Notes on "The Transition Handbook"

Another terrific book I hope to acquire soon.

The book deals with an anticipated shortage of cheap, safe, easy-to-extract oil. It does not assert that we are running out of oil, per se, but that while for the past hundred years we've produced more and more oil each year we are now reaching, if we haven't already past it, our peak oil production capacity. (See Peak Oil at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil )

This means that each year, less and less oil will be produced and oil prices will rise – perhaps dramatically.

As almost all the power we use for industrial and residential use as well as used to ship the material items we need is ultimately provided by fossil fuel, this – alongside of disruptions produced by global warming - promises to be a very disruptive change if we do not take the ten to twenty years it will take to re-gear our economy to one based on local production of energy and food.

He uses two historical examples of how this was done: Great Britain's re-tooling of its agriculture program during WWII as well as Cuba's re-tooling of its agriculture after its Soviet Union lifeline collapsed in the early '90s.

He also sites contemporary examples of so-called transition initiatives in which communities are deliberately "powering down" to face the coming challenges. (See Transition Towns at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns )

Beyond the huge but specific problem this book addresses, it is my opinion that his largely positive, hopeful and happy approach goes beyond the immediate problem to other social problems such as unresponsive government, employment, education and other issues.

Namely, we need to not wait for the government to solve these issues (although government will ultimately have to involve itself) but to engage them ourselves, as communities of citizens, at the local level.

In all of these issues it is becoming the role of the citizenry to lead the government, rather than vice versa.


The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins
at http://www.amazon.com/Transition-Handbook-Dependency-Resilience-Guides/dp/1900322188/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287350955&sr=1-1