Grassroots to Global Garden
We are living in a global renaissance of step-up-and-do-it activism, but something subtle is keeping these initiatives from growing into their potential.
Hello again after a long hiatus, to my very small audience of subscribers, and a plain hello to anyone new who happens along. When I published part one of Flourishing First, I had in mind a vague idea I might get one or two posts out per month. Well that clearly didn’t happen! I have been focussed instead on another strand of my interest in the ideas behind living systems: a long-standing software project, which I hope will one day be useful to the types of organisations and communities I am now, once again, writing about. The paths we follow often lead us back home, and while trying to articulate my goals for this software, I realised it was time to share a piece which was mostly written over a year ago.
I hope you find it interesting, thought provoking, or just an enjoyable read.
As we saw in part one, the story of living systems is already well under way: a story of stories that together show a path forward that might just lead us out of the mess we’re in.
And we are, without doubt, in a sticky situation. We face global problems that are so complex, and so intertwined with the way we run our societies, that no one is quite sure if we will be able to untangle them before disaster strikes. The very systems we have put in place to create material wealth and our high “standard of living” have severe unintended side effects. We are becoming victims of our own success. The tail is wagging the dog.
The list of impending crises has become so familiar it hardly bears repeating. Climate change, biodiversity loss, the return of inequality, divided societies, meaningless work, extremist politics, runaway mental health problems…
If, as I believe, all of this stems from unintended side effects of the systems we have created to serve us, more of the same is only going to make things worse. The cure will not be found in that which created the illness. To question progress is heresy to some, but this is not an argument against progress itself — clearly we need to move forward to something radically new if we are to grapple with these problems — but we might need an entirely different kind of progress. If our problems are created by our existing systems, we will need to look outside the system for solutions.
Fortunately, we are living in the beginnings of a global renaissance of solutions born outside the mainstream. Just when our confidence in politicians and corporations has all but evaporated, something vibrant and inspiring is happening at the grassroots. The reality is finally sinking in: if we want to take proper care of the natural world and each other, if we want to see social and economic justice, then choosing who to vote for or making ethical buying decisions is not going to cut it. We need to step up and do this ourselves. And we are.
If you know where to look, community-led projects are popping up like the green shoots of spring. Food production, energy generation, responses to discrimination, providing meaningful work, caring for the unwell and the vulnerable, the restoration of natural habitat: all of these things and so much more, can and are being done effectively, cheaply, brilliantly, by local people at a local level.
But there’s a catch. As inspiring as they are, all these grassroots projects tend to share one attribute that makes them a lot less hopeful: they are small. My home town has a wonderful community-supported agriculture scheme providing organic, seasonal, locally grown veg. The town also has seven huge supermarkets with a business model that is anything but local. Construction of an eighth is nearly finished.
Grassroots is not going to do the job while all we’ve got is grass. We need a world-wide flourishing garden. The step-up-and-do-it movement has a growth problem.
It’s worth taking a good look, then, at a grassroots movement that started about fifteen years back and, for a while at least, grew like crazy. This is the (ongoing) story of Transition Town, with its wonderful slogan more like a party than a protest march.
The Ups and Downs of Transition Town
In 2004, permaculture designer and educator Rob Hopkins was soon to return home from Kinsale in Ireland to Totnes, England. Before leaving, he set his students an assignment that was to prove momentous. He asked them if the principles of permaculture could be applied to the problem of fossil fuel dependency. The exercise had led to the concept of a transition town: a place that had adopted an “energy descent plan”: a path for transitioning from a high-carbon to a low-carbon local economy.
Shortly after, back in Totnes Hopkins and his collaborators decided these ideas were worth taking seriously, and in 2006 they established Transition Town Totnes, as a simple banner under which to invite local people to take real action in response to the threats of climate change. If individual action was going to prove too little, they reasoned, and government action too late, maybe community action was the sweet spot that could successfully rise to this challenge. They key word being action. In the face of problems that tend to make us feel powerless, what about trying the power of just doing stuff (a phrase which would, years later, become the title Hopkin’s book on the movement).
This proved to be one of those ideas whose time has come, because something unexpected happened. Almost of its own accord, the movement began to grow. In response to burgeoning interest, The Transition Handbook was published in 2008, opening up the ideas for anyone who wanted to give it a try. Just five years later over a thousand initiatives were up and running across no less than forty two countries: community gardens and kitchens, sharing hubs for tools and equipment and transport, even small-scale clean power production and much more besides. At the peak of the growth, the feeling was palpable that here at last was a movement that could cross over into mainstream life, with an impact large enough to make a real difference.
