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  • From: Tompkins County Relocalization Project <tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • To: Sustainable Tompkins <sustainabletompkins AT lists.mutualaid.org>, tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [tcrp-news] Fw: The End Is Near! (Yay!)
  • Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:44:38 -0400

Great mainstream article on the Transition Towns movement.

Jon

==================================================================

The New York Times
The Green Issue
The End Is Near! (Yay!)
By JON MOOALLEM

The stage lights went up at the Panida Theater, a classy old movie
house in Sandpoint, Idaho, and the M.C. stepped out of the dark
with one finger high in the air. There was an uprising of applause
and cheering. Then, shouting like a head coach before a bowl game,
she said, "Sandpoint, are you ready?"

It was a Friday night last November. All around the little town of
Sandpoint, beetles were blighting north Idaho’s pine forests. The
previous day, the U.N. reported that emissions from automobiles
and coal-fired power plants were collecting in brown clouds over
13 Asian and African cities and blocking out the sun. Iceland’s
main banks had crumpled, and American auto executives were about
to fly to Washington in private jets to plead for a bailout. Off
the coast of Africa, Somali pirates were hijacking oil
tankers. But the folks at the Panida Theater wouldn’t stop
clapping. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative, a new chapter of a
growing, worldwide environmental movement, was officially coming
to life.

The Transition movement was started four years ago by Rob Hopkins,
a young British instructor of ecological design. Transition shares
certain principles with environmentalism, but its vision is deeper
-- and more radical -- than mere greenness or
sustainability. "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.

Transition’s approach is adamantly different from that of the
survivalists I heard about, scattered in the mountains around
Sandpoint in bunkers stocked with gold and guns. The movement may
begin from a similarly dystopian idea: that cheap oil has
recklessly vaulted humanity to a peak of production and
consumption, and no combination of alternative technologies can
generate enough energy, or be installed fast enough, to keep us at
that height before the oil is gone. (Transition dismisses Al Gore
types as "techno-optimists.") But Transition then takes an almost
utopian turn. Hopkins insists that if an entire community faces
this stark challenge together, it might be able to design an
"elegant descent" from that peak. We can consciously plot a path
into a lower-energy life -- a life of walkable villages, local
food and artisans and greater intimacy with the natural world --
which, on balance, could actually be richer and more enjoyable
than what we have now. Transition, Hopkins has written, meets our
era’s threats with a spirit of "elation, rather than the guilt,
anger and horror" behind most environmental activism. "Change is
inevitable," he told me, "but this is a change that could be
fantastic."

After developing the rudiments of Transition with a class he was
teaching at an Irish college, Hopkins moved to the English town of
Totnes, and, in 2005, began mobilizing a campaign to "relocalize"
the town. The all-volunteer effort has since been busily planting
nut trees, starting its own local currency and offering classes on
things like darning socks in order to "facilitate the Great
Reskilling."

More than 80 other initiatives across England have followed,
including one in Bristol, a city of nearly half a million
people. Worldwide, there are now more than 150 official Transition
Towns (communities with an active group of citizens), and last
winter, trainers from Totnes traveled the globe to run workshops,
leaving activists on three continents to begin the relocalization
of their own communities -- autonomously and with whatever
financing they can raise. (The Transition revolution is, loosely
speaking, a franchise model.) Sandpoint, Idaho, was the second
Transition Town in the United States after Boulder County,
Colo. They have been joined by more than 20 others in the last
year, including Portland, Maine; Berea, Kentucky; and even Los
Angeles. But the American arm of the movement is expanding far
faster than it is accomplishing anything, which is why the event
in Sandpoint that night was so significant. The Sandpoint
Transition Initiative was the first in North America to hold this
kind of coming-out party, meant to engage the community in its
work. This constituted Step 4 in the 12-step Transition Process
laid out in Rob Hopkins’s Transition Handbook, the jargon-filled
manual at the center of the movement. The handbook calls this
event "A Great Unleashing."

The Transition Handbook reads like an imaginative take on a
corporate-management text. It recommends techniques for building
consensus, from bureaucratic-sounding protocols like Open Space
Technology to an exercise in which people decorate a potato like a
superhero. "The Transition model," the founder of one English
Transition Town explained to me, "provides a structure, a
foundation for organizing." And along with Transition’s emphasis
on hopefulness over fear, this rigorous playbook seems to set it
apart from earlier grass-roots crusades. It is, Transition leaders
say, what they hope will allow the movement to bring in the people
that conventional activists have failed to reach and, just as
important, keep everyone focused through the messiness and
disillusionment every community-organizing effort encounters and
many do not survive.

