Imagine waking up on a refreshing summer morning in the Rockies, stepping out of your front door to pick up the newspaper, and finding this headline: ENORMOUS OIL FIELD DISCOVERED IN THE AMERICAN WEST.

Imagine also that this oil field promised to produce enough energy to substantially offset growing national demand, help prevent shortfalls in supply, and hold down prices for suppliers and consumers alike. And imagine further, if you can, that new technologies will enable us to tap into this vast energy reserve without leaving a trace on our spectacular Western landscape.

And then imagine that this resource is going to be developed in your own backyard.

But don’t panic.

This imagined news story is not a creation of pure imagination. An enormous, cheap, and clean energy reserve belong not to the imagination, but is cached all around us, ready for the taking.
In hundreds of places and practices, we can use less energy to achieve the same ends, whether it is in heating and lighting our homes, or transporting ourselves from home to work.

The energy that we don’t use adds up to the equivalent of the richest, most environmentally friendly oil field we can imagine. We don’t have to buy it from utilities or oil and gas companies; we can simply give it to ourselves as we conduct our lives with greater energy efficiency.

The Center of the American West’s most recent report, What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy Efficiency and Conservation: A Guide to a New Relationship, aims its appeal at the domains of reason, pride, and pleasure in the complicated minds of our species. We take to heart (literally!) the frequently used metaphor of “America’s love affair with fossil fuels,” urging the region and nation to move toward a new and happier relationship with efficiency and conservation.

The energy that we don’t use adds up to the equivalent of the richest, most environmentally friendly oil field we can imagine. ... we can simply give it to ourselves as we conduct our lives with greater energy efficiency.

While not a total solution to the nation’s energy challenges, greater energy efficiency and conservation is nonetheless a necessary component. If a substantial number of businesses and households adopted energy-smart practices, the amount of energy “harvested” in savings would have a significant positive effect on the national energy supply. Yet, the majority of Westerners have not yet begun to mine the opportunities presented by efficiency and conservation. This new report helps those Westerners take action.

Building on the success of our original energy report of 2003, this new publication is part of the Center’s ongoing mission to equip citizens in Colorado and around the West to make good and sustainable choices about the region we all call home.

This time around, we teamed up with the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP), a highly respected authority in this territory. With SWEEP’s help, we have assembled the most current information on efficiency and conservation into a lively, engaging and practical guide for individuals and businesses who want to save both energy and money.

Appearing at a time of surging public interest and vigorous legislative deliberation on energy policy, What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy Efficiency and Conservation can also serve as a guide, both practical and inspirational, for community leaders who must decide how best to manage our region’s energy resources.

Although fossil fuels, with their fantastic density of stored energy, have made it possible for modern Americans to take for granted an extraordinary level of material comfort, a careful budgeting of energy resources has been the rule for virtually all human history. For millennia, wood provided heat; human and animal muscle raised crops, constructed buildings and roads, transported goods and people, and did just about everything else that needed doing. In this traditional energy regime, the need to manage one’s resources carefully was a requirement of survival. Wasting energy was about the most self-destructive thing a person could do in agrarian society, and for everyone not fortunate enough to be among the elite classes of society, energy profligacy meant destitution and extinction.

In the Rocky Mountain West, a clear illustration of the necessity of energy efficiency can be found in nearly every settler’s story. Consider, for example, a day in the life of Kate and George Sly, homesteaders on Colorado’s Uncompahgre Plateau at the turn of the century. At 5:00 AM on a summer Monday morning, Kate Sly rose from her bed and did what she did every Monday – she cleaned the house. Heating water over a coal oven, she washed the clothes using a bar of yellow soap and a copper washboard. Items that needed ironing (and for Kate Sly that meant sheets, dishtowels, and men’s socks in addition to the usual shirts and dresses) were pressed beneath a sadiron, a bulky triangular contraption that earned its name from its propensity to burn the user. Once the wash was hung out, she would conclude her routine by mopping the floors with the soapy water from the boiler tubs. Somewhere in the midst of these labors, Kate also prepared breakfast on the coal oven for her young sons and her husband George. After breakfast, George headed off to his day’s work constructing the community water ditch. With only hand- and horse-powered tools and a rudimentary knowledge of engineering, it took the town’s small company of ditch diggers eight years to bring water fifteen miles over the rugged countryside. The opportunity to waste energy did not figure in their days.

Note that, with their coal-fired oven (and probably in other ways), Kate and George Sly were already participants in the Fossil Fuel Age. Perhaps they even stopped to reflect, from time to time, on how fortunate they were that they did not have to gather wood for heat. But the contrast of their ways with ours is breathtaking, and humbling. As individuals and as a society we have all benefited immensely from fossil fuels. As coal, oil and natural gas increasingly took the physical burden off of people like the Slys, these fossil fuels have contributed to a widespread rise in material standards of living and opened up opportunities unimagined by earlier generations. When we finally draft the epitaph for the Fossil Fuel Age, we would do well to remember that it was also – by no coincidence – the Age of Human Emancipation and the Age of Democracy.

