For several years, Michael Brownlee and Lynnette-Marie Hanthorn have pioneered relocalization in Boulder County, Colorado. Their latest project is the Boulder County EAT LOCAL! Week, August 28 through September 4. Last week I caught up with Michael who generously gave an hour out of his packed schedule to talk about the desperate need for promoting local food and farming in our communities.

CB: So Michael, as a subscriber to Truth to Power’s Daily News Digest, I know that every day you see the headlines regarding skyrocketing food prices. Can you say a bit about why you think this is happening?

MB: Well, I think what we’re seeing with food prices, with spot shortages and commodities in various places around the world is just the beginning of a much larger situation. Fundamentally, what’s happening is that as the cost of fossil fuels goes up, then the whole agricultural production system is affected because the whole system is dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers for fuel, pesticides, and herbicides. The cost of all of these is going up, and we’re just now reaching the point where, as the era of cheap fossil fuels ends, and as fossil fuels continue to become increasingly expensive, the entire global industrial agricultural system is going to collapse. We are seeing the very beginnings of that right now, and for most people, especially here in America, it seems very remote, but it will have tremendous impact here in this country within the next two or three years.

CB: What would you say to people who would argue that actually the price of oil has gone down and doesn’t seem to be rising much?

MB: Well, the price of oil fluctuates a lot, but the trajectory is steadily upward. Since we’ve reached the point on the planet where we’re beyond Peak Oil, that is, we’ve burned more than half the oil that’s on the planet, it is inevitable that oil from here on out will be harder to get out of the ground and more and more expensive. This is not a bullet we can dodge.

CB: Currently Transition Colorado is working very hard at finalizing your first Eat Local Campaign for Boulder County. You have the Boulder County Commissioners on board and the Boulder City Council as well. Transition Colorado could have chosen to focus on a number of other issues this year. Why is this event so urgent, in your opinion, and what do you hope to accomplish by organizing it?

MB: As we’ve been emphasizing the need for relocalization and our community’s needing to be able to meet our most essential needs locally instead of being dependent on globalized systems, we’ve seen that the area where we are most vulnerable here in Boulder County is food. At the moment we’re spending about $700 million a year on food. From all that we can tell from the limited data that’s available, less than 1% of that is being spent on food being grown in Boulder County. That’s a tiny, tiny amount. So currently, our foodshed, which is kind of like a watershed, stretches across the globe. We’re bringing in food from China, South America, Europe, and as the industrial agricultural system begins to fail, we have no choice but to shrink our foodshed to be much, much more local. And it looks like we don’t have much time to do that. The impact on industrial agriculture will begin to unfold within the next two to three years, so we need to quickly rebuild local food and farming.

Fortunately, there has been a tremendous amount of work done by people like Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Joel Salatin—people who have been working on these issues for years and have helped to educate millions and millions of people about the importance of local, organic food. So there’s a great readiness and a rising demand for locally grown, organic food. So what that means is that this is an area where we can have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time. It’s not everything that we need to do in terms of relocalization, but it is maybe the most important thing.

There are lots of reasons for this besides needing to meet our food needs locally. There’s a benefit to health that comes from local, fresh, organic food. One of the most important but perhaps least recognized issues in the transitioning from an industrial, fossil fuels agricultural system to a localized organic system is that the latter will greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We’re beginning to understand now that the way we grow and process our food, the way we ship it-all of that, contributes about 31% to our greenhouse gas emission. So here in Boulder, while there’s a lot of effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through pretty advanced climate action plans, there is no discussion of the impact of food and farming and greenhouse gas emission. So this is one area where we can make a huge difference in a very short period of time. And since no one else locally is taking that issue on, we will and we are because we must. This is also an area where Transition initiatives around the country can demonstrate leadership.

CB: This leads me to ask the next question which is: What should individuals be doing in terms of creating their own food security? And what should neighborhoods and communities be doing to create food security for their place?

MB: For a long time now we’ve been saying that it’s a good idea for everyone to learn to grow at least some of their own food. This is something that everyone can do, no matter where they live, even if they live in a high-rise apartment building. They can grow at least some of their food. Initially it’s not so much about how much food they might each produce, but it’s about learning the skills. It’s about reconnecting with the natural processes and cycles of life and beginning to understand soil, how to build it and restore it. These are skills we have become very disconnected from and that will be essential for all of us in the future.

So we think that those kinds of skills are going to be more important to food security than storing up lots of food. We can always grow food. As we’re compelled increasingly to eat seasonally again, we’re going to have to learn how to preserve food from harvest so that we can consume it during the winter months. So we get to learn all those things like canning, drying food—ways that we can feed ourselves year-round. We’ve gotten so accustomed to being able to eat whatever we want anytime we want it. We just go to the grocery store. We’ve become totally dependent on this system, and we’ve lost those basic skills. That’s the more real aspect of food security.

On a neighborhood level, I think one of the most important things we can do is to organize as neighbors to support each other. A lot of people can’t have their own gardens. They might be able to have a window box garden or some tomato plants on their porch, but they can’t really produce much. But community gardens can easily be organized. Again, it’s not so much about the amount that’s grown, but rather about the process of people working together and rebuilding those fundamental connections between people. Those kinds of connections have been at the heart of civilization from the beginning, and they have eroded away the last two hundred years or so.

On a broader level within a local food shed, let’s say an area of a couple hundred miles or so, such as in Boulder County, we need to focus collectively on greatly increasing food production. 75% of our agricultural land here in Boulder County is being used either for pasture land for animals or to grow crops to feed animals. We need to be using much more of that land to grow food for our own people. Agriculture has gotten focused over the last century on exporting commodity crops to other countries and has totally lost site of the need to feed our own people. We need to reverse that priority and make the purpose of local farming and the whole food system to feed our own people first, then export surplus once those local needs have been met. It’s a huge transition we have to go through, but that’s ultimately where our food security will come from.

CB: One of the presentations you frequently do is entitled “The Extent of Our Predicament”. In a few words, what is the extent of our predicament, and what should we be doing to deal with that predicament?

MB: First of all, what inspired me to talk about this is Gus Speth’s book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability where he concludes that we will never do what is necessary until we understand the full extent of our predicament. So I’ve been speaking more and more about our predicament in terms of first of all, the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels—the reality that we will never be able to replace the amount of energy we’re burning in fossil fuels today and that we will have no choice but to dramatically reduce our energy consumption. That’s the first realization that we have to come to.

The second is that climate change is going to change the face of the planet and will certainly change the trajectory of the human presence on the planet, and this will happen much more quickly and much more painfully than almost any of us is willing to think about. But we need to begin. Primarily because of our use of fossil fuels and our profligate burning of fossil fuels, we’ve unleashed profound changes in our climate that are probably going to give us the equivalent of a species near-death experience. The near-death experiences for many individuals will be a profound wake up call and will produce a shift from an aimless, dissipated, wasted life to a focus on purpose and service. Climate change is likely to be affording us as a species, that kind of opportunity.

The third aspect of our predicament is the reality is that our economic system will not recover but will go into a steeper decline, eventually plunging into an irreversible global depression that will last beyond our lifetimes. Of course, it’s because our entire global economic system has been based on cheap fossil fuels and the American dollar. The whole system now is beginning to collapse. So we need to understand that the global systems on which we’ve come to depend are already failing, and they will fail dramatically in the future. So we have to rebuild from the ground up our capacity to live well, to live meaningfully, in a healthy and productive manner on this planet.

CB: Michael you often speak of the “evolutionary threshold” on which humanity stands in the present moment. What do you mean by this?

MB: I think that where we are as a species and what gives me hope perhaps, is the realization that we are a very young species in the universe. We are living in a time where we are beginning to emerge from our species adolescence into adulthood. It’s not a very comfortable time just as is often the case for adolescents when they begin to shift into early adulthood, but that’s what’s up for us, and as we shift into adulthood, we’ll have to live very, very differently. But seeing it that way is very good news because it means that as a species it means that we’re not doomed, we’re not fatally flawed—it just means that it’s time for us to grow up together. Of course, in order to do that, we’re going to have to make some pretty significant changes. We’re going to have to put behind us our childish way of living, our very selfish way of living, but we certainly have an opportunity to begin to realize the potential and destiny of the human species.

