COMMENT ON PETER GOODCHILD ARTICLE POSTED YESTERDAY

My comment: Peter Goodchild is an astute researcher of Peak Oil, but I could not disagree more with his assessment regarding Transition. In this article ‘The Depletion of Key Resources’, he states:

Whatever a transition polity might be, it most certainly will not be a city or town. Those who are living at the end of all the bell curves will prosper only if they are far from anything resembling an urban or suburban area. It has always been possible for small rural communities to live close to the land, somewhat avoiding the use of fossil fuels, metals, and electricity, but modern large centers of population are founded on the premise of an abundance of all three. Urban areas, in fact, will be experiencing the worst of each form of depletion described above.

Goodchild apparently has never read the Transition Handbook or does not understand that Transition ‘towns’ or communities do not have to look like cities or suburbs. They can be pockets within or on the fringes of those areas. Many people who write and speculate about the collapse of civilization assume that no one will survive who is not far away from towns and villages and living in complete isolation off the land.

More power to those who have the skills to live entirely off the land (and very, very few people do), but without connection with others, without mutual support in getting food and other resources, no one will survive. Dmitry Orlov’s experience with the collapse of the Soviet Union is instructive. Many people in the Soviet Union survived even though they did not live in rural areas. What allowed them to survive was cooperation, bartering, and being engaged in an alternative economy. I believe it is important to get beyond the either/or of town vs. rural life. To assume that the only possibility of survival is living in isolation in a rural area is to misunderstand the complexities of collapse and to minimize the dire necessity of cooperation among groups of individuals.

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