image by Neil D.

Continuing from yesterday’s discussion ...

Transition focuses on increasing resilience in communities by creating sustainable, local systems for producing food, generating energy, creating needed products, and transacting business. Life in the “Energy Descent,” as Transition calls it, can be healthier, happier, and more fulfilling than the lives we in the developed world are living now. From the site of founder Rob Hopkins:

“How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march?”

When I first heard about Transition at the 350 Conference, I was with Sarah, who was already very familiar with it. She told me that she’d been contemplating moving to a Transition town, but she felt conflicted. How worthwhile is it, she wondered, to work to make one place resilient, when what needs to change in the world is on a global scale?

Like Sarah, I see a lot of beautiful things in the Transition movement. I like its optimistic, participatory tone, and I like the fact that they see the possibility for an amazing future. I also like that they focus so much on internal transformation, something that seems to be missing from much of the Bright Green stuff I’ve encountered.

Part of me kinda wants to jump in right now—quit my job, move back to Pittsburgh, buy a cheap house, start raising awareness about Peak Oil, and plant a ginormous garden. And I have no doubt that would be an incredibly useful thing to do. Maybe I’d even run for public office.

But, to another part of me, Transition sort of feels like giving up, like going backwards. We and our fellow humans have gone through so much together—beautiful, awful, and everything in between—and we are just starting to get to know each other on a global scale. Wouldn’t it be a shame to go back to focusing on mostly just the people directly around us?

I also wonder if my attraction to Transition comes from the daunting bigness of Bright Green. It feels far-off and cold sometimes, like a sci-fi story more about gadgets than people. And it is difficult to see how we can be a part of it—unless I’m an engineer, or an architect, or a brilliant designer, what do I have to contribute?

Since learning about Transition, I’ve been feeling (and I guess Sarah has been, too) like I need to make a choice between these two movements—one pulling me out to a breadth of context both exhilarating and terrifying; the other pulling me back into the arms of nature. It’s tempting to narrow my focus to one town, one neighborhood, one plot of land that I can make safe and resilient.

But when I make the choice to stand in that super-broad, so-Bright-Green-it’s-blinding context, I see Transition for what it is: one of many technologies that humans need in order to move forward. In this context, Transition isn’t a step back at all—it’s a way to integrally bring forward the traditional values of moral transformation, community, and connection with the land. Maybe Transition’s traditional values can complete Bright Green’s postmodern sensitivity and modernist excitement about having big brains that can think up cool stuff.

This is how I answered Sarah’s question: if she is called to do Transition work, that doesn’t mean she has to do it only for herself and the small community around her. She could do it in the broadest possible context, share all her findings, and encourage others to do the same. She could do Transition in a Bright Green way. So could I.

I imagine what this mashup could look like 20, 30, 50 years out, and I see beautiful, efficient, brilliantly designed Bright Green communities made up of engaged, organized citizens working together to push the boundaries of human possibility—in everything from astronomy to agriculture to spirituality—in every context from local right up to cosmic.

Each city or town will be unique, of course—what works in Detroit may not work the same in Dubai. But each can be embedded in a global communicative culture that continually experiments, shares feedback, and collaborates. Each can contribute to making the whole more than the sum of its parts. Some economies and products may be local, and others may not, but all will be created with full awareness of the facts of nature: nothing ever goes away, and in fact, there is no away. Our planet is one planet, and no part of it is separate from any other. Nor are any of us separate from the whole, or any of its parts.

Right now, it doesn’t seem like the Transition and Bright Green movements have much of a connection with each other. Bright Green sees Transition as Dark Green, going backwards, and Transition sees Bright Green as abstract techno-babble that we don’t have time for. But in truth, they are working on the same thing: finding new ways to live that work within the planetary systems in which we evolved, and which increase human happiness and possibility. Can you imagine what could come out of a collaborative effort?