[Scpg] Yesterday's NY Times: article about Transition Towns

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

The word about the  new Transition Town movement, founded by permaculture 
teacher Rob Hopkins of the  UK and now spreading fast in the US, has reached 
the New York  Times!  
_http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html) 

 
This article was also posted and commented on at Transition  California: 
_http://transitioncalifornia.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-end-is-near-yay-by-jon
_ 
(http://transitioncalifornia.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-end-is-near-yay-by-jon)    Thanks to Bob Banner for passing it along to us.
 
Some cool stuff highlighted in green...
 
Linda
 
April 19, 2009

The Green Issue
The End Is Near!  (Yay!)
By JON MOOALLEM

The stage lights went up at the  Panida Theater, a classy old movie house 
in Sandpoint, Idaho, and the M.C.  stepped out of the dark with one finger 
high in the air. There was an uprising  of applause and cheering. Then, 
shouting like a head coach before a bowl game,  she said, “Sandpoint, are you 
ready?”

It was a Friday night last  November. All around the little town of 
Sandpoint, beetles were blighting north  Idaho’s pine forests. The previous day, 
the U.N. reported that emissions from  automobiles and coal-fired power plants 
were collecting in brown clouds over 13  Asian and African cities and 
blocking out the sun. Iceland’s main banks had  crumpled, and American auto 
executives were about to fly to Washington in  private jets to plead for a 
bailout. Off the coast of Africa, Somali pirates  were hijacking oil tankers. But 
the folks at the Panida Theater wouldn’t stop  clapping. The Sandpoint 
Transition Initiative, a new chapter  of a growing, worldwide environmental 
movement, was officially coming to  life.

The Transition movement was started four years ago by Rob Hopkins,  a young 
British instructor of ecological design. Transition shares certain  
principles with environmentalism, but its vision is deeper — and more radical —  
than mere greenness or sustainability. “Sustainability,” Hopkins recently 
told  me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of  
industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep 
running.  By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” —
 putting  new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient 
as possible,  bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil 
grows astronomically  expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner 
than we think,  industrial society frays or collapses entirely. For a 
generation, the  environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to 
avoid  catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now 
 irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want 
to  survive.

Transition’s approach is adamantly different from that of the  survivalists 
I heard about, scattered in the mountains around Sandpoint in  bunkers 
stocked with gold and guns. The movement may begin from a similarly  dystopian 
idea: that cheap oil has recklessly vaulted humanity to a peak of  production 
and consumption, and no combination of alternative technologies can  
generate enough energy, or be installed fast enough, to keep us at that height  
before the oil is gone. (Transition dismisses Al Gore types as  “
techno-optimists.”) But Transition then takes an almost utopian turn. Hopkins  insists 
that if an entire community faces this stark challenge together, it  might be 
able to design an “elegant descent” from that peak. We can consciously  
plot a path into a lower-energy life — a life of walkable villages, local food  
and artisans and greater intimacy with the natural world — which, on 
balance,  could actually be richer and more enjoyable than what we have now. 
Transition,  Hopkins has written, meets our era’s threats with a spirit of “
elation, rather  than the guilt, anger and horror” behind most environmental 
activism. “Change is  inevitable,” he told me, “but this is a change that 
could be  fantastic.”

After developing the rudiments of Transition with a class he  was teaching 
at an Irish college, Hopkins moved to the English town of Totnes,  and, in 
2005, began mobilizing a campaign to “relocalize” the town. The  
all-volunteer effort has since been busily planting nut trees, starting its own  local 
currency and offering classes on things like darning socks in order to  “
facilitate the Great Reskilling.”

