Transitioning

Some thoughts published on my WordPress blog a year ago.

On my first post on my WordPress blog, I mentioned how I ‘transitioned’ to going vegetarian in the late Spring / early Summer of 1986 and a few years later, vegan, though in neither case did I consider it to be a 'transitioning' process.  In each case there was an obvious end goal and the transition really didn't take much time.  Going vegetarian meant cutting out what was already a low consumption of meat, poultry and fish.  It also meant looking out to avoid animal fat or any other food ingredients obviously derived from the slaughter of animals, birds or fish, though I'll admit that my knowledge back then of food additives wasn't great.  In a non-dietary sense I had no leather clothing in any case and may not have even owned any leather shoes as I wore trainers (sneakers) even during winter!

Going vegan in in a dietary sense meant no longer consuming any dairy products and paying more attention to food additives.  This was greatly helped in those pre-internet days by having joined the Vegetarian Society, receiving from it upon joining a copy of the 1989 edition of The Vegetarian Handbook containing a comprehensive (for the time) list of Common Food Additives & Contaminants.  I already used to avoid eggs or anything containing them.  In a non-dietary sense there really wasn't any change as I owned no woollen clothing.  Nowadays many people try to make both of those transitions in one go.  In reality they probably do so progressively rather than overnight by adopting a phased approach to dietary change and that of leather or wool on a replacement basis as needed, rather than just discarding shoes or clothing that may still be wearable.  Each of us who has made these transitions to vegetarian then vegan has done so at our own pace without any degree of coercion.

Coercion of any sort will always backfire and if during Veganuary, someone is curious to make the transition, the thing to do is point them in the direction of where information can be found and let them make their own decisions, progressing at what pace they deem appropriate.  There is an end goal, though one shouldn't expect anyone to achieve that overnight.

This leads me onto the ‘Transition’ movement founded in 2006 by permaculturalist Rob Hopkins. ‘Transitioning’ is used in many contexts, it has for example been used by the neo-liberal globalists of the ‘Chicago School’ to describe countries that they've been bringing under their ideology, such as those of the former Eastern Bloc, where utilities and industry, which had been under state ownership, were sold off to private multi-national corporations via what Naomi Klein described in her book The Shock Doctrine (Part 4, Lost in Transition), first published in 2007.  ‘Transitioning’ has also more recently been adopted by those people who believe that by claiming a different gender identity, it will enable a change to their biological sex, although that is genetically impossible.  This ideology is mainly being used by some men in order to exclude women from society.

I was already aware of the ‘Transition’ movement from having found via WordPress a blog post elsewhere on the subject, but until I saw the above display in the reference section of Leamington Spa library in 2022 last year was unaware that it is (or had been) a ‘Transition Town’.  The books in the display should give some idea of what is (was) involved, though as none of them were published more recently than 2011 and most are up to ten years older than that, the local initiative in Leamington may well have stalled.  The manifesto for want of a better term is the book on the bottom right of the display, The Transition Handbook, From oil dependency to local resilience, published in 2008.  The library has three copies and I have since learned it is possible to buy a second-hand copy quite cheaply on-line, which makes me wonder if too many were printed in the first place, or used to begin with, but that local initiatives elsewhere may have started but stalled as people lost interest.  Leamington Spa is listed in the book as one of many ‘Transition Towns’ as is Coventry, a city of more than a third of a million people where the Ecology Party had been founded in 1975 and where I had lived for more than a decade at the time of this book's publication, without at the time then ever having heard of the ‘Transition’ movement, let alone Coventry – or perhaps one suburb of the city - being the locality of one such initiative.

The synopsis of the book essentially is that current at the time, as they still are, ‘Western’ consumer lifestyles are environmentally as well as economically unsustainable.  That message was not exactly new at the time.  What Hopkins was advocating was for us to turn our backs on globalisation and move back towards a more locally-oriented society.  So far, so good, that has been the message of the green movement from the start.  The ‘Shock Doctrine’ in this case, that the populations of wealthy countries need to wake up to is that of ‘Peak Oil’, the point where remaining reserves become increasingly expensive to recover.  It is not just oil, it is all fossil fuels.  In the case of Britain, our economic self-sufficiency in oil that we had during the 1980's and 1990's is long gone, we still have plenty of coal but the mines have all closed and our North Sea gas reserves, like the oil reserves, are depleted, because of the decision to shift electricity generation from coal to gas to meet Kyoto Protocol targets on climate change. Building combined-cycle gas turbine power stations was the post-privatisation option in the 1990's, rather than building a new generation of coal-fired power stations.  And nuclear power stations, because of the high capital cost, long-lead in time and possibility of a Public Inquiry, have never been attractive to the private sector looking to make a quick buck.

