My friend Cal is deeply involved in Peak Oil and consciousness groups, trying to raise awareness of the deeper forces behind the split you mention:

www.healthesplit.com/

He's spoken at some Peak Oil gatherings here in the SF Bay Area, and is trying to help people understand the collective consciousness issues at play... from a Jungian perspective.

I'm less worried about potential divergence post-peak than I am with educating people about community as a powerful tool for sustainability right now, both to increase post-peak surivability and to buy more time pre-peak through conservation/efficiency.

Graham Meltzer's book on Sustainable Communities demonstrated (through research) that people living in cohousing tend to live in half the space they did previously and consume fewer resources, not just initially (through sticks and bricks, efficient construction) but increasingly over time, as people get rid of extra cars, do more trip sharing, drive less because more resources are right there in the community, recycle/compost more because it only takes 1 enthusiast out of up to 50 to help the whole community get educated and operate more efficiently.

The challenge I see is that many intentional communities are rural because that's where land was cheap and agricultural self-sufficiency was apparently viable (it didn't always turn out to be practical). And with fuel costs post-peak, they'll be faced with significant intrastructural burdens related to transportation.

There are major forces at play, the challenge is predicting which of the unanticipated side effects will dominate.

Raines
cohousing.tribe.net
intentionalcommunity.tribe.net

Oakland: Organic urban farm blossoms in what used to be a blighted vacant lot

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

In the industrial concrete landscape of East Oakland, sandwiched between the roaring BART trains and the rumbling stream of traffic on International Boulevard, sits an unlikely earthen oasis where sun-kissed organic tomatoes ripen on vines, neat rows of two-story-high cornstalks and greens await harvest, and plump chickens pick at the ground, oblivious to the urban bustle surrounding them.

On 23rd Avenue in the Lower San Antonio neighborhood of the Fruitvale district, a stone's throw from Interstate 880, Sustaining Ourselves Locally is an urban farming project started two years ago by a small group of young gardeners and environmental educators committed to proving that fertile ground can be found in the least expected places.

While urban gardening projects are not unique to the Bay Area, SOL is among the few whose organizers actually live in the space they've created. The project's nine members share three apartments above a 5,000-square-foot yard stretching to International Boulevard. They have separate "day" jobs and volunteer their time to SOL, transforming the land from a largely abandoned dump site to a flourishing organic urban farm. There is also a large commercial storefront that the group has made into their kitchen, common area and event space for educational workshops, open houses and public events.