This is just my very subjective opinion, but the term 'great unleashing' used in T-Town has an worrisome tone--at least to me.

It seems at the very least grandiose.

A great unleashing of WHAT?

We are talking of supposedly local community movements that are supposed, on paper, and via the websites, to serve the needs of the local communities.

So why use such wierdly grandiose language.

It is also jargon ridden--the website actually has a "jargon buster" subsection

[www.transitionnetwork.org]

Also please note what they say about Peak Oil. Notice, how right on the definitions page, they tell what is' the wrong conversation to have.'

Quote

Peak oil
There are a thousand pages on this subject across the internet, ranging from the wildly optimistic "We'll get to 120 million barrels a day easily before we see a drop off in supply" and the abysmally pessimistic "We hit peak in 2005 and we'll be descending into complete social chaos in the next couple of months".

One of the most important things to remember is that this should not be a discussion about when the oil will run out. That's the wrong conversation, and it's pretty much irrelevant.

(Corboy--sez who? And whose interests are beings served by claiming, 'That's the wrong conversation?)

What's important is recognising the inevitability and imminence of the time when the endlessly increasing amounts of fossil fuels that have powered our food, energy, transport, economic and industrial systems will reach a peak, fluctuate their way along a bumpy plateau and then inexorably decline.

('Inevitablity and imminence'--again, says who, and whose interests are being served-Corboy).

What's important is to analyse these systems and their dependency on fossil fuels and figure out what they might look like if we redesigned them to be dramatically less reliant on these dwindling resources. In many cases the inevitable redesign looks like relocalisation.

An excellent place to start learning more about peak oil is the Energy Bulletin Primer.

(Okay, could someone let us know if this Energy Bulletin Primer has contributions from academics with good reputations? Corboy)

[www.energybulletin.net]

Note (as quoted from the site)

Quote

Energy Bulletin is a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities

.


[www.postcarbon.org]

[www.postcarbon.org]

Fellows of the Post Carbon Institute

[www.postcarbon.org]

So...let me hand the football to a member of the team.

Could someone check the the energy bulletin site?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/2010 01:14AM by corboy.

"So...let me hand the football to a member of the team.Could someone check the the energy bulletin site?"

-I can take that handoff. As I suspected, the PostCarbon Institute includes oil experts like... Rob Hopkins! And Richard Heinberg! Getting the pattern here yet? I didn't look at EVERY bio on the fellows page, but I can make this general assesment.

Seems to fall into two categories:

1. non-oil experts. Behavioral therapists, community researchers, sustainability advocates, etc. An ex-CIA analyst thrown in for good measure.

2. a few oil guys (or who at least claim to be) with industry ties.

Not one actual oil or petroleum geologist to be found. Not one. If somebody did find one, please point them out to me. I got tired of looking at the resumes of "Masters of Arts Therapy" after going through about 70-80% of the bios.

The best two resources on the Oily Peakers and their shenanigans are Peak Oil Debunked and Anti-Doomer. Funny, scientific, great sites!

[peakoildebunked.blogspot.com]

[anti-doomer.blogspot.com]

"Transition is a bit more than a social experiment"

We really should learn what that 'bit more' consists of.


Great Unleashings--it would be a most intersting project to study descriptions of these.

They seem to be two-day events. One way to tell if someone is a likely recruit is if that person shows up on the second day.

Persons familiar with LGAT might feel invited to google 'Great Unleashing' read some accounts and try and see if it resembles LGAT language in any way.

An indepth article of another key compenent of T-Town--energy descent.

Could this mean using less petrol based energy?

Or could it mean calling down spiritual energy into an a matter clogged world beset by Ahrimanic ignorance.

So, could energy descent be a double term for a use of collective ritual in which as many persons as possible are persuaded to participate a ritual, even if not told they are doing so, and to conceal that its a ritual, told that this is merely a ecular project to conserve fossil fuel, rather than an esoteric ritual dressed up in modern language of energy conservation, eh?

As a conscious citizen, I would like to know if something is merely a political project or if there is a cocealed ritual at the base of it. I take ritual seriously and would want to know enough to decide whether or not to lend my effort to support someone's ritual.

I took vows to practice in a particular tradition and that means deciding where to give support and when to step aside.

That is why Geoffrey Aherns criteria of transparency and full disclosure of beliefs are important in evaluating a project.

