A large painting of Don Quixote is displayed so promi­nently in M. King Hubbert's home that visitors are often taken aback. More than one has asked if there's a reason for its thrusting presence, other than artistic merit, their host long having been celebrated and castigated for his assaults on the scientifically sacrosanct.

Miriam Hubbert insists there is no connection; the painting was bought well before her husband became famous (and in the view of some infamous) for his solo sorties against ideas entrenched in universities, oil company exploration departments, and the US Geological Survey. Miriam bought the portrait before her hus­band ever set eyes on it. She worried he might not like it. The previous owner had returned it to the gallery because he couldn't stand to be in the same room with it. I was afraid King would have the same reaction. For­tunately, he feels as I do. (They both are so passionate about the portrait that Miriam long ago made her pro­prietary interest perfectly clear: I told him if he ever throws me out I'm taking it with me. It's mine.)

But unlike the knight of noble countenance, King Hubbert has lived to see many of his former opponents fall. The descent was more of a conversion to posi­tions he initially proposed decades ago and en route King collected a formidable number of major scientific honors. The award parade peaked in December 1981 when he received the Vetlesen Prize from Columbia University. The~Vetlesen is the highest honor in the earth sciences. It was doubly significant in Hubbert's case because he left Columbia in 1940 after many stormy years on the faculty in which he tried, with no success, to put physics into geophysics.

"My departure was by mutual consent," he recalls. "They had had enough of me and I had had enough of them."

This antipathy at the time was considered regrettable, something that might prevent a first-class mind from reaching appropriate heights. Today, said Barry Raleigh, director of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, in his introductory remarks at the Vetlesen ceremonies, Hubbert's intransigence is regarded by some as incomparably valuable. "Being outspokenly correct when the conventional wisdom would have it otherwise may not win popularity contests, but the vitality and intellectual integrity of men such as King Hubbert are rare and precious quali­ties. Recognition of King Hubbert marks our great grati­tude and humble respect for all that he has done for our science and for this country."

Currently Hubbert is probably the best known geo­physicist in the world to the general public because of his startling prediction, first made publicly in 1949, that the fossil fuel era would be of very short duration. A year later he challenged an optimistic forecast by famed petroleum geologist A. I. Levorsen at a meeting spon­sored by the United Nations on utilization and conservation of natural resources. He was on the front page of the New York Times the next day. He has been regularly cited in the mass media ever since.

He rose to the eminence of media stardom in the early 1970s after his forecast concerning an imminent zenith in US crude oil production had come true with pinpoint accuracy.

Hubbert's speculations about future availability of natural resources have dominated assessments of his scientific status since 1956, when he dramatically presented a pessimistic analysis to an unwelcoming audience, the production division, southern district, of the American Petroleum Institute. That speech, in which he accurately forecast that US crude oil production would peak in the early 1970s, ignited a controversy lasting almost 20 years.

But he also made significant contributions to earth science knowledge. Some of them were very successfully adapted to petroleum exploration and production, both before and after that famous speech. Before it he earned such prestigious honors as the Day Medal from the Geological Society of America, fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Subsequently he collaborated on important papers which dealt with the mechanics of hydraulic fracturing and overthrust faulting.

This body of work is greatly distinguished in its own right. It is worthy of elevating its author to the highest ranks of geophysical theorists. But in Hubbert's case the work is overwhelmed by the publicity and controversy sparked by his mathematical analysis, widely known as' "Hubbert's pimple" (because of the shape of a key graph), of resource availability. This has caused him to be routinely referred to as a petroleum geologist and damned as the ultimate doomsayer. He is not now, and rarely has been, either.

His long, still active working life has included extended periods with universities, the Shell Oil and Shell Development companies, and the USGS. But none of these jobs required him to spend much time doing day-to-day geophysical or geological work in the Oil Patch. "I have never made a real geological map," he says.

