Читать книгу Everything Gardens and Other Stories - UNIV PLYMOUTH - Страница 12

Part 1: The Moving Transition

3. ‘Everything Gardens’, Gardens Everywhere

It appears common practice for researchers interested in Transition to start from a definition of what the movement is ‘about’. In our case, this definition posits both a defined endpoint to Transition’s activism (such as responding to climate change and peak oil), as well as describing Transition in a fundamentally summative manner (because of the analytical dissection that is presupposed in the ‘quantitative’ way of seeing). By this, I mean that Transition is portrayed as the sum total of a number of components that feed into it. I consider this summative approach a hurdle in fostering an understanding of what I sense is a much more fluid, continually changing, motion of the social.

One of the areas where the difference in approach emerges most vividly, between the dynamic perspective espoused here and the analytical stance of other commentators, is in relation to the role of permaculture. In the previous chapter, I hinted that permaculture is acknowledged as a central ‘building block’ of Transition in the Handbook, even though it becomes less prominent in subsequent introductory expositions, such as the Companion. This evolution could be interpreted in a misleading manner, if permaculture were envisioned as a component (like a Lego piece) that can exist independently of Transition, and that can therefore be incorporated inside it (or removed from it) in seemingly mechanical fashion, without the ‘part’ itself being affected by its participation in an emergent whole. In this chapter, instead, I want to offer a dynamic account of the relatedness (and the difference) between permaculture and Transition, so that permaculture-in-Transition can emerge as the participant part of an internally related whole that unfolds through a process of constant transformation and re-fitting, a process inherent in the appearing of Transition as living sociality. Understanding the relatedness (and the difference) between Transition and permaculture – so as to be able to follow the movement of their changing fit – is in this sense a first step towards emancipating the account offered here from a concern about reducing Transition into a set of component parts susceptible of independent existence.1

Moving on from here, a fitting beginning is to introduce permaculture, which can be described as a design approach for bringing to life sustainable organic systems. This is a very broad definition of permaculture that does not immediately betray its origins in the practice of agriculture, food growing and garden design.2 The term permaculture originates from the merger of the words permanent and agriculture. In this sense, it was meant to offer a number of guidelines to convey a way of seeing and relating to food growing, such that food could be produced in systems that are as self-sustaining as possible, and – simultaneously – that fit harmoniously in the particular context in which the food growing is to be undertaken. In this sense, the permacultural design process typically involves sustained observation of all the relations (between plants, animals, climatic forces and all elements enfolded within a landscape, including human beings) that shape the site chosen for intervention.3 Those interactions are then considered for their potential in benefitting the success of the intervention, following the maxim of ‘turning problems into solutions’.4 What the act of observation is meant to disclose is a map of the ‘living landscape’, which the permacultural designer can work with, so as to generate synergies that will enable a successful intervention with minimal disruption of the existing ecology of relationships, be these of a social or biological nature. Institutionally, from its beginnings in the works of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, permaculture as a design approach has been disseminated through dedicated organisations, such as, in the UK, the Permaculture Association. These organisations administer, alongside other outreach work, a system of certification for permaculture teachers.

Beyond the application of the permacultural design approach to the design of food growing ecosystems, permaculture is acknowledged to have gradually shifted in meaning from permanent agriculture to permanent culture. In this sense, as a way of seeing and being in the world, permaculture promises to offer an approach through which all types of engagements (beyond just food growing) can be informed by an (ethical) orientation towards promoting care for the Earth, for other people and in support of social justice.5 This ushers possibilities for non land-based permacultural designs. It is possible to adopt the permacultural way of seeing to bring forth certain qualities of inclusivity and nonviolence in all forms of relating, without these being confined to the work of growing food or developing a garden. This broader applicability of permacultural design is reflected, for instance, in the work of Macnamara, a permaculture teacher offering one of the first permacultural design courses that is focused on the use of permaculture as a technique for ‘transforming people’6 by nurturing relationships of care and resilience vis-à-vis oneself and others.7

The emerging shift, within permaculture, from permanent agriculture to permanent culture is perhaps the point at which we can catch a glimpse of a process of differentiation that finds, in Transition, one of its possible continuations. Rob Hopkins, who has been (and still is) intimately involved with the unfolding of Transition since its beginnings, is a practitioner of permaculture. He first tried to apply it to facilitate a process of energy descent in response to peak oil and climate change in Kinsale, Ireland, where he used to live prior to moving to Totnes. It was in Totnes, however, that this form of permacultural intervention got a distinctive name as Transition.

