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dedicated support to incipient Transition initiatives outside Totnes. But the reason this pamphlet is interesting in the economy of this chapter is in a number of significant differences from the Handbook. For one, references to permaculture are omitted, and the formal passages of the permaculture design process are substituted with a set of ‘principles of Transition’.20 This, of course, is not because of a sudden change of heart as to the place of permaculture within Transition, but rather a further confirmation that permaculture need not be part – as it wasn’t for the Transitioners I encountered in Totnes – of an induction into Transition.
Another significant innovation from the presentation style adopted in the Handbook is the more explicit emphasis placed on the non-prescriptiveness of the guidelines on offer. In an interview I undertook with Rob Hopkins, in fact, he admitted he quickly felt – soon after publishing the Handbook – that it risked being taken too literally, so that the ‘twelve steps’ he outlined for setting up a Transition initiative would be taken methodically, as opposed to being treated as a mere form of advice, which people could be free to disregard if not needed. Overall, Who We Are and What We Do seems to try to correct the aim and lower a threshold that might have become a hurdle in fostering the birth of further Transition initiatives: namely rigid adherence to a rulebook.
The Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan (the ‘EDAP’),21 which came to light in 2010, has a slightly different function from the previous two documents: less of an introduction to Transition, and more a culmination of the original twelve-step process in relation to the Totnes initiative. Unlike the previous two documents, the intended audience of the EDAP has a more limited geographical remit, being addressed mostly to ‘individuals, the community and local service providers in the area of Totnes and District’.22 However, by virtue of being the first energy descent plan originating in a Transition initiative, the EDAP is structured as an extensive reference resource, in a self-conscious attempt to signpost the journey of Transition in Totnes for interested others.
The narration presented in the EDAP once again introduces Transition as a response to the challenges of peak oil and climate change. However, where it adds to previous literature is in setting a vision of how Totnes might achieve greater resilience to peak oil and climate change within a rough timeline (by the year 2030) and in selected areas of intervention, from food provisioning to building efficiency, down to energy security and economic relocalisation. In this sense, it is close in spirit and style of presentation to Rob Hopkins’ PhD dissertation, which has a similar concern with setting out possible pathways and milestones towards achieving resilience to climate change and peak oil.
In the dissertation – which could be read as a suitable ‘companion volume’ to the EDAP23 – Rob Hopkins unpacks various dimensions of community resilience in the face of peak oil and climate change, and relates these to the work undertaken in the ‘pilot’ initiative in Totnes. For this purpose, it seems that one of the principal concerns of that text is to assess feasibility and anticipated effectiveness with respect to a number of steps or strategies, such as liaising with local government. The dissertation also endeavours to position the Transition approach – as exemplified by the instance of Totnes – in the context of the debate about relocalisation more generally.24 In sum, the PhD appears to build and expand – for evaluative purposes – on the topics and strategies set out in the EDAP, and is once again reliant on the ‘twelve steps’ that had been introduced in the Handbook.
However, his thesis equally contains shoots of the innovations that would begin to distinguish later works on Transition from this ‘early literature’. For instance, at one point Hopkins discusses his intention to develop a second edition of the Handbook, in order to go beyond the twelve steps. He justifies this on grounds of there being ‘an emergent understanding that the 12 Steps, used to communicate Transition, fail to reflect the depth of what is emerging in Transition’, and he suggests in their stead a different communicative approach to ‘better reflect the more interconnected, systems-thinking model into which Transition has evolved’.25
This is a crucial passage, for it is here that one can witness the emerging rift between the picture of Transition conveyed by a set of instructions and its experiential unfolding. During an interview with myself, Hopkins offered the following observation, in order to explain the move away from the normativity of the Handbook. Namely, a number of accounts from fellow Transitioners beyond Totnes reported that the steps would normally be followed up to a point, and then people would begin referencing them more liberally, picking and choosing what worked. A new style of presentation was needed, therefore, to be more receptive to the variety of paths into Transition that seemed to emerge over time, beyond the original stepwise sequence. Where this change comes to fruition and is expressed in a new editorial product is in The Transition Companion.26
Recipe books and collections of short stories
The Transition Companion (‘the Companion’) was published in 2011. This new volume makes explicit the intention to move away from the twelve-step approach of the Handbook, towards ‘a more holistic, more appropriate model’.27 From the very start, therefore, it addresses the tension between the linearity of the steps and the more irregular, tumultuous coming to life of Transition. It soon emerged, in fact, that new Transition initiatives would normally be following the Handbook for the first few steps, and then proceed in a less rule-bound fashion, using this text more as a source of inspiration and examples than working their way through it in a structured manner.28 Hence the relinquishing of an instruction manual-like way of introducing Transition that risked enclosing it in a bounded, normative framework.29 (The stepwise presentation that is shed in the passage from the Handbook to the Companion, however, is the same one to which a number of academic authors still cling, given its easy adaptability to scholarly habits of exposition as it lends itself to analytical and comparative examination.)30
The Companion is therefore the point at which awareness appears to emerge about the need to achieve greater fittingness and alignment between the practice of Transition, and the ways in which that moving is communicated and re-presented. In the Companion, Hopkins is able to develop a type of narration that leaves behind the tone of an instruction manual, towards what was dubbed – in an interview with the publisher of this volume – as a ‘recipe book’ consisting of ‘ingredients’. This type of narration is one that proceeds through concrete examples, showcasing possibilities for engaging and experimenting with Transition, as enacted in a variety of disparate settings. Readers are furthermore encouraged to pick and choose those opportunities with which they may resonate most.31
The inspiration for this approach – as Hopkins makes clear in his dissertation32 – was Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.33 This is the work by a renowned advocate of ecological architecture, who looks at the built environment as comprising of patterns that are susceptible of application to similar contexts while – at the same time – retaining sufficient adaptability so that no two instances in which a pattern occurs will be exactly identical.34
Part of the process of aligning the life of Transition with a suitable style of re-presentation also involves a breaking down of the authorial voice. As Hopkins promises in the Introduction: ‘You will find not just my voice throughout this book, but the voices of many people who are actively trying out these ideas and sharing their experiences’.35 The Companion, in other words, has less of the structured, linearised approach of the Handbook, and offers what could perhaps be dubbed a more ‘Transition-like’ possibility for communicating Transition; an instance where resonance is produced between the expression of Transition’s moving in language, and the moving itself.
The change from the Handbook is, at times, striking. Far from a normative pre-setting of the goals that Transition is set to achieve as ‘resilience in the face of peak oil and climate change’, the Companion enumerates a number of different reasons why people are drawn into the moving of Transition. A number of these, such as ‘because it means they can do that project they have always dreamed of’,36 hold little sway as motivations that would be recognisable in some academic settings, where some agreed definition of a ‘problem’ to which a ‘solution’ is being suggested would be expected. But, I believe, this is precisely the point. To observe Transition as a moving, and to go deeper into it, involves precisely a splintering of all-too-neat discursive shells that may be the result of the application of this or