Century of Challenges

Today we went down to Albany to hear blogger and polymath Nicole Foss who writes as Stoneleigh at The Automatic Earth speak about global energy and financial crises. Nicole has been touring both North America and Europe giving her talk entitled “A Century of Challenges” with an aim of helping turn the virtual community that reads her blog into a set of real communities that are working to prepare for future change. The talk was hosted by Transition Albany, one of many hundred such groups that are part of the Transition movement across the world that are working to come with local adaptations to shrinking energy supplies and problems with climate change. Nicole’s prognostications are grim — not that her message to expect a deflationary depression is new to me, having been reading her and her writing partner Ilargi’s blog for several years now — but we left her talk feeling inspired. Nicole says she’s trying to provide “a psychological inoculation” against the human herding behaviors of fear and anger, the inoculant being that by working within community there is in fact a lot we as individuals can do to try to prepare for future upheaval.