There is a section called “What Should You Do?” which is usually the part in such books that picks you up a bit, and makes you believe that you can do something to alter the projections he has previously set out.  There are some great bits of ‘personal advice’ in there, such as ‘focus on satisfaction rather than income’, ‘do not acquire a taste for things that will disappear’, ‘stop believing that all growth is good’, and ‘in politics, remember that the future will be dominated by physical limits’.  Fair enough.  But there is one there that is so spectacularly depressing that I really needed to bring it out here and look at it with some other people.

It is “don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Randers reasons that over the next 50 years we will see the ongoing erosion of biodiversity and wilderness, due to climate change and humanity’s reach into more and more remote areas.  A love for “old, undisturbed nature”, he argues, is something it will become increasingly difficult to satisfy.  ”By teaching your child to love the loneliness of the untouched wilderness, you are teaching her to love what will be increasingly hard to find”, he argues, which will lead to unhappiness and despondency.  ”Much better then”, he concludes, “to rear a new generation that find peace, calm and satisfaction in the bustling life of the megacity – and with never-ending music piped into their ears”.  That must rank as one of the most devastating visions of the future I have read anywhere.

This links to another of his pieces of personal advice, “invest in great electronic entertainment and learn to prefer it”.  I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts.  Might a move to a world that has successfully decarbonised itself only be possible if we are to disconnect from wilderness?  I know what I think about it, but I’d love to hear from you.  Is this something that fills you with horror, or are you pleased to finally see someone taking what strikes you as being a realistic angle on this?  Discuss.

Michael Mann (2012)  The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: dispatches from the front lines.  Columbia University Press. 

Michael Mann is the principal creator of the (in)famous ‘Hockey Stick’ graph which showed that the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100 years is in excess of historic warming, and clearly linked to increased CO2 emissions.  The graph achieved great prominence, as a result of which he became a target of the fossil fuel industry, in particular during the co-ordinated assault on climate science known as ‘Climate Gate’, where emails, including his, were hacked from the University of East Anglia.  In this passionate and compelling page-turner, Mann comes out fighting, puts his side of the story, restates the science behind it all, and what it feels like to be on the receiving end  of an orchestrated campaign to discredit him and his work.  Vital reading.

John-Paul Flintoff (2012) How to Change the World.  The School of Life. 
A big question, but in this small but beautifully laid-out book Flintoff takes it on with great gusto, drawing from Transition to Camila Batmanghelidjh, from Rosa Parks to his tales of leaving vegetables on his neighbours’ front door steps.  Like any meaningful book on how to make change happen, it has one foot in his own experience of trying the make change happen where he lives, in his life, in his community.  That, for me, gives it a richness, a humour, and a depth that I really valued.

Martin Crawford (2012)  How to Grow Perennial Vegetables: low-maintenance, low-impact vegetable gardening. Green Books. 
Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of Martin Crawford, and his amazing work pioneering agroforestry in the UK context.  His latest book is a plant-by-plant guide to over 100 perennial vegetables and everything you could ever want to know about them.  He also sets out the advantages of a perennial garden over an annual one, and how to design for perennial plants.  An essential addition to any permaculturist’s bookshelf.

Jorgen Randers (2012)  2052: a global forecast for the next forty years.  Chelsea Green.

Randers is one of the team that created the original ‘Limits to Growth’ report in the 1970s.  Here he looks forward over the next 40 years, analysing the trends that will define 2052.  It is alternately deeply illuminating, frustrating, at times wildly depressing, hugely clarifying yet always considered and very hard to argue with.  His conclusions are what he calls “quite gloomy … not catastrophic”.  His ‘Twenty Pieces of Personal Advice’ I will explore in later posts here will divide opinion but certainly can’t be accused of taking a safe and unchallenging route.

Stephen R.J. Sheppard.  (2012)  Visualising Climate Change: a guide to visual communication of climate change and developing local solutions. Routledge.

One of the aspects of Transition revolves around trying to vision the kind of future we want to see.  This book tries, in a similar way, to bring the predictions and the future reality of climate change to life by making it visible.  What does a ton of carbon dioxide actually look like?  How would the place you live look were it to be 2°C warmer than it is today?  How might it look designed around public transport and walking?  Both chilling and inspiring, it uses the latest in computer imagery to show the kind of world that will be created by our inaction today, but also the kind of world we could create if we can muster the collective will.

Looby MacNamara (2012)  People and Permaculture: caring and designing for ourselves, each other and the planet. Permanent Publications. 

While there have been many books on the nuts and bolts of permaculture, the design system, the plants, etc, there hasn’t yet been on that focuses purely on the ‘peoplecare’ aspects of it.  It argues that in order for permaculture to really work and to embed itself, it needs to address relationships, and how we work together as people and as communities.  Containing over 50 practical exercises, it is a rich exploration of how to do permaculture in such a way that it is also attending to the ‘inner’ aspects of the whole thing.

Nicholas Shaxson (2011)  Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world.  Bodley Head. 

Not much to say about this here, as I only recently interviewed the author about this book, but I thought this an extraordinary book.  Something I had vaguely heard of but knew very little about is brought into such clarity and focus, and the book bristles and seethes with the sheer unfairness of the whole thing.  Essential reading.

Michael Shuman.  (2012)  Local Dollars, Local Sense: how to shift your money from Wall Street to Main Street and achieve real prosperity.  Chelsea Green. 

Shuman is one of the great thinkers of the localisation movement, and although this is a US publication and doesn’t necessarily transpose entirely to the UK context, his argument is just as relevant here.  The vast amounts of money sat in pension funds, savings accounts, life insurance and stocks and bonds needs to be moved, her argues, to the creation of resilient local economies, supporting new enterprise and new economic activity, rather than the continuation of the current, morally bankrupt model.  He presents a wide range of possible models that can make this happen.  Nail a copy to the Bank of England’s door.

Ben Pike (2012) The Fruit Tree Handbook.  Green Books.

Here is a beautifully created guide, for the amateur and the expert on the care of all manner of fruit trees.  It covers orchard design, choosing your species, tree care, a great guide to pruning with wonderfully clear illustrations, and how to harvest and store the results of your hard work.  Heavily laden with a rich crop of hard-won experience, it is a delicious companion for anyone who already has, or wants to create, an orchard on any scale.  Figs, peaches, nectarines, cherries… need I say more?

Anthony Horowitz (2011)  The House of Silk.  Orion.

And finally, something completely different.  The first new Sherlock Homes novel approved by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate since his death is an absolute cracker.  I am reading it with my 13-year old at the moment, and it’s an edge-of-the-seat, gripping, unputdownable page-turner, virtually indistinguishable from the original tales.  I don’t get to read many novels, but this one, from page one, had me back in Holmes’ Victorian world of gaslamps, horse-drawn carriages, fog, and dark secrets that only the great detective himself can unravel.  Highly recommended.

