Rob Hopkins: The transition handbook. From oil dependency to local resilience
Green Books limited, Totnes, UK, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-900322-18-8
Book review by Vidar Kristiansen
Rob Hopkins
A new movement is conquering the world. So called transition initiatives are spreading out from the UK, where it all started, and to places all around the globe. For historical reasons the original term «transition towns» are still used for these communities, but they do not need to be a town. They could just as well be a municipality, a village, a forest or an island. According to Wikipedia, the idea originated from Louise Rooney. But, I guess, most people who know the concept regard Rob Hopkins, who is the man who made the idea known to a larger audience, as the founder of the transition movement. This book of his is for everyone who wants to know what the transition initiative is all about.
He divides the book into three parts, called the head, the heart and the hands. This division is roughly a division into answering the three questions why, what and how. Why as in: «why has the transition movement been founded?» what as in: «what alternative does the transition movement offer people?» and how as in «how do the transition movement do the practical implementation of the transition?»
The first part is about what the author calls the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil. He elaborates the latter phenomenon the most, since this is something that is not commonly known to people. Peak oil is a term to describe when the world passes its all time maximum in oil production, an event that many people believe happens right now. The interesting thing is what this will do to the price of oil and the access to cheap fossil fuel, which is what powers almost all aspects of the economy of the modern world. Many people believe that we will do fine as long as we have oil left. The author argues that this is missing an important point. From the moment on, when we are over the top, fossil fuels will become more and more expensive, even prohibitively so for many activities that we have grown accustomed to regard as essential to our way of life. The author also describes how people often end up feeling helpless, depressed and overwhelmed by such information. And, I believe, a lot of readers will feel just that after finishing part 1 of this book. Luckily, the book does not end there.
The second part explains why life in a post oil economy does not need to be awful at all. Indeed, the author rather argues that a life in a post oil economy might even be a better life than life as we know it now. The transition movement tries to find out what was good about life in the pre cheap oil economy, and how we can rediscover the skills and know how that made life good back then. The thing that really got me interested in reading this book was the fact that the transition movement describes itself as a constructive movement motivated by a positive vision, using other tools than activism, protesting and lobbying, which are the traditional tools used by environmentalists. Being a movement that is for something rather than against. In the foreword to this book Richard Heinberg describes the transition movement as a collective action that looks more like a party than a protest march. It just so happens, that when we put together the first set of ideas for Green Life Innovators, we used many of the same basic principles, at that time being unaware of the existence of the transition movement, which, of course, makes it highly interesting coming across someone who has already proven that a positive, constructive, depoliticised approach can lead to success.
The third part of the books deals with the practical implementation of the transition initiative and the experiences the movement has made so far. The transition initiative is built around the principle of rebuilding local resilience. Local resilience means the ability of a local community to get life back on track after suffering a shock of some kind. The transition movement works towards achieving this through things like local food production instead of long supply lines and local and natural building materials instead of oil based products. They even experiment with local currency. In the British town of Totnes, which was the first transition town, many local businesses have agreed to accept the Totnes Pound as a means of payment.
Being a techie, I would have to add that the book also shows that the transition movement does not seem to include a strong focus on green tech in their work. I think that they should also ask the question: «What was not so good about life in the pre cheap oil economy, and what could be done to avoid that?» Because, though society has to go back to an economy that is not based on cheap oil, it does not mean that we have to do a complete rollback of everything to more or less exactly the way it was before. We do, after all, get to take all the knowledge we acquired on our way to the peak oil mountain top with us. Green tech is, in my opinion, something that can make life in a post oil economy more pleasant than it was in the pre oil economy. So, I would have to say that I hope that the transition movement will incorporate green technology more strongly into their models, so that when I read the 2018 edition of the transition handbook, it would also contain a chapter on this issue.
This should, however, not discourage any of you techies reading this from reading the 2008 edition of the book, because it is great food for thought. The same goes for the video clip included here, where the author himself talks about the transition initiative. The clip is almost 1 hour, but well worth the time watching.
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