{"id":4509,"date":"2010-09-14T06:15:12","date_gmt":"2010-09-14T13:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/?p=4509"},"modified":"2012-04-04T15:51:12","modified_gmt":"2012-04-04T22:51:12","slug":"the-end-is-near-yay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/the-end-is-near-yay\/","title":{"rendered":"The End Is Near! (Yay!)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Supporters of the Transition movement in the Panida Theater in Sandpoint, Idaho. Surviving economic and environmental upheaval, the group says, depends on working together, not on building bunkers.<\/p><\/div>\n

The stage lights went up<\/strong> at the Panida Theater, a classy old movie house in Sandpoint, Idaho, and the M.C. stepped out of the dark with one finger high in the air. There was an uprising of applause and cheering. Then, shouting like a head coach before a bowl game, she said, \u201cSandpoint, are you ready?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a Friday night last November. All around the little town of Sandpoint, beetles were blighting north Idaho\u2019s pine forests. The previous day, the U.N. reported that emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants were collecting in brown clouds over 13 Asian and African cities and blocking out the sun. Iceland\u2019s main banks had crumpled, and American auto executives were about to fly to<\/p>\n

\"Sandpoint,

North First Avenue in Sandpoint, Idaho, a town of 8,100 surrounded by two mountain ranges. <\/p><\/div>\n

Washington in private jets to plead for a bailout. Off the coast of Africa, Somali pirates were hijacking oil tankers. But the folks at the Panida Theater wouldn\u2019t stop clapping. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative, a new chapter of a growing, worldwide environmental movement, was officially coming to life.<\/p>\n

The Transition movement was started four years ago by Rob Hopkins, a young British instructor of ecological design. Transition shares certain principles with environmentalism, but its vision is deeper \u2014 and more radical \u2014 than mere greenness or sustainability. \u201cSustainability,\u201d Hopkins recently told me, \u201cis about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.\u201d But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about \u201cbuilding resiliency\u201d \u2014 putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely. For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.<\/p>\n

Transition\u2019s approach is adamantly different from that of the survivalists I heard about, scattered in the mountains around Sandpoint in bunkers stocked with gold and guns. The movement may begin from a similarly dystopian idea: that cheap oil has recklessly vaulted humanity to a peak of production and consumption, and no combination of alternative technologies can generate enough energy, or be installed fast enough, to keep us at that height before the oil is gone. (Transition dismisses Al Gore types as \u201ctechno-optimists.\u201d) But Transition then takes an almost utopian turn. Hopkins insists that if an entire community faces this stark challenge together, it might be able to design an \u201celegant descent\u201d from that peak. We can consciously plot a path into a lower-energy life \u2014 a life of walkable villages, local food and artisans and greater intimacy with the natural world \u2014 which, on balance, could actually be richer and more enjoyable than what we have now. Transition, Hopkins has written, meets our era\u2019s threats with a spirit of \u201celation, rather than the guilt, anger and horror\u201d behind most environmental activism. \u201cChange is inevitable,\u201d he told me, \u201cbut this is a change that could be fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

