Transition Culture

Here’s a great ‘The Transition Companion’ widget created by Green Books, which offers an immersion into the book, complete with audio bits and all sorts. It’s easily embeddable, so if you have anywhere on-line it could go, that would be wonderful. Click on it and it blows up into a flip-throughable selection from the book. Thanks to Stacey at Green Books for creating it…

Here is the January Transition podcast, lovingly spliced together in order to offer a more in depth look at three of the stories from last month’s round-up.  You’ll hear about how Transition Chesham’s local produce market was recently voted the greenest market in Britain, how Transition Town Whitehead are planning to plant 60,000 trees over the next few weeks, and how Transition Town Shrewsbury stepped in when the local council announced that it was stopping collecting cardboard for recycling, and did it themselves.  I hope you enjoy it, and do let us know what you think.

Today I’d like to share a map with you (click on it and it will magically fill your screen), and I’m hugely grateful to Geri Smyth for giving me this.  It is a map of the town of Guildford (or Guldeford as it was then) in 1793.  Regular readers will know I love a good map, and I have spent a fair while poring over this one.  There are a couple of things I love about it.  Firstly, it is the most amazing piece of draughtsmanship.  It is a thing of extraordinary beauty in a way that Googlemaps can only dream of.  The way its laid out, the calligraphy, the attention to detail, are beautiful in a way very few people could recreate today.  But what is so extraordinary, upon closer inspection, is how it captures what it looks like when food grows everywhere. Think of it, if you like, as Incredible Edible Guildford, circa. 1739.  

This is a Guildford before the car, before before shopping malls, before tarmac.  It is also clearly a Guildford with a much lower population than today, with far far lower living standards, and with a lot more mud on the soles of its shoes.  My reason for posting this beautiful artifact isn’t to romanticise times that were very different, and in many ways much harder, rather it is to marvel at what a really local food culture looks like in reality for those of us who have no living memory of such a thing.

We see, for example, that the hospital has its own vegetable garden.  The Free School has its own orchard.  While many of the houses have their own gardens, others appear to have allotments out the back, large pieces of land divided into plots.  In the centre of the map is a cluster of coaching inns, each of which have yards full of vegetable gardens.  Behind every house, on every piece of ground, food is being grown.  It is an extraordinary snapshot of a time when food production was the principal form of urban land use after roads and buildings.  I won’t say more about it, just take some time to let your eye wander over its surface.  You can download a hi resolution pdf of it here (caution, it’s a big file).

Makes me think how the maps of the future of our settlements will look.  Peeling back the tarmac as our priorities change, as the economics of globalisation begin to go into reverse, as our cultural perceptions of the usefulness and attractiveness of lawns start to change, and as the need to create meaningful and fulfilling work grows, will transform our urban terrain.  Adding in rooftop growing, vertical growing and other more recent innovations, and we’ll see the places we live transformed.

I walked this morning through the frost, and past my local allotments in the early morning sun, sparkling with frost and with a low mist hanging above it, catching the first rays of the morning sun as it emerged.  How much more life-affirming, exhilarating and nurturing such a thing is to experience in everyday life than carparks and lockup garages.  Perhaps it’s just me, but a walk of the imagination around the landscape captured in this map is not just a look back into our past, but also, in many ways, a look forward into our future.

What do you do when you are the heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and you have spent years surrounding yourself with new agey thinking and conspiracy theories?  You make a film like ‘Thrive‘, the latest conspiracy theory movie that is popping up all over the place.  I’ve lost count of the number of people who have asked me “have you seen ‘Thrive’?”  Well I have now, and, to be frank, it’s dangerous tosh which deserves little other than our derision.  It is also a very useful opportunity to look at a worldview which, according to Georgia Kelly writing at Huffington Post, masks “a reactionary, libertarian political agenda that stands in jarring contrast with the soothing tone of the presentation”.   Here’s the trailer to give you a taste:

Visually the film is like some kind of Star Trek fan movie crossed with a National Geographic wildlife film, and is largely built around Gamble’s own years of ‘research’ into the question of what it is that “stops life on earth from thriving”.  A reasonable question to ask, but his approach can hardly be called ‘research’ due to the low standards he accepts as ‘evidence’ and his all-round lack of critical analysis.  His research, such as it is, is cherry-picked to deepen and support his established worldview, rather than the worldview being built from a careful analysis of the evidence.  As we’ll see, this is a dangerous foundation.

So here’s the film’s argument in a nutshell.  Humanity is killing itself and the world around it because free energy sources are being deliberately kept from us, cures for cancer are being kept from us, all because we are controlled by an invisible elite who want to create a ‘new world order’ to control us all and prevent us from thriving.  So let’s look at some of the film’s central arguments in turn.

Free energy machines

One of the key threads of the film revolves around free energy, the idea that we can generate unlimited clean energy by just tapping into the ‘torus’, a shape that supposedly pervades the universe (see right), and which could yield endless free energy.  ’Thrive’ would have you believe that there are dedicated independent scientists around the world bravely defying the laws of thermodynamics only to have their work seized by the FBI, their patents bought up and ‘lost’, or harassed into silence.  Yet all we are offered as evidence is some grainy film of machines that could be anything doing anything, and some smart computer graphics of spinning torus shapes.

If this amazing breakthrough that would rewrite science and win Nobel Prizes for anyone involved were actually a reality, and if you were going to spend huge amounts to make a film to argue for their existence which you would then put out into the public arena, surely you would get a working model of such a device into the studio with some impartial scientists to verify it in operation?  If they actually exist, and actually work, then this wouldn’t be a big challenge surely?  As Kyle Hill writes in his review of the film, “wanting something to be true does not make it more possible”, and “someone wanting to invent such a device is not evidence”.  ‘Free energy’ is a world notoriously riddled with charlatans and cranks.

Gamble argues that these technologies could provide “enough energy to transform the entire earth”, and here’s a key point I want to challenge.  The idea that free energy would be a universal good (even if it were feasible, which it’s not – the US Patent and Trademark Office gets so many nonsensical requests for patents on perpetual energy devices that they now refuse to even look at them without a working model) is deeply dubious.  Kimberly Carter Gamble, Foster Gamble’s partner, states at one point in the film that:

“… so much of the pain on the planet has to do with the lack of access to energy”.

Wow, now there’s a statement.  How many people on this planet would argue that much of the pain on the planet has to do with the developed world having lack of access to energy?  While of course for millions in the developing world, lack of access to energy is a huge impediment to being able to attain a reasonable standard of living and to move beyond poverty, in the developed world, cheap energy (you could argue that for the past 150 years fossil fuels have been so cheap that they might as well have been ‘free energy’) has allowed Western nations to conquer, plunder, colonise, mine, clearcut, dominate and oppress.

While it has also allowed us to do many good things, energy cannot be seen in isolation from our relationship with other resources.  Free energy would mean we would drain the aquifers faster, degrade the soils faster, work our way through the earth’s other depleting resources at an accelerated rate.  Nowhere in the film is the idea of limits even mentioned, apart from occasional mentions that believing in ‘scarcity’ is one of our problems.

Can anyone seriously argue that the United States (which is principally the focus of this film) with a new free source of energy would be a more responsible member of the global community?  Would they happily share it with the rest of the world? (the current stand-off about Iran’s nuclear energy programme rather indicates that they wouldn’t).  I would argue that it is only the realisation that we are nearing the end of the age of cheap energy, cheap fossil fuels, that is finally bringing some sense, some awareness of the fact that we live on a finite planet and that we need to live more responsibly.  Gamble’s argument that we could have enough free energy “to transform the entire earth” fills me with dread and foreboding rather than excitement.

We are told that oil companies are spending “huge amounts of money” suppressing free energy, with no evidence presented to support that at all.  I would hazard a bet though that if even any money at all is spent on such things, it is a tiny fraction of what is spent on climate change denial, funding dubious organisations which attempt to undermine climate science, all of which gets no mention here.  Of course we already have technologies that can harness natural energies and which provide clean energy – they are called renewables, we know they work, and we can install them today.  ‘Free energy’ is a fantasy, and will always remain so.  As Kyle Hill writes in his review, ”just because the universe is hard to understand and many times mysterious, does not mean that anything goes”.

Down the conspiracy rabbithole

Then we are bombarded with the full range of conspiracy thinking.  9/11 was an inside job, there is a conspiracy to suppress natural medicines, “Big Brother’s not coming, it’s already here”, we are one step away from a “military dictatorship”, a climate treaty in Copenhagen would have been “a tax base for tyranny”, there are ‘chemtrails’ in the sky to deliberately poison us, there is a deliberate attempt to reduce the world’s population underway, there is only a cancer epidemic because all the cures have been suppressed, etc, etc.

UFOs are also brought into the picture, which is odd as they serve little to deepen his argument, rather the argument seems to go like this: there are UFOs and they are extraterrestrial craft, and in order for them to have got here, they must have free energy machines, so therefore the Elite must know about this and be keeping it from us.  As he writes on the film’s website, “if we can expose the suppression, reveal the truth about ET visitation, and further develop new energy technologies that ETs apparently rely on, then we can decentralize power and make massive strides toward a thriving future”.  I’ll leave you to decide whether that 2+2+2=9 kind of logic makes any sense to you, and whether the word ‘apparently’ constitutes an evidence base.  Naturally, no evidence is presented to support this other than a few fuzzy videos of lights in the sky in different parts of the world.

Wheeled out as ‘experts’ to support the film’s arguments are Deepak Chopra and, erm, David Icke, among others.  Gamble is keen on talking about “my research”, yet his research, such as it is, is so undemanding that I am reminded of Sir Terry Frost’s words, “if you know before you look, you cannot see for knowing”.  Gamble wheels out the classic conspiracy theorists’ gambit, “could I be wrong?  Perhaps.  But what if I’m not?”  No, you are wrong.  And even if you were right, you have presented us with so little evidence to back up you claims that you would have no way of knowing whether you were right or not.

He also does the other classic conspiracy theorist’s trick of saying “don’t just take my word for it, do the research yourself”, offering links on the film’s website that all back up his arguments, rather than giving a rounded balanced view of arguments and counterarguments.  There’s some dreadful rubbish on there, the film ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ is presented as evidence that climate change is probably not a problem, for example, and the appalling section on climate change beautifully states “those who point to solar activity as a cause of global warming are often ridiculed and accused of being funded by the oil industry, even when that’s not the case”.  “Even when”?

