By: Paul Chatterton and Alice Cutler from the Trapese Collective (following the link you get the PDF-file including photo)
TOWNS MOVEMENT AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE.
There’s been a lot of talk about Transition Towns (TT) lately. In a nutshell, the TT approach offers a permaculture-influenced model for a transition to a low carbon society. The original idea grew out of a full time permaculture degree in Kinsale, Ireland where in 2005 Rob Hopkins and his students developed a town wide Energy Descent Plan for a ten-year period.
The idea spread quickly to Totnes and Lewes and
now there are neighbourhoods, villages, cities and whole islands
embarking on the journey. There are currently over 35 towns and cities
who are officially part of the transition network, and more than 600
are considering joining in the UK alone. TT foregrounds the big twin
threats as climate change and peak oil, (the point when the maximum
rate of global production is reached and begins its terminal decline.)
TT argues that these problems, can be tackled only if we develop
robust community responses, forming local groups that grapple with
issues like food, health, transport, energy, textiles, and waste and
working out how they can become less fossil fuel dependent on a local
level. There are twelve steps to transition which are laid out in their
‘Primer’ document and the aim is to draw up and implement an energy
descent plan following this model which involves local businesses,
councils and participation by everyone. Local groups can ask to affiliate
to a national network, which offers national co-ordination.
A Transition Initiative is a community that is unleashing its own latent
collective genius to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and to
discover and implement ways to address this BIG question:
"For all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain
itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the
effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the
effects of Climate Change)?"
“If we collectively plan and act early enough there's every likelihood that we
can create a way of living that's significantly more connected, more vibrant
and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill
that we find ourselves on today.
We have written this booklet as part of a debate about this movement
as it emerges. From the beginning we want to make it clear that we
really welcome what the TT initiative is trying to do and that this
response is meant as a constructive but critical intervention as to what
exactly a ‘transition’ might mean for social change. We write this as
people who fully support and work hard with grass-roots initiatives
who are tackling climate change through a whole raft of responses:
community food projects, sustainable living through appropriate
technologies, autonomous health initiatives, do it yourself bike
workshops, social centres for education and debate – you name it! We
are not calling for a rejection of the concept of Transition Towns, nor a
halt to their expansion. Quite the opposite. We support any transition
away from the hugely ecologically unsustainable and socially unjust
structures and ways of life that dominate in our towns and cities. But
we also believe that we should be prepared to fully engage with and
challenge the causes of these problems. As popular educators we
believe that asking questions, knowing our collective histories,
understanding root causes, encouraging public debate no matter how
uncomfortable, and inspiring action are an essential part of this
process.
Over the past few years there has been an unprecedented level of
media coverage and initiatives around climate change. Arguments that
environmentalists have been making largely ignored for decades have
rapidly moved in to the public debate since Blair chose climate change
to top the G8 agenda in 2005. Since then the scale of the problem,
media attention and the striking evidence of the rate of change have
left many scared and anxious. People desperately want ideas for
positive action, for how we can turn things around and somehow limit
the scale of the disaster facing our world. The Transition Town model
is, as Rob Hopkins says, “unleashing a spirit and a depth of
engagement” with this practical action. While this is clearly a welcome
development compared to the total denial of the previous decades, let’s
not shy away from asking problematic questions, even when they may
not always have clear answers. As thousands of hours of precious
human resourcefulness are poured into these projects around the UK,
we want to ask: a transition to where, and from what? And what
models of organising can help us along the way? As authors, we make
no excuses for this. Yes, now is the time to act. But there are powerful
forces to confront and it is essential to learn from past experiences and
be clear about our aims. TT could be merely the latest fad, a ray of
hope in an otherwise despondent world. Or they could offer something
to be genuinely excited about. There are no easy ways round these
issues. And only by being realistic about the scale of change needed
and what change might really mean, as well as feel and look like, can
the difficult times ahead be tackled. Putting the transition movement in
its historical and political context can help to deepen and strengthen
the important conversations happening in Transition meetings all
around these islands.
Of course there are many people who are already familiar with the
arguments we are making, our intention is not to patronise or
thoughtlessly snipe from the sidelines. We also recognise that many of
the problems discussed here are not exclusive to TT, and that some of
the suggestions could take years to incorporate in to the TT model. But
as an open and developing process we hope that this booklet provokes
constructive debate and provides some points for reflection for all those
who are engaging or not with this exciting new movement.