There’s no guarantee that we’ll make this transition. In fact, there are a lot of reasons to doubt that we’ll be able to do this. In our adolescence, the problems we’ve created for ourselves are so overwhelming that if we don’t make the course correction very quickly, the window of opportunity will have passed, and we will not survive. But right now, the window is still open, and if enough people can wake up to our predicament and put into place the basic processes and structures that will enable what’s best about the human species—what’s the most important, what’s the most precious about our species in order to survive beyond this transition, then ultimately humanity will fulfill its purpose and destiny.

CB: Thank you Michael for taking this time to talk about the crucial role of local food and farming. For readers in Boulder County, please attend the Eat Local Campaign. For readers elsewhere, check out the EAT LOCAL!l website and think about how you might implement a local food and farming campaign in your place.

In his time as the UN’s chief climate negotiator, Yvo de Boer has had a simple take on his job. It is to cajole 192 nations into agreeing to a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that will deliver what those countries say they want — a world in which global warming is kept below 2 degrees Celsius. That is what scientists say is necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. It requires, as a down-payment, that industrialized countries cut their emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, by 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels within the next decade and that by 2020 global emissions will have also peaked and begun to decline.

But in the final weeks before he gives up the job at the end of June, de Boer is pessimistic that it will happen. The failure of talks in Copenhagen last December leaves him concluding that nations are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve their stated goal. “As things stand now, we will not be able to halt the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions in the next 10 years,” he told delegates during resumed negotiations in Bonn early this month. The dapper Dutch diplomat — who has a passion for his cause that left him shedding tears on stage three years ago in Bali — said in Bonn: “The 2-degree world is in danger.”

His successor, Costa Rican ambassador Christiana Figueres, is a cooler customer. In low-profile briefings in Bonn, she declared: “It is not my mandate to set objectives. There is a process underway of rebuilding trust.”

The contrasting characters — one the advocate in a diplomat’s suit, the other a handbag-wielding conciliator — personify an important change going on in the climate talks after Copenhagen. Alarmed by the divides that opened up in the Danish capital, the talk now among climate negotiators is of healing rifts and finding common ground. Healing the climate is suddenly taking second place.

For three years negotiators tried to draw up a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012. They wanted to combine new, tougher targets that finally included the U.S. with the legally binding language of the Kyoto deal. That was the task they set themselves in Bali in 2007 and expected to conclude in Copenhagen.

But, after the Copenhagen failure, that is all unravelling. What looks likely to emerge at talks in South Africa at the end of 2011 — the new target date for a completed deal — is a consensual accord. One with promises of emissions cuts rather than fixed enforceable commitments. And one, as de Boer tirelessly pointed out in Bonn, shorn of its scientific umbilical cord.

Rather than the 25 to 40 percent cut that science says is necessary, developed nations have pledged cuts that work out, according to de Boer’s secretariat, at a total of 12 to 19 percent – less than half as much. “Copenhagen has created conditions which make it probable its own target will not be met,” says Alex Evans of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, author of an upcoming history of the geopolitics of climate negotiations.

The only visible outcome of the Copenhagen talks was the Copenhagen Accord. This hastily-created agreement between 25 leading nations, headed by the U.S. and China, brought uproar to the end of the Copenhagen conference. Intended to break a negotiating logjam, it only created further bad feeling.

Its inadequacies are plain. While it promised to deliver a maximum warming of 2 degrees, it did not include the means, since it simply invited nations to submit non-binding commitments. While including long-term goals for cutting emissions in 40 years, it avoided a commitment to peaking global emissions before 2020. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesabout the economics of a post-Copenhagen environment, Yale economist William Nordhaus says: “It is unlikely that the Copenhagen temperature goal will be attained even if countries meet their ambitious stated objectives under the Copenhagen Accord.”

Nonetheless, the terms of the accord are now being written into a new UN negotiating text that will form the basis of negotiations over the next 18 months. Some, particularly European governments, hoped at the time that the accord could eventually be adopted with legally binding teeth. But even that now looks unlikely, say negotiators. In talks in Bonn this month, the European Union was the only group actively supporting legally binding targets. As one of EU delegate told me: “We are still in favor of a new Kyoto Protocol, but we cannot do it alone.”

The extent of the climb-down now underway is evident in the pledges made in Copenhagen. China, for instance, said it would reduce the “carbon intensity” of its economy by 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. It sounds impressive. But China has one of the most carbon-intensive economies on the planet — and the improvement amounts to nothing more than business as usual. It has been making improvements at a similar rate since 2005.

In the U.S., the Obama administration’s emissions promises depend on legislation. Passing a climate bill was a top priority for Obama in his early days. He wanted completion in time for Copenhagen. But legislation remains mired on Capitol Hill, and even optimists do not expect any outcome before 2012. Nordhaus says: “Continued delay in adoption of climate-change policies by the United States may lead to a domino effect in which other countries follow the U.S. inaction.”

In any event, the U.S., which never signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, has irritated those countries that did sign on by wanting to have a baseline of 2005 for its own emissions in any new deal — effectively writing off its 16 percent emissions growth between 1990 and 2005.

And Canada, which did sign on to Kyoto but has taken few steps to meet its targets, says what is good enough for the U.S. has to be good enough for Canada, too. Many say it will be impossible to hold any country to account for failing to meet its Kyoto targets.

The European Union, which has always seen itself in the vanguard of action on climate change, is also back-peddling. It recently announced that even though new analysis suggested that it would be cheaper than anticipated to cut its emissions by 30 percent by 2020, its plans to do so had been put on hold.

And there is worse. Many of the pledges currently on offer are likely to be undermined by huge loopholes in existing and proposed rules for industrialized countries. Three topics loom large: “hot air,” international transport, and carbon emissions from forests.

“Hot air” is insider jargon for the emissions permits handed over to former Soviet nations that did not need them because their industries collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The majority are owned by Russia and the Ukraine, who are likely to hold unused permits to emit up to 10 billion tons of CO2 at the end of 2012. They want to bank them — and sell them to other nations to offset their own emissions in subsequent years. If the countries of the European Union bought those permits, they would be enough to achieve the entire 20 percent emissions reductions the EU has promised, right through to 2020.

Then there are loopholes that allow emissions from forestry to escape carbon accounting. Again, they are huge. New Zealand has met its Kyoto targets by planting commercial forests and claiming them as a carbon sink. Fair enough. But under current rules, according to Simon Terry of the Sustainability Council of New Zealand, the country will not have to account for the 90 million tons of carbon emissions that will be produced when those forests are logged in the 2020s. Russia says it will reduce its commitment to cuts from 25 percent to 15 percent if a loophole concerning how it accounts for its forest carbon is removed. Canada and Austria have similar issues for partial carbon accounting.

Talks on bringing emissions from international shipping and aircraft within the rules, deemed essential before Copenhagen, formed no part of the Copenhagen Accord and seem no nearer to resolution than in Kyoto 13 years ago.

Under de Boer, such loopholes were to be closed. In the new diplomacy, they seem positively to be encouraged as a way of easing negotiating deadlocks. Russia, for instance, is likely to get its way. Together, the loopholes could reduce the promised cuts in developed countries’ emissions from 12 to 19 percent to somewhere between a 2 percent cut and a 2 percent increase, according to a European Union study published in March.

How will this play out for the planet? Nordhaus has looked at the implications of five possible scenarios. They range from business as usual, through various versions of a deal based on the Copenhagen Accord, to a policy based on a strict 2 degree C limit on warming.

Business as usual sees atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at almost three times pre-industrial levels by 2100, putting the world on a path to peak warming of a terrifying 6.7 degrees C — 12 degrees F. The existing Copenhagen Accord proposals would see eventual warming of more than 4 degrees C, while a deal in which developing countries eventually adopted Western-style emissions limits would still likely cap warming at nearer 3 degrees C than two.

As the diplomatic dance over a deal on climate blunders on — looking ever more like the protracted Doha talks over a world trade deal — the chances of meeting the 2-degree challenge posed by scientists look increasingly remote.

Talks in Bonn ended early so delegates could head off to their hotel rooms to watch the World Cup. In the language of soccer, the result in Bonn was: Diplomats 3, Climate nil.

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren,
to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over,
how it is that we live forever.

~ Mary Oliver ~

In some spiritual and psychological circles we often hear unambiguous proscriptions against the emotion of anger. However, in many indigenous traditions, anger is not experienced with the same suspicion one finds in Western psycho-spiritual circles. While ancient teachings regarding anger do not condone aggression, they do not unequivocally assume that feeling the emotion of anger will lead to hostility or violence. In fact, they tend to revere anger as an innate human emotion which may be utilized on behalf of the earth community without inflicting harm. Ancient teachings often include practices for “uploading” the raw emotion of anger to higher chakras or physiological energy centers on behalf of preserving boundaries or protecting the innocent-both of which are characteristics of the non-aggressive warrior.

Anger is one of the Five Stages of Grief articulated by the death and dying researcher, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. As I noted in Sacred Demise, in the context of those stages, anger shows up in reaction to a loss. First we feel shock and denial, then move into anger which may include frustration, anxiety, irritation, embarrassment, and shame. Subsequently, we move into depression and grief, followed by bargaining, then acceptance and re-investment in our lives. As Kubler-Ross emphasizes, none of the stages are neatly detached from the others. We tend to move through them fluidly, with each stage somewhat blurring into the next stage or containing remnants of the last one.

In the process of preparing emotionally to navigate the coming chaos, it is crucial to examine each stage of grief, to note where we have been in the process, to look at where we are in the moment, and to honor each emotion along the way. Many people today are stuck in anger because they have not allowed themselves to move through it into mindful grieving. In fact, I believe that the United States, and many nations throughout the world are currently mired in anger. In 2009, author and spiritual teacher Caroline Myss, stated in her article “An Epidemic of Global Anger“:

“We are a community of nations on fire with anger. And we are getting angrier by the day. Whether we look at the increase in uprisings occurring around the world or at the escalating tension brewing in America, what is becoming more apparent is that we are witnessing a rapidly increasing rate of global anger, so much so that it qualifies as an epidemic.”

Many Americans are enraged at their government. Some who have been researching the demise of the current paradigm and understand the self-destructive aspects of corporate capitalism, the limits of economic growth, and the unsustainability of a civilization dependent on fossil fuels feel angry because their leaders refuse to acknowledge what is so. As their minds have been awakened, so have their emotions, and anger has been part of the process. But as they have come to understand that industrial civilization itself is collapsing, they are likely to have stopped wanting to repair and improve it and have begun to entertain a larger picture of how they could join with allies in constructing a new paradigm and a new culture.

It is likely that for these individuals, anger metamorphosed into deep grief or despair as a feeling of powerlessness to “fix” civilization set in. Implicit in the emotion of anger is the sense that something can or must be done to alter the that has evoked anger. As one comes to understand the inevitability of the unraveling of industrial civilization and the futility of attempting to prevent it, one may in fact experience a sense of relief that collapse is beyond control and proceeds in its own way, in its own time. One grasps that our mandate as a species is to move with the demise, not against it, and find within the unraveling a greater purpose than the one civilization has offered, proceeding with the work we came here to do. At that point, even though we may carry some residue of denial or anger, and even though our willingness to see what is so puts us directly in the path of deep grief, the embrace of our purpose and our role in the collapse process, is in itself a re-investment in our lives and the well being of the earth community.

However, the individuals I have just been describing do not comprise the vast majority of those in the United States or the world who are fixated in anger because they are also fixated in denial. One cannot move through the Five Stages of Grief if one does not move beyond denial. Refusing to see what is so guarantees that the journey through the stages will not occur. So whether one is an enraged Muslim suicide bomber or a vitriolic white, middle class Tea Party enthusiast, one’s emotional state and behavior belie an inordinately diminished perspective of reality, resulting in a desperate need for vituperative scapegoating. In other words, fixation in anger.

The Mary Oliver poem above about loving the world which in part means reveling in the sensual delight of nature which means becoming “accustomed to savoring that which is momentous, concealed within bare bones simplicity.” It also means a profound gratitude which the poem describes as “mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here.” The world has given us stupendous gifts which Oliver says causes her to “stand still and learn to be astonished.”

But does our gratitude for the world mean that we should never be angry about the injustice or self and eco-destruction its inhabitants have perpetrated upon each other and the earth community? Certainly not, but being deeply connected with our purpose in the world provides perspective that buoys us and allows us to keep moving forward when the magnetic pull to become fixated in anger may feel irresistible.

When we are intimately familiar with our purpose, we understand that the world is not paradise, it is not a vacation resort, and it is not a place to which we have come to live in perpetual bliss. Rather, the world is comprised of both the magnificent wonderment and extraordinary beauty depicted by Mary Oliver as well as the horrors engineered by a species about to become successful in its incalculable attempts to commit suicide.

Author and spiritual teacher, Marshall Vian Summers, writes in his book Greater Community Spirituality:

Be without judgment of the world. If the world were a perfect place, you would not need to come here. If the world were a place that functioned harmoniously, without friction or conflict, this would not be the place for you….The world is your place to work and to give. Its pleasures are small but real. Its pains and difficulties are great. The world cannot give you what you seek, for what you seek you have brought with you from beyond the world.

That which we have brought with us from beyond is something greater than our personality or human ego. Summers refers to it as Knowledge, and others use terms like the sacred, spirit, the Self, the divine within. However we choose to name that part of ourselves, it comprises our core. I believe that the more intimately familiar we are with it, the less we expect from the world, and the more we are willing to serve the world in order to imbue it with the sacred. Loving the world, as Oliver names it, is not about sentimental emotion, but about a commitment to the work we came here to do which by definition, serves the earth community.

The mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme, in his extraordinary lecture series, “The Powers of The Universe,” clearly articulates this concept. Cataclysm, he notes, is one of the inherent powers of the universe, and “it is currently happening on our planet. The choice before us is whether we will participate consciously.” Participating means that “as all the structures that are destroying the earth are collapsing, they are releasing us into the essential nature of who we are.” While this awareness does not remove our anger or our anguish, it brings us face to face with the deeper meaning of the collapse of industrial civilization and our purpose in it.

I believe that the world of the future will be a chaotic world which will be, among other things, an angry world, especially in the initial stages of the demise of the current civilization. In a December, 2009 article “America The Traumatized”, Adele Stan argues that a series of events that occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century have made us a PTSD nation–and that was before the BP oil disaster of 2010. Until we understand trauma and post-traumatic stress, the need to blame the traumatizing event or person(s) who inflicted it is exceedingly compelling. When we do grasp the magnitude of trauma and its consequences, we come to understand how futile is our rage in the face of an inundation of horror.

I write these words more than two months after the BP Gulf of Mexico cataclysm. Am I angry as I witness the horror? Am I enraged at the lies of BP with regard to its prior knowledge regarding the safety of the Deepwater Horizon rig? Am I livid when I hear the stories of people who tried to warn the corporation that its bypassing of standard international safety regulations would result in catastrophe? Does white hot rage pulse through my body as I witness BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, taking a yachting trip and begging to “get his life back” as the entire world lays the blame for this debacle at his door and as the entire ecosystem is now in the path of the destruction visited upon it by a multitude of corporations and CEO’s of BP’s and Tony Hayward’s ilk? Am I incensed when I see millions of people immersed in an epic blame-fest, pointing fingers and mouthing incessant sentences beginning with “they shoulda, coulda, woulda”?

The answer to all of those questions is a resounding “yes”, and from the moment the catastrophe was first made public, I realized the probable scope of it, and I saw the word t-r-a-u-m-a writ large all over it. What purpose at this point will my anger serve? How could I be seduced by the inherent assumption in my anger that the there is a possibility that the situation can be remedied? In my opinion, the BP oil disaster of 2010 is nothing less than 100 Hurricane Katrinas in slow motion. It is an unfathomable game-changer-perhaps the tipping point in humanity’s destruction of this planet. As I witness countless animals dripping and dying from disgusting quantities of crude oil resembling raw sewage suffocating their bodies; as I consider that perhaps 40-50% of the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico will soon be covered with petroleum; as I reflect on the spread of the spill into other oceans and the death of plankton and the ultimate devastation of the food chain; as I consider the economic devastation of a section of the country that comprises about 20 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, and as I speculate that perhaps the entire Gulf Coast region may become uninhabitable, I see, hear, and feel nothing but trauma. Furthermore, if the entire population of the United States were not already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, it is now.