More than 80 other initiatives across  England have followed, including one 
in Bristol, a city of nearly half a million  people. Worldwide, there are 
now more than 150 official Transition Towns  (communities with an active 
group of citizens), and last winter, trainers from  Totnes traveled the globe to 
run workshops, leaving activists on three  continents to begin the 
relocalization of their own communities — autonomously  and with whatever financing 
they can raise. (The Transition revolution is,  loosely speaking, a 
franchise model.) Sandpoint, Idaho, was the second  Transition Town in the United 
States after Boulder County, Colo. They have been  joined by more than 20 
others in the last year, including Portland, Maine;  Berea, Kentucky; and even 
Los Angeles. But the American arm of the movement is  expanding far faster 
than it is accomplishing anything, which is why the event  in Sandpoint that 
night was so significant. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative  was the first 
in North America to hold this kind of coming-out party, meant to  engage the 
community in its work. This constituted Step 4 in the 12-step  Transition 
Process laid out in Rob Hopkins’s Transition Handbook, the  jargon-filled 
manual at the center of the movement. The handbook calls this  event “A Great 
Unleashing.”

The Transition Handbook reads like an  imaginative take on a 
corporate-management text. It recommends techniques for  building consensus, from 
bureaucratic-sounding protocols like Open Space  Technology to an exercise in which 
people decorate a potato like a superhero.  “The Transition model,” the 
founder of one English Transition Town explained to  me, “provides a structure, 
a foundation for organizing.” And along with  Transition’s emphasis on 
hopefulness over fear, this rigorous playbook seems to  set it apart from 
earlier grass-roots crusades. It is, Transition leaders say,  what they hope will 
allow the movement to bring in the people that conventional  activists have 
failed to reach and, just as important, keep everyone focused  through the 
messiness and disillusionment every community-organizing effort  encounters 
and many do not survive.

At the Panida, the keynote speaker  was Michael Brownlee, the director of 
the Transition effort in Boulder and a  representative of Transition U.S. — 
an even newer group that is forming to help  the movement spread in America. 
He was like the Transition equivalent of a  middle manager flown in from 
corporate.

Brownlee gave his own variation of the standard PowerPoint  presentation 
distributed at Transition trainings. Up on the screen behind him  came a slide 
showing the three convergent emergencies that Transition aims to  help us 
through: climate change, the unraveling of the global economy and peak  oil. 
The theory of peak oil concludes that the productivity of the earth’s oil  
wells will soon peak — if it hasn’t already — and, once production falls 
short  of demand, the market for our fundamental resource will rapidly spiral 
into  chaos, potentially pulling much of society down with it.

Brownlee spelled  out some probable outcomes, quoting peak oil’s pantheon 
of thinkers: Oil hits  $300 a barrel by 2013. Middle Eastern exports cease. 
Things we take for granted  — supermarkets, suburbs — quickly become 
impossible, and the world sinks into an  “unprecedented economic crisis” that will 
“topple governments, alter national  boundaries,” incite wars and “
challenge the continuation of civilized life.”  Brownlee paused after reading that 
last quote. He hadn’t even gotten to climate  change and the implosion of 
the American dollar.

It was all  surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has 
been collecting in  the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by 
skyrocketing line  graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally 
pushed something just a  little too far and are now watching everything start to 
teeter over. Maybe it’s  not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have 
plugged up the atmosphere  with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. 
We’re all starting to career  down the other side of that hill — which 
hill, specifically, is up to you. But  it’s the shadowy side, and none of us 
can see the bottom.

In Sandpoint,  though, people were trying to move the stale chatter of 
environmental collapse  out of the health-food store and into the 21st century — 
to pull each  incongruous part of their community together and make their 
town,  collaboratively, the blessed place they all knew it could be. At a 
time when so  much fuzzy energy for change ricochets through our culture, and 
even Chevron ads  ask us to use less oil and harness “the power of human 
energy” instead,  Transition seemed to offer this sold-out theater in Idaho both 
a vision and a  lucid, 240-page instruction manual with which to give it a 
try.

Would it  work? Nobody could say. But as Brownlee finished, and the crowd 
suddenly  re-erupted into applause, even just trying it seemed to feel 
wonderful. Next, a  group of kids raced onto the stage in Sgt. Pepper garb, 
holding inflatable  guitars. Later came a “sustainable performance arts” troupe 
(they use biofuels  when fire dancing) and a woman who sang about rain and 
peace. By the time the  last guitar duo performed “Here Comes the Sun,” 
everyone in the room was so  keyed up — so ready to turn the impending dark age 
of peak oil and climate  change into a renaissance — that no one heard the 
slightest menace in the line  “Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly 
melting.” Or if they did, they just  kept singing along anyway.

