Sounding the alarm early is far better than not sounding the alarm at all. In fact, those who do are the true pioneers of ecological conciousness. Heinberg may be early, or he may not be, yet he has engaged us all in a very necessary conversation, arguably the most important conversation my generation will have in our lifetimes.

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Apollo is a small town in western Pennsylvania, part of the old coal and steel belt that surrounds Pittsburgh. The people who grew up there have learned what harm the corporations who employed them and their relatives and friends have done and continue to do. Men, women, and children were poisoned by that uranium fuel plant and that glass plant. Yet, for the most part, they ignore this, content to contemplate instead their “warm and fuzzy” memories, as one person put it.

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Our capacity to bring about collective change decreases with every passing year – at least the kind of collective change the French people can accept. It is quite possible to simplify the French society, but that means accepting, even embracing, poverty, not something we as a people are likely to do.

Authoritarianism is therefore bound to fail, and become more and more authoritarian with time as, unlike democracy, failure is not something it can accept. Its normal way of dealing with it is not handing power to the other side, but finding somebody to blame.

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-Dump the pump: could peak oil be voluntary?
-Shell's Majnoon deal highlights Iraq oil target verdict
-Insight - Peak, pause or plummet? Shale oil costs at crossroads

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Dangerously low levels of sustainability in the food industry may skyrocket to the top of the to-do and worry-about lists of business executives, government officials, and perhaps even environmentalists and shoppers.

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Could we really feel that the Transition movement's responses were adequate in the face of the suffering being inflicted by the crisis? Would speaking of local currencies feel sufficient in comforting the family of the pensioner who shot himself in front of the Greek Parliament last month after his pension was cut to nothing (described by Greeks not as suicide, but as "financial murder")?

Transitioning Money means building narratives and economic structures that empower people to step away from the crumbling mainstream and learn to trust in each other again, instead of in money.

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“In the first world, we have been fed a false sense of security that is imploding,” says Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, recounting her family’s experience with the militant experiment in collective governance and self-sufficiency. “On Earth Day, our families were a part of manifesting a collective vision for a better way forward—that the land be a community educational center. We have planted strawberries in the children’s garden and feed the chickens with snails that we collect from our own garden. My partner, a cook, brings us food regularly. We are making that vision real.”

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Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein is a well-researched discussion of the history of money, capitalist economics and the worldwide movement for economic relocalization. Part I explores the profound effect the institution of money has on human thinking and psychology, as well as direct links between our monetary system, the current economic crisis and the impending global ecological crisis. Parts II and III explore possible alternatives to a debt-based monetary system that has outlived its usefulness.

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