Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel.
Hopkins leads a vibrant new movement of towns and cities that utilize local cooperation and interdependence to shrink their ecological footprints. In the face of climate change he developed the concept of Transition Initiatives -- communities that produce their own goods and services, curb the need for transportation and take other measures to prepare for a post-oil future. While Transition shares certain principles with greenness and sustainability, it is a deeper vision concerned with re-imagining our future in a self-sufficient way and building resiliency.
Transforming theory to action, Hopkins is also the co-founder and a resident of the first Transition Initiative in the UK, in Totnes, Devon. As he refuses to fly, it is from his home in Totnes that he offers help to hundreds of similar communities that have sprung up around the world, in part through his blog, transitionculture.org
Hopkins website is "Transition Culture: An evolving exploration into the head, heart and hands of energy descent", where he asks "How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations" One of the posts I found most thought provoking on his site is Your Free Guide to Setting Up Local Currencies, available in .pdf for download on that page. He discusses in the video below some communities setting up their own currencies and local economies.
We have a society that is moving very rapidly to the super-, super-, super-consumptive, and I'm proposing that might not be the final answer. So I'm saying, why don't we try a leaner alternative?
The disheartening slowness of any progress toward freedom from need is mainly fruit of a greed out of proportion to any justifiable fear of insecurity.
[...] land conservation will succeed only if and when man creates beautiful cities wherein he will feel it a privilege to be, live, and work.
Science rejects the non-rational as unreal. In doing so, she puts herself in a position of non-competence in all those fields or things that through existing, inasmuch as they modify the real, do not avail themselves of any computation or any methodological inquiry.
Life is a study of the improbable, not the statistically average.
Nothing is purer than sterility and simpler than death.
“And hundreds of thousands of simple, kindly folk torn from their wives, mothers, and children, and with murderous weapons in their hands will trudge where ever they may be driven, stifling the despair in their soles by songs, debauchery, and vodka. They will march, freeze, suffer from hunger and fall ill. Some will die of disease, and some will at last come to the place where men will kill them by the thousands. And they too, without themselves knowing why, will murder thousands of others, whom they have never yet before seen and whom have neither done nor could do them any wrong.” From Christianity and Patriotism By Leo Tolstoy Author of War and Peace
Other problems include the fact that this system rewards the least scrupulous behavior and penalizes community oriented behavior. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and in so doing also concentrates the power at the top, creating a plutocracy in the least case and economic feudalism in the worst case. The problem in the United States is a kind of willed ignorance. A decision that people make not to know things. I think that is the primary problem in the United States;that people with education and access to information make a choice not to know things. Because to know things if one retains any sort of moral sensibility, if you know about something that's going on that is inconsistent with your own principles, once you know about it there is the moral question about why have you not acted.
In the United States part of this mass mediated, mass marketed mass medicated world is about allowing people to remain willfully ignorant. That is another level that we have to combat. This is where I often find myself again in tension because if you look at things like the movie industry and television and spectacle sports, all of this industry that is designed to keep people out of touch, that has to be resisted and when you resist that, then you are told that you are being elitist and ya know you got to understand that it is good to go to the Cubs game now and then. And I think, "No!" I actually think that's part of the problem. So these tensions work out too, in organizing. How do you reject that part of the society without doing it in a way that seems to be talking down to ordinary people? How do you make that analysis part of a bigger politics that tries to offer an alternative to the mass mediated, mass marketed, mass medicated world? So its both about critique and construction of alternatives. Robert Jensen - "The Old Future's Gone - Progressive Strategy Amid Cascading Crises" which can be heard in its entirety at Unwelcome Guests#428 and #429.
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
-- Emma Goldman
I posted a diary yesterday on the bailout for billionaires, which I adamantly oppose for reasons laid out in that diary. I was thoroughly pissed when I wrote it and some of my rhetoric became a bit heated (as my rhetoric sometimes will), and my meaning was misconstrued by some who read the piece. This is an effort to clarify.
This is the second installment in the series. In my first installment, I established that in order to grok the future, it is necessary to understand the present and remember the past and that in order to influence the future, strategies must be emplaced. In this installment, I will attempt to show Docudharma nation that there are proven methods, techniques and tools available that can be used to develop strategies. These are proactive methods and can be used to focus our resources towards achieving our ultimate goals; whatever those may be.
stable solid line | stable divided line | stable solid line
stable divided line | moving divided line | moving divided line
Earth over Fire evolving into Wind over Fire
36. Wounded Brightness
37. Family Members
Wounded brightness.
Beneficial is laborious persistence.
Being weakened. It is good to work diligently on the situation.
