Brown; your enthusiasm and support is something I will cherish long after publication. Totnes, of course, is where a lot of the action for this book has taken place. There, Schumacher College has been a unique breath of fresh air and, indeed, a triggering factor in making me want to follow the trails of conscience above those of career. Jonathan Dawson, Julie Richardson and Tim Crabtree, the organisers of the course in Economics for Transition, have been incredibly supportive of my antsy presence and polemical verve. Finally, the community at the College, from the students and all the other teachers, to the cooks and the volunteers, has etched itself in my heart for the space, the companionship and the support it has offered (not to mention heaps of incredible vegetarian food!).
In Totnes I have also had the privilege of meeting many trailblazers with varying degrees of vicinity to Transition. To every single person I interviewed goes my heartfelt gratitude. When I think of the time and the honesty you generously gave to a relative ‘outsider’ like myself (with every interview often going over the hour and, in a couple of instances, close to three), I am truly humbled, and sincerely hope you will find inspiration in this text I offer back.
My thanks also go out to everyone else whom I did not interview, but who took the time to show me around, to point me to this or that person or event and who acted as go-between to ensure I could meet those people or participate in those events. This book has grown upon the fertile ground of your knowledge surrounding the Transition terrain, which I have avidly tried to soak up, and I hope it has done it justice. Last, but not least, Devon is also where I have met David Inglis, who has offered fatherly support, sociological wisdom, and a model of grace and patience to look up to for the rest of my career.
But pirates and revolutionaries hide a bit everywhere. R.C. Smith, the founder and director of the Heathwood Institute in Norfolk, has generously given his time and expertise to draft the preface to this book. The Heathwood Institute, an independent research organisation looking to develop a synthesis between phenomenology, psychology and the politics of Occupy and alternative education, is one of the most interesting experiments I have come across as of recent. Steffen Böhm and Stephen Quilley in Colchester and Waterloo (Canada) have equally accompanied this book with their enthusiastic appreciation and kind words.
I am also thankful to the places that have given me the opportunity to be an academic according to my own inclinations and leanings. The Department of Sociology at the University of Exeter has offered a respectful and supportive space to come into my own as a scholar. My other academic home, the International University College of Turin, is an impressive instance of a post-secondary institution working for the common good. Not in the trite sense of promoting empty notions of ‘excellence’ mediated by meaningless rankings, but in the sense of conceiving of education as an occasion for commoning and for individual and collective emancipation. Finally, I am grateful to the Fondazione Felice Gianani for their financial support that made my fieldwork – and this book – possible (here, the usual disclaimer applies).
Another debt of gratitude is the one I have towards anyone who has afforded me spaces to talk about my work so far, especially Stefan Geier of Shoreditch Radio for a memorable interview (and some really funky tunes), Charlotte DuCann of the Transition Free Press, Jonny Gordon-Farleigh of STIR Magazine and Allegra Hawksmoor of the Vagrants Among Ruins collective. I also wish to disclose my indebtedness to Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain Project for their inspiration: I hope they will find here traces of uncivilised writing.
Last, but not least, my thanks go to the many friends and family that have dined, smiled and punctuated months of hard work with moments of lightness and words of encouragement. To my mum and dad for never making me feel distant, despite living in different parts of the world, and to my brother for making me part of the enthusiasm that new ideas can offer. To my adopted family in India and Wales, for memorable times spent together in Aberystwyth and in Shillong: among them, I cannot thank Danny and Zelma Pariat enough for giving me a home where I was able to complete this book. I am also grateful to Amin, for having supported my work early on when I took it where it needed to go. To Paul and Jane, for taking the pirate metaphor so far as to move to an island. To Isheeta and Michael, for patient listening and board game shenanigans. To Rob and Maria, for giving us a home to so many fond memories in Brighton. To Alfonso, confidant and co-conspirator, Hannah, Marius and Giovanni for breaking bread together and Lal for sha, jingbam and Wahingdoh matches.
My closing thought goes to Janice. If I have got to the end of this book in good physical and mental health, and most of all in love, it is because she is truly magnifica.
1. Introduction: Travelling Without Moving
It is in the doing that the ‘community’ is understood, in practice not definition.1
Legend has it that a visitor, upon coming to Totnes to ‘witness’ Transition, frowned in disappointment and observed the following: ‘I am dismayed to see that you still have cars on the streets. And not only do you have no living roofs in the town, but [...] there are also no goats grazing upon them’.2 Like that visitor, I confess, I too was after my own idea of purity; an idea formed studiously over a period of months spent toiling over articles and books, trying to make out from a distance what Transition was supposed to be. Those neat expectations, however, gave way to Kafkan disorientation when I entered the maze of a living and growing Transition initiative, like the one in Totnes. A bit like the main character Michele in Lo Cascio’s La città ideale3 I, too, went looking for ‘the ideal city’. I tried everything I could to fit that new place into my own ecological idealisations, only to realise – upon hitting on a live, moving thing like the horse Michele runs into with his car – that I was only seeing the inside of a blinker. Wind trapped in a box does not come out the same when the lid is lifted again. In the same way, confining Transition to boundaries that delimit what ‘it’ is meant to be can hardly preserve the pulsating intensity of its everyday unfolding. As Michele does by the end of Lo Cascio’s film, so did I, eventually, awaken to the possibility that ‘[t]he windy nature of events makes it impossible for life to drift [unchanged] in a frozen moment. All we can do is tell its tale’.4
This, I guess, is how I came to feel that too many works are written about Transition, which begin by offering a pre-formulated definition of what it is, like a box in which wind is enclosed. These accounts are often woven around a neat storyline that has a beginning, middle and an end. Transition, one learns from such works, is a social movement that begins – conceptually – from a vision of the world after peak oil5 and – geographically – in the town of Totnes, Devon. In the process of rolling out this vision, a list of steps and strategies is deployed; this results in projects ranging from communal gardens to local and complementary currencies, and in a geographical expansion spiralling outwards from Totnes, towards the rest of the UK and beyond. The end of this story is an assessment of these achievements, against the benchmark set by the initiating, seemingly fixed goal to tackle peak oil: how successful has Transition been at fulfilling it? It is from the end of the story, therefore, that the evaluative task of the scholar normally begins.6 This approach is one that sits uneasily with me. Chiefly because there is something deeply paradoxical about fencing Transition in a relatively closed and ordered narrative (what it is, what its goals are, what initiatives are necessary to bring about that vision and against which to appraise its ‘performance’) when its very name conveys the sense of movement. Of something perched in a precarious, unfinished position. A passage. A transition, precisely.
This book is my answer to that disquiet. Namely to the sense that understanding Transition also poses a fundamental challenge to the customary ways – within academic discourses – of explaining things away, and of adopting an external position from which to look at something as though it was a separate object. The detachment required when talking about Transition this way appears to me incapable of capturing the sense of participation, of journeying or of heeding a call to adventure that its very name bears: from the latin transire, to move across. For every crossing is also the stretching of a path open to yet further continuations, just like – in my experience of it – Transition manifests as the iterative uttering of an invitation to mix in the folds of something as yet unfinished; acting into it while – through one’s responses to that invitation – giving form to its ongoing specification.7
Another helpful