Hubbert didn't even have much contact with oil during his youth in Texas. He was born in 1903 and spent most of his boyhood on a farm in San Saba county in the central part of the state. "It's probably the only part of Texas where there isn't any oil," he says. His early education was erratic, the academic year varying from four to seven months depending on how that year's farm work was progressing. Hubbert completed two years at tiny Weatherford College, a junior college near his home, in 1923. He was determined to continue his studies outside of his home state because he "didn't like the colleges there and I was pretty thoroughly disgusted with the general intellectual level of the place."

His college president suggested he transfer to the University of Chicago. Hubbert applied and was accepted. "There was only one problem. I didn't have any money. In fact, I owed the Weatherford president $50 and the dean $50."

So he decided to work his way north, following the wheat harvest. He started with little more than the bare minimum, the clothes on his back. He didn't even own an overcoat. He stuck to his plan through Texas and Oklahoma, but made a strategic reappraisal when he reached the Kansas border. A series of 13-hour working days, "in which I became very familiar with radiant solar energy," followed by nights sleeping in haystacks, made Hubbert "swear I would never work the wheat fields again."

He had earned enough money to get as far as Kansas City so he went there in hopes of pleasanter working conditions. But he found nothing initially and "got down to my bottom dollar" before landing a job on a work gang with the Union Pacific Railroad. He was sent to Colorado where the railroad was replacing old track with rails made of heavier steel.
"That was heaven. It was out in the air, there were bunks to sleep in, the food was ample and the work light - only 10 hours a day. It was almost fun."

He reached Chicago in September and, incredibly, ran into a friend from Weatherford ". . . on the sidewalk in the middle of town the afternoon of the first day I was there." He went with his friend to a boarding house whose other lodgers were almost exclusively medical students. "I saw those boys through medical school and internship. I'm practically a doctor by proxy."
The remaining months of 1924 were a kaleidoscope of jobs - telephone installer, post office clerk, restaurant handyman. Hubbert ended up working 20 hours a day and "nearly broke my health." But he was able to start classwork on schedule.

The first of his confrontations with education authorities occurred a year later when Hubbert received a summons from "my dean, who reminded me that I had not yet declared what my major subject was to be." Hubbert replied that he didn't want to major in anything. He wanted an education. But university rules required a major, and Hubbert was ordered to pick one.
"I had a very wide spectrum of interests and I didn't want to be pinned down. I studied the college catalogue very carefully and found a little known provision for a joint major in geology and physics. That made it almost a necessity to minor in mathematics."

Hubbert thus became one of the most broadly educated earth scientists of his time. He quickly learned the value of this general background and became a passionate supporter of it as basic training for geophysicists. This crusade would ultimately lead to a confrontation with his academic peers at Columbia and a career shift from teaching to industrial research.

But before starting his "years of frustration" on the Columbia faculty, Hubbert spent a brief period in the field doing geophysical exploration. His first assignment was surveying elevation in the mammoth Amarillo oil field in the summer of 1926. He operated out of Borger, then primarily a single street between two rows of drilling rigs. It was the fringe of civilization, its atmosphere perfectly preserved in a tiny photograph Hubbert took of a crude building whose sign subtly announced: Beds 504: Baths 504: Free baths for regular roomers.

"That was probably the wildest boom town in the US at the time," Hubbert says. "There were hijackers all over the place. Once some bandits rounded up the crews of several rigs, herded them into a gulch, and robbed them en masse."

Hubbert worked for Amerada and its subsidiary, Geophysical Research Corporation, for two years. In 1927 he was on a GRC crew which did experimental work in reflection seismology. His party chief was Henry Salvatori, later to become one of the most important figures in mineral exploration as founder and president of Western Geophysical.

"I needed to break out of academic life and breathe some fresh air," Hubbert says of that time. But he promptly accepted when the University of Chicago offered him a teaching assistantship. He has been primarily a teacher ever since. Even during the years with Shell, the USGS, and today in nominal retirement, he spent and spends much time in the classroom.
Almost as soon as he returned to Chicago, Hubbert began campaigning against the traditional methods of teaching earth sciences. "It was constantly on my mind that nothing in the nature of geophysics was being taught. I decided I could teach it and I wound up with a job at Columbia. In 1931 I became instructor of geophysics."

