The Role of Values in Responding to Major Social Change: Christian Churches and the Transition Town Movement

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SummaryThe likely impacts of climate change are constantly in the news, but are still currently having very little effect on day to day behaviour. Resource depletion is much less considered, even though many oil experts consider that oil may peak in the next three to five years.The Transition Town Movement (TTM) began in Kinsale, Ireland, and then took root in Totnes in 2005, and is currently one of the fastest growing social movements, with more than 100 groups in the UK, and groups in Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia. It exists to prepare communities for the likely impacts of peak oil and climate change in terms of food security, work and lifestyle. The TTM is aligned with no political party and no religious group. Transition training, however, appeals to a wide range of literature ranging from permaculture to ecopsychology to psychotherapy, and this literature is what is appealed to by the 'Heart and Soul' groups of the TTM, charged with finding spiritual resources for dealing with major social change. This literature is largely 'popular' and much of it can be found in the 'Mind, Body, Spirit' sections of Chain Bookstores. What are the values and assumptions implicit in this literature, and does it really have the capacity to sustain constructive responses to major social change? How does it relate to another Western social and spiritual tradition, namely Christianity? Asking these questions is important because responding to the impacts of peak oil and climate change is going to be a critical collective choice problem. When we find ourselves having to do this we need not to be in the dark.The TTM has no overt political objectives. To the extent that it is about citizens shaping their environment and their future, taking control of their lives, it does, however, have political implications. What processes and practices does it adopt, and how effective are these in enabling constructive social change ( as opposed, say, to panic or anarchy) ? Once again, these questions may be very urgent very soon. Once again, Christianity has many models for dealing with social change, ranging from monasticism, which emerged during the break up of the Roman Empire, to the base communities of Latin America, which emerged during the military dictatorships of the sixties and seventies. It is important to try and see what social processes are effective ways of responding to change constructively.The study is comparative and will help both to understand the spiritual traditions of our current society and to explore their strengths and weaknesses as ways of responding to the social impacts which many members of the scientific community are predicting, but which do not yet form part of popular consciousness.