Fruit and vegetables growing in a tube station in Kilburn, an ex-double glazing sales man going door-to-door in Moss Side, a young boy selling salad on the side of the road in Pittsburgh and elderly people teaching the young to plough in a small village in Italy. Each of these stories seem so small, even irrelevant, on their own but together they are part of a much larger story.

One of a movement which is getting people and communities to re-think and re-design the way they live. This is the story of Transition 2:0 – and a new film by that name has just been launched to celebrate this quintessential grassroots movement.

Born in 2005, in Totnes in Devon, the Transition Network (or Transition Towns) now consists of 900 registered initiatives across the UK and Europe, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

It was founded to tackle the twin problems of peak oil and climate change.
The transition movement has now sprung up across towns, cities, boroughs, universities and streets – both in rural and urban areas.

Transition 2:0, the sequel to the movement’s first film released in 2010 which introduced the project to the world, showcases the work of these communities from growing food everywhere and anywhere, to printing their own money and setting up community energy schemes.

The film is a tool-kit – a beginner’s guide to setting up a transition group.

The film’s strength is in its gathering of diverse stories of community action from across the globe. It takes you on a journey through what Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition Towns, calls ‘the four stages of transition’.

At stage one you see Joel Prittie, former-salesman going door-to-door in Manchester’s Moss Side – an area with the reputation as the Bronx of Britain – in attempt to set up a local transition group.

Prittie tells you that for the 1100 plus doors he has knocked on he now has a mailing list 400 strong and a core group to get the movement going.

From the basics of community growing, you are taken deeper into the world of Transition to examples in Yorkshire, where groups have taken over their local fruit and veg store as a co-operative and turning it back into the hub of the community.

From here you go to Brixton, where the local currency – the Brixton Pound – has now gone electronic and allows people to invest their hard-earned cash into local salesman and businesses, and then across to India, where 400 vegetable gardens has been created in Tamil Nadu.

As well a visual ‘tool-kit’ for the movement, the film also aims to inspire.

Notably some of the communities who have been hit by the shocks of the natural world are included. Following the 2011 earthquakes in New Zealand, community ‘time banks’brought people together in an attempt to help aid and speed up the areas recovery.

And in Japan, one community member explains how before the Tsunami he felt like Transition made sense for the community – but since the events of March 2011, he now knows just how vital it could be.
And back in the UK, the example of Transition Town Tooting in South London acts as a celebration of the movement, as the groups moves through the boroughs streets in their Carnival of Waste.

One destination – many roads

While this is just one film, it depicts a movement which has become so vast and has so many different stories to tell.

In some ways, the success of the Transition Network has been down to this variety. Local groups are not tied down to a set of rules or activities they must keep to and each group can develop in its own time and manner.

One example of this is shown in the contrast between Transition Town Brixton and its neighboring group Transition Town Peckham.

While both situated in South London, both being poorer boroughs of the city and both having multi-cultural communities, many people would expect them to want similar things.

But what works in one Transition Town has not necessarily led to a success in the other and while the two groups work closely together, they are at the same time very different groups. Rather than being a negative, this diversity is celebrated with the Network.

While there is a growing disillusionment over the global progress on climate change, particularly since the Rio+20 Earth Summit, and calls are growing for more localised action, Transition provides an example of how this action is in fact already happening and has been for years.

But it is not all shining lights and celebration.

Essentially the movement will be as successful as the community involved allows it. Where communities are engaged and empowered by the process, a striving and long lasting Transition Town is usually found – one which take root in the community, benefits from it and is beneficial to it.

Meanwhile those which find people un-engaged will soon find themselves disheartened and struggling.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I took from the film though was that where the opportunities are there, communities are often willing to engage. They just need a little help.

While many people believe this sense of togetherness is no longer present in modern society, Transition Towns seems to be a great example of people being willing if given that opportunity.

In an abandoned lot in Pittsburgh a boy is selling lettuce. Down Tooting High Street a carnival is in full swing. In a village in Portugal two men are walking in a field beside horses. In a fire station in Moss Side a film preview is taking place: “There was silence. You could have heard a pin drop. And then a sound, kind of like a pin dropping. There it is again. And again, many times in rapid succession. Then silence. Nothing.” This is Joel Prittie, writing about his experiences previewing the film, In Transition 2.0, simultaneously with eleven other initiatives worldwide in February. He’s telling us how the machine jammed, how he resolved the dilemma, and how everyone cheered at the end.

It’s a small story. These are all small stories. You might not know they are happening or take much notice of them. But if you were curious, you would discover how that lettuce came to be growing in such an unlikely neighbourhood; why everyone in the carnival was wearing clothes made of rubbish; why the elders of the village were teaching the young people to plough; why Joel Prittie, ex double-glazing salesman, knocked on 1100 doors in the rain in Manchester. If you pulled these stories together, you would notice they all had a common thread. That’s the moment you realise it’s a big story. The story in fact. The story of how people are coming together in the face of difficulties and making another kind of future.
That’s the story of Transition 2.0.

