It is with great sadness that I take this moment to mourn the passing of my friend Richard Heinberg and to celebrate his life and work. Richard passed away after a short illness a few days ago and will be much missed. He was a Fellow at Post Carbon Institute, and the author of many books as well as an accomplished public speaker and violinist. He was also one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I ever met, and such a vital inspiration for so much of my life and work.
First thing I knew about Richard’s work was his book The Party’s Over, his seminal book on peak oil, which a bunch of people I knew when I was living in Ireland devoured around the same time and which had a huge impact. I was teaching permaculture at that time at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland and my last year was deeply inspired by The Party’s Over. As the year came to a close we set about organising a conference called ‘Fuelling the Future’, pretty much entirely because we had heard that permaculture co-originator David Holmgren and Richard were both going to be in Ireland for an event in Dublin. We built an event, in a marquee in the college car park, around them. It was the first time they had met, staying together in a student’s B&B in the town. It was also the first time I met his wife Janet.
Richard’s talk at the conference was fantastic, and in the evening, in the amphitheatre my students had just completed building, Richard played his violin as part of the Open Mic evening we put on there (see photo above). I still meet people who talk about how amazing his playing was, what a perfect evening it was. It was at that event that we released ‘The Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan’, a project of my students that set out to design an intentional pathway away from dependence on oil and gas. Richard was thrilled by it, took lots of copies back to the US with him and his enthusiasm for the project was one of the things that gave us the confidence to think perhaps there was more to explore in this idea, one of the vital seeds of what later became the Transition movement.
In late 2006 he visited my new home in Totnes, where we had just started the Transition Town Totnes initiative, to teach on the ‘Life After Oil’ course at Schumacher College. His ability to present complex information in a digestible and accessible way, and his generosity to sit and discuss ideas with people, was beautiful to see. I did an interview with him for my Transition Culture blog, which you can find here. We shamelessly took advantage of his being in Totnes to ask him to do a public talk at the Civic Hall, which was absolutely rammed. An evening with electricity in the air and a pretty seminal moment in those early days of the Transition movement. We also travelled together to Stroud for a talk at the Subscription Rooms, and if my now rather skronky memory serves me right, he also spoke at the very first Transition movement gathering at Ruskin Mill.
The next time I met Richard was at Findhorn, for the 2007 Positive Energy conference, where I had the huge honour of being a presenter alongside Richard, Joanna Macy (are all our great sources of inspiration leaving the stage together?) and others. That was a remarkable, deep and intense event, where on arrival we were all told to scrap whatever presentations we had prepared and instead to just immerse ourselves in the event and to then create something in response to that. Richard’s talk at that event was a tour de force. You could have heard a pin drop. Again, it was such a joy to spend time with him, just hanging out, walks through the Findhorn gardens, impressed by his deep curiosity about so much in the world. I learnt so much from him.
His book Powerdown had a huge impact on the Transition movement, as did the next one The End of Growth. In 2013 he was back in Totnes to promote that, speaking again in the Civic Hall. Again we sat down for an interview which dived deep into some of the ideas in that new book. I remember how, in order to catch his plane home, he had to get a bus from the centre of Totnes at 2 am, and that the bus was cancelled with no notice, and my friend Chris very kindly got up in the middle of the night to drive him all the way to the airport, a beautiful taste for Richard of Totnes community support networks in action!
In 2013 I visited the US for a speaking tour there. One of my highlights was speaking at the Northern California Permaculture Gathering at the Real Goods site. Richard was there and we both gave talks and spent some time together at that beautiful event. Next day I spent the morning at Richard’s house in Santa Rosa, seeing Janet again, and doing an interview with Richard sitting in his beautiful permaculture garden. That interview started with me asking him “So Richard, it’s 10 years since The Party’s Over came out, which is certainly a book that turned my life upside down and the lives of many others, I suspect”. His reply was “I have a lot to answer for, I’m afraid…” He certainly did, in the very best of ways. He lit a fire beneath me that is still fuelling me.
My deepest love and condolences to Janet and to all Richard’s colleagues at Post Carbon, especially Asher Miller. There is a GoFundMe page to support Janet through this difficult time. Please show your support here.
