Stockholm Resilience Centre. Rob Hopkins of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Culture. As Lester Brown recently noted on this site, the coming decline of oil will be ‘a seismic economic event’. So what do we do when we learn that the ’black gold’ will soon start running out? Do we grab a gun and head for the hills, or do we redouble our efforts to build strong, resilient communities and economies that are not dependent on fossil fuels? Rob Hopkins is at the forefront of the latter approach. Originally a permaculture teacher, Rob began tackling peak oil by coordinating an energy descent action plan with his students for Kinsale, the town in Ireland where he was living and teaching. The resulting document received a huge amount of interest from around the world (and can be downloaded as a PDF here), and has since given rise to the Transition Towns movement – a rapidly spreading, community-lead approach to peak oil planning, which is currently being implemented at a village, town and even city level.
[Photo credit: Jersey Evening Post] TED Talk: Transition Founder on Peak Oil, Resilience and Sustainability (Video) Image credit: TED From 13th Century computers to Majora Carter's powerful argument for environmental justice, TED talks are always a wonderful source of inspiration and education. This latest is no exception, as Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Towns Movement, explores peak oil, the end of the oil age, and how resilience differs from sustainability. For those who have followed Treehugger's coverage of Transition, including an interview with Rob Hopkins and posts on community-lead peak oil activism, there is little that is groundbreakingly new in this video. But it is a useful primer on the Transition approach of positive grassroots action.
And it is, I think, another sign that Alex Steffen got it way wrong when he described Rob Hopkins as exhibiting "a casual eagerness for the death of others. " Perhaps most illuminating is Rob's take on the difference between sustainability and resilience. Center for Resilience at The Ohio State University. Sustainability And Resilience Demystified | www.knowledgescotland.org | Readability. Published on 4 March 2010 in Sustainability and Communities Introduction The terms sustainability and resilience occur frequently in science and policy documents and most people have an intuitive sense of what these terms mean in general when applied to agriculture, ecosystems, or rural livelihoods.
In common with other terms that originate in science, and are subsequently used in wider spheres, such as in policy discussions or everyday life, the scientific meanings of sustainability and resilience have become augmented by a large, and often less well-defined, set of additional meanings and connotations. This accumulation of extra meanings and nuances is not necessarily a bad thing, but one of the results is that the everyday meanings of the terms contain ambiguities that lead to a reduction in their explanatory value. That is, the terms encompass so many possible interpretations that each use has to be qualified in order for it to be unambiguously understood. Key Points Author Topics.