After developing the rudiments of Transition with a class he was teaching at an Irish college, Hopkins moved to the English town of Totnes, and, in 2005, began mobilizing a campaign to \u201crelocalize\u201d the town. The all-volunteer effort has since been busily planting nut trees, starting its own local currency and offering classes on things like darning socks in order to \u201cfacilitate the Great Reskilling.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than 80 other initiatives across England have followed, including one in Bristol, a city of nearly half a million people. Worldwide, there are now more than 150 official Transition Towns (communities with an active group of citizens), and last winter, trainers from Totnes traveled the globe to run workshops, leaving activists on three continents to begin the relocalization of their own communities \u2014 autonomously and with whatever financing they can raise. (The Transition revolution is, loosely speaking, a franchise model.) Sandpoint, Idaho, was the second Transition Town in the United States after Boulder County, Colo. They have been joined by more than 20 others in the last year, including Portland, Maine; Berea, Kentucky; and even Los Angeles. But the American arm of the movement is expanding far faster than it is accomplishing anything, which is why the event in Sandpoint that night was so significant. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative was the first in North America to hold this kind of coming-out party, meant to engage the community in its work. This constituted Step 4 in the 12-step Transition Process laid out in Rob Hopkins\u2019s Transition Handbook, the jargon-filled manual at the center of the movement. The handbook calls this event \u201cA Great Unleashing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Transition Handbook reads like an imaginative take on a corporate-management text. It recommends techniques for building consensus, from bureaucratic-sounding protocols like Open Space Technology to an exercise in which people decorate a potato like a superhero. \u201cThe Transition model,\u201d the founder of one English Transition Town explained to me, \u201cprovides a structure, a foundation for organizing.\u201d And along with Transition\u2019s emphasis on hopefulness over fear, this rigorous playbook seems to set it apart from earlier grass-roots crusades. It is, Transition leaders say, what they hope will allow the movement to bring in the people that conventional activists have failed to reach and, just as important, keep everyone focused through the messiness and disillusionment every community-organizing effort encounters and many do not survive.<\/p>\n

\"Richard

Richard and Berta K\u00fchnel of Transition in their treehouse. <\/p><\/div>\n

At the Panida, the keynote speaker was Michael Brownlee, the director of the Transition effort in Boulder and a representative of Transition U.S. \u2014 an even newer group that is forming to help the movement spread in America. He was like the Transition equivalent of a middle manager flown in from corporate.<\/p>\n

Brownlee gave his own variation of the standard PowerPoint presentation distributed at Transition trainings. Up on the screen behind him came a slide showing the three convergent emergencies that Transition aims to help us through: climate change, the unraveling of the global economy and peak oil. The theory of peak oil concludes that the productivity of the earth\u2019s oil wells will soon peak \u2014 if it hasn\u2019t already \u2014 and, once production falls short of demand, the market for our fundamental resource will rapidly spiral into chaos, potentially pulling much of society down with it.<\/p>\n

Brownlee spelled out some probable outcomes, quoting peak oil\u2019s pantheon of thinkers: Oil hits $300 a barrel by 2013. Middle Eastern exports cease. Things we take for granted \u2014 supermarkets, suburbs \u2014 quickly become impossible, and the world sinks into an \u201cunprecedented economic crisis\u201d that will \u201ctopple governments, alter national boundaries,\u201d incite wars and \u201cchallenge the continuation of civilized life.\u201d Brownlee paused after reading that last quote. He hadn\u2019t even gotten to climate change and the implosion of the American dollar.<\/p>\n

It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America\u2019s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it\u2019s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it\u2019s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We\u2019re all starting to career down the other side of that hill \u2014 which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it\u2019s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.<\/p>\n

\"City

City Councilman John T. Reuter. <\/p><\/div>\n

In Sandpoint, though, people were trying to move the stale chatter of environmental collapse out of the health-food store and into the 21st century \u2014 to pull each incongruous part of their community<\/p>\n

together and make their town, collaboratively, the blessed place they all knew it could be. At a time when so much fuzzy energy for change ricochets through our culture, and even Chevron ads ask us touse less oil and harness \u201cthe power of human energy\u201d instead, Transition seemed to offer this sold-out theater in Idaho both a vision and a lucid, 240-page instruction manual with which to give it a try.<\/p>\n

Would it work? Nobody could say. But as Brownlee finished, and the crowd suddenly re-erupted into applause, even just trying it seemed to feel wonderful. Next, a group of kids raced onto the stage in Sgt. Pepper garb, holding inflatable guitars. Later came a \u201csustainable performance arts\u201d troupe (they use biofuels when fire dancing) and a woman who sang about rain and peace. By the time the last guitar duo performed \u201cHere Comes the Sun,\u201d everyone in the room was so keyed up \u2014 so ready to turn the impending dark age of peak oil and climate change into a renaissance \u2014 that no one heard the slightest menace in the line \u201cLittle darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting.\u201d Or if they did, they just kept singing along anyway.<\/p>\n