At the Panida, the keynote speaker was Michael Brownlee, the
director of the Transition effort in Boulder and a representative
of Transition U.S. -- an even newer group that is forming to help
the movement spread in America. He was like the Transition
equivalent of a middle manager flown in from corporate.

Brownlee gave his own variation of the standard PowerPoint
presentation distributed at Transition trainings. Up on the screen
behind him came a slide showing the three convergent emergencies
that Transition aims to help us through: climate change, the
unraveling of the global economy and peak oil. The theory of peak
oil concludes that the productivity of the earth’s oil wells will
soon peak -- if it hasn’t already -- and, once production falls
short of demand, the market for our fundamental resource will
rapidly spiral into chaos, potentially pulling much of society
down with it.

Brownlee spelled out some probable outcomes, quoting peak oil’s
pantheon of thinkers: Oil hits $300 a barrel by 2013. Middle
Eastern exports cease. Things we take for granted -- supermarkets,
suburbs -- quickly become impossible, and the world sinks into an
"unprecedented economic crisis" that will "topple governments,
alter national boundaries," incite wars and "challenge the
continuation of civilized life." Brownlee paused after reading
that last quote. He hadn’t even gotten to climate change and the
implosion of the American dollar.

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.

In Sandpoint, though, people were trying to move the stale chatter
of environmental collapse out of the health-food store and into
the 21st century -- to pull each incongruous part of their
community together and make their town, collaboratively, the
blessed place they all knew it could be. At a time when so much
fuzzy energy for change ricochets through our culture, and even
Chevron ads ask us to use less oil and harness "the power of human
energy" instead, Transition seemed to offer this sold-out theater
in Idaho both a vision and a lucid, 240-page instruction manual
with which to give it a try.

Would it work? Nobody could say. But as Brownlee finished, and the
crowd suddenly re-erupted into applause, even just trying it
seemed to feel wonderful. Next, a group of kids raced onto the
stage in Sgt. Pepper garb, holding inflatable guitars. Later came
a "sustainable performance arts" troupe (they use biofuels when
fire dancing) and a woman who sang about rain and peace. By the
time the last guitar duo performed "Here Comes the Sun," everyone
in the room was so keyed up -- so ready to turn the impending dark
age of peak oil and climate change into a renaissance -- that no
one heard the slightest menace in the line "Little darling, I feel
that ice is slowly melting." Or if they did, they just kept
singing along anyway.

The second phase of the Sandpoint Transition Initiative’s Great
Unleashing weekend began the next afternoon. A four-hour meeting
was called to divide people into working groups, Step 5 in the
Transition Handbook. Each working group would focus on a necessity
of the town, like food, energy or transportation. They would
develop projects, then research and write a plan delineating what
steps Sandpoint must take in order to relocalize over the next
several decades. The Transition Handbook calls this crucial
document an Energy Descent Action Plan. Producing one is Step 12.

More than 100 people turned out for the meeting in the gymnasium
of a local charter school. Everyone wore name tags. Richard
Kühnel, who started the Sandpoint Transition Initiative with some
like-minded friends in his living room, drew a shining sun on his.

Kühnel, 54, is a smiling stick figure of a man, with wispy hair
and a whitening beard. He has worked as a software designer on and
off since he was a teenager but also has a degree in "ecosocial
design" from Gaia University. (He is Austrian and moved to
Sandpoint in 1995 with his wife, an alternative-medicine
practitioner.) Kühnel organized the initiative’s first meeting
early last year after returning from a pilgrimage to Totnes, where
he attended one of the first Transition trainings. He was
attracted to the movement, he told me, because it alone seems to
understand how to persuade people to address the world’s gloomiest
challenges without shoving them into denial or depression. "We are
not fighting against something," Kühnel told me. "We are for
something. I wanted to be part of the solution, positively
responding to all these challenges here in Sandpoint."

Sandpoint is a town of 8,100 people, rimmed by the Cabinet and
Selkirk Mountains and bordered by picturesque Lake Pend
Oreille. Like many Western towns, it is the mottled product of a
century of migration. Railroad workers were followed by timber
workers. In the 1970s, young, long-haired back-to-the-landers
arrived, and many persevered even as northern Idaho ossified into
a conservative stronghold. Last year, after the rise of Sarah
Palin, who is a Sandpoint native, a local magazine ran an account
of the couple of months she spent there as an infant before moving
to Alaska. "I was in the eighth grade," a former baby sitter told
the magazine. "I held her."

