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 Customer Reviews
Transition Handbook, 08 Oct 2008
This book is way overdue. I have been eagerly searching for books addressing the preparation for post peak oil for many many years. Books like this should have been written years ago so I was delighted to see that at last practical guides are starting to appear on the book shelves.
I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters dealing with peak oil and its implications for society. Subsequent chapters I did not enjoy as much particularly when the Kinsale Energy Decent Action Plan is promoted as a role model for sustainable community development.
There is a huge wealth of expertise in the development community, particularly which which was developed from overseas aid agencies. They have developed approaches, standards, principles and a multitude of methodologies for developing communities, with limited or almost non existent resources, and where success or failure costs lives. This expertise has been ignored and attempts made to reinvent the wheel.
I think the focus of the book should have built on the expertise of organisations such as Oxfam, VSO, Save the Children, and Overseas Development Administration and focused on the structures, processes and outcomes, which would help develop community resilience and sustainability, with limited resources.
I have a worry that communities who attempt to use this handbook as the basis for their transition will make fantastic progress initially through the generation of enthusiasm but due to improper planning, a lack of monitoring and evaluation of effectiveness and imprecise goals and objectives, people will become disillusioned and drop out. There is also the danger that communities who adapt this approach will not be able to communicate effectively with traditional disciplines, local authorities, health services, energy engineers or others. Who should change first? The current decision makers and service providers or the community development
organisations?
This process of conflict between service providers and community organisations has happened time and time again, without learning the lessons of what actually is sustainable in the long term. It usually results in the community organisation being unable to access state funding resulting in decline and or death. How can a community organisation sustain itself unless it becomes a business, with formal structures, job descriptions, terms of reference, fundamental guiding principles, training, development, salaries, income generation, sales etc. How can that fit with the "loose" concepts proposed?
Lets hope this is just the first of a huge range of increasingly sophisticated publications yet to come that will address these issues using the best expertise available in the fields of business, development management, community organisation, sustainability, public health, and many more, combined into a consensus best practice manual for transition. I hope these comments help to stimulate a critical approach to sustainable community development.
A smart, accessible guide to a resilient, low-carbon future, 11 Sep 2008
There is a powerful current in our contemporary, post-industrial culture that is arguing for a simpler, more sustainable alternative to our wasteful, environmentally damaging way of life. Proselytisers rely on a varying mix of three sets of arguments: the environmental challenge posed by climate change, the energy supply challenge posed by peak oil and, finally, the spiritual challenge emerging from the newest science on personal wellbeing (in a nutshell: beyond a certain point more money and stuff doesn't make us happier.)
Rob Hopkins' Transition Movement is pragmatic attempt to come to terms with the disruptions that are heralded by climate change and peak oil. Thoughtlessly addicted as we are to fossil fuels, our societies are ill equipped to deal with the adverse implications of energy scarcity and a hotter, less predictable climate. According to Hopkins, what we need to develop is resilience: the ability to deal creatively and locally with energy supply and environmental shocks.
The Transition Handbook is a hands-on guide to help communities make that transition towards a resilient, low-carbon future. It is useful to distinguish three layers in the book.
The first layer encapsulates the three main parts of Hopkins' argument, focused on the head (the facts about climate change and peak oil you need to know), the heart (the need for positive vision and commitment) and the hands (practical guidelines for enabling resilient communities).
The second layer consists of a range of design principles that can be relied on to shape resilient communities. For example, in preparing for an energy-scarce future we need to know that resilience relies on a small scale, modular and decentralised infrastructure. We also need to invest in high-quality productive relationships, integrate rather than segregate and use the creative edges of systems to make the most of their potential. There are many more of these principles that have been lifted from an eclectic mix of disciplines, including systems science, ecology and the psychology of change. Hopkins himself was deeply influenced by the permaculture movement, a radical design approach to constructing "sustainable human settlements".
The third layer features a range of practical solutions that comply with these design principles. These solutions are meant to be the cornerstones of any resilient community and include a template for working towards a more energy-thrifty ("energy descent planning"), decentralised energy generation, local food sourcing, re-skilling of consumers into creative citizens and local currencies.
Transition thinking is not only a theory but it is also a social movement and the book features a number of UK examples of communities that have started going down the path towards resilience. Hopkins is acutely aware that the governance of the Transition movement needs to mirror the design principles underlying resilience. It would hardly be credible and effective to embody a Transition movement by a tightly-managed, centralised bureaucracy. So, Hopkins is only willing to give pointers to help people in facilitating bottom-up, small-scale, self-steering initiatives. Lots is left to emergence and action learning ("... where it all goes remains to be seen ..." is an often used phrase in the book).
The Transition Handbook is an accessible, smart guide to helping us deal with the challenges we may face as a result of climate change and peak oil. In itself the book doesn't offer anything new, but it rearranges familiar pieces of a puzzle into a compelling and coherent approach towards learning again to help ourselves and to do more with less.
Enabling, 01 Jul 2008
Hooray. Despite some people's misgivings about the psychology section, which seem largely dependent on a definition of 'success', this is an outstanding book. It's primary achievement is to show the reader how societal change can take place in the absence of the usual too little too late response of governments, whose priorities lie with business, rather than people or environmental sustainability. The future security of Britain, and elsewhere, lies in groups of people with the will and power to make communities sustainable. It might seem unbelievable, but we have the power to transform our society, and are not at the whim of government. They will follow. If you admire Kohr, Schumacher, Papworth and Sale, you will respond positively to this book.
Brilliant in parts, dangerously foolish in others, 28 Jun 2008
I've the greatest sympathy with this book's concept in many respects. Rob correctly identifies the overriding need to reduce energy dependence, and that we must not wait for "them" to do anything about it, or even help us. Correctly he sees that we need a "how-to" manual for how to make communities (rather than just the reader) self-sufficient in food and so on. But the devil is in the practical details, or more precisely the practical unknowns which are all too easily glossed over.
The book gets hideously, dangerously misguided in its important section on psychology, with its notion of the importance of a "positive vision". History is bursting full of "positive visions" which ended in huge disasters. Instead, what is needed is a judiciously realistic vision. It is vitally important to recognise that criticism and doubt are just as important as hope and "constructive" "enthusiastic" thinking. Otherwise huge energy and effort is almost certain to be lost in enthusing down disastrous dead-ends.
In a traumatised society, many people become lost to despair, depression, negativity. But there is the equal problem that too many people desperately pin their hopes on "positive" but false solutions which ultimately fail them.
Someone said that the transition concept has been "phenomenally successful". That is seriously unhinged fantasy. There hasn't yet been a transition to test out how or even whether the ideas work out in practice.
You need to be very careful to avoid assuming that action is the same as achievement of solutions, or that international fame and crowds of enthusiastic followers is the same as success in solving the problem.
I would strongly urge the author to revise the psychology section of his book to take account of these comments. The importance of a realistic vision.
essential reading, 30 Apr 2008
I'm two thirds way through this book and overall find it an inspiring read. The first section in particular summarises some of the issues in a very easy to understand style. I liked the section on psychology particularly - I think both grieving, shock and addiction models are useful to understanding the apparently irrational responses of people to climate change and peak oil.
The rest of the book is harder to read - a lot of detail about how one should go about starting a transition initiative. Some of this stuff makes very important points about embedding the initiative into the community and I appreciate that it is derived from experience. At the same time I found it somewhat prescriptive, especially the directions for conducting meetings/workshops etc. This is a bit of a turn off - there are of course lots of ways of doing these things and I feel it would have been better just to refer to some resources or put these in appendices.
We have to act on climate change and peak oil and I buy the resilient local economy model. There is lots of useful stuff in this book, maybe some of it just more detailed than necessary.
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Customer Reviews
Transition Handbook, 08 Oct 2008
This book is way overdue. I have been eagerly searching for books addressing the preparation for post peak oil for many many years. Books like this should have been written years ago so I was delighted to see that at last practical guides are starting to appear on the book shelves.
I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters dealing with peak oil and its implications for society. Subsequent chapters I did not enjoy as much particularly when the Kinsale Energy Decent Action Plan is promoted as a role model for sustainable community development.
There is a huge wealth of expertise in the development community, particularly which which was developed from overseas aid agencies. They have developed approaches, standards, principles and a multitude of methodologies for developing communities, with limited or almost non existent resources, and where success or failure costs lives. This expertise has been ignored and attempts made to reinvent the wheel.
I think the focus of the book should have built on the expertise of organisations such as Oxfam, VSO, Save the Children, and Overseas Development Administration and focused on the structures, processes and outcomes, which would help develop community resilience and sustainability, with limited resources.
I have a worry that communities who attempt to use this handbook as the basis for their transition will make fantastic progress initially through the generation of enthusiasm but due to improper planning, a lack of monitoring and evaluation of effectiveness and imprecise goals and objectives, people will become disillusioned and drop out. There is also the danger that communities who adapt this approach will not be able to communicate effectively with traditional disciplines, local authorities, health services, energy engineers or others. Who should change first? The current decision makers and service providers or the community development
organisations?
This process of conflict between service providers and community organisations has happened time and time again, without learning the lessons of what actually is sustainable in the long term. It usually results in the community organisation being unable to access state funding resulting in decline and or death. How can a community organisation sustain itself unless it becomes a business, with formal structures, job descriptions, terms of reference, fundamental guiding principles, training, development, salaries, income generation, sales etc. How can that fit with the "loose" concepts proposed?