Background

The Transition movement began in 2005 in the market town of Totnes in Devon and since then has sparked off 900 initiatives worldwide. There are initiatives in cities and rural villages, towns and bioregions. Originally billed as a “community-led response to climate change and peak oil”, Transition provides a structure for communities to engage in order to become resilient in the face of these challenges. The term, borrowed from ecology, means the ability for systems to adapt and survive great shocks.
Living within a dominant corporate monoculture where communities are often fragmented and there is little mainstream media attention on these global realities, this is a big ask for most modern people. Every aspect of our industrialised lives has been made possible by cheap fossil fuels, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. We live, however, mostly in the dark about these facts, or the effects of our daily actions on the environment. Or if we do know them, we see them as information and do not take action.

In Transition 2.0 focuses on the moves groups of people are making to look at the future squarely, to make connections with one another and to find ways to thrive in challenging times. In 2012, resilience also means the capacity to deal with Transition’s third driver, the economic crisis. The shock of the shock doctrine — the crushing blow of austerity, as people everywhere feel the consequences of our growth-at-all-costs culture and the increasing consolidation of wealth for the few.
In its typical pragmatic, positive way In Transition 2.0 doesn’t analyse this situation within a political frame. It acknowledges the big picture, and then gets down to work relocalising the neighbourhood. The film lays out the three drivers briefly at the start, then follows the track of the second book, The Transition Companion, dividing its attention on the different stages Transition initiatives go through, from the start up phase — forming a group and raising awareness — to building up local social enterprises. Rob Hopkins, the co-founder of the Transition Network, explains these stages, and the film looks at the projects that best illustrate the way Transition works.

In many ways the documentary is a tool, a showcase for people who may know nothing about Transition’s aims and structures. It is a mild watching experience, with interviews and information, and you might wonder why someone who has been involved in two initiatives and immersed in Transition communications for almost four years would have anything to find in it. What more did I need to know?
But the fact is: this is a big story. Resilient systems enforce their connections by constant feedback. You are consciously connecting with others through a vast communications network, that works like the mycorrhizal fungi in soil. I might know what is going on in the neighbourhood, but I don’t know what is going on in Portugal or Maryland. You don’t know for example that the first Transition initiative in India has created 400 vegetable gardens in Tamil Nadu. You don’t know how the co-operative Handmade Bakery in Yorkshire set up business, how the Brixton Pound (Britain’s first e-currency) works in the market, or that the mayor of Monteveglio in Italy has adopted an energy descent plan for the whole region. Most of all you realise that the crisis which up to this point has seemed academic is now very real in many places.

Unlike the first film which focused on the start up exhilarating phase of Transition, this had a darker, deeper tone. Here are initiatives who are undergoing the shocks of climate change and the collapse of top-down infrastructure. Here is Japan after the nuclear disaster, New Zealand after two earthquakes. Transition groups that had already been working together were able to respond collectively to the crisis. Thanks to the connections already made though the Lyttelton time-bank, the initiative was able to pull in help to deliver water and food all over the devastated town.

“We are setting up structures, pioneering them and putting them in place for the future,” explained Dirk Campbell of Ovesco in Lewes, Britain’s first community owned solar power station. “It’s difficult and takes enormous amounts of effort, commitment and time.”

Facing the crisis

There are many criticisms of Transition. It is not political, realistic, activist enough; it is white and middle class; it lacks structure; it’s too structured, too fluffy and feel-good. It doesn’t fulfill everything. It’s true, it doesn’t fulfill everything. But you would be hard pushed to find another method that can bring diverse people together within a frame of change. There are plenty of adversarial organisations that address climate change (Climate Rush, Greenpeace) and the financial system (UK Uncut, Occupy); there are plenty of low-carbon incentives (10:10, 350.org) and urban growing projects (Growing Communities in Hackney, Abundance and city farms in Sheffield). But what Transition does is address all these aspects simultaneously. It allows for many kinds of people to sit in a room together and work out ways to proceed. What is the most important ingredient or tool in the book (87 in all)? I asked Rob Hopkins at the Twitter launch of the Transition companion. The first one, Working in Groups, was his reply.

Our number one challenge is working in groups when we have been raised in an individualist hierarchical culture, taught to be hostile to the max. The film doesn’t show the struggle that most groups go though in dealing with this, though it does talk about conflict (including the testimony of Chris Hart from Transition Lancaster that collapsed and then reformed itself successfully a year later). Nor does it show the massive fall outs that happen when an old way of doing things (my will against yours) clashes with a new (our way together). How these old structures cling on. How the new ones demand massive inner shifts, but that if you manage to hold together extraordinary things start to happen.