Quote

But as one initiative leader told Hopkins, “While it’s true that we have no assurance Transition will ultimately succeed in the U.S., we’re going to give it our all here anyway. I see no downside risk to wholeheartedly placing all our local bets on Transition and attempting to engage entire communities in the process.”

In reality, Transition is a bit more than a social experiment, for our communities are directly in the path of a global tsunami (James Howard Kunstler’s “Long Emergency”), and we must quickly rise to the occasion and get ourselves to higher ground—together.

As Hopkins freely acknowledges, the Transition movement might yet fail. And if it does, Transitioners will at least know that they have given ourselves to what they considered was both most important and most urgent. The learning that will come from their experience will likely be useful to others who will subsequently inherit these challenges and opportunities.

[islandbreath.blogspot.com]

But...if someone is actually motivated by an esoteric creed, then mere political failure need not matter...and those who dont share the esoteric belief system may be used as a mere means to a spiritual end.

Hi, "Out of Transition",

Out of curiosity, who is the "channeler who brought Transition to the US"? Is it Jennifer (aka Raven) Gray?

I apologize for not replying sooner, Margaret, somehow I missed your posts on the board.

"Not Heinberg. I had heard of it before Heinberg wrote his books. There are many other books on this subject written by scientists of various stripes. Heinberg is a latecomer."

-I'm aware of Hubbert. However, he is not the main public face of "Peak Oil". Heinberg is. And he is a weird dude and a believer in Velikovsky. If the organizations espousing "Peak Oil" want to gain more credibility, they need to can that dude. Yet nearly every article I ever read about Peak Oil... they quote Heinberg. And yet I have seen zero debate within the "Peak Oil" community on his value as a spokesperson.

"But I do know that there a very large movement with exactly these same concerns proposing exactly these same solutions and it's all on the up and up. I've followed this stuff since at least 1993, although back then terms like 'car-free cities' and 'sustainable transportation' were in vogue."

-However, there is a continued element of "population control" and anti-immigration sentiment at the core of the main Peak Oil groups, including ASPO, which has printed fascist screeds by British racists. Do you support such causes?

"And let's go back to first principles: the definition of a cult, per Singer et al. Does Transition Towns meet the criteria?
Dodgy, sleazy, weird, flakey, pointless - a group can be all these things, and still not be a cult."

-I agree, the jury is still out. However, the elephant in the living room is that this is a 12-step program! Do you really think that was unintentional? I mean, couldn't it have been 10 steps or something?

"The Great Awakening?" "The Great Unleashing?"

Hi, Shakti,

No, I am afraid that I did not get the name of the channeller who brought Transition to the US. I believe it was a man. At any rate they were rather uneasy about this getting out to the general public, if I recall correctly.

You mentioned population control. One of the topics raised that night was population control. There were some extremely bigoted remarks made against two very large religious denominations that do not believe in birth control. I just sat there and thought, you want me to tell my friends and neighbors and coworkers about your little group, knowing the kind of reception they will get if they happen to have religious or political views that differ from yours? I saw two people almost come to blows over an argument over the use of computers and e-mail. I do not wish my friends and neighbors to be the target of that kind of wrath, nor do I myself wish to become the target. You can make of that what you will, but it was not what I signed up for. I don't like being in a group where I have to watch my every step lest I reveal something about myself that would brand me "the enemy." I wasn't a member for very long, but just long enough to know that there were minefields aplenty, because I--and most of the people I know and work with on a daily basis--come from completely different political backgrounds. Let's just say that this group does not represent a true cross-section of my area. And I am afraid that if they keep on the way they are going--screamfests over stuff that most of the people I know would roll their eyes at, insulting others who don't share their beliefs--it will not much matter whether they are a legitimate movement or not, because they will end up alienating most of their allies.

Dear All,

I usually avoid forums like this, but someone pointed this thread out to me, and something about the absurdity of some of the discussions on this thread compelled me to at least try and correct some of what has appeared here. I am the Rob Hopkins spoken of so disparagingly above, one of the originators of the Transition approach, spoken of above similarly disparagingly, and although I clearly can do little to alter the beliefs of anyone who has read this thread and actually seriously believes that Transition is in any sense a cult, I will try and throw a little clarification into the mix here. I haven't read any other threads on this forum, but if this is the quality of the debates here, something tells me I haven't missed a great deal. 'Corboy's idea of researching something appears to be to put it into Google and to then believe verbatim what comes back, hardly exemplary critical thinking. So, to clear up a few of more absurd things said here....

