About “And as involvement in transition is purely voluntary and open to all, then clearly there are cultural / societal reasons that it has the membership that it has.”

The inability of the poor and uneducated to provide their own assets for making changes will bind them into their current choices and lifestyle. That is one reason I suggested that the people most needing support, those unable to provide their own assets for the disruption of changing to Transition, may be an overlooked and significant opportunity for Transition growth – and a significant opportunity to serve others.

If Transition is worthwhile for the individual, then the marginal might still be marginal within Transition, at least at first, but their environmental, social, and economic impact (for those able to Transition off public assistance) would be lessened.

Change is measured in pain. There is a little “death” of the life from before the change, we suffer grief for that old life. Witness the difficulty in quitting smoking, the depression expected when changing jobs, and buyers remorse. This reaction to change gives us an inherent interest in maintaining the status quo. For those with the assets to manage changes, options open up, and relatively minor changes can be taken in stride. Hence the fairly well educated, well read, literate and affluent (compared to devastatingly poor) current social strata of Transition. They are some of the population *able* to make big choices in their lives, that *did* choose Transition.

Should Transition provide ongoing support? No. But the process for joining, by those with limited asset and learning means, should be clear, inviting, and at moderate cost.

Look at it this way. Bringing the poor onboard today is practice for dealing with anticipated displaced masses, as economic decline proceeds.

But being totally pragmatic, what I see at the moment in the transition movement is mainly relatively well educated, relatively well-off people. And as involvement in transition is purely voluntary and open to all, then clearly there are cultural / societal reasons that it has the membership that it has.

So, as the numbers involved in transition are currently tiny, then maybe the way to go to increase numbers is to concentrate on reaching out to the sort of people who seem already somewhat predisposed to having an interest?

I’m not trying to be controversial. That’s just my opinion.

It comes to me that if catastrophic economic decline hits, or even a gradual decline proceeds, that many of us will need the kind of transition that today’s poor needs. I believe part of my attention to this particular demographic is to prepare the tools and processes for what are likely to become the most needed.

First, apologies for not seeing that you put up the first comment as well as the two I responded to.

I’m sure many people (here) wonder whether our current welfare system is sustainable, but probably doing anything about it is not very high on most people’s action plans. I suspect that with the transition movement we’ve still got an awful lot more “low-hanging fruit” to pick before we start putting too much time into persuading the less affluent and less educated (stop me if my generalisations are offending anyone) sectors of society to give up on wanting the things that they still see the vast majority of the population “enjoying”

On the other hand I’m sure there are ways to make transition appealing across social boundaries. For example, we have some people in our group (Transition Purbeck) who are very interested in community supported agriculture, and it would be great to see something like a market garden or community farm get started that would involve the local schools and thus extend the transition message across social boundaries in a way that is actually fun.

Personally I think that practical initiatives like that are going to be more effective in drawing people in than simple reasoning in the face of the barrage of marketing messages that most people face every day.

I think I am still looking for a better answer.

My comment about affluence and the poor is the artificial way welfare payments usually perpetuate an illusion of affluence – of continuing the pre-packaged, individual dwelling, individual transport lifestyle of the upper middle class. It doesn’t work for those receiving welfare, but it doesn’t help people achieve an independent, community-involved, secure way of life, either. What welfare does do for recipients and others pursuing the “looks like affluent” lifestyle is to perpetuate a demand for the high energy products and structure of living that keeps the world rooted in huge demands for oil.

I am trying to understand how there can be people in the past, such as pioneers and peasants, that could live lives from atrocious and fraught with insecurity – to comfortable – without oil and high energy products. Yet we aren’t trying to learn much, or involve today’s very poor, in breaking away from Government Minimum Standards.

Humankind survived and persisted to grow into out modern society – often with large families in single room dwellings. Yet today we are guilty of child abuse for putting three children in too small a bed room, and heaven forbid pubescent children should share a bed room with siblings or parents. Is this morality, or encapsulated conspicuous consumption?

Throughout history the elite have chosen attitudes and displays of wealth, often uncomfortable or requiring multiple assistants to dress or conduct their business of the day. How many of our attitudes must we challenge for sustainable energy suitability?

As for the comment about affluence and welfare assistance, that was a revelation on reading a previous comment, that welfare payments are an attempt to bestow middle class level consumption ability on the poor, and not a reasoned attempt, free of preconceptions, to sustain a comfortable and secure life.

It seems to me that pulling people into a comfortable and secure life, free of the cheap energy assumptions of conspicuous consumption, is the only sustainable way to reduce reliance on welfare assistance. I haven’t seen that happen.

I wonder if part of the transition mind set might be to reinvent affluent living, and not sufficiently challenge the attitudes and assumptions of today’s society – or who *needs* the Transition the most, and who needs it the most immediately.

Another example of attitudes I question is ambition. Today’s assumptions that real children need college to be real people overlooks the fact that not everyone has an ambition to succeed. In engineering disciplines the schools seem to universally inculcate a career definition that demands advancement within five years or else. What happened to the craftsmen, the horseshoer, the miller, the carpenter, that learns a trade and serves the community in the same capacity for a lifetime? How reconcile a parent’s role, enduring from the mating ritual until the grave of planning for, caring for, nurturing, and guiding one’s children, with an assumption of unlimited growth in status, in authority, in responsibility and power, throughout one’s career – or that one should stop working while still able?

When did “servant” become anathema to self respect? Why does having sufficient wage to live alone with all the appliances and living space and travel time, become the minimum acceptable? Can we afford to overlook the live-in help – providing a place for someone willing – for room and board, and the odd set of clothes and gift of actual coin?

How long will it take to learn to build communities with corner stores within walking distance, again, and multi-family or multi-generational homes, or for the affluent, a place for a helper or servant – or five – to provide a place for those interested and replace the need for high-energy devices?

I have seen arguments that seem reasonable for many changes. I myself wonder how to contact WalMart and Ikea, and suggest they begin working on creating neighborhood branches that draw customers from less that 1.5 miles – instead of today’s intention of drawing people from 30-50 miles, creating a vastly larger expenditure of fuel for a commute-mindset community. I see a bit of chicken and egg thing here. Until we build homes and stores on the assumption of limited personal travel, no one will build that way. And no one will build that way while the community continues to focus on residential zones and business zones and industrial zones without counting the fuel expended to move people over great distances to work and shop efficiently for the merchants involved.

I am not enough involved in Transition to prove or disprove anything. But there are some questions that arise for me, and some topics that seem pertinent, like artificially perpetuating an affluent market place through welfare assistance.

And perhaps I fell for a smart-sounding phrase, one time, that a well-asked question may be more important than any answer. I am still working on the “well asked” part.

I am not looking to get caught in a debate, I agree with you that the desperately poor contribute less to the damage of the environment. The is pretty much self evident.

But in a world with figures of around 5 billion middle class citizens (who are largely responsible for most of the carbon we create). I think that this is a worthwhile issue to address, especially as it is an achievable one.

I don’t think that this is the only solution or even necessarily the best one, but I think it is one that is going to be easier to sell to the mainstream (I live in Australia, but I assume there are significant similarities to anywhere in the western world), some of whom still deny anything ‘man-made’ is really taking place, and most of whom are so comfortable in their lives that they have worked hard for that they do not want to give much ground up.

The problem is as stated by others here, that nothing significant is going to change before a disaster happens. But there is a chance, just a small one, that if we can actually make massive inroads into the amount of greenhouse gases our consumption creates, and restructure the way we do business then we might decrease the size or avoid the disaster.

I actually agree with Sid ‘What is actually needed is a new vision’. But as he alluded to, the vast majority of the world, isn’t even close to being ready to accept a new vision.

I’m not trying to be rude, but I’m struggling to see any point in either of your posts, except maybe “relax, everything is fine”

You seem to be having a bit of a go at those in the transition movement for being affluent enough to be able to afford to do so?

“We are ignorant, and devoid of enough options.”

I suspect the issue of mis-spent money is one of affluence. The desperately poor seem to make fewer purchases that damage the economy or ecology, that waste relatively less resources, especially relating to fossil fuels.

Most of the argument is about conspicuous consumption and other forms of un-needed spending. Affluence. Perhaps most especially, the worst atrocities of conspicuous consumption and waste of resources occurs as a result of public spending. The (now defunct) American “war on poverty”, social support spending, does an incredibly inefficient job of routing a portion of collected tax dollars to inadequately support a lot of people – in the fond expectation they will vote for one political figure or another.

One advocate for spending on space research and exploration pointed out in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I think, that a million dollars spend on any US NASA program employed more workers, feeding more families, than that same money (after costs and wastes of government programs reduce the available total) spent on direct payments to those in need. The illustration was focused on benefits received for the government spending, and didn’t include the results of research that have extended lives, improved nutrition, and understanding of human health that have resulted from space research dollars. (Umm, as I recall, government programs were measured in millions and *tens* of millions of dollars, back then.)

Rather than struggling to sustain today’s affluent “bad choices abounding” lifestyle, there is relatively little motion to transition to something sustainable at a lower level of energy and dependence on unlimited economic growth. Unemployment benefits are transparently geared to be temporary supports for the worst of the consumerist paradigm.

Individuals and Transition Towns working towards a more resilient and sustainable lifestyle and life’s work tend toward those with sufficient assets – to have the luxury of making choices with their lives. Any real change has to take into account the masses displaced as a consequence of the financial collapse, and the looming crises as world economies begin recovery – and demand for oil skyrockets.

I don’t see any significant motion, such as a homestead option, to occupy and nurture those already displaced from the flailing economic and political structures we have today.

Patricia Dodd Racher,

Many years ago, a middle school teacher told my class that the trickle down thing works, though seldom for everyone. When a company moves work to a “sweat shop” overseas, that is a temporary exploitation of starving people, at worst. The influx of money, at however abysmal the wage, creates demand, and competition, and wages increase. For the loss of 100 jobs in an industrial nation, 500 families might get better food, medical care, elsewhere. And in 20 years, they are no longer that cost-effective to compete for jobs – and have become markets for consumer goods themselves. This model has played out across the world, with varying degrees of success and benefit, for centuries. That is, nations and industries generally benefit. People, as always, get caught between the armies and merchants, between poverty and neglect and corruption – and peace and prosperity.

What is actually needed is a new vision. The old systems with capitalism/communism at their extremes are old measuring sticks that need to be discarded. They all predicate unlimited growth on a finite planet, and an inequitable distribution of the means to live with corruption at all levels from expenses fiddling to outright fraud and theft as seen for example in the banking sector (Madof et al), and are found at both ends – capitalist and communist.

This level of ‘re-skilling’ or re-conditioning of multiple human psyches is probably impossible; the process started at such an early age (see: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com for example)

Arguments about who does what, when, where, and why are irrelevant in a system that is predicated on material growth and consumption, with a reductionist/deterministic/competitive philosophy at its heart, that is fundamentally at odds with a symbiotic planetary system. (see anything by Lynn Margulis or Mae Wan Ho for example)

What most people miss in the whole ‘British workers can’t do immigrants jobs’ is the third piece of the lassaiz-fair neo-liberal project: freedom of movement of goods and capital was achieved after WWII, but labour proved stubborn to get moving – the UK was one of the first to embrace this notion with the freedom for those in the ex-colonial states to move to the UK. However like all ideals this one was left wide open to exploitation. I recall a group of young friends working lettuce fields in the early 90′s earning about £40 per day for up to a 12 hr shift. Then one day a van arrived full of (illegal) migrant workers, with a gangmaster (who took a cut) who offered to do the job for less – a lot less. While £40 a day wasn’t much even back in the early 90′s, it was typical of the work available for young free and single traveling types, and often set them up for more secure employment later on. While anecdotal, this example shows how the whole idea of free movement of labor has been abused turning the migrants themselves into a form of slave labour (witness the poor Chinese cockle pickers). Also the very notion of an (such a reputable) agency as the BBC ‘inviting’ people to take the place of migrant workers (who no doubt were themselves hand picked – i.e. not under the auspices of a gangmaster) whose earnings relative to their home land might be greater than a factor of 5 (or even by a factor of 10 – the UK is one of the most expensive places on the planet to live!) beggars belief.

Anyway, this is turning into a rant. For those actually interested in finding out how systems work, check out John Gall’s “The Systems Bible” – it will make you both laugh and cry…

As for how Transitions pans out, well we shall have to wait and see…

L,
Sid.