The capital future begins now
On the Road to Transition: Two books for the journey. Gerri's book review of Transition Handbook and Abundance and Depletion
The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Self-Reliance
By: Rob Hopkins
Price: $24.95
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front
By: Sharon Astyk
Price: $18.95
Many books on climate change and peak oil are tech-heavy tomes whose tone is so severe and forbidding that they induce “post-petroleum stress disorder” in readers – the scary perception that deprivation and misery stalk our future and only armed survivalists will prevail.
But two new books on the topic offer other, more optimistic possibilities to confronting the triple crises of declining fossil fuel supplies, unpredictable climate patterns, and widespread economic shock.
The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Self-Reliance and Depletion by Rob Hopkins and Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front by Sharon Astyk both squarely address the urgent challenge modern societies face: how to dramatically reduce our energy dependence by establishing community resilience, strengthening local economies and ramping up “homestead” food production. Although the books differ in their approaches, they reinforce and complement each other in powerful ways. Together the books offer a comprehensive, practical and pro-active approach to facing a vastly altered future.
Sharon Astyk’s special contribution is her ability to translate the technical, abstract concept of energy depletion into the down-to-earth, daily details of household life—in the living room, kitchen and backyard. An English literature graduate student-turned-farmer and the mother of four children, her observations are eminently practical, and reflect lived experience. (It is worth noting that Astyk is, so far, the only woman author who has published widely on the implications of peak oil, both in this book and through her brilliant and far-ranging blog, www.sharonastyk.com).
For her, the household assumes primacy as the center of production, conservation, and activism. The “Home Front” allusion of the book’s subtitle hearkens back to World War II, when Victory gardens, developed out of local women’s garden clubs from decades earlier, eventually produced almost 40 percent of American food. As she writes, “In time of war, governments acknowledge what they otherwise deny in market economies—that our ordinary human actions have a powerful political and social context.”
She poses the immediate concrete questions that a responsible parent in an energy-scarce future would ask:
Where do we go from here? How will these (conditions) affect me and my family? How will people in the neighborhood get water? Who has yard space to grow food? How will you check on the elderly and disabled? Where will the kids go to school if the buses stop running?
Not that Astyk relegates herself to the “mommy ghetto” wherein female authors’ concerns are limited to the domestic scene; on the contrary, she brings a sophisticated and subtle analysis to a range of post-Peak Oil issues. In particular, her exploration of the informal economy – the in-kind, barter, work sharing and other kinds of “value” exchange outside of the market economy –underlines the increasing importance this model will assume in our lives as the consumer society (a byproduct of cheap energy) withers. Frugality, recycling, and repairing are values we must discover anew but, as she points out, “we all have to address how to be less rich, but still have security, stability, pleasure and comfort,” to nurture ways to get the things we need not that are not traded on the stock market. A “dividend” is that as more people practice and attain more self-sufficiency, their power to affect change increases and, just maybe, that of the corporations may lessen.
Astyk’s realistic, often witty, descriptions of neighborhood and family dynamics inform a wise understanding of what it really takes to build community. And she affirms that none of us can be secure in isolation. Individual and familial efforts are important, but the sheer scale of problems we face on a national and global level also requires a larger, organized community response.
The “how to” details of creating of resilient, self-reliance communities is the particular strength of The Transition Handbook. The genius of the Transition concept is that is provides the “missing link” that bonds hopeful good intentions with concrete, achievable goals –goals that are rooted in community realities and anchored by the calendar.
As expressed in the foreword, “Forces are converging very fast that make whether we choose to retain and enhance resilience…much more than just a philosophical discussion…The move towards more localized energy-efficient and productive living arrangements is not a choice; it is an inevitable direction for humanity.”
