What Is Transition?

Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook is available for sale online, or locally, at The Sacred Circle.

Funny to finally be tackling the question, What is Transition? after having been a part of this worldwide movement since last December, officially so since Transition Staunton Augusta became the 61st US group this past March.

In part because much of the work we do is self-evident in its intent, and covered in our About Us page, we did not feel a pressing need to remark on the more sweeping historic factors driving the imperatives behind the transition movement.

But consistently being a part of this movement, researching more and more, getting involved and talking to others both locally and in the online community, has now compelled us to address those factors in helping our own community learn more about why we’re doing this, and why we’re doing this now.

The Transition Movement, begun by a permaculture teacher, Rob Hopkins, who is also a writer and profoundly gifted community organizer, takes as its starting point a response to the energy crisis known as “peak oil“.

Essentially a technical term, peak oil refers to the highest point on the bell curve of oil extraction, meaning that point when we’re pumping more of the stuff out of the ground than we ever will again. Peak oil happens not only in individual wells, when the max output occurs and then the rest of the well basically empties out, but also in individual oil fields, when the max comes out of the whole field and then supply goes downhill from there. Similarly this occurs in whole regions, say the United States for example, which, in spite of what the Sarah Palins and Rush Limbaughs of the world would have you believe,  hit the peak of its production in the 1970s. Peak oil also refers to worldwide peak oil–that point when we’re pumping the most out that we possibly can on a global scale, and then after that, we’re on the downward resource slope, never again able to get as much oil out as we once did. Oil is a finite, nonrenewable resource after all. You can’t pump the same well twice.

Add to this peak an increasing worldwide competition for oil due to its nearly magical exponential power output, and we have the twin problems of increasing demand and decreasing supply. Oil is so “magical” in fact, that, however much we must embrace clean energy, nothing green will ever take the place of oil.

That’s the short story of peak oil on what is already becoming too long of a post. You can read more about it in books such as Richard Heinburg’s The Party’s Over and Peak Everything, James Howard Kustler’s The Long Emergency, and John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent, to name a few of my favorites (and the most readable).

Suffice it to say that while peak oil is an undeniable geologic fact its not a topic that government and “leaders” have the stomach for, particularly as they remain beholden to business interests rather than exhibiting the vision and action necessary for the long term arc of success in the broader economic organization of societies. Similarly, the main stream media has better things to talk about, such as Lindsay Lohan’s recent court-ordered  jail time, the merits of Lady Gaga, and LeBron James’ relocation choices.

In the end, the Transition movement is about people who aren’t waiting for government to step up to the plate, for business to “self-correct” in response to market imperatives, or for broadcast media to get the word out about a coming shift in society’s most basic common resource denominator–energy–and the way this affects EVERY aspect of how we live and how we will live going forward.

The Transition movement offers one response to the crisis of peak oil, and is among the most positive responses in that its key feature rests on the involvement of ordinary citizens to strengthen their communities through shared ideas, plans, and actions that relocalize their areas for resilience. By that I mean to address local economy, food, production and manufacturing, transportation issues, water quality and many other of the infrastructural elements undergirding localities. The model could in fact broaden to include states, regions, countries, and the globe, but for now its defining feature is the local nature of the project as expressed in citizen groups throughout the world.

Hopkins built a model for nurturing and developing local involvement, and his founding group, Transition Town Totnes, released a comprehensive Energy Descent Plan governing their local infrastructure that could be a model for localities worldwide. It is our aim to engage the Staunton-Augusta community to produce one for our area. An energy descent plan is considered necessary to transition groups because resource depletion requires a cogent response. If we’re used to living one way, utterly dependent on a fuel source, a sole crop, or any other central infrastructural feature, its absence requires that we adapt to a new reality and craft a workable response so that we can preserve life and social stability.

There’s ten million other things that can be said about peak oil and the Transition Town response model, but this is just one blog entry designed to deepen the conversation at the local level and broaden transition outreach where we can.

One thing worth addressing is the sense of looming catastrophe and social collapse that some in the peak oil movement believe is immanent. That view is not one taken by the Transition movement, which looks to respond with positive local solutions to the predicament of peak oil.

There is no getting around, however, that a permanent decline in a finite resource suggests that the paradigm under which industrial society has developed stands to change. At Transition Staunton Augusta, we’re not in the crystal ball business. Although the transition model engages with scenario planning, looking at a variety of responses and their degree of effectiveness, it does not purport to entirely know the future. In the face of positive planning, there may yet be (and likely will be) mini scenarios that aren’t pretty, whether in the form of disease, safety and security threats, scarcity, and perhaps worse. There are also overly optimistic responses not grounded in physical reality, such as technology saving us with its ever-renewing discoveries. This response fails to acknowledge advanced technology’s complete dependence on fossil fuels, and the role of fossil fuels in the deployment of vast new infrastructure for a giant global population.

In our group we aim to take the middle way approach, planning for the best, preparing for the worst. This is a must do in response to an entire shift of the economic and energy paradigm as we know it today. And while this may take a century or more to fully play out, precipitating events along that trajectory suggest that we can’t wait to begin planning the response. If we look at how vast our given infrastructure is now, in its current state, it does not take much intelligence or insight to recognize that a comprehensive response will take time–the idea that things shift on a dime is a foolish approach.

I hope this small primer helps folks in the Staunton Augusta area (and others reading this online) to begin to think about the pervasive quality of energy in our lives, and the essentially hidden aspect of its role in how we live now, and how we are likely to live going forward. I view this as an opportunity, not only for humanity but frankly, for business.

In my view peak oil is the most serious crisis modern civilization has ever faced, the extent of which will touch all of our lives and, even more, the lives of our descendents. I take the transition to the next paradigm as a moral imperative calling us to engage as stewards, responsible, caring, and committed to the best that can be realized in our human relationships as social creatures at a specific time in history. This is what Transition is about, building the resilience that allows us to advance humanity in a manner that goes beyond current views of progress, and into the unknown, with open hearts and minds, willing hands, individual initiative, and community strength. I hope you’ll join us on this journey.