This piece was written for Lam Rim Buddhist Centre’s Summer 2008 issue of its Mandala newsletter. Though the essay was written with Lam Rim Buddhist Centre in mind, its contents could apply to any community, village, town or neighbourhood. I offer it here for reflection and comment.

Lam Rim Buddhist Centre in a World of Rising Oil Prices

An offering for reflection on Lam Rim Buddhist Centre’s future.

Tibetan Buddhism has come to the West at a unique time in world history. If we pin the arrival of the Tibetan traditions to the West to a decade after His Holiness the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India, 1959, we have seen an extraordinary growth of Tibetan Buddhism around the world in forty years. In that time we have seen Dharma Centres appear in almost every country. Lamas of all Tibetan traditions have criss-crosse

d the globe to offer teachings. Students have travelled to access these teachings. Books covering all possible nuances of Buddhism are widely available. Ritual implements and incense have travelled out of the Tibetan refugee communities in India and Nepal to wherever they are needed. All this is without even mentioning the extraordinary success of the Tibetan refugee community and especially their monastic traditions’ survival and development in exile.

So what is it that makes this period in history so unique? It is something without which the rapid spread of Tibetan Buddhism, indeed our modern way of life would never have been possible and will, I believe, have a defining effect on how the Dharma develops around the globe during this century and beyond. That something to which I am referring is oil.

The modern history of oil starts around 1846 with the development of a method for producing our present day petroleum, however it was not until the 1950’s that oil became the principle fuel source of the world. Since then oil exploration and production has increased at a ferocious rate and spawned a world that would be virtually unrecognisable to those who preceded the oil age. Aside from the benefits to the Dharma world spoken of above, our Centres have also gained from luxuries such as central heating, and the availability of a wide variety of delicious food regardless of the time of year. This has all been borne on the availability of cheap, abundant oil. However, now we are reaching a time when what we take for granted will become increasingly expensive, and more difficult to obtain. These times could soon be upon us, if they aren’t already.

In the 1950’s a Shell employer, M. K. Hubbert predicted that America would peak in oil production in the 1970’s. The peaking in production is that time when a region has reached its highest point of oil production, the maximum rate of flow of oil from its fields. From that point on oil produ

ction goes into terminal decline. M. K. Hubbert was told by his employers to be quiet and not believed, but sure enough America peaked in oil production in the 1970s. Britain is now a net importer of fossil fuels, the North Sea oil fields are in decline. It is also worth noting that like the last few drops of petrol in the tank of your car where the dregs sit, the quality of oil declines as we reach the bottom of these fields. Oil will never run out, but the economic feasibility of extracting those last remnants will most probably render the final barrels worthless.

The world is now reaching a time when the peaking of global oil production is not far away, if it has not already been passed. We will not know until after the event, in the same way that you will not know when you have reached the half way point in your own life until the day that you die. The peak might be a bumpy plateau; geopolitics and the occasional oil field find might prevent a quick sharp down turn. However, when we do reach the peak a world with increasing energy demands will be met by dwindling supplies. This in turn will force up the price of oil - at the time of writing, oil has topped $135 a barrel. The end of cheap oil is over.

With oil prices rising, the effects will be felt right through our lives. There is little in modern life that is not touched by oil. We can remember the oil refinery blockades in Britain during the lorry drivers strike of 2000. Within no time after the industrial action started, refineries were closing up and down the country. Queues were forming outside of petrol stations, which soon ran dry. Within days the roads were as quiet as early on a Sunday morning. Panic buying set in at the supermarkets as shelves were stripped bare. Sir Peter Davis, then chairman of Sainsbury, “wrote to Tony Blair warning him that food would run out in ‘days rather than weeks’.” (The Last Oil Shock, D. Strahan; 2007)