Lets hope this is just the first of a huge range of increasingly sophisticated publications yet to come that will address these issues using the best expertise available in the fields of business, development management, community organisation, sustainability, public health, and many more, combined into a consensus best practice manual for transition. I hope these comments help to stimulate a critical approach to sustainable community development.
A smart, accessible guide to a resilient, low-carbon future, 11 Sep 2008
There is a powerful current in our contemporary, post-industrial culture that is arguing for a simpler, more sustainable alternative to our wasteful, environmentally damaging way of life. Proselytisers rely on a varying mix of three sets of arguments: the environmental challenge posed by climate change, the energy supply challenge posed by peak oil and, finally, the spiritual challenge emerging from the newest science on personal wellbeing (in a nutshell: beyond a certain point more money and stuff doesn't make us happier.)
Rob Hopkins' Transition Movement is pragmatic attempt to come to terms with the disruptions that are heralded by climate change and peak oil. Thoughtlessly addicted as we are to fossil fuels, our societies are ill equipped to deal with the adverse implications of energy scarcity and a hotter, less predictable climate. According to Hopkins, what we need to develop is resilience: the ability to deal creatively and locally with energy supply and environmental shocks.
The Transition Handbook is a hands-on guide to help communities make that transition towards a resilient, low-carbon future. It is useful to distinguish three layers in the book.
The first layer encapsulates the three main parts of Hopkins' argument, focused on the head (the facts about climate change and peak oil you need to know), the heart (the need for positive vision and commitment) and the hands (practical guidelines for enabling resilient communities).
The second layer consists of a range of design principles that can be relied on to shape resilient communities. For example, in preparing for an energy-scarce future we need to know that resilience relies on a small scale, modular and decentralised infrastructure. We also need to invest in high-quality productive relationships, integrate rather than segregate and use the creative edges of systems to make the most of their potential. There are many more of these principles that have been lifted from an eclectic mix of disciplines, including systems science, ecology and the psychology of change. Hopkins himself was deeply influenced by the permaculture movement, a radical design approach to constructing "sustainable human settlements".
The third layer features a range of practical solutions that comply with these design principles. These solutions are meant to be the cornerstones of any resilient community and include a template for working towards a more energy-thrifty ("energy descent planning"), decentralised energy generation, local food sourcing, re-skilling of consumers into creative citizens and local currencies.
Transition thinking is not only a theory but it is also a social movement and the book features a number of UK examples of communities that have started going down the path towards resilience. Hopkins is acutely aware that the governance of the Transition movement needs to mirror the design principles underlying resilience. It would hardly be credible and effective to embody a Transition movement by a tightly-managed, centralised bureaucracy. So, Hopkins is only willing to give pointers to help people in facilitating bottom-up, small-scale, self-steering initiatives. Lots is left to emergence and action learning ("... where it all goes remains to be seen ..." is an often used phrase in the book).
The Transition Handbook is an accessible, smart guide to helping us deal with the challenges we may face as a result of climate change and peak oil. In itself the book doesn't offer anything new, but it rearranges familiar pieces of a puzzle into a compelling and coherent approach towards learning again to help ourselves and to do more with less.
Enabling, 01 Jul 2008
Hooray. Despite some people's misgivings about the psychology section, which seem largely dependent on a definition of 'success', this is an outstanding book. It's primary achievement is to show the reader how societal change can take place in the absence of the usual too little too late response of governments, whose priorities lie with business, rather than people or environmental sustainability. The future security of Britain, and elsewhere, lies in groups of people with the will and power to make communities sustainable. It might seem unbelievable, but we have the power to transform our society, and are not at the whim of government. They will follow. If you admire Kohr, Schumacher, Papworth and Sale, you will respond positively to this book.
Brilliant in parts, dangerously foolish in others, 28 Jun 2008
I've the greatest sympathy with this book's concept in many respects. Rob correctly identifies the overriding need to reduce energy dependence, and that we must not wait for "them" to do anything about it, or even help us. Correctly he sees that we need a "how-to" manual for how to make communities (rather than just the reader) self-sufficient in food and so on. But the devil is in the practical details, or more precisely the practical unknowns which are all too easily glossed over.
The book gets hideously, dangerously misguided in its important section on psychology, with its notion of the importance of a "positive vision". History is bursting full of "positive visions" which ended in huge disasters. Instead, what is needed is a judiciously realistic vision. It is vitally important to recognise that criticism and doubt are just as important as hope and "constructive" "enthusiastic" thinking. Otherwise huge energy and effort is almost certain to be lost in enthusing down disastrous dead-ends.
In a traumatised society, many people become lost to despair, depression, negativity. But there is the equal problem that too many people desperately pin their hopes on "positive" but false solutions which ultimately fail them.
Someone said that the transition concept has been "phenomenally successful". That is seriously unhinged fantasy. There hasn't yet been a transition to test out how or even whether the ideas work out in practice.
You need to be very careful to avoid assuming that action is the same as achievement of solutions, or that international fame and crowds of enthusiastic followers is the same as success in solving the problem.
I would strongly urge the author to revise the psychology section of his book to take account of these comments. The importance of a realistic vision.
essential reading, 30 Apr 2008
I'm two thirds way through this book and overall find it an inspiring read. The first section in particular summarises some of the issues in a very easy to understand style. I liked the section on psychology particularly - I think both grieving, shock and addiction models are useful to understanding the apparently irrational responses of people to climate change and peak oil.
The rest of the book is harder to read - a lot of detail about how one should go about starting a transition initiative. Some of this stuff makes very important points about embedding the initiative into the community and I appreciate that it is derived from experience. At the same time I found it somewhat prescriptive, especially the directions for conducting meetings/workshops etc. This is a bit of a turn off - there are of course lots of ways of doing these things and I feel it would have been better just to refer to some resources or put these in appendices.
We have to act on climate change and peak oil and I buy the resilient local economy model. There is lots of useful stuff in this book, maybe some of it just more detailed than necessary.
Just what it says on the tin, 16 Sep 2008
This is a wonderful book. As the title suggests, it is cool, reasonable, and patient, looking carefully at all the evidence and coming to conclusions which it is hard to disagree with.
Like other reviewers, I find it hard to take excerpts from the book because I would have to quote the whole thing! However, perhaps I may try to help anyone who is wondering whether to read it. One way to look at the global warming/climate change debate is to ask oneself three questions.
First, is the world getting warmer?
Second, is human activity, and specifically CO2, a major cause?
And third, does it matter? Will there be harmful consequences? And if so, what should we do about them?
Much of the angry debate between believers and sceptics rages round the first two points. Lawson surveys the evidence on both, and comes to a conclusion. But what makes this book so powerful is its focus on the third question: whether a warmer world is one that will harm people, animals, plants, and our descendants. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) argues that it will. Lawson disagrees. He takes us through the IPCC scenarios, and their range of predictions relating to five potential impacts of a warmer world: on water, ecosystems, food, coasts, and health. In each case he demonstrates, with evidence, that a warmer world will either be neutral or even beneficial. What makes this evidence particularly persuasive is that much of it is drawn from the IPCC's own 4th report (2007)!.
It would be wrong to think of this book as complacent, a kind of 'I'm all right, Jack, pull up the ladder'. As Lawson points out, the single major cause of ill-health and death in the world is poverty, and if we take the standpoint of human welfare, the surest way to benefit humans is to lift them out of poverty. Lawson sees many serious problems facing the world, and many things that urgently need putting right. The view of this compelling and convincing book is that global warming isn't one of them.
A call for solid science to replace the hype and hysteria, 14 Sep 2008
A well written and thought provoking book that attempts to speak above the hysterical din that dominates the subject.
The author calls for a considered approach and appeals to organisations to address the issues we face in a sensible and practical way.
Lawson knows best apparently, 23 Aug 2008
The combined wisdom of the world's leading climate change scientists is clearly no match for Nigel Lawson. He alone is clear sighted enough to see these clever people are all wrong. Stop worrying you people on coastlands and islands as you watch the tide rising. Stop fussing about those droughts Africa and Australia! Trust Nigel, everything will be well because...er because he says so.
Thought-provoking contribution, 19 Aug 2008
In this thought-provoking book, Nigel Lawson asks key questions about global warming. Is the world warming and if so, why? How much warmer will it get? What will be the consequences? What can and should we do about it? What is the most cost-effective way to tackle it?
He looks at the temperature record. Surprisingly, temperatures have not risen since 2001, even though global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever. There was a 0.7oC rise over the last century while the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 30%, largely caused by industrialisation driven by the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption (burning coal, oil and gas). Some, possibly most, of the warming is due to this growth of CO2 emissions and so of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report predicted a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100. (Its 1990 report predicted a 3.67 metre rise.) The IPCC predicted a 1.8o-4oC temperature rise by 2100, a mean of less than 3oC. (At 3oC, it says, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase.") 3oC is 0.03oC a year, compared to 1975-2000's 0.02oC a year.
The IPCC says the one `virtually certain' impact of global warming is `reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure'. A 2003 Department of Health study confirmed this, predicting a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 and an increase in heat-related mortality of 2,000 by the 2050s.
On the IPCC's worst case scenario, of 1% growth a year in the developed countries and 2.3% in the developing countries, global warming could cost us 5% of world GDP by 2100. This would make developed countries' GDP 2.6 times today's rather than 2.7 and developing countries' GDP 8.5 times today's rather than 9.5.
Lawson argues that we should drop the precautionary principle because it is wrong to take decisions on the basis of worst-case possibilities: probabilities, not possibilities, should be our guide.
