Everything Gardens and Other Stories. UNIV PLYMOUTH
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innovation in that it does away with the one good ‘official’ reason to enter Transition, and looks at a much broader array of motives. This, judging also from the interviews I conducted as part of my fieldwork in Totnes, is a more grounded re-presentation of Transition, as the manifold existence of a community in its making.
This approach echoes throughout the Companion. In ch. 6, for instance, Hopkins introduces Transition while avoiding any straightforward definition, but rather by proposing different ‘flavours’ that Transition may disclose to different people. So it is, for example, that Transition is presented as an ‘inner process’, as storytelling and leading by example, as well as a ‘cultural shift’.37
Finally, when presenting possible strategies of performing Transition, these are all offered up as ingredients in a recipe that can then be adjusted to context. Moreover, these strategies are always buttressed by the narration of examples and individual instances carried out in different Transition initiatives. There is, in sum, a much wider diversity of ‘ways into’ Transition and a richer expression of the qualities of its moving that find their way into the re-presentation crafted in the Companion, than there might have been in previous literature.
This approach also shines through in the last addition to Hopkins’s ‘Transition trilogy’ with Green Books: The Power of Just Doing Stuff.38 The book begins, however, by temporarily reverting to a more normative style of exposition. In The Power of Just Doing Stuff, in particular, Hopkins tries to account for the emergence of a number of initiatives around economic relocalisation, which have become thematically recognisable under the label of the REconomy project (see ch. 6). It is understandable, therefore, that this new title has an upfront focus on presenting Transition as an alternative economic model (in a manner reminiscent of the way in which Transition was presented as a community response to peak oil and climate change in the Handbook). The more sectorial focus on economics might equally be a consequence of the fact that the book was originally conceived – according to the publisher John Elford – as a guide to Transition for local authorities, which might therefore justify the inclusion of an immediately recognisable ‘policy’ framing. However, as the book moves beyond the first chapter, the strategy of presenting a number of stories to illustrate and articulate certain common themes in the moving of Transition brings The Power of Just Doing Stuff once again closer to the Companion. Hence, after introducing a new ‘Big Idea’ (that of local resilience as a model for economic development),39 this book eventually departs from a straightforward definitional process. Instead, it articulates that idea by feeling its contours as they emerge through different stories and initiatives.40
The adoption – in these later works by Hopkins – of a format leaning towards a collection of short stories is deeply interesting, as it resonates with a number of other works that fall into a somewhat loose and expanding family of books about Transition-like cultural experimentation. These are other attempts at making visible and calling forth a phenomenon that shines through situated instances of unrest and activism.
One of these works is called Tales of Our Times,41 and it is a collection of Transition-related stories gathered by Stephanie Bradley, a storyteller based in Totnes. A member of Transition in Totnes, Bradley undertook a pilgrimage on foot through a number of other Transition initiatives in the UK. In the process, stories were gathered that Bradley has subsequently retold in the form of fairy tales. The idea behind the project being that, imagining to look back at the present from the future, many of the experiments woven in the moving of Transition could be recast in retrospect as ‘folk’ tales of a time of change.
Bradley, however, goes beyond a mere recollection of projects undertaken under the institutional patronage of Transition. Instead, Transition finds expression here as an open-ended form of life, which makes it possible to recognise kinship across a broad spectrum of outwardly different experiments. For this purpose, she willingly departs from formal designations and institutional belonging. After presenting the stories of a number of Transition initiatives (such as the ‘failure’ and collapse of Transition Brighton42 and the ‘resurrection’ of Transition Lancaster after a similar disbanding,43 or the touching story of a LETS system in West Bridgford near Nottingham),44 she then moves beyond the virtues and vicissitudes of undertakings designated explicitly as ‘Transition’. Instead, she also relates, for example, the tale of care and conviviality shared by one of her hosts during her pilgrimage, whereby a group of elders in the town of Bridgwater would organise to meet local youths outside nightclubs, in order to provide them with ‘essential supplies’ necessitated after a night of partying (such as flip-flops for girls tired of heels).45 With this style of presentation, Bradley channels the experience of Transition through concrete instances. She does so by offering an insight into the continuity transpiring across the breadth of her encounters, at the same time as honouring their individual differences. The result is a sense of Transition as an incipient, still evolving, form of life that demonstrates tentativeness, dynamism and an openness to innovation and to the accommodation of yet more forms of concerted activity (even if these originate outside of the organisational setup of a Transition initiative).
Bradley’s work is echoed in another recent book that offers a similar approach to appreciating movement and change in the social field: that of scavenging for sensed Gestalts, i.e. emergent forms of life (into which action is directed),46 which become more discernible as a degree of fittingness is gradually achieved between the different stories and experiences that etch them into shape. The collection I am referring to is Stories of the Great Turning, edited by Peter Reason and Melanie Newman.47
The stories in that book reinforce the possibility to sense the incipient profile of a new social world in the mutual relatedness of situated instances. These come to be progressively understood as participants in the unfolding of a phenomenon that is given shape and sharpness when we dwell on those vignettes. In that text, the point of departure is not so much a journey through Transition initiatives. Rather, its focus is on unveiling before the readers’ eyes what the authors call ‘The Great Turning’. Much like Transition, this can be understood as an unfolding profile woven through instances that cling to each other responsively across time, as though part of an emerging, unfinished conversation. Ecological activist Joanna Macy first introduced the term ‘The Great Turning’. In her work, she instructs readers to ‘see’ it presenting itself through a number of undertakings, from communal gardens to co-housing. On the basis of this, Macy is adamant about The Great Turning embodying a change in cultural sensitivity that appears to be specifying itself in progressively finer detail, the greater the number of strands it gathers along the way. In the light of this, she is optimistic about the possibility of a sea change in our collective ethical posture towards the meaning of ‘dwelling’ on the planet.48 What is very interesting to notice is how a number of stories already related in Hopkins’ books also find their way into Stories of the Great Turning. It is no surprise, given the open-endedness of Transition already sensed in the Companion and in Tales of Our Times, to see it mix into the folds of other recognisable forms of life, such as The Great Turning. I also mentioned, in the Introduction, how – for example – Schumacher College and Transition were understood by many to be enfolded in the same movement of consciousness, albeit with slightly different orientations. In the same sense, the relative porosity of boundaries between The Great Turning and Transition is not a problem. If anything, it enhances the ability to navigate across a range of possibilities that extend beyond the realm of already recognisable ‘Transition’ things and doings, pointing to available ‘next steps’ that can be experimented with.49 So, it is the case that stories that quite clearly belong in the moving of Transition50 are juxtaposed, in this collection, to accounts of people abandoning dead-end jobs to experiment with lifestyles not dictated by the motives of a corporate career (which simultaneously raises the question of whether Transition could find ways to approach and ‘move into’ this disquiet, on which see later ch. 6),51 or alongside the description of a particular community garden in King’s Cross, London.52
All of these works that fall in the genre of the ‘collection of short stories’ embody a different attitude towards the re-presentation of Transition. They undertake a move away from attempts to outline Transition as a ‘solid object’ with a stated goal and purpose, a set of steps to achieve that and a formal organisation. Instead, from the Companion to Stories of the Great Turning, they undertake more fluid explorations that do not so much define and