One Saturday morning in February, a small group of people huddled together beneath crisp morning skies in the Westchester area of Los Angeles. They focused on the words of an 85 year old man as he fingered the burgundy colored branches of a bare-limbed peach tree. He spoke gruffly of growth buds and cutting tools, sharing tips about fruit tree pruning techniques that he had learned from his father at the time of the Great Depression. Then, hesitantly, they began. One at a time, people stepped forward, angling their pruning clippers as instructed. A sharp “snip” was followed by a brief smile of victory, and a surge of confidence emerged.

In the Transition Movement, we call this a “reskilling” workshop. We are relearning the basic skills needed for everyday living – skills like growing, preserving, and pickling food; rainwater harvesting; composting and building fertile soils; crafting functional items; building structures; and making basic clothing. In the past 150 years of energy plenty – the brief “age of oil” – we have gleefully outsourced these basic needs to distant continents. But as we enter the declining second half of our planetary oil supply, as we begin to glimpse the extent to which climate change will impact agriculture and fresh water supplies, and as we fathom the far reaching repercussions of economic contraction and the end of economic “growth,” we find we are going to need these basic skills.

In the Transition Movement, we realize that our current lifestyles and our current way of doing things cannot continue. With the “triple header” of peak oil, climate change, and economic contraction, business-as-usual is doomed. We are faced with rethinking just about everything we currently consider “normal.” When our basic daily sustenance comes from supermarkets which stock a mere three-day supply of highly-processed food, fed by an oil-dependent globalized supply chain, and fully dependent upon petrochemical-driven agriculture, it is clear that we are not well equipped to handle what is coming.

On a Sunday evening, in an entirely different setting in the North Hills area of the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, 50 people gathered in a borrowed church facility. The attendees included young parents and senior citizens, small-business persons and employees of global corporations. They had the highest qualifications: concerned earth citizens. Within the Transition Movement, we understand that it is at this grassroots level where we will find creative, ingenious, very realistic and possible solutions. Once people understand the problems ahead, they can begin to invent practical solutions. And most of these solutions involve existing knowledge, existing materials, low-technology, and on-the-ground familiarity with local resources.

After a brief Powerpoint overview of the “triple header” crisis, the North Hills session broke out into working groups, roughly by neighborhood. The question was asked for public discussion: What might resilience mean in your local community?

The Transition Movement

Transition Los Angeles has been asking this very question of audiences across Southern California and getting some inspiring, clearly focused, and intelligent responses. We are using proactive and creative approaches developed by the international Transition Network,  a rapidly growing grassroots effort that began in the United Kingdom and has now spread to most of the developed nations of the world. The Transition Movement asserts that life without oil could possibly be better than what we have now, if we get to work and plan for it.

The Transition Movement has its roots in Permaculture, a design philosophy developed in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren to explore how we might consciously create a permanent human culture.  In 2004, Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, was teaching Permaculture classes in Kinsale, Ireland. He asked his class to envision the changes to different sectors of society – food, housing, transportation, and more – as society moved into a post-petroleum era. Hopkins carried the ideas generated in Kinsale to his new home in Totnes, Devon, England. There he was joined by several creative individuals including Naresh Giangrande, Sophy Banks, and Ben Brangwyn.

The Totnes team embarked on an aggressive program to spur action within their local town by raising awareness of peak oil and climate change, offering reskilling workshops, networking with other organizations, and holding working groups and visioning sessions. At the end of their first four years, 74.9% of the townspeople were aware of the Totnes team’s work, and 33.3% had participated in one form or another.  Now the work begun in Transition Town Totnes has inspired the world.

Within the Transition Movement, we speak of the “inner and outer Transition.” Even as we are installing physical projects like community gardens and rainwater harvesting equipment or setting up economic structures like Time Banks and local food redistribution networks, we realize that these tangible elements are only the vehicle for the deeper, inner changes of building community and changing minds.

Our Westchester group has worked with many different faith communities and offered workshops where community members can explore the psychological and spiritual implications of radical paradigm change. Even as we change the outer, physical aspects of our lives, we must facilitate the inner Transition as well.

Resilience versus Sustainability

Building resilience is the cornerstone of the Transition Movement. By “resilience,” we mean our ability to flex and adapt through the changes ahead. Specifically, this means the ability to adapt to peak oil and climate change, simultaneously, combined with economic circumstances that will render large-scale capital investment unrealistic.

