[Scpg] another article on the Transition Town movement

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

_ (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 at sbpermaculture.org
_www.sbpermaculture.org

_ (http://www.sbpermaculture.org/) "We are like trees, we must create new 
leaves, in new  directions, in order to grow." -  Anonymous

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