Yet what I have personally discovered about my anger over the years is neither that I shouldn’t have anger or that I should discharge it whenever I feel like it, but rather, to approach my anger mindfully. A stellar article by Holistic Psychologist, Jennifer Franklin, entitled “Mindfulness In Practice: Anger Management” defines mindfulness this way: “To be mindful is to be conscious, more awake, more informed about how one lives one’s life.

Being more mindful, therefore, allows us to make more awake or informed choices in every moment. Our words and actions would be more mindful if we were more awake or conscious in those moments in which when we choose them.” According to psychotherapist Richard Pfeiffer, quoted in the article, anger is a neurological response process that essentially prepares us to fight or flee.

We have many options for creating more mindfulness within ourselves. Meditation is, of course, one of the principal tools for strengthening mindfulness, even if the meditation is not the specific technique called “mindfulness meditation.” It is important to remember that mindfulness isn’t so much about becoming mindful of the world around us, although that generally accrues from a meditation practice, but rather, mindfulness is about being mindful of ourselves. It helps us become centered observers of our own process.

For example, the Dr. Franklin’s article offers the classic example of road rage and how it can be handled mindfully instead of reactively:

When you exercise mindfulness, you exercise non-reactivity or the capacity to stay centered, grounded, and unshaken in response to a stimulus. Now, don’t confuse non-reactivity with non-feeling. Let’s use road rage as an example. You’re driving, and someone cuts you off, and in response to being cut off you flip the driver the bird. You’ve just behaved reactively.

Contrast that with what non-reactivity would look like in that scenario: You are cut off by the driver, and rather than focusing your attention on the event itself, you focus it on you. You focus it on the sensations you are feeling in your body, most likely a fast heart rate, perhaps a tightness in the chest, or constricted breathing. Then you shift your attention to your breathing, sending the breath into the parts of your body that are feeling the anger-your heart, your chest-wherever it is for you. In the time it took you to do this exercise, you never even thought about flipping the driver the bird because you were too busy focusing on your reaction; that driver has probably gone on his or her merry way by now. This is non-reactivity.

Non-reactivity allows us to feel all of our feelings but not react to them. We feel them until we organically feel something else or until we decide mindfully, with awareness and choicefulness, that either we want to focus on something else or we want to act.

As I sit with the BP disaster, other emotions course through my body-deep, deep grief; fear, despair, and helplessness, and I have to wonder about the emotions of the earth itself. And since I believe that Gaia is a living, breathing organism, I must correct my use of “the earth itself” and state unequivocally that I believe she must be very, very angry. Within the past two years prior to the BP disaster, we have witnessed what many believe is an unprecedented number of natural disasters. Although officials from the U.S. Geological Survey insist that the number of earthquakes has not increased in recent years, many question that conclusion. Is Gaia “working through” her Five Stages of Grief? And if she is angry, what might she do next?

Perhaps those questions feel too anthropocentric to the reader, so I refer to the natural process of homeostasis which is “the ability of a system or living organism to adjust its internal environment to maintain a stable equilibrium.” When a system is out of balance, some internal process attempts to adjust the imbalance and return it to a state of balanced functioning.

In a 2008 interview with C-Realm Podcast, Albert Bartlett, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of The Essential Exponential for Our Planet, stated, regarding population and unlimited growth, “If we don’t stop it now, then Nature will stop it through a big die-off.” Bartlett argues that population and growth spell annihilation for the planet if humans do not radically change their ways of occupying our planet.

One might argue that if Bartlett’s theory is so, it is all a matter of simple physics and that speaking of earth’s anger is pure anthropocentrism. Yet the distinguished doctor of medicine and biophysics, James Lovelock, who penned the book The Revenge of Gaia, argues in that work, as he does in many places, that humans have created out-of-control global warming and climate change which are now wreaking revenge on our species. Lovelock too may be indulging in rampant anthropocentrism, but if the earth itself has conscious self-awareness, both Bartlett and Lovelock may be onto something.

While we cannot validate with certainty earth’s anger, we can certainly attest to our own in the face of humanity’s devastation of the ecosystem. And while I do not concur with some in the field of psychology who argue that anger isn’t really a fundamental human emotion but a kind of mask for other feelings such as fear and grief, I do believe that in the case of our anger toward members of our species who are committing ecological suicide, it is crucial that we connect with our grief and terror regarding the state of the planet and the dire consequences of the project of industrial civilization which we are now beginning to experience.

In the short term, anger may be useful in motivating us to act-to prepare for the coming chaos, to help raise the awareness of others, and to inspire others to prepare, but if we allow ourselves to fully grasp the calamitous reality of the future into which we are moving, I believe that our anger will soon be eclipsed by fear, grief, and despair. My forthcoming book, Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Toolkit for Inner Transition, provides an extensive array of options for utilizing all emotions we might encounter in a world unraveling in order to sustain and protect ourselves.

Among the myriad reactions I hear to the BP disaster from the folks with whom I interact, the one that overshadows all others is anguish. We hold hands across the sand and bodies of water, we pray, and we talk to our friends, but fundamentally, we are absolutely powerless to remedy or reverse what occurred on April 20. We knew our planet was in a state of full-blown collapse, but we didn’t expect it to unfold this way. As one friend recently said to me, “It’s just a matter of time now.” I could have said, “Until what?” but I long ago learned not to ask questions I already know the answer to. My friend and I could just as well have been standing on the deck of the Titanic having the same conversation.

In an angry, chaotic world, it will be important for us to read the deeper emotions that underlie the rage we are likely to see erupting in society and in our communities. We will need to fortify ourselves emotionally and logistically from the collateral damage that myriad wounded-animal outbursts from others could inflict upon us, and even more importantly, not allow our egos to succumb to the momentary pleasure our own indulgence in rage might afford. At the same time we validate the rage our fellow humans feel, our compassion must penetrate the vitriol and understand the shipwreck that any human soul might become after years of sailing the waters of dogged denial and unwarranted faith in the American dream. If you are reading these words, it is likely that you have awakened from the dream or are in the process of doing so. Millions more never have and never will. How will we hold all of our emotions in the face of the rage their sense of betrayal will evoke in them? How will we go on loving the world?

Last night’s presidential speech on the Gulf oil spill had been pre-billed by the Washington Post as Barack Obama’s “Jimmy Carter moment.” But reading any of Carter’s speeches (a good one to start with is that of April 18, 1977) side by side with last night’s bromide is an invitation to nostalgia and bitter disappointment.

President Obama offered up one promising paragraph:

“For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked—not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.”

It sounds for all the world as though the President is about to unleash a grand program on the scale of the New Deal—an energy Moon Shot, a rousing call-to-arms reminiscent of December 8, 1941. But this is what follows:

“So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party—as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development—and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development. All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny—our determination to fight for the America we want for our children, even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how to get there, we know we’ll get there.”

Translation: “I don’t have a clue what to do; but, if anyone else has some good ideas, I’m all ears.”

Look: I want Obama to succeed; I want it earnestly, even desperately. And so I hate to be critical. It’s true that we’ve all got to work together to solve our energy crisis, and that means rising above partisanship. But leadership is sorely needed here, and leaders must set definite goals.

Jimmy Carter at least had a plan. He proposed lofty objectives and investments: targeted reductions in oil imports, an energy security corporation, a solar bank. In contrast, Obama’s strategy seems to be to avoid specifics while insisting that we Americans will somehow overcome our oil dependency because . . . well, because we’re Americans. We’ve gotten through other scrapes throughout our history as a nation, so why not this one? “I demand action,” the President seems to be saying, “but I’m unwilling to say what that action should be.”

Yes, we Americans have risen to meet previous challenges. The problem is, we haven’t been doing so well in dealing with the energy crisis, which has been going on for at least forty years—since 1970, when U.S. oil production peaked and began declining. Despite complaints, exhortations, and hand-wringing from both Democratic and Republican administrations, very little has actually been accomplished. America continues to import more oil, and to burn enormous amounts of coal and natural gas—and the monetary, geopolitical, and environmental prices we pay for these depleting fuels just keep escalating. Mr. Obama seems to say that now something has changed, but it would be nice to know what, and why, in a lot more detail.

