MAKING A VIRTUE OF DEPRIVATION? Transition anticipates ecotopia after the oil runs out.

The Transition movement is built around making the transition to a world after peak oil—the time when world oil production reaches an all-time high, then goes into irreversible decline. Oil prices will spike and the economy will stop growing, wreaking havoc in our society, which depends on petroleum for nearly everything, from growing food to maintaining economies. The Transition movement aims to prepare communities for peak oil—or climate change, or economic meltdown—by reclaiming lost skills, teaching new ones, and fostering local self-sufficiency.

I can't make stuff up like this.

[Rob] Hopkins moved to Totnes, a town in southwestern England, and launched the first official Transition Town. He rallied people to devise an “energy descent plan”— which has become the core of the Transition movement—for scaling back energy use, sourcing food and other goods closer to home, and otherwise aiming for local sustainability.

Near Totnes is the Rattery Bank on the Great Western Railway. A rattery, for those of you who get no closer to the source of your meat than the frozen prepared foods aisle, is a rat farm. That's local sustainability in the days before scientific animal husbandry.

But these efforts could also strengthen communities and improve people’s daily lives. There’s no downside to eating fresher food, getting to know our neighbors, and avoiding maddening commutes. Those are all solid preparation for energy and food shortages, economic shocks, and climate tempests to come—and they may help us avoid such a bleak future.

Perhaps so. Return with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

A local book publisher is letting the Long Ashton group use a piece of land to start a community vegetable garden. When they wanted to break the sod, a Conservative Party district councilor brought his draft horses and plowed the plot. It was tough work, even for the stout horses, but now Transition Long Ashton is planting crops and building a chicken coop.

There's a Victor E. Garden behind Northampton Grange, and this has been a very good year for habaneros, okra, and tomatoes. But it's a garden, gosh darn it, not a political statement. The zoning code and the subdivision's covenants preclude a chicken coop. I suspect the neighbors wouldn't take too kindly to the cock crowing first thing of a June morning anyway. Although I joke with the neighbors that my electric lawnmowers and rototiller, whose power source is recycled nuclear warheads, are the quintessence of swords into plowshares, they're for quieter tools and for exercise.

In Long Ashton, those pitching in with the community garden are also trying their hand at keeping chickens and pigs, and learning from their neighbors how to build fences to keep them in. They’re learning how to preserve food as jams, by canning, and through lactic acid fermentation—the way that sauerkraut is made.

Perhaps this is the way I could convince the government to pay me not to raise pigs. I've had over fifty years of practice not raising pigs.

The real rewards will go to the people who develop backstop technologies, possibly using renewable energy sources, including breeder reactors. Reversion to the world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder is a second-best choice.