This passage, where permaculture forks into something different (and yet genetically related to permaculture itself) through the initiation of Transition, is one that is often overlooked in the scholarly literature on Transition. Permaculture tends, in fact, to be presented as one of the ‘key components’ of Transition, following the approach of breaking something continuous into constitutive parts, as though it were the result of their juxtaposition. So it is, for instance, that Polk suggests that the Transition approach ‘uses permaculture as its central premise’.8 Hardt, after acknowledging that Transition is endowed with certain distinctive properties that are specific to its style of development, subsequently falls into the analytical way of seeing and dissects Transition into formative components, among which a central place is occupied by permaculture.9 The stress on permaculture is one that also emerges strongly in the early literature on Transition by Hopkins, albeit with a dwindling focus as one moves beyond the Handbook. So it is, for instance, that permaculture is acknowledged as one of the main philosophical foundations of the Transition concept in the Handbook.10 It becomes a ‘tool’ (among many) for Transition in the Companion,11 and loses a dedicated reference in The Power of Just Doing Stuff.12 Far from implying that permaculture is irrelevant to Transition, my intention here is to stress that the moving of Transition is related yet at the same time different from – and not reducible to – permaculture, not even by saying that permaculture is a ‘component’. This can mislead us into expecting to find permaculture inside Transition in exactly the same way as it exists for its own sake; insulating it from the bubbling tapestry of other trajectories it binds with (and alongside which it consequently achieves a fit) in the moving of Transition.

One initial step in the direction suggested here can be taken by dwelling on the distinguishing aspects between permaculture and Transition, as acknowledged by Hopkins himself:

Permaculture is a movement which offers, as redefined by Holmgren, the design system and philosophical underpinning of a post-peak society, yet at the same time, according to Stewart, it is often guilty of maintaining a distance from that society.13

For Hopkins, the moving of Transition possesses a quality of inclusiveness that is somehow missed in the permacultural approach when it comes to shooting for more than food-growing projects. There is, in other words, a sense in which permaculture is perhaps less inclusive than it purports to be, possibly due to the knowledge gap between a ‘trained’ permaculturist and someone who has not yet approached the knowledge base of the subject. For example, by virtue of being articulated through twelve principles and three ethical guidelines, permaculture is harder to explain and introduce to a complete layperson than Transition would be. This is something that Hopkins already picks up on in the Handbook.14 There is a knowledge barrier to becoming conversant in permaculture – by virtue of the means through which the narration of permaculture is articulated – that makes it somewhat harder for it to involve complete laypersons, unless these are convened specifically with the purpose of learning about permaculture.15 Permaculture is not, in other words, something as easy to ‘stumble upon’ as Transition is, despite the great resonance between the two in terms of approach.

In fact, I would like to submit that Transition could be regarded as a reflexive application of permacultural methods for the purpose of devising an approach that makes permaculture accessible to a wider audience.16 By this I mean that, on the one hand, Transition resonates with the permacultural practice of careful prior observation insofar as it stays tuned to the subtleties of interaction (such as knowledge differentials, information overload and the non-permaculture focused nature of gatherings in which Transition may be introduced) in settings where the moving of Transition expresses itself by making a difference. On the other hand, it is this very application of a careful observational approach that prompts a departure from the ‘standard’ presentation format of permaculture, morphing into something different within Transition, so as to enable wider inclusion. This is perhaps why Hopkins also refers to Transition as a ‘Trojan horse’ for permaculture, underlining both the relatedness as well as the difference of Transition vis-à-vis permaculture.17 As Hopkins suggests: ‘permaculture is a concept that is very hard to explain to the person in the pub who asks you what it means, if you don’t have a flip-chart and pens and fifteen minutes in which to draw pictures of chickens and ponds and green-houses. [...] Yet somehow the concept of Transition is easier to explain, allowing more time for other conversations’.18 He goes on to observe that the existence of permaculture in a set of material practices and bodies of knowledge that present some kind of barrier to ‘mainstream’ access risks confining it to a long-term vision of survivalism, opposing the initiated few to the many laypeople. This would however require – to protect permacultural oases in a post-peak oil world – for those tending to them to be willing to defend such oases from hordes of others excluded from the movement of permaculture (which would contradict the very ethos of compassion and care that informs permaculture in the first place).19 Including as many people as possible from the start is therefore a way out of this ethical impasse, so as to ensure the sustainability of a permacultural approach to collective dwelling even in a post-peak oil future.20

