Green shoots of New Economy

SUBHEAD: A replacement economy – a green economy – is now emerging. image above: Tokyo building atrium with mirrored escalators. Not so green. From http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1900344,00.html High Entropy - Moi? By John Thackara on 2 November 2009 in Worldchanging - http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010700.html

When I first came to Tokyo, fashionable parts of the city would be lined with hundreds of heavy taxis sitting in queues with their engines running, for hours on end. Every powered item was always on, 24/7. Tokyo Metropolitan Government has passed a law against idling cars - but this hall of mirrors atrium is a reminder that high entropy Tokyo will not disappear without a struggle.

This picture is by way of context for my lecture yesterday at the International Design Symposium which was held to mark Musashino Art University's 80th anniversary.

Here below is what I said. [I've borrowed here from a fantastic book I read on the way here: The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle and Andrew Simms. Review of that to follow - but buy it now.]

Kosa-san, esteemed colleagues, I will talk today about the emerging green economy - and, within that, the role of art and design. But first, a word of background.

Peak energy. Peak credit. Peak climate change. Each of these challenges is daunting on its own. Taken together, they mean that business- as-usual is over - for good. The old ways will not return. Yes, there are “green shoots” - but they are not the same old plants. They are the first sign that new economic and social life forms are emerging.

I believe that we have arrived at what complexity researchers call an “inflection point”. After forty years of talk and prevarication, we have arrived at a moment of profound transformation in the economy. I believe our instinct for survival is taking hold.

I say survival, because the old economy - the economy in which Gross Domestic Product is the only measure of success – has become, in the words of the True Cost campaign, a "doomsday machine". The traditional economy can only survive if it keeps growing, to infinity; and yet it wants to grow to infinity in a biosphere whose carrying capacity is finite.

That’s what makes the old economy a doomsday machine. Running after GDP, we ensure the destruction of the biosphere for economic reasons. It’s madness. The economist Lord Nicholas Stern was talking at the People's University of Beijing last week.

Stern, an insider’s insider, a key architect of the global status quo, stated the unthinkable:

“We have to question whether we can afford future growth.”

Can’t afford to grow! What an extraordinary thing for a former World Bank chairman to say! But what choice did he have? Do we all have? The basic operating system of the economy is broken.

The good news is that a replacement economy – a green economy – is now emerging. It has a new operating system. Rather than strive to make the most profit, regardless of the consequences, the green economy sets out meet human needs, whilst also protecting the capacity of natural systems to support life.

For business, and design, this new economic framework changes everything. Before this financial crisis, a new product or service was launched, somewhere in the world, every three minutes.

Nearly all these new products involved the in-efficient use of energy, water, and natural resources. Each product – remember: a new one every three minutes - contributed to the 70 million tonnes of C02 that is emitted into the earth’s atmosphere, every 24 hours, as a result of human activity.

Most of these products, and the environmental impacts that accompanied them, involved input from designers and the creative industries: concepts, artifacts, communications, packaging, shops, malls.

All these had, as their direct outcome, un-sustainable consumption. Without the creative industries, the economic doomsday machine could not function.

Design is not uniquely responsible, of course. The digital revolution, too, has played a part. The digital economy was added to, but did not replace, the industrial economy. The result of adding a digital layer to the industrial economy was to amplify energy and resource use in the global economy - tenfold. Digital communications also added a new layer of insulation – a kind of blindfold - between human beings and the biosphere.

Thanks to the the internet, and later with social networking, we became more connected to each other - but less connected to the natural systems on which all our lives depend. Technology separates us from direct experience of the world. It therefore blinds us to the consequences of our destructive economic behaviour.

So: If we can no longer carry on designing and producing stuff mindless of the consequences, what, then, should our focus be?

The emerging 'green economy' is based on a simple principle: We all live and work within a system whose carrying capacity is finite. The business opportunity, in this context, is develop the new services and infrastructures to meet daily life needs in radically lighter ways.

A key concept here is Ezio Manzini's idea of enabling solutions - solutions that re-assert human agency in our systems-filled world. A core task of design, in this emerging green economy, is to make it easier to share resources – resources such as energy, matter, time, skill, software, space, or food.

This green economy, you will note, is not principally about smart machines, such as electric vehicles, or wind turbines. The most important resources in the green economy are people. Even when machines are part of a green solution, people matter.

For example, efficiency in buildings, or in transport systems is determined by intensity of use, and by load factors - for example, of vehicles - not just by energy and material costs. Shared patterns of use are as important as low energy propulsion systems.

A huge design effort is also needed to create and optimize tools. Tools are needed to help us for perceive, understand the world in new ways.

The aim, in the green economy, is "radical transparency"- a situation in which we all know the true environmental, health, and social costs of what we buy.

The keyword here: True Cost.

Another keyword here is Social Innovation.

The green economy I am describing is not a future dream. It already exists. Social innovation is all around us. Even if the old economy, the market economy, does not recognize them, every community contains assets in the form of people and their skills and their culture.

By some accounts, there are one million grassroots environmental organizations out there. The website WiserEarth, alone, lists 120,000 of them all over the world.

The better-known examples have names like “Post-Carbon Cities” or “Transition Towns." The Transition Towns movement, especially, is, for me, hugely significant.

Transition initiatives, which only started to emerge a couple of years ago, are multiplying at extraordinary speed. More than 200 communities in Europe and North America have been officially designated Transition Towns - or cities, districts, villages - and even a forest. A further 800 communities around the world are "mulling it over" as they consider the possibility of starting their own Transition Initiative. Transition groups have started to appear in Japan, too. Check them out.

The transition model - I'm quoting their website - “emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye." But they don't just look: Transition groups break down the scary, too-hard-to-change big picture into bite-sized chunks.

They develop practical to-do lists; put those items in an agreed order of priority; and then start to work on the priority tasks they’ve agreed on. Their focus is the notion of resilience.

“Fui so” in Chinese is the capacity of a system to adapt to change, to rejuvenate.

In a green economy, resilience means the capacity of a place-based community to survive without the profligate energy and resource consumption we have become used to.

Transition groups deal with this in a most practical way. Each group asks a simple question: "for all those aspects of life that our community needs, in order to sustain itself and thrive, how will we do, if the worst case scenarios, that we fear, come to pass?

The Transition model is powerful because it brings people together from a single geographical area. These people have different interests and capabilities, but are united in being dependent on, and committed to, the context in which they live.

A second reason the Transition model works is that it uses a process of setting agendas and priorities - the "open space" method - that is genuinely inclusive of all points of view. The green economy is not being made by clever guys staring at computer screens. The green economy is not being made in shiny expensive buildings protected by guards. No: the green economy is being made wherever people are growing food in cities.

The green economy is where people opening seed banks, or teaching young people how to forge links direct with farmers in Community Supported Agriculture schemes. It’s being made where communities are removing dams, and restoring watersheds.

Anywhere you find car-share schemes, or off-grid energy pilots – there is a green economy hotspot. You’ll find the green economy wherever people are launching local currencies – nine thousand examples at last count. In their own version of the green economy, 70 million Africans are exchanging airtime - not cash. Non-money trading is exploding. Thousands of groups, Thousands of experiments.

For every daily life support system that is unsustainable now - food, health, shelter, journeying – alternatives are being tried. In the green economy now emerging, some aspects of resilience are technological solutions.

Other solutions are to be found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution – fir example, using plants to clean water. But most resilience attributes are social practices - some of them very old ones, that have evolved in other societies and in other times.

So, before we start designing new services and systems from scratch, we need to ask first: has anyone addressed a similar question in the past? How might we learn from, adapt, and piggyback on their success? or failure, come to think of it.

Last week, for example, I received a new book by Azby Brown – Just Enough - which describes how Japanese society confronted multiple crises of energy, water, fuels, food, and population – 200 years ago.

Japanese society in the Edo period met these challenges because it was conservation-minded, waste-free, and valued wellbeing with the minimum of resource consumption. I do not propose that we try to go backwards in time. And I am not promoting Edo as a lifestyle choice, a product you buy from a catalogue. No: as Azby Brown writes in his book, Just Enough is valuable as a mentality, as a framework for acting in the world - not a list or rules and prohibitions.

The green economy is not a prison camp. It’s a garden.

Advanced Design Education

I have spoken about the emerging green economy. I have talked about the necessity to account for the True Cost of a whole system in everything we design. I have spoke about the concept of “resilience” as a keyword in the society now emerging. I have also argued that social innovation – and especially Transition Towns – are more important sites of innovation than technology labs - or design studios.

