This is a really fantastic piece of collaboration animation on the subject of responses to climate change, from the striking opening comment on Copenhagen on through. Though as the creators freely acknowledge, the ideas behind it need a little love.

It strikes me that some great candidates for their proposed Green Knowledge Trust, Catalyst System and Open Innovation Centre are already coming together..

Christopher Fraser of London Transition has kindly transcribed the popular interview with Canada’s Radio Ecoshock that I posted a couple of months back. I’ve also added links at a few pertinent points.

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Alex Smith, Radio Ecoshock: [addressing audience] You know we’re going to run out of civilisation’s lifeblood, fossil fuels. And if we burn what’s left, the climate may tip into a mass extinction event. Meanwhile barking madness seems to be the only growth industry in some places. Is it time for more pills, booze or Endtime religion?

Our next guest says there may be some hope left. Shaun Chamberlin’s blog is called Dark Optimism, and that may be as good as it gets. Shaun is part of the Transition Movement in Britain; he’s the author of the new book The Transition Timeline for a local, resilient future, and co-author of an upcoming report for the British Parliament on a scheme to give everyone an energy quota. Shaun, welcome to Radio Ecoshock.

Shaun Chamberlin, Dark Optimism: Thanks for having me, Alex.

AS: OK, well let’s start with what is Dark Optimism?

SC: [Laughs] Well, it all started talking with a friend of mine who was trying to work what kind of person I am, what kind of a thinker I am, and I was lying in bed that night thinking about it and it sort of came to me in a flash that I’m a dark optimist. And over time it became the title for the work that I do, but really it’s looking at life and not being afraid to look at it when it’s dark, when it scary, which as you well know if you look into the future it certainly can be at the moment, but with a faith that if we explore the unknown we often find that when things are unknown they are more scary than when we look at them. In all the horror movies you will find the scariest monsters are the ones you never see and you just imagine, so looking into the darkness is a tool that brings us realism that we can then use to create a better future than the one that we’re left with by running away from that darkness.

AS: Yes, and you’ve been looking less for a technical fix and more to some of the stories we tell ourselves. How can that help us out?

SC: Yeah, well this ties in a lot with my book. When I was doing the research for that it was a project that came out of the Transition movement, and various of the transition communities were trying to write their Energy Descent Action Plans – looking 20 years into the future of their own communities. And they found that was very difficult because they needed to know about some of the big scale issues that were going to affect their communities, but which maybe they couldn’t themselves directly affect. So things like climate change and peak oil, but also government policy decisions, national food supply, things like this.

And as I looked at the shape of our future I realised that it’s really shaped by the cultural stories that we tell ourselves, the narratives which flow throughout our culture, and really I found in my opinion there are three dominant stories which really shape our ideas. And one is the idea that the future will basically look like today, that we’ll just carry on much the same, and you see that a lot in government documents for example that assume this has happened up until so we assume that this line, that trend, will carry on into the future. And a second story that is very powerful is the apocalypse story, whatever that looks like, whether that’s religious apocalypse or The Terminator, or the Age Of Stupid. Whatever form that takes that’s a narrative that we see throughout our culture. And the third one I think, as you have just hinted, is the techno-utopia idea that science and progress will save us all and that we’ll move onto this maybe Star Trek kind of a future. And those three stories I’ve found when I was talking to a huge diversity of people about our future I could usually categorise them quite easily into one, or more than one sometimes, sometimes there’s a compound vision based on a couple of those. And so one of the things that we are trying to do in the Transition movement is create a fourth story of our future – a story that is based around realistically looking at the limits, the environmental limits, that we’re starting to really bump up against and creating a better future within that realist context.

AS: It seems to me at times that the denial movement or just letting things keep on going the way it is, may be the way it turns out. Did you work out in your book what that world would look like in 2020 or 2030?

SC: Absolutely. I mean one of the things I really learned in writing the book was about Resilience – which is one of the core concepts in Transition – that it is very important not to just create a single vision of the future but rather to explore adequately a set of different visions. And so what we did in the writing of the book was explore four of those scenarios, based on each of the four stories I’ve just talked about, and look at a timeline for each of those out to 2030. I like to say resilience is humility in action. We have to accept that as the Chinese say “when men speak of the future the Gods laugh.” We have to accept that we don’t know what’s coming and the most sensible things that we can do are things which are useful in a range of possible futures. So absolutely, that’s something we explored, looking at how each of those cultural stories would pan out taken to its logical conclusion, but then looking in a lot more depth at the Transition Vision, for the simple reason that that doesn’t have a lot of traction in our society at the moment, and I think it really needs fleshing out so that people can feel that’s it’s a real vision that can get them out of bed in the morning.

AS: I find it interesting that while you’re advocating and talking about joining a community movement at the local level to get away from fossil fuel dependency, you’re also helping with a national action plan by the UK government. Can you give us a peek into the upcoming report on Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) and maybe start by explaining that those are?

