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.

[Here's a great story from Portugal.  My thanks to Isabel and Luis for sending it in]. Hello everyone. We are Isabel and Luis, from Cascais, in Portugal. We have lived here (in Cascais) for the last 15 years, with the blue sea and fabulous sand beaches nearby, on one way and amazing mountain sides on the other, sensing the earth and the sea …

… watching beautiful sunrises and sunsets (more sunsets now than sunrises, since our recent embraced work tends to keep us awake till late hours)…

… and live with the constant presence of our history,…

… feel the life in the community and taking part in it,…

 … and watching how climate change is taking its toll with some hot waves in the Summer (2003 was indeed the worst, but some others have already followed) and the sea leaving some of the beaches without much of the sand in the Winter (like in 2010).

Well, as we were saying,… we were thinking how sustainable our lives should be to keep being as good as they have been until then, and so that our two children (with six and three years old) could keep on growing with at least the same chances of having a good and safe future as we did back in the time when we were growing up.

By April of 2010 we knew that our municipality was starting a community garden program and we applied ourselves to it. On July 2011, we were called up to start the program formation on organic farming and we haven’t stopped gardening our vegetables since then.

In fact we have quite a group there, with some good friendships developing and lots of celebrations to bless our crops.

Meanwhile, about that same time, I (Isabel) came in contact with the Portuguese permaculture and transition groups over the Internet… and I found a new world that looked like it was just there waiting to be found!… For years I had been searching for such kind of knowledge and practical information and… there it was!…

On September 17th and 18th took place the Transition Initiative Course in Sintra, but although an attractive theme, it was still just an idea for me.

On November of 2011 I took notice of a meeting of the local (Cascais) Transition Initiative and I knew I had to come. Until then I had never left what I thought was my comfort zone. And then… I found Transition. After that meeting, Transition grew on me.

On early January of 2012, this time with Luis and the kids coming along, we went to another group meeting, where the core group assumed the disintegration of the existing Initiative.

Later on that month, after some thoughtful consideration, we (Luis and I) looked at each other and… as Rob says “if there is no Transition Initiative in your town, start your own” and so… We did!

From late January we started “Cascais em Transição” group on Facebook, we picked up the existing blog (from the previous group), and on early February we went to the Lisbon Initiatives Meeting and were invited to be on the National HUG (HUB) Meeting, the day after. It was so good meeting all of those whom became our Transition companions and they gave us such levels of inspiration and strength to go on with our new mission in Cascais!… We returned home with our hearts full of joy and motivation to carry on our work.

In the beginning of March we saw our Initiative group grow to six members and on March 23^th and 24^th we, Luis and I, did the Initiative Training Course in Linda-a-Velha.

In early April we, on behalf of the ‘Cascais em Transição’ Initiative, presented a proposal to the Cascais Municipality Budget 2012, a program started in 2011 by the Local Government to motivate local residents to have a more active citizenship, to participate in the local decisions and have a saying on how the local funds are spent. This year we presented a proposal and it was approved after being initially voted in the first presenting session!…

Here is Luis presenting the proposal (and you can see the satisfaction on his face, once we knew it had been approved).   

What we are trying to do with this proposal is to pass a vote on a decision to convert a local urban park and to create renewable energy infrastructures on the existing buildings and others like community gardens and community composting area, community wood ovens, cycling school, and a place or building where we can start some sensibilization and capacitation activities.

Now the proposal will be technically evaluated by the municipality budget department and after that it will be voted through the internet by the resident constituents. We shall know the final results in October.  By that time we also concluded we needed a Logo and we needed it fast if we wanted to have an image that presented ourselves to the outside as a Transition group. And this is what we came out with:

Still, on 17^th of March 2012 we were invited by the organization of ‘MUSA CASCAIS’ Festival to join them on a tree plantation campaign to neutralize the carbon footprint of the Festival.  It was quite a group of people gathered in this cause.

 Here is Miguel and Sofia planting their first cork oak trees with mum and dad.

 And here is our Mayor, Carlos Carreiras, carrying the oak trees up the hill. He turned to be quite a dedicated man. On that day he said that he wanted to plant one tree for each newborn child in Cascais while he was in office. Since that number had already been exceeded (65.000), he set a new goal: to plant one tree for each resident. We are 268.000.

On the May 5^th we invited all of Transition Initiatives of the Lisbon Area to join us in celebration for the national (and simultaneous) exhibition of the ‘In Transition 2.0’ film. It took place in the Cascais Cultural Center and it was followed by a picnic in the park where we all gathered afterwards and talked about it, exchanging experiences, expectations and points of view about what we had seen.  It had a good audience, with lots of friends from other Transition Initiatives, and not only from Lisbon, which left us grateful for their presence and for the outcome.

Now, about our most recent adventure on behalf of our Transition Initiative …

After planting some trees to help to neutralize the carbon footprint of the ‘MUSA Cascais’ Festival’, and since ‘MUSA Cascais’ is and has been from 2006 onwards strongly advocating in favor of sustainability, and of an active response to global warming and climate change – its tag is “Preocupas-te?” or “Do You Care?” – this year, we decided to propose to the organization of this Festival to land us a place or a stand in the grounds of the event, where we could promote Transition and demonstrate its practices.

When we met, instead of discussing the conditions or accepting our request, they proposed to us to go a “little” bit further in our ambitions and asked us to speak to our national HUG to know if, as a growing civic movement, we would be interested in turning ‘MUSA Cascais’ into a wide and transversal Transition Festival.

In such short notice, this year, with the help of the other portuguese local Initiatives we will all be able to raise a stand representative of the Portuguese Transition, capable of a good deal of promotion and demonstration of our Transition standards in this Music Festival.  Next year, with time, preparation and due efforts, we hope we will be able to share with the world our first Transition Festival.  This is the current lineup of this year MUSA Cascais’ Festival and it is not closed yet.

