Despite my deep respect for Rob and the enormous legacy to which he and Transition in the UK have given birth, I cannot be silent about his concerns. The first seems to be Michael’s assertion that Transition initiatives in the U.S. must “declare independence,” from Transition in the U.K. Here I recall one of the things that first drew me to Transition, namely its focus on local solutions based on the needs of a particular place. Having been an activist for decades, I was beyond disillusioned by groups that claimed to depart from the hierarchical, corporate functioning of most organizations of industrial civilization but in fact, mimicked them. I was thrilled to discover that the Transition model as outlined in the Transition Handbook, was at long last, a genuine exception to this. In more recent months, however, I have started to feel as if a kind of creeping corporatism is beginning to emerge which as Michael notes, we need to declare independence from. Specifically, what I have noticed is an implicit assumption that however Transition is implemented in a particular place, it must defer to the leadership of Transition in the U.K. and in the U.S. So on the one hand, “declaring independence” from a tendency to become monolithic in thinking and action may well be necessary, but in no way is this synonymous with renouncing a “spirit of collaboration.” Throughout Michael’s article, I hear a deep desire for collaboration, but also for resilience in our approach to implementing Transition in the U.S.

As for economics, Rob’s argument against putting all his eggs in the basket of any one economic theory, misses the point. The point is not to choose a particular theory and defend it, but to put all the theories he mentioned on the table and engage in deep, protracted dialog about all of them. The U.K. is presently enduring a horrible winter in which people are freezing to death, losing jobs, police and fire personnel are being laid off by the hundreds, and at the same time, the nation is facing the same severity of economic meltdown now occurring throughout many other industrialized nations. All of this is happening in the vicinity of Rob’s local place, and one does not need to be an economist to understand that conditions are becoming increasingly dire all across Europe. Transition initiatives in all parts of the world will ultimately find themselves confronted by these grim economic realities, and they should be talking about them with as much focus as they are directing toward Peak Oil and climate change. As frightening as the consequences of Peak Oil will be, the consequences of a global economic collapse are beginning to bring similar or worse realities to our doors with dizzying speed. In fact, currency wars, gargantuan amounts of debt, and a worldwide crisis in food production and food prices—all of which are happening now, may ultimately make the consequences of Peak Oil seem anticlimactic.

All of this leads up to a statement by Rob that I find appalling: “I get a sense from how Michael builds his case in his article that he has drawn together all the very worst forecasts of everything and used that to underpin his case for ‘Deep Transition’.” Yet in just a few sentences below, Rob admits that he finds the facts regarding climate change “terrifying.” He then states: “I don’t think that one needs to exaggerate threats and try and terrify people into a sense of urgency. The facts are motivating enough on their own. Indeed there is lots of research showing that bombarding people with terrifying information is far more likely to lead to a Flight/Fight/Freeze response than to constructive engagement. It is rarely an effective approach to engaging people in my experience.”

This reveals a reality that for me is profoundly disturbing among some members of Transition initiatives, namely, an unwillingness to deeply analyze the meaning of the word “transition.” It comes from a sixteenth-century Latin word which means “to cross over.” If one is crossing over something, it is important to understand what one is crossing from and what one is crossing to. Therefore, I personally find the word “transition” by itself an inadequate description of our current planetary predicament . That is why in my work, I incessantly use the words, collapse, transition, and Great Turning, the latter term used by Joanna Macy and David Korten. The historian in me finds it necessary to look at where we have been, where we are in this moment, and not just where we would like to be in the future. The entire process, which I choose to call an evolutionary leap for the human species, occurs in stages, and let’s not delude ourselves: At the moment there is much more collapse going on than transition even though it is difficult to know exactly where on ends and the other begins.

At the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are experiencing the collapse of industrial civilization. No matter how much we may want to call it “transition”, we are profoundly fooling ourselves if we are unwilling to use the “C” word, as I have found many members of Transition are. One of the hallmarks of industrial civilization is its enculturation into idealism, denial, and frantic addiction to progress. We love the rebirth, but we absolutely refuse to talk about the death that makes it possible. Oh isn’t this lovely—we’re “transitioning.” Never mind that our entire way of life is dying. Never mind how we actually feel about that in our guts and in our hearts. Whistle a happy tune because we’re “transitioning.”

I am an enthusiastic supporter of holding a positive vision for the future, but not unless I am also willing to stare down the reality of the collapse of civilization and all of the adversity that will entail. Here in the U.S. we are shamefully addicted to positive thinking as the author and social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her 2010 book Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it she argues that positive thinking in American culture is believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist. Ehrenreich believes this notion has permeated our society and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis. She, of course, attributes that crisis to many other causative factors as well but notes that positive thinking has become an integral aspect of corporate and popular culture. American culture is deeply afflicted with the delusion that we are exceptional and entitled and will always prevail in the face of hardship, and this delusion, I believe, fuels the sense of urgency conveyed by Michael in his article.
Thus I adamantly disagree with Rob when he states that “the facts are motivating enough on their own” to cause us to incisively grasp the severity of our predicament. This is an unequivocally false assumption borne out by the level of denial that still dominates the psyches of humanity both in and out of the Transition movement—a reality that lies at the heart of industrial civilization. Because he doesn’t seem to understand this, Rob defends some aspects of industrial civilization as advantageous:

Also, there are some elements of Michael’s analysis that don’t seem to stand up to historical analysis. For example, he writes that “industrial civilisation destroys communities”. While on the one level this could be argued to be the case from a Robert Puttnam/Happiness Index analysis, it is also important to note that at present, industrial civilisation is, for much of the world, the only thing that feeds, clothes, employs and heats and cools billions of people. Yes it is deeply flawed, yes it is highly oil vulnerable, yes it is pushing the biosphere to the edge of collapse, yes it is grossly unequally distributed, but is Transition, at this point, in any position to take over and run an alternative infrastructure? To argue that ‘industrial civilisation destroys communities’ is hugely over-simplistic.

First of all, a clarification. It was David Orr, a Post-Carbon Institute Fellow, who first stated that industrial civilization destroys communities. While it is true that industrial civilization provides those things mentioned in the above paragraph, what Rob is not addressing and what Michael seems to be attuned to is the paradigm of industrial civilization—the assumptions, demands, roles, and fundamental tenets thereof. Few would counter the reality that industrial civilization has provided mindboggling advantages for the human species. Because of it, people walk on the moon, penicillin has saved millions of lives, and you are reading these words on the internet. But if we do not thoroughly, deeply, assiduously explore the price that each of us has paid for these benefits, we will lack the capacity to appreciate the extent of our predicament and the urgency inherent in it. For this reason Michael states:

We will need to tell and retell the story of how we got into this predicament. It would be the story of the rise of the Industrial Growth Society, and how it has deeply wounded every single human living today, and how it has devastated the entire biosphere. It would be the story of how we’re learning that the Industrial Growth Society—in the form of economic globalization—is the culprit that has been pushing us to the brink of The Long Emergency, the brink of economic collapse, even the brink of civilization’s collapse.

On Page 79 of the Transition Handbook, at the beginning of the chapter “The Heart,” one reads:

I think alongside an understanding of the issues, it is important not to pretend that we can keep our awareness of these issues on a purely intellectual “head” level, but that we need to address the “heart” too, acknowledging that this is disturbing information, that it affects us, and that how it affects us in turn shapes how we respond—or don’t.

Later on the same page, we read, “Ultimately, at the heart of this section is the understanding that the scale of this transition requires particular inner resources, not just an abstract intellectual understanding.”

Yet throughout this entire section “the heart” is not defined. What is it? Obviously, in this context, it means much more than the physical organ. Thus I must reflect on the irony that when Rob states in the second paragraph of his article that Michael’s use of the word “sacred” is never defined, the Transition Handbook has never really defined “heart” except intuitively. We have clues in that particular section of the Handbook, but no explicit definition. So I suspect that if Rob wants to fully comprehend what is meant by “sacred,” he would do well to deeply contemplate the ambiguous term “heart.”

At its inception, the Transition movement went to great lengths to avoid a reference to the sacred or spirituality. At that time, this circumvention was probably appropriate. The point Michael is trying to make, it seems, is that because Transition and the world are evolving, such avoidance is no longer congruent with humanity’s dire predicament which now necessitates digging deeper into the core of the human species.

I began researching Peak Oil, climate change, and economic collapse in 2002, and in 2007, well in advance of the unleashing of an official Transition movement, I came to understand that the ramifications of these were so enormous that they were literally challenging our species to look more incisively than ever before in human history not only at its place in relation to the earth community, but into its very essence. In fact, I realized that these daunting challenges would ultimately confront humans with the fundamental question of what it means to be a human being inhabiting planet earth. It became increasingly clear to me that these challenges were no longer simply challenges of energy, climate, economics, or politics, but that in fact, they were profoundly existential. I came to understand that if we follow the reverberations of them into the farthest reaches of the human psyche we will confront something greater than the human ego and the rational, linear mind. In fact, we will confront the mystery at our core and at the core of the human community at large. Thus, I began viewing the collapse of industrial civilization not as a calamity befalling the human species, but rather as an opportunity for humanity to become a uniquely new species—that as a result of navigating the loss of the way of life as it had known, it would become a species that could never again permit the kind of existence on this planet that industrial civilization has created.

Consequently, in 2009 I published Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse. I actually felt reluctant to publish the book because I assumed it would be ignored at best and reviled at worst. Too depressing, too truthful, too demanding? Much to my surprise, Sacred Demise has been widely read around the world and touted as a book that offers tremendous inspiration and motivation at the same time that it clearly elucidates collapse, transition, and the Great Turning.

So now you may ask, what do I mean by “sacred”? For me, the word simply means “something greater” that is at the core of humanity and the earth community. The mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme speaks of conscious self-awareness, that is to say, the universe being conscious of itself through the human species. To grasp the implications of this notion, we need only ask a few simple questions: What would our world be like if human beings understood and lived as if they are the universe being conscious of itself? What would be the implications in energy, environment, economics, health, law, education, human relationships, and relationships between humans and non-humans?

The dictionary offers many definitions of sacred; one of them is set apart. We speak of “sacred time,” “sacred places,” and sometimes ask, “Is nothing sacred?” Perhaps some part of us knows that completely irrespective of religious dogma, there is something in each of us that is “set apart”—-that cannot be touched by and is in fact greater than any of the challenges we face. And therefore, I must disagree with Rob when he states:

For me, if Transition has done one thing well over the past 4 years, it has been the designing of an approach that comes uncluttered by much of the baggage that has encumbered environmental responses over the past 30 years. These responses have often been perceived as being smug, judgmental and against lots of stuff without a very clear idea of what it is for. The Transition idea has spread into businesses, organisations, Councils, the media and so on, as an idea that is simple to understand and accessible to people from all manner of mindsets. Making a central and explicit connection with the ‘Sacred’ would be a sure-fire way to consign Transition back to the left-field, far away from businesses and communities everywhere.

Peter Senge, an American scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, one of the world’s noted masters of organizational development utilizes “the sacred” in much of his work with businesses worldwide. Like Rob, he speaks of the “head, heart, and hands” approach to our humanity. In Kosmos Journal Senge writes:

…head, heart, and hands. People have said it in many different ways. Chinese culture has three different traditions: Taoism, which is physically based; Confucianism, which is relational or the social philosophy of the heart; and Buddhism, which is more mentally centered.

We have a tremendous imbalance in our schools with so much emphasis on the pure development of the intellect. Rationalism is the dominant worldview today. The primary example of this is the economic worldview that basically says no person does anything unless self-interest is involved and the benefits exceed the costs. It’s not very enlightened or thrilling, but that’s rational-economic man.

Also we are aware that we are part of nature. We are physical. We live in a body, and that is in a process of continual construction, so we are tied to the unfolding of the universe. Every seven years every cell in the body is replaced. We have a very deep sense of connection to nature. I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t had a profound experience in nature. So that kind of naturalism or physicalism is a critical part of our nature. I also think that learning is nature. The best definition of learning I know is Tom Johnson’s: “Learning is a process of discovering and embodying nature’s patterns.” What is walking? It is discovering and embodying a pattern of mobility that nature makes possible for this particular physiology. Humanism, the third worldview, points to our life as a journey of becoming a human being, which includes but goes beyond the physical and the mental aspects of existence.

