At last, at last, the buzz is about peak oil, energy descent and sustainable (and might I add “inclusive”) design and planning. When the Transition Town movement was founded, well over a year ago, their struggle for attention was something of an uphill battle. But no longer: although it will take some time before the mainstream realizes that it’s not global warming that is our biggest, immediate challenge but energy descent, Transition Towns and their initiatives are really making inroads. So what is a Transition Town?
A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:
“for 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)?”
The resulting coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life leads to a collectively designed energy descent pathway.
Resilience is a matter of seeing abundance and making it work for you. It is about having more than one iron in the fire. So, to harvest energy, you make use of many sources, instead of trying to harness one dominant source, while losing sight of alternative possibilities. Spiritually, such wisdom in planning is a matter of being open to circumstances, is a measure of acceptance of inevitable facts.
The Transition Network’s primer can be found here.
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Being open to circumstances and acceptance of inevitable facts are two ingredients of living with a disability. I’ve resonated much with your recent posts in this direction. The phrase “energy descent” intrigues me. What is the genealogy of that idea?
I’d also think living with an apparent “loss” of capabilities. Of course, you and I and many other people know that it’s a matter of finding alternatives, cunning ways to do things differently. And that’s what these initiatives are on to. I think the term “energy descent” was coined in the late 1970s to describe the gradual decrease of abundant energy sources that are based on fossile sources. To me it is a very useful term, as so much in the mainstream way of thinking on these issues is about finding technology to replace fossil fuels. However, the energy density of fossil fuels will always be greater than any proposed alternative. This is clear if we look at the way biofuels are now starting to harm our capacity to survive as a species. The answer needs to be that we plan for a significant decrease in available energy. Transitioning means devising strategies to deal with this on a local level.
Yes, I like the sense of direction in energy descent. Peak oil implies something that can only crash, without much of a plan beyond it.
I agree, another way of life than the present one (in the west) is so inconceivable to us. Yet I only have to ask my mother (and my grandmother certainly had great skills in this respect) and I know how it can be done. My own experience, in starting up permaculture “tasters”, is that local, simple, lightweight, easy organisation and planning always win out. No need to plan ahead, but instead do the things that come to hand without delay.
I feel that way about walking. It was the simplest, most readily achievable solution to my visual disability. Twenty years later it was the first step in cardiac rehabilitation. Walking is an art, as the flaneur knows. Walking is a sacrament.
Yes, walking is a gift.
the term ‘energy descent’ was originally used by ecologist howard t. odum in his book, “a prosperous way down”, and was recycled by david holmgren, one of the 2 co-founders of ‘official’ permaculture. as signaled in another post, holmgren is a very lucid thinker-activist in this domain, as this contributor can personally attest, having taken an advanced permaculture course a couple of years ago with him in brasilia, in the aftermath of the ipc8 in sao paulo. it puts the myopic self-obssessed techno-fix preocupations of ‘cradle2cradle’ and other technological utopians to shame..
see:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/524
http://www.holmgren.com.au/DLFiles/PDFs/HolmgrenAdelaidePublic.pdf
http://www.futurescenarios.org/
a western-based attempt to get back to the source
of thinking(feeling)acting, by effecting a shift in
the dominant paradigm:
http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/tissot/IU_Ecology_Intro.pdf
yes. thank you for this. we always have a hard time convincing people that we organise ceremonies for a reason, that permaculture is not just about botany and building herb spirals and planting nut trees. We have those ceremonies to provide people with an experience of how to live in a simple, yet grand manner, in tune with the elements, instead of fighting them.
If you have some more information about these ceremonies, and the broader sense of permaculture, I would be interested..
I’ll write something more substantial about that in a short while.