If you’re a transitioner yourself, chances are you’re well aware of this book. You may even have a hand in it somewhere, having sent in a story, a photo or a quote. You may have read the draft chapters as they were posted on Rob’s Transition Culture blog, or suggested a title.  The Transition Companion: Making your community more resilient in uncertain times is the follow-up to The Transition Handbook. Where the first book proposed a movement and speculated about how it might be created, the second reports on a dynamic and growing world of Transition. It is packed with examples, stories, experience and friendly advice, gathered together from Transition groups around the UK and as far afield as Brazil and South Africa. It is a crowd-sourced answer to the book’s central question: “What would it look like if the best responses to peak oil and climate change came not from committees and acts of parliament, but from you and me and the people around us?”

It takes a whole book to explore that question because the answer is diverse. There is no one way to transition your town or city beyond fossil fuels. Only tailor made local approaches are going to work, approaches that honour local history and tradition, and that respond to the specific needs of people and place. But in exploring what others are doing, in looking at what has worked, and what has failed and why, certain patterns emerge – good ideas to try and pitfalls to avoid.

Those ideas are written up as ‘ingredients’ and tools for setting up and running a transition initiative, things to consider or to think through – how to live up to the claim of being inclusive; should you have an office or not; celebrating failures as well as successes; mini how-tos on fund raising and public speaking. Whether you’re starting out or well on already, there’s plenty here to learn from.

In keeping with the  ‘pattern language‘ inspiration of the book, it is divided into short numbered sections. Each has a one or two sentence summary at the start,  and a ‘you may also enjoy’ box at the end. It makes the book easy to dip in and out of, browsing the bits you’re most interested in or are most relevant. The ‘companion’ title an apt one.

If you’re new to the whole concept of Transition, The Transition Handbook has more detailed explanations of why a transition is necessary, and how the ideas were developed. If you’re familiar with the ideas and want to see how they are being worked out in practice, this is the one to go for.

For me personally, it’s great to see the little contributions from Transition Luton and know we’ve been able to contribute to the conversation. (And to find this article on Japan referenced in a mention of post-growth economies.) It’s also a kick up the backside to get stuck in again after something of a hiatus after becoming a dad, and I have a list of things to do and try scribbled on the inside back cover. Actually, the book ought to come with a warning: ‘this book will leave you with no excuses left for not getting involved in Transition.’

That sense of an invitation is not accidental. Rob puts it himself towards the end of the book, describing The Transition Companion as “the current thinking about what transition is and how it works – an invitation to pick it up, try it out, see if it works for you and, if so, make it yours.”

Transition is now a worldwide grassroots movement that looks climate change and peak oil squarely in the face and dismisses the utter impossibility of endless economic growth on a planet of finite resources. It offers community based solutions to help people in villages, towns and cities adapt to the inevitable challenges of the oncoming reality of profound economic and social change unflinchingly and with a good degree of humility and good cheer. It’s a collection of recipes for building community, environmental regeneration, relocalised economies and so much more.

Transition emerged from an energy descent plan process during an in-depth permaculture design course taught by Rob Hopkins at Kinsale Further Education College in the early 2000s and has since spread around the world. Rob’s first book, The Transition Handbook (2008), introduced the concept and explained how to set up Transition initiatives. It went down a storm. Other titles followed in the series – on local food, money, planning a Transition ‘timeline’, and how to influence local government with these ideas – by a variety of authors working with Rob and the other co-founders of the movement. Almost a decade of experimentation unfolded. This new volume offers stories of Transition initiatives from all over the world, plus practical Transition Tools for starting, and perhaps more critically, maintaining a Transition initiative. It’s an impressive collection of ideas and praxis.

I read so many books about peak oil, the state of the world, and environmental degradation that I often glaze over. This one is different. It has authority born from practical experience, a musculature that is immediately engaging, even reassuring. It feels mature. The book is not afraid to catalogue the limitations and failures, even celebrate them, as well as the successes. I like the way the book was crowd sourced. Rob blogged on each Transition Tool and invited feedback and ideas. The participatory aspect brings it alive: here is more than one visionary man’s voice but a whole chorus of voices. There’s a good degree of futurecasting within its pages: stories from a future that has embraced transition, some not without their humour. As computer scientist, Alan Kay said, “The best way to invent the future is to predict it.” That’s exactly what this book aims to do.

As a publisher, I like the physical design of the book. It is visually interesting and easy to read but what I really love about it is its honesty. Right from the start Rob says, “Transition is not a known quantity. We truly don’t know if it will work. It is a social experiment on a massive scale.” What I am convinced of is its validity and critical necessity. The strings of governments are pulled by vested interest. Individuals are lone voices. It is only when we gather together in numbers that we begin to tip the balance of power. Working to transform how we live as a species is the only work worth doing. I applaud Rob and his fellow transitioners for their global experiment and their vision of hope that have awakened so many people. As the old world crumbles, we need to test out new ideas, techniques and technologies. So many are contained here and are reported with the wisdom of experience. This is rich meal for a creative, alternative future.

At the moment, when contemplating urban food production, the models that are used tend to be allotments, community gardens, planting productive trees or forest gardens, private gardens or even, perhaps, rooftop gardens.  Commercial urban market gardens tend to be thought of as needing to be on a larger scale and requiring significant infrastructure.  SPIN is based on the idea of ‘patchwork farming’, of seeing unused areas of urban land as having the potential to be worked commercially, viewed through the eyes of a commercial grower rather than someone growing for a hobby.  This is a profound shift of emphasis and one that I find very exciting.  Here is a short talk by SPIN farmer Paula Sobie of City Harvest which gives her take on what SPIN farming is:

SPIN farming strips out any talk of politics or ideology that underpins approaches such as organics or permaculture, stating “think in terms of a production system, not a belief system”, although it doesn employ organic techniques.  It can start on parcels of land as small as 1,000 square feet, and can be spread across a number of pieces of land.  It is a commercial operation, albeit a small and decentralised one.

Its focus is on maximising output and profit for the grower.  It weaves in intensive relay cropping practices, achieving a balance between high-value and low-value crops, “highly regimented harvesting techniques” and direct marketing.  Unlike conventional farming, its start-up costs are low.  The authors argue that the key to viability is focusing on high-value crops, such as spinach, carrots, fresh herbs, lettuce, a variety of leafy greens, radishes, scallions and chard, direct selling and being based within the community you are feeding.

What is so brilliant about ‘SPIN Basics’ is that it is not just an idea, an aspiration, rather it is set out as a ‘read-this-then-get-to-it’ guide for the would-be grower, which itemises costs and the kinds of returns you can expect from successful SPIN plots on a range of scales.  It is here that the reader starts to get a sense of the potential of all of this to underpin a revolutionary rethink in how urban land use is conceived.  Although the figures given are all in dollars, they are compelling.  One person, working 1,000 -5,000 square feet could expect a potential gross revenue of $3,900 – $18,000.  Two people working fulltime on 10,000 to 20,000 square feet could expect a potential gross revenue of $36,000 -$72,000.

