culture we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future and where we might move forward from this point some of those stories are that
my work for a long time has been involved in education in teaching people practical skills for sustainability
i lived in ireland built the first straw bale houses in ireland and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing but all my work for many years was
focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model and moderating what comes in at one end and moderating the outputs at the other end
and then i came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly and in order to introduce you to that i've got something here that i'm going to unveil which is one of the great marvels of the modern age and it's something so astounding and so astonishing
that i think maybe as i remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate if you could help me with that it would be fantastic
this is a liter of oil this bottle of oil distilled over a hundred million years of geological time ancient sunlight
we can turn it into a dazzling array of materials medicine modern clothing laptops a whole range of different things
it gives us an energy return that's unimaginable historically we've based the design of our settlements
our business models our transport plans even the idea of economic growth some would argue on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity
yet when we take a step back and look over the span of history at what we might call the petroleum interval
it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material and then based a whole way of life around it
but as we straddle the top of this energy mountain at this stage we move from a time where our economic success our sense of individual
there are ninety eight oil producing nations in the world but of those sixty five have already passed their peak the moment when the world on average passes this peak
but are we to assume that the same brilliance and creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate
when we have to design a creative way back down the other side no but the thinking that we have to come up with has to be based on a realistic assessment of where we are
so the ipcc said that we might see significant break up of the arctic ice in two thousand one hundred in their worst case scenario actually if current trends continue it could all be gone in five or ten years time
just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms
it would offset all the savings that we need to make in carbon over the next forty years to avoid runawayclimate change we have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization
the generation that lived at the top of the mountain that partied so hard and so abused its inheritance
and one of the ways i like to do that is to look back at the stories people used to tell before we had cheap oil before we had fossil fuels and people relied on their own muscle animal muscleenergy or a little bit of wind little bit of water energy
you having to do any work provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge otherwise you'd flood your entire town with warm porridge
we have the magic porridge pot in the form of walmart and tesco and we have the elves in the form of china but we don't appreciate what an astonishing thing that has been
and what are the stories that we tell ourselves now as we look forward about where we're going to go and i would argue that there are four there is the idea of business as usual that the future will be like the present just more of it
is the idea of hitting the wall that actually somehow everything is so fragile that it might just all unravel and collapse it's this popular story in some places
third story is the idea that technology can solve everything that technology can somehow get us through this completely and it's an idea that i think is very prevalent at these
the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energycrisis that a move to a knowledge economy can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints
the idea that we can step off neatly onto a completely renewable world but the world isn't second life we can't create new land and new energy systems at the click of
and as we sit exchanging free ideas with each other there are still people mining coal in order to power the servers extracting the minerals to make all of those things
the breakfast that we eat as we sit down to check our email in the morning is still transported at great distances usually at the expense of the local more resilient food systems that would have supplied that in the past which we've so effectively devalued and dismantled
we can be astonishingly inventive and creative but we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands energy and technology are not the same thing
what i'm involved with is the transitionresponse and this is really about looking the challenges of peak oil and climate change square in the face and responding with a creativity and an adaptability and an imagination that we really need
it's open source it's something which everybody who 's involved with it develops and passes on as they work with it
it's self organizing there is no great central organization that pushes this people just pick up an idea and they run with it and they implement it where they are it's solutions focused it's very much looking at what people can do where they are to respond to this
it's sensitive to place and to scale transitional is completely different transition groups in chile transition groups in the u s transition groups here what they're doing looks very different in every place that you go to
it learns very much from its mistakes and it feels historic it tries to create a sense that this is a historic opportunity to do something really extraordinary
and it's a process which is really joyful people have a huge amount of fun doing this reconnecting with other people as they do it one of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience
and i think in many ways the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability the idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology and it's really about how
systems settlements withstand shock from the outside when they encounter shock from the outside that they don't just unravel and fall to pieces and i think it's a more useful concept than sustainability as i said
when our supermarkets have only two or three days worth of food in them at any one time often sustainability tends to focus on the energyefficiency of the freezers and the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in
looking through the lens of resilience we really question how we've let ourselves get into a situation that's so vulnerable
this is at a time when the city of bristol which is quite close to here was surrounded by commercial market gardens which provided a significantamount of the food that was consumed in the town
and created a lot of employment for people as well there was a degree of resilience if you like at that time which we can now only look back on with envy
so how does this transition idea work so basically you have a group of people who are excited by the idea they pick up some of the tools that we've developed
they start to run an awareness raising program looking at how this might actually work in the town they show films they give talks and so on it's a process which is playful and creative
and informative then they start to form working groups looking at different aspects of this and then from that there emerge a whole lot of projects which then the transitionproject itself starts to support and enable
so it started out with some work i was involved in in ireland where i was teaching and has since spread there are now over two hundred formaltransition projects and there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage they are mulling
whether they're going to take it further and actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff but what do they actually do you know it's a kind of nice idea but what do they actually do on the ground well i think it's really important to make the point that actually
you know this isn't something which is going to do everything on its own we need internationallegislation from copenhagen and so on we need national responses we need local government responses but all of those things are going to be
lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies community owned energy companies where the community can invest money into itself to start putting in place
the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need a lot of places are working with their local schools newent in the forest of dean big polytunnel they built for the school the kids are learning how to grow food
and also starting to play around with the idea of alternative currencies this is lewes in sussex who have recently launched the lewes pound
a currency that you can only spend within the town as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy you take it anywhere else it's not worth anything but actually within the town you start to create these economic cycles much more effectively
another thing that they do is what we call an energydescent plan which is basically to develop a plan b for the town most of our local authorities when they sit down to plan
for the next five ten fifteen twenty years of a community still start by assuming that there will be more energy more cars more housing
getting a lot of interest from government ed miliband the energyminister of this country was invited to come our recent conference as a keynote listener which
and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea there are now two local authorities in this country
and the head of the council said if we didn't have transition stroud we would have to invent all of that community infrastructure for the first time
as we see the spread of it we see national hubs emerging in scotland the scottish government 's climate change fund has funded transition scotland as a national organization supporting the spread of this and we see it all over the place as well
but the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now but that things are already inevitably changing and what we need to do is to work creatively with that based on asking the right questions
i think i'd like to just return at the end to the idea of stories because i think stories are vital here and actually the stories that we tell ourselves we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here
one of the key things that transition does is to pull those stories out of what people are doing stories about the community that's produced its own twenty one pound note for example
the school that's turned its car park into a food garden the community that's founded its own energy company and for me one of the great stories recently was the obamas digging up the south lawn of the white house to create a vegetable garden
so the question i like to leave you with really is for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive
how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions while also building resilience personally i feel enormouslygrateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil
i've been astonishingly lucky we've been astonishingly lucky but let us honor what it has bought us and move forward from this point
more nourishing and in which we find ourselves fitter more skilled and more connected to each other thank you very much
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