The second phase of the Sandpoint Transition  Initiative’s Great Unleashing 
weekend began the next afternoon. A four-hour  meeting was called to divide 
people into working groups, Step 5 in the  Transition Handbook. Each 
working group would focus on a necessity of the town,  like food, energy or trans
portation. They would develop projects, then research  and write a plan 
delineating what steps Sandpoint must take in order to  relocalize over the next 
several decades. The Transition Handbook calls this  crucial document an 
Energy Descent Action Plan. Producing one is Step  12.

More than 100 people turned out for the meeting in the gymnasium of a  
local charter school. Everyone wore name tags. Richard Kühnel, who started the  
Sandpoint Transition Initiative with some like-minded friends in his living  
room, drew a shining sun on his.

Kühnel, 54, is a smiling stick figure of  a man, with wispy hair and a 
whitening beard. He has worked as a software  designer on and off since he was a 
teenager but also has a degree in “ecosocial  design” from Gaia 
University. (He is Austrian and moved to Sandpoint in 1995  with his wife, an 
alternative-medicine practitioner.) Kühnel organized the  initiative’s first meeting 
early last year after returning from a pilgrimage to  Totnes, where he 
attended one of the first Transition trainings. He was  attracted to the 
movement, he told me, because it alone seems to understand how  to persuade people 
to address the world’s gloomiest challenges without shoving  them into 
denial or depression. “We are not fighting against something,” Kühnel  told me. “
We are for something. I wanted to be part of the solution, positively  
responding to all these challenges here in Sandpoint.”

Sandpoint is a  town of 8,100 people, rimmed by the Cabinet and Selkirk 
Mountains and bordered  by picturesque Lake Pend Oreille. Like many Western 
towns, it is the mottled  product of a century of migration. Railroad workers 
were followed by timber  workers. In the 1970s, young, long-haired 
back-to-the-landers arrived, and many  persevered even as northern Idaho ossified into 
a conservative stronghold. Last  year, after the rise of Sarah Palin, who 
is a Sandpoint native, a local magazine  ran an account of the couple of 
months she spent there as an infant before  moving to Alaska. “I was in the 
eighth grade,” a former baby sitter told the  magazine. “I held her.”

Transition seeks to “unleash the collective  genius of a community,” as 
Hopkins often puts it — to unify a town behind a  single, critical purpose. 
And at first glance, unifying Sandpoint might seem  impossible. But those 
living on the land, whether out of a left- or right-wing  ideology, do have a 
lot in common, including an astounding amount of  resourcefulness. Peggy 
Braunstein, who came to Sandpoint from New York 27 years  ago, told me that for 
her and her neighbors, many of whom live off the grid,  life without oil “isn’
t so overwhelming or shocking. People here have already  lived a 
scaled-down life. We’ve already bartered and shared, canned together.” A  local 
green-tech entrepreneur told me that Transition should not have too much  trouble 
“bridging the rednecks and the hippies.” (“The best way to bring them  
together is a Willie Nelson concert,” he joked.)

At the charter school,  everybody found seats in a circle. Many balanced 
legal pads on their laps.  Kühnel’s wife, Berta, began by asking everyone to 
join hands. She instructed  them to close their eyes and transmit energy 
around the circle in a clockwise  direction. “We’re going to journey into 2030 
and see what’s there for us,” she  said. She told them to feel their bodies 
lifting into the clouds, falling back  to earth as rain, then joining a 
river, “flowing forward in time.” The river ran  through Sandpoint. It was the 
future now, and Berta asked everyone to look  around: “What’s the 
technology? Is there technology? How do we dream? How do we  live?”

