May 3rd

May 3rd

     8:30 PM
     Yesterdays meeting with Todd Workman resulted in my schedule to be slightly changed, I would work from home the majority of days on the project that he gave me. The first step to creating an outline for Franklin to be considered a "Transition Town" was to dive into research first thing in the morning. I woke up at 8:30 and had a light breakfast and quickly jumped into research. I spent the better part of the morning reading The Transition Town by Rob Hopkins and took notes on the reading. The goal after finishing the book will be to develop a model and plan for Franklin to become a transition town, the main points I gathered from the reading was the importance in a sense of community and resilience. 

     The image above is taken in Franklin, New Hampshire where a potential community garden, running trail, kayaking spot and picnic area for the community. This image was taken on Earth day but the terraced garden idea came up today during my reading. 

     After a brief lunch I spent the rest of my afternoon looking into articles that talked about fiat money and watched a TED Talk by Rob Hopkins on the Transition to a World without Oil. The day finished with myself organizing my notes into a probable ideas and important information that was gathered throughout the day. Tomorrow I hope to push further into The Transition Town start to develop an idea on how Franklin could become a transition town.
Today I worked from 9-5.
Total Hours: 16 1/2 hours

Below are some of the notes I took today.

The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins

Introduction

1. Concept of resilience, the ability of a system, from individuals to whole economies, to hold together and maintain their ability to function in the face of change and shocks from the outside. 

2. The book argues that while during our efforts to drastically cut carbon emissions we must be equal effort into becoming resilient. 

3. When he visited the Hunza Valley in Northern Pakistan which had been completely cut off from the outside world prior to the highway in 1978 “If on Earth there is a garden of bliss, it is this, it is this.”

4. Quote from Rob “Hunza is quite simply the most beautiful, tranquil, happy and abundant place I have ever visited, before or since.” 

The idea of the Hunza Valley People

They were surrounded by a society that is enveloped in technology but they have a system where everything is being reused. All the waste, including human waste, was carefully composted and returned to the land. Terraces were irrigated through a network of channels that brought water from the glacier to them. (Relates to what we were doing during the Earth Day activity)

If they were to somehow be cut off from the world and the global economy’s highways with trucks packed with goods they would have been fine. The people were resilient, happy, healthy, and with a strong sense of community. 

How he defines resilience: a culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its limits, and able to thrive for having done so.

Our achilles heels is basically our oil dependency, the only notion of economic globalization was only made possible due to cheap liquid fossil fuels. The movement towards more localized energy-efficient and productive living arrangements is not a choice; it is an inevitable direction for humanity. 

We are surrounded by an economy that thinks everlasting economic growth is possible, that the next generation will always be wealthier than the last. How does this even make remote sense?

We need to become a new more nourishing world, rather than taking whatever we can get while we are here. 

Totnes pound example - They are testing the idea of currency that is based purely in one town, which will allow the circulation of money to stay in the town. 

Maybe we are approaching everything the wrong way, we always talk about probabilities rather than possibilities. When Rob spoke about the Totnes Pounds people were happy, but when approached with the issue of peak oil and climate change they would become horrified, but that is basically what they are staring at. 

The end of cheap oil is rapidly coming upon us.

Chapter 1 Peak Oil and Climate Change - The two great oversights of our time

Everything around you, or most everything relies on cheap oil to produce and/or transport it

One gallon of oil contains the equivalent of about 98 tons of the original surface-forming, alga matter, distilled over millennia, and which had itself collected enormous amounts of solar energy on the waves of the prehistoric ocean.

Oil makes us stronger and faster

The main idea to take away from this chapter - The most important moment for us will not be when we use the last drop of oil but when we past our peak, knowing that each year there will be less and less oil to use. We can see the possibility of life without this oil looming before us.