[Lapg] Transition cities: Mission impossible? by Joanne Poyourow/Energy Bulletin

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Transition cities: Mission impossible?
by Joanne Poyourow
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http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-01-03/transition-cities-mission-impossible



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"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. "

-- Lewis Carroll
In 2005, while I was writing a novel which envisioned the 
transformation of Los Angeles (and while Rob Hopkins was putting the 
final touches on the world's first Energy Descent Action Plan with 
students in Kinsale, Ireland), I attended a Permaculture seminar in 
Santa Barbara, California.  The Permaculture movement asserts that we 
could consciously design a more sustainable or permanent human 
culture. 

In a breakout session that day, called "Urban Permaculture," one of 
the participants commented, "This is all great for the rural areas, 
but what do you do about a big city like Los Angeles?" 

The instructor threw up his hands and shrugged.  It's impossible. 
Someone laughed uncomfortably.  Amid a crowd of what should have been 
Southern California's most forward thinking, out-of-the-box 
designers, there were no answers.

People have said it to me directly over the years, in person and in 
email.  It's impossible.  How can you even think about Transition in 
Los Angeles?  It's too big.

Within Transition circles we counsel each other to "start where you 
are."  Well, where I am is in the middle of Los Angeles, the eleventh 
largest metropolitan area in the world, 10 to 12 million people. 
This is my home town.  This is where we started.

TRANSITION IN LOS ANGELES
  Sensible people say it's impossible, but impossible things are 
happening every day.
The Transition movement in Los Angeles is unfolding today via a 
series of neighborhood initiatives.  Our city hub supports seven 
active local initiatives which are holding regular meetings.  Others 
occasionally hold Transition-style gatherings.

On any given week, there are several Transition-type events offered 
within our local network (and countless more offered by other 
groups).  Two years into this work, our direct email lists reach 
perhaps 2,000 people, with immediate distribution far beyond that. 
Our speaker's bureau maintains a brisk schedule, each week fielding 
several requests from other groups.

The local Transition initiatives have spawned time banks, community 
gardens, rainwater harvesting installations, a backyard food 
redistribution network, and monthly clinics on alternative health 
care.  Our more colorful events have included bread baking workshops, 
100-mile meals, "Repurposing Old Clothes" workshops, and a Chicken 
Run Party where participants built a coop together.
Peel back the surface of any of these projects or events and you'll 
find far more than a cool, greener thing to do.  There is a conscious 
effort to create comprehensive solutions to the great challenges that 
humanity faces today, namely peak oil, climate change, and economic 
contraction, combined.
Back in 2005, when I was driving home from Santa Barbara, if you'd 
told me that within five years all these things would unfold, I'd 
have laughed through my pain and declared it was impossible.

IT'S TOO BIG
"The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer."

  - Army Corps of Engineers motto during WWII

The critics are right:  It is "too big."  So we don't think about 
that very much. 
In our Transition Los Angeles circle we focus upon the task at hand: 
creating positive change, changing hearts and minds, right within our 
immediate neighborhoods.  Once a month our core team gathers and we 
dare to take a peek at the bigger picture, perhaps to plan outreach 
to untapped geography within our city.

But for the most part, we focus on creating a supportive atmosphere 
for each other and for newcomers who similarly want to transform 
their own local neighborhoods.  We are a network of many people doing 
very positive local things.  We remind each other to start small, to 
create change where you know you can, and to trust that the rest will 
happen.
It is impossible to think about transforming Los Angeles, to think 
about transforming our entire society, western civilization, the 
globalised economy, our modern world.  It's too big.  But what are 
our alternatives?  To give up and do nothing?  In my mind, inaction 
in the face of these problems is unconscionable.

There are some people who like to broadcast the doom, supposedly 
"waking people up" to what is wrong in the world.  In my mind, mere 
telling of the bad news alone - without any solutions - is completely 
inadequate.  At this point in human history, we must reach beyond 
mere awareness-raising, into taking positive action.
And that is where the Transition movement comes in.

THE SECOND DIMENSION
"Our first task is to create a shadow economic, social and even 
technological structure that will be ready to take over as the 
existing system fails."

-- David Ehrenfeld
Joanna Macy speaks of the three dimensions of the Great Turning. 
Traditional environmentalism is in many cases a manifestation of 
Macy's first dimension:  Stopping Action, preventing further 
destruction, slowing the damage to Earth and its beings.

The Transition approach as outlined by Hopkins and now being 
experimented with and customized around the world, is primarily a 
movement growing up within Macy's second dimension: Creating New 
Structures, the creation of structural alternatives.  The Transition 
movement also touches upon Macy's third dimension, a Shift in 
Consciousness, a shift in our deeply ingrained values.

