image by Jeff Kubina

Have you heard about the Transition movement? The New York Times Magazine did a great piece on it a few weeks ago in their Green Issue—here’s their summary of what it’s all about:

“Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.”

The article goes on to say that Transition springs from a quite dystopian vision—Peak Oil and the impossibility of making a full systems switch before it hits the fan—but then takes a Utopian turn, putting new possibilities into the picture. Maybe a low-energy future can be a fantastic place to live! Maybe it’ll be better than what we have now!

The task of the Transition movement is to build bridges to that low-energy future—to create systems of food production, economic activity, transportation, education, and everything else that can run locally and without fossil fuel inputs. How do we do this? The Transition Handbook, written by Transition founder Rob Hopkins, provides 12 steps to help communities work together and figure it out.

The vision of a sustainable local community that can provide all of its own needs is satisfying on a very deep level. It feels like a return to what we were meant to be—people living together embedded in the natural systems around us. But how reasonable is this on a large scale? A few questions:

• How will people in developing countries, who already live largely at the whim of the natural, economic, and political systems around them, respond to the developed world’s request to not come as far as we have?
• Even for those of us who are privileged enough to see and renounce the excesses of our wealthy culture, how can we ever really go back? In this world, time and evolution move in only one direction—forward.
• Also, I wonder—are Transition’s assumptions correct? Surely, we know things have to change, but the Transition movement seems to be betting everything on the belief that we’re already behind the 8 ball, that technology can’t help much, that the systems that support us will inevitably and quickly collapse. If you believe this, then the Transition movement is probably the best use of your time. But I’m not sure that we need to—or can—give up on the larger global framework of our society just yet.

Even with all these questions, I can still see a lot of appeal in the Transition movement. Its language, pragmatism, and idealism make it available to a wider range of people than any form of environmental activism that came before it. Engaging more and more citizens with details of the systems that allow them to live their lives can only be a good thing. And it’s a deeply positive movement, full of possibilities for creativity, well-being, and fulfillment.

What remains to be seen is this: as it transforms small groups in dozens of towns across the developed world, can the Transition movement can keep its eye on the big picture? Can resilient local communities hold the whole world in their hearts?