If these ideas sound a long way from the traditional concerns of art and design – well, that’s because they are! But it’s not just design that’s facing profound change. A green economy means profound change for all professions, all businesses, all cities and regions.

But a question has been posed to us: what is an “Advanced Design Education” and how to we deliver it? My first response to this question is that “Advanced Design Education” already exists – only not by that name, and not in one place.

In my travels around the world, I have been encountering what Im tempted to describe as “transition design schools!” Some of these schools, or research sites, have an environmental agenda, but also have art and design in their culture.

In parallel, so-called “green MBAs” are beginning to be offered, which also have a design component. Two interesting examples, again in the US, are Bainbridge Graduate Institute and the Dominican University. Other ventures are further ahead of traditional design.

What these all have in common is that they operate in three complementary modes: • the mode of the live project in a real place; • the creation of a marketplace to connect ideas and projects together in viable enterprise; • the cross-pollination of models, tools and experiences from other places, and other times.

I would also mention my own organization, Doors of Perception, in this context.

Five years ago, we stopped organizing big international conferences to focus on in-situ events.

For a city or region, we: • scope for and map resources, especially people and natural resources who would not otherwise be visible; • we bring the most interesting projects together, and run design clinics to find out how each project can be helped; • finally, we often help each project pitch for support in a kind of Dragon’s Den game, with the aim of launching them as a social enterprise.

Our model, City Eco Lab helps a regions speed up its engagement in the green economy. This, for me, is one new form of advanced design education.

Conclusion

Until recently, it has been it’s too hard to try these experiments in mainstream universities, or business.

But as I said at the start today, these are new times. The moment is right for what Eugenio Barba calls “the dance of the big and the small.” Big institutions need fresh input and thinking. Small, edgy projects yearn for scale, reach, and impact

For me, “advanced design education” is about making new connections, and starting new conversations. Advanced design education is not much about dreaming up original content in a lab, or studio. Advanced design education, for me, is about getting out of the tent – going to where the action is. Art and design have a lot to offer.

The ability of the artist to help us all perceive the unseen, or the invisible, is vital as we reframe the tasks and priorities of the economy.

Artists can sensitize us to systems, and their behaviour, and thereby help us engage with the biosphere as a systemic whole - in which human beings are a co-dependent part.

In many cultures, this has been the work of artists for thousands of years. The idea of art separated off from daily life is literally unknown in so-called “un-developed” cultures.

Design skills, too, are needed, right now, out there where the green economy action is. Design is needed to help create tools. Tools for perceiving, seeing, understanding, conversing. Tools for sharing resources, organizing people, and exchanging time.

As Professor Tony Jones reminded us yesterday, artists and designers are workers!

So, put them to work!

Critique of Critique of Transition

SUBHEAD: The Transition movement holds fast to the principle that it’s not all about the technology or doomsday. image above: Entry into the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. From http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/MH/Crime/wwizoz.htm By Rob Hopkins on 3 November 2009 in Transition Culture - http://transitionculture.org/2009/11/03/responding-to-alex-steffens-critique-of-transition-at-worldchanging

I have been following with interest the discussions surrounding Alex Steffen’s piece at WorldChanging in which he critiques Transition. I am honoured that someone so widely respected as a writer on sustainability issues saw fit to engage in discussions around Transition, but, as a critique of Transition, it leaves a lot to be desired.

It is a confusing piece in which, in spite of Alex’s protestations in the comments thread to have read everything about Transition that is out there, seems to have somewhat missed the point. I’ll go through some of Alex’s main points, but an overall reflection is that it appears to me that what Alex does is to describe Transition as something it isn’t, criticize it for being that, and then propose something to replace Transition which is actually what Transition was all along. An odd approach. Carolyn Baker has already posted an articulate response to Alex’s piece, but here’s mine.

What Transition is Not

It might be useful to start by clarifying a few beliefs and characteristics which Alex erroneously attributes to Transition.

• Transition does not focus exclusively on towns and ignore cities. Although the term ‘Transition Towns’ alliterates nicely, we now use the term Transition Initiatives (and have done so for at least 2 years), given that there are now Transition cities, islands, hamlets, streets, districts, Universities and more. In fact, many of the most fascinating Transition projects are happening in cities, projects like the Brixton Pound are one such example.
• There are 239 ‘formal’ Transition initiatives… but thousands of ‘mullers’ or unofficial initiatives across the world.
• Transition does not suggest that people “just go ahead and do something, anything’. It suggests a community-led design project, to consciously and creatively design for the transition away from oil dependency. Although it encourages people to get started with taking action in whatever way they feel moved to and feel passionate about, it proposes that this take place within a wider framework of being strategic, hence the concept of Energy Descent Planning being Step 12 of the 12 Step approach.
• It does not suggest that “the only proper scale at which to prepare for a soft landing is at the local level”. It is stated very clearly in the Transition Handbook that we need a hierarchy of responses; we need local and national government responses, we need international agreements such as that being discussed soon in Copenhagen, but without vibrant, creative, positive local level engagement, all of those will be less well informed, slower and less inclusive. The drive can come from communities, but they can’t do it alone. I often talk about Transition as having the potential to be the lubricant that re-oils the wheels of political engagement that have, for many, become rusted to the stage of inaction.
• Alex writes “all over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of apocalypse… and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing swap”. This is enormously patronizing as well as factually incorrect, and I will explore why in what follows.

Collapse or Descent?

Much of Alex’s piece revolves around his belief that Transition is obsessed with collapse and its inevitability. Some of what Alex writes here goes beyond being factually incorrect and is actually quite deeply insulting. I find it extremely suprising to be accused of having a “casual eagerness for the death of others”. I have met no-one involved in Transition who would display such an eagerness, and I would be deeply shocked if I did. At the heart of this is the difference between the concept of energy descent and of collapse.

For me, as I have articulated in the Transition Handbook and elsewhere, the motivation for Transition is that of responding to peak oil and climate change, and to the notion of energy descent. Energy descent, as articulated originally by Howard Odum and later by David Holmgren, and given a rigorous energetic basis by Ted Trainer’s analysis in ‘Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society‘, is based on the observation that the world is passing the peak in fossil fuels, and that we need to be designing for the declining availability of both oil itself and of net energy.

As I also set out in the book, there are many scenarios that then emerge as to what happens now, of which collapse is one, but the clearly stated desire of Transition is to be able to create a safe, intentional way through energy descent, avoiding collapse, shifting the focus to local economies and increased resilience, what Odum called ‘A Prosperous Way Down’.

Alex writes that I talk “almost cheerfully about passing peak oil, widespread food shortages and the idea of globalization crashing suddenly”. What I actually do is to stress that the passing of peak oil, the entering of the age of energy descent, could be, given the successful mobilizing of what we call ‘engaged optimism’ and of communities seeing the possibilities within this rather than just the challenges, need not be dreaded.

The reskilling that would accompany relocalization, the move away from fossil fuel dependence, the rebuilding of local food networks, the rediscovery of local building materials, all have huge potential for a cultural renaissance and could, I argue, actually be the thing that revives local economies in the face of the world’s recent financial woes,and could lead to a way of life which is an improvement on the present.

It is this that I work for, and I think that it will only happen if people see it as a positive and desirable future, which is why I talk about it ‘cheerfully’. I talk about it cheerfully because the potential it holds is genuinely thrilling, what we could become is exhilarating and because, it seems to me, there don’t seem to be a whole pile of more appealing options on the table.

Transition observes that most of the large-scale systems that we have, and on which we depend, are highly oil dependent and therefore vulnerable. It is therefore not a case of somehow longing for Helter Skelter, for the collapse of the evil behemoth of Western Capitalism, rather an observation that we had better get real and serious about designing something better and more appropriate to a world of energy descent.

The extent to which Transition should also be preparing for impending collapse rather than a prolonged descent is one that Richard Heinberg and myself have debated and take different positions on. If the ‘dark side’ Alex writes of exists, I have yet to come across it.

It is also interesting to note that alongside Alex’s criticism of Transition for craving collapse, there are many other critiques out there that criticize it for the opposite, for not taking collapse seriously enough, and for being naive about humanity being able to design its way out of it. Given that, as I have stated here, the intention of Transition is to design proactively for the safe and productive navigation of energy descent, I am puzzled by Alex accusing Transition of being “engineered to solve the wrong problem”.

