Public opinion: Your blogs

Is Transition the co-operative movement for the internet age?

A large plate of pork pies sits uneaten amid a table of vegetarian dishes prepared by members of Marsden & Slaithwaite Transition Towns group.

I’m at the inaugural Transition North conference in the Yorkshire town of Slaithwaite; over a (meat-free) lunch, radical ideas for how our cities and towns will make the transition to low carbon, resilient communities circulate.

One man from Leeds has plans to convert his neighbours’ chip oil into diesel. A team from inner-city Sheffield discuss their move into farming as plans for their community supported agriculture project take shape.

I wonder what Rob Hopkins, the founder of Transition Towns and today's keynote speaker, thinks about the worldwide movement spawned by his classroom project in 2003.

His big idea was to link the two key problems current civilization faces – peak oil and climate change – and create a plan for energy descent that starts at community-level. His idea has spread like a virus; Transition focuses on positive solutions to difficult problems, on reconnecting and re-skilling to ensure our towns and cities become less dependent on diminishing supplies of oil.

Opening Transition North, Hopkins makes a plea for a social, economic and cultural renaissance the likes of which we’ve never seen.

But today is not about celebrating the success of Transition but of uniting Transitioners with their older sibling, the co-operative movement.

Peter Couchman, chief executive of the Plunkett Foundation, has the job of uniting the two, and he does so with an eloquent tour through the history of co-operatives from Robert Owen to William King, who he calls the ‘first co-operative blogger’.

Their philosophy of step-by-step, of taking control of the needs of their communities, makes Transition part of the same radical tradition as the co-operative pioneers, he says.

Slightly unnervingly, during each major chapter in the co-operative movement there was a belief that the time they were living in was doomed, facing up to the dangers of ‘peak coal’ and even ‘peak wood’ just as we now contemplate peak oil. Their aim, then as now, was to put in place a resilient model of community and business life that will stand the test of time.

Will the plans being hatched by today’s Transition activists survive and what will their level of impact be? These are the questions left hanging as delegates break out into sessions on boosting local food production, setting up community bakeries and spreading happiness.

As the neglected plate of pork pies shows, the people gathered here today represent a particular section of society. Many are struggling to break through to the mainstream of people living within their communities and to have real influence on their local power base.

Hopkins wonders why Transition Towns rather than Defra is working out how much food Britain needs to grow in order to feed itself, should diminishing oil supplies curtail our reliance on imports.

For, rather than being radical, the ideas circulating today feel like the right level of response to some of the problems we face.

A handful of local governments have got the message: today’s event was opened by the Lord Mayor of Kirklees, a council setting an example of progressive action, nurturing green businesses and local food and insulating every house for free.

Where Transition goes now depends on those who decide to engage with it. Like the co-operative movement, its outcomes depend on the needs and wishes of its members. If Transition is the co-operative movement for the globalised internet age, its open-source ideas spreading and adapting to meet the needs of communities from Yorkshire to Japan, who knows where it will end up?