A version of this article was published in
Resilience, 5 May 2026.
The most important social movement in the world today is the Transition Towns movement. This might seem to be a reckless claim, but the argument below, which I have been putting for decades, will support it strongly. However, I have serious concerns about the movement, and I want to offer suggestions as to how it needs to be modified. Unfortunately, at present I do not think it is making the kind of contribution we need
The global situation
It is obvious that we are confronted by a “polycrisis” involving a wide range of very serious problems. But most people do not seem to realise how huge it is or that it cannot be solved without large-scale reductions in the amount of producing and consuming going on, and therefore without transition to a very different kind of society.
Here is a brief list of the major elements in the polycrisis. Resources including minerals, timber, water, soils, fish are dwindling. Just about all ecosystems are being damaged, including the atmosphere, oceans, forests and soils. Species are being lost at an alarming rate. For the 7 of the 9 nine major “planetary boundaries” impacts have now exceeded safe levels.
These environmental impacts are mainly due to loss of habitats, and that is a consequent of economic growth. The environmental damage is generating cost increases of many sorts especially due to storms, fire and floods, and is producing rapid rises in construction, production, insurance and supermarket costs.
These numbers show that we are far beyond sustainable limits to the amount of producing and consuming going on. The World Wildlife Fund’s “Footprint” measure shows that Australians today are using 5 to 7 times the per capita amount of productive land that would be available to all in 2050.
In addition, rich world affluence is largely due to a grossly unjust global economy involving exploitative resource extraction from poor countries, estimated by Hickel et al. to be worth a net annual flow of $2.5 trillion from poor countries to rich. The global capitalist economy inevitably traps billions of people in poverty while their resources are exported to rich countries.
The economic system is not only unsustainable, it is generating most of the big global problems. Because it is driven by market forces and profit it inevitably increases the wealth and power of the rich while it worsens inequality and drives the living standards of most people down. Even in Australia one third of people are reported to be going without sufficient food at times.
Then there are the social and cultural effects. Social cohesion is decaying. There are rising rates of personal distress. Depression might be the biggest illness now. Faith in democracy is declining while people are turning to authoritarian and fascist rule.
But there is one factor which is more important than all the above. It is the probably immanent collapse of the global financial system. The economy has been kept “healthy” by pumping in vast amounts of money created by the banking system and issued as debt. Global debt has tripled in three decades, is much higher than before the GFC, and is now generally regarded as totally unrepayable. It is not possible for the borrowed money to be invested in ventures that will repay it plus interest, mainly because people suffering cost of living increases do not have the surplus purchasing power to buy more products. Unless sales of additional products valued at around $350 trillion plus interest can be made the debt cannot be repaid.
It is difficult to imagine how this deteriorating situation can continue for much longer. At some point borrowers and lenders will realise that the debts are not going to be repaid and they will suddenly panic to retrieve their loans. Catastrophic effects will quickly cascade, including widespread bank failures and loss of savings, bankruptcies, inability to finance business and trade, etc.
This has only been an indication of the present grossly unsustainable situation. We must add the effect of economic growth. If by 2050 the expected 10 billion people were to rise to the GDP per capita Australians would have by then given 3% p.a. economic growth, total world economic output would be over 10 times the present amount. But the present amount is grossly unsustainable: the WWF estimates that as present 1.7 planet Earths would be needed to meet the present global resource demand sustainably.
Many see these factors as inevitably leading us towards a catastrophic collapse of the global system. They cannot be eliminated unless there is a) a dramatic reduction in the amount of producing and consuming going on, and b) scrapping of the growth and profit driven global economic system.
There is only one social form that can solve the polycrisis
The foregoing facts and figures show that a sustainable and just society that all could share and that did not generate the many global problems now threatening us must take the following form. (For the detail.)
- Most people would live in small, highly self-sufficient local communities, largely independent of national or global economies, devoting local resources to meeting local needs, with little intra-state let alone international trade.
- Much simpler systems, infrastructures, procedures etc. Local economies eliminate most need for transport, heavy industry, global trade networks, cities, sewers, big dams, power stations, government and bureaucracy.
- Mostly local economies, not driven by profit.
- Caring, cohesive communities, prioritizing the or market forces or growth but focused on meeting needs, rights, justice, welfare and ecological sustainability, and ensuring that all are provided for, for instance eliminating unemployment and enabling all to have a valued livelihood.
- People in the small communities taking cooperative and participatory control over their own local economies and development, via voluntary committees, working bees and town meetings.
- Caring, cohesive communities, prioritizing the welfare of their ecological and social systems and the quality of life, not accumulating wealth.
- There would be a (much diminished) role for the centralised state, (a few, small) cities. We could have more socially useful high tech, medical research etc. than there is now, if a few of the resources now wasted on unnecessary production were reallocated to it.
- Them most important element in this vision is willingness to live far more materially simply than at present. Life goals would be about enjoying community living, a relaxed pace, security, a valued livelihood, many skilled craftspeople eager to teach, and lots of time for leisure and personal development. Working for money might take only two days a week.
The way such a society can dramatically reduce resource use is shown by
our study comparing egg supply via the normal supermarket path with backyard and cooperative sources. The dollar and energy cost of the former was found to be 100 to 200 times the latter. In addition, local recycling of food nutrients eliminated the need for much transport, fertilizers and sewers, while producing methane for cooking. Such arrangements enable the Dancing Rabbit Eco-village in Missouri to cut per capita resource use by 80-90% of US averages, while providing a higher quality of life than the US average. (Lockyer 2017.)
The significance of Transition Towns?