He held the same rank when he left in 1940 with the geophysics curriculum little changed from the primitive one he had inherited. Ironically, while losing this academic battle, Hubbert was gaining wide recognition for theoretical work. Two of his most important papers, the 1937 Theory of Scale Models as Applied to the Study of Geologic Structure and the 1940 Theory of Ground-water Motion, were published during his Columbia years. The genesis of both was somewhat accidental. Hubbert had been asked to complete an unexpired term on a committee of the National Research Council. Scale models were mentioned at the meeting. "This was something I had been toying with since I was a kid. So I accepted a request to do a paper on it." The paper has often been called a classic. J. D. H. Donnay, in his remarks at the 1954 Day Medal presentation, said, "It once and for all solves the old paradox: how can the earth be, at the same time, strong as steel and soft as putty?"

The paper had two beneficial but unintended effects for Hubbert. It was accepted, after publication, as his doctoral dissertation. (Degrees seem to be of little importance to him. He only got his Masters in 1928 because he thought it would lead to a job at the University of Oklahoma. That didn't materialize and Hubbert never mapped out a formal plan to earn his doctorate, only haphazardly moving in that direction over the years.) Later a revised version of this paper, known as The Strength of the Earth, would have a positive impact at a critical time in his career with Shell.

The origins of the ground-water paper go back to the early 30s when Hubbert spent his summers doing earth-resistivity research for the Illinois Geological Survey and the USGS. His interest in ground-water behavior began in ‘31 when he investigated whether buried, water-filled gravel deposits could be located by electrical measurements of earth resistivity. This research never advanced much beyond idle curiosity and was not rekindled until 1936 when questions about water movement arose during a course Hubbert had been drafted to teach to mining and civil engineering students. He developed much of his ultimate theory at that time but attached little importance to the work, thinking it must be common knowledge among professional hydrologists.

However, at a scientific meeting in 1939, he learned through a friend that authoritative publications in the field were saying something which he knew was false - that water flowed from higher to lower pressure - and that a long established mathematical formula, known as Darcy's law, was often erroneously presented. (Darcy had bad luck not only with his law but with his name. During subsequent research, Hubbert discovered that Henry Darcy was frequently referred to as Henri d'Arcy. The offenders included some library catalogues. The argument over the correct spelling still occasionally arises. Hubbert settles it by keeping a copy of the title page of Darcy's original paper in his desk drawer.) "Only then did I realize that my previous work had not been a duplication of pre-existing knowledge."

In October 1939 he began to write what he anticipated
would be a 10-15 page paper. But new problems arose and the project's scope underwent geometric growth. The final manuscript was book length (160 printed pages), took several months to finish, and required that an issue of the Journal of Geology be printed in two parts.

The paper's immediate effect, Hubbert says, was to anger both the hydrologists and the petroleum engineers. "These guys hardly spoke to each other, but I managed to infuriate both camps. When I say furious, I mean furious. It was rather like having thrown rocks into two hornets' nests simultaneously."

The shock lasted for years. When Hubbert gave the paper in Europe shortly after World War II, one listener became very upset. "He said that in effect that I was stating that everything he had done in his whole career was wrong."
Hubbert adapted this work to petroleum exploration in the famous 1953 paper, Entrapment of Petroleum

Under Hydrodynamic Conditions. It won him selection by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists as a Distinguished Lecturer and eventually became part of the canon of petroleum geology, earning Hubbert the Lucas Medal of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers in 1971 and the William Smith Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1978.

The 1953 lecture series was the second of three Hubbert made for AAPG. The first came almost a decade earlier, shortly after he joined Shell. His parting from Columbia in 1940 had been unpleasant. Hubbert had been outspokenly unhappy about the little progress he had made in elevating geophysics to respectable status within the academic community.

"Subjects such as geophysics or geochemistry were regarded as borderline fields between geology and physics, or geology and chemistry, and involving but a minimum amount of each," he says. "The faculty treated geophysics as if it were a trade school. Its only purpose was to teach people how to use the instruments." Hubbert's frustrations were intensified because his
students "had absolutely no preparation for geophysics courses. The geology department was rigidly isolated from others such as physics or chemistry. Few geology students ever had a course in differential or integral calculus, or a college course in introductory physics. I felt that since the earth represents a composite of chemical, mechanical, thermal, gravitational, electrical, magnetic, nuclear, and biological phenomena, then a very broad education in basic sciences became a logical necessity for an earth scientist."

