Petrocollapse isn't the danger. We will not run out of oil - just the cheap oil we have become used to - but depletion of our socio-economy's primary fuel has made us vulnerable to a Great Depression style dislocation. Commentators predict variants of the following scenario:

• oil spikes upwards over $100 a barrel, perhaps $200 a barrel;
• companies in key industries - airlines, tourism, distribution, etc. - go bankrupt and resulting deflation pounds existing speculative bubbles - real estate, stock markets - which burst and, as the deflation accelerates, lack of demand plus increased energy costs for production and distribution, plus strikes/fuel price protests, rapidly paralyses existing trade.

Transport, because of its almost complete dependence on fuels derived from crude oil, is particularly vulnerable to a decline in the availability of cheap oil. Food miles and the impact of the increasing transportation associated with today's food supply chain have been seen as key to the sustainability agenda for over a decade.

"In an ecologically and esthetically impoverished landscape, it is harder for children and adolescents to find a larger meaning and purpose for their lives. Consequently, many children grow up feeling useless. In landscapes organized for convenience, commerce, and crime, and subsidized by cheap oil, we have little good work for them to do. Since we really do not need them to do real work, they learn few practical skills and little about responsibility. Their contacts with adults are frequently unsatisfactory. When they do work, it is all too often within a larger pattern of design failure. Flipping artery clogging burgers made from chemically saturated feedlot cows, for example, is not good work and neither is most of the other hourly work available to them. Over and over we profess our love for our children, but the evidence says otherwise. Rarely do we work with them. Rarely do we mentor them. We teach them few practical skills. At an early age they are deposited in front of mind-numbing television and later in front of computers. And we are astonished to learn that in large numbers they neither respect adults nor are they equipped with the basic skills and aptitudes necessary to live responsible and productive lives. Increasingly, they imitate the values they perceive in us with characteristic juvenile exaggeration"~ Loving Children: a Design Problem by David Orr