The reality is that nothing significant has been done to deal with our energy crisis because tackling it will require fundamental changes to our economy—to our transport and food systems, even to our financial institutions. Until we are willing to honestly face the fact that an “American dream” based on ever increasing rates of consumption of non-renewable resources is a dead end, and that we will have to dramatically cut back on energy usage in order to make a transition away from fossil fuel dependency, all discussion about renewable energy, efficiency standards, and energy research is fairly pointless.

Call it the Carter Curse. Ever since the great peanut farmer-President scolded the American people about the need to reduce consumption in his famous series of cardigan-clad homilies, leaders have shied away both from telling the American people the truth about just how dire our energy dilemma really is, and from proposing any remedies powerful enough to make a difference. Instead we get only whimpers about our “addiction to oil” and timid suggestions to raise fuel economy standards another notch. It is assumed that if any President actually told it like it is—the way Carter did—he or she would suffer the same fate. Carter’s plan, after all, was ignored by Congress and ridiculed by candidate Ronald Reagan, who trounced Carter in the 1980 election.

Maybe the Carter Curse is real. Perhaps straight talk about energy is political suicide. But if nobody at least tries—if no one has the courage to make specific proposals that are commensurate with the scale of the challenge that faces us—then the political survival of the current office holder is essentially irrelevant. If no one is willing to confront the Carter Curse head on, then in effect we face a failure of our political system that will also ensure a failure of our economic system, our food system, and our transport system.

I keep hoping that’s not the case, but hope needs to be based on evidence from time to time, and I’m not seeing any.

So Chris, introduce yourself and the Crash Course to any Transition Culture readers unfamiliar with your work.

My name is Chris Martenson and I’m the creator of something known as the Crash Course which is an online tutorial that explores the connections between the economy, energy and the environment. I’m a father of three children, a former scientist – toxicology was my training but I was a research scientist. I then went on and got an MBA and spent about a decade in the corporate world, corporate finance and various strategic management finance positions, terminating in a position where I was vice president in a company doing high level consulting to the life sciences industry, which is where I was when I stumbled across the information that is now enshrined in the Crash Course and that changed my life forever.

If you had to explain the Crash Course to somebody in a lift for three minutes, how would you encapsulate the essence of the Crash Course?

I would say that there’s an amazingly high chance that there’s going to be an enormous change in our future. The economy is the way in which we organise ourselves, it’s how we get things done, it’s the living, breathing creature that surrounds our daily lives and so we have a commanding interest in its health and well-being – certainly the events of 2008 have really brought that to the forefront of people. But the economy doesn’t exist by itself – it’s intimately connected to, and feeds upon resources that come out of the earth, human resources, all kinds of resources.

I connect the economic ‘e’ to another ‘e’, which is energy. There’s enough information out there around the concept that we might be nearing peak energy. Peak oil in particular – people owe it to themselves to take a good, hard look at that particular story. Then I extended into the environment, that being the third ‘e’. There I’m really looking at resources, all kinds of resources – phosphorous, copper, uranium or any of the other resources that we get from the earth. When we put all three of these ‘e’s into one spot, it seems very likely that the ways in which things have been working up until now is not the same way things will continue to work.

It’s a story of change, it’s a story of a sharp corner in the road, potentially, but it’s really ultimately a story that at first might look disturbing, or potentially even depressing to some people, ultimately is a story about the options and opportunities we have to take control, to seize the power back in our lives, to be responsible for how our personal, individual and community futures turn out.

Chris, I know that the Crash Course and your thinking has been evolving. Since you first put the Crash Course online, are there things you’ve fundamentally changed your views on?

I think one of the things that’s shifted very dramatically for me is thinking about what responses make sense, given the information in the course. For me, when I first started on this journey, it occurred to me that there were a lot of personal changes I had to make in my life, and I made those. When I say ‘my life’, this is my wife and my family – we made some very profound changes in our individual lives. But along that path, which has been about 5 years for us now, we discovered the power of community and the importance of community.

There are some individual things everybody should do – my approach is to think that if you want a strong nation, you need strong individual provinces or states, and if you want a strong states you need strong cities, and if you want strong cities you need strong communities, and if you want strong communities you need strong individuals. So that’s the path I say. There are some changes that can be made in our lives that really apply to us as individuals, but the most important ones for us, particularly in the last couple of years, have been in the importance of community and really thinking about how we want to approach this next ten years and really coming to the conclusion that for us, in my family, we want to approach it with joy, excitement, as much happiness as we properly can.

We are where we are, whatever’s going to unfold that’s out of my control will unfold, but of the things I can control, there’s no reason to do those from anything than the position of excitement. I really truly think there are some very exciting times coming, maybe some hard times as well. My learning has been that in order to have these changes not of the disrupting, hard sort – in order to have them be of the exciting sort, that’s all about community. I guess that word means different things to different people, but to me, that means strong, inter-dependent relationship with the people around me on my street, in my town, with the people I know.

So does that mean you might make some changes to chapter 20 of the Crash Course as it’s currently up there, on the web?

You know, my wife and I have been in this together and we hold seminars. The Crash Course is a prerequisite for people coming to our seminars, because we don’t want to spend another minute talking about it. The Crash Course is a big step into the left side of the brain, it has all the information there, it can present a very compelling case that something needs to be done, that there’s a sense of urgency that perhaps the way things used to work is not how we’re going to work going forward. That would be a bad strategy to plan on that sort of future.

When we do the seminars however, we step over into the right side of the brain and we talk about what are the implications of this material. There might be some practical implications, and we might spend a lot of time with some people talking about those; that there might be physical implications in terms of where do I live, where does my food come from, what are the things I can start to engage with on that front. But there are emotional implications as well. A lot of this material confronted beliefs, very powerfully held beliefs, beliefs like, ‘my country’s number one’, or ‘we’ve always made it through crises before because we’ve kept an optimistic view.’

Or beliefs about money and how it is created. So when those beliefs are confronted, that creates a lot of emotional turmoil. And in many cases we’ve found it really does follow the model that Kubhler-Ross laid down, in terms of the five stages of grief, although we add another stage or two in there because they seem to be stages that people enter when they first encounter this material.

In the seminars, a really important part for people is how you can identify where someone is on that spectrum, from denial at one end to acceptance at the other. And how to talk to people who are not where you are on that spectrum, so if I’m in a position of anger, where I was a few years ago, I found that I could talk to angry people and we’d have a little angry get together and we’d be preaching to the choir with each other. Once I learnt that my intentions to be as effective as I can, to communicate this information – and it can be really challenging, not just intellectually, but emotionally challenging – I found that once I lost my attachment to needing people to be where I was with the material, I became a lot more effective.

So we have a whole part on how to talk to friends, loved ones, reluctant partners, spouses, about what can be a really challenging amount of material. So instead of going back and reworking chapter 20 of the crash course, our intent is to build off all this other material that we’ve got that really just extends and builds off it, and say, ‘okay, we’ve got the left side of the brain, now let’s talk about the other side of things’.

It’d be good, following on from that, to look at how you prepared the Crash Course. I remember you saying that you had very deliberately gone through it, stripping out things which were questions of opinion and sticking to facts, so as to make it as hard as possible for people to say, ‘I’m not going to listen to that at all’. But it sounds like in your seminars, you’re doing almost the opposite there from that process you did with the crash course.

The similarity between the two pieces is that we’re still taking the complicated information, and we’re putting some structure around it and we’re unpacking it and taking a good careful look at it. You mentioned the piece which is very important, which does show up in the second part of the seminar as well, it’s in the first crash course, which is differentiating between fact and opinion and belief. There are good facts and flakey, murkey facts and we spend some time talking about the difference between the two. Opinions are generated off of facts and they tend to be conclusions.