Ah, so that’s what ‘Thrive’ is all about …

Then, at the end of the film, we finally get into Thrive’s manifesto, it’s vision for the future and how we might get there.  There is lots in there that I wouldn’t disagree with, more local food, renewable energy, local banking, local shopping and so on, apart from free energy being thrown into the mix too.  But now, it is in this final section of ‘Thrive’ that the dark side of the film emerges.  One of the things put forward, alongside local food, renewables and so on, is “little or no taxes”.  Eh?  Where did that come from?!  Ah, now we get into the real agenda of the film, a kind of New Age libertarianism, a sort of cosmic Tea Party, and it all starts to get deeply alarming.

Gamble sets out his 3 stages to get to humanity’s being able to thrive.  Firstly, he argues, we need to hugely scale back the defence industry and the Federal Reserve.  Well I could go along with that, but then the second is “shrink government’s role in order to protect individual liberty”, and the third is then, because we are now freer, with “no involuntary tax and no involuntary governance” and with “rules but no rules” (?), we can all now thrive.  OK, whoa, let’s pause here for a moment.  Indeed the film’s website goes further, describing ‘involuntary taxation’ as “plunder” and ‘involuntary governance’ as “tyranny”.

Thrive's vision of a thriving world: no taxes, no government, 'free energy charging stations' and community markets.

In her review, Georgia Kelly quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying “taxes are what we pay for a civilised society”.  In spite of all it’s cosmic graphics and pictures of forests from the air, it is in essence a kind of New Age Tea Party promo film, arguing for a society with no government, no taxes, no laws, alongside “interplanetary exploration”, which somehow combine to create a world that respects the rights of all.  Apparently, this would lead to a world where “everyone would have the opportunity to thrive”.  In reality, it would lead to a world in which the wealthy would thrive, but the rest of us would lose healthcare, social welfare, libraries, public transport, pension entitlement, social housing etc etc.  Sounds more like a surefire route to the kind of Dickensian world that led to the creation of a welfare state in the first place.

Responding to any of the truly global issues, such as climate change (which ‘Thrive’ clearly dismisses as part of the conspiracy), would no longer happen due to intergovernmental co-operation presumably being interpreted as steps towards a ‘one world government’. The film presents its suggestions in complete isolation from any notions of ‘society’ and community, presenting a vision of the future where the entire global population is living the same lifestyle as Gamble, the resources to enable this presumably being imported from other planets, or perhaps created afresh using magic?

Nowhere in the film do you hear the words ‘less’, or anything about reduced consumption in the West.  Just as free energy and cures for cancer are our birthright, so, presumably, is the right to consume as much as we like – to think otherwise is to lapse into a ‘scarcity’ mindset.  What I find most alarming about ‘Thrive’ is that most of the people who have asked me “have you seen Thrive?” are under 20, and they seem genuinely excited by it.  Perhaps it is the simplicity of the message that appeals, the “all we need to do is” clarity of its ask.  But having to discuss why free energy machines are impossible and the shortcomings of conspiracy theories with otherwise educated young people who are inheriting a warming world with its many deep and complex challenges is deeply depressing.

How we might actually help the world thrive

‘Thrive’ is dangerous because it invites us to put our faith for the future in a fantasy.  A fantasy that free energy is possible, a fantasy that the only thing that is preventing us from creating a benign and enlightened society is a handful of powerful families.  Things that are already very successfully preventing the world from thriving include:

• climate change (you try thriving in a world with a world whose temperature has risen 11°F, as the IEA warned this week)
• the fact that we fail to see reducing our oil demand as a key as a key aspect of energy security, oil prices having quadrupled since 2003 and going nowhere other than up, UK North Sea oil production falling by 22.5% in 2011 (a record fall) and North Sea natural gas production falling by 29.5% (a record fall) in 2011
• Social inequality, which as the book  ‘The Spirit Level’ so brilliantly showed, underpins many of our other social problems
• Our economic system, designed to channel money upwards rather than downwards and to enrich the 1%, but this is a sufficiently abhorrent system (see, for example, Nicholas Shaxson’s brilliant ‘Treasure Islands’, review coming soon) without invoking secret societies and conspiracies to explain it

The solutions are already out there, there are proven technologies, proven strategies, and we need to work on all levels, as indeed the film argues, and to withdraw our support from a corrupt and ineffectual model which is taking us over the brink, and put that support into creating a more resilient, localised and accountable model.  However, it’s not about ‘interplanetary travel’, it’s about finding our feet, here and now, in the communities and the soils that surround us.  It’s not about ‘free energy’, it’s about learning to appreciate what a precious thing energy is and learning to live well with less of it.  It’s not about ‘no involuntary taxation’, it’s about taxes that disincentivise the things that are narrowing our future options, and incentivising the things we need to get in place urgently.  It’s not about ‘no government’, it’s about truly democratic government using its considerable powers to build resilience, decarbonise society, shift the collective focus.  The few countries in the world that are actually seriously engaging with the climate issue are those with stronger government, not weaker government.

I have occasionally been interviewed for a film and then squirmed with embarrassment when I have seen the final context in which my interview has been used.  I can only imagine that some of the progressives, such as Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, who appear in this film, are similarly horrified with ‘Thrive’.  It is a film that offers us nothing, and which, taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to our having thrown away the few options for actually thriving that remain open to us.  It is the film equivalent of a self-published book, with no critical editor rounding off the corners, and as a self-funded film a sense that you can do what you like.  Avoid.

Here’s a great article from the latest edition (‘The Green Issue’) of Norwich magazine, to whom I am very grateful for permission to republish in full.  You can also download the pdf of the article here with more of Tony Buckingham’s excellent photos here. 

Close to home

In November, Transition Norwich celebrated its third birthday. Sabine Virani investigates a green initiative that is part of a global movement yet focuses on local need, local interest and local resources.

It was all going so well until the tractor died. Thirty members and friends of Norwich FarmShare had turned up at the five-acre farm next to the Postwick Park & Ride to bag the last of the year’s potato harvest. It was an urban-dweller’s day out and a nice way to spend a warm Saturday in October. All they had to do was walk behind the potato harvester, pick up the freshly lifted spuds and pop them in a bag. But half-way down the second row, the tractor gave up the struggle.

Fortunately for the farm, these were committed volunteers. The farm is a cooperative, and though the land is rented, the business is owned by its members, who give about nine hours a year of their time and pay a monthly subscription in return for a weekly share of the harvest throughout the year. Faced with a dead tractor, they simply grabbed the garden forks and started digging. In all, they hauled some two tonnes of spuds that day.

Leading a tour of the farm in late November, head grower Tierney Woods apologises that it is so bare. Yet the fields still seem generously full of chemical-free vegetables for cropping through the winter and into the spring: leeks, onions, spring cabbages, broad beans and garlic. There are a few carrots left, too – although the rabbits are showing an interest and might finish them off – and rows of purple and green ‘January King’ cabbages that look
fit for an artisan grocer’s in Primrose Hill. And then there’s the asparagus bed and the polytunnels.

In its first 12 months Norwich FarmShare recruited 70 members. By taking on two more acres, building soil fertility and cropping more closely, the cooperative hopes to increase membership to 200 in 2012.  Norwich FarmShare is seen by many as the flagship project of Transition Norwich, an initiative that was launched in St Andrew’s Hall in October 2008. Some 400 people attend­ed the launch, drawn by shared concerns about global dependence on a finite resource: oil.

For many at the launch, climate change was the overwhelming concern. But others were just as concerned about warnings from some petr­oleum geologists that global oil production has already peaked (a phenomenon known as ‘peak oil’), and that what is left will be harder and more expensive to access. Almost every aspect of modern life depends on oil, and some believe that the galloping rate and scale of oil-hungry development in China and India will have a sharp impact on the price and availa­bility of oil in the near future, leading to rapid and unprecedented challenges.

A different form of action

Many people still can’t really get their heads around climate change, much less peak oil. These are global issues, wrapped up in complex science and economics, accompanied by nightmare scenarios and outright (if diminishing) denial. It’s easier to ignore the lot and carry on as normal.

Yet while many of us continue to live as if we’ve never heard of these things – do you cycle rather than drive, or measure the tea water before boiling? – others are taking action. Not the save-the-rain-forests sort of campaigning action that’s now widespread, but something closer to home. In a wide field of environmental and progressive organisations, with countless opportunities to protest against government and big business, the Transition movement is creating a stir with a different approach.

Now a global phenomenon, the Transition movement dates back to 2003, when founder Rob Hopkins first learned of peak oil. At the time, he was teaching permaculture (an ecological design system) in Kinsale, Ireland, and was so struck by the concept, he had his students apply permaculture principles to create a local response to the challenge presented by peak oil. Their work was published in 2005 as the Kinsale Energy Decent Plan, which was later adopted as policy by the town council.

Keen to replicate the process elsewhere, Hopkins returned to Devon, where he launched Transition Town Totnes in 2006. A number of rural and urban Transition initiatives quickly followed across the UK, before the ideas caught on Australia and New Zealand. When Norwich resident Christine Way learned about the movement, she began to recruit the team who helped Norwich became 50th initiative to register with the Transition Network. There are now over 900 registered initiatives globally – with many more unregistered – spread over 35 countries.

Transition initiatives share a grassroots, community-based model, using the framework laid out in Hopkins’s The Transition Handbook (2008) and The Transition Companion (2011). In the handbook, Hopkins spells out a number of differences between Transition and more conventional environmentalism. Transition focuses on resilience and relocalisation, rather than sustainable development. Transition uses hope, optimism and proactivity – rather than fear, guilt and shock – as drivers for action. Its tools are public participation, arts, culture and creative education, as opposed to campaigning and protesting. And it seeks policy change not through lobbying, but by initiating projects that can appeal to voters – and hence politicians – of all persuasions. In the nearby Transition initiative Sustainable Bungay, a life-long Tory voter volunteers comfortably alongside a commited Marxist on a project that promotes local, seasonal food.