* There are no links between Transition and the Steiner schools movement. There may be some people who are involved with Steiner schools who get involved with Transition and vice versa, but there is no Steiner thinking in the Transition approach. Zero. Nada. From the rather odd thread referred to at the start of this one where someone in Totnes said he lived in Totnes and there was also a Steiner school here, all of a sudden 2 + 2 = 7 and Transition is an Anthroposophical cult. We have a Conservative Club in Totnes too, and a Masonic Hall, 2 supermarkets and a swimming pool. Do we therefore share some idealogical ground with them too? Of course not...
* Shakti claims that my qualifications don't qualify me to voice an opinion on peak oil. It is true that I am not a petroleum geologist, but I have never claimed to be. I am also not a climate scientist either, but I know how to discern good climate scientists from charlatans, and likewise with peak oil, I do the research and I reference everything (have a look at The Transition Handbook). For the record, I have a BSc in Environmental Quality and Resource Management and an MSc in Social Research, and am finishing a PhD (not about Richard Heinberg, as someone commented) but on resilience, a Human Geography PhD.
* The assertion that Transition was brought to the US by a New Age channeller is just ridiculous.
* 'Corboy' - the term 'energy descent' is not some New Age term about chakras and so on, it is a term coined by Howard Odum in his book 'A Prosperous Way Down' to describe the inevitable economic contraction that will accompany the peak in world oil production. On this forum with your obsession with cults you may be very sensitive about the word energy, but in Transition we use it in the way that Chevron, governments and most people use it, as in these two dictionary definitions, "Physics. the capacity to do work; the property of a system that diminishes when the system does work on any other system, by an amount equal to the work so done; potential energy" and "any source of usable power, as fossil fuel, electricity, or solar radiation".
* 'Corboy' also criticises Transition for its use of unusual language, implying that there must be something nefarious about this. 'Unleashing' for example is supposedly 'wierdly grandiose'. No, it is playful and fun, and is intended to describe the launch of this community process, in a way that it should feel historic for that community. In Transition, we try to get away from the dry, depressing language often used in environmental groups, and be a bit more playful. 'Unleashing'? Why not? Quite how you make a leap from that to the idea that Transition is some brainwashing cult is beyond me. It should also be remembered that these are terms developed in England, and transposed into the US context they may have other connotations, but here they work rather well....
* 'OutofTransition' talked about how, at the Transition event she attended, 'new age rituals abound'. I can't imagine what she is referring to. Read all of the Transition materials, nowhere does it say that 'New Age rituals' are an obligatory part of Transition. Of course, each group is an independent entity, and we don't control them all (that would, after all, be dangerously cultish). It is important to say though, one person's 'new age rituals' is another person's 'minute of silence before we start', or arranging the seats in a circle so everyone can see each other better....
* I have never heard a Transition group use the term "the great awakening"
* Shakti's insinuations, that Richard Heinberg has somehow a connection to the sexual abuse of children is utterly disgraceful, and should lead to the moderator of these posts removing the offending posts and excluding the person who posted them from this forum.
* Another gem turned up in Corboy's googling was the piece from the person claiming to have tried, repeatedly to have had a dialogue with people from the Transition Network. Again, here the kind of critical thinking one would hope for from a site such as this is sadly lacking. The writer in question is Ian R Crane, a new age conspiracy theorist, who argues, among other things, that peak oil is a scam, climate change is a scam, that the 2012 Olympics will be used to stage a fake extraterrestrial invasion so the New World Order (he's big on the NWO) can take the world over. He is a classic David Icke style conspiracy theorist. 9/11 was an inside job, as was 7/7 etc etc. He lives near where I live, and constantly badgered us to debate peak oil with him, a subject he clearly knows very little about, believing, as he does, in abiotic oil, a theory taken seriously by about 0.01% of petroleum geologists. He is a fringe new ager, and his claims to have been "an ex oil-field executive" fail to mention the fact that he worked in telecommunications, and knows virtually zilch about petroleum geology. So no, we didn't debate with him, because had we done so, any credibility we have built up here would have been lost, and we would have been, like him, the laughing stock of the town.
* Shakti thinks that the 12 Steps thing is somehow, again, evidence of Transition's cultishness. OK. To rewind. When Transition started, interest in it grew very fast. Lots of people started to ask how it worked, and we had no idea as it was really work in progress. We started to set out what seemed to be the ingredients of the process, and there were 12 of them. I had been writing about addiction as a metaphor for understanding how a society might move away from oil dependency, and liked the play on 12 Steps. Anyway, now, in the training we do, we call them the 12 ingredients, as they aren't really steps, and in the next edition of Transition Handbook we will be moving away from 12 Steps entirely, and basing it instead on Christopher Alexander's 'Pattern Language' model (google him Corboy, he's an architect)....
* Corboy asks, referring to peak oil 'Inevitablity and imminence'--again, says who, and whose interests are being served". Well in the Transition approach, we would argue that for communities to prepare for peak oil, not the abrupt running out of oil, but the end of the age of cheap oil, is inherently practical, and yes, it is inevitable and imminence. Not sure what you are trying to imply there... whose interests do you think are being served? I'm puzzled.

