If the Transition Initiative were a person, you’d say he or
she was charismatic, wise, practical, positive, resourceful, and very, very
popular. Starting with the town of Totnes in Devon, England, in September 2006,
the movement has spread like wildfire across the U.K. (delightfully wriggling
its way into The Archers, Britain’s longest-running and most popular radio soap
opera), and on to the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The core
purpose of the Transition Initiative is to address, at the community level, the
twin issues of climate change and peak oil—the declining availability of
“ancient sunlight,” as fossil fuels have been called. The initiative is set up
to enable towns or neighborhoods to plan for, and move toward, a post-oil and
low-carbon future: what Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Initiative, has
termed “the great transition of our time, away from fossil fuels.”
Part of the genius of the movement rests in its acute and
kind psychology. It acknowledges the emotional effect of these issues, from
common feelings of anger, impotence, and denial, and it uses insights from the
psychology of addiction to address some reasons why it is hard for people to
detoxify themselves from an addiction to (or dependence on) oil. It
acknowledges that healthy psychological functioning depends on a belief that
one’s needs will be met in the future; for an entire generation, that belief is
now corroded by anxiety over climate change.
Many people feel that individual action on climate change is
too trivial to be effective but that they are unable to influence anything at a
national, governmental level. They find themselves paralyzed between the
apparent futility of the small-scale and impotence in the large-scale. The
Transition Initiative works right in the middle, at the scale of the community,
where actions are significant, visible, and effective. “What it takes is a
scale at which one can feel a degree of control over the processes of life, at
which individuals become neighbors and lovers instead of just acquaintances and
ciphers. . . participants and protagonists instead of just voters and
taxpayers. That scale is the human scale,” wrote author and secessionist
Kirkpatrick Sale in his 1980 book, Human Scale.
How big am I? As an individual, five foot two and whistling.
At a government level, I find I’ve shrunk, smaller than the X on my ballot
paper. But at a community level, I can breathe in five river-sources and
breathe out three miles of green valleys.
STARTING WITH a steering group of just a handful of people
in one locality, the motivation to become a Transition community spreads, often
through many months of preparation, information-giving, and awareness-raising
of the issues of climate change and peak oil. In those months, there are talks
and film screenings, and a deliberate attempt to encourage a sense of a
community’s resilience in the face of stresses. When members of the steering
group judge that there is enough support and momentum for the project, it is
launched, or “unleashed.”
Keeping an eye on the prize (reducing carbon emissions and
oil dependence), Transition communities have then looked at their own situation
in various practical frames—for example, food production, energy use, building,
waste, and transport—seeking to move toward a situation where a community could
be self-reliant. At this stage, the steering group steps back, and various
subgroups can form around specific aspects of transitioning. Strategies have
included the promotion of local food production, planting fruit trees in public
spaces, community gardening, and community composting. In terms of energy use,
some communities have begun “oil vulnerability auditing” for local businesses,
and some have sought to re-plan local transport for “life beyond the car.” In
one Transition Town there are plans to make local, renewable energy a resource
owned by the community, in another there are plans to bulk-buy solar panels as
a cooperative and sell them locally without profit. There are projects of seed
saving, seed swapping, and creating allotments—small parcels of land on which
individuals can grow fruit and vegetables.
“The people who see
the value of changing the system are ordinary people, doing it for their
children,” says Naresh Giangrande, who was involved in setting up the first
Transition Town. “The political process is corrupted by money, power, and
vested interests. I’m not writing off large corporations and government, but
because they have such an investment in this system, they haven’t got an
incentive to change. I can only see us getting sustainable societies from the
grassroots, bottom-up, and only that way can we get governments to change.” In
the States, the “350” project (the international effort to underscore the need
to decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million) is similarly
asking ordinary people to signal to those in power. If change doesn’t come from
above, it must come from below, and politicians would be unwise to ignore the
concern about peak oil and climate change coming from the grassroots.
The grassroots. Both metaphorically and literally.
Transition Initiative founder Rob Hopkins used to be a permaculture teacher,
and permaculture’s influence is wide and deep. As permaculture works with,
rather than against, nature, so the Transition Initiative works with, rather
than against, human nature; it is as collaborative and cooperative in social
tone as permaculture is in its attitude toward plants and, like permaculture,
is prepared to observe and think, slowly.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment.