Reviews
Groovy Green Book Review
October 16, 2008
By Matt Mayer
When I requested a copy of the Transition Handbook I had the idea in my mind that I was going to get a book that would tell me step by step what I needed to do to get my town prepared for a future with short energy supplies. Instead what I got was a book that talked about what one town was doing, which I could use to glean information from, and ideas of what to do to transition to a low energy environment from a 10 thousand foot view, but not a 12 step program for this transition.
Is that a bad thing? Not really, it just messed with my perspective of what I thought the book was about. It’s an interesting read with a lot of information. There is a lot of personal information here and personal examples of what they have done, but what I gathered from reading this book is that each situation is unique. While you can have a general outline of what you want to achieve, you really need to look at your specific situation and adapt your strategy to your area.
Practically every state in this country would have a different strategy because they all have different climates, urban/rural ratios, population differences, natural advantages or other unique circumstances. Upstate NY will have to develop much different strategies than Albuquerque, NM. I think that is what I most got from this book. That the key to start moving and not wait for someone to provide you a general idea of what needs to be done. That you should look at your situation, make a few decisions, start moving and then modify your ideas as you go to develop the best answer to your specific areas needs.
Amazon has the following summation of this book which I think is an apt description:
We live in an oil-dependent world, arriving at this level of dependency in a very short space of time by treating petroleum as if it were in infinite supply. Most of us avoid thinking about what happens when oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead can have a positive outcome. These changes can lead to the rebirth of local communities that will grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and build their own houses using local materials. They can also encourage the development of local currencies to keep money in the local area.
There is a lot covered in that description just like there is a lot covered in this book. If you need to adapt your town, city or village to a low energy lifestyle you should check out this book.
I found this review for the book also that I thought was interesting and that you might enjoy it. It’s hosted on the website for the Transition Group.
Books: Useful Advice for Building Sustainable Communities
By Carol Polsgrove Special to the Berkeley Daily Planet
Thursday September 25, 2008
With the rise of oil prices, the movement for sustainability has new wind in its sails. Farmers markets make ever more sense, alternative energy networks scour the territory for small-scale solutions, and even in red states, city councils set up peak oil committees.
For communities where transformational breezes are stirring, Rob Hopkins’ The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience offers useful advice.
Based on his own experience as a motivator of “transition towns” in Ireland and England, Hopkins presents strategies for nudging communities to action through a democratic consciousness-changing process. A staged plan for the community’s future emerges from months of conversations, speeches, films, and group discussions on topics from waste to transportation.
The goal is not isolation but resilience—the ability to survive shocks without going under. “The UK truck drivers’ dispute of 2000 offers a valuable lesson here,” Hopkins writes. “Within the space of three days, the UK economy was brought to the brink, as it became clear that the country was about a day away from food rationing and civil unrest.”
If more communities could at least feed themselves in a pinch, a country as a whole would be less vulnerable to disaster in a world where insufficient oil supplies twinned with global warming are undermining the global economy.
While Hopkins joins others in the peak oil movement in believing there is not much time left to make the needed turn, he reminds readers of how quickly British communities learned to feed themselves during World War II. What’s required, above all, is a conviction that things must change.
The strategies he offers for bringing about that conviction—above all, many guided discussions by many citizens—may seem less likely to succeed in a city like Berkeley than in smaller towns like those Hopkins has worked with. He himself suggests the ideal candidate for a transition initiative would be “market town” of, say, about 5,000. But later cities can try organizing themselves into networked “villages.”
Will this really work? Can grassroots efforts like this successfully challenge entrenched power inside and outside the community? Can they get around laws that restrict what they can do without the approval of higher authority? Can they defeat economic interests that stand to lose ground?
Hopkins can’t promise success-the strategies he puts forth have only been tried in the short term. The first transition town, Kinsale, Ireland, launched its movement just three years ago. The Transition Towns WIKI (transitiontowns.org) even offers a disclaimer: “We really don’t know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.” Or, in Hopkins’ words, it is “a collective adventure.”
