A changing climate means a changing society. The Island Press Urban Resilience Project, supported by the Kresge Foundation, is committed to a greener, fairer future for all. This post was originally published on Resilience.org
Imagine a respite from the relentless torrent of bad news! Both The Transition Towns (Transition) and Intentional Communities movements facilitate secession, to varying degrees, from the exploitive culture that surrounds us, and build alternatives that are supported by broad networks. Now the two movements have joined together to share lessons learned about egalitarian community building.
The Transition and Intentional Communities movements offer pathways to recovery from an abusive, extractive growth-economy. Their proponents seek wholeness through cooperation. The movements embrace anyone with the gumption to self-liberate from the corrosive mainstream matrix and commit to resilient social practices that foster the unity of people and the planet.
Intentional residential communities are groups of people dedicated to figuring out how to live together cooperatively. Transition Towns, villages, and city neighborhoods are local nodes of people, connected through a global network, who are determined to wean their localities from fossil fuel dependency and move toward resilience.
Neither model is a magic bullet. But both movements can learn volumes from the other. To that end, the Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub (MATH),The Fellowship for Intentional Communities (FIC), and theFederation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC)—networks that support Transition initiatives and intentional communities respectively—are purposefully pursuing cross pollination.
Interchange between the two movements is happening in the zone where their missions overlap. That is, in the space where people wake up and summon the grit to live consciously, seek wholeness, and unplug from the dysfunction of the homogenized American norm.The Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) has joined the Spokescouncil of Egalitarian Resilience Networks, an “affinity circle” within the MATH Constellation, to help spark the joint work of the two movements. The Spokescouncil is working to hold both movements accountable to the basic tenets of egalitarian process.
In addition to their shared commitment to equality, both movements seek to cultivate wholeness. Wholeness—systems working purposefully in sync—is the definition of physical, mental, and community health and wellbeing. Wholeness is true resilience. An integrated personality manifests in strong self-esteem. Citizens working together improve communities. Cohesive workplace teams boost the bottom line. Conversely, separation and fragmentation are biological harbingers of disease, and sociological indicators of institutional disintegration. Horrendous income inequity, frayed nerve endings, office infighting, and the lonely, emotional isolation of lives lived in ubiquitous ticky tacky houses and strip malls, reflect illness.
Whereas the pursuit of wholeness through cooperation is embedded yet latent in the DNA of the Transition movement, hundreds of intentional communities alreadydemonstrate just that. Irrespective of how diverse a group of people in an intentional community may be, they necessarily share an allegiance to the baseline value of sustained cooperation. Transition initiatives do not have that luxury.
While “collaboration” and “cooperation” have become buzzwords, relatively few Americans—conditioned as we are in a competitive, top down, power-and-control culture—know what that looks like in practice. Authentic cooperation requires people to change deeply imprinted habit patterns that are continually reinforced by society.
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