The second phase of the Sandpoint Transition Initiative\u2019s Great Unleashing weekend began the next afternoon. A four-hour meeting was called to divide people into working groups, Step 5 in the Transition Handbook. Each working group would focus on a necessity of the town, like food, energy or transportation. They would develop projects, then research and write a plan delineating what steps Sandpoint must take in order to relocalize over the next several decades. The Transition Handbook calls this crucial document an Energy Descent Action Plan. Producing one is Step 12.<\/p>\n

More than 100 people turned out for the meeting in the gymnasium of a local charter school. Everyone wore name tags. Richard K\u00fchnel, who started the Sandpoint Transition Initiative with some like-minded friends in his living room, drew a shining sun on his.<\/p>\n

K\u00fchnel, 54, is a smiling stick figure of a man, with wispy hair and a whitening beard. He has worked as a software designer on and off since he was a teenager but also has a degree in \u201cecosocial design\u201d from Gaia University. (He is Austrian and moved to Sandpoint in 1995 with his wife, an alternative-medicine practitioner.) K\u00fchnel organized the initiative\u2019s first meeting early last year after returning from a pilgrimage to Totnes, where he attended one of the first Transition trainings. He was attracted to the movement, he told me, because it alone seems to understand how to persuade people to address the world\u2019s gloomiest challenges without shoving them into denial or depression. \u201cWe are not fighting against something,\u201d K\u00fchnel told me. \u201cWe are for something. I wanted to be part of the solution, positively responding to all these challenges here in Sandpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sandpoint is a town of 8,100 people, rimmed by the Cabinet and Selkirk Mountains and bordered by picturesque Lake Pend Oreille. Like many Western towns, it is the mottled product of a century of migration. Railroad workers were followed by timber workers. In the 1970s, young, long-haired back-to-the-landers arrived, and many persevered even as northern Idaho ossified into a conservative stronghold. Last year, after the rise of Sarah Palin, who is a Sandpoint native, a local magazine ran an account of the couple of months she spent there as an infant before moving to Alaska. \u201cI was in the eighth grade,\u201d a former baby sitter told the magazine. \u201cI held her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Transition seeks to \u201cunleash the collective genius of a community,\u201d as Hopkins often puts it \u2014 to unify a town behind a single, critical purpose. And at first glance, unifying Sandpoint might seem impossible. But those living on the land, whether out of a left- or right-wing ideology, do have a lot in common, including an astounding amount of resourcefulness. Peggy Braunstein, who came to Sandpoint from New York 27 years ago, told me that for her and her neighbors, many of whom live off the grid, life without oil \u201cisn\u2019t so overwhelming or shocking. People here have already lived a scaled-down life. We\u2019ve already bartered and shared, canned together.\u201d A local green-tech entrepreneur told me that Transition should not have too much trouble \u201cbridging the rednecks and the hippies.\u201d (\u201cThe best way to bring them together is a Willie Nelson concert,\u201d he joked.)<\/p>\n

At the charter school, everybody found seats in a circle. Many balanced legal pads on their laps. K\u00fchnel\u2019s wife, Berta, began by asking everyone to join hands. She instructed them to close their eyes and transmit energy around the circle in a clockwise direction. \u201cWe\u2019re going to journey into 2030 and see what\u2019s there for us,\u201d she said. She told them to feel their bodies lifting into the clouds, falling back to earth as rain, then joining a river, \u201cflowing forward in time.\u201d The river ran through Sandpoint. It was the future now, and Berta asked everyone to look around: \u201cWhat\u2019s the technology? Is there technology? How do we dream? How do we live?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sandpoint\u2019s mayor, a painter and former hardware wholesaler named Gretchen Hellar, was sitting next to Berta. When I asked her later what she made of the exercise, Hellar told me: \u201cFirst of all, I\u2019m not a good-feelings, touchy-feely kind of person.\u201d She added, \u201cPeople wanted to talk about where we can put community gardens, how can we make our downtown more viable.\u201d John T. Reuter, a Republican city councilman a few seats over, told me that when Berta told them to hold hands, he was looking around the room, counting up the people he knew Transition just alienated.<\/p>\n