There are not yet many Transition Towns, as such, in the United States, but California communities have started coordinated transition efforts under other names. In fact, a speaker from Willits Economic Localization (WELL) presented a workshop at Kinsale, and Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow from Sebastopol’s Post Carbon Institute (which has a Relocalization Network) has spoken in English transition towns.
Author of his own books on the world after cheap oil, Heinberg contributed a foreword to “The Transition Handbook,” pronouncing it “accessible, clear, and upbeat.” He has that right. Hopkins has written is a reader-friendly, optimistic guide to building a local movement, and if its ideas are not helpful in all circumstances, it is still well worth a read.
Carol Polsgrove is an emeritus professor at the University of Indiana.
Library Journal Starred Review
Monday, September 01, 2008
This book happily describes the British grassroots "Transition Towns" movement, the group Robin Mills (see below) called "mistaken, appalling and dangerous." Meant to be a guide and motivator, the handbook discusses how several U.K. towns are preparing for the twin threats of climate change and peak oil. Hopkins, a teacher of permaculture and natural building and a cofounder of the Transition Network, urges a community response—local sustainability made fun—in which groups grapple with issues like food, transportation, energy, building materials, and waste and even develop their own local currency. Hopkins takes our "addiction" to oil literally, and so we will read of "post-petroleum stress disorder," and see applied addictions psychology helping to ease the townies' withdrawal symptoms. It's a handsome book, thoughtfully designed, which may make its message a little more palatable to oil addicts on this side of the Atlantic. [See the author speak about his book and ideas at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGHrWPtCvg0.Ed.] Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
Review: The Transition Handbook
Energy Bulletin
energybulletin.net
March 1, 2008
by Graham Strouts
“The concept of energy descent, and of the Transition approach, is a simple one: that the future with less oil could be preferable to the present, but only if sufficient creativity and imagination are applied early enough in the design of this transition.”
—Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook
The publication of the much anticipated Transition Handbook marks the latest landmark in what has become the fastest growing environmental movement since CND in the 1960s: the phenomenon that is sweeping the UK, the Transition Towns movement.
The book is clearly written and entertainingly illustrated- including some original line drawings by the author. Primarily it is a handbook for inspiring and guiding communities into a new sustainable future with less dependency on fossil fuels. Comparisms with the recent early-industrial past- food production and allotments during Britain’s “wartime mobilisation” in the 1940s for example- make fascinating reading and give some kind of pointers for how large-scale change could happen again- if we only had the collective will and sense of urgency to achieve it.
What makes it unique is that this is not merely aspirational, but also documents the meteoric rise of the transition movement. Its advice and exercises have been hewn on the workbench of real local communities making the first steps of a radical transformation that the whole of the developed world will have to confront over the coming years.
Placed through the book are 12 “Tools for Transition” describing in detail different workshop activities that can be used to help develop a process and facilitate discussions, including “Open Space” and “World Café”; the “web-of-life” game is described, but has become the “web of resilience”- a game whereby participants stand in a circle and pass a string back and forth between them representing links between different elements of a woodland or a community:
“it is becoming clear that the cheap oil required to sustain our oil-dependent lifestyles is not going to be with us indefinitely, we find ourselves looking around at the severed strands of web and starting to wonder which strands might reconnect to which others. The Transition approach is one of re-weaving this web, and remaking the connections which will be needed by a resilient post-oil economy. Every new harmonious relationship we forge is a step back to sanity.”
It all started at the end of the summer of 2004 when Rob was teaching permaculture in Kinsale, the course he had set up three years earlier- a 2-year Practical Sustainability course, one of the only courses of its kind anywhere in the world. Davie Philip of Cultivate had just shown me The End of Suburbia and I gave a copy to Rob just before the start of term. He immediately arranged to show it to the students along with a talk by Colin Campbell, and presented with them what must still be the greatest challenge to have faced permaculture students on that course: to write an Energy Descent Action Plan for the town of Kinsale.
