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.
