Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook is a new, tremendously useful, and inspiring book on how to move, as the subtitle says, "From oil dependency to local resilience."

Richard Heinberg has spent a lot of time visiting Transition Towns in the UK, and he describes the movement as looking "more like a party than a protest march."

And it is a party, not a protest. The Transition Town philosophy is about making change where you are, with the people around you, not pressuring someone else to make the change for you.

Here's one small way this book has helped me:
I give a lot of peak oil slide shows, and I was intrigued by his suggestion for a "do-it-yourself" peak oil slideshow. You create the slideshow by printing up each slide on a piece of 8.5x11 paper, with circles and arrows (or, in any case, a paragraph) explaining the slide on the back of each one, and then hand the cards out to the audience. Each person's job is to meet every other person in the room and explain the slide he or she has. By the time everyone has met everyone else, they have had quite an introduction to peak oil. It really gets people invested in the ideas and helps them get to know each other!

I haven't tried the full DIY slideshow yet, but the idea has inspired me to cut off the final part of my standard slideshow and replace it with a visioning exercise about the future of Vermont. I then ask the audience to break up into small groups and share their visions. The room comes to life when they do it!

Though the book came out in March or so in the UK, it's not scheduled to be distributed in the US until September.* Normally, I try to buy books at local bookstores. This one is too good to wait that long for. You can order it online, with quick and surprisingly inexpensive shipping from the UK.

Go to the book's order page at the Transition Cultures web site, and click on the "Rest of the World" tab. It's £21.50 with shipping, about $42, and arrived within a week when I ordered it. As of this writing, there are also at least a couple copies available at Amazon for about $32 with shipping from the US.

This book is too important to wait until the fall to read. Get it, read it during the summer lull in activism, and then you'll be read to put its ideas to work during the fall activism crescendo.

While you're waiting for the book to arrive, take some time to poke around the Transition Culture web site, or read some of the articles tagged Solutions or Community at EnergyBulletin.net, or read the Vermont Peak Oil Network's latest monthly newsletter to get a sense of what is already happening in the state.

*UPDATE: Margot Baldwin at Chelsea Green has emailed me to say that they now expect the book to be available here in July. I've asked her to let me know when it is available. (The post is also updated with a minor formatting change.)