He looks at the prospects of some specific disasters. He notes that Antarctic ice-sheets are growing, that the IPCC's 2007 report said that an `abrupt transition' of the Gulf Stream is `very unlikely' and that the World Meteorological Organization said of climate change's effects on hurricanes, "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."
The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has increased profits for selected emitters and not cut emissions. Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism has done no better. The EU promotes growing biofuels, yet the Chinese government has suspended the production of the biofuel ethanol because it has raised food prices.
The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said that meeting the EU's agreed target of 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 would raise our electricity costs by £18-22 billion a year.
In June 2007 Merkel and Blair tried to get the G8 to agree to cut emissions by 50% by 2050. The rest rejected the idea. Six months later, Britain and Germany lost again when they proposed a mandatory global emissions cut of 25-40% by 2020.
We could control the world's temperature by severely limiting carbon dioxide emissions through raising prices of carbon-based energy, to make non-carbon-based energy more competitive. But this would force our energy-intensive industries out to China and other countries. (Although China's, and India's, emissions per head are still far less than the West's.) 1990s Russia showed that the only way to meet the Kyoto targets is to destroy your industries.
Lawson argues for an across-the-board carbon tax, even if it forces our remaining energy-intensive industries abroad, and for ending subsidies to all carbon-based energy. Instead, we need to keep our industries, se we need new carbon-based power stations and new gas storage facilities, which the market has not provided and will not provide.
Deluded amateur challenges the science, 12 Aug 2008
Lawson flies in the face of scientific consensus with no solid basis for his position. An unhelpful book.
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Customer Reviews
Transition Handbook, 08 Oct 2008
This book is way overdue. I have been eagerly searching for books addressing the preparation for post peak oil for many many years. Books like this should have been written years ago so I was delighted to see that at last practical guides are starting to appear on the book shelves.
I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters dealing with peak oil and its implications for society. Subsequent chapters I did not enjoy as much particularly when the Kinsale Energy Decent Action Plan is promoted as a role model for sustainable community development.
There is a huge wealth of expertise in the development community, particularly which which was developed from overseas aid agencies. They have developed approaches, standards, principles and a multitude of methodologies for developing communities, with limited or almost non existent resources, and where success or failure costs lives. This expertise has been ignored and attempts made to reinvent the wheel.
I think the focus of the book should have built on the expertise of organisations such as Oxfam, VSO, Save the Children, and Overseas Development Administration and focused on the structures, processes and outcomes, which would help develop community resilience and sustainability, with limited resources.
I have a worry that communities who attempt to use this handbook as the basis for their transition will make fantastic progress initially through the generation of enthusiasm but due to improper planning, a lack of monitoring and evaluation of effectiveness and imprecise goals and objectives, people will become disillusioned and drop out. There is also the danger that communities who adapt this approach will not be able to communicate effectively with traditional disciplines, local authorities, health services, energy engineers or others. Who should change first? The current decision makers and service providers or the community development
organisations?
This process of conflict between service providers and community organisations has happened time and time again, without learning the lessons of what actually is sustainable in the long term. It usually results in the community organisation being unable to access state funding resulting in decline and or death. How can a community organisation sustain itself unless it becomes a business, with formal structures, job descriptions, terms of reference, fundamental guiding principles, training, development, salaries, income generation, sales etc. How can that fit with the "loose" concepts proposed?
Lets hope this is just the first of a huge range of increasingly sophisticated publications yet to come that will address these issues using the best expertise available in the fields of business, development management, community organisation, sustainability, public health, and many more, combined into a consensus best practice manual for transition. I hope these comments help to stimulate a critical approach to sustainable community development.
A smart, accessible guide to a resilient, low-carbon future, 11 Sep 2008
There is a powerful current in our contemporary, post-industrial culture that is arguing for a simpler, more sustainable alternative to our wasteful, environmentally damaging way of life. Proselytisers rely on a varying mix of three sets of arguments: the environmental challenge posed by climate change, the energy supply challenge posed by peak oil and, finally, the spiritual challenge emerging from the newest science on personal wellbeing (in a nutshell: beyond a certain point more money and stuff doesn't make us happier.)
Rob Hopkins' Transition Movement is pragmatic attempt to come to terms with the disruptions that are heralded by climate change and peak oil. Thoughtlessly addicted as we are to fossil fuels, our societies are ill equipped to deal with the adverse implications of energy scarcity and a hotter, less predictable climate. According to Hopkins, what we need to develop is resilience: the ability to deal creatively and locally with energy supply and environmental shocks.
The Transition Handbook is a hands-on guide to help communities make that transition towards a resilient, low-carbon future. It is useful to distinguish three layers in the book.
The first layer encapsulates the three main parts of Hopkins' argument, focused on the head (the facts about climate change and peak oil you need to know), the heart (the need for positive vision and commitment) and the hands (practical guidelines for enabling resilient communities).
The second layer consists of a range of design principles that can be relied on to shape resilient communities. For example, in preparing for an energy-scarce future we need to know that resilience relies on a small scale, modular and decentralised infrastructure. We also need to invest in high-quality productive relationships, integrate rather than segregate and use the creative edges of systems to make the most of their potential. There are many more of these principles that have been lifted from an eclectic mix of disciplines, including systems science, ecology and the psychology of change. Hopkins himself was deeply influenced by the permaculture movement, a radical design approach to constructing "sustainable human settlements".
The third layer features a range of practical solutions that comply with these design principles. These solutions are meant to be the cornerstones of any resilient community and include a template for working towards a more energy-thrifty ("energy descent planning"), decentralised energy generation, local food sourcing, re-skilling of consumers into creative citizens and local currencies.
Transition thinking is not only a theory but it is also a social movement and the book features a number of UK examples of communities that have started going down the path towards resilience. Hopkins is acutely aware that the governance of the Transition movement needs to mirror the design principles underlying resilience. It would hardly be credible and effective to embody a Transition movement by a tightly-managed, centralised bureaucracy. So, Hopkins is only willing to give pointers to help people in facilitating bottom-up, small-scale, self-steering initiatives. Lots is left to emergence and action learning ("... where it all goes remains to be seen ..." is an often used phrase in the book).
The Transition Handbook is an accessible, smart guide to helping us deal with the challenges we may face as a result of climate change and peak oil. In itself the book doesn't offer anything new, but it rearranges familiar pieces of a puzzle into a compelling and coherent approach towards learning again to help ourselves and to do more with less.
Enabling, 01 Jul 2008
Hooray. Despite some people's misgivings about the psychology section, which seem largely dependent on a definition of 'success', this is an outstanding book. It's primary achievement is to show the reader how societal change can take place in the absence of the usual too little too late response of governments, whose priorities lie with business, rather than people or environmental sustainability. The future security of Britain, and elsewhere, lies in groups of people with the will and power to make communities sustainable. It might seem unbelievable, but we have the power to transform our society, and are not at the whim of government. They will follow. If you admire Kohr, Schumacher, Papworth and Sale, you will respond positively to this book.
Brilliant in parts, dangerously foolish in others, 28 Jun 2008
I've the greatest sympathy with this book's concept in many respects. Rob correctly identifies the overriding need to reduce energy dependence, and that we must not wait for "them" to do anything about it, or even help us. Correctly he sees that we need a "how-to" manual for how to make communities (rather than just the reader) self-sufficient in food and so on. But the devil is in the practical details, or more precisely the practical unknowns which are all too easily glossed over.
The book gets hideously, dangerously misguided in its important section on psychology, with its notion of the importance of a "positive vision". History is bursting full of "positive visions" which ended in huge disasters. Instead, what is needed is a judiciously realistic vision. It is vitally important to recognise that criticism and doubt are just as important as hope and "constructive" "enthusiastic" thinking. Otherwise huge energy and effort is almost certain to be lost in enthusing down disastrous dead-ends.
In a traumatised society, many people become lost to despair, depression, negativity. But there is the equal problem that too many people desperately pin their hopes on "positive" but false solutions which ultimately fail them.
Someone said that the transition concept has been "phenomenally successful". That is seriously unhinged fantasy. There hasn't yet been a transition to test out how or even whether the ideas work out in practice.
You need to be very careful to avoid assuming that action is the same as achievement of solutions, or that international fame and crowds of enthusiastic followers is the same as success in solving the problem.
I would strongly urge the author to revise the psychology section of his book to take account of these comments. The importance of a realistic vision.
essential reading, 30 Apr 2008
I'm two thirds way through this book and overall find it an inspiring read. The first section in particular summarises some of the issues in a very easy to understand style. I liked the section on psychology particularly - I think both grieving, shock and addiction models are useful to understanding the apparently irrational responses of people to climate change and peak oil.
The rest of the book is harder to read - a lot of detail about how one should go about starting a transition initiative. Some of this stuff makes very important points about embedding the initiative into the community and I appreciate that it is derived from experience. At the same time I found it somewhat prescriptive, especially the directions for conducting meetings/workshops etc. This is a bit of a turn off - there are of course lots of ways of doing these things and I feel it would have been better just to refer to some resources or put these in appendices.
We have to act on climate change and peak oil and I buy the resilient local economy model. There is lots of useful stuff in this book, maybe some of it just more detailed than necessary.
Just what it says on the tin, 16 Sep 2008
This is a wonderful book. As the title suggests, it is cool, reasonable, and patient, looking carefully at all the evidence and coming to conclusions which it is hard to disagree with.
Like other reviewers, I find it hard to take excerpts from the book because I would have to quote the whole thing! However, perhaps I may try to help anyone who is wondering whether to read it. One way to look at the global warming/climate change debate is to ask oneself three questions.