I quote Senge as an example of an increasing number of high profile individuals in businesses and organizations who view the sacred as an integral aspect of optimum functioning in their endeavors. Yet another example is the Holacracy model, the motto of which is “liberating the soul of organizations.” Thus to assume that “Making a central and explicit connection with the ‘Sacred’ would be a sure-fire way to consign Transition back to the left-field, far away from businesses and communities everywhere” is probably a very inaccurate assumption. Increasingly, American businesses and organizations are incorporating aspects of “the sacred” in their leadership training models.

Rob tells us that the word “sacred” would be divisive among Christian and Muslim groups and that atheists and agnostics would be alienated. On the contrary, that has not been my experience. In fact, in workshops I have conducted on my book Sacred Demise and in coaching sessions and conversations I have had with individuals who identify as Christian, agnostic, or atheist, I have witnessed in them a profound interest in exploring and experiencing the sacred in nature. Often, this interest leads to a more profound exploration of inner transition—yes, “deep transition.”

Moreover, what I notice in my work with Transition and Transition-related functions is that there is an insatiable hunger at the core of most of the people I encounter for the sacred in relation to the Transition model. They consistently report that their connection with the sacred buoys and inspires them, enhances their resilience, and helps them navigate the losses that seem ubiquitous in the current declining milieu. Most importantly, people report that they have grown weary of charts, graphs, and scientific articles on Peak Oil, climate change, and global economic collapse and while they are looking at these issues head-on and working hard in their Transition initiatives to make their communities resilient, they now crave a deeper sense of meaning and purpose and a rich relationship with the sacred and the entire earth community.

As Rob notes, we are well into the end of the age of oil, and climate change realities are “terrifying.” Converging with these two crises is a global financial catastrophe that shows every indication of worsening. As humans confront the severe consequences of these concurrent crises, which are likely to play out differently in different places, what preparation is the Transition model offering us to navigate the unprecedented emotional and spiritual trauma that is already manifesting in many parts of the world? Suicide and depression rates are dramatically elevated in all parts of the industrialized world. Energy descent action plans, awareness raising, and reskilling—all of the superb logistical strategies that the Transition model provides are necessary for enhancing our physical survival, but they are woefully inadequate for addressing what is likely to be a planetary crisis in meaning among our species. The Transition model has provided a skeleton for this preparation with its heart and soul aspect. Going forward from here, we must now focus on the sacred by adding flesh to these bones, and each initiative will do this differently. In the process, we “reskill” the human interior for the daunting journey of collapse, transition, and Great Turning.

I feel blessed to be part of a heart and soul group that has met regularly here in Boulder, Colorado for over a year. We have evolved and continue to evolve by experimenting with new practices in addition to utilizing a book study as a springboard for our discussions. Among the members of our group, most of whom are deeply involved in other aspects of Transition, the hunger for a safe place to share feelings about collapse and transition is palpable, and in the process of discussion, we are building nurturing, supportive relationships.

According to Rob, Michael asserts that “it is our belief if you’re not spiritually connected to the Earth and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on Earth, it’s likely you will not make it.” He argues that this approach would permanently alienate a massive proportion of the people we’re trying to reach. What must be noted, however, is that it is not Michael who makes this assertion but rather the Native American elder, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, quoted in Michael’s article. In this statement, Westerman succinctly captures the fundamental wisdom of indigenous traditions whose “transition” model kept them thriving for thousands of years. Although indigenous cultures are not utopias and have their own issues to deal with, their lived experience throughout the world has been that disconnection from the sacred in nature has mitigated against survival and has facilitated the creation of the paradigm of industrial civilization.

There can be no Great Turning without the collapse of the endless growth model and a transition from that model to a new paradigm and a new culture. As much as we all wish for a seamless transition, reality dictates that we will not “tiptoe through the tulips” of a Transition movement into resilience and self-sufficiency without great suffering and painful loss. Anyone who pretends otherwise or inserts earplugs upon hearing this statement is greatly deluding him/herself.

Yet this demise of an earth-murdering, soul-murdering paradigm is nothing if not sacred—set apart, unique, and resonant with the core of our humanity and the wisdom of all other species whose human-caused misery may be alleviated as the structures and systems of industrial civilization disintegrate.

Unfortunately, what I hear in Rob’s critical response is a great deal of fear of that which can only be partially defined because it is inherent in a great mystery which demands that we recover from our addiction to Western, Cartesian, rational, linear thinking. While I do not advocate disowning our phenomenal left-brain capacities, they are insufficient and woefully inadequate in the face of the species-transforming upheaval that is profoundly shifting the tectonic plates of the human soul and perhaps the earth itself.

And so it is that another way of putting those letters S-A-C-R-E-D together comes in the form of the word S-C-A-R-E-D. To open ourselves to something greater and something beyond the rational, scientific mind—something that cannot be contained within the bounds of our “civilized” paradigm, is indeed scary. We must have compassion for ourselves when we are afraid to go there, yet we must find the courage to do so. Feeding our addiction to the rational and the optimistic is understandable because of our enculturation. As a result of it, we may fear that if we entertain the deeper meaning of words like “sacred” or “spiritual,” we will become irrational, dogmatic ideologues. Many of us have witnessed the irreparable damage done by organized religions throughout history, and such words may remind us of it.

Additionally, I sense from Rob’s comments a distinct fear of how Transition is going to appear to the rest of the world. While on the one hand this concern is legitimate, it presents a very tricky edge which if not skillfully navigated could lead or perhaps has already led to a kind of old paradigm corporatism. In other words, one can fret so much about how one is perceived that one soon finds oneself in a black hole of constant image management. A personal story may be appropriate.

As stated above, I have been researching what have come to be known as “Transition issues” since 2002. When I first began writing and speaking about them, I was perceived as nothing less than certifiably psychotic. Today, at least 80% of what I forecasted is now our current reality, and I frequently hear from people who want to apologize to me for their derision of the information I shared. Hundreds of other researchers were also addressing these issues at that time and long before—people like Colin Campbell, Mike Ruppert, Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Megan Quinn Bachman, Richard Heinberg, Vicki Robin, to name only a few, and now standing on the threshold of 2011, we have all been transformed from prophets of “doom and gloom” to very accurate historians. We could have chosen instead to obsess about our images and become silent. Certainly some people did choose to do just that because it was too risky to do otherwise, and that was and is everyone’s right. However, I believe that the Transition network should concern itself much less with image and political correctness and emphasize the kind of reskilling and preparation for which people in one’s local place are crying out. If that includes a hunger for “deep Transition,” then so be it. Subsequently, as the consequences of economic collapse, Peak Oil, and climate change intensify, the naysaying masses are likely to be approaching Transition in droves for assistance. This is not to say that image is totally irrelevant, but under the influence of a paradigm which is mostly about image, with very little substance, we must be extremely cautious when establishing our priorities.

Thus, it may be that humanity now finds itself on the edge of a precipice—pushed to that edge by the collapse of the old paradigm, but terrified to either leap or scale the sides of the cliff for fear of losing our intellectual footing. Neither move will be easy because another word comprised of these letters S-A-C-R-E-D, with the addition of one more letter is S-C-A-R-R-E-D—a word that describes all of us who have managed to navigate the wounding of the endless growth, slash, burn, pillage, and plunder paradigm. Yet we must not allow our fear and wounding to preclude a deeper exploration of the sacred.

One aspect of the scarring is either/or thinking which may for example conclude that if people are hungering for “deep Transition” what they were experiencing before was “shallow Transition.” Fully grasping the concept of evolution precludes making such binary judgments. Whether we name it “deep” or “shallow” is irrelevant. What matters is that the course of events in the past three years is now dictating a fresh, new approach that does indeed place inner transition at the core. Is the Transition model sufficiently expansive for this endeavor? Are its creators, caretakers, and collaborators willing to confront their scare and their scars sufficiently so that a discerning exploration of the sacred will enable an evolutionary leap for Transition and the human species?

[Carolyn’s forthcoming book is Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition, available in January, 2011. Please stay tuned to her website for a specific release date: www.carolynbaker.net.]

The emergence of the Transition movement in the last four years or so is one of the most hopeful signs in the early 21^st century, and Transition may yet turn out to be one of the fastest-growing, most inspiring, and most significant social change movements we have ever seen.

For those of us who had already been working towards relocalization for some years, the community-wide Transition process that Rob Hopkins and his fellow pioneers began developing in Totnes in 2006 was the very first sign of a clear and replicable pathway to community resilience and self-reliance in the face of the converging global crises of fossil fuel depletion, global warming, and economic collapse.

In Boulder County, we had well understood the urgent need for relocalization since we began in mid-2005. Inspired by Julian Darley’s Post Carbon Institute, then located in Vancouver, we joined the Relocalization Network early on, and did our best to follow the principles and guidelines that flowed from Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg and the early “Post Carbon Outposts,” most notably in Willits, California. The tag line in those early days was, “Reduce consumption, produce locally.” Some took that as a kind of tough love. This early movement was focused on an understanding of the peak oil crisis, and was driven by people who Darley called “the walking worried.”

That primitive relocalization movement grew surprisingly rapidly. At its peak, probably early 2007, there were reportedly some 200 such Post Carbon Outposts in a dozen nations or so, and founder Julian Darley predicted in an interview I did for HopeDance Magazine in July 2006 that the network would continue to grow exponentially. But it didn’t happen. And at the moment Darley was saying this, it was already beginning to collapse. Groups were disbanding, giving up. The Relocalization Network turned out to be unsustainable, partly (perhaps) because it lacked precisely the kind of replicable process for relocalization that Transition provides.

This experience has perhaps provided me a healthy skepticism. But I think it needs to be said that the Relocalization Network was very effective in raising awareness of the implications of the coming calamity that we call Peak Oil.

It also gave us in Boulder County a profound experience of confusion, frustration, disappointment, and sometimes even despair—for while we understood that relocalization urgently needed to happen in our community (and in every other community, of course), we were painfully aware that we certainly didn’t know what we were doing or how to do it. And to our dismay we discovered that no one else knew how to do it either!

As in all relocalization efforts, we had been trying our best to discover the ways to prepare our communities for a crisis that was just over the horizon and had not yet quite arrived, and attempting to do this without being seen as alarmists, doom-and-gloomers, or inciters of fear and anxiety.

Meanwhile, we were watching what was happening in the UK. The earliest indication that something new was brewing came with the Kinsale (Ireland) Energy Descent Action Plan, produced in 2005 by a group of Permaculture students, led by Rob Hopkins, which was ultimately adopted by the town council of Kinsale. But it was essentially a student project.

In 2006, we heard that Hopkins had moved to Totnes, England, where he was prototyping a community-wide process to achieve local resilience and self-reliance. It seemed ambitious, but possible. We eagerly awaited news.

The forthcoming news was very encouraging. A robust, seemingly viral movement was soon underway, and we soon learned that Rob Hopkins was writing The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependence to Local Resilience to help fuel the movement.

Shortly after it was published, in early 2008, I hurriedly read The Transition Handbook on a plane to the UK, on my way to see for myself if the burgeoning Transitioning movement really lived up to the glowing reports we had been reading on the Internet. I had to know if it was actually working, and to somehow gauge whether the movement could possibly be sustainable.

My first stop was Dundee, Scotland, to take the two-day Training for Transition with Sophy Banks and Naresh Giangrande, two of the co-founders of Transition Town Totnes. I’ll just say that my experience there was entirely unexpected. Somehow Transition just landed in me, in my heart, and I saw that Transition was a living, breathing being. Transition was alive—and alive in me!

Afterwards, I made the long train-trek down to England to make my pilgrimage to the birthplace of the movement, Totnes. And there I was able to spend some time with founder Rob Hopkins and Ben Brangwyn, who headed up the Transition Network. I got to see the movement “on the ground,” not only in Totnes but in several communities in England. I saw that Transition had become a household word in the UK, and that the movement was indeed spreading virally. It looked like this was going to work!

I came back to the states deeply inspired, carrying the fire of Transition, determined to ignite this nation.

Amazingly, both Hopkins and Brangwyn candidly admitted to me that while considering Transition in the U.S., they felt it was too daunting a task. This country seemed unimaginably large to them, and too difficult to deal with. They had figured they would just forget about the U.S.! So there were no plans to bring Transition to the U.S., but I knew it was essential.

On May 1, 2008, our relocalization organization in Boulder County became the first officially recognized Transition Initiative in North America (number 53 in the world, the 5^th outside the U.K.), and in September of that year Lynette Marie Hanthorn and I (she’s the co-founder of our organization) held the first Training for Transition, with 61 people participating. That spawned 20-some local initiatives in Colorado, five of which became officially recognized (so far). That spurred us, perhaps a bit prematurely, to become Transition Colorado, the first statewide Transition Hub.