While there is a clear set of Transition principles and tools, each initiative is encouraged to develop independently according to local need, interest and resources. In its first three years, Transition Norwich has been exploring what resilience in Norwich might look like. Energy is at the root of the Transition movement, and Norwich developed two approaches to helping individuals reduce their energy usage. Christine Way began to lead Carbon Conversations, a model developed in Cambridge for people to meet in small groups to explore climate change from a personal perspective, and to think creatively about ways to reduce their own carbon footprints. A £20 fee covers the course book and expenses, and more than 100 people in Norwich have completed the six-session course. Way estimates that participants have reduced their CO2 emissions by an average of about one tonne each. Meanwhile, taking a more homespun approach, 15 local Transition members set out, and rep­ortedly managed, to cut their CO2 emissions to four tonnes annually, less than half the UK average.

The Magdalen Street Celebration is another Transition Norwich project, launched in 2010 by Helen Simpson, Karen Steadman and Stefi Barna. “Magdalen Street has the biggest concentration of antique, charity, second-hand and vintage shops in the city, and that fits with the Transition spirit of reuse and recycling. The vast majority of the shops are locally owned, and that is part of the Transition idea of localism. There are also shops that teach craft skills, and it has the largest number of international food shops in the city. So we saw the theme of the street celebration as representing creativity, sustainability and diversity. These are the things that make a neighbourhood vibrant and resilient.”

Transition Norwich has now run two Magdalen Street Celebrations. So far the programme has featured everything from bands under the flyover to medieval musicians in St Saviour’s church, with buskers, stiltwalkers and clowns roaming the street and Anglia Square. There are also creative workshops for families, and dozens of community stalls.

“The celebration seems to work as a way of bringing residents, shoppers and ‘fans’ of the street together, and to promote local businesses and local bands and artists,” says Barna. “It’s also a fantastic opportunity for the community to take charge of how the neighbourhood should develop. What do we want to do with the open space under the flyover? How can we support the businesses better?”

This Low Carbon Life

Transition Norwich currently has no committee, or ‘core group’, to help steer its course. So in its abs­ence, the communications group has taken on a greater significance. As part of this group, Charlotte Du Cann puts out a monthly news bulletin, listing upcoming local events. She also coordinates This Low Carbon Life, Transition Norwich’s daily blog of features. It’s written by a community of between eight and 12 regular bloggers, with a rota to ensure someone posts a blog every day. Often on a Sunday, the blog is open to anyone. Du Cann, once a fashion journalist and now a committed Transition member, doesn’t necessarily agree with everything that’s written, but says: “The blog is about creating an alternative media infrastructure, giving a voice to ideas that wouldn’t necessarily get into mainstream media.” Now going for two years and the model for a national Transition blog, This Low Carbon Life is something Du Cann is particularly proud of.

Another Transition Norwich project is the development of a low carbon cookbook. Transition events generally involve food, with participants each bringing a dish to share. The emphasis is on seasonal, organic, local or fair trade, vegetarian food. A group has been meeting for over a year, writing down recipes, taking photos, making notes and writing blogs. The cookbook will include not only recipes, but a directory of food-related issues, from food sovereignty and raw food to waste and the political, economic and social justice ethics of what we eat. They’ll be looking for a publisher this year.

Three years and counting

In November 2011, Transition Norwich celebrated these and many other projects and events at its third anniversary celebration. Rob Hopkins came to speak and share the work of Transition initiatives around the world. Asked whether he is still able to maintain the optimism for which he has been known since the early days of the Transition Movement, he responded by quoting entrepreneur and environmentalist Paul Hawken: “If you read the climate science and you don’t feel absolutely miserable, then you’re not really reading it properly. But if you tap into the movement of people who are doing something about it and you don’t feel inspired, then you don’t have a heart.”

Like most groups, Transition Norwich is not without its internal struggles. Several former members acknowledge that, while it has acted as a catalyst for FarmShare, Norwich Community Bees and various other things, it could do much more. One concern with Transition initiatives generally is their flat organisational structure: though this has various benefits, it can mean that nobody drives things forward.

One active member also notes, “There’s no mechanism for dealing with personality clashes and power struggles, which inevitably occur, so good will and good people are sometimes lost. Still, there’s room for those who want to solve a problem, who have a vision. We can get caught up in the people politics, but we have bigger battles to fight.” That sounds like an invitation to get involved.

www.transitionnorwich.org
www.transitionnorwich.blogspot.com
www.norwichfarmshare.co.uk
www.transitionnetwork.org

‘In Transition 2.0′ is nearly ready to be unveiled to the world!  We are very excited about this inspiring reweaving of the Transition story, and want to tell you more about it here, and about how it will be rolled out over the coming months.  To get us started, because we are so excited about sharing this with you, here is the film’s trailer, completed just yesterday, directed by Caspar Walsh.

Hopefully that has sufficiently whet your appetite for what is a remarkable film.  We describe it thus:

“In Transition 2.0 is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.  You’ll hear about communities printing their own money, growing food everywhere, localising their economies and setting up community power stations.  It’s an idea that has gone viral, a social experiment that is about responding to uncertain times with solutions and optimism.  In a world that is awash with gloom, here is a story of hope, ingenuity and the power of growing salads in unexpected places”.

It has been produced by Emma Goude, with animation by Emilio Mula, photography by Beccy Strong and with stunning original music by Rebecca Mayes.  They have drawn together stories from around the world showing Transition initiatives at the various stages of transitioning their communities.  In order to be able to feature some of the stories from overseas, they ran a crowd-funding process which raised the money required.  An international team of volunteers have translated the film in 18 languages.

Also, in spite of telling stories from around the world, no-one set foot on an aeroplane in order to make this film, local camera-people being enlisted to film each non-UK sequence, making this one of the lowest-carbon international films ever produced.

Who’s in it?

The film captures stories of Transition from around the world.  You’ll hear about Transition Wayland in the US, and their very first meeting, how Transition Moss Side in Manchester have sought to raise awareness and engage the community by knocking on the area’s front doors, the amazing community visioning work of Aldeia das Amoreiras Sustentável (sustainable village of Amoreiras) in Portugal, how the Whitney Avenue Urban Farm in Pittsburgh has had a remarkable impact on the people around them, how  Transition Kensal to Kilburn have set up the first food garden on a London underground station and how Transition Town Tooting‘s Trashcatchers’ Carnival, London was a remarkable and very memorable celebration of  community and of taking care of the Earth.

You’ll hear about the difficulties of doing Transition too, with the story of how Transition City Lancaster initially fell apart due to conflict but has since risen from the ashes and is now busy with a range of projects, and how Transition groups in London come together to support each other so as to minimise burnout.  You’ll hear the story of Transition Monteveglio in Bologna, Italy and their very successful collaboration with the local council and a ground-breaking resolution, committing the council to deep sustainability and resilience-building.  There’s Transition Streets from Totnes in Devon which works street-by-street, getting people together to meet, form new connections, and reduce their carbon footprints.

And then there are the emerging social enterprises, The Green Valley Grocer in Slaithwaite, Yorkshire which raised shares from the community to take over the local grocers which was closing down, The Handmade Bakery, also in Slaithwaite, a really innovative model for how a young couple can set up a vibrant new business.  They also make exquisite bread.  There’s The Fujino Power Company, Japan, where, following the devastating tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, members of Transition Fujino responded by setting up a community energy company, with the intention of powering their whole valley using renewable energy. There’s The Lewes community solar power station, in Sussex which was funded by over £300,000 raised in community shares, and the Brixton Pound in London, the local complementary currency which can be spent in the area of Brixton in London with local traders – “money that sticks to Brixton”.  We join them on the night they celebrate launching the UK’s first mobile phone-based complimentary currency.

We visit Heal the Soil CSA in Auroville, India, who help people start up small vegetable gardens in the rural villages of India, providing seeds and permaculture training in order to help them get started growing food, and Project Lyttleton in New Zealand, who employ Transition as one of the tools for their work building community resilience.  When the recent earthquakes struck Lyttleton, the value of their work, especially its Time Bank, became apparent.

Screenings

In early February, each of the initiatives whose stories are told in the film have been invited to host a preview.  Most of those will be on the evening of February 2nd, and following the screenings, director Emma Goude and Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins will host an online Q&A session which each screening will be able to contribute questions to via Twitter and which they will be able to screen.  Screenings are still being added, but those confirmed so far are:

• Totnes.  The Barn Cinema, Dartington.  February 2nd, 8pm.  Tickets available here.
• Koganei, Japan.  Transition Japan and Transition Town Koganei in Japan will be hosting a screening on February 2nd at 8pm at the Maron Hall in Koganei (30 minutes west of central Tokyo).
• Lewes.  Lewes Town Hall (BN7 2DQ).  February 2nd, 8pm.  More information available here.

Further preview screenings will be announced via Twitter (@intransitionmov) and on the film’s forthcoming website.  We have invited each project to organise a screening which tells a story, stories which we hope some of them will subsequently tell as part of Transition Network’s Social Reporters project.

The premiere!

The premiere of ‘In Transition 2.0′ will be at a high profile event in late March which is still under wraps but which will announced as soon as we can.

The DVD

Emilio Mula's 'leaky bucket' animation, one of several animated sequences in 'In Transition 2.0'.

Unlike ‘In Transition 1.0′, the DVD of the film will be released around the time of the premiere.  This time it will be a single disc DVD, beautifully packaged, and Transition initiatives will be able to buy discounted copies in bulk to sell at their screenings and other events.  The DVD will also be available to buy singly on the film’s website.  It will feature the following subtitles, all of which have been done by volunteers in their respective countries: Albanian, Basque, Croatian, Dutch/Nederlands, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.

Screenings

Following the premiere, the film will be available for screening by organisations, community groups, Transition initiatives, cinemas and businesses. There will be a sliding scale for screening licences which we hope will make screenings possible for everyone.  More information on this will follow.

We hope Transition groups will use the film as the centrepiece of inspiring events, and that they will also be able to generate some income through sales of the DVD, which will also be a great resource for giving to local politicians, schools and so on.  This film is a rich celebration of the work of Transition initiatives around the world, make your screening a celebration of what your Transition group has achieved so far!  The new website (coming soon) will also have space for you to tell the stories of your screenings.  After the premiere, it’s over to you, make it yours, spread it far, deep and wide!