When considered separately, peak oil and climate change each have a set of possible solutions. Yet many of the possible solutions to peak oil – switching to coal, for example – are unthinkable for global warming. And many of the proposed solutions to global warming – switching to electric cars, or the “hydrogen economy” – are severely constrained by how much cheap oil we will have on hand to put the infrastructure in place and whether we will have sufficient economic support for the massive conversion.

Taken together, the “triple header” crisis dictates a very small pool of potential solutions. Realistic solutions are not likely to include continued globalization; we simply will not have the fuel to maintain it. The most resilient solutions tend to be simple, local, and small scale and demand few resources and little in the way of energy inputs. This set of solutions has been variously described as “energy descent”  or “powerdown.”  In any event, the crises we face have already determined that our future will inevitably be one of less energy consumption overall.

Within Transition initiatives, building resilience means growing our local ability to meet the everyday needs of life despite fewer resources and less energy with which to do it. The goal is that local communities become more flexible, robust, and skilled. Thus rather than campaigning for “clean-fuel” trucks to bring our food from globalized supply networks to supermarkets, resilience-thinking guides a Transition initiative to expand its local skill base and develop the local food network through urban agriculture and edible landscaping. Rather than massive-scale solar projects in a grid across the desert, resilience-thinking highlights the wisdom of small, community-owned solar arrays while simultaneously powering down our electricity demands to a minimal level which matches what can be generated locally. Rather than one-size-fits-all, resilience-thinking points to local culture, local abilities, and local resources as the core of practical answers.

The term “sustainability” has become far less useful. In order to achieve a state of human existence which might potentially be able to be sustained for a long period of time, powerdown must come first. Given our North American and developed-nations ecological footprint, we must substantially adjust our consumption habits to bring them within the carrying capacity of the planet. When the word “sustainability” is used in a context that excludes the concept of powerdown – for example the oxymoron “sustainable prosperity” – it becomes completely useless as a target for basic human survival. Additionally, attaining true societal sustainability is such a long-term prospect that big-picture thinkers such as David Holmgren estimate that those of us alive today will never see it, and it implies such a static state that thinkers such as Transition Colorado’s Don Hall hope we never do.

“Resilience,” on the other hand, is imbued with the vibrancy of life. The term brings up images of a kid bouncing on a trampoline, able to rebound easily and delightfully with the changing surface beneath him. Resilience is simultaneously robust and flexible. Resilience is exhilarating creativity. Resilience is diversity of approaches and multiplicity of solutions. And resilience-building contains “the potential for an economic, cultural, and social renaissance the likes of which we have never seen.”

The Transition Approach

In Hopkins’ early work, he stressed our “addiction to oil” and explored how psychological models of treating substance addictions could be useful in creating post-petroleum consciousness change within society as a whole. Thus he offers “12 Steps” that the Totnes team used to achieve their stellar progress. Many of these involve reaching out to citizens within the community through public events.

Community-building is essential to resilience. Without a supportive community around us, if we do not know our neighbors and get a good working relationship in place, we will be ill equipped to weather the sweeping changes ahead. As contrasted with a survivalist approach, the Transition Movement is by nature community-centric. We recognize that the survival of one – whether family, street, neighborhood, or village – is entirely dependent upon working toward the survival of all.

When forming a new Transition initiative, one of the first steps is to cultivate awareness within the community – awareness of the problems we face together with awareness of the need to radically change our lifestyles in order to prepare. Transition initiatives around the world have invented many creative, delightful, and fun techniques for transmitting this information; and they share these event ideas freely in Creative Commons forums.

Reskilling is another one of the “12 Steps.” Here in Los Angeles, in addition to the fruit tree pruning workshop, we have offered bread baking, raw foods cooking, solar cooker-building workshops, quilting circles, organic vegetable gardening classes, and more. This helps grow the local skill base of functional, practical skills that our local communities will need in coming years as oil and transportation become far less available. In addition, deep inside, the participants who gain these new skills begin to feel more capable, more prepared, and more able to cope psychologically with whatever the future might bring. A regular stream of public meetings creates a gathering place – the beginnings of a new sense of community.