With some this is now the standard view, but it was heresy in the 30s. Hubbert lost, but ultimate victory was forthcoming. It arrived via a paper in 1938 and his leading role in a debate which by 1949 generated a GSA recommendation that the geology curriculum be reorganized to include mathematics, chemistry, and physics.

After leaving Columbia, Hubbett spent two years with the Board of Economic Warfare, then joined Shell in research. "Shell had a hard rule that they would not hire anyone over 40. 1 got in under the deadline by three weeks. I was kind of on probation that first year. They left me alone to work quietly in my own way and I had very little to show for it during the first few months. My professional life was in jeopardy."

He was rescued by a request for a revised version of his earlier scale models paper. Initially, Hubbert wasn't sure he could accept. "Shell was pretty cagey about letting their people publish, but I convinced them there was no oil smell about this project so they let me proceed." The new version, entitled The Strength of the Earth, brought Hubbert his first AAPG Distinguished Lectureship. "I don't think I ever had a greater success. That sort of put the Shell management on the spot. I was over the hump."

Years later he learned the paper had also created a positive behind-the-scenes effect. The late Wallace Pratt, one of the greatest names in petroleum geology, read it and another paper by a second Shell employee. "Pratt telephoned the president of Shell and told him he had two of the best men in the business on the Houston staff. Apparently, it made quite an impression."

By 1945, Hubbert's prestige with Shell had soared. "One day I was called in and told I was going to be No. 2 man in a new research and production laboratory. I helped design, build, staff, and run it for the next seven years. Within 10 years, this was an outstanding laboratory in the petroleum industry."

After his first decade at Shell, the company decided to relieve some of its senior scientists of assigned duties and give them free hands to research in any direction they wished. Hubbert was the first man chosen. His immediate reaction was similar to that of his college days when he had been ordered to select a major.

"I spent a lot of time thinking about a title," he says.

"It wasn't vanity. It was to avoid a professional strait jacket. The prevailing thinking was that you were an expert in something or other and that something was the only area in which your opinion should carry any weight. The one thing I didn't want was to be trapped. So finally I decided on Consultant, General Geology. That's broad enough to do nearly anything and not be accused of being out of your field."

During these years of independent research Hubbert made two outstanding contributions to structural geology. In 1957, in collaboration with David Willis, he reversed orthodox thinking by demonstrating that fluids under pressure in boreholes will fracture rock vertically rather than horizontally. This was later adapted into an oil production technique. Two years later, he collaborated with W. W. Rubey in solving a geological riddle at least a century old - overthrusting of huge sheets of rock. Conventional mechanics deemed this impossible because the rocks were not strong enough to absorb the amount of force needed to move tens of miles.
"Yet there they were. It had obviously happened. You could go look at them." Hubbert and Rubey claimed overthrusting was possible because the rocks were supported by fluids confined underneath them at high pressure. "There are still a lot of things we don't understand about overthrusting, but essentially the problem is solved as far as the mechanics go."

"Solved," according to Barry Raleigh, with typical Hubbert elan. "It is the clearest mark of Hubbert's work that the mechanical principles involved were laid down so clearly and elegantly," Raleigh said at the Vetlesen ceremonies. "From this paper alone have come explanations of the origins of deep-focus earthquakes, the basis for field experiments that succeeded in turning earthquakes on and off under precisely predictable conditions, the explanation for the formerly mysterious and sometimes disastrous earthquakes that attend upon the filling of reservoirs, and a wide variety of topics relating to the mechanical effects of fluids in rocks."

If this series of brilliant contributions to structural geology had been Hubbert's sole production, he would today be universally revered as an august man of science. But that fate, for better or worse, has eluded him because of his research into the future availability of the natural resources which modern society depends on. It is an area where few have ventured with honor
and where the credibility of many has been destroyed. Hubbert, as result, remains a controversial figure even though he has won as many formal honors as anyone in the earth sciences.