As certified Transition Trainers, Lynette Marie and I have trained hundreds of people all over the country in the Transition process, and have conducted numerous Transition Clinics both online and in person.

I also became part of the original “initiating group” that sought to develop Transition U.S., which was formally birthed in January 2009 with the support of Post Carbon Institute, and served on its board of directors until April of this year.

And of course, through all this we’ve greatly expanded our Transition efforts in Boulder County, primarily focusing on catalyzing something of a revolution in local food and farming. Lately, we’re in the process of launching a Local Food and Farming Enterprise Investment Fund, which has already been seeded by an extraordinary commitment of capital.

THE CONTEXT FOR TRANSITION

Enough for backstory. What I want to address here is the evolution of the Transition movement, particularly in this nation, and to reflect on where it’s gotten to and where it’s headed.

There are three principal themes I’d like to consider. First of all, the context for Transition (or at least our understanding of it) has changed dramatically since the model was first articulated. In other words, we have a much more sharply defined sense of what we need to be preparing our communities for.

Secondly, the Transition model first emerged from a culture very different from ours. And I think we’ve already seen indications that just transplanting the UK approach to Transition here may not work very well. We will need a uniquely American approach to Transition, and that is just beginning to take shape—but I think it will require that we once again declare our independence from England, and establish our interdependence.

Thirdly, Transition itself is in transition. Transition is a self-organizing, emergent, “open source” movement that is evolving in sometimes unexpected ways (perhaps always in unexpected ways). And this, to me, demonstrates one of the great strengths and resiliencies of the movement, that it is flexible enough to adapt locally and evolve globally. What’s beginning to emerge in the movement, particularly around what we could call the Inner Transition, is of special significance—and it’s here that I would like to go a little deeper, suggesting an approach to Transition that is both uniquely American and that can perhaps breathe new life into the movement here.

To begin, let’s look at the current state of the context for Transition, the reasons why Transition is so needed, so urgent—in other words, what we are preparing our communities for. I’ll try to talk about these things in a very succinct, bottom-line manner, without building the arguments or citing the data—which are now abundantly available.

Peak Oil

First, it’s become quite clear that we must quickly prepare our communities for sharp fluctuations in fossil fuel prices and a general decline in fossil fuel availability. This will plunge our national and local economies into chaos, for they are built on fundamentally wrong (and profoundly unsustainable) premises. In the next few years, give or take, it’s likely that we will all finally come to understand that Peak Oil is upon us.

The hope that we’ll be able to maintain our current way of life by substituting renewable energy for fossil fuels is wildly unrealistic and perhaps even dangerous. We now know that renewable substitutes will not come on line quickly enough or at large enough scale to be able to maintain our current way of life. We’re going to be facing a future with far less energy available to us. So this is not just Peak Oil, but Peak Energy! This is a reality we’re going to have to come to terms with, and we need to allow this to really sink in to our consciousness. It will change everything, and much sooner than we care to think about.

It’s unavoidable that we will be going through a wrenching energy transition—likely beginning in the next couple of years—which will change profoundly how we live, where we live, and even who lives. This tells us that we simply can’t adequately prepare our communities with new technology alone, or with incremental decreases in energy consumption. We will need to live very differently—and we will have to hurry.

Climate Change/Global Warming

The second thing we need to talk about is that climate change/ global warming is already upon us, and here we are woefully unprepared. Sadly, recent data from the United Nations Environment Programme reveals that we’re unavoidably on track for at least a 6.3-degree Fahrenheit temperature rise globally by the end of the century—even if all governments meet all their most optimistic targets (which is highly unlikely). And this could happen even by mid-century. This will change the face of the planet radically, and the trajectory of human population.

A couple of things became very clear out of the muddle in Copenhagen last December and in the subsequent embarrassing spectacle in our own Congress. First, the scientific consensus is that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are already having a devastating impact on the ecosphere that supports all life, and this will get very much worse in the future. Secondly, we see now that our governments are simply not going to be able to rise to the occasion in time to mitigate the impacts.

In his recent book, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, Australia’s Clive Hamilton suggests that “We will be powerless to stop the jump to a new climate on Earth, one much less sympathetic to life. The kind of climate that has allowed civilization to flourish will be gone and humans will enter a long struggle just to survive.” This means a very profound shift for human existence, one that we have hardly begun to accept.

So this is not merely climate change we’re talking about, but climate disruption, and it may ultimately give our species the equivalent of a “near death experience.” We know that those who have had near-death experiences or life-threatening illnesses are often transformed, so that they see their previous lives as empty and self-centered. So if we survive as a species, perhaps we will be likewise humbled, and devote the rest of our days to service.

Economic Decline/Collapse

The third area we must talk about is the economy, and this is precisely the arena that the founders of the Transition movement in Totnes have been so skittish about taking on as part of the context for Transition—until very recently, thanks to American Chris Martenson and Canadian Nicole Foss (who writes under the name “Stoneleigh”). Here, we need to know that economic decline will soon accelerate to inevitable collapse. There will be no long-term economic recovery. The underpinnings of modern human society (and the global economy) as we have known it are fundamentally unsustainable, and they are beginning to unravel before our eyes.

This is partly because the entire globalized economy is based on the U.S. dollar, which is based on cheap oil. And now the whole system is beginning to come apart.

When you hear predictions of economic recovery, just remember that those economists and politicians who are making these predictions are the very same ones who were predicting not so long ago that there was virtually zero chance that we could slip into an economic recession—and we now understand they were saying this at a time when we were already at least a year into recession.

We need to recognize these rosy predictions for what they are, and prepare for the end of economic growth as we have known it.

In our lifetime, we will most likely experience roller-coaster periods of global recession followed by weak and partial recoveries; this will ultimately give way to grinding, long-term global depression. In the process, many of the institutions on which we have come to rely as anchors for certainty and normalcy and sanity will surely fail, some of them slowly, some of them suddenly and spectacularly. It will be a chaotic time for the next several decades, and the chaos will prevail long after most of us have left this planet.

—

Over the last few years I’ve noticed that we tend to think of fossil fuel depletion, climate change, and economic decline as three separate global crises. But of course they are all deeply interrelated. When we say this, it seems so obvious. But we’re just beginning to wake up to this reality: Our growth economy is based on cheap fossil fuels, and burning fossil fuels is obviously dramatically altering our climate. Therefore, economic growth as we have known it cannot and will not continue. Our Industrial Growth Society cannot and will not continue.

This is what James Howard Kunstler has called The Long Emergency. And this is really what we are preparing ourselves and our communities for.

Clearly, we are entering into a prolonged period of profound change, an era of “unintended consequences.” The changes that are coming our way will profoundly alter not only how we live, but even how we conceive of ourselves, how we think about the world, and how we see the future. And not only will we have to learn to cope with severe disruption to our conception of ourselves and the world, but we will also need to forge a new vision of the world that we can live by. Where will that vision come from?

The larger context for the Transition movement, of course, is that all communities are in transition, whether we realize it or not, whether there is a formal Transition Initiative present or not—and so are all cultures, all nations, and all institutions. We are in a transition as a species, even as a planet in a larger Universe. Of course the outcome of this great Transition is profoundly uncertain and unpredictable, perhaps even unknowable. But this is what we’re all preparing for.

Awareness-Raising

We will need to tell and retell the story of how we got into this predicament. It would be the story of the rise of the Industrial Growth Society, and how it has deeply wounded every single human living today, and how it has devastated the entire biosphere. It would be the story of how we’re learning that the Industrial Growth Society—in the form of economic globalization—is the culprit that has been pushing us to the brink of The Long Emergency, the brink of economic collapse, even the brink of civilization’s collapse.

It is this deeply dysfunctional mindset—insane, really—from which we must all learn to decolonize, recover and heal. That’s a process that’s going to take a while. But it won’t happen at all unless there are those of us who are holding that possibility, holding the space for healing and regeneration.

One of the key roles of Transition that sets it apart from other efforts is a commitment to continually raise awareness about our collective predicament. We’re sometimes criticized for this. I find it very helpful that Gus Speth recounts that in The Death of Environmentalism the authors remind us that Martin Luther King, Jr., did not proclaim, “I have a nightmare.” Speth’s incisive reply to them is that “King did not need to say it—his people were living a nightmare. They needed a dream. But we, I fear, are living a dream. We need to be reminded of the nightmare ahead. Here is the truth as I see it: we will never do the things that are needed unless we know the full extent of our predicament.”

I believe that our Transition initiatives need to be dedicated to informing our communities about the full extent of our predicament, and that we must not shrink from this task.

TOWARDS AN AMERICAN TRANSITION

There are now 77 officially-recognized Transition Initiatives in the U.S., along with 17 in Canada (and none in Mexico). But this is a nation of some 300 million people. Canada has about 35 million.

The UK claims 170 officially-recognized Initiatives, with a population of just over 60 million. Granted, the movement in the UK has been ongoing for a couple of years longer than in the U.S., but the rate of adoption does seem noticeably slower here. To approach a similar level, we’d need to somehow get to nearly 400 official Initiatives over the next 18 months. That would be truly extraordinary growth, and I’d really like to see that happen.

Sadly, however, the rate of adoption in the U.S. seems to be slowing. Transition is hardly a household word in this country, and mainstream media have given the movement scant attention. What’s happening here?

I don’t know if ever there will emerge a coherent and robust and truly viral Transition movement in this nation. I do know that we need it urgently. But today the movement here seems to me to be somewhat fragmented. Surely there are very inspiring and important things going on in a number of communities—as in Sandpoint, Idaho—and truly I’m grateful for all of that. But in several other communities, the effort for relocalization has already essentially stalled. For many, it just seems too difficult, too big a challenge.

But we need Transition to work here, especially in this nation—because the U.S. is ground zero for The Long Emergency. We are the world’s largest user of fossil fuels. With less than five percent of the world’s population, we burn about 25 percent of the world’s oil (two-thirds of which we have to import). We are also the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for at least 25 percent of the total. Some would have us believe that China is the biggest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions, but this ignores the fact that much of what China produces is for consumption in the U.S. In fact, one-third of the world’s industrial products come to the U.S.

We are the world’s most significant contributor to fossil fuel depletion, and environmental degradation, and global warming. And now, with the entire globalized economy based on the U.S. dollar, which is based on an abundant supply of cheap oil, we are also the world’s greatest contributor to economic decline—which is likely to soon become economic collapse, or at least long-term economic depression.

Make no mistake, the U.S. is the belly of the beast. Given this situation, it’s hardly surprising that it’s very challenging to get Transition to catch fire here. There may be no other nation on the planet where denial and greed are more deeply rooted.

I appreciate the assessments of David Orr at Oberlin College, who observes, “Conventional wisdom maintains that we are slowly recovering from a recalcitrant recession. As we are now entering at least the third year of real economic contraction, continue to reel from the predations and corruption in a financial sector the federal government treats as sacrosanct, are in the sixth year of a plateau in worldwide oil extraction, and climate change is essentially unmitigated, it should be obvious that American society is arrantly unsustainable—ecologically, fiscally, economically, politically, and ethically… We’ve got a whole culture locked in the first stage of Abraham Maslow’s five stages of human development: infantile self-gratification.”

But we have a unique history and heritage here in the U.S., and in many ways a painful legacy, and all this needs to deeply inform our approach to Transition.

Geologian Thomas Berry helps us to understand our particular predicament here:

When we came to this continent, we saw ourselves as a people with the most sublime spiritual insights… as the most intellectual people of the world… as people with the most human political traditions of the world, with our democratic political commitment; as a people, through our technologies, most able to deal with the daily needs of the world for food, clothing, and shelter. Now, after four centuries we find the North American continent toxic in its air, its water, and its land and gravely diminished in the variety and abundance of its living forms. We must ask ourselves what happened? The answer is simply that we have lost our awareness that the human community exists only as a component of the larger Earth community. Instead of an intimate presence on an abundant continent that could inspire our minds and imaginations while providing for our practical needs, we became a predator people on an innocent continent.

The North American continent will never again be what it once was. The manner in which we have devastated the continent has never before occurred… It is clear that there will be little development of life here in the future if we do not protect and foster the living forms of this continent. To do this, a change must occur deep in our souls. We need our technologies, but this is beyond technology. Our technologies have betrayed us.

What we are learning is that what has gotten us into our collective predicament is a deep disconnection from the natural world, from life itself. And this separation between humans and the earth and the fundamental processes of life is nowhere more dramatic or more devastating than right here in the U.S.

