Retrospective

This is the 100th “Road to Resilience” column. I originally began writing it as an outlet for ideas that were surfacing in our Transition Vashon group.  The Transition Network, of which we were a member, began in Great Britain in 2004.  They felt that we needed to address climate change and “peak oil” by lowering our energy use.  It was impossible for anybody to really know how it would unfold.  The goal for the transition movement was to design positive and creative adaptations to an inevitable future rather than ignore and deny until forced to react in desperation.  Part of the unknown was how quickly it would unfold, and so there was a degree of urgency in beginning to make our changes now, both because lifestyle changes take time and because more limited resources and social unrest would make adaptation both more painful and difficult.

Climate scientists first reached a consensus in 1988 that human-driven climate change was occurring.  The kinds of dramatic changes we need to make would normally take 20-30 years in a large, complex society like ours.  Unfortunately, we squandered the advantage of early warning and it is now necessary to make dramatic changes in a very short time span,  a task similar to our buildup to WW11.   Transition believes that the strategies most likely to succeed involve focusing action in widely diverse communities and building self-reliance and resilience at the local level.  Since we have no idea which solution will work, it is best to develop as many as possible.  

Since I wrote the first column in January of 2011, a lot has unfolded, some of which was expected and some that caught us completely by surprise, some good and some bad.  In 2011, nobody ever expected that North America would become the leading exporter of fossil fuel.  Fracking technology may have been envisioned in 2011, but the speed and magnitude of its development wasn’t on anybody’s radar.  It doesn’t mean that the supply of fossil fuels are not finite, nor that we will not run out someday, but it has allowed us to procrastinate on making the cuts we need to make to mitigate climate change, and, at the same time, the increased fossil fuel use is degrading the environment in new and unforeseen ways.

We knew that the changes we required were going to be at the expense of many large corporations profiting from the status quo. In the intervening years, we have come to grasp just how much wealth has been concentrated; now the top 1% own 40% of the wealth of the richest country in the world. Their control over both the government and the media is daunting. Strategizing on wrestling a bear and actually wrestling one, feeling the power and resolve, is something else altogether. Big business has been called out, they are willing to fight, and they mean business.  At one time, even BP was talking about transitioning to renewable energy.  Now, not so much.  Corporations have become so brazen that they have no qualms about pushing an obviously self-serving and power-consolidating treaty like the TPP down our throats whether we like it or not.  The fact that we are at war has become clearly defined, and, so far, we have been losing.

The climate appears to be changing faster than anyone expected.  No scientist is ready to attribute any one event to global warming, but the increased frequency and severity of weather events can’t be denied.  That’s bad in that we may not have as much time as we thought.  On the other hand, it is convincing more of us that we have to get off our butts and do something.

A very good thing that is happening is that the cost of renewables is shrinking much faster and more dramatically than anybody ever expected.  As much as the media try to portray renewables as maybe practical in the far out fuzzy future, many of us can’t avoid seeing that it is fast becoming an attractive alternative now.

Although the complacency of people whose basic needs and wants are reasonably well supplied has been a real obstacle when trying to get people to react to something locked into the future, recent events have shown that public opinion can change amazingly fast.  I was particularly surprised at how fast an emotional issue like LGBT rights has gained acceptance.  I have a theory that what overcomes people’s fears, even on an emotionally charged issue like this, is personal acquaintance.  We have all realized that we are talking about that nice couple that lives down the street that are perfectly normal everyday folks.  In the same way, people are beginning to connect the dots between environmental degradation, corporatocracy, income disparity, social injustice, global turmoil, suppression of renewable energy, farming alternatives, high drug and medical costs, and the Democratic/Republican hegemony.  Every person who loses a job, loses a house due to a bank or a freak weather event, or some other misfortune has a personal realization that the status quo is not working for them.  And as more of us see that all of these things have an economic system in common, we are beginning to understand how fundamental a change we need to make.  The multinational corporations understand this very well and are doing everything they can to make sure that you don’t.

Comments?   terry@vashonloop.com