Transtrap

Co-option / Neoliberal Elite

• Anarchist architect John F.C Turner's ideas of self-help and mutual aid finding favour at the World Bank and being used to justify Structural Adjustment Programs that closed 'ineffecient' publicly owned industries who employed large percentages of the population, and cut public services & public housing.
• Mike Davis - Planet of Slums - book containing chapter 'The Illusions of Self-Help
• Elite computer game - idea of a global mission, a game

By talking of transition without acknowledging these sorts of attacks, groups may end up fufilling the role of John FC Turner by advocating mutual aid and self-help local community/food schemes, which could end up being used by local councils as places in which to drop ASBO youths, long term unemployed and other people who need to 'pay their debt to society' - whilst taxes that could have provided decent paid work are diverted to private interests like pension speculation, subsidies for big business and increased military spending.

Could there be a divide between the ecological haves and have-nots?

For example

• how do i get involved in making transition if i am stuck in crappy precarious work, not got time,too knackered, getting hassle from benefits , debt. etc?
• how do i make my house green if i live in poor quality housing, renting, or have no money to invest?
• 'Ecological justice' - Environmentalism which analyses how environmental degradation also is situated and impact the poor dispropotionaltely.For example the location of heavy industries - can Transition support ordinary people who live near heavy industries to help them fight environmental degradation? Or can they support people who work in heavy industries to be included in the transition by for example supporting demands for retraining and compensation? see 'Just Transition' from USA for practical examples
• Stuff that sounds ecologically progressive on the surface - i.e the Bin Tax in Dublin - but was revealed as a situation where the council was implimenting un-progressive flatrate taxes for collecting the recycling and rubbish, privatising and all sorts of not-good-stuff. Some sections of the Greens movement used it as a way to portray people as being uncaring about the environment if they resisted paying this tax..possibly counter productive.
• This divide could be symbolised by 'It's Not Easy Being Green' tv show which was basically "how do i make a bunker" (a nice ecological bunker with nice people - but a bunker nevertheless, out of reach for most)
• Some things are inherently linked - i.e energy and housing. Community based energy systems, like combined heat and power work, best at community scale. So as well as a a roll out of renewable energy a strengthening of public housing goes hand in hand.
• The same for stuff like transport - what came first ? people in cars or the systematic destruction of public transport networks? Knowing these histories can inform the present. So in this case rather than seeing people in cars as being somehow right selfish bastards and want to punish them with stuff like congestion charges (the implication being - if you can afford it then you can drive) it might be interesting to demand cheap , or free public transport.
• Ready meals are linked to working patterns. Increasingly as people are working wierder hours they have less time to get in food and prepare it.

Heirachy

"This has led to a perception that, in the UK at least, LA21 is largely promoting a white, middle-class agenda and has nothing to offer disadvantaged and marginalised groups and communities. It has also served to fuel the widely held belief that poorer communities are not interested in the environment, a myth firmly dispelled in a recent study by Burningham and Thrush (2001)."

"What’s in a name? - Local Agenda 21, community planning and neighbourhood renewal" Karen Lucas, Andrew Ross and Sara Fuller

The experience of the German Green Party getting absorbed into local government is also relevent here