The mention of his name can still bring frowns at a dinner party. It is likely that his ultimate reputation will be tied to the accuracy of his forecasts, something that should be known before the end of the century. Hubbert seems willing to accept his fate. He calls this work "the most important I have done" and it has been a lifetime project. The subject has possessed him, with varying degrees of fervor, since he was in college.

"In the spring of 1926 I had to take a course called economic geology. I signed up for it with no enthusiasm whatever but it turned out to be the most revolutionary course I ever had. I remember looking in utter astonishment at a graph of coal production. Iron and coal were then the foundations of modern industry. I plotted how production and consumption fit a curve. I've been plotting them ever since, and watching."

D.F. Hewett's 1929 paper, Cycles in Metal Produc
tion, influenced Hubbert enormously. Hubbert has often called this "a truly great paper, one of the more important papers ever written by a member of the US Geological Survey." Hewett's basic conclusions on the evolution of a mineral-producing area are still cited today, indicating they have risen to the level of accepted dogma.

Hewett's work was also the immediate ancestor of "Hubbert's pimple" and related graphs. "The important thing I got from it was the answer to the question of how long can you keep going up? The answer is, the curves don't keep going up. They go over the hump and back to zero. This is the one future point on the curve that you definitely know and it greatly facilitates the mathematics. The area beneath the curve is graphically proportional to the amount of development. The area beneath the curve can't exceed your estimate. It's a very simple but very powerful method of analysis."

this is what made Hubbert's first forecasts different from his mostly ludicrous predecessors. Earlier speculators themselves made the estimates of how much crude oil remained to be discovered. They were usually grossly in error, such as the one that contended there was no oil in the entire state of Texas. These forecasts were nearly always proved glaringly wrong within a few years and led to the assumption that the world had considerable time left before it had to find a substitute for oil.

Hubbert, however, did not make the estimates he based his earliest graphs on. He took the figures then (and now, although there was an astronomical inflation in between) accepted by the petroleum industry and showed what those figures meant mathematically. Such
an interpretation was far different from the commonly held view.

in its first 100 years, the American oil industry found and burned 50-60 billion barrels of oil within the US borders (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). It was rather universally agreed, circa 1950, that 150-200 billion barrels was the total amount of recoverable crude in the US. Thus the widely held view was that there was enough oil to last for several generations. But Hubbert's curves gave a much different picture. They indicated American production would peak quickly, within a generation, and decline rapidly. If his analysis is accurate, 9O% of the recoverable crude in the Lower 48 will be gone before the turn of the century.

"I first worked this out in the middle 1930s but the first time I really wrote it down was for the AAAS convention in 1948," Hubbert says. "I was one of three speakers on an energy symposium. One spoke on solar energy and another (Eugene Widner, later a Nobel laureate) on nuclear energy. I had gotten a letter out of the blue asking me to talk about energy from fossil fuels. It was surprising and puzzling because I had no published writings in this field. Obviously, somebody knew something."

The man apparently in the know was James Gilluly of the USGS, a personal friend of Hubbert's with whom he had previously discussed his theories. "Apparently, he kept rejecting all the suggested speakers until they decided to invite me."

Hubbert was "swamped with mail, universally favorable" after the 1948 speech was printed a year later. But it was hardly noticed by the petroleum industry even though it was little different from the later, 1956 version which caused an uproar. Hubbert could be more specific in his analysis in 1956 because of additional data, and he predicted US crude production would peak in 10-15 years.

"That caused a jolt. Instead of palming the shortage off on our grandchildren, we found ourselves staring it right in the face. The first reaction was honest incredulity. Then the industry split. One side refused to accept the situation and started changing the figures. The other side, people like Shell, found they could not change the figures."