SC: Well Tradable Energy Quotas is a concept which has gone by a lot of names, things like carbon rationing and energy rationing very much among then. I think at the moment, certainly among green circles, there is a lot of backlash against this idea of “tradable” in that with good reason carbon trading is something which is deeply mistrusted. But when it comes to looking at the practical detail of how an energy or carbon rationing scheme would operate, tradability becomes essential to the concept, because unlike something like food which certainly here in the UK we have living memory experience of food rationing, but food is something that people need basically the same amount of each, roughly speaking. Energy is not quite like that in that certain professions, a country doctor, say, or perhaps a farmer, require more energy than other lifestyles, and so if we just gave everyone a [strict] equal entitlement of energy then we would end up with all the above-average energy use professions in the country ceasing to exist overnight, which obviously would not be of great advantage to the society.

So the idea of Tradable Energy Quotas is essentially that once you’ve got your constraint, whether that’s a nation carbon budget or whether that’s a national oil depletion or gas depletion problem perhaps, that gives you a declining budget which you can then lay out over say a 20 year period. Then that budget is turned into essentially rations for the economy, and those are giving out on an equal per capita basis to every individual in the country, while the proportion that is relevant to industry and organisations is auctioned to those organisations. And this means that all the energy and carbon within the economy can be captured and accounted for and the carbon budget can actually be achieved, which is something which is really lacking in our international negotiations at the moment — there are all sorts of promises with very little idea of how to achieve them. So those can actually be achieved without the need to measure tailgate emissions on cars or specific emissions from a particular factory because it’s done at the national scale. [for more information see www.teqs.net]

And as you say it sort of does seem like there is a contradiction between addressing things at that level and the community scale, and I think my personal journey was that maybe five years ago or so when I was wonder what I could do about this global situation my first thought was I need to get involved in the Conference Of Parties process, the UN Copenhagen, Kyoto type process because that seemed to me where the big action is at, that’s where I can really make a difference. And there was a quote from my now-colleague David Fleming which really changed my whole perspective on that. He said “large scale problems do not require large scale solutions, they require small scale solutions within a large scale framework” and the more I think about that the more I see the truth in it. And so really what I’ve been doing since then in my life is working at the small scale, working on those small scale solutions, trying to support the wonderful diversity of solutions, not just Transition Towns, but the huge diversity of local solutions that are out there, but also recognising that we really do need those frameworks to harness all those individual efforts and ensure they are sufficient for the scale of the challenges that we face. Otherwise, you know, obviously something like climate change is a problem where if one group does their bit and another group doesn’t then we don’t have a solution.

So we do need these frameworks, but I really feel that without a focus on the local and individual levels the frameworks are empty. Actually, the real realisation for me was when I thought ‘what is the point of something like Copenhagen?’, I mean if Copenhagen had produced the kind of treaty we all dreamed of, really that would have meant nothing if it didn’t stimulate change at the local level. I mean that’s where all the emissions come from, that’s where all the energy demand comes from. So all of the international and national level stuff only exists as a way to stimulate and support changes at the community level and once that sort of clicked in my head it became very obvious that the community level would become the focus of my efforts, while still trying to contribute to getting some kind of reasonable framework at that level.

AS: I can see how these Tradable Energy Quotas would give the individual more of a chance to figure out their own solutions, but I think we all have the worry, and does this address it, that somehow the fat cats are going to keep flying around and driving in limousines and wasting energy in huge houses, while the poorest among us will have trouble getting enough energy for heating their homes if peak oil comes around and if there’s a shortage of supply. How do we get around that?

SC: Sure, I mean that’s obviously the fear with the tradable ration rather than absolute rationing. I think the key thing to remember is that in such a scheme it’s absolutely true that the rich would be able to buy surplus rations from the poor if the poor found that they had surplus rations. And really that is just a consequence of the fact that we live in a capitalist system. This is not a suggestion that overthrows capitalism, and it is a fundamental fact of capitalism that if you’re richer you can consume more stuff – but really the critical thing about this scheme is that it changes the current picture. Whereas currently if oil for example is in short supply it goes to either the person who can bid the most or the person who moves the quickest and gets to the gas station first. Under this scheme, if the rich did consume more [than their equal share] they would actually be paying the poor directly for the privilege, so it would actually be redistributing the wealth from the high consumers to the low. So not only would it create a very strong incentive for people at all income levels to reduce their [consumption] it would also ensure that people were compensated directly if there was an imbalance in energy usage throughout the economy.

AS: Recently in the United States there are been threats of revolution and rage over a very basic plan for health care coverage. Imagine the furore if gas happy citizens are told that big government is going to ration your energy supplies. That’s going to be real problem, and yet when I look at Saudi Arabia and Kuwait building up their own energy and using their own oil supplies and I look at what’s happening in China – all the car sales and everything – it looks like rationing is almost inevitable sooner or later.