Sandpoint’s mayor, a painter and former hardware wholesaler named  Gretchen 
Hellar, was sitting next to Berta. When I asked her later what she made  of 
the exercise, Hellar told me: “First of all, I’m not a good-feelings,  
touchy-feely kind of person.” She added, “People wanted to talk about where we 
 can put community gardens, how can we make our downtown more viable.” John 
T.  Reuter, a Republican city councilman a few seats over, told me that 
when Berta  told them to hold hands, he was looking around the room, counting 
up the people  he knew Transition just alienated.

The crowd split into groups of nine to  draw their visions. Bruce Millard, 
a local architect who builds with straw  bales, quickly emerged as his group’
s moderator. Quite tall, with a ponytail and  mustache, Millard bent over 
and drew several circles on his group’s sheet of  paper with an orange 
crayon. He envisioned a hub-and-spoke system: many  villages, each with a 
different specialty, with downtown Sandpoint as a trading  post in the middle.

The group started brainstorming, assuming there would  no longer be cars or 
a power grid. One village might grow food. Another should  educate children.

“Where are we going to put the corpses?” someone  asked.

“Eat ’em!” said a woman in braids.

“Can you just make a  rule that everybody’s cremated?” a somber-looking 
woman in a blazer asked. Her  husband was sitting with his face in his hands.

“Well,” Millard said, “it  takes a lot of energy to cremate people. 
Besides, now we’re getting into  rules.”

Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of  
Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American  history. In 
the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series  of 
jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” 
 A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s 
workshops,  cultural institutions and farmland.

Fourier was horrified by what he saw  at the outset of the Industrial 
Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that  dishonest lending and capitalism 
in general would lead to the enslavement of  humans by big companies; “
industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike  Transition, he aimed to 
overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed  to have reduced all 
possible human personalities to a number of essential types.  From there, it 
was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women  and 
children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily  
following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s  
essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new  
industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”

By the  mid-1800s, more than 15,000 Americans had experimented with 
Fourieristic living,  many drawn to its promise during a severe economic downturn. 
But Fourier’s  belief that acute scientific modeling could bring disparate 
people together  didn’t hold. It reflected, the historian Carl J. Guarneri 
writes, “the naïve  faith that . . . Baptists would get along with 
freethinkers and intellectuals  would make great farmers.” Arguments tore phalanxes 
apart. So did debt. All but  eight failed within three years.

It has been an American impulse since  the Puritans: feeling the world 
racing in the wrong direction and withdrawing to  a small, insular place to 
start over. Hippies came to Sandpoint in the 1970s for  similar reasons: to live 
solitary, self-reliant lives. But going back to the  land was tough, 
particularly since many never lived on the land in the first  place. (“I couldn’t 
build things with my hands,” one man, once part of a small  commune called 
Huckleberry Duckleberry, told me. “It was futile.”) By the early  ’80s most 
had either moved into town or left the region.

Now, maybe  because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs 
so much to  disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no 
longer feels like a  possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may 
be that we can’t  escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the 
places where we already  live.

By now, around the charter-school gymnasium, one group was  imagining 
year-round farmers’ markets in the buildings that would, by 2030, no  longer be 
banks. Another discussed bicycle parking and nodded benignly at a man  who 
pictured everyone living in caves with Internet connections. Millard’s  circle 
was ticking off ways they could travel between the villages they had  
drawn. “O.K., so we’re walking, we’re bicycling, we’re skiing,” he  said.

“Kayaking!” someone offered.

Peggy Braunstein spoke up,  worried about the snowy north Idaho winters. “We
’ve got a problem,” she  said.

“There’s no problems,” Millard told her. “In a dream there’s no  
problems. There’s only solutions.”

Karen Lanphear, who has been steering  the Transition Initiative alongside 
Richard Kühnel since its inception, found  this portion of the meeting 
excruciating. “I thought we squandered at least an  hour or an hour and a half of 
people’s time,” she told me later. Lanphear is a  commanding woman of 62 
with short, styled gray hair and a doctorate in  education. In many ways, she 
is Kühnel’s temperamental opposite. She feeds off  his visionary energy but 
felt compelled to run their earliest meetings with  timed agendas.

