CHAPTER 7
In Transition: A Movement Dies, Another Is Born
I’m reminded of the old shopman’s rule that you don’t actually know how to use a tool until you are ready to name at least three ways it can be abused and at least three situations where it’s the wrong tool for the job.
—JOHN MICHAEL GREER
The primitive Relocalization Network had grown surprisingly rapidly in its early phase. At its peak, probably early 2007, there were reportedly some two hundred Post Carbon Institute outposts in about a dozen nations, and founder Julian Darley predicted in an interview I conducted that the network would continue to grow exponentially—to perhaps thousands of communities by 2010.28 But it didn’t happen. Even as Darley was saying this, I knew the network was already beginning to collapse, although he couldn’t see it. Local groups were disbanding, giving up, finding the challenge too great. By the end of 2007, there were probably no more than fifty active local groups. The Relocalization Network itself turned out to be unsustainable, partly (perhaps) because it lacked a replicable process for relocalization, a methodology. It is also true that the Post Carbon Institute failed to create an adequate system to support local groups.
This experience of witnessing (and being part of) an important movement as it fell apart provided us a healthy skepticism about social movements in general. It also gave those of us working in Boulder County a profound experience of confusion, frustration, disappointment, and sometimes even despair—for while we understood that relocalization was urgently needed in our community (and in every other community, of course), we were painfully aware that we didn’t know what we were doing or how to do it. And to our dismay, we gradually discovered that no one else knew how to do it either. We were attempting to pioneer something that was absolutely necessary but maddeningly difficult, and we often found ourselves vacillating between inspiration and despair.
As in all relocalization efforts, we had been trying our best to discover how to prepare our communities for a crisis that was just over the horizon but had not yet quite arrived—and we were attempting to do this without being seen as doom-and-gloomers or alarmists inciting fear and anxiety. We had done our best to follow the principles and guidelines that flowed from Post Carbon Institute, Richard Heinberg, and the early Post Carbon outposts, most notably in Willits, California. But while we continued our work, constantly adjusting and recalibrating, we could not escape the feeling that we were merely dabbling at relocalization and that we were floundering, grasping at straws. Some days, we felt that we were failing utterly.
Meanwhile, we were also watching what was happening in Ireland and England—what a permaculture teacher named Rob Hopkins was doing. Hopkins had been tapped to teach the world’s first two-year permaculture course at a community college in Kinsale, Ireland. For the first class meeting, Hopkins decided to show the newly released documentary The End of Suburbia and to invite Colin Campbell (who lived nearby) as a guest speaker. Campbell was a celebrated petroleum geologist who was among the first in the industry to sound the alarm about the looming energy crisis.29 He was also the founder of an international group of petroleum-industry experts, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil.
That first class, providing a clear glimpse into the depth of the looming disaster, was life changing for Hopkins and his students. It was, Hopkins said later, his “peak oil moment.” What subsequently unfolded in Kinsale was a class project that would reverberate around the world. Hopkins and his students decided to devise a plan for the town of Kinsale (population eight thousand) to be able to weather the coming storm. They envisioned in detail what a resilient, self-reliant, sustainable Kinsale might look like in 2025, and then, through a process of backcasting, began mapping the myriad steps that would need to happen along the way. They called the resulting map the “Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan.” It was an inspiring piece of work, and many of us in the peak oil movement were grateful to have access to it.
Almost as an afterthought, the class felt compelled to share their plan with the Kinsale city council. Surprisingly, the council decided to adopt the students’ energy descent action plan as the plan for the city of Kinsale—and, as legend has it, that plan continues to be implemented there today. This was truly a breakthrough moment in the history of the relocalization movement, and it gave many of us a much-needed sense of hope that more was possible than we had imagined.
But things apparently did not go well for Hopkins. Shortly after the initial success in Kinsale, he seemed to disappear from the scene and abandon the effort. Later I learned that Hopkins’s home—made of straw bales and cob (an earth-and-straw building material), which his students had helped him build—had been burned to the ground. Arson was suspected, but Hopkins was apparently so badly shaken that he decided Kinsale was not where he wanted to raise his family.
