Tantalizing Glimpes of Resilience…

That yesterday’s successes give birth to today’s challenges would seem to be one of Life’s truisms; it is, after all, learning to crawl that brings us to the challenge of learning to walk. And now that we’ve burned our way through ‘cheap energy’ into an unsustainably consumptive life style, it’s also time to face squarely the need to begin our adaptation and transition to other ways of being in the world.
My friend and colleague, Shaktari Belew, with The Honoring All Life Foundation, sent me this link announcing the release of a new book exploring this territory.
Tantalizing Glimpses of Resilience: The Introduction to “The Transition Handbook” is a title post at the blog, Transitionculture.org: An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent.
“Central to this book is the concept of resilience – familiar to ecologists, but less so to the rest of us. Resilience refers to the ability of a system, from individual people to whole economies, to hold together and maintain their ability to function in the face of change and shocks from the outside. This book, The Transition Handbook, argues that in our current (and long overdue) efforts to drastically cut carbon emissions, we must also give equal importance to the building, or more accurately to the rebuilding, of resilience. Indeed, I will argue that cutting emissions without resilience-building is ultimately futile. But what does resilience actually look like?
…”Forces are converging very fast that make whether or not we choose to retain and enhance resilience, rather than just let it crumble, much more than just a philosophical discussion. It is no longer just a case of whether we should be questioning the forces of economic globalisation because they are unjust, inequitable or a rapacious destroyer of environments and cultures. Instead it is about looking at the Achilles heel of economic globalisation, one from which there is no protection other than resilience: its degree of oil dependency. The very notion of economic globalisation was only made possible by cheap liquid fossil fuels, and there is no adequate substitute for those on the scale we use them. The move towards more localised energy-efficient and productive living arrangements is not a choice; it is an inevitable direction for humanity.
“The Transition Handbook is more than just a book of problems and ideas. It is about solutions, and about the Transition model, which I think may turn out to be the foundation for one of the most important social, political and cultural movements of the 21st century.