What Transition is

As I mentioned in my opening, Alex creates what seems to me be to be a false explanation of what Transition is and then slates it, proposing instead something he sees as being more relevant and workable. This is best seen in his sentence:

“Indeed, if anything, places that are by global standards rich and well-educated need to be preparing to be bulwarks of stability in a chaotic world, to be more deeply invested in making things work for everyone”.

That is exactly what Transition initiatives are doing. What they do though, is to assert that those ‘bulwarks of stability’ are based on realistic assumptions about the future. The creation of such bulwarks based on the idea of perpetual economic growth, endless availability of cheap energy, and no need to respond to climate change will not be of much use to anyone.

The rebuilding of resilience, as discussed in my recent article in Resurgence, is the aim of Transition initiatives. Within resilience is the idea of modularity, that rather than the highly networked systems of today, what is needed is for communities, settlements and nations to have more, in effect, surge breakers, in the form of local food systems, local energy generation and more robust local economies, to enable them to better withstand shocks.

Alex’s list of what should replace Transition is in fact, a list of what Transition initiatives are already doing, and of the thinking that underpins their work. This is especially evident in his final suggestion;

"Above all else, re-imagining the future. Since we can’t build what we can’t imagine, and visions of the future dominate our ability to understand the present, how can we embrace future-making tools to redefine the possible in our communities? Because the powers that be have one gigantic weakness: they offer us no future, none at all, and every time we shift the debate to be about where we’re going, we win."

As numerous commenters below Alex’s list have pointed out, re-imagining the future is one of the key elements of Transition, as set out in ‘Who We Are and What We Do’, as well as in pretty much every written piece on Transition ever produced. Personally speaking, I think the work Transition initiatives do around this, and the tools they are developing are exceptional. If Alex has any better ones, I’m sure they would be only too eager to get their hands on them to try them out as well.

Civic Engagement

Alex stresses that what distinguishes his ‘Bright Green’ approach from Transition is that Transition is somehow mired in inconsequential local noodlings and obsessing about collapse, and thereby neglects to seek engagement in the political process. He argues that we need an ‘organized, educated, passionate democracy’ capable of overcoming the ‘pervasive cynicism’ which currently inhibits action.

Here again, there is a misunderstanding as to what Transition groups are actually doing out there. Many are engaging with their local governments, some Transitioners even standing for election. Transition Stroud has been very actively involved with their local Council, to the extent that the former deputy head of the Council said that “if Transition Stroud didn’t exist, we’d have had to make them up”, or words to that effect.

Across the UK, Councils are seeing local Transition initiatives as a key part of engaging communities in action around climate change, and the Scottish Government is funding Transition Scotland Support, seeing the value of their work. Alexis Rowell, a Councillor in Camden in London, is currently writing “Local Communities and Local Councils: working together to make things happen”, due out next March, which is explicitly about how people involved in Transition can better engage with the political process. Working with institutions is also the work of Transition Training and Consulting, and also with the emerging Transition Universities work, seeking to draw the principles of resilience and carbon reduction into institutions.

Alex writes that “we need to see ourselves as the powers that will be”. Of course. I struggle to imagine that anyone involved in Transition would disagree. Transition is not about rejecting political engagement, or blanking existing structures, of somehow longing for collapse in order to sweep away all that is unwholesome and corrupt.

We argue that we are all in the same boat, facing the same challenges, and that a large part of our work is to take engagement in the kind of community-wide planning process that we need to a far deeper level than the green movement has thus far managed. This is exactly what Transition groups are currently doing.

Some Final Thoughts… ‘Bright Green’ or ‘Dark Green’?

The discussion thread that follows Alex’s piece is very interesting, with many people from Transition initiatives writing to state that Transition, as it is described in Alex’s piece, is not the Transition that they know and that they dedicate their time to. Some readers may be puzzled by the ‘bright green’ reference in the title. Delving a bit deeper on his website, it seems that he has come to his analysis of Transition bearing his model for defining environmental initiatives as ‘bright green’, ‘deep green’, ‘light green’ and grey’, what he calls the ‘new environmental spectrum’ (for more detail as to what those mean, click here).

In brief, ‘bright green’ asserts that no-one will want to give up current luxuries, and that the only way to move to sustainability is to harness prosperity, wellbeing and entrepreneurial zeal, whereas dark green is mired in doomerism, localism, bioregionalism, and a rejection of consumerism.

I think this spectrum is unhelpful. Of course there is always a range of views on green thinking, which is well documented in the sustainability literature. However, my sense is that Transition does not fit neatly into the “mostly judgemental” Deep Green category in which Alex places it, indeed having as much in common with his ‘Bright Green’ approach.

Transition is about bringing insights and observations from the ‘deep green’ into the ‘bright green’ (although I think this classification is clumsy), arguing that the rebuilding of local economies is not about a retreat into survivalism (regular readers will know the regular kickings I get from survivalist commenters), but is actually the only practical (in the context of energy descent) way of realising the kind of entrepreneurial zeal he is so keen on. As I said in the TED talk I gave this year;

Then there is response that suggests that technology will come riding to our rescue, one, I would observe, is rather prevalent at these TED Talks. The idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis, that the move to a knowledge economy can allow us to neatly sidestep the very real energy constraints we are facing. The idea that we will discover some extraordinary new source of energy that will sweep aside any concerns about energy security. That we can make a seamless step across onto renewables. It is perhaps because we have shown such great creativity all the way up the mountain, that we assume we can do the same thing all the way down again.

However, the real world is not Second Life. We cannot create new land, new energy systems at the click of a mouse. We live in a world of very real constraints. As we sit at our laptops exchanging ‘free’ ideas with each other, collaboratively building new ideas and concepts, there are still people in China mining coal to power the servers our web access relies on, processing the materials for our new devices, and the breakfast we eat before we start work has been sourced from great distances, with a huge energy and carbon debt, and usually at the expense of the resilient local food systems we have so effectively devalued and discarded over the past forty years. While we can be astonishingly inventive and brilliant about this, we also live in a very real world with very real demands and constraints.

Rather than toss Transition into a corner, Alex could do better to consider how the values of entrepreneurship, increased wellbeing and business acumen which he espouses (as does Transition) would best be harnessed in an energy descent context. He might find, by so doing, that a great deal of creative thinking has already emerged from the Transition movement.

Alex writes that “what we need is a movement of local efforts aimed at changing things that matter at scales that matter, based on the politics of optimism”. Absolutely. I sat at the end of reading Alex’s piece feeling somewhat puzzled and bewildered. Isn’t that exactly what we’ve been doing for the last four years? Perhaps if he manages to miss what Transition is about in such a way, his piece bats the challenge back to Transition; how well are we communicating what we are doing?

see also: Ea O Ka Aina: Emerald City vs Transition Town 10/27/09

Lu Guang’s China

SUBHEAD: Guang’s images document the industrial pollution that is devastating the Chinese countryside and poisoning those who have to live there.

image above: A family of five children who emigrated to Inner Mongolia from the nearby Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region to find work in the Heilonggui Industrial District, April 10, 2005. The oldest child is nine years old; the youngest is less than two. Photographs by Lu Guang

By Garry Peterson on 2 November 2009 in Resilience Science - http://rs.resalliance.org/2009/11/02/lu-guangs-china

Chinese environmental photographer Lu Guang won the 2009 W. Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography for his for his project, “Pollution in China.” (For more information and photos see NYTime’s Lens blog , and China Hush).

The W. Eugene Smith award recognizes photographers “who have demonstrated a deep commitment to documenting the human condition in the formidable tradition of compassionate dedication that W. Eugene Smith exhibited”

image above: Tianjin Steel Plant, She County, Hebei Province, China, March 18, 2008

China scholar, Orville Schell describes Lu Guang’s photos in China’s Boom: The Dark Side in Photos:

I have seen some woeful scenes of industrial apocalypse and pollution in my travels throughout China, but there are very few images that remain vividly in my mind. This is why the photographs of Lu Guang are so important. A fearless documentary photographer who lives in China’s southern province of Zhejiang and runs a photo studio and lab that funds his myriad trips around China, Lu photographs the dark consequences of China’s booming but environmentally destructive economic development in ways that stay with you. Evidently Chinese officials seem to agree, because they often try to censor his photography, forcing him to use an alias. …

Some of his arresting images show plumes of pitch black and garishly colored yellow and red smoke belching out of factory and power plant chimneys - almost all caused by the burning of soft coal. They are reminiscent of the eerie, unnatural images and colors that blink out of a television set when the tint controls are turned all the way to one side.

