transition

It is one thing to see what is wrong with the old paradigm ways of control,centralisation, division, and selfish greed. It is quite another to work out what best to do, now, in our own lives, to bring about the desired new paradigm economy, based on sharing, collaboration, and sustainability. How do we transition through the inertia created by the incumbent system?

The Transition Towns movement is a popular approach which aims to build bridges to the future, town by town, by raising community awareness of sustainable living, and by encouraging them to increase their resilience through becoming more self reliant.

Ted Trainer writes about this movement, praising the initiative, but raising his concern that resilience is not enough:

The goal seems to be to make the town safe from the coming storm but to go on living in it in typical rich world affluent ways, when those ways can’t continue without an unsustainable and unjust global economy.

He argues that what is actually required is to create new local economies capable of gradually replacing the old paradigm ways, as and when they collapse. As Ted puts it:

The first principle of a sustainable and just society must be the willingness to live very simply in terms of resource use. This does not imply hardship or deprivation; it is about being content with what is sufficient for a good quality of life.

The supreme goal should be building a new local economy, and running it.

We have to build a local economy, not a national or globalised economy, an economy designed to meet needs, not to maximise profits, an economy under participatory social control and not driven by corporate profit, and one guided by rational planning as distinct from leaving everything to the market.

Transition Towns and Ted both focus on "Peak Oil and Climate Change", but we face not just impending resource scarcity and ecological destruction, but a collapse of our entire old paradigm financial, economic and political systems. Centralised control, having long ago lost its moral compass, is now losing its grip entirely, and most people are sleepwalking their way to destruction.

Transition Towns aims to reform the existing systems, while Ted sees the urgent need for a more radical approach which will in time replace these failing systems with a new-paradigm approach. I certainly agree that the old ways are too rigidly entrenched in most people to be bent into fundamentally new shapes, especially in the very short timespans we have left to react to this crisis. We must "take it all down and start again".

Actually it is more a case of "start again then take down the old"! As Ted indicates, the practical approach for bringing in a new system is to establish it in parallel with the old. Currently we are too dependent on the old paradigm systems to survive their immediate removal, so we need to create the new alongside the old, before the old collapses completely.

This is analogous to building our new compact eco-house in the garden of our draughty and decaying old mansion: we are living in the old house while we build the new, but we are already dismantling parts of it to recycle the materials. The new house is much smaller than the old, and a radically different design. It faces the sun, and will provide comfortable shelter, while avoiding the waste and inefficiency of the old.

As Ted says:

If we don’t plunge into building such an economy we will probably not survive in the coming age of scarcity.

In another analogy, we are in an orchard where the few big old trees are diseased and dying and their yields are dwindling. We cannot save these trees - their days are numbered. We must plant new seeds right now, of a more resilient variety, and nurture them diligently, or we will quite simply starve before they can grow to fruition.