If the Transition of our local economies is going to work, it will need to find ways of creating a new resilient and more localised infrastructure in such a way that it is commercially viable, creates livelihoods, creates reskilling and employment opportunities for young people and which feels like it adds to a place, makes it more beautiful, more interesting, more diverse.  You can easily imagine Transition initiatives identifying potential SPIN sites, training young people in the techniques, providing a central resource of tools, and helping with the marketing.

At the 2011 Transition Network conference at Hope University in Liverpool, I walked around the site each day looking at the huge areas of lawns and thinking in these days where students are expected to leave university with a debt of over £50,000, rethinking those lawns as SPIN farming plots would tick many, many boxes.  A while ago I gave a talk at the Environment Agency in Bristol about Transition.  Their site sits surrounded by masses of lawn, and I remember telling them that in 10 years it might be that the fact they now operate as a market garden is the only reason anyone still comes to work for them.  Again, SPIN farming, more than anything I have come across yet, sets out how that could become a reality.  As you can tell by now, I am quite fired up about it.

‘SPIN farming basics’ is just one of the books that SPIN produce.  It isn’t a step-by-step growing guide, rather it is an overview book on how to run such an operation.  I have no way of gauging whether their figures are accurate and how they might translate into the UK context.  I’m also not sure what they do about slugs.   There is also, I guess, a distant danger that should this really take off it might edge out more egalitarian forms of urban land use, such as allotments and community gardens.  But even if they are only half right  about their potential yields, it is still an impressive approach, and it calls for a powerful shift in focus for urban growers.  In the wake of the recent riots in a number of English cities, I am struck by the potential of this approach to shift thinking about how to create viable social enterprises and a sense of purpose for young people.  It has certainly got my brain ticking over pretty rapidly.

As the authors put it, “once you put on SPIN glasses, you start seeing dollar signs all over vacant and underutilised patches of land”.  As economic contraction worsens, and peak oil starts to bite, this form of land use will become the norm, as it has done every time in history that societies have faced similar sets of circumstances.  The obstacle to getting started has always been how to make this stuff viable.  That obstacle, thanks to the work of the SPIN folks, would appear to no longer exist, or at least to be greatly diminished.   If you don’t do it someone else will, and they likely won’t do it in a way rooted in social justice, community benefit, food security and Transition.  This is an important window in time to get moving on this.

This is a revolutionary text, an incendiary call to rethink urban land use in a way that ticks everyone’s boxes.  I can’t recommend it too highly.

Here is another film about SPIN farmer Curtis Stone in Kelowna, BC, Canada:

It is rather hard to tell from the SPIN website which of the books they offer is this one… so for the last time ever, here is a link to the book on Amazon…. it is quite pricey, but one to get and share with as many people as you can…

When I reported here the recent death of my dear friend Dr. David Fleming I wrote, “and he never did get his bloody book finished!”  Everyone who knew David will have seen one or other iteration of his book, whether it was known as ‘The Lean Economy’ or ‘Lean Logic‘, tucked under his arm, adorned with much scribbling and crossing out.  Following his death, his family and friends have set to the task of making sure that his life’s work does finally see the light of day, and I’m delighted to announce that copies will soon be available.  I’m delighted, as would he have been, to know that his insights, his humour and his brilliance, are now more widely available.  Here is the text from a flyer I was recently sent announcing the publication.  I’ve already ordered mine…

LEAN LOGIC: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It
David Fleming’s Lean Logic will be published in his memory in July 2011.

The book will be printed in a hardback first edition of 500 copies, comprising David’s final draft, comprehensive footnotes, bibliography and references and many wonderful wood cuts and illustrations.  All proceeds from sales of Lean Logic will be used to promote David’s work and passions.

Copies may be obtained for £30 or £25 each for two or more (plus £5 per copy for postage and packing if required) by sending your address details and a cheque payable to Lucy Barlow to:

Lean Logic
Court Farm House
North Street
Fritwell
Oxon OX27 7QX

If you prefer to make a bank transfer, please email orders@leanlogic.net for the required details.

What follows are 10 money-saving tips for gardeners taken from ‘Grow your food for free (well almost…), although two of them are entirely fictitious and made up by yours truly, while the rest are true.  Email me (don’t post your answers as comments) by midday on Friday 17th June (to rob (at) transitionculture.org) and let me know which are the two incorrect ones… good luck…

1. Toilet roll holders make excellent pots for starting seedlings off in, especially peas and beans
2. Save a fortune on plastic plant labels by cutting yoghurt pots into strips and writing on them
3. Middle sized slugs, left out in direct sun for 10 minutes make an excellent substitute for Blutak when sticking posters to your shed walls
4. Good strong fences can be made with timber obtained by dismantling pallets
5. Old demijohns, with the bottoms cut out, can make excellent cloches
6. Save a fortune on fruit trees by haggling for those that garden centres chuck out at the end of the season (this can be a good way to get other perennials too)
7. Spent hops from a local brewery make an excellent mulch (although they smell a bit odd initially)
8. Clubbing together with friends to buy seeds can lead to larger orders which give much bigger discounts
9. Old building rubble salvaged from skips can make great paths and/or stepping stones
10. You can save a fortune on driving to your local recycling centre to dispose of diseased plant material by simply tossing it over the hedge into your neighbour’s garden.

Dave describes the book thus: “rather than re-write another book you can find in any charity shop this book aims to teach people how to improvise with what they have around them. I wanted to write the kind of book I’d like to read, a sort of Douglas Adams meets Gardeners’ World. I’m not sure I quite achieve the genius of Mr Adams (it’s especially difficult in a gardening book!) but I hope you find it entertaining anyway.”  You’ll love it…

It’s nearly three years since I received a copy of The Transition Handbook and was inspired to become involved in the movement. Much has happened since then both in terms of the way Transition has developed and in the wider world of global economics and environmental concerns. So it was with great interest that I read Rob Hopkins’ PhD thesis (progenitor of the Transition model).  If his Transition Handbook sowed the seeds of the Transition concept then this thesis examines some of the green shoots that have arisen and effectively asks the question, ‘Will they grow and blossom into a meaningful crop?’

It is, of course, primarily an academic work designed for an academic purpose but it is, nonetheless, a very valuable addition to the cadre of literature con-cerned with how we can best adapt to the challenges we face concerning living more sustainably. It is written in Rob’s clear and highly readable style and it pulls together the recent and relevant literature and political developments, of which there have been a great many. In particular it raises the intriguing potential connection with the coalition government’s rather unclear notions of the Big Society and ‘localism’.

Totnes is used as a case study to see what has been achieved. The nature of the town, its socio-economic make-up, history and location all conspire to give transition a head start as many residents are predisposed to the ideas and are willing to help. There has been lots of activity and considerable success, but the question is, can it be replicated in other places, such as urban areas, communities with significant disadvantage etc.? And even in Totnes there has been limited success in engaging those under 30.

As an active ‘transitioner’ I recognised much of the findings from my own experience. In particular I found myself nodding at some of the comments about the existence of what sociologists describe as the ‘value-action gap’. This being the seemingly ubiquitous phenomenon whereby people have aspirations (in this case about adopting broadly green lifestyle principles) but these are often not translated into practical action. Many activists within transition circles spend a great deal of time considering how such a gap can be minimised.
The thesis looks at the ‘what now?’ question for Transition. It sees a focus on ‘resilience’ as being better than climate change/peak oil for wider engagement. This too is an approach that New Forest Transition has found to be effective, especially in engaging local politicians who eye Transitioners with some suspicion.