Hopkins’s work can subsequently appear as a response to such concern, trying to emancipate permaculture from its more institutionalised aspects and the risk of closure and recast it in a manner that allows it to mix in the life of a range of other situations, beyond the specialised ‘Introduction to Permaculture’ weekend, for example. The inception of the moving of Transition, if we try to find our way into it from permaculture, seems to be located precisely at this fork in the road. A fork where it parts from some of the attachments that are characteristic of permaculture proper, and experiments with alternative modes for drawing in more trajectories and possibilities. And this search gives shape to the moving of Transition, which begins developing precisely around the quality of lowering the threshold for engagement. This is why it then makes sense, after acknowledging the ancestral bloodline with permaculture, for Hopkins to go on to outline ‘six principles that [...] define what is distinctive about the Transition concept’.21 It therefore appears equally – if not more – interesting, when seeing-in-relation Transition and permaculture, to focus not merely on what they have in common, but on where they part. This inquiry becomes an occasion to find what is distinctive in the moving of Transition, such as a tension towards inclusivity that appears to differentiate it from permaculture.

By these means, it is possible for the continuity between Transition and permaculture to shine through, alongside the simultaneous differentiation of Transition’s own style of moving. The concern that initiated this distinction – about avoiding that permaculture close in on itself – would, once woven through Transition, mix and creolise with a number of additional trajectories of action so as to confront Transition with a horizon of its own, distinct from that of permaculture.22 In sum, this varying degree of openness to other trajectories opens a fork in the road, a fork where Transition and permaculture can be set in relation to one another in the process of articulating their reciprocal difference. The import of this differentiation can already be grasped by witnessing the distinctive fit that gardening and food growing – practices that are equally central to the life of permaculture – find within Transition initiatives. It is to these that I now turn to.

Gardening in Transition

Gardens are one of the most iconic ‘things’ that can be observed across Transition initiatives; they are everywhere.23 Food growing projects within Transition take the most varied of forms. In my own experience in Totnes, I have come across tree planting, the upkeep of communal gardens and orchards and the development of community-supported agriculture schemes.24 Moving across the spectrum of food growing projects in Transition, they seem poised to exceed the situated scope of individual experiments, or even the purpose of growing food more generally, and appear instead to be simultaneously entangled as orienting devices towards other undertakings that also have a life within Transition. In this sense, Transition as a whole displays an internal relatedness that takes food growing beyond the more bounded logic of the ‘perma-blitz’,25 and makes it a springboard towards further engagements and invitations, beyond the showcasing of permaculture design techniques.

This manifold, entangled existence of food growing projects is noticeable already in one of the first ones initiated in Totnes, namely the planting of edible fruit and nut trees across town. Beyond the physical impact of the trees in terms of integrating food growing in the urban landscape as well as providing ecosystem services such as carbon capture,26 this activity also offered material embodiment to a distinctive story about Totnes, allowing the latter’s branding as the ‘Nut Tree Capital’ of the UK. This way, the planting of trees becomes more than just an isolated project pertaining to growing food. It is also a device to provide visibility to the moving of Transition as a whole, conjuring – in the trees – the emergence of a distinctive culture of Transition. Through the signposting (with trees) of a space – the nut tree capital of the UK – in which certain orientations are being nurtured, it becomes easier to ‘see’ Transition in its making, and tip over into seeking an involvement with something that sits increasingly within reach. This simple story, in other words, facilitates precisely the sort of immediate communication and open invitation that a long discussion on climate change and peak oil, followed by an outline of the principles of permaculture, just wouldn’t do.

