The “Life After Oil” Transition event Sept 20 in Los Angeles

 

The “Seeds Committee” of Transition Town Santa Barbara (Cat, Mark, Roy, Linda and Larry) bundled into our Honda Hybrid at 6:30 am to make the trek to the wilds of LA for the first Transition event we had been to since TTSB began a few weeks before in a local Irish pub. 

 

We had our first meeting in this pub for three reasons: (1) in honor of the founding of the Transition movement in Kinsale, Ireland (2) because we heard permaculturist Graham Barnett on Sustainable World Radio tell our own Jill Cloutier that his UK Transition Town effort had also been founded in a pub and (3) most importantly, two of the key concepts in the Transition movement are fun and community, and a good local pub meets both of those criteria!

 

We arrived at a lovely Episcopal church in Westchester (LA) and were delighted to see many old and new friends from up and down the Central and Southern California watersheds.  Bob Banner (www.hopedance.org), Jim Cole and permaculture teacher Larry Santoyo were among those from the SLO area.  Sarah and Paul Edwards arrived from Pine Mountain Club.  We also enjoyed connecting with other Santa Barbara and Central Coast folks like Kristine Haugh and Heather Mathes who are passionate about Transition and we all did a lot of schmoozing over the delicious vegetarian lunch provided by Rev. Peter.

 

Environmental Change-Makers’ Joanne Poyourow was our guide for the day.  We explored the hard facts of global climate disruption and Peak Oil and explored the solutions suggested by permaculture co-founder David Holmgren, Peak Oil expert Richard Heinberg, ecophilosopher Joanna Macy and Transition founder Rob Hopkins.  We watched a You Tube video of Rob and Joanne also read us a special letter to this group meeting in LA from Rob, which I’ve included below.

 

In the spirit of Transition, there was a lot of grassroots talking and networking as we divided up into geographical regions. Our group did some creative brain-storming about how to bring Transition to the Central Coast.

 

After an intense and exhilarating day of Transition Talk we took Larry’s Santoyo’s advice and decompressed in a great Thai restaurant on Hwy 1 in Malibu, full of energy and ideas about how Santa Barbara can transition to far greater local resilience.

 

Transition cheers,

 

Linda

 

LETTER FROM ROB HOPKINS TO OUR SEPT 20 TRANSITION EVENT IN LA:

 

A while ago here in Totnes in Devon, a group came to see me from Brazil.  They asked if the Transition model would work in Brazil.  I asked where in Brazil, and they said Sao Paolo. “You mean you’re asking if a model that works in a town of 8000 people will work in a city of 10 million people?  I have no idea.”  And I don’t.  I have no way mentally of imagining anywhere that big.  LA is even bigger, and so likewise, I cannot guarantee that what we have developed here will be successful.

 

I do know that here in the UK, the way urban Transition projects (and there are many of them now) are working is to break the city into neighbourhoods and then train, inspire and network them.  Working at the neighbourhood scale means working at a scale people feel they can influence.  They are developing many new tools and approaches, and this is what is exciting about Transition, we are all making this up as we go along.

 

I would suggest you don’t call what you are doing Transition Town LA.  You aren’t a town, you are a city, and that is something to celebrate.  Transition City LA.  We need to find ways of reclaiming what it means to live in a sustainable city, not just wish it were a town.  In doing this work you will develop your own tools, your own insights, your own vocabulary.  The work you are starting to do is seminally important.  You are pioneers, doing some of the most important work to be undertaken anywhere.  I wish you well, and please keep the rest of the many hundreds of communities around the world also doing Transition work posted as to your successes, and perhaps most importantly your failures.  We tend not to talk about those, but they are just as, if not more, rich with potential for learning.

 

The Transition of the next 10 years will be from a time when one’s sense of wellbeing, prowess, economic status and social standing directly correlated to one’s amount of oil consumption, to one where one’s degree of oil dependency is also one’s degree of vulnerability.  This is an astonishing shift for somewhere like LA, but it CAN be done, and the more playful, historical and empowering we can make the shift, the more likely it will be to happen, and the more likely we are to make it.  All power to your collective elbows