The need to ‘scale up’ action through a growth in social enterprise and local governance approaches is seen as a way forward with a potential alliance with current political policies (Big Society/Localism) is important. Because it is an articulate and thorough review of the topic, I believe this thesis can serve to inform policy development both at regional and national levels. I would urge policy makers to read it.

Richard Barnett
Co-Chair New Forest Transition
www.newforesttransition.org

Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: The Case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)
By Rob Hopkins
475 pp. University of Plymouth, Devon, UK – Oct. 2010. £15.00; available only in PDF at Transitionculture.org.

For several years groups of innovative, environmentally conscious people worldwide have been part of a social change movement called Transition. It strives to create relocalized communities that are resilient to the looming climate and energy crises, and in which “the future with less oil could be preferable to the present.” It all began humbly enough as a class project six years ago. Since then, it’s spawned thousands of communities, inspired a documentary and several books, been awarded millions in grants and vaulted its figurehead, Rob Hopkins, to something like celebrity status in southwestern England (really not sure about this bit! Rob…). If there’s a movement today that can be welcomed as a fulfillment of David Korten’s 2006 book The Great Turning, this is it.

The bible of Transition is Hopkins’ Transition Handbook (Green Books, 2008). But in hindsight Hopkins has come to view this book with a critical eye, noting fallacies in its reasoning that he attributes to Transition’s organic, ever-changing nature and its still being a young movement. Partly to address these flaws, he’s now come out with a second book, Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: The Case of Transition Town Totnes. It’s the dissertation for a doctoral degree that he pursued for four years along with his activist work. Hopkins is now a newly minted Ph.D. and is marketing Localisation and Resilience through his Web site as a companion volume to Transition Handbook.

The dissertation is a case study of the first official Transition Town, the English market town of Totnes, long a popular tourist destination known for its alternative culture. Using interviews, focus groups, questionnaire surveys and other social science research methods, the study examines the degree to which the Transition ideals of localization and resilience have become a reality in Totnes. (Transitioners endorse a number of upbeat definitions of a resilient community, a popular one being “[a] culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its own limits, and able to thrive for having done so.”*)

When Transition began, Hopkins was an instructor at the Kinsale Further Education College in Kinsale, Ireland. He was teaching permaculture, an environmental design approach that dates back to the ‘70s oil crises. Not yet peak oil-aware, he saw his work primarily as a way of nurturing beneficial relationships within communities, rather than as a ticket to a gentle ride down our energy descent. But when someone did introduce him to peak oil, it dawned on him that permaculture just may be humankind’s best shot at salvation. He and his students embarked on a project to determine what steps their community would need to take in order to successfully weather the decline of oil. The result was a cornerstone Transition text, the very first Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP).**

Kinsale Town Council made the historic decision to adopt their EDAP, with the result that Kinsale is now a proud part of the Transition network.† However, it is in Totnes that Transition took off the fastest, hence Totnes’ status as the first official Transition Town and the home base for the movement. In just a few years, Transition Town Totnes (TTT) went from being the abstract aspiration of zealous volunteers to a limited company offering an array of programs aimed at promoting self-reliant, low-carbon living throughout the South Hams region (a few highlights include Gardenshare, the Nut Tree Planting Project and a local currency called the Totnes Pound).

It is challenging to generalize about results, since Transition is meant as a catalyst for community action rather than as a prescribed program, and different communities come up with different initiatives depending on their particular circumstances. But one general conclusion that Hopkins draws from his research is that the Transition approach has been effective in generating community engagement and initiating new enterprises.

Hopkins admits that Totnes still has a long way to go toward meeting its needs locally. However, he demonstrates that it could supply nearly all of its own food needs, the only exceptions being foods that require soil types not indigenous to the region. As for energy, Hopkins shows that local renewables could meet half of total demand, and that efficiency measures could make up the difference. On the subject of housing, he says that demand could easily be met with local materials (e.g., straw bales, earth, lime, car tires and other recycled objects, hempcrete and cob) but that ramping up current natural building efforts to a commercial scale has proven difficult. Lastly, with regard to transport, Hopkins notes Totnes’ high level of automobile use and suggests that a crucial step in reducing it will be to sway people’s attitudes.

Some of the study’s findings weren’t at all what Hopkins had hypothesized. For example, he originally hypothesized that the main obstacles to resilience and relocalization in Totnes would prove to be an absence of community cohesion and a lack of skills. But as it turns out, the actual stumbling blocks are largely issues of governance. Another major obstacle is the need for increased social enterprise, a still-little-understood quality that Hopkins suggests may be “the key to stepping across from thinking to doing.”

The oral history interviews give the dissertation an ethnographic feel and illustrate how profoundly daily life in Totnes has changed since the advent of cheap oil. The interviews are used to gain insights from the past that may prove useful in acclimating to an oil-scarce future. Hopkins’ team randomly selected townspeople with memories of the period from 1930 to 1955 and had them describe their recollections of the local economy and what practical skills people had then that they don’t have now. In one telling interview, a woman remembers the dreaded chore of doing laundry before electric washers and dryers were widespread. She recalls, “We had a mangle, you had to mangle your clothes! It was terrible. Your feet and legs would get wet, it was hard work.”

Hopkins is mindful of his positionality as a researcher trying to critically examine his own movement. “I am not able to assume an entirely impartial and neutral position in relation to the subject of this PhD,” he concedes. So in designing his methodology, he took steps to at least minimize bias. He had his assistants conduct interviews for him whenever possible, since interviewees who knew him might have been inclined to give him answers that he wanted to hear. And whenever he was conducting interviews, he would tell interviewees to “please answer the following questions as though I have no connection whatsoever with TTT.” He admits that these measures weren’t completely effective, but suggests that the resulting sacrifice of objectivity was made up for by the advantages of his embeddedness in TTT, namely, his trusted access to specialists in a range of fields and an understanding of the community “from the inside.”

Localisation and Resilience represents a solid case study of the first Transition initiative. It goes a long way toward filling some chasms in the resilience literature, which, as Hopkins points out, is still quite sparse. And of course, one of the ultimate tests of its academic rigor has been passed with flying colors, now that Hopkins has successfully defended his research and been granted a doctoral degree.

