Culture & Behavior

Life without electricity

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“Actually, it takes more time to develop low-tech than it does to develop high-tech although we tend to think of advanced scientific technology when we say ‘technology,’ while we take low-tech lightly,” says Fujimura. On this misplaced assumption, we tend to desire the products of excessively advanced science and technology that promote convenience and comfort, and thus we have placed a huge burden on the environment, leading to the energy crisis and other critical situations.

The Impermanence of Knowledge

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Knowledge is essential to our existence. Without knowledge life is almost impossible. So we need to care about what we know. In the recent past mankind has managed to collect enormous amounts of knowledge. This era is now nearing its end. For knowledge is, perhaps surprisingly, intimately connected with energy. We are at present in for a severe energy crisis, which translates into a knowledge crisis. In other words: the science boom is over. But not only will it be next to impossible to continue increasing our knowledge, even keeping the knowledge we already have will become a great challenge.

The tyranny of comfort

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Blind pursuit of comfort must take some blame for the quandary we find ourselves in. In America, we’re burning through an incredible bounty of fossil fuel, a bounty so energy-dense that most of us fail to comprehend its magnitude. This way of life is centered on comfort…Perhaps it’s only news to Mr. Cheney (and other politicians before and since), but “unsustainable” will trump “non-negotiable” every time. And America is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of comfort.

Occupy Wall Street: No demand is big enough

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We protest not only at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on earth, every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has created, then we want none of it.

Ten ways to turn from a consumer to a producer

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Growing up in America, my generation was taught that any and every need could be met by a particular product or service, all of which were just waiting to be purchased. To afford these purchases as part of a “lifestyle,” the proper career path for middle class people was to attend college, learn an intricately detailed specialization in order to make a salary, and buy whatever we might need or desire, from childcare to lawn services to fast food to psychiatric services. While specialization can certainly make economic sense, the pendulum swung too far. We grew up to be thoroughly knowledgeable in a very narrow field, yet helpless and unempowered in every other walk of life, at the mercy of a cheap-energy growth economy supported by underpaid or slave labor and ongoing environmental destruction.

Announcing a revolutionary leap forward in the Transition model…

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Today sees the launch of three exciting new developments and outputs from Transition Network, the results of many months of work, that finally emerge blinking into the daylight. We are sure that they will greatly deepen your understanding of Transition, bring depth and richness to your work, re-inspire and energise you. They represent a radical shift in how Transition is understood and communicated.

What’s in store for 2012?

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I am not by nature a squirrel. I don’t get a big feeling for hoarding or collecting stuff (though I do, like many coastline dwellers, have a habit of pocketing stones and quirky things from the beach). And yet this is the time when it is smart to be thinking ahead and stocking up with summer’s abundance. Some wise Transitioners have been at this for months: plaiting onions, bottling raspberries, cooking up vats of green tomato chutney and damson jam, drying rosehips and borlotti beans. Along their hallways and windowsills sit pumpkins of various colours and sizes, seeds carefully collected in a drawer, dried herbs and chillies swinging from the ceiling.

Different journeys in the same direction

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Sue doesn’t believe in what she calls the “myth” of climate change. And she’s not interested in the peak oil conversation. She follows a couple of conservative talk show hosts and does what she does because of what they’ve forecast for our economy. The outward signs of my life read much the same as hers, but my motivation comes from concern about environmental degradation, energy scarcity, and the economic implications of both. I’m progressive and listen to public radio. Yet Sue and I can work side-by-side because we’ve taken the time to listen to each other, to learn about and understand our different perspectives. We’ve chosen not to argue the details, but to welcome each other to the work that aligns to address our shared concerns.

Living on stolen time

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Let us try to apply this same approach to a truly complex system: the economies of US and Europe, in the state in which we currently find them: raging government deficits, staggering levels of bad debt, continuous government bailouts and infusions of free money by central banks, record levels of poverty and long-term unemployment and underemployment, and a lack of any meaningful economic growth. Specifically, let us try to characterize the effect of the continuous monetary infusions, bailouts, and stimulus spending. The economics profession has failed to do this and so amateurs are forced to step into the breach.

The trouble with binary thinking

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Robert Anton Wilson pointed out some years ago that people who say “you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution” are usually part of the problem. The habit of thinking in binaries–that is, in hard oppositions between antithetical concepts–has deep roots in the human mind, but it leads to certain predictable difficulties, among them a particular kind of vulnerability to the sorcery practiced by the advertising and marketing industries. If we’re to see past the haze of arbitrary binaries to a less polarized future, a glance at other ways of thinking is probably worth our while.