Reimagining a just transition

Transitions have a bad name. Rob Hopkins, who arguably introduced the word ‘transition’ into the environmental lexicon, is said to have chosen the most neutral expression possible, so that reluctant consumers and businesses would not be frightened by the hard choices and sacrifices entailed by living in harmony with the biosphere (as opposed to blindly destroying it). Transitions are supposed to be painless. What is worse, the French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has convinc- ingly argued that ‘energy transition’ is an expression coined by indus- trial lobbies in the mid-1970s to prevent the idea of ‘energy crisis’ from taking hold in western minds. Transitions are supposed to never really happen (and remain, forever, ideas for tomorrow). And yet, the concept of transition is actually a very powerful tool to think about what we should be doing in the face of worsening ecolog- ical crisis—and to act upon it. Imagining a transition means having to answer three fundamental questions: why is the world we live in not desirable anymore, what world do we want and how to get from here to there?