Transition seeks to "unleash the collective genius of a
community," as Hopkins often puts it -- to unify a town behind a
single, critical purpose. And at first glance, unifying Sandpoint
might seem impossible. But those living on the land, whether out
of a left- or right-wing ideology, do have a lot in common,
including an astounding amount of resourcefulness. Peggy
Braunstein, who came to Sandpoint from New York 27 years ago, told
me that for her and her neighbors, many of whom live off the grid,
life without oil "isn’t so overwhelming or shocking. People here
have already lived a scaled-down life. We’ve already bartered and
shared, canned together." A local green-tech entrepreneur told me
that Transition should not have too much trouble "bridging the
rednecks and the hippies." ("The best way to bring them together
is a Willie Nelson concert," he joked.)

At the charter school, everybody found seats in a circle. Many
balanced legal pads on their laps. Kühnel’s wife, Berta, began by
asking everyone to join hands. She instructed them to close their
eyes and transmit energy around the circle in a clockwise
direction. "We’re going to journey into 2030 and see what’s there
for us," she said. She told them to feel their bodies lifting into
the clouds, falling back to earth as rain, then joining a river,
"flowing forward in time." The river ran through Sandpoint. It was
the future now, and Berta asked everyone to look around: "What’s
the technology? Is there technology? How do we dream? How do we
live?"

Sandpoint’s mayor, a painter and former hardware wholesaler named
Gretchen Hellar, was sitting next to Berta. When I asked her later
what she made of the exercise, Hellar told me: "First of all, I’m
not a good-feelings, touchy-feely kind of person." She added,
"People wanted to talk about where we can put community gardens,
how can we make our downtown more viable." John T. Reuter, a
Republican city councilman a few seats over, told me that when
Berta told them to hold hands, he was looking around the room,
counting up the people he knew Transition just alienated.

The crowd split into groups of nine to draw their visions. Bruce
Millard, a local architect who builds with straw bales, quickly
emerged as his group’s moderator. Quite tall, with a ponytail and
mustache, Millard bent over and drew several circles on his
group’s sheet of paper with an orange crayon. He envisioned a
hub-and-spoke system: many villages, each with a different
specialty, with downtown Sandpoint as a trading post in the
middle.

The group started brainstorming, assuming there would no longer be
cars or a power grid. One village might grow food. Another should
educate children.

"Where are we going to put the corpses?" someone asked.

"Eat ’em!" said a woman in braids.

"Can you just make a rule that everybody’s cremated?" a
somber-looking woman in a blazer asked. Her husband was sitting
with his face in his hands.

"Well," Millard said, "it takes a lot of energy to cremate
people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules."

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."

By the mid-1800s, more than 15,000 Americans had experimented with
Fourieristic living, many drawn to its promise during a severe
economic downturn. But Fourier’s belief that acute scientific
modeling could bring disparate people together didn’t hold. It
reflected, the historian Carl J. Guarneri writes, "the naïve faith
that . . . Baptists would get along with freethinkers and
intellectuals would make great farmers." Arguments tore phalanxes
apart. So did debt. All but eight failed within three years.

It has been an American impulse since the Puritans: feeling the
world racing in the wrong direction and withdrawing to a small,
insular place to start over. Hippies came to Sandpoint in the
1970s for similar reasons: to live solitary, self-reliant
lives. But going back to the land was tough, particularly since
many never lived on the land in the first place. ("I couldn’t
build things with my hands," one man, once part of a small commune
called Huckleberry Duckleberry, told me. "It was futile.") By the
early ’80s most had either moved into town or left the region.

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.

By now, around the charter-school gymnasium, one group was
imagining year-round farmers’ markets in the buildings that would,
by 2030, no longer be banks. Another discussed bicycle parking and
nodded benignly at a man who pictured everyone living in caves
with Internet connections. Millard’s circle was ticking off ways
they could travel between the villages they had drawn. "O.K., so
we’re walking, we’re bicycling, we’re skiing," he said.

"Kayaking!" someone offered.

Peggy Braunstein spoke up, worried about the snowy north Idaho
winters. "We’ve got a problem," she said.

"There’s no problems," Millard told her. "In a dream there’s no
problems. There’s only solutions."

Karen Lanphear, who has been steering the Transition Initiative
alongside Richard Kühnel since its inception, found this portion
of the meeting excruciating. "I thought we squandered at least an
hour or an hour and a half of people’s time," she told me
later. Lanphear is a commanding woman of 62 with short, styled
gray hair and a doctorate in education. In many ways, she is
Kühnel’s temperamental opposite. She feeds off his visionary
energy but felt compelled to run their earliest meetings with
timed agendas.