His pictures of open-pit coal mines that have been illegally gouged into the Mongolian steppe, and the attendant mountains of tailings that tower beside them, bespeak a landscape so despoiled that millions of years of restoration will not be enough to heal it.

Everything you see in Lu’s photographs—whether desolate mines, gritty plants spewing out toxic smoke, grimy miners, poisoned bodies of water or tundras of trash—grows out of China’s use of coal. In fact, 80 percent of China’s electricity comes from coal (in contrast to about 50 percent for the US). And electrical power has provided the Chinese economy with the energy it needs to maintain 10 percent growth rates for more than a decade.

In other words, coal has been China’s bounty and salvation, enabling tens of millions of people to rise up from grinding poverty, and allowing the government to build a whole new system of ports, highways, airports, railroads, bridges, buildings, and tunnels. It has also helped to create a prosperous middle class; and contributed to China’s emergence as a world power.

However, China’s reliance on coal has been polluting the country’s air and water, depleting its resource base and despoiling its landscape in ways that are difficult to imagine without actually visiting the Chinese countryside. Yet the photography of Lu Guang gives us a glimpse of this landscape, reminding us that these scenes of devastation are not isolated phenomena. They are ubiquitous. Above all, it also reminds us that there is a steep cost to such rapacious and high-speed development, something the Chinese government has started to understand and to try and remedy.

also see: Ea O Ka Aina: Photographs of Oil 11/1/09 The Story of Stuff

Day of the Dead

SUBHEAD: Are we about to enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past? image above: Graphic celebrating Mexico's Day of the Dead. From http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.volumeone.com/products/images/dayofdead.jpg By Albert Bates on 02 November 2009 in Culture Change - http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=541&Itemid=1 The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Humankind has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.

"We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees’ seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones.

If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past." - Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (2004)

Late October’s stock market crash was forecast so broadly that anyone who was surprised by it has not been noticing. Those green shoots the government was jiving about in the Spring did not yield fruit, and now comes the Winter of Great Discontent.

We are still being told this will not be an “L” shaped depression, but don’t believe it. The shape is more like a long back-slash, pixel-bit-mapped by resting steps. If you back down the enlargement, it smoothes. Enjoy the slide. Like us, you may find you have more time on your hands.

We have been skipping more conferences than we have been attending lately, and fortunately for us, those meetings have been getting more web-savvy and posting the presentations for the non-attendee audience. That used to mean not getting to hear the illuminating conversations that happened around the coffee urn, or in sponsored hotel suites and piano bars, but even that part is now being web-cast.

See, for instance, the conversation <theautomaticearth.blogspot.com> between Euan Mearns and Rembrant Loppelaar, of The Oil Drum: Europe, <europe.theoildrum.com> and Stoneleigh, of The Automatic Earth <theautomaticearth.blogspot.com> as they un-jet-lagged in the Rocky Mountains National Park in the run-up to the ASPO meeting in Denver <peakoil.net>. We could call ourselves a fly-on-the-wall, but from the photo, there was way much too much snow for that.

Speaking of flies, here in Mexico it is very, very quiet. This past weekend the children were all in Halloween costumes and parties and parades for the Day of the Dead were temporarily festive, but now it is Sunday morning, and the quiet has returned. Calling up ghosts, the newspaper Por Esto! <poresto.net> daily reports the number of people getting off airplanes in Cancun and Acapulco and the numbers of flight cancellations. Numbers, what numbers? It’s a cargo-cult for the vanishing tourism industry. Fewer than twenty percent of the hotels and restaurants in this part of the Mayan Riviera are even bothering to open.

The Diebold presidente here, Felipe Calderón, proposes to privatize the national oil company, Pemex. The elected but excluded actual presidente, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, with his pot-bagging street crowds, controls enough of the national assembly to thwart that move, but the seriousness of the proposal exemplifies the degree of official desperation.

The largest single source of both national exports and government tax revenues is the state-owned oil and gas resource, which is in production free-fall after desperate attempts at tertiary recovery using nitrogen injection and lateral drilling. Mexico is the US’s third largest supplier, in case we had forgotten.

With the tax base falling, services are being curtailed at all levels, business taxes have tripled in six months, there are rolling blackouts and brownouts every day, the peso has slid and the price of food (most of it now imported) has skyrocketed. On January 1, 2010, the federal government will raise the price of gasoline, diesel, electricity and LP and LNG gas by 17%. It will also levy a “holding tax” on any bank deposit of 3% per year on everything over $1500. That comes on top of a 16% addition to the VAT.

This week they came with trucks and stopped at city halls in rural towns and gave out rice, beans, and corn flour for anyone who needed it. This is normally something they do after a hurricane. The hurricane now is economic. The government doesn't like people banging pots.

Mexico is getting hit with a triple whammy — its other two largest sources of income are remittances (which are down and people are returning from the north in search of employment) and tourism (which is being killed by the swine flu and violent crime rumors, both overblown, and by the financial belt-tightening upstream where tourists are begat — the US, EU, and Japan).

Calderón’s solution to privatize Pemex is not even so much a proposal as a bullying threat. It would mean Mexico would not get $86 billion/yr in oil revenues to run the government, but it would get a one-time purchase price, and the government could run on that until Calderón leaves office.

Seriously, that's the president’s plan. It only amazes us that no-one in the US is considering doing what an earlier presidente of Mexico, Lazaro Cardénas, <peaksurfer.blogspot.com> did, which was to nationalize the oil companies. Since 2007, Exxon’s profits alone could have gone a long way towards balancing the deficit. Instead, they are being squandered on high-priced condos in Dubai with 50-meter private boat docks that spell out Koranic verses that can be viewed by orbiting billionaires.

Rather than nationalize the oil companies, the US jumped off on Afghanistan to take back its poppy trade, which had been successfully eradicated in the 1990s by the Islamic fundamentalist local Talibans, despite the CIA’s best efforts. That is really the only reason the Western Alliance is in Afghanistan. We watched Joe Biden listening to “God Bless America” being played at the seventh inning stretch during the third game of the World Series and we wondered, does he know?

Is that why our Nobel Peace Prize-winning Shogun is raining hellfire missiles on Pakistan’s tribal territories from predator drones controlled from windowless buildings in Las Vegas — a completely outlaw move under international treaties going back two centuries — to take back control of our former guys (they are called Al Qaeda) from the Koran-readers? To ramp that production back up? The heroin trade envoys — largely private contractors — have been doing spectacularly well at their assigned mission, despite the blow-back from the human rights community. Afghani Brown <newsmeat.com> is now ratcheting up close its earlier production records. The Opium Empire is secure, or at least so it might appear to the heir of Kissinger’s Nobel House.

Unfortunately, whether it is poppies or tulips, the global economy had other plans. It was overdue for correction, and Peak Everything was both the trigger and the bullet through its brain. We are in a civilization collapse of unprecedented proportions now: Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond cubed; the Club of Rome on steroids.

Here in the Yucatán they still speak Yukatek, and the local government, at its incense-burning base, is managed by a class of white shamans, who call themselves that formally, and cleave to many of the rituals that have remained in these parts since the Ah Itzá left, including the occasional ayahuasca ceremony to communicate with the spirit world and cleanse demons. Dia de los Muertos is all about that.

Historically the Itzá were a fierce Mesoamerican people who remained in the Yucatán long after other Mayan dynasties collapsed. In the classic period they erected the cities around Tikal near lake Peten Itzá in Guatemala, then abandoned those to migrate north into the Yucatán during the classic period collapse. From their new capital at Chichén Itzá, which resembles Tikal in its monumental architecture arranged as an astronomical calendar, they established a sail-powered trade empire reaching as far south as Honduras. Collapse? What collapse?

Eventually the Itzá got sacked in a power struggle between three Yucatekan lineages all claiming to have descended from the Toltecs. The Itzá said that dark sorcery was at work in their defeat and these local governments of white shamans are making sure that won’t happen again. In 1331 the Itzá royal lineage abandoned Chichén Itzá and returned south to the Petén, constructing a new fortress city, Noh Petén (also called Tah Itzá or Tayasal), on an island in the middle of Lake Peten Itzá, today part of Guatemala, near the western border of Belize.

There they successfully resisted many military expeditions by the Spanish until finally surrendering in 1697 to a diplomatic delegation led by Martín de Ursua, governor of Yucatán. The terms of surrender allowed them to retain the Mayan shamanic culture that continues today.

To the Maya the oil that seeped from the ground was useful for tarring canoes and sailing craft, but little else. It was too stinky and smoky to burn for heat or light, and you couldn’t eat it.

