Transition Timeline

Giving teeth and traction to the Transition movement springing up across the land—mapping our path of “energy descent” and the changes needed to make it through to a greener, truly sustainable human presence on Earth, The Transition Timeline For a Local, Resilient Future by Shaun Chamberlin is a large, illustrated Chelsea Green paperback at $29.95.

The Transition Timeline lightens the fear of our uncertain future, providing a map of what we are facing and the different pathways available to us. It describes four possible scenarios for the UK and world over the next twenty years, ranging from Denial, in which we reap the consequences of failing to acknowledge and respond to our environmental challenges, to the Transition Vision, in which we shift our cultural assumptions to fit our circumstances and move into a more fulfilling, lower energy world.

The practical, realistic details of this Transition Vision are examined in depth, covering key areas such as food, energy, demographics, transport and healthcare, and they provide a sense of context for communities working towards a thriving future. The book also provides a detailed and accessible update on climate change and peak oil and the interactions between them, including their impacts in the UK, present and future.

Use it. Choose your path, and then make that future real with your actions, individually and with your community. As Transition movement founder Rob Hopkins outlines in the chapter he has contributed, there is a rapidly spreading movement addressing these challenges, and it needs you.

“While definitely focused on empowering the community rather than the policy makers, this book is much more than a folksy agenda for comfort in the crisis. It is a serious plan to reconstruct society in the light of ecological and energetic realities, informed by the best evidence about the vortex of forces influencing the global crisis. Chamberlin runs along a knife edge between the harsh realities facing the whole of humanity on the one hand, and hope and pragmatic vision on the other, outlining a pragmatic plan for a society-wide adaptation to the energy descent future. Let’s see if we can run along that knife edge; we have nothing to lose.” —David Holmgren, co-originator of the Permaculture concept and author of Future Scenarios

“So here it is: the map and timeline of how to save our world and ourselves.” -Richard Heinberg, author, Peak Everything