In the six weeks before the Unleashing, Lanphear met with the
Downtown Sandpoint Business Association, the University of Idaho
extension office and the branch manager for U.S. Bank. She was the
keynote speaker at the Greater Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce’s
monthly Women in Business luncheon and penned six editorials on
Transition for the local paper. Lanphear told me she has a gift
for "building coalitions." This was apparent. But it wasn’t clear
if everyone she briefed had the same frame of reference. Karl Dye,
head of the Bonner County Economic Development Corporation, told
me, "All the things Transition’s doing basically line up with what
we’re trying to do, which is create better-paying jobs." He saw a
lot of promise in Lanphear’s group, though he also said: "If you
start a business to produce food locally and there are
opportunities to make money by taking it to other areas, you’re
going to do it. You may believe in Transitions and local
production and local consumption, but hey, man, we’re still
Americans."

At the time of the Great Unleashing, 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.

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. Most people I met in
Sandpoint seemed to have latched onto the enjoyment part and run
with it. The vibe was much more Alice Waters than Mad Max. (Jeff
Burns, a local food activist who joined the food working group,
was a conspicuous exception. "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."

During the next few days, I surprised myself by actually arguing
with people in Sandpoint about whether they were doing Transition
properly -- with enough intensity, given the stakes. "I can’t live
with the ambiguity of pending disaster," Lanphear told me. "I was
raised to believe there are no problems without solutions." She
said she didn’t believe things would become as bad as Brownlee and
others predicted. She had a lot of faith in the ethic and
ingenuity of younger generations and also told me, contradicting
what seems like a central tenet of Transition, "I think technology
is going to be one of our saving graces."

A few months after the Sandpoint Un-leashing, I went to a meeting
of the new board of Transition U.S. in Sebastopol, Calif., north
of San Francisco. The organization had just partnered with the
Post Carbon Institute, another peak-oil-focused nonprofit group,
and received $280,000 of seed money. The board had signed the
lease on its new headquarters 12 days before I arrived.

Transition U.S. is designed to offer guidance to Transition
initiatives forming around the country and to organize
trainings. Already it had communicated with activists in more than
900 communities. Jennifer Gray, who started the second Transition
Town in England and then went to California to found Transition
U.S. last year, was spending most of her time fielding phone calls
and e-mail messages. She took it as a good sign that no one in
Sandpoint was reaching out to her.

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!"

Consequently, the structure Transition sets forth is intentionally
very minimal, and improvisation is encouraged. The handbook’s 12
steps needn’t be done in order (Hopkins now calls them the 12
"ingredients"), and communities are free to skip ones they don’t
find useful. Ultimately, the most profound thing Transition offers
isn’t a methodology at all but a mood.

"The genius of the Transition message, as I see it, is that it
takes what we should be doing to avert these crises and turns it
into something that sounds inviting and positive and uplifting,"
Richard Heinberg, a Transition U.S. board member, told me in
Sebastopol. Heinberg is an icon of the peak-oil fringe and the
author of the seminal, comfortless book "The Party’s Over." In
2007, he published a wider-ranging volume called "Peak
Everything." Still, Heinberg said he worries that Transition risks
losing people in the elation it inspires. He has been debating
with Hopkins whether, in addition to devising a long-term descent,
Transition should emphasize preparing for disasters that Heinberg
says are unavoidable or already unfolding, like volatile gas
prices or "being sideswiped by economic catastrophe and weather
disruptions."

Eventually he expects the energy grid to weaken or shut off
entirely and, like Michael Brownlee, he told me he considers
martial law or worse persecution possible as resources become
scarcer. Jennifer Gray, meanwhile, told me she expects "a big
population die-off." Heinberg said, "There’s nothing wrong with
being motivated by fear if there’s something to be genuinely
afraid of."

I returned to Sandpoint in late February. The 11 working groups
formed at the charter school in November were meeting
regularly. They ranged in size from half a dozen to about 20
people and were all filing minutes to a steering committee as they
plotted their first projects.

Jennifer Gray describes one of Transition’s goals as creating a
"parallel community," putting things like local power generation
or local food networks in place to survive the slow crumbling of
our current ones. But for the most part, the projects evolving in
Sandpoint seemed designed to make the town’s current
infrastructure a little greener and more livable. One group hoped
to facilitate energy audits, making Sandpoint’s buildings more
efficient users of the energy grid. The mobility working group,
meanwhile, was planning to install a barrel of brightly colored
flags at a dangerous intersection downtown. Pedestrians could pick
up a flag and cross the street waving it, making themselves more
visible to automobile traffic. Ideally, one member told me, they
would persuade the city to put a traffic light there, "but that’s
two, three years down the road."

