Community
The importance of bringing the collective intelligence and skills of people together cannot be underestimated for a low energy future.
Stories in our Culture
When people talk of what’s coming in our future the messages can often be boiled down to three main stories or scripts.
The first is ‘business as usual’; this story presumes that things aren’t particularly troublesome, we’ll keep finding new oil and society will continue to function easily.
The second is ‘techno-fix wonderland’ where human have developed their incredible technologies to a point where everything is amazing and we’ll eventually leave here in spaceships to live our Star Trek. Although amazing energy technologies exist, they’re in the hand of corporate control and there’s much development left to go on them.
The third is ‘apocalypse’; climate catastrophe and oil depletion have left human society in a state of ruin. Nothing was done in time and we’re all fighting each other over the scraps of food, with a handful guarding their herd with a shotgun keeping the hoards of hungry people at bay.
The fourth story that has not been told is the realistic positive vision that’s embodied in the transition movement. It’s a story where the global is taken head on by at the community and city level. The Resilience (a systems capacity to withstand change) of a town is improved to a point so that these great catastrophes are not too much of a shock. Because community creates something greater than the sum of it’s parts, working with people on the land, sharing basic skills with each other, and entertaining each other will be a much more commonplace part of existence.
This forth story needs to be told more clearly and more often, now more than ever, so as to ensure a peaceful, practical and fulfilling transition to a low energy society.