Book: 'The Transition Handbook' is Creating Transition Towns

Are we going to reach peak oil soon? Will there be energy crises severe enough to make what we have look like child's play? Should campuses and communities work together to develop the resilience" necessary to cope with such crises? The Transition Handbook sounds intriguing. Perhaps we'll get it reviewed for Planning for Higher Education. Anyone want to volunteer to review it?

Colleges are often like little towns of their own, and many colleges are increasingly involved and intertwined with their surrounding communities. So why not form a “transition college”? Colleges are going to have to get serious preparing for future energy crises, and they should start thinking about how they might deal with them now. Most colleges are thinking mainly about cutting carbon emissions, which Mr. Hopkins believes is important but secondary to dealing with the energy crisis. Climate change is an end-of-tailpipe problem, while peak oil is an into-fuel-tank problem, to paraphrase peak-oil proponent Richard Heinberg.

Colleges Should Plan—and Teach—for an Oil-Scarce World

A nice piece from Scott Carlson of The Chronicle of Higher Education. (He'll also be at SCUP-43 in Montreal next week!) Yes, it's not just the current high price, it's the likelihood that the price will stay high, or if it does go down, will go high again: And then there's the likelihood of growing scarcity of oil at any price. Maybe not a concern for personal use of an automobile, but something colleges and universities need to address in their planning for as short a time frame as 10-25 years:

College leaders, with help from facilities managers, sustainability directors, faculty members, and even students, should think hard about how systems on their campus would operate in an energy-scarce world. That thinking should range beyond running part of the campus fleet on a cafeteria's fryer oil, a seemingly-popular response at the moment. Look at food supply chains, for example, and how far food travels from field to dining hall (1,500 diesel-powered miles, on average). How do you heat and cool buildings, and is that new building in the campus master plan really necessary? (It's regrettable that this energy crisis comes at the end of a campus building boom.) Is your campus an integrated part of the community around it—friendly to pedestrians and affordable to students and staff members? Or is it a destination at the end of a long freeway drive?

Brett Pasinella, a program coordinator at the University of New Hampshire's sustainability office in Durham, is thinking about some of these very issues with his colleagues. "You quickly run into problems and questions that go far beyond the standard internal university thinking and more into how the university fits into its region and its community," he says. "You run into the same problems that a town planner would run into."

The most important question colleges should ask themselves: If students are getting squeezed by high energy prices, what will compel them to pay your tuition?