Life After Oil
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@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org
"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new
directions, in order to grow." -
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