What can we say…  That good chances only unveil to those who stand with open heart and mind to what life can accept of them.

A big HUG from Portugal

Isabel and Luis Gonçalves

“Hello.  I want to tell you a story which pulls together a lot of what we’ve heard already and looks at what that might look like in the context of one place. And it’s a story which I think can change the world. It’s a story which already is changing the world. It’s the story of my town, Totnes, in Devon.  A town of about 8,500 people, midway between Exeter and Plymouth.   But before I can tell you the story I really want to tell you about Totnes, I have to get another one out of the way first. 

Totnes was once referred to as the “Capital of New Age Chic”, that’s ‘chic’ not ‘sheep’. The idea of a “Capital of New Age Sheep” is too horrible to imagine. The Western Morning News, the local paper, in an article which I’ll be coming back to later, once referred to the average resident of Totnes as a “sandal wearing, crystal gazing soap carver subsisting entirely on brown rice and organic parsnips”. And Matt Harvey, our local poet, says that when you’ve lived there too long your body starts to secrete a hormone called ‘Totnesterone’, where your masculine and feminine come into perfect balance with each other.

But I think it’s really important that we move beyond the stereotypes of the town into another story that is happening there, which I think is really, really important. Totnes has a much higher than the national average number of families depending on part time work rather than full time work, has 50% more families living below £20,000 a year than the national average, very high house prices, and has seen most of its industry, most of its employment shut down over the last 15-20 years. The bacon factory, the milk factory, the art college, to a point where local businessman and historian Walter King talks about whether what we’re seeing is “the long, slow death of Totnes as a living working town, gathering pace”. And it’s that story, that context that I really want to talk about.

My role in this, I suppose started in 2005 when a friend and myself started showing some films about peak oil, about the idea that we are reaching the end of an age of cheap energy and all that that has made possible. We’re entering a time of increasingly volatile energy prices and that what we need to do with focus, determination, optimism and a sense of possibility is design the way that we’re going to get away from that. Same in terms of addressing climate change.  (Points to slide) It’s the very first talk that I gave in the town and it’s a story that has really started to build from that point because ultimately there is no cavalry coming to the rescue of places like Totnes, of most places where you live.

The current economic situation, these kind of issues around peak oil and climate change, what we really need to do, I would argue, is to harness, engage the collective genius of the people around us and focus on these challenges, seeing them as an enormous opportunity to be more brilliant than we’ve ever been, to do something which is really, really historic.  What I want to do is show you a very short little animation from the film that we’ve just released which is called ‘In Transition 2.0’ which hopefully captures rather creatively how transition approaches making change happen on the ground.

[Audio from video clip] “You can think of the economy of the place that you live as being like a big bucket and into that bucket go pensions, wages, grants and so on, but at the moment things like supermarkets, paying our electricity bills, internet shopping are all drilling holes into that bucket that means that our accumulated wealth and its potential are just draining away. And everywhere that there’s a leak in that bucket is a potential local livelihood, potential local business or a training opportunity for young people. So things like supporting community energy companies, supporting local food where it’s available and boosting that where it is and using local currency are all very skilful ways of plugging the leaks in that bucket.”

So from quite early on of doing Transition Town Totnes as it started to be known, we had a big event called ‘The Unleashing’ which was our launch event and from very early on, very quickly projects started going, people were excited, they were inspired, they wanted to see thing happen where they were. There were projects like the nut tree planting scheme where we wanted to plant productive trees throughout the town. There are now 250 planted, looked after by people who are close to them. A lot of local businesses paid to have them planted. And we had our first harvest of almonds from a park in town last autumn.

The Totnes Pound, the local currency scheme, specifically designed not to fit out through those holes in the bucket because if we take them anywhere else they’re not worth anything. You can’t use local currency, you can’t put it in offshore banking accounts, they‘re not very useful in the Cayman Islands!  A Local Food Directory so people can identify and support local food businesses. A co-housing group looking to build affordable co-housing for people as part of the local development. Awareness raising things like Open Eco-Homes, Open Edible Gardens where people can go and visit other people’s places where they’re already doing that stuff and learn from it. The Garden Share scheme where people who have a garden that they’re too elderly or too busy to use, are matched with people who want to grow food and don’t have anywhere to grow it. And that’s been going really really well.

In 2009, when this had been going for about 3 years, we did a survey and we found that 75% of people in the town had heard of what we were doing, 62 % of people agreed with it, thought it was a good idea, and about 30-33% had had some kind of engagement with it at some point. But stories started to reach us of how it was being picked up in other places. And my favourite was the daughter of a woman who is very active in the local churches went on holiday to Canada, a canoeing holiday. She was out in the middle of one of the great lakes, canoeing along, middle of nowhere, sees another canoe thinks “I’ll be sociable”, I’d better go over and say hello, paddles over, gets chatting “Where are you from?”  “Totnes”. “Oh, Transition Town Totnes?”  And it’s amazing how that story has rippled out.

But very quickly we needed to put some foundations under this, this was something that was starting to grow very very quickly and it had a lot of interest, both within the place and from outside people coming along and saying “What do you do?”, “How does that work?”. So Transition Town Totnes was set up as an organisation to offer project support, it’s a ’do-ocracy’. The people who make the decisions are the people who are doing stuff. It employs one and a half posts at the moment, and has brought in, I reckon, about one million pounds to the town over the last five years, and has rapidly become one of the pillars locally of local culture I think.

When we started doing Transition I was always imagined it was an environmental thing.  More and more I see it as being a cultural thing, really more and more I see it as being a cultural thing.  How do you change the story of the place where you are? And within that there’s a whole process of ’we can start lots of different projects’ but what does it look like if we start to see them all together?  If we can create a vision, if we can create a story that the people in the place can start to resonate with, it starts to make sense.

