Does the Transition Town model represent a “dark green” survivalist approach to citizen climate action?
Is the Bright Green Future model better because its emphasis on large scale technological mitigation aims to prevent climate catastrophe rather than just adapt to it?
Does this have to be an either/or choice?
Last week Alex Steffen of WorldChanging chastised the Transition Towns movement for having a “casual eagerness for the death of others” underlying their core motivation, which – Alex offers – is to ready their communities for the coming collapse. Says Alex:
“My beat is looking for ways to create a future which is sustainable, dynamic, prosperous and fair — a future which is both bright and green. WorldChanging is based on the premise that such a future is not a distant possibility, but a growing reality. We seek to connect worldchanging people with the tools, models and ideas for building it.”
My feeling about it is that Alex came down too harshly given that what we really need are many more people who recognize the urgency of the situation, even if, for some, their main incentive is to not get caught under the collapse. I have my doubts about whether humanity can get its collaborative and collective act together in time to head off calamity. But that’s why I’m starting up XC3.0.
Alex believes that first and foremost we need to unite our will and effort behind a global technological leap into sustainability. This is his bright green future – one that I believe can be realized for many people. But there are going to be many very different approaches to adapting for a sustainable future.
Any outright planning, at this point, is an act of faith – as we’re in sort of a global prisoner’s dilemma. Who commits first to taking the great leap? We need a lot of best-case scenarios for progress to come true. The odds don’t look so good for that.
The premise of extreme community doesn’t rest on imminent collapse, but it does assume that at the local level, society finds itself in a state of constant adaptation to the unpredictable, and that the dynamics of self-governance are in flux. This is the urgency of HAVING to get good at community.
[addendum] – Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition Towns, responds to Alex’s piece. In a nutshell, Hopkins says his response is that, ”
…it appears to me that what Alex does is to describe Transition as something it isn’t, criticise it for being that, and then propose something to replace Transition which is actually what Transition was all along.
I agree with Rob when he writes that, though Transition emphasizes the need for action at the national and global levels, the local is important because, “without vibrant, creative, positive local level engagement, all of those will be less well informed, slower and less inclusive.”