Metro Jacksonville

QuoteWhy ‘Transition Culture’?

We live at a fascinating point in history. The convergence of challenges, most particularly global warming and peak oil, have brought us to a point where we are profoundly challenged to act. We are surrounded by what poet Gary Snyder, in his classic poem For the Children called “The rising hills, the slopes, of statistics” and by individuals telling us that this means the end, that we have gone too far, that it is inevitable that life as we know it will collapse catastrophically and very soon.

Yet, at the same time, something very powerful is stirring and is taking root the world over. People are choosing life and are manifesting that in their lives and their communities. People are starting to see peak oil as the Great Opportunity, the chance to build the world they always dreamt of. As one man said during a group discussion at the end of a screening of The End of Suburbia that I organised in Clonakilty, “we’ve just seen that the end of the Oil Age will bring about the collapse of industrial society … bring it on!”. The scale of the challenge is huge, and the obstacles are plenty, but there is an emerging energy to succeed, a sense of quickening and an exhilaration in talking and listening to each other once again, to visioning what we want and then rolling up our sleeves and starting to co-create it. This is not a denial of the scale of the challenges we face, rather a practical and instinctual response to it. In towns and cities all over the world people are asking each other “what can we do about this?”.

FTFWhat fascinates me, and what I plan to explore in this website, is the emerging culture that underpins this work. We are communities, a society, a world in transition, and to do that we need a culture of transition, but also the tools for manifesting it. The term ‘transition culture’ originated with Louise Rooney who formulated the term ‘Transition Design’ to best describe the work she and Catherine Dunne have undertaken in trying to drive the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan forward (above picture show, left to right, Louise Rooney, Catherine Dunne and myself). I love the term, and see the work I am doing as looking into a slightly different aspect of transitions, that of how one really roots it in a culture and creates a ‘culture of transition’. So, credit where credit’s due, collectively we see our various works as moving beyond ‘environmental’, ’sustainable’, ‘eco’ this or that. This is about transition to where we want to get to, how do we do it and what might it look like.

My background is in the teaching of permaculture for many years, giving people the tools to create more sustainable ways of living in their own gardens and families. Since I found out about peak oil, I have become fascinated by how we apply these principles to whole towns, whole settlements, and in particular, to how we design this transition in such a way that people will embrace it as a common journey, as a collective adventure, as something positive. So much peak oil and other environmental literature is doom-laden and information heavy, and most peoples’ reaction is to switch off. How can we design descent pathways which make people feel alive, positive and included in this process of societal transformation?

My own thoughts led me to develop an approach I call ‘Energy Descent Action Planning (EDAP)’, which works with a community to vision how they see their town 20 years in the future, in a positive way, and then backcast from then to now. It was developed in Kinsale, and continues to grow in other, safe, hands. I am now looking at the wider question of how the EDAP process can evolve and be refined, as well as drawing on the experience of other communities doing similar things. It is work I feel to be of the utmost importance. That is what I am exploring in my work, and it is that which I will strive to share with you on **TransitionCulture.org.**

luckly we have a while to deal with no oil. There is still a HUGE untapped oil supply in Russia.

I'll be to old to care at that point(assuming I make it that long)

We only need to make it 'til 2012.

We are a loooooonnnnnnng way from the end of oil.  Planting gardens is a nice idea, as is transition thinking, but we should  be thinking public policy instead of local initiative for real change.  By public policy I mean we should center our legislative efforts on PROVEN ideas that will work right now.  Incentivize nuclear power generation.  Utilize the oil we have in our own territory and encourage the use of domestic oil & gas through the use of export and import taxes.  Utilize that money to subsidize solar, wind, and other new generation sources as well as electric and other alternative power vehicles.  Bring back mass transit by making it CHEAP or FREE and utilizing it between major, permanent infrastructure (airports, sports complexes, convention centers, hospitals and colleges). 

DON'T-cap and trade, increase gas & oil tax on consumers, federalize electrical generation (or anything else for that matter), restrict domestic oil & gas production, allow lobbyist to dictate national energy policy.

Quote from: buckethead on November 28, 2009, 10:20:36 AM
We only need to make it 'til 2012.

I'v been constantly called the anti-christ this week esspically. So I think Im safe for 2012  :D

Quote from: NotNow on November 28, 2009, 11:06:45 AM

DON'T-cap and trade, increase gas & oil tax on consumers, federalize electrical generation (or anything else for that matter), restrict domestic oil & gas production, allow lobbyist to dictate national energy policy.

You mean like the petro-industry lobbyists?
There is a balance to be struck, between "drill baby drill" anywhere and everywhere, and doing nothing.

ESPECIALLY petro-industry lobbyist.  Drill Baby Drill is just a catch phrase.  Political mantra.  In reality, we should be drilling where we can Economically produce.  How hard is that?  Screw Martha's Vineyard, if we need to put a platform offshore, then let's do it.  If this is the emergency that we keep hearing it is, then we should allow for domestic production, right?  If it is only an emergency for certain political purposes, well then we know the answer to that too, don't we? 

Anyway, that is only a part of what OUR ELECTED LEADERS should be doing in energy IMHO.

There is an interesting discussion of the Dubai World debacle and the long term implications for the Dubai government and the future of financial markets as a result of peak oil combined with massive debt. The columnist calls the Dubai World failure the "canary in the mines" and points out that many of the great oil producing countries of the world have also amassed huge debts. Even if the situation is handled here, it will signal the beginning of changes in world markets.

http://www.theoildrum.com/ (http://www.theoildrum.com/)

Stephen - All the easy oil has been found in the US. We have Shale oil available in the western states, but the issue is that the water runoff to get to the oil, from what I have read, violates the EPA requirements, so the oil is there, we just cannot get to it easily, with current technologies. We have more natural gas than the Saudis have oil, but our economy is built around cheap oil, and until we change to use more CNG, we're screwed in the US.