In Memoriam: Pat Murphy

Pat Murphy outside Antioch College at a Community Solutions conference
Photo Credit: John Morgan

Our former Executive Director and longtime friend of the organization, Eugene “Pat” Murphy, died on Oct. 1, 2021.

Pat was born in Missouri on Dec. 8, 1938. Educated as a computer scientist, he worked in the aerospace, energy and construction industries. In 2003, Pat and his wife, Faith Morgan, Arthur E. Morgan’s granddaughter, took the helm of Community Service, Inc., rebranding the nonprofit Community Solutions, and reorienting its work around the growing awareness that oil depletion and climate change would require a radical shift in society. Pat dubbed the preferred course of action “Plan C,” which stood for curtailment, conservation and community. He served as executive director from 2003–2010, and later as research director, until he retired in 2015. Pat and Faith went on to form a new nonprofit, Plan Curtail.

During his tenure, Community Solutions became a national and internationally known nonprofit at the forefront of conversations around peak oil, resource depletion and climate change. Pat helped organize seven national peak oil conferences, traveled widely to present, and helped co-produced and co-wrote the films, “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” (2006) and the “Passive House Revolution” (2013). He was the author of “Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change” (New Society, 2008), along with numerous books and reports critiquing mainstream approaches to sustainability. He helped establish and served on the Yellow Springs Energy Board, advising the village on energy-efficiency measures and low-carbon power sources.

At Community Solutions, Pat was a tireless researcher and a profound thinker and speaker. He took a methodical, analytical approach to issues, questioned conventional wisdom and always followed the numbers. A handwritten note hung in his office: “To measure is to know.” Yet Pat balanced his rational, technical side with a deeply felt understanding of the spirit of community and the values of a simpler, low-energy agrarian society, often drawing on his childhood experiences growing up in rural Missouri. Pat’s work was fueled by the desire to leave the world a better place for future generations.

In 2005, Pat designed a sustainable, energy-efficient community to model a new way of living in harmony with the land and one another. He named it Agraria and the organization worked toward building it in Yellow Springs. “Agraria will be a practical model for this small town renewal, including the revitalization of the many skills and traditions lost in the rush for industrial urbanization,” Pat wrote in a planning document.

Although the development never came to fruition, when the nonprofit purchased a 128-acre farm in 2017, Pat generously granted them use of the name Agraria. Today, the organization now known as Agraria continues to work toward Pat’s vision of restoring agrarian culture and knowledge while regenerating land and community.