SC: Well absolutely, this is the fundamental problem that environmental thinkers have had for a very long time – really what we’re doing here is recognising pre-existing natural limits and trying to address them in a rational way. And again this comes back to the issue of cultural stories. If our cultural story tells us that there is infinite abundance and that human ingenuity will continue to create energy sources out of nothing forever more, than if anyone comes along and tells you that they want to ration it then obviously they are an enemy and must be opposed.

On the other hand if our stories tell us that we’re moving into a period where we’re really approaching our environmental limits and we need to address that in the most sensible, painless, rational way possible, then suddenly sharing out what is available in the fairest possible way becomes a no-brainer. So really this is why a lot of my work focuses on shifting these cultural perspectives, because as you say the political battles needed to implement something like a national rationing scheme will never be won while the current cultural stories that shape the discourse are in place.

AS: Your report for The Lean Economy Connection gives two reasons for tackling carbon: we’re bound to run out of supplies and it’s wrecking the atmosphere. But I’ve just read in the Guardian newspaper, March 22nd, about a government advisory board giving a third reason – one I’ve been harping on about – the pollution from burning carbon, mostly from cars, is killing city dwellers by the thousands. The committee of MPs estimate up to 50,000 people die prematurely in Britain alone every year due to smog. Will you add that list of motivations to clean up the system?

SC: Well, absolutely. That is a critical thing. It’s very interesting at the moment that our UK Government is seemingly having a bit of a change of heart on its attitude towards fossil fuels. There’s that report you’ve just mentioned and there’s also, just yesterday, a report by a group called the Peak Oil Taskforce, which is an industry group made up of some of our biggest companies, including Virgin — whose chairman Richard Branson is very well known here, I don’t know how well his fame has spread across the Atlantic — and some of our big transportation groups, our rail companies, have launched a report basically stating that as an industry they are deeply, deeply worried that Governments aren’t taking peak oil seriously enough and that they really need some support on this from the government level. And the government put out a statement yesterday essentially saying that they’re a bit confused because on one hand they’ve got the likes of Shell telling them there’s nothing to worry about, on the other they’ve got some of their biggest industry representatives saying that they’re terribly worried about it. So they have now called together a ‘Colloquium’ I think they’ve called it, pulling together some of their biggest stakeholders on this issue to try to get to the bottom of why there is so much disagreement. And we’ve got a couple of representatives from the UK Transition movement going along to that meeting.

It is interesting that whereas a few years ago you were laughed out of the room for talking about the need to get off fossil fuels, these days it seems almost zeitgeisty.

AS: Yes. This is Radio Ecoshock, we’re talking with Shaun Chamberlin, a British author and thinker who’s deeply involved with the Transition movement. And I want to ask you now, how can we use this Transition Movement to turn what looks like despair into better lives around us?

SC: Wow – there’s a big question! I suppose despair, in a strange way, has a certain motivation within it, in that despair is looking at what we expect the future to look like and realising that it isn’t what we want. And I think we can channel that part of despair and if we can make people understand that a different future is possible then suddenly that despair becomes not a sort of motivation to inaction, but a huge motivation to action. I suppose that really is the dark optimism idea in practice. So again it’s about this Transition Vision of what our future could look like, and trying to make that a visible reality that people can see and feel that they can get involved with.

I think part of the beauty of Transition is that it operates on a human scale, and you’re getting together with a group of maybe 15 other people from your local community to work on a particular practical project, and there’s something in us that just functions on that scale. You know, the people who are thinking about the kind of topics that are maybe often talked about on Radio Ecoshock, we’re used to thinking about how can we feed 7 billion people or whatever, but it’s a very hard job to get a human brain to think on that kind of scale. Whereas operating at the human scale soothes that despair by saying ‘well here I am doing something practical, doing something real, and doing it with my community’, and while there’s part of your brain saying “oh, but is that enough, is it sufficient?” that’s soothed by the knowledge that there’s this movement of thousands of communities around the world that are doing the same thing. And given the abject failure of the international political process to deal with the scale of the problems we’re looking at, that’s where the relief from despair can come.

AS: Yes, there’s some healing from learning to grow food or learning a skill or meeting with others to get something done. I was wondering if you can give us some specifics from the Transition community that you’ve been working with?

