The Backstory
Nov. 26, 2010 (Transition Times) -- The emergence of the Transition movement in the last four years or so is one of the most hopeful signs in the early 21st century, and Transition may yet turn out to be one of the fastest-growing, most inspiring, and most significant social change movements we have ever seen.
For those of us who had already been working towards relocalization for some years, the community-wide Transition process that Rob Hopkins and his fellow pioneers began developing in Totnes in 2006 was the very first sign of a clear and replicable pathway to community resilience and self-reliance in the face of the converging global crises of fossil fuel depletion, global warming, and economic collapse.
In Boulder County, we had well understood the urgent need for relocalization since we began in mid-2005. Inspired by Julian Darley’s Post Carbon Institute, then located in Vancouver, we joined the Relocalization Network early on, and did our best to follow the principles and guidelines that flowed from Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg and the early “Post Carbon Outposts,” most notably in Willits, California. The tag line in those early days was, “Reduce consumption, produce locally.” Some took that as a kind of tough love. This early movement was focused on an understanding of the peak oil crisis, and was driven by people who Darley called “the walking worried.”
That primitive relocalization movement grew surprisingly rapidly. At its peak, probably early 2007, there were reportedly some 200 such Post Carbon Outposts in a dozen nations or so, and founder Julian Darley predicted in an interview I did for HopeDance Magazine in July 2006 that the network would continue to grow exponentially. But it didn’t happen. And at the moment Darley was saying this, it was already beginning to collapse. Groups were disbanding, giving up. The Relocalization Network turned out to be unsustainable, partly (perhaps) because it lacked precisely the kind of replicable process for relocalization that Transition provides.
READ MORE: CarolynBaker.net