Hopkins links Peak Oil and hence depletion of all fossil fuels to climate change.  The danger with this however is that sceptism about the latter being an ‘emergency’ (a scepticism that I happen to share) can then lead to a denial about how to tackle the former, although the depletion of fossil fuel resources and hence the need to diversify away from them has been known since long before ‘global warming’ became a hot topic in the late 1980's.  Oil by-products, he recognises, are one of the features of modern life, including nylon and polyester for clothing and PVC, which is sometimes used in clothing as a leather substitute.  However, even if these were to become more expensive to manufacture they ought to be durable enough to be re-used. The major problem with forecasting when Peak Oil will occur, or has it already occurred? – and remember that this book was published a decade and a half ago – is the accuracy of the data, when there are different datasets from different sources and none can be entirely accurate.  But the general synopsis is that the major world economies need to diversify away from it; and not to rely on increasingly dirty sources such as trying to extract oil from tar sands or via fracking.  Fair enough. The main problem that I have with the book is the over-use of the corporate Newspeak word ‘resilience’, mentioned many times in the first chapter, which is about Peak Oil and climate change, it sets the tone for the book.  From a vegan perspective, replacing polyester with wool would be a backward step, as would the demechanisation that he desires, in replacing modern machinery such as tractors, with animal labour, horses pulling ploughs.  Even if the horses were well looked after, what would happen to them at the end of their working lives?  And would Hopkins also like transport to be demechanised, with horse-drawn trams, stagecoaches and carts replacing cars, vans, lorries, buses, coaches and trains?

Whilst embracing localisation, Hopkins didn’t mind somewhat distorting the truth in order to make a point.  He recognised that the supermarket chains operate on a high turnover of stock, hence depending on the product may only keep from a few days’ worth to a few weeks’ worth in warehouses.  He mentioned a ‘truckers’ strike’ in 2000 as having exposed this weakness in supply, however such a strike never happened. Rather it was lorry drivers, to use the British term, blockading oil refineries to protest at the high level of taxation that many ‘greens’ support, which led to a decline in fuel available, hence the lack of deliveries.  The lorry drivers also staged go-slows on motorways and in their protests at oil refineries were joined by taxi drivers and farmers.  During that strange week in September 2000 the Great British public indulged in their now well-established habit of panic buying, of bread, cows’ milk and other perishable food, no doubt resulting in a lot of waste from people buying more than they consumed when supplies returned to normal. Unlike in March 2020, I don’t recall any panic buying of toilet paper, so that must be a more modern trend!  In my lifetime I have only known one genuine food shortage and then only of bread, due to millers going on strike resulting in a shortage of flour.  But that was back in 1977 when supermarkets were considerably smaller and a high proportion of people still purchased bread from proper bakeries, some of which were part of a chain, others independent; none back then were ‘artisan’!  Moving forward to September 2000 again, some of the panic buying was also of flour, when the bread had run out.  I wonder how much of it ever got used?

Hopkins had and may still have a particular vision as to how a ‘Transition Town’ could develop via an initiative based on certain concepts and steps. But reading it I found that he came across rather like a management consultant, with the buzzword ‘resilience’ included of course.  And some of the initiatives, such as having a printed local currency, may only have succeeded because of their novelty value.  But the reality is that complete localisation within a national economy, let alone a global one, is impossible. It is a parochial pre-industrial world view proposed for a post-industrial world, in which no-one commutes more than a few miles or has any reason to travel further than that.  In the real world, people commute because they cannot afford to live close to their principal place of employment, or because personal circumstances don’t allow it.  In the real world, two good salaries are required to purchase even a modest abode and as likely as not each partner may be employed in a different town, maybe even more than one hour’s journey from each other. More to the point, long-term security of employment has long been in decline and why should people be continually obliged to move home, rather than being allowed to put roots in one particular place, just because their place of employment may vary from week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year? There are millions of people in Britain and in other largely post-industrial societies who are in this position, where commuting to different places, which may be more than an hour’s journey from home, is an economic necessity for survival.  Rob Hopkins can present idealistic alternatives, but in the real world, that is all that they can ever be.  Even if someone has a permanent contract of employment based at one location, the nature of the employment may necessitate regular journeys once a week or so, away from that location. For the vast majority veganism is less difficult to transition to and has a definite end goal; and on a personal level can be achieved without societal changes, whilst continuing to campaign for them.  The problem with Rob Hopkins’ ‘Transition Movement’ is that it is unclear what the end goal is.  That we should all live in ‘15 minute cities’, forbidden from travelling further afield, to visit friends, family, have holidays, attend events elsewhere and just understand what living really means?

Primary Reference

The Transition Handbook.  From oil dependency to local resilience – Rob Hopkins, Green Books, Dartington, England, 2008.

Additional Reference

The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein, paperback edition, Penguin Books, London, England, 2008