February, 2008
Since I learned about Transition Towns, I stopped waiting for my jet-pack to be delivered.
When I was a snotty-nosed 10-year-old in the mid-1980s, my school teacher gave out a booklet. It described how by the year 2000 we would commute by jet-pack from the roofs of our air conditioned living pods over green fields to gleaming cities of sky-scraping steel and glass.
There we would do a squeaky-clean 20 hour week, while the machines and robots did most of the work. Leisure would be the largest industry; our biggest problem would be working out what to do with all the spare money and free time.
Of course, it didn’t mention that this kind of future would only ever be available for a tiny minority of super rich people at the expense of everybody else. It left out the limits of global resource use, Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Fast forward to now. Surprise. It turns out Star Trek was a science fiction show after all. The jet packs ain’t comin’.
How each of us copes with this reality, how we re-imagine and re-engineer our future with this knowledge and build new dreams, is the greatest and most exciting challenge humanity currently faces.
Transition Towns is one way in which people are coming together to do this. It accepts that the future is going to be one in which we consume dramatically less energy than currently. Most communities, towns and regions, not to mention individuals like me, are terribly ill-prepared for this.
But if we prepare in enough time and engage with enough creativity, we can create a better, more vibrant future than the life we are currently living.
When I cycle up to meet James Samuel, New Zealand’s volunteer national co-ordinator for Transition Towns, he is smiling from his sun bleached shed-come-office perched over Waiheke’s idyllic Oneroa Bay. He’s wearing beach shorts, an open shirt and large greenstone disc dangling from his neck. With his athletic build, twinkling eyes and deeply relaxed composure, he doesn’t seem like a 50-year-old who has been on a computer all night.
“I took a Skype call at about 2am about sales on our latest book,” he explains. “Then at 3am I got involved in a web training seminar with the UK, then another call came in at 5.30am with the feedback from another workshop being held over there. It was great.”
Okay, Transition Towns isn’t some Doomsday Luddite anti-technology cult. I may not get my jet-pack, but I won’t get in trouble for bringing my laptop. We go for a swim in the ocean beneath James’ home. With a holistic work schedule like James’ you take your breaks whenever you feel it’s appropriate.
Nobody can question his commitment. He has now spent most of his savings while working 50 wildly irregular hours a week on this for the past five months, for which he has managed to get $3,500 in funds. He says this doesn’t worry him.
“I will never be homeless on this island, and never without food,” he says simply. “I don’t own my own home, but I have a lot of social capital built up here.”
The concept of Transition Towns began life just about when I was due to start gliding off my garage, by another seaside, in Kinsale, Ireland. It grew – you might say organically – from its originator Rob Hopkins’ study and practice of permaculture, which he had at that time been pursuing for more than a decade.
Permaculture – coming from ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’ – is a design approach which aims to integrate and harmonise humanity with nature to provide for all our needs in a sustainable way. In permaculture gardens, lakes, ponds, rivers, fields, forests and buildings are designed or reshaped with the intention of being as diverse, stable and resilient as nature itself.
Applying these principles to Kinsale, Rob began to develop ways in which the community could prepare for the approaching realities of Peak Oil and Climate Change. The result was the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan, which was adopted by the local town council.
The plan was essentially aimed at creating a vision of what a happy, healthy, thriving post-Peak Oil and Climate Change savvy Kinsale might look like, and then charting out the steps aimed at getting there.
Or, as Rob describes it: “It was the first, as far as we know, attempt at designing a timetabled strategy for weaning a town off fossil fuels.”
Importantly, the plan was informed by community discussions and input from a wide range of local people. Transition Towns is not about politicians or ‘experts’ telling people what they should do. It’s an open invitation for everyone to play a part in creating a really tight-knit, focused, inspired community, which can share the upcoming challenges and successes equally.
It does this by helping a community to identify what they need to become stronger and more resilient to the changes ahead. It could be anything from intensive permaculture design courses and setting up alternative currencies to coffee mornings and yoga classes. Anything that binds the community together is thrown into the mix. The Transition Town group’s job is to just to keep stirring.
After his success in Kinsale, Rob moved on to Devon and began work on a plan for Totnes, where a calendar of Transition events and a number of working groups have sprouted. Word spread. What became the Transition Network forged links with similar worldwide movements. Today there are 35 full scale Transition projects in the UK, one in Australia, and two in New Zealand.
Which is where James came in, in about the middle of 2007, with his eclectic background as farmer, woodworker, traveller, paragliding instructor, religious community member and facilitator. When he first heard of Transition Towns, he had already been working hard on bringing his own community together.