Beliefs exist at the sub-conscious level, they’re actually what cause us to take actions or not take action. The point of everything, the one thing that I’m trying to get across to people is that this is a time to take action, even if we’re not really clear what they are, we haven’t got it all mapped out, it’s really time to start demonstrating strong alignment and in many cases any alignment between what we know to be true and the lives that we’re living. For a lot of people that’s a huge gap and it creates anxiety. My goal is to help reduce that anxiety and to give people the most important gift I know, which is the gift of time – time to begin adjusting to a possibly difficult future on your own terms, in your own way.

Having this lead time can be one of the most important gifts that anyone can give to themselves even, to begin working with this material on their own terms while the time exists, while the resources are there; taking a more central path up and around an escarpment rather than having to scale it all at once at some point in the future when things change. So that’s the direction that we go with that. I don’t see them as necessarily in opposition to each other, it’s really an extension of the same kind of structured thinking, but it does get into an area which is a little bit murkier than straight facts, if you will.

One of the criticisms by some of crash course has been the degree to which it downplays climate change and doesn’t factor that in as one of the key issues. Can you talk about your thinking behind that?

I very specifically avoided that whole area for two reasons. The first is that I thought I could create a compelling enough sense of urgency without going into that topic, and the second reason is that I had worked with this enough in various life settings to discover that there are people on both sides of that story that hold very strong beliefs around that material. I only know one climate scientist and I trust him very intimately with his material and we’ve talked about it a lot, but not everybody else is a climate scientist – they’ve fallen into camps.

They’re approaching the topic with very strong beliefs. In talking about things that touch on very strong beliefs, it’s very tricky territory. My experience is that when I’m talking to somebody who’s holding a very strong belief is that in presenting it, or even slightly challenging it, or even raising a fact that runs counter to it, they’ll react to it emotionally, usually with anger or with some sort of a charge, sometimes sadness.

In looking at that, I waded pretty deeply into the story and because I would have to spend a whole other hour of material on this – I’m not sure how many up sides I could get out of this. I can see a lot of ways I could fail and create down sides. And you know, I think I can still tell the story in a way that creates the same sorts of changes that I’m seeking, preaches the same sorts of urgency that I’m seeking, without touching that story. So it was really a strategic decision and part of it was a tactic and it was really centred on my belief at the time when I was putting the crash course together, that I was going to be opening an enormous can of worms and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to or qualified to manage.

I doubted my ability to go into that territory and come out of it with the ability to reach everybody. If I had a mission or a goal for the crash course it was to create it in such a way that it’s not partisan, there’s no religious beliefs in there; I’m not engaging in any class or socio-economic warfare zones if you will. I hope that the crash course is presenting a body of material that is so important that I want everyone to have the chance to hear it, without them shutting down and saying, ‘Oh he holds the wrong position on a political party, on climate change, on a belief-laden area’. So it was just my belief that I could reach more people telling it the way I did without going into climate change, than if I had.

In Richard Heinberg’s Powerdown, he talks about the difference between ‘Building Lifeboats, or ‘Powerdown’ as a response. There was the paper that David Korowicz just produced, ‘Tipping Point’, that FEASTA published, where he talks about whether what we’re looking at is sudden collapse, systemic collapse, or whether we’re looking at oscillating decline. What’s your sense of what the terrain of the next 5-10 years looks like in relation to those scenarios?

I see ranges of possibilities, that’s part of my background and training. I would give about an 80% chance that what’s going to happen is all these trillions of dollars that have been pumped into the economic landscape by governments all across the globe, they’re going to find their mark in the sense that they’ll what will be a viable economic recovery – I think we’ve seen the first glimpses and glimmers of that in some of the data, but it’s really a false rebirth, it’s not born on the back of what I would call legitimate economic foundations, it’s just money that’s been printed out of thin air and poured into the economic patient.

It will jolt back to life and the problem is that all the energy data that I’m reading right now suggests that because of the credit conditions we’ve run into, and because of volatility in the markets and uncertainty, a whole lot of projects in oil and gas have just not been undertaken. So there are some real issues with supply as we go forward. My view is that there’s an 80% chance, a very high chance that within in the next 5 years our economically rejuvenated patient runs into an actual legitimate supply constraint on energy.

So we’ll see that old $147 barrel of July 2008, we’ll see that again. There’s a risk in there that some nations discover that this concept of resource nationalisation potentially, they worry about not exporting oil if it’s truly in limited supply. When I look forward to that….you’re asking a question about the scope, the scale, the pace of the next shock… it is my contention that that next shock has a very strong chance of being a lot worse than the last one, meaning that we could see much larger volatility in the currency markets, we could see some markets shut down, we could see that whole portions of the economy basically cease to function, particularly the portions that were predicated on ever expanding credit growth.

I see that has a very high chance of happening. Whether that leads to, or is perceived by some people as collapse; I don’t really know what collapse means, but I do know that what I suspect is going to happen is that we will see a dramatic shrinking of expectation and economic complexity as a result of the next oil or energy shock that’s going to come forward. I base that on the fact that I can’t find any literature, I can’t find any academic discussion, I can’t find any policies, I can’t find any writing that has even begun yet to address the gap that exists between the idea of economic growth on one hand, and the failure of energy to continue growing on the other hand.

There’s an enormous gap there – nobody has yet explained how economic growth can happen in the absence of growth in basic energy supplies. I know some people are starting to work around the edges of that and start wanting to produce some amount of work in that regard. Certainly I’ve been hammering at it, a number of other people are as well, but there’s really, as far as I can tell, no high level official response, recognition, thinking around that. That’s going to take time. My concern around how this will unfold is that I see that when we hit this next shock, we’re probably going to be about as unprepared for it, intellectually…as we are today, because there’s almost no curiosity, there’s no room for these sorts of ideas to yet be involved in, or engaged with these high level ideas.

If the next crisis happens, I believe this is the kind of crisis that’s so fundamental, so structurally major that we need every possible minute to begin wrapping our minds around this, to begin thinking about how we’re going to respond to this in a proactive rather than a reactive fashion. Once we’re reactive to the reality of the second energy crisis I think the consequences are going to be higher magnitude, a little bit more volatile, possibly a lot more vicious than the set of shocks we just went through.

That’s the highest likelihood – I always reserve a small chance somewhere in there that we might discover that there’s a system error, that would cause things to really, really change, like international banking not really working in a viable way anymore or something like that that would fundamentally alter the landscape that we’ve carefully built over the last few decades, which is a global, just-in-time delivery network of manufacturing and supply. So I have some concerns about supply chain disruption and things like that, but my major thought is that we experience another shock that feels like the last one, but probably more severe.

When you say Chris that you don’t think there’s been much intellectual preparation for this, would you not see some grappling of these ideas in the work of say Herman Daily on Steady State Economics, or Peter Victor on Managing Without Growth?

Oh absolutely, you’ve mentioned two academics and there’s a number of others I’d include in that as well. I was really referring to official recognition, at the higher levels of parliament or in D.C. or places like that – from the political class would be one end. And then on the banking side, we are still being very heavily patrolled if you will, by a set of bankers – talking about my country specifically, the central reserve is really, really tight with our Wall Street bankers.

I haven’t detected anything yet from their analysts that would suggest they’ve understood the rift that I see, to the larger economy and the overall model due to energy insufficiency. That’s something that’s still wide open. There are one or two notable exceptions – Jeff Rubin of CBC, their chief economist, he’s got this story down and he’s up there talking about it. So there are some, but I’m talking about do we have critical mass, are we really talking about this as something other than a few pockets at the edges – how close to the centre are these discussions. It’s my assessment that we’re not that close to the centre yet.

Clearly you know most about how close to the centre this discussion is in the US – do you see significant cultural differences between the US and maybe the UK and Europe or other parts of the world?

Absolutely, the UK is in my estimation way ahead of us rhetorically in talking about some of these issues. When I was just over there on a visit it really struck me that several decades of much higher petrol prices has this shaping effect on society, that leads to all sorts of things around how efficient mass transit is, around people’s relationships with automobiles vs. walking, there’s all kinds of very subtle, long term impacts of having lived with a very different energy landscape, and a very different cultural landscape.

My assessment of my own country is that we still have a dominant belief in the story that there are no resource limits, and if there are technology will fix them. We haven’t yet got to the point of self-admission on a cultural level that says, ‘we might actually have to live within some sort of limit.’ That work has not really begun here yet at the centre, but people all around the edges are absolutely figuring that out and coming to these sorts of conclusions on their own, so that’s what gives me great hope.

