If The Long Emergency and An Inconvenient Truth sounded the alarm for us to wake up and change course, Pat Murphy’s hard-hitting Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change (New Society, 2008) presents a compelling case for joining together to implement plan C: revitalizing community and curtailing our consumption culture.

For the record, Plan A is our present course: more oil drilling, more growth, more carbon dioxide emissions, more consumption, more of a gap between the haves and have-nots. Plan B suggests that we can shop our way out of climate change and peak oil, if only we consume “green” products and services. But Plan C advocates a drastic reduction in consumption as the necessary ingredient for a sustainable, equitable world. Replacing competition with cooperation and materialism with meaningful human relationships, Plan C makes an appealing case for unique places where neighbors care for each other and communities work cohesively to achieve a common wealth that has little to do with money.

Plan C provides a vivid analysis of our present predicament of peak oil (and rising energy prices), climate change and the growing social and economic inequity both in the US and globally. It’s paired with timely solutions addressing food, transportation, and the built environment within the context of revitalizing our communities (read: turn off the TV and invite your neighbors over for lemonade) and curtailment that might even involve some personal sacrifices. Is a plasma TV, using about as much electricity as a refrigerator, really necessary in order to watch the evening news? Why not ditch the clothes dryer and line-dry laundry instead?

Could this be what President-Elect Barack Obama alluded to during his acceptance speech in Chicago? President-Elect Obama called it a “new spirit of sacrifice” and asked Americans to summon “a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility” and called on us to look after ourselves and each other. This definitely doesn’t sound like an appeal for us to go vacationing at Disney World, or hit the malls.

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