“You and I are not people who live in communion with the earth,” says Chellis Glendinning. “We exist instead dislocated from our roots by the psychological, philosophical, and technological constructions of our civilization, and this alienation leads to our suffering: massive suffering for each and every one of us, and mass suffering throughout our society.”

As Americans, we will need to come to own all of this, to allow it to sink deep into our conscious awareness, and to learn to heal from it together.

TRANSITION IN TRANSITION

In his Cheerful Disclaimer, Rob Hopkins candidly and humbly admits that Transition is a massive social experiment and we really don’t know if it will work. Well, with the stakes as high as they are, I think we need to explore finding the ways to help ensure that it will work, especially here in the U.S.

I want to be very clear here. I do think the Transition model or process is a revolutionary development, one of the most important we’ve seen to date. But we should recognize that Transition itself is now undergoing radical change, one that is most especially needed in the U.S.

The important thing to acknowledge here is that Transition is evolving very quickly—based both on what has been experienced in communities all over the world, and on what is seeking to emerge in and through this movement. You could say that Transition is in transition! And pehaps the most visible sign of this evolution is a radical reframing of the Transition model by Rob Hopkins himself.

To his credit, Rob Hopkins was horrified to see that his early attempts to articulate a Transition process became a sort of catechism for emerging Transition Initiatives, so he is now in the early stages of a valiant attempt to sweep away the rapidly-forming accretions of tradition—how is it possible for a movement to establish “traditions” in a scant four years?—and to replace them with a re-conception of Transition as something called “a pattern language,” following the example of famed architect Christopher Alexander.

Shortly before the international Transition Network conference in England in June, Rob sent out this message, which took many by surprise:

In the interests of promoting non-attachment to ideas and enshrining the principle that none of us really know what we are doing, as encapsulated in the ‘Cheerful Disclaimer’, for the Transition Handbook 2.0, I am taking the original Transition model and throwing it up in the air, using ‘A Pattern Language’ as a way of re-communicating and reshaping it.

With some excitement, we had learned early this year that Rob was heading in this direction. And now we see he is slowly writing the Transition Handbook 2.0, pattern by pattern, on his blog, inviting input and feedback. It’s a very ambitious and creative project. Not everyone is happy about this reframing, however, including some of Alexander’s long-time students—but it’s on its way nonetheless.

What is the meaning of all this? What is emerging in the Transition movement? And what is all this about Pattern Language?

I can only point to this in the briefest way here, but let me give you a few thoughts from Christopher Alexander himself that give us a clue to this very rich understanding. Just let this wash over you—like poetry:

The specific patterns out of which a community is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in inner conflict.

The more living patterns there are in a place, the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.

And when a community has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself—the quality that cannot be named.

To work our way towards a shared and living language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.

We may then gradually improve these patterns which we share, by testing them against experience: we can determine, very simply, whether these patterns make our communities live, or not, by recognizing how they make us feel…

So, pattern language is about discovering the inherent patterns that bring aliveness, wholeness and healing to our communities. This is potentially an extremely potent development for the Transition movement, for underlying the Transition process is the healing impulse. In fact, it’s the same impulse that’s underlying Permaculture.

It’s been hard for us to find the ways to talk about this. But just at the moment we’re exploring a deeper integration between the principles of Permaculture and Transition, we’re discovering just how extraordinary Alexander’s contribution really is. Here’s an excerpt, adapted from A New Theory of Urban Design:

Let us consider what kind of process might be needed to let a community become gradually whole.

In nature, the inner laws which make a growing whole are, of course, profound and intricate…

What happens in the community, happens to us. If the process fails to produce wholeness, we suffer right away. So, somehow, we must overcome our ignorance, and learn to understand the community as a product of a huge network of processes, and learn just what features might make the cooperation of these processes produce a whole.

We must therefore learn to understand the laws which produce wholeness in the community…

The process is a single process because it has only one aim: quite simply, to produce wholeness, everywhere…

Now all this may seem rather mystical, even spiritual. Well, perhaps it is. We eventually discover that what Alexander is pointing to is that wholeness and connectedness and aliveness and sacredness and holiness are all one seamless unfolding evolutionary process.

In the UK, this bold re-conception is being delivered under the banner of “Assembling Transition” and Hopkins has taken to call the patterns he has identified as “Transition Ingredients”—as if Transition is some sort of recipe to follow, a kind of cake we can just cook up! Unwittingly, Hopkins may be condemning Transition to the same kind of fate that has befallen a mechanistic view of Nature and the Universe.

Language matters here. It’s not trivial. Brian Swimme laughs at earlier scientists who imagined that the Universe had somehow been assembled from parts—and imagined that the human had no integral connection with the process. As I delve deeper into all this, I find myself suspecting that Rob may be ignoring the deeper aspects of Christopher Alexander’s work.

THE EMERGENCE OF DEEP TRANSITION

One of the core principles of Permaculture has to do with valuing what’s happening at the edges of a system. As David Holmgren says, “The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.”

For the last two years, we’ve been exploring some of these edges at Genesis Farm in Northwest New Jersey, where—after thirty years as a center for the study of Earth Literacy and “The Great Work” of Thomas Berry—Sister Miriam MacGillis has opened the door to a profound exploration of how to help foster the Transition movement in this land, how to regain within it with the sense of sacred energy revealed through the story of the emergence of the Universe itself and the evolution of our own Earth, and how to cultivate a truly bioregional context for reinventing and relocalizing our way into the future (in other words, becoming native to our place).

At Genesis Farm, in a rich and deeply supportive environment, working with Miriam MacGillis, Seanna Ashburn (another Transition Trainer), and others, we’ve held dialogues, presentations, and an ongoing series of two- and three-day workshops for Transition leaders.

Out of this exploration, several key themes have emerged:

Seriousness and urgency. First, there is a growing and indisputable recognition that our collective predicament is far more serious and more urgent than many of us had been willing to actively contemplate. This is being increasingly reflected in the larger Transition movement, sometimes to the apparent dismay of its founders. Part of the discomfort, of course, is the unavoidable recognition that, as John Michael Greer tells us, the situation we face is not a problem that can be solved, but a predicament of our own making to which we must now quickly adapt. It’s very important to name our predicament, and to name and express how it’s impacting us, what we are feeling about all this.

And with this comes the realization that while the long-term Energy Descent Action Planning process is essential in our communities, we must also quickly develop short-term plans to respond to likely near-term events—things like breakdowns in food or fuel supply chains, or a sudden collapse of the stock market, or a weather catastrophe, or even a widespread health crisis. Richard Heinberg has been pleading for this kind of emergency planning for years now as a core part of every resilience program. Few in this country have listened, and now time is very short.

Emergence. Second, we’re beginning to learn about Emergence—or what Christopher Alexander calls “Unfolding,” the evolutionary process by which the universe itself self-organizes, finding profound and practical lessons in how to catalyze Transition in our communities. We’re in the process of learning about what is emerging in the Transition movement itself. In our communities, we’re learning about what it is that’s wanting to emerge there, far beyond our hopes and fears and desires. And in ourselves, we’re discovering what it is that’s wanting to emerge in us—and through us.

Self-organization. Third, in a closely-related way, we’re also beginning to learn the meaning of “self-organization,” which is actually a core principle of Transition, though little discussed. We’re discovering that catalyzing self-organization of a community around relocalization or Transition is entirely different from community organizing!

Permaculture principles and ethics. We’re also beginning to understand how essential the principles and ethics of Permaculture are to the Transition process. These have not been translated very explicitly into the Transition literature, and yet they are fundamental to Transition. This translation will become increasingly important over time, because Permaculture is based on a very deep understanding of how life works.

New Cosmology/Universe Story. We’re also diving deep into the story of the evolution of the Universe, of the Earth, and of life itself. As Thomas Berry explains, this New Cosmology “explores the contemporary, scientific story of the origin, nature and function of the Universe from its beginning, through its galactic phase, its supernova events, the shaping of the solar system, Earth, life, human life and self-reflective consciousness as a single, unbroken series of events.” It’s often framed in terms of “Earth Literacy,” because we humans are so illiterate about the place where we live and how we got here. But the New Cosmology is helping us to recover our sense of the sacredness of life itself, and our fundamental connectedness with the processes that make life possible.

When people hear the word “cosmology” they sometimes automatically think that it’s somehow religious. But in reality it’s based on a very deep understanding of science, the story of the evolution of the Universe. And, surprisingly, it brings us to a profound sense of the sacredness of life.

This perspective is even embedded in the Preamble to the Earth Charter, which says: “We are part of a vast, evolving universe. Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life.” This is not a mere metaphor.

In an interview with Derrick Jensen, Creation Spirituality’s Matthew Fox says, “I maintain that the best, most profound mystical literature today is coming out of science. The new creation story is that everything—each of us—is mystery. What we’re finding is that the smallest part of the atom is mystery. It’s dancing. And then of course the macrocosm is a mystery. In the previous scientific worldview, mystery was ‘just what we don’t know yet. We’ll solve it.’ It’s not that way. Death is not something you solve. Love is not something you solve. A broken heart is not something you solve. It’s something you experience. It’s Moses on the mountain. Moses had his experience with the burning bush. We’re learning that every bush is a burning bush, burning with photons and photosynthesis and this amazing cosmic process that was invented a few billion years ago, a process that goes back to the original fireball.” This perspective is deeply enlivening!

Pattern Language. As an important adjunct to the New Cosmology, we’re beginning to discover the importance of the patterns of evolution itself—and patterns of wholeness and healing. That’s certainly possible with Rob Hopkin’s infusion of Christopher Alexander’s extraordinary work into the Transition process. We’ll see. What’s happening at Genesis Farm is we’re finding that our understanding of how Transition works and how real community works are being radically reshaped by our understanding of how the Universe itself evolves, how life evolves and how life works.

Inner Transition/Heart & Soul. Finally, we’re beginning to appreciate the centrality of Inner Transition, what is frequently called “Heart & Soul” work in the Transition movement, a recognition that Transition in the outer world cannot occur without an Inner Transition. Holding the space for this—including the psychology of change; the whole broad field of ecopsychology;  dealing with grief, anger and despair; and Joanna Macy’s “Work that Reconnects”—is to me one of the most refreshing and endearing aspects of the Transition movement. This may turn out to be a more powerful attractor to the movement than the issues of peak oil, climate change, and economic decline!

As Sophy Banks in Totnes reminds us, “Part of the human condition is an experience of inner woundedness or brokenness. We want to be whole again, and some part of us knows how to do that. We yearn for wholeness and integration.” And her partner, Naresh Giangrande, says, “Transition work is a manifestation of the healing impulse. We’re making a plea to bring love into Transition.” These things are not often openly stated in the Transition movement, but they are being uttered in Heart & Soul groups that are meeting even in the most unexpected places.

It’s a long and intense process, but we’re beginning to see (and communicate) how the New Cosmology, the Universe Story, Permaculture, Heart & Soul, and Christopher Alexander’s work are very closely related—and how they’re just beginning to land together in the Transition movement. What this means, to me, is that we’re finally beginning to understand Transition itself as an evolutionary process, one of the most intriguing and promising processes to emerge on this planet! And it’s all absolutely integral with the 13.7 billion year process of the unfolding of the Universe—which of course is a continuing emergent unfolding.

In short, at Genesis Farm we’re beginning to catalyze the infusion into Transition of new perspectives and leading-edge processes that are absolutely necessary in order for Transition to be ultimately successful. The emergence of these new perspectives is encouraging and inspiring. To me, these are all signs that Transition is working.

TOWARDS DEEP TRANSITION

Alastair McIntosh gives us some wonderful context for all this in his book, Hell and High Water, where he writes about climate change (but he could just as well be speaking of our total predicament). He says, “To mitigate climate change—and even to adapt to its consequences—without losing our humanity, there needs to be a radical reactivation of our inner lives.”

He continues, “Inner climate affects outer climate because inner hubris drives outer hubris in a spiral of mindless economic frenzy.” That’s very powerful!

“I perversely hold out hope for humanity,” he says, “not in spite of global warming, but precisely because it confronts us with a wake-up call to consciousness. Answering that call of the wild to the wild within us all invites outer action matched by inner transformation.”

And that’s part of what we’ve been attempting to cultivate at Genesis Farm. We’re exploring these things out of a deep and urgent sense that these perspectives, these tools and processes will be absolutely essential for Transition leaders as we move into a very uncertain future.