First, is the world getting warmer?
Second, is human activity, and specifically CO2, a major cause?
And third, does it matter? Will there be harmful consequences? And if so, what should we do about them?
Much of the angry debate between believers and sceptics rages round the first two points. Lawson surveys the evidence on both, and comes to a conclusion. But what makes this book so powerful is its focus on the third question: whether a warmer world is one that will harm people, animals, plants, and our descendants. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) argues that it will. Lawson disagrees. He takes us through the IPCC scenarios, and their range of predictions relating to five potential impacts of a warmer world: on water, ecosystems, food, coasts, and health. In each case he demonstrates, with evidence, that a warmer world will either be neutral or even beneficial. What makes this evidence particularly persuasive is that much of it is drawn from the IPCC's own 4th report (2007)!.
It would be wrong to think of this book as complacent, a kind of 'I'm all right, Jack, pull up the ladder'. As Lawson points out, the single major cause of ill-health and death in the world is poverty, and if we take the standpoint of human welfare, the surest way to benefit humans is to lift them out of poverty. Lawson sees many serious problems facing the world, and many things that urgently need putting right. The view of this compelling and convincing book is that global warming isn't one of them.
A call for solid science to replace the hype and hysteria, 14 Sep 2008
A well written and thought provoking book that attempts to speak above the hysterical din that dominates the subject.
The author calls for a considered approach and appeals to organisations to address the issues we face in a sensible and practical way.
Lawson knows best apparently, 23 Aug 2008
The combined wisdom of the world's leading climate change scientists is clearly no match for Nigel Lawson. He alone is clear sighted enough to see these clever people are all wrong. Stop worrying you people on coastlands and islands as you watch the tide rising. Stop fussing about those droughts Africa and Australia! Trust Nigel, everything will be well because...er because he says so.
Thought-provoking contribution, 19 Aug 2008
In this thought-provoking book, Nigel Lawson asks key questions about global warming. Is the world warming and if so, why? How much warmer will it get? What will be the consequences? What can and should we do about it? What is the most cost-effective way to tackle it?
He looks at the temperature record. Surprisingly, temperatures have not risen since 2001, even though global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever. There was a 0.7oC rise over the last century while the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 30%, largely caused by industrialisation driven by the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption (burning coal, oil and gas). Some, possibly most, of the warming is due to this growth of CO2 emissions and so of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report predicted a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100. (Its 1990 report predicted a 3.67 metre rise.) The IPCC predicted a 1.8o-4oC temperature rise by 2100, a mean of less than 3oC. (At 3oC, it says, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase.") 3oC is 0.03oC a year, compared to 1975-2000's 0.02oC a year.
The IPCC says the one `virtually certain' impact of global warming is `reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure'. A 2003 Department of Health study confirmed this, predicting a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 and an increase in heat-related mortality of 2,000 by the 2050s.
On the IPCC's worst case scenario, of 1% growth a year in the developed countries and 2.3% in the developing countries, global warming could cost us 5% of world GDP by 2100. This would make developed countries' GDP 2.6 times today's rather than 2.7 and developing countries' GDP 8.5 times today's rather than 9.5.
Lawson argues that we should drop the precautionary principle because it is wrong to take decisions on the basis of worst-case possibilities: probabilities, not possibilities, should be our guide.
He looks at the prospects of some specific disasters. He notes that Antarctic ice-sheets are growing, that the IPCC's 2007 report said that an `abrupt transition' of the Gulf Stream is `very unlikely' and that the World Meteorological Organization said of climate change's effects on hurricanes, "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."
The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has increased profits for selected emitters and not cut emissions. Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism has done no better. The EU promotes growing biofuels, yet the Chinese government has suspended the production of the biofuel ethanol because it has raised food prices.
The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said that meeting the EU's agreed target of 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 would raise our electricity costs by £18-22 billion a year.
In June 2007 Merkel and Blair tried to get the G8 to agree to cut emissions by 50% by 2050. The rest rejected the idea. Six months later, Britain and Germany lost again when they proposed a mandatory global emissions cut of 25-40% by 2020.
We could control the world's temperature by severely limiting carbon dioxide emissions through raising prices of carbon-based energy, to make non-carbon-based energy more competitive. But this would force our energy-intensive industries out to China and other countries. (Although China's, and India's, emissions per head are still far less than the West's.) 1990s Russia showed that the only way to meet the Kyoto targets is to destroy your industries.
Lawson argues for an across-the-board carbon tax, even if it forces our remaining energy-intensive industries abroad, and for ending subsidies to all carbon-based energy. Instead, we need to keep our industries, se we need new carbon-based power stations and new gas storage facilities, which the market has not provided and will not provide.
Deluded amateur challenges the science, 12 Aug 2008
Lawson flies in the face of scientific consensus with no solid basis for his position. An unhelpful book.
A Fabulous Grumpy Old Man, 23 Oct 2008
I remember first hearing James Lovelock's Gaia theory (that the Earth is a self regulating entity) on the BBC in the 1970's and thinking it was quite convincing. I was really disappointed reading this book to find that he seems to have very little additional evidence for Gaia after nearly 40 years. This lack of hard science behind Gaia undermines the authority of the book. As a result it reads like a fabulous and fabulously well researched grumpy old man rant.
Lovelock has a go at just about everything - population growth, climate change, nitrates, the green movement and so on. His is a counsel of almost complete despair, he has only two positive suggestions to make, one is to support nuclear energy and the other is to reduce the Earth's population from 6bn to 1.5bn.
He is very lucid on the problems, even if not fully convincing on the Gaia-ness of them, but I can see that if you were a policymaker this book would be of no help at all and frequently it's exasperating. He's an important scientist, so it's a book that should be read, but don't expect to come away any clearer about how to shape the future.
Essential Reading, 11 Apr 2008
We should salute the (now) 89 -year-old author, James Ephraim Lovelock (Ephraim is Hebrew for fruitful): an independent, dissenting voice in science. Rebelling against reductionist philosophies, he took an inclusive, systems view of the planet, publishing his Gaia Hypothesis in 1970. It took over 30 years for the international scientific community to come round.
Having studied chemistry at Manchester U and received his PhD in medicine at London U, Lovelock was engaged in the 1960s by NASA to find ways to detect life on Mars. He realized that life would influence the atmosphere and designed an instrument to detect trace gases. Thinking about the reason why Mars is so barren and Earth so fruitful, he arrived at his Hypothesis.
In brief the Hypothesis stated that the Earth is not just a rock that happens to have things living on it: it is a complex interacting system of soil, sea, atmosphere and living things that shows a tendency to keep itself stable in a way that supports life. In particular this complex web has acted to hold temperature within a narrow range over hundreds of millions of years even as the sun warms and the planet wobbles in its orbit.
Lovelock calls this system Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and persists in referring to Gaia as a person who acts with intent. Some find this annoying and unscientific. This reader accepts it as poetry and metaphor.
In summary, in his latest book, Lovelock revisits his Hypothesis and argues that:
1. Not only is climate change an impending disaster but an irreversible tipping point may already have been reached
2. The single most important step to take now is a major switch to nuclear power
3. Too many people simply do not understand the issues correctly: the well-meaning Greens are also at fault
4. Gaia's revenge will be to restore the equilibrium of the planet by removing most of the human population
On page 1 he states bluntly: `we are now so abusing the Earth that it may..move back to the hot state it was in 55 m years ago and most of us and our descendants will die.'
He starts with a by-now familiar history of the issue of climate change and goes on to say: ` we are now approaching one of those tipping points and (are) like passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.'
He reminds us how huge are the effects of what seem like minor temperature shifts: only 3 degrees separates us from the last ice age; the same scale of increase now seems likely this century: very rapid change indeed in geological time.
The tipping point factors of climate change are by now well-known:
1. The poles melt and less sun is reflected: this seems to be happening now
2. The bogs thaw and methane is released (a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2)
3. The seas warm and the algae stop fixing carbon and making clouds
4. The forests bake and catch fire
5. Methane clathrates are released from the deep sea bed
What makes Lovelock distinctive is his Gaian perspective. He argues that:
1. A `cold' planet' is healthier than a `hot' one. If the Earth was 5 C cooler than now (as it has often been) , there would be glaciers down to the English Channel. But the Atlantic would be teeming and Africa would be a green garden.
2. We are mistaken to think that the Earth is in a Goldilocks orbit. It started out too cold for life. The sun is slowly warming and now the Earth is becoming too hot. So Gaia keeps tilting to coldness. There have been 11 recent ice-ages in the British Isles. We are in the `fever' of a warm interglacial and would normally be heading to the `cure' of the ice-age.
3. But man has disrupted the balance, not just by burning fossil fuel but also by replacing forest with farm. Gaia will do what it must to restore the balance.
4. The underlying problem is that the sustainable human population is probably under 1 billion. Today it is 6 billion, forecast to be 11 billion by 2050.
His argument for nuclear power is simple: all the other solutions produce lots of CO2 or don't work well and/or take too long (new approaches such as carbon sequestration take 20-40 years to mature):
1. Nuclear power is tried, tested and economical and produces very little CO2
2. Wind power is unreliable and costly. It would take 56000 large wind-mills plus fossil fuel back-up just to replace current nuclear capacity (20% of our total needs)
3. Solar is poor for the UK: unreliable and 3x more expensive than conventional methods
4. Wave power apart from a Severn barrage is expensive .....
And so on.
