Generation Fallout or Generation Transition?

Today was a good day.

It's good to meet friends, and students, and colleagues, and know that everyone is working to make things better, healthier, more wholesome and more resilient.

On the topic of resiliency, there is a great video here of Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition UK, talking about a new, solutions-based approach to coping with the challenges of peak oil and climate change. Rather than feel despondent over the collapse of the extraction-based economy of the 20th Century, Hopkins and other Transition-ers view the coming collapse as a chance to unleash our creativity--a bold conclusion, and a necessary one for a species that has based its social life of 6,000 years on a faith in historical progress.

One of the more interesting points he makes is how incredibly fortunate we are to have lived in the Era of Abundance. Yes, there were genocidal and ecocidal holocausts. Yes, there was mass-deprivation and gross inequality between the haves and have-nots. Yes, our connection to the natural world was eroded, and our communal and familial bonds were fractured, often beyond repair.

But haven't we learned something from all of this, through all of this? Wasn't the peak of energy production also a fantastic explosion in human spiritual and creative energy? Didn't humanity finally confront itself in all of its brilliant, myriad manifestations and have to acknowledge that, indeed, the world is round? I am glad to be part of Generation Fallout, the first generation to have to pay MORE for energy than ones preceding it, to have higher infant mortality rates and less nutritional intake than their parents.

The image of the Oil Age as a great peak is sometimes better represented by a descending curve, such as we find in this picture. The Age of Oil was one in which we lost ourselves, our families, and our culture to the great homogenizing influence of Technological Progress. We are emerging from the Great Descent; we get to relish the great coming together and great imagining that must happen to us as individuals and as a culture if we are to get out of this mess intact.

Actually, having deep admiration for the principles of biocentrism, deep ecology, and primitivism I find it hard to be so patently celebratory of the wonders of the modern age. But it is quite a fascinating one to live in, and it had enabled my little white, European soul to encounter realities that would have been inaccessible to it just a century ago. Primitivism itself is a modernnotion--it represents nothing less than the movement of Western culture and academia towards an appreciation of the 10,000 cultures that perished beneath the march of our impeccable One World Culture.

So yeah, I guess Hopkins is right about it having been a pretty wild time to live. I enjoyed going to Europe and Asia, and I am glad to have been able to skip out on Polio or crop failure. We are fortunate and we are blessed, but we have also been denied many other things. The Transition Movement still ascribes to this Eurocentric faith in historical progress, but it does it with an ecological conscience. History, and our historical sense, is with us whether we like it or not. And most critiques of time, progress, and history are often rooted in the very historicism they attempt to deconstruct. It's simply one of the ironies of being white, modern, and aware of all that has been destroyed, erased, and lost.

Check it out. Hopkins' talk is informative and uplifting, a nice antidote to my usual "half-empty" despair.

Voila!