Transition Culture

9 Oct 2008

The Stirrings of Transition Los Angeles…

Here is an email I received from Joanne Poyourow in LA about the early steps that are being taken to kick start Transition ideas in the city.  Hope this is interesting/encouraging for other Transition city groups.  Just to remind you, the Transition Cities Conference takes place in Nottingham on the 27th – 28th November.  Full details to follow next week, but do put those dates in your diary. 

“Sometimes the question of “what to do about Los Angeles” seems just too big — both to those on the outside looking in, and even at times to the brave Permaculturists and Transitioners who are here working from the inside.  Los Angeles is huge.  The city grew with the age of the automobile, and what were once small towns scattered here and there, gradually filled in with sprawl.  At this point, the “Los Angeles Basin” (or even the majority of Southern California) is one continuous area, where borderlines between small cities merge one into the next, with city lines often only distinguishable because the color of the street signs changed.  City census information lists the Los Angeles metropolitan area at approximately 3.8 million people.  Some estimates say the broader Los Angeles County numbers 10 million people.  It would be easy to give up, and say “it’s too big.”  But this is where we live, and change has to begin at home.

Indeed, when I got a hold of your Transition Handbook, I thought “wow, I’d like to be part of something like that!”  I looked around the internet to find someone who was doing it, so that I could attend their events.  But there were no Transition events here to attend.  It seemed that instead of waiting for someone else to create an event, we had to just do it ourselves.  So this September, here in the middle of Los Angeles — in the middle of the car culture — we bravely offered a series we called “Life After Oil.”  If I recall correctly, we stole the name off one of the fliers in the Transition Handbook.

It was so wonderful to get all these people together.  At the start of the day, as I stood before the crowd, I could feel the energy and excitement buzzing in the room.  Each one of us dreams of having a Transition Initiative in our own local neighborhood.  Each one of us had looked at the enormity of the “problem of L.A.” and found it daunting — too big to do alone.  But together in one room, we realized that we have lots of help, lots of people with whom to get this started.  We have all the people who attended, and all the people from those neighborhoods who didn’t make the drive that day.  All the people who had scheduling conflicts so couldn’t make that particular session.  It adds up to a whole lot of people, all holding the common vision of Transitioning Los Angeles into a post-oil future.

Through the course of our day, we used many of the exercises outlined in your Handbook.  We did a “peak oil self-teach” like page 27 of the Handbook (our slides are online here).  To introduce the Transition concept, we used your YouTube tapes for the I.F.G. conference. After that, we read your letter to LA.  One of the women told me later that we should have handed out tissues — it was very moving to the participants to hear your voice and your humor on the tape, and it really touched people to have you speak directly to LA through the letter.  It was as if you were in the room with us.  When you open the IFG YouTube tape you mention why you weren’t attending the Washington conference, the no-fly pledge — that too made an impact on people here in LA.  And your exercises work really well, even when used straight out of the book!  Thank you so much for “joining” us here in LA at our event.  Your ideas are really making a difference.

At the end of the day, we held working sessions so the people from similar geography could gather to process the information of the day, and begin thinking toward developing their local resource picture.  And as a closing ceremony, we planted a tangerine tree together in our little community garden.

Our local circle — the Environmental Change-Makers, who hosted all of the above — has been meeting for nearly 3 years.  We’ve been doing a slow but steady process of awareness raising and offering reskilling classes.  We were asked to write a book about our little group; Environmental Change-Making should be out in about a month.  It tells the story of how we got our community ready for Transition ideas.  As I’ve told many people, a community doesn’t go from outrageously unsustainable consumerism into being a Transition Town overnight — our book tells the “getting ready” story.  Perhaps it could be called a prequel to the Transition Handbook — at least it served that way for our little neighborhood.

Here in the Southern California / Greater Los Angeles area, we’re continuing our dialog online through emails, and looking forward to our “official” Transition training in December when Naresh Giangrande and Sophy Banks will be here from the UK.  We’re also beginning to connect with other cities in the U.S. through the new Transition United States site  For people who’d like to hold events like ours, our agendas and most of our resources are online here.