It’s with sadness that I announce the end of my association with New College of California. The college is in the process of closing as a result of administrative and leadership problems at the main San Francisco campus.

In January I happily accepted the invitation to work full-time for Post Carbon Institute as a Senior Fellow.

Details on both developments follow.

More About New College

The New College of California North Bay program on Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community was a pioneering effort that graduated hundreds of brilliant students, while serving as a hub within the region for environmental activism as well as musical and cultural events. While we faculty members were always frustrated with the San Francisco campus’s leadership, we were and continue to be extremely proud of what we accomplished here in Santa Rosa over the past ten years.

A countercultural school founded in San Francisco in the early 1970s, New College had no endowment and subsisted entirely on tuitions. We at the satellite campus in Santa Rosa (founded in 1998) carved out our own niche in environmental studies, thriving on the freedom and independence that flowed from our geographic distance from the main campus. We ran our program mostly by consensus via the college’s only continuing faculty meetings.

Last year the school’s accrediting agency, Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), put the school on probation. This had happened several times before, but now serious allegations prompted a thorough review. Then the Department of Education began withholding student financial aid money, the lifeblood of the college. Faculty stopped receiving paychecks in October, and students stopped receiving financial aid. The school went into crisis mode; the president was replaced, and a Faculty Council stepped up to partially fill the governance vacuum. But these actions were insufficient. The Department of Education still has not released over $2 million of tuition (in the form of student loans), and without that money there was no realistic hope of reviving the school. At the end of February, WASC announced that it was revoking accreditation.

It has been instructive to watch the collapse of an institution, knowing that—as the global economy implodes over the next few months and years—something similar will be happening on a much wider scale to banks, businesses, and cities nearly everywhere. Clearly, while New College ran on idealism, money was the necessary enabler. As long as it flowed, things got done—after a fashion. When the checks stopped coming, staff and faculty soldiered on loyally for many weeks, but most had to leave to get paying jobs. For the world as a whole, both money and energy are prime enablers, and both are about to get scarce. When resources dissipate, people tend to show the best and worst of themselves. At New College, I’ve seen mostly the best, with many faculty and staff volunteering their time to help students finish up or get their transcripts.

I wish everyone well as they find their way to new employment.

More About Post Carbon Institute

Soon after the publication of The Party’s Over in 2003, I received an invitation from Julian Darley and Celine Rich to come to Vancouver and speak at a conference they were organizing (Bill Rees was another invited speaker). Though small in scale, this was to be the first Peak Oil conference in North America; it was soon followed by twelve other Post Carbon conferences in four countries, including one at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C..

Julian was schooled in environmental sociology and had been a consultant for the World Resources Institute; Celine had a background with cultural development projects. That year they formed Post Carbon Institute (www.postcarbon.org).

For the first few years, I was on the board of the organization, and in more recent years have been a Fellow.

In February 2007 Post Carbon Institute moved its headquarters from Vancouver, BC to Sebastopol, just a few miles from where I live in Santa Rosa.

Since 2003, the organization has grown to become a respectable non-profit with over a dozen employees and a million-dollar annual budget. Its programs include Global Public Media (www.globalpublicmedia.com), the Oil Depletion Protocol (www.oildepletionprotocol.org), the Energy Farms Network (www.energyfarms.net), the Relocalization Network (www.relocalize.net), Post Carbon Cities (www.postcarboncities.net), a Fellows program, and now Solar Car Share, which boasts a growing fleet of electric vehicles.

A related for-profit company, Post Carbon Inc., funnels its profits to the non-profit; its divisions include Post Carbon Press, which has released its first book (Post Carbon Cities, by Daniel Lerch); and Post Carbon Books (www.postcarbonbooks.com), which now handles my online book sales and publishes MuseLetter.

The organization’s objective is extremely broad in scope and scale—in Julian Darley’s words, "to get society off fossil fuels fast" by offering research and demonstrations in fields as diverse as agriculture, urban planning, grass-roots organizing, and public policy. Post Carbon Institute operates as a think tank (its list of Fellows includes Julian Darley, David Fridley, Richard Douthwaite, Colin Campbell, William Rees, Dave Hughes, and James Howard Kunstler), but it is also action-oriented, offering support to dozens of affiliated local groups scattered around the world. Any one of these areas of effort would be plenty to bite off for most NGOs. But with so little time and so much needing to be done in order for society as a whole to navigate a survivable transition to a non-hydrocarbon economy, it wouldn’t help matters much if one of the very few organizations with a holistic view of that transition were to focus on only one project area.

Post Carbon Institute is now firmly rooted in Sonoma County, but its mission and operations are global in scope.

As Senior Fellow, my role in the organization is many faceted. I am still writing and speaking on the usual topics, but now instead of attending faculty meetings and teaching students at New College, I attend meetings at the Post Carbon offices in Sebastopol, help with strategic planning, and help focus and integrate our vital programs.

This year I have lectures planned in the UK as well as many regions of the US and Canada, and will be finishing up my new book, The Great Coal Rush for Post Carbon Press. The lecture series I developed during my decade at New College will be captured on video later this year for DVD release, also by Post Carbon Press.

Meanwhile, the gardens at Janet’s and my home in Santa Rosa continue to mature, with expectation of record harvests this year.