What it does show is how Transition as a method, culture and network brings people together to work out solutions in places suffering from massive downturn. In the Portuguese village of Amoreiras the initiative held a meeting and asked everyone to dream. The village had suffered the fate of many rural places where most of the population had left for work in the cities. The group listened to everyone’s desires and then put their collective vision into motion. They painted the whole village, set up a local market, organised a working party to bring about better healthcare.

Here is Fred Brown in Pittsburgh, a city that in the 1970s and ’80s, lost 100,000 jobs when steel mills transferred their manufacturing to countries around the world. It’s a city where marginalised low-income neighbourhoods are threatened by incoming gentrification and big businesses. In his community of Larimer, Google have recently built a new facility, benefiting from millions of urban redevelopment funds that were intended to help the residents:

“The community doesn’t need or want more experts telling them what to do. We want partners and we want help to develop and implement our dream. Transition is helping us come together, deepen the vision, create working groups, get practical work done, and understand community-wide needs. It is also giving us language and a process for negotiating with those who seek to take, or to give on their own terms — empowering us to be proactive and co-creators.”

This is the hardest task. We are taught to listen to experts and to obey rules. Transition puts the decisions back into our hands and asks everyone to take the lead, become knowledgeable about how towns and councils work, talk with other local groups, find out about waste, alternative energy, sustainable food systems, how to write a press release, give a talk, keep bees, grow a lettuce. We are discouraged in our every attempt by the status quo. Keep shopping, keep distracted, keep listening to the old story!

But there is new narrative out there, what Paul Hawken calls the greatest untold story of our time. Some of this is embodied in Transition. It’s hard work and rarely paid, but it brings rewards you don’t see on the surface, that are difficult to show on a film. These are the invisible connections between people, feelings of belonging, of meaning, of self-worth, boldness and possibility, the simple joy of sharing things, tools, knowledge, apples from your tree.

“I feel proud of where I live at and that’s changed me.”

Most of all it gives you an opportunity you never knew existed. Here’s next week’s schedule with my home initiatives of Sustainable Bungay and Transition Norwich: showing a documentary with Waveney Greenpeace in a local barn (Crisis of Civilisation), working in our monthly community kitchen (for a sit-down supper for 50), helping out at our Give and Take Day (free exchange of stuff), introducing people to medicine plants in an event called Walking with Weeds, writing on two community blogs (one local, one national), setting up a newspaper (Transition Free Press).

None of these activities would happen without this small band of people I have been working with for the last four years. We would never have met. History and consumerism and the class system would have kept us separated from one another. Our library community garden would be bare brick. The bee-friendly wildflower meadow would be unsown. Norwich would not have an urban farm. I would never have met any of my fellow transitioners I am in daily contact with, or the many affiliated groups that write in our blogs from Occupy Norwich to BiofuelWatch to the new bicycle workshop off Magdalen Street. I would not be writing this piece. You would not be reading it. The film and everything that happens in its 66 minutes would not be happening.

Except that it is happening: and it’s worth seeing if only to know that these seeds are being sown in a time when everything seems set against us and all life on earth.
There is a story that underpins what we do and sometimes we tell it to each other in the hard times. The caterpillar keeps munching his way voraciously across the green planet. One day he buries himself in a cocoon, and unknowingly begins the process of transformation. His body starts to dissolve and as it does imaginal buds start to appear from nowhere. At first the caterpillar’s immune system attacks and defeats this new form. Then the buds rise up again. This time they link up and the defence system can not destroy them. They hold fast. The old structure dissolves. The butterfly begins to emerge.
It’s a form you would never have imagined, something beautiful emerging in world that appears only to profit the greedy and antagonistic. But sometimes in our struggle we catch a glimpse of the butterfly wing. In the flash of carnival costume, in the mists over a Japanese mountain, in the sound of each others’ voices, in the smile of a boy holding a lettuce grown against all odds.
_____

Charlotte Du Cann is a writer and community activist, working with the Transition Network and the Dark Mountain Project. An ex-journalist, she now edits several community blogs, This Low Carbon Life, The Social Reporters Project and the OneWorldColumn. Her book 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth i(Two Ravens Press) will be published on August 1. You can find a selection of recent writings on http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com.

Transition 2.0 is out! Phillip Moore finds it compelling, with a stronger narrative than its predecessor, and full of inspiring stories from many continents about what is perhaps the fastest growing social experiment in the world.

When Transition 1.0 was released in late 2009 the world felt like a darker place.

The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference had ended. The bitterly cold snow covered landscape reflected the desolation and exhaustion felt by many within the environmental and activist movement after COP15 in the Danish capital. Things didn't look good.

