Media & Communications

A Transition take on the Big Society (seeking comments and input)

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The Big Society is associated with localism, cuts in spending and de-regulation as opposed to community-led re-localisation. While we agree with the need to give more power to local government and local communities, how and why that is done is crucial. What we have done in Transition is to create a powerful story, around resilience and localisation, around unleashing the creative genius of communities to respond brilliantly to times of great challenge. At the end of this paper, we set out what such a story for the Big Society might look like.

Rethinking resilience

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The word resilience is going the way of sustainability – becoming so over-imbued with meaning that it becomes meaningless. I recently heard a presentation by somebody who was basing a whole research project around meanings of sustainability. It seems to me the time would have been better spent organising a Potato Day like the one we have coming up in Stroud.

The future’s further shores

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As peak oil moves toward the mainstream, some parts of the peak oil movement have begun to embrace respectability in order to engage political and economic institutions. This is essential, though it has its pitfalls; still, just as essential is a balancing movement in the other direction, toward a radically diverse exploration of options that could provide individuals and communities with critical tools as the crisis of industrial society deepens around us.

Coal, climate, and confusion

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Both of these outcomes (the peak and decline of coal production within a few decades, or 4°C of surface warming) would be an unmitigated disaster for human civilization. There’s no doubt about it. Running low on coal would be great for the climate, but would blow up human economies. If we have more coal than we know what to do with, we would blow-up the climate but the coal would help sustain human economies, absent a miraculous breakthrough in renewable energy.

A critical response to Michael Brownlee’s call for ‘Deep Transition’

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I read Michael Brownlee’s recent piece “The Evolution of Transition in the US”, with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of “Transition, nice idea, but it isn’t [ … ] enough”. So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn’t technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn’t politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of “premature triumphalism”, for Ted Trainer it isn’t sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the “Sacred” at the heart of what it does.

A shift in the burden of proof

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It is no small thing to shift the burden of proof. Yet that is what Lawn and Clarke, and their colleagues, have done in this remarkable study. The presumption in the “empty world” has been that growth in GDP is “economics” in the sense that it increases benefits faster than costs, as well as in the sense that this thing we call the economy is getting physically bigger. Lawn and Clarke have shown that in a large part of today’s “full world” growth in GDP often costs more than it is worth at the margin, and thus should be called “uneconomic” growth.

Reaping whirlwinds: Peak oil and climate change in the new political climate

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Political prognostication is a dangerous game, but one of the certainties of the latest election was that the US will not be enacting any significant federal climate legislation. If inaction is certain on climate change, it may be that all is not entirely hopeless if we reframe the terms to addressing our carbon problem. Peak-oil activism could accomplish many of the goals of climate activists. Unlike climate change, peak oil doesn’t carry the ideological associations with the left that climate change does. Could peak oil provide a framing narrative for political action to address both climate change and peak oil?