enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

The Harlow family – Jill and John, who wheels Josie, 2, flanked by Madison, 9, and Molly, 6, with Spencer, 8, leading – cross Pine Street in South Portland on their way to Little League practice. They walk wherever they can and they’re selling one of their two vehicles to cut gas costs.

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THE SERIES

This is the last of five parts.

Jeff Keating is tired of spending money for gasoline to support his 25-mile round-trip commute between his home in Yarmouth and his job in Portland. So he's buying and moving to a Munjoy Hill fixer-upper, figuring that the gas savings alone will put $163 per month into his pocket.

Jill and John Harlow of South Portland already live fairly close to where they work. So they took a different step: They ditched their Chevy Suburban and became a one-car family.

"I'm sick of being held hostage by gas prices," Jill Harlow said. "There is no reason why we can't walk and do healthy things. We don't have to drive everywhere."

Observers from a variety of perspectives say that the Keating and Harlow households may be the leading edge of cultural shift that will have profound ramifications: If high oil prices are here to stay, a way of life will change.

For the past half-century, they say, cheap energy has fueled the migration of Maine's population outward from cities and villages and into the countryside. As energy becomes increasingly costly, the flow will reverse.

"We see people rethinking their commute, rethinking where they live, rethinking their distance to shopping," said Alan Caron, president of GrowSmart Maine. "This will have an extraordinary effect on where we live and where we shop."

It will take decades to play out, he said, as government, businesses and families make decisions after factoring the effect of costly energy.

It also will take time for people to make major changes to their way of life. Right now, most families appear focused on quick and relatively easy changes, such as adding insulation to an attic or getting an old wood stove out of storage.

Moreover, many people aren't sure whether the current high prices are the result of short-term supply-and-demand problem or something permanent. Such uncertainty fosters a hunker-down approach rather than a transformational one.

Still, with economic growth in China and India driving up worldwide demand for oil, many people believe that a fundamental change is occurring in the economics of energy, said former Gov. Angus King, who has been promoting wind energy as an alternative source of electricity.

Electricity makes up 10 percent of the average Maine family's annual energy bill, he said. Home heating oil accounts for 40 percent, and the rest is transportation.

"Conservation and additional electrical energy sources are important, but I don't think they are going to be enough, given the magnitude of the problem," he said. "The price explosion is just too severe."

King, Caron and others said the solutions will require more than high-tech gadgetry, such as geothermal heat pumps and solar panels.

It means changing behavior.

Some of the most significant changes, they say, will be familiar to anyone who grew up 1940s, when people lived closer to where they worked, most families owned only one car and public transit played a bigger role in daily life than it does today.

Before World War II, the vast majority of Americans lived in cities and villages.

Maine's historic towns and cities were developed before the automobile, said Christian McNeil, a Portland activist whose blog, rightsofway.blogspot.com, focuses on local transportation and land-use issues.

In Standish, his hometown, for example, the village of Steep Falls was established around a train station, which was the center of commerce, communication and transportation. McNeil said the automobile -- combined with government-funded highway construction projects and the plentiful supply of inexpensive gasoline -- has allowed for the emergence of low-density suburbs where the majority of Americans now live, places such as Standish today.

Those same factors have allowed trucks to overtake freight trains as the primary method for moving cargo around the nation, even though trucks are...