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The continual discovery of new oil and gas reserves by ever-improving technological advances drives the idea of resource scarcity into absurdity. But at what price? In the foreseeable future, the critical boundaries of growth are not in the exhaustion of fuel sources and raw materials, but rather in the burden placed on critical ecosystems.

A Keynote by Daniela Gottschlich.

Cécile Maisonneuve is Director of the Center for Energy of the Institut Français des Relations Internationales. Paul Hockenos talked with her about the German Energiewende, France’s energy future and the public debate about the renewables, which is only just beginning.

Martin Bursik is deputy leader of the Greens and chairperson of the Chamber of Renewable Energy Resources in Prague. Paul Hockenos talked with him about the renewables, the problem that Germany’s electricity flows swamping the Czech grid and the missing public debate about energy-related topics in Czech.

Germany resolved to go down the path of its energy transition – the Energiewende. But it became clear very quickly at the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s two-day conference entitled “Energiewende – Think European!” in Berlin, there’s a lot of skepticism about and even deep-seated resentment toward Germany’s energy policies. Poles and the French, Czechs and Brits, in fact most of the EU27, are not on the same page as Germany.

In the south of Mexico people are regenerating the society from the bottom up. It is a new kind of revolution without leaders or vanguards, which goes beyond development and globalization. It is about displacing the economy from the center of social life, reclaiming a communal way of being, encouraging radical pluralism, and advancing towards real democracy.

Today there are more than 500 “official” Transition Town initiatives in more than 38 countries, and several thousand more are in the process of formation in many cities, towns and regions across the world. But what is it that makes the Transition model so attractive for so many extremely different people and cultures?

In the past, we tended to see cities as dirty, unnatural, and isolating places; today, citizens and urban planners alike are starting to see their potential for generating widespread well-being at low financial and environmental cost. People want the streets to make room for pedestrians and bicyclists, and for civic engagement and for sharing. 

There is an all-enclosing commons-economy which has been successful for billions of years: The biosphere is neither efficient nor does it know property. Nature embodies the commons paradigm par excellence and can therefore provide us with a powerful methodology of the commons as a natural and social ecology.

Clearly possession is no more sufficient today than it was for the English villagers of the 17th and 18th centuries of enclosure. Only legal recognition of commons as the communal property of communities, author Liz Alden Wily finds, is sufficient to afford real protection.