But as of 2022, it hasn’t happened.
The original initiative in Totnes has worked marvels. The town has become an inspiration for forward-thinking civic planning across the world. But sadly, the majority of those thousand initiatives seem to have remained small and plenty have faded out entirely. Google’s “Trends” tool shows that searches for ‘transition town’ peaked around 2009 and have since declined to about a tenth of that level.
What went wrong?
One explanation revolved around the story of imminent “peak oil”, which was central to the movement’s narrative. Oil shortages and the resulting skyrocketing prices were about to force the world to take energy descent very seriously, or so the story went. But nothing of the kind has yet happened. “Our credibility” wrote co-founder Sam Allen in his 2018 farewell to the movement, “was in tatters”.
This doesn’t ring true for me. As mentioned, the movement aspires to be more like a party than a protest march, and people like parties. Did an abstract and theoretical story titled “Peak Oil” get thousands of people fired up into action across 43 countries, and then half of them gave up when oil failed to peak? Something much bigger than that was happening and still is, but something subtle, something difficult to see, is undermining it and blocking the growth.
Solving this problem could not be more important. The ideas pioneered by Transition really work. We now have a pretty good idea what the sustainable world we so urgently need will look like, we just can’t quite reach it. Transition was groundbreaking, but a further breakthrough is needed.
A Breakthrough
We love a good breakthrough these days, don’t we? The big media outlets gush breathlessly about the new technologies poised to revolutionise our lives: artificial intelligence, genetics, robotics. Elon Musk is building a computer we can inject into our brains. (Let’s hope that one can’t be hacked!)
But against this very inhuman-sounding backdrop, some share a very different hope for the future. It’s a hope that the true breakthrough of our time, which in retrospect might make all those clever things look a lot less important, will be something much closer to home.
If we understand the word technology in its broadest sense — ideas and discoveries that make new things possible — the breakthrough tech of the twenty-first century may well be this: a world run in large part not by giant corporations and huge bureaucracies, but by networks of small groups of people, going about their business, doing things that matter to them, taking care of each other and the environment around them, and doing a much better job than the top-down, command-and-control systems we all inhabit today.
The vision of the Transition movement and many like it, is to build this new world from the ground up, but a crucial piece of the new technology has been missing. The ideas and discoveries that will get us from grassroots to a flourishing global garden are not yet fully in focus.
Which brings us back to the previous post and our story of stories, because these are the stories of the missing pieces. Is it possible that the practices and principles of living systems can solve our grassroots growth problem? If so, then we are in a very good place, because these practices are not mere theory but the lessons learned from real projects helping real people. Not only do we know what we need, we know how to make it happen.
The how is critically important. There are countless books telling us what this world needs in order to be more sustainable: we need to hold corporations to account; we need to each hold ourselves to account; we need a carbon tax; we need a new approach to economics; we need a whole new perspective, a paradigm shift. All of which may be true, but is of little use unless we know how to get there. What should we actually do? And telling others what they should do doesn’t count. What should I do?
This is the question I believe people like Jos de Blok, Hillary Cottam and John McKnight have answered. I believe the work they have done holds the solution to the growth problem of the grassroots renaissance. To understand why, we need a new perspective, one that questions our deepest assumptions about human activity and our relationship with the natural world.
The times we live in ask us to square up to truly enormous challenges: transitioning the whole of society to use less energy, or reorganising around small, local groups. But our true challenge may be even more dramatic. It is something we unconsciously recognise in the term grassroots, made explicit in the term living systems.
We are creating life.
Not biological life of course. We will not be looking at stories of mad scientists with lightning flashing in secret laboratories. But life in the sense that we all readily use the word: ”this place seems so alive”, “I felt myself coming back to life”, “we need to inject some life into this”. We all know instinctively that some things are more alive, and some less, and that this has nothing to do with plants or animals or cells. We know that this quality of aliveness is profoundly important. Things that are alive are thriving, they flourish, they grow. And on the contrary, nothing is worse for a project than to be lifeless or dying.
The central premise of Flourishing First is that this hard-to-define aliveness is far and away the most crucial quality we need to aim for if we wish to make the world more kind, more just and more sustainable. In fact I will go further and claim that without this quality, whatever we may try, we are doomed to recreate the very problems we are trying to solve. Let’s take a closer look at why this might be the case.
