Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins: The transition handbook. From oil dependency to local resilience

Green Books limited, Totnes, UK, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-900322-18-8

A new movement is conquering the world. So called transition initiatives are spreading out from the UK, where it all started, and to places all around the globe. For historical [...]]]>

Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins: The transition handbook. From oil dependency to local resilience

Green Books limited, Totnes, UK, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-900322-18-8

A new movement is conquering the world. So called transition initiatives are spreading out from the UK, where it all started, and to places all around the globe. For historical reasons the original term «transition towns» are still used for these communities, but they do not need to be a town. They could just as well be a municipality, a village, a forest or an island. According to Wikipedia, the idea originated from Louise Rooney. But, I guess, most people who know the concept regard Rob Hopkins, who is the man who made the idea known to a larger audience, as the founder of the transition movement. This book of his is for everyone who wants to know what the transition initiative is all about.

He divides the book into three parts, called the head, the heart and the hands. This division is roughly a division into answering the three questions why, what and how. Why as in: «why has the transition movement been founded?» what as in: «what alternative does the transition movement offer people?» and how as in «how do the transition movement do the practical implementation of the transition?»

The first part is about what the author calls the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil. He elaborates the latter phenomenon the most, since this is something that is not commonly known to people. Peak oil is a term to describe when the world passes its all time maximum in oil production, an event that many people believe happens right now. The interesting thing is what this will do to the price of oil and the access to cheap fossil fuel, which is what powers almost all aspects of the economy of the modern world. Many people believe that we will do fine as long as we have oil left. The author argues that this is missing an important point. From the moment on, when we are over the top, fossil fuels will become more and more expensive, even prohibitively so for many activities that we have grown accustomed to regard as essential to our way of life. The author also describes how people often end up feeling helpless, depressed and overwhelmed by such information. And, I believe, a lot of readers will feel just that after finishing part 1 of this book. Luckily, the book does not end there.

The second part explains why life in a post oil economy does not need to be awful at all. Indeed, the author rather argues that a life in a post oil economy might even be a better life than life as we know it now. The transition movement tries to find out what was good about life in the pre cheap oil economy, and how we can rediscover the skills and know how that made life good back then. The thing that really got me interested in reading this book was the fact that the transition movement describes itself as a constructive movement motivated by a positive vision, using other tools than activism, protesting and lobbying, which are the traditional tools used by environmentalists. Being a movement that is for something rather than against. In the foreword to this book Richard Heinberg describes the transition movement as a collective action that looks more like a party than a protest march. It just so happens, that when we put together the first set of ideas for Green Life Innovators, we used many of the same basic principles, at that time being unaware of the existence of the transition movement, which, of course, makes it highly interesting coming across someone who has already proven that a positive, constructive, depoliticised approach can lead to success.

The third part of the books deals with the practical implementation of the transition initiative and the experiences the movement has made so far. The transition initiative is built around the principle of rebuilding local resilience. Local resilience means the ability of a local community to get life back on track after suffering a shock of some kind. The transition movement works towards achieving this through things like local food production instead of long supply lines and local and natural building materials instead of oil based products. They even experiment with local currency. In the British town of Totnes, which was the first transition town, many local businesses have agreed to accept the Totnes Pound as a means of payment.

Being a techie, I would have to add that the book also shows that the transition movement does not seem to include a strong focus on green tech in their work. I think that they should also ask the question: «What was not so good about life in the pre cheap oil economy, and what could be done to avoid that?» Because, though society has to go back to an economy that is not based on cheap oil, it does not mean that we have to do a complete rollback of everything to more or less exactly the way it was before. We do, after all, get to take all the knowledge we acquired on our way to the peak oil mountain top with us. Green tech is, in my opinion, something that can make life in a post oil economy more pleasant than it was in the pre oil economy. So, I would have to say that I hope that the transition movement will incorporate green technology more strongly into their models, so that when I read the 2018 edition of the transition handbook, it would also contain a chapter on this issue.

This should, however, not discourage any of you techies reading this from reading the 2008 edition of the book, because it is great food for thought. The same goes for the video clip included here, where the author himself talks about the transition initiative. The clip is almost 1 hour, but well worth the time watching.

External links

Transition Towns wiki

Rob Hopkins’ blog on transition culture

Transition Town Totnes

Wikipedia on transition towns

Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan

www.peakoil.net

YouTube : The end of suburbia

More Rob Hopkins videos on YouTubeFurther reading:

• Must see: Transition movement’s Rob Hopkins on TED-talks
• Book review : Here comes everybody
• Must see: The transition movement movie
• Welcome
• Must see: Richard Heinberg on our post carbon future

Clay Shirky: Here comes everybody, the power of organizing without organizations

The Penguin press, New York, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-59420-153-0

Among all the different things that inspired us to found Green Life Innovators as a web community driven organization, one source, one book, stands out as the very spark that started it [...]]]>

Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky: Here comes everybody, the power of organizing without organizations

The Penguin press, New York, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-153-0

Among all the different things that inspired us to found Green Life Innovators as a web community driven organization, one source, one book, stands out as the very spark that started it all. It was not a book in my rather large collection of science books, nor was it a book in my even larger collection of books on technology. It wasn’t even a book on environmental issues.

No, it was a book on social interaction and the modern day tools that makes it happen in a whole new way. It was Clay Shirky’s “Here comes Everybody”

Most people have notices that there are big changes going on in the world. Things like Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Delicious bookmarks, Flickr, The open source movement, flash mobs etc. change the way humans interact socially and productively. I believe that most people tend to follow the flow, without really thinking to much on what it is, that is really going on. That is where Mr. Shirky’s book comes in. Here is an author who has really thought it through, what it is that is going on, analysed it with great clarity and written a delightful book about it to share this knowledge with the rest of us.

The book is not about the technology as such, but rather about its effect on people. It argues a strong point that once a technology has gotten to mature long enough to have become woven into the fabric of society, that is when interesting social effects start to emerge.

The phenomena so elegantly described in this excellent book not only shape and change the way we as human beings do things together. They are also opening up a whole new world of opportunities. “What happened to the tasks that were too expensive to form a traditional organization to do in the past,” the author asks. The answer is that they were simply just never done. Mr. Shirky predicts that the next emerging step we will see now that “group forming has become ridiculously easy” is collective action , and he describes a few very interesting examples of the latter already at work. And that is really were our inspiration for “Green Tech the open source way” came from, because as Mr. Shirky puts it: “group action just got easier.”

See the author on YouTube

“Before we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now we can do big things for love” Clay Shirky

External links

Wikipedia article about Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky’s home page

The “Here comes everybody” blog

YouTube: Clay Shirky on Tedtalks

YouTube: Clay Shirky talks about the book

More Clay Shirky videos on YouTube

• Website review : TED Ideas worth spreading
• Book review : The Transition Handbook
• Welcome
• Techies, from heroes to nerds and back?
• Website review: World Community Grid