From the Bookshelf of The Transition Movement…

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid the resulting rise in sea level? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau, the ice melt which sustains the major rivers and irrigation systems of Asia during the dry season? Can we stabilize population by reducing fertility before nature takes over and stabilizes our numbers by raising mortality? …
We need a new mindset. Let me paraphrase a comment by environmentalist Paul Hawkins in a 2009 college commencement address. In recognizing the enormity of the challenge facing us, he said: First we need to decide what needs to be done. Then we do it. And then we ask if it is possible.

The term “failing state” has entered our working vocabulary only during the last decade or so … Foreign Policy observes “Failed states have made a remarkable odyssey from the periphery to the very center of global politics … World leaders once worried about who was amassing power; now they worry about he absence of it.”
States fail when national governments lose control of part or all of their territory and can no longer ensure the personal security of their people … When they can no longer provide basic services such as education, health care, and food security, they lose their legitimacy … Societies can become so fragmented that they lack the cohesion to make decisions. (p. 18)

Plan B is the alternative to business as usual. Its goal is to move the world from the current decline and collapse path onto a new path where food security can be restored and civilization can be sustained … Plan B is far more ambitious than anything the world has ever undertaken, an initiative that has no precedent in either scale or urgency. It has four components: cutting net carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020, stabilizing population at 8 billion or lower, eradicating poverty, and restoring the earth’s natural systems, including its soils, aquifers, forests, grasslands, and fisheries. The ambitiousness of this plan is not driven by political feasibility but by scientific reality. (pp. 23,24)