The Transition Handbook – From oil dependency to local resilience

by Rob Hopkins

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Hopkins, Rob. The Transition Handbook – From oil dependency to local resilience. Foxhole, UK: Green Books Ltd. 2008.  240 pp    8 pp References  4 pp Resources  $24.95     

Rob Hopkins initiated the Transition Town Movement in a student project at the Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland. His ideas of dealing with the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil at local levels first took root in Totnes, in western England in 2005. The movement currently has member communities in growing numbers of countries worldwide. (Guelph, Ontario, Canada where I live has a fledgling group. Click here to see list of Transition towns.)

Governments around the world are doing a poor job of reducing oil use and carbon emissions. The Transition Town Movement is exploring, developing and promoting new ways to deal with these problems at local levels. Every person can make meaningful contributions towards these ends.

Transition Initiatives are based on four key assumptions:

1. That life with dramatically lower energy consumption in inevitable, and that it’s better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise.
2. That our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil.
3. That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now.
4. That by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively design our energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching and that recognize the biological limits of our planet.
   (p. 134)

Hopkins' plan has been spreading rapidly – not only due to the immanence of potential tipping points beyond which our world could be toast – but also because of his positive attitude and his open-ended, visionary approaches.

Hopkins demonstrates the positive attitude that infuses a lot of the earth-healing literature and initiatives. This is a very important contribution of the Transition Towns Movement. Quoting (p. 94-5) from Tom Atlee:

I’ve started viewing both optimism and pessimism as spectator sports, as forms of disengagement masquerading as involvement. Both optimism and pessimism trick me into judging life and betting on the odds, rather than diving into life with my whole self, with my full co-creative energy. I think the emerging crises call us to transcend such false end-games like optimism and pessimism. I think they call us to act like a spiritually healthy person who has just learned they have heart disease: We can use each dire prognosis as a stimulant for reaching more deeply into life and co-creating positive change.

And so I’ve come to conclude that all the predictions – both good and bad – tell us absolutely nothing about what is possible. Trends and events only relate to what is probable. Probabilities are abstractions. Possibilities are the stuff of life, visions to act upon, doors to walk through. Pessimism and optimism are both distractions from living life fully.

And (p. 98) from Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth Anderson:

Today as we are besieged by planetary problems, the risk is that we will deal with them in a pessimistic and unproductive style… Transfixed by an image of our own future decline, we could actually bring it about. A positive vision of the future, according to writer and philosopher David Spangler, ‘challenges the culture to dare, to be open to change, and to accept a spirit of creativity that cold alter its very structure.

Hopkins' approach invites people to come together in their town or neighborhood to brainstorm ideas and suggestions for initiating and building local initiatives within the Transition Town model. Many of the suggestions that have been gleaned from Transition Town meetings are marvelously practical and of immediate benefits to business owners who are unde various financial pressures. For instance:

Oil Vulnerability Auditing (OVA). In essence, it is a method for auditing the various processes a business uses, and where it utilizes oil, whether directly as fuel, as lubricants, in transportation, processing, packaging and so on. It allows the person conducting the Audit to build up an accurate picture of where oil is used, and then to explore, by pushing up the price of that oil, where the business’s vulnerabilities lie. At $100 a barrel? $120? $150 a barrel? Which parts of the business’s operations become unviable first? Is it the degree of dependence on transportation for the goods that they sell, prompting them to explore more local sourcing, or is it the energy intensiveness of their processing?
 
OVA is a risk-assessment tool. It looks to the bottom line, and requires no allegiance to the peak oil/climate change arguments. (p. 194)

Visions for far-reaching changes are encouraged, with development of timelines which provide goals that promote imaginative initiatives to make them possible.

For instance, Hopkins suggests the following Healthcare visioning with a target date of 2030:

The closure of local hospitals in favour of centralised ones – so rampant twenty years ago – has been reversed, and local healthcare centres are now not just about treating illness but promoting health in many diverse ways. They have forged partnerships with local schools, promoting food growing and familiarizing young people with the whole food cycle from seed to salad. The wellbeing of the individual is seen as inseparable from the health of the community. Human biology is now a compulsory school subject, and has expanded to include nutrition and basic herbalism.

About half of the medicines prescribed by doctors are now locally sourced, with local farmers growing certain key medicinal plants which are processed in local laboratories. Local chemists also now make over 50% of the medicines they sell on the premises. Doctors are able to prescribe a range of complementary treatments, as well as involvement in local community gardens, and access to affordable good food. The growth in access to meaningful work, the rebuilding of social cohesion and an emerging common sense of purpose, has resulted in fewer stress-related illnesses and cases of depression. Conventional and complementary practitioners are seen very much as two sides of the same coin, and the concept of promoting health rather than just treating disease has lead to a range of innovative measures.

As a result of people’s moving away from being sedentary consumers to becoming more physically active producer/consumers, there has been an increase in musculo-skeletal problems. Doctors are now able to issue prescriptions for, for example, Alexander technique sessions. It has become more commonplace, as in China, to see free Tai Chi sessions in local parks in the morning. Technology has also enabled certain tests and observations to take place online in the patient’s own home, what is known as ‘tele-medicine’. (p. 109-10)

Hopkins' book is very highly recommended for anyone concerned with global heating and its consequences.

References:
Tom Atlee, ‘Crisis Fatigue and the Co-creation of Positive Possibilities’, Co-Intelligence Institute, http://www.co-intelligence.org/

Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth Anderson (2000), The Cultural Creatives: how 50 million people are changing the world, Three Rivers Press.

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