He believes that popular misconceptions of cancer risk militate against nuclear. (It's arguably worse than that: the UK government has ducked the issue for over a decade. Only in the last few months, stampeded by the risk that (a) the lights will go off around 2012 and/or (b) we will depend on a hostile Russia for gas, has the UK government moved). Lovelock bemoans the fact that our political classes do not have any feel for nature or the planet. (They also know little of science or business and there is often a grim determination among temporary ministers to avoid difficult decisions.)
He feels that the Green movement has lost its way: for example by wanting `sustainable development' when much more radical action is needed and for promoting low-productivity organic farming when this means eating up yet more of the countryside. This is putting a lifestyle choice ahead of the planet. He detests the Green wish to cover the land with tens of thousands of windmills.
He offers several examples of similarly faulty decisions: including the massive error of banning DDT. Because the vocal western middle-classes did not want pesticide in its food, Africans died. Yet the use of DDT to kill human disease vectors posed little food risk: it was abuse of DDT by farmers.
Lovelock explores some blue-sky technical fixes to global warming: planetary sun-shades, for example, but without real enthusiasm. Perhaps because it would distract from his here and now message: go nuclear.
So are his arguments complete and wholly compelling? No. The central question of power sources deserves a large book in its own right. Do you have to accept Gaia to believe that climate change is likely to destroy us? No. Do you have to accept Lovelocks' wistful argument for a countryside free of windmills? No.
But although bits of the book can be faulted, the whole seems to me to succeed. It is a well-written, lively, provocative book on a critical subject and a key idea of our times written by one our most gifted and original thinkers.
****
It's nice to know that when climate Armageddon arrives: the poles and the permafrost melt, the bogs and tropics catch fire and much of Southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the USA and Australia starve and fry, the Atlantic Conveyor will also switch off resulting in a local temperature drop. The result could well be that the UK climate remains equable. On the other hand the UK will be a shrunken archipelago, with our major cities submerged, tens of millions of people looking for a home and many millions of refugees landing on our beaches.
Sentimental nonsense, 23 Mar 2008
Nature is simply indifferent to our fate: it is neither malicious, nor benevolent. If humanity's time is up, it's up. We won't be the first species to die, nor the last. Let the polar bears look after themselves. Carpe diem.
Forget Windfarms - Go Nuclear!, 11 Feb 2008
I first read "The Revenge of Gaia" two years ago, when it was published. By early 2006, of course, we were all becoming aware of a progressively strident chorus about the imminent catastrophe that global warming was going to cause and how there was a scientific consensus on the matter. Lovelock was the first book I read on the subject.
I was suitably alarmed by Lovelock's analysis, and particularly by his identification of "tipping points", whereby a relatively modest increase in temperature would lead to positive feedbacks, e.g. from a hotter Amazon rainforest dying and releasing its stored CO2, by a greening Greenland absorbing rather than reflecting heat, and thus causing further, and unstoppable, global warming. Lovelock envisaged humanity reduced to a few million "breeding pairs" on the Arctic and Antarctic fringes.
Two years on, I have re-read in a more critical way and have a number of observations about the way Lovelock states the case for there being a major and immediate problem.
Firstly, Lovelock makes no reference to any experimental work to justify the feared quantitative relationship between a rise in "greenhouse gases" and average global temperature. There is much reference to computer modelling - Lovelock is a keen computer modeller, and the Gaia theory is supposedly validated by it - and correlations. (What experimental, as opposed to modelling, work has been done? If you have any recommendations do let me know via a "comment".)
Secondly, he makes some sweeping leaps of logic. Having stated that climatic prediction is easier than forecasting the weather on the basis that we an predict that it will be colder in Berlin on December 2010 than it was in the previous July, he states that an increase in CO2 to 500ppm will accompanied by "profound climate change".
I was struck by his personal reliance on Michael Mann's so-called "hockey stick" graph, adopted uncritically in the 2001 IPCC 3rd Report, which had been pretty thoroughly discredited by the time the book was written (and which has all but disappeared from the 2007 IPCC 4th Report). If his fear of man made global warming is based primarily on this work, then I am reassured that it is probably not as bad as it seemed.
Lovelock quotes Dick Taverne (March of Unreason) warmly for criticising the greens' "impractical romanticism". I would disagree that that is a fair synopsis of Taverne's book, but in any case in his recommendation of the adoption of the "precautionary principle" he ignores one of Taverne's principal criticisms, that overcaution without a scientific basis threatens economic progress that can lift millions out of poverty.
Finally, Lovelock's arguments encompass warming and cooling trends over a variety of timescales, from the geological epochs, the last 100,000 years and the last hundred. He states that we are in an interglacial period, then that it has been hotter in he past. I found it hard to identify a pattern in this. He talks about a gradually warming sun, but not of any other cycles that might affect the sun's warming of the Earth. Svensmark's (more recent) book provides a coherent explanation of solar and galactic effects, and I am aware of others.
That having been said, the book is evidence that, back in 2005, Lovelock and others predicted that warming was occurring, (however it was caused). He predicted the opening of the North-West Passage, which indeed did happen this year. CO2 and CH4 may be contributing to this, and (by my reading at least) science cannot reliably tell us how much and to what eventual effect. What, then, of what Lovelock recommendations as to what we do about it?
I am struck, on re-reading Lovelock, at how little notice the global scientific consensus and its British offshoots have taken of his recommendations: forget wind turbines, go nuclear. The downsides of wind turbines have been covered more recently, and extensively, by the sceptical Booker and North. Lovelock writes on the basis that we need technological solutions to manage a "sustainable retreat" to a world living within Gaia's means, ideally with just 500 to 1,000 million people - he quite clearly hankers after the "idyll" of 1800AD. (1800AD in England might have been bearable for Jane Austen, great for Mr Darcy, but for the rest of us...?) I fear he underestimates the difficulty of making nuclear fusion a viable solution, and even of using plutonium for fission reactors, but there is much to be said for trying if you think that CO2 emissions are going to destroy life on the planet. Lovelock also advocates the Severn Tidal Barrage, and one wonders why this proven and predictable technology is not being implemented instead of the plan for thousands of off-shore wind turbines. Some of his other sustainable retreat solutions are less appetising - notably the suggestion that we should synthesize our food so that more of the planet can be allowed to revert to the wild.
Lovelock's book is short and well written. The courteous way in which he refers to global warming "sceptics" and other opponents is commendable, and is quite unusual in this polarised debate between "alarmists" and "deniers". His summary of possible positive feedbacks is compelling (in a frightening way) irrespective of the extent to which warming might be being driven in the first instance by man made or other effects, and his arguments as to which alternative energy sources to pursue are delivered with scientific objectivity. As to the extent to which he represents that there is an immediate and catastrophic problem, however, the way that Lovelock rubbishes the over-reaction to the fear of acid rain is illuminating. "It is", he says, "all to easy it seems to lose our sense of proportion." Consumed by the Gaia theory that he finds difficult not to imbue with new-age spiritualism despite his rational scientific basis, it is possible that Lovelock has done so himself.
Essential, 05 Jan 2008
This book served as my introduction to the concept of Gaia. A friend suggested I should read it and politely I agreed. Quite simply, Lovelock's arguement makes a lot of sense and the messages conveyed within the volume should be considered by all. Especially politicians and (well meaning) greens. Only this week the news was dominated by debate regarding a new fossil fuel power station. This book clearly explains why this must not happen (ever) and presents the alternatives available now and those that will become so in our lifetimes. Lovelock really puts current environmental issues into context. An excellent read and with content that will touch the lives of every human being, present and future. READ THIS BOOK!
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Customer Reviews
Transition Handbook, 08 Oct 2008
This book is way overdue. I have been eagerly searching for books addressing the preparation for post peak oil for many many years. Books like this should have been written years ago so I was delighted to see that at last practical guides are starting to appear on the book shelves.
I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters dealing with peak oil and its implications for society. Subsequent chapters I did not enjoy as much particularly when the Kinsale Energy Decent Action Plan is promoted as a role model for sustainable community development.
There is a huge wealth of expertise in the development community, particularly which which was developed from overseas aid agencies. They have developed approaches, standards, principles and a multitude of methodologies for developing communities, with limited or almost non existent resources, and where success or failure costs lives. This expertise has been ignored and attempts made to reinvent the wheel.
I think the focus of the book should have built on the expertise of organisations such as Oxfam, VSO, Save the Children, and Overseas Development Administration and focused on the structures, processes and outcomes, which would help develop community resilience and sustainability, with limited resources.
I have a worry that communities who attempt to use this handbook as the basis for their transition will make fantastic progress initially through the generation of enthusiasm but due to improper planning, a lack of monitoring and evaluation of effectiveness and imprecise goals and objectives, people will become disillusioned and drop out. There is also the danger that communities who adapt this approach will not be able to communicate effectively with traditional disciplines, local authorities, health services, energy engineers or others. Who should change first? The current decision makers and service providers or the community development
organisations?
This process of conflict between service providers and community organisations has happened time and time again, without learning the lessons of what actually is sustainable in the long term. It usually results in the community organisation being unable to access state funding resulting in decline and or death. How can a community organisation sustain itself unless it becomes a business, with formal structures, job descriptions, terms of reference, fundamental guiding principles, training, development, salaries, income generation, sales etc. How can that fit with the "loose" concepts proposed?
Lets hope this is just the first of a huge range of increasingly sophisticated publications yet to come that will address these issues using the best expertise available in the fields of business, development management, community organisation, sustainability, public health, and many more, combined into a consensus best practice manual for transition. I hope these comments help to stimulate a critical approach to sustainable community development.
