David Reid is an engineer from Scotland living in Seattle who became active in the peak oil awareness movement. The more he learned about the implications of dwindling energy capability for industrial society and the consumer economy, the more he might have despaired or continue to talk and talk about the crisis until there was nothing more to say.

At least that's the way it usually works: one monitors the deteriorating world situation and tries to anticipate the future, and -- for the adventurous or the paranoid -- maybe relocate. One tries to be hopeful.

But Dave believed in an adventurous, positive future, so he took the bull by the horns. He bought a sailboat and followed up on a promising-  sounding idea: a network for sail transport for the post petroleum world. In September, after attending the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula, he sailed with some friends to Seattle on his sloop the Whisper. It was laden with the organic-farm produce from a farm on the peninsula. With no engine's noisy growl or spewing of pollutants or greenhouse gases, the food was delivered in a timely manner to waiting customers across the Puget Sound.

Thus occurred the first practical, "official" and historic voyage for the Sail Transport Network (STN). After its inception in 2000, when oil prices were so low almost no one cared about alternatives to motorized trade, STN could not get beyond the initial organizing stage. In succeeding years there were a couple more false starts for the project. Such as, we put our energy and fundraising behind an old fishing schooner in Georgia, to no avail. We then spent a lot of energy trying to create a new organization and explore new approaches, over a year ago. We got caught in the doldrums and had to wait for a breakthrough. Meanwhile, people were steadily responding to our website SailTransportNetwork.org, emailing their ideas and questions from places as far away as New Zealand, Texas, and the British Isles.

The main breakthrough had been in 2006 when Boston-based author Dmitry Orlov wrote to Culture Change and offered a manuscript, "The New Age of Sail." The original ideas therein that we published constituted a breakthrough. We've been sailing along on a higher level ever since. In addition to Dave's voyages flying the STN burgee, we have software being written for a matchmaking web-based system for hooking up captains with passengers/crew and vice versa.

Orlov's brainchild, the system will enable people to participate far and wide and as simply as possible. Sail transport can be for just travel or for moving limited freight. You can be a wooden-boat purist and use natural sail fibers, or be a pragmatist and grab the nearest fiberglass boat. Anything goes. But as Dave says, true Sail Transport Network shipping ought not to involve cheating via auxiliary engines so as to minimize depending on the wind, just to save some time in order to compete with petroleum traders.