SC: Yeah, I’m based in Kingston Upon Thames, which is a suburb in south west London. And some of the things we’ve been doing, we’ve had quite an engagement with our local allotment group and we’ve people who are working to try and expand the space that is available for food growing locally both through getting more land allocated to that but also things like working with our local council here, trying to get flower beds and things turned into edible flower beds which are still as attractive but also creating more usefulness and creating more local resilience through that. That would be one example where our local groups have been working to do something which feels engaging, which feels pleasurable, which feels like it’s tangible and is building something, but also which creates a demonstration for the rest of the community of what Transition is about. And of course builds up food resilience so that if we do come to a situation where we’re really struggling to get by then we’re creating more resilience to that. For me personally one of the things that I find most important about Transition is that it’s a process which makes sense whether or not we win the fight on climate change, if you like. Whether we’re fighting to avoid the tipping points into unstoppable runaway climate change, Transition has a very important role in trying to win that fight. But equally, if we lose that fight Transition is going to have a very important role to play in creating that resilience against the kind of situations we’re likely to find ourselves in. And I think for a lot of people who are deeply troubled by the fact that we could be losing that fight that is one of the most powerful aspects of it.

AS: You’ve just answered one of the questions I had which was that I’ve heard you say Climate Change may be unstoppable as early as 2016. That only give us five years, so a critic might say the Transition movement is going to be too slow to make significant changes by then, and ditto the slow drop by Tradable Energy Quotas – it might take years just to get public acceptance – so are you finding that you can overcome those fears and still get people going on these projects?

SC: Yeah, as I say I think the crucial thing is if that’s something which is a fear – and it certainly is a fear that I’ve spoken to lots of people who find it quite paralyzing – I think the key thing is to work on projects which, as I say, make sense either way. And Tradable Energy Quotas, yes, absolutely has a role in allowing nations to be able to meet the incredibly stringent carbon targets that are going to be necessary if we are going to avoid unstoppable runaway [climate change]. But equally, even if we cross those tipping points, we’re still going to have an energy problem, we’re still going to have this situation to deal with, and having those systems in place is going to make the response to that an awful lot more rational and sane. I think this two-pronged approach is the thing which can help people remain sane in times which, as you say, can be quite despair-filled for a lot of people who are trying to engage with these issues.

AS: There must be people in these communities who are very apathetic or even outright hostile to changes in their lifestyle? How do we handle that?

SC: Listening, I think, is the straightforward answer. Here in Kingston it’s a fairly affluent suburb on the whole, but equally we have council estates which are some of the most deprived areas of London. And trying to find common ground between the very different perspectives on life here has been one of our real challenges, and I think listening to each other and not feeling like “Oh, I’ve listened to Radio Ecoshock and I’ve heard this answer and I’m going to go out and apply it” but actually respecting the opinions of the different people and the stories that the different people bring and recognising that a diversity of outlooks and stories is a real strength. We don’t need to agree on every aspect of what the future is going to look like, what we need to do is have a diversity of stories from which we can choose and apply the most appropriate if we’re going to create the most positive future that we can.

AS: I sometimes see all these things – Transition, local community building, local food production – as sort of a lifeboat building process. But then again is there anything wrong with lifeboats if we think the ship might be sinking? Is that dark optimism?

SC: [Laughs] I think dark optimism would say there’s nothing wrong with lifeboats whether you think the ship is sinking or you think it will stay floating. Either way they’re good things, so there’s no harm in building them.

AS: [Laughs] OK. We’re starting to run out of time. Is there something else you would like tell our listeners at this point?

SC: Ah, that’s always a difficult question… I think the key thing is really to follow your passions, regardless of where it leads. I mean, if you feel like “ah, this climate change thing really just leaves me cold, and I can see that it’s incredibly important and I can see that it’s this huge world changing thing that is coming, but what I really want to be doing is making documentaries” or whatever that person’s passion is… creating great art… I think it’s very important that we do follow our passions.

There’s a quote that always inspired me which is “don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive”. There’s a guy here called David Attenborough who is a wildlife documentary maker for the BBC, and he has been doing that for his whole life – he’s getting on a bit now – and he’s generally regarded in all the polls on such things as the most trusted figure in Britain because we all learned about nature by watching his programmes. And when he came out in one of his programmes and said something like “the only question remaining on climate change now is whether it’s going to be a disaster or an outright catastrophe”, that was one of the key moments in our country for shifting the whole debate, the whole perspective, because everyone is so used to his word being law on the things he talks about. And I found that so interesting because I thought if he’d given up his passion to be a wildlife documentary maker and gone and spent his life campaigning on climate he might never had made as much impact on that very different issue as he did by doing the thing which made him come alive. So I think would be my one thing for people to take home. Don’t give up on what you’re passionate about. It’ll be useful.

AS: That is a beautiful vision.

I’m Alex Smith for Radio Ecoshock. Our guest has been Shaun Chamberlin. He’s working on a report to the British Parliament on energy rationing, his latest book is The Transition Timeline for a local, resilient future. And you can get that book, and a lot more of his stimulating views, at his blog: www.darkoptimism.org. Shaun, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.

SC: Thanks, it’s been a pleasure.

