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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.
He is also known for his collaboration with the late David Fleming, having brought his award-winning lifework Lean Logic to posthumous publication, drawn from it the paperback Surviving the Future, and served as executive producer on Peter William Armstrong's 2020 feature film about Fleming's legacy - The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? Fleming Policy Centre announcement of film project, 1 August 2017
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. 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. "British lawmakers propose energy rationing", Financial Times, 18 January 2011 Chamberlin interview on report launch, BBC Radio 5 Live, "Wake Up to Money", 18 January 2011 During this period Chamberlin also spent eighteen months as a director of the campaigning organisation Global Justice Now.
In 2012 he collaborated with David Graeber, John Holloway, Ann Pettifor and others on What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto, 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.
In 2016, he took a manuscript left by his late mentor David Fleming and edited it for posthumous publication as . Chamberlin's preface to Lean Logic This uniquely structured hardback was published alongside the paperback Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy, conceived and created by Chamberlin after Fleming's death, and consisting of content from Lean Logic which he selected and edited into a conventional read-it-front-to-back narrative.
The twinned books were critically acclaimed, won several awards including first place in the 2017 New York Book Show, and were named in multiple Book of the Year lists. "Surviving the Future", Bollier.org, 13 June 2017 They also gave rise to both Peter William Armstrong's 2020 film The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? and Sterling College (Vermont)'s $1.5m EcoGather project, including the online program Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time, led by Chamberlin since 2020.
Accordingly, his writing and participation with activist projects like the Ecological Land Co-operative, Occupy movement 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, 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".
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.
He also frequently addresses psychological and spiritual topics such as grief and despair in the face of our collective predicament. He is noted for coining the widely-adopted term 'Dark Optimism', which The Guardian's Anne Karpf has characterised as "facing dark truths while believing unwaveringly in human potential", and which inspired EXPO 1: Dark Optimism at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2013, featuring artists including Ansel Adams, Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Olafur Eliasson and Adrián Villar Rojas.
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> 2017 - "Community, Place and Play: A Post-Market Economics" - Schumacher College course taught by Chamberlin, in partnership with Rob Hopkins and Mark Boyle
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