[Lapg] 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 Whole Life Times April 2009

[Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

<http://wholelifetimes.com/2009/04/index.html>April 
2009 | <http://wholelifetimes.com/archive/section.html?s=Feature>Feature





Life After Oil

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

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in 
new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous

First Annual Southern California Permaculture Convergence August 2008
http://socalifornia.permacultureconvergence.org
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