Excerpted from my presentation at Xavier University’s Lecture Series on Ethics, Religion, and Society, November 7, 2010.
There are now seventy-seven officially recognized Transition initiatives in the United States, along with seventeen in Canada (and none in Mexico). But this is a nation of some three hundred million people. Canada has about thirty-five million.
The United Kingdom claims 170 officially recognized initiatives, with a population of just over sixty million. Granted, the movement in the United Kingdom has been ongoing for a couple of years longer than in the United States, but the rate of adoption does seem noticeably slower here. To approach a similar level, we’d need to somehow get to nearly four hundred official initiatives over the next eighteen months. That would be truly extraordinary growth, and I’d really like to see that happen.34
Sadly, however, the rate of adoption in the United States seems to be slowing. Transition is hardly a household word in this country, and the mainstream media have given the movement scant attention. What’s happening here?
I don’t know if ever there will emerge a coherent and robust and truly viral Transition movement in this nation. I do know that we need it urgently. But today the movement here seems to me to be somewhat fragmented. Surely there are inspiring and important things going on in a number of communities—as in Sandpoint, Idaho—and truly I’m grateful for all of that. But in several other communities, the effort for relocalization has already essentially stalled. For many, it just seems too difficult, too big a challenge.
But we need Transition to work here, especially in this nation—because the United States is ground zero for the Long Emergency. We are the world’s largest user of fossil fuels. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we burn about 25 percent of the world’s oil (two-thirds of which we have to import). We are also the largest producer of greenhouse-gas emissions, responsible for at least 25 percent of the total. Some would have us believe that China is the biggest contributor of greenhouse-gas emissions, but this ignores the fact that much of what China produces is for consumption in the United States. In fact, one-third of the world’s industrial products come to the United States.
We are the world’s most significant contributor to fossil fuel depletion, environmental degradation, and global warming. And now, with the entire globalized economy based on the U.S. dollar, which is based on an abundant supply of cheap oil, we are also the world’s greatest contributor to economic decline—which is likely to soon become economic collapse, or at least long-term economic depression.
Make no mistake—the United States is the belly of the beast. Given this situation, it’s hardly surprising that it’s challenging to get Transition to catch fire here. There may be no other nation on the planet where denial and greed are more deeply rooted.
I appreciate the assessments of David Orr at Oberlin College, who observes in Derrick Jensen’s Listening to the Land:
Conventional wisdom maintains that we are slowly recovering from a recalcitrant recession. As we are now entering at least the third year of real economic contraction, continue to reel from the predations and corruption in a financial sector the federal government treats as sacrosanct, are in the sixth year of a plateau in worldwide oil extraction, and climate change is essentially unmitigated, it should be obvious that American society is arrantly unsustainable—ecologically, fiscally, economically, politically, and ethically.… We’ve got a whole culture locked in the first stage of Abraham Maslow’s five stages of human development: infantile self-gratification.35
But we have a unique history and heritage here in the United States, and in many ways a painful legacy, and all this needs to deeply inform our approach to Transition.
Self-declared “geologian” Thomas Berry helps us to understand our particular predicament here.
When we came to this continent, we saw ourselves as a people with the most sublime spiritual insights … as the most intellectual people of the world … as people with the most human political traditions of the world, with our democratic political commitment; as a people, through our technologies, most able to deal with the daily needs of the world for food, clothing, and shelter. Now, after four centuries we find the North American continent toxic in its air, its water, and its land and gravely diminished in the variety and abundance of its living forms. We must ask ourselves what happened? The answer is simply that we have lost our awareness that the human community exists only as a component of the larger Earth community. Instead of an intimate presence on an abundant continent that could inspire our minds and imaginations while providing for our practical needs, we became a predator people on an innocent continent.36
The widespread destruction that has resulted from our presence has been enormous, as Berry laments, “The North American continent will never again be what it once was. The manner in which we have devastated the continent has never before occurred.… It is clear that there will be little development of life here in the future if we do not protect and foster the living forms of this continent. To do this, a change must occur deep in our souls. We need our technologies, but this is beyond technology. Our technologies have betrayed us.”37
What we are learning is that what has gotten us into our collective predicament is a deep disconnection from the natural world, from life itself. And this separation between humans and the earth and the fundamental processes of life is nowhere more dramatic or more devastating than right here in the United States.
“You and I are not people who live in communion with the earth,” says ecopsychology pioneer Chellis Glendinning. “We exist instead dislocated from our roots by the psychological, philosophical, and technological constructions of our civilization, and this alienation leads to our suffering: massive suffering for each and every one of us, and mass suffering throughout our society.”38
As Americans, we will need to come to own all of this, to allow it to sink deep into our conscious awareness, and to learn to heal from it together.
