Rob Hopkins

Rethinking Transition as a Pattern Language: an introduction

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Yesterday I posted a document which contained the first rough attempt at sketching out a new way of communicating Transition, using Christopher Alexander’s ‘pattern language’ approach. Over the coming weeks and months I will be blogging more about this, but in advance of the 2010 Transition Network conference (only a week to go!), I thought it might be helpful to give some more background on this. What is a ‘pattern language’ and why might it be a better way of communicating Transition? Here are some initial thoughts.

Under pressure to block oil, a rush to dubious projects

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In response to the widening disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, government officials have approved a plan to intercept the oil by building a 45-mile sand berm. But scientists fear the project is a costly boondoggle that will inflict further environmental damage and do little to keep oil off the coast.

Peak oil means deepwater drilling is business as usual

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With Federal regulators approving a new Gulf of Mexico oil well and the Canadian government continuing to support deepwater drilling off its own coasts, it looks like business as usual for the oil industry despite media coverage of BP’s ongoing ecological disaster. Even if the media debate switches to the realities of peak oil and the need for renewable alternatives to declining fossil fuels – or indeed the lack of regulation of the oil industry in the US, which has been compared to the financial sector before the 2008 credit meltdown – it seems a fair bet that it won’t dull our appetite for oil.

Edible Landscaping: One Transition Step from Peak Oil

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We are told that in the US, the food on our table has traveled an average of 1500 miles and consumed 9 calories of energy for each food calorie on our plate. In a time when “oil prices are likely to be both higher and more volatile and where oil prices have the potential to destabilize economic, political and social activity”[1], we need a way to mitigate the near certain risks of much higher impending food costs.

Magical Thinking

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Tune into most online discussions of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the broader crisis of industrial civilization, and one thing you’re sure to hear is a flurry of abstract plans and rhetorical claims. What lies behind these is magical thinking — and if you’re going to practice magic, the Archdruid suggests, take the time to learn how to do it right.

The Hurricane Effect

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A hurricane is a dynamic system. Heat, air and water create pocket thunderstorms that come together and gather strength in a powerful spiral effect, destroying whatever isn’t prepared for it on land. A hurricane is gathering strength in the global economy, as a self-reinforcing spiral of debt, money and materials hurls toward us, with most of us obliviously lying on the beach in our bathing suits and shades on, assuming the calm weather will last indefinitely.

When You Should Not Adapt in Place

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Most of the people who take Adapting-In-Place, reasonably enough, are doing so because they intend to stay where they are or fairly nearby in the coming decades. They know that they may not be in the perfect place, but for a host of reasons – inability to sell a house, job or family commitments, love of place…you name it, they are going to stay. Or maybe it is the best possible place for them. But I do think it is important to begin the class with the assumption that everything is on the table.

What I Learned in the Charleston Jail

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US public education has been retreating into an ever-narrower curriculum for several decades, and the early casualties have been programs that involve kinesthetic experiences and the manipulation of materials: arts, physical education, music, and particularly crafts like woodworking, nutrition and food preparation, drafting, sewing, and metalworking.