Featured Outpost: Bay Area Peak Oil

Today’s Bay Area Post Carbon outpost grew out of meetings initiated by Dave Room and others during the summer of 2004. People found each other through the Oil Awareness groups on Meetup.com. Attendees of the Meetup sessions were redirected towards Dave’s East Bay peak oil group.

The Bay Area Peak Oil outpost has functioned as an incubator for a number of additional outposts in the San Francisco Bay region.

These additional outposts have stayed loosely interrelated. As interest in peak oil has grown, so has activity in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco. Four outposts have developed here, with cross-pollination between them: Bay Area Peak Oil, San Francisco Post Carbon, SF Oil Awareness, and the East Bay Post Carbon Solutions Group.

Monthly meetings typically include discussion of current events, screenings, announcements of local events, special presentations, and working groups focused on projects. Some people attend two or three of these meetings monthly, helping to share information and perspectives between the regional groups. The Bay Area Post Carbon outposts also interact with groups in neighboring communities: Willits, Sebastopol, Pacifica, Benicia-Vallejo, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Ithaca, NY and Oregon.

Members of the Bay Area groups come from many different age groups and walks of life: teachers, engineers, researchers, authors, biologists, physicists, activists, students, professionals, and other concerned citizens.

These Bay Area groups have organized activities such as: film screenings, discussion panels, lectures, visibility at regional festivals (Solfest, SF Green Festival, Bioneers), community solar energy installation, a local peak oil conference, an educational poster on peak oil (oilposter.org), a college-level course on peak oil, and have traveled to attend peak oil conferences in other parts of the world (ASPO Portugal, ASPO Denver, and The Community Solution in Yellow Springs).