Hopkins’ Englishness automatically gives him an edge over other peak oil thinkers. England, like Europe at large, is implicitly more appreciative of the gift of abundant oil than is America, since it’s long been much more expensive there. And while the nation shares much of America’s oil vulnerability, it’s easier to get around there without fuel, since the area was settled long before the reign of the automobile. Localisation and Resilience offers no comment on the prospects for Transition on this reviewer’s side of the Atlantic; but it certainly has been heartening to watch the movement build steadily here, from just one official initiative in 2008 to 79 at last count.‡

_{* “Resilience – a few more definitions,” Transition Town Totnes, http://www.transitiontowntotnes.org/content/resilience-few-more-definiti… (accessed Jan. 29, 2011).
** Rob Hopkins, “Powerdown and Permaculture: At the Cusp of Transition,” in Gaian Economics: Living Well within Planetary Limits, eds. Jonathan Dawson, Ross Jackson and Helena Norberg-Hodge (East Meon, Hampshire, UK: Hyden House Ltd., 2010), 212-7.
† Adam Fenderson, “Energy Descent Action Plans – a primer,” Energy Bulletin, Jun. 7, 2006, http://www.energybulletin.net/node/16859 (accessed Jan. 27, 2011).
‡ ”Official Transition Initiatives,” Transition US, http://transitionus.org/initiatives-map (accessed Feb. 1, 2011).}

The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable System Model. Patrick Hoverstadt. (2008) John Wiley & Sons.

Seems a bit useless to start with a book which I have to confess I haven’t read this yet, but I do plan to read it over the Christmas break.  It comes highly recommended as a good introduction to the Viable Systems model, which, for those interested in the concept of resilience, is a fascinating deepening of the concept, arguing that as, if not more important than resilience is the concept of viability.  I look forward to getting my teeth into this one…

Nonsense on Stilts: how to tell science from bunk. Massimo Pigliucci. (2010) Chicago University Press.

Quite probably the most fascinating book I have read recently.  In terms of the recent discussions here at Transition Culture in terms of ‘Ways of Knowing’, or the debates around the controversial attempts in the US to make the idea of the ‘Sacred’ central to the Transition model, this is essential reading.  Pigliucci argues that on many issues the world is facing today, and in spite of robust scientific evidence, millions of people increasingly embrace pseudoscience.  He argues that this leads to decision-making which is both flawed and, often dangerous.  He offers a brilliant crash course in how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted and what it means to our society.  Has a great section on climate change, and the scientific arguments around that.  A very important book.

Meat: a benign extravagance. Simon Fairlie. (2010) Permanent Publications.

A tour-de-force from Simon Fairlie.  He sets out to argue that livestock farming has a key role to play in a low carbon food system, and that eating meat is an ethical response to climate change, countering the “the best thing would be if everyone was vegan” argument with in-depth analysis.  This is the book which changed George Monbiot’s mind, not an easy achievement!  One of the most important books about food and farming published recently.

Eaarth: making a life on a tough new planet. Bill McKibben. Alfred A. Knopf Publishing.

McKibben wrote the first environmental publication I ever read, ‘The End of Nature’, which had a profound impact on me. Now, 18 years later, he produced Eaarth, an equally hard-hitting book.  The title refers to his argument that climate change means that our planet is now so profoundly altered that it should actually be renamed in order to better reflect where we find ourselves.  A brilliant rounding up of recent climate science, and a robust analysis of where we find ourselves and what we might do about it.

Social Enterprise in Anytown. John Pearce. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. (2009)

What would it look like if a community were to intentionally create a culture of promoting social enterprise?  Pearce’s book is a fascinating collection of ideas and examples that offer great guidance for a Transition initiative that wants to cultivate such a culture.  I had been looking for a while for such a book, and this is a great guide to the power of social enterprise, and what it could look like if a Transition initiative is able to draw in the local Council, the local schools, local businesses and other organisations into the intentional design of a new economic culture in the place.  Very important stuff for Transition.

Groundhouse: diary of a natural home. Daren Howarth and Adrienne Nortje. Bliksem Publishing

I love ‘here’s how we built our houses’ books (well, good ones anyway).  Daren and Adrienne built a house in France based on the Earthship model, and documented the process beautifully.  At the same time, they had to feed and keep happy the crew of builders, often using food grown around the building site.  This book is, in effect, two books in one, the first, ‘Cook’, being a cookbook of the recipes that sustained spirits on the site, and the second, ‘Build’, being a record of the build, the people, the tools, the stages it went through.  It is a love poem to a beautiful building, and also to all the ingredients that produced it, in the widest sense of the term.  Beautiful.

Fleeing Vesuvius: overcoming the risks of econ0mic and environmental collapse. Richard Douthwaite and Gillian Fallon (editors).  (2010)  FEASTA.

The latest publication from FEASTA is a collection of essays from many people who will be familiar to Transition Culture readers, David Korowicz, Nate Hagens, Chris Vernon, Brian Davey and many others, which, in a particularly Irish context but by no means restricted to that, sets out to analyse where the world finds itself, on the edge of an economic contraction of unprecedented proportions, approaching peak oil, as well as facing a number of other challenges.  Subjects covered are refreshingly diverse: from the psychology of change to practical solutions and from new economic models to passionate debates as to the nature of the crisis confronting us, all are explored in the rigorous and clear manner we have come to expect from FEASTA publications.  Also contains a great history of Transition from Davie Philip.

Where did our money go? Building a banking system fit for purpose.Andrew Simms and Tony Greenham. new economics foundation. (2010)

The New Economics Foundation have produced an excellent overview of the financial crisis government would have us believe is now behind us, but which looks much more likely to have only just begun.  It looks at how the financial system works, at how the banks were allowed to operate which created much of the crisis, where the UK finds itself today, and what a new banking system that is fit for purpose would look like.  I found it hugely informative.  It can be downloaded for free here.

Allotments. Twigs Way. (2009) Shire Publishing.

Here is a short but fascinating history of allotments in the UK.  From the wartime and the ‘Dig For Victory’ movement, to the slump in interest in allotments of the 1970s to the present day revival, this is a fascinating potted history.  Beautifully illustrated with period photos and posters, it also tells the story of how allotments began to inform the planning of towns, such as through the Garden Cities approach.  ‘Allotments’ packs a huge amount into a small book… wonderful.  Can that really be the author’s real name though?

Requiem for a Species: why we resist the truth about climate change. (2010) Earthscan

What if we have actually left climate change too late?  What if the vital ‘tipping points’ climate scientists speak of are actually behind us?  Clive Hamilton’s book is a stark, clear and chilling assessment of where we find ourselves, but also offers an insightful look at the psychology that allows us collectively to look the other way.  He sets out to answer the question of what stories people will tell about us, the generation that knew it was destroying the biosphere but was so entranced by its baubles and gadgets that it did nothing to stop the decline.  Not a comforting read, but a vital one.

Roundwood Timber Framing: Building Naturally Using Local Resources. Ben Law. (2010) Permanent Publications.

Now we move to a book which has a much higher photos-to-text-ratio.  The work Ben Law is doing with his roundwood timber framing innovations is fascinating and hugely important.  If you still believe that a move towards the increased use of local materials will necessitate people living in hovels, this may be the book to shift your perceptions hugely.  By starting his design of buildings with the materials he has around him which, given that he lives in and manages a sweet chestnut coppice in Sussex is round wood poles, he has created a new vernacular which is breathtakingly beautiful.  As well as the poles, for which he has pioneered new techniques, he also incorporates strawbales, clay plasters, and other locally sourced materials.  A fascinating taster of what construction could be and, on so many levels, needs to be.