The crowd split into groups of nine to draw their visions. Bruce Millard, a local architect who builds with straw bales, quickly emerged as his group\u2019s moderator. Quite tall, with a ponytail and mustache, Millard bent over and drew several circles on his group\u2019s sheet of paper with an orange crayon. He envisioned a hub-and-spoke system: many villages, each with a different specialty, with downtown Sandpoint as a trading post in the middle.<\/p>\n

The group started brainstorming, assuming there would no longer be cars or a power grid. One village might grow food. Another should educate children.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere are we going to put the corpses?\u201d someone asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cEat \u2019em!\u201d said a woman in braids.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan you just make a rule that everybody\u2019s cremated?\u201d a somber-looking woman in a blazer asked. Her husband was sitting with his face in his hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d Millard said, \u201cit takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we\u2019re getting into rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Millard\u2019s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a \u201cphalanx.\u201d A central estate or \u201cphalanstery\u201d would be surrounded by tradesmen\u2019s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland.<\/p>\n

Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; \u201cindustrial feudalism,\u201d he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would \u2014 all by merrily following their individual passions \u2014 end up satisfying all the phalanx\u2019s essential needs. \u201cThe new amorous world,\u201d he wrote, would rise out of \u201cthe new industrial world\u201d by the force of \u201cpassional attraction.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the mid-1800s, more than 15,000 Americans had experimented with Fourieristic living, many drawn to its promise during a severe economic downturn. But Fourier\u2019s belief that acute scientific modeling could bring disparate people together didn\u2019t hold. It reflected, the historian Carl J. Guarneri writes, \u201cthe na\u00efve faith that . . . Baptists would get along with freethinkers and intellectuals would make great farmers.\u201d Arguments tore phalanxes apart. So did debt. All but eight failed within three years.<\/p>\n

It has been an American impulse since the Puritans: feeling the world racing in the wrong direction and withdrawing to a small, insular place to start over. Hippies came to Sandpoint in the 1970s for similar reasons: to live solitary, self-reliant lives. But going back to the land was tough, particularly since many never lived on the land in the first place. (\u201cI couldn\u2019t build things with my hands,\u201d one man, once part of a small commune called Huckleberry Duckleberry, told me. \u201cIt was futile.\u201d) By the early \u201980s most had either moved into town or left the region.<\/p>\n

Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition\u2019s more oblique arguments may be that we can\u2019t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.<\/p>\n

By now, around the charter-school gymnasium, one group was imagining year-round farmers\u2019 markets in the buildings that would, by 2030, no longer be banks. Another discussed bicycle parking and nodded benignly at a man who pictured everyone living in caves with Internet connections. Millard\u2019s circle was ticking off ways they could travel between the villages they had drawn. \u201cO.K., so we\u2019re walking, we\u2019re bicycling, we\u2019re skiing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cKayaking!\u201d someone offered.<\/p>\n

Peggy Braunstein spoke up, worried about the snowy north Idaho winters. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a problem,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no problems,\u201d Millard told her. \u201cIn a dream there\u2019s no problems. There\u2019s only solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karen Lanphear, who has been steering the Transition Initiative alongside Richard K\u00fchnel since its inception, found this portion of the meeting excruciating. \u201cI thought we squandered at least an hour or an hour and a half of people\u2019s time,\u201d she told me later. Lanphear is a commanding woman of 62 with short, styled gray hair and a doctorate in education. In many ways, she is K\u00fchnel\u2019s temperamental opposite. She feeds off his visionary energy but felt compelled to run their earliest meetings with timed agendas.<\/p>\n

