ROB HOPKINS

I have been following with interest the discussions surrounding Alex Steffen’s piece at WorldChanging in which he critiques Transition. I am honoured that someone so widely respected as a writer on sustainability issues saw fit to engage in discussions around Transition, but, as a critique of Transition, it leaves a lot to be desired.

In July 2009, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband unveiled the government’s UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, a bold and powerful statement of intent for a low-carbon economy in the UK...There is, though, a key flaw in the document, which also appears in much of the wider societal thinking about climate change. This flaw is the attempt to address the issue of climate change without also addressing a second, equally important issue: that of resilience.

It’s been a fascinating few days. Early in the week, Nate Hagens and Sharon Astyk were suggesting that perhaps the term ‘peak oil’ has outlived its usefulness, given that we have almost certainly peaked, and that the peak oil movement needs to shift its focus. It echoed something I wrote a while ago, likening ASPO and the wider peak oil movement to a Loch Ness Monster Society, dedicated to establishing the existence of this fabled creature. They organise conferences, scientific searches of the loch, write papers and journals, and then one day, an entire, intact Loch Ness Monster washes up on the shore. Then what? They have no reason to exist any longer, their whole raison d’etre vanishes overnight.

September 17th sees the release of the first in a series of ‘how to’ books published under the imprint of ‘Transition Books’ (due soon, guides to money, working with local government and cities). Entitled ‘Local Food: how to make it happen in your community’ it is the work mainly of Tamzin Pinkerton (who was recently interviewed here at Transition Culture) with bits from me, and it is really quite brilliant.

After many months of Ed Milliband putting himself out there as a Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change that actually gets climate change, finally his big Plan, the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan was unveiled on Wednesday...

Sharon concludes: "All that matters is that the work gets done, as well as possible, that the floods are as small as we can make them, and that the suffering is as little as possible. That’s honestly all I care about." Indeed. That is the task to which we all dedicate ourselves, whatever we choose to call this work.

At the Transition Network conference, Richard Heinberg gave an online presentation looking at the concept of Emergency Planning for Communities ... For a while now, Richard and I have been discussing the tension between longer term planning for resilience and the more immediate and pressing responses demanded by sudden and rapid change. It is still an ongoing discussion, but ... What follows is the series of email exchanges we have had since late last year.

A fascinating update on how things are going in Japan.

Burnout is the elephant in the room of activists and world changers. It has to all have happened yesterday, and; as Bill Mollison once famously put it “I can’t change the world on my own, it’ll take at least 3 of us”.

If I had written it as a Transition Tale in the Transition Handbook, it would have ranked as being even more ridiculous than the Beckhams’ cob retirement house. However, here we are, and Michelle Obama has started to dig up part of the White House lawn and turn it into a vegetable garden.