Shaun Chamberlin is an author and activist, based in London, England. He is the author of The Transition Timeline, co-author of several other books including What We Are Fighting For, chair of the Ecological Land Co-operative, and was one of the earliest Extinction Rebellion arrestees.[1][2][3][4]
Chamberlin studied at Schumacher College in 2006, where his teachers included Rob Hopkins and David Fleming. Hopkins met his future co-founders of the now-global Transition Towns network during the course, and Chamberlin remained a key figure, co-founding Transition Town Kingston before authoring the movement's second book, The Transition Timeline.[8][9][10][11]
He also retained close links with Fleming, and they together advised the UK government's feasibility study into his influential TEQs system for fuel/electricity rationing in the face of climate change.[12][13][14] Shortly after Fleming's death in 2010, an All Party Parliamentary report advocating TEQs, authored by Fleming and Chamberlin and endorsed by twenty MPs, met with a controversial reception both in the UK and internationally.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21] During this period Chamberlin also spent eighteen months as a director of the campaigning organisation Global Justice Now.[22][23]
In 2012 he collaborated with David Graeber, John Holloway, Ann Pettifor and others on What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto,[24][25] and was also the editor of Mark Boyle's The Moneyless Manifesto. He and Boyle then collaborated towards the realisation of a moneyless community, in partnership with the Ecological Land Co-operative, of which he became chair in 2015.[26][27][28][29]
Chamberlin argues that the key challenge of modernity is responding to what he describes as the dilemma of economic growth - "either we cease growing, and so collapse the economy on which we all depend, or continue to grow until we overwhelm and destroy the ecosystems on which we all depend". He contends that unless we address this, the economy will inevitably continue its ecological destructiveness, though also highlights that such behaviour is demonstrably not merely human nature, since many cultures - especially indigenous cultures - have a long track record of acting otherwise.[46][47]
Accordingly, his writing and participation with activist projects like the Ecological Land Co-operative, Occupy and Extinction Rebellion emphasise the possibilities for living in fulfilling ways that do not support our collective drive towards life on a devastated planet. He personally does not fly,[48][49] and he and Mark Boyle complement their writing by living as part of the community at 'The Happy Pig' in County Galway, Ireland, which Chamberlin has described as "a bastion for the renaissance of the non-monetary economy".[50][51]
Drawing on David Fleming's work, he has argued that a post-growth rediscovery of culture and community is inevitable, yet only likely after civilisational collapse.[52][53][54][55]
2020 - LeanLogic.online - Freely-accessible reworking of David Fleming's posthumous Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It as an interactive website
