Promotion, promotion, promotion

This week has been all about thinking why people don't take notice of the Transition movement. It all boils down to promotion, promotion, promotion.

On Monday it was the Transport Group meeting, and it was just me and Fatherly Figure, a guy that spends his time networking, talking like a politician, and sounding like he is Mr Transition. I tried to steer the conversation towards the obvious issue that it was just two of us there, and what do we do to get more people involved? But he wasn't interested in talking about that. Instead, he told me all about the latest things he had been doing, doing the positive thinking thing and pretending that everything was OK when it obviously wasn't. He was going to talk on Thursday on a workshop organized by the University on the subject "Being hopeful in the face of climate change", and I asked him to mention the Action Plan.

On Thursday, I went to the workshop with Transition leaflets I had printed myself and absolutely determined to raise my hand in the turn of questions to get a say on the Action Plan. I didn't trust Fatherly Figure to say what I hoped for, and I was entirely right. He just talked in generalities like a politician. In the turn of questions, there was this girl that asked just the kind of question I was hoping for: "But what is it all going to look like when we have gone carbon neutral?" Fatherly Figure completely screwed it. He said: "We will find out by working with others and the community and blah blah blah"... and absolutely nothing specific to hang on to. Then another member of the panel gave the one answer that I'm absolutely certain is incorrect: "Oh, it will all look exactly the same as now, everything just like today, only that in some places you will see windmills in the horizon." In the last twenty years we've had no great war, no revolution, no huge change of any kind, and if you took somebody from 1989 to have a look at today, they'd be completely baffled when they saw everybody works in front of a computer and music is something you download. In the next twenty years, we are guaranteed to see some of the most profound changes humanity is ever going to be through in their history, and everything is going to look just the same? Give me a break! I was frantically putting my hand up, but I was ignored and the whole thing finished without me having a chance to say the one thing worth saying that anybody had there: That we need some serious planning, and some of us are working on it.

It's absolutely obvious that we have a problem with promotion and giving out our message, and people like Fatherly Figure, who think they are part of the solution, are clearly part of the problem. Ignoring things and glossing over details don't make the problems go away. Having as a spokesman the kind of guy who is utterly forgettable isn't a brilliant idea. We need a different approach.