And we’ve done 2 things that have been really sort of strategic pieces around design. One of them was the Energy Descent Action Plan which you can find online, which involved many hundreds of people in trying to envision what the place could be like if we take peak oil, climate change, our economic situation as a huge opportunity to be brilliant. And the other one is called the Economic Blueprint that we’re doing at the moment which is actually now the local council’s Economic Blueprint.

What’s exciting with that is that for the first time that I’m aware of it’s starting to map the potential of the local economy. What passes through it and how could we start to cycle that more locally if we can start to plug some of the leaks?  So what are the initial findings for example?  Every year the area spends £30 million on food.  £20 million of that goes out through just 2 supermarkets. If we could start to shift just 10% of that spent to local food, we’ve brought £2 million into our local economy. We haven’t had to get government grants in, we haven’t had to invite big companies in, we’ve got £2 million in our economy for creating skills, trainings, new livelihoods and new enterprises. That feels like, to me, like a really big, really important idea of our time.

And one of the projects we did a couple of years ago which I think is really really interesting, this is after starting an organisation focussed on community responses to peak oil and climate change, is this thing called ‘Transition Streets’. Transition Streets is based on the idea that maybe change sticks better if you get together with your neighbours and it works on a street by street level.  So you get out on your street, you knock on the doors, you get between 6 and 10 people/households together and you agree to meet 7 times in each other’s houses.

You look at water one week, energy another week, food another week and you make pledges at the end of each session about what you’re going to do. And on average each household that gets involved cuts their carbon by about 1.3 tonnes and saves themselves about £600.  500 households have done this now. That becomes a very significant reduction towards the town’s emissions. But when I meet people in the street who’ve done it, they don’t say: “Oh, it’s great Rob, we did Transition Streets, we saved 1.3 tonnes of carbon, we’re feeling really pleased with ourselves. So great, we really feel we’re doing our bit.” What they say is: “it’s great, I now know Sandra over the road, Dave over the road, you know we’re doing this thing, I didn’t know him, he’s such an interesting guy, he does this and he knows all of this and he’s shown me how to do that.” And all that social side of it is what comes to the fore.

When we asked people in a report at the end that pulled together all the learnings from it “why did you get involved in Transition Streets?”, the key answer was “because I wanted to know my neighbours better.” And when we asked them “What were the key benefits you feel that you got out of being involved in that?” and we turned it into one of those clever Word Cloud things,  ‘Community’, ‘neighbours’, ‘getting to know’.  ‘Climate change’ doesn’t even register, ‘peak’, a tiny little word in the bottom corner, which for me is really really fascinating, that maybe in terms of making change happen, there is a different way of doing it which is about something which is kind of infectious and sort of viral and fun and contagious in that way. I’m using lots of disease analogies and I’m not trying to but they seem to be coming to my mind quickly!

And what we’re really focussing on now increasingly is about how do we make a new economy a reality in the town? If the cavalry aren’t coming, how do we do that? What does it look like if we start to put that in place? So things are now happening like the Totnes Renewable Energy Society, which now has 500 members and is about to put in for planning for 2 wind turbines on the edge of the town.

Transition Tours, which is about turning the many people who come to Totnes to find out about TTT, put on a really good experience for them in such a way that means we don’t kind of drown in it. Transition Homes which is a development looking to build 20 affordable houses but using predominantly local materials, because in the same way when we talk about food, localising food brings more money cycling into our economy, exactly the same thing works for building materials.

We’re seeing businesses starting to emerge through the kind of culture that’s been created of saying “we need new enterprises for this, who’s up for that?”.  We recently held a thing called the ‘Local Entrepreneur Forum’, where we brought together people with business ideas in the town, about 40 people who had great ideas for different enterprises with local potential investors and mentors to really try and kick start what this new economy could look like. We have a micro brewery project which is in the offing, The Kitchen Table which is really about catering but trying to catalyze lots of other things around local food as well.

It’s looking for businesses which have a number of criteria, that they’re about:

• promoting local resilience
• that they’re low carbon
• that they are not just purely for personal profit
• that they are working within natural limits
• promoting localisation, and
• that they’re about bringing assets into the local community.

I’m really glad I remembered all 6 of those, because lots of people talked about their anxiety dreams in advance. My anxiety dream before TED was that DeLaSoul came round to my house to stay for the night, the 80‘s rap trio, and I couldn’t find enough bedding for them. And so the fact that I’ve remembered all those things is great, I’ve broken through that barrier, that’s fantastic!

And when I was preparing this talk I asked various people “What were their highlights of being around this process for the last 5 or 6 years?” One person said it was the event at the end of Transition Streets where we showed a film called ‘Start something together’ which you can find on YouTube, which documents that process.  All the people from all the different Transition Streets came together to the Civic Hall and had a big kind of celebration. She said that she was almost moved to tears by the energy that that had created. Another friend of mine who organised a hustings event in the run up to the election where we invited all the local candidates rather than just having them sit there answer questions, we talked about this, about the kind of economy we wanted to create for the place, and then asked them “how are you going to support that, how are you going to help that into being?”

My personal highlight was this headline from the Western Morning News, the lead editorial no less, which contained this sentence: “In an interesting twist to the climate change debate, communities and individuals once seen as quaintly idiosyncratic for their way out views, have now become mainstream and may yet provide some of the answers to the biggest questions we all face”.

