Being Valentine's Day (or, as some of us like to call it, Singles Appreciation Day), chances are you may be finding yourself with a few heart-shaped chocolates in front of you. Or, if you're reading this a few days later, maybe you're just about to indulge in a few of those marked down chocolates that never made it to their star-crossed lovers.

But hold on just a second. Where did those chocolates come from? (And No, the grocery store is not the answer I'm looking for).

Part of being a less energy-dependent community does mean purchasing more locally, but this isn't possible with everything. Chocolate, along with coffee, tea, and spices, are some good examples of this. And when products aren't locally available, shouldn't we do our best to ensure that the communities that produced those goods benefit from their production? Shouldn't we do our best to make sure that those communities are strong and resilient communities of their own? This is what Fair Trade is all about.

Fair Trade products, as defined by Fair Trade Canada, are goods that ensure a fair price and fair labour conditions for farmers, in addition to minimizing harmful impacts to the environment. "Fair Trade appeals to our sense of fairness and common decency, and applies those values to the marketplace. It allows us to make a positive difference in the world just by the products we choose to buy."

As many of you may be aware, Transition Guelph is on its own mission to make Guelph a Fair Trade Town. This would mean, among other things, that local council would endeavour to use Fair Trade products where possible, that local stores and restaurants would be encouraged to include Fair Trade products in their offerings, and that we would work to raise awareness around the economic and social benefits of Fair Trade products for both the vendor and the consumer.

So Cupid...how 'bout those fair trade chocolates? Maybe you could even let the Easter Bunny know.

For more information on Transition Guelph's Fair Trade Town initiative, click here.

by Ingrid Sorensen

“What makes agriculture and communities resilient?" Go ahead and write down a few ideas… How do those ideas look to someone who lived seven generations ago? To someone who will live seven generations from now? How do those ideas look to an earthworm? To a politician?” This is how the 18th annual Environmental Sciences Symposium began on a sunny winter morning at the University of Guelph.

And throughout the day, there were many intelligent and inspiring answers to those questions. With Dr. Youbin Zheng’s help, we imagined green roofs that could act as the lungs of a city, simultaneously breathing life into a community and removing air pollutants. Nick Fegan showed us that with an Earthship, our homes could become ecosystems that can provide us with both greenery and protein from indoor gardens and fishponds. Dr. Ralph Martin passed on the wise words of Pierre Dansereau, now-deceased biologist and ecologist, who encouraged us to live “happily frugal.” Many of us spoke of local foods and farmer’s market, of the need for biodiversity and decreased dependence on fossil fuels.

But what stood out most to me was that beneath all of these ideas was a common theme – community. Resilience is the idea that we can persevere – that we can sustain ourselves in the face of adversity. A single tree in a clear cut is not resilient. Although it may have been spared the gnawing of the chain saw, the lone tree will surely succumb in the next windstorm. In order to be resilient, we need to be a forest. We need to bend and sway and insulate one another from the winds. Shannon Hayes, author of “Radical Homemakers,” writes that community is a form of insurance. Anyone who has been heavily involved in a local food scene before knows this. When something is missing from the garden or its been a bad year, someone will supplement what you’ve been able to grow. Gardens begin to complement each other and soon bounties are shared. When a garden has a hard year, the gaps are filled in with kind neighbours and friends.

Beyond this, community is synergy. Our expertise, given the opportunity, can compliment each other. Moreover, we can share what physical supplies we have. For example, Hayes points out that many of us (myself included) have a strange tendency to say that we need to have a car just for emergencies. When did it become wrong to ask our neighbour for help in an emergency? Why have we grown to believe that interdependence on others is something to be ashamed of? Of course, being independent of others is an illusion but when the transaction of money is involved, we fool ourselves into believing that we function without others….My point is simply that in order to make the most of our ideas, we need to work together. You can’t be resilient alone.

Just like biodiversity, community means that we have a diversity of voices and those differing and sometimes even conflicting voices make us stronger….And this voice, well, it’s just mine. So, please, join the conversation. How will we become a resilient community?

The following is reprinted verbatim from an email that I received from Jennifer Davidson, who is spearheading the Transition Cambridge (Ontario) initiative. I couldn't have said it better myself!

"I was asked the other day if it is necessary to believe in everything about the Transition Town movement in order to be part of it. My answer is simple: Absolutely not. You do not have to believe in global warming or climate change to believe that there is value in strengthening the local community. You do not need to believe in peak oil to believe that growing more of our own food or taking an interest in protecting our water supply is a good idea. You do not need to believe that our economy is going to collapse to explore ways to live more simply and sustainably. The range of issues that Transition Town initiatives can work on is wide, and people who join our group are encouraged to participate in which ever area they are drawn to.

