JOANNE POYOUROW

"How can you possibly do this in L.A.?" people familiar with the Transition model often ask me. Even people who live here find the idea quite daunting. One local Permaculture teacher, when asked "What about LA?", literally threw up his hands in a gesture that said "It's hopeless."

Los Angeles is a mega-city. At 11 million people, we're somewhere between 8th and 15th on the list of the world's largest. We're one of the biggest population centers that have dared to actively work with the Transition model. Just for the record: it isn't categorically "hopeless."

I hastened to buy Local Dollars, Local Sense by Michael Shuman, because I was attracted to the title and had high hopes for the emphasis on localization. Shuman's book represents a small step in a needed direction, but I was yearning for much deeper.

As we navigate The Great Turning, we must create a safety net or "backup plan" as the conventional growth-dependent economic system falters and crumbles. Ideally, that safety net will integrate threads which become the foundation for the new economy -- a post-carbon, post-petroleum, post-peak-everything, more socially just, necessarily degrowth economy.

As a gardener, Winter Solstice holds much more meaning for me than the conventional new year marker of January 1. Even here in Southern California's year-round growing season, we observe the slowing of plant growth into semi-dormancy as the Solstice approaches. We witness the acceleration into new growth once the Solstice is past. Animals know it too -- my chickens are resuming laying.  The Winter Solstice is the crossover point, the planet's annual marker of change.

Mop and vinegar spray in hand, cleaning up and restoring household order after two Thanksgiving feasts (one with my family, and another with my dh's extended family), a multitude of seasonal reflections tumble out...

Someone asked "if you could say something to the Occupy movement what would you say?" Vandana Shiva flashed her brilliant and embracing laughing smile, a smile that hooks right into your heart and you can't help but feel the connection. She replied: "I'd tell them, Occupy your Life." She reminded us how Gandhi had the symbolic actions -- sitting in protests -- but with that he also had the cotton -- the tangible actions.  Dr Shiva said that along with the protests, people need to grow food, to build connections within their communities, to make changes in their lives.

I haven't journeyed down to OccupyLA myself. In part that's because it is quite a distance from me, and I have kids' schedules to uphold. But deep down, those are simply excuses; really, my heart's not in it. I see the Occupy movement as an outbursting of emotion, expressing that the existing System is horribly broken, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. But the protests, now shifting to from Wall Street to upscale neighborhoods, are a gigantic "blame game" which cannot possibly fix anything real.

Here, in the middle of urban Los Angeles, knitting is a pretty elitist hobby. It might be a "reskilling type of thing" good for necessary clothing-making somewhere out on a farm where there are plenty of goats and sheep. Or if I took to raising angora rabbits. Because when the serious hiccups in the economy come, when the darker transportation issues of peak oil set in, the boutique yarn stores I patronize today likely won't be around anymore.

In Sacred Economy, Charles Eisenstein poses the seemingly outrageous idea that money should be sacred. In this he means that a good bit of the mess we’re currently in is because we have lost this sense of the sacred and the special – the connected and interdependent nature of transactions between people.

In early writings about the Transition movement, one of the guidelines was to "Let it go where it needs to go." Don't attempt to control the growth of your budding initiative or local group. Allow it to develop -- "organically" if you will -- however it needs to. Given the unique dynamic between individuals on our initiating core teams, given the particular issues in our local communities, given the preexisting status of transition-oriented activity around us, what needs to happen next in one locale has been quite different from what needs to happen next in another.