Transition Town groups love to jump into projects with easily visible results. Last issue, I profiled Transition Town Putney, which created community gardens and a bustling farmers' market in their first year. Transition Town Montpelier's first-year accomplishments included the first vegetable garden on a U.S. statehouse lawn in modern times.
Where do all of these fit into the strategy of the Transition project, “from oil dependence to community resilience”? Are they enough to Transition the community in a planned, participatory, democratic, and fun way before crises force less-pleasant adjustments? And what does the resilient community look like, anyway?
Transition Town Montpelier is hosting discussions to address these and many other questions in the framework of an Energy Descent Action Plan, or EDAP. Monthly meetings are just starting to define what the EDAP will look like.
Planning for an energy-scarce future with a good quality of life for all is at the heart of the Transition concept. Transition Towns were conceived through a quick and dirty EDAP exercise that Rob Hopkins led in a permaculture class in Kinsale, Ireland. The class took on the project of writing the EDAP for the town, so it came together quickly and with a lot less input from a wide range of town residents than is ideal for planning documents.
Hopkins took the Transition Town concept to Totnes, England, and started a process more deeply rooted in the community. He included the EDAP among the 12 ingredients of the Transition Town process when he wrote The Transition Handbook, but he put it last. And Transition Town Totnes co-founder Naresh Giangrande remarked, on a Vermont visit, that most Transition Towns prefer action to planning, so the EDAP process hasn't started in them yet.
Vermont is no stranger to planning. The state requires cities and towns to develop master plans and update them every five years, and regional planning commissions develop similar documents. A key difference of the EDAP is just in the first two words, “Energy Descent,” the EDAP acknowledges up front that energy will be considerably more scarce and expensive in the relatively near future than it is now. As with other Transition projects, it is also done with the recognition that slowing and adapting to climate change will be a key challenge of the coming decades, and an expectation that the formal economy will continue unraveling.
In 2010, the city of Montpelier adopted a master plan that recognizes energy scarcity and climate change. The plan outlines ways the community can respond over the next 50 years to meet these challenges. The plan was a culmination of a three-year process, enVision Montpelier, that involved hundreds in the community.
Montpelier's 50-year perspective is much less urgent than the thinking behind the EDAP. In an early thought exercise, the Transition Town Montpelier EDAP group divided up into two groups to consider how to plan moving from producing 5 percent of Vermont's food in-state to 80 percent. One group considered how to get there in 10 years, and the other one worked on an emergency, two-year transition to 80-percent food self-reliance. (The state's new food strategy, developed in the Farm-to-Plate program, envisions growing 10 percent of our food in-state in 10 years.)
As with other Transition work, the emphasis in an EDAP is on the positive. Rob Hopkins encourages groups to write an EDAP that describes the future like a travel brochure for an attractive vacation destination, so people will want to do what it takes to go there.
Transition Town Totnes has recently published its EDAP. Transition Town Montpelier, together with other Transition activists from elsewhere in the state, is just starting to define what its EDAP will look like. It's a sign of maturity in the state's Transition movement that some people are pausing to develop this medium-term vision.
The EDAP for Transition Town Totnes (Transition in Action) can be purchased at locally owned, independent book stores or viewed online at totnesedap.org.uk. To join the Transition Town Montpelier EDAP group or find out about its upcoming activities, go to transitionvermont.ning.com/group/transitionvermontedapcommittee.