In the six weeks before the Unleashing, Lanphear met with the Downtown Sandpoint Business Association, the University of Idaho extension office and the branch manager for U.S. Bank. She was the keynote speaker at the Greater Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce\u2019s monthly Women in Business luncheon and penned six editorials on Transition for the local paper. Lanphear told me she has a gift for \u201cbuilding coalitions.\u201d This was apparent. But it wasn\u2019t clear if everyone she briefed had the same frame of reference. Karl Dye, head of the Bonner County Economic Development Corporation, told me, \u201cAll the things Transition\u2019s doing basically line up with what we\u2019re trying to do, which is create better-paying jobs.\u201d He saw a lot of promise in Lanphear\u2019s group, though he also said: \u201cIf you start a business to produce food locally and there are opportunities to make money by taking it to other areas, you\u2019re going to do it. You may believe in Transitions and local production and local consumption, but hey, man, we\u2019re still Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time of the Great Unleashing, most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn\u2019t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition\u2019s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn\u2019t \u201ca greenie, hippie, far-out thing.\u201d But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn\u2019t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by \u201cinventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.\u201d (The new word Boge objected to wasn\u2019t \u201cTransition\u201d; it was \u201csustainability.\u201d) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition\u2019s ideals. \u201cI\u2019ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.\u201d Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.<\/p>\n

Transition\u2019s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes. Most people I met in Sandpoint seemed to have latched onto the enjoyment part and run with it. The vibe was much more Alice Waters than Mad Max. (Jeff Burns, a local food activist who joined the food working group, was a conspicuous exception. \u201cSome people on the food group want to feel good,\u201d he told me, \u201cand some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn\u2019t yet understand that \u201cjust because you\u2019re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn\u2019t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.\u201d He later added, \u201cIf I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the next few days, I surprised myself by actually arguing with people in Sandpoint about whether they were doing Transition properly \u2014 with enough intensity, given the stakes. \u201cI can\u2019t live with the ambiguity of pending disaster,\u201d Lanphear told me. \u201cI was raised to believe there are no problems without solutions.\u201d She said she didn\u2019t believe things would become as bad as Brownlee and others predicted. She had a lot of faith in the ethic and ingenuity of younger generations and also told me, contradicting what seems like a central tenet of Transition, \u201cI think technology is going to be one of our saving graces.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few months after the Sandpoint Un-leashing, I went to a meeting of the new board of Transition U.S. in Sebastopol, Calif., north of San Francisco. The organization had just partnered with the Post Carbon Institute, another peak-oil-focused nonprofit group, and received $280,000 of seed money. The board had signed the lease on its new headquarters 12 days before I arrived.<\/p>\n

Transition U.S. is designed to offer guidance to Transition initiatives forming around the country and to organize trainings. Already it had communicated with activists in more than 900 communities. Jennifer Gray, who started the second Transition Town in England and then went to California to found Transition U.S. last year, was spending most of her time fielding phone calls and e-mail messages. She took it as a good sign that no one in Sandpoint was reaching out to her.<\/p>\n

Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There\u2019s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn\u2019t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: \u201cLet it go where it wants to go.\u201d Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents \u2014 all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn\u2019t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to \u201cunleash the collective genius of the community\u201d and hope all the right pieces spill out. \u201cWe truly don\u2019t know if this will work,\u201d Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the \u201cCheerful Disclaimer!\u201d<\/p>\n

