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only a tiny portion of the population accepts that “growth is over,” perhaps time and circumstances
will change that. Some recent shifts in social values and opinions (such as public acceptance of gay
marriage) have moved from an “early adopter” to “early majority” phase surprisingly rapidly; per-
haps energy and climate awareness will likewise eventually overcome what currently appears to be
overwhelming resistance.
FIGURE 2: The innovation adoption lifecycle
Another source of inspiration is Donella Meadows's perennially useful paper “Leverage Points:
Places to Intervene in a System.” 7 Meadows identified 12 leverage points (from constants and para-
meters, to mindsets and paradigms, to the power to transcend paradigms), which she organized into
a hierarchy of relative effectiveness. If we need to change our energy and economic systems pro-
foundly and quickly, we should intervene at the level of paradigms, not regulations and taxes.
Innovators have already teased out the implications of Meadows's paper and acted on them.
What's needed, evidently, is an attractive new paradigm that might lead us to proactively reduce
our energy consumption. The voluntary simplicity movement blazed that trail back in the 1980s, 8
and the Transition Network has made considerably more headway by organizing whole communit-
ies around the task of reducing fossil fuel consumption while relearning preindustrial skills and re-
building local economies.
Transition also emphasizes building community resilience as an essential strategy in adapting
to our emerging energy, economy, and climate reality. This is because (for reasons discussed in the
first portion of this essay) we've waited far too long to begin the paradigm shift, so it may not be
possible to sustain many of the systems that currently support an industrial mode of societal organ-
ization. Shocks are on the way, and we need to bounce rather than shatter.
It's easy to see how elected leaders could help in this vital transformation if they were inclined
to do so—for example, by ditching GDP in favor of the genuine progress indicator (GPI) or gross
national happiness (GNH) measures. But most policy makers are likely to remain in the “late ma-
jority” or even “laggard” categories. 9
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