We’re finding that this perspective about the inner work is fundamental to Transition, and opens the door to what we’ve begun calling Deep Transition.

While these things may not be a “traditional” part of the Transition orientation, Deep Transition represents an opening where breakthrough understandings and processes can readily emerge and make significant contributions. After all, since no one anywhere has yet successfully relocalized a community, it is quite likely that approaches both ancient and new will be needed.

As David Orr says, industrial civilization destroys communities. And at its core, Transition is about healing and regenerating community. This is deep and profound work, and it is the very epicenter of the Transition process, even though we haven’t talked about it publicly very much—yet.

This is what Alistair McIntosh calls the Cycle of Belonging—where we help one another to re-member what has been dismembered, to re-vision how things could alternatively be, and then organize to re-claim what is needed to regenerate and heal community. This Cycle of Belonging offers meaning and direction in generating the responsibility necessary for community regeneration and healing.

But in the long run, I feel our Transition efforts may not be sustainable or resilient or self-reliant unless we place the Sacred at the very core of our work and at the center of all our activities.

For Transition is not a movement for bringing about change. Change is coming, with us or without us, whether we want it or not—profound change. Transition is a movement for preparing our communities for the changes that are coming. And our preparation is likely to crumble unless we are able to connect with and cultivate the aliveness, the wholeness, the healing, and the sacredness that underlies the Transition process.

Buried deep in the Transition literature, there is a reference to core principles that should guide the practice of Permaculture and presumably Transition itself. These are not discussed at any great length, but perhaps we can sense that they are fundamental:

• A sustainable human presence on the planet must align its systems with how life works.
• As long as our human culture is based on unsustainable assumptions, those systems will fail.
• A reinvention of a sustainable human culture must be in alignment with the rest of life.
• The laws of life can be seen and experienced in the natural world and many indigenous cultures.

There is aliveness here, and great wisdom. I propose these as foundational principles for Deep Transition.

I remember Christopher Alexander saying that aliveness and wholeness begin with something small. If it’s authentic, truly alive, it spreads or unfolds—often in mysterious ways. It’s eerily contagious, and uncontrollable. This is not something to be “organized.” Instead, it grows—organically. This is as true for a community as it is for an organism.

The challenge for those of us involved in Transition is to be able to see such pockets of aliveness and wholeness in our communities, and to support them, to protect them, to lovingly shine the light of day on them, to cultivate them, to catalyze their replication—and then to see what’s possible and needed next. This is how communities are healed and ultimately made whole.

We’re learning that none of us can make Transition happen in our communities. But we can surely be a catalyst for this emergence. All it takes is seeing what is possible, and beginning right where we are.

I’d like to close with an authentically American perspective, from the late Floyd Red Crow Westerman, speaking from the Native American tradition:

Time evolves and comes to a place where it renews again. There is first a purification time, and then there is renewal time. We are getting very close to this time now.

We were told that we would see America come and go. And in a sense, America is dying—from within—because we forgot the instructions of how to live on Earth. Everything is coming to a time when prophecy and man’s inability to live on Earth in a spiritual way will come to a crossroad of great problems.

It’s our belief that if you’re not spiritually connected to the Earth and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on Earth, it’s likely you will not make it.

I think that’s true for each one of us, for this nation, and for the Transition movement itself. We need to regain and reclaim the sense, as Red Crow proclaims, that everything is spiritual, that this planet, this Universe, this continent, and this movement are all about the Sacred. Perhaps this is ultimately the only thing that will truly ignite the Transition movement in America, and the only thing that will enable this land and its people to fulfill our common destiny.

“Dear Transitioners,

We’ve been floundering in Nottingham with the Energy Descent Action Plan and it was agreed that I write to you to see if you’ve got ideas that would help..

Part of the problem appears to revolves around what we mean by a “plan” – a plan is a way of attempting to shape the future – yet there is also an explicit ethos in the Transition Movement of “letting things go where they will”. “Letting things go where they will” implies accepting that things will unfold in unexpected ways and being flexible to that, taking up unforseen opportunities as they arise and being prepared to abandon unrealistic aspirations along the route. Instead of shaping the future this is about being prepared to be shaped by the future.

The reason this is important in a city is that a city is a large and very complex beast so the number of unexpected connections and developments is much greater than in a village or small town. It follows that the capacity of Nottingham to generate unexpected developments is hugely greater than in Totnes with 1% of our population. For many years Nottingham had a bike industry and pharmaceuticals – both arose unexpectedly in Nottingham – there was nothing special about Nottingham that led to them being here.

Further – it is not clear to us what the Transition Movement means by planning. For those of us who come to this with a mind-set shaped by business planning for project development the EDAPs that we have seen do not appear to be much like planning. A plan has specific, measurable, achievable targets.

It follows that if the plan is intended as serious thinking about how to achieve an adjusted future then, when you write:

“Nottingham will have a network of community garden hubs in each district to support local people grow more of their own food by 2012″

…then you also have to have something like this written two years in advance of this, by 2010…and written by a group with sufficient capacity to actually deliver it (skills, time, money, organisation, mutual trust):

“In Sherwood the community garden hub will be based at the Sherwood Community Centre gardens with an area of one hectare and with a half hectare extension orchard across the road in Woodthorpe Park. The Sherwood hub will employ one garden worker and an outreach worker and will be open 4 days a week including Sundays. Courses on fruit and vegetable growing and permaculture will be available on one day a week organised in conjunction with Brackenhurst College. There will be 20 regular volunteers and a further 30 occasional volunteers and visitor numbers are anticipated as 1,000 per annum. The budget will be £60,000 – a half of this will be fees from courses, one quarter a reducing grant from Nottingham City Council and one quarter from sales of fruit, vegetables and meals cooked in a joint project with the Community Centre…..”

“….In Wollaton the community garden hub will take over and regenerate the walled garden in the park as well as developing a farm animal training centre on the field opposite the lake which will be used as training for broadscale agriculture in conjunction with Jim Rose of Tinker Bells Farm in Hucknall. 3 people will be employed. 30 people will be trained a year in ploughing with animal skills. Pasture/fodder for the horses will be provided on fields at..

continues….

Well, I made all that up. It was complete off the top of my head fantasy. But in a real plan it would not be. It would be based on discussions and agreements and research that your group had done, as in a business plan.  Yes, we do realise that that is much more of a tall order. It is much more ambitious. It would be hard work….but it would be real PLANNING.

The point I am making is that a plan mentions specific places, specific numbers and  specific budgets – and that provides the basis for specific actions. Unless you get down to that level of details and start working through tasks to achieve that you will end up, after a few years, with  reams of paper of all the things that you said that you were going to do and almost none of them will have even been started on. By focusing more specifically in this way you have to GET REAL and actually start project developing specific very small scale projects – instead of writing “visions” that a few years later are still no more than that and produce disillusionment about the group that has created them as being no more than a talking shop.

EDAPs have been around for a few years now – so if we go back and look at how much of the things that were said would happen for years that are now in the past, how much of them have actually happened. If the answer is “not very much” then what conclusions does one draw from this for the process of writing EDAPs!

Any comments please?

Brian – for the Nottingham EDAP Group

******

This is a fascinating area for discussion, and what I am offering here are only thoughts and suggestions, in the hope that it stimulates conversation and debate. So, let’s start from the beginning.  What is an EDAP and why would anyone do one?  ‘Create an Energy Descent Action Plan’ is the 12th of Transition’s 12 Steps, intended as the culmination of the preceding eleven.  The idea is that it is one of the key things that distinguishes Transition from other approaches, that rather than being a disparate assembly of projects, Transition pulls together a range of initiatives and puts them in the wider strategic context of intentionally planning for the relocalisation of the settlement as a whole.  An EDAP is, in essence, a Plan B for the community, a mapping out of how the community might get from here to there.  The reality is though, that although the first thorough EDAP (for Totnes) has just been published, still none of us know, in practical terms, what planning for the intentional powering down and relocalisation of a city will look like in practice.

How might a Transition group know when it is ready to undertake such a project?  It is hard to come up with hard and fast quantifiable criteria such as “when over 10% of people in the community have attended a Transition event” (the Totnes survey showed about 25%), “when over 50%, when surveyed state that the work your Transition initiative is doing is relevant to their lives” (in Totnes it was 61%), or “when over 50% have heard of your initiative” (in Totnes it was 75%).  These criteria would be different for every settlement, although clearly some significant degree of community buy-in and support will be vital.  Undertaking an EDAP does, however, require certain foundations to be in place, including;

• a dedicated group of people for whom creating an EDAP is what fires their passion, is the thing they most want to bring about for the Transition initiative
• good links with as many other organisations in the community as possible (i.e. the local council, schools, other environmental groups, community groups and so on), so the plan can represent their views as much as possible, and get them engaged in its creation
• some dedicated resource for the project, it is an impossible project to pull of with no budget whatsoever (you’ll need to run events, hire rooms and halls, produce materials and so on…)
• strong Transition working groups who can drive forward, collaboratively, their parts of the Plan
• a good level of awareness raising to have been done, so that an EDAP process isn’t constantly having to start from square one every time
• space in the Transition initiative’s programme of events for EDAP to become a theme that runs through it
• good web facilities to enable discussion of ideas, collaborative editing of drafts, promotion of events.

Creating the Totnes EDAP, an Energy Descent Plan covering a settlement of 8,500 people and its surrounding catchment of around 23,000 people was a big undertaking.  It required around 2o months of time, a full time paid co-ordinator, additional funding for design and printing, and the voluntary efforts of many people.  I think that what we have produced is an unprecedented piece of work, something with much that can be replicated in other settlements of a similar size (we learnt a lot doing that will be of use to other communities).  A good example of a mini-EDAP, or what was termed a ‘pre-DAP’, can be seen in Transition Forest Row’s ‘Forest Row in Transition’ document, done in a short period of time as a vision document.  I am less confident, however, that the EDAP model, as currently imagined, transfers across intact as an approach,  to, say, Bristol or Leeds, and here are some thoughts as to why.

1. Can Community-led plans ever be comprehensive?

Can communities be expected to cover all the bases that such a plan would require?  One of the things I have done in the PhD I am doing (nearing completion) is to take the Resilience Indicators developed in the Totnes EDAP and drop them into a table generated by Liz Cox at New Economics Foundation of indicators for a sustainable economy.  What emerges is that Resilience Indicators generated by a community (well, Totnes at least) tend to fall within the columns that relate to economics, local resilient infrastructure and so on, and not in governance, social enterprise and interdependence (seeing the wider picture) – these things fall, at least in the case of Totnes, outside of a community’s interests/expertise, yet they are essential to an effective and comprehensive response.

They are areas that are usually the domain of Council planners, enterprise agencies, businesses and so on.  The Totnes EDAP is the community’s plan, reflective of the passions and interests of those that get involved in the process, but how it now intertwines with Council policy remains to be seen, that will be the focus of TTT’s work over the next few months. Might it be that for cities, effective and comprehensive plans of this nature will require the Transition initiative to work together with its local Council, and with other organisations with some of the other expertise lacking within the Transition group?

2. Do cities and towns develop differently?

A few months ago I sat at Birmingham New Street Station with Andy Goldring of the Permaculture Association, discussing this whole question of what EDAP might look in the urban context.  A town like Totnes, every few years, goes through a planning process, where it looks forward over the next 10 years, and plans how it might develop, where to put new homes, services and so on.  Cities, on the other hand, are continually re-inventing themselves, pulling bits of themselves down and rebuilding them, constantly changing and shifting; as Brian puts it in his email “cities are large and complex beasts”.  On a recent visit to Bristol, I sat by the Arnolfini looking across the docks, realising that since I was 16 and used to sit there, virtually all that I could see has been rebuilt.  Andy’s point was that cities are in a process of continual redevelopment, and rarely get the opportunity to sit and plan in the way towns do. In this context, might the role of urban Transition groups be to try, as skillfully as possible, to try and input to, and influence, the process that is already in place, inputting information, vision and the community engagement Transition does so well?

3.  Are we talking about a Plan or a Vision?

As Brian points out, there is a tension between producing a Plan, and producing a Vision.  He warns of visions as things which “a few years later are still no more than that and produce disillusionment about the group that has created them as being no more than a talking shop”.  In creating the Totnes EDAP, we deliberated long and hard about this.  We didn’t want to create something that was purely a vision, something that was a long prose piece about carparks turned into allotments and how quiet everything was and everyone has a spring in their step, nor did we feel able to create something that was a hard and fast plan of the kind Brian outlines above.

