explanation (see the box in ch. 2). A central task of my effort in this book is precisely to introduce the phenomenon of Transition not in the extensive manner (i.e. through comparing different ‘units’ external to one another), but in an intensive manner. What I try to do, in other words, is to go as deep as I can into the fine details of the phenomenon of Transition. In providing a rich empirical account,33 our knowledge of the qualities of the phenomenon becomes more intimate and less informed by a pre-existing theory we super-impose on the phenomenon itself.
This is why, when I chose the subtitle ‘Growing Transition Culture’ for this book, my attention was not on ‘Transition’, understood as an entity that exists and that can be examined extensively (which would leave me open to the criticism that I plan to do what would require a comparative study, without having actually undertaken a comparative study). Instead, my emphasis is on the ‘growing’. Where I judge the success of the enterprise of writing this book, in other words, is in being able to take the reader into the qualitative moving through which a distinctive culture of Transition develops, and I do so through the detailed observation of one initiative.
What this focus allows, despite its modest beginnings in one particular case, is to get a glimpse of the whole phenomenon; of Transition as an unfolding whole. By going deeper into its moving, my hope is to develop some facility with the process whereby a culture – which I understand as broadly as possible, as any set of discursive and material attachments34 that orient engagement in the world – comes to be, through a motion of relating difference and achieving fittingness in a dynamically unfolding whole. By turning to the process in its proceeding, it becomes possible to understand how the whole comes to be, how it ‘moves’. This, in the end, is something that requires a shifting of attention away from this or that ‘end-product’ of the unfolding of a social phenomenon, and into the making of those observed outcomes: these, after all, are only crystallisations of a fluid motion, not the motion itself.35
2. Transition: A Publishing History
Many studies of Transition begin by looking at existing accounts that may offer guidance as to what ‘it’ is supposed to be ‘about’. In this sense, the written materials produced by prominent individuals who have been continually involved in the life of Transition are the customary starting point for the sort of analytical enquiry that I distanced myself from in the Introduction. In this chapter, my goal is to show how, even if we set off from where most social scientists start in relation to Transition, we need not end up where they have. Indeed, an initial glimpse into the unfolding, dynamic quality of Transition – as a moving and not a completed movement – already shines through a synoptic reading of various introductory texts produced within the Transition milieu. If we take them separately, as is often the case, we risk missing a dynamic motion in the horizon of Transition, paralleled by the style of its presentation. This impression, that the Transition Handbook1 (the first official ‘manual’ about Transition) is only a part of the story – and a dated one at that – was reinforced by interviews I undertook with the former publisher of the Transition series for Green Books, John Elford, as well as with Rob Hopkins, one of the initiators of Transition and the author of some of the most popular reference titles about it.
In order to illustrate what I mean, this chapter sketches a short history of Transition, dotted by references to some of the accompanying literature that has been generated in the process.2 In more detail, the texts I will focus on are primarily those produced by Rob Hopkins, either individually or in a team of authors. These are: his three titles with Green Books – in chronological order – The Transition Handbook,3 The Transition Companion4 and The Power of Just Doing Stuff,5 his PhD thesis,6 the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan written by Hopkins with Jacqui Hodgson7 and a pamphlet by Hopkins and Peter Lipman with the title Who We Are and What We Do.8
Before delving into a review of these texts, however, I want to spend a little longer on the purpose of this chapter, in the economy of the narration I am trying to weave through this book. A common misconception that academic analyses bring to the study of a social phenomenon in motion is to take whatever has crystallised as an indication of what it is. So it occurs that, when trying to study Transition, most accounts rely heavily on writings produced in the early days of the Transition phenomenon, as though they clarified the essence of it. Often, however, these are just passages through which this phenomenon has appeared. They are signposts on which its unfolding has relied upon for a while, and subsequently moved on, absorbing them inside whatever continuations of the story have been subsequently enacted. In this sense, any literature originating within the Transition milieu – and this applies even more to the early one – has to be appreciated in context, recovering the tentative spirit of the early days. It is merely a snapshot of an unfolding phenomenon so that it might, in the light of subsequent progress, become too tight or too rigid to embrace what Transition is in the process of becoming.
Whenever we try to cling to these snapshots, and substitute them for the whole, we are taking a risk: a risk on which the whole possibility of ‘knowing’ through this process stands or falls. A snapshot is the picture of a motion; in fact, even a collection of snapshots is still a collection of discrete representations of that motion and not the motion itself. When the snapshots we take as starting points are not approached with a degree of self-consciousness – in the knowledge that they are crystallisations of an unfolding motion – there is a risk that what we speak about no longer exists; that Transition, for example as described in the Transition Handbook, might have morphed beyond recognition into something more complex and textured than the initial text could encapsulate. If we don’t use snapshots as a way to access the motion, but confuse them for the motion itself, we risk simply being too late. Coming armed with theories to a meeting with something that has moved on, so that we end up building scaffolding around an empty shell.
This is why I think it is important to devote an entire chapter to illustrating that any number of written accounts are to the life of Transition what past perfect is to present. Think of this section as a springboard through which to ignite our curiosity and poise our attention for taking the plunge from the pictures to the process by which the motion itself arises (or, rather, my experience of it, which I gathered through ‘accompanying’ the life of Transition in Totnes) in subsequent chapters.
Beginnings and instruction manuals
The ‘early’ writings on Transition encompass a number of texts. In 2008, Rob Hopkins published The Transition Handbook with Green Books.9 This was followed, in 2009, by a shorter pamphlet called Who We Are and What We Do, authored by Hopkins and Lipman.10 In 2010, Hopkins and Hodgson issued the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan11 and, in the same year, Rob Hopkins defended his PhD dissertation.12 I set the cut-off for these ‘early writings’ just before The Transition Companion, published in 2011.13
These are the writings that accompanied the launch of the first Transition initiative in Totnes in 2006. In fact, the ‘unleashing’ of Transition in Totnes, although marked by a discrete celebratory event, was actually a longer process woven through preparatory film screenings and other public events. These eventually culminated in what has been called – in Transition-speak – ‘The Great Unleashing’ of a new Transition initiative:14 in this case the first, in Totnes.
The months after the unleashing of Transition were particularly hectic. Not only, in fact, were members being engaged in the life of the new-born Transition Town Totnes, but they were also receiving a lot of requests for information by groups wanting to reproduce the Transition concept in their own communities. In order to respond to those requests, Rob Hopkins authored The Transition Handbook (‘the Handbook’), a first official ‘how-to’ guide to setting up a Transition initiative. This occurred with the parallel development of the Transition Network, the ‘outreach’ arm of the formal organisation of Transition, devoted to supporting incipient initiatives around the world.15
The Handbook is organised around an exposition of the Transition concept as a response to the challenges of man-made climate change and peak oil (i.e. the anticipated exhaustion
