Transition Culture

4 Oct 2006

Transition Town Totnes - The Story So Far by Naresh Giangrande.

My TTT colleague and fellow peak oil activist Naresh Giangrande wrote this piece as notes for a talk he gave to Totnes Friends of the Earth last night, and I felt it gave such a good overview of the project and what it is doing that I asked him if I could post it here. Naresh runs Living on the Cusp, and runs workshops around the country on preparing for peak oil.

Transition Town Totnes began the with understanding that we are facing imminent social collapse. Not the slow but steady social collapse that FOE, Greenpeace, the Club of Rome, and others have been warning about for decades now, but imminent. That the time for action is now, and that external events global world changing events will, at times, overtake this process, and will drive this process.

As Joanny Macy puts it;

“until the late 20th century, every generation throughout history lived with the tacit certainty that there would be generations to follow. Each assumed, without questioning, that its children and children’s children would walk the same earth, under the same sky. Hardships, failures and personal death were encompassed in the vaster assurance of continuity. That certainty is now lost to us, whatever our politics. That loss, unmeasured and unmeasurable, is the pivotal psychological reality of our time�.

“We are weaving our own insanity,” Elizabeth Roberts, the co-editor of Earth Prayers, Life Prayers and Prayers for a Thousand Years. “The answer to the environmental malaise isn’t just a technical solution. It requires more because we are in a psychological and spiritual crisis, a crisis of culture and character.”

How to respond to this reality? Our answer is TTT.

For Rob and I PO has informed and driven both of us separately- him to create the Transition Town process first of all in Kinsale in Ireland, and myself to start teaching my Living on the Cusp workshops, and speaking about PO - And now together on this project. As US Senator Tom Udall said earlier this year, “a crisis looms if we do not begin preparing for the day when world oil production peaks. And that day is coming, most likely within four to eight years. Peak oil is a fact, not a theory, and the logic is simple”.

So PO has been a determining factor, and remains a guiding light of both Rob and myself, particularly the factor that the event known as PO will come upon us in a relatively short time period and with little warning- warning in the sense that our political social and economic systems acts as a predictor of future events, and will send us signals in good time. All the analysis I have seen point to a scenario where the PO will take us by surprise, and come without adequate warning, in the sense that there will be insufficient time for us to prepare plan ‘B’.

The now famous Hirsh report concluded that a minimum of 10 years prior to the peak would require an unprecedented crash program to create other substitutes and enact conservation and efficiency programs. Anything less than that would result in widespread disruption to the US and world economy. However whatever the cause, whether we live in a carbon constrained world (Has anyone seen ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ ?) or be ambushed by PO, or both, its clear to me that will have to live our lives do business and just about every other aspect of our lives very differently in a relatively short period of time.

In short we will have to redefine our culture, our role on the planet, our goals and aspirations as a species. This is unprecedented.

So how does TTT fit into all this?

There have been lots of programs and campaigns aimed at stimulating individual action- Green consumer stuff- Carbon offsets, recycling and reusing, solar panels, etc. There have been many political initiatives aimed mostly at national government, The Big Ask, Stop Climate Chaos, and anti GM etc. But few if any aimed at local and community based solutions, in particular what individuals can do to influence their immediate environment beyond their personal space, that aren’t focussing on local government.

This is an anarchic, grass roots, democratic, citizen based initiative. We are aiming to reclaim power over our lives and the resources in our area. We will certainly engage with local government, but will act independently from local government. So this is the first unique aspect of TTT, it is an attempt at a community wide, democratic response.

The second distinguishing factor of TTT is the wholistic view taken- all aspects of life are included- we consider everything, from transport to education, to spiritual and emotional well being. And probably more beside. Permaculture has been very influential.

and the third aspect -chaotic nature of the structure and process.

What it’s not:

A program We don’t have the thing mapped out and planned. It’s not a planned process- like a 5 year CP plan.

A return to the past
We can’t

A new political party
We are staying out of party politics, but parties might want to align themselves with the process, or not!

A plan to make us poorer
In fact it’s a way to make us richer, maybe not monetarily but in other ways. It will call into question the terms of economic growth (I hope), and what is well being.