Motivation Matters
An obvious feature of any grassroots movement is that participation is voluntary. Top-down organisations have the power to bring incentives to bear: do as we ask and we’ll pay you; do as you’re told and you won’t go to prison. Bottom-up not so much. These projects must attract rather than compel. People join a movement like Transition Towns because they want to. A keen member might give ten hours of their time every week, someone less enthused might give half an hour ever other Christmas, each according to their personal feeling towards the work. Psychologists call this intrinsic motivation, and it is the key to our growth problem. For a time, more and more people wanted to jump in to the Transition Town movement. Later, less did.
What makes people step up and do it? One factor, clearly, is idealism. Some people seem to be just innately motivated to try and make this world a better place. They believe in the idea of a better world and they believe it is possible to work towards it. These beliefs are strong enough to motivate them into action. They might join a community garden project partly for the pleasure of gardening, but largely because they can see that here is a path to a brighter world.
It’s pretty clear from observation that idealists are something of a minority, and that’s not surprising. Ideas are immaterial and abstract. They can lead to real change of course, but in themselves they are pure thought-stuff. That makes idealism very powerful, but also very nebulous. Taking a historical perspective, idealists have helped bring about our greatest breakthroughs in justice and liberty, but also our most horrific atrocities. Ideas can be very, very dangerous.
But let’s not get side-tracked into the pros and cons of idealism; that way lies an endless and probably fruitless philosophical debate. My point is just to observe that most people — and this is probably for the best — are more concrete in their motivations. Most people join a community garden for the pleasure of gardening, or they don’t join at all.
So an obvious and rather defeatist explanation as to why grassroots movements do not grow to world-changing proportions is that there simply aren’t enough idealistic people. Not much you can do about that. But the early growth of Transition Town tells a different story. For a while there it looked like this thing was going to take off and go mainstream. Did the movement break through the ‘idealist limit’? If so, how? And why did it not keep on growing and growing?
From the start, something was fundamentally different about the Transition project. Here’s co-founder Sam Allen again:
“[we realised] the need for deep, far reaching systemic change in just about every area of life… There was no name for what we were proposing. It was bold, imaginative, and beyond what most folks thought of as environmentalism. It wasn’t environmentalism, it was much more than that. Much more.”
If most people are not particularly motivated by ideas, then there’s really only one way to make a movement like this more appealing. You have to get from abstract ideas to concrete reality. You have to take the future you wish for, and try to make it a lived reality, today. This is exactly what the Transition movement set out to do. Allen again (emphasis added):
“As we are all, in some sense, part of the problem, we invited people into an uncomfortable experiment. What would it be like to live both as the problem and a potential solution?”
This was nothing less than an attempt to create a different kind of life. A thousand projects and forty three countries later, this was clearly a life that spoke to people. Maybe they simply enjoyed it. Isn’t being happy the point of life, after all? The Founding Fathers of the USA even built their constitution on it: “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.
But is the goal of life really to be as happy as we possibly can? Modern psychologists might disagree. Research has shown that there is such a thing as an excess of happiness. Most of us have are ups and downs, but there are some atypical folks who report being happy nearly all the time, and those same people also tend to report things like excess alcohol and drug use, binge eating and risk taking. Life without the light and shade might be more like a disorder than an aspiration.
When it comes to motivation, perhaps the key word in “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is actually that first one: the best thing in life is simply life itself.
I’m not talking about the difference between actual life and death, but about degrees of life.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine a less powerful version of Aladdin’s genie: there are only two wishes on offer, and you get to pick just one. In the left hand, an everlasting Netflix binge, where every episode is better than the best TV you ever watched: every joke hilarious, every action scene jaw-dropping, all the drama gripping, all the actors achingly beautiful, and to sweeten the deal, a magic pill that ensures you never get bored of watching. In the right hand, unbreakably loyal friendships and an incredible job. Your life will be intricately tied up with the joys and sorrows of those close to you. Your work will give deep meaning to your days, with continuous opportunities to grow, along with the conflicts and difficulties that make that growth possible. To me it’s pretty obvious which is the richer life and the better choice. The good life, surely, is found not in the pursuit of happiness, but in the pursuit, simply, of being fully alive.
It is painful then, that we live in a time of incalculable loss of life. This, I believe, has been the most tragic cost of our project to tame, control and systematise the world. Life is wild and risky. Control is deadening. We have been so successful at making the world safe and predictable it is making us numb inside. And that is to say nothing of the destruction of so much of the natural world. Blake’s words which we saw in part one bear repeating:
“Cruel Works of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace.”
