Is driving into the sunset of our society the best way to talk about Transition? Photo: Nicholas_T via Flickr.
This September sees the fifth anniversary of the Unleashing of Transition Town Totnes. We were deeply flattered the other day to receive a somewhat premature but very welcome plaque from the Town Council bearing the inscription “Transition Town Totnes: to celebrate their first 5 years of activity within the town.”
I’ll probably write a more detailed “Totnes: some reflections after five years in Transition” in September, but this post was prompted by an email from a friend in Totnes, who grew up here in the 1960s and is very much a pillar of the community. He had valiantly read my dissertation, Localization and Resilience, cover to cover and wrote with some reflections. In his email he makes a very interesting point:
Another conclusion occurred. Further mention of climate change, peak oil and sustainability is probably pointless. Again, you are either preaching to the choir or the resistant. By now everybody has heard of those terms and must be intimately familiar with them. I don’t think there is anybody left who can genuinely call themselves undecided.
I thought this was a fascinating observation. Although it is peak oil and climate change that initially inspire Transition initiatives and form the underpinning for much of the initial awareness stage, might it be that an initiative reaches a point where continued focus on those issues could be counterproductive?
His point is that most people have by now made up their mind as to whether they agree that peak oil and/or climate change are important issues or not. Instead, he’s asking if, beyond a certain point, it could be that continued highlighting of the issues actually risks dividing and alienating people rather than including them?
Localization as economic development
At the moment, the outward focus of TTT’s work is more explicitly about economic regeneration and social enterprise, rather than on promoting the issues of peak oil and climate change.
We are promoting the concept of “localization as economic development” and about to start work on an Economic Blueprint for the town, working with the Town Council, Chamber of Commerce and other local bodies. We are seeking to support emerging social enterprises and to create new mechanisms for inward investment. While all of this, clearly, is underpinned by an understanding of peak oil and climate change, we haven’t actually held a talk about peak or climate change for a while.
In the forthcoming Transition Companion (due out in September), Transition is described has happening in five stages:
- Getting started: this is the beginning stage, where a group of people come together and form a group, inspired by the principles of Transition. They start awareness raising and networking in their community
- Deepening: here they start to become “Transition wherever,” a recognized initiative which begins to embark on distinct projects as well as becoming more organized in how it works
- Connecting: then they start to go deeper, reaching beyond the usual suspects and deeper into the community
- Building: this is about embarking on the practicalities of intentional localization, thinking strategically about creating new institutions, new infrastructure and supporting the emergence of new enterprises that ground the concept of localization as economic development in the local economy
- Daring to Dream: what would it look like if every community had a vibrant Transition initiative and they were all actively transforming their local economies? Here we step into the speculative and wonder about where all this could go.
A time to reap, a time to sow
In the first stage, peak oil and climate change serve as the absolutely vital framing, the inspiration and the motivator. In stage two, an ongoing program keeping them out there as issues is also vital.
By stage three, you are beginning to get into the field of the people who are open to knowing about it will probably already have picked up on it, and the rest of the people might be starting to feel a bit like you are “that lot,” like Transition is not for them, and starting to feel excluded from what is supposed to be a community-driven process.
By stage four, “Building,” while any strategic thinking, such as an Energy Descent Action Plan, a local economic blueprint or whatever, clearly needs to be underpinned by peak oil and climate change, as well as the end of economic growth, the focus starts to shift to economic regeneration and enterprise.
As the plaque from Totnes Town Council shows, at this point it is possible to be well and widely respected, but this is the stage where people are expecting great things and are expecting you to live up to the expectations you have created.
Brewing a hoppy Transition
Shifting the focus to localization as economic development offers the opportunity for those who felt excluded by the peak oil and climate change focus to step in, and for your Transition initiative to be seen as addressing local challenges as perceived by most people (lack of employment, skills and training, lack of affordable housing and so on). By this stage, awareness of peak oil and climate change are diffused into the DNA of the organization. As TTT nears its fifth birthday, this is certainly our experience. People with great expertise and skills in business and livelihoods are coming on board to help drive forward our work in a range of initiatives and projects who may well not have done so before.
In Topsham in Devon, Transition Town Topsham began in the usual way, showing films, holding events, doing some practical projects. They found though that engagement was only going so far. “Is peak oil the thing that will unite and inspire this community?” they asked. Probably not. “Climate change?” Again, probably not.
