Page 12 RAIN Oct./Nov. 1983 The State of the Movement RAIN has always been a generalist magazine, concerned (as was stated in Volume I, No. 1) with "the evolutionary possibilities of interdisciplinary connections.” Still, it is easy to pick out certain broad concerns of the appropriate technologyIsocial change movement that have also been RAlN's principal concerns since the very beginning: sustainable agriculture, bioregional planning, community economics, renewable energy, information Icommunications, recycling, and alternative shelter. For this special anniversary issue, we asked people with well-recognized knowledge and experience in each of these areas of the a. t. Isocial change movement to share their views of the movement's successes and failures over the past 10 years and their visions of what awaits the movement during the second RAIN decade.—JF Drawingsfrom Diane Schatz's Ecotopia posters Energy © by Amory and Hunter Lovins At least two-thirds ofAmericans now realize that "energy conservation" means insulating your roof, not freezing in the dark. People who suggested that energy be used efficiently and that a larger share of it (eventually most or all of it) come from appropriate renewable sources were considered kooky primitivists a decade ago and utopian dreamers five years ago. Now they're painfully respectable. They cite such sources as the Harvard Business School and the new-product reports of the Fortune 500; opposition to their thesis is confined to the uninformed. The transition from the barricades to the boardrooms is difficult for some to make. The transition, though, is toughest of all for the energy supply industries. Planners are awash in unexpected gluts of oil, gas, coal, uranium, and electricity (at least in countries like our own—not in the nations where roughly two billion people still scrounge for wood and dung to cook their food). The energy supply industries, believing their own inflated projections, tooled up to sell far more energy than anyone wanted to buy. As a result, once-mighty utilities can't finance their way out of a paper bag; they may have to write off $100-200 billion in the next two decades. Some major oil companies may go belly-up, victims of imprudent investment strategies and the illusion that people wanted to buy barrels of sticky black goo (rather than mobility, comfort, etc.). However, those of us who saw all this coming, at least in outline, should restrain the impulse to say we told them so; while it's fun to be right, nobody likes to be around you when you are. We need instead to practice aikido politics—to talk to people where they are, not where we are, and to honor them and their beliefs even when we know, by divine inspiration, how misguided they are. Everyone's forecasts have been wrong, in varying degrees and for various reasons; nobody deserves a monopoly on humility. The speed of the energy transition caught everyone
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