William Blake, Jerusalem
Perhaps what the Transition Town movement offered, best of all, was more aliveness. To re-localise the economy is to rediscover our neighbours. To rely less on fossil fuels is to rely more on each other. Less industrial energy, more human energy. Lower emissions, greater life.
Just as Sam Allen explained, Transition was an invitation to live, today, in the world we want to see tomorrow. More than the idealistic goal of averting climate disaster, I believe it was this step away from the machine-like system, this offer of a richer life, that enabled the movement to grow almost to the point of becoming mainstream.
Almost, but not quite. Something is getting in the way.
Habits of Control
As important as this hard-to-define thing called aliveness is, we don’t pay very close attention to it. It sits just below our radar. It probably means more to us than anything else, but we unconsciously consider it a mere side-effect of other things. We never concern ourselves with aliveness directly. When it comes to creating life, we are novices, green behind the ears. We know aliveness when we see it, we know it works wonders, and we know we love it, but we know little about what it really is, where it comes from or how to get more of it.
When we look at the systems that run our modern world, they are all things we have designed and built. But living systems cannot be created in this way, any more than we can design and build a rose. Roses grow. Living systems emerge spontaneously, from a process we can encourage, as gardeners do, but never control.
If there really is a technology that can give us more life, it will be unlike any technology we are used to. The fundamental breakthrough will be less about how to do something, and more about how to stop doing the wrong things: a technology of getting out of the way. This is not easy.
Thousands of years after the dawn of agriculture, our insatiable desire to tame this wild world has given us habits of thought deeply ingrained. The mindset of control has become so automatic, we can’t imagine life without it. This, I have come to firmly believe, is the hidden force subtly undermining thousands of beautiful projects striving towards a better world. We try to control things instead of letting them grow, and in doing so we choke out the life.
Am I suggesting that movements like Transition end up co-opted by domineering control-freaks? Well yes, I do think a few people like that tend to crop up, but there is a wider problem that is much more subtle. We all do this because we don’t know how to do anything else. We want these movements to get bigger and have more impact, so we reach for what we know. With the best of intentions we turn to subtle forms of control. We don’t call it control, we call it ‘organising’, but organising through control is such an entrenched idea it has become automatic. We can’t help ourselves. It’s been drummed into us since the first day of school.
Any grassroots project that enjoys some kind of success will inevitably start to grow. At a certain point, spontaneous beginnings will need to give way to some kind of structure, or disorganised mess will result. To out great cost, we are mostly unaware that this moment is filled with peril. If we don’t understand the principles of living systems then we will necessarily turn to control. The mess is avoided but something essential is lost. Slowly but surely, what was at first an opening into a richer life starts to feel a little bit more like just going to work.
And unlike ‘normal’ work, a particular feature of grassroots projects is that there is little other than personal motivation holding them together. If I don’t find what I’m looking for there’s nothing stopping me from simply not showing up tomorrow.
Could this perspective explain the lack of large-scale impact despite the great proliferation of grassroots projects? Bottom-up movements always start off wonderfully alive and free, but as they grow, it’s inevitable that well-intentioned little chiefs will began to emerge. That might sound rather innocuous, but new life is a fragile thing. It might also sound necessary, but there is another way. We can organise like an organism. We can build living systems. We just need to learn how.
As we saw in part one, the five principles of living system are nothing less than the systemic manifestation of love, and what, more than love, could lead us to a life worth living?
What if joining in a local grassroots project meant much more than just helping out with a meaningful cause? What if it became the source of our own flourishing? What if we discovered more and more truth, about ourselves, our friends, and the issues we care about; if we found rich opportunities to be of service; if our personal autonomy, and that of our work teams was respected and supported through deep connections; and what if all of this became gradually stronger and stronger over time through living growth? Who wouldn’t want to stick around?
And most importantly, what if all of these opportunities for flourishing could remain present as the project got bigger and bigger, delivering more and more impact? Transition Town itself, still going strong, might be one place where we will start to find out; the ideas of living systems are gradually getting more attention within the movement.
The great hope is that we will start to see grassroots initiatives growing large and powerful, not by adopting top-down control, but organically, through living structure. A structure not built from Blake’s cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other, but from wheels within wheels revolving in freedom, harmony and peace. Perhaps a modern Eden really is starting to grow around our feet.