One day a German guy came, about 2 years ago, into the office of TTT. He said: “I have come all the way from Germany to see the famous Transition Town Totnes and you still have cars!” Well, you might like to temper your expectations a little bit you know!  But it’s really interesting reflect over the last 5 years about how this has spread. And the best kind of analogy that I can come up with is like mycorrhiza, an incredibly fine fungus, one of the main things which gives forests their resilience, it gives soil their resilience. If I had an inch cube of mycorrhiza-rich soil here it would contain 10 miles of mycorrhiza. And what it does, it’s like a neural network between all the different parts of it that enable it to spread excess nutrients around, communicate risk, communicate disease or threats to it and so on, it’s an extraordinary thing.

In a sense Transition is a bit like inoculating a community with something like that in that it runs and so our German friend who came he was looking for all the fruits, but a lot of what it does, it runs under the surface, it fruits where you expect, but it also fruits where you don’t expect. Research that we did showed that for example when Transition Streets had only just started, it hadn’t had any publicity or anything, we did a focus group completely on the other side of town and a woman talked about the first place where we had a pilot going on and said ”it’s great over there, it’s like the war, they’re like a village, they have street parties and everything.” That sense had started to percolate through.   One local councillor I talked to said: “the best thing TTT has done is bring people together.”

If it had just been something that happened in Totnes, that wouldn’t really have been that much use, but actually what happened is something has germinated there, has spread and spread and spread. There are now Transition initiatives in 34 countries, thousands of initiatives places all of this in their own context, whether it be Brazil or Barcelona, Bologna or Brixton, and using it to create their own banks, their own energy companies, their own food systems and so on. It’s an exhilarating thing to see and observe the spread of.

It’s a story which is able to bring 300 people from the town out about 2 weeks ago down onto the former derelict industrial site in the town for a big photograph to launch a campaign about bringing this site, which used to employ 163 people back into community ownership. To develop it as a catalyst for a Transition economy for the town, what we call the Atmos project.

It’s a story which is really about communities seeing community resilience as where their economic future lies. And Jay Tompt who works with us, wrote a beautiful blog about it which contained this sentence I wanted to read to you:

“There is plenty to keep and our children busy for a long time to come, the important thing is that we’ve begun, we know that we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for, so we’re just doing it, we don’t need the cavalry, we’re already here”.

So this has really been a process about ordinary people and a process that has dirt under its fingernails and has seen the opportunity this time around, it’s a really really exhilarating thing to be part of.  I just want to finish with one of my favourite quotes which is from my children’s favourite story book which is ‘Comet in Moominland’, written in 1946 by Tove Jansson. I think captures what the essence of Transition more than any academic paper on the subject I ever heard or I’ve ever written about it.

“It was a funny little path winding here and there, dashing off in different directions, sometimes even tying a knot in itself from sheer joy. You don’t get tired of a path like that and I’m not sure that it doesn’t get you home quicker in the end.”

Thank you very much.

Here is some updated information on the Festival of Transition:

The nationwide ‘Festival of Transition’, coordinated by nef (the new economics foundation) and the Transition Network, has begun, running until 20th June, the first day of the 20th UN Earth Summit in Rio.   Instead of flying to Brazil, the Festival gives people the opportunity to do something positive about climate change and the economic crisis in their own communities.

The Festival is a unique mixture of walks, talks and a DIY day of action on 20th June.  It combines a series of organised events at festivals, museums and institutions around the country with an open invitation to schools, workplaces and community groups to stage their own ‘real-life experiments’ in living differently on 20th June.  Full details of Festival events can be found at http://www.festivaloftransition.net.

The ‘What if?’ events include:

• 19^th/20^th May (this weekend!) at the Bristol Festival of Ideas: ‘What if… we left the oil in the ground?’ with author James Marriot and ‘What if…  we could create money as well as the banks?’ with nef and the newly launched Bristol Pound
• 30^th May at the Hay Festival: ‘What if… we turned back the climate clock?’ with poet Lemn Sissay and Greenpeace chief executive John Sauven and ‘What if… cities produced our food?’ in association with the Soil Association

• 6^th June at the Royal  College of Art: ‘What if… creatives redesigned economics?’ with nef and Occupy Design
• 13^th June at the Museum of East Anglian Life: ‘What if.. the sea keeps rising?’
• 14^th June at Manchester Museum: ‘What if… Manchester was as sustainable as Havana?’

 The ‘Transition Walks’ include:

• 22^nd May: ‘In the shadow of the City: A walk through the history of the Corporation’,  with author Nick Robins
• 23^rd May: ‘On London’s Oil Road: A journey to the heart of the energy economy’, in association with Platform London

Community groups and Transition initiatives have already started pledging to stage 24-hour experiments in living differently on 20th June via the Festival website.  Does your Transition initiative have any plans to do anything?

Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation said:

“This summer thousands of people will fly to Brazil to wait and watch as politicians struggle to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, hoping for action to meet the scale of the climate crisis. International political action is vital, but we’ve moved beyond leaving it all to big, global conferences. People are impatient and want to take action themselves. The Festival of Transition is an opportunity to question, taste, and experiment with living better within life-preserving environmental limits. We believe that once people take a first step, they’ll want to keep on walking.”

What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century?  While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site.  However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it).  The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself.  As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.  

I often use the analogy, in terms of food, of a cake.  Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it.  What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing.  In the same way that for food we need to urgently reverse this, for many reasons that will be only too familiar to regular readers of this blog, the same can be argued for building materials.

In the case of these alms houses in Sherborne, it literally was the building’s ‘icing’ that caused the difficulties.  With about 30% of UK road freight now due to the movement of construction materials, many of which already have a high level of embodied energy, I’d like to argue here that we need to think about construction in the same way we are starting to think about food, specifically in the context of the Atmos Project, a community initiative I am involved in in Totnes.