To keep up to date with screenings, news, stories and information, follow the film on Twitter @intransitionmov and very soon a dedicated website, www.intransitionmovie.com will be launched, for now there is a holding page.  The film is around 68 minutes long. 

Hi this is Nick Osborne here from the REconomy team. If you haven’t heard of us, REconomy is a project being run through Transition Training & Consulting, to support people in building new kinds of local economies. Next month we are releasing a website jam-packed with tools, resources, links and information to support people in doing this.  Here’s a taste of what’s to come: 

We are working with a pilot group of 10 Transition Initiatives who have told us that they would also like online training resources to use with their groups and communities. So I am currently researching options to do this. I also deliver the Transition Launch training and the Introduction to Effective Groups training and am considering how we may be able to use E-learning methods to support or deliver these trainings too.

As a trainer, I see a considerable overhead for groups in getting face-to-face training from trainers. Overheads in terms of cost of the trainer’s fees and expenses, in terms of the effort involved in organising live training events with venue, food, accommodation etc. And also the carbon overhead of all the travel involved. In times such as they are, I’m seeing this overhead becoming more of a stretch than it used to be. So e-learning may be a good low-carbon, customizable, modular and easily accessible option for a range of different learning needs?

I’m writing to ask if anyone reading this might have some knowledge or expertise in this area? I do know something about it, but would also benefit from some expertise or wider perspectives. We need to choose an e-learning platform for this and I’m looking for recommendations.  Moodle is so far is looking like the best option. It has an ethos and philosophy of learning which aligns with the Transition ethos; its free and open source; it is the standard platform used in education sector; and whoever I have asked about it has recommended it.

Anyone got any expertise in this area? Experience of and opinions about the pros and cons of using Moodle? Any other recommendations? Please comment below or let me know directly at nick (at) response-ability.org.uk . Thanks!

Welcome back to Transition Culture, and a Happy New Year to you.  We’ll kick off with our round-up of Transition for December.  We’ll start with a few stories of Transition groups working on energy efficiency and fuel poverty which, even though this has been the UK’s mildest winter for many many years, is still a big concern for many people, especially as energy prices continue to rise.  TT High Wycombe have created a Warm Homes Team (see right) who have taken to the streets with their council loaned thermal imaging equipment to address winter fuel poverty.

Also in Buckinghamshire, members of TT-Marlow are now trained in using thermal imaging cameras so they can help local residents see where they are losing heat from their homes and take appropriate action (see left).  In Lincolnshire, TT-Louth have teamed up with another community group called Groundworks to help those living in fuel poverty. Funding will enable them to carry out draught busting and other energy reduction techniques in around 20 local homes.

Transition Town Cheltenham recently held a festival at the Gardens Gallery, Montpellier Gardens, Cheltenham, celebrating one year of Transition activity in the town, an event captured in this great video:

Chesham market has been crowned the Greenest Market in Britain. The market was established in 2010 by TT-Chesham in partnership with the local council.  Congratulations all.   Moving into Hertfordshire, Abbots Langley TT just has received a council grant to help them promote their activities within the wider community.  Also in Hertfordshire, Transition Northaw have started Community Beekeeping.  This video shows them “moving the new nucleus into our top bar hive”:

Incredible Edible and Transition Town in Wilmslow, working with Cheshire East Council, recently planted an orchard of fruit trees, captured in this film:

Clearly planting community orchards is very much in the air, because the good people at Transition Town Worthing have been doing it too, and have made one of their great films about it:

TT-Harborough is making a bid on behalf of the town for a slice of The Big Lottery’s Communities Living Sustainably fund and have asked the community to come forward with ideas.  Heading west into Shropshire, when the local council ditched kerbside collection of cardboard waste, two members of TT Shrewsbury decided to jump in and do something. In the run up to Christmas they decided to collect and recycle local residential and businesses cardboard themselves and all money raised from the innovative scheme was split between two worthy causes. You can also read more about it here in the Shropshire Star.

In Surrey, a local councillor has put forward a proposal for making Horley a Transition Town which has created much follow up discussion around the idea of a Horley Pound including who might grace the currency notes.   TT-Kingston get a positive write up in this SW Londoner article.

Transition Stroud held a ‘Winterfest’ that brought together the wide range of projects underway in the area:

One of the most exciting bits of news from December was that Transition groups were 3 of the 4 winners in the Energyshare/British Gas Energyshare vote (a story captured here and in this recent Transition podcast).  One of those was Portobello TT and Greener Leith in Edinburgh, who won £50k from Energyshare for their wind turbine proposal. If planning permission is granted for the site on a local water works, the turbine could be up and running by 2013 and powering up to 1300 homes. Read the full story here in the Scotsman.  Portabello TT have also been busy this month creating their own Free Energy Saving Guide which is a free download and really rather lovely.

In West Lothian, T-Linlithgow have an ambitious million pound action plan for sustainable travel around the town and hope to source the funding to enable their vision to become a reality. Go Linlithgow!

From Monmouthshire, we are grateful to Marcus Perrin of T-Chepstow for submitting this lovely story to us:

Children from Chepstow’s Pembroke Primary School ‘evening bike club’ were thrilled to receive an invitation to Llandaff Cathedral last month to meet Princess Anne and celebrate their achievements The after-school club was started by keen cyclist and parent Jayne Worrin before the summer holidays with Transition Chepstow members Jennifer and Nik Peregrine helping to maintain the bikes. Following huge interest from pupils and securing funding from the organisation Bike Club, the group is going from strength to strength. Additional volunteers are being trained to teach the children vital cycling skills and it is hoped children will be able to repair their own cycles with the purchase of a tool kit. While most children have their own bike to ride, the club has accepted repairable ones kindly donated by the local community, for those who do not. Bike Club is a joint initiative led by ContinYou, UK Youth and CTC, the national cyclists’ organisation. In Wales key partners also include Youth Cymru and ContinYou Cymru. More info on the bike club here…

Leaving the UK now and heading to Australia, in Queensland, over in the Scenic Rim, one of the Tamborine Mountain Transition founders is assisting the Southern Gold Coast in its Transition efforts. Part of their awareness raising included screening In Transition 1.0 at the Gold Coast Arts Centre.  In case you haven’t seen it, here it is:

http://vimeo.com/8029815

News to follow soon about the sequel, ‘In Transition 2.0′ which will be out in late March.  T-Nambour in the heart of the Sunshine Coast held info and conversation tables at their local Big Pineapple Growers’ Market throughout December.  Scroll down the page a short way to read their thoughts and vision about a Big Pineapple Revival (see right)!

From the US, you might enjoy Rob Hopkins’ responses to 9½ Questions in this article for TheAtlantic.com, and also this piece about the first ever Transition Congregations, offering a training and workshop specifically to interfaith groups.  For other stories from the US, check out their December round-up here.  In Chatham-Kent in Canada, Ignite Chatham-Kent is a high-energy evening of five-minute talks by people who have an idea, and who have the guts to get on stage and share it. Organized by local volunteers, Ignite Chatham-Kent is a force for innovation, excitement, and fun in the community.  One of their presenters was Lance Meredith, who gave a talk called ”Transition Initiative for Chatham-Kent”.

In Ireland, TT-Tralee held a Transition Christmas Fair which celebrated the many positive things happening within their community, and in Transition Voice, Kurt Trumble gives a traveller’s perspective on Kinsale, the birthplace of the Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) which led to the setting up of Transition in Totnes.

TT-Whitehead took to the airwaves on youth station Tune FM to talk up Power NI’s BIG Energy Saving Challenge (see left).  They have also been out planting trees, as captured in this wonderful film (tree planting with a Sigur Ros soundtrack, quite made my morning).  The tree planting captured in the film is just a warmup, in a few weeks they plan to plants 60,000 trees!

http://vimeo.com/34400137

From Holland, here is a film of a presentation about Transition which unfortunately loses its sound after about 3 minutes, but given that most of you probably don’t speak Dutch anyway, and if you can you can probably read her slides which is some compensation, we thought we’d put it in anyway:

Lastly, let’s go to Portugal, where Portalegre em Transiçao held a community winter jam-making event.  You can see photos of it here, or read a more detailed report of it here.  Basically, they facilitated a completely self-organising event, where people decided what they wanted to make with winter fruits, the local council made a kitchen available free of charge, and 30 people gathered and taught each other how to make jams and preserves.  I love the poster, and it sounded like a fantastic occasion.

Claudian Dobos in Romania wrote to us the other day: “Last month we had the first seminaries organized in Romania with the tematic of TT.  The first was held in Cluj Napoca and was facilitated by Anne Ambles (TT Mayenne). A Romanian premiere. with the participated more than 24 person in this first moment. The organization was facilitated by the Romanian Permaculture Nework. The other cities were Baia Mare and Sighet.  Anne just took part of her holidays to facilitate this moments.  In January it will be held a seminary in Bucharest, Iasi and Cluj Napoca by Claudian Dobos.  Great news for Transition Movement in Romania for 2012!”

And finally, here’s an article on Resilience and the Resource Crunch as featured in US industrial news website Thomas Net.  Thanks, and do send us your stories for next month’s roundup.  In 2 weeks time we’ll put out the podcast of this roundup, going into more depth on 3 of the stories here.  To hear the December podcast click here, and for the November one, click here.

And with that I take my leave for the festive period.  As of 4pm today I will be turning off my computer, my phone, and leaving Transition Culture dormant until January 4th, when ordinary service will be resumed.  I am hoping for a period, at least in terms of girth, of zero-growth.  Have a great break, and thanks for your support and input over 2011.  See you in 2012.

Surely in our present and unfolding predicament, to recalibrate our economy as a Steady State economy requires an enormous amount of infrastructure, investment and maybe we don’t have that kind of resource any more. Might the kind of more localised world that Transition is talking about be what we get by default rather than by design?

There are many possible futures out there.  I think that what I see is a huge amount of resources in our economy, both in terms of capital equipment, intellectual effort, finance, being directed towards the growth agenda. A different agenda, a different ambition for our society and our economy away from the pursuit of growth, would automatically free up, at least in principle, a lot of these resources.