Over three years later Transition 1.0 has transformed into Transition 2.0 – a slicker, more economical manifestation of its former self. Transition is a process after all – not a fixed state. In a world of uncertainty Transition 2.0 not only entertains but offers the viewer stories of hope and resilience. A vital strand in any response to peak oil, climate chaos and economic instability.

Opening with personal reflections on what transition means, director Emma Goude's Transition 2.0 shapes a more personal exploration with a stronger narrative backbone than its earlier incarnation. In one instance Rob Hopkins describes Transition as 'originally designed as a detox for the west' but which now has a global reach and appeal. The film collects stories from around the world in the form of a series of cine-postcards ('zero flights taken' the filmmakers proudly proclaim) charting the many Transitions taking root.

And this is where the strength of the film lies – in gathering stories of what is perhaps the fastest growing social experiment. Inspiring stories from economically ruined cities in the US to small villages in India, Transition 2.0 is a snapshot in time of what's happening on the ground now as groups envision different – and hopeful – futures.

The extended interview with Rob Hopkins, co-founder of Transition Town Totnes, and perhaps the very quintessence of the Transition movement, anchors the stories with wonderful descriptions of what Transition is, can, and might one day be alongside elucidating the stages that usually take place for a Transition network/town/movement to happen.

This serves to reinforce the intimate interviews and compelling stories of how Transition manifests in very unique ways but with a shared DNA that speaks to movement.

WAYLAND — In the early evening of Feb. 2, the Senior Center at Wayland Town Building filled up with over 50 people. They had come from near and far to attend the prescreening of “In Transition 2.0.”

Transition Wayland co-founder Kaat Vander Straeten introduced the movie by pointing out that Wayland was one of only 15 communities in the world to prescreen it before the official release at the end of March. The honor, she said, is due to Transition Wayland having contributed footage.

The crowd settled in with popcorn donated by the local Whole Foods and watched the one-hour film, which shows neighbors helping neighbors move beyond fossil fuels and build a resilient and sustainable local economy and community in the face of climate change, peak oil and economic uncertainty.

How this works is shown in a series of snapshots of Transition Initiatives around the world – communities setting up community owned solar power stations, growing food in the most unlikely places, localizing their economies one grocery store and bakery at a time, printing their own money and even going electronic with it (the Brixton Pound), and rebuilding an earthquake stricken New Zealand town by time banking.

The movie lives up to Transition’s greatest promise, to respond to uncertain times with solutions and optimism, and in a world awash with gloom, to tell a story of hope, ingenuity and people power.

The reactions from the audience affirmed this.

Having been involved in script writing and producing the trailer for In Transition 2.0, you could say this review will be biased. You’d be right. And my bias comes from the belief that this film is a powerful call to arms for a rapid evolution in the way we live and work together as it shows how collectively, we can effect extraordinary change.

In Transition 2.0 takes the viewer through an emotional journey that effectively charts the evolution of the movement from its humble origins in Kinsale, Ireland, to an international movement that now attracts the attention of politicians and world leaders.

There has been a remarkable evolution in the Transition movement over the last four years, since the first film, In Transition 1.0, was released. In Transition 2.0 has a much deeper emotional thread running through and on several occasions I was moved to tears.

“The first film was a more straightforward look at how to set up a group, such as a food or energy group,” says director Emma Goude, but since that film’s release in 2008, the movement has evolved significantly.

“Transition has moved much further into quite business-like territory and towards recreating a local economy,” continues Emma. “And the other big difference is this film is really international. We have stories from Portugal, India, US, Japan, New Zealand, England… Transition really galvanises everybody together in a sense that it is local and global, the force of numbers is quite empowering for people.”

In Transition 2.0 is a high standard professional documentary, worthy of any festival entry and certainly worthy of an international cinema release. The film was ingeniously created in the spirit of the movement itself, as a collective enterprise working with filmmakers across the planet.

Whereas the first film felt more like a budget production, for In Transition 2.0, Emma Goude felt it was important to connect with professional filmmakers. Her reasons were: to reduce editing time and production cost; to present consistently high production values; and to reduce the carbon footprint of the film by using professionally progressive filmmakers around the world.

Funded using the internet-based ‘crowdfunding’ method, the film’s producers were able to raise enough money to ensure all the filmmakers got paid.

The film left me with a feeling that this is a vital contribution to the world’s current financial and political climate – and of course the environmental climate itself. The time is clearly right for the Transition movement and this film reveals that a critical mass of people wanting change has been reached.

In Transition 2.0 shows us that anything is possible if we work together both locally and globally. The incredible journey continues.

In Transition 2.0 is due for DVD release in late March 2012. Licences are available for community screenings. More information: www?.intransitionmovie?.com