Many Islanders can hardly afford put food on the table as it is. High gas prices and high food prices and our current design for how we live = the impossible for many.

This is the bind that many in the Arab world find themselves. But we can think our way though this - provided we don't just hope that all of this is going away.

All our eggs are in this basket. You have fire insurance on your house. Some even life insurance! But we have no insurance for oil and a total dependency.

The case for local resiliency is surely a good one? So what might that mean for PEI which is a small Island community?

How can we protect ourselves from high energy costs and high food costs?

Heat - Gas - Electricity and the big one Food!

We use oil for all our heating - $200 million a year. This is the largest single expense in the family budget - a typical house uses 3,500 litres.

The quick answer here is more insulation and a shift to biomass.

We have had small programs for insulation - we could go bigger and have a community element with incentives.

With Biomass we could do as we did with wind. Convert all public buildings to Biomass to create demand - that will stimulate the supply. There is more than enough wood in Atlantic Canada for this. Drive wider conversion with incentives.

Link our wind with mini hydro. All over PEI are the remains of the early hydro dams. Mini hydro could give us the "Battery" we need to store surplus wind.

For Gasoline - make Telecommuting the new norm for government workers. Not push them into their homes but into local Commons. PEI is the Commuter Capital of Canada. This way most people would be minutes away from where they live not only cutting back on their gas use but making their communities more viable.

Start the shift from Factory Schools where all the kids are bused longer and longer distances - to experimenting with the virtual alternative. It makes no sense to me to have a school system that depends on busing. If prices go up much more how will it survive? I see instead the emergence of the new Super Local School where the education comes to the child and not the other way around.

This also supports a more local society.

We then have a lot of surplus buses - mmm maybe the beginning of a real public transport system?

Food - How can our current design of farming survive high oil prices? It cannot. This has to be thought out again. Smaller everything. More local too.

What is our most important market? Off PEI or on it? If people are hungry what is our real choice.

There is so much to think through here - I can only touch the surface here. But
if we thought this through, surely we could come up with a society that used much less oil and kept much more money here at home? Would not such an approach also revitalize our rural way of life? Would it also not bring back a lot of work?

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

“No one knows where this ends,” said Helima L. Croft, a director and senior geopolitical strategist at Barclays Capital. “A couple of weeks ago it was Tunisia and Egypt, and it was thought this can be contained to North Africa and the resource-poor Middle East countries. But now with protests in Bahrain, that’s the heart of the gulf, and it’s adding to anxieties.”

Middle Eastern oil fields are generally well defended and far from population centers, but energy analysts say the continuing turbulence potentially threatens supply lines and foreign investment that producers like Libya and Algeria depend on to increase production.

World oil prices started rising sharply when demonstrators overwhelmed downtown Cairo earlier in the month because of concerns that unrest could block the Suez Canal and Sumed pipeline through which three million barrels of crude pass daily. Labor unrest continues to roil the canal, though shipments have continued without incident.

Unrest in Yemen potentially threatens the 18-mile-wide Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, a shipping lane between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East that serves as a strategic link between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean through which nearly four million barrels of oil pass daily. Security for tanker traffic in the area became a concern after terrorists attacked a French tanker off the coast of Yemen in 2002. Read more at www.nytimes.com