Dave Wheelock, a.k.a. The Pencil Warrior, asks why the leading presidential candidates never mention - nor are ever asked about - peak oil and the impending oil crisis that looms. He argues the topic is too important to be ignored and we do so at our own peril.

It turns out we in the United States, along with the rest of the industrialized world, have some things to learn from those we are supposed to despise. The recent histories of two communist countries - North Korea and Cuba – illustrate divergent responses to unavoidable crisis, with dramatically different results. Even as our own inaction leads us toward the more disastrous outcome, the path with the light at the end may still be open to us.

The December 20, 2007 edition of the Pencil Warrior presented a version of what could be in store for every person on our planet with the oncoming peaking and subsequent decline in world oil production. At the extreme end of a possible future, disruptions and even permanent scarcity of the basic necessities of life as we have known it are likely.

Modern Western civilization, as we have known it, is history. The lives we in the industrialized world have led since the advent of affordable and reliable energy, including natural gas but especially oil, is on the verge of being turned upside down through a combination of suffocation and privation. The scope of change in our lives will be so profound it is nearly impossible to grasp today, yet failure to act will only guarantee the worst.

An old expression asserts that sometimes the only way to get the attention of even the most beloved family mule is to whack him up alongside the head with a board. I’m extending the adage to the mule’s sire, the donkey, and adding a dose of tough love to arrive at a message for that political party we Greens usually consider the lesser of two evils.

From the White House, a Proclamation by the President of the United States of America, Oct. 31, 2007: “National American Indian Heritage Month is an opportunity to honor the many contributions of American Indians and Alaska Natives and to recognize the strong and living traditions of the first people to call our land home.”

Here we go again. It’s time, once again, to write or email the five-member Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and beg them not to lift limits on the number of broadcasting and newspaper outlets a corporation can control within a local market. As over two million U.S. citizens did in 2003. Time, once again, for the Pencil Warrior to help fill the void that still exists - in newspapers, magazines, on radio, television - on the negative effects of centralized big media on our communities and way of life. As I did in December of 2004 and again in October 2006.