Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience Book

[If you're going to read this, be sure to skip right to The Transition Companion, which is the updated, expanded, and reformatted version of this same book based on another 5 years of experience.]

I love it. I love the book, I love the idea, I love the plan in action.

I'll start with the book. A thorough guidebook for creating a community response to climate change and peak oil based on a broad application of permaculture principles, starting from scratch. The arc of the book is just fantastic, and mirrors Hopkins' suggested steps for how to lead a town or neighborhood through the same process. He starts with a scary fact dump on our coming climate catastrophe: it's depth, it's breadth, it's intensity. From there on out, he only takes us upward. Hopkins is the leader of the posi posse! A good chunk of this book is laying out a vision for what "energy descent" could look like if we did it mindfully, purposefully, and slowly, beginning now (or like 4 years ago). I'm a sucker for doom and gloom, and usually I get bored with hippy bullshit. But Hopkins lays out the visioning in a way that totally captivated me. Yes! All these things like urban homesteading and cooperative workplaces totally rule!! I know that because it's sort of the thing I spend most of my time being passionate about right now, but I've been trained to think that really I'm pushing rocks up hills. I feel really enthusiastic about Hopkins visioning. And of course, I like how dedicated he is to the process, "visioning" being a role for a large group to collectively take on.

I love how he draws community participation, leadership, and ownership into the core of the infrastructure of the process, imbuing direct democracy and constant consultation with all stakeholders-- really reaching out beyond comfort zones-- into every single step. At the same time, Hopkins is practical: yes, meet with city councilors and business owners, and charm the hell out of them. Make sure they feel invested and respected so they don't become a road block. On that note, just gotta say props to the incredible wealth of authors and ideas represented within the text and quoted on the sidebars. Hopkins did his research and gave credit where due as far as I can see.

The Transition process is a great guide for starting any big project. It teaches how to engage big groups (educate and listen, host an incredible number of educational events, all of which need to also be participation events), how to figure out together where you want to go, and how to very practically unravel that idealistic dream into it's component steps, and their component steps, and onward all the way down to very realistic projects which, done now, will conveniently set up the next project, gradually building toward the final vision in a slow, flexible, but purposeful way.

I guess critically, I didn't see too much focus on anti-oppression, inequality and resource distribution, which surely impacts some of the meeting dynamics and exactly who is able to contribute. Transition is about localisation, so the ties to global justice were weakly laid out, and international solidarity could be added into the process.

The last few sections of the book tell tales of Transition Towns that are already being enacted. It was nice to see the way they move in different directions, the way that some projects get mired in design while others manifest physically almost immediately. It's important to balance those two. I'm working on a large-scale, city-wide organizing project right now, and by some fluke-- or perhaps, I suspect, because another organizer had already read this book-- we have in fact almost followed this process to a T. And so the project which was a fleeting suggestion in a meeting early last summer was organized through outreach for several months, and then 'unleashed' in a great social event cum structured brainstorm Bash in the fall. From then we've met regularly, formed working groups, and begun incredible long-term projects and visible short-term projects about which I'm really really satisfied. So for me this book was maybe a bit late to read, but definitely useful, life-affirming, and happy.