Have a nice day!

JH

But not every one!

Cheers – john

Of course I also think there is no evidence anyone can hole themselves up and survive, and plenty of evidence that blind faith in technology is partly the problem, not the solution. But this isn’t just about ‘facts’.

I keep a store of tins and fresh water for emergencies like bushfires or blackouts, and read the New Scientist technology section every week, but I believe the only moral thing for me to do is what I can to help build communities who can work together on how to survive and what technology they can sustain. I know I am unlikely to be persuaded otherwise by ‘evidence’.

It intrigues me to see certain value differences I’ve experienced before when studying and living in the US coming out pretty much the same in Transition discussion. (Of course there are some other interesting differences around values in Transition…)

PS I don’t believe I come from the ‘green community’ as it happens, but I have noticed the problem of being seen as just a greenie (hippie mark 2?) appears to bother some American Transitioners more than here in Australia, for example. I grew up believing it does matter how you present ideas – that things are readable, for example – but you do have to speak from your values if you want to communicate effectively.

Worrying obsessively about how to speak to someone who doesn’t agree with you can be quite crippling, and in previous activist life it seemed often to go with self-doubt. At least I always wonder what someone is really expressing when they suggest we shouldn’t look so (fill in the box) green/ left/ feminist/ queer….

To be a bit more constructive, those who don’t feel so green, etc, can do their part by spending time talking with people they feel won’t listen to radicals. It truly will take all sorts to transform the world. – warm wishes, Ruth

Well, I agree with you if the projects are very local, very practical and don’t require a lot of capital because when this current market rally ends (any day now), we are going to see another pulse of people laid off and without resources. Here in the U.S. local governments are broke as are most state governments. Soon the tax hikes are going to start (might have already).

I’m of the view that most of the time for medium-term planning is now in the past. People need to get very serious about how they are going to keep a roof over their head and food coming in the door. A good thing to do now while one has money is stock the pantry as though one is living 200 years ago and a long winter is coming. A friend in Utah told me two weeks ago that the Mormons, who are famous for their “two years of food in the pantry” rule, are frantically stocking up. This is a very, very good plan. Having food in the house will give people some breathing room as they work on other items.

In fact, I think it’s a very good idea if TT were to issue a “Stock Up Sunday” event of some sort. Get every TT community to organize one before the end of the year. Send suggested items, plus instructions on how to store food well and safely for a long time.

At this point, that would be MUCH, MUCH more valuable than a meeting to discuss an energy descent plan (which will never be enacted because the money won’t be there) or to map community resources.

John I understand your commitment to collaboration but time is now very short. I think it’s madness considering the precipice we are on to continue talking with folks like Alex and trying to create something together. Here in the U.S. we are on the brink of 20% unemployment (officially — we’re already there according to ShadowStats.com, whose numbers I trust more). It’s probably the same in the U.K.

If everyone reading this doesn’t have a full pantry and plans in place to bring in other people to help pay the rent or mortgage, they are just a job-loss away from the abyss. At that point it won’t matter how many visioning meetings they’ve gone to — they will be too busy looking for housing.

There is, in my view, much less time than most TT’s think to become personally resilient. Make the next TT meeting about how to get one’s own house in order before the end of the year (food and finances).

-André

However… having obviously looked into the other parameters you mention over the years (and I’m sure many of us have), I still think there is hope: the big thing to do is to get projects rolling out that BAU accolytes within our communities find as appealing as TT-types like us – Shane and Andrew made some valuable points regarding such things above. Find that comon ground and find it ASAP! The intimate relationship between economics and resources that creates processes like demand-destruction is something that will buy quite a bit of time IMO. We must try to use that time as sagely as possible!

Cheers – John

“The cornucopians and ‘bright greens’ have, in my view, a very poor grasp of the following key macro trends…”

I haven’t studied the ‘bright green’ idea in depth but I suspect they are somewhere between the ‘mad max’ line and the cleantech stability line in the four scenarios graph (which is actually Holgrem’s graph, of course) — exactly where TT’s are.

The difference is that TT’s generally understand the bullet points I wrote about above (net energy decline, export land model, the fatal flaw in fractional banking, etc.) whereas the bright greens, it seems, either don’t know about those forces or ignore them. (Again, I haven’t studied bright greens in depth, so I’m open to being corrected here.)

