Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil

There's something tantalising about this idea but the talk lacks substance. I very much like the affirmation that stories profoundly shape our culture, or at least identify desires that then through hard work get satisfied. Rob provokes the TED audience into asking whether it is right to give the impression that innovation is the magic elixir, without pointing out the obvious risk of this belief (we don't invent the things that will solve the problem - surely this is not possible).

Rob is clever enough to not dismiss the possibility that we can invent tools that bail us out. Instead he asks actually, is this what we want. His last sentence nicely sums up his view:

"a world that is more resilient, more skilled and more connected to each other"

But, the details I suspect leave many wanting more. On a practical level he only mentions or alludes to energy micro-generation, urban gardening, local currencies and new ways of building with natural products.

This leaves me cold too. While I do think many more people would be happier involved in simple manual tasks, hard work outside, because this would help solve a huge problem: too many people are cut off from meaningful relationships by pointless jobs.

But why should we aspire to be farmers and house buildings, is this just harking back to medieval days? Did the Amish have it right? Nostalgia is a powerful drug (does 'nostalgia' apply to something that we have no real memory of?), having been a keen allotment gardener in the past I know it is not all fun, and making enough to live from is much more work than most could handle, and more importantly very risky e.g. crops do fail.

I think this nostalgia is really fuelled by another social malaise. Lack of trust in the people/organisations that provide these commodities. We just don't like the big supermarkets, the intensive agriculture systems, the transport networks, the energy and chemical companies that underpin the whole thing. We don't know who they are, what they do and the assumptions that underpin their operations. We suspect they are there just to make huge profits to line a few people's pockets, treating the consumers cynically and with disdain.

What is more, I just cannot believe it is more efficient for thousands/millions of people to be farmers rather than the few. Is the battle here Fordism vs Anarchy with the assumption that people would be happier within a slower individualised world. I love to clear the mess from my desk so that I can have more interesting thoughts, I aspire to escape the mundane. After a while creatively needs new props, I am not sure how far my thoughts will travel within sensory universe of manual labour.

I suspect this view is largely unfounded and the issue is more to do with poor communications and laziness in many areas of innovations. Operations have been swimming in oil, basking on the beaches of indolence letting the fat cats swell to bursting point. What I suspect Rob and the network he is supporting is really peeved at is having their ideas and sense quashed for decades by the weight of these baby boomers, the Peter Pan generation and their 'progress' dogma.

Personally I don't want to be a market gardener, I want just enough food and energy for me to have meaningful relationships, and focus as much of my self as possible engaged in creative processes that befit 2100 AD rather than 1400 AD.