What we created in the end was neither, and yet both at the same time.  Although it is called a Plan, I think of the Totnes EDAP as being more like a story.  It starts with a vision, and then backcasts from that.  It sets out, sequentially, the things that individuals can do, the community can do, and the local council can do.  It is clear though, that as a Transition initiative, we can’t make all these things happen.  What we can do is to create a vision that is sufficiently inspiring, enticing, yet also achievable, that it begins to inform the culture of the town as a way forward.  It tells a new story of the future of Totnes in a way that is far more appealing than the future being told by the Council and other organisations.

As a follow-up to the publication of the Plan, TTT’s next step is not to undertake to implement the EDAP in its entirety.  We don’t have the resources, and our role is project support, catalysing others to develop projects, businesses, community responses.  Rather, we hope to create a post focusing on social enterprise, supporting people to make new businesses and livelihoods from the plan, and enabling them to get to the stage of being investment ready.  In parallel to this, there will be a process of trying to work with the local council to embed it in their work, and also spreading it out among the community.  The Totnes EDAP is a lot more than just a vision, but the vision side of it is also critical.

Given these considerations, might we then start to sketch out some options as to how an urban Transition group might best start to approach an EDAP, or something resembling an EDAP?  Here are a few possible models;

1. A Transition initiative-led planning process, like the Totnes EDAP, but which, in the city context, focuses on the neighbourhood scale.  It takes the role of gathering visions from across the community and then backcasting how to achieve it.  It identifies new areas for food production (like the excellent Sow and Grow report recently published in Glasgow), proposes a range of initiatives and projects that could revitalise and build resilience in the community, with a particular focus on a vision for the area and for practical initiatives which, with some support, the Transition initiative could enable.  This ‘A Transition Vision for [insert name of place]‘ could be something that feeds into the wider planning process, as well as galvanising a range of projects.

2. A Council-led process with Transition intervention. Here, the Transition intiative would work at doing what Transition does best, catalysing at the neighbourhood level, while also engaging the local authority, perhaps first pressing for a peak oil resolution (like Nottingham City Council did) and then for a follow up exploring what this means for the city.  The best example of this is the Bristol Peak Oil report, commissioned by Bristol City Council and written by some members of Transition City Bristol.  This is now an official document, and can start to inform wider planning decisions. In this version, the Transition group pressures to get peak oil and resilience recognised as Council objectives, and then feeds into planning processes, in the same way that Transition Stroud have been inputting into their local council’s food policy.  This is a process that, in more enlightened Councils, could begin with the kind of visioning exercise that Transition Taunton Deane did with their local authority.  The danger, of course, with this approach, is that with an unresponsive local authority, this could be an enormous drain of energy and source of frustration.

3. A collaborative once-off project, with input from local authority, Transition initiative, academics.  A brilliant yet intensely frustrating example of this is the San Buenventura Post Oil Plan, from California, produced by the local authority, with input from academics, transport engineers, architects and planners. An amazing example of visioning and planning done by professionals, but almost entirely lacking in input from the communities affected. Had it been something with input from the local Transition initiatives/community groups, it could have been a very different piece of work.  I wish the Totnes EDAP, for example, had had input from the team behind the San Buenaventura document…

This could either be part of, or run alongside, more conventional planning documents.  Transition would bring the community engagement part (it could perhaps provide that as a paid service to the local authority) and a wealth of other insights, academics could bring a research side to it and Councils could bring the policy side of things, as well as engineering, highways and a range of other input.  The skillful part here is going to be around how these three, culturally very different, bodies talk to each other and collaborate on such a scale.  Facilitation would be key. This would, with such diverse engagement, be more able to be a ‘plan’ in the way that Brian refers to.

I may well, of course, be entirely wrong, and several city groups could be on the verge of publishing amazing EDAPs (I’d love to hear from you…).  In terms of ‘Let It Go Where It Wants to go” though, perhaps the absence of completed EDAPs out there, in cities as well as elsewhere, perhaps indicates the time is right for reflection on this.  I think the principle of creating a story/vision/plan is still central, and I think the Totnes EDAP offers lots of useful indicators for how this might be, but I hope this discussion will generate some focused thinking on next steps.

The three suggestions above are really just starters for discussion.  There may be hybrids between them, or entire other approaches we haven’t yet thought of. I asked Ben Brangwyn at Transition Network for his thoughts, and he allowed himself a flight of fancy, unconstrained by budgetary restraints (!), speculating as to what an EDAP for London might look like in an idealised scenario….

As a baseline document to form the foundation of the EDAP process, for me it would be London’s Carbon Reduction Plan created under Ken Livingston, expanded to cover peak oil and economic resilience and accompanied by;

1. the research that is starting to emerge within the government ministries that’s starting with a common language/understanding for discussing community-led change potential in a volatile world
2. a listing of all of civil society’s groups that could potentially get involved in delivering analysis and actual change
3. an analysis of the city’s disparity of wealth (and some mitigation suggestions) by the Equity Trust
4. a comprehensive list of social enterprises that could arise from this, produced by a combination of Ashoka’s orthogonal thinkers, Unlimited and the School for Social Entrepreneurs
5. a permaculture design team to apply these principles to the all aspects of the baseline document and finally, a bunch of rappers, celloists, fine and graffiti artists to create a non-static art installation that tugs on the heartstrings and inspires engagement among the young and old alike.

This will certainly be a question I will be bringing to the Open Space discussions at this year’s Transition Network conference (coming soon… get your booking in!), and want to then explore further with people who know more about this.  Anyway, some opening thoughts.. anyone want to comment?

[Rob Hopkins delivered this talk in Totnes on May 5, marking the publication of the long-awaited Energy Descent Action Plan.]

3 years, 119 days ago, or 3 years, 8 months and a day ago if you prefer, 400 of us gathered here in this hall to “Unleash” what we had just decided to call “Transition Town Totnes.” It was an extraordinary evening which I am sure some of you will remember. Since then, TTT has grown to become a powerful force in this community. The survey done for this Plan found that 75% of households had heard of TTT, 61% felt that the work of TTT reflected their concerns, and over a third have had some degree of practical engagement with it. It has brought over £¾m into Totnes, most notably with its Transition Streets programme which is now underway across Totnes, which will, among other things, turn this very building into a solar power station. At the Unleashing, we committed to work towards the creation of an EDAP for Totnes and district, and today, here it is.

We are launching this plan the day after a General Election during which environmental issues and climate change largely dropped off the agenda. In the rush to tell the population that everything will be alright again soon, climate change and peak oil, and the intimate link between cheap energy and economic growth, became the tiara-ed, tutu-clad elephant dancing wildly in the corner. It now appears that the largest vote went to a party whose candidates rank climate change 19th out of 19 issues, who are committed to reducing on-shore wind, who advocate increased North Sea drilling and many of whom are avowed climate sceptics, and who failed to set out any targets for emissions reductions.

Yet climate change has not gone away. March was the warmest March on record, and scientists around the world are observing feedbacks which were only predicted in the worst case scenarios, and weren”t meant to happen for many years. Arctic ice melting at an alarming rate, oceans warming and becoming more acidic, soils starting to release carbon rather than absorb it, methane being released as the permafrost melts. As Joseph Romm put it, “if we fail to act in time, it will be the single biggest regret any of us has at the end of our lives”.

A slew of recent reports, from organisations as diverse as the US Joint Forces Command, the UKERC and Richard Branson argue that we are close to or at the peak in world oil production. Petrol at the pumps in the UK is now the most expensive it has ever been and the Gulf of Mexico oil slick shows the perils of deep sea oil production, reinforcing the fact that we are only drilling there and unleashing the horror that is Tar Sands production on the world and the climate, because the easier oil is all but gone. Similarly, the global debt bubble is now bursting, Greece being the first nation, but this unravelling of the results of years of reckless partying at future generations” expense has, it would appear, only just begun.

But in TTT, we do not look at this as a time for gloom and doom, rather as an opportunity for creativity, optimism, entrepreneurship. Our approach is to look these challenges square in the face. We cannot hide, and these times demand our creativity. Transition is about the application of “engaged optimism” to figuring out where we go from here. We argue that the end of cheap and easy energy means more than just lightbulb changing and recycling. It means a shift of our focus from globalisation to a world which is “intensely and inherently local”. As the recent Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name showed, we are highly vulnerable to any disruption to our just-in-time systems. A week of no planes, and Kenyan farmers have no export markets and we have no out-of-season produce.

But rebuilding an economy that can support us here, vibrant local agriculture, renewable energy systems that we own and benefit from, energy efficient housing that utilises local materials, more local and meaningful employment, these are not the things of some Luddite retreat to the caves, but the foundations of a resilient economy more adapted to the times. Totnes is uniquely placed to achieve this. We are big enough for it to work, but small enough to be able to do it quickly, and as TTT has shown, what we start here can spread elsewhere incredibly rapidly and virally. Totnes emerges from the survey as a skilled, optimistic and adaptable community. Totnes as model that inspires the future direction of humanity? Why not?

And so to the EDAP. I am so proud of this document. I am so proud of everyone who brought it into being. It has been an extraordinary process, one, like much of what we do in Transition, that we have had to make up on the hoof. Although it is called a Plan, I see it more and more as a story. After all, who are we to write a step-by-step plan? What we have created here is one story of how we could do this. It is rich with research and data, the facts and figures that we will need. More importantly, it tells a story that starts in the 1950s, the last time this community had less food, less energy, and was more localised. The stories we have drawn together from oral history interviews tell of a more resilient, local world, from which we can learn a great deal. The future may or may not turn out as we have described it, but this is an invitation to make this part of your story.

This must not be a plan that gathers dust on a shelf. TTT is committed to driving this forward and to making it happen. Already Dartington Hall Trust have started a Land Review process into which TTT is inputting, to see if the Estate”s land can be refocused to meeting the diversity of local needs, and Sharpham Estate is also engaging enthusiastically with this process. The ATMOS project is seeking to bring the Dairy Crest site into community ownership. TRESOC is nearly ready to go. The EDAP is not a fantasy, it captures what is already underway. We have new eco-school at Dartington, and KEVICC is moving forward with great enthusiasm. In our survey, 66% of people stated they felt confident in growing food. We have the School for Social Entrepreneurs here now, teaching people the skills they need to turn these ideas into livelihoods. We can do this. This EDAP sets out our vision for Totnes and shows that it is possible.

Finally I want to thank one person. Jacqi Hodgson. The fact that this community”s visions, ideas, inspirations and research have been drawn together into this EDAP

has been due almost entirely to Jacqi. Her dedication has been extraordinary. Her professionalism, and her determination that this would be published, and that it would be wonderful, is entirely down to Jacqi. As we move away from oil, energy such as that which Jacqi has poured into this project is what we need to replace it with.

I want to be able to hand this world, and this beautiful, quirky, stubborn, creative and unique town onto my children with a twinkle in my eye, rather than the deep regret Joseph Romm referred to. This Plan sets out how we can do it, and I hope you take it to your hearts, make it yours, and help us make history here that will be the subject of the songs and stories of the Totnesians of the future. Thank you.

Vermont was pretty sparsely populated then. Still is. The state capital (Montpelier) is the smallest in the nation, and its population of 620,000 or so ranks 49th among US states. And with large tracts of forest lands, farms, abundant water, fertile river bottoms, a reasonably agreeable climate (if you ignore Mud Season), and a long tradition of local democracy that breeds a healthy blend of independence and interdependence, Vermont makes a darned good place to transition to a post-carbon world.

And, fortunately, some hardy Vermonters are doing just that. Last weekend, Post Carbon Institute stopped by their first-ever meeting of Transition Town leaders: 50 Vermonters from 17 different localities like Putney, Manchester, and the former mining town of Hardwick—the darling of Gourmet, The Town That Food Saved, and Dan Rather(!). Joining the fun were another dozen leaders from New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Long-time PCI supporter Carl Etnier (Peak Oil activist and prolific radio host), herbalist Annie McCleary, and naturalist George Lisi a team of Transition organizers coordinated the meeting including Barbarina Heyerdahl, Bill Laberge, Kye Cochran, Annie Galliard, Paul Levasseur, Kathryn Blume and others hosted this Transition “family gathering,” with an eye toward amplifying the impact of individual Transition Town efforts across Vermont’s 255 towns, cities, and “gores” (don’t ask).

