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Linked to below are two articles where Ted Trainer, author of Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society, critiques the Transition Towns movement, and Rob Hopkins, originator of the movement, writes back in answer. -KS
The Transition Towns Movement; its huge significance and a friendly criticism
Ted Trainer, (We) can do better
The only way the global sustainability and justice predicament can be solved is via something like the inspiring Transition Towns movement. However thought needs to be given to a number of themes or it might fail to achieve significant goals.
The Transition Towns movement began only about 2005 and is growing rapidly. It emerged in the UK mainly in response to the realisation that the coming of “peak oil” is likely to leave towns in a desperate situation, and therefore that it is very important that they strive to develop local economic self sufficiency.
What many within the movement probably don’t know is that for decades some of us in the “deep green” camp have been arguing that the key element in a sustainable and just world has to be small, highly self sufficient, localised economies under local cooperative control. (See my Abandon Affluence, published in1985, and The Conserver Society, 1995.)
It is therefore immensely encouraging to find that this kind of initiative is not only underway but booming. I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that if this planet makes it through the next 50 years to sustainable and just ways it will be via some kind of Transition Towns process. However I also want to argue that if the movement is to have this outcome there are some very important issues it must think carefully about or it could actually come to little or nothing of any social significance. I want to suggest l below that there is a need for a much more focused and detailed action strategy, giving clearer guidance to newcomers, and following a much more radical vision than seems to be informing the movement at present.
My comments won’t make much sense unless I first make clear the perspective on the global situation my comments derive from. Most people would reject this view as being too extreme….
(30 July 2009)
Responding to Ted Trainer’s Friendly Criticism of Transition
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
Ted Trainer (right, author of, among other things, the utterly indispensible ‘Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society’ just published a long and detailed piece which offers his thoughts on the Transition movement. He sent me an earlier draft which I, in return, sent him some detailed thoughts on. Given that the final published piece didn’t seem to take on many of the points I sent, the comments I wrote still stand as a response to it, and I offer them below in the hope that they offer a reasonable companion to Trainer’s considered piece.
Dear Ted,
My sense is that ultimately we agree on most things, just where we might part company is on where to be most skilful in applying our energy in order to make it happen, and in particular on the way in which to engage with other people who don’t look at the world in the way in which we do. The first thing I wanted to pick up on was some of the language you use, which we try very hard to avoid in Transition. You write that “people will come across to join us”, and “people will see that they must either take up our examples or starve”. My sense has been that for years, in the green movement, we have held just that kind of thinking, that we are right, that everyone else is wrong or misguided, that we have the answers if only people weren’t too stupid to see them. This kind of thinking has really been encapsulated for me in the film title, “The Age of Stupid” and its ‘Not Stupid’ campaign (I think since I wrote this letter that that campaign has since morphed into the far better 10:10). For me, the most fascinating areas looking at this now, such as Tom Crompton and Tim Kasser’s forthcoming ‘Identity Campaigning’ paper, see it as being much more complex, that we are all a mass of contradictions, compromises, complexities and core values.
I don’t see the nature of the challenge in quite the way I get the impression you do. I don’t think that we (i.e. the green movement) have all the answers, and that it is just a case of getting everyone else to see how right we are. Many of the answers we need are to be found in people who we might, in a more judgemental moment, see as being part of the ’system’. In my town, there are business people, lawyers, church groups, local history groups, and thousands of ordinary people with busy lives, bills to pay and children to raise. Many of them may be keen on some aspects of Transition but not others, many have never heard of it, and some don’t care, and many of them have feet in both camps. Does that make them stupid, or in need of ‘our example’? What is important, it seems to me, is that we get people to become healthy manifestations of wherever they are at… in fact in my view it is not a case of people “taking up our examples or starving”, rather that unless we, as a small minority with some good and powerful ideas, learn to engage respectfully and creatively with that mainstream, we will starve too…
(8 Sept 2009)