Fortunately for us, the history of the West is well-stocked with hardy and inspirational folks like Kate and George Sly. The people of the past were not saints and not consistently heroic, but their example does offer us both a challenge and an inspiration. In their determination and persistence, we see demonstrated the character traits we will move us toward a post-fossil fuel age.

The Fossil Fuel Age is passing. The most expansive estimates foresee the limits of easily and inexpensively produced oil in our lifetimes. Greater energy efficiency and conservation is the bridge to our energy future. The good news of efficiency and conservation is that we need not await technological or engineering advances, but that those practices are already and individually available.

News about the shortage of oil refinery capacity and the industrialization of China can seem unrelated to our simple need, for instance, to drive our children to school.

The energy stored in fossil fuels is so compact and cheap, so available for conversion into food, heat, light, and transportation, that we use them nearly unconsciously. But therein lies the opportunity to bring a new awareness to our use of these resources, and the great opportunity to find ways of using less to achieve the same results.

Yes, the kids have to get to school, but what car will you use? Can you use a bike for other travel segments in your day? You must light your home, but will you use traditional incandescent bulbs or the energy-efficient compact fluorescents?

With good humor and clear-eyed prose, What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy Efficiency and Conservation offers down-to-earth recommendations and profiles of exemplary Western citizens and organizations.

Readers will find numerous ideas to help them keep them warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and justifiably proud of their own good conduct as they save energy and money.

Most of the current discussion about energy production and consumption is, frankly, grim. Concerns about our energy supply complicate the nation’s international relations; we hear daily about global warming caused by fossil fuels; and prices at the pump are on an upward climb.

The message of our report is, however, overwhelmingly positive. Individual actions do matter and do add up to significant societal change. We need not rely on some hypothetical corps of engineers and scientists to save the day. The ability to act resides with each of us. And that’s the best outcome we can imagine from this report: that it will leave people feeling that their day-to-day actions can connect directly and consequentially to the building of a better West.
Here are some excerpts:

Energy Tips in Seventeen Syllables

We are keenly aware that lists can get tedious, and that the creative packaging of information can often reach a deeper part of the memory off limits to such relentless catalogs of good advice (and it is good advice).

Clearly, the literary genre known as “lists of energy-savings tips” has not yet reached the transcendent levels of some of the literate world’s most celebrated forms. Yet, with such a great deal of our future well-being resting upon it, there is no reason for such worthy material to remain confined to bulleted lists.

In the world of poetry, the haiku form is the very model of efficiency. What better format for presenting the artistic side of energy efficiency and conservation?

Live in an old house?
Insulate the attic first.
Just don’t live up there.

Appliance shopping?
Insist on Energy Star.
Spend savings on beer.

In Praise of Clotheslines

Whether you subscribe to the wooden slip-on, spring action, or modern plastic variety, chances are you share something in common with a vast and diverse community that appreciates the importance of a good clothespin in the art of drying clothes on a line.

The elegance of that straight line stretched across your backyard or between apartment buildings inspires you to let you pants dance in the wind and turns your sheets, kitchen towels, and underwear into an art installation that Christo might applaud. And you deserve the highest praises for your efforts, defying subdivision covenants and seeing through the empty promises of laundry products that claim to make your shirt “clothesline fresh.”

We would present you with a medal, but we know that snuggling your nose into a crisp, cool pillowcase fresh off the clothesline as you slip dreamily to sleep is reward enough!

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Initiative

Increasing home size generally leads to more energy consumption for heating and cooling, adds space for more "hardware" to consume more energy. But there is nothing in the Western way of life that requires us to continue on the trajectory of bigger homes and more stuff.

The Center of the American West announces an incentive: The (Comparatively Little House on the Prairie (or Desert or
Mountain) letter of commendation, sent to the Western family
who could have built a large, sprawling house, which would
have required a lot of energy to heat in the winter and cool in the
summer, but who chose instead to build a modest, comfortable,
efficiently heated (Comparatively) Little House.

Send your story and a photo of your comparatively little house to us at info@centerwest.org.

While saving energy should be a primary motivefor this family, their larger goal would be happiness. When two or three or four people attempt to live in spaces that seem to be the equivalent of Grand Central Station, rattling around a giant house and endlessly returning to the room they just left to pick up items they misplaced and left behind, the cause of domestic happiness isnot necessarily served.

Humans are sociable creatures, and there is evidence that Pleasure thrives in conditions of snugness and withers in sprawl and isolation.

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Center of the American West. Jason Hanson is a researcher at the Center and part of the report team. The story of Kate and George Sly was recounted by their granddaughter, Kathleen Wares, in The Visionaries: First and Second Generation Pioneers of the Pinon, Ute, and Nucla Areas (compiled by Marie Templeton and published in Nucla, Colorado, by the Rimrocker Historical Society in 1998, pages 102-7).