“Beer?” Ah, now you’re talking.
Topsham Ales was funded by £35,000 raised in shares being sold to 56 members of the co-operative they created. It is rooted in the concept of localization (uses local hops, spent hops go to local pigs, beers and labels celebrate local place and history) but not explicitly so. Might there be a lesson to be learned from Topsham Ales in terms of the need, at a certain point in the evolution of a Transition initiative, to shift its focus? Discuss….
Cross posted from Transition Culture.
— Rob Hopkins
Yes. As with Carbon Credits or any other resource-specific topic, what we have to look at is the underpinning of human behaviors and the real needs of the planet. There are an infinite number of ways to approach the problem, but I think the basic paradigm lies in the direction of our service and usefulness. By this, I mean that we have to evaluate whether our actions are adding to the future or taking resources away from it. Economically, this is determined by whether value (sometimes represented by money) is flowing up and away from the soil (which is the future foodstuffs we will need), or if we are utilizing our humanness (tools, minds, labors) to improve the soil and planet.
In simplest terms, are we taking or giving? Are we consumers or creators? Sometimes we need to consume things in order to create something, but the net flow or net future usefulness we should be striving for is toward the local and the fundamental elements of need, rather than toward the dreams and fantasies of some high-tech, unrestrained ‘freedom of choice’ which is just another description of uncontrolled consumption.
The scary part about peak oil discussions is not the oil itself, but that people who start to think about how we use oil also start to look for some “direction” to act with. Up until this Peak Consumption moment in history, our directions have come from On High and have been oriented toward perpetually increasing consumption and exploitation of the lower forms of resources in favor of more and more humans and “better” living “standards”.
We now have a different direction to follow, and it is downward, to support the neglected resources around us so that they will be available in the future, to increase diversity and sustainability at the cost of human comforts. Whether we can face up to it as a species will be a matter of our integrity in the universe.
I’m still reading “Permaculture Magazine” – which stresses the positive benefits of sustainable living – but I’d given up on “The Ecologist” – all doom and gloom – even before the printed edition folded. Yet we still need to keep the message visible, otherwise sooner or later someone will want to sell Topsham Ale in the next town … then the next county … and then get it listed by Tesco.
Great post, I thoroughly enjoyed it. On the subject of local economies, though, I’d like to share an opinion. I do agree that we should focus in the short-term on strengthening a local economy in every sense of the word. However, it would seem that in a broader stroke, we should be seeking opportunities to experiment with alternative society models. Given that a community has adequate resilience and self-sufficiency, we could explore the possibility of a society without physical currency. Perhaps we exchange something more significant and incorrigible, such as time. It is evidenced by much of written history that societies based on a monetary system are NOT free and equal. With a monetary system, debt is inevitable and is essentially slavery.
I also want to nod to Auntiegrav’s post. Very well said indeed. I gain a lot of hope, meeting and talking with people in my generation who are wise to what is happening and are determined to fix it. However, the damage caused by our wanton consumption on the planet, and the social pressures we endure has taken a toll. We have a long way to go before we can resume the right path.
Great article, Rob, but I must strongly disagree with your friend that everyone’s made up their minds on peak oil, at least not in America. While climate change is a household phrase here, peak oil definitely isn’t. Peak oil is not discussed in the mainstream media, and no American president has ever uttered the phrase in public. I am a graduate student at Antioch University in Seattle, and even in my classes full of educated, liberal environmentalists, the term often elicits blank stares.
For this reason, I believe there is an audience ripe to buy into the peak oil story: people who are concerned about dependence on foreign oil, weakened communities, sustainability, “unlimited” growth, etc., but have not heard of peak oil because it’s not an issue that one usually comes upon by casually reading the paper or listening to NPR. Peak oil has to be sought out. If the Transition movement is interested in increasing its members in the US, perhaps some effort should be put into bringing “peak oil” into the public lexicon.
We’re not too good for peak oil ya know… we can’t cut our legs off and turn into polyanna. When you lose the edginess, all you get are career politicians set on cashing in on “sustainability” by carbon-TAXING us up the butt & banning plastic bags (which we will have to BUY when we walk our dogs). Without the “mad max” feel, it all becomes liberals jerking each other off.