(The brightness is the light of consciousness, one's aliveness, one's energy. It being injured means that one's aliveness is diminished, one is being weakened.)
Family members.
Beneficial is the women's dedication.
People are there for each other.
Moving Line 5:
Viscount of Ji's hidden brightness.
It is beneficial to persist.
Tactfully feigning ignorance, in order to avoid being hurt by someone. It is a good idea to persist doing that. (The viscount of Ji feigned madness, in order to escape the abuses of a king.)
Line 6:
Not brightness, but darkness.
At first ascending to heaven,
then going into the earth.
Things seemed so bright at the start, but are turning unlucky.
In order to grok the future, it is necessary to understand the present and remember the past. In order to influence the future, strategies must be emplaced. This is my attempt to bring the docudharma nation to concensus of understanding.
Apparently, something is more important to members of Congress
Submitted by feline on July 17, 2008 - 9:57am.
than public opinion; more important than the U.S. Constitution, the treaties of the Geneva Conventions, and the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal; more important than truth, justice, accountability, restoration of the rule of law. It's something so terribly important that the opinions of the United Nations, the International Red Cross, retired generals, veterans and enlisted military personnel, the intelligence community, imbedded journalists, victims' families, judges, constitutional and international legal scholars, psychiatrists, etc. are basically obsolete. Something is more important than our civil liberties, real national security, a stable domestic infrastructure, and diplomatic foreign policy.
Providing immunity to violators of the law and perpetrators of obstruction is more important than any of our opinions.
Amid skyrocketing oil, gasoline, coal, and electricity (coming to a neighborhood near you) prices, 2008 offers Americans quite serious and stark choices between knowledgeable, impassioned, and thoughtful candidates when it comes to finding paths toward a prosperous 21st century economy, on the one side, and Fossil-Fool candidates focused on tightening our shackles to the ever-more costly (pollution, financial, otherwise) and archaic oil-coal based energy system.
One of these stark choices comes in California's 46th district, where Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook is running against ten-term Congressman Dana Rohrbacher.
Debbie was one of the first on the Energy Smart Act Blue page. Join me after the fold for some indications as to why.
UPDATE: Energy Smart Debbie Cook will be meeting with Barack Obama tomorrow morning, 13 July ...
The Democrats are either very naive and nearsighted or they are willing participants in their own party's destruction. Perhaps they are a mixture of both. If the Democrats win the election this fall, (personally I think Obama is the odds on favorite), then they are going to be saddled with a plethora of problems. As we reach the breaking point for serious global issues. By not fixing accountability for these long ignored problems on this runaway neocon fascist train, the fallout for ignoring those problems will fall squarely on the leader in charge. You would think that the Democrats would understand this: by not pursuing impeachment and fixing accountability where it belongs, the media will vilify and blame them for all the problems that they will be handed.
On my walk to the train early Tuesday morning, I realized that my apartment building has a new resident. Or at least the property does...
He sleeps wrapped up in a blanket in the 18 inches or so between our building's far northwestern corner and the bush that runs along the edge of the sidewalk. At first glance, it's easy to mistake the man for an abandoned pile of clothing. I'm sure that's by design, and frankly I doubt even I would have noticed him at all if I hadn't dropped my keys in my early morning stupor.
And now that I've gotten my personal matters straightened out again; and I will finally leave this miserable neighborhood for good in 6 weeks to single-handedly multiply the Coolness Factor of SE Hawthorne by a factor of 10...I wonder where this man will go from here? Will he stay out this way for long? Will anybody else "catch him"? Does he even care? Does he have anything to lose?
I wonder about this man's life...but I'm never going to wake him. Does anybody ever think about him? Now, or in the recent past? Besides me, of course...
A wife? Kids? Parents, brothers, sisters...nieces, nephews?
Does he know that somebody's writing about him right now?
(Electrification of our nation's railroads is winning idea. Do we have the will and money to make it happen? - promoted by Magnifico)
Welcome to the next in my (sporadic) Long Emergency series of essays.
This one is a real cheap rip-off essay, in which I simply rip out the short policy proposal wrapped up in a Daily Kos candidate diary, and present it without the candidate diary parts.
Here is a version of the national Wind Resource map:
It should, I hope, be clear that much of the best resource is in areas that do not have the highest electricity consumption. And at the same time, that is a lot of the terrain that the transcontinental freight rail must traverse to get where its going. And, at the same time, we desperately need to get the main freight rail trunk lines electrified, by hook or by crook. Ergo, I got a grossly oversimplified policy proposal to present.