That’s the reason I tend to work with groups on the edges rather than spending my time trying to wade into the centre and convince the centre of something. It’s not clear to me that we’ll be able to change attitudes at the centre fast enough before the next crisis, so I think we’ll have to manage that things as best we can at the centre.

When we talked before, you mentioned some practical stories about how people in the US and how people in Transition projects were making use of the Crash Course – could you tell us about those?

Certainly, a number of people have used the Crash Course to great effect. It’s available online for free but not everybody watches 3½ hours of material on a computer, and it really wasn’t my intent for people to sit down alone and watch 3½ hours of stuff on the computer. It’s meant to be shared. So we produced it as three separate discs – they come in a single DVD case – and each of those discs is an hour and a half or less, and that was produced so that people would take that and bring it to their communities, maybe run three separate sessions a week.

That’s what we recommend because you have to integrate the material – I would not recommend watching it all at once. Some people really picked that up and ran forward with it. In January 2010 this year I was out in Sonora, California where a gentleman whose an architect in town had taken the crash course, had the 3 disc set. He put the first disc on on Thursday night, invited everybody back next Thursday, and for the third and final disc. On the fourth Thursday he led a discussion and people talked about it, and then he repeated that the next month. He went from 12 people to 48. Then he repeated it the next month and it went up to 90 odd people, and then he had to move to a larger space.

He did that for 6 months in a row, and when I showed up out there to give a talk they were going to use that talk as a springboard event to introduce the concept of becoming a Transition Town, organising themselves together around this idea that there’s things they might want to do together as a community. When I showed up they rented the largest auditorium – it seemed very ambitious to me, it seated 440 people. They ended up having to turn maybe 50 or 70 people away at this event because the hall had been filled to capacity. To capture the feeling of it – it was very exciting, there was a lot of energy in the room, it was really fantastic.

Somebody who stood up afterwards just captured it perfectly. He said, ‘before I ask a question I just want to make a statement. I see everybody in town here, I see lawyers, I see council people, we’ve got our hippies in the room, our conservatives – we’ve got everybody here. This reminds me of 3 years ago when we had that forest fire that was threatening our town, and everybody dropped their social walls and we just came together because we knew that there was something facing us that was larger than our daily lives and we banded together. That’s what it feels like.’

To me that’s just a fantastic success story because that’s exactly how I envision the Crash Course being used: as a way of taking a very complicated bit of information and putting it into one spot so that we don’t have to keep reinventing that particular wheel, and put just enough in there so that people can see the context that underlies the actual set of conditions that we find ourselves in today, so that we can come to the conclusion that we need to start doing something. That’s where the Crash Course leaves off and then it’s up to each community to go forward and take their interpretation of that that’s unique for them.

Everybody’s got different land, different water, different socio-economic, different sources of wealth – everybody’s got a slightly different condition. That’s why I’ve just been so pleased that they were able to go and pick up the Transition Handbook because the Transition model is all about individual communities holding up a framework and then adapting it to their situation and particular condition. They had a great kick-off and they’re up and running and I’m getting reports back from them, and the best part about that whole story is that yes, there’s an urgency, yes, there’s some anxiety, but they’ve just done it with a real sense of excitement and purpose and joy.

To me they’re an absolute model of how this can be done – the fact that we not only can, but we have to find ways to reach everybody in town, not just the usual people that show up to change things. We need everybody to pull on this. Everybody’s got to contribute, and everybody has something to contribute. So I’m just really pleased with that particular outcome out there, I love what they did.

That’s a great example. On that subject of reaching everybody, when you came and spoke in Bristol, one of the people that came up on the platform afterwards for discussion was the person was the senior officer leading on this sort of energy planning work for Bristol City Council. And he sat there and he said, ‘Thank you Chris, that’s a real eye opener but what do I do with that now? How do I actually create organisational, infrastructure level, meaningful change in response to this, because what you’re really saying is we need to fundamentally change our practices, and most organisations are not built up to enable fundamental change – they’re built up to respond to either business as usual or incremental change.

Yes, and certainly that’s one of the great challenges. I don’t know any other way to begin to approach that, besides starting with developing a critical mass of awareness within the community, within the town, within the organisation. Once that critical mass of awareness is there and you have enough people on board who are saying, ‘yeah, I get it, we have to fundamentally do things differently’, I think you can open it up to the second part of the conversation. That’s when we can start to explore ways in which we can culturally realign ourselves so, what is the culture of an organisation and how does that adaptability work?

Here’s a perfect example of this. Katrina comes into Louisiana and makes a mess of things, and it turns out that FEMA is mortally embarrassed. There are life long members of FEMA that are mortally crushed by the lack of ability to respond to that type of crisis. So they commissioned a study, they said, ‘why did that happen?’ They realised that they’d built themselves up over time in these siloed types of organisations, so there’s somebody who’s responsible for water, and there’s somebody who’s responsible for shelter, and there’s somebody whose responsible for food.

That person who’s on the ground doing food will move to their particular corner of the disaster and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I need water’. They have to go all the way up to the top, jump over and go down to the water people, and it’s a very poor response. So they said, ‘is there any example that we can look to that says, here’s an example of a major disaster that was dealt with really well – we’d like to know how that happened and why they were organised.’ It turns out there was another hurricane, hurricane Aniki, just an amazing blow and it came across Hawaii and the community on one of the islands got the full brunt of this thing and it was absolutely destroyed.

By the time anyone got there three days later, the town had its own water set up, it had taken care of its injured, it had basically gotten everything under control….so FEMA went back and did a study and asked, ‘how did this happen?’ It turns out it was the culture – they still had this indigenous culture there such that when this storm came in, people knew that if their children weren’t with them, they’d be with someone else and they knew they’d be fine; they had cultural means of managing chaos and disruption, they did a lot of things horizontally.

Everybody within each of their areas felt empowered to do whatever they needed to do in their areas, but felt perfectly empowered to do other things that needed doing. Everybody just more organically did what needed doing, right where they were at that moment of crisis. So FEMA wrote this whole report up and said, ‘no, we didn’t suffer from a lack of resources, we totally had enough resources to manage this particular crisis….what we had was a cultural problem. Our culture was geared towards one set of circumstances, and it couldn’t realign itself, couldn’t be flexible, couldn’t reorganise itself in the face of a crisis that was actually larger than our organisation’s current ability.’

So I don’t know how you have that level of discussion about how Bristol City Council could benefit from changing itself culturally, until people have that critical mass of awareness that there’s a hurricane like Aniki? coming, and that it’s in our best interests. It’s something we have to do.

Because we either respond now, while we can, with the luxury of time, or we respond later when pressed by circumstances. Between those two particular responses there’s just a world of difference, night and day. I just think that step one is building that awareness, building that sense of urgency, getting that critical mass, and then we can step into that next box. It’s cart before the horse to start talking about fundamental, non-status quo changes until people are ready and receptive to really have those conversations.

Does what’s going on in Greece at the moment mean that the cultural stories can change very quickly because the crisis becomes far more obvious to people and you can move pretty much immediately onto fundamental infrastructure change? Also, what lessons do you think the UK could be learning from what’s happening in Greece?

I think both lessons are ones that we’ve learnt before and that we’re going to relearn again, that is that financial crises are incredibly quick. They’re like bush fires – one day everything is fine, and a couple of weeks later everything is not fine. This is particularly true to the extent that our entire financial system is one global construct so when they say that Greece is about to default the first question is, ‘default on what, and who do they owe it to?’ It turns out that France is exposed, Germany’s exposed, the UK is exposed, America is exposed, a lot of countries are exposed to this debt.

The lesson there is that when these things finally break, they break incredibly quickly. So I would extrapolate that just a little bit and go forward and say, ‘Greece has a problem because it had spending mismanagement at the government level, but really it has a problem of living beyond its means, and it was piling up debt. A debt edifice creeps to a higher and higher level and then it suddenly breaks, and we saw that in Greece. Well let’s fast forward – there are a number of other countries out there right now, and the UK is one of them, whose debt level should be creating some pretty serious cause for concern amongst people because those debt levels are really at the same sorts of levels we’ve been seeing in Greece.