Historically, as well as being the only option people had, the use of local materials also led to the evolution of vernacular styles of building, so that each region had its own distinct styles of building, rooted in materials, culture and tradition.  As John and Jane Penoyre note in ‘Houses in the Landscape’ “in these simple buildings the available materials are the principal dictators of style”.  Mark Gorgolewski writes in The Green Building Bible:

“… as materials closer to their natural state will tend to have had less processing, which often means less energy use, less waste and less pollution.  Local materials can reduce the need for transport and benefits the local economy and community”.

Christopher Day writes that “local materials minimise transport energy, suit local climate, support local employment and society and reinforce locality identity, anchoring buildings into local culture … so roundwood instead of sawn, adobe or brick instead of concrete”.  As well as having far less embodied energy due to requiring so little transportation, they also often have far less embodied energy in their manufacturre, as the graph below showing overall CO2 emissions by weight [kg] released by production of 1 kg of twenty-four common building materials demonstrates (source).  Note that those materials on the right hand side actually lock up more carbon than they emit (depending on how far they are transported of course, a strawbale house in the UK built with Turkish bales would clearly not qualify):

Then there’s also the aesthetics.  The other day I was in Marlborough in Wiltshire, and took a walk around the town.  It is easy to be nostalgic about old buildings, and to assume that they are so characterful and attractive simply because they are old.  I would argue that the ambience that comes through in some of the photos below has more to do with the materials than with the age of the building.

The combination of brick, timber and cobbles is far more attractive than just one single material.

Clay wall tiles that were fired in kilns with variable temperatures produced tiles of a range of colours, from black to orange, which gives the tiled surface much more richness.

This timber frame house is a beautiful example of how the materials available locally dictated the design of the building and its character.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the use of natural and local building materials in recent years.  Cob building, strawbale, lime plasters, roundwood timber, hemp, clay plasters, have all experienced a renewal of energy, but are still almost only ever used in self build projects, and have yet to cross over into mainstream construction.  Yet, as Gill Seyfang points out, they are still very much in a niche and what is needed is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”.  She argues for the natural/local building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime”.  Key to that will be scale.

Of course, running alongside the discussions about materials is the need to create truly low carbon buildings, in their construction, their inhabitation and eventual demolition/recycling.  The Larch and Lime houses built recently in Ebbw Vale are passivhauses (Larch House right), that is they are built in such a way as to require no space heating.  When I talked to the architect behind them, Justin Bere, he told me that most of the materials were local (stone, slate, locally made Rockwool etc) but hadn’t veered too far into the world of very local and natural materials.  Part of the reason for that is that for the kind of accurate modelling needed for passivhaus certification, data for many of these materials doesn’t yet exist.  I would argue that this is a pressingly urgent area for new research.

Enter the Atmos Project.   For the past couple of months, as well as my Transition Network stuff, I have been working a day a week on the Atmos Totnes campaign.  Atmos has been running for the past 5 years, since Dairy Crest closed their 8 acre site next to Totnes station, and since when it has sat and become more and more of an eyesore (you can read the story so far here).  The Atmos Project, as it became known, due to it being home to a building built to house Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s experimental ‘atmospheric railway’, has sought to bring the site into community ownership to develop it as a catalyst for new businesses in the town and as a demonstration of Transition in action.

The initiative did a lot of work, raised bits of funding to do design work, business planning and so on, but seemed to be getting nowhere due to the site’s owners’ unwillingness to engage seriously with the community.  So a couple of months ago we started a campaign, aimed to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the site’s owners.  We gathered voices from around the community, got a lot of media exposure, got people in the town out for a big photo opportunity and for a public meeting, and a couple of weeks ago, had a very positive meeting with Dairy Crest, and all of a sudden the project is moving forward with an energy that is a delight to see.

The tagline for the campaign has been ‘the heart of a new economy’, and it is seen as a development that in all that it does is focused on skills, training, the creation of new businesses and the boosting of the local economy.  It is of a scale where it can do some very exciting things in terms of construction.  One of the founding ideas is that the place that the development starts its very first question, is what are the local materials that we have to hand?  In the same way that I always used to teach on permaculture courses that the question should be “I’m going to cook a meal, what’s in the garden”, rather than “what’s in the fridge?”, that same principle could and should apply to building materials.

So, as the first part of the design process, and as part of what will form a key part of the brief for whoever ends up being the project’s architect, will be a list of the local materials available to such a project in Totnes.  We have commissioned a specialist in this to draw this up, including the places locally where they would be sourced.  My initial list off the top of my head is:

Timber: for construction grade timber, internal studwork, window and door frames, roofing shingles, laths, panelling, flooring, wattles, wood fibre insulation.

Clay: for rammed earth construction, cob walling, daubs, clay plasters, cob bricks, clay paints

Hemp: for use in hemp/lime construction, to make insulation, for hemp/lime or hemp/clay plasters and bricks

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

Reed: for thatching roofs, and also to make ‘reedboards’, an alternative to plasterboard

Lime: for plasters, mortars, renders, as well as in construction systems such as hemp/lime

Straw: baled, and used in ‘straw bale building’, chopped as an ingredient in plasters

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

Recycled Materials:  newspaper processed as an insulation product, car tyres, recycled bricks

It used to be that when a cathedral was built, a temporary village was built around it, with a stone masons’ quarter, a timber framers’ quarter and so on.  On the scale of something like the Atmos project, it may well be possible to do something very similar, processing the timber needed on site, making cob blocks, even hand-making tiles for external cladding.  If done skilfully enough, integrating training and apprenticeships, it could be a vitally needed new approach to development, especially when combined with the potential for the community to invest into the development.

Panels at Charing Cross tube station in London showing the various trades associated with the construction of Charing Cross in the late 1200s.

A development that from the outset seeks to source it’s metaphorical cake locally.  As the Euro crisis continues to unravel at a pace, as the academics are telling us that the only thing that will halt climate change is a massive economic downturn, or at least a huge rethink about how we make economic activity happen, we need a new approach to development.