The town of Kinsale in Ireland was one of the first to start a deliberate transition in this direction. In 2004, Handbook author Rob Hopkins –a local teacher – assigned his university students the task of planning how the town could transition to a lower-energy future. By canvassing their neighbors and researching local institutions, the students –and in due time, the wider community -- constructed a year-by-year plan to begin to “localize” food, energy, education, transportation, economic resources, and more. This “Energy Descent Plan” as described in the Handbook, “sets out a vision of a powered-down, resilient, relocalized future, and then backcasts, in a series of practical steps, creating a map for getting from here to there.”
Four key transition concepts are reflected throughout the Handbook:
-Life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and it is better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise
-Our communities have lost the resilience to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil
-We (that is, ordinary citizens) have to act collectively, and we have to act now
-Generating and harnessing collective wisdom can lead to choices that increase stability, creativity, and sustainability
If The Transition Handbook has a limitation, it is that it will appeal most immediately to those who know something about the topic and will not be deterred by some of the (necessary) scientific and technical explanations of why energy descent is crucial. This is perhaps unavoidable; relatively few people have been exposed to the transition concept due to the paucity of reporting in mainstream media.
Nevertheless, the transition concept is spreading rapidly. Kinsdale was the first of dozens of towns in Britain that have adopted “Transition Initiatives.” Numerous U.S. cities, including Washington DC, are replicating local transitions.
The Handbook lays out the step-by-step process for Transition initiatives, with milestones, activities, questionnaires, surveys and processes that need to be in place. It offers a number of useful tools for organizing and publicizing initiatives and integrating initiatives with local government. Both the Transition Handbook and Depletion and Abundance also offer full, well-researched references and resources—books, videos, websites, and documents --many of them free and downloadable via the Internet.
Beyond the “nut and bolts,” the Handbook offers a philosophical vision – one that may offer inspiration in the hard times ahead:
“While peak oil and climate change are undeniably profoundly challenging, also inherent within them is the potential for an economic, cultural and social renaissance likes of which we have never seen. We will see a flourishing of local businesses, local skills and solutions, and a flowering on ingenuity and creativity...Emerging at the other end, we will not be the same as we were; we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled and ultimately wiser.”
As we enter the early stages of the End of Cheap Oil, we are indeed fortunate to have these two books to provide both personal and communal roadmaps to a sustainable and more satisfying future.
(This review appeared with alterations at the website of Potter’s House (www.pottershousedc.org), whose bookstore sells both books.)
By: Rob Hopkins
Price: $24.95
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front
By: Sharon Astyk
Price: $18.95
Many books on climate change and peak oil are tech-heavy tomes whose tone is so severe and forbidding that they induce “post-petroleum stress disorder” in readers – the scary perception that deprivation and misery stalk our future and only armed survivalists will prevail.
But two new books on the topic offer other, more optimistic possibilities to confronting the triple crises of declining fossil fuel supplies, unpredictable climate patterns, and widespread economic shock.
The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Self-Reliance and Depletion by Rob Hopkins and Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front by Sharon Astyk both squarely address the urgent challenge modern societies face: how to dramatically reduce our energy dependence by establishing community resilience, strengthening local economies and ramping up “homestead” food production. Although the books differ in their approaches, they reinforce and complement each other in powerful ways. Together the books offer a comprehensive, practical and pro-active approach to facing a vastly altered future.
Sharon Astyk’s special contribution is her ability to translate the technical, abstract concept of energy depletion into the down-to-earth, daily details of household life—in the living room, kitchen and backyard. An English literature graduate student-turned-farmer and the mother of four children, her observations are eminently practical, and reflect lived experience. (It is worth noting that Astyk is, so far, the only woman author who has published widely on the implications of peak oil, both in this book and through her brilliant and far-ranging blog, www.sharonastyk.com).
For her, the household assumes primacy as the center of production, conservation, and activism. The “Home Front” allusion of the book’s subtitle hearkens back to World War II, when Victory gardens, developed out of local women’s garden clubs from decades earlier, eventually produced almost 40 percent of American food. As she writes, “In time of war, governments acknowledge what they otherwise deny in market economies—that our ordinary human actions have a powerful political and social context.”