This daunting task was undertaken with considerable enthusiasm and the document they produced has been hugely influential in framing the tasks ahead for those seeking effective responses to peak oil and Climate change.
The Fuelling the Future conference followed, and then Rob moved to Totnes and I took on his job as permaculture teacher in Kinsale.
Transition Towns kinsale Inspired by the EDAP and keen to see it develop, one of the first projects I undertook was to ask the town council to locate a suitable piece of within the town boundaries which we could do a design for as a potential community garden. Although the first site located was eventually deemed unsuitable, the following year a small plot on a council estate was designed by students and continues to serve as a community garden for the Transition Towns group in Kinsale. Permaculture Students continue to play a major role in developing TTK, organising events, building school gardens, and through their course work, engaging in more design work in the town with a view to creating more gardens.
In the meantime, across the water a small revolution has been brewing, with Transition initiatives now numbering dozens around the UK- and beyond- and groups that are “mulling” – considering starting a process- now in the hundreds. Somehow, Rob has hit upon an idea, a theme for our times that has captured the imagination and in less than three years shown what power there can be in community.
All this and more is described in the handbook, which is divided into three parts, the “Head, Heart and Hands” of energy descent.
In the first section, Rob outlines the issues of climate change and peak oil but skilfully weaves them together and shows how the two must be considered as two sides of the same coin if we are to make an appropriate response: just cutting carbon emissions, as proposed in some “conventional” programmes for addressing climate change, for example, will never be enough: our dependency on systems that require high energy inputs from fossil fuels may make us even more exposed as we begin to run out. Equally, Rob’s wit and sharpness is put to good effect to expose some of the more absurd- and dangerous proposed solutions to energy depletion. For example, of tar sand he writes:
“Tar sands are akin to arriving at the pub to find that all the beer is off, but so desperate are you for a drink that you begin to fantasize that in the thirty years this pub has been open for business, the equivalent of 5,000 pints have been spilt on this carpet, so you design a process whereby you boil up the carpet in order to extract the beer again.”
The key theme that he introduces early on and builds on throughout the book is the idea of resilience. This is essentially the quality that allows communities to provide most of their essential needs- food, energy, water and raw materials- from multiple sources so that in the event of the large-scale system failures we are faced with collapse is averted because the smaller-scale local community has the wherewithal to fend for itself. This is the quality that has been systematically eroded by the globalization process as small communities have over the last hundred years in the west and much more recently in the developing world- as described for example by Helena Norberg-Hodge in Ladakh- and this is the quality that the Transition process aspires to recreate.
“The move towards more localised energy-efficient and productive living arrangements is not a choice; it is an inevitable direction for humanity… The time for seeing globalisation as an invincible and unassailable behemoth, or localisation as some kind of lifestyle choice, is over.”
The second section, the Heart, deals with some of the defining features of the transition movement which have made it so successful: the insistence that a positive vision of the future is more important to galvanise change than focusing on the various dystopias all-to-common in peak oil literature.
“Environmentalists have often been guilty of presenting people with a mental image of the world’s least desirable holiday destination – some seedy bed and breakfast near Torquay, with nylon sheets, cold tea and soggy toast – and expecting them to get excited about the prospect of NOT going there. The logic and the psychology are all wrong.”
Rob admits,” I am aware that being one of those people who can read a desperately depressing book about peak oil and societal collapse and draw from it the inspiration and motivation to do something practical puts me in an extremely small minority.”
This is perhaps the most original contribution of the transition project, looking at the psychology of change and integrating an understanding of what motivates people and what can hold them back into an understanding of the environmental crisis we are dealing with.
The two main ways this is looked at are addiction therapy and community visioning. The first is covered by an interview with Dr. Chris Johnstone who talks about the Stages of Change model and how it can be applied to kicking the oil habit.