We also met the leaders of the highly successful agricultural education project Shelburne Farms, which has a close relationship with Transition Shelburne, which is led by other friends of PCI, including Ron Miller. Miller, along with other PCI friends, catalyzed Energy Action Now, which is bringing a diverse set of stakeholders together to set Vermont on a path to 100% renewable energy by 2030. That, in turn, should create a more supportive environment for endeavors like AllEarth Renewables, run by PCI supporter David Blittersdorf.

You get the idea: Vermont is the kind of place where neighbors know (and help) neighbors, the scale of change seems manageable, and quite a few transition pieces are already being put into place. Add in progressive and complimentary efforts like a state-wide feed-in tariff for alternative energy, “Cow Power” from six methane digesters, and leaders like PCI Fellows Bill McKibben, Bill Ryerson, and Josh Farley, and Vermont just might have the capacity to take post-carbon living—and living well—to scale.

Sure, Vermont is an outlier in many respects. After all, much of New England is essentially park land, with relatively few extractive or heavily polluting industries, and the region’s demographics and economy don’t reflect the nation as a whole. But Vermont has its challenges as well: long winters, limited crop choices, widely dispersed communities…it’s by no means an ideal location. No place ever is or will be.

But Vermonters are showing how to bloom where they’re planted…well, at least bloom from April to October, and live carefully the rest of the year.

With the economic instability, political upheavals, a looming environmental and energy crisis, advances in technology and genetic engineering, one thing is clear: We are living in a time of great change and uncertainty. These systemic changes can have many implications on our personal lives in ways that we can’t possibly predict.

Simultaneously, many of us have awakened to a broader awareness and sense a deeper meaning for our lives. From this place, we are inspired to pursue our greater potential and positively impact the world. So we may vacillate between feeling hope and optimism for new possibilities, and a pervading sense of anxiety that the security we counted on is ephemeral. Many of us experience this directly around the challenges we face with finding work that is aligned with our emerging selves and in receiving the financial means we desire.

We are no longer willing to simply commit our lives to working at a job we don’t find meaningful. Making the money and postponing our fulfillment till somewhere down the road is no longer satisfying. We want more, and we realize that life is too short to be wasting our time. It is true that we may take a job that is less than ideal to make ends meet temporarily, but we intuit that it is not sustainable for us in the longer term. It’s too big of a compromise of who we are and what we know we are capable of.

This path towards creating a career that is both an expression of our purpose and one that provides the financial means for a nourishing lifestyle, can often feel like a lonely journey with no clear destination in sight. Whether you have a well paying job and want more fulfillment, or you are clear on your purpose but are unable to support yourself through its expression, it often feels like a challenge that we are unable to overcome. We have come to a place that we know we are missing a big opportunity that is right in front of us, but it feels just a little too far out to grasp.

An opportunity for what? An opportunity to discover and co-realize a way in which we can make a living through living our purpose. You are not alone in the challenges that you are facing. Nor are you alone in the hope that you feel, although at times it may seem like a distant light on the horizon. Together we can bring about a new way of approaching work in our world. A way in which our gifts and talents we each possess are the source of value from which we create abundance for ourselves and our community. A way in which our work is an expression of our highest values. A way of working together that collectively creates that which we most long for. A way that we can have both the means and the meaning. The way of Liberation Economics.

Liberation is about freedom that is not dependent upon external circumstances. Instead of feeling limited or confined by financial concerns, we can use economics as a tool to support us in living our purpose and creating greater freedom in our lives. What we need is a new vision of work that is driven by intrinsic motivation, acts as a reflection of our practice, and creates greater abundance in our lives as we consciously participate in the evolution of our society and the preservation of our planet. But we can’t afford to wait for someone else to create this vision. We are the change we’ve been waiting for. If we want to make the kind of change that truly makes a difference, we need to step into this undertaking as part of our evolutionary obligation living in this time.

The time is right, as the “rules of the game” are changing. Anyone can see that many of the systems by which we have been operating (political, economic, environmental, health, education, religious, etc.) need to change. Why? The ‘old rules’ are obsolete because they are inadequate to address the complexity of our current challenges. Nor are they sufficient for the realization of our new possibilities. What are some of these old rules in relation to work?

• We stay in one profession at a time, and continue trying to advance in that field throughout our lives.
• The work we do is separate from our path of personal growth & development – we work so that we can support our lives. (Hence we need ‘work/life’ balance.)
• The top priority in our lives is to work so that we can make money. And the money that we earn is mostly for what we do and not for who we fully are or what we’re capable of creating.
• Our work is separate from & independent of our environment and community.
• If we choose to do meaningful work, we have to sacrifice financial security
• We need to compete for limited resources in the marketplace, and there’s only so much to go around.

It’s good that the rules need changing. It’s a sign of progress, and also the source of our opportunity. We’ve come to the point where our insights, knowledge and awareness are far beyond how we are individually and collectively showing up day to day. Most of us have had experiences which have revealed to us that we can live our lives with a greater purpose. We have sensed that it is possible to come into a deeper and more harmonious relationship with ourselves, each other, and the whole of existence. We know at some level that it’s possible for us to connect with this greater sense of meaning to move beyond our sense of a separate self, and work for the benefit of each other.

We need to practice embodying these higher principles in ourselves, in our culture and our systems. Because this is what it takes for us to truly be happy and free. As an example: Most of us know that we are not totally independent and can’t live free from relying on and affecting others and our environment. We have the awareness that we are living interconnected lives – with our family, communities, country, & planet. “That which unites us is so much greater than that which divides us.” Yet how can we act & work as if this is really the case? This is also related to our understanding that our current way of living isn’t sustainable for the planet. But there’s a gap between what we know and the choices we make moment to moment. It’s time for us to close this gap. It’s ultimately what we want, and what we are here to do. But how?

We can’t do it by thinking how we’ve always thought and doing what we’ve already been doing. We need something different. And since so much or our time and energy is spent generating our livelihood, the most powerful way that each of us can begin to cause the change we want to see in the world is by creating a new approach to our livelihood that honors what we value and also transcends the current limitations we are feeling. We need to facilitate the emergence of a practice community that collaborates, supports, and even relies on each other to co-create opportunities for all members of the community to make a living through living our purpose.

For this to happen, each of us needs to start by intimately knowing what our purpose is. So how do we do that? Traditionally, we tend to think that each of us has a unique purpose. And that our fulfillment is dependent upon us feeling like we are on the path towards realizing this unique purpose in some way. The surprising insight of Liberation Economics is that we all have a common purpose. This shared purpose is to fulfill our potential, and it’s that potential which is unique to each of us.

An even more powerful realization is that our potential already exists within us right now. It emerges from within as our unique gifts, which include our insights, virtues, talents, skills, ideas, and abilities. Take a moment to let the implications of this distinction really sink in. Our fulfillment no longer depends upon external circumstances. It arises through the ongoing realization of our potential in every aspect of our lives. So that daily life itself becomes the context for our fulfillment.

Once we become clear that our purpose is to fulfill the potential that exists within us, we need to engage a life of practice. Practice is the act of purposefully embodying our potential.

While having an expanded awareness of the potential within us can elicit a sense of new possibility that is inspiring, it is just the first step. For example, we may see the opportunity for generating a livelihood from work that is more fulfilling than what we are currently doing. The next step is to consciously choose this possibility as a potential that we want to fulfill. This is the act of becoming purposeful. Out of this comes an intention for that new livelihood opportunity to emerge.

As we hold this intention, we begin to see things that we have taken for granted as new opportunities. Perhaps we see the possibility to engage our colleagues in a way that’s not just about what we do together at work, but also expresses who we are. In some instances we may act accordingly, but we will also become acutely aware of times when our actions are not aligned with our intentions. And instead of relating to what we notice as problems to solve or insurmountable obstacles, we can now see these moments as opportunities to actualize our potential. This way of practicing is what creates true liberation in our lives.

A ripple effect occurs when we purposefully embodying our potential. This act attracts those that can appreciate the value that we create through our livelihood and it creates an inspiration for them to do the same. When a group of people start engaging with their potential in this way, a community of partners emerges. We honor this group of individuals as a Catalyst Community. This community accelerates the development of each of our individual potentials by collaborating, supporting and relying on each other to co-realize the opportunities for each of us to make a living through living our purpose.

This emergent community needs support and design for it to flourish and grow. We have a strong individuating response to look after our individual interests but through practices we can touch in to the foundational connection that we all share. Communities that engage in practice together have the ability to manifest an emerging potential that can not be realized individually. The obstacles are great in tapping into this emerging potential, but it is the greatest challenge of our time to realize this opportunity to fulfill this potential.

When we realize that the coordination of our partners needs a larger framework for it to flourish and meet the needs of each of our partners, something more complex emerges. We are ready to embrace structure in a way that is no longer inhibiting or oppressing, but actually serves to liberate our greatest potential. The plan that emerges both embraces structure and flexibility, hierarchy and individual needs. With our partners we collaborate on a structure that supports the unfolding of our potential and allows for both a greater freedom and a high level of accountability. This plan denotes what is needed by each of the partners and creates livelihood by fulfilling the actual real needs of our community.

We are grateful for this opportunity to be transparent about our intentions and to invite you to collaborate with us in Liberation Economics.

Sincerely,

Marco Lam and Huy Lam

Transition Whatcom

Transition Whatcom is a community organization whose members believe we must dramatically reduce energy use in response to impending energy resource scarcity and cost, climate change, and economic instability. TW is engaging the community to build resilience—the capacity to provide for our basic needs as we reduce our energy use and dependence on fossil fuels.

From the Transition Whatcom website:

MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR THE GREAT UNLEASHING!

April 10-11, 2010, at Bellingham High School
The Great Unleashing will be a two-day celebration and extravaganza that will motivate, excite, educate and engage our community in coming together to envision a vibrant, resilient, and dramatically less energy-dependent Whatcom County, and will unleash our collective genius as we start working towards a tangible and compelling plan to get us there.

Click here for details on keynote speakers.

Download flyer here.

Below is a powerful video about the upcoming Unleashing event.

The movement is driven by one simple idea: Rather than hand-wringing and lamenting dwindling energy reserves and climate change, Transition wants people to envision and create models for that future — and find much to be cheerful about.

A variety of activities take place under the Transition banner. Scroll around — the movement has had a strong Web presence from the start — and you’ll find numerous farm and food events, tree-planting get-togethers, launching a local currency, campaigns to install Smart Meters (through British Gas’ Green Streets Energy Challenge), and a program in which teenagers interview elderly people to learn about daily life before the era of cheap oil.

“Transition is often seen as an environmental movement, but ultimately it’s about cultural change: enabling the shift from what’s appropriate for the upward net energy curve to what’s appropriate for the downward curve,” says Hopkins, who had been a teacher of permaculture — a holistic design system rooted in ecology — the principles of which underlie Transition.

“[The Transition movement] has become part of the part of the cultural scene, especially in places like Vermont, Oregon and Northern California,” says author and environmentalist Bill McKibben. “When he started this, Rob really understood that people needed to take their worries about the climate and do something practical.”

What began five years ago as a student project on lowering energy use in Kinsale, Ireland, has grown to 273 “official” initiatives in 15 countries, not to mention the thousands of “mullers” (as in thinking about it). The United States now has 55 active Transition initiatives, the latest in San Francisco.

And while many Transition groups are in predominantly liberal areas, others have set up in more conservative areas, such as Houston and Louisville in the United States, as well as in working-class areas like Brixton and Penwith in the United Kingdom. In Penwith, residents’ memory of poverty and knowing that they were last on the supply chain made them receptive to Transition.

The movement remains low profile and unsung. One reason may be that it’s so hard to characterize: Transition is at once local and global, high-tech and down-home, methodical and freewheeling. Awareness of the movement has also been confounded by its original designation of “Transition Town movement,” since a Transition community might be an island (as in Waiheke in New Zealand), city (Los Angeles) or city district (London’s Brixton and Belsize Park). It is now simply referred to as “Transition,” and a Transition group is called an “initiative.”

What follows is a lexicon of Transition terms, which will help explain the movement and where these ideas come from.

Transition: In Hopkins’ words, “Transition” represents “the process of moving from a state of high fossil-fuel dependency and high vulnerability to a state of low fossil-fuel dependency and resilience.” Transition “is not the goal itself — it’s the journey,” he says. Specifically, it’s seeing this journey as an opportunity to embrace rather than a calamity to approach with dread.

“Transition” is predicated on the assumption that society cannot keep consuming energy and other resources at our current pace and that we’re better off accepting this reality and choosing how to adapt rather than letting ourselves get backed into a crisis. The idea is that the adaptation process can harness creative and even joyful possibilities that until now have laid dormant in our towns and cities. As Hopkins has been known to say, “It’s more like a party than a protest march.”

