Abstract

The Transition movement is more than an instrumental strategy to address climate change and fossil fuel shortage. It is a collective form of life. Against the tendency to reduce social movements to mission statements and policy solutions, this book insists on de-strategising the development of Transition. It argues that the flourishing of its distinctive culture is open to both uncertainty and paradox, and resistant to prediction and mapping. 

Everything Gardens and Other Stories focuses instead on the body as the site where politics begins, engaging with the disquiets and anxieties that instigate the development of Transition practices: from Inner Transition, to food and currency activism, down to the REconomy project. Borne out of a sociologist’s accompaniment of Transition in Totnes, Everything Gardens and Other Stories inaugurates a new mode of accessing the everyday politics and ethical dilemmas that surface in the process of cultural innovation.

What is Transition? That is the question that is at the core of this book. How do we go about Transition? How is Transition defined? At what point is Transition perceived as complete? The difficulty of these questions is so wonderfully managed in ‘Everything Gardens’, wherein we learn that, in a way that is perhaps similar to Theodor W. Adorno’s (or Herbert Marcuse’s) notion of non-identity, Transition is best understood only insofar as it is not reduced to an instrumental process that can be absolutely captured in some total concept or theory. […] If ever there was a book that was so penetrative and that raises so many fascinating questions about the phenomenon of Transition, it is ‘Everything Gardens’. As a study of the utmost integrity, one can only hail this work by Russi as a significant and important achievement in the field of social science.
R.C. Smith