In the six weeks before the Unleashing, Lanphear met with  the Downtown 
Sandpoint Business Association, the University of Idaho extension  office and 
the branch manager for U.S. Bank. She was the keynote speaker at the  Greater 
Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce’s monthly Women in Business luncheon and  
penned six editorials on Transition for the local paper. Lanphear told me she  
has a gift for “building coalitions.” This was apparent. But it wasn’t 
clear if  everyone she briefed had the same frame of reference. Karl Dye, head 
of the  Bonner County Economic Development Corporation, told me, “All the 
things  Transition’s doing basically line up with what we’re trying to do, 
which is  create better-paying jobs.” He saw a lot of promise in Lanphear’s 
group, though  he also said: “If you start a business to produce food locally 
and there are  opportunities to make money by taking it to other areas, you’
re going to do it.  You may believe in Transitions and local production and 
local consumption, but  hey, man, we’re still Americans.”

At the time of the Great Unleashing,  most people in Sandpoint presumably 
hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But  the ones who had often found a 
way to interpret the movement as extensions of  their own visions. Having 
watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and  tourists rush into 
Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of  building a better, 
quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that  Transition wasn’t “a 
greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City  Council 
president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t  understand 
why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for  it and 
wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to  
wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five  
drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club 
called  the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s 
ideals.  “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make 
a concerted  effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe 
that with the  country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a 
prism, offering a  slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each 
person turned it, but  always shooting out lots of rainbows.

Transition’s message is twofold:  first, that a dire global emergency 
demands we transform our society; and  second, that we might actually enjoy 
making those changes. Most people I met in  Sandpoint seemed to have latched onto 
the enjoyment part and run with it. The  vibe was much more Alice Waters 
than Mad Max. (Jeff Burns, a local food activist  who joined the food working 
group, was a conspicuous exception. “Some people on  the food group want to 
feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure  out how to feed 
40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”)

Michael  Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his 
chair during the  charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the 
unflinching cheeriness  of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also 
worried that people didn’t  yet understand that “just because you’re 
passionate about a particular issue  like transportation or water or local food doesn
’t mean that you have the skills  to do the research, analysis or planning 
around that issue.” He later added, “If  I knew how to convey how serious, 
how urgent the situation is without sending  people into fear and 
helplessness, it would take a great burden off of  me.”

During the next few days, I surprised myself by actually arguing  with 
people in Sandpoint about whether they were doing Transition properly —  with 
enough intensity, given the stakes. “I can’t live with the ambiguity of  
pending disaster,” Lanphear told me. “I was raised to believe there are no  
problems without solutions.” She said she didn’t believe things would become 
as  bad as Brownlee and others predicted. She had a lot of faith in the ethic 
and  ingenuity of younger generations and also told me, contradicting what 
seems like  a central tenet of Transition, “I think technology is going to 
be one of our  saving graces.”

A few months after the Sandpoint Un-leashing, I went to a  meeting of the 
new board of Transition U.S. in Sebastopol, Calif., north of San  Francisco. 
The organization had just partnered with the Post Carbon Institute,  another 
peak-oil-focused nonprofit group, and received $280,000 of seed money.  The 
board had signed the lease on its new headquarters 12 days before I  
arrived.

Transition U.S. is designed to offer guidance to Transition  initiatives 
forming around the country and to organize trainings. Already it had  
communicated with activists in more than 900 communities. Jennifer Gray, who  
started the second Transition Town in England and then went to California to  
found Transition U.S. last year, was spending most of her time fielding phone  
calls and e-mail messages. She took it as a good sign that no one in 
Sandpoint  was reaching out to her.

Transition insists that initiatives be  completely bottom-up organizations. 
There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve 
slightly differently wherever  it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative 
shouldn’t be controlled too  tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the 
handbook is really more of a  mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” 
Like a Fourierian phalanx,  a Transition Town should be the product of the 
passions of  its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, 
though,  Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to 
succeed. It  simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective 
genius of the  community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We  
truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a  
mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful  Disclaimer!”