What it is:

A process
We can’t get from un-sustainable to sustainable in one step, it will be many small incremental steps over many years. It will unfold in many different directions. Because it will address all different areas of life, it will maybe progress in one area faster than other, and then other areas will catch up. For instance, maybe energy will go quickly, maybe we will set targets or RE, of x MW per annum and that might get started quickly. Maybe it won’t.

Maybe the targets for food self sufficiency might be met or exceeded, who know. Maybe our education or medical system will change in ways we can imagine. We don’t as yet even have any targets or wish lists for that.

The process is chaotic.
Neither of us has any idea how the process will unfold and where it will go. That’s part of the beauty of it for me. It’s unpredictable. We have set the process in motion and then are allowing it to happen. Chaotic in the sense of chaos and complexity theory. There is no way of predicting what might happen or when, like predicting the stock market or the weather. We will be responding to events and happening as and when they happen, and let those events and happenings guide us. When dealing with complex systems with many different feedback mechanisms and inter-relations there is no way of knowing how they will inter act and what will be created.

There is no one controlling it Wiki web site Open space events: Whoever comes is the right person. Self organising Whoever wants to be part of it can, and can take whatever responsibility or role they wish.

It’s ongoing and there is no arrival at the solution We have no definition of sustainable, when that goes and where it doesn’t remains to be seen. We may have to have more control and more definition of this, we don’t know.

What have we achieved so far or work in progress:

Awareness raising Why do we think this is an important thing to do- Showing EOS Talking about energy descent planning, and Rob’s experience Project launch 350 people attending PO talks

Strategic partnerships – using what’s there FOE Sustainability group DARE report and conference Schumacher College Power switch

Planned a series of events.

Evening focussing on specific area of the TTT process – Energy, Food, Heart & soul – eco psychology followed by an open space event that will engage people who are interested in exploring that area and leading a plan of action. Also Rob is doing an evening course- ‘Skilling up for Power down’, and my talking like this and my LOTC

What we hope and think will come out of the OS events will be a group who are willing to explore that area and survey what’s there, and then develop an action plan to begin the transition process.

Funding.

we currently are looking at structure of the TTT organisation with a view to fund raising. Currently existing on donations and good will.

The “Powerdown Party Plan�

While some people will attend regular talks and events, many others are unwilling or unable to attend such events. In order to reach such people, the Powerdown Party Plan will make the ideas in the Transition Town Totnes process accessible to all. It will take the form of a 3 hour session that will be run in peoples’ homes, provided the host could guarantee more than 6 people would attend. It will be positive and fun, as well as informative, and will also form a two way process for obtaining peoples’ ideas about the Energy Descent Action Plan.

This model is also being developed by other relocalisation groups around the world, with whom we are sharing ideas. Students from the Skilling Up for Powerdown course would be qualified to run these sessions and would help to design them. An information pack would also be designed which would be left with those attending.

“How Totnes Became the Most Wonderful Place on Earth� Book Project – with local schools.

One of the biggest difficulties with sustainability initiatives is the creation of a tangible vision of how the future could be following their implementation. Enabling young people to feel excited about the possibilities of the future rather than fearful or concerned is through enabling them to voice their visions for the future.

This project will feature a workshop run with children, which explains energy dependency and its fragility, and some ideas of how a low energy future could be. The children would then be invited to write a story, set 30 years in the future, telling the tale of how Totnes began and saw through this transition, becoming the first truly sustainable settlement in the world. Their stories, poems and illustrations on the subject would be collected and published as a book.

Interviews with Elders

An important strand of this work is looking back at how people lived before cheap oil. How did people heat their homes, source their food, make their livelihoods? What infrastructure was in place in a more localised economy and what skills did people have? A number of interviews with older people will be carried out to obtain this essential information from those with direct experience of a more localised economy. These interviews also are important in that they are a recognition and honouring of the elders of the town, and a valuing of their experience and wisdom.

“Small actions now are disproportionately important. They are more important than bigger actions later because of the non-linearity of the process we are talking about,” Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the Government