She poses the immediate concrete questions that a responsible parent in an energy-scarce future would ask:
Where do we go from here? How will these (conditions) affect me and my family? How will people in the neighborhood get water? Who has yard space to grow food? How will you check on the elderly and disabled? Where will the kids go to school if the buses stop running?
Not that Astyk relegates herself to the “mommy ghetto” wherein female authors’ concerns are limited to the domestic scene; on the contrary, she brings a sophisticated and subtle analysis to a range of post-Peak Oil issues. In particular, her exploration of the informal economy – the in-kind, barter, work sharing and other kinds of “value” exchange outside of the market economy –underlines the increasing importance this model will assume in our lives as the consumer society (a byproduct of cheap energy) withers. Frugality, recycling, and repairing are values we must discover anew but, as she points out, “we all have to address how to be less rich, but still have security, stability, pleasure and comfort,” to nurture ways to get the things we need not that are not traded on the stock market. A “dividend” is that as more people practice and attain more self-sufficiency, their power to affect change increases and, just maybe, that of the corporations may lessen.
Astyk’s realistic, often witty, descriptions of neighborhood and family dynamics inform a wise understanding of what it really takes to build community. And she affirms that none of us can be secure in isolation. Individual and familial efforts are important, but the sheer scale of problems we face on a national and global level also requires a larger, organized community response.
The “how to” details of creating of resilient, self-reliance communities is the particular strength of The Transition Handbook. The genius of the Transition concept is that is provides the “missing link” that bonds hopeful good intentions with concrete, achievable goals –goals that are rooted in community realities and anchored by the calendar.
As expressed in the foreword, “Forces are converging very fast that make whether we choose to retain and enhance resilience…much more than just a philosophical discussion…The move towards more localized energy-efficient and productive living arrangements is not a choice; it is an inevitable direction for humanity.”
The town of Kinsale in Ireland was one of the first to start a deliberate transition in this direction. In 2004, Handbook author Rob Hopkins –a local teacher – assigned his university students the task of planning how the town could transition to a lower-energy future. By canvassing their neighbors and researching local institutions, the students –and in due time, the wider community -- constructed a year-by-year plan to begin to “localize” food, energy, education, transportation, economic resources, and more. This “Energy Descent Plan” as described in the Handbook, “sets out a vision of a powered-down, resilient, relocalized future, and then backcasts, in a series of practical steps, creating a map for getting from here to there.”
Four key transition concepts are reflected throughout the Handbook:
-Life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and it is better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise
-Our communities have lost the resilience to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil
-We (that is, ordinary citizens) have to act collectively, and we have to act now
-Generating and harnessing collective wisdom can lead to choices that increase stability, creativity, and sustainability
If The Transition Handbook has a limitation, it is that it will appeal most immediately to those who know something about the topic and will not be deterred by some of the (necessary) scientific and technical explanations of why energy descent is crucial. This is perhaps unavoidable; relatively few people have been exposed to the transition concept due to the paucity of reporting in mainstream media.
Nevertheless, the transition concept is spreading rapidly. Kinsdale was the first of dozens of towns in Britain that have adopted “Transition Initiatives.” Numerous U.S. cities, including Washington DC, are replicating local transitions.
The Handbook lays out the step-by-step process for Transition initiatives, with milestones, activities, questionnaires, surveys and processes that need to be in place. It offers a number of useful tools for organizing and publicizing initiatives and integrating initiatives with local government. Both the Transition Handbook and Depletion and Abundance also offer full, well-researched references and resources—books, videos, websites, and documents --many of them free and downloadable via the Internet.
Beyond the “nut and bolts,” the Handbook offers a philosophical vision – one that may offer inspiration in the hard times ahead:
“While peak oil and climate change are undeniably profoundly challenging, also inherent within them is the potential for an economic, cultural and social renaissance likes of which we have never seen. We will see a flourishing of local businesses, local skills and solutions, and a flowering on ingenuity and creativity...Emerging at the other end, we will not be the same as we were; we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled and ultimately wiser.”