He had been manager of the local cinema, ensuring that films covering Peak Oil and Climate Change were screened. He also helped to establish community gardens, the local farmer’s market and even a new primary school.
“I called the first Transition meeting, inviting 20 people, and 24 came, which was encouraging,” he said. “I soon realised that people already knew about Peak Oil and Climate Change, they wanted to talk about the process, about what to do.”
Currently the Transition Towns concept includes guidance on 12 steps – like Alcoholics Anonymous except it deals with our community’s addiction to oil. Rob admits they are not so much designed to take you from A-Z as from A-C, since this is as far as people have got up until now.
The steps are not prescriptive, they can be followed in any order, left out, or new ones added as the group sees fit.
- Setting up a steering group designed only to continue as long as a few of the steps have been taken. This avoids burn out or stifling of ideas by strong personalities and bureaucracy;
- Raising awareness about the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change with films, talks and other events. These should all be designed to be positive and constructive;
- Connecting with people and groups that are already acting on these issues;
- Organising a launch event which celebrates the community’s resources and willingness to act;
- Forming groups to work on areas like energy use, transport, food etc;
- Using Open Space, a collaboratively organised conference where participants all get a chance to lead discussions and choose the topics;
- To avoid becoming just a talking shop, developing physical practical manifestations of the project like tree planting, solar panels, or alternative local currencies, and getting publicity for them;
- Helping people train in basic self sufficiency skills and problem solving in a relaxed, social atmosphere of fun;
- Connecting the project to your local authority;
10. Learning from those who remember the transition into cheap oil between 1930 and 1960;
11. Letting it go where it wants to go. The Transition group is there to act as a catalyst for the community and to facilitate them asking the right questions, rather than to come up with answers;
- Finally, creating an Energy Descent Action Plan.
What it doesn’t involve is getting funding, fighting the law, stepping on the toes of other green groups, waiting for someone else to do something, berating people or obtaining qualifications.
“The idea is to keep the energy going,” says James. “Find great people, and make them as effective as possible, so that everyone can focus on what they have a passion for.”
As an island beside an island nation, with a warm climate and abundant water supplies, Waiheke is fertile ground to test the Transition Town idea. And because New Zealand does not produce large amounts of oil and is a long way from the key oil producing parts of the world, it is likely that energy decent here will be quite sudden.
Current priorities for Transition Waiheke include looking at ways to reduce food imports to the island, working with Meridian power to reduce power consumption on the island, and encouraging house builders to use local materials.
The group is also planning a new sustainable public transport system, sharing sustainable skills like woodworking and blacksmithing and drawing together a full inventory of current community projects.
The Transition Towns push also manifests itself on the island in neat little ideas, like the veggie swap stall on the local market, where instead of money, people’s surplus fruit and vegetables from their gardens changes hands. Or the ‘fabulous fruit tree’ project, which aims to plant 20,000 fruit trees in public spaces on the island by 2014.
These are what James refers to as ‘baby steps’, which get people used to the idea of gathering and sharing natural resources. They also provide fresh opportunities for people to get to know and like each other.
“People want to feel that it is doable, that we can start now,” he explains.
In New Zealand all Transition Towns activities are undertaken by volunteers, and only three people formally work in the UK home of Transition Towns. The number of people involved ebbs and flows depending on their passions and availability, and the events taking place at the time. Despite, or perhaps because of it, the momentum is growing.
“Things are moving at a phenomenal pace,” says James. “The last film showing we had was on a really sunny Saturday afternoon on which there was a load of other stuff happening on the island. We still filled the auditorium and had people sitting in the aisles!”
As well as Waiheke, Orewa has begun the formal transition process, and a number of meetings have been held. The business of raising awareness is also underway there. This recently included a talk from Cuban biologist Roberto Perez, who provided an example of how his country survived and thrived while oil was scarce because of the US blockade.
More than 30 other areas in New Zealand have expressed an interest in this approach, and are using some of the Transition Towns techniques to bring people together. The chances are there is one near you. If not, James suggests you get in touch, so you can start something yourself.
“It is an amazing, exciting, encouraging, growing thing and I don’t see that stopping,” he says. “We have got to keep learning from each other. When people come up with something really creative everyone can benefit from it, and that is exciting.
“When a community comes together as a Transition Town they are saying ‘we have started’ which means they have already succeeded, not in some future moment. It is a movement and evolution which begins now.”
Tags: community, Transition Towns