I was also surprised by the degree to which Transition members
were intermixing with city authorities. Shortly after the Great
Unleashing, Shelby Rognstad, a young cafe owner and an early
Sandpoint Transition Initiative board member alongside Kühnel and
Lanphear, was appointed to the town’s planning and zoning
commission -- a significant position, because Sandpoint was
writing its first new comprehensive plan in 30 years. Rognstad
spent the winter reading thick books on urban planning and cut
down his involvement with Transition significantly. His outlook
was changing. "Philosophically, I want to look 100 years down the
road and just shoot for that vision," he told me. "But the city’s
only going to go for what’s real and achievable right now, in this
fiscal year, in this election cycle." He said he was thinking of
running for office.

Kühnel was serving on the mayor’s advisory council on
sustainability, a panel that was assessing a proposal by
Transition’s food working group for an organic community garden.

By all estimates, the food group was far ahead of the others. When
Jeff Burns approached the city about doing a garden as a first
project, the parks director immediately pulled out satellite maps
and started recommending plots. The parks director and the mayor
had already scouted locations for gardens and were only waiting
for some kind of volunteer organization or beautification
committee to come and ask for one. Transition was given a third of
an acre of an unused athletic field near the center of town and
agreed to help keep the rest of the property weed-free in
exchange. The food group had already lined up donations of seeds
and tools and had a built-in pool of exuberant volunteer
gardeners. A groundbreaking party was planned for early May.

And so, the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was taking its first
steps. They were baby steps and, it seemed, pointed in only the
general direction of the revolutionary postcarbon future the
Transition Handbook had called them toward last fall. Other
working groups are now volunteering to help the Chamber of
Commerce, which happened to be starting its own "buy local"
campaign. Transition Initiative members will organize a contest to
design the campaign’s logo and will go around town, asking shop
owners to hang up posters. 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.

"I love Richard’s energy," Councilman John T. Reuter told me
during my last afternoon in Sandpoint. "I can’t say that enough
times. I just think he’s the best thing since sliced bread. But I
guess I can’t really say that because sliced bread is a problem --
that’s part of the industrial-food complex. So he’s better than
that! Richard is the best thing to recover us from the crime of
sliced bread."

Reuter is 25. Bearded but otherwise baby-faced, he is one of three
City Council members under the age of 31. He comes from a family
of Greek Orthodox sheep ranchers in southern Idaho and now heads
the county Young Republicans. He talks fast, scurrying through wry
digressions like a comedian at a Catskills resort.

"Have you read Rob what’s-his-name’s book?" he asked me, meaning
the Transition Handbook. Almost before I could answer, he said, "I
read that whole thing." Reuter didn’t like it, though. "There’s no
question oil is a limited quantity," he said, adding that we
should prepare for a life without it. But the handbook struck him
as overly pessimistic, resigning humanity to the sort of druidic
life people at the charter school were romanticizing. "I guess I
don’t celebrate the loss of energy the way some of the people in
the Transition group do," he said. "I like having a dishwasher."

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."

More than anyone else I had spoken to in Sandpoint, including the
initiative’s own organizers at times, Reuter was able to
articulate a cohesive understanding of what Transition was
actually doing. The movement wasn’t going to unify everybody in
Sandpoint, he said: "I know that’s their dream, but I just don’t
see it happening." But it was inspiring for Reuter to watch the
group emerge as one fervently turning gear in the larger mechanism
of self-governance.

"It’s like any other civic organization," he said approvingly. It
wasn’t a very romantic notion, and maybe achieving that status so
easily was a sign that the initiative wasn’t really tackling the
level of paradigm-busting work Transition wants to awaken us
to. Maybe that will turn out to be regrettable. But, as utopian
movements go, it also struck me as an unusually constructive
outcome.

Writing an Energy Descent Plan or building a parallel community --
bridges to carry us over the terrible time ahead and into a world
we long for -- wasn’t going to be Transition’s strength or its
usefulness, as Reuter saw it. "Government used to be the place in
our community where people came together and made civic
decisions," he told me. "That’s what we should do again, and
that’s what’s going to bring us back together: not having
government be this force somehow outside of us, that’s bearing
down on us or annoying us, but as a force that we actually embrace
and want and that does what we want."

Reuter had a utopian vision, too: the one laid out in the
U.S. Constitution. And the Sandpoint Transition Initiative seemed
to be moving Sandpoint closer to that ideal in its own small way,
even though it was working out of a totally different
handbook. They were managing to make the functioning democracy in
their town a little more productive. For a wide range of
not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that
Transition could help them build the world they wanted. And now,
only because enough people stepped forward and made that decision,
Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were
picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging
it as earnestly as they could.





  • [tcrp-news] Fw: The End Is Near! (Yay!), Tompkins County Relocalization Project, 04/19/2009

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