The estimate Hubbert used in 1956 - 150-200 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the US, was virtually the unanimous view of the industry. Just a month before his speech, Wallace Pratt had published the results of a survey of the 25 men he ranked the most knowledgeable in the business. The lowest estimate of that group was by Pratt himself, 145 billion barrels. The highest was 200 billion. Yet, within five years reserve estimates had grown as high as a staggering 590-billion barrel figure by the USGS. That astonishing number was treated with respect until the energy crisis of the 1970s forced a reassessment.

In 1961 Hubbert approached the problem from another angle. US President John Kennedy asked the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate the country's natural resources. Hubbert authored the NAS report and in it he abandoned the traditional method of estimating petroleum reserves - analyzing geologic formations - because it had yielded "a wide variety of estimates, most of which obviously had to be grossly wrong."

Hubbert based the estimates for his report on discoveries vs. the rate of exploration. His figure was 170 billion barrels, very close to the figures which became widely accepted a decade later. In this report Hubbert also dealt with natural gas supplies and he forecast they would peak in the mid 1970s. "Actually, they peaked in 1973, about three years earlier," Hubbert says.

The late Phillip Handler, former president of the NAS, called Hubbert's forecast "superbly accurate" but it was ignored by the Kennedy administration. "Its influence was as close to zero as possible," Hubbert says.

The government did what it often does in controversial matters - nothing. "Since these were predictions about the fairly near future, we just sat around and waited to see what would happen."

As it seems now, things so far are closely following Hubbert's predictions. Ironically, he may have been slightly optimistic. Production in recent years has fallen below the anticipated curve. "Unless this is an anomaly that quickly corrects itself, then total US production will not reach 170 billion barrels. Right now it's looking like about 163 billion," he says.

When the energy crisis developed in the 1970s, Hubbert was suddenly elevated to celebrity, almost cult-hero status. He was constantly sought by big-name journalists for their ritual, poorly backgrounded stories.

"Hubbert's pimple" was even featured in an advertising campaign. His fame throughout that decade grew so steadily that it now borders on mythical proportions. In November, 1982, an article in the New York Times called him "nearly legendary."

As with most myths, considerable fiction infiltrated the factual fabric. For instance, it is usually taken for granted that Hubbert was ostracized by fellow earth scientists, and the petroleum industry in general, because of his pessimism. Of course, there were (and are) those who vigorously disagreed but they did not deprive Hubbert of a prominent place in the subsequent scientific debate. He continued to work at Shell until mandatory retirement age. He then joined the USGS when it was endorsing reserve estimates three times higher than Hubbert was using. He was president of the GSA and for 16 years associate editor of the AAPG Bulletin after the 1956 uproar.

Major awards came at a steady rate, almost annually through the 70s. Hubbert has received honorary membership in many societies tied to the earth sciences, including the Society of Exploration Geophysicists in 1960. He first joined SEG in 1945 and quickly became an active member. He has served on the standing committee on geophysical education, the standing committee on publications, and as editor of Geophysics (1947-49).

Although regularly roasted by some oil executives, he has retained or made close ties with others. "They know just as well as I do that they're running out of oil," he says.
In addition to the awards previously cited, Hubbert received the Penrose Medal in 1973 (making him one of very few people to capture the GSA's two highest honors); a Rockefeller Public Service Award in 1978; and the Elliott Cresson Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1981.

Hubbert has had serious health problems for several years. Both his eyesight and hearing now give him problems. But neither the ailments nor the recent adulation have eroded his zest for intellectual combat. In recent years, he has assaulted a target - which he labels the culture of money - that is gigantic even by Hubbert standards. His thesis is that society is seriously handicapped because its two most important intellectual underpinnings, the science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance, are incompatible. A reasonable co-existence is possible when both are growing at approximately the same rate. That, Hubbert says, has been happening since the start of the industrial revolution but it is soon going to end because the amount the matter-energy system can grow is limited while money's growth is not.

"I was in New York in the 30s. I had a box seat at the depression," Hubbert says. "I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We're doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929-30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it's not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It's unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can't possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered."

The Hubberts relaxing in their spacious living room, their favorite part of a made-to-order retirement home.

