Expensive oil, resource destruction and depletion, skyrocketing food prices… climate change.
Besides sounding like a negative, what do all these things have in common? Well, they are all branches of the same tree, if you look at that tree from a systems perspective.
Petroleum has made it possible to massively centralize and homogenize the chain of consumption, and in so doing completely disconnect from the simple economic realities of time, space and community.
For nations everywhere, and especially the US, we have consumed our way to an extreme vulnerability to our national security, food security, and especially our community security.
It is literally possible at present for an unexpected geo-political event to disrupt the supply of petroleum enough in one week to bring our economy and the transportation of essential food and supplies to near standstill… in a matter of days.
The underlying fact is our entire lives are organized around systems that can not be sustained without cheap oil inputs, and lots of it, and cheap oil has now become a thing of the past.
Expensive oil and disruptions to the supply of crude are part of the reality of our present place in the history of modern civilization.
Our grandparents would never dream of being this vulnerable, and not having a plan for “a rainy day”, but most communities have lost the skills and local know how that were common even 2 generations ago.
We need to reinvent the neighborhoods, towns and communities that our grandparents understood and thrived in during difficult times. We need to make the move back to a better way of being in community that heals our communities and local economies.
It’s time for a New Renaissance. The Transition Towns movement presents a working model for us to recreate our local communities, and be happier folks in the process.
HERE’S A THUMBNAIL SKETCH, from Transition U.S.
