The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience
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- ISBN13: 9781900322188
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Product Description
We live in an oil-dependent world, arriving at this level of dependency in a very fleeting space of time by treating petroleum as if it were in infinite supply. Most of us avoid thinking about what happens when oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes yet to be can have a positive outcome. These changes can lead to the rebirth of local communities that will grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and erect their own houses using local materials. They can also encourage the development of local currencies to keep money in the local area.
There are now over 30 “transition towns” in the UK, Australia and New Zealand with more joining as the thought takes off. They provide valuable experience and lessons-learned for persons of us on this side of the Atlantic. With small proactive thinking at the governmental level, communities are taking matters into their own hands and acting locally. If your town is not a transition town, this upbeat guide offers you the tools for starting the process.
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I have watched this movement with interest. I am sad to see them gradually subsuming what was once a messy, redundant, robust movement about peak oil and climate change in to a abstractedly “new agey” imagination driven regime which supports “Official” Transition Towns, grant writing ( they want a piece of the $), political engagement, and expensive trainings ($200 a pop). Despite that the book does not contain a single original excellent thought ( but a plethora of original terrible ones), it has attracted some of the best minds in the movement. I am hopeful that it can mature into something meaningful, but they are all just too busy congratulating themselves.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Rob Hopkins initiated the Transition Town Movement in a student project at the Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland. His thoughts of dealing with the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil at local levels first took root in Totnes, in western England in 2005. The movement currently has member communities in growing numbers of countries worldwide. (Guelph, Ontario, Canada where I live has a fledgling group. Click here to see list of Transition towns.)
Governments around the world are doing a poor job of sinking oil use and carbon emissions. The Transition Town Movement is exploring, developing and promoting new ways to deal with these problems at local levels. Every person can make meaningful contributions towards these ends.
Transition Initiatives are based on four key assumptions:
1) That life with dramatically lower energy consumption in inevitable, and that it’s better to plot for it than to be taken by surprise.
2) That our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil.
3) That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now.
4) That by unleashing the collective genius of persons around us to creatively and proactively design our energy descent, we can erect ways of living that are more connected, more enriching and that admit the biological limits of our planet. (p. 134)
Hopkins’ plot has been spreading rapidly – not only due to the immanence of potential tipping points beyond which our world could be toast – but also because of his positive attitude and his open-finished, visionary approaches.
Hopkins demonstrates the positive attitude that infuses a lot of the planet-healing literature and initiatives. This is a very vital contribution of the Transition Towns Movement. Quoting (p. 94-5) from Tom Atlee:
I’ve ongoing viewing both optimism and pessimism as spectator sports, as forms of disengagement masquerading as involvement. Both optimism and pessimism trick me into judging life and betting on the odds, rather than diving into life with my whole self, with my full co-creative energy. I reflect the emerging crises call us to transcend such fake end-games like optimism and pessimism. I reflect they call us to act like a mentally healthy person who has just learned they have heart disease: We can use each dire scenario as a stimulant for reaching more deeply into life and co-making positive change.
And so I’ve come to conclude that all the predictions – both excellent and terrible – tell us absolutely nothing about what is possible. Trends and events only tell to what is probable. Probabilities are abstractions. Possibilities are the stuff of life, visions to act upon, doors to walk through. Pessimism and optimism are both distractions from living life fully.
And (p. 98) from Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth Anderson:
Today as we are besieged by planetary problems, the risk is that we will deal with them in a pessimistic and unproductive style… Transfixed by an image of our own future decline, we could really bring it about. A positive vision of the future, according to writer and philosopher David Spangler, `challenges the culture to dare, to be open to change, and to accept a spirit of creativity that cold alter its very structure.
Hopkins’ approach invites people to come together in their town or neighborhood to brainstorm thoughts and suggestions for initiating and building local initiatives within the Transition Town model. Many of the suggestions that have been gleaned from Transition Town meetings are wonderfully practical and of immediate benefits to business owners who are unde various financial pressures. For instance:
Oil Vulnerability Auditing (OVA). In essence, it is a method for auditing the various processes a business uses, and where it utilizes oil, whether directly as fuel, as lubricants, in transportation, processing, packaging and so on. It allows the person conducting the Audit to erect up an accurate picture of where oil is used, and then to explore, by pushing up the fee of that oil, where the business’s vulnerabilities lie. At $[...]a barrel? $[...]? $[...] a barrel? Which parts of the business’s operations become unviable first? Is it the degree of dependence on transportation for the goods that they sell, prompting them to explore more local sourcing, or is it the energy intensiveness of their processing?