"Do I believe everything? Not necessarily – I am on the fence about some points. What I believe in the most is that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by strengthening community ties and involvement. If an interest in Transition causes us to spend more time in nature, meeting and working with our neighbours, making our homes more energy-efficient, being more active, or learning new skills, I believe we all win, regardless of what the future brings.

"Even if you disagree with some of what Transition Town people are talking about, I hope you will find something here you are passionate about, and join us in building a stronger and more resilient community."

I find myself wondering repeatedly when (or indeed, if) the right wing media will ever come to the important realization that simply saying something is so in print does not automatically make it so. A recent article in The National Post pooh-poohed (in typically derogatory and contemptuous terms) the notion of Peak Oil, and the impending depletion of our global oil reserves, by pointing out that there is a huge “oil reserve”, “second in size only to Saudi Arabia” underneath Israel.

If true, this would of course change the global oil supply picture considerably, although it is crucial to point out that however big a reserve it may be, it is still finite in size, and will, like every other oil reserve on the planet, eventually run out. Any exploitation of any new oil reserves (tar sands, polar, deep water, etc. etc.) is only to forestall the inevitable.

However, this vast Israeli reserve is not oil, a point not really made in the Post article. It’s oil shale, and there’s a huge difference.
1. There is currently no extraction technology for oil shale that will allow large scale extraction at an EROEI greater than about 3:1. Even the tar sands has a higher EROEI (5 or 6:1 at best.)
2. These technologies do not scale up well. (I am referring to pyrolysis, a process whereby the shale is heated up to about 300oC in situ, and the resulting fractionated hydrocarbons are then pumped to the surface, treated with hydrogen (from natural gas, by the way) and then refined. This is an extremely time-consuming and energy hungry process, and there has been no demonstrated capacity for this technology to provide refinable oil in quantity.)
3. As with tar sands oil, there is a huge environmental impact. Large quantities of waste water contaminated by toxic extraction byproducts, an enormous carbon footprint, and the potential destruction of thousands of square miles of the planet’s surface: forests and grasslands, complex ecosystems, arable land, watersheds, etc. in order to access the shale.
What makes us so certain that Israel is willing do this? Even if they do, what make us so certain they will be willing sell the oil to us in the quantities we need?

Bottom line: this changes nothing in terms of the likely impacts of oil depletion on society. It’s happening. And we need to respond. Our future depends on it.

There is apparently something deeply embedded in the American psyche that appears to find the major cataclysm, the global catastrophe, the collapse, the Armageddon, the Apocalypse, both frightening and alluring. Witness the endless parade of feature films whose plot features any of these scenarios: Deep Impact, Armageddon, The Omega Man, The Day After, Independence Day, the “Planet of the Apes” series, I Am Legend, War of the Worlds, The Day After Tomorrow, the “Terminator” series, 12 Monkeys, Failsafe, Dr. Strangelove, The Matrix trilogy… the list goes on, and on… and on.

There’s something fascinating in the idea that this massive, globalized, industrialized, mechanized, seemingly unstoppable civilization could come to a grinding halt, after which we’d all wind up in a kind of post-apocalyptic stone-age. (It’s interesting, though, that the so-called “film that started it all” (far from true, really), “Mad Max”, is actually Australian. The Cult of the Apocalyptic is not limited to the United States, by any means.)

There have been no shortage of “end of the world” predictions, most of which have originated in the U.S. We just escaped global destruction on May 21 of this year (2011) due to an apparent miscalculation by the Reverend Harold Camping, who made the prediction originally (and a good thing, too. I was really busy that day.) I believe the new end-date, as he has now recalculated, is October 21, 2011 (Yay! At least we get another summer!).

And of course the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012 has apocalypse written all over it. (And why are so many of these end-dates on the 21^st day of the month? I have no idea.) Y2K (the first few seconds of the year 2000, when computer systems the world over would go crazy) was supposed to have had airplanes falling from the sky, nuclear reactors melting down, banks collapsing, and the internet, the phone system, the electricity grid, and so forth shutting down forever. I’m sure I would have noticed that if it’d happened.

So what is it, this peculiar American fascination with apocalypticism? Certainly the Religious Right who, for the most part, believes we are heading for the Armageddon prophesized in the Book of Revelation, has something to do with it. But I am sure there’s more to it than that.

One could relate to images of America as a specially favored nation, with a special divine destiny, that go back to the very beginnings of European settlement. The Puritan leaders of New England speculated freely that America might in fact be the New Zion, offering an example to the world of a redeemed, purified, God-fearing social order. This belief emerged strongly in the millennial strand of the great revival movements of the 18th and early 19th centuries, in early Mormonism, in the expansionism that comes at the end of the 19th century, and in the reform-minded Social Gospel theology of the Progressive era.

