Katie Quinn-Jacobs wrote:
As I recall, powering down our community is what relocalization is all about. And it was, briefly, a goal of TCLocal's, then named TCRP (Tompkins County Relocalization _Plan_). But it quickly became obvious that "the plan" in TCRP, should it be written, wouldn't fly politically here in Tompkins County. Maybe it would now?
The purpose of TCLocal was, and is, to influence local government by researching various aspects of local self-sufficiency in order to lay the groundwork for future policy responses to energy descent (not the kind that results from individual choices, admirable as they are, but the kind that will be forced upon us by geology, economics, and climate change). This objective hasn't changed since we started. What has changed is a shift to focusing on individual topics rather than attempting to produce a complete overall plan in the near term. This is in contrast to efforts such as those mounted by the Portland (OR) and San Francisco Peak Oil groups, which have created comprehensive visions of their desired future. The more modest approach was necessitated by our limited resources, but in retrospect I think we've benefited by looking more deeply at one aspect of our local situation at a time. The result is a slowly growing body of pretty solid analysis that TCLocal contributors can justly be proud of (see tclocal.org). Through the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, we were able this summer to print up and distribute a year's worth of TCLocal articles to over 500 local government officials and staff in Tompkins County. I have no way of judging the extent to which this has increased the level of awareness of the need for relocalization and local energy descent planning among our local policy makers and implementers, but I'm confident that we have a clear objective and are executing on that objective as well as anyone possibly could under the circumstances.
TCLocal ditched "the plan" and shied away from becoming a local political activist group, as was being encouraged by the Post-Carbon Institute at the time, in favor of educating the community through a series written articles.
The TCRP/TCLocal focus on research rather than political action was there from the beginning. For much of 2006 we also conducted separate meetings of a parallel PostCarbon Ithaca group (affiliated with the PostCarbon Institute) and offered repeatedly to help set up a PCI effort to carry out political activism, but no one was interested.
And when Transition Towns arrived, olive branch in hand, at the Woman's Community Bldg a year or so ago, the rep was told after her presentation, "Thanks, but we've already got that covered."
Yes, our roughly two dozen local sustainability groups were already working and in many cases had been in existence a lot longer than the Transition Town movement. It's understandable that there was not a lot of enthusiasm for abandoning those separate efforts or merging them under a single organizational umbrella.
So do we? If not, why not? Would solidarity with other Transition Towns be of any help in our own struggles? Is "global relocalization" really an oxymoron?
I'll repeat here what I said at that meeting. The Transition Town concept (if you boil it all the way down) is based on convincing local government to take the lead in moving a municipality to an energy descent model -- not gradually reducing the local carbon footprint by buying hybrid vehicles for city staff but completely reorganizing the whole system of production and consumption. The larger the municipality, the harder it is to sell this concept, which is why the big TT success stories have been in relatively small towns. It is theoretically possible for Ithaca to become a Transition Town, but there's no willingness among the local power structure to head in this direction. Absent a City leadership with a consensus view of the need for radical reform of the entire local economic system, the alternative is a local sustainability group with the organization and authority to adopt the Transition Town goal as its primary objective. The obvious (and only) candidate for such a group here is Sustainable Tompkins. As I said at that meeting, it could be desirable from a marketing standpoint for ST to become Transition Town Ithaca, and with the growing visibility of the TT movement, I continue to believe that this is something ST should seriously consider. But successfully carrying out such a plan would require two dozen autonomous groups to come under one leadership, which is not something that would be easy to accomplish. In the meantime, anyone with the necessary skill and interest is invited to join the little group of us chipping away at the job of understanding in detail what needs to be done to meet the challenges of energy descent in Tompkins County. Further description is linked from the tclocal.org web site. Jon (TCLocal Editor) _______________________________________________ For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins Questions about the list? ask [email protected] free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