So, is Transition a cult? No, of course not. It is based on the latest science of climate change, on trying to find the most reliable evidence in terms of oil depletion, and trying to design a collective and positive response to both of these vast challenges. It draws from the science of resilience, on research on behaviour change, and on tools for enabling groups to work together creatively. Transition, as an approach, has been endorsed by 3 local authorities in the UK (Somerset, Leicestershire and Bath and North East Somerset). Transition Town Totnes was one of 20 communities across England and Wales chosen as 'Low Carbon Communities', chosen to model meaningful behaviour change around carbon reduction. The Transition Handbook was the 5th most popular book UK MPs took on holiday with them during the summer of 2008. It is an approach being recognised by governments and by local councils as an important part of the overall response to climate change, the outgoing Climate Change secretary Ed Miliband said "the work of the Transition Towns movement is incredibly important". It is also leading to some fantastic initiatives and projects in communities around the world. There are good academic researchers doing scientific research on Transition, and the ESRC, the leading academic research body in the UK, just announced a £7 million fund to research 'Energy and Communities', and mentions Transition specifically in its list of what it wants to research.

Transition does, as well, create a space for also looking at the psychology of change, and for acknowledging that this is not just a process of building outer community resilience, but also of building inner resilience, supporting people to be more able to withstand shock. It draws from the psychology of change, and from addictions studies, to suggest that people need to look at how to support communities to be more emotionally resilient, not just more resilient in terms of food and power. Nothing 'cultish' about that, seems like common sense to me. Of course we need to be vigilent in any movement like this that it does't get hijacked by cults, but really, there is no indication of that being an issue anywhere, to the best of my knowledge.

Thanks to Margarets and Hope for sticking up for common sense here! If you want to find out more, rather than relying on Google to point to you odd little outliers of information about Transition, you could read The Transition Handbook, or the more recent 'The Transition Timeline', 'Local Food: how to make it happen in your community' or the soon to be published 'Local Money'. You could also look at the film 'In Transition' which you will find at [transitionculture.org]. We have our annual conference between June 12th and 14th in Devon, a less cultish event would be hard to find. While it is important to remain vigilent to the threat of cults, which can be hideous and nasty things, if you want to see cultishness in everything you will. I hope that I have managed to shed a little light on things, and to have contributed something of use to this discussion.

With best wishes
Rob Hopkins

Here's what people need for sustainable living.

A place to have a piss.

[recycledbogrollblues.blogspot.com]

and some observations about the larger Brixton situation from a bloke who lives there.

[recycledbogrollblues.blogspot.com]

And if you want to have an impact on public life, be prepared to take the piss.

" I haven't read any other threads on this forum, but if this is the quality of the debates here, something tells me I haven't missed a great deal.

-Nice, start with a blast at the forum itself.


* There are no links between Transition and the Steiner schools movement. There may be some people who are involved with Steiner schools who get involved with Transition and vice versa, but there is no Steiner thinking in the Transition approach. Zero. Nada. From the rather odd thread referred to at the start of this one where someone in Totnes said he lived in Totnes and there was also a Steiner school here, all of a sudden 2 + 2 = 7 and Transition is an Anthroposophical cult. We have a Conservative Club in Totnes too, and a Masonic Hall, 2 supermarkets and a swimming pool. Do we therefore share some idealogical ground with them too? Of course not...

