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Dark optmism: Jamais Cascio on The Transition Timeline
Jamais Cascio, Open the Future
Shaun Chamberlin has written a book that, in my view, absolutely needs to be read by anyone who follows this blog.
The Transtition Timeline: For a Local, Resilient Future combines a scenario-based look at how we as a global society can respond to the combination of global warming and peak oil, with a practical manual for building the kind of world that can successfully manage such a crisis.
I saw a late draft of the work, and Shaun asked me for my reaction. Here’s what I wrote, and I’m happy to see that it’s included in the book’s lengthy list of endorsements:
It’s been said that pessimism is a luxury of good times; in bad times, pessimism is a death sentence. But optimism is hard to maintain when facing the very real possibility of planetary catastrophe. What’s needed is a kind of hopeful realism — or, as Shaun Chamberlin puts it, a dark optimism.
In The Transition Timeline, Chamberlin offers his dark optimism in the form of a complex vision of what’s to come.
(10 April 2009)
Transition Towns and participatory problem solving
John Robb, Global Guerrillas
Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Towns movement and I have been working on methodologies by which communities can become resilient for about the same amount of time (since 2004-05, building on the earlier work of others). We have developed different approaches to the same goal and still need to find the time to share notes. His approach, informed by peak oil and climate change, is focused on a radical reduction in energy usage. In short, it’s a plan to achieve community “energy descent,” to provide a buffer against oil price spikes/shortages and reduce any contribution to climate catastrophe.
However, as I pointed out in my earlier post on the movement, the real value of the Transition Towns approach isn’t its emphasis on energy descent (which may neither be sufficient nor ultimately valuable for resilience), but rather its concisely crafted methodology for catalyzing community participation via a messy open source organizational process (which allows people to deviate from the “energy descent approach” if they desire to). This is exactly the conclusion Jon Mooallem, who wrote a long article for the New York Times on the Transition Towns movement in the US, reached.
(20 April 2009)
Do Worry. Be Happy.
Lisa Chase, Elle (magazine)
Get in fighting shape for the coming storms–psychologically, economically, and environmentally
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… What attracted me to Transition, as the movement is called, was the word resilience, with its implications of being skilled, being ready, being confident, and therefore being optimistic about The Day After Tomorrow. The word is all over Transition’s literature, all over its YouTube clips. It seemed such a superior word to green and sustainable and eco—once hot, now almost clichés, and subject to corruption by the market. But resilience, you can’t fake. A resilient person is who I want to be. And if I’m not inherently resilient, can I learn to be?
Transition was founded by Rob Hopkins, an adorable-looking English academic with jug ears and a growing mob of admirers. According to the foreword of Hopkins’ engaging new Transition Handbook, he has “found a way for people worried about an environmental collapse to invest their efforts in ongoing collective action that ends up looking more like a party than a protest march.”
(16 April 2009)