SO TT IS ABOUT CHANGE. BUT IS IT ABOUT POLITICAL CHANGE?
While preparing a recent workshop with a Transition group about
climate change, one of us from Trapese suggested the issue of Rossport
as a possible point of discussion and action. For the past five years, the
local community in Rossport, County Mayo, Ireland, has been
struggling against Shell and a consortium building a high-pressure gas
pipeline through their community. People from around Ireland have
supported them and their situation has been brought to international
attention through many solidarity actions. The people helping to plan
the workshop explained that according to the TT model, this was not
an appropriate topic. In order to be as accessible as possible, Transition
groups do not support particular campaigns but rather develop a model
that forms around what many different people have in common. It’s a
model about positive responses and not something that takes positions
‘against’ institutions or projects. While it may seem obvious to try and
limit political wrangling in a burgeoning movement, this position
raised some serious questions about the effectiveness of a depoliticised
movement and was one of the motivations for us to write this booklet.
Perhaps in this particular instance it was not relevant to talk about a
campaign, but there are many reasons why it is important to be more
confident and defiant when calling for transition and actually take a
stance against the exploitative and polluting corporate practices that
are happening all around us.
How can we talk about climate change and peak oil and not deal with
politics or side with communities struggling against the expansion of
fossil fuel infrastructure? If we want to avoid catastrophic climate
chaos we must leave the majority of remaining fossil fuels where they
are – in the ground. Yes, finding ways of dramatically reducing our
personal consumption and demand is one part of this, but it is only one
side of the equation. It seems naïve to assume that companies such as
Shell and Stat Oil, BP or Esso will easily give up and go home or
fundamentally change what they do while it is still so enormously
profitable. Shell by the way, makes £7 million clear profit, every day!
The experience of the communities fighting Shell around Rossport is
one of corruption, police collusion and profit hungry multinational
companies riding roughshod over every safety and environmental
concern. This pipeline project is not about merely meeting expanding
consumer demand for energy, but is an aggressive, profit motivated
project, which has needed the collusion of malleable politicians. It is
also about a grab for the last remaining energy reserves as access to oil
fields abroad become more geo-politically unstable. Around the globe,
in Wales, Nigeria, Georgia, Mexico and Alaska, to name a few, people
are struggling against energy multinational corporations in similar
ways. Their lives and livelihoods are directly threatened, not just by
future climatic catastrophe but also by pollution, repression and loss of
land as the extraction happens. Those who challenge or try to prevent
these things are often portrayed as needlessly angry or violent which is
a divisive tactic that we should guard against. Providing support for
communities who are resisting the efforts of the industries to extract
and burn ever-increasing quantities of fossil fuels is one of the most
important strategies in dealing with climate change and this solidarity
and exposing the companies and the political systems that facilitate
them must surely be a central part of transition.
Being against climate change doesn’t have to be political position. But
the analysis of how we got into this mess, and the best way to move on,
does bring us back to politics. It involves taking on power and those
who hold wealth and influence. People could be drawn to TT for a
number of different reasons - fear, solidarity, a desire to rebuild
communities, looking for direction, or as a platform for their own
political pet project. While this is fine and to be expected, problems will
occur along the way if big political debates are brushed aside because
we only talk about what we already have in common. Communities
must face up to issues such as nuclear expansion, market based
solutions to climate change such as carbon trading and offsetting, agrofuels
and food scarcity, developments such as airport expansion and
resource extraction. These things all occur through active government
policies, which try to maintain the economic and political, “business as
usual” scenarios. Unfortunately, left unchallenged they could also wipe
out the best efforts at local sustainability, like a tsunami in front of a
sand castle. In these difficult times, it’s not good enough to say that TT
doesn’t have an opinion on these issues, or does not want to alienate
people by discussing them. As well as building local resilience, these
struggles are the bread and butter of what our future will look like and
therefore these political debates need to be at the heart of TT. This does
not have to translate into a ‘party line’ or other dogma. Information can
be presented with space for questions, dialogue and groups can develop
their own responses to these issues. But it is fundamentally important
to identify and name the enemies in the battle to make a real
transition.