As we enter the early stages of the End of Cheap Oil, we are indeed fortunate to have these two books to provide both personal and communal roadmaps to a sustainable and more satisfying future.
(This review appeared with alterations at the website of Potter’s House (www.pottershousedc.org), whose bookstore sells both books.)
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Comment by ishi on March 13, 2009 at 8:40am -
one comment on the transition theme----i have only looked at some of the articles on transition web sites, such as the primers, principles, etc.
two things i did like was the idea that 'we are not going to re-invent the wheel' and 'we are not going to try to take over existing groups'.
However, my impression from a couple of transition meetings is that they are in some ways, or for some people, reinventing the wheel. I would say, even in this review, the idea that the technical aspects of reducing energy use (and the reasons why that should be done) are somehow abstruse, and need to be broken down for the average person, i think may not be all that or neccesarily true. that is actually an empirical and interesting question----exactly what does the 'average person' know, or groups of people.
of course, some aspects of those phenomena are very abstruse technical and scientific questions, some discussed for the layperson on realclimate.org (e.g. are computer models of climate change correct?) and at grist magazine (also on-line, especially articles by gar lipow---e.g. exactly what particular solar technology is most useful (small diffuse collectors on houses, or huge concentrating collectors placed in the desert west)?) but many of the basics are just that, basic. I likely am not representative and follow these issues closely and have a science degree (and don't watch TV, etc.) but many of these things are so widely discussed, even in newspapers and on some talk shows, that if people don't know them it seems to me they must be oblivious. But I guess that is so----most people work full time, and I guess listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Reality TV and sports and chat on the cell phone.
also, peak oil is an idea that has been around for years (i have old scientific americans from the 1970's which discussed it, by King Hubbert, who basically predicted peak oil even before then).
Also, there are many methods promoted for organizing (whether in business schools, 'nonviolent communications' sessions, consensus group and conflict resolution processes, alinsky's 'rules for radicals', etc.) so that whether there is anything new in the methods promoted i think could be researched, or if instead it is just a repackaging under the Transition model brand name. In addition, one can ask whether that recipe is the best one, or if may have some advantages for some situations, but not others.
Selling the transition book can appear like selling a college text book---you can make a whole lot of money if you can get everyone to buy your brand of calculus or econ101. But sometimes, its essentially plagiarism.
(Some people choose social or political groups the way they choose religions---they just accept the first 'holy book' they are given as the truth and path, and ignore all the rest as either not existing or second rate. And they give all their allegiance to their particular sect. This approach is responsible i think for many current problems; in fact this is a psychological mind set or 'character' which is also in need of 'transition' ).
So, to me it sometimes appears this group is doing what Al Gore did with his movie---repackaging a set of ideas for mass consumption. In some ways that is fine and useful, but other times it can look like what people are doing is simply jumping on a bandwagon and essentially introducing a 'copycat' product for the emerging environmental market (which is now flooded with highly redundant books, magazines, and web sites). It may be politically that that is the way to go, since Gore did apparently reach alot of people (as did Michael Moore with his films). But other times it looks like everyone is really competing for the next best seller, in the way there are millions of copycat music bands. Of course it may be good if the transition model somehow becomes the next 'beatles', and really gets it right, and creates change. But it may be just a diversion from real change, with time wasted making money selling books and for trainings. Or maybe a combination---some real transitions, along with creating some wealthy superstar transition trainers who themselves are part of what needs transition.
I remember one promoted idea was that ecolocity become the web site everyone in the dc area visits every day. That doesn't seem to be the right idea, yet. How do you know there are some other good web sites, or eventually some other ones? There are already umbrella type web sites. If your Transition idea and web site are good, then maybe people will come to them. But to post alot of reprints and links to green web sites is reinventing the wheel, and if you reinvent a wheel i see no reason why your wheel (even if labeled transition) should be the one everyone uses.
