Why Transition?

Every so often, I need to explain what exactly we mean by transition and why we are urging you to help bring it about in our community. The transition movement began in the UK as a response to an anticipated time of economic dislocation due to the effects of world resource depletion, oil in particular, and the constraints we will need to live within to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

We have many wonderful organizations on Vashon that are working to make us more able to live in this future. Why have we created another one? I think that what the Transition movement brings to the table is a sense of urgency. While everybody wants us to prepare for the future, we’re saying that the future is utterly dependent on what we do now in the next few years, and the longer we take to make the changes, the more difficult and expensive it will be. Mobilization on the scale we are talking about requires that our community work together closely to implement a plan that we all formulate together. There is no overall solution in the works; we need to do what works best for us.

Why the rush? The economy we evolved to take advantage of cheap and abundant energy requires an ever larger fuel supply as it grows. Meanwhile, that energy is getting harder to find and is ever more expensive. Although we are beginning to find huge deposits of natural gas, it doesn’t take the place of oil. Even if we could make it work, Bill McKibbon points out that, if we burn the fossil fuel carbon we already have, we would make our planet uninhabitable. Renewables will only take us so far. It isn’t the lack of resources per se that is our greatest danger; it is the resultant economic and political instability that makes it increasingly difficult for us to rebuild our infrastructure to adapt to change.

Our world economy is highly integrated and becoming more so everyday. Greater interdependence and efficiency have the ironic effect of seriously lowering our resilience to shocks anywhere in the system. We saw a Toyota plant in the southeastern US close due to lack of parts just a week after the earthquake in Japan. The world runs on the highly efficient "just in time" parts delivery system, which allows plants all over the world to forego extra warehousing that is merely storing and not producing. Any break in the supply lines means a very rapid stop in production. In our drive for efficiency, we have put ourselves out on a limb.

I don’t think it is too big a stretch to say that the global economy is teetering on the verge of collapse. Our attempts to grow our economy increase our climate instability while our inability to grow increases economic and political instability. Each of these elements is exacerbated by the others and any event anywhere in the world could take the whole system down. We are like a groggy prizefighter struggling to stay on his feet while attempting to avoid the knockout punch.

What do we need to do? We need to localize our economy. I realize that we can only do so much, but every little bit will increase our resilience to shocks elsewhere. That means making and growing more of our own stuff, learning how to maintain what we have, and learning to do without some things. It means building a strong and supportive community we can depend on. We need to start now. What are we going to do this year? What are we going to do next year? Transition Vashon has a goal of helping to bring together all the talented and committed efforts we already have to focus on making an energy descent plan to insure some measure of safety, stability and happiness during a time of great world change and uncertainty. Even as I write that, I’m a bit embarrassed by the melodrama, but there it is: anything short of a dramatic call to action is a foolish failure to see what needs to be done. I might add on the plus side that those of us who foresee where we are going have a huge opportunity to be the providers of the goods and services we will need in that new paradigm. Note that as you read the next paragraph.

On October 30, at 6 PM, GreenTech Night will be presenting the film, "As Goes Janesville" at the Island Theater. It is about Janesville, Wisconsin in the current economic malaise, as typified there by a General Motors plant closing. It tells the story of three families and the town leadership attempting to regain financial security. This is the all too familiar and ubiquitous condition across our country: community members live in a state of separation from each other, each utterly dependent on corporate America to supply life giving jobs, each desperately shameless in the lengths to which they will go to shape themselves into acceptable job prospects. Do we really want to live like this? We can do so much better! There will be a panel discussion afterwards to talk about alternatives.

Comments?
terry@vashonloop.com