Their black gold was soil, and the milpa system still practiced in the Petén and elsewhere, with chinampas<en.wikipedia.org>; the black earths within the pyramid city walls attest to their skill as scientific soil-builders. They had learned the hard way what happens when you cut your trees to roast lime and let the good soil run off the land. By changing their soil management practices, they had improved their diet, moderated their climate, and changed their fortunes.

When we glance at the downloadable audio files and powerpoints from another meeting, “4 Degrees and Beyond” held September 28-30 in Oxford, England, <eci.ox.ac.uk> we can easily see that once humans break through the 2°C striped yellow caution tape, tacked up by the EU a few years ago, we’ll enter what the Potsdam Institute <eci.ox.ac.uk> now calls Terra Quasi-Incognita, complete with sea levels rising back to the Oligocene (+100m), a 90% population die-off, and tipping points that could take us to Venus.

Standing along the path to Copenhagen, offering handfuls of soil to the passing delegates, are the Yucatán shamans.

* * * * *

Albert Bates is a permaculture and appropriate technology instructor at the Ecovillage Training Center (thefarm.org/etc) in Summertown,Tennessee and in rural Mexico and Belize. He will next be teaching a full Permaculture Design Course at the Maya Mountain Research Center in Belize <mmrfbz.org> in March 2010 after he returns from Copenhagen, where he will attend the climate talks as a UN representative for the Global Ecovillage Network. His next book, The Tao of Biochar, will be published by New Society in 2010. Albert blogs at peaksurfer.blogspot.com. See Culture Change articles by or on Albert at <culturechange.org>

Challenge of Energy Descent

SUBHEAD: “If we act as individuals, it’ll be too little. But if we act as communities, it might be just enough, just in time.” By Michael Brownlee on 30 October 2009 in Transition Times - http://transition-times.com/blog/2009/10/30/transition-meeting-the-challenge-of-energy-descent

“I believe there is a course of action that is appropriate to what we face, and is actually inevitable, whether we go there voluntarily or have to be dragged kicking and screaming into that future: the comprehensive downscaling, rescaling, downsizing, and relocalizing of all our activities, a radical reorganization of the way we live in the most fundamental particulars.” –James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21^st Century

Our Predicament It’s become axiomatic that, like it or not, we will be facing a future with ever less energy. But what does this “Energy Descent” mean, exactly? And how do we prepare?

Richard Heinberg has been fairly specific about the dimensions of the challenge. He estimates that due to fossil fuel depletion and decreasing exports we could easily see a 25-40% decline in available energy over the next two or three decades. He calculates that in but a very few nations probably no more than 25% of the energy currently being consumed could be replaced by alternative/renewable sources by 2030. So for fossil fuel importing nations like the U.S., says Heinberg, it would be prudent to anticipate and plan for at least a 25% decline in total energy by that time. That would certainly change the face of modern society!

CMO comparison

But with the energy revolution green-shooting all over the planet, won’t alternative sources of energy quickly replace the oil we’re using? No, suggest scientists at Stanford Research Institute, who noted that the 83 million or so barrels of oil we’re burning every day to run the world adds up to just about one cubic mile of oil (CMO) per year. An enormous amount of energy is embedded in all that black liquid!

So what would it take to replace the oil we currently use? The SRI researchers say that to finally achieve that much energy output, every year for fifty years in a row we’d need to build the equivalent of four Three Gorges Dams (still the largest construction project in human history). Or bring 52 nuclear power plants online every year for fifty years. Or launch 104 coal-fired power plants every year for fifty years. Or, if you’d prefer a “cleaner” approach, we’d need to install 91 million solar panels or 33,000 wind turbines a year for fifty years in a row.

From this perspective we can say that certainly there will be alternatives to oil, but they are not likely to come on stream quickly enough or at large enough scale to maintain our current way of life. Gulp!

The End of the Culture of Growth

Our Energy Future

One of the most important implications of Energy Descent is that economic growth—the primary culprit in climate change and environmental degradation—will slow down (already happening) and eventually reverse course. This is the economic equivalent of a pole-shift, and will shake the very foundations of human civilization as we have come to know it.

Where we are now is at the beginning of a transition from an industrial growth culture to a culture of descent. This transition will be characterized by much cultural chaos, and then we will be declining or descending to a far more sustainable low-energy culture. Regarding this, David Holmgren says, “We have trouble visualizing decline as positive, but this simply reflects the dominance of our prior culture of growth… The real issue of our age is how we make a graceful and ethical descent.” It is no coincidence that Holmgren sees permaculture playing a crucial role in designing this descent.

Holmgren has also charted the disturbing correlation between increasing energy consumption and human population growth. Now energy consumption and human population are peaking, he says, partly because cheap fossil fuels are peaking. On the other side of this peak is an inevitable decline: “I use the term ‘descent,’” says Holmgren, “as the least loaded word that honestly conveys the inevitable, radical reduction of material consumption and/or human numbers that will characterize the declining decades and centuries of fossil fuel abundance and availability.”

Rob Hopkins, the plucky founder of the burgeoning Transition movement, defines Energy Descent as “…the continual decline in net energy supporting humanity, a decline that mirrors the ascent in net energy that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution.” (Hopkins is obviously deeply influenced by Holmgren.)

Writers like Archdruid John Michael Greer have helped us understand that Energy Descent is not a problem that can be solved, but a predicament of our own creation to which we must now quickly adapt. In the face of such a predicament, the desperate and futile search for “solutions” is both misleading and distracting, and leaves us unprepared for the realities that are coming. (I recently had a revealing conversation with researchers at Amory Lovins’ famed Rocky Mountain Institute who told me that they are working to quickly develop alternative energy technologies that will allow America to continue life as usual without having to change or sacrifice anything.)

A predicament, as Heinberg once said, is like growing old. “You can’t solve that. However, you can choose to respond respectfully, wisely and imaginatively to it.” Like ageing, he says, even a fundamental predicament can become a source of unexpected riches.

Relocalization and Resilience

Hopkins summarizes our current predicament succinctly:

• The challenge of global climate change makes a transition off fossil fuel dependence necessary for planetary survival.
• The impending peak in oil and gas production means that the transition is inevitable.
• Our only choice is whether to proactively undertake the transition now—or later.

But this is not about bad news, not doom and gloom. Cheerfully, Hopkins says, “I believe that a lower-energy, more localized future—in which we move from being consumers to being producer/consumers, where food, energy and other essentials are locally produced, local economies are strengthened and we have learned to live more within our means—is a step towards something extraordinary, not a step away from something inherently irreplaceable.”

In this more localized future, says Hopkins, we know we must make our communities more resilient, less vulnerable to the profound changes that are coming—for resilient communities, self-reliant for their essential needs, will be far better off than those who are still dependent on globalized systems for food, energy, transportation, health, and housing.

The Transition movement teaches that the essence of resilience is relocalization, which means moving towards local production of food, energy and goods; local development of currency, government and culture; and, importantly, reducing consumption while improving environmental and social conditions. Notably, for the Transition movement, relocalization also means developing exemplary communities that can provide working models and inspiration for other communities as the effects of energy decline become more intense.

But how does all this happen? How can communities actually make this Transition?

Transition’s Energy Descent Action Plan

By now, most of us are familiar with the inspiring story of how long-time permaculture teacher and activist Rob Hopkins conspired with his students to develop a visionary plan for applying the principles and ethics of permaculture to help transition the town of Kinsale, Ireland off fossil fuel dependence, and how their Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) was subsequently adopted by the town council. This was a shot-heard-round-the-world kind of moment that ignited the imaginations of would-be relocalizers in communities far and wide, all the more so as we have since witnessed Transition initiatives blossom in more than a thousand communities in some 15 countries (there are as of this writing 206 initiatives officially recognized by the Transition Network, including 38 in the U.S., plus an unknown number of “mullers”—likely in the low four-figures—along with scores of groups who are already utilizing the Transition process but have not yet sought official status).

Many of us watched in fascination as Hopkins moved to Totnes, England, where he began prototyping an ambitious process (somewhat coincidentally described in twelve loosely-defined “steps,” which are now understood as “ingredients” or pieces of the overall Transition puzzle; see below) for engaging an entire community in relocalizing, becoming resilient and largely self-reliant for their essential needs. The holy grail or pinnacle of the process became the development of an Energy Descent Action Plan for the community, one which is developed organically with the broad involvement of grassroots citizenry and local government alike.

Hundreds of communities have earnestly and enthusiastically begun the Transition process over the last couple of years, but where has the effort gotten to? Where do we see stellar examples of community-produced Energy Descent plans?