(Alex Smith’s writeup can be found here)

I got back from the Dark Mountain Project’s Uncivilisation festival a few days ago, and while I could write about many of the aspects of that stimulating week, one thread it really tugged on for me was the role – the critical importance – of the arts in shifting the cultural stories that shape our future.

So today I would like to highlight a few musical artists who have inspired my personal journey, and to invite you to suggest a few artists of any kind who have brought something to your engagement with the global problematique, in whatever way, and perhaps deserve a little more exposure.

The ‘headline act’ at Uncivilisation was George Monbiot debating the usefulness of the Dark Mountain project with one of its founders. Sitting in the audience I was engaged by this – if rather frustrated by some of the arguments unvoiced or misrepresented – but then found myself profoundly refreshed to have my intellectual cogitations blown away by what followed. Immediately afterwards, Alastair McIntosh took the stage, and used the language of music to allow him to speak to the spiritual in us – to our connection with our homes, our land.

Maria Elvorith, ‘Red wine, Lipstick and the World in my hand’, 2009

The shift in energy in the room (and in me) was palpable, as we moved from our separate intellectual camps to what felt a unified sense of wonder and shared values.

Thinking back on this, I am put in mind of some insightful advice from the late Howard Zinn which I recently discovered and am endeavouring to embed into my outlook:

“Don’t look for a moment of total triumph. See it as an ongoing struggle, with victories and defeats, but in the long run the consciousness of people growing. So you need patience, persistence, and need to understand that even when you don’t “win”, there is fun and fulfilment in the fact that you have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile.”

The arts are so key to that fun and fulfilment, as well as to the growth in consciousness, that I feel the need to acknowledge some of my own inspirations…

Saul Williams – Act III Scene 2 (Shakespeare)

Ani DiFranco – Self Evident

My new friend Alex Fradera has already suggested adding this link to three folk songs on the subject of the credit crisis (though clearly none as well-sung as this one).

For me personally though, Nine Inch Nails’ 2007 album, Year Zero, was the point where my musical interests collided head-on with my life.

The mysterious initial trailer video (above) contained the critical clue to send online fans worldwide spiralling off into an ‘Alternate Reality Game (ARG)’ set in a dystopian near-future ravaged by climate destabilisation and social breakdown. Without ruining too much of the fun for newcomers who want to explore, the Viability Index site gives one flavour of the world that music fans were drawn into, some parts of which are genuinely moving and disturbing. And drawing us ever deeper was the fact that a few of the tracks off the forthcoming album lurked in its depths.

I talked with people for whom the experience – and the music it uncovered – opened their eyes to the realities of our present, as well as to new ways of engaging with those realities. And for me it led to my work on the Superstruct ARG, which tried to expand on that success.

But that’s another story. For now, I’ll leave you with some of the art that has affected me, and look forward to discovering more through you.

Sir Edwin Landseer, ‘Man proposes, God disposes’ 1864

Photograph by Iain D. Williams, Canada, Nov 2009

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Above is an interview I did last week with Canada’s excellent Radio Ecoshock. The full 60 minute show can be heard on Energy Bulletin here.

Dark Optimism readers may also be particularly interested in Ecoshock’s recent “Expecting Collapse” edition, featuring interviews with Dmitry Orlov and John Michael Greer, as well as clips from Professor Joseph Tainter.

Apologies to all those who’ve been visiting looking for this, I’ve been laid up in bed for the past couple of days.

Edit – Christopher Fraser of London Transition has kindly transcribed this interview in full. Available here.

An interview with the ever-insightful Richard Heinberg, discussing where we should put our efforts in the aftermath of the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit. It is well worth a watch, and you might want to consider spreading it to your contacts via the “Share This” link in the bottom right corner of this post.

I heartily endorse his perspective, but disagree when he argues in support of carbon taxation at around fifteen minutes in, saying that “we need to make fossil fuels more expensive”. In my opinion, we do not – we need to guarantee a fair entitlement to the available energy, not ration it by the depth of people’s pockets.

As Richard says, “if you’re taxing everybody on their use of fossil fuels – raising their cost of living – it’s pretty hard to get their buy-in to that”, but once you guarantee people a fair entitlement, in line with a declining cap, society can then collectively focus on keeping the price of energy as low as possible, which is a simply-understood task that everyone can buy into with enthusiasm.

Richard is touching on a widely-unrecognised contradiction at the heart of present energy/climate policy discussions – the desire to raise carbon prices while keeping energy prices low. Market-based approaches struggle to see past this, but TEQs would resolve it at a stroke, through the recognition that reducing the quantity of carbon emissions can be best achieved by means other than a high price.

Below the cut is the text of my latest article for the highly-recommended Resurgence magazine. They asked me to tell the story of my own personal journey thus far, and how I ended up doing what I do. Thanks to Resurgence for permission to reproduce it here (and on my articles page).