In his cheerful disclaimer, Rob Hopkins candidly and humbly admits that Transition is a massive social experiment and that we really don’t know if it will work. Well, with the stakes as high as they are, I think we need to explore finding the ways to help ensure that it will work, especially here in the United States.
I do think the Transition model or process is a revolutionary development, one of the most important we’ve seen to date. But we should recognize that Transition itself is now undergoing radical change, one that is most especially needed in the United States.
The important thing to acknowledge here is that Transition is evolving very quickly—based both on what has been experienced in communities all over the world and on what is seeking to emerge in and through this movement. You could say that Transition is in transition. And perhaps the most visible sign of this evolution is a radical reframing of the Transition model by Rob Hopkins himself.
To his credit, Rob Hopkins was horrified to see that his early attempts to articulate a Transition process became regarded as a sort of catechism for emerging Transition initiatives, so he is now in the early stages of a valiant attempt to sweep away the rapidly forming accretions of tradition—how is it possible for a movement to establish “traditions” in a scant four years?—and to replace them with a reconception of Transition as something called “a pattern language,” following the example of famed architect Christopher Alexander.
Shortly before the international Transition network conference in England in June, Rob sent out this message, which took many by surprise: “In the interests of promoting non-attachment to ideas and enshrining the principle that none of us really know what we are doing, as encapsulated in the ‘Cheerful Disclaimer’, for the Transition Handbook 2.0, I am taking the original Transition model and throwing it up in the air, using ‘A Pattern Language’ as a way of re-communicating and reshaping it.”
With some excitement, we had learned early this year that Rob was heading in this direction. And now we see he is slowly writing The Transition Handbook 2.0, pattern by pattern, on his blog, inviting input and feedback.39 It’s an ambitious and creative project. Not everyone is happy about this reframing, however, including some of Alexander’s longtime students—but it’s on its way nonetheless.
What is the meaning of all this? What is emerging in the Transition movement? And what is all this about pattern language?
Pattern language is about discovering the inherent patterns that bring aliveness, wholeness, and healing to our communities. This is potentially an extremely potent development for the Transition movement, for underlying the Transition process is the healing impulse. In fact, it’s the same impulse that’s underlying permaculture.
In the United Kingdom, this bold reconception is being delivered under the banner of “Assembling Transition,” and Hopkins has taken to calling the patterns he has identified as “Transition Ingredients”—as if Transition is some sort of recipe to follow, a kind of cake we can just cook up. Unwittingly, Hopkins may be condemning Transition to the same kind of fate that has befallen a mechanistic view of nature and the universe.
Language matters here. It’s not trivial. Brian Swimme laughs at earlier scientists who imagined that the universe had somehow been assembled from parts—and imagined that the human had no integral connection with the process. As I delve deeper into all this, I find myself suspecting that Rob may be ignoring the deeper aspects of Christopher Alexander’s work.
One of the core principles of permaculture has to do with valuing what’s happening at the edges of a system. As David Holmgren says, “The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.”40
For the last two years, we’ve been exploring some of these edges at Genesis Farm in northwestern New Jersey, where—after thirty years as a center for the study of “Earth Literacy” and “The Great Work” of Thomas Berry—Sister Miriam MacGillis has opened the door to a profound exploration of how to help foster the Transition movement in this land, how to regain within it the sense of sacred energy revealed through the story of the emergence of the universe itself and the evolution of our own earth, and how to cultivate a truly bioregional context for reinventing and relocalizing our way into the future (in other words, becoming native to our place).
At Genesis Farm, in a rich and deeply supportive environment, working with Miriam MacGillis, Seanna Ashburn (another Transition trainer), and others, we’ve held dialogues, presentations, and an ongoing series of two- and three-day workshops for Transition leaders.
Out of this exploration, several key themes have emerged.
First, there is a growing and indisputable recognition that our collective predicament is far more serious and more urgent than many of us had been willing to actively contemplate. This is being increasingly reflected in the larger Transition movement, sometimes to the apparent dismay of its founders. Part of the discomfort, of course, is the unavoidable recognition that, as John Michael Greer tells us, the situation we face is not a problem that can be solved, but a predicament of our own making to which we must now quickly adapt. It’s important to name our predicament, and to name and express how it’s impacting us, what we are feeling about all this. And with this comes the realization that while the long-term process of energy descent action planning is essential in our communities, we must also quickly develop short-term plans to respond to likely near-term events—things like breakdowns in food or fuel supply chains, or a sudden collapse of the stock market, or a weather catastrophe, or even a widespread health crisis. Richard Heinberg has been pleading for this kind of emergency planning for years now as a core part of every resilience program. Few in this country have listened, and now time is very short.
