CO2 and the myth

You know how it is when an idea begins to germinate in your head? At first it is prenatal, just a seed, small and undefined. Then as you turn your attention to it, imagining different possibilities, it begins to take on an identity. If it is a really good idea and the potential it holds is appealing, excitement builds and more and more energy is poured into the story around the idea. Over time the story becomes believable. You essentially begin to mentally occupy the scenario you have envisioned and take action to bring it about.

Driving today, shrouded in a voluminous cloud of deadly emissions spewing from the bus in front of me, I wondered what my city would look like without snarls of cars, trucks, and buses on the freeways. I imagined how quiet it would be...how clean the air would smell. I thought about people biking or walking and how friendly that would feel. So safe. Of course if we were all peddling or on foot we would have to live near our workplace. How convenient.

Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute calls this an "alternative story field." What I began to imagine while I was driving behind the bus is a myth. It is a situation that doesn't exist here. But I started wanting it to. It represents a simpler, more leisurely and connected way of life. It feels more appealing than this frenetic existence we create for ourselves going compulsively fast, accomplishing unprecedented amounts of work, and consuming voraciously.

Is it possible to plant an idea seed that could generate enough excitement to effectively change the way we live? Rob Hopkins asked that question and found an answer. He tried his method in Totnes, England, and was so successful that in 2008 he published The Transition Handbook - From Oil
Dependency to Local Resilience, so other cities could follow his lead and begin their Energy Descent. The plan is brilliant in its simplicity. Basically he helps a town envision life without oil. Then the people in the town begin to tell stories about what that would look like. Pretty soon, given enough energy and attention, the stories they have fabricated feel more true and desireable than their current way of life and they begin to implement the changes they have envisioned.

Blasting people with gloom, doom, and destruction is not an effective motivator. Offering a carrot that is sweeter and more carroty than the alternative, however, seems to be highly motivational. As of Sept. 2010, because of Hopkins' Handbook, over 300 Transition Communities have come into existence world wide. As I scour the web for information I see there are Transition groups meeting in neighborhoods just blocks from me. It baffles me no end how I could not have heard of peak oil, permaculture, energy descent...! But the blank looks I get when I start to talk about these subjects confirms that I am not alone in my ignorance. The more I learn the more deeply rooted is my conviction that, in the scheme of things, there is nothing more urgently worthy of our attention than this.