Readjusting to reality 2: Transition?

Abstract

This is a sequel to another paper—also entitled ‘Readjusting to Reality’, published in City 17 (1)—that focused on Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture (UPA) as a vital component of the downward passage from our energy-intensive modern world to one where we will have to live more in tune with our ecological context, with re-localised economies that live on local resources and production. This paper focuses on the Transition Movement that is growing rapidly around the world, aimed at responding more broadly to the emerging energy and climate change problematic, ahead of what otherwise can be expected to be the collapse of our globalised economy and the social aspirations and political structures that this has created. The Transition Movement, by contrast, is concerned to develop positive responses that reintegrate local communities, living in harmony within their local worlds. The heart of the paper, however, focuses on the current tumult of protest movements and demonstrations around the world, enquiring as to what these are trying to achieve, how effective they are in achieving their ostensible aims and, in the final analysis, whether the inchoate aspirations are in practice realisable. The discussion places the present manifestations in the context of past revolutions and their motivations to ask whether we might expect growth in the current protest movements to yield genuine change to resolve the issues they are attempting to address, warning that these could, rather, end in authoritarian, even tyrannical responses. The paper ends by suggesting that the Transition Movement, relating as it does back to anarchist movements of the past, presents a realistic resolution to the problematic of revolution as well as addressing the emergent energy and climate change problematic. A tailpiece to the paper asks whether Transition is relevant not only to the global North but also to cultures elsewhere, illustrating this with a description of an emergent Transition Initiative in the Philippines.