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For me, there was a definite moment when my environmental awakening began in earnest. I was studying philosophy at the University of York a decade ago when, out of the blue, I received an email from my father alerting me that “a long-term survey of oil and gas resources shows that demand for oil will exceed the maximum possible supply by 2010 and the oil price will sky-rocket”. This was followed by his (enduringly plausible) outline of the likely consequences – economic collapse, mass starvation and war.

I took a deep breath.

My initial reaction, like that of so many in their ‘peak oil moment’, was one of shock, rapidly followed by disbelief. I wondered how there could be near-universal silence on this issue if it truly had such vast implications, and tried to assure myself that ‘they’ would surely find some solution. Nonetheless, I resolved to look into it, partly in the hope of reassuring my father. Needless to say, what I learned wasn’t particularly reassuring.

As my studies came to an end, I quickly found myself with some appropriately philosophical questions to answer. The familiar post-university concerns of finding a way to earn some money, enjoying myself and caring for friends and family had to be balanced with two added factors – a sense that a ‘sound career path’ might not prove so sound in a civilisation that might be heading for the buffers, and an understanding that the world desperately needed all hands on deck if it was to have a future at all.

My attempts to discuss all this with my peers met with limited success. They reminded me that many people, both in our culture and around the world, are struggling to get by, and that I would need all the time I had just to look after myself and my family. Some suggested that I should be wary of having my life derailed by all this environmentalist rubbish, which had predicted ‘the end of the world’ so often before.

Others argued sadly that we must accept that it is simply human nature to go on being short-sighted and environmentally destructive. But that just sounded like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The many inspiring historical examples of human selflessness, wisdom and foresight must, if nothing else, show that we have a choice in these matters. Indeed, it seemed to me that those of us fortunate enough to have the time, education and mental health to perceive and face the circumstances of our world have a responsibility to act. If many others cannot, that is all the more reason why we must.

As Paul Hawken has since put it, maybe we are the world’s immune system. And where would any of us be if our own immune system got distracted seeking its personal fortune, say, or pursuing hedonistic diversions?

But while this musing was all very fine sitting in my university common room, how could I apply it to my life? My degree had failed to provide a helpful module on such ‘Applied Philosophy’ so, like everyone else, I had to make it up as I went along.

Time for another deep breath.

I did find one useful touchstone, a quote from the American theologian Howard Thurman:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Wonderful stuff, but to ‘come alive’ I also needed to stay alive, so when a job offer came on the very day my bank account hit empty, I decided to take it, working as an administrator at a project for marginalised groups where I had previously volunteered.

Over the next few years I worked my way up to a position I loved – managing the project’s learning centre – paid off my student debts, and spent much of my spare time learning more about the state of our world. Unfortunately, these investigations led to a growing sense that ultimately there wasn’t much point in helping people to reintegrate with society if that society itself really was running off a cliff. I realised this job was no longer helping me to come alive. I felt called to something else, but what?

I didn’t know, but I left the job anyway, and spent my time reading everything I could get my hands on regarding peak oil and climate change, attending events and asking questions. Where could I best put my energies to create a peaceful, creative, resilient and diverse world?

I slowly came to see that those common room discussions about human nature were touching on just one of a wide set of cultural stories that shape and define our perception of the world. That, despite its severity and urgency, ‘Peak Climate’ is just a symptom, a product of the ways of thinking we value, respect and adopt. And that it is at this level that radical change is both necessary and assured. Of course, many have discussed the need for a rapid paradigm shift – the Age of Aquarius, the Great Turning – but I was still struggling to find my role in supporting and shaping it.

The resolution came when I found myself at Schumacher College in 2006, where I studied for a fortnight and felt more intensely alive than I had in a long time. This was surely a good sign, and here I had my first encounter with the fledgling Transition movement, which even at that early stage recognised the innate importance of stories and visions in building thriving, resilient communities.

Over the last few years I have become ever more involved with this work, and 2009 saw the publication of my first book, The Transition Timeline, which grew out of requests from Transition communities to flesh out what a realistic, positive vision for our future might look like, and for more input on the major challenges we are likely to face as we try to create it.

This allowed me to explore my fear that the Transition movement may struggle to match up to the scale of these challenges, and I also found that the process shifted my own perspective. Whereas I probably started out trying to resolve all of the world’s problems single-handedly (and demanded the same of such initiatives), I have since noticed that the people and projects I respect most aren’t those who’ve tried to do everything, but those who have done the thing that they love rather brilliantly. In so doing they have, sometimes quite by accident, contributed to shifting the stories on which cultures are built.

So now I see myself not only as part of a team in my local Transition Town, but as part of a global movement to which we all lend our passions. Transition may not single-handedly ‘save the world’, but those who are trying to do so are certainly glad of its contribution, which seems a decent test of whether it is a worthwhile project.

