Everything Gardens and Other Stories. UNIV PLYMOUTH
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first official ‘manual’ about Transition) is only a part of the story – and a dated one at that – was reinforced by interviews I undertook with the former publisher of the Transition series for Green Books, John Elford, as well as with Rob Hopkins, one of the initiators of Transition and the author of some of the most popular reference titles about it.
In order to illustrate what I mean, this chapter sketches a short history of Transition, dotted by references to some of the accompanying literature that has been generated in the process.2 In more detail, the texts I will focus on are primarily those produced by Rob Hopkins, either individually or in a team of authors. These are: his three titles with Green Books – in chronological order – The Transition Handbook,3 The Transition Companion4 and The Power of Just Doing Stuff,5 his PhD thesis,6 the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan written by Hopkins with Jacqui Hodgson7 and a pamphlet by Hopkins and Peter Lipman with the title Who We Are and What We Do.8
Before delving into a review of these texts, however, I want to spend a little longer on the purpose of this chapter, in the economy of the narration I am trying to weave through this book. A common misconception that academic analyses bring to the study of a social phenomenon in motion is to take whatever has crystallised as an indication of what it is. So it occurs that, when trying to study Transition, most accounts rely heavily on writings produced in the early days of the Transition phenomenon, as though they clarified the essence of it. Often, however, these are just passages through which this phenomenon has appeared. They are signposts on which its unfolding has relied upon for a while, and subsequently moved on, absorbing them inside whatever continuations of the story have been subsequently enacted. In this sense, any literature originating within the Transition milieu – and this applies even more to the early one – has to be appreciated in context, recovering the tentative spirit of the early days. It is merely a snapshot of an unfolding phenomenon so that it might, in the light of subsequent progress, become too tight or too rigid to embrace what Transition is in the process of becoming.
Whenever we try to cling to these snapshots, and substitute them for the whole, we are taking a risk: a risk on which the whole possibility of ‘knowing’ through this process stands or falls. A snapshot is the picture of a motion; in fact, even a collection of snapshots is still a collection of discrete representations of that motion and not the motion itself. When the snapshots we take as starting points are not approached with a degree of self-consciousness – in the knowledge that they are crystallisations of an unfolding motion – there is a risk that what we speak about no longer exists; that Transition, for example as described in the Transition Handbook, might have morphed beyond recognition into something more complex and textured than the initial text could encapsulate. If we don’t use snapshots as a way to access the motion, but confuse them for the motion itself, we risk simply being too late. Coming armed with theories to a meeting with something that has moved on, so that we end up building scaffolding around an empty shell.
This is why I think it is important to devote an entire chapter to illustrating that any number of written accounts are to the life of Transition what past perfect is to present. Think of this section as a springboard through which to ignite our curiosity and poise our attention for taking the plunge from the pictures to the process by which the motion itself arises (or, rather, my experience of it, which I gathered through ‘accompanying’ the life of Transition in Totnes) in subsequent chapters.
Beginnings and instruction manuals
The ‘early’ writings on Transition encompass a number of texts. In 2008, Rob Hopkins published The Transition Handbook with Green Books.9 This was followed, in 2009, by a shorter pamphlet called Who We Are and What We Do, authored by Hopkins and Lipman.10 In 2010, Hopkins and Hodgson issued the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan11 and, in the same year, Rob Hopkins defended his PhD dissertation.12 I set the cut-off for these ‘early writings’ just before The Transition Companion, published in 2011.13
These are the writings that accompanied the launch of the first Transition initiative in Totnes in 2006. In fact, the ‘unleashing’ of Transition in Totnes, although marked by a discrete celebratory event, was actually a longer process woven through preparatory film screenings and other public events. These eventually culminated in what has been called – in Transition-speak – ‘The Great Unleashing’ of a new Transition initiative:14 in this case the first, in Totnes.
The months after the unleashing of Transition were particularly hectic. Not only, in fact, were members being engaged in the life of the new-born Transition Town Totnes, but they were also receiving a lot of requests for information by groups wanting to reproduce the Transition concept in their own communities. In order to respond to those requests, Rob Hopkins authored The Transition Handbook (‘the Handbook’), a first official ‘how-to’ guide to setting up a Transition initiative. This occurred with the parallel development of the Transition Network, the ‘outreach’ arm of the formal organisation of Transition, devoted to supporting incipient initiatives around the world.15
The Handbook is organised around an exposition of the Transition concept as a response to the challenges of man-made climate change and peak oil (i.e. the anticipated exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves into the future). In this sense, Transition emerges in the context of a narration about those challenges, to which it is presented as a possible solution (I dwell further on the origin of Transition in the disquiet engendered by peak oil in ch. 9). Furthermore, in the light of the need – which the book was trying to address – to provide guidance to others asking about Transition (so as to ease some of the strain on the organisational resources of Transition in Totnes), the Handbook follows the structure of an instruction manual. This is particularly evident in the setting out of twelve steps towards establishing a Transition initiative; steps that very much mirrored the way the Transition Town Totnes had been set up. These went from building awareness and organising a ‘Great Unleashing’ to drawing up an ‘Energy Descent Action Plan’.
In the Handbook, Hopkins also traces some of the ‘roots’ of Transition thinking to permaculture. This is a set of principles/orientations to guide the design of resilient, diverse systems (whether the ‘system’ be a woodland, an allotment or a more complex human community).16 Originally developed in relation to the building of self-sustaining agricultural systems, permaculture – under the guise of a design know-how – has been applied to a much wider array of pursuits than food-growing, on the assumption that ‘everything gardens’17 and can therefore benefit from the application of design principles originally devised in relation to land-based activities, such as allotment growing or smallholder agriculture:
The basic principle of permaculture is to make useful connections between different elements in a system, so that as many inputs as possible are provided from within the system, and as many of the outputs as possible are used within it. This principle can be applied to connections between human beings just as well as it can to plants and animals.18
Hopkins presents Transition as a derivation of the permaculture approach, adapted to the design of communities that be more resilient in meeting their needs in the face of the challenges of climate change and peak oil. At the same time, however, he also distances Transition from permaculture, observing that the latter has often been pursued in relative isolation, and never really went mainstream. Permaculture is therefore implicit, rather than explicit, in the Transition phenomenon,19 acting for Transition like a ‘starter’ does (this is the yeast from which sourdough bread is subsequently baked, which is transformed in the process). What this means became clearer to me as I went on to carry out interviews with members that were involved in Transition. The more testimonies I gathered, the less prominence permaculture seemed to have in their first-person accounts of how they were drawn into it. While all had heard of it, only a very small minority had actually gotten interested in permaculture as a consequence of their involvement in Transition: most simply knew of its existence, but not much more beyond that. Despite borrowings from permaculture – as I will discuss in greater depth in ch. 3 below – permaculture is hardly an explicit component of Transition as many scholarly accounts seem to give it credit for.
In response to the demands for support and information that followed the unleashing of the Transition Town Totnes, a formal ‘outreach’ organisation was set up, the Transition Network. This is the main focus of the 2009 pamphlet by Rob Hopkins and