Publisher's Synopsis
In Transition Town, Melissa and Bill, a mid-career couple disenchanted with America's work-and-spend treadmill, leave New York City with their newborn for an unlikely place: Suraqueta, a subtropical town where the Andes meets the Amazon in Bolivia. They're lured by the potential of the "sweet life" ( suma quamaña), the Bolivian idea that happiness is best achieved in deep community in balance with nature. Initially, the young family discovers a blossoming Transition Town with a miniscule carbon footprint, organic farms, community work parties, and a pace of life reflected in its denizens' longevity and happiness. They build an adobe house beside a prolific orchard and weave their lives into a creative community of Bolivians and foreigners. But it isn't long before tropical insects ravish their organic garden and invade their house. Carbon-neutral transition initiatives sputter. And North American-inspired capitalism-mines, malls, Big-Ag-extends its seductive tentacles, threatening Bolivia's pioneering Law of Mother Earth and the very foundations of the Sweet Life. Joining the battle is a motley crew of permaculturists, bio-builders, artists, beer brewers, earnest university students, creative businesspeople, and public officials who, against all odds, struggle to forge a Global South model of self-sufficiency and sustainable happiness. Can one family overcome the obstacles to living a sustainable, happy life? Can a vulnerable town confront fast corporate globalization, defending a slow economy and community? Can the Bolivian nation, in the end, forge a workable alternative to inspire an endangered planet? This is the third in the chronological "Beyond the American Dream" trilogy, which began with Powers's Twelve by Twelve, about a guy in an off-grid tiny-house in rural North Carolina, and followed by New Slow City about Bill and Melissa's experience as a newlywed couple in a Manhattan micro-apartment trying to find slow in the midst of the world's fastest city. It culminates, here, with Transition Town about a self-exiled young family searching for balance, humanity, and happiness in a small Bolivian town.
