One of the witticisms I'll remember from soccer legend George Best goes something like this: "I spent my money on booze, women and gambling. The rest I just squandered." When I think of future civilizations looking back on this one, I can imagine them shaking their heads and saying: "All that oil they wasted on cars, wars and cheap toys. The rest they just squandered."

Today the average American has an unprecedented amount of energy at their fingertips. Each has the energy equivalent of dozens of slaves working for them. Take the unit of automobile power, the horsepower, for instance. Then think of having a stable of 100 horses in your garage and you begin to get a sense of just how profligate our energy use is.

And what do we have to show for it? An overweight, neurotic population, overworked and overstressed, that exports its waste products to the Third World and dumps its carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with wild abandon. Surely this is not what the founders had in mind.

Here's another example. Take the average American meal, grown with massive amounts of petrochemicals or in energy-intensive factory farms and then transported over one thousand miles. Now picture a glass of crude oil sitting by your meal. Now multiply that by 300 million, three times a day. We just don't burn oil, we eat it.

Domestic oil production peaked at about 10 million barrels a day in 1970. We now use about 20 million barrels, about 25 precent of the world's oil. Now geologists are telling us that one half of the world's supply of about two trillion barrels is essentially gone. (How much is that? Think of a sphere with a diameter as high as Mount Everest, now strip-mined to about half its height.) We have about ten years left of our own endowment and perhaps 40 years of world oil. And nothing in sight that could come close to the energy-rich, eminently transportable and transformable magical substance that is oil.

I don't believe in gods or goddesses (except as instruments of social control), but I can easily picture a George-Burns-like figure sitting at the Pearly Gates. "You came to Turtle America and took everything. A complete continent of rich forests and wildlife replete with enough oil, coal and minerals to jumpstart an industrial society that could have freed ordinary people from lives of toil. What did you do with it? You wasted and despoiled the place. Then exported that lifestyle around the globe with the help of a war machine that costs more than the armies of the rest of the world combined (with about 95 precent of the world's population). You expect to get in here? I don't think so."

Now that the cheap, easy oil (and natural gas) are gone and the major powers are realigning themselves for the scraps, we need to pause and reconsider the lifestyles we have become accustomed to. Do we really want to live this way? Is it making us happy? What do we tell our children when they struggle to find close-by, meaningful work in a world without cars? How will they heat their homes? Where will their food come from? What will be the legacy of the Age of Oil?

As I write this, Earth Day is just up ahead. Back in 1970, a growing movement of ordinary citizens transformed the political landscape by speaking up and asking questions about the future of the planet. The political system had to respond and, briefly, hope reigned. Their example of bottom-up, grassroots change remains our inspiration. No politician or political party will be coming to save the planet. It's up to us. To raise consciousness. To raise hell. To raise vegetables.

We still have enough oil left to build a renewable energy future. We can provide a comfortable, fulfilling life for everyone on the planet. We won't be driving cars or flying to Hawaii for vacations. But if we can take the power back from the corporations and build a people's movement of real democratic sustainability, we can still use the Second Half of the Age of Oil to fulfill Enlightenment dreams of a free people living in harmony with the Earth.

To these ends, we need to be developing a parallel sustainable economy, a Moral Economy, to use eco-philosopher Murray Bookchin's phrase. One that features fresh home-grown foods, locally-produced goods, and low-energy transportation. As if our future depends on it.

Soccer hero, George Best, died last year of alcohol-related causes. He had been given a second liver, something uncommon for alcoholics. But he still couldn't kick the habit. The question remains, can we kick ours?