The Transition Timeline - Softcover

Shaun Chamberlin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1900322560 ISBN 13: 9781900322560

Publisher: Chelsea Green, 2009

Synopsis

Describes four possible scenarios for the UK and the world over the next 20 years, obviously aiming at encouraging people to adopt the Transition Network's ideas for community based responses to climate change and peak oil.

About this title

About the Author

Shaun Chamberlin is the founder of http://www.darkoptimism.org and has been involved with the Transition Network since its inception. He is also the TEQs Development Director at The Lean Economy Connection and a member of the Department of Energy and Climate Change's Personal Carbon Allowances Advisory Group, as well as a core member of Transition Town Kingston, UK.

Rob Hopkins is the cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network. He has many years' experience in education, teaching permaculture, and natural building, and set up the first two year-full-time permaculture course in the world, at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland, as well as coordinating the first eco-village development in Ireland to be granted planning permission.

He is author of Woodlands for West Cork!, Energy Descent Pathways and most recently The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, which has been published in a number of other languages, and which was voted the fifth-most-popular book taken on holiday by MPs during the summer of 2008. He publishes www.transitionculture.org, recently voted the fourth best green blog in the UK. He is the winner of the 2008 Schumacher Award, an Ashoka Fellow, a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, served three years as a Trustee of the Soil Association, and was named by the Independent as one of the UK's top 100 environmentalists. He is the winner of the 2009 Observer Ethical Award for the Grassroots Campaigner category, and in December 2009 was voted the Energy Saving Trust/Guardian's Green Community Hero. He lectures and writes widely on peak oil and Transition, holds an MSc in Social Research, and recently completed a PhD at the University of Plymouth entitled "Localisation and resilience at the local level: the case of Transition Town Totnes." He lives in Devon and is a keen gardener.

Review

"Shaun Chamberlin ties down the uncertainties about climate, energy, food, water and population, the big scene setters of our future, with no-nonsense authority. What we get with The Transition Timeline is a map of the landscape we have to find a way through. Don't set out without it. You will have a good idea of where you are, and inspiration about where you are going. It is almost as good as getting there."--David Fleming, director of The Lean Economy Connection, and author of Energy and the Common Purpose

"In this refreshingly real and hopeful book, Shaun Chamberlin lays out the many aspects of the limits to our growth, and highlights the fact that cultural change is likely our only successful path forward. We undoubtedly face serious biological and biophysical constraints that our forebears did not. The Transition Timeline gives us a guide on how to best use science and culture in adapting to our new situation."--Nate Hagens, Editor of The Oil Drum

While definitely focused on empowering the community rather than the policy makers, this book is much more than a folksy agenda for comfort in the crisis. It is a serious plan to reconstruct society in the light of ecological and energetic realities, informed by the best evidence about the vortex of forces influencing the global crisis. Chamberlin runs along a knife edge between the harsh realities facing the whole of humanity on the one hand, and hope and pragmatic vision on the other, outlining a pragmatic plan for a society-wide adaptation to the energy descent future. Let's see if we can run along that knife edge; we have nothing to lose."--David Holmgren, co-originator of the Permaculture concept, and author of Future Scenarios

"Without a vision of what can be, there is no alternative to a future completely constrained by the past. The ideal future set forth herein is not a useless pipe-dream. There is not a single outcome described in The Transition Timeline that could not realistically be achieved IF we all do things beginning now that are entirely within our ability to do.So here it is: the map and timeline of how to save our world and ourselves. Whether we WILL take up these suggestions as scheduled is a question for the cynics and dreamers to debate. For us realists, the only relevant questions are, Where do we start?, and, Will you join us?"--Richard Heinberg, Senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, and author of eight books, including The Party's Over and Peak Everything

"Highly readable and well researched - this book is a hugely valuable contribution to Transition thinking. With grace and wit Shaun Chamberlin ably scopes out the combined dangers of peak oil and climate change and shows us what we can do to avoid their worst impacts. Read it and implement its wisdom if you want to help create a liveable future."--Dr. Stephan Harding, co-ordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College, and author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia

"The Transition Timeline isn't another climate jeremiad, but a map of the course we'll need to take over the coming decade if we are to save our planet, and ourselves. It is a book of hopeful realism, making clear that the future we want remains in our grasp -- but only for a short while longer."--Jamais Cascio, Co-founder of WorldChanging.com and founder of OpenTheFuture.com

Edition details

• Publisher: Chelsea Green
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1900322560
• ISBN 13: 9781900322560
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192