A smart, accessible guide to a resilient, low-carbon future, 11 Sep 2008
There is a powerful current in our contemporary, post-industrial culture that is arguing for a simpler, more sustainable alternative to our wasteful, environmentally damaging way of life. Proselytisers rely on a varying mix of three sets of arguments: the environmental challenge posed by climate change, the energy supply challenge posed by peak oil and, finally, the spiritual challenge emerging from the newest science on personal wellbeing (in a nutshell: beyond a certain point more money and stuff doesn't make us happier.)
Rob Hopkins' Transition Movement is pragmatic attempt to come to terms with the disruptions that are heralded by climate change and peak oil. Thoughtlessly addicted as we are to fossil fuels, our societies are ill equipped to deal with the adverse implications of energy scarcity and a hotter, less predictable climate. According to Hopkins, what we need to develop is resilience: the ability to deal creatively and locally with energy supply and environmental shocks.
The Transition Handbook is a hands-on guide to help communities make that transition towards a resilient, low-carbon future. It is useful to distinguish three layers in the book.
The first layer encapsulates the three main parts of Hopkins' argument, focused on the head (the facts about climate change and peak oil you need to know), the heart (the need for positive vision and commitment) and the hands (practical guidelines for enabling resilient communities).
The second layer consists of a range of design principles that can be relied on to shape resilient communities. For example, in preparing for an energy-scarce future we need to know that resilience relies on a small scale, modular and decentralised infrastructure. We also need to invest in high-quality productive relationships, integrate rather than segregate and use the creative edges of systems to make the most of their potential. There are many more of these principles that have been lifted from an eclectic mix of disciplines, including systems science, ecology and the psychology of change. Hopkins himself was deeply influenced by the permaculture movement, a radical design approach to constructing "sustainable human settlements".
The third layer features a range of practical solutions that comply with these design principles. These solutions are meant to be the cornerstones of any resilient community and include a template for working towards a more energy-thrifty ("energy descent planning"), decentralised energy generation, local food sourcing, re-skilling of consumers into creative citizens and local currencies.
Transition thinking is not only a theory but it is also a social movement and the book features a number of UK examples of communities that have started going down the path towards resilience. Hopkins is acutely aware that the governance of the Transition movement needs to mirror the design principles underlying resilience. It would hardly be credible and effective to embody a Transition movement by a tightly-managed, centralised bureaucracy. So, Hopkins is only willing to give pointers to help people in facilitating bottom-up, small-scale, self-steering initiatives. Lots is left to emergence and action learning ("... where it all goes remains to be seen ..." is an often used phrase in the book).
The Transition Handbook is an accessible, smart guide to helping us deal with the challenges we may face as a result of climate change and peak oil. In itself the book doesn't offer anything new, but it rearranges familiar pieces of a puzzle into a compelling and coherent approach towards learning again to help ourselves and to do more with less.
Enabling, 01 Jul 2008
Hooray. Despite some people's misgivings about the psychology section, which seem largely dependent on a definition of 'success', this is an outstanding book. It's primary achievement is to show the reader how societal change can take place in the absence of the usual too little too late response of governments, whose priorities lie with business, rather than people or environmental sustainability. The future security of Britain, and elsewhere, lies in groups of people with the will and power to make communities sustainable. It might seem unbelievable, but we have the power to transform our society, and are not at the whim of government. They will follow. If you admire Kohr, Schumacher, Papworth and Sale, you will respond positively to this book.
Brilliant in parts, dangerously foolish in others, 28 Jun 2008
I've the greatest sympathy with this book's concept in many respects. Rob correctly identifies the overriding need to reduce energy dependence, and that we must not wait for "them" to do anything about it, or even help us. Correctly he sees that we need a "how-to" manual for how to make communities (rather than just the reader) self-sufficient in food and so on. But the devil is in the practical details, or more precisely the practical unknowns which are all too easily glossed over.
The book gets hideously, dangerously misguided in its important section on psychology, with its notion of the importance of a "positive vision". History is bursting full of "positive visions" which ended in huge disasters. Instead, what is needed is a judiciously realistic vision. It is vitally important to recognise that criticism and doubt are just as important as hope and "constructive" "enthusiastic" thinking. Otherwise huge energy and effort is almost certain to be lost in enthusing down disastrous dead-ends.
In a traumatised society, many people become lost to despair, depression, negativity. But there is the equal problem that too many people desperately pin their hopes on "positive" but false solutions which ultimately fail them.
Someone said that the transition concept has been "phenomenally successful". That is seriously unhinged fantasy. There hasn't yet been a transition to test out how or even whether the ideas work out in practice.
You need to be very careful to avoid assuming that action is the same as achievement of solutions, or that international fame and crowds of enthusiastic followers is the same as success in solving the problem.
I would strongly urge the author to revise the psychology section of his book to take account of these comments. The importance of a realistic vision.
essential reading, 30 Apr 2008
I'm two thirds way through this book and overall find it an inspiring read. The first section in particular summarises some of the issues in a very easy to understand style. I liked the section on psychology particularly - I think both grieving, shock and addiction models are useful to understanding the apparently irrational responses of people to climate change and peak oil.
The rest of the book is harder to read - a lot of detail about how one should go about starting a transition initiative. Some of this stuff makes very important points about embedding the initiative into the community and I appreciate that it is derived from experience. At the same time I found it somewhat prescriptive, especially the directions for conducting meetings/workshops etc. This is a bit of a turn off - there are of course lots of ways of doing these things and I feel it would have been better just to refer to some resources or put these in appendices.
We have to act on climate change and peak oil and I buy the resilient local economy model. There is lots of useful stuff in this book, maybe some of it just more detailed than necessary.
Just what it says on the tin, 16 Sep 2008
This is a wonderful book. As the title suggests, it is cool, reasonable, and patient, looking carefully at all the evidence and coming to conclusions which it is hard to disagree with.
Like other reviewers, I find it hard to take excerpts from the book because I would have to quote the whole thing! However, perhaps I may try to help anyone who is wondering whether to read it. One way to look at the global warming/climate change debate is to ask oneself three questions.
First, is the world getting warmer?
Second, is human activity, and specifically CO2, a major cause?
And third, does it matter? Will there be harmful consequences? And if so, what should we do about them?
Much of the angry debate between believers and sceptics rages round the first two points. Lawson surveys the evidence on both, and comes to a conclusion. But what makes this book so powerful is its focus on the third question: whether a warmer world is one that will harm people, animals, plants, and our descendants. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) argues that it will. Lawson disagrees. He takes us through the IPCC scenarios, and their range of predictions relating to five potential impacts of a warmer world: on water, ecosystems, food, coasts, and health. In each case he demonstrates, with evidence, that a warmer world will either be neutral or even beneficial. What makes this evidence particularly persuasive is that much of it is drawn from the IPCC's own 4th report (2007)!.
It would be wrong to think of this book as complacent, a kind of 'I'm all right, Jack, pull up the ladder'. As Lawson points out, the single major cause of ill-health and death in the world is poverty, and if we take the standpoint of human welfare, the surest way to benefit humans is to lift them out of poverty. Lawson sees many serious problems facing the world, and many things that urgently need putting right. The view of this compelling and convincing book is that global warming isn't one of them.
A call for solid science to replace the hype and hysteria, 14 Sep 2008
A well written and thought provoking book that attempts to speak above the hysterical din that dominates the subject.
The author calls for a considered approach and appeals to organisations to address the issues we face in a sensible and practical way.
Lawson knows best apparently, 23 Aug 2008
The combined wisdom of the world's leading climate change scientists is clearly no match for Nigel Lawson. He alone is clear sighted enough to see these clever people are all wrong. Stop worrying you people on coastlands and islands as you watch the tide rising. Stop fussing about those droughts Africa and Australia! Trust Nigel, everything will be well because...er because he says so.
Thought-provoking contribution, 19 Aug 2008
In this thought-provoking book, Nigel Lawson asks key questions about global warming. Is the world warming and if so, why? How much warmer will it get? What will be the consequences? What can and should we do about it? What is the most cost-effective way to tackle it?
He looks at the temperature record. Surprisingly, temperatures have not risen since 2001, even though global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever. There was a 0.7oC rise over the last century while the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 30%, largely caused by industrialisation driven by the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption (burning coal, oil and gas). Some, possibly most, of the warming is due to this growth of CO2 emissions and so of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report predicted a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100. (Its 1990 report predicted a 3.67 metre rise.) The IPCC predicted a 1.8o-4oC temperature rise by 2100, a mean of less than 3oC. (At 3oC, it says, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase.") 3oC is 0.03oC a year, compared to 1975-2000's 0.02oC a year.
The IPCC says the one `virtually certain' impact of global warming is `reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure'. A 2003 Department of Health study confirmed this, predicting a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 and an increase in heat-related mortality of 2,000 by the 2050s.
On the IPCC's worst case scenario, of 1% growth a year in the developed countries and 2.3% in the developing countries, global warming could cost us 5% of world GDP by 2100. This would make developed countries' GDP 2.6 times today's rather than 2.7 and developing countries' GDP 8.5 times today's rather than 9.5.
Lawson argues that we should drop the precautionary principle because it is wrong to take decisions on the basis of worst-case possibilities: probabilities, not possibilities, should be our guide.