Moreover, the growing of food, whether this may be in connection with the tree-planting project or other forms of gardening, brings together a community that forms around a common task.27 Gardening together offers a sense of shared involvement, without that involvement having to be negotiated from first principles, and without having to come to an agreement on the reasons to engage in gardening. Participating in a communal garden can in fact fulfil many different purposes: from an opportunity to assert a political commitment or an interest in learning more about growing food, to offering ways for a young mother to allay the occupation of childcare (as gardening – and other gardeners – keeps the children busy), or for someone else to learn a skill, to be physically active28 or simply to dig up a few potatoes. In fact, it is the garden itself that necessitates maintenance and therefore sets the stage for building lasting relationships between participants, because they come to ‘owe it’ to the garden’s continued life. The communal garden has the capacity to involve people without asking too many questions: gardeners do not ‘enunciate a principle and then act on it’.29

In addition to this, the meaning of an embodied practice of gardening can only be teased out by exploring what ‘next steps’ are apparent from one’s initial engagement with it, so as to understand what sort of orientation that practice ultimately provides. Here, it is possible to distinguish gardening as a specifically ‘Transition’ thing (and different from, say, a permacultural practice), in the sense of directing participants to undertake further steps into a milieu where gardening latches on to a range of other distinctive possibilities that become accessible from there. And those possibilities relate not so much to the further discovery of permaculture and the acquisition of the embodied and informational resources needed to become a permacultural practitioner. Instead, they introduce concerns that may spark further doings in alignment with the evolving possibilities present within the Transition milieu.30 For instance, one may develop a kindred interest in foraging (and perhaps be ushered into the problem of relating to the ecology one has thereby gained awareness of),31 or a willingness to meet more often by organising potlucks apart from the gardening engagement. Or one may go on to become involved in a community-supported agriculture scheme (and, from there, into supporting the local economy more generally), or take on critical attitudes towards consumption as a consequence of the direct experience of producing food (and search for what additional possibilities might be available to facilitate such behaviour, such as a community currency). In other words, gardening within Transition has the potential to involve participants in a number of experiences and realisations that can induce a sense of a ‘lack of fit’ with the attachments that shape their lives outside of the gardening project and, by introducing new disquiets and areas of concern, spark a search for matching social and material arrangements to release the tension.

An example may help contextualise this better in relation to a particular case. On a cool morning, I joined a group of other volunteers to perform some maintenance on an orchard that was part of the ‘Incredible Edible Totnes’ project,32 involving the growing of herbs and vegetables in public spaces for people to freely pick from. Here, a few things drew my attention. The first was a noticeboard signposting edible plants that passers-by might not necessarily be familiar with, helping the layperson develop an ‘eye’ for seasonality and particular plant varieties. I subsequently inquired about the criteria that went into the choice of the vegetable mix to plant in an orchard of this sort. The response was interesting, since one of the criteria for choosing cultivars was to enable as low a threshold of engagement with the orchard as possible on the part of passers-by. So, for instance, chosen plants tended to be of a variety that allowed easy picking, tipping the bias towards herbs as opposed to tubers like potatoes, that would require one to possess some tools and knowledge to dig them up, with the risk of damaging other plants if not done with the requisite care and expertise. Moreover, on that particular occasion, the orchard was growing a few herbs and some squashes, which the volunteer group were pulling out to make space for the next crop. Our digging was briefly interrupted by a passer-by that inquired about a particular squash he had been watching, and which he was planning to harvest and cook once ripe. The passer-by’s interaction with the working team expressed concern for the potential loss of an attachment (to the desired squash) that had been developed and tended to in their absence, and it provided a succinct manifestation of the extent to which the presence and design of the orchard enabled experiences – of seasonality, of concern for public space, and a curiosity for foraging – to ‘grow’ in an almost underhand way on those engaging with it. These orchards were ‘Transition’ orchards insofar as they acted as possibilities through which to become oriented towards its moving that embraces more than the orchards themselves and, specifically, other Transition-type practices. The yields sought were not simply centred on the individual patch and the uses that human and nonhuman bodies would make of it, but they embraced the facilitation of forms of engagement that could subsequently ‘poise’ those so affected to become more open to other experiences available, beyond the garden itself, in the wider life-world of Transition.

Growing food evokes Transition-ness precisely when it signals a potential continuity with other non-food growing activities into which the inadvertent forager or food grower might be ushered by having taken that initial step. As participants develop a deeper ability to recognise – and a taste for – seasonal food, an awareness of the availability of and challenges pertaining to common spaces, and gather experiences of conviviality (in the sense of cum-vivere, i.e. living – and belonging – together), gardening can act as a source of further curiosities and disquiets, to which they might be more inclined to respond by escalating their involvement beyond the gardening/harvesting itself, and into developing other aspects of an evolving Transition culture.