I see it much more as a question of re-allocating the resources that we have towards an economic structure that isn’t based upon the pursuit of growth rather than thinking well somehow we’ve got to keep all those expenditures that we’re currently maintaining in the pursuit of growth and then worry about where all extra money and resources are going to come from to pay for and effect a transition in the economy?  The dilemma to me is a little bit different. It’s that the institutions that control all of these resources, both in the public and private sector, themselves are busily pursuing growth and so they’re not freeing up resources to lead into a different direction. I think it is possible, but it’s not happening as a result of the normal functioning of our current system.

I think the idea that we’ll default to more local economies whether we do it deliberately and maybe reasonably pleasantly, or whether we’ll be forced into it, is a very good question. The subtitle of my book is “Slower by design, not disaster.” If you have an economy predicated on growth that slows and maybe growth goes negative, that’s a disaster formula. That’s mass unemployment, deep poverty. Greenhouse gas emissions would go down but the social consequences of would be horrendous. That’s surely something we want to avoid.

That, though, I believe is the kind of scenario that we should be comparing to an alternative, which doesn’t pursue growth. Not a naïve notion of some kind of golden age where we were growing steadily and wondering why that can’t continue. I don’t think it can continue for the various reasons that have come up in this conversation. So, what are our alternatives? That’s really what we need to discuss. By the way, I hardly use the term, in fact I probably don’t use the term “Steady State economy” in my book at all.  I’m quite interested in the Steady State but I just think the danger is that it conjures up in some people’s mind a rather stagnant image and they don’t warm to it. So whilst I’m actually on the board of the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy here in North America, it’s a term that, well, if more people would find it favourable I would be happy to use it, but I don’t think it’s one that communicates very well.

Could you, tell us or describe to us, what does a post growth economy look like to you? Can you describe it? What would it look like, smell like and sound like? How would we know we were living in one? What’s the kind of vision that that conjures up in your mind of what it would be like?

I can give you some dimensions of it. This is something that requires a much broader public discussion than we’ve had to date. But the sorts of things that I would see are first of all, when we look at how our economy uses resources, and produces waste and occupies land, those numbers would be going down instead of up. So, efficiency of course offers us some possibilities there. We can and we have become somewhat more efficient in how we use our resources and we’ve produced less waste of many kinds per unit of economic output. The trouble is the growth of our economic output has gone up faster than the gains in efficiency, so it’s sort of overwhelmed them.

If we’re not growing so fast but we’re still getting the gains in efficiency and I do believe that’s possible, then we would see a lightening of the burden we’re placing on the biosphere.  In terms of how our lives would be lived, transportation is one aspect to look at. We’ve got a transportation system particularly in North America that’s built largely around the car. There is plenty of room, I believe, to move to much more use of public transit, so that’s a fairly simple thing to do.

I would see a shift to renewable energy, away from fossil fuels.  Some of that’s happening, but it’s happening partly as an addition to our use of fossil fuels as opposed to a replacement of the fossil fuels which is what we have to accomplish. One of the things I discuss in my book quite extensively is the idea that if we continue to become more productive as workers and employees, but the overall output of the economy’s not growing, it could be a formula for massively increased unemployment.

One answer is to work less. That would free up our time, we’d have more discretionary time. To me that’s a great element of personal freedom that I highly value. So that would be important. Some people, like Juliet Schor have taken this a bit further to consider what people might do with that extra time. This comes back, I think, very much to the Transition idea and to the use of time for more self-provisioning and local provisioning, which could be outside of the market system. That would be interesting.

They’ve done better at this in continental Europe. Maybe Britain isn’t much better than Canada, but in continental Europe they have benefitted from shortening the amount of time spent at work as compared with Canadians. It’s even worse in the US where people work some 100 -150 hours a year more than other people. I think this is a real missed opportunity: that we should be benefiting from increased productivity by working less rather than by producing and consuming more.

I think we would likely see less physical travel and less physical movement of goods, partly because I do expect energy prices to rise anyway and that will discourage these activities. The electronics revolution is a partial compensation for that. We can all now, well those of us with access to the equipment at any rate, see other parts of the world without actually physically having to go there.  I’m not sure that would be a perfect substitute, but maybe it’s the kind of sacrifice we have to make as we pass seven billion and head towards nine billion inhabitants of the planet. These are some of the things that I see, but as I say this is a subject that requires widespread public discussion and debate.

One of the things that’s put forward here is the idea of the Green New Deal, as a kind of Keynesian project of borrowing massive amounts of money in order to try and stimulate a green economy. What’s your sense of the degree to which we should go further into debt in order to create this?

Ah well, there’s so much in your question! First of all, if Keynes was writing now he’d be on side with those of us who understand that the economy is embedded in the biosphere and that that relationship has long been neglected and now can no longer be. If you read his 1931 paper on ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ you see that he was a man of great vision, not that his expectations for the future all came to pass, but just that he could conceive of a time when, as he put it, the economic problem would be solved. We’d be producing enough and we could divert our attention to, even in his own terms, much more important things, such as the arts.

I think Keynes would have been with us in this discussion. The ideas that he produced in the 1930s were for dealing with short-term unemployment. The question now is to what extent do those ideas have to be changed because of these additional considerations that we have. I’m still enough of a Keynesian to think that there’s no reason why governments have to balance their budget, except on average over a goodly length of time.

So the idea of a green Keynesianism, the idea that when governments see the need to stimulate the economy they should do so by either spending money or inducing the rest of us to spend money on activities that will help transform the economy in a green direction, I think that makes good sense. But, you know, Keynes did make it very clear in his writings that most of his interest was in the short term.

This discussion we’re having is not just about the short term. This discussion is about the medium and the long term. What’s the new direction we should be heading in? The sort of short term stimulus that he stressed shouldn’t just be expenditure on anything. It should be geared towards the transformation of the economy to something that’s more viable in the long term.

Do you think there is a case to argue that economic growth makes an economy less resilient? Can you kind of correlate it in that way? Would a more resilient economy by necessity be one that has moved beyond economic growth?

One of the main, if not the main arguments, for globalisation, by which I mean the deliberate dismantling of national restrictions on the flow of capital and trade in goods and services, has been that it’s good for economic growth. I think that that agenda has led to the decline in resilience of national and sub-national economies. We see this very much in what’s happening in Europe at the moment, where individual nations are very vulnerable to circumstances outside their borders, so it’s not so much growth itself I would say that threatens resiliency and undermines it, it’s the measures that we take in pursuit of growth that move us in one direction only.

That is, they continually weaken the capacity of communities at all levels, from local up to national and even a little bit beyond that to really have much control over what’s happening to them. That’s the problem. So it’s a little bit more complicated than saying growth it’s growth that threatens resilience, it’s what we’ve allowed our institutions to do or prevented them from doing that, as much as anything, has made our economies and our society less resilient.

Where do you see the seeds coming from for this? When you wrote this book the Occupy movement didn’t exist and that seems to have really created a space in which we can more freely question the very idea of economic growth much more freely than we could a couple of years ago. Where do you see the next steps as coming from?”

I have a passing interest in the history of ideas. To me, economic growth is an idea. It’s the modern incarnation of progress. It’s often regarded as synonymous with progress. What I discovered is that a lot has been written in the past, a lot of really interesting material that has largely been forgotten, and yet when there’s a sort of a growing awareness of an issue, such as the one we’ve been talking about, it’s really nice to know we’re not actually starting from scratch.

There’s a lot of ideas that we need to go back to and bring forward and make sure they’re in the public domain and are informing the public discussion. I’m just reading an essay written in the 1950s, it’s hard to tell from the publisher, entitled “Size of Nations and Living Standards” by Leopold Kohr.  The author’s arguing that as an economy gets bigger, as a society gets bigger, living standards eventually decline, and he does some early quantitative estimates. He reckons that the US peaked in about 1950 and that living standards have been in decline since then.

Here’s another book, “The Social Costs of Private Enterprise” by K. W. Kapp, written in 1950, all about the increasing burden that the economy is placing on the environment. They’re just fresh in my mind. There’s lots of stuff there, and what I would like to be better at is to find ways of getting these ideas out to a wider audience so that movements such as the Occupy movement, and perhaps the Transition movement, realise that there’s a considerable body of work on which to draw.

We don’t all have to make it up over the next couple of weekends. I think that’s a big part of the4 next steps. How do I put this in more simple terms? It’s about changing the stories we tell ourselves about our economy, our society, and our own selves, in terms of what we think success looks like. The pursuit of economic growth for a long time has been based on the idea that economic growth is the mark of success that we should all strive for. We need more meaningful objectives for ourselves and our economy.

Fortunately a lot of this is now being picked up. For example, the Sen/Stiglitz report of a couple of years ago, written at the instigation of Sarkozy, was about defining and measuring quality of life and sustainability. This report has been quite influential. Statistics departments around the world are looking at how they measure progress and whether they should make changes. There hasn’t been a lot, as far as I can tell, a lot of real action at the national levels yet, but there’s there’s the OECD work and in Canada we’ve just had the release of the Canadian index of well being and so on.

So there are things happening, there’s local community work, there’s the sort of thing you’re doing, there’s interest from student populations, there’s academic research, there’s more, there’s stuff going on in officialdom to make changes. The problem is it hasn’t yet congealed into a new story, which says “you know what, we should be looking to rather different objectives and using different means of getting there than we’ve been accustomed to in the past.” I can’t tell you what’s going to trigger that, maybe nothing and then we’ll be in for it, but maybe it’ll all flip pretty quickly and we’ll be on our way.

I had the privilege recently of speaking with Peter Victor, Professor in Environmental Studies at York University and author of ‘Managing without growth’ (you can see his full bio here).  At a time when the obsession with making our economies grow again is close to hysteria, Peter’s work asks the question as to whether economic growth is the best way to achieve what we want from a society; employment, happiness, good public services, increased equality and so on, and concludes we could have an economy that isn’t growing, but which is actually better at those things.  Having read his fascinating book, it felt like a good time to give him a call (I will break this into 2 posts, one today and one tomorrow).

