May 4th

May 4th 

     9:40 PM

     Today proved to be a good day to sit inside and spend the majority of it reading The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins. Through the better part of the morning I was slowly working my way through each chapter, the difficult part about reading this is applying how I can see Franklin taking on some of these roles. The other difficult part is determining which information is really important to me as a reader, I spend a lot of my time taking notes and at the end of each day I organize them into what I find useful for the task I have ahead. Today after reading for the majority of my day I took a much needed break to go watch the home games at Proctor. 

     Tomorrow I hope to finish up the last few chapters of The Transition Handbook and start developing a more clear plan/design to present to Todd on how we can positively change Franklin to become a transition town. I am sorry for the lack of photos but reading for the majority of my days does not particularly present the best opportunity for them. I will leave a little bit of my notes each blog, but if you would like to see more of them feel free to email me andersonri@proctoracademy.org.

Hours Today: 8-2

Total Hours 22 1/2

The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins

Introduction - Tantalizing Glimpses of Resilience 

• 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. 
• Resilience within a culture: A culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its limits, and able to thrive for having done so.
• Building local resilience will be key in the future, due to the inevitable fact that our oil supply will be decreasing and become more expensive. An example of this is the Hunza Valley People, they lived within their limits and could function indefinitely.
• “Hunza is quite simply the most beautiful, tranquil, happy and abundant place I have ever visited, before or since.”
• The achilles heel of our civilization is the degree to which we are dependent on oil.
• “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.”
• 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. 
• "sense of elation, rather than the guilt, anger and horror that most campaigning involves.”

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

• The era of cheap liquid oil is rapidly coming to an end. Peak oil is not about when we use the last drop of oil but rather when from each year on there will be less and less oil. As more countries past their peak oil the closer we get to this point. 
• Peak Oil - The hypothetical point in time when the global production of oil reaches its maximum rate, after which production will gradually decline.
• 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.
• Greenhouse gases (CO2) must have a drastic cut to reduce climate change.
• Rob then talks about how climate change and peak oil are so closely related to each other.
• Due to the rising demands of oil the result is the increase price of oil which will eventually pull the economy into recession, which makes the likelihood of funding climate change mitigation to therefore decrease as well. This also increases the likelihood of using other greenhouse gases such as coal, tar sands, biodiesel etc. However the positive aspect of this will be that any change that happens to one, will also happen to the other in some fashion.