The Transition Movement realizes that it does not have all the answers; in fact, we may become mere facilitators of what already exists. Thus networking is one of the “12 Steps,” reaching out to other organizations within the local area which might be doing similar work. When existing work – whether that be transportation plans, social justice campaigns, education and outreach projects, or health-oriented programs – is viewed within the context of peak oil + climate change + economic contraction, a finite set of realistic solutions emerges. Sector by sector, a larger picture emerges. This larger picture is ultimately what we are after.

We are a society which is adrift without a story to guide our future. The old story of colonial expansion, industrial growth, moon landings, and Starship Enterprise has expired. In an energy-constrained, post-carbon world, that old story does not serve us anymore, but we have not yet replaced it. We need new stories which excite the consciousness and guide us forward into a resource-efficient, socially just, post-petroleum future. Transition initiatives are working to develop those stories too. Using art, performance, and storytelling techniques, they entice community participants to develop visions for this possible future.

The creation of the Energy Descent Action Plan is perhaps the defining moment for a Transition initiative. Step 12 of Hopkins’ approach – and so far attained by only a few Transition initiatives worldwide – this document typically merges the concrete sector-by-sector plans with the imaginative art and storytelling and offers a vision for the future of the community. In some UK communities, these documents have been embraced by planning departments and city councils as guidelines for future direction.  Thus an Energy Descent Action Plan holds enormous potential to bring environmental and social forecasts, plus the voice of citizens, to guide land use considerations, government investment decisions, educational curriculums, and more.

What We Can Do

With respect to implications for planning, policy-making, and action, resilience-thinking leads us to several conclusions:

(1) Question the growth paradigm. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, our society has embraced the idea that growth is good and lack of growth is a failure: When the stock market does not rise, we panic; when our incomes do not increase, we must be doing something wrong. Yet as humanity reaches the planet’s carrying capacity and experiences resource limitations including but not limited to peak oil, we are clearly at the end of “growth” as we have known it.

What will replace “growth”? Many thinkers are working on the answers.  But as we plan cities, plan developments, and plan programs for the future, if these plans are to be anything approaching viable, they must include decreased resource supplies, decreased energy supplies, decreased transportation abilities, and decreased financial resources. Additionally, without growth, the underlying premise of debt (borrowing against the future because future income will presumably be greater) disappears; thus incurring any new debt becomes unwise, and eliminating the old becomes essential.

(2) Include peak oil and climate change combined. As stated earlier, when we consider one problem or the other, exclusively, we come up with a portfolio of solutions, many of which will be rendered unrealistic once we consider the repercussions of the other problem. We must include both peak oil and climate change as a combined and interdependent unit in all of our thinking and planning. This will dictate rather specific types of solutions: local solutions; solutions which operate mechanically or energy-free; solutions which consider the embodied energy and cradle-to-cradle implications; and consideration of whether a new program’s goals are even irrelevant with less oil, less ability to transport ourselves, or diminished economic vitality.

Any investment made this year, next year, and into the future should better prepare us for the impacts of peak oil and climate change. If it does not, it is headed in the wrong direction. Future expenditures of transportation funds, for example, should emphasize fossil-free bicycle and pedestrian transportation and overtly phase out the current dominance of the personal automobile. Water policies should curtail wasteful uses such as ornamental landscapes while encouraging local rainwater harvesting and on-site, low-tech greywater filtration. In an economy where capital investment is so scarce and precious, the opportunity cost of ill-placed investments is very high: they undermine our potential to survive.

(3) Prepare your communities with resilience. Educational and outreach programs should enlighten the public about the realities and forecast repercussions of the “triple header” of crises. Educational programs need to gear up young and old, middle class and working class in acquiring the hands-on practical skills needed for everyday living in a post-petroleum era, including skills of growing and producing food, garden-to-medicine herbalism, and basic craftsmanship. Public policies could ease prohibitions against city chickens, simple greywater systems, and composting toilets. Social programs will need mental health providers to assist people with the psychological aspects of Transition – that the reality of our future is dramatically different from what we were reared to think it would be. In order to finance all this during economic contraction, we will have to get creative about economics too, perhaps with sophisticated bartering systems and local currencies.

(4) Walk the talk. Resilience building and the Transition to a post-carbon, post-petroleum future begins at home. Even as you make big plans for our collective future, cultivate resilience-building practices in your personal and family life. Switch to local foods; bike to work; hang out the laundry; create a potluck with your neighbors; dig a vegetable garden and wriggle your fingers in the soil. Get to know real life in your immediate spot on this very small, very precious planet we all call home because herein is the beginning of the change.