Fine tuning the Great Transition: Why we made The Crisis of Civilization and what’s next for Transition

If ever there was a time when the Transition movement was ideally positioned for take-off, it’s now. The popular appetite for radical change is there – of that, there can be no doubt. It’s no coincidence that the Occupy movement in the US, UK and Western Europe snowballed since early 2011, hot on the heels of the Arab Spring revolts that shook the Middle East and North Africa from December 2010.

The eruption of mass public outrage across East and West took most of us by complete surprise – in much the same way that mainstream neoliberal economists never saw the 2008 global financial crisis coming. But the trends were there. Shortly before the Arab Spring, my book, A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, was published. My book is the first serious attempt to bring together the seemingly disparate crises of climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity, economic meltdown, terrorism, warfare, and state-militarisation, into a single framework of analysis. My holistic approach critiques the self-negating trajectory of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, charts the probable demise of industrial civilization in its current form over the next few decades, and suggests a series of fundamental radical political, economic, cultural, ideological and ethical changes that communities need to explore to achieve a transition to more sustainable, equitable and participatory structures.

Unlike most mainstream economists, I had predicted the global financial crash, triggered by the collapse of the housing markets, in 2006. In my book, I’d also warned that our inability to understand the inherent interconnections and systemic context of contemporary crises would not only inhibit our capacity to respond to them effectively; but further would, therefore, lead inevitably to ill-conceived, short-sighted responses based on violence to control symptoms of crisis convergence, in order to maintain business-as-usual.

Suffice to say, my argument would hardly make fun, bedtime reading. So when film-maker Dean Puckett offered to help me promote my book on youtube, after bumping into him at a democracy rally in St. James Park, I was rather chuffed. Dean and I had known about and respected one another’s work for some years, and I was excited that he was keen to help me get the word out after he’d heard me speak at the rally.

We arranged a date, and Dean came round my flat with his camera to interview me for what we both thought would be a cool little clip I could use on my blog or website. He sat opposite me in my little office, flicking through my book and asking me questions as he went. In the end, we conversed for nearly five hours. “Maybe we could make a series of clips, then”, ventured Dean as he left my flat.

About a week or so later, Dean called me up and told me how he’d experimented with splicing footage of our interview with old archive film footage from the 40s, 50s, and 60s – mostly social engineering films by corporations and government celebrating the supposed brilliance of industrial capitalism – to illustrate my thesis.

He’d also asked artist Lucca Benney to create an animation to represent one of core themes of the book, leading to an eye-popping hand-drawn cartoon of the Unlimited Growth Monster.

 A 15 minute film about Meat Carving from which
a 6 second shot for the opening sequence was taken.

“Nafeez”, I remember Dean telling me. “I think this could be a feature film.” I was obviously thrilled. A film of my book? It’s any author’s dream come true.

The process of working with Dean and Lucca on a shoe-string budget to make the film was enlightening and exhilarating. For nearly a nearly a year, we worked to find ways to translate my ideas about civilizational crisis and the necessity of a radical transition to post-carbon societies into the format of a documentary feature film. It was an exercise in breaking down what in the book presents itself as a rigorous, complex and interdisciplinary argument drawing on hundreds of academic and industry sources, and articulating a sophisticated holistic theoretical framework; into an accessible one hour twenty minute narrative, chock full of startling stock footage imagery, modern newsreel, and colourful animations.

The message of the film, like the book, is ultimately simple. If we are going to overcome the convergence of civilizational crises we are now facing, we need to address the fundamental fragmentation in our approaches, and take a much broader, holistic view. But this needs to be done not just in a purely epistemological sense to do with the way we pursue knowledge – requiring joined-up and systemic thinking; but also in practical sense, related to the way we do policymaking, and perhaps more importantly, activism.

What is the Crisis of Civilization? . Crowd funding video explaining how the film was put together.