I am familiar with some of the web sites in DC that are umbrellas, and my view is every single one has strengths and weaknesses, which means the people who run them basically are fairly biased, so they list what they want other people to think is important, and don't list other sites which they would prefer people not know about. (This is like religion---if an idea exists which is against our one true faith (say evolution, or galileo) then you try to suppress it.)
So I am a bit skeptical. In some ways I am out of touch with the 'masses', and so an Al Gore packaging type job may be useful (McEcology). But it can be innefficient (I haven't seen Gore's movie and don't really plan to, since I know the stuff basically). Many times I have gone to groups where the leaders dominate them, and proceed to explain things like 'peak oil' when I may know more about the subject and for longer than them. Its exceedingly condecending. Other people experience the same feeling, often on a range of different topics. Sometimes its better to just ask people what they know, rather than take their time to run them through their elementary school curriculum again, and pretend that you are explaining something to them. And while Gore's approach may be somewhat effective one will have to see; it may have been possibly more important simply for making him alot of money (he now has a green investment fund i hear), and also, perhaps if people were serious about climate change/energy then there are better things to do than make and watch movies. (Movies sometimes make life appear to operate like Hollywood, which may not be true.)
I will say my own view of the issue of whether things need to be broken down for the masses using easy to read books and movies, and using 'proven organizing strategies' is that actually we should be into 'prevention' by making critical thinking and taking an interest in the world at large as much a part of the daily ritual as sleeping and eating. "Turn off the TV and cell phone". Also, the political process encourges this at present, since people think if they watch the presidential debate then they know the issues, and if they vote then the leaders will take care of all the problems, so they are free to hang out till next time. I am not much of an activist partly because sometimes it seems not really a good deal to work hard to improve the world for people who basically prefer to remain ignorant. Maybe some hard times would force them to pitch in and think about and help solve problems.
And second the idea that 'we are not invading and taking over other groups' I am not sure will be seen that way by existing groups. Having an Umbrella group with a big theme actually creates a kind of hierarchy, so if you go somewhere and try to bring people into the transition network, then they may feel like you are either attempting to control them, or that you are using them to validate your own group's existence.
also some existing groups even if compatible with the transition basic goals, may not ever want to be in the network. I notice the Transition group promotes using UNDHR principles in all groups to keep out various intolerant supremacists or seperatists. That I think may be ok; though I personally would just use some very generic set of principle---such as used by colleges to say they don't discriminate----
ie 'if you are racist, sexist, homophobic, a religious fundamentalist or political dogmatist who wants to impose your agenda, dont show up, you are not welcome here" .
In fact the Green Party's 10 key values i think are not bad, though they could be reduced to 4, or even 2 or 1 i think. The UNDHR looks a bit prolix.
Alot of people actually have some questions about the UNDHR because from my glance it means you basically have to endorse current political processes (citizenship---which is actually controversial in DC where there are alot of undocumented people), courts, judges, politicians, voting processes, etc. Also, the UNDHR is unenforcable, so practically useless.
I think it would be interesting to discuss whether local, informal groups (ie not political parties or corpiorations) should use UNHDR or something more generic. Also, I am not sure from an ecological view whether the focus should be on humans only but possibly be on life itself, and maybe nonlife too. My view of the declaration is in fact it is as vague as the US constitution (which can be interpreted to mean at different times segregation is or isn't ok, abortion is or isn't, gay rights exist or don't ----and i call that vague). There are huge discussions of rights existing but they mostly seem to be an academic industry; alot of rights people simply try to define for themselves on the ground.
(when i was younger i used to use my version of the golden rule, which was
''if you f-k with me, i'll f-k with you'. )
maybe each transition town can have its own version of the UNDHR or golden rule.
I do wonder whether the 'network' structure can avoid the problem of hierarchy; their are actually quite a few studies on this kind of question. The Transition theme is a good one basically (deal with the entire system) so it is a correct (to me) umbrella notion, but as can be seen even with the question of paying for trainers from the umbrella transition group, issues of power and purpose (just making money ?) do arise.
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