As my book has made its way into the world, I have found myself invited to speak and write for local groups, parliaments and everything in between, and it is good to feel that I am contributing. Yet somewhere in my soul I can feel my next move gestating. At some important level, I feel called again to re-examine my role in the world.

It is time for another deep breath.

I’ve just been sent this footage from a debate on carbon trading and offsetting I took part in at the Cheat Neutral event at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre (video of the full event available at link, more on Cheat Neutral here). As will be obvious, this all took place in December, just prior to the Copenhagen conference.

Eagle-eyed readers will also notice that I have created a new page on this website with full details of The Transition Timeline, pulling together the various online reviews etc, and including the means to buy signed copies. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but I was nudged into action by receiving the happy news that the book has been selling over a hundred copies a week thus far!

So here it is, the final proof that all Transitioners (me included) have been brainwashed to think alike! Two other vids, and an explanation of where they all came from, below the cut.

Transition: What’s that all about then?

What’s your ‘Transition Vision’?

These three videos were made by Andreas Teuchert via a simple process. He roamed the 2009 Transition Conference, pouncing on unsuspecting passers by and dragging us into a dark room to point a camera at us and probe us with questions. Then he took the footage away and edited it up into the finished videos you see before you. Good work!

For those who may be interested in attending, details of this year’s Transition Conference(s) can be found here.

I just stumbled across this documentary (English with Dutch subtitles) following the story of the 70s/80s punk band Crass. They are still living wholeheartedly by their Do It Yourself ethos and “There is no authority but yourself” philosophy. A recommended watch.

“Tell everybody
Waitin’ for Superman
That they should try to
Hold on, best they can

He hasn’t dropped them,
Forgot them,
Or anything,
It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift”

~ The Flaming Lips

We’ve all seen Hollywood movies in which humanity is threatened by an unstoppable force, powerful beyond comprehension, which is eventually, in the final climax, held back and thwarted by our hero straining every sinew and pushing really hard…

Over recent weeks I have been in two meetings with Ed Miliband, our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change – one just before Copenhagen, and one just after. At the earlier meeting he told us to judge him on the results of Copenhagen, and (despite my previous comments, and the fact that the UK is one of the minority of countries who have not endorsed a 350ppm target) I do believe that he tried everything he knew to be that hero and bring back a passable agreement.

Unfortunately, this Hollywood story isn’t a useful one for our current predicament. Sometimes superhuman achievements really are beyond the grasp of mere humans. Trying to pull together a global agreement reconciling the fundamentally incompatible demands of unlimited economic growth and a limited physical environment is one such fool’s errand.

In interviews in Copenhagen Ed appeared somewhat bewildered by the lack of progress and, frankly, somewhat dejected. It was hard not to feel for him.

For the technical details of what was eventually ‘agreed’ click here, for the text of the agreement itself click here, or for a more informal ‘executive summary’ see the clip below, but to cut a long story short, nothing was agreed that comes remotely close to addressing the scale of our climate challenge. Indeed, as I and many others have been pointing out for months, an agreement in line with climate science wasn’t even close to the negotiating table, so there wasn’t much point in hoping for it.

When we heard from the beginning that “talks are progressing more slowly than expected”, part of the explanation was that some of the smaller countries were stubbornly refusing to sign their own death warrants this time, no matter what they were offered to do so. Bloody inconsiderate of them.

“We’re dying here, we’re drowning; and some of us know that they don’t really care, because we have to beg them. Actions speak louder than words. If they really do care, please have a little listen to us.” – Jerome Esebei Temengil from Palau’s delegation

(In an idle moment I did wonder whether the negotiations would have proceeded any differently had a volunteer Palauan family locked themselves in a transparent box in the middle of the conference hall, set to gradually fill with water and drown them unless they released themselves upon hearing that the 350ppm agreement demanded by their delegation has been signed…)

Of course there were many reasons why various countries and other interests strove to undermine any meaningful agreement, but I think Algerian envoy Kamel Djemouai, who speaks for 53 African nations, outlined the worst-case scenario well: “No deal is better than to have a bad deal, particularly for Africa.”

Indeed, even the White House admitted before the talks that:
“An empty deal would be worse than no deal at all”

Yet we ended up with what the Financial Times described as “the emptiest deal one could imagine, short of a fist fight”.

(The greatest success of the talks? A bit of childish humour adorning the back of lying climate change denialist Christopher Monckton)

Still, by the time of our post-Copenhagen ‘debrief’ Ed Miliband appeared to have decided (or been told) to put a positive spin on the outcome. Despite looking as depressed as anyone in the room, he described the Accord as a “critical first step”, and proceeded to argue that expectations of Copenhagen had simply been too high. Yet of course those lofty expectations were based squarely on the science, which remains stubbornly unchanged by the recent political manoeuvrings.

