about those challenges, to which it is presented as a possible solution (I dwell further on the origin of Transition in the disquiet engendered by peak oil in ch. 9). Furthermore, in the light of the need – which the book was trying to address – to provide guidance to others asking about Transition (so as to ease some of the strain on the organisational resources of Transition in Totnes), the Handbook follows the structure of an instruction manual. This is particularly evident in the setting out of twelve steps towards establishing a Transition initiative; steps that very much mirrored the way the Transition Town Totnes had been set up. These went from building awareness and organising a ‘Great Unleashing’ to drawing up an ‘Energy Descent Action Plan’.
In the Handbook, Hopkins also traces some of the ‘roots’ of Transition thinking to permaculture. This is a set of principles/orientations to guide the design of resilient, diverse systems (whether the ‘system’ be a woodland, an allotment or a more complex human community).16 Originally developed in relation to the building of self-sustaining agricultural systems, permaculture – under the guise of a design know-how – has been applied to a much wider array of pursuits than food-growing, on the assumption that ‘everything gardens’17 and can therefore benefit from the application of design principles originally devised in relation to land-based activities, such as allotment growing or smallholder agriculture:
The basic principle of permaculture is to make useful connections between different elements in a system, so that as many inputs as possible are provided from within the system, and as many of the outputs as possible are used within it. This principle can be applied to connections between human beings just as well as it can to plants and animals.18
Hopkins presents Transition as a derivation of the permaculture approach, adapted to the design of communities that be more resilient in meeting their needs in the face of the challenges of climate change and peak oil. At the same time, however, he also distances Transition from permaculture, observing that the latter has often been pursued in relative isolation, and never really went mainstream. Permaculture is therefore implicit, rather than explicit, in the Transition phenomenon,19 acting for Transition like a ‘starter’ does (this is the yeast from which sourdough bread is subsequently baked, which is transformed in the process). What this means became clearer to me as I went on to carry out interviews with members that were involved in Transition. The more testimonies I gathered, the less prominence permaculture seemed to have in their first-person accounts of how they were drawn into it. While all had heard of it, only a very small minority had actually gotten interested in permaculture as a consequence of their involvement in Transition: most simply knew of its existence, but not much more beyond that. Despite borrowings from permaculture – as I will discuss in greater depth in ch. 3 below – permaculture is hardly an explicit component of Transition as many scholarly accounts seem to give it credit for.
In response to the demands for support and information that followed the unleashing of the Transition Town Totnes, a formal ‘outreach’ organisation was set up, the Transition Network. This is the main focus of the 2009 pamphlet by Rob Hopkins and Peter Lipman. In it, they trace in broad strokes the formal organisational structure that has been put in place to offer dedicated support to incipient Transition initiatives outside Totnes. But the reason this pamphlet is interesting in the economy of this chapter is in a number of significant differences from the Handbook. For one, references to permaculture are omitted, and the formal passages of the permaculture design process are substituted with a set of ‘principles of Transition’.20 This, of course, is not because of a sudden change of heart as to the place of permaculture within Transition, but rather a further confirmation that permaculture need not be part – as it wasn’t for the Transitioners I encountered in Totnes – of an induction into Transition.
Another significant innovation from the presentation style adopted in the Handbook is the more explicit emphasis placed on the non-prescriptiveness of the guidelines on offer. In an interview I undertook with Rob Hopkins, in fact, he admitted he quickly felt – soon after publishing the Handbook – that it risked being taken too literally, so that the ‘twelve steps’ he outlined for setting up a Transition initiative would be taken methodically, as opposed to being treated as a mere form of advice, which people could be free to disregard if not needed. Overall, Who We Are and What We Do seems to try to correct the aim and lower a threshold that might have become a hurdle in fostering the birth of further Transition initiatives: namely rigid adherence to a rulebook.
The Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan (the ‘EDAP’),21 which came to light in 2010, has a slightly different function from the previous two documents: less of an introduction to Transition, and more a culmination of the original twelve-step process in relation to the Totnes initiative. Unlike the previous two documents, the intended audience of the EDAP has a more limited geographical remit, being addressed mostly to ‘individuals, the community and local service providers in the area of Totnes and District’.22 However, by virtue of being the first energy descent plan originating in a Transition initiative, the EDAP is structured as an extensive reference resource, in a self-conscious attempt to signpost the journey of Transition in Totnes for interested others.
The narration presented in the EDAP once again introduces Transition as a response to the challenges of peak oil and climate change. However, where it adds to previous literature is in setting a vision of how Totnes might achieve greater resilience to peak oil and climate change within a rough timeline (by the year 2030) and in selected areas of intervention, from food provisioning to building efficiency, down to energy security and economic relocalisation. In this sense, it is close in spirit and style of presentation to Rob Hopkins’ PhD dissertation, which has a similar concern with setting out possible pathways and milestones towards achieving resilience to climate change and peak oil.
In the dissertation – which could be read as a suitable ‘companion volume’ to the EDAP23 – Rob Hopkins unpacks various dimensions of community resilience in the face of peak oil and climate change, and relates these to the work undertaken in the ‘pilot’ initiative in Totnes. For this purpose, it seems that one of the principal concerns of that text is to assess feasibility and anticipated effectiveness with respect to a number of steps or strategies, such as liaising with local government. The dissertation also endeavours to position the Transition approach – as exemplified by the instance of Totnes – in the context of the debate about relocalisation more generally.24 In sum, the PhD appears to build and expand – for evaluative purposes – on the topics and strategies set out in the EDAP, and is once again reliant on the ‘twelve steps’ that had been introduced in the Handbook.
However, his thesis equally contains shoots of the innovations that would begin to distinguish later works on Transition from this ‘early literature’. For instance, at one point Hopkins discusses his intention to develop a second edition of the Handbook, in order to go beyond the twelve steps. He justifies this on grounds of there being ‘an emergent understanding that the 12 Steps, used to communicate Transition, fail to reflect the depth of what is emerging in Transition’, and he suggests in their stead a different communicative approach to ‘better reflect the more interconnected, systems-thinking model into which Transition has evolved’.25
This is a crucial passage, for it is here that one can witness the emerging rift between the picture of Transition conveyed by a set of instructions and its experiential unfolding. During an interview with myself, Hopkins offered the following observation, in order to explain the move away from the normativity of the Handbook. Namely, a number of accounts from fellow Transitioners beyond Totnes reported that the steps would normally be followed up to a point, and then people would begin referencing them more liberally, picking and choosing what worked. A new style of presentation was needed, therefore, to be more receptive to the variety of paths into Transition that seemed to emerge over time, beyond the original stepwise sequence. Where this change comes to fruition and is expressed in a new editorial product is in The Transition Companion.26
Recipe books and collections of short stories
The Transition Companion (‘the Companion’) was published in 2011. This new volume