Town of Totnes

Not surprisingly, it turns out that developing an EDAP in a community is a long and complicated process. Transition Totnes, England—the first official Transition Town—launched its much anticipated 12- to 24-month planning process on Sept. 24, 2008, nearly three years after Hopkins arrived and two years after their spectacular “Great Unleashing” event. (Significantly, the planning process was well-funded before they actually began formal work on the project.)

A 2030 vision of a resilient and self-reliant Totnes was cultivated from a lengthy series of meetings and community-engagement workshops, along with the output of a variety of working groups focused on specific areas of concern, and a preliminary draft of the plan was published in late July of this year for a month of open online consultation from the public.

Key themes and pathways in the draft plan include Working with Nature, Creative Energy Systems, Resourcing Localisation, Nurturing Transition, and Empowering People. These all incorporate timelines, ideas, suggestions and proposals by participants at public workshops designed to fashion a vision for Totnes in 2030. This fall, Transition Totnes will open their Energy Descent Plan to a lengthy process of wider consultation, discussion, and—finally—implementation.

Early output from the Totnes EDAP work has resulted in the publication of groundbreaking research in “Can Totnes and District Feed Itself? Exploring the Practicalities of Food Relocalization.” Hopkins calls this paper “the most comprehensive look at this question thus far, and is the first step in developing a national project and tool around the ‘Can Britain Feed Itself?’ question.”

Hopkins muses, “The paper looks at the degree of food self reliance that might be possible, based on the quality of the land available, and on how it is presently used. It reveals large gaps in our knowledge, the difficulty of establishing yields for the more complex, [bespeaks] food production systems such as agroforestry, the potential impacts of climate change, and also the difficulty of obtaining affordable access to the range of datasets that doing this work in more detail would require.” The authors view it as “the first stab at research that is vitally needed across the world.”

The conclusions of the paper, says Mike Grenville of Transition Network News, identify “the need for a rethink of how agriculture is practiced, as well as the urgent need for research into new models of food production. Also identified is the need for national version of this research, a larger project, but in the light of the fast moving issues of peak oil, climate change and the economic difficulties facing the UK, a profoundly urgent one.”

Transitioners around the world are closely following the Totnes planning process, as it promises to be the “gold standard” for EDAPs everywhere.

Transition Forest Row’s “Pre-EDAP”

Transition Forest Row in England has taken a very different approach to their Energy Descent Plan. Forrest Row was one of the early Transition Initiatives in the UK, holding its Great Unleashing in March 2008. Fueled by a small grant and an accompanying aggressive deadline, the group found themselves plunging into the planning process much earlier than anticipated. They began with the usual community events and working groups, but as the deadline loomed, an editorial team took things in hand to produce a publishable product. What quickly emerged was a narrative, a story-from-the-future of a fictional family called “The Foresters,” and how they made the Transition as a family and how the community of Forrest Row changed around them.

The result is a creative combination of storytelling, cartoons and drawings, along with practical steps to a fossil-fuel-free community by 2030. It is packaged as a colorful, beautifully-produced, and rather whimsical sort of “pre-EDAP,” telling the story of a possible future for Forest Row for the man in the street. Transition Forest Row printed 1,800 copies, and delivered one to every home in the community (along with a copy of their Local Food Directory). The hope was that it would begin to embed a positive vision into the village that would later lead to the development of a full-blown plan.

Transition Forest Row endeavored to utilize language and ideas that would be accessible to all people in the community, whether they were familiar with Transition or not. They attempted to present necessary changes as positive steps, but did not shrink from projecting uncomfortable future trends, such as food riots in 2018.

In hindsight, the organizers of Transition Forest Row learned that their relationships with people in their community were of primary importance. They told 350 attendees at a recent international Transition Network conference in London, “It’s not what you do that’s important. It’s the way that you do it that gets results. It’s how you work with each other.” Their guidance will surely help shape the next phase of the Forrest Row EDAP process.

Many other Energy Descent Plans are reported to be under way throughout the movement, but few have progressed as far as Transition Totnes or Transition Forest Row.

Engaging Entire Communities in the Process

Transition Circle

One of the key distinctions of the Transition model is its attempt to engage entire communities in the process of carefully designing their own transition from oil dependence to resilience and self-reliance, guided by the principles and ethics of permaculture. This sets Transition Initiatives apart from myriad “activist groups” in a community by attempting to bring everyone—activists, citizens, local business and government—into the process. How can this be achieved? The answer lies in the stages or phases of the Transition model:

1. Form an Initiating Group. The process always seems to begin when someone gets “struck by lightning” and realizes that their community is vulnerable and needs to make the Transition. They enlist others to form an all-volunteer “Initiating Group,” which takes responsibility for beginning the Transition process in their community and designs how they will hand off this responsibility when the appropriate moment arrives.
2. Raise Awareness. The Initiating Group launches an extended awareness-raising campaign to heighten understanding of the challenges of peak oil, climate change, and economic chaos, as well as to convey the opportunities that Transition provides.
3. Lay the Foundations. The Initiating Group begins developing relationships with existing groups and individuals in the community, laying the foundations for collaboration and partnership.
4. Organize a Great Unleashing. When the process reaches sufficient momentum, the group decides to hold a large public launch event–full of insight, inspiration and entertainment—which the community will remember in hindsight as the moment when the process of Transition really began for them.
5. Form Working Groups. With the unleashing of community enthusiasm and support, it’s now possible to begin forming working groups to focus on specific areas of concern (food, water, transport, energy, etc.). These groups will ultimately feed into the Energy Descent planning process, and their arrival signals the beginning of the long-awaited handoff of responsibility from the Initiating Group to a larger and more organic entity (usually a non-profit organization complete with board of directors) that will gradually evolve into the community’s “relocalization agency.”
6. Use Open Space Technology. For harvesting ideas and creative input from large numbers of people, Open Space Technology is a key resource. Many working groups have been spawned as a result of Open Space events focused on a specific topic or challenge, such as “How will our community feed itself beyond the age of cheap oil?”

1. Develop Visible, Practical Projects. People need to see that more than meetings are happening in the Transition process. Community gardens, local currencies, tree planting, and a local food directory are examples of projects that keep members of the community engaged and inspired.
2. Facilitate the Great Reskilling. Drawing on local experts, the Transition Initiative begins to provide training in those fundamental life-skills once taken for granted by our grandparents and great-grandparents—gardening, canning and preserving, beekeeping, raising chickens, rainwater harvesting, sock darning—skills that, like our forebears, we will need in order to thrive in energy-scarce times.
3. Build a Bridge to Local Government. From early in the larger Transition project, it is important to cultivate positive and productive relationships with local government, for they too must become part of the process. (Hopkins likes to say that you may find yourself “knocking on an open door”; and indeed, many local governments in the UK are already providing significant fiscal support for Transition Initiatives.)
4. Honor and Engage the Elders. Along the way, the Transition Initiative will need to develop ways to involve the elders of the community, for they possess knowledge, skills, and experience that will be highly valuable for all.
5. Create and Energy Descent Action Plan. Eventually, perhaps two or three years into the process, it will be possible to begin the formal Energy Descent planning process, starting with catalyzing an inspiring vision for the future and backcasting to determine necessary steps along the way.
6. Let It Go Where It Wants to Go. Lastly, Hopkins admonishes Transitioners to remember that control is an illusion. The focus should be on unleashing the genius of the entire community.

The Transition process is a general guide, non-prescriptive, flexible, and arguably adaptable to communities of virtually any scale. The steps are not necessarily sequential, although the first five seem to represent a natural flow of events. Of course there are many other important aspects of the Transition process which are beyond the scope of this article, such as the Inner Transition (“Heart and Soul” work), collective visioning, the translation of permaculture principles and ethics to a community-wide level, and dealing with the psychology of change.

Energy Descent Planning in America?

A gleaning project for Community Food Share in Boulder County, Aug. 2009, creates equitable distribution and fun.

The Transition movement landed in the U.S. in mid-2008, with Transition Boulder County (now Transition Colorado) becoming the first officially-recognized initiative in North America in May of that year. Since that time, nearly 900 people have gone through the two-day “Training for Transition,” which is focused on providing tools and processes that local initiatives will need in order to launch sustained Transition efforts in their communities. A community of 21 certified trainers is available to deliver this training (not really a “training” per se, but a powerful conceptual and experiential in-depth introduction to Transition). And nearly 40 initiatives have been officially recognized to date, the latest being Media, PA, ranging from small towns of a few thousand people to, surprisingly, the mammoth metropolis of Los Angeles (approximately 13 million).