Second, we’re beginning to learn about emergence—or what Christopher Alexander calls “unfolding,” the evolutionary process by which the universe itself self-organizes, finding profound and practical lessons in how to catalyze Transition in our communities. We’re learning about what is emerging in the Transition movement itself. In our communities, we’re learning about what it is that’s wanting to emerge there, far beyond our hopes and fears and desires. And in ourselves, we’re discovering what it is that’s wanting to emerge in us—and through us.
Third, in a closely related way, we’re also beginning to learn the meaning of self-organization, which is actually a core principle of Transition, though little discussed. We’re discovering that catalyzing self-organization of a community around relocalization or Transition is entirely different from community organizing.
We’re also beginning to understand how essential the principles and ethics of permaculture are to the Transition process. These have not been translated explicitly into the Transition literature, and yet they are fundamental to Transition. This translation will become increasingly important over time, because permaculture is based on a deep understanding of how life works.
We’re also diving deep into the story of the evolution of the universe, of the earth, and of life itself. As Thomas Berry explains, this New Cosmology “explores the contemporary, scientific story of the origin, nature and function of the Universe from its beginning, through its galactic phase, its supernova events, the shaping of the solar system, Earth, life, human life and self-reflective consciousness as a single, unbroken series of events.”41 It’s often framed in terms of Earth Literacy, because we humans are so illiterate about the place where we live and how we got here. But the New Cosmology is helping us to recover our sense of the sacredness of life itself, and our fundamental connectedness with the processes that make life possible.
When people hear the word cosmology they sometimes automatically think that it’s somehow religious. But in reality, it’s based on a deep understanding of science, the story of the evolution of the universe. And, surprisingly, it brings us to a profound sense of the sacredness of life.
This perspective is even embedded in the preamble to the Earth Charter,42 which says: “We are part of a vast, evolving universe. Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life.” This is not a mere metaphor.
In an interview with Derrick Jensen, Creation Spirituality’s Matthew Fox says,
I maintain that the best, most profound mystical literature today is coming out of science. The new creation story is that everything—each of us—is mystery. What we’re finding is that the smallest part of the atom is mystery. It’s dancing. And then of course the macrocosm is a mystery. In the previous scientific worldview, mystery was “just what we don’t know yet. We’ll solve it.” It’s not that way. Death is not something you solve. Love is not something you solve. A broken heart is not something you solve. It’s something you experience. It’s Moses on the mountain. Moses had his experience with the burning bush. We’re learning that every bush is a burning bush, burning with photons and photosynthesis and this amazing cosmic process that was invented a few billion years ago, a process that goes back to the original fireball.43
This perspective is deeply enlivening.
As an important adjunct to the New Cosmology, we’re beginning to discover the importance of the patterns of evolution itself—and patterns of wholeness and healing. That’s certainly possible with Rob Hopkins’s infusion of Christopher Alexander’s extraordinary work into the Transition process. We’ll see. What’s happening at Genesis Farm is that we’re finding that our understanding of how Transition works and how real community works are being radically reshaped by our understanding of how the universe itself evolves—how life evolves and how life works.
Finally, we’re beginning to appreciate the centrality of Inner Transition, what is frequently called Heart and Soul work in the Transition movement, a recognition that Transition in the outer world cannot occur without an Inner Transition. Holding the space for this—including the psychology of change; the whole broad field of ecopsychology; dealing with grief, anger, and despair; and Joanna Macy’s “The Work That Reconnects”44—is to me one of the most refreshing and endearing aspects of the Transition movement. This may turn out to be a more powerful attractor to the movement than the issues of peak oil, climate change, and economic decline.
As Sophy Banks in Totnes reminds us, “Part of the human condition is an experience of inner woundedness or brokenness. We want to be whole again, and some part of us knows how to do that. We yearn for wholeness and integration.” And her partner, Naresh Giangrande, says, “Transition work is a manifestation of the healing impulse. We’re making a plea to bring love into Transition.”45 These things are not often openly stated in the Transition movement, but they are being uttered in Heart and Soul groups that are meeting even in the most unexpected places.
It’s a long and intense process, but we’re beginning to see (and communicate) how the New Cosmology, the Universe Story, permaculture, Heart and Soul, and Christopher Alexander’s work are closely related—and how they’re just beginning to land together in the Transition movement. What this means to me is that we’re finally beginning to understand Transition itself as an evolutionary process, one of the most intriguing and promising processes to emerge on this planet. And it’s all absolutely integral with the 13.7-billion-year process of the unfolding of the universe—which, of course, is a continuing, emergent unfolding.
