Common Ground

Wedge issues divide people leading to a bifurcation in alliances or allegiances. Common ground brings people together. It didn't occur to me until fairly recently that common interests could have brought three big Peak Oil proponents together. First, Geology Professor Craig Bond Hatfield:

My second meeting with Dr. Hubbert came thirteen years later, in April 1969, at the annual meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in Dallas, Texas. We met on an elevator in the convention hotel, and I told him that I had heard his 1956 talk and asked him if he still thought that U.S. oil production was about to stop growing and start declining. He said it would start to decline within the year. We talked for maybe an hour sitting in the hotel lobby – mostly about fishing. He was an avid fisherman (fresh water lakes – not deep sea).

As a second bit of synchronicity, the publisher/editor of the most popular fresh-water fishing magazine of the 1970's and beyond, George Pazik, wrote extensively on Hubbert and tried to educate and warn his readers, shaming major media outlets of the time with his common sense insight:

Taking off on Hewett's earlier work, Hubbert used integral calculus to produce a curve that mathematically would illustrate the birth, middle years, and finally the death of an exhaustible resource, Fig. 1. Never mind the integral calculus part, this simple curve can be read by any grade school child.

Pazik himself interviewed Hubbert about Peak Oil, and no doubt shared fish tales, during the 1970's. This kind of shared encounter propagated to a fish-crazy teenager becoming aware of an altogether different subject and years later studying the integral calculus to death. All for the love of tossing a lure into the water.