The Transition movement is very young in this country, and very few initiatives have reached the level of maturity and sustainability to develop an EDAP. An exception may be Transition Sandpoint in Idaho, started by Gaia University Master’s graduate Richard Kuhnel, which after less than one year of intense awareness-raising activities held their Great Unleashing in November 2008 and immediately organized a series of robust working groups to begin tackling the research and planning (the subject of a long and smarmy story in the New York Times Magazine, April 19, titled “The End is Near! Yay!”). It’s still too early to evaluate how successful the project is, but Transition Sandpoint claims to be the first in the U.S. to reach the point of involving the broader community in the planning process.

In general, there appears to be some resistance in U.S. Transition Initiatives to taking on the Energy Descent planning process, which after all is supposed to be the crown jewel of the Transition movement. Perhaps this is because it’s easier for groups to get involved in a variety of enticing positive projects (such as constructing community gardens, or developing a local currency, or organizing a co-op market), and these projects tend to quickly overwhelm a group’s capacity, leaving little time or energy for long-term planning. Perhaps it’s because organizing and supporting successful working groups is very hard work, and besides, research and strategic planning are skills that those passionate about the issues often don’t possess (and those who do have the skills are often too busy to perform the needed work in such a group). And perhaps it’s because Americans are prone to disregard and abandon process models like Hopkins has developed, choosing instead to reinvent their own way.

In any case, it is likely to be a while before the U.S. Transition movement produces model Energy Descent plans that can serve as inspiration to other communities. Given the growing urgency of fossil fuel depletion, climate change, and economic chaos, some may wonder if the plans—which, once developed, will take years to implement anyway—will arrive too late to be of much use. This perhaps is the heart of the dilemma of the movement here, whether the actions Transition spawns are proportionate to the scale and urgency of the challenges we know we face as a society.

Significantly, the Transition movement as a whole has now apparently reached just about the same level of proliferation as Post Carbon Institute’s Relocalization Network did at its peak (reportedly about 200 groups in 15 countries). But the Relocalization Network rapidly declined after that point, despite estimates that the movement would grow exponentially and reach perhaps 10,000 groups by the end of 2008. That network proved to be unsustainable, partly because it lacked precisely the kind of replicable model/process for relocalization that Transition provides. It remains to be seen whether the Transition movement can learn from the missteps of the Relocalization Network.

The Cheerful Disclaimer

Waiting in line for the Community Cycles bike mechanic at a free bike clinic in Boulder.

Refreshingly, Hopkins is careful to caution Transitioners not to overpromise or overstate what Transition offers. After all, “Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale,” he says. “We don’t know if this will work. But we do know that if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late. And if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little. But if we act as communities, it might be just enough, just in time.”

It’s a poignant, if cheerful, disclaimer. No one has ever successfully relocalized a community before, and no one knows for certain if it can even be done. But as one initiative leader told Hopkins, “While it’s true that we have no assurance Transition will ultimately succeed in the U.S., we’re going to give it our all here anyway. I see no downside risk to wholeheartedly placing all our local bets on Transition and attempting to engage entire communities in the process.”

In reality, Transition is a bit more than a social experiment, for our communities are directly in the path of a global tsunami (James Howard Kunstler’s “Long Emergency”), and we must quickly rise to the occasion and get ourselves to higher ground—together.

As Hopkins freely acknowledges, the Transition movement might yet fail. And if it does, Transitioners will at least know that they have given ourselves to what they considered was both most important and most urgent. The learning that will come from their experience will likely be useful to others who will subsequently inherit these challenges and opportunities.

Hard Times in Sin City

SUBHEAD: The financial crisis has mauled Las Vegas like no other city. What was once the land of luxury and excess is now the home of empty houses and broken dreams. [Publisher's note: This is a long and detailed article on the tremendous negative impact of the current financial situation on Las Vegas. It does not mention the connection between Hawaii and Vegas, and why about 100,000 Hawaiians would choose to live there. Will there now be a reverse migration?]

image above: Photo from inside the Neon Museum sign graveyard in Las Vegas is big tourist draw. From http://las-vegas-hotels.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g45963-d110193-Reviews-The_Neon_Museum-Las_Vegas_Nevada.html By Thomas Schulz on 30 October 2009 in Spiegel - http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,657616,00.html

The bar on the 64th floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel offers what could arguably be the best view of Las Vegas at night. A mile-long strip of brightly colored neon lights and gigantic, floodlit casinos glitters through the bar's floor-to-ceiling windows. Still, as you survey the otherwise dazzling city of nocturnal light, you can see conspicuous patches of darkness dotting the landscape.

One of these black craters is the construction site for the Fontainebleau Hotel casino and the 4,000 rooms it is supposed to offer. When the investors ran out of money, 70 percent of the project had already been completed. If you look diagonally across the street, you can see the site of what is supposed to be the Echelon complex. Only eight of its planned 57 stories were completed before the construction cranes pulled out.

There is even a dark, gaping hole next to the Trump Tower. A twin had been planned for the site, but it will most likely never be built. Las Vegas, the global symbol of gambling and glitz, is hurting.

Super-Sizing Paradise Over the last two decades, no other American city grew as quickly as Las Vegas. In 1980, it had 460,000 inhabitants; now it has 2 million.

Nowhere else was the boom wilder, consumption more excessive and the delusions of grandeur more extreme. New houses and apartment complexes shot up by the tens of thousands. Dozens of new casino hotels were built, many of which boasted 2,000, 3,000 or even 4,000 rooms. Celebrity chefs came to the city to open satellites of their famous restaurants, while junk shops gave way to stores offering exclusive fashion labels.

During that era, the strip was crowded until even 4 a.m., mainly with drunk, carefree Americans who could hardly believe they could walk around outside with a beer in their hand, that they could still smoke in public establishments and that there were swimming pools where women could go topless.

In a country notorious for its puritanical bent, Las Vegas is an anything-and-everything-goes kind of place. But now, the recession has blasted open one of its deepest craters here in this city surrounded by the Mojave Desert. Las Vegas now has the country's highest rate of home foreclosures, and more than 70 percent of homeowners here owe more on their mortgages than their houses or condos are worth. Since 2006, the average home price has dropped by a half.

Unemployment, on the other hand, has risen -- from about only 3 percent to over 13 percent. The city's luxury hotels have seen tens of thousands of reservations cancelled. Major casino operators are deeply in debt. In the spring, one of them, the MGM, barely escaped from having to declare bankruptcy.

In the meantime, economists are already warning that the collapse of the US residential real estate market could be followed by a similar disaster in commercial real estate. And if that bubble bursts, it will hit Las Vegas first.

Migrating Money For more than two decades, banks, investment funds and financials firms attracted by the chance to make hefty profits and a seemingly limitless boom pumped billions of dollars into the city. They supplied the financing for casinos, shopping centers and entertainment venues. One of Las Vegas's biggest investors was Deutsche Bank.

Germany's largest bank is seen as one of the three major players in the local construction industry and in the financing of casinos and hotel complexes worth billions. Indeed, the Frankfurt-based banking giant is mentioned as an investor in connection with many major projects in the city.

To almost everyone -- and especially the Germans -- Las Vegas seemed recession-proof. But now, since the summer of 2008, gambling revenues have dropped by more than 10 percent after having plunged to as much as 25 percent in the months immediately following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

The city's future is now uncertain. There are still plans on the table to add 40,000 new hotel rooms to the 140,000 ones that already exist by 2012. The pending development projects are valued at $20 billion. But now people are wondering who needs all the additional rooms anymore and who will provide the financing for them. Even the city's wealthiest residents, who have consistently topped the lists of America's richest people, must now keep a close eye on the assets they have left.

For example, Sheldon Adelson, the owner of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, whose assets include the luxury Venetian Resort, has seen his company's stock value plummet from $149 to $1.38 a share. Kirk Kerkorian, who has been one of the most important investors in Las Vegas since 1955, has been forced to sell many of his holdings in industrial companies, such as the automaker Ford. MGM Mirage, the city's largest casino operator, is almost $14 billion in debt and has only staved off bankruptcy with difficulty.

The banks, which once fueled the city's growth with attractive loans, are now much less willing to part with their money. "Ownership structure on the Strip five years from now is going to look different from now," says Rich Moriarty, director of the Union Gaming Group, which advises financial investors, hedge funds and banks on investing in Las Vegas.

