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Rob Hopkins on “transition towns” and peak oil
Scott Carlson, Urbanite Baltimore
KEYNOTE: POWER PLAY
Sustainability expert Rob Hopkins talks about “transition towns” and explains how to brace ourselves for life without oil.
For someone who believes that world oil supplies are about to begin an inexorable decline, possibly dragging down civil society in the process, Rob Hopkins is a rather cheery fellow. Hopkins, a 40-year-old doctoral student at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, is the founder of the Transition movement, which encourages people to wean their neighborhoods, communities, and towns off oil and nudge them onto a path of self-sufficiency in an increasingly energy-scarce world. “The change we have seen over the past hundred years will be nothing compared with what we will see over the next twenty,” he says. But it’s not a dire warning; it’s an adventure. “This is an extraordinary time to be alive. I feel really fortunate to be around-it’s going to be a fascinating time in history.”
Hopkins was teaching permaculture design, or the design of sustainable human settlements, when he stumbled across the idea of “peak oil,” which holds that an irreversible decline in global oil production is imminent. That led him to create “Transition Towns”-among them the village of Totnes in southwestern England where he now lives. Hopkins and his colleagues have encouraged the planting of gardens and nut trees for local food sources, the establishment of gas-free transportation (including a rickshaw service), and the support of local businesses and local skilled labor. Totnes also has its own local, transition currency, the Totnes pound.
There are now about eighty official Transition Towns, mainly in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. Here in the United States, there are three, all recent converts to the cause: Boulder, Colorado; Sandpoint, Idaho; and Ketchum, Idaho.
(September 2008 issue)
Don’t be scared, be prepared
A review of Kathy Harrison’s “Just In Case”
Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
As we mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of a ravaged New Orleans and Gulf Coast and as the residents of those areas again wait breathlessly to see where the volatile Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna are headed, a review of Harrison’s third book, Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens is especially timely.
Kathy Harrison and her husband Bruce live in Western Massachusetts and have spent many years parenting hundreds of foster kids, and in fact, in 1996 were named by their state as Foster Parents of the Year. Kathy has devoted her life to caring for homeless, abused, and neglected children, and has written two other books before Just In Case entitled Another Place At The Table and One Small Boat. That’s why, unlike most preparedness books, this one is supremely family-oriented, born in the heart of an ordinary mom who simply cares about the safety and well being of her family.
As we mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of a ravaged New Orleans and Gulf Coast and as the residents of those areas again wait breathlessly to see where the volatile Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna are headed, a review of Harrison’s third book, Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens is especially timely.
Harrison notes that this book is not about long-term survival and emphasizes that her “objective with this book is to offer access to the kind of crisis information that will be helpful to ordinary families in extraordinary situations.” Therefore, she hasn’t offered directions for making shoes or clothing or hunting and skinning game animals for food. Consequently, her introduction asks some exceedingly practical but tough questions…
(28 August 2008)
The Limits of Volunteerism
Christopher J. Ryan, The Localizer
Most communities have a corps of volunteers who keep the wheels of local government moving or serve some noble cause for the destitute or forgotten. Efforts to enable innovative and new strategies like relocalization largely rely on these volunteers as there is no systemic call yet to compensate them. But until the various tasks and elements of relocalization can carve an economic niche and allow those who work to advance these concepts, I argue that this these efforts will not have the momentum and achieve the timely advances necessary to effectuate sufficient cultural change.
How have I come to this conclusion? I have observed through my involvement with several area Locals that for some, action was being hindered by available time. Most members had day jobs which absorbed most of their time and energy. Since it is becoming rarer to expect a 40 hour week where you can forget the office at 5:00 p.m., these people were working 50-60 hour weeks regularly. To have even nominal time and/or energy for volunteerism after this grind is indeed noble. Add to this the fact that these volunteers are split between at least two and more likely three or more volunteer gigs, you can deduce that it is difficult to set meeting dates and that it is hard to dedicate much time to projects or tasks.
Thus, as with any worthy cause, the only way to extend the impact that volunteers are making today is to create economic opportunities within the area of relocalization to allow those who are interested to work on these issues on a full-time basis. There might be some resistance to this idea, particularly where a relocalization effort is grounded in a grass roots, non-profit entity and any suggestion to derive a profit from some of these activities may sound crass and mercenary.
While I sympathize with these concerns, I believe it necessary to develop a suitable model within the range of relocalization efforts to legitimize a reasonable profit-driven sector that allows more energy and innovation to occur in support of the goals and ideals of this movement. I leave it to further discussion to recommend how this should be done but as a starting point, perhaps some guidelines could include a provision that any profit could not be sought or derived from one’s own community or neighborhood, depending on the level of the relocalization effort. This dichotomy could provide the separation necessary to maintain an ethical volunteerist niche while seeking sustenance (and derived knowledge for the volunteer group) in the process.
Finally, I would recommend that the relocalization community further develop the network of ideas, products, and services and where coordination and collaboration can be encouraged and enabled. This is another means to reduce the need to reinvent the wheel and make volunteer efforts more efficient. It can also bring people with similar ideas together which can enable partnerships and other collaborative projects to flourish.
(27 August 2008)
Author is an “Urban planner with over 25 years of experience in local government with expertise in sustainability most recently Director of Planning with small New England town; adjunct professor of planning at Antioch University; and PhD candidate in Environmental Studies.”
Beyond Voting: Guerrilla Gardeners, Outlaw Bicyclists & Pirate Programmers
Benjamin Dangl, Toward Freedom
This US election year an unprecedented number of voters will likely head to the polls to cast their ballots in an exercise that should take just a few minutes to complete. But what about the rest of the minutes left in the year? Author and activist Chris Carlsson has some suggestions for social change beyond voting in Nowtopia, a new book about modern day rebels who, in his words, “aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on-high but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old.”
Chris Carlsson is a long-time community organizer, writer and radical historian based in San Fransisco. He helped launch the Critical Mass monthly bike-ins, which now take place in five continents and over 300 cities, and was a founder of the dissident magazine, Processed World, a publication reporting on the “underside of the Information Age.” These experiences enrich his enjoyable and fascinating new book, Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today (AK Press, 2008).
A driving argument throughout the book is that nowtopians are more than their jobs or class, and are working outside of the capitalist economy to create “A social revolt against being reduced to ‘mere workers,’ to being trapped in the objectified and commodified status of labor power.” It is this movement that the dynamic book focuses on, telling stories from across the garden plots, bicycle parties and kitchen tables that play essential roles in creating utopia now. Though there are many more examples of community organizing and activist work that could ever fit into the pages of one book, Nowtopia presents compelling stories of activism that anyone can learn from.
In a chapter on vacant-lot gardeners Carlsson digs into the roots and legacies of community gardening.
(26 August 2008)