Food and the experience of ‘community’

Similar initiatives invite anyone, even in their capacity as passers-by (and not as people interested to know more about permaculture) to join. Gardening projects work as much on the availability of local food as they foster what a volunteer called the ‘spirit of sharing’, through which particular inclinations slowly ‘grow’ on participants, prompting the development of a wider culture of Transition (across and even beyond the food growing aspect). One instance of this is the experience of foraging for food in a communal garden, which may nurture a newfound ability to ‘perceive’ seasonality and a curiosity to locate ‘edible’ crops. Leading on from this, the Transition initiative in Totnes arranges what are called Skillshares. These are ‘taster’ meetings to which anyone can sign up, and take part in an induction session about various activities, often related to cultivating a novel relationship with food. Therefore it is the case that expert foragers have offered taster sessions on foraging in and around Totnes through this channel. An incipient interest in foraging, appropriately nurtured, can in turn lead to yet other experiences beyond the harvesting of food. For example, foraging parties are occasions for experiencing conviviality by spending time outdoors with others, either by walking or by sharing some of the work for processing harvested produce (such as shelling nuts together). Foraging can also provide an awareness of being ‘embedded’ in an environment that produces food regardless of our direct intervention, nurturing the sense that food production is not just an activity that is subject to human control and calculation. In this sense, foraging not only provides a practical focus for the coming together of a ‘community’ of other foragers, but it can also usher the experience of feeling part of an ecosystem, fostering a sense of participation in an ecological whole that includes ourselves. In this sense, the experience of foraging in a communal garden multiplies lines of interest and possibilities for further engagement, facilitating resonance with other offerings (such as Skillshares or ‘Inner Transition’ practices, discussed in the next chapter) existing within Transition, through which one may find a way into this evolving milieu.

On some of the occasions when I have been involved in growing food outdoors, I have also found the sharing of food at the end of a day’s work to be a central part of the experience. Food growing activities, such as tending to communal gardens or orchards, have sometimes included mini-potlucks, where participants could bring food they had cooked, normally homemade cakes, and share it with one another. An experience of this sort can consequently make one more receptive and eager to partake in (or organise) more potluck events, where people bring food and sit around tables to chat with each other and dwell together in a shared space where a ‘community’ is thereby assembled.33 This was, for instance, the case with events organised by the Network of Wellbeing, a Totnes-based initiative that, while formally separate from Transition, often shared an overlapping membership, and through which participation in food-growing projects within Transition is sometimes encouraged. In fact, this is how I was able to originally get involved in tending to communal gardens in Transition.

Eating also amounts to the stealth cultivation of bodily orientations and ‘tastes’ for particular kinds of foods, such as ‘organic’ or ‘seasonal’. If, as suggested by sociologist Michael Carolan,34 attachments to food are not just something we can concoct intellectually, but which are built through repeated engagement with a particular experience of taste,35 then it makes sense to see how – according to one interviewee – it is crucial to offer experiences of alternative food choices:

At our community meal, we only serve vegetarian food [...] we don’t suddenly sit up and say ‘Now, we’re going to turn you all into vegetarians’. That would just be a nightmare! It would be a waste of time. However, they’re having an experience of it, they’re getting used to people coming up and saying ‘Hey, you know, the cabbage that we’ve just been eating has come from so-and-so’s allotment, or we bought if from so-and-so, and all this stuff is made by hand, it’s not processed, hasn’t come from a factory, all these apples have been picked at a local community orchard. All these kind of things [...] these connections are happening. People are eating it. They’re experiencing it. That’s what matters.