He looks at the prospects of some specific disasters. He notes that Antarctic ice-sheets are growing, that the IPCC's 2007 report said that an `abrupt transition' of the Gulf Stream is `very unlikely' and that the World Meteorological Organization said of climate change's effects on hurricanes, "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."
The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has increased profits for selected emitters and not cut emissions. Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism has done no better. The EU promotes growing biofuels, yet the Chinese government has suspended the production of the biofuel ethanol because it has raised food prices.
The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said that meeting the EU's agreed target of 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 would raise our electricity costs by £18-22 billion a year.
In June 2007 Merkel and Blair tried to get the G8 to agree to cut emissions by 50% by 2050. The rest rejected the idea. Six months later, Britain and Germany lost again when they proposed a mandatory global emissions cut of 25-40% by 2020.
We could control the world's temperature by severely limiting carbon dioxide emissions through raising prices of carbon-based energy, to make non-carbon-based energy more competitive. But this would force our energy-intensive industries out to China and other countries. (Although China's, and India's, emissions per head are still far less than the West's.) 1990s Russia showed that the only way to meet the Kyoto targets is to destroy your industries.
Lawson argues for an across-the-board carbon tax, even if it forces our remaining energy-intensive industries abroad, and for ending subsidies to all carbon-based energy. Instead, we need to keep our industries, se we need new carbon-based power stations and new gas storage facilities, which the market has not provided and will not provide.
Deluded amateur challenges the science, 12 Aug 2008
Lawson flies in the face of scientific consensus with no solid basis for his position. An unhelpful book.
A Fabulous Grumpy Old Man, 23 Oct 2008
I remember first hearing James Lovelock's Gaia theory (that the Earth is a self regulating entity) on the BBC in the 1970's and thinking it was quite convincing. I was really disappointed reading this book to find that he seems to have very little additional evidence for Gaia after nearly 40 years. This lack of hard science behind Gaia undermines the authority of the book. As a result it reads like a fabulous and fabulously well researched grumpy old man rant.
Lovelock has a go at just about everything - population growth, climate change, nitrates, the green movement and so on. His is a counsel of almost complete despair, he has only two positive suggestions to make, one is to support nuclear energy and the other is to reduce the Earth's population from 6bn to 1.5bn.
He is very lucid on the problems, even if not fully convincing on the Gaia-ness of them, but I can see that if you were a policymaker this book would be of no help at all and frequently it's exasperating. He's an important scientist, so it's a book that should be read, but don't expect to come away any clearer about how to shape the future.
Essential Reading, 11 Apr 2008
We should salute the (now) 89 -year-old author, James Ephraim Lovelock (Ephraim is Hebrew for fruitful): an independent, dissenting voice in science. Rebelling against reductionist philosophies, he took an inclusive, systems view of the planet, publishing his Gaia Hypothesis in 1970. It took over 30 years for the international scientific community to come round.
Having studied chemistry at Manchester U and received his PhD in medicine at London U, Lovelock was engaged in the 1960s by NASA to find ways to detect life on Mars. He realized that life would influence the atmosphere and designed an instrument to detect trace gases. Thinking about the reason why Mars is so barren and Earth so fruitful, he arrived at his Hypothesis.
In brief the Hypothesis stated that the Earth is not just a rock that happens to have things living on it: it is a complex interacting system of soil, sea, atmosphere and living things that shows a tendency to keep itself stable in a way that supports life. In particular this complex web has acted to hold temperature within a narrow range over hundreds of millions of years even as the sun warms and the planet wobbles in its orbit.
Lovelock calls this system Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and persists in referring to Gaia as a person who acts with intent. Some find this annoying and unscientific. This reader accepts it as poetry and metaphor.
In summary, in his latest book, Lovelock revisits his Hypothesis and argues that:
1. Not only is climate change an impending disaster but an irreversible tipping point may already have been reached
2. The single most important step to take now is a major switch to nuclear power
3. Too many people simply do not understand the issues correctly: the well-meaning Greens are also at fault
4. Gaia's revenge will be to restore the equilibrium of the planet by removing most of the human population
On page 1 he states bluntly: `we are now so abusing the Earth that it may..move back to the hot state it was in 55 m years ago and most of us and our descendants will die.'
He starts with a by-now familiar history of the issue of climate change and goes on to say: ` we are now approaching one of those tipping points and (are) like passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.'
He reminds us how huge are the effects of what seem like minor temperature shifts: only 3 degrees separates us from the last ice age; the same scale of increase now seems likely this century: very rapid change indeed in geological time.
The tipping point factors of climate change are by now well-known:
1. The poles melt and less sun is reflected: this seems to be happening now
2. The bogs thaw and methane is released (a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2)
3. The seas warm and the algae stop fixing carbon and making clouds
4. The forests bake and catch fire
5. Methane clathrates are released from the deep sea bed
What makes Lovelock distinctive is his Gaian perspective. He argues that:
1. A `cold' planet' is healthier than a `hot' one. If the Earth was 5 C cooler than now (as it has often been) , there would be glaciers down to the English Channel. But the Atlantic would be teeming and Africa would be a green garden.
2. We are mistaken to think that the Earth is in a Goldilocks orbit. It started out too cold for life. The sun is slowly warming and now the Earth is becoming too hot. So Gaia keeps tilting to coldness. There have been 11 recent ice-ages in the British Isles. We are in the `fever' of a warm interglacial and would normally be heading to the `cure' of the ice-age.
3. But man has disrupted the balance, not just by burning fossil fuel but also by replacing forest with farm. Gaia will do what it must to restore the balance.
4. The underlying problem is that the sustainable human population is probably under 1 billion. Today it is 6 billion, forecast to be 11 billion by 2050.
His argument for nuclear power is simple: all the other solutions produce lots of CO2 or don't work well and/or take too long (new approaches such as carbon sequestration take 20-40 years to mature):
1. Nuclear power is tried, tested and economical and produces very little CO2
2. Wind power is unreliable and costly. It would take 56000 large wind-mills plus fossil fuel back-up just to replace current nuclear capacity (20% of our total needs)
3. Solar is poor for the UK: unreliable and 3x more expensive than conventional methods
4. Wave power apart from a Severn barrage is expensive .....
And so on.
He believes that popular misconceptions of cancer risk militate against nuclear. (It's arguably worse than that: the UK government has ducked the issue for over a decade. Only in the last few months, stampeded by the risk that (a) the lights will go off around 2012 and/or (b) we will depend on a hostile Russia for gas, has the UK government moved). Lovelock bemoans the fact that our political classes do not have any feel for nature or the planet. (They also know little of science or business and there is often a grim determination among temporary ministers to avoid difficult decisions.)
He feels that the Green movement has lost its way: for example by wanting `sustainable development' when much more radical action is needed and for promoting low-productivity organic farming when this means eating up yet more of the countryside. This is putting a lifestyle choice ahead of the planet. He detests the Green wish to cover the land with tens of thousands of windmills.
He offers several examples of similarly faulty decisions: including the massive error of banning DDT. Because the vocal western middle-classes did not want pesticide in its food, Africans died. Yet the use of DDT to kill human disease vectors posed little food risk: it was abuse of DDT by farmers.
Lovelock explores some blue-sky technical fixes to global warming: planetary sun-shades, for example, but without real enthusiasm. Perhaps because it would distract from his here and now message: go nuclear.
So are his arguments complete and wholly compelling? No. The central question of power sources deserves a large book in its own right. Do you have to accept Gaia to believe that climate change is likely to destroy us? No. Do you have to accept Lovelocks' wistful argument for a countryside free of windmills? No.
But although bits of the book can be faulted, the whole seems to me to succeed. It is a well-written, lively, provocative book on a critical subject and a key idea of our times written by one our most gifted and original thinkers.
****
It's nice to know that when climate Armageddon arrives: the poles and the permafrost melt, the bogs and tropics catch fire and much of Southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the USA and Australia starve and fry, the Atlantic Conveyor will also switch off resulting in a local temperature drop. The result could well be that the UK climate remains equable. On the other hand the UK will be a shrunken archipelago, with our major cities submerged, tens of millions of people looking for a home and many millions of refugees landing on our beaches.
Sentimental nonsense, 23 Mar 2008
Nature is simply indifferent to our fate: it is neither malicious, nor benevolent. If humanity's time is up, it's up. We won't be the first species to die, nor the last. Let the polar bears look after themselves. Carpe diem.
Forget Windfarms - Go Nuclear!, 11 Feb 2008
I first read "The Revenge of Gaia" two years ago, when it was published. By early 2006, of course, we were all becoming aware of a progressively strident chorus about the imminent catastrophe that global warming was going to cause and how there was a scientific consensus on the matter. Lovelock was the first book I read on the subject.
I was suitably alarmed by Lovelock's analysis, and particularly by his identification of "tipping points", whereby a relatively modest increase in temperature would lead to positive feedbacks, e.g. from a hotter Amazon rainforest dying and releasing its stored CO2, by a greening Greenland absorbing rather than reflecting heat, and thus causing further, and unstoppable, global warming. Lovelock envisaged humanity reduced to a few million "breeding pairs" on the Arctic and Antarctic fringes.
Two years on, I have re-read in a more critical way and have a number of observations about the way Lovelock states the case for there being a major and immediate problem.
Firstly, Lovelock makes no reference to any experimental work to justify the feared quantitative relationship between a rise in "greenhouse gases" and average global temperature. There is much reference to computer modelling - Lovelock is a keen computer modeller, and the Gaia theory is supposedly validated by it - and correlations. (What experimental, as opposed to modelling, work has been done? If you have any recommendations do let me know via a "comment".)