Post Carbon Reader:Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises.  Richard Heinberg & Daniel Lerch (editors).  (2010)  Post Carbon Institute.

This authoritative tome includes 35 essays by 28 Post Carbon Institute Fellows, including Bill McKibben, Richard Heinberg, Stephanie Mills, David Orr, Sandra Postel, Michael Shuman, Wes Jackson, Erika Allen, Bill Ryerson, Gloria Flora, and many other leading sustainability thinkers, and me.  A brilliant balance of the academically rigorous and the passionately visionary, this is a key collection of ideas and information, and a seminal snapshot of the emerging movement which sees peak oil, climate change and economic contraction as opportunities for a rethink of many of the basic assumptions that underpinned the last century.

Where Earwigs Dare. Matt Harvey. (2010)  Green Books.

Transition Culture readers will be familiar with Totnes poet Matt Harvey and his particularly quirky way of looking at the world.  Here is his latest collection, a wonderful assortment of his work, including his classic ode to the slug, which includes the immortal description “bold-as-brass brassica editor”.  Overflowing with poetic gems and load of bits you put your finger on and head off in search of someone to read them to.

Of course one of the dangers of writing history is the people that you leave out, so I apologise in advance, by its very nature I am scrabbling about in my memory here and this is by no means an attempt to be exhaustive, but from my memories of the period 1996-2005, here are some of the people I think should such a history should record (apologies also for the fact that this is inevitably a pretty Munster-based selection…).  There are the permaculture pioneers, the people who were teaching permaculture up and down the country, often using their own evolving sites as their classroom: Marcus McCabe in Clones, Richard Webb, Graham Strouts in West Cork, Philip Allen in Belfast, Dominic Waldron, the straw mulch man, Klaus Hauschild, and John Dolan, the pond wizard.

In the media there were people who pushed this whole thing forward too, getting stories about what was going on into the mainstream media.  There were the various publications, Don Coughlan’s The Source, which didn’t make it beyond a few editions but was great while it lasted, Sustainability Magazine which also recently stopped publishing, Construct Ireland which has done a huge amount to spread green building ideas in Ireland.  There were the broadcasters, Duncan Stewart who has made very influential environmental programmes for years, George Lee who made ‘Future Shock’ for RTE about peak oil, and writers such as Iva Pocock and Adrienne Murphy who got stories into the press about these things from early on.

There were the ‘Monsanto 6′ who pulled up the first Monsanto trial crops in Ireland, John Seymour, Gavin Harte, Pauric Cannon, Davie Philip, Adrienne Murphy and Richard Roche, who ended up not being prosecuted. Also, in terms of food, and pushing for looking at food in a different way, organisations such as the Dublin Food Co-op were years ahead of their time, and writer and cook Darina Allen has done a huge amount to push the idea of local food in the Irish mainstream.  The Irish Seed Savers have done amazing work protecting the country’s genetic heritage and making it available again to growers.  Madeline McKeever in West Cork is now doing similar things, selling local heirloom seed varieties. Dominick Cullnane ran the Mallow Garden Festival for some years and created a very high profile space for many innovative ‘green’ businesses and craftspeople to read a wider audience.

Then there are the building and construction pioneers.  Architects like Brian O’Brien and Mike Haslam of Solearth Architects, designers of The Village in Cloughjordan and green building pioneers at a time when nobody knew what they were on about.  Other architects, such as Paul Leech, Sally Starbuck, Tony Cohu, Rachel Bevan, who were bringing ideas about sustainability into their work at a time when the national push was for as much construction built as cheaply as possible, usually using concrete blocks.  There are the pioneers of different natural building approaches, Marcus and Kate McCabe who built Ireland’s first strawbale house and are now great hemp advocates, the many timber framers up and down the country who tried to break concrete’s stranglehold, the people who learnt cob building, often at The Hollies, and went on to do it in other places.  There’s The Village project, many of whose members have been involved since 1997, and only now, 13 years later, are actually building their houses.  It is a project that is the embodiment of tenacity and patience.

Brian Rogers, Sligo’s last master thatcher, who has done so much to keep that art alive, and Dan McPolin of Narrow Water Lime Services, who first got me fired about about lime. Christy Collard and Saul Mosbacher introduced the chainsaw into construction, bringing the concept of the reciprocal frame roof forward with each new construction. There was the then Mary O’Donnell (since divorced and I forget her new surname) who did an amazing job in the mid-90s trying to build a methane biodigestor near Skibbereen that would have used local slurry to power a swimming pool and ice rink, many years ahead of her time, and came very close to realising it.  Quentin Gargan and Clare Watson who, among other great work promoting renewable energy and running for political office among other things, built a very well researched and gorgeous strawbale house.

There were those who pushed for a new way of looking at Ireland’s woodlands, for a move away from monocultural forestry to  a more diverse and productive approach.  Jacinta French and Paul McCormick started experimenting with growing nut trees in West Cork, and Mike Collard, whose Future Forests nursery has been a huge catalyst for the planting of broadleaf trees and more unusual productive trees (as well as for the idea that chainsaws can do a lot more than just cut down trees).  Joe Gowran and Mark Wilson’s ‘Coppice Association of Ireland’ did great work promoting the idea of coppicing, and Ted Cooke reconnected people to their cultural connection to the forest through story and through experience.  Ian Wright and the Irish National Forestry Foundation created, at Manch, a series of demonstration trials to show the potential of broadleaves in Irish forestry.  Then there was the woodland survey work that An Tasice did, pushed forward in West Cork by Jacqi Hodgson, Tony Cohu, Joyce Russell and others.

There were the educators too.  Sonairte in Meath was one of the first environmental education centres in the country, as was The Ark Permaculture Centre in Clones, Co. Monaghan.  There are the organic colleges, An T-Ionad Glas Centre for Organic Education and the Organic Centre in Rossinver, as well as the pioneers within the universities, such as Tipperary Institute, one of the first off the block in terms of weaving sustainability into their courses through the work of people such as Seamus Hoyne and Kevin Healion.  There’s Dr. Anne B Ryan at NUI Maynooth, who has researched and published on the whole notion of ‘enough’.  There is the permaculture course at Kinsale Further Education College, started due to the vision of its Principal, John Thuellier, and the ongoing training work done at The Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability by Thomas and Ulrike Riedmuller and others.

There were those who argued for treating waste water in a different ways, promoting the idea of composting systems and of reed bed construction, Marcus McCabe, Feidhlim Harty, Olan Herr, John Dolan, often found up to their knees in water, but who did much to shift the idea that the septic tank is king.  Who can forget Marcus McCabe, at a conference in Dublin full of planners and architects, passing a bucket round the audience containing the well-composted output from his family’s bucket toilet system?  There were the economists, people who argued that the financial path being pursued by Ireland in its Celtic Tiger boom was unsustainable, in particular Richard Douthwaite, the only person mentioned here who does get a mention in Liam Leonard’s book.  The pioneers of the early local currency experiments in the country, both LETS schemes and printed currencies.  And of course Dr. Colin Campbell, the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, who gave talks up and down Ireland, and whose presentations to the Irish treasury led to his nickname of ‘Dr Death’.