[transitionculture.org]

"Shakti claims that my qualifications don't qualify me to voice an opinion on peak oil. It is true that I am not a petroleum geologist, but I have never claimed to be. I am also not a climate scientist either, but I know how to discern good climate scientists from charlatans, and likewise with peak oil, I do the research and I reference everything (have a look at The Transition Handbook). For the record, I have a BSc in Environmental Quality and Resource Management and an MSc in Social Research, and am finishing a PhD (not about Richard Heinberg, as someone commented) but on resilience, a Human Geography PhD. "

-Everyone has a right to voice an opinion on peak oil. Yet for someone striving for credibility on the topic, it is imperative to source good experts, rather than utter charlatans like Heinberg. C'mon, the guy is a "Velikovskyian". Right there, that knocks him out of the realm of ANY scientific credibility. It's like the Google Earth engineers consulting the Flat Earth Society for mapping advice. You should know that. If there are more credible scientists backing your thesis, you wouldn't need to touch Heinberg with a ten-foot pole.

" The assertion that Transition was brought to the US by a New Age channeller is just ridiculous."

-Well, then, who DID bring Transition to the US? Names, please.

" Shakti's insinuations, that Richard Heinberg has somehow a connection to the sexual abuse of children is utterly disgraceful, and should lead to the moderator of these posts removing the offending posts and excluding the person who posted them from this forum."

-In his own words, Heinberg admits to being part of an "intentional community" (Emissaries of Light) that has been accused of instituionalized abuse. He also worked for a college with a HORRIBLE reputation, New College of California, that was closed by the state. The founder of that college was John Leary, child molester. As Rob does not live in California, he may not fully grasp the poor reputation that New College has engendered over the years. I did not claim that Heinberg was a molester. Yet he has spent years involved with two separate institutions that have been accused of covering for or glossing over child molestation. That doesn't say much for his "filters".

[www.bishop-accountability.org]

"Leary went on to found New College of California in Sausalito in 1972. He later moved New College to San Francisco, where, during the next 34 years, the school evolved into Bay Area academia's left-wing social conscience. Officials from the Jesuit order and Gonzaga said that while responding earlier this year to requests for documents connected to a priest-abuse lawsuit not involving Leary, they found files detailing a 1969 agreement among the university, the order, and Spokane police under which Leary wouldn't face charges of molesting victims if he left town within 24 hours. The announcement of the 1969 cover-up by the Jesuits, the police, and the university spawned articles in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, the Seattle Times, the New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune.

But in San Francisco, and at New College, where Leary's legend has been used as a core recruiting and fundraising tool, and where, prior to the September announcement, officials were preparing to name a refurbished classroom the "Father John Leary Room," there's been silence.

...In talking with New College President Martin Hamilton, who was hired by Leary as an instructor in 1977, and who later invited Leary to preside over his wedding, I got the sense that news of Leary's secret criminal life had stunned him into inaction.

...The news of Leary's criminal past, Hamilton noted, revealed that New College of California exists thanks to an extraordinary irony. "If [Gonzaga] had done what they did now, then," and announced in 1969 Leary's history of allegations of sexual assaults on boys, "Jack wouldn't have started New College," Hamilton said.

....when it comes to owning up to the abusive sexual past of one of their leaders, the Republican Party and New College of California don't seem to be on the same, well, page.

And that's too bad, because a real analysis and accounting of Leary's role as a pedagogical Johnny Appleseed could be interesting as well as instructional. He spent the '70s and '80s launching, or attempting to launch, cutting-edge programs of study in San Francisco, Reno, New York, and Santa Barbara with great fanfare, before leaving each place suddenly for reasons never fully explained. Investigating it can only make New College a more intellectually honest, and fascinating, place.

..."Leary was a bad guy," the Spokane Spokesman Review quoted John Whitney, the Jesuit's provincial superior based in Portland, as saying, after the Jesuits and Gonzaga University issued separate public statements on Sept. 8 describing the 1969 cover-up. The Jesuit order has settled with two of Leary's victims for a total of about $400,000, according to the order. Gonzaga University sent statements to school alumni who were students while Leary was at the school, and braced for more victims to come forward, stating that,"today we desire not self-protection but the protection, especially, of those who are most vulnerable." After receiving the call, Hamilton didn't announce the news to the school at large. A few days later, he left on a two-week trip to Brazil.


.., med to during three weeks of telephoning alumni and former teachers who knew Leary at New College during the 1970s and giving them the bad news. Most people Leary knew seemed to have deep, fond impressions of the man, and were utterly confounded by the idea he was a child molester.

