GREAT article in Orion Magazine

[Kate Clark]

I love this article, very well written. I printed a few copies out to pass out to people when asked about Transition...here's a short excerpt:

“MISTAKEN, APPALLING, AND DANGEROUS” is how the Transition Initiative has been described, which is the kind of criticism you covet, knowing that the speaker is an oil industry professional and author of The Myth of the Oil Crisis. Others have criticized it for being insufficiently confrontational. There are also criticisms from within: a tension between those who prefer fast action and those who prefer slow consideration, for the movement is both urgent and slow. It is transformatively sudden, and yet uses the subtle, tentative questioning of long dialogues within communities, a very slow process of building a network of relationships within the whole community."

Or this one...

“We’re doing work for generations to come,” says Giangrande. You can’t change a place overnight, he says, but you have to begin now in the necessary urgency of our time. “We’re facing a historical moment of choice—our actions now [are] affecting the future. Now’s the time. The system we know is breaking down. Yet out of this breakdown, there are always new possibilities.” It’s catagenesis, the birth of the new from the death of the old. The process is “so creative and so chaotic,” says Giangrande. “Let it unfold—allow it—the key is not to direct it but to encourage it. We’ve developed the A to C of transition. The D to Z is still to come.” Brave, this, and very attractive. It is catalytic, emergent, and dynamic, facing forward with a vivid vitality but backlit with another kind of ancient sunlight: human, social energy."

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/

[Kate Clark]

Thanks David- I just copied from the URL line and looks like I didn't capture the whole thing. I think its the same one now on Common Dreams.

[David MacLeod]

Hi Kate,

I just noticed your link is going to the wrong article. It's going to a good article about oil and addiction, but the Transition article is here:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4792/

"Many people feel that individual action on climate change is too trivial to be effective but that they are unable to influence anything at a national, governmental level. They find themselves paralyzed between the apparent futility of the small-scale and impotence in the large-scale. The Transition Initiative works right in the middle, at the scale of the community, where actions are significant, visible, and effective. “What it takes is a scale at which one can feel a degree of control over the processes of life, at which individuals become neighbors and lovers instead of just acquaintances and ciphers. . . participants and protagonists instead of just voters and taxpayers. That scale is the human scale,” wrote author and secessionist Kirkpatrick Sale in his 1980 book, Human Scale."

[Keith Foecke]

Ever notice how the powers that be won't let the old innefectual models die? We are living in a time where the governments (federal, state, and local) are spending our (and future generation's money) in an attempt to sustain the unsustainable.

“We’re facing a historical moment of choice—our actions now [are] affecting the future. Now’s the time. The system we know is breaking down. Yet out of this breakdown, there are always new possibilities.” It’s catagenesis, the birth of the new from the death of the old.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/

It's like putting the phoenix on life support. The new will never be born unless we let the old die. In 2008 america voted for change.

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss - The Who " Won't Get Fooled Again"

[Kate Clark]

No kidding! I like These Ironic Times too, real headlines- its hilarious!