Re-Branding a City At first glance, Vegas doesn't seem to be particularly hard-hit by the crisis. The casinos resonate with the incessant "ding-ding-ding" of thousands of betting machines. Gambling and alcohol go hand-in-hand, and some gamblers are already drinking at 11 am. The casinos are windowless in order to deliberately keep out daylight and, consequently, a sense of time.

Lured by drastically reduced hotel rates, the curious are returning to Vegas; but they are spending less. Double rooms in famous luxury hotels -- such as the Mirage, which was home to the entertainment duo Siegfried and Roy for many years -- can now be had for less than $100 a night. Many hotels are renting their rooms at prices below cost -- which is better than not renting them at all. The visitors who are coming to Las Vegas now don't go out to dinner in the casino, Moriarty says. "It is a lower quality customer. They go across the street to the mall to have dinner rather than stay on the property."

Ironically, over the last decade, the trend in Las Vegas has put an increased focus on luxury. In some restaurants, appetizers go for $30, while the hottest nightclubs regularly won't let people in who aren't willing to fork over $400 for a bottle of liquor.

With its new foray into luxury tourism, Las Vegas has moved miles away from its first few successful decades. Those were the wild years. Since banks and corporations didn't want to be associated with gambling, only the Mafia was willing to invest in casino development. Those were the years when criminals like Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and Anthony Spilotro openly controlled the city and when crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin performed in relatively shabby venues, such as the Desert Inn.

It wasn't until the 1980s, when Wall Street discovered the gambling oasis in the Mojave Desert, that the casinos and hotels became not only flashier, but also more sophisticated. "The entire amount of new supply is all high-end, luxury rooms," says Moriarty.

For Alan Feldman, the head of communications at MGM Mirage, there is only one option: "We have to expand the market." Feldman wants to attract people from new target groups, including the "cosmopolitans" and "urban elites" -- in other words, those for whom Las Vegas has always been, as Feldmen says, "too kitschy" or "unreal". If only a small percentage of Americans can be convinced to come to Las Vegas, as Feldman hopes they will be, even the new hotel rooms will soon be full.

At the same time, the city's tourism officials have stepped up their efforts to attract visitors from abroad, who have traditionally only accounted for about 15 percent of guests. For example, tourists from Germany have almost no effect on the city's total number of visitors. The few that do come to Las Vegas are usually on their way to the nearby Grand Canyon.

Deutsche Bank to the Rescue? Things look much different in the city's financial world. Deutsche Bank has "massive exposure" in Las Vegas, to the tune of a figure of double-digit billions, says Moriarty, who launched his own business with a partner this spring after having managed Deutsche Bank's investment banking arm in Las Vegas for years.

Since the end of 2008, Deutsche Bank has even been in direct control of one of the city's largest construction projects. At the time, the developer of the Cosmopolitan Resort & Casino could no longer service a $760 million loan, so Deutsche Bank acquired the 3,000-room behemoth for $1 billion.

"They are even picking out the wallpaper," themselves, says one insider. The banks are doing everything not to lose their investments.

Even so, the bankers will still not be able to operate the casino themselves. Instead, they will have to hire a professional with a license to run a gaming operation. The resort is scheduled to open in 2010. Deutsche Bank already took a$741 million write-off on the property in the second quarter of 2009.

Financing Competitors Likewise, as a result of its other lending projects in the city, the bank actually has a hand in financing its competitors. For example, the owners of the Fontainebleau Hotel Corporation were convinced that the Germans wanted to "destroy" their Las Vegas development project. Construction was halted in the summer on the 3,800-room complex, which was 75 percent complete, after an $800 million loan, of which Deutsche Bank held a significant portion, was withdrawn.

In May, the owners of the Fontainebleau sued Deutsche Bank, accusing it of trying to "minimize competition with the Cosmopolitan." It was for this reason, they claim, that the bank "aggressively pushed for" other lenders, including the crisis-shaken German bank HSH Nordbank, to back out of the deal.

Deutsche Bank calls the allegations "baseless." Meanwhile, Fontainebleau, struggling with a possible bankruptcy, has withdrawn some of its charges, but it hasn't abandoned its lawsuit.

Even without the Fontainebleau suit, the Frankfurt-based bankers are already likely to encounter major problems with their casino. The CityCenter, which is the largest private development project in the United States, is being built right near the Cosmopolitan. Designed by a number of famous architects, including Daniel Libeskind, Helmut Jahn and Norman Foster, the CityCenter comprises three luxury hotels with a total of 6,000 rooms, thousands of condominiums, dozens of restaurants and a number of gambling facilities.

The huge development, a joint venture of MGM Mirage and investors from Dubai, will cost $8 billion. The plan almost imploded in the spring for lack of funds, but now the center is slated to open after all next spring.

To fill the mammoth developments, the owners hope to attract more trade fairs and corporate events. Las Vegas is the world's largest meeting and convention city. In 2008, more than 22,000 events took place there, ranging from large-scale affairs, such as the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with its 140,000 visitors, to the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. And then there are thousands of company meetings large and small, many of them little more than trips meant to reward deserving employees who, after a meeting in the morning, can spend the rest of the day gambling and drinking.

Mafia Vegas vs. Vegas Inc. For years, such meetings helped sustain the city. And that was the case until a new president came on the scene and -- in a single sentence -- declared Las Vegas the country's most dangerous spot for companies. "You can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers' dime," President Barack Obama said at a televised town hall meeting in February. A short time earlier, details had emerged about how Wells Fargo, a major US bank, had booked a 12-day company event in the city -- after having been saved from bankruptcy with billions in government bailout funds.

In the end, Wells Fargo canceled the event -- and many other organizations followed suit. "They are trying to make it out that Las Vegas has become this toxic city you can't even go to," complains Phil Cooper, a leading event manager. In the first quarter of 2009 alone, more than 400 conferences and trade fairs were cancelled.

"I certainly was not happy about it. What it did is put the imprimatur on Las Vegas being a place of excess," says Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, a lawyer who became a celebrity while defending the city's most notorious gangsters. In fact, Goodman plays himself in "Casino," Martin Scorsese's 1995 Oscar-nominated film about the Las Vegas underworld. But this hasn't stopped city residents from electing him to three terms as mayor.

Can today's Vegas even be compared with the city in its wild years, when it was dominated by the Mafia rather than Wall Street? The big corporations have made it more impersonal, says Goodman, as he glances at the hundreds of photos on his office wall that show him with famous people, such as Bill Clinton and Michael Jackson.

"I liked life in the old days better," says Goodman. "I'd like to be able to shake a person's hand and have a deal rather than have a contract in writing. I think with the shakeout we are having now, many of those corporate properties will go into private hands and that will be more like the old Las Vegas."

If you're looking for the old Las Vegas, it can still be found north of "the Strip," in neighborhoods beyond the sparkle of the casinos. These are the neighborhoods where run-down wedding chapels advertise their services by claiming that Elvis Presley got married there once, and where the gamblers seem as seedy as the decades-old small gambling houses, where old people with pale faces and empty-looking eyes spend hours in front of slot machines that cost only two cents a game.

But the new, modern Vegas demands a different clientele. It needs companies and businesspeople, the kind who burn through their expense accounts and spend a few days having fun on the company's dime.

Desperate Times Since this spring, the city has invested millions in an advertising campaign that also focuses directly on businesses. For example, according to a 10-page ad the city placed in the Wall Street Journal, "Business meetings in Las Vegas offer the best value proposition on the planet." It sounds a little desperate.

And no wonder: With each empty room, more and more jobs in Las Vegas are threatened. The rule of thumb is that each hotel room equals two and a half jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs have already been lost.

Las Vegas is now surrounded by empty developments with names like Azure Canyon and abandoned bedroom communities in the "Mediterranean style." Richard Plaster, one of the city's top developers, says that 30,000 houses -- or the equivalent of a new small city -- were built every 12 months. Parts of Las Vegas are only five or six years old.

The houses were all built along roughly the same lines: five rooms, three baths and two garages. There is plenty of space around Las Vegas. Most are now dark and empty -- either because they were never lived in or were quickly abandoned. Every month, there are foreclosures on an average of 2,000 buildings.

It's eerily quiet on the freshly paved streets. They have names like "Evening Melody" and "Dancing Breeze," names meant to evoke a pleasant life in a place where it never gets cold. Here and there, empty or half-developed properties form voids in the endless rows of houses, like gaps in a row of teeth. Plaster is convinced that "there are long, hard times ahead."

see also: LAS VEGAS: Living in underground tunnels