One of the ideas that I found really surprising from the book was that the whole idea of growth and that economies should grow on a continuous basis is actually a relatively new idea. I wonder if you could give us a quick potted history of where the idea of economic growth came from?

The idea of economic growth per se could probably be dated back at least as far as Adam Smith who was interested in the wealth of nations. What I think is new, and I think what you’re referring to, is the idea that governments should take responsibility for trying to ensure that economies achieve a certain rate of economic growth.  That is relatively new, and only really came to be around about the 1950s / 1960s.

It happened more or less along these lines. The work of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s convinced most in the economics profession that full employment was not a natural outcome in capitalist economies and that the government could play a useful role in stimulating demand to generate employment when the economy was not capable of doing that itself. This was adopted as a policy by many western governments after the Second World War, but then it was pretty quickly realised, in the space of a decade or so, that when you encourage expenditure to stimulate employment, some of that expenditure is likely to be on new equipment and infrastructure which expands the capacity of the economy, and therefore you have to keep increasing the amount of expenditure simply to keep your growing capacity employed.

This of course is just another way of saying what economic growth is. So economic growth was first adopted by governments in about the 1950s as a measure, as an approach to achieving full employment.  In other words, not for its own sake, but as an employment measure.  However, within about a decade or so things got switched around, and you can see by looking at some of the older literature, that governments started to put the pursuit of growth as their number one priority and employment was reduced to a second level consideration.

Can you give us, in a nutshell, the argument you set out in Managing Without Growth as to why that is something that we should be thinking of doing?

What’s happened in the last half century in particular is that we’ve become very aware that our ever-expanding economies require more and more energy and materials to support that expansion. Now I’m not saying that economic growth as measured by changes in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is automatically and inextricably related to increases in materials and energy because of gains in efficiency over time, but the historical record is such that clearly there’s been a positive link between the two.

What we’re seeing is mounting evidence that the planet can’t cope with all this extraction of materials and disposal of waste and occupancy of land by humans that we’re imposing on it. And so the question I decided to address was whether we could manage without growth, at least in advanced economies, which are pretty rich certainly by historical standards.

Could we achieve full employment? Could we eliminate poverty? Could we significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? And could we do all that without the government going bankrupt and in the context of an economy that isn’t growing? That’s really what I tried to look into and concluded that it is possible at least from an analytical point of view to show that you can have an economy that can do all that and doesn’t have to grow.

Is your argument that growth is undesirable or that it’s no longer feasible?

I’m interested in both of those lines of argument. I did cover in the book some of the fairly modern literature on the disconnect between economic growth and happiness. If that’s true, if really getting richer doesn’t make us happier then you really have to wonder why we put so much effort into doing it. But then there’s also the question of feasibility.  It doesn’t look like it’s feasible to continue to have economies that just keep growing and keep growing.

It’s good to know, I think, that if growth is not the secret to a happy life, certainly after you’ve achieved a certain level of  material well-being, that not having something that’s not particularly desirable is not such a bad outcome! I think both lines of argument are really important, that there are likely to be ways of leading more fulfilling lives if we pay much less attention to the pursuit of growth and that in doing so we’ll lighten the load that we’re placing on the biosphere.

At the moment here in the UK the government is obsessed with growth at all costs. Everything else seems to be being thrown out of the door in terms of this obsession with trying to get the economy to grow again. What do you see as the dangers that are inherent in trying to do that at a time when all the other pressures are becoming so clear upon us?

Well of course they’re not on their own in that!  I think that’s true of many governments.  The problem I see is that it’s an approach that’s entirely focussed on the short term. Now of course the long term is made up of a series of short terms, so the problem I see is that if we keep focussing on the short term we will lose sight, I think we’ve lost sight, of the sort of broader priorities which call upon us to change our direction.  So I have a lot of sympathy for governments that see the immediate problems and strive to deal with them, but I have much less sympathy if they don’t have a longer term vision that makes sense of where we’re heading.  That’s what I think is lacking.

I’m very concerned that trying to pull out all the stops to re-stimulate economies, to use the cliché, “to get back on track”, is actually a formula for far worse things to happen, probably in the not too distant future.

You wrote the book in 2008.  In terms of economics, rather a lot’s happened since then! If you were updating the book or re-writing it now, how would the crash and the implications of the last three years strengthen or weaken or change what you would have put in the book?

The book was published in 2008 by an academic publisher, Edward Elgar, a very good publisher, but they took about a year to produce the book.  I completed it in 2007 and I wrote most of it in 2006, so it’s actually a longer period of time than the three years that we’re talking about here. Anyway, when I wrote the book, Canada was in a particularly healthy economic position as is currently understood. In particular, our governments were running substantial budget surpluses, (of course it’s changed now, they’re running deficits) so that alone makes the problem of a transition to an economy which isn’t madly pursuing economic growth somewhat more problematic, but I don’t think it brings the whole pursuit to an end, if I can put it that way.

What I think of course has happened is that we know a lot more about the fragility of the financial system than was apparent when I was doing my research and I didn’t pay much attention in the book to that aspect. I simply assumed that the central bank in Canada, the Bank of Canada, would continue to try to keep the level of inflation in the standard range, something like 2% plus or minus a little bit, and adopt a monetary policy that would do that. That wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, and I think it’s the same sort of assumption that I would make going forward if I was doing the work again, but they’d be starting from a more difficult position because of the other problems the economy’s having.

I should say though that Canada has been patting itself on the back during these last three years because our banking system turned out not to be as vulnerable as those of many other countries, because they didn’t get involved in some of the more suspect and precarious investments. That was as much by luck as it was by judgement I think, but that’s another story.

In fact, that’s some of the work that I’m doing right now with my good friend and colleague in Britain, Tim Jackson. We are building a better macroeconomic model of national economies in which the financial sector is much more front and centre so that we can better understand the links between the financial sector, the real economy and the biosphere – trying to track all those three systems at one go. But, you know, I think on the one hand the financial system and its situation has to be better understood, but on the other the fact that we’ve gone through these very difficult economic times has led a lot of people, who used to think that everything was moving along pretty nicely, to question just how robust our economic and  environmental systems are.

That’s been good. I think it’s generated much more interest in this kind of work than was there when the book first came out. I think this is positive. On the negative side I think that the information we have about the state of the world’s eco-systems just tells us things are going from bad to worse. So the urgency has actually increased over the last three to five years to say we’ve really got to look at alternatives and take them on board. I think one of the encouraging things of the Occupy movement which sort of started from nothing and went around the world very fast, indicates an appetite for change that wasn’t there three years ago.

One of the points that I found very interesting from a Transition Network perspective was that you look at localization as a part of the response, and say that actually without appropriate policies from government it’ll be insufficient, but then you also say that you don’t see a national government response coming unless it’s led by the grass roots and by communities. I wonder where you see the, how you see that log jam might be broken?

I don’t have a good answer to that question!  What I try to do is to put before people an alternative economic future that I hope they find credible.  Up until now, and I would say even right now, the pursuit of growth is really a showstopper for many other alternatives. If you propose some policy or measure to reduce environmental damage inevitably someone says, “Well what would that do for economic growth, for competitiveness or productivity?”, and many many good ideas along those lines get shot down because growth is used as the test for these other initiatives.

What I’m trying to suggest is that it’s not a reasonable test. We can just, to re-state the title of the book, “manage without growth”. Whilst it’s true that I do think there’s a very important role for policy to establish the framework within which we all operate, I’m also very focussed on the idea that these ideas and initiatives have to come from the grassroots. No government of the sort I’m interested in can be expected to take what we would call leadership unless there’s a lot of people out there who want to go in this direction. It’s as much a push from the bottom as it is a sort of a pressure from above, and I think what’s happening right now is we’re seeing more push from the bottom, through movements such as yours, and very little take-up from the top, although there are glimmers of hope in some places.

In Canada we have three levels of government, all quite significant: the federal, provincial and municipal.  Municipal governments seem far more aware of the limits within which they have to operate than the more senior levels of government. Go up to the provincial level of government and there’s a fair bit of understanding of these issues. At the federal level it seems to evaporate entirely.

Can we have capitalism without economic growth?

I’m going to give two answers to that question. First and foremost, although I talk about managing without growth for pragmatic reasons and because I want to take part in the current dialogue I focus on GDP, the growth that we really have to stop, and in fact turn back, is growth in the use of materials and energy and land use. Clearly water is also one other material, but I don’t otherwise mention water separately. Those are the points at which we as a species really interact with the biosphere, and that’s where we’ve gone too far.

We have to, I believe, find ways to discipline ourselves so that we are much gentler on the planet. What our economies will then be capable of doing within that set of constraints is hard to say. I personally don’t think that the pursuit of growth as measured in conventional terms is a good way to deal with those biosphysical limits because they get sacrificed in the pursuit of growth.  Can capitalism survive if it has to operate within limits? You see when it’s put that way it sounds like a very ordinary question because the standard definition of economics is about making the best use of scarce resources.

Economics and economists have understood for a long time that economies are always constrained by available resources, so that in itself has never been a threat to capitalism, the efficient use of limted resources has always been seen as one of its virtues. So I don’t think that a stricter limit on the extent to which we draw resources from nature and put waste materials back is necessarily a threat to capitalism.

If I have to look for support for this idea, there was a quote that I refer to many times by Robert Solow, a great economist particularly known for his work on economic growth, who says very much the same thing, that he sees no reason why capitalism can’t survive with low, or even no-growth. Now that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many questions to be answered, such as what sort of institutions could work if the economy was not pursuing growth or wasn’t growing? To what extent and in what ways do our institutions have to change?

These are questions that I and some others are investigating right now and whether we end up with a view of an economy that we’d say doesn’t look anything like capitalism, we don’t really know yet. My own sense at the moment is that if we do effectively come to terms with these limits on how we interact with the biosphere, we’ll be looking back maybe half a century or a century from now and saying well, there was no one time when the economic system was transformed but it has evolved into something which we may or may not chose to call capitalism at that time.

So the end of economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean an economic collapse?

