Hi Folks, ST hosted the meeting with the rep from Transition Towns. Although the model that they propose is focused on energy descent, it seemed to me that in practice the various citizen groups just beginning their journey under that banner were engaged in a wide range of sustainable community projects (community gardens, smart growth planning, buy local, etc). In other words, the people in Transition Town groups were like all of us -- tackling particular aspects of becoming more sustainable according to their interests, their influence, and their resources.
It seemed to me from the presentation we had that the Transition Towns organization wasn't quite prepared to deal with communities where there was already a diversity of sustainability initiatives underway. I didn't think that either "side" spurned the other; rather there was no mechanism for a conversation with citizen groups that were already active. Perhaps this was because the rep had only recently completed her training, and Transition Towns headquarters hadn't yet developed any guidelines for their outreach people. And I wonder if any surveys are available that detail exactly what is underway in the 250+ communities who've signed up as Transition Towns. I see from their wiki that they want allegiance to their model and their organizational hierarchy, so perhaps they still don't have a mechanism for integrating with existing groups who would not want to rename themselves or transfer authority to an outside group. Re: the suggestion that ST become the local Transition Town group. ST is a small organization, and our dance card is already overfull for the coming months. However, we believe each of our programs -- whether building awareness or building infrastructure -- is a useful part of the puzzle of culture shifting and economic redirection. Our mini-grants are helping citizen groups plant gardens and gain other sustainability-related skills, the climate fund will help low-income folks face energy descent, the Marcellus Challenge pushes individuals to prepare their home for energy descent, and Finger Lakes Bioneers offers the annual venue for bringing folks together to share what they are doing. Meanwhile, the SEEN (Sustainable Enterprise and Entrepreneur Network) is the latest program of our spin-off, the Green Resource Hub. I have found that people in our local sustainability movement are glad to have support services offered to them by ST (Signs of Sustainability, this list, the Sustainability Map, etc), but many folks prefer to do their own thing and start their own organization around the task they are most interested in. That seems to fit Ithacans culturally. I suppose we all grew up with strong values around individualism and self actualization. Of course, that does leave us with the long-range challenge of learning how to mesh our efforts and have them become instruments for radical redesign of our systems. Personally, I have my doubts about the utility of trying to become one organism instead of a swarm. Passion tends to get best expressed in small groups, where each person can feel essential to the outcome. Larger organizations tend to rely upon passive support, and you may actually experience a decrease in the number of initiatives underway. When it comes to culture making, I think having many cooks in the kitchen is a good idea. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't benefit hugely from support infrastructure that helps us come together as peers (like the SEEN and the Cayuga Sustainability Council). Although we aspire to the larger work that Jon describes, we need to grow as an organization before ST would have the capacity to help other organizations coalesce around one shared mission. I've always been interested in learning and sharing the tools of systems thinking, but just haven't yet had the luxury of time to find out what tools are out there that might help us all come together and do the kind of systems work that energy descent and climate change require of us. And right now, with the threat of massive global shale gas drilling and a glut of natural gas supplies, our near-term threat is climate change and local environmental damage. How sick that the windfall profits in the oil industry are being used to buy up the drilling companies so that Exxon et al can use our own money to destroy our local environment -- and then overcharge us for the natural gas under us in order to finance whatever exploitative game is next on their roster. The faster we adopt the Marcellus Challenge and shrink our use of fossil fuels, the faster we can starve that beast. Gay On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Jon Bosak <[email protected]> wrote: Katie Quinn-Jacobs wrote: 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) -- ---------------------------------------------------- Gay Nicholson, Ph.D. President Sustainable Tompkins 109 S. Albany St. Ithaca, NY 14850 www.sustainabletompkins.org 607-533-7312 (home office) 607-220-8991 (cell) 607-216-1552 (ST office) 607-216-1553 (ST fax) [email protected] _______________________________________________ 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