"Another gem turned up in Corboy's googling was the piece from the person claiming to have tried, repeatedly to have had a dialogue with people from the Transition Network. Again, here the kind of critical thinking one would hope for from a site such as this is sadly lacking. The writer in question is Ian R Crane, a new age conspiracy theorist, who argues, among other things, that peak oil is a scam, climate change is a scam, that the 2012 Olympics will be used to stage a fake extraterrestrial invasion so the New World Order (he's big on the NWO) can take the world over. He is a classic David Icke style conspiracy theorist. 9/11 was an inside job, as was 7/7 etc etc. "

-I agree with you, Rob, about Crane. I meant to point out that to Corboy, but forgot to. Crane is a crank and an idiot, from what I've seen. HOWEVER, you have no problem citing Heinberg, who is ALSO a conspiracy theorist, and actually spoke at a "911 Truth" conference.

[www.deceptiondollar.com]

"2:10 -2:40 Oil, Iraq, and the War on Terror. The events of 9-11 were facilitated by persons highly placed within the US government. What was their motive? This can best be discerned by looking backward from the present: what have the governing elites actually done since 9-11, based on the mandate of public opinion that the events created? Answer: nations have been invaded and numerous permanent military bases constructed—in two regions crucial for global oil supply. All of this is occurring as official petroleum reserves are coming under question, and signs are appearing that world oil production may reach its historic peak within the next one to five years. Examining the most recent compelling evidence that we are entering the beginning stages of a global energy famine and resource war—of which 9-11 was merely the opening salvo.Richard Heinberg Author of War, Oil and the Fate of Industrial Societies, New Society publishers 2003."

-So it is OK for Heinberg to be a 911 Conspiracy Theorist, but not Crane?

" Corboy asks, referring to peak oil 'Inevitablity and imminence'--again, says who, and whose interests are being served". Well in the Transition approach, we would argue that for communities to prepare for peak oil, not the abrupt running out of oil, but the end of the age of cheap oil, is inherently practical, and yes, it is inevitable and imminence. Not sure what you are trying to imply there... whose interests do you think are being served? I'm puzzled."

-As strange at it may seem to you, possibly the oil industry... and covert racist groups. And business in general. I also think that coal may be at play here as well, as Thyssen/Petroconsultants were the first to push Peak Oil into the public debate, and Thyssen owns massive coal to liquid facilities.

I am suspicious of the fact that with many "Peak Oil" folks, there is not a press for more conservation, or a switch to alternative fuels, but an emphasis on "culling the herd". "There is no time to switch to alternative energy" is something I hear often. Yet that is not the consensus of world scientists or ecologists. This is NOT a conservationist, or alternative fuels argument. It is a "there are too many people" argument. The presence of racialists like Virginia Abernathy, Pimental, (both endorsed by Heinberg) within the Peak Oil movement is undeniable. Are you aware of the fascist rants, like by John Stanton of Social Contract Press, in Colin Campbell's ASPO newsletter? In fact, it was the BNP, a group I'm sure you are well aware of, who were the first party in England to jump on the "Peak Oil" bandwagon.

If I were a corporate exec, it would scare the hell out of me to see a global environmental movement that was willing to target their profits in exchange for a better world for the masses. One strategy I might try would be to diffuse and dilute such resistance by creating a "locally based movement" that would be easy to divide, coopt, and steer astray. While I applaud some of the local efforts you are making, Rob, (assuming that you are on the level at least personally), in no way are those efforts going to be sufficient to deal with the issues of climate change. It will take international treaties, international laws, and the enforcement of such. It will take confrontation on a mass scale with the world's corporations and governments. Those are not paths that Transition is advising. Also, while some towns may heed your call, get themselves energy independent in prep for the "Great Doomsday of the Peak", what happens to the towns that don't? What is Transition Towns plan for them? The whole thing smacks of 80s survivalism and white suburban fear than it does of any kind of progressive, 21st Century world ecological movement.

I also note that you make no attempt to debunk Heinberg's connections to Russian fascists, his Nazi occult beliefs in "Shambala", "Hyperborea", and other elements of the Hindu/Aryan myths. Care to comment, Rob?

"Transition does, as well, create a space for also looking at the psychology of change, and for acknowledging that this is not just a process of building outer community resilience, but also of building inner resilience, supporting people to be more able to withstand shock. "

This is interesting. It is clear that YOU DO have aims beyond just "local ecology" but shaping entire patterns of people's thought. In other words, "thought reform", a topic all too familiar to the people on this board. If those posting here seem a little "oversensitive" to you, why not peruse some of the other topics here on the forum so you can try to grasp why some of the language around Transition is a little alarming to us.