Fin Keegan

Oil, particularly in the West, has become almost as necessary to our way of life as oxygen and water. It is quite the thought experiment to figure out how much we are dependant on the stuff–and what will happen when it starts to run out.

Peak Oil proponents hold that we have used around 50% of extractable oil and thus face a dwindling, increasingly expensive supply. (One proviso: OPEC do not reveal their reserve estimates but, as every driver knows, prices have been rising over recent years, indicating demand outstripping supply).

Cut out oil overnight and our social and commercial fabric would quickly collapse: supermarkets would be empty in a matter of days for example. But this will be a slower crisis and, if we are to overcome it, we need to act now.

One grassroots initiative that has taken off in recent years, particuarly in English-speaking countries, is called Transition Towns. You can learn more in an article I wrote for the Smarter Cities website recently:

Keegan – All Together Now: Transition Towns Rise in the US

Thanks to Paul McRandle, John-Paul Flintoff, Annie McCleary, Ben Brangwyn, and Trathen Heckman for their help. Flickr image by Roger Smith

My essay on three novels by the late Chilean novelist, Roberto Bolano, appears in the current issue of the Dublin Review of Books.

His protagonists are wanderers, usually bohemian, invariably troubled, following their distant star across oceans, into deserts, through the orbit of violence and evil or madness, then on into the depths of almost certain obscurity. They live, for the most part, in the contemporary world, consuming books and encountering friends and lovers, but their dedication to art seems anachronistic, more of a piece with the romantics, surrealists, or beat poets: these are not the kind of self-branding careerists to show up as writers in residence or guests on Start the Week. As with all great vocations, many are called but few are chosen: suicide, addiction and neurosis are often their lot but, along the way, they partake of a quest which, for Bolano, is the most interesting thing humans can do.

You can read the full text at the Dublin Review of Books.

Flickr image by rocketlass

Imagination…is the healthy child’s most precious possession, the bedrock of their ultimate identity as autonomous and well-adjusted adults.

Why then, one might ask, does society lay siege on imagination? For that is how things stand today.

To begin with, falsely believing abductions and child murders to be everyday dangers, we have put in a host of needless restrictions on children’s lives, preventing them as a result from experiencing much nature (or life indeed) beyond the bite-sized chunks dolloped out to them on screen or in museums.

We allow advertisers (even on RTE, to our shame) to exploit children by making them feel self-conscious for not having Object X or looking like Celebrity Y.

You can read the full text of this article I wrote for the Mayo News, by clicking the link below:

Keegan – The (Almost) Lost World [Mayo News]

Flickr image by …Tim

Such is the electric opulence of Las Vegas, my erstwhile home, that one can forget how vast quantities of power and water are required to keep the city in its customary orgasmic brilliance.

Enter the Colorado River–which kisses the southern edge of the Silver State and keeps Las Vegas alive.

Of course, long ago, when the southwestern states divvied up river resources, little did they imagine that a city of 2 million high-maintenance souls would emerge in the pitiless Desert cauldron of the Las Vegas Valley.

But emerge that city did, replete with mod cons and then some. And then along came Global Warming in the shape of an ongoing drought.

Add to that trenchant opposition to water extraction from rural counties…and you end up with the present situation: a regional water system under severe stress, as evidenced by the dramatic “bath ring” in Lake Mead pictured above.

You can read an article I just wrote for the NRDC’s Smarter Cities website on this topic, as well as listen to a portion of an interview I conducted with Pat Mulroy, the Las Vegan charged with meeting the city’s water needs, by clicking the link below:

Keegan – Ring of Dust (NRDC Smarter Cities)

Thanks to Pat Mulroy, Dr Robert Fielden, Robert Glennon, and Paul McRandle for their help on this article. Flick image by loop_oh.