I suppose Ed is virtually obliged to appear positive about the political process, because that is what he has invested his life in, and what he is giving all his efforts to. And when that many world leaders gather it is inevitable that the outcome will be spun as some kind of at least partial success. But Ed’s comments in an article last Sunday are rather more telling: “In the months ahead, (Copenhagen’s) concrete achievements must be secured and extended”.

I wonder if such ‘unsecured concrete achievements’ were what Connie Hedegaard (initial President of the Copenhagen Conference and soon to be European Commissioner for climate change) was hoping for when she declared: “This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we got a new and better one. If we ever do.”

And what do these ‘achievements’ add up to? Well, if all the aspirational numbers in the Copenhagen Accord were actually fulfilled, they would lead to a CO₂ concentration of 780ppm (double current levels) and a 3.9 degree warming by 2100. If political reality and scientific reality cannot be reconciled, there will be only one winner – Nature and physics simply do not negotiate. As George Monbiot put it, “Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest; it was nice knowing you, not that we really cared”.

So now the political focus shifts to the odd game of claiming that the Copenhagen Accord represents success while simultaneously blaming others for its failure. Thanks to the nationalistic, competitive nature of international politics, Miliband, Obama and all the other would-be superheroes are desperately trying to find their supervillain.

It has been pointed out before that if an alien invasion was swooping in to attack, with projected human mortality and other effects similar to those of climate change, we would have united against the threat long ago. That is the kind of external enemy we could really get to grips with (Hollywood stories have trained us well for that one), but for as long as politics is treated as a competition between nations, cooperative efforts for mutual benefit will remain beyond us.

Perhaps this time the ‘supervillain’ we face is far more cunning than those movie aliens. He realises that in order to destroy the world with his dastardly plot he needs only to hide from view. As long as humanity perceives no hand but our own in any of these events, he can just sit back and calmly watch us destroy ourselves.

It seems we can accept being killed by our own foolishness much more easily than being outsmarted. Unfortunately, taking a long hard look in the mirror and battling our internal supervillains remains deeply unfashionable…

So where does all this leave us? What are our chances now of avoiding unstoppable runaway climate change, with all that entails?

50%-50% ?

90%-10% ? (I don’t need to say which way)

Not even close.

For years now, I have played host to a cordial internal conflict between the part of me that insists that there may still be a tiny chance left of maintaining a stable climate, and the part that accepts that unstoppable runaway climate change is now inevitable…

I kept reading and researching, the information kept getting worse and worse, and then I recently stumbled across a quote that brought me up short. A 13th Century Islamic mystic by the name of Hajji Bektash Wali made the following pronouncement:

“For one who has perception, A mere sign is enough. For one who does not heed, A thousand explanations Are not enough”

I confess that by now I may have had more than a thousand explanations of why it is too late, but it is still hard to give up hope on this one. In the article referred to earlier, Ed Miliband declared that:

“The challenge for all of us is not to lose heart and momentum. The truth is that the global campaign, co-ordinated by green NGOs, backed by business and supported by a wider cross section of the public, has achieved a lot… no campaign ever wholly succeeds at the first time of asking. We should take heart from the achievements and step up our efforts.”

And of course it is not just the politicians pushing this message. The likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth also spun the Copenhagen fortnight as “humanity’s last chance” to avoid the horrific impacts of runaway climate destabilisation, which leaves their calls for (yet) “one more big push” sounding a little hollow, even, I suspect, to them.

Yet the repeated calls to redouble our efforts do retain a certain allure. Yes, in part because finding peace with our own impotence in the face of such large-scale suffering is a formidable task, but I think even more because it would be so terrible to look back and feel that we gave up while there actually was still a chance there. Maybe there’s still a chance that there’s a chance…?

But what if we are on the Titanic and the iceberg has already been struck? Can we think of nothing wiser to do than to try to patch the hole as the ocean rushes in?

There are times when Hollywood heroism is just what is needed, but there are also times when superhuman efforts really are beyond us. And perhaps the perception the mystic spoke of whispers that one such time has come. A time to ponder the reasons why the latest political “last chance” wasn’t taken, to accept that a scientific technofix ain’t gonna save us either, and to look unflinchingly at the unpalatable, overwhelming realities of the period we are moving into.

Let’s at least allow ourselves to really ask: “What does life look like in a world of unstoppable climate destabilisation?”. What does my life look like there?

There are still lives to be lived in that world, choices to be made, love to give and suffering to alleviate. And only by allowing ourselves to explore that unknown realm can we see it for what it is, rather than what we might fear it to be.

On that note, I would like to introduce you to The Dark Mountain Project, started by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, which invites us to explore this very terrain. By way of introduction, this from their Manifesto: