Life After Oil
http://wholelifetimes.com/2009/04/lifeafteroil0904.html

The Transition Town movement aims to wean us off our fossil fuel addiction ­without knowing if it’ll work. How an unproven social experiment is becoming a phenomenon


By Rachel Dowd

In the late 1980s, Joanne Poyourow’s life looked like the American Dream. A certified public accountant in charge of multistate taxation at a boutique practice in Newport Beach, Calif., she had earned the shiny little sports car, three-inch heels, and business class flights to which she had grown accustomed.

Then she left it behind.

To see Poyourow today ­ sporting a low-slung ponytail and blue fleece jacket as she harvests organic chard from the Holy Nativity Community Garden in Los Angeles ­ it’s impossible not to wonder, “What happened?”

“We’ve created a society where it’s very easy to be unreal,” she explains. “We’ve maxed out on nearly everything. For me, it was about getting back to real ­ because we have to.”

Poyourow is part of a budding number of Americans embracing the phenomenon of Transition, which starts with the idea that our triple-latte, two-hour commute, plugged-in and gassed-up way of life is on borrowed time. Faced with the real threat of climate change, economic decline and peak oil (the point when cheap and abundant oil ends) they’re ripping up their grass lawns for edible gardens, installing rainwater collection barrels under roof gutters, and forming coalitions to transition their communities to a local and low-energy lifestyle.

“Anybody who doesn’t have his or her head in the sand knows there’s something powerful going on in the world,” says Vermont resident George Lisi, instructor at Wisdom of the Herbs School in East Calais and member of Transition Montpelier. “It’s about seeing past the welter of information and counter information and just getting it on a deep level. Things are most certainly going to change in very challenging ways. But there is truly a lot we can do if we start now and if we work together.”

Hitting the Peak
Imagine for a moment what the world might look like without a ready supply of oil. Or save yourself the energy and consider Cuba in 1991. That’s when the former Soviet Republic (Cuba’s primary source of cheap oil) collapsed, triggering a sudden and unexpected energy crisis on the island. Transportation slowed to a brisk walk. If buses did run, they ran late and were packed beyond capacity. Electricity became spotty and frequent blackouts cut the use of everything from water pumps to air conditioners for up to 14 hours a day. Food production and delivery came to a halt, which consequently lowered Cubans’ caloric intake from 2,908 calories a day in the ’80s to 1,863 in 1993. Malnutrition rose, birth weights fell, and the average Cuban lost 20 pounds.

That’s certainly one way it could go. Though it’s hardly the way Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement, would choose.

In 2005, while teaching a course on Practical Sustainability in Ireland, Hopkins and his students created the Kinsale Energy Descent Plan, the first strategic design for weaning a community off fossil fuels. That same year, Hopkins turned his PhD thesis into a roadmap down from the twin peaks of oil dependency and climate change. He called it the Transition Model: “a social experiment on a massive scale” that, incidentally, may not actually work.

The humble caveat didn’t stop the people of Totnes in Devon, England, from becoming the first official Transition Town in 2005. And it hasn’t dissuaded more than 145 towns and cities worldwide ­ including 17 in the United States ­ from signing on since.

If America’s interest in an unproven social experiment came as surprise to Jennifer Gray, Hopkins’ longtime friend and the current president and cofounder of Transition US, she quickly recovered. “I expect the movement will be bigger here,” says the Bay Area denizen, who was instrumental in launching the second Transition Town in Penweth, England, in 2006. “People are entrepreneurial. They have a very strong pioneering spirit and the uptake of new ideas is much faster here than in the U.K.”

Of course our never-say-die spirit can have a downside. “We have had challenges dealing with big egos,” Gray admits. Case in point: Two very strong characters tried to establish competing Transition initiatives in the same California town, which Gray declines to name. “People want to take it in different directions. They’re used to doing things their way, aren’t they?”

A Culture of Permanence
To prepare for the possibility of peak oil, Hopkins preaches many of the same solutions Cuba used in the ’90s. The ultimate goal of Transition is to make a community resilient in the face of external shocks like oil and food shortages. Hopkins theorizes the best way to get there is through re-localization of food, energy, economics, healthcare, transportation, water and waste. In short, he says anything that has become part of the fossil-fuel dependant global economy needs to be reclaimed as a sustainable, low-energy, local initiative. That means community gardens and backyard vegetable plots, building materials like straw bale and cob, energy generation from solar and wind, and development of local currency and gray water programs. It means re-skilling ourselves in everything from farming to darning socks. But unlike Cuba, Transition doesn’t rely on the government to institute change ­ it’s fueled by the will and ingenuity of the people.

Anyone who has brushed up against the environmental movement in the past decade will likely recognize the re-localization talk. But look a tad closer and Transition reveals itself to be the spitting image of Permaculture ­ a system created by Australian ecologist Bill Mollison in 1978 to generate a culture of permanence through smaller ecosystems that function harmoniously within the larger natural ecosystem.

“Rob has cleverly packaged it in different paper,” explains Jennifer Gray, who like Hopkins is a Permaculture educator. “Permaculture was reaching out to gardeners and diggers and activists. Transition is reaching out to communities, governments and businesses. A lot is in the word ­ say, ‘Transition Towns’ and people are intrigued and excited ­ but it’s definitely a permaculture model through and through.”

“I think of it as Permaculture 2.0,” says Eric Anderson, a handyman and member of Transition LA, to 40 people at a Permaculture meeting in Santa Monica, Calif. “Transition just takes some of the [permaculture] concepts and makes them purposeful.”

The concept of Transition is clear even if the execution is murky. Like a house full of foster kids, Transition Towns are unquestionably a family, though technically no one has the same genetics. While each community follows the 12-step process outlined in Hopkins’ Transition Handbook ­ including setting up a steering committee, creating public awareness, developing projects and eventually crafting an energy descent action plan ­ each place is tasked to carry out those steps in a way that both responds to the community’s most pressing needs and emphasizes its assets.
For example, New England sensibility has kept the residents of Montpelier, Vt., well versed in practical skills like dairy farming and canning fruit ­ huge advantages to the re-localization of food production ­ but the challenge of heating homes without oil in a climate where winter temperatures hover below 20 degrees is astronomical. The artist enclave of Laguna, Calif., which became an official Transition Town in November 2008, has the benefit of a robust local business community that caters to tourism, making it a perfect environment for instituting local currency. But squeezed between a 7,000-acre greenbelt and the Pacific Ocean, Laguna at present imports all of its food and water.

And then there’s Los Angeles, graced with a 12-month growing season but burdened by a population of 13 million and a water supply that travels hundreds of miles via aqueducts to reach the city. Hardly a town, LA is perhaps the ultimate testing ground for Transition’s unwavering optimism. “If I stop to think about it, that’s enough to throw on the breaks,” says Transition LA’s Poyourow about the daunting task of transitioning her city. “You do what’s under your nose. Go work in your own backyard. Just because a project is big doesn’t mean you don’t start.”

Geography isn’t solely responsible for why each Transition Town is unique. The people involved also define its spirit. For instance, dietician and therapist Becky Prelitz has numerous ideas about how Transition Laguna can work with the greenbelt to grow food, generate solar energy and harvest rainwater. “But we need to do a lot of foundation building before that can be heard,” she says. “We can’t just be groovy in the dirt. We need to be a little slick too.” Consequently, Transition Laguna’s six-person steering committee has taken its time crafting a mission statement and preparing to introduce the group to the community. Whereas in Los Angeles, “anything is part of outreach and awareness if we have people to do it,” says Poyourow. “What’s your passion? Then let’s do that.” Different members of Los Angeles’ roughly 10-person group have begun pet projects like the Holy Nativity edible garden ­ which provides the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank with a weekly supply of fresh produce ­ urban fruit harvesting, and a political letter writing campaign.

It should be noted that each Transition Town presently makes up only a very tiny percentage of people in a community. In fact, towns can earn official Transition status from the international Transition Network with only four or five dedicated residents willing to lead the way. So the first order of business for newly-anointed towns is reaching out to their neighbors and getting them on board. Most don’t aim to convert the Hummer driver ­ at least at first. Rather, they speak about Transition at Permaculture meetings and visit local eco-villages; they join forces with existing environmental groups, talk up their plans at farmers’ markets, and set up social networking sites to disseminate information and foster discussion.

“It starts with just a few thoughtful and committed people,” says Gray. “Our aim is to get everyone on board with Transition, but I don’t think we will in time for the shocks that are coming. Even if the larger part of our community isn’t prepared, we have this small shabby group of people who at least have a methodology for organizing and getting together and collectively trying to figure out how to survive.”