Moreover, in all of the above activities, people are able to relate to each other through the common tending to a garden, through participation in a foraging expedition, or by sharing and eating food. In this sense, the connection between them is somewhat more ‘ready to hand’36 than if it were just based on people’s negotiation of political views about community, local food or climate change. In being brought together through engagement in growing, harvesting, sharing or eating food, it is easier for individuals to be assembled as a ‘community’, in that attachments are already partially formed as people come in with the goal of doing something like tending to the garden or preparing food.37 This is akin to the situation of going to a dance party and being able to leverage an attachment to a drink as a way to not feel ‘awkward’ for not dancing, as one does not have to negotiate explicitly the choice not to dance. Which is why occasionally those people less inclined to dance might still be able to join one such event and, on finding the right song, even join in the dancing. A party, in this sense, has a lower threshold than a dancing class, where the very explicit purpose of the gathering is to dance. To apply this to Transition initiatives, then, the ‘community’ is not built through the achievement of a discursive consensus over what action should be taken to address the issues that the event seeks to build awareness of,38 but it is – in a way – preformed by piggybacking on a particular material activity: growing, planting, foraging, cooking or eating. In engaging repeatedly in similar doings a social aggregation is eventually built nonetheless, as one starts seeing the same faces at a number of events, and begins to feel included within a ‘community’, one not sought explicitly through linguistic agreement on shared commitments. It is, instead, built through the lowest possible threshold, of offering minimally assembled spaces where people can engage in material activities that bring them together and make them stick to the activities and, at a distance, prompt them to expand the range and variety of their involvements by taking the plunge into the diversity of the Transition milieu.

It is in this sense that the engagement with food in Transition is broader than the way food can be represented in permaculture. Food becomes specifically a ‘Transition’ thing in its ability to act as a facilitation tool to draw people inside the moving of Transition, beyond a narrower focus on the food growing project isolated from a wider cultural transformation. Of course, some people who grow food will stick to only growing food. Moreover, many food growing projects within Transition are based on permacultural principles (mulching, no-digging, use of natural inputs, integration with ecological context, mapping patterns of use and interaction). It seems that food growing in Transition can simultaneously be a way of cueing the life-world of permaculture, as well as having an existence as a ‘Transition’ activity. The two are not mutually exclusive. The quality of being a ‘Transition’ thing emerges most vividly when food is approached for its ability to feed interest and curiosity for a moving that spirals beyond the original port of call into valuing other related aspects of the food growing experience (the challenges of working with others, the possibility of meaningful connection with the natural environment, the connections of food growing to concerns about jobs, energy generation or local resilience). This is how food growing facilitates participation in a culture of diverse Transition activities: an invitation seems to be open to follow through the unfolding of Transition, and intensify it in more ways than by simply growing food. In this ‘more than’ quality lies precisely the orientation towards a maze of other intra-twining practical trajectories that weave the fabric of Transition (and which, by virtue of their participation in it, simultaneously acquire their identity as ‘Transition’ things).

Critical food cultures

Alongside the tending to communal gardens, participation in Skillshares and the organisation of potlucks, the moving of Transition in relation to food unfolds through initiatives that are directed towards the development of dedicated cultures of consumption. I am referring here, in particular, to the development of community-supported agriculture initiatives and, in Totnes, the incubation of a Food Hub.

A community-supported agriculture initiative is usually one where a local farmer is supported by a particular group of consumers.39 This support can happen in various ways: from direct shareholding to the guarantee of regular purchases, to the contribution of volunteering time. In Totnes, the most representative instance of community-supported agriculture is a farm located on the Dartington estate, called School Farm. This site used to be a market garden supplying retailers in Totnes, and not originally organised as a CSA scheme. It adopted this model, however, through the support of the Transition initiative. Namely, the Dartington estate conducted a land use review, in order to know what to do with its property once the dairy farmer – to whom it leased most of the land – was to leave the estate. As part of this review and consultation came the proposal to undertake a community-supported agriculture scheme. It followed from this that the Transition initiative was approached by Dartington, as the group who would have the greatest familiarity with setting up projects of this sort. At which point, the Transition initiative in Totnes advanced the idea that School Farm could become a CSA venture, and subsequently provided assistance to the growers involved at School Farm in dealing with the Dartington estate.

