The New Voluntary Simplicity: The Peak Oil/Climate Change Community-building Movement

• In Event: 552 - Section on Political Economy of the World-Systems Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Capitalism and Wealth in the World-System

Abstract

Based on projections of “peak oil,” the imminent peak of the global oil supply, a community-building movement developed in the new millennium. This organizing has increasingly also incorporated the possibility of social disruption due to catastrophic climate change in its diagnosis. The best-known network that is part of this larger movement is the Transition Towns network, which began in the U.K. and has since spread to the U.S. and elsewhere. The persistence of the movement following the dramatic drop in the price of oil and the increase in the supply in natural gas based on fracking reveals its motivation to be more than immediate economic self-interest. In the context of world-system inequality and calls for climate justice, the movement is an important example of action in the North to reduce disproportionate consumption. This paper analyzes the movement focusing on movement intellectuals, mainly based on websites and books, in preparation for ethnographic research on local activists.

Author

• Richard Hutchinson, Kennesaw State University