This vision of a landscape of thriving highly self-sufficient communities run by cooperative conscientious self-governing citizens living very frugally should portray the goal of the Transition Towns movement. Such a planet-saving vision cannot be achieved other than via a Transition Towns movement of some kind. Unfortunately this is not clearly the driving motivation evident within the Transition Towns movement.
If one asks what seems to be the point of the movement the term that it uses to define itself is achieving “resilience”. Certainly, the communities sketched above will be highly resilient, but that should not be the defining feature or the primary goal. It will be another highly desirable consequence of the intended social form. It’s no good if your town achieves resilience by developing arrangements that require a large amount of the world’s scarce resources. Elon Musk is reported to be developing a bunker on Hawaii costing $100 million. It will be quite resilient (for a while) but not a model whereby 10 billion could live sustainably. Is Prestons, or Brixton or Stroud or working to be such a model? If so, say so, loudly.
My point here is that the movement’s primary purpose should be demonstrating the social form required to enable all the world’s people to enjoy a high quality of life via extremely low resource and ecological impacts. The primary purpose should be not to provide benefits to members of the movement but to show to the world the necessary social form, how it can solve the polycrisis, that it is the only way, and that it would enable liberation from the capitalist trap.
The same criticism can be levelled at the Ecovillage movement. Even some of its members worry that it gives the impression that it is only about providing a pleasant escape that only few can take. (Sky Blue, Executive Director for the Foundation for Intentional Community, says this in Communities Magazine, 2025, p. 206.)
This could be fixed simply by slightly reworded mission statements, stressing the above awareness raising goal. (Several of my efforts over the years to get the head organising agencies to take notice of this message have failed to even evoke a reply.)
There are some additional problems that need to be addressed. One is that the movement is explicitly and deliberately reformist as distinct from revolutionary. It involves practices and structures which could easily be added to or implemented within the society driven by market forces, profit, growth and capitalism. For instance, getting “anchor institutions such as hospitals and councils to purchase locally just takes jobs from other localities.
A second issue is that the movement is not focused on achieving sufficiently dramatic reductions in in resource throughput. These cannot be achieved without huge changes in systems. There is concern with reduction, but it is not the overriding concern. For instance, there seems to be little or no effort going into assessing the town’s resource use and ecological impact footprints. It was explained above that if the polycrisis is to be resolved then reducing these to small fractions of their present levels must be the supreme goal.
Nor in my view is the movement sufficiently concerned with taking collective control of the town’s situation, functioning and fate. Initiatives tend to be those of individuals and groups, rather than conceived and undertaken by the town as a whole, gradually enabling it to determine what happens as distinct from allowing market forces and the profit motive to determine trajectories. (This does not have to mean eliminating any role for those factors.) Eventually town and neighbourhood assemblies should be making the decisions as to what is going to be done, and to do those things via committees, rosters, cooperatives and working bees. Are there homeless or unemployed people around here? Well then how can we eliminate this problem? What can we do to make sure that there are no lonely or depressed people in our town? This level of thinking goes beyond subgroups setting up a garden or swap shop. The Rojavan Kurds do this at the neighbourhood level, carrying out educational, security, policing and other activities.
Another major issue to be addressed is the avoidance of politics. The left strongly criticises the transition Towns movement for deliberately refusing to be political, in its rhetoric, let alone its practise. This was the intention of its initiator, evidently on the assumption that division and conflict are to be avoided. The left regards this as a fundamental mistake on the standard grounds that the task is to get rid of capitalism via the culmination of class conflict in the overthrow and replacement of the system by a classless society under the control of the working class. The movement is regarded as not just fundamentally mistaken about revolutionary strategy but as defusing discontent with the capitalist system and siphoning energy into trivial reforms within it. The material put out and the ventures undertaken hardly ever mentioned capitalism let alone any need to get rid of it, and the projects described could be pursued within it. (Choudhury agrees.)
The following argument is that this critique is valid with respect to the movement as it now stands, but it need not be, and would not be if it framed itself in the way outlined below. The reasoning is detailed in my discussion of degrowth strategy (Environmental Values, 2023, where I argue for a “turning away” strategy.
Barkin and Sanchez document the way large numbers in poor countries, notably the Zapatistas, are not concerned to take state power or get rid of capitalism. They are focusing on the establishment of their own alternative ways. In the developed countries this orientation is supported by the view that the decision-making institutions of these. countries are incapable of adopting degrowth policies and that radical change will only be enabled at the grass roots level by the coming global collapse being brought on by the accelerating global polycrisis.
This view of the situation reinforces the notion of building alternatives such as Transition Towns here and now rather than trying to take state power. But everything depends on this being seen as the first step in a long term project intended to culminate in the replacement of capitalism and citizen control of the small, remnant, powerless and socialised state.
But there are even more convincing reasons why socialist goals and strategies are inappropriate, at this point in time. (See in Trainer.) The alternative Simpler Way can only be built and run by “ordinary” people at the grass roots level, as they transform their towns and suburbs into Transition Towns. Everything will depend on the mentality, values, ideas and dispositions of conscientious and responsible citizens down there. It cannot be done from the top, that is, by the centralised state. Secondly at present no state has the slightest intention to do it anyway. None has any interest in degrowth. We could only get a state with the required policies if a majority of people had come to hold the degrowth perspective. We are at best decades away from that.
So, what should we do?
The task for us is to work hard, for a long time, simply to help people to come to the degrowth perspective. The Transition Towns Movement is by far in the best position to do this, by proclaiming the goal and increasing public awareness of the mission. This would involve making their towns impressive examples of the desirable future, including courses, videos, and hosting tours.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ted Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. He has taught and written about sustainability and justice issues for many years. He is also developing Pigface Point, an alternative lifestyle educational site near Sydney. Many of his writings are available free at his website, The Simpler Way.
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