If humanity is to survive the threat posed by accumulating greenhouse gases, and the end of the age of oil, it will be because of a great conversion made to convert our economies, in a time frame similar to The Great Depression, to one that uses 20 percent of the fossil fuels currently consumed globally. Our descendants will look back upon this time as The Great Conversion.

So much of activist energy and resources is drained away in the battles to fight what's wrong with the plutocracy that is ravaging the lives of billions of people, and savagely ripping apart the very fabric of nature, that not nearly enough has been put to the task of strategically organizing to bring about the changes that must happen in the next decade because of the order of magnitude and urgency of the climate crisis and peak oil limitations. There is a climate crisis clock, even if we don't know what time it is. Nature's limits are set to a specific time and we either make enough of a change by that time or we fail completely. As with the Asian tsunami, it's not enough to run away from the ocean when the water retreats. If people don't get far enough away by the time the wave hits, then they die.

Imagine one day we wake to find the plutocracy has vanished; we own everything. Suddenly we have no resistance to moving as fast as we can toward the creation of Ecotopias, or to at least make enough changes in our economic infrastructure, fast enough, to beat the clock on peak oil and the climate crisis. We would start to have big pow-wows with the various sectors of our communities: people from labor, agriculture, health care, education, transportation, architects and planners. We would meet to develop plans, designs and prioritize resources for constructing bioregionally-integrated, sustainable, localized (as much as possible) economies and infrastructures needed to create post-fossil-fuel societies.

This list is for planning such conferences now.