Consequently, the structure Transition sets forth is  intentionally very 
minimal, and improvisation is encouraged. The handbook’s 12 steps needn’t be 
done in order (Hopkins now  calls them the 12 “ingredients”), and 
communities are free to skip ones they  don’t find useful. Ultimately, the most 
profound thing Transition offers isn’t a  methodology at all but a mood.

“The genius of  the Transition message, as I see it, is that it takes what 
we should be doing to  avert these crises and turns it into something that 
sounds inviting and positive  and uplifting,” Richard Heinberg, a Transition 
U.S. board member, told me  in Sebastopol. Heinberg is an icon of the 
peak-oil fringe and the author of the  seminal, comfortless book “The Party’s 
Over.” In 2007, he published a  wider-ranging volume called “Peak Everything.” 
Still, Heinberg said he worries  that Transition risks losing people in the 
elation it inspires. He has been debating with Hopkins whether, in addition 
to devising  a long-term descent, Transition should emphasize preparing for 
disasters that  Heinberg says are unavoidable or already unfolding, like 
volatile gas prices or  “being sideswiped by economic catastrophe and weather  
disruptions.”

Eventually he expects the energy grid to weaken or  shut off entirely and, 
like Michael Brownlee, he told me he considers martial  law or worse 
persecution possible as resources become scarcer. Jennifer Gray,  meanwhile, told 
me she expects “a big population die-off.” Heinberg said,  “There’s nothing 
wrong with being motivated by fear if there’s something to be  genuinely 
afraid of.”

I returned to Sandpoint in late February. The 11  working groups formed at 
the charter school in November were meeting regularly.  They ranged in size 
from half a dozen to about 20 people and were all filing  minutes to a 
steering committee as they plotted their first  projects.

Jennifer Gray describes one of Transition’s  goals as creating a “parallel 
community,” putting things like local power  generation or local food 
networks in place to survive the slow crumbling of our  current ones. But for the 
most part, the projects evolving in Sandpoint  seemed designed to make the 
town’s current infrastructure a little greener and  more livable. One group 
hoped to facilitate energy audits, making Sandpoint’s  buildings more 
efficient users of the energy grid. The mobility working group,  meanwhile, was 
planning to install a barrel of brightly colored flags at a  dangerous 
intersection downtown. Pedestrians could pick up a flag and cross the  street 
waving it, making themselves more visible to automobile traffic. Ideally,  one 
member told me, they would persuade the city to put a traffic light there,  “
but that’s two, three years down the road.”

I was also surprised by the  degree to which Transition members were 
intermixing with city authorities.  Shortly after the Great Unleashing, Shelby 
Rognstad, a young cafe owner and an  early Sandpoint Transition Initiative 
board member alongside Kühnel and  Lanphear, was appointed to the town’s 
planning and zoning commission — a  significant position, because Sandpoint was 
writing its first new comprehensive  plan in 30 years. Rognstad spent the 
winter reading thick books on urban  planning and cut down his involvement with 
Transition significantly. His outlook  was changing. “Philosophically, I want 
to look 100 years down the road and just  shoot for that vision,” he told 
me. “But the city’s only going to go for what’s  real and achievable right 
now, in this fiscal year, in this election cycle.” He  said he was thinking 
of running for office.

Kühnel was serving on the  mayor’s advisory council on sustainability, a 
panel that was assessing a  proposal by Transition’s food working group for an 
organic community  garden.

By all estimates, the food group was far  ahead of the others. When Jeff 
Burns approached the city about doing a  garden as a first project, the parks 
director immediately pulled out satellite  maps and started recommending 
plots. The parks director and the mayor had  already scouted locations for 
gardens and were only waiting for some kind of  volunteer organization or 
beautification committee to come and ask for one.  Transition was given a third of 
an acre of an unused athletic field near the  center of town and agreed to 
help keep the rest of the property weed-free in  exchange. The food group 
had already lined up donations of seeds and tools and  had a built-in pool of 
exuberant volunteer gardeners. A groundbreaking party was  planned for early 
May.