That is obviously a scenario of catastrophe, a possibility Hubbert concedes. But it is not one he forecasts. The man known to many as a pessimist is, in this case, quite hopeful. In fact, he could be the ultimate utopian. We have, he says, the necessary technology. All we have to do is completely overhaul our culture and find an alternative to money.

"We are not starting from zero," he emphasizes. "We have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time."

A non-catastrophic solution is impossible, Hubbert feels, unless society is made stable. This means abandoning two axioms of our culture.. . the work ethic and the idea that growth is the normal state of affairs. Hubbert challenges the latter mathematically and concludes the exponential growth of the last two centuries is the opposite of the normal situation.

"It is an aberration. For most of human history, the population doubled only once every 32,000 years. Now it's down to 35 years. That is dangerous. No biologic population can double more than a few times without getting seriously out of bounds. I think the world is seriously overpopulated right now. There can be no possible solutions to the world's problems that do not involve stabilization of the world's population."

Hubbert's ideas about work are even more heretical. Work is becoming, he says, increasingly unimportant. He thinks it is conceivable that the future work week might be on the order of 10 hours. Indeed, because production will have to be limited by increasingly limited mineral resources, that might be inevitable. And that, Hubbert stresses, could be the foundation of an earthly paradise.

"Most employment now is merely pushing paper around," he says. "The actual work needed to keep a stable society running is a very small fraction of available manpower."

The key to making this cultural alteration is to come up with a limitless supply of cheap energy. Hubbert feels the answer is obvious - solar power - and he does not feel more technological breakthroughs are needed before it can be made universally available. His faith is not that of a kneejerk trendy but that of a doubter who did much studying before his conversion.

"Fifteen years ago I thought solar power was impractical because I thought nuclear power was the answer. But I spent some time on an advisory committee on waste disposal to the Atomic Energy Commission. After that, I began to be very, very skeptical because of the hazards. That's when I began to study solar power. I'm convinced we have the technology to handle it right now. We could make the transition in a matter of decades if we begin now.

"Solar power is limited by astronomic time but not in a human time frame. It's been there for billions of years and it will be going on for billions of years after we're gone. It also has another great advantage over conventional sources - once the system is in place it is permanent. All that's required to keep it going is routine maintenance."

Hubbert (center) and two party members doing field research in Illinois in the early 1930's.

Harnessing an infinite supply of cheap energy is the key to Hubbert's utopia because of the leisure time it would generate. "Look at the people who did remarkable things in the past. The Greeks. The English of a century ago. What did they have in common? They were highly educated and had a lot of leisure time. Of course, not everyone with that combination did remarkable things, but the people who did do remarkable things generally had that combination."
In both those cases, though, the opportunities for intellectual greatness were limited to very few. The intellectual life of Greece was made possible because it was a slave society. England's was supported by great masses who lived in terrible poverty. But if the sun is conquered, education and leisure could be universal. "It could result in the greatest intellectual renaissance of all time," Hubbert says.

And his nominees for the leadership role in making this cultural change? His earth science peers. Intellectual leadership is, he says, their natural function.

"I think earth sciences are about to enter a third phase. The first was about 1780-1880 when a handful of men like Hutton, Lyell, and Darwin changed the world. They gave us a geologic view of history instead of a Biblical view. In the second stage, from 1880 until now, earth scientists became utilitarian and concentrated mostly on the search for ores, metals and fossil fuels. They did very little thinking about the broader subjects. Now is the start of a third phase when the world is heading into intellectual turmoil. It needs guidance. The knowledge essential to competent intellectual leadership in this situation is preeminently geological - a knowledge of the earth's mineral and energy resources. The importance of any science, socially, is its effect on ~what people think and what they do. It is time earth scientists again become a major force in how people think rather than in how they live."

Although he is nearing 80, it is obvious Hubbert has not lost what is probably the most remarkable of his many gifts. He makes people, intelligent people who both admire and deplore his opinions, think hard about unpleasant things. If Hubbert is right about man being on the brink of an unparallelled crisis, then men are going to have to make fantastic decisions - species-wide decisions - imminently. This ability to make people, particularly the right people, think, will be of inestimable worth. It may be Hubbert's greatest legacy.