The funny thing is It doesn’t seem to matter to many of my colleagues in the sustainability/cleantech/climate change fields that the first big warning of peak oil ($147 oil) has helped cause historically high unemployment and a credit crunch — precisely what peak oil educators have been saying would happen for years. They simply keep talking about their pet ideas and technologies assuming there will be a recovery and that they just need to bide their time.

bright greenish people aren’t planning on having this world on a diet of 5% — they are cutting back considerably — but not to the victorian era.

if you don’t think that’s possible but you do think you have a magic spell that protects you from horrors then we better go out and find SOMEONE rational because none of us is.

I am for one. To point out the truth is to help someone; if they don’t get it, they don’t get it. But often, if you keep doing it, they ’see reason’ — then they say, “Thankyou for the reality check.”

To truly mourn makes us far stronger than to smile — and deny. What Steffen is saying is, “I will not allow you to recognize the truth, nor mourn, nor act according to the reality.”

There is no such thing as bright green and dark green. As Andre says, bright greens are cornucopians. Cornucopians are wrong. That’s the end of the story.

Reality is a good thing.

All of the rest of the arguments embed into this new frame. There’s a great deal of people that believe that money and materials equates to quality of life but that’s the cultural story that we need to break or snap out of. There’s enough evidence out there that money doesn’t equal happiness and this notion is supported across all demographics. Even my Daily Mail reading dad agrees with this argument i.e. this is not a green argument, it’s one that once the cultural story has shifted, we can all buy into and work towards the new story with a passion.

i know this means competing with the capitalist corporate machines but at the end of the day that’s run by humans and these ideas all ready have strong holds at all levels of the corporate world and are permeating deeper and being given urgency by the current PO CC imperative.

I have faith that this is an argument that could put the majority of society on the same side. I can’t imagine that everyone agreed with the civil rights movement but it’s just about getting the critical mass.

I also like that it’s simple. a quick and easy phase; “replacing economic growth with the growth of quality of life (of all beings)” sums up a potential global shift to a resilient and vibrant planet. the reality is far more complex but it’s kind of like the 10:10 campaign, it needs that simple hook to penetrate a new believe or idea into the masses.

I also find that in spreading the “eco” message here we focus much more on the personal $$$ savings that there are to be made, rather than getting into the debate on Climate Change.

Both of those seem to reach people no matter what side of the political spectrum they are on.

“was it Martin Luther King who blew wide open the campaign for rights for black Americans, when he re-framed the approach as civil rights instead of black rights? i.e. all the American peoples rights where being infringed. I think we have a similar issue of having to re-frame the approach in a way that takes it out of the green ghetto. It’s up to us to re-present the problems and solutions so that people realise that we’re all on the same side.”

That’s very true indeed, and well put – now the tricky bit – how do we do it? How do we achieve what would, if successful, apparently be the greatest paradigm-shift of humanity in 150 years?

I’m up at half-past four in the morning again simply because I was fed up of lying in bed worrying about just that when I should have been fast asleep!

To dip into the Microsoft analogy-world again, it does sometimes seem as though we are computers running on a different operating-system whilst the majority are running and communicating on Windows, so that they cannot even recognise any datafiles we produce, let alone begin to read them!

Is not one of the key problems that we have in communicating these issues simply this: that corporate consumer-capitalism works so effectively (when unconstrained by irritations such as resource-depletion) because it involves a near-total decoupling of the individual’s lifestyle with the natural world and its inherent physical properties? Once that is achieved, you have a consuming unit that takes a lot for granted, and expects stuff to be available regardless of the consequences elsewhere on the planet. Any perceived threat to that is then reacted to as an attempt to erode that most precious thing of all, “freedom of choice”. Green activists in the UK are often portrayed as people attempting to do just that, hence the “they want us to wear hair-shirts and go back to living in caves” type accusations that they often face.

Having said which, the “roll up your sleeves and get on with it” approach is still something that most people can relate to, and it acts as a bridge between people of many different political persuasions/levels of environmental consciousness. Just as well really, since as pointed out above, a lot of the techo-fixes some people like to posit for oil depletion are almost without exception la-la-land!

Cheers – John