One of the reasons I embraced the Transition movement was that it 
seemed to me to be the most viable, most broad-based, 
deepest-thinking "second dimension" approach available.  There simply 
aren't any other organizations I have found which are Creating New 
Structures with as considered and informed and panoramic a scope.

David Holmgren created the Permaculture Flower, a diagram I have long 
used in my presentations because it describes the panorama of human 
experience.  Traditional environmentalism in many cases concerns 
itself with one or two petals of this Flower.
Rob Hopkins' brilliance is that he has created a way of applying 
Holmgren's Permaculture philosophy to each of the petals of the 
Flower:  to communities, to urban issues, to politics and economics. 
The Transition movement is What We Can Do to move forward toward a 
more lasting human culture, beginning not with a clean slate but with 
what we have now.

The Transition movement takes into account a full and realistic 
assessment of our power-hungry buildings, our paved cities, our urban 
demographic, our globalized food system, our crumbling economy.  It 
combines the reality of now with the dream of what can be.  It calls 
into action the collective creativity of the local people.  And then 
it creates a plan.

And there it's pretty unique.  I don't know of any other organization 
that is creating a plan, putting in place new structures to replace 
the broken ones we have now, in local community after local 
community, cultivating an effort that is crafted grassroots by the 
people.  I haven't heard of other networks that are organized with 
the intent to so effectively address Macy's second dimension.  The 
Transition approach is in its infancy, it's not perfect, and we have 
absolutely no guarantees that it will work.  But it's the best we've 
got.

WE ARE NOT ALONE
"A Transition initiative supports the energy to make things happen, 
and then supports the emergent projects."

-- Transition Network, discussion of pattern language
It is impossible to think of transforming Los Angeles with a 20 
person city hub core team or a few thousand emails.  But we have to 
remember that we're not alone.

There are hundreds of other organizations within this vast city that 
are also working on facets of the problems.  There are organizations 
working on the global warming aspect, organizations working on more 
sustainable power sources, organizations working on bicycle 
transportation and urban agriculture and waste stream and 
transforming our public educational curriculum.
Our fledgling local Transition network has a role to play in all this 
- or perhaps many separate roles toward one big agenda.  The big 
agenda is of course preparing our populace for the crises ahead, 
namely peak oil, climate change, and economic contraction, combined.

One of our roles is as the banner carrier for the trio of crises. 
Some organizations are single-focused, perhaps promoting solutions to 
global warming yet they don't include peak oil concepts.  It's up to 
us in the Transition movement to continually presence the convergence 
of the trio.
It's up to us to point out when a proposed "solution" might work for 
global warming but isn't feasible in a time of economic contraction. 
It's up to us, with a considered and calculated approach, to raise 
the trio of problems in front of governmental planning commissions. 
It's up to us to get people thinking about the how we will solve life 
issues given that these problems are a simultaneous set.

We do this by becoming the one who ask questions.  "How will that 
work with peak oil?"  "How might you accomplish that through times of 
economic contraction?"  With a polite and well-placed question, we 
might be able to plant the seed of an idea, and to engage the 
creativity of another organization's team in designing new structures.

Transition L.A. encouraged the local tree-planting nonprofit to think 
about how their operations might change in view of peak oil.  We 
encouraged a local environmental justice nonprofit to contemplate how 
they might continue to function despite economic contraction because 
we need them on board.
Yet another of our roles is as the facilitator.  By creating the 
space for good things to happen, they will.  Our September 2008 "Life 
After Oil" conference created the space for the Transition movement 
to begin to take hold in Los Angeles.

It's important to remember that we don't have to do it all.  We don't 
have to host every reskilling class in the greater Los Angeles area. 
The magnitude of the proposal is ludicrous, and there are many 
qualified individuals and organizations out there who are already 
doing a fine and capable job.
Which brings up another role, that of weaver.  We, who understand the 
trio of challenges and have glimpsed the panorama of solutions work 
that will be required to meet these challenges, are uniquely situated 
to get people working together.

We could call it "networking," but in my sense of what is needed, we 
need to transcend old definitions of networking.  Rather than 
introducing people to each other (say, for a business deal), we are 
weaving the fiber of new structures.  By creating a new way of people 
working together we are weaving the very cloth that the future will 
be made of.

You could say it's a pretty impossible task, but we're working on it.
Joanne Poyourow is the cofounder of the Environmental Change-Makers, 
the initiating group that brought Transition ideas to Los Angeles. 
She continues to serve on the core team at the Transition Los Angeles 
city hub.  She is the author of two books, a blogger at Transition 
US, and her articles frequently appear on Energy Bulletin.  In her 
home neighborhood she has designed two community gardens, where she 
manages the plantings for abundant year-round harvests.
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