outside, like a scaffolding that envelops a building: it rests on it, following its contours, while failing to offer a glimpse into the building-ness of the building, into the process by which a building becomes itself.97
Last, but not least, is the recent PhD contribution by Aiken, who offers a detailed exploration of the ambiguity connected to the use of the term ‘community’ in referring to Transition.98 ‘Community’, he suggests, is a wilfully indeterminate notion subject to constant specification as new occasions for common doings arise; community in Transition is therefore ‘flexiform, shapeshifting and never permanent. It is rooted locally, based on small-scale personal interactions, but has swings and ebbs and flows of people, ideas and energy throughout. In short, everything exists in a permanent state of transition’.99 In this sense, Aiken offers a first phenomenological glimpse into the piecemeal, contingent process by which new strands and trajectories are intersected and drawn into the moving of Transition, while it gathers diversity, depth and nuance along the way. He also offers the first clear articulation of the tension that I have outlined so far between policy/instrumental approaches to Transition (as a strategy to achieve normatively-fixed goals) and the endeavour to express the life of Transition’s moving on its own terms, with all the orientational dilemmas that can only be sensed from within (but not from without, in the position of a policy-maker that knows already where they want to go). Aiken finds this tension playing out in relation to the deployment of the term ‘community’ in order to speak of Transition, where he distinguishes between ‘governmentalised [understandings] of “community” used to discipline individuals into “correct” environmental actions and behaviours [on the one hand], and the “community” of experience and belonging [on the other]’.100 He positions himself in relation to this tension, by suggesting – in much the same way as I have done here – that ‘“community’s” meaning [...] is not an object to reflect on, be discussed and cognitively understood. Rather it is lived, embodied, and just is’.101 In this sense, the practice of community is ‘achieved only through work on a “demanding common task”. One does not simply walk into “community”’.102
The basic intuition underlying this alternative approach to engaging with Transition – and most clearly expressed by Aiken – is what this book tries to develop. Unlike scholarship of the ‘policy’ sort, a phenomenological narration of Transition actively tries to eschew a definition, the simplification of Transition from a policy perspective, mistaking one possible instantiation of this phenomenon – as a set of strategies to address peak oil – for the whole. I also try to avoid narrating the moving of Transition through a process of separation and re-combination, as do some of the writers in the incipiently ‘phenomenological’ strand I discuss above, like for instance Polk and Hardt. While noticing the moving, the latter fall short of providing an account that travels with the dynamic generative process of Transition. This is a process that discloses relatedness-in-difference across a range of practical pursuits, revealing the edge of a phenomenon that unfolds in increasingly complex, fractal form. This book aims to delve into this possibility, by experimenting with a description that is intensive rather than extensive. By going deeper into the phenomenon so as to let it speak, rather than beginning with a process of definition and categorisation that, like a scaffolding, sits on the outside but fails to grasp exactly how a phenomenon comes to life.
Part 1: The Moving Transition
3. ‘Everything Gardens’, Gardens Everywhere
It appears common practice for researchers interested in Transition to start from a definition of what the movement is ‘about’. In our case, this definition posits both a defined endpoint to Transition’s activism (such as responding to climate change and peak oil), as well as describing Transition in a fundamentally summative manner (because of the analytical dissection that is presupposed in the ‘quantitative’ way of seeing). By this, I mean that Transition is portrayed as the sum total of a number of components that feed into it. I consider this summative approach a hurdle in fostering an understanding of what I sense is a much more fluid, continually changing, motion of the social.
One of the areas where the difference in approach emerges most vividly, between the dynamic perspective espoused here and the analytical stance of other commentators, is in relation to the role of permaculture. In the previous chapter, I hinted that permaculture is acknowledged as a central ‘building block’ of Transition in the Handbook, even though it becomes less prominent in subsequent introductory expositions, such as the Companion. This evolution could be interpreted in a misleading manner, if permaculture were envisioned as a component (like a Lego piece) that can exist independently of Transition, and that can therefore be incorporated inside it (or removed from it) in seemingly mechanical fashion, without the ‘part’ itself being affected by its participation in an emergent whole. In this chapter, instead, I want to offer a dynamic account of the relatedness (and the difference) between permaculture and Transition, so that permaculture-in-Transition can emerge as the participant part of an internally related whole that unfolds through a process of constant transformation and re-fitting, a process inherent in the appearing of Transition as living sociality. Understanding the relatedness (and the difference) between Transition and permaculture – so as to be able to follow the movement of their changing fit – is in this sense a first step towards emancipating the account offered here from a concern about reducing Transition into a set of component parts susceptible of independent existence.1
Moving on from here, a fitting beginning is to introduce permaculture, which can be described as a design approach for bringing to life sustainable organic systems. This is a very broad definition of permaculture that does not immediately betray its origins in the practice of agriculture, food growing and garden design.2 The term permaculture originates from the merger of the words permanent and agriculture. In this sense, it was meant to offer a number of guidelines to convey a way of seeing and relating to food growing, such that food could be produced in systems that are as self-sustaining as possible, and – simultaneously – that fit harmoniously in the particular context in which the food growing is to be undertaken. In this sense, the permacultural design process typically involves sustained observation of all the relations (between plants, animals, climatic forces and all elements enfolded within a landscape, including human beings) that shape the site chosen for intervention.3 Those interactions are then considered for their potential in benefitting the success of the intervention, following the maxim of ‘turning problems into solutions’.4 What the act of observation is meant to disclose is a map of the ‘living landscape’, which the permacultural designer can work with, so as to generate synergies that will enable a successful intervention with minimal disruption of the existing ecology of relationships, be these of a social or biological nature. Institutionally, from its beginnings in the works of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, permaculture as a design approach has been disseminated through dedicated organisations, such as, in the UK, the Permaculture Association. These organisations administer, alongside other outreach work, a system of certification for permaculture teachers.
Beyond the application of the permacultural design approach to the design of food growing ecosystems, permaculture is acknowledged to have gradually shifted in meaning from permanent agriculture to permanent culture. In this sense, as a way of seeing and being in the world, permaculture promises to offer an approach through which all types of engagements (beyond just food growing) can be informed by an (ethical) orientation towards promoting care for the Earth, for other people and in support of social justice.5 This ushers possibilities for non land-based permacultural designs. It is possible to adopt the permacultural way of seeing to bring forth certain qualities of inclusivity and nonviolence in all forms of relating, without these being confined to the work of growing food or developing a garden. This broader applicability of permacultural design is reflected, for instance, in the work of Macnamara, a permaculture teacher offering one of the first permacultural design courses that is focused on the use of permaculture as a technique for ‘transforming people’6 by nurturing relationships of care and resilience vis-à-vis oneself and others.7
The