Responding to climate change could mean new niche markets for
capitalism, greater social inequality, closing borders and strengthening
state power. An agreement “not to rock the boat” will not help TTs long
term viability, as it would mean not really changing anything. People
are generally aware of the bigger political and economic forces
influencing their lives and only talking about these issues honestly will
build true momentum for change. One major challenge are the
enormous budgets and state-of-the-art PR campaigns that have already
swung in to action to positively influence the public perception of
everything from the coal industry, agro-fuels to nuclear power. This
greenwash tries to make an unsustainable, polluting industry appear
environmentally friendly to preserve its legitimacy in the eyes of the
general public. It's essential that these unsubstantiated arguments are
challenged; they do not tackle the root causes of the problem and in
many cases make things a lot worse. (E.g. see carbontradewatch.org)
ONE HALF OF TT IS ABOUT TACKLING CLIMATE CHANGE. SO
WHAT ARE ITS ROOT CAUSES?
Frequently the Transition line, and perhaps the lowest common
denominator, is that the problem stems from too high a concentration
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and this needs to be lowered. But
this focuses attention on the ‘effect,’ not the ‘cause’ of the problem. Of
course high concentrations of atmospheric carbon are a reality that
reflects the scientific consensus, but too much carbon is a symptom of
a bigger illness that needs a particular cure. The problem boils down to
too much production – too much economic activity (simply making
things and transporting them, often over thousands of miles) and the
energy inputs that go with this. But it’s also the WAY we organise
production that is the problem – what we can call free market
capitalism. This economic set up relies on ceaseless economic growth
and many things, including short-term political electoral cycles and the
legal duty of large companies to constantly increase profits, underpin
this. Those in power are unable to make many of the changes needed,
because of an established set of economic “truths”, known as the rules
of the game that are a real barrier to change, whether from above or
below. A chief executive cannot reduce shareholder profit, or not
without risking their job. A politician cannot win an election by saying
they will make the country poorer by reducing export earnings.
Reducing production is presented as leading to a downward spiral that
would curb the money supply, increase unemployment and create a
deflationary and recessionary situation (and who wants that? Think
back to the hunger of the 1930s). So we are seemingly stuck in an
economic system, which needs to grow otherwise the whole thing will
collapse like a house of cards. This ceaseless need to produce more
economic output is the real driver of climate change, and only when
the rules of the game are changed can carbon dioxide concentrations
and all the associated problems be truly tackled.
But are there different rules to play by? Well the Soviet model of stateplanned
production and consumption didn’t offer anything progressive
– it was a disaster based on corruption and hideous repression. Nor
does the vast modern day China or the rapidly growing India seem to
offer anything different that can meet people’s needs without
exploiting them. What is at fault is the wider ‘development era’ that
really got going after the Second World War and was dominated by the
USA and its global bully boy ambitions. This unleashed an economic
model based on the ideas that ‘growth is good’ and the ‘West is best’ –
that our way of organising the economy should be rolled out across the
globe. The liberalisation of the economy was presented as equating to
freedom and democracy and was offered as the only medicine for the
illness of the Global South’s “under-development.” It has now pretty
much become all encompassing through what has been called the
‘Washington Consensus’ where global trade policies are directed
through a small number of US controlled institutions – the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation. The old
colonial way of doing things - ‘gunboat diplomacy’ - has now morphed
very neatly into a sweeter pill of ‘neo-colonialism’ where big western
corporations continue to asset strip and exploit the resources of their
majority world neighbours, while telling them that it is the only way
their economies can grow. Structures are put in place such as
international trade agreements, aid conditionality and intellectual
property laws to enforce this regime worldwide. Meanwhile the
infamous ‘trickle down effect’ where everyone will eventually benefit
from increased wealth at the top, fails to materialise. In fact the gap
between rich and poor continues to grow within the industrialised
countries and the richest country on earth, the US, has around 13% of
its population living below the poverty line at any one time. So this is
the growth paradigm of the development age – a whole way of
organising economic activity around the globe that has to expand or
die, and every day becomes more and more inter-connected.