Secondly, he makes some sweeping leaps of logic. Having stated that climatic prediction is easier than forecasting the weather on the basis that we an predict that it will be colder in Berlin on December 2010 than it was in the previous July, he states that an increase in CO2 to 500ppm will accompanied by "profound climate change".
I was struck by his personal reliance on Michael Mann's so-called "hockey stick" graph, adopted uncritically in the 2001 IPCC 3rd Report, which had been pretty thoroughly discredited by the time the book was written (and which has all but disappeared from the 2007 IPCC 4th Report). If his fear of man made global warming is based primarily on this work, then I am reassured that it is probably not as bad as it seemed.
Lovelock quotes Dick Taverne (March of Unreason) warmly for criticising the greens' "impractical romanticism". I would disagree that that is a fair synopsis of Taverne's book, but in any case in his recommendation of the adoption of the "precautionary principle" he ignores one of Taverne's principal criticisms, that overcaution without a scientific basis threatens economic progress that can lift millions out of poverty.
Finally, Lovelock's arguments encompass warming and cooling trends over a variety of timescales, from the geological epochs, the last 100,000 years and the last hundred. He states that we are in an interglacial period, then that it has been hotter in he past. I found it hard to identify a pattern in this. He talks about a gradually warming sun, but not of any other cycles that might affect the sun's warming of the Earth. Svensmark's (more recent) book provides a coherent explanation of solar and galactic effects, and I am aware of others.
That having been said, the book is evidence that, back in 2005, Lovelock and others predicted that warming was occurring, (however it was caused). He predicted the opening of the North-West Passage, which indeed did happen this year. CO2 and CH4 may be contributing to this, and (by my reading at least) science cannot reliably tell us how much and to what eventual effect. What, then, of what Lovelock recommendations as to what we do about it?
I am struck, on re-reading Lovelock, at how little notice the global scientific consensus and its British offshoots have taken of his recommendations: forget wind turbines, go nuclear. The downsides of wind turbines have been covered more recently, and extensively, by the sceptical Booker and North. Lovelock writes on the basis that we need technological solutions to manage a "sustainable retreat" to a world living within Gaia's means, ideally with just 500 to 1,000 million people - he quite clearly hankers after the "idyll" of 1800AD. (1800AD in England might have been bearable for Jane Austen, great for Mr Darcy, but for the rest of us...?) I fear he underestimates the difficulty of making nuclear fusion a viable solution, and even of using plutonium for fission reactors, but there is much to be said for trying if you think that CO2 emissions are going to destroy life on the planet. Lovelock also advocates the Severn Tidal Barrage, and one wonders why this proven and predictable technology is not being implemented instead of the plan for thousands of off-shore wind turbines. Some of his other sustainable retreat solutions are less appetising - notably the suggestion that we should synthesize our food so that more of the planet can be allowed to revert to the wild.
Lovelock's book is short and well written. The courteous way in which he refers to global warming "sceptics" and other opponents is commendable, and is quite unusual in this polarised debate between "alarmists" and "deniers". His summary of possible positive feedbacks is compelling (in a frightening way) irrespective of the extent to which warming might be being driven in the first instance by man made or other effects, and his arguments as to which alternative energy sources to pursue are delivered with scientific objectivity. As to the extent to which he represents that there is an immediate and catastrophic problem, however, the way that Lovelock rubbishes the over-reaction to the fear of acid rain is illuminating. "It is", he says, "all to easy it seems to lose our sense of proportion." Consumed by the Gaia theory that he finds difficult not to imbue with new-age spiritualism despite his rational scientific basis, it is possible that Lovelock has done so himself.
Essential, 05 Jan 2008
This book served as my introduction to the concept of Gaia. A friend suggested I should read it and politely I agreed. Quite simply, Lovelock's arguement makes a lot of sense and the messages conveyed within the volume should be considered by all. Especially politicians and (well meaning) greens. Only this week the news was dominated by debate regarding a new fossil fuel power station. This book clearly explains why this must not happen (ever) and presents the alternatives available now and those that will become so in our lifetimes. Lovelock really puts current environmental issues into context. An excellent read and with content that will touch the lives of every human being, present and future. READ THIS BOOK!
How come I didn't notice all the smugness? , 10 Sep 2008
A few other reviews have drawn attention to Barbara Kingsolver's "smugness", including one person who liked the book but doesn't want her round for dinner.
I'm usually really sensitive to people being a bit too pleased with themselves, but I didn't think this book was like that at all. I thought it was touchingly hilarious about the weeks that they ended up just bottling tomatoes for days on end. And I loved all the information about intensive farming, agribusiness seed companies, and terminator genes - like a good article in the Sunday paper.
Most of all I found the book really inspiring. It made me pay attention to where my food came from, much more than I already did. I have always tried to eat seasonally and avoided food imports, but I found myself really being intrigued by her model, where you stuff your face with a couple of foodstuffs until you are heartily sick of them, by which time something else is coming into season. It's just such a different way of doing things. I don't know if it'll ever totally catch (back?) on, but my god, she makes a persuasive case.
Mixed Feelings, 18 Jul 2008
There are many good things in this book, the author urging a more seasonal and local approach to food being the main theme. I can see how inspirational this book can be.
However the stumbling block for me was the superior approach the authors took to anyone who did not fit in with what they believed. For instance, the daughter wrote a piece about people who did not eat meat being unable to get proper and complete nutrients. This is nonsense, and what was written sounded like someone else speaking, some one else telling her that being an omnivore was the only right way. It felt almost religious in away - I am right and if you disagree you are wrong.
There were also instances in the book where the main author took snide little digs at anyone who was concerned with animal welfare, making quite clear her opinion that anyone who was thus concerned was over emotional and didn't "understand" the realities.
Ms Kingsolver's smug and superior attitude put me off a book that had been recommended to me by so many people and I was disappointed because I had a real desire to be inspired. A little respect on her part for those who choose a different way of reaching the same goal wouldn't have gone amiss.
FAB BUT BUY THE HARDBACK !, 15 Apr 2008
Excellent, informative book - very good at explaining scientific backgounds to issues. (Kingsolver and husband are both scientists.) Not what I was expecting. I probably expected jolly year-in-the-life-of, and that is there, but also so much more. As an example, regarding knowing what veg are in season & when - other books provide plenty of lists, but this explains in a way that makes you understand. Very well written, laugh aloud funny in parts, I just wish I'd bought the hardback because I know I will want to keep it to refer to again, or lend to friends, but also because I found the paperback needed constant pressure to keep it open, especially when reading the inside of the left- hand page. Annoying! For a few extra pounds get the handback - it's worth it.
Yes and No, 14 Feb 2008
There's little doubt that this book is soaked in fascinating information and powerful ideas, but I couldn't help thinking that Mrs Kingsolver et famille all sound a tad smug - I don't think I could bear to have them round to dinner at mine...
Choose Food to Enhance Life, 03 Jan 2008
If you read only one book about food in 2008, I suggest you make it this one.
Barbara Kingsolver, her husband, Steven Hopp, and her daughter, Camille, present selecting, growing, producing, harvesting, storing, preparing, sharing, and eating food as a way to enhance their own lives and those of others. It's a life-affirming approach that I found quite intriguing.
Let me give you a few examples. Ms. Kingsolver decided it would be interesting to breed turkeys as well as raise them. Now, this isn't done very often. Turkeys don't have the necessary equipment and habits to be very good at mating and raising their young so most growers use artificial insemination and incubators. The result is a fascinating story of discovery about turkeys and herself.
Her family also decided to almost totally limit themselves to the food they could produce or purchase as locally grown (within about 250 miles) for a year. So you don't eat strawberries in January with that approach unless you freeze some from the summer, have a greenhouse, or live in southern California. This family lives in Virginia so the options are heavily constricted by the limited growing season. As a result, you'll find lots of recipes in the book to use the seasonal bounties of foods that are easy to grow in quantity like zucchini and tomatoes.
The book is also informative about food and how it is produced. I realized that I knew many of these things because my dad grew up on a farm and my mom on a ranch. They also grew a lot of our food when we were growing up. But I'm sure my children have no idea about these things. Ms. Kingsolver does a great service by transmitting this increasingly scarce and important information to another generation.
My own consciousness about food was raised when I realized that I've been ignoring many wonderful local food choices to supplement my tiny garden. Next spring, I plan to do things much differently.
More significantly, this book makes the challenges of the small organic farmer clearer to me. I see that I need to buy more local organic food to help make this offering available and to help those who want to do that kind of work.
For those who are concerned about food quality and environmental sustainability, this book contains much valuable information and advice.
The book's style is very accessible. There are sidebars written by Professor Hopp and Ms. Camille Kingsolver that give the book a nice change of pace. There are also lots of interesting recipes. Ms. Barbara Kingsolver also uses a narrative style that allows for lots of anecdotes and extended stories. Her pleasant novelist's touch gives the book a warmth and glow that you don't find in many books about food.
I was very sorry when the book ended. I could have kept on reading for another five years. Perhaps they will write an update at some point. I hope so!
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Customer Reviews
Transition Handbook, 08 Oct 2008
This book is way overdue. I have been eagerly searching for books addressing the preparation for post peak oil for many many years. Books like this should have been written years ago so I was delighted to see that at last practical guides are starting to appear on the book shelves.
I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters dealing with peak oil and its implications for society. Subsequent chapters I did not enjoy as much particularly when the Kinsale Energy Decent Action Plan is promoted as a role model for sustainable community developm | | |