And over the horizon?

Transitions?

An article in the Times magazine about a group trying to organize sustainable communities for what they believe will be an awesome and coming crash of our civilization. It's more interesting as a look at where we are now than as where we may be twenty years in the future.

The thrust of the movement:
'“Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, 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.'

'For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.'

'It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it’s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We’re all starting to career down the other side of that hill — which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it’s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.'

What makes this different from any other apocalyptic movement? Its dovetail with conscious capitalism and rising Level 6 sensibilities in the mainstream.

'...most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.'

As noted above, though, this is does not exactly appear to be an integral movement, but more of a snapshot of what's emerging from (more and more) mainstream 6s.

For example, in response to a woman asking if they couldn't just make a rule to cremate everybody:'“Well,” Millard said, “it takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules.”' Straight-up 6.

There's more in this to believe that this is more of a reaction against the evils of modernity than an actual constructive growth into the future:

'Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland. Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; “industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”

Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn’t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”'

There's even the sense that the founders of the group want this to happen, which makes sense. Because society today has so recklessly shit in the salad bowl, it's all going to come crashing down, taking everything despicable with it. This is not to say that anyone is consciously aware of this, but 'Transition’s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes.' Why in the world would we enjoy this? because humans naturally should enjoy living in this sort of world, so tossing off all of the old barriers to natural humanity would make us all really happy.

Another hallmark of first-tier thinking here is that there's no conception that when things get tough resources-wise, things are going to get rough violence-wise. There's no thought about level 3s coming in to take over whatever sustainable resources a place like this has created; the overall vision is just of people coming together and living peacefully in sustainable communities because that's the way people naturally are. This narrow, if innocently-optimistic-and-lovely-in-its-own-way view of human nature is a call sign of the green 6s. It isn't, however, how everybody is approaching the project: '“Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”

Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn’t yet understand that “just because you’re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn’t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.” He later added, “If I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.”'

All in all, though, despite the limits of level 6, there are quite a few important contributions being made here. After all, we only have one planet:

'Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.

Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.

What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”'