Transition Towns Plan for Energy Descent
David Holmgren, who along with Bill Mollison introduced the concept of permaculture, has launched an insightful new website called Future Scenarios that assesses how the climate crisis and peak oil may interact and shape the prospects for humanity.
In exploring the future of energy, Holmgren outlines four possible futures, ranging from a wildly optimistic “techno-explosion” to a full-scale collapse. He devotes special attention to an energy path that he notes is generally ignored, which he calls energy descent, characterized by declines in population, energy and resource usage, economic activity, and complexity.
Holmgren argues persuasively that we would benefit by preparing for the energy descent scenario that he describes, even if we do not believe it to be probable. Fortunately, if we are inclined to follow his advice, we need not start from scratch. There is already a network of “transition towns” that are making plans to be ready for the advent of energy descent, and they are sharing their work online.
Transition Towns is a website for communities around the world that are taking action in the face of the climate crisis and peak oil. It also provides information from the Transition Network, a new organization intended to offer resources and support to such communities.
The website defines transition initiatives as those that seek to respond to the following question:
“[F]or all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?”
Appropriately, the effort appears to be learning from open source efforts, including the use of a wiki, which allows people to create and edit content on the website.
Most of the transition towns are now found in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland, but a growing number of communities elsewhere have expressed interest in becoming transition towns. The latter group is shown below.
For an example of one of the more active transition town sites, check out Transition Glastonbury. The folks in Glastonbury have taken a number of actions to identify lessons that can be applied within their community, ranging from tours of local farms and “eco-homes” to working to adapt local policies and practices to environmental needs to starting appropriate new businesses. They even had time to watch a documentary I saw last month, A Convenient Truth, and learn from the citizens of Curitiba, Brazil.
There is also an upcoming book on this subject called The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, which was co-authored by Transition Network founder Rob Hopkins and Richard Heinberg, a Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. It is scheduled to be released in September 2008.
Evan
This is excellent news. I personally think the ‘descent’ is the more realistic option if we really want to survive this. And I think that communities have to do this - the federal government cannot mandate it. Each community is different in its population, environment, weather, constraints and opportunities.
I’m looking forward to the book and hopefully can start a group to get my own community pointed in the right direction.
Right now it is totally unplanned development, sprawl, and all the usual stuff. They do have bike lanes, a revitalized downtown and a proposal to remove traffic from a few blocks in favor of bikes and pedestrians.
But, sigh, a long long ways to go.