It could mean that, if you have an economic system that relies on growth.  That’s the dilemma we’ve got now. It seems to be that unless the economy is growing it flirts with collapse or it does collapse. The challenge to us is to try to configure an economy that doesn’t grow and doesn’t collapse. I think that’s really what I try to do in my book. As some of the simulation work suggests, and it’s no more than a suggestion because the work is somewhat preliminary, that yes, of course you can have a steady state economic system, just like you can have a steady state eco-system.

Think of a forest that is in what might be called a mature state. It doesn’t mean it stays that way forever, but for a good length of time its total biomass is roughly constant. Now within that, trees are being born and are growing and dying all the time. And I think that’s quite a good parallel to make with a steady state economy. In some overall sense it’s in a steady state. Perhaps that’s because the material and energy flows through the economy are being maintained at a more or less constant level, but what’s going on in the economy can be very vibrant and exciting, just that the whole system’s not growing.

It’s time for the second monthly Transition podcast, in which we return to November’s ‘Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition‘ and go into more depth on three of the stories it contained.  Do let us know of any stories you think should feature in the next one.  This month we look at:

• Transition Norwich’s Farmshare CSA project, interviewing one of its founders standing in the very field where the CSA is based and hearing the joys and the realities of running such a scheme
• Bath and West Community Energy‘s recent share launch which raised £721, 350!  Find out their plans, the story so far and their very ambitious plans for energy generation in their area
• Transition Llambed (Lampeter) who have just taken on a 20 year lease from their local council for their local hall, and have great plans to turn it into a Transition resource centre and farmers’ market.

At just over 15 minutes in length it’s rich with stories, inspiration and the voices of people out there doing Transition on the ground.  You can play it here, or download it to listen to on the train, while you’re cooking, or out running.  We do advise against listening to it whilst swimming though, on health and safety grounds.  Do let us know what you think….

The newly opened Dunbar Community Bakery.

I spent a fascinating afternoon on Monday at an ‘Economic Summit’ (nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds) for Members of South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council.  The meeting was called to update councillors on the strategic thinking within the councils in terms of the economic development of the area and to hear their views on it.  Three communities were invited to present to the councillors the work they were doing to regenerate their economies, and Totnes was one of them.  What I want to do in this post is two things simultaneously.  I want to give some reflections from that meeting, but also give a review of ‘The Portas Review’ (“an independent review into the future of our high streets”) which was published yesterday.  Together they give a sense of the two deeply different narratives that were on show at the Summit, the dangers that their incompatibility presents, as well as the opportunities that emerge. 

Narrative One.  ‘Produce Economic Growth or Die Trying’

At the summit event, this was the narrative pushed by the (all-male) presenters from the Council as they unveiled their strategic plans and the new role of local authorities in the local economy.  Most used term of the day?  “Identifying barriers to growth”.  Growth, so this narrative goes, is only being held back by ‘regulation’ and ‘red-tape’, and by a lack of spending on new infrastructure.  The solutions we need are large scale ones.  Tim Jones, chair of the Local Economic Partnership, waxed lyrical about Sainsburys building a new regional depot in the area, a vital piece of infrastructure and investment that will create jobs, the new £10bn Hinkely Point C nuclear power plant getting the go-ahead in the area was, he stated, “a project to die for”.

He talked about the different things that the area apparently needs, roads, more construction and so on, one of which was mentioned as “that whole debate about renewable energy” (funny, there wasn’t any debate around any of the other things).  The next speaker stated that the councils have “some great credentials in the environmental sector” without stating what those actually were.  This is all, we should remind ourselves, in a context now where sustainable development has been redefined as any development which sustains economic growth. The talk was all of “creating the conditions” for attracting businesses and of having a more “flexible” planning system (i.e. build what you like where you like).  At events like that 2 years ago, the term ‘low carbon economy’ was banded about freely.  Now nobody even mentioned it once.

Narrative Two. ‘Erm, we already have a vibrant economy thanks’.

Mary Portas' vision of a vibrant high street, from her report.

Now here’s where it got really interesting.  Even before we got to give our presentation, a number of the council members stood up to say that in the area, 65-85% of economic activity is already generated by small to medium sized businesses, the majority of whom employ less than 25 people.  As one member said “why do we need a Sainsburys distribution centre?  We have local grocers, local farmers, local processors, local markets.  This will undermine, not support them”.  These are the businesses that weather economic storms because they have nowhere else to go.  They don’t make a decision to relocate and overnight throw hundreds of people onto the dole.  They are the businesses that actually build a community’s resilience.  They are the ones with the links to local farmers, local producers, local people, and to each other.  They are the ones who care about that place, because they have to live there.  What is required, one might suggest, is to stop undermining that sector of the economy, and to rethink its value in the context of the bigger challenges bearing down on us fast.

“Barriers to growth?”.  Start with these….

I started my presentation by pointing out the very real barriers to growth that represent the elephants in the corner as far as Narrative Two is concerned.  The first is the woeful oil dependency it fosters, and the fact that all the changes we had heard proposed thus far would increase our oil dependency rather than reduce it, and this is not a time when that is a smart thing to do.  Bloomberg are now stating that the smart money in the options market is for the price of oil to reach $150 a barrel within a year.  The Financial Times reports that the cost of importing oil into the EU has risen from $280bn in 2010 to over $400bn in 2011, and it is clear now that the price of oil will strangle any possibility of a revival of economic growth (and if you think ‘unconventional oil’ will make much of a difference, think again).  You want to identify a barrier to economic growth?  Well there’s one very big one.  Until we massively reduce our oil dependency, we can kiss any chance of any sort of revival in our economic fortunes goodbye.

Then of course there’s climate change, and the fact that our inability to prevent runaway climate change within the next few years will be the mother of all “barriers to growth” (and the smart money is on the probability that we won’t prevent it).  And, lest we forget, there’s the economic crisis, the scale of which few people still appreciate.  In a recent post at Automatic Earth, Stoneleigh quotes Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital in the US as saying “our government doesn’t have enough spare cash to bail out a lemonade stand”.  Yet bailing out the EU would take hundreds of trillions of dollars, which no-one has.  And if we in the UK think that by not signing this week’s EU treaty we are somehow insulated from the crisis unfolding there, have a look at this chart by Morgan Stanley Research:

As George Soros put it recently, “people don’t realize that the system has actually collapsed”.  All of a sudden the word “barrier”, at least in the way it was used at the Summit, looks like a considerable understatement.  The question that needs to be asked, I said in my presentation, is “does any particular new development or development model increase our oil dependency and our scale of economic precariousness, or decrease it?”  These are the very real risks, the very real “barriers to growth” identified by the World Economic Forum as the risks with the greatest perceived likelihood of occurring and economic impact on developed economies.  Let’s get real here.

Enter ‘The Portas Review’

Mary Portas (see right), star of ‘Mary, Queen of Frocks’ (a TV programme where she goes and makes-over failing retailers) was asked by the government to do a report about how to revive the UK’s high streets, and her report was published yesterday.  In the main I have to say I thought it was rather good, delicately straddling the space between ‘Narrative 2′ than ‘Narrative 1′.  At one point she says, in a soundbite perfect for our discussion about the Sainsburys distribution centre:

“A pound spent in a retailer with a localised supply chain that employs local people has far greater domestic impact than a pound spent in a supermarket or national chain.  What’s more, out-of-town developments are often presented as major new sources of employment, but we need to recognise that this ‘job creation’ is often just job displacement”.

Her argument is that rather than sit back and be battered, high streets need to come out fighting, to innovate, to become places people want to visit.  She puts forward some great ideas for making our high streets the vibrant, bustling places they need to be:

• The solutions need to bubble up from each place.  As she puts it, “each high street will need to find its own bespoke response to revival, rather than being prescribed some generic response from on high”
• “Local people”, she argues need to be seen “as co-creators not simply consumers”
• She argues for the creation of ‘Town Teams’, charged with regenerating high streets and town centres, arguing that shopping malls have a management team, and high streets need something very similar
• She argues for ‘Super BIDs’ (Business Improvement Districts) where local businesses come together, funded by an annual fee to all local traders, to oversee the stimulation of business in the area.  These ‘Super BIDs’ she argues could have the power to compulsorily purchase empty shops and get them going again
• She proposes new street markets, where for perhaps just £10 a table, anyone could sell anything (legal), and some of the shops could also have stalls
• She proposes cuts in business rates for new start-up businesses
• Big retailers, she argues, could mentor smaller businesses, and large chain retailers should be compelled to highlight in their annual reports “what they are doing at a local level to support the local high street”
• She also is clear that one big problem is absentee landlords who have no interest in their property being a part of this kind of regeneration process, and she suggests ‘empty shop management orders’ and a range of ways to force landlords to use their properties more responsibly
• The community should have the right to take over empty properties, and as well as the ‘Right to Buy’, she also proposes a ‘Right to Try’, which I love, arguing that “if [a community] can’t buy an empty property then they should be able to try it”, and “to go into the property and test co-operative ventures”.
• She also proposes the use of loyalty cards, although doesn’t mention the Brixton Pound, which would no doubt, like the forthcoming Bristol Pound, be right up her (high) street.

In short, there are loads of great ideas in the report.  I love her talk of “looking beyond simply price-based considerations to include community wellbeing and long-term sustainability”.  There is a passion that runs through it which I admire.   I do however have just two criticisms of the report.  The first is that there are a couple of places where I feel she is simply not angry enough, where she pulls her punches.  She acknowledges the terrible situation that many high streets have been thrown into by out of town shopping centres and supermarkets muscling onto the high street, but is frustratingly shy about naming names as to how that has happened.  She writes:

“The fact is that the major supermarkets and malls have delivered highly convenient, needs-based retailing, which serves today’s consumers well.  Sadly the high street didn’t adapt as quickly or as well.  Now they need to”.

It’s a bit like blaming a mugging victim for not ducking in time when the mugger took a swing at him.  It is hard to adapt quickly enough when a supermarket pitches up next to your shop and undercuts all your prices, provides acres of free parking and uses all the other tools at its disposal to push you out of business.  Have a look at this graph from the report showing the percentage change in UK store numbers between 2001 and 2011:

This is not a change in direction that happened by accident.  Nor did, as the report states, the fact that 8000 supermarket outlets now account for over 97% of total grocery sales in the UK.  This ‘transition’ (if you like) was supported, indeed driven, through subsidies, through a planning system driven by the same mania for growth that we are seeing today, it was driven by corporate interests, lobbyists, a whole wretched economic model that saw small businesses as disposable and large corporates and shareholder returns as essential, not just by unimaginative shopkeepers who failed to “adapt” quickly enough.  Communities up and down the country tried to resist their towns being taken over by out-of-town shopping centres, becoming ‘CloneTowns’, and tried to protect their local traders by stopping supermarkets opening up on their high streets or one the edge of town, but were usually defeated by supermarkets’ huge budgets and legal fire power.