The Federal Government invests in publicly owned infrastructure to electrify the main railroad
In return, the owners of the right of way cede use of the right of way above the part that they need to public use, together with access to the ground level right of way for support structures
That right of way is used to establish long distance High Voltage DC trunk lines to bring sustainable energy from the places that have it to places the need it
In areas where there is a commercial wind resource, the usage rights above those trunk lines are available to be leased out for wind farm operators, with the lease payments rolled back into the funding for the program
Some answers to some challenges to the proposal, after the fold.
Over on the European Tribune, where I crossposted a couple of these bike blogs, asdf asked:
If bikes are the most efficient way to get around--at least for distances up to a few km--then why do we not have proper bikeways? Smooth pavement, gradual hills, and COVERS to keep the snow/wind/rain off? Imagine a countryside with little bike tunnels going here and there, with cozy, dry riders efficiently making their daily trips...
This is a lovely image. Indeed, a system of bikeways of this could even qualify as a dream.
However, if we start to dream it, we have to be careful that we do not fall into the familiar bad habits of the fading age of Auto Uber Alles ... which is to use bikeways as a mechanism to get those pesky cyclists off the road.
If a system of bikeways is done right, then it will create far more bikes on the road of most cities, towns and suburbs of American than we have ever seen ... indeed, than most of use have ever imagined. Which means, directly, that any system of bikeways intended to get those pesky bikes off the roads will be bikeways done wrong.
See you over the fold ... and remember, as always, this is also a general cycling open thread.
This is a Transport Cycling Open Thread: if you didn't get a bike for Christmas, and don't cycle in the winter, share what your first cycle trip of the new year is likely to be.
The elegant solution might involve that tricky, tiny atom, hydrogen. Let's put aside the political aspects your quite correctly identify, just for a moment. It might work someday.
In the meantime I'm all in favor of some inelegant kludge. If solar photovoltaics come down in price there will be a point where you won't care if they're only 20-30% efficient. There's so much solar energy hitting the earth that they'll simply be everywhere.
Re: LQD : Metaphysics I believe that the problem is Metaphysical. The assumptions that underpin conventional Economics bear no relation to reality as we know it.
They are distorted in a way designed to suit the beneficiaries of the value flows that result from the surreal financial structures that comprise our current Economy.
Re: LQD : Metaphysics I think one of their point is that not only money is important, and that economics, as a social science, needs to look beyond money, as it is not the only means of social exchange - that is basically the basic axiom of current economics, that are way to much based on econometrics.
The vote, the christmas gift, the exchange of drink rounds, are also important means of economical interaction, but are denied by the modern economics influenced thinking.
Crossposted from The European Tribune to Docudharma ...
... because the world can't end today, its already tomorrow on Docudharma.
Early this month I finished Justinian's Flea, which looks at the reign of Justinian the Great as the pivot between "late antiquity" and the rise of medieval Europe ... and the central role in the drama played by the Plague of Justinian, the first clearly documented outbreak of the Bubonic Plague.
Which was one more addition to the mix of things involved in my reaction(s) to the diary [NB. at the European Tribune] by Jerome a Paris, Hostility to the notion of limits to growth ... and the question of what was so special about the Industrial Revolution.
I'll start with what is normal, then with what has been peculiar in the past couple of hundred years, and then how that peculiarity must have warped our economic institutions ... and to get back to normality, we will have to unwarp them.
OK, "tell them what you are going to tell them". Check. Make it clear as mud. Check. "then tell them". That's after the fold.
... as that Tom Waite{NB} lyric says at the beginning:
Well I stumbled in the darkness
I'm lost and alone
Though I said I'd go before us
And show the way back home
There a light up ahead
I can't hold onto her arm
Forgive me pretty baby but I always take the long way home
{NB. No, that is not Tom Waite singing the song. Good eye!}
Now, I wasn't literally lost. What I did was decide that, with four days off coming up, I could take the long way home, which ought to be very pretty this time of year. Instead of going down the county highway to turn left onto the township highway to turn right onto the main county highway that goes straight to my (current) home town ...
... I decided to turn right to go past the Quarry, then cross the state route to go along the Lake road then the bike trail that runs to my home town.
And I was glad I did, because it was a terrible route, and I set me thinking about bikeways versus freedom to ride.
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
Amid skyrocketing oil, gasoline, coal, and electricity (coming to a neighborhood near you) prices, 2008 offers Americans quite serious and stark choices between knowledgeable, impassioned, and thoughtful candidates when it comes to finding paths toward a prosperous 21st century economy, on the one side, and Fossil-Fool candidates focused on tightening our shackles to the ever-more costly (pollution, financial, otherwise) and archaic oil-coal based energy system.
Early this month I finished Justinian's Flea, which looks at the reign of Justinian the Great as the pivot between "late antiquity" and the rise of medieval Europe ... and the central role in the drama played by the 