Consequently, the structure Transition sets forth is intentionally very minimal, and improvisation is encouraged. The handbook\u2019s 12 steps needn\u2019t be done in order (Hopkins now calls them the 12 \u201cingredients\u201d), and communities are free to skip ones they don\u2019t find useful. Ultimately, the most profound thing Transition offers isn\u2019t a methodology at all but a mood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe genius of the Transition message, as I see it, is that it takes what we should be doing to avert these crises and turns it into something that sounds inviting and positive and uplifting,\u201d Richard Heinberg, a Transition U.S. board member, told me in Sebastopol. Heinberg is an icon of the peak-oil fringe and the author of the seminal, comfortless book \u201cThe Party\u2019s Over.\u201d In 2007, he published a wider-ranging volume called \u201cPeak Everything.\u201d Still, Heinberg said he worries that Transition risks losing people in the elation it inspires. He has been debating with Hopkins whether, in addition to devising a long-term descent, Transition should emphasize preparing for disasters that Heinberg says are unavoidable or already unfolding, like volatile gas prices or \u201cbeing sideswiped by economic catastrophe and weather disruptions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually he expects the energy grid to weaken or shut off entirely and, like Michael Brownlee, he told me he considers martial law or worse persecution possible as resources become scarcer. Jennifer Gray, meanwhile, told me she expects \u201ca big population die-off.\u201d Heinberg said, \u201cThere\u2019s nothing wrong with being motivated by fear if there\u2019s something to be genuinely afraid of.\u201d<\/p>\n

I returned to Sandpoint in late February. The 11 working groups formed at the charter school in November were meeting regularly. They ranged in size from half a dozen to about 20 people and were all filing minutes to a steering committee as they plotted their first projects.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Gray describes one of Transition\u2019s goals as creating a \u201cparallel community,\u201d putting things like local power generation or local food networks in place to survive the slow crumbling of our current ones. But for the most part, the projects evolving in Sandpoint seemed designed to make the town\u2019s current infrastructure a little greener and more livable. One group hoped to facilitate energy audits, making Sandpoint\u2019s buildings more efficient users of the energy grid. The mobility working group, meanwhile, was planning to install a barrel of brightly colored flags at a dangerous intersection downtown. Pedestrians could pick up a flag and cross the street waving it, making themselves more visible to automobile traffic. Ideally, one member told me, they would persuade the city to put a traffic light there, \u201cbut that\u2019s two, three years down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was also surprised by the degree to which Transition members were intermixing with city authorities. Shortly after the Great Unleashing, Shelby Rognstad, a young cafe owner and an early Sandpoint Transition Initiative board member alongside K\u00fchnel and Lanphear, was appointed to the town\u2019s planning and zoning commission \u2014 a significant position, because Sandpoint was writing its first new comprehensive plan in 30 years. Rognstad spent the winter reading thick books on urban planning and cut down his involvement with Transition significantly. His outlook was changing. \u201cPhilosophically, I want to look 100 years down the road and just shoot for that vision,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut the city\u2019s only going to go for what\u2019s real and achievable right now, in this fiscal year, in this election cycle.\u201d He said he was thinking of running for office.<\/p>\n

K\u00fchnel was serving on the mayor\u2019s advisory council on sustainability, a panel that was assessing a proposal by Transition\u2019s food working group for an organic community garden.<\/p>\n

By all estimates, the food group was far ahead of the others. When Jeff Burns approached the city about doing a garden as a first project, the parks director immediately pulled out satellite maps and started recommending plots. The parks director and the mayor had already scouted locations for gardens and were only waiting for some kind of volunteer organization or beautification committee to come and ask for one. Transition was given a third of an acre of an unused athletic field near the center of town and agreed to help keep the rest of the property weed-free in exchange. The food group had already lined up donations of seeds and tools and had a built-in pool of exuberant volunteer gardeners. A groundbreaking party was planned for early May.<\/p>\n