What does all this mean for Lam Rim Buddhist Centre? In Tibet, small monasteries would serve and be supported by a local community of villages, which might also be from where the monks (or nuns in the case of a nunnery) for the monastic community would come from. Western Retreat Centres on the whole serve a distant community who visit the Centre from afar. They might also find themselves situated in remote

areas, far from facilities that are needed for day to day living. Lam Rim’s two main sources of heat are oil for the main house, supplemented by two coal burning stoves, and gas for the Coach House. Most of Lam Rim’s food is brought in, despite Edita’s wonderful garden each summer and her year round supply of chutneys and jams. That food requires at the very least, for Raglan, an eight mile round trip, but more normally one is looking at a journey of twenty miles or more; and of course that food is flown, shipped and driven in from further afield. Then there are the people who visit the Centre, who in the pragmatics of day to day living help to finance Lam Rim Buddhist Centre through the fees that they pay for the courses that they attend. All of this before we get into books for the shop, goods from India, electricity in the house and many more items that could easily be added to an almost endless list.

So what would Lam Rim Buddhist Centre look like beyond the oil peak? I have no exact answer for that, but in the brief space of this essay I would like to suggest what the Lam Rim community might be looking to create. It is very easy to be lulled into a false sense of security if life at the moment is allowing us to at least get by - but change can happen quickly as the teachings all too often remind us. Look at the truck driver’s strike mentioned above. I reiterate that the end of cheap oil has passed. I believe that it would be more prudent, indeed it is an imperative to start preparing for the future now rather than waiting to see what will happen. We should not be waiting around until the petrol pumps start running dry, or food prices start getting beyond our reach. Living our lives in that way we would find ourselves living in a space of fear and hope. Fear of something that we know will happen and hope that it will not happen tomorrow. To use an analogy of our practise - to not prepare for our death time is not wise. We all know that we will die, but we don’t know how or when, so much better to start preparing now. Embracing the reality of our death brings life into more perspective, life becomes sharper, more focused and we use our time better. We don’t embrace death to live a morbid life, rather to live a more full, meaningful life. The same can be said of preparing for a post fossil fuel age. We know that it will come, we live on a finite earth. So much better to prepare now than wait until the results of price increases paralyse our options. Embrace an inevitability and look to create a Centre that continues to benefit people into the future.

I would like to introduce a term that I first heard about in this context from Rob Hopkins, a person who will be known to some of you. Rob is known for starting the Transition movement - www.transitionculture.org - and he speaks of the need to build resilience. Just to touch in on the Transition movement, it seeks to build a plan of action for moving a community (town, village, neighbourhood) from a highly oil dependent existence to a more self-sustaining community with lower carbon footprint (if you are interested, more can be found out from the link above and Rob’s book “The Transition Handbook”).

So returning to the term “resilience”, our society supports itself on a network of systems that come from afar - it has little inbuilt resilience or ability to withstand a collapse from within even a small part of these systems. The brief look at Lam Rim’s vulnerability above in terms of its dependence on oil illustrates this. Lam Rim has few means to support itself if oil prices were to sky rocket and necessities become more scarce. The same goes for Penrhos, Raglan and most probably where you the reader live as well. By building resilience, we are looking at building a local network that enables you to better withstand the shocks. In the same way that you might look to stay healthy so that you can better fend off illness, a resilient community can better keep its head above water when  supply lines are threatened.

Now resilience does not mean that a group becomes isolated and insular, just working for itself - in many ways that is an opposite extreme of what we have now. Resilience means reaching out and working with the local community, the community here possibly being Penrhos. Some within that community are good at growing food. Others might have a coppiced woodland for supplying wood to the community. Another might have facilities for storing food through the winter. Local farmers become just that, farmers for the local community.

As fuel prices rise, Lam Rim will have to start looking at what it offers and how. The Centre will need to rethink how and in what ways it wishes to serve the Buddhist tradition, while remaining viable. Sunday teachings will become a thing of the past as a Sunday afternoon trip to Wales becomes just too expensive. In time weekend courses will probably also become impractical. Perhaps one day Lam Rim Buddhist Centre will become a place solely of retreat? These are things that need to be discussed.

The sense of overw

helm can seem huge when considering the challenges that oil depletion will cause us to face. For the next generation the world will be a different place. The current generation will probably see the beginning of that world. What I believe is needed now for Lam Rim Buddhist Centre is for the community to start preparing for that time - complacency is not an option. There are models out there for working towards a post carbon world, and a very good place to start is Rob Hopkin’s Transition Initiative.