In short, at Genesis Farm, we’re beginning to catalyze the infusion into Transition of new perspectives and leading-edge processes that are absolutely necessary in order for Transition to be ultimately successful. The emergence of these new perspectives is encouraging and inspiring. To me, these are all signs that Transition is working.…
Alastair McIntosh gives us some wonderful context for all this in his book, Hell and High Water, where he writes about climate change (but he could just as well be speaking of our total predicament). He says, “To mitigate climate change—and even to adapt to its consequences—without losing our humanity, there needs to be a radical reactivation of our inner lives.”46
He continues, “Inner climate affects outer climate because inner hubris drives outer hubris in a spiral of mindless economic frenzy.” That’s very powerful.
“I perversely hold out hope for humanity,” he says, “not in spite of global warming, but precisely because it confronts us with a wake-up call to consciousness. Answering that call of the wild to the wild within us all invites outer action matched by inner transformation.”
And that’s part of what we’ve been attempting to cultivate at Genesis Farm. We’re exploring these things out of a deep and urgent sense that these perspectives, these tools and processes, will be absolutely essential for Transition leaders as we move into a very uncertain future.
We’re finding that this perspective about the inner work is fundamental to Transition, and it opens the door to what we’ve begun calling Deep Transition.
While these things may not be a “traditional” part of the Transition orientation, Deep Transition represents an opening where breakthrough understandings and processes can readily emerge and make significant contributions. After all, since no one anywhere has yet successfully relocalized a community, it is quite likely that approaches both ancient and new will be needed.
As David Orr says, “industrial civilization destroys communities.”47 And at its core, Transition is about healing and regenerating community. This is deep and profound work, and it is the very epicenter of the Transition process, even though we haven’t talked about it publicly much—yet.
This is what Alistair McIntosh calls the cycle of belonging—where we help one another to re-member what has been dismembered, to re-vision how things could alternatively be, and then organize to re-claim what is needed to regenerate and heal community. This cycle of belonging offers meaning and direction in generating the responsibility necessary for community regeneration and healing.
But in the long run, I feel our Transition efforts may not be sustainable or resilient or self-reliant unless we place the Sacred at the core of our work and at the center of all our activities.
For Transition is not a movement for bringing about change. Change is coming, with us or without us, whether we want it or not—profound change. Transition is a movement for preparing our communities for the changes that are coming. And our preparation is likely to crumble unless we are able to connect with and cultivate the aliveness, the wholeness, the healing, and the sacredness that underlies the Transition process.
Buried deep in the Transition literature, there is a reference to core principles that should guide the practice of permaculture and, presumably, Transition itself. These are not discussed at any great length, but perhaps we can sense that they are fundamental.
• A sustainable human presence on the planet must align its systems with how life works.
• As long as our human culture is based on unsustainable assumptions, those systems will fail.
• A reinvention of a sustainable human culture must be in alignment with the rest of life.
• The laws of life can be seen and experienced in the natural world and many indigenous cultures.
There is aliveness here, and great wisdom. I propose these as foundational principles for Deep Transition.
I remember Christopher Alexander saying that aliveness and wholeness begin with something small. If it’s authentic, truly alive, it spreads or unfolds—often in mysterious ways. It’s eerily contagious—and uncontrollable. This is not something to be “organized.” Instead, it grows—organically. This is as true for a community as it is for an organism.
The challenge for those of us involved in Transition is to be able to see such pockets of aliveness and wholeness in our communities, to support them, to protect them, to lovingly shine the light of day on them, to cultivate them, to catalyze their replication—and then to see what’s possible and needed next. This is how communities are healed and ultimately made whole.
We’re learning that none of us can make Transition happen in our communities. But we can surely be a catalyst for this emergence. All it takes is seeing what is possible and beginning right where we are.
With thanks to Mike Ruppert, I’d like to close with an authentically American perspective, from the late Floyd Red Crow Westerman, speaking from the Native American tradition.
Time evolves and comes to a place where it renews again. There is first a purification time, and then there is renewal time. We are getting very close to this time now.
We were told that we would see America come and go. And in a sense, America is dying—from within—because we forgot the instructions of how to live on Earth. Everything is coming to a time when prophecy and man’s inability to live on Earth in a spiritual way will come to a crossroad of great problems.
It’s our belief that if you’re not spiritually connected to the Earth and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on Earth, it’s likely you will not make it.48
I think that’s true for each one of us, for this nation, and for the Transition movement itself. We need to regain and reclaim the sense, as Red Crow proclaims, that everything is spiritual, that this planet, this universe, this continent, and this movement are all about the Sacred. Perhaps this is ultimately the only thing that will truly ignite the Transition movement in America and the only thing that will enable this land and its people to fulfill our common destiny.