Work in progress: Cob walls, hemp plaster on the walls, clay plaster onto lath on the ceiling, local timber window frames...

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion?  I think so.  I think the time is right for that, and that’s what we want to do with Atmos.  Watch this space.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at TedxExeter, a fantastic occasion with many great speakers (have a look at their website as more and more of the films from the day go online).  I spoke for the first time in detail about Totnes as a case study, and what, after 6 years, we can draw from the experience of Transition Town Totnes.  I hope you enjoy it.

In a recent interview with Transition trainer Sophy Banks she talks about how doing Transition can feel like having two feet on different conveyor belts moving in different directions.  She says “it’s like we have these two systems that are going in opposite directions, the system that’s still trying to get more growth, more material consumption, sell us more stuff … and another system that’s saying we need to put the brakes on, we need to slow down, and living in Transition means you’ve got a foot on both conveyor belts, and there’s a psychological stress in inhabiting those two world views at the same time”.  The other day I spotted a great example of this in an unlikely medium, Lego.   Lego pride themselves on being able to model most things in Lego, from Hogwarts to Atlantis, but I was fascinated to see that everyone’s favourite plastic block producers and vacuum cleaner bunger-uppers have succeeded beautifully but unwittingly in modelling the tension outlined by Sophy.  In the latest Lego catalogue, picked up by one of my kids in a toy shop recently, is the ‘Hillside House’.

It is a house, presented as, I imagine, the perfect modern home. But what struck me was that this is the first time I have ever seen a Lego house with solar panels on the roof.  It felt to me to be one of those junctures, one of those historic moments where you get a sense of a cultural shift beginning to move, the moment when Lego started fitting solar panels to their houses.  I feel honoured to be here to see it.

Perhaps, I thought when I first spotted it, Lego have ‘got’ Transition, have ‘got’ the need to model low carbon living in their creations, and are using their new models to subliminally promote a vision of a post oil world.  Although the level of clarity one is able to get with plastic blocks doesn’t really allow you to tell if they are photovoltaic cells or solar thermal panels, there they are, unmistakably gleaming on the roof.

However, look closer, and our new, enlightened Transition Lego Town starts to come a bit unstuck. They have a barbecue, fair enough, there’s nothing like a good bit of locally produced Lego charcoal, but ah, what’s that behind our smiling Lego man (who isn’t showing much sign of psychological distress)?

A Lego paraffin patio heater! (see right).  Gah!  All of a sudden, this whole Lego setup sets off the feeling of being on the two conveyor belts.  Of course it could be a rather odd and angular tree, but it certainly looks far more patio heater to me.

It is hard to tell if the car in the picture is a highly efficient electric vehicle charging from the Lego solar panels on the roof, or a gas guzzler, as the size of its tyres might suggest.  The windows of the house could indeed be triple-glazed Passivehaus windows, indeed the house could be built to that standard, but the whole picture feels to me to firmly have both feet on different belts, modelling the tension Sophy refers to.  We know that the world is changing, that we are entering a ‘new normal’, where renewable energy is becoming a part of everyday life, more woven into the culture, but at the same time things like patio heaters sit alongside them.

Personally, I’m looking forward to the Lego raised beds, where you can arrange your produce in the beds.  Rocket?  Mizuna?  Purple sprouting broccoli?  It’s all possible with the Lego Incredible Edible range.  Vertical veg growing up the walls?  No bother.  Indeed, it would then enable you to grow food on the roof of your Lego Hogwarts, or on the Death Star.  Some nice espalier fruit trees could be good too.  Some Lego blocks that look like wany-edged sweet chestnut boards would be great too.  You could give your Millenium Falcon some nice rustic touches.

Or of course you could just bin it, and build stuff out of mud and sticks.  Much more scope for creativity and you could always use old mobile phones as solar panels (or something).  The big question though, is whether the recent changes to the Feed in Tariff, which many argue has damaged the future of the solar industry, will lead to a reduction in Lego solar installations?  I will watch future catalogues with great interest.

Transition Streets has already been rolled out in places other than Totnes, but in a few weeks, a whole supported programme will be coming out whereby you will be able to run it in your community (I’ll let you know).  You can see the first section of the Transition Streets workbook here to get a flavour of it.  It is a great example of the tool from ‘The Transition Companion’ called ‘Street-by-street behaviour change’.

The main output from Transition Streets is the ‘Final project report’, which “shares information about the Transition Streets project, funded by the previous government’s Low Carbon Communities Challenge funded: how it worked, what it achieved, what was learnt and where we are heading next”.  You can find a summary of its findings here.  It is a very thorough round-up of the project.

However, the most fascinating to me is “Social Impacts of Transition Together (SITT): Investigating the social impacts, benefits and sustainability of the Transition Together/Transition Streets initiative in Totnes“,which goes into the more qualitative aspects of Transition Streets, what motivated people to get involved, what changes people made as a result of getting involved, what benefits individuals and groups actually experienced, what are the features of a successful group, what issues groups experienced and how they dealt with them, and finally, what role people see for their groups beyond their time doing Transition Streets.

When I meet people in town who were part of Transition Streets, they don’t enthuse about how much carbon they saved, they talk about the new social connections they have made, and that comes through really strongly in this brilliant piece of research.  People’s main motivations for getting involved weren’t climate change or peak oil, but were “building good relationships with my neighbours”.  The main benefit they pointed to from having been involved was social and community benefits.  Here is the word cloud thing from when people were asked what were the most significant benefits they experienced from taking part in Transition Streets.

