Transition Culture is, bar none, the best site I know on life after peak oil. Rob Hopkins is a teacher of permaculture and a developer of a powerdown community in Ireland. He speaks publicly, he teaches courses, he is active in his community — and he blogs it all to encourage us to prepare for powerdown in our own communities. We find out how his town’s Energy Descent Action Plan is going as it goes.

For those who want to know where to begin in creating their own transition town projects, he has compiled 10 First Steps for a Transition Town Initiative, based on the experience in his town of Totnes.

1. Awareness Raising
2. Lay the Foundations
3. The Official Unleashing
4. Form Groups
5. Use Open Space
6. Develop Visible Practical Manifestations of the Project
7. Facilitate the Great Reskilling
8. Build a Bridge to Local Government
9. Honor the Elders
10. Let it Go Where It Wants to Go and Reflections

Every one of these steps and every post on the Transition Culture blog is a rich inspiration in itself. And, yet, it’s all just plain practical if you are concerned about relocalization. These steps are seriously practical. It makes me think of the statement by Hopi Elders.

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know our garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

This could be a good time!

In order for you to prepare for potential futures you might face, you need to be able to imagine yourself in that future. I am not sure most of us could let our imaginations go quite that far.

Fiction might push you a lot further down that road of imagination than you intended. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road took my breath away. The stark dialogue between father and son and the stark choices they made to survive their reality make so much of what we do seem irrelevant. Yet, the love and devotion shines even in this context as the child learns to be “one of the good guys,” the ones “carrying the fire.”

Reviews

• “Apocalypse Now,” Washington Post, October 1, 2006.
• “The Road through Hell, Paved with Desperation,” New York Times, September 25, 2006.
• “This is the End,” Pop Matters, September 18, 2006.
• “End of the Line,” Village Voice, August 31, 2006.