The chief lesson is, don’t be complacent. Be aware of the risks. You should be asking yourselves if these risks are getting larger, or are they getting smaller. One of my chief criticisms on the way in which this economic bailout was handled on both sides of the Atlantic, was to increase the level of indebtedness of the public sector, and it’s therefore increased the threat of a Greece-like event. I really believe individuals should trust themselves, look at the numbers, read them, say, ‘Does this make me feel better or worse about our future prospects?’

A lot of people are coming to the conclusion that this whole notion of just piling up ever higher larger amounts of public debt to cover up a shortfall in private borrowing – yes it’s a solution, but it’s not addressing the root cause of the problem. This is a crisis rooted in debt, we’re going deeper in debt, and that creates higher levels of risk. For the UK I think there should be hard, fundamental questions around the level of indebtedness, how this is going to be serviced, how it’s going to shape the future, and really question is it that important that we get consumers back consuming at any cost, or should we maybe consider that this is the time when should be retrenching?

We’ve lived beyond our means for a period of time, maybe we have to consider living below our means to offset that, get the yin and the yang balance again, and then come out of this crisis stronger, more structurally sound, with a better functioning economy after taking a run down. That makes a lot of sense, but it’s not the direction the UK has chosen, it’s not the direction the US has chosen, and it looks like it’s not the direction the EU is going to choose with Greece. It looks like they’re going to print and add more public debt to cover up debt that’s essentially already gone bad. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m hoping I’m wrong and that their strategy will work, but the risks are still there – in some cases I think we can make an argument that they’re higher than they used to be, and that’s a cause for concern.

What we’re seeing in Greece is that as the kind of cuts that are required to get an economy out of that mess kick in, we’re starting to see some significant public order issues and big strikes. Is it inevitable that the way out of that amount of debt is going to involve major hardship across the board and we just have to accept that’s how it is?

Public disorder is something that concerns me because it just shows what happens when people have one set of expectations or a set of entitlements and those are not met, or are dashed. Often that does result in social strife. That’s certainly a very well understood dynamic. There’s something called an IMF riot – those used to happen all the time down in South America, and in Africa and other places. What’s interesting is that a little bit of the IMF medicine is now coming to the Western world and so we’re seeing it get better television coverage, but the dynamic itself is really well understood.

Greece got itself into some trouble, and yes they over spent and so now we’re seeing the early stages of IMF riots in their country as austerity measures are imposed and that’s a predictable sort of a reaction. When I cast forward and I look at peak oil and this lack of energy expansion and its impact on the economy, it will create kind of that same condition all across the western world. We could be entering a period – and I try to make a case for this in the work I do – it’s a serious option and I think people should consider it as a possibility.

We could be facing that same sort of circumstance across much of Europe and across the United States, Japan as well, China is a bit of a wild card to me. I see those countries as being heavily exposed to this particular story. So in some ways I look at Greece and I see that in some ways it a harbinger of things to come. I try to understand how the official sectors respond to this, what do the policy makers do on the fiscal side, on the monetary side. There’s a larger lesson in this: the same story is playing out in Greece now that I saw play out in General Motors when they bailed it out, which is that they’re going to print money in order to protect the current holders of the bonds from experiencing significant losses. That’s one way you can do it, but all that does is it makes the holders of the bonds whole in the story, and transfers the cost of that onto everybody, through the pernicious effects of printing money out of thin air, which creates inflation and a truly regressive tax because it hits everyone at once, it punishes savers. So really we could see this in some ways as rewarding the imprudent at the expense of the prudent – I’m not a big fan of this because people are quick learners and it doesn’t take them long to figure out it doesn’t pay to be prudent.

The next thing you know, you’ve got a worse problem on your hands. So I think we’re seeing very predictable, short sighted responses which are, ‘let’s just keep the pain in Greece down as much as possible now, we’ll just make it through next week, we’re just trying to manage a crisis.’ But inevitably, we find that the long term health and very important sources of sociological and cultural impact are really swept under the rug in the name of battling a crisis.

History shows that when these sorts of crises come around, when governments resort to the printing option instead of the bitter pill option – the printing option has not yet worked in a long term capacity. It’s all descended into some sort of pain: currency collapse, major inflation, sometimes hyper inflation. We had hyper inflation in Yugoslavia, hyper inflation in Germany before World War II. Inflation is the absolute number one thing I would want to avoid at any possible cost, but we’re seeing our early responses are to print our way out of this and so there are some concerns there as well.

If I could give any advice it would be to say, ‘why don’t we just try to see what happens if the people who have been imprudent have to live with the consequences of that, and not sacrifice the prudent at this particular order. Is there any way we can make the outcome of this rest on the shoulders of those who are most responsible? So far that’s not the course we’re taking, at least as far as I can see.

You could argue that the imprudent ones are the ones that are taking the decisions still! I have a final question for you – I know you strove in the crash course to stick to fact and not opinion, but this is definitely one on opinion. It’s to do with the depth of the crisis you’ve very convincingly argued we’re hurtling towards, and whether in fact, given the deep grained nature of our industrial growth system, we would have had any opportunity to change in a meaningful way without such a crisis?

I absolutely think we could – if everyone woke up tomorrow with an entirely different view we could do things completely differently. It is entirely possible for us to use energy in ways that are much more clever, efficient. We are wasting enormous amounts of resources at this particular point in time. My understanding of energy is that this is a once in a species bequeathment, it was built up over hundreds of millions of years and we’re going to use it in a roughly 200 year time frame and so we could actually be giving ourselves the most important gift. We could absolutely be giving ourselves the gift of time by entering into very aggressive conservation programmes, and being much more clever about how we use our energy.

Here’s an example – if someone wants to come forward and have a great idea for say turning algae into biofuel then they’ve found a way to recycle nutrient loss coming out of sewage plants and that want some energy to go forward and do that – if I was king for a day I would say, ‘okay, here’s what energy is going to cost you for that particular use.’ But if Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft wants to take a 400 ft yacht around the world, I would have a different cost for that fuel. I think that instead of pulling all of this energy out of the ground as fast as possible and then allowing ‘the market’ to decide where it gets used, I think we could be a lot more directive and a lot more specific about where it’s going.

In my own little corner here on my property we’re starting to work with a wonderful, bright young guy with permaculture principles for growing food. I understand that it’s possible to use a lot less energy and still have a very good quality of life, in my own small corner of the world and I don’t understand why that can’t be possible elsewhere, why we couldn’t be much more clever and creative about the ways in which we use energy. I think this doesn’t have to end in crisis, there are lots of ways we could restructure currency systems that we already know about, there are already the technologies that exist – we don’t need any new ones to be developed – that can allow us to use our energy much more efficiently and usefully.

We don’t need any new thinking, we don’t need any more books to be written, we don’t need any more technology, we could absolutely apply what we’ve already got and make enormous differences. But – we are not. That’s why I think that of the things we need most, we need political will, more than anything, to be serious about this, to confront the issues on the basis of the data, to really face the facts as we know them. If we do that, I can see ways that this could be really positive, that this could actually turn out that we have many generations of time in front of us.

If we do it poorly – meaning status quo, all engines full, must get back to consumptive lifestyles, must bet back to full spending then we’ll talk about the real issue – I see a lot of ways that that story could fall of the rails and have an accident. I’m hopeful because I see ways it could turn out, I have a loss of hope in some ways because I don’t see us being serious, really serious about the nature of the predicament we’re in at that stage. But we could close that gap, that’s where Transition Towns come in, that’s where I come in, that’s where Daly comes in, that’s where all the people that you mention come in, to try and change the narrative where there’s still time.

To me, that’s where the work needs to happen. It’s about changing the stories we tell ourselves, it’s about having a different narrative. The most important one, that we’ve touched on a couple of times today, if we could just change this one sentence then a lot would fall off and it could all be beautiful: ‘the economy must grow’. If we could just drop that concept and be really serious about finding economic models that aren’t reliant on continuous exponential growth, then a lot of great things would fall off of that. Big changes, but they’d be exciting changes and I think a lot of people, particularly young people, would find a very purposeful set of ideas and jobs to throw their hearts and minds into.