As a consequence of this, School Farm adopted the form of a community interest company (CIC) and, as part of that, it started issuing ‘shares’ to customers, who would get in return a portion of the garden’s produce. While this form of direct consumer involvement is an oft-praised feature of community-supported agriculture schemes, it is also the case that it is only part of the mix through which this particular garden supports itself. Grant funding and income from educational projects are the other financial legs on which the project retains its viability. This is particularly interesting, as it shows how a CSA project of this sort is shaped in an inclusive way to enable as wide a variety of interactions with as broad an audience as possible. For one, the CSA scheme comes with the organisation of monthly work parties to which subscribers of the farm’s shares can partake. On top of this, there is also an active community of volunteers who help on the farm, reproducing a pattern of engagement and community building shared with other projects, such as tree planting or the tending to communal gardens in town. Moreover, the educational function of the CSA equally shapes the project in significant ways. School Farm is often showcased as part of ‘Transition Tours’, as an example of the type of agriculture – organic, local and participatory – that carries Transition in the realm of food growing. School Farm has also been engaged on courses at Schumacher College and other local agricultural colleges. I remember, for example, visiting School Farm for the first time on one of my earliest stays at Schumacher College, as part of an ecology course. School Farm was meant to showcase how ecological farming would ‘look’ like. Making space for the educational function, as explained to me by one of the growers at the project, is also reflected in the mix of crops in use at School Farm, where the goal appears to be diversity – to enable the development of growing knowledge about as many different varieties of plants as possible – rather than the ability to place the most lucrative crops (such as salads) on the commercial market for a premium. Therefore, School Farm is more than an attempt to make a quantitative difference in terms of its contribution to local and organic agricultural production around Totnes. It is also a site where interested audiences – typically people with an interest in Transition, horticulture or food growing more generally – can gain exposure and nurture different embodied understandings of food, discerning how the growing of sustainable food actually looks.

What, instead, of ‘uninterested’ audiences? A recent report authored by the Transition initiative, alongside other local institutional partners, observes that over 70% of food consumption in Totnes still takes place through the conventional channel of supermarkets.40 There is, in other words, another problem that Transition food activism equally tries to address. Which is to remain open beyond the circle of ‘converted’ to the mantras of local, seasonal and organic. This requires attempts and experiments to draw, into the moving of Transition, participants for whom food is mainly related to in terms of price, or convenience of access (which a supermarket, with extended opening hours and because of its nature as a ‘one-stop shop’, can satisfy). The question then becomes one of allowing the moving of Transition to involve a demographic that might not necessarily be able to connect with experiences of communal gardening, community potlucks, foraging, volunteering in a CSA or buying a veg box. For this audience, one attempt at facilitating an inroad into the animating concerns driving Transition’s engagement with food has been the development of a ‘Food Hub’. The concept behind the Food Hub is to try and attract consumers in the simplest capacity as people who want to buy groceries on a budget. Engaging with the Food Hub does not require a pre-existing concern for the ecological or social impacts of modern farming methods, or for the impacts of supermarkets on the food chain. The Food Hub is going to be based around a software infrastructure, through which to be able to coordinate a myriad local producers with consumers, ‘assembling’ a community of interested buyers and sellers. The idea is for consumers to be able to select their groceries online, for these to be delivered to a local community centre. In this way, by cutting out the middleman, it is hoped that prices will be such as to make the Hub an attractive choice for people acting in the simple capacity of consumers of food on a budget. However, by enabling contact with food that is fresh and seasonal, this may be a doorway into the discovery of new experiences of taste that may shift attachments away from ‘supermarket’ food. In this sense, the Food Hub is different – in the audiences it tries to engage – from other existing Transition projects. At the same time, by acting as a kind of ‘Trojan horse’ to induce new forms of gastronomic tuning,41 as well as by inducing a state of awareness of issues around food production,42 it shows the potential to relate back to the moving of Transition, by favouring an orientation towards the other realms of experience, both related and unrelated to food, where Transition practices can be experimented with. This reflects an approach to changing attachments and commitments – one that was pointed out to me in conversation with a Transition activist engaged in the food group – whereby change is understood as a ‘drip, drip, drip’ process; a gradual one, rather than there being a discrete moment that makes one shift their allegiances. It’s an accumulation of experiences, so that what is important is to make sure that opportunities are open for people to undertake small experiments that disclose the complexity of the issues at play in the background of everyday attachments (e.g. to supermarket shopping), and invite a questioning of what people do in their own lives. In the case of the Food Hub, it was already in the development stages of the project that early promise transpired for this sort of ripple process. A committee of local producers and local consumers was set up to enable early trials and the gathering of feedback to design a workable system. In this scoping process, connections took place between producers and consumers who became suddenly aware, for example, of the reasons why meat from grass-fed cows is different from that of battery-raised cows, and why producing a more nutritious and sustainable product eventually translates in a slightly higher end price. In other words, already through the process of designing the system, experiential cracks have been insinuated in the otherwise predominantly price-based experience of some supermarket consumers, signalling the inception of an attachment to different products and, over time, perhaps an openness to other animating trajectories woven through Transition.