In more secularized form one can see it in President Woodrow Wilson's soaring rhetoric of the World War I era, in which America becomes the instrument for spreading democracy, freedom, and peace around the world. This kind of thinking provided a fertile seedbed for apocalyptic ideas. When historical developments made it seem increasingly implausible that the millennium would arrive in the present age, the apocalyptic strand in American religious life turned more toward a “pre-millennial” rather than a “post-millennial” eschatology, foreseeing increasing wickedness, war, and the demonic rule of the “Antichrist” before Christ's millennial kingdom arrives--through divine intervention rather than human reform effort.

America has never had a state church or an established religion. Rather, it's had a competitive, “free-market” form of religious life, which encourages the rise of new religious groups, charismatic religious leaders, and the use of extra-denominational techniques to win a following, such as revivals, radio, television, mass-market paperbacks, etc. All this has encouraged high levels of religious activism in America in general, and a high level of interest in biblical prophetic and apocalyptic writings in particular.

So how the hell does this relate to Transition? you're asking. Good question. Well, for starters, the vision of a post-carbon world tends to be by far the most negative, and the most "apocalyptic", in the U.S. as compared to, say, Western Europe, or even Canada (America’s closest neighbour in far more than mere geography.) One has only to look at the peak-oil websites, and correlate them to their physical locations to see a definite pattern emerging. Survivalism in all of its forms, post-nuclear, post-millennial, as well as post-carbon, is rampant in the U.S., while is generally seen as rather atypical in most other parts of the world.

The American “cult of individualism” is partially responsible, I think. America is the home of the “rugged individual” as popularized and validated in everything from television to film to advertisement. The manly American doesn’t ask for help, doesn’t ask for sympathy or support, doesn’t ask for directions. When faced with a challenge, it is seen as admirable to button up, tighten your manly jaw, and triumph over the problem single-handed. It’s what the “strong, silent type” would do. Naturally, when surrounded by a collapsing civilization, it is thus a natural, “ruggedly individualistic” response to escape to the woods, build fortifications, and protect home, property and family (in that order) against all external threats by oneself.

Also, as Dr. Stephen Quilley points out, the United States still has thousands of square miles of untracked wilderness that it’s possible to escape to. Most other countries don’t have that luxury. Canada does have far more wilderness than the United States, but much of it is distinctly inhospitable, often featuring either muskeg swamp to the horizon, or a severely unpleasant climate, or both.

It’s likely no accident that the Transition movement, which embodies the spirit of collaboration, community and cooperation, started in Great Britain, an island that is almost entirely inhabited, and those relatively small areas still uninhabited are often even more inhospitable to human presence than Canada’s. And of course many cities in Great Britain survived the blitz during World War II largely because of what Pat Murphy calls the “power of community”.

Finally, the United States is one of the few countries on the globe that has never (the highly-selective attacks of 9/11 notwithstanding) experienced a direct threat due to war or attack. Many other countries have not been so lucky. In particular, countries in Western Europe and the British Isles have endured the massive devastation inflicted by two world wars, and have learned through direct, hard-won experience the value of community, and of banding together in time of crisis.

God knows I hope we are not headed toward a large-scale collapse due to peak oil, or climate change, or both, but nevertheless it is certainly one of several plausible scenarios. So, here’s a question: should such a collapse occur, who’s more likely to make it to long-term survival? The survivalist, hiding in the woods in his fortified bunker with an arsenal of weapons and a mountain of freeze-dried foods, or a community that bands together for mutual support and comfort, sharing of workload, distribution of essential tasks, and engaging in a large-scale collaboration on redesigning and rebuilding the local infrastructure with the goal of providing for their mutual and collective needs in the immediate and longer-term future?

I don’t have a definitive answer to that, but I know what my gut is telling me.

The local media's been pretty good to us, all things considered. The Mercury, The Trib, Snap and The Echo all had items about the Resilience 2011 festival (although one of them, not naming any names, insisted on calling it the "Resiliency" festival) and the coverage was, generally, pretty accurate, and favourable. But there still appears to be limits on what constitutes "appropriate" coverage of certain issues. Is peak oil still a fringe theory? Is it still the domain of guys walking around in sackcloth and ashes, carrying signs saying "the end is nigh?"

Perhaps that was true at one point. But within the last two weeks, no less a mainstream entity than the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has released a report warning of the severe economic consequences of a "downshift in the trend growth of oil supply" in the global oil market - IMF-speak for peak oil.

And last week, a special research unit within the Canadian military released its own report, predicting that both oil depletion and accelerating climate change could wreak havoc on political, social and economic stability around the globe, and warning that we may be heading toward a future that could trap Canada in a violent spiral of decline in the economy and the environment.

It's hard to know how much more mainstream an issue has to get before media and, more importantly, governments begin to take notice.

It's a core value of the transition movement that we embrace non-partisanship, and respect all political points of view. But hey, this is my blog. And I have to say that, while I do respect those key values, I have grave doubts that the outcome of the upcoming federal election is going to hold much other than bad news for the environment, sustainability, local resilience, and our economic future.

More to come...