The Transition Network is a movement of communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world. Transition is a movement that has been growing since 2005. It is about communities stepping up to address the big challenges they face by starting local. By coming together, they are able to crowd-source solutions. They seek to nurture a caring culture, one focused on supporting each other, both as groups or as wider communities.
Transition accepts the huge changes we must make to our economic, food and energy systems to avoid catastrphic climate change and tries to take a positive spin on them. Transition anticipates the many community and biological benefits that might come from these essential actions and advises us to prepare for this seismic shift, as it is inevitable.
Transition podcast, Rob Hopkins talks with Richard Heinberg
A discussion between the Transition network founder, Rob Hopkins and author and commentator on energy and the post carbon economy Richard Heinberg
- Rob Hopkins is a permaculture teacher who challenged a course group in Kinsale Ireland some years ago to design a community response to the challenges of peak oil and cliamte change, and there began the Transition movement.
- Richard Heinberg is a teacher and author of a series of books on transition including The Party’s Over and The End of Growth. He is a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, a response tothe joint challenges of climate change and peak oil.
We know the world is warming, there is extensive data measuring it, but we dont know how bad or how quickly the crisis will unfold. To many around the world it is already a disaster with rising sea levels, erratic weather patterns and increasing uncertainty.
What kind of future are we planning for?
None of us has a crystal ball, but we can make informed guesses. David Holmgren came up with 4 scenario options in his book Future Scenarios and a
dvised us to plan for all of them. Rapid global warming, the top 2, point at desperate situations, either total collapse leading to lifeboats.. that is only pockets of stablity remaining and backs to the wall survival strategies, or Brown Tech, whereby the oil keeps flowing in an ever polluted and divided world, driving climate change and leading to ever more repressive regimes.
The lower two scenarios assume slower climate disruption and a greater ability for society to adjust to the coming changes. If the energy supplies hold out long enough then we might have time to engineer a green tech sustainable future, and indeed early adopters who were never too heavily invested in the carbon economy might well make this shift in time. Costa Rica, maybe Nicaragua, Cuba, Uganda might get there as they have natural sustainable energy resources like solar, geo-thermal and hydro and a strong local food economy. The over-indistrialised countries are going to find this much harder as we are so heavily invested in economic growth, petroleum driven trasportation and industrial agriculture.
James H Kunstler says: We are not going to be able to continue driving to Walmart for our groceries in our post carbon future.
If energy supplies run out faster then Green Tech becomes much harder to achieve and we are headed to a future based on Earth Stewardship, or permaculture. This involves making the best of the what relics we have from the industrial age and working hard to repair the damage we have done to the bioshpere to offset the worst impacts of climate and ecological damage. We will need to construct a localised economy based on organic agriculture, social inclusion by the local economy and an abandonment of globalisation all together.
This might all seem pretty bleak but the reality is that by failing to prepare in any way for the realities of our time will almost certainly lead us to the life boats scenario. Indeed persuit of the Brown Tech options will most likely also lead us to Lifeboats and a future we are unprepared for. We have to prepare for the Green tech future while we have the economic activity to achieve this. Our insurance policy is to invest in permaculture and to plan for an earth stewardship future as the basic default position to underwrite our food and resource security issues.
Find out more about Permaculture here:
- Permaculture Design Principles
Thinking tools, that when used together, allow us to creatively re-design our environment and our behavior in a world of less energy and resources - Permaculture Association
We support our members and others in the permaculture network to design thriving communities across Britain by applying permaculture ethics and principles, and to contribute to permaculture worldwide - Permaculture Magazine UK
Practical Solutions beyond sustainability - Transition Network
Home of Transition network worldwide. - Sector39 permaculture
Permaculture courses, landscapes and design.
That’s us, we are based in Mid Wales and offer permaculture education and design services.