Currently, we are simply not talking to each other. Our economists, politicians, agricultural experts, ecologists, business leaders, artists, and activists operate largely in self-contained silos – we rarely communicate across and between disciplinary boundaries, and even less do we actually actively coordinate our efforts. This fragmentation afflicts not just the way we pursue knowledge, it also characterises the way we devise policy, and accordingly, the way our societies end up functioning. As activists, then, there is a dire need for us to ensure that we counter this by making our activism holistic.

Unfortunately, this isn’t happening. While the Transition Town movement has made leaps and bounds, there is much ground yet to cover. To date, the movement remains overwhelmingly white and middle class. Although the vision of a new more sustainable and equitable society, one would think, would be attractive to a wide and increasingly disillusioned citizenry, the transition movement has nevertheless for the most part failed to reach out to and cement the involvement of the very groups who are suffering most within the current system: within the North, ethnic minorities, young people and those living in relative poverty; within the wider global political economy, the countries of the South, particular the poorest and most populous regions in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and parts of South America.

This strange failure is, however, no accident. It is symptomatic of the very fragmented and self-centric approach that characterises the structure of industrial civilization today. We in the movement have failed to ensure that the Transition Town phenomenon moves beyond Western-centrism, to think concretely about the way in which the structure of our high-consuming Western economies is linked, indelibly, to massive violence and repression in far-flung parts of the globe. As such, we haven’t recognised the extent to which civilizational transition is not simply about local efforts to re-skill, grow food, produce energy, and so on (all of which are obviously essential); but also about challenging, resisting and transforming the repressive structures of state-power in all its forms. A holistic transition movement must be capable of linking up our activism across different sectors – from opposing the unconstrained power of the banks; to resisting the state’s reactionary encroachment on our civil liberties in the name of ‘security’.

 

Sequence from The Crisis of Civilization about the Civil Contingencies Act in the UK

We must resist state violence in foreign theatres justified in the context of the ‘War on Terror’ but clearly motivated to dominate fast depleting strategic energy resources and direct actions to reclaim public access to the Global Commons, consisting of the earth’s vast water, land and mineral resources currently dominated by the “1 per cent.”

The 1% own all the of land, so what are we going to do about it? video

To the extent that we haven’t yet managed to join-up our activism under the overall umbrella of pushing for a transition to an alternative vision of better societies, our activism, like the problems we are trying to address, remains disjointed and unfocused. That is why, ultimately, young and disadvantaged people in both East and West – who potentially stand to benefit the most from such a transition – cannot yet see the relevance of the Transition Town movement for them.

Equally, if the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring do not ground themselves in a deep understanding of the wider systemic context of the problems we are now facing, and the corresponding need for a holistic joined-up approach to dealing with these problems (not just in terms of lobbying defunct and corrupt states for change, but in terms of building new, alternative structures now, from the ground up) – then they will fail. These social movements need to draw from the amazing strides the Transition Town movement has already made, as well as its deeper insights into the fundamental origins of the challenges we all now face, in order to revitalise activism so that it becomes more than just single-issue oriented. The task, now, is to plant the seeds of the new, post-carbon civilization, right here, right now, within the dying shell of old industrial social forms. Occupy, Spring, and Transition need to not just talk to each other. They need to become one.

We made this film as a tool which could help people get a better handle on the systemic interconnections between multiple, converging crises, and the urgent need for civilizational transition; but more importantly, to help activists and transitioners already somewhat aware of these issues to communicate them more effectively, powerfully and positively to a wider audience. The idea was to give people a solid framework with which to both understand everything that’s going wrong in the world, and thus recognise the necessity of radical systemic transformation in order for us to survive and perhaps even prosper in the twenty-first century.

We hope that we’ve succeeded, We have been running a fantasic and eye opening community screenings intuitive since October and on 7th March we’re proud to announce that we’re giving this film to you, for free online and available to purchase on DVD with loads of extras in Bio degradable/ recycled packaging , to run with and show to your friends, families, colleagues, communities, elected and unelected representatives. Aware. Alert. Alive!

Transition Network