The idea that we are “addicted to oil” is a controversial one; nevertheless, these tools may have a significant role to play in helping us to understand the grip that a consumer lifestyle has on people, and addressing the obstacles to change like fear that may come up. I think it is essential for the environmental movement to begin to take seriously the psychology of change and ask more often “why don’t more people appear to care about sustainability?” There is a huge amount of work still to be done in this area- it would have been nice to see for example some references to what evolutionary psychology can contribute- but this is a handbook and we are given some useful practical tools to get started.
The section on visioning describes the process of scenario planning where people are asked to envisage a post-peak future in which the community has successfully achieved the transition to a low-energy, sustainable and localized state – and then come up with imagined newspaper stories in the future- some of which are reproduced in the book and make hilarious reading- check out the Beckham’s cob retirement home from 2029!
By way of getting us to think about things in a different way, Rob also invites us to question whether “Peak” oil is really the best word to use:
“The idea of energy descent is that each step back down the hill could be a step towards sanity, towards place and towards wholeness. It is a coming back to who we really are, similar to how members of a busy family rediscover each other during a power cut. Energy descent is, ultimately, about energy ascent – the re-energising of communities and culture – and is the key to our realistically embracing the possibilities of our situation rather than being overwhelmed by their challenges.”
The final section is “The Hands” in which Rob takes us through the transition concept- including a look at some of its inspiration such as Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles- and how it fills a gap between the “light-bulb syndrome” of useful but wholly inadequate individual changes, and government actions on the national scale:
“The transition model explores the ground between these two: what could be achieved at a community level”.
It is significant I think that Rob includes a table showing the difference between this permaculture-informed community response and conventional environmentalism which has often only had piecemeal solutions which address the symptoms, not the cause. One of these is the emphases not only on carbon footprints, but on the need to build resilience in every facet of a community.
The following chapters cover How to Start a Transition Initiative, including the 12 steps of transition; an account of the first year of Transition Town Totnes, the most interesting project initiated there being the Totnes pound, a local cash currency that has generated huge media interest in the Transition Movement; and how the process went viral and spread in a matter of months to hundreds of communities across England, Wales and Scotland, with stories of how the process has developed in some of these pioneering places.
The emphasis of the book is primarily on community processes and in this it is an excellent and inspiring resource. This is important also because the first steps of any such process is the enrollment of the local community into the idea of preparing for the inevitable changes ahead.
It would have been good also to see perhaps an extra appendix on, for example, the basics of energy and how to conduct a simple domestic energy audit;. more detail on the assessment of needs in terms of per capita energy use, amount of land available, amount of land required per capita to grow food; approximations of land needed to grow bio-fuels for on-farm use; population trends; etc..
This is the area now ripe for moving into with Energy descent Planning- counting, calculating, assessing. There is a lot of work to be done, much of it technical and requiring specialist skills and as such perhaps beyond the remit of the transition handbook. What Rob does do is lay the important groundwork and show how to go about finding those within the community who have the necessary skills.
Reading through the handbook and reflecting on the process as I have observed it blossoming under Rob’s gentle guidance over the last couple of years, I got the impression that the future was already here, that somehow all the things we all want to see in our communities- the cycle lanes, the school gardens, the walnut tree plantations and the solar panels- that these features of a sustainable society really can be here because there is just no reason not to have them. To get there will take tremendous effort, but if the apocalyptic visions of petrol riots, food shortages and flooded coastal cities are the stick, the Transition Handbook is surely the carrot we need to lure us on.
“While peak oil and climate change are undeniably profoundly challenging, also inherent within them is the potential for an economic, cultural and social renaissance the likes of which we have never seen. We will see a flourishing of local businesses, local skills and solutions, and a flowering of ingenuity and creativity. It is a Transition in which we will inevitably grow, and in which our evolution is a precondition for progress.”
Bring it on.
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