Resilience: A community’s ability to adapt and respond to changes, as well as to withstand shocks to the system, such as disruptions in food or energy supply chains. Resilience differs from “sustainability” in that the emphasis is on community survival as opposed to maintaining the structures and behavioral patterns that currently exist.

“Resilience is the new sustainability,” says Michael Brownlee, a member of the Transition U.S. board and co-founder of Transition Boulder County, the first Transition Initiative in North America. “It’s been co-opted by almost everybody. Everybody is sustainable these days.”

Marketing aside, Hopkins says the two are intertwined: “Sustainability only works if it has resilience embedded in it.”

Energy Descent: The directional change from being on the energy upslope — designing our lives according to the wide availability of cheap energy — to making the most with less. When an individual shifts to lower energy use, this is known as “powering down.” Central to Transition is uniting a community around developing and implementing an “energy descent action plan,” or EDAP, sometimes described as a 20-year “Plan B” for keeping a place functioning and even thriving on a low-fuel diet.

As with all Transition efforts, each EDAP — to date only been a few have been fully developed — reflects the circumstances and flavor of the community it is to serve. Hopkins notes that Transition Town Totnes, the South Devon market town where he lives, will shortly be publishing its EDAP, which he hopes will serve as a template for others.

Unleashing: A community breaking free from its dependence on fossil fuels. A “Great Unleashing,” which takes place when an initiative has the momentum and organization to implement the EDAP, is a big “coming out” party that announces the group’s strategy, commitment and enthusiasm to the broader world.

The Great Unleashing for Idaho’s Transition Sandpoint Initiative in November 2008 drew more than 500 people to the Panida Theater for talks — including one by Mayor Gretchen Heller — music and dance. “The event is designed to be seen historically as the point at which the process began,” says Hopkins. “It’s a celebration of local culture. It’s an event that the next generation will commemorate by putting up a plaque.”

Reskilling: Reclaiming skills that previous generations took for granted but most of us have let fall by the wayside. “The Great Reskilling” refers to the community-wide mastering of skills that will facilitate the process of “powering down.”

For many, this is the entry point. Someone may attend a workshop in, say, sock-darning (now something of a fad in the United Kingdom) or mushroom identification, and begin to question aspects of a throwaway, shrink-wrapped culture. “People have an intuitive understanding that we’re much more vulnerable than our forebears,” says McKibben. “Today we’re so specialized, in that people tend to do one thing well enough to earn money and depend on the larger system to do the rest. People enjoy the feeling of becoming more competent in things.”

The range of reskilling events is vast: coppice forestry, heat masonry, beehive building, intro to beer brewing, 16-brick rocket stoves, nut drinks and butters (kid approved, of course), lye soap-making, making cheese with raw goat’s milk, essential oils for cleaning and healing, “pizza” (circular) weaving, using rain barrels, making your own wooden knitting needles — and these come solely from those posted for my home state of Vermont.

Will Transition culture continue its rise? Will the movement play a role in how people and communities greet the confluence of challenges looming before us?

McKibben thinks it’s likely. “Many people [involved in Transition] are willing to become politically involved,” he says. “In the 350 event — the largest day of mass political action the world has seen — Transition Town people played a large role.”

He notes that while Transition initiatives focus on the local – creating food, energy and economic resilience on a community basis — the connection between global and local is not lost: “No matter how great your organic garden is, it still has to rain sometimes.”

We stand at a critical point in human cultural evolution. Going back to the old normal where peace is just an interval between wars is not an option; what we need is a fundamental cultural transformation.

As Einstein said, we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them. If we think only in terms of the conventional cultural and economic categories—right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, capitalist vs. socialist, and so on—we cannot move forward. What we need is to look at social systems from a new perspective that can help us build not only a nuclear-free world but also the better world we so urgently want and need. I believe we must change our underlying social configuration: We must transition from a system of domination to one of partnership.

My Passion and My Work

I was born in Europe, in Vienna, at a time of massive regression to the domination side of the partnership/domination continuum: the rise of the Nazis, first in Germany and then in my native Austria. So from one day to the next, my whole world was rent asunder. My parents and I became hunted, with license to kill. I watched with horror on Crystal Night—so called because of all the glass that was shattered in Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues—as a gang of Gestapo men broke into out home and dragged my father away. As a little girl, I witnessed brutality and violence.

But I also witnessed something else that night that made an equally profound impression on me: what I today call spiritual courage. We’ve been taught to think of courage as the courage to go out and kill the enemy. But spiritual courage is a much more deeply human courage. It’s the courage to stand up against injustice out of love. My mother could have been killed for demanding that my father be given back to her; many people were killed that night. But by a miracle she did obtain my father’s release—yes, some money eventually passed hands, but it would not have happened had she not stood up to the Nazis. So we were able to escape to Cuba, and I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana, because the Nazis confiscated everything my parents owned. And it was there that I learned that most of my family—aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents—were murdered by the Nazis.

These traumatic experiences led me to questions most of us have asked at some time in our lives: Does it have to be this way? Why is there so much injustice, cruelty, violence, and destructiveness, when we humans also have such a great capacity, as I saw in my mother, for caring, for courage, for love? Is it, as we’re often told, inevitable, just human nature? Or are there alternatives—and if so, what are they?

These questions eventually led to my research. I found very early I simply could not find answers to them in terms of the old social categories (right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, capitalist vs. socialist, and so forth). These categories just look at this or that aspect of a social system, never its fundamental configuration. None of them answer the most critical question for our future: the question of what kinds of beliefs, values, and institutions support our enormous human capacities for caring, for consciousness, for creativity, for sensitivity—the capacities that are most developed in our species, that make us uniquely human—and which promote capacities we also have for cruelty, selfishness, and violence. Neuroscience teaches us that we humans are genetically capable of many different kinds of behaviors, but our experiences profoundly affect which of those genetic possibilities are expressed.

Connecting the Dots

I look for patterns, drawing from a large set of data that cuts across cultures and periods of history. It then becomes possible to see social configurations that had not been visible looking at only a part of social systems—configurations that kept repeating themselves. There were no names for them, so I called one the Domination System and the other the Partnership System.

It is in our primary human relations—within our families and friendships, the relations that are still not taken into account in most analyses of society—that people first learn (on the most basic neural level, as we today know from neuroscience) what is considered normal or abnormal, moral or immoral, possible or impossible.

If children grow up in cultures or subcultures where violence in families is accepted as normal, even moral, what do they learn? The lesson is simple, isn’t it? It’s that it’s OK to use violence to impose one’s will on others, both in intimate relationships and international ones.

I want to illustrate this with two cultures. One is Western, the other is Eastern; one is secular, the other religious; one is technologically developed, the other isn’t: the Nazis in Germany and the Taliban in Afghanistan. From a conventional perspective, they are totally different. But if you look at these two cultures from the perspective of the partnership/domination continuum, you see a configuration. Both are extremely warlike and authoritarian. And for both, a top priority is returning to a traditional family—their code word for a rigidly male-dominated, authoritarian, highly punitive family.

Now, this is not coincidental. Nor is it coincidental that these kinds of societies idealize warfare, even consider it holy. Neither is it coincidental that in these kinds of cultures masculinity is equated with domination and violence at the same time that women and anything stereotypically considered feminine, such as caring and nonviolence, are devalued.

I want to emphasize that this has nothing to do with anything inherent in women or men, as we can see today when more and more men are fathering in the nurturing way mothering is supposed to be done, and women are entering what were once considered strictly male preserves. But these are dominator gender stereotypes that many of us—both men and women—are trying to leave behind.

If we are to build cultures of peace, we have to start talking about something that still makes many people uncomfortable: gender. We might as well put that on the table; people don’t want to talk about gender, do they? But let’s also remember what the great sociologist Louis Wirth said: that the most important things about a society are those that people are uncomfortable talking about. We saw that with race: Only as we started to talk about it did we begin to move forward. We’re beginning to talk more about gender, and starting to move forward, but much too slowly.

This is important for many reasons, including the fact that it is through dominator norms for gender that children learn another important lesson: to equate difference (beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species between female and male) with superiority or inferiority, with dominating or being dominated, with being served or serving. And they acquire this mental and emotional map before their brains are fully developed (we know today that our brains don’t fully develop until our twenties), so they then can automatically apply it to any other difference, be it a different race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

The Economics of Domination and Partnership

The roles and relations of the two halves of humanity can no longer be considered “just a women’s issue” (though we’re half of humanity, that phrase again shows how we’ve been conditioned to devalue women and anything associated with women). In reality, gender roles and relations affect everything about a society from its institutions (for example, whether families are more democratic or authoritarian) to its guiding system of values.

Let me give you an example from economics. Most of us would never think economics has anything to do with gender. At most, we think this refers to the workplace gender discrimination we’re finally beginning to talk about. But actually it goes much, much deeper. Economics has huge systemic effects.

Have you ever wondered, for instance, why it is that so many politicians always find money for weapons, for wars, and for prisons, but when it comes to funding health care, child care, and other “soft” or caring activities, they have no money? Nor do they have money for keeping a clean and healthy natural environment—rather like the “women’s work” of keeping a clean and healthy home environment.

Underlying these seemingly irrational priorities is a gendered system of valuations we’ve inherited from earlier, more domination-oriented times. To meet the challenges we face, we must make this visible.

Neoliberalism is actually a regression to dominator economics: to a top-down economic system where trickle down economics is really a continuation of dominator traditions, where those on the bottom are socialized to content themselves with the scraps dropping from the opulent tables of those on top.

This is an ancient economics of domination, which transcends labels like capitalism and socialism. Indeed, the two large-scale applications of socialism, the USSR and China, also turned into domination systems, highly authoritarian and violent, with horrendous environmental problems, because the underlying social system did not shift from domination to partnership.

That’s not to say we should discard everything from capitalism and socialism. We need to retain and strengthen the partnership elements in both the market and government economies and leave the domination elements behind. But we need to go further to what I have called a “caring economics.”

Now, isn’t it interesting that when we put “caring” and “economics” in the same sentence, people tend to do a double take? We’ve been told that caring policies and practices may sound good, but they’re just not economically effective. In reality, study after study shows that investing in caring for people and nature is extremely effective—not only in human and environmental terms, but in purely financial terms.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Finland suffered from poverty and famine. Today, these nations are invariably in the highest ranks not only of United Nations Human Development Reports but of the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness reports. This is largely due to the fact that their norm became a more caring economics, a more caring society.

These nations have government-supported childcare, universal healthcare, stipends to help families care for children, elder care with dignity, generous paid parental leave. In short, they economically support caring work in both the market and the household. As a result, they have very long life spans, very low poverty rates, very low crime rates, and a generally high standard of living for all. They are also in the forefront of moving toward sustainable energy and invest a larger proportion of their GDP in helping people in the developing world than other nations.

They are not ideal nations, but they have moved farther than most contemporary nations to the partnership side of the partnership-domination continuum. They have more democracy and equality in both the family and the state. They have been in the forefront of trying to leave behind traditions of violence inherent in domination systems. For example, they pioneered the first peace studies and the first laws prohibiting physical discipline of children in families. And, in contrast to domination systems that subordinate the female half of humanity to the male half, they have a much more equal partnership between women and men. For example, approximately 40 percent of their national legislators are female.

As the status of women rises, men no longer find it such a threat to their status, to their masculinity, to also embrace more caring practices and policies. These nations also have a strong movement to disentangle masculinity from its dominator equation with conquest and violence, including a strong movement for men to take responsibility for violence against women and children.

Between child-battering, wife-beating, sexual abuse of children, rape, bride burnings sexual mutilation of girls and women, so-called honor killings, and other horrors, the number of lives taken and blighted by intimate violence worldwide are much greater than those taken by armed conflict. And yet this violence is still largely invisible.

Our job is to make it visible. If we really want a more peaceful world, we can’t just tack that on to a system that idealizes violence as “masculine” and devalues caring and nonviolence as “feminine.”

Building Cultures of Equity and Peace

Let’s join together and move into that second phase of the peace movement: that  integrated phase that takes into account the whole of human relations, from intimate to international. Let us muster the spiritual courage to challenge traditions of domination and violence in our primary human relations – the formative relations between women and men and parents and children.

Let us work for systemic change, for the new norms that will enable a future where all children, both girls and boys, can realize their enormous human potentials for consciousness, creativity, and caring.