To give her her due she does suggest that when it comes to communities and supermarkets, there is not a level playing field.  Her suggestion that “people need a powerful, legitimate voice and planning needs to be a much more collaborative process than it has been to date”.  She suggests that developers should make a financial contribution to ensure that the local community has a strong voice in the planning system (I can see that one going down like a lead balloon). There is a key tension here though in terms of a government who would see such an approach as a “barrier to growth”, as unnecessary ‘red tape’ to be swept asunder.

The other problem with it is that reading it one would think that the decline in high streets is happening in isolation from the larger economic picture.  There are some trends working in favour of the high street.  The price of fuel has meant that John Lewis recently reported that sales at their out-of-town stores are now down 12% compared to their town centre stores.  I would have love to have seen what this report would have looked like if she has explicitly been asked to look at how high streets could also boost community resilience in the wider sense, actually responding to the looming energy crisis, to the debt crisis.  Although she does touch on some things that would be very helpful for this, some joining up of dots is frustratingly elusive.

Back at the summit… tools for building bridges

What was fascinating at the summit was a sense that began to emerge about how a dialogue might look that was about building a bridge between these two narratives.  It was the Conservative councillors who were arguing for support for local businesses, for more apprenticeships, for support for new businesses.  Arguing that economic growth, as we’ve known it so far is over, is probably not going to register, whereas presenting Transition as the opportunity for entrepreneurship and innovation, for supporting local businesses which are key to community resilience, seems to gain far greater traction.  What will impress such people is not the amount of carbon we’ve saved, but the number of jobs we’ve created.  Often they see those two things as mutually exclusive, we can model just the opposite.  Once Transition becomes the thinking that underpins hundreds of jobs in a place, it becomes a no-brainer.

The Portas Review presents a powerful and well-reasoned argument that we need to nurture and revive the high street, that they need to be diverse and innovative, that local people need to be more involved and that they need some kind of protection from the predation of the chainstores.

I left the meeting feeling that the strategic planning guys are a dead loss, they have to make the kinds of plans that include Sainsburys distribution centres and nuclear power plants because that’s their job.  They represent a slow moving supertanker in terms of how long it takes to move things forward, and how long it takes to turn them around, what the film ‘The Story of Broke’ refers to as ‘the dinosaur economy’.  Will the finances to build them still be in place in a couple of years?  Will the realisation dawn that they deplete rather than enhance the area’s resilience?  Will the new Community Resilience Framework‘s assertion that it is up to communities to choose what they are building resilience to mean that they will also, under the localism agenda, be given the powers to resist things they see as diminishing their resilience?

A question arises here in terms of timing.  We have very little time to make this stuff happen, it needs to happen now.  Local authority strategic infrastructure planning work stretches out 20 years into a very uncertain future, yet moves very slowly and is very difficult to turn around.  So the question that arises from the Summit is is there any value to a Transition initiative putting its energy into these long-term strategic consultations or into setting up community enterprises, retraining, reskilling, new food systems and so on?  Also, given that most of the money from central government is distributed via. the networks of Narrative One, much of the resource that is needed to build the more resilient systems won’t reach them.  Again, plugging the leaks of our economy and enabling inward investment are vital.  I think this is a different take on emergency preparedness, that what we need to do right now is to take the ‘can do’ spirit and entrepreneurial drive Portas lays out, combined with the bottom-up mobilisation, the intentional localisation and resilience-building that runs through Transition, and harness the inherent enthusiasm and support for this that can be found everywhere.

Transition is so important because it is about doing things, engaging the community, starting to create and model the economy we do want to see.  Across the world, Transition initiatives are doing just that, whether it’s Sustainable Dunbar’s new community bakery now open for business, Bath and West Community Energy just raising £721,350 in a community share launch for renewables in the area, or the Plymouth Food Charter which Transition Plymouth are a key part of, they are starting to model the kind of economy for which there is much more support.  Yes it needs support, it needs investment, it needs that money currently being spent on bypasses and new roundabouts, and it needs to be far more visible on the ground.  Portas puts it beautifully in her report, “what really matters, what’s really important, is that we roll up our sleeves and just make things happen“.  Indeed.

At the end of the meeting, one of the senior representatives of South Hams District Council stood up to give his reflections on the day, and what he said gave a great sense of how these two narratives might find some common ground, and how Council thinking might shift.  He talked about how own his thinking had shifted as the day went by, and that he was now questioning why developing an economic strategy for the area always meant thinking in terms of large scale ‘solutions’ and big centrally-funded infrastructure projects, and that perhaps focusing on local economies might be a more skillful way to move forward.  This felt like a powerful observation, and one we can certainly build on locally.

I often end talks with Arundhati Roy’s quote “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day I can hear her breathing”.  Might we be able to adapt her quote, so that, in the context of what I have written about here today, it is not only a case of hearing her breathing, but being able to see her, around us, setting up local businesses, reviving her local economy, setting up a community bakery, mentoring scores of young people with business ideas, attracting inward social investment finance, creating the models whereby people can invest in their communities, creating economic blueprints which set out the case clearly for how the local economy can be strengthened and supported?  Yes there are very real barriers to growth, such as the barrier that you can’t do infinite growth on a finite planet, but there are no barriers to the growth of the innovation, community and resourcefulness that already underpins our local economies and local traders, and which represents the real bedrock on which a new, more resilient economy needs to be built.

Like buses, you wait for ages for Energy Descent Action Plans to come along, and then two come along at once.  This month sees the publication of two new EDAPs, from Llambed in mid-Wales, and Dunbar in East Lothian, Scotland.  For a crash course in EDAPs and a taste of those published thus far, see this ingredient from The Transition Companion.  These two high quality pieces of work represent two communities taking the idea of an EDAP and rooting it to their place, their community, their challenges. 

Transition Llambed (Lampeter)’s is titled ‘Transition Pathways: a first Energy Descent Plan for the Lampeter area” (download the pdf here), and was funded by the Rural Development Plan for Wales.  It sets its context as being peak oil and climate change, and assesses the current ecological footprint of the area.  They did a survey of the area which gave a sense of the levels of awareness of these issues, concluding that peak oil, and the vulnerabilities it raises awareness of, are a better way to engage people than climate change.  It sets out a vision for the area that emerged from a series of workshops that were run as part of the process of creating the plan.

It then goes on to look in more detail at energy (both how to reduce energy use and the potential of renewable energy generation in the area) and food and agriculture (a kind of “Can Llambed feed itself” type approach), before distilling out concrete suggestions in its closing “Recommendations – a Transition Pathway”.  It is a bilingual publication, pick it up and look at it and it’s in English, turn it over and the other way up and it’s in Welsh!  It is a powerful vision underpinned by achievable steps, the first of which has already happened (a story you’ll hear more of  in tomorrow’s Transition podcast).

The second one is from Sustaining Dunbar, who are also a Transition initiative.  They have all kinds of projects underway, such as the Dunbar Community Bakery which opened recently.   The Dunbar EDAP, the ‘Sustaining Dunbar Action Plan’ (download here), is presented as being a draft, but it is a comprehensive document in its own right.  Like the Llambed document, it is based on a survey of the local community, in their case, over 1500 Dunbar residents.  The surveys showed that local people strongly want more local food, more energy efficient homes, neighbourhoods which are safe and attractive, more walking and cycling and more local jobs.  Hardly surprising, but not generally the assumptions that underpin most local authority development plans!

While the Totnes EDAP ran to 305 pages (as well as being available online), the Dunbar document masters the art of brevity beautifully, running to less than 30 pages.  After a page that sets the context, it then sets out its vision for food, energy, transport, health, enterprise, skills and eduction, each of which runs over 3 pages.  The second half is then a series of A3 fold-out ‘logic diagrams’ (see the food one, right), a great idea, which set out the situation now in terms of barriers and the current state of play, then the aim for 2025, then who needs to be involved and what they can do, and then milestones to know they are moving in the right direction, short term (5 years), medium term (10 years) and long term (15+ years).  For each it sets out how the local Council will have helped and supported the process.  I actually think it is quite a brilliant piece of work, and feels like a very do-able document, and a powerful tool for the Transition initiative, the community and the local authority.

This is what I love about Transition.  There are no ‘experts’ on how to do an Energy Descent Action Plan, indeed that’s really the whole point, we are all trying to figure this out together, bringing our own skills and insights to this, and rooting the whole thing in our own communities.  From the distant days of the Kinsale EDAP, that idea of the need to visualise where we want to get to and to then try and set out how we might actually get there has taken a number of forms.  ‘The Transition Companion’ makes the point that an EDAP may not be the best tool for everywhere, that something like the Economic Blueprint work being developed in Totnes, Hereford and Manchester may be a piece of work which better meets a more widely perceived need.  It’s all work in progress, but to read these two pieces of work which represent great evolutions in the development of this tool, is very inspiring.

As part of the promotion of ‘The Transition Companion‘, Emilio Mula made these 10 short films of different stories from the book.  The recent BBC series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ beautifully told the story of the evolution of human history illustrated by 100 objects chosen from the British Museum’s collection. We used a similar approach to tell the story of the emerging and unfolding Transition movement, which in its short life has spread to 35 countries around the world from its humble beginnings in Kinsale, Ireland.  You can read more about these stories here, and here are the films…

No. 1. A stripey jumper.

No. 2.  Bertie and Gertie.

No. 3.  Part of an old gas lamp.

No. 4. An egg.

No. 5.  Some mini-Draughtbusters.

No. 6. A bulb of garlic.

No. 7. A Transition Streets workbook.

No. 8.  A small pennant flag.

No. 9.  A small bowl of topsoil.

No. 10.  A bottle of ‘Sunshine Ale’.