Thoughts on the transition to a sustainable society.

• Author: Trainer, Ted
• Position: Viewpoint essay

Only when we are clear about the nature of our global predicament and the radical system changes that are needed, and about the form a sustainable society must take, are we in a position to think about the best way to work for the transition.

The global situation: Consumer-capitalist society is grossly unsustainable and unjust. We are far beyond levels of production and consumption that can be kept up or spread to all. It provides a few with "high living standards" by delivering to them far more than their fair share of world resources. Technical advance cannot solve the problems; they cannot be fixed in or by consumer-capitalist society. There must be dramatic reductions in levels of economic output, and therefore there must be radical and extreme system change. (1)

The Solution: There must be transition to The Simpler Way, involving simpler lifestyles, high levels of local economic self-sufficiency, highly cooperative and participatory arrangements, an almost totally new economic system (one that is not driven by market forces or profit, and has no growth), and fundamental value change. Many realize a sustainable and just society must be made up mostly of small local economies in which people participate collectively to run their economies to meet needs using local resources, and in which the goal is a high quality of life and not monetary wealth. This is a largely anarchist vision and the coming conditions of scarcity will give us no choice about this. Big, centralized authoritarian systems will not work.

Following are some important implications of the foregoing analysis for the transition process.

The conditions we are entering, the era of scarcity, rule out most previous thinking about the good society and social transition. The good society cannot be affluent, highly industrialized, centralized or globalized, and we cannot get to it by--violent revolution led by a vanguard party. Governments cannot do it. The new local societies can only be made to work by the willing effort of local people who understand why The Simpler Way is necessary and who want to live that way and who find it rewarding. Only they know the local conditions and social situation and only they can develop the networks, trust, cooperative climate, etc., that suit them. The producing, maintaining, and administering will have to be carried out by them and things can't work unless people are eager to cooperate, discuss, turn up to working bees, and be conscientious...