Sounds like the only game in town? But there are countless ways to
organise economic activity – ultimately all we are trying to do is find
an optimal way to allocate the goods and resources we really need. It
shouldn’t be that difficult and it doesn’t have to be done at the expense
of exploiting people and our environment. For example, there is really
illuminating work coming from thinkers like Michael Albert and his
ideas of participatory economies that show us that there are different
and appealing ways to organise trade and the economy. These draw
upon producer and consumer councils who agree the types and
amounts of goods to be produced through work that is meaningful, fair
and equally paid. Workers cooperatives like the huge one in Spain
called Mondragon are also inspiring here – they are fully controlled by
their workers and produce goods according to need.
New ways to organise the economy will have to take social and
environmental sustainability and energy efficiency as central
principles. So there will certainly be less production, resource use and
extraction, as these are achievable and relatively quick ways of
significantly decreasing carbon emissions. Although politicians and
business leaders make statements to the contrary, it really isn’t possible
to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions – to in effect have
high growth but a low carbon economy. Continuous technological
improvements mean that jobs are lost at about 3% per year, so the
economy and output has to grow by this amount just to maintain the
current amount of jobs. Contrary to accepted economic logic, this
doesn’t have to mean that mass unemployment is inevitable, but that
jobs will be different – geared more towards local and regional activity
and less tied to export industries and consumer goods. This isn’t to say
that changes to the economy will be small. It will be transformed
beyond recognition and there is very little evidence to suggest that it
will be able to sustain the lifestyles that many have become
accustomed to in the West. It also means moving away from
conventional measure like Gross National Product (GNP) towards
indicators that measure quality of life and protecting the atmosphere,
soil, water and other species. Environmental improvements and
protection and rebuilding local economies will also be a huge new area
of job growth. Basically, there’s a huge amount to be done to prepare
our society for the changes it needs to make – a lack of work is the least
of our worries. In a low carbon economy there will be less of the
unfulfilling or non essential jobs that service the highly connected,
mediatised economy, think of all the wasted energy that goes into
advertising, free newspapers, shifting throw away goods around the
planet or making useless plastic packaging. At the same time there will
be more human labour necessary than in previous years to make up the
energy input that has come from cheap fossil fuels and we will need to
move towards a culture of repairing, reusing, sharing, skill swapping
and relearning tools for greater community sufficiency. As well as
learning how to meet basic needs communities will also have to deal
with many different kinds of problems and crises. The impacts of the
waste and pollution from high consumption lifestyles have been
externalised to other places or ecosystems for years, but the impacts are
about to be felt in the form of increased extreme weather events,
economic instability etc.
So what does all this mean? While it is clearly important to support
projects for sustainability and improve our local communities’
resilience, this should not be confused or conflated with tackling the
root causes of climate change or ‘peak oil’ energy scarcity. Given the
reality of the global economy, to what extent can TT initiatives alter the
current rules of the global economic game? It is possible that removing
a significant proportion of consumers from the equation would
ultimately weaken and threaten economic growth. However, it is more
likely that low carbon community initiatives could happily exist without
challenging causes such as high levels of economic output, highly
concentrated ownership in the hands of a few multinationals, lack of
democratic control, rampant resource extraction and the search for new
areas of profit. The popularity of Corporate Social/Environmental
Responsibility (CSR) is also a key part of this debate. Large
corporations are certainly being held more accountable, at least on a
superficial level, for their effects on people and the planet. But on one
level, of course they would be. It’s not in their interests for the economy
to become too harmful to people and the environment because then
who would buy their goods? CSR also allows corporations to give
themselves a more human friendly face so they can maintain what they
are doing, deflecting arguments about their right to exist, extract
resources virtually for free, and take home a huge profit. Responses
which focus on individual consumers, market based mechanisms or
reinforce the role of business-friendly central governments will not help
us to tackle the root causes of climate change.
There's a strong business case for adopting more sustainable practices, and
it’s gradually finding its way into mainstream business thinking. The
emphasis on CSR and triple bottom line accounting may be steps in the
right direction, and carbon trading could yield substantial cuts in global
CO2 emissions. However, none of these address the way that Peak Oil will
make itself felt on businesses that have long supply chains, or serve markets
in distant locales. Businesses that have a long term perspective and are
aware of the constraints fossil fuel depletion will have on the globalised
economy need to be looking in general at oil dependency throughout their
organisation and at four specific areas: supply chain, waste, energy usage
and markets. (From the Transition Initiatives Primer.)
PEAK OIL IS THE OTHER HALF OF TT, AND IT’S ALL ABOUT
Read on part two
Read on part three
Read on part four