And then finally of course, there are the networkers, the people who connected all the bits together.  Davie Philip, networker par excellence, initially with Caoimhin Woods, who put on the Convergence Festival every year as a way of networking and building a movement, and who has provided an extraordinary service to it ever since.  They produced the ‘Source Book’, the country’s first green directory, which subsequently moved online.  There are, of course, many many people I have forgotten or never heard of who should be in here.

I think that the work of these, and other pioneers, should not be forgotten in any history of the environmental movement in Ireland.  Of course such a movement needs the campaigners, those who lobby politicians, who mobilise campaigns against environmentally disastrous projects.  But there are also the stories of the pioneers, the craftspeople trying to retain and promote traditional crafts, the people who have often taken great financial risks and leaps into the unknown because they felt that certain things had to be done, allowing those who came after to learn as much from their failures as from their successes.  With the Celtic Tiger well and truly now unravelled, and Ireland staring into a very uncertain future, it may be that much of the work of those mentioned above is finally coming into its own, and deserves to take its place in the history books.

It is my observation, through seeing what groups inspired by Transition have done, that happiness and fulfillment are achieved through meaningful activity, and meaningful activity needs to happen with other people. If we see climate change and peak oil as purely environmental and energy problems that someone else will fix, we give away our potential to create change, and we close ourselves away and feel powerless–and the last thing we need at this point in history is people feeling powerless.

…Given the scale of the challenges humanity faces in the early-twenty-first century, already outlined in great detail in earlier sections of this book, it is clear that a range of responses is required. Government is part of the solution, but it tends to be reactive rather than proactive.

Local government is often so focused on meeting immediate needs with limited resources that it doesn’t feel it can be imaginative or take much initiative. Local citizens often feel disempowered after years of being ignored in the decisions made about their community.

However, any sufficient response to these challenges requires all of the levels of response working together, driven by the twin objectives of massively reducing carbon emissions and building resilience. The Transition movement embodies this approach with an attitude that might be summarized this way: “If we try and do it on our own it will be too little, if we wait for government to do it it will be too late, but if we can gather together those around us—our street, our neighborhood, our community—it might just be enough, and it might just be in time.”

So Chris, how does ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ differ from all the other green building books out there?

You could fill a bookshop with volumes on green building. There are so many works on sustainable design and construction and green materials that choosing what to read has become almost as difficult as deciding which spectacle frames to wear! But this book is different because it concentrates on how individuals, groups and communities are making it happen. Okay, I admit that in places the book does drift into looking at materials and construction methods but the bread and butter of the text deals with examples from around the country of how people are making sustainable homes a concrete reality – but without the concrete!

What do you think is unique about the Transition take on housing?

In a word? People and communities. Oh, that’s three! The transition movement is making resilient communities the central plank for building a sustainable future. Perfect eco-homes, whatever they might be, won’t solve the problem of climate change or prepare us for a future without cheap fossil fuels. We have to see sustainable housing in the context of sustainable communities. Imagine a house built with local timber, insulated with strawbales from a nearby farm and roofed with slates from a local quarry.

The window frames and doors are supplied by a local carpenter and the energy comes from a district heating system and a community owned wind turbine. The occupants get much of their food from a community supported agriculture scheme and also work locally. Not only does their home have a much lower carbon footprint and less embedded energy but it’s also stimulating a virtuous circle of local enterprise. When homes like this, whether they are newly built or refurbished, become the norm, then our communities will be more cohesive and better equipped to tackle climate change and cope with the problems that peak oil will bring.

What surprised you most while researching this book?

Almost as soon as I started gathering information two things became clear. First, there were lots more interesting projects going on than I had thought       possible. I could have filled the book just with stories about low impact developments or what housing associations are doing. Second, the pace of change means that new projects are being launched all the time so I was constantly rewriting to keep up to date. Fortunately the whole project, from start of researching to publication, was only just over a year so the book is pretty up to date. So I suppose the big surprise was just how much is happening out there. But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent. At a rough guess I’d say we need to increase the scale of our activity around sustainable homes a thousand-fold to really deal with the problem!

What does ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ teach us about the current state of the Transition movement?

It would have been much more difficult to write this book as an individual rather than as a transition activist. Access to transition initiatives around the country and overseas through the Transition Network was immensely valuable so, even at this early stage of development, the movement is a valuable tool for learning from and disseminating local experience.

But we need to recognise that, despite our successes, the Transition movement is still just a small part of the picture. Most of the people and projects described in ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ have either no links or a very tenous connection to Transition and very few sustainable housing projects are formal Transition initiatives. Is this a problem? Not really. The fact that so many projects are happening already is really encouraging. The fact that they don’t have a Transition label is not an issue.

Cloughjordan, which is now linked to the Transition movement, and Totnes sustainable housing projects like Transition Together and Transition Homes, are valuable examples that I’m sure will be surpassed by communities all over the UK and elsewhere. The Totnes Pound has been eclipsed by the success of local currencies in Lewes and Stroud and the same process of leapfrogging will happen with sustainable housing.

What do you feel are the key ingredients in a community housing project?

Community. By that I mean the things that bind people together for the common purpose of making their homes and neighbourhoods more sustainable. There are many examples in the book of people coming together to face a threat to their communities such as an unwelcome housing or office development or unnecessary demolition, then using this new cohesiveness to launch something positive. But community cohesion can develop in other ways. Building links between people in existing communities through programmes such as Transition Together or  people with a shared vision such as low impact development or cohousing develop shared goals that see them through the difficulties they encounter.

Of course there are ways of building and laying out homes that foster productive interactions. George Monbiot dealt with this in a recent article but most of the estates we want to turn into communities have already been built so our starting point must be the people themselves.

Transition promotes the use of local building materials.  How big a part do you think they will play in the future, or can industrial materials do things that more local, natural materials simply cannot do?  How purist should we be?

One of the points I make in the book is that we need to reduce the embodied energy in new homes and refurbishments as well as everyday energy consumption. An ‘eco-home’ built with high energy fossil fuel based materials may consume very little energy in the long term but it will take decades to pay back the carbon debt created by building the house in the first place – and climate change is a problem NOW! Even if the problem of carbon emissions was not so urgent why develop a dependency on construction methods and materials that will be unsustainable with the end of cheap oil?

Local materials are vital to sustainable construction because you immediately reduce the transport emissions associated with materials carried from across the country or half-way round the world. What’s the true cost of slates from China or paving slabs from India when we include the environmental damage their production and transport cause?

Using local timber, straw, hemp, earth, stone, wool and a host of other materials also boosts local economies, helps create resilient communities and brings back a regional identity to our buildings. And many of these materials lock up carbon so new buildings and refurbishments can actually be carbon negative

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting a return to the cold and drafty buildings of the 18th or 19th century. We need a new synthesis of modern construction methods and traditional materials to create homes that are a pleasure to live in but don’t cost us the earth.