In conclusion, in this chapter I have tried to begin from where Transition is often said to have begun, namely the derivation from permaculture as a ‘gardening’ approach to relating in the world, and gardens (and other food-growing projects) as a practical pursuit. My concern, however, aimed to unearth a fork in the road in the moving of permaculture that leads, through differentiation, into Transition. In the attempt to make the permaculture way of seeing accessible beyond the customary circles of dedicated permaculturists, Transition sets off as a move beyond the material and discursive set-up that is normally necessary to introduce permaculture, and – at the same time – it also discloses a tension towards more than permanent agriculture, in favour of a more encompassing ‘permanent culture’. Transition, by way of showing attunement to the challenges of ‘reaching out’ to untouched audiences, is almost an application of permacultural principles to the to disentanglement from the strictures and access barriers of permaculture proper, and effects a turn towards inclusivity. Therefore, despite the relatedness to permaculture in its observational, minimally interventionist approach, an important difference is also insinuated: namely in the way that Transition is presented and in the realms of experience it tries to engage beyond the focus on growing food. As a consequence of this, one need not be familiar with permaculture to join the moving of Transition; this has been my experience in meeting Transition activists in Totnes, only a handful of whom had deepened their interest in permaculture by taking design courses, or the like.43 Transition does not, therefore, act – as I myself had originally thought – as purely an inroad for laypersons into permaculture. It appears, instead, as a transformation of permaculture, where the formal apparatus of the latter is – to quote Rob Hopkins – ‘implicit’ and not explicit. Such features as these are equally present in Transition: the awareness and attention to context and to social/biological ecologies, the concern for making inroads as targeted and minimally disruptive as possible into the drift of people’s everyday activities, and the gradual, slow approach to change. Yet, these are all integral to the lived experience of Transition, without necessarily having to be formalised through a relatively more regimented procedure (as is, on the other hand, the process of undertaking a permacultural design).44

Moreover, the open-ended orientation of Transition, such that the engagement in it is always open to yet further deepening and intensification, already shines through a distinctive approach to undertaking projects relating to food. So, for instance, it is the case that the food growing or the preparation and consumption of food helps pre-assemble a space for social interaction, so that people may come together without having to negotiate discursively the entirety of the terms of their mutual engagement in ways that are reminiscent, for instance, of Occupy-style consensus-based assemblies (which have their merits for the cultivation of democratic practices of communication, but also present a higher threshold of engagement, as participants have to negotiate the structure of their mutual involvement). Food growing, while often undertaken through permacultural methods (and therefore a way perhaps to also get exposure to permaculture as a form of gardening), equally tries to nurture embodied dispositions towards dwelling communally by tending to a space together, by spending time alongside each other and exchanging views, by developing – together – ways to speak about the activities that are being undertaken (in such a way as to gradually build an awareness that is not a prerequisite for taking part in the first place). In this sense, engagement in food growing activities displays a tendency towards greater inclusivity that is distinctive of the moving of Transition vis-à-vis the phenomenon of permaculture. Food growing is undertaken not just for the sake of growing food in a particular way, such as to enable greater provision of local, seasonal and/or organic food. This is just the first layer of the story. Deeper down, food is one area of everyday experience through which the moving of Transition as a whole begins to shine. From community gardens and potlucks to community-supported agriculture initiatives down to the Food Hub, food within Transition appears always as an open invitation to get involved in something else and something more. This makes it an opening towards the development of new attachments and affinities, and new sensibilities – towards food, the ecology where the food growing takes place, the emerging sociality where the food is prepared and consumed – which all enable an orientation and a disposition towards undertaking even more ‘Transition things’ a part of one’s everyday life.45

One of the possible ‘next steps’ available upon having become involved in a common task, such as growing food, is the challenge of cultivating ways of relating to others in the common tending, so as to build into the life-world of Transition embodied and discursive responses to the tensions one may uncover in the process. These tensions pertain to the search for meaningful work, to the need for peer support and authentic human connection, and to ensuring resonance between the task tended to and the process by which the tending occurs, so as to prefigure in the doing the very qualities that the task is also meant to achieve.46 It follows from this that Inner Transition is a possible way ahead from here.