Well, how does peak oil actually affect us? I was talking to a friend who is a chef and she told me that the price of food has more than doubled in the past few years. It's been going up and up. Shipping has increased enormously. In a few years the price of shipping may make it hard to get the kinds of food we were used to. That's why I feel that we must support local agriculture. We have a farmer's market in our town, and we buy food there every Saturday. The food is fresh and comes from the local area. It's important to get more of this up and running now, while we can still afford to set things up. A local young farmer is selling milk in the old fashioned bottles. This kind of thing will be crucial in the transition to a world where the cost of shipping makes it impossible to send milk from halfway across the country.

We make our own maple syrup and people from the community visit us whenever there is steam coming out of the sugarhouse. They buy the syrup and feel a sense of ownership in the process. I think it helps to bring us together. Who doesn't like maple syrup? I was looking at a book of paintings by Eastman Johnson from the 1800's. They were about maple sugaring in Maine. He painted certain people, like the kettle tender, the storyteller and the dandies from town who went out to visit the sugar camp. I realized that we have those same people today. I can tell you who the storyteller of the camp is and who the kettle tender is. We do the sugaring every spring. It's a piece of our peak oil strategy, and it also builds community.