The Transition Movement discussion

For comments about the group goals and direction.

We could attempt a second group read of something. If there’s interest in that, we should probably have nominations and then a poll to decide on the book. Then there’s 1) identifying the moderator (it could be me, but not necessarily) and 2) setting a reading schedule.

The Transition movement is not about reading books, of course. Here on Goodreads that’s what groups do, so that is a possibility.

A different possibility (which could be done either as the sole activity, or in conjunction with reading(s), would be to try to take some sort of action in the real world. Such as:

1) Members joining or founding a Transition Group in their local area.

2) Members trying to “get word out” about Transition and/or the crises that Transition was founded to address.

It occurs to me that education is such an action, and by that I mean attempting to get local or regional schools involved in something like teaching Big History (see the chapter 20 discussion of State of the World 2013). I think this might be a worthwhile activity for some of us to try to do, in either high schools or colleges in our areas. It wouldn’t be easy, but I don’t think it’s impossible to do, either.

Our situation represents the "no comment" status,unfortunately.

I will come back to this in a while, Ted.

I fell behind with the book because I wanted to read more about things that can actually be done to change things. I ended up reading a book that I found really inspiring: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

State of the World actually touched very briefly on some of the things that are covered in the Resilience Imperative in more detail, such as public/community land trusts and fee-based, interest-free banking (necessary for a steady-state economy).

While I do think it's important to educate people about the problems we face, I think it's equally important to educate about possible solutions. And although I haven't finished State of the World yet, it seems to be lacking specifics in that department. There is a big gap out there right now. Lots of people are aware of the problems we face, at least to some extent, but feel paralyzed and helpless because nobody is talking about solutions. People don't know what they can do. I personally think the group should learn more about possible solutions and from that, hopefully people can find ways to take action and be an active part of the solution.

On the subject of education, the field of economics is very important. Our universities continue to churn out students who believe in infinite growth and who lack the ability to think critically about our current way of doing things. Economics is taught as an ideology and it's a big problem. We need to reach out to students studying economics and put more pressure on universities to round out the very narrowly focused economics curriculum.

Katie wrote: "I fell behind with the book because I wanted to read more about things that can actually be done to change things. I ended up reading a book that I found really inspiring: https://www.goodreads.c..."

Thanks for your input Katy. I agree entirely about the importance of new economic thinking. That was discussed in chapter 11 of the book, don't know if you got that far yet.

The first eight chapters were definitely an overview of problems, though I think chapters 3 & 4, at least for me, were a very necessary part of the book, in that in assessing hopes for sustainability, they did the job of defining what sustainability really means to the editors and to Worldwatch.

The second part of the book was in my opinion very action oriented.

Finally, the third part was focused more on the Resilience issue that the book you read discussed. And it is the issues of this third part in which the Transition Movement is much concerned.

I suspect that the book you read likely would have been referenced in SotW 2013 had it not been so recently written. (It's interesting the its title, The Resilience Imperative, actually occurs as a phrase in chapter 32, p. 361, middle of page.)