Some specialist materials and products – glass, photovoltaics, heat pumps – may best be sourced from outside the local area. We shouldn’t lay down rigid rules but use common sense. So no, we shouldn’t be purists, but neither should we give up too easily in the search for local and sustainable low energy alternatives.

In the book you tell the story of the TTT Building and Housing group and what it has achieved thus far.  You have been involved since early in its evolution, what lessons do you feel you have learnt about what is possible for such groups to achieve?

Wow! The sky’s the limit. Set realistic goals but never imagine that there are limits to what can be achieved. Build on what’s already happening in your area but don’t be constrained by it. Aim for a mix of education, practical action and inspiring projects. Remember that the dividing lines between different transition theme groups are arbitrary so don’t be afraid to work with other groups on joint projects. Be organised with regular business meetings, mailing lists, events and discussions and try to involve as many people in conducting the business as possible. This creates a sense of ownership and involvement and prevents a few people getting burnt out because they are doing everything – but that applies to almost any campaigning organisation.

I think the key factor in the success of the Building & Housing Group in Totnes is that we have a solid core of people who have been involved for the past few years and just keep coming to meetings and getting involved in projects. How to build and maintain such a group will vary in each area and we don’t have any magic formula. Just use whatever mix of education, agitation, organisation and inspiration that works.

Any final thoughts you would like to share?

I’ve really enjoyed researching and writing this book and I hope people learn as much from reading it as I have from creating it. When we first discussed the idea of a book on sustainable housing for the Transition series I envisaged a very different end result from the book that will be published in a few days. So the book really is the product of what I came across while traveling around the country, trawling through the internet and talking to hundreds of people rather than just flesh on the bones of an original concept. I hope people beg, borrow or hopefully buy a copy and I really hope they’ll be kind enough to tell me what’s wrong with it!

Fred Pearce (2010) The Climate Files: the battle for the truth about global warming. Guardian Books.

The saga of the hacked, or leaked, emails from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) has gone on to become known, predictably, as ‘Climategate’.  This release of thousands of emails and documents, sceptics argued, proved that climate science was fabricated and fraudulent, and showed scientists deliberately falsifying data. The release of the emails just days before the Copenhagen climate talks couldn’t have been worse timed, and they were dissected endlessly online, often by people with little understanding of the science, selected quotes being used to dismiss climate science in its entirety as a wicked scam (here‘s one more lurid example of this). In this, the first book to look in depth at Climategate, Pearce offers a remarkably well balanced and up-to-date account of what really happened, what it all means and where climate science finds itself in the wake of the whole sorry saga.

The implications of Climategate are only just starting to really sink in.  What the emails revealed was that climate scientists can be as territorial, unpleasant, defensive and bitchy as the rest of us.  For anyone who thinks that teachers, for example, in the privacy of the staff room don’t discuss some of their students in rather derogatory terms, or lawyers, or nurses or whoever… this may come as a bit of a shock.  Climate scientists are shown in the emails as having, on occasion, refused to comply with Freedom of Information requests for them to share their data sets, misused their position to try and keep papers they diasgreed with out of journals, and generally tried to shut up shop in the face of a barrage of demands from climate sceptics.  Pearce, in spite of being a leading writer on climate change himself, is frank in his assessment that some of the behaviour within UEA was not up to the standards expected, and has put the process of peer review in a very bad light.

It is clear that several years before the release of the emails, relationships between the scientists and the sceptics had already broken down, and levels of animosity had reached such levels that it gets rather hard to start telling right from wrong.  Like a ‘family at war’ on the Jeremy Kyle Show (such as this one), relationships had soured, and people were happy to block other people’s work on principle, and had started acting so unreasonably that nobody emerges from this story with very much credit.

Pearce does a great job of explaining just what it was that everybody was arguing about.  Much of it relates to what is called ‘paleo-climatology’.  While we have climate data, temperatures and so on for the past 160-odd years (“since records began”), it is the detective work required to build up a picture of temperature changes further back in history that is the source of much rancour.  Debates revolve around which data is used to build up that picture, tree rings data being a bone of particular contention.  Sceptics and critics point to Mike Mann’s famous ‘hockey stick’ graph and argue that he cherry picked the data in order to show flat temperatures followed by the more recent spike, an accusation which Mann himself has argued against for years.  Pearce explains patiently and clearly what all this means, and the different sides of the debates.

The key question of course is whether any of this proves that climate science is wrong, or is part of some vast shadowy conspiracy to usher in a One World Government, or some such nonsense.  Pearce is clear:

“none of the 1,073 emails, or the 3,587 files containing documents, raw data and computer code upsets the 200-year-old science behind the “greenhouse effect”. We might wish it weren’t so, but the world still has a problem.  A big problem”.

This is a point also made by George Monbiot in this recent interview:

The world continues to warm, the first half of 2010 having been the hottest ever recorded.  Evidence of other feedbacks and indicators of rapid warming continue to accumulate – Climategate has done nothing to undermine the science.  Indeed if anything, as this recent report from WWF shows, the science published since IPCC’s fourth assessment in 2007 suggests a far graver picture than that set out in that report.

‘The Climate Files’ does occasionally feel like it was written in a hurry, rather like books about celebrities lives that emerge weeks after their demise, with no index and the odd typo, but the advantage of that is that it is right up-to-date with developments.  Pearce’s style is clear and patient, and although I picked up the book in order to gain a clear overview of the story and implications of Climategate, I found I also picked up a great deal about climate change and the debates within the science.  Clearly, he argues, something went horribly wrong here.  The levels of openness, the practice of good science and, as he explicitly states, the levels of basic human courtesy, were not what one would expect from scientists of such repute.

Pearce argues that in moving forward from the mess of the past 9 months, given the damage and disrepute it has caused not just for climate science, but for science in general, a new principle of openness is required, in effect, the ‘Open Sourcing’ of climate data, the opening up of datasets and information, a new spirit of collaborative learning.  This, Pearce argues, is actually one of the key objectives of the new generation of climate sceptics, who are not like the older generation of sceptics, often funded by petrochemical interests to ‘manufacture doubt’ (watch Naomi Oreskes’s excellent presentation on ‘manufactured doubt’ here), but who rather see themselves as ‘liberators of data’, arguing for the open sourcing of all climate-related data.

‘The Climate Files’ is a highly readable, fascinating account of an event which has been spun by so many different people as meaning so many different things, depending on their views about climate change.  Is it the ‘smoking gun’ that proves climate change is all a conspiracy?  Does it prove scientific fraud on an unprecedented scale?  Or does it show that climate scientists are, in fact, human, and that when put under pressure, sometimes people don’t behave to the standards they would otherwise observe?  Pearce’s book is clear, fair and balanced, and a fascinating account of this whole sorry saga.  Essential reading for anyone with an interest in climate change, and a reminder of why alongside good scientific practice we also need to value civility and courtesy.

You can also hear Fred Pearce, along with some of the other key players in ‘Climategate’ in the podcast of the excellent debate hosted recently by the Guardian in London, which explored many of the issues raised in the book, here.