See how tiny the word ‘peak’ is?  I think there are a lot of lessons to be learnt from the experience of Transition Streets.  It is the first really good piece of research and evidence of how the Transition approach works, and how it is about so much more than just reducing energy use.  These reports give a taste of perhaps where the skilfulness of Transition lies, in making Transition feel like where people are having most fun, where the laughter and the companionship is, where people feel they can connect with each other.  Perhaps the best analogy for that comes from what, for me, is one of the best sequences in the history of film, the opening sequence of Woody Allen’s ‘Stardust Memories’ (between 1:20 and 2:50).  Ultimately, people have a deep sense of which of the two trains they’d prefer to be on.

“Sunday May 13th 2012 will be declared “In Transition 2.0 film and information day” in Germany, Austria and Switzerland!  We kindly ask all German, Swiss & Austrian Transition initiatives to self-organize screenings of the movie at that date in their regions/towns/cities.  More info for the organizers (in German) & about the coordination here.

A screening in Bielefeld is already fixed; see details here.  We would love to generate a lot of broad, positive reviews and excitement about the movie and Transition in general at that date in the German-speaking region(s) of the world”.

From Transition Town Hannover, here is a short film called “Im Rausch der Rohstoffe”  which according to Google Translate means “In the intoxication of the raw materials”, which, erm, doesn’t really tell us very much.  Anyway, here it is:

… and here is an interview with Fabian from the local group:

From Holland, here is Paul Hendricksen speaking about a project he is involved with to build a new settlement of Earthships near Deventer:

From Ireland, Davie Philip from Transition Ireland and Northern Ireland National Hub reports that on March 22nd as part of the Ashoka Change Nation event, a number of Irish Transition catalysts met Rob Hopkins to discuss progressing a number of new Transition projects in Ireland.

While at Change Nation (which he wrote about here) Rob was interviewed for Ireland’s RTE Television:

Also, this Easter, Dermot Higgins and his son Fionn (from Rush, Fingal) will attempt to paddle across Ireland by kayak, from Dublin to Donegal (330km) in just six days.  The money they raise from their exciting expedition will go to their local Transition Town – Rush Open Organisation for Transition Status  (ROOTS). Read more in The Final Independent. Good Luck Dermot and Fionn!

From Portugal, here is a piece from the newsletter sent in by the Transition Portugal (a National Hub), entitled “In Portugal, creativity is used to find alternative ways of financing the 2-day Transition Launch Course”.   

Celebrating Spring, Transition Portugal stepped a little further towards a more sustainable and inspiring paradigm: during the weekend of 23/24th of March, the Linda-Velha Transition Initiative organized the 3rd Transition Launch Course in Portugal, the first led by Portuguese Trainers.

Adding to this special occasion, the organizing team and trainers decided to step outside of their comfort zone and test an alternative financing model inspired by the “Gift Economy”. Participants, who were also co-responsible for the course logistics (food and props), registered in the course paying a basic registration fee of €30 (confirming the intention and interest to enroll). At the end of the course, all people involved (including participants, trainers and organizers) were faced with the following question: “how much did this course worth for me; what are my true financial capacities; and how much am I going to offer to this course as a way of gratitude, supporting its continuity in the future?”

At the same time, the organizing team and trainers presented their ‘dream budget’ on the blackboard, specifying not only the real costs of goods acquired (mainly stationary) but also how much the organization and trainers would like to get for their work. The dream budget was €1290 … and a couple of minutes after… the sum collected was €1211 … Waw!!!… A dream came true… It did work!… Congratulations to everybody!

So in this time of change, notably for a country like Portugal, our recent experience demonstrates that blooming and flowering are here to stay. Lets show our dreams and colours! Trust we will be pollinated and tasty fruit will develop… Lets believe that bees will spread our pollen … Let’s create that magnificent Garden we envision to live in!

Reading Transition Town volunteers Charlotte Selvey, Sabrina Piergorossi and Ornella Trevisan in Palmer Park.

Over to the UK now, and TT-Reading have been busy planning sweet chestnut and walnut trees as part of their edible planting project in the town (see right).  In Cheshire, T-Wilmslow who were recently awarded a substantial grant from the Governments Local Energy Assessment Fund (LEAF), held a public meeting inviting local residents to share thoughts about the future resilience of the town.  In Derbyshire, T-Belper want to transform a local church car park in to an allotment and have met with a plethora of reactions from the towns councillors! Read more in the Ripley and Heanor News.

On the subject of tree planting, TT-Exmouth in Devon planted almost 50 trees opposite local Greenfingers Garden Centre who kindly provided a soup lunch to the many volunteers who turned out to dig.

TT-Honiton held a Seedy Saturday to mark Climate Week and to encourage people to swap and grow seeds. Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall (who wrote the foreword to The Transition Companion) just happened to be in the neighbourhood and popped in (see left).  See a full write up and more pictures on the TT-Honiton website by Rufus Duffin.  Here’s a film about the Seedy Saturday:

Rufus also writes here about a successful evening of lively discussion with Rebecca Hosking and Tim Green after a viewing A Farm for the Future.  Here are Rebecca and Tim and some of the group at the event:

L to R: Rufus Duffin (TTH), Rebecca Hosking, Tim Green, Geoff Wilmot (TTH), Christine Planel (TTH). Photo copyright M.Wilmot 2012

Transition Town Honiton also held a big tree planting event:

Transition Town Totnes (TTT) with the Totnes Development Trust have launched a 6 month campaign called the Atmos Project in a bid to transform a derelict site in the town to a low-carbon mixed development for the community. If you missed Rob’s blog on the launch, you can read it here. This story was also picked up This is South Devon, and as part of the campaign, every day a new ‘Atmos Voice’, a member of the community speaking about the campaign, is posted on the site.  Jonathan Dimbleby popped by to launch the campaign outside the site itself:

Here is a great video of A Little Patch of Ground, by Encounters-Arts, a Transition supported inter-generational food growing and performance project which took place just outside Totnes, on the Dartington Estate.  TTT also held, together with Transition Network’s REconomy Project, a ‘Local Entrepreneurs’ Forum’ at the town’s Civic Hall, which brought together entrepreneurs, mentors and potential investors.  You can read about how it went here, or watch this film of the occasion:

In Ashburton, Totnes’ neighbouring town, Ashburton Futures, part of the Transition Network, recently, thanks to the LEAF Fund which many Transition initiatives have benefitted from, have made a series of films about how to make a diversity of local house types more energy efficient.  One of the hosts is Fraser Durham of Anahat Energy, who is also an active member of TTT.  Here are a few of them:

To neighbouring Dorset, where in Blandford, the relatively fledgling TT group held a Local Food Evening to engage the community.  The picture below shows an activity to map all their local food producers and suppliers:

Also in Dorset, TT-Dorchester’s energy group held an information road show on retrofitting and much more.

Penrith Action for Community Transition (PACT) organised a ‘Big Spring Clean’, in association with Eden District Council, Churches Together and Soroptimists (who I must confess I’ve never heard of, but Google reveals is “an international organization for business and professional women who work to improve the lives of women and girls, in local communities and throughout the world”).  Here is a film about it:

In London, Transition Kensal to Kilburn held a ‘Big Dig’, at Queens Park Allotment where a group of volunteers prepared an allotment ready to plant vegetables.  Here is a great time-lapse film of it:

In Hertfordshire, TT-Berkhamsted held an event during Climate Week called ‘What On Earth should we do about Climate Change?‘, and in Kent, Tunbridge Wells just got its first electric vehicle charging point in the town.  Transition Harborough and the Rural Community Council are hoping to gain a substantial investment from the Big Lottery’s Communities Living Sustainably Fund. In this Green Building Press article you can read their many proposals for positively transforming the town.  There’s more on this story in the local Lutterworth Mail.

Transition Town Leamington's 'Wool Day'

TT-Leamington held a wool day where people could learn to the crafts of spinning and felting.  Also in Warwickshire, T-Shipston are saying no to a proposed supermarket moving in to their town.  Marsden and Slaithwaite Transition Town (MASTT) are running a ‘Warmer Homes’ campaign, looking at how to make the area’s hard to treat houses more energy efficient.  As part of that, the Green Building Store made the following video to promote the campaign:

Thanks to Anita van Rossum of T-Chichester, in West Sussex, for sharing this great video of some of their activities.

Over now to Canada.  TT Sooke on Vancouver Island, hold a regular Transition Town Café to discuss ideas and engage the local community.  TT-Powell River featured this great Self-Repair Manifesto on their website – a must for any Transition up cyclers and fix-it fanatics (see poster, right)!

Also in British Columbia, Nancy Hofer of TT Comox Valley recently presented to the CVEC. The Comox Valley Environmental Council is a 21 year old ‘Not for Profit Society’ which acts as an umbrella organization for 20 local environmental organizations and local Municipal and Regional representatives. Read more about the meeting here in Canada.com.  In Ontario, T-Guelph held their second Resilience Festival over two days, read more in the Guelph Mercury.

From Barrie, Canada, comes this presentation, seemingly filmed on a phone from the back of the hall, about Transition in Barrie:

… and also to mention, in case you missed it, the launch of Transition Prince Rupert’s new website and fantastic Transition crash-course they developed.  You can read about it here, or here is Lee Brain from the group to tell you all about it:

In Tasmania, Derek Leahy ponders five thought bubbles (one of which is Transition) and tries to connect the dots regarding the forthcoming Day of Action on tar sands on May 5^th.  TT-Guilford in Western Australia held a successful weekend to build community resilience with over 100 attendees.  From Victoria, while browsing  the TT-Maroondah website, we came across this wonderful banner:

To Brazil.  Thanks for Isabela Maria Gomez de Menezes for this wonderful story and picture from T-Brasilândia who celebrated a Beauty Day dedicated to the beauty and strength of the women of Brasilândia.

Here is the story in English:

The beauty day, was a day totally dedicated to the beauty and strength of the women’s of Brasilândia. The event honoring the month of women was organized by women of the Transition Brasilândia, in the community of Vila Teresinha in Brasilandia.

Throughout the day the visitors could enjoy the hairstylist and treatments offered by Institute Embelleze, and also learned how to make turbans and braids with the girls of the collective ”Manifesto Crespo”or the Curly manifest, with the project ”weaving and braiding art”, which enhances and strengthens the memory and afro brazilian self-esteem. They also had massage available and the women from the “Brasilianas”,  selling their products made with recyclable materials.

During the event, an street art artist from the community,   painted a wall with themes of the event.  Closing the day they raffle a free registration in a Gym Club and distributed seasonings seedlings provided by the Office of Sustainability, to promote the habit of cultivating food crops at home.

For the Transition US March roundup of what’s happening in Transition in the US, click here.  In California, TT- Berkeley celebrated their first birthday with a Potluck meal.  The event also doubled up as an informative get together for those wanting to know more about Transition and how to get involved.  Frances Bigda-Peyton of Bedford-TT (MA) writes an article following her attendance at a recent comprehensive plan workshop and suggests that resilience is crucial for the towns’ future. 

Also in MA, T-Ashland have started a new programme called Grounds around Town which is a fantastic and innovative way to make use of the towns used coffee grounds.  Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition held an event called Education not Deportation.  Canton Public Library in Michigan has been hosting a Transition Towns series and this month was Getting Started in Organic Gardening with Bettylou who says you don’t need lots of space to start growing food.  T-Keene (NH) has launched a Neighbourhood Food Security (NFS) program which has a very specific goal – