across the spectrum of Transition activities. By beginning to navigate an ethical trading space, consumers are stealthily encouraged to experiment with new consumption choices and, through these, to begin developing new attachments. So, for instance, while the Bristol Pound has made an exception to its local sourcing policy for public transport, there are no gas stations that participate in the scheme (thereby encouraging a change in transport choices from private to public transport, which can spark an alternative experience of place and provide greater curiosity towards projects that are coherent with that experience). Similarly, in Totnes, there was a general agreement that the Happy Apple, an independent supermarket stocking local produce, would be a very welcome addition to the Totnes Pound network, whereas the local Morrison’s supermarket shouldn’t be allowed to join. Indeed, even if a currency does not enjoy much circulation, but purely through the act of ensuring that the exchange circuit where it is allowed is signposted and clear, certain consumption choices can be encouraged, while others discouraged and, in turn, new puzzlements and disquiets find their way in people’s lives, demanding a response that can spark a search and further engagement with the Transition milieu.
Therefore, local currencies are a way to tap into a realm of experience (the use of money) that is not self-evidently related to the issues that prompted the initiation of Transition’s moving like peak oil and climate change. At the same time, the local currency scheme avoids foregrounding the elements of disagreement, but meets users of money where they are, acting as a silent facilitator to a process of exploration that may lead to a reconsideration of ‘taken for granted’ routines, and even spark further engagement in Transition activities – beyond just shopping locally. In fact, as people are set on a path of critical reassessment of their consumption choices, it is difficult to know how far the experimentation and the readjustment of their material attachments and discursive self-understandings may take them.
These considerations are relevant to understand the fittingness of initiatives like the Pound or the REconomy project (ch. 6) in the moving of Transition as a whole. To the question that some scholars asked, whether ‘a movement that wants to aim for broad participation [ought to be] open to those that do not necessarily agree with everything associated with it’,39 it becomes easier to understand why Hopkins would express the view that the answer is ‘yes’.40 As a strategy for change, this involves the creation of spaces to meet people where they are, and ‘activate’ them to the possibility of developing new attachments that may shift the very position from which they develop their opinions, eliciting greater openness to the rest that Transition culture holds.
At the same time, a moving that spirals out to embrace and enable more experiences is constantly faced with the problem of fitting everything together,41 trying to ensure that any new opening relates to what’s there already, so as to prevent fragmentation that might break the movement’s wholeness, through irreversible forks in the path from which the relatedness-in-difference would become exceedingly difficult to perceive, and lead to the shedding of some part. This is how it is possible to understand Longhurst’s doubt as to whether a Totnes Pound that is understood purely as a loyalty scheme might not be reaching too far, without being sufficiently woven into and imbued by the other strands of Transition culture.42 On the other hand, the way into Transition might be more intricate than Longhurst suggests, and unfold less through explicit discursive agreements (e.g. about peak oil being a problem) than it might through piecemeal shifts in non-representational material and embodied attachments (such as looking through the shelves of a shop stocking local and seasonal produce, seeking to accommodate one’s desire for particular tastes with what’s on offer, and discovering new flavours). In fact, my suggestion is that questions like the one voiced by Longhurst should be understood as coessential to the moving of Transition as a live process: a moving that proliferates differences, and entangles these together by developing resources to express their relatedness as participant parts of an unfolding whole. This is akin to Goethe’s suggestion, for understanding the mutual relatedness of the different parts of a plant, of ‘train[ing] ourselves to bring [the different] manifestations [of the plant’s metamorphosis] into relationship in opposing directions, backward and forward. For we might equally well say that a stamen is a contracted petal, as that a petal is a stamen in a state of expansion’.43 Indeed, it is precisely by remaining sensitive to how the different practical trajectories enfolded in Transition become reciprocally relevant, that one can grasp the appearing of Transition as a moving, not a completed movement. This is an insight that evokes a process of continual self-differentiation across various domains of practice, alongside the unearthing of a mesh of cross-references between these (as was the case of Inner Transition being cued in the Totnes Pound meeting).
To conclude, in this chapter I have tried to outline how, even when it comes to experiences of an economic character woven into the moving of Transition, there is more than meets the eye. Local and complementary currencies, while a tool for relocalisation, can equally be understood as a technique for facilitating engagement with an unfolding material and discursive culture of Transition.44 In this light, particular attention has been devoted to the different possibilities offered respectively by currencies and LETS schemes. It has been suggested that the former make it easier to meet larger audiences in simpler capacities, due to the lower threshold of engagement in comparison with a LETS scheme (despite, of course, LETS schemes retaining a place in Transition culture, albeit with a slightly different purpose than perhaps to act as a direct invitation for wider constituencies).
Local and complementary currencies, in particular, are useful tools to nurture an interest in Transition by making it speak through the seemingly everyday act of consumption. They can serve as a tool for foregrounding possibilities that might have hitherto been hidden – in a manner not dissimilar to the practice of culture jamming45 – and facilitate a rethinking of one’s personal, everyday experience through the novelty of an attachment to the local currency (and the accompanying ‘ethical trading space’). In this sense, the Totnes Pound stands out as a Transition thing for its simultaneous relatedness to – and diversification of – the moving of Transition. On the one hand, in fact, engagement with a local currency can be a first step towards the discovery of additional Transition practices that may be encountered through the initial experience of buying in an ‘ethical trading space’. On the other hand, the currency scheme makes space within Transition for the seemingly routine act of consumption. In this way, it adds to the range of experiential possibilities that can be sustained within this evolving cultural milieu. However, this process of cultural differentiation comes packaged with the recurring challenge to ensure that every new experience ‘fits’ and is embedded into all the strands that animate this moving, so that the currency project can speak as yet another manifestation of a distinctively ‘Transition’ culture, and not secede into a self-standing loyalty scheme.
Russi almost achieves the impossible in providing a rich and polyvalent description of an idea on the wing. Academics might recognise a kind of phenomenology in his approach, which is more akin to smelling and tasting, than weighing and measuring. Everything Gardens explores from within, Transition as a process of incubation or the deliberative unfolding of an alternative to consumer capitalism – a pattern language for a more place-generative, ecologically recursive form of local economy. Poetic and optimistic, Russi’s book adds ‘participant permaculture’ to the social science playbook. This is a new methodology that I am sure will become part of the repertoire.
Stephen Quilley, Associate Professor of Environmental and Social Innovation, University of Waterloo, Canada
What is Transition? That is the question that is at the core of this book. How do we go about Transition? How is Transition defined? At what point is Transition perceived as complete? The difficulty of these questions is so wonderfully managed in Everything Gardens, wherein we learn that, in a way that is perhaps similar to Theodor W. Adorno’s (or Herbert Marcuse’s) notion of non-identity, Transition is best understood only insofar as it is not reduced to an instrumental process that can be absolutely captured in some total concept or theory. [...] If ever there was a book that was so penetrative and that raises so many fascinating questions about the phenomenon of Transition, it is Everything Gardens. As a study of the utmost integrity, one can only hail this work by Russi as a