Sometime in 2006, we heard that Hopkins had moved to Totnes, in southwest England, where he was apparently prototyping a community-wide Transition process to achieve local resilience and self-reliance. It seemed ambitious, but possible. We eagerly awaited news.
Hopkins would later say that he had no intention of starting a movement. His interest was simply the relocalization of Totnes, a beautiful market town of some eight thousand people (which reminded me of Carmel, California). But as he rolled out his new Transition effort in Totnes, people in other communities were watching, as we were. When it became clear that Hopkins was experimenting with a process similar to what had occurred in Kinsale—this time driven by community citizens on a grassroots level—other community groups quickly began emulating his process. It appeared that Hopkins had stumbled onto something important, which just might be the key to achieving relocalization in communities anywhere.
Transition was rooted in a grand vision, as Hopkins later wrote: “Inherent within the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change is an extraordinary opportunity to reinvent, rethink and rebuild the world around us.”30
From internet reports, it quickly became clear that a robust, seemingly viral movement was springing up around the Transition process in Totnes, and we soon learned that Rob Hopkins was even writing a book, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependence to Local Resilience, to help foster the movement.31 I wondered if this might be the much-needed book that Julian Darley had failed to complete.
Shortly after The Transition Handbook was published, I read it on a plane to the United Kingdom, on my way to see for myself if the burgeoning Transition movement really lived up to the glowing reports we had been reading on the internet. I had to know if it was actually working and to somehow gauge whether the movement could possibly be sustainable.
My first stop was Dundee, Scotland, to take the two-day Training for Transition from Sophy Banks and Naresh Giangrande, two of the cofounders of Transition Town Totnes and the creators of the Training for Transition. My experience there was entirely unexpected. Somehow Transition just landed in me, in my heart. I saw that Transition was alive—and, inevitably, alive in me.
Afterward, I made the long train ride down to southwest England to make my pilgrimage to the birthplace of the movement, Totnes. And there I was able to spend some time with Rob Hopkins and his chief coconspirator, Ben Brangwyn, who headed up the international Transition network. I got to see the movement on the ground, not only in Totnes, but also in several other communities in England. I witnessed that Transition had indeed become a household word in the United Kingdom, and that the movement was indeed spreading virally. It looked like this was going to work.
I came back to the States deeply inspired, carrying the fire of Transition, determined to ignite the entire nation around the project of relocalization.
To my dismay, both Hopkins and Brangwyn had candidly admitted to me that they had considered Transition in the United States, but they felt it was too daunting a task. This country seemed unimaginably large to them—and too difficult to deal with. They had figured that they would just forget about America. There were no plans to bring Transition to the United States, but I felt it was essential. After all, I told them, the United States was by far the world’s greatest consumer of fossil fuels and the largest producer of greenhouse-gas emissions. We needed Transition in this country, and we needed it to work—for everyone’s sake.
I was deeply inspired by Hopkins’s “cheerful disclaimer” that Transition was a social experiment on a grand scale. We really didn’t know whether it would work or not. We moved forward with the conviction that if we waited for governments to act, it would be too little, too late. And if we merely acted as individuals, it would certainly be too little. We believed that if we acted together—as communities—it might be just enough, just in time.
As I shared this cheerful disclaimer with audiences and initiatives across the country—along with the context for Transition (our collective predicament) and a brief description of the essential elements of the Transition process—people responded with great enthusiasm. For many, this was the most hopeful development they had seen in a time of growing darkness in the world.
On May 1, 2008, our relocalization organization—renamed Transition Boulder County—became the first officially recognized Transition initiative in North America (number fifty-three in the world, and the fifth outside the United Kingdom), and in September of that year, Lynette Marie and I conducted the first American Training for Transition, with sixty-one people participating. These first efforts resulted in the birth of several local initiatives in Colorado, five of which became officially recognized. That spurred us (prematurely) to become Transition Colorado, the first statewide Transition Hub.