And so, the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was taking its first steps. They were baby steps and, it seemed, pointed in only the general direction of the revolutionary postcarbon future the Transition Handbook had called them toward last fall. Other working groups are now volunteering to help the Chamber of Commerce, which happened to be starting its own \u201cbuy local\u201d campaign. Transition Initiative members will organize a contest to design the campaign\u2019s logo and will go around town, asking shop owners to hang up posters. Lanphear told me, \u201cAs long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn\u2019t matter who gets the glory or the credit.\u201d Richard K\u00fchnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, \u201cI feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that\u2019s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is\u201d \u2014 whether those people know it or not.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love Richard\u2019s energy,\u201d Councilman John T. Reuter told me during my last afternoon in Sandpoint. \u201cI can\u2019t say that enough times. I just think he\u2019s the best thing since sliced bread. But I guess I can\u2019t really say that because sliced bread is a problem \u2014 that\u2019s part of the industrial-food complex. So he\u2019s better than that! Richard is the best thing to recover us from the crime of sliced bread.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reuter is 25. Bearded but otherwise baby-faced, he is one of three City Council members under the age of 31. He comes from a family of Greek Orthodox sheep ranchers in southern Idaho and now heads the county Young Republicans. He talks fast, scurrying through wry digressions like a comedian at a Catskills resort.<\/p>\n

\u201cHave you read Rob what\u2019s-his-name\u2019s book?\u201d he asked me, meaning the Transition Handbook. Almost before I could answer, he said, \u201cI read that whole thing.\u201d Reuter didn\u2019t like it, though. \u201cThere\u2019s no question oil is a limited quantity,\u201d he said, adding that we should prepare for a life without it. But the handbook struck him as overly pessimistic, resigning humanity to the sort of druidic life people at the charter school were romanticizing. \u201cI guess I don\u2019t celebrate the loss of energy the way some of the people in the Transition group do,\u201d he said. \u201cI like having a dishwasher.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people\u2019s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. \u201cTo say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn\u2019t sufficient,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s something really more substantive: they\u2019re bringing people to the process.\u201d It was easy to argue that at the initiative\u2019s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. \u201cThere\u2019s just something happening here that\u2019s reviving people\u2019s civic sense of possibility,\u201d he later said. \u201cPolitics is \u2018the art of the possible,\u2019 right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what\u2019s possible in people\u2019s minds. It is expanding people\u2019s ability to dream bold. And that\u2019s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than anyone else I had spoken to in Sandpoint, including the initiative\u2019s own organizers at times, Reuter was able to articulate a cohesive understanding of what Transition was actually doing. The movement wasn\u2019t going to unify everybody in Sandpoint, he said: \u201cI know that\u2019s their dream, but I just don\u2019t see it happening.\u201d But it was inspiring for Reuter to watch the group emerge as one fervently turning gear in the larger mechanism of self-governance.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like any other civic organization,\u201d he said approvingly. It wasn\u2019t a very romantic notion, and maybe achieving that status so easily was a sign that the initiative wasn\u2019t really tackling the level of paradigm-busting work Transition wants to awaken us to. Maybe that will turn out to be regrettable. But, as utopian movements go, it also struck me as an unusually constructive outcome.<\/p>\n

Writing an Energy Descent Plan or building a parallel community \u2014 bridges to carry us over the terrible time ahead and into a world we long for \u2014 wasn\u2019t going to be Transition\u2019s strength or its usefulness, as Reuter saw it. \u201cGovernment used to be the place in our community where people came together and made civic decisions,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat\u2019s what we should do again, and that\u2019s what\u2019s going to bring us back together: not having government be this force somehow outside of us, that\u2019s bearing down on us or annoying us, but as a force that we actually embrace and want and that does what we want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reuter had a utopian vision, too: the one laid out in the U.S. Constitution. And the Sandpoint Transition Initiative seemed to be moving Sandpoint closer to that ideal in its own small way, even though it was working out of a totally different handbook. They were managing to make the functioning democracy in their town a little more productive. For a wide range of not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that Transition could help them build the world they wanted. And now, only because enough people stepped forward and made that decision, Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging it as earnestly as they could.<\/p>\n

[Via NYTimes.com<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The stage lights went up at the Panida Theater, a classy old movie house in Sandpoint, Idaho, and the M.C. stepped out of the dark with one finger high in the air. There was an uprising of applause and cheering. Then, shouting like a head coach before a bowl game, she said, \u201cSandpoint, are you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[195,394],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-survivalism"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}