And so, the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was  taking its first steps. 
They were baby steps and, it seemed, pointed in only the  general direction of 
the revolutionary postcarbon future the Transition Handbook  had called 
them toward last fall. Other working groups are now volunteering to  help the 
Chamber of Commerce, which happened to be starting its own “buy local”  
campaign. Transition Initiative members will organize a contest to design the  
campaign’s logo and will go around town, asking shop owners to hang up 
posters.  Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right 
direction, it  doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel 
chose to see it  in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever 
wants to participate  and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the 
Sandpoint Transition  Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.

“I love Richard’s  energy,” Councilman John T. Reuter told me during my 
last afternoon in  Sandpoint. “I can’t say that enough times. I just think he’
s the best thing  since sliced bread. But I guess I can’t really say that 
because sliced bread is  a problem — that’s part of the industrial-food 
complex. So he’s better than  that! Richard is the best thing to recover us from 
the crime of sliced  bread.”

Reuter is 25. Bearded but otherwise baby-faced, he is one of  three City 
Council members under the age of 31. He comes from a family of Greek  Orthodox 
sheep ranchers in southern Idaho and now heads the county Young  
Republicans. He talks fast, scurrying through wry digressions like a comedian at  a 
Catskills resort.

“Have you read Rob what’s-his-name’s book?” he asked  me, meaning the 
Transition Handbook. Almost before I could answer, he said, “I  read that whole 
thing.” Reuter didn’t like it, though. “There’s no question oil  is a 
limited quantity,” he said, adding that we should prepare for a life  without 
it. But the handbook struck him as overly pessimistic, resigning  humanity to 
the sort of druidic life people at the charter school were  romanticizing. “
I guess I don’t celebrate the loss of energy the way some of the  people in 
the Transition group do,” he said. “I like having a  dishwasher.”

What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint  Transition 
Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that  the changes 
they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only  created a 
community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s  
something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It  
was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly 
defined  philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed 
to  argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our  society is 
already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s  just something happening here that’
s reviving people’s civic sense of  possibility,” he later said. “Politics 
is ‘the art of the possible,’  right? I think what the Transition 
Initiative is doing is expanding what’s  possible in people’s minds. It is 
expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And  that’s what we need to do: dream 
bold. Because people have been limited by their  own imaginations.”

More than anyone else I had spoken to in Sandpoint,  including the 
initiative’s own organizers at times, Reuter was able to  articulate a cohesive 
understanding of what Transition was actually doing. The  movement wasn’t going 
to unify everybody in Sandpoint, he said: “I know that’s  their dream, but 
I just don’t see it happening.” But it was inspiring for Reuter  to watch 
the group emerge as one fervently turning gear in the larger mechanism  of 
self-governance.

“It’s like any other civic organization,” he said  approvingly. It wasn’t 
a very romantic notion, and maybe achieving that status  so easily was a 
sign that the initiative wasn’t really tackling the level of  paradigm-busting 
work Transition wants to awaken us to. Maybe that will turn out  to be 
regrettable. But, as utopian movements go, it also struck me as an  unusually 
constructive outcome.

Writing an Energy Descent Plan or  building a parallel community — bridges 
to carry us over the terrible time ahead  and into a world we long for — wasn
’t going to be Transition’s strength or its  usefulness, as Reuter saw it. 
“Government used to be the place in our community  where people came 
together and made civic decisions,” he told me. “That’s what  we should do again, 
and that’s what’s going to bring us back together: not  having government 
be this force somehow outside of us, that’s bearing down on us  or annoying 
us, but as a force that we actually embrace and want and that does  what we 
want.”

Reuter had a utopian vision, too: the one laid out in the  U.S. 
Constitution. And the Sandpoint Transition Initiative seemed to be moving  Sandpoint 
closer to that ideal in its own small way, even though it was working  out of 
a totally different handbook. They were managing to make the functioning  
democracy in their town a little more productive. For a wide range of  
not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that Transition could  
help them build the world they wanted. And now, only because enough people  
stepped forward and made that decision, Transition actually looked like a 
good  tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they 
grasped. They  were swinging it as earnestly as they could.

_http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html?_r=1&r..._ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewan
ted=print)  
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