At a workshop in Grafton on Monday on how to finance local food systems, at least three of us sat ready to promote the Transition Town model. To the others in the room, it may have looked like a coordinated effort among the three of us. It wasn’t; we were simply enthusiastic about the same thing.
Will Rapp, founder of Gardener’s Supply and Intervale Composting, struck first. He held up his copy of The Transition Handbook, by Rob Hopkins, and told the assembled activists, policymakers and financiers that the Transition model is crucial to building sustainable local food systems. He passed his copy around. That prompted Margo Baldwin, co-owner of the book’s U.S. distributor, Chelsea Green, to pull out her copy and send it around the room, too.
I had something else to pass around: Posters for the Montpelier visit of Naresh Giangrande, a co-founder of the first Transition Town in the United Kingdom (see sidebar).
The Transition Town model is a very different way to address peak oil and climate change than most of those now getting headlines. We hear a lot about getting other people to do something: Build electric cars, erect wind turbines, re-build passenger rail or sign the Kyoto Protocol. In Transition Towns, people get together themselves to weatherize each others’ homes, repair bicycles, create community gardens, and plant nut and fruit trees in parks and along streets.
Without the sort of vision that the Transition Town model presents, change is difficult. Many proposals to address peak oil and climate change make little sense. Proposed responses to oil shortages, for example, include massive investments in corn ethanol, offshore drilling, oil shale and tar sands – investments that worsen the climate crisis while merely slowing the decline in liquid fuel availability. And proposed responses to climate change include dumping loads of iron filings in the southern oceans and hoping they stimulate algae blooms which take carbon dioxide out of circulation. Ideas like these spring from hopes that some form of business-as-usual responses can meaningfully address the biggest challenges of the 21st century.
The Transition Town concept started in Kinsale, Ireland, in 2004. Rob Hopkins was teaching a college-level class in permaculture, which is a set of design tools for working with nature. The class learned that peak oil meant that global supply lines would become increasingly unreliable in a fairly short time. They threw themselves into creating an Energy Descent Action Plan for the town – a step-by-step plan for building community resilience to oil shocks and reducing their carbon use.
Kinsale’s Energy Descent Action Plan targeted sweeping increases in self-reliance by 2021. For example, it calls for Kinsale to move from importing 90 percent of its food to being largely self-reliant. By 2021, according to the plan, “All landscaping in the town (is) edible plants, fruit trees line the streets, all parks and greens have become food forests and community gardens, and every back garden contains a food garden.” Practical steps for 2008 include starting a community food garden at the town hall and an “EasyGarden” program for distributing vegetable seedlings to citizens who don’t grow their own.
In health care, the plan for Kinsale anticipates shortages of industrially manufactured pharmaceuticals. Establishing and maintaining good health take priority over treating diseases. Both health maintenance and healing are increasingly accomplished with locally grown medicinal plants. One of the health-related proposals for 2008 is like our Safe Routes to School, which both exercises kids’ developing bodies and establishes walking and bicycling habits early in life. Another proposal is to make the local hospital carbon-neutral through efficiency and local renewables, so heating and electricity problems don’t force it to close in the future.
The plan for Kinsale is full of fascinating ideas, but it was developed in a college course and produced over a single semester. It wasn’t rooted in the community. Totnes, England became the first town where Hopkins and others engaged the entire community in planning the transition.
In the Totnes approach, the Energy Descent Action Plan comes last. First, the Transition team raises awareness of the challenges of peak oil and climate change as well as the possibilities of local responses. They also network with local government, use committees to tackle individual transition issues (food, transportation, medicine, education, etc.), promote “re-skilling” in the arts of community self-reliance (farming, sewing, cooking, etc.), and create tangible projects (tree plantings, bus shelters from local materials) quickly.
Last week, Transition Town Montpelier became the first officially designated Transition group in Vermont. Groups in other parts of the state are what the British originators of the model call “mullers.” They are considering adopting the model or are doing parts of it without using the formal name.
In fact, there’s a lot happening in Vermont that fits the Transition Town model, even if that language hasn’t been used much here. Transition Town Montpelier has its work cut out for it just identifying and listing all the organizations that are already part of re-skilling: Food Works, Freeride bicycle collective, Roots survival skills school, Montessori music school and the Button-Up Vermont home weatherization workshops are just a few in the Montpelier area.
With so much already happening, what does the Transition process add? First, it thrusts the concept of “resilience” onto center stage. Resilience is a system’s ability to respond to changes, like oil supply disruptions or an economic downturn. Many organizations have set goals for reducing carbon emissions, and their plans do increase resilience. With resilience as a key goal of all planning, however, priorities can shift. Transportation planners may pay more attention to helping people share rides with each other and less to redesigning intersections, for example.
Second, the Transition Town model prominently considers peak oil, which empowers planning. Reducing carbon emissions is hugely important, but Vermont could reduce down to zero and be offset in a short time by new coal power plants or expanded extraction of tar sands. Increasing our resilience in the face of high energy prices and supply disruptions helps us, no matter what others do.
A third contribution of the Transition Town model is the clear instructions on achieving a rapid transition. As more communities gain experience with Transitions, the model is evolving, but at any given time there are a set of best practices to draw on. The Transition Network Web sites, conference calls, etc. offer up-to-the-minute guidelines on what has worked and what hasn’t.
The most important contribution of the Transition Town model may be the positive vision of a low-energy future it offers. Such a positive vision can motivate people to act more than warnings of addictions to oil or the end of maple sugaring in Vermont. As is already being done in the enVision Montpelier process, people in Transitions describe the rewarding activities we could do in a world with much less oil. Sure, we won’t drive en masse to Burlington, Montreal, or New York for entertainment, but we can go to local theater, play music together and dance. Car trips become less common, but we build pride in our growing ability to accomplish a lot with each trip.
Like Moliere’s character Jourdain, who was delighted to discover he’d been speaking prose all his life, I’ve found I’ve been doing transition-related work without knowing it. I look forward to continuing to learn the Transition model and try it out with people in our area.
Carl Etnier, director of Peak Oil Awareness, blogs at vtcommons.org/blog and hosts radio shows on WGDR, 91.1 FM Plainfield and WDEV 96.1 FM/550 AM, Waterbury. He can be reached at EnergyMattersVermont(at)yahoo.com.
Sidebar: Transition talk and other resources
“Transition Towns: From Oil Dependency to Resilient Communities.” Presented by Naresh Giangrande, co-founder of Transition Town Totnes, UK. Monday, November 24, 7 pm. Unitarian Church, Main Street, Montpelier.
Kinsale’s Energy Descent Action Plan (PDF): www.planputnam.org/documents/KinsaleEnergyDescentActionPlan.pdf
Transition Town Network: transitiontowns.org
Transition Town Vermont www.transitionvermont.ning.com