OVA is a risk-assessment tool. It looks to the bottom line, and requires no allegiance to the peak oil/climate change opinion. (p. 194)
Visions for far-reaching changes are encouraged, with development of timelines which provide goals that promote imaginative initiatives to make them possible.
For instance, Hopkins suggests the following Healthcare visioning with a target date of 2030:
The closure of local hospitals in favour of centralised ones – so rampant twenty years ago – has been reversed, and local healthcare centres are now not just about treating illness but promoting health in many diverse ways. They have forged partnerships with local schools, promoting food growing and familiarizing young people with the whole food cycle from seed to salad. The wellbeing of the individual is seen as inseparable from the health of the community. Human biology is now a compulsory school theme, and has expanded to include nutrition and basic herbalism.
About half of the medicines prescribed by doctors are now locally sourced, with local farmers growing certain key medicinal plants which are processed in local laboratories. Local chemists also now make over 50% of the medicines they sell on the premises. Doctors are able to prescribe a range of complementary treatments, as well as involvement in local community gardens, and access to affordable excellent food. The growth in access to meaningful work, the rebuilding of social cohesion and an emerging common sense of purpose, has resulted in fewer stress-related illnesses and cases of depression. Conventional and complementary practitioners are seen very much as two sides of the same coin, and the concept of promoting health rather than just treating disease has lead to a range of innovative measures.
As a result of people’s moving away from being sedentary patrons to apt more physically active producer/patrons, there has been an increase in musculo-skeletal problems. Doctors are now able to issue prescriptions for, for example, Alexander technique sessions. It has become more commonplace, as in China, to see free Tai Chi sessions in local parks in the morning. Equipment has also enabled certain tests and observations to take place online in the uncomplaining’s own home, what is known as `tele-medicine’. (p. 109-10)
Hopkins’ book is very highly recommended for anyone concerned with global heating and its consequences.
References:
Tom Atlee, `Crisis Fatigue and the Co-creation of Positive Possibilities’, Co-Intelligence Institute, [...]
Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth Anderson (2000), The Cultural Creatives: how 50 million people are changing the world, Three Rivers Press.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Highly readable. The best treatment I’ve seen of Peak Oil, Global Warming, and what you, your family tree, and your community can do about it, to date.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This handbook is appealing in concept, and potentially very useful overall, but it suffers from much of the beginning being wasted on restating peak oil and environmentalist opinion.
Presumably anyone interested in a Transition Handbook would either agree with these points already, or have another strong opinion about them that the shallow treatment would not modify, so it’s unclear what the point of these are. They slow down the introduction of the actual suggestions and transition program a fantastic deal.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
We face the collapse of our fossil fuel based global economy. There is no longer any question this will take place, and that it will take place soon, within our lifetime (5-20 years or less). This means our lives will change radically, and soon. These claims are no longer exaggerations or scare tactics, they are the extreme truths of our extreme times.
To the best of my knowledge, this book is the only one that not only acknowledges this fact but provides a clearly-laid plot to erect new and better lives through this transition from our central oil, gas and coal economy to smaller local community self reliant economies.
It includes tips on how to manage the emotional and psychological hurdles we’ll face, as well as how to erect a locally resilient community organization that plays well with local politics and with additional similar organizations. It is a friendly book, cheerful even. The end game for the Transition Model, after all, is not just survival, not just resilience, not just the development of alternatives to isolated and oil-dependent suburban lives, but something much better than we have now: lives with relations and communications and resource sharing with our neighbors.
The bottom line is, Change is Coming. We have no choice about that. Our lives will be turned upside down. The question is, will we choose to manage that change and turn it into something healthy and fun and pleased, or will we and our grandchildren perish or be forced to live miserable and miserable lives, disconnected from each additional and the rest of the world? This book gives us a map so we can do it right. Get it. Start now. You have precious small time and very much indeed to do.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5