The collapse of industrial society has been postponed indefinitely

“I’ve always been cautious about the argument that everything is about to collapse catastrophically,” Transition Network co-founder Rob Hopkins said yesterday on a conference call with hundreds of Americans worried about the effects of peak oil and climate change on the economy.

Unlike peak oil writers including Dmitry Orlov and Mike Ruppert, Hopkins has not been issuing warnings that peak debt or some other symptom of industrial overshoot will bring down the world political order within a few months or a few years. Hopkins still thinks that, instead of imminent collapse, the nations of the world are likely to see a long slow contraction of their economies, what James Howard Kunstler has called a Long Emergency.

But that doesn’t mean Hopkins thinks everything is cheery. He does find that some places — he mentioned Spain — are already experiencing economic troubles that could be called collapse, while others continue on in relative prosperity. “As William Gibson said, the future is already here, but it’s unevenly distributed.”

Richard Heinberg, the host of the call, noted that, as with many things, it’s good to be prepared for many contingencies. Transitioners would be wise to prepare both a bug-out bag, for natural disasters or other emergencies, while at the same time developing a long-term plan, he said.

Is it a political movement?

To the question of politics, Hopkins said that Transition is political with a small “p,” but that “Transition is much more powerful for not being explicitly political” and not taking sides on issues or using activist language that associates it with either the left or the right.

He thinks that Transition should reach out more to conservatives and says that at least in Totnes, a progressive burg that also has many rural conservatives, Transition has successfully positioned itself as mainstream and non-ideological. And since devolving political power down to localities is more an issue of the right than the left in the UK, re-localization resonates with conservatives.

“If we want something akin to a war-time mobilization, then we need everybody involved.”

Transition Voice