With the oldest U.S.-based Transition Town in Boulder, Colo., only two years old, it’s hard to say what the movement will accomplish, how many people it will inspire, and whether it will withstand the two-headed monster of peak oil and climate change. But for 17 towns in the U.S. ­ including places as disparate as Ketchum, Idaho, Portland, Maine, and Pima, Ariz. ­ that doesn’t seem to matter. They’re busy throwing kick-off parties that in some cases have attracted hundreds of curious participants, planting community gardens, and screening films like An Inconvenient Truth and The End of Suburbia to encourage neighbors to face the problem and brainstorm solutions.

In these early days, Transition Towns amount to profound work on a small scale that inspires hope in an age where that sentiment is in short supply. Hope that people will wake up to the imminent need to change; hope that we can truly change our world; hope that we’re not too late. Whether Transition will work may not be the point ultimately. “Even if nothing comes of this,” says Sarah Edwards of Transition Pine Mountain, Calif., “it makes for a better life today.”

“I have this image of the musicians that carried on playing on the Titanic rather than scrambling for a lifeboat,” Gray says. “I’d rather be those people playing something beautiful and hoping we don’t sink. And we probably will sink ­ but at least I’ve done something my son can be proud of.”

Rachel Dowd is a Los Angeles-based writer currently contemplating what edible plants to include in her first container garden.

Twelve Steps to Community

At first blush, Transition Towns might look strikingly similar to other cultural responses to climate change and peak oil, from EcoVillages to urban homesteading. But one key ­ and provocative ­ distinction is that Transition is grounded in the principles of addiction psychology.

According to Transition founder Rob Hopkins, most environmental organizations operate under the premise that awareness naturally inspires action ­ i.e. if people only knew how awful things really were, they would change their profligate ways. But our brains don’t work that way, says Hopkins. Instead, we’re more like addicts, hooked on fossil fuels ­ and our recovery is likely to be as fraught and incremental as that of any lifelong, hardcore abuser.

For an inkling of the monumental challenge we face, consider the stages of addiction recovery: After years of abuse ­ marked by periods of denial, fear, defiance, and destruction ­ an addict comes to realize that something must change. So he contemplates the pros and cons of life without his chosen drug. If the pros prevail, the addict commits to breaking his addiction and prepares a plan. Then comes the action stage, which implements and revises the plan. In time, the addict stops using completely and eventually integrates abstinence ­ no longer an acute struggle ­ into his new lifestyle. At any point during this cycle, there is strong potential to lose heart or become complacent, leading to relapse to an earlier stage.

Hopkins designed the Transition Model to acknowledge and respond to people at different stages of their recovery from fossil fuels. To meet the challenges of the contemplation stage ­ when an addict needs a place to voice his thoughts, concerns, ambivalence, and desire ­ Hopkins created Open Space events, where large groups of people engage on questions like “How will our town feed itself beyond the age of peak oil?” Hurdling the preparation stage requires a plan, which Transition accomplishes through its development of positive, forward-looking, community-based projects.

What makes the Transition Movement so appealing is its fundamental positivity. It posits that a group of creative, intelligent, and dedicated people actually can transition our modern, maxed-out, and alienated global culture into a harmonious and social community. In this way, the grim specters of peak oil, climate change, and economic collapse are recast as entry points to a more beautiful, enriching and peaceful world ­ a world in which we rely on each other. Unlike the treeless desolation of post-Apocalyptic sci-fi films, the future for Hopkins is lush and bountiful, filled with music and art and honest connection. The end of the world as we know it is a good thing.

A skeptic might argue that Hopkins’ image of what life could be assumes that humans are genuinely good and sensible, while history proves otherwise: people are inherently self-destructive and self-serving, motivated by a desire to attain rather than sustain. And if addiction recovery is the model, Transition can expect roughly 70 percent of people to return to oil dependency within the first year.

But Hopkins is no skeptic. “He’s hopelessly optimistic,” says Gray, “which is one part of what makes him so endearing.” And for a small and growing group of people set on bringing about a better world after peak oil, that optimism is fuel for their fire. “I see a potentially better life ahead,” says Transition Laguna’s Becky Prelitz. “I’m not Pollyanna; I realize there are big problems. This is an opportunity to find ourselves, to give back.”

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
   an educational non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous



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