As certified Transition trainers, Lynette Marie and I subsequently held Training for Transition sessions for hundreds of people all over the country, and we conducted numerous Transition clinics, both online and in person.
During that period, I made frequent plane trips to California for Transition United States board meetings. There was a particularly memorable board meeting in 2009, at the organization’s headquarters in Sebastopol, California. Pamela Grey (an intellectually formidable scientist and entrepreneur) set the tone by saying that from her recent research she had come to the conclusion that the global situation—particularly regarding climate, energy, and the economy—was far worse than almost anyone had imagined, and it was deteriorating rapidly. Near-term systemic collapse seemed inevitable, and the economic unraveling of 2008 seemed to be the beginning of global economic disaster. She worried that the effort to organize Transition initiatives across the country was moving far too slowly, that the movement could fail spectacularly. Board member Richard Heinberg, who by this time had become a senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute,32 confirmed that Grey’s sense of unfolding realities was dead-on accurate, that disaster could soon be upon us. We all felt a great sense of urgency and frustration, as well as bewilderment as to how to move forward.
We were greatly concerned that an energy descent action plan, like the one originally designed by Rob Hopkins’s students in Kinsale, developed by any community would be far too little, too late. The process would take years to complete, let alone implement. We felt that global conditions were changing far more rapidly than Transition plans could accommodate.
Shortly thereafter, a few of us met with Transition network leaders (including Hopkins) at an international gathering in London. I was intent on learning why Transition in the United Kingdom seemed to lack a sense of urgency. It appeared that the economic crisis did not seem all that serious to them, and in fact, they had consciously decided (after some debate) to leave the economy out of the discussion in Transition trainings and in public presentations. This seemed inexplicable to us, and dangerous.
We explored various potential collapse scenarios with our British counterparts, but it was clear that there was a gulf between us in our understanding of the seriousness and urgency of our collective situation. This was driven home by Hopkins himself, who passionately expressed his conviction that if things got really bad, the British government would step in to make sure that people were well taken care of. We were incredulous, having witnessed the complete incompetence of the U.S. government in the face of Hurricane Katrina. But we could see that somehow, in the United Kingdom, there was a firm belief that the government could be relied upon to provide a safety net for its people. We in the United States suffered no such delusion.
Later that year, after a board meeting back in the United States, I arranged for a private meeting with Richard Heinberg. He invited me to his home in Santa Rosa, where he and his wife, Janet Barocco, had transformed a modest house on a small suburban plot into an oasis of food production and sustainable living. In the small straw-bale studio they had built in the backyard, Richard and I settled in for a long and candid conversation.
I had come to regard Richard as the most reliable researcher and most courageous communicator on Peak Everything issues. For me, he was one of the most important elders of the human tribe, an anchor of sanity in a world gone mad. I told him that I was well aware of his increasing sense of urgency about the human predicament and that I had decided to seek his counsel, since he seemed to know more about the realities of the coming cataclysm than anyone. He had pointed to the likelihood that collapse would soon land in the United States, and I wanted to know how he thought it would hit us first, where we would experience the greatest pain.
“Well, of course, it’s food,” he said matter-of-factly. Check—confirmation of what we had been feeling back in Boulder.
“When will it hit us?”
“Well, it could be next year or the year after. But probably no more than three years or so.” Damn! We’ll have to move much faster!
We talked for maybe an hour after that, but I can scarcely recall anything else from the conversation, for I knew (as I had suspected) that I would have to return to Boulder and focus all our relocalization efforts on food. I’m sorry I couldn’t have recorded that meeting, but I had asked for a candid and off-the-record conversation.
We had been deeply committed to relocalization in the place where we lived and to assisting wherever else we could. We had understood what was at stake, and we had viewed the Transition movement as the viable pathway forward. At the same time, something deeper was happening in our own understanding and experience, which was quite different from the Transition model as it was being practiced. And this eventually drew us in a radically different direction and focus. In late 2010, I was finally compelled to speak publicly about it.