TRANSITION NETWORK

Celebrating Failure is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the book. Because we live in a culture of success. No matter how we talk about losing being part of the game, it's still losing. Victors take all, stand on the podium crowned with laurels, king of the castle, biggest banker on the block. No one wants to be in the beaten team, on the bottom of the pecking order. But to be in Transition means we have to understand this win-or-lose mindset as an old order we need to transform.

For those of you who don’t know anything about crofting, in its heyday it could be seen as a perfect model for Transition...Most crofts consist of a few acres of what’s called ‘in-bye’ land – the actual smallholding itself, on which the croft house is usually situated – along with rights to put livestock out onto the ‘common grazings’ of the crofting township. Crofters now have rights to security of tenure, fixed rents, and the right to inherit or assign crofts pretty much in perpetuity. Recently, the right for crofting communities to buy out their land has been enshrined in an astonishing package of legislation that in an ideal world would mean that crofting townships like ours should flourish.

What is it, then, to make oneself at home, within a community of living beings, as if one belonged? If it requires a word, I prefer indigenate. And where to start? As all good things must, with one’s self at home.

Okay I admit it upfront. I do have a Transition initiative. In fact, I'm involved with two. Sustainable Bungay and Transition Norwich. So why don't I just get out of here and let the Transition individuals without an initiative get on with the week? The thing is, I live in neither of the places where the initiatives are. So in my transition beginnings in 2008 I was very glad of the introduction to the 12 original key steps, with its idea of Transition Anywhere-You-Find-People.

Sometimes, if we step back to think about all of the challenges, we get a little overwhelmed. How do you transition a street, and a neighborhood, in an American city of great extremes between the wealthy and the poor?

"How can you possibly do this in L.A.?" people familiar with the Transition model often ask me. Even people who live here find the idea quite daunting. One local Permaculture teacher, when asked "What about LA?", literally threw up his hands in a gesture that said "It's hopeless."

Los Angeles is a mega-city. At 11 million people, we're somewhere between 8th and 15th on the list of the world's largest. We're one of the biggest population centers that have dared to actively work with the Transition model. Just for the record: it isn't categorically "hopeless."

This is the grove I come to each spring, first with the daffodils, and later with the bluebells and red campion. This is the season, between the Equinox and May Day, when England is her most green and exuberant. I love this spring moment. I love English marshes and Welsh hills, the deserts of Arizona, the valleys of Ecuador, the islands of Greece, the forests of Mexico. I have traversed many lands, sat with a thousand flowers and learned their medicine. I have climbed trees, swum in wild water, and spent a big part of my life immersed in the fabric of nature, trying to find words for the wild, the beautiful and the free . . .But what on earth has this got to do with Transition?

Nature is big and encompasses so many things. Forest, ocean, whale, field, meadow, sky, bird, flower, cow, river, mountain, sun, tree. Human too, though we often don't think of ourselves as part of the natural world. That's a big part of the problem. It means we don't truly see that the havoc we wreak on the living systems of the planet, on all our fellow creatures and plants, we wreak on ourselves, connected as we are in the web of life.

This is a post about shopping and a conversation we've been having for three years now in my Transition initiatives about relocalising food culture in East Anglia. Because when you're discussing supermarkets you are really discussing the industrialised food system and the producerist society we live in. It's a massive topic and one we will return to in our Diet and Environment Week in April, when I'm hoping to write about disentangling ourselves from Big Ag on the micro-level. Right now I'm looking at the macro-level and how there is life after supermarkets. Really.

I seem to have done rather a lot of talks in schools recently. I did one last week which included showing clips from the film ‘In Transition 2.0’ and talking about all kinds of stories from Transition initiatives around the world. It was also the first one I have done yet where no-one was texting at the back of the room, which was a nice change (might one assured way to raise educational standards in schools be to make sure none of them have a mobile phone signal? Bit radical.) One of the questions I was asked was about how Transition got started, a question I am asked with alarming regularity still). It got me thinking about the whole question of getting things started.