization will end. Scientists aren't immune -- during geologist Ken Deffeyes's Peak Oil presentations, he displays the words "war," "famine," "pestilence," and "death" -- the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Right has the Left Behind books, and the Left has Peak Oil.

About Author:

Toby Hemenway is an American author and educator who has written extensively on permaculture and ecological issues. He is the author of Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture and The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience. He has been an adjunct professor at Portland State University, Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and is currently a field director at the Permaculture Institute (USA).

After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company.

At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife, Kiel, spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was the editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2004, and after six years of developing urban sustainability resources there, Toby and his wife now divide their time between Sebastopol, California and western Montana.

Toby Hemenway is the author of Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, which for the past six years has been the world's best-selling book on permaculture, a design approach based on ecology for creating sustainable landscapes, homes, communities, and workplaces. He has been an adjunct professor in the School of Graduate Education at Portland State University, Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and a biologist consultant for the Biomimicry Guild. He teaches, consults, and lectures on permaculture and ecological design throughout the US and other countries. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Natural Home, Whole Earth Review, and American Gardener. He lives in Sebastopol, California, where he is developing sites and resources for urban and small-town sustainability.