On a cool November Sunday the hall of the Little Lake Grange in Willits, CA, filled with members and supporters of WELL – Willits Economic Localization.
11 years earlier many of them had come to hear Richard Heinberg after reading his book The Party’s Over: Oil, War & the Fate of Industrial Societies. The 2004 Canadian documentary, The End of Suburbia, featured an interview with Heinberg and became an inspiration here as well as for the emerging international Transition Town movement.
Arguing that modern life as we know it will end as oil reserves begin running out and climate change does not allow us to burn the rest, the Transition Town Movement focuses on the interrelated issues of energy and economy and all the positive projects of local self reliance that are already under way.
Richard Heinberg’s talk on “Our Renewable Future” is set among all the frightening news about accelerating climate change. However his message was serious but positive. He asks how our daily life will change as we fully embrace the era of renewable energy? How will we need to shift the ways we use energy – offering both opportunities and challenges.
Richard is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at the Post Carbon Institute and has written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues, including oil depletion.
He is the author of twelve books, including some of the seminal works on our energy and environmental sustainability crisis. The most recent one’s are: Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels (2015); Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future (2013); and The End of Growth: Adapting the Our New Economic Reality (2011)
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