This lecture is on transition towns, a social movement or grassroots effort to respond to
the problem of peak oil.
People who live in these towns, TT towns as they call them, grow their own food using
techniques of permaculture.
They learn how to use less energy, how to save rainwater, how to grow chickens, how
to work with local governments, and especially they learn how to build community.
The idea here is an elegant scaling down of resource use with improved civic life.
The general goal is less consumption and more community.
The social movement began in the UK in 2005, and there are now over 1100 registered towns
all over the world.
"Transition" in a social movement is defined as "transforming the place you live from it's
current highly vulnerable, non-resilient, oil-dependent state to a resilient, more localized,
diverse and nourishing place."
The guru behind the movement is Rob Hopkins who wrote these two books and has been the
spokesperson for the movement and a big generator of activity behind the development of towns
all over the world.
Hopkins says that resilience refers to communities' ability "to not collapse at first sight of
oil or food shortage" and "to respond with adaptability to disturbance."
This is a social movement that is looking ahead to disruption and trying to prepare
in very practical everyday ways for what may be coming.
I stress that this is a movement of very ordinary people.
This is not eco-villages, or preppers, or survivalists, or people that want to go live
on farms or communes.
It's just everyday people who have become aware of some of the issues around peak oil
and climate change who want to stay in their own homes and who want to learn how to be
more resilient and build resilient communities around them.
These towns are all over the place.
You find them in Santa Cruz, LA, Laguna Beach, Santa Barbara, Berkeley, San Francisco to
name just a few of the places that we all are familiar with.
There are four assumptions behind the social movement.
The first is that life with lower energy consumption is inevitable and we need to prepare for it
now while we still have time and not be taken by surprise.
Another assumption is that communities currently lack resilience and that severe problems that
we might encounter in the future we're not really prepared for those, especially the
problem of more expensive oil, and while we still have oil we should start thinking ahead
to the future and planning and preparing.
Transition Town is very big on acting collectively and acting now.
The idea is that you don't want to just get individuals to turn their thermostat up or
down or use a little bit less energy or even to buy a hybrid car.
You want to weave sustainability into the fabric of an entire community.
Hopkins says by unleashing the collective genius of those around us we can creatively
and proactively design our energy descent, build ways of living that are more connected,
more enriching and that recognize the biological limits of our planet.
In some ways this is very humble and homey and local and community-based, and in other
ways it's a very big vision and it's kind of a radical vision.
Now, here is a more theoretical definition of resilience.
This comes from Biology and Walker states "the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance
and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function,
structure, identity, and feedback" is the essence of resilience.
We bring this concept into a course on disruption because of course when things are disrupted
if they materially change and don't go back to their original form then you have something
that could be quite dysfunctional.
So, if you have a community that can bounce back from disruption that is resilience and
that is what we're aiming for, and that is what this social movement is about.
Now, community is really the byword of this social movement and Hopkins says if we wait
for governments it will be too late, if we act as individuals it will be too little,
if we act as communities it will might be just enough just in time.
So, they're looking for this middle ground between changing laws and policies on the
one hand and just acting as an individual on the other and trying to find out what we
can do in small local groups that we might still be able to have some control over and
yet still have a pretty big impact.
Now, what is it about community that the social movement likes so much?
Here is a response from a survey that I think is pretty revealing.
"We value neighbors' views, opinions and information more than we value information from experts,
government advisors, or companies who want to sell us their product.
We think our neighbors are more trustworthy."
There is a certain amount of cynicism underlying this kind of response, the idea that we can't
really count on the government or on companies to save us and we better start doing something
about it ourselves.
That of course is the essence of any social movement is people saying okay, I want to
make a change, what can I do?
Here is another response that I like that is very personal.
"If things get really bad with climate change, I know everybody on my street.
We've all been together in groups.
We've all had dinner together.
We're all friends.
So if something goes wrong, we're not gonna fight.
We're gonna say: how can we work together?
What can we do?
How can we share our food?
I have a little bit of bread, I have some croissants, I have a bag of flour, we are
going to share everything, and work together to make it work."
So, the idea is that these kinds of social bonds will be knit into the community now
before we're really disrupted and they can then be relied on if problems arise in the
future, and even if problems don't arise in the future this is a better way to live in
a community, to know your neighbors, to share, to have dinner together, to feel that you
can rely on them.
Another thing the communities want to do is share their skills.
In the old days everybody knew how to repair a bike, or sew, or do carpentry.
Those skills are not as readily found now and we sometimes have to learn them from our
neighbors, so people get together in their homes and if I know how to repair a bicycle
I can have a little class and teach everybody else in the community.
Most of the skills tend to be old fashioned like keeping chickens, but some of them are
more contemporary like repairing or upgrading computers or building a website.
There is a whole range of skills that people share in these community-based classes, and
as a result of even just getting together in their homes that in itself is an act of
building community.
In a survey people said that that was one of the things they really liked about the
social movement was that they were getting to know their neighbors in ways that they
had not before.
Now, what are the IT implications here?
I think there is one really big one and that is that we have a need for civic media and
not just social media.
In social media the individual is the nexus of the network.
We all have our own individual social networks on Twitter and Facebook and so on, but those
kinds of networks aren't really set up to deal with our neighbors, and shared geography,
and communicating about practical problems and solutions so there's a great opportunity,
a great design opportunity, for thinking about what it would mean if we had civic media and
not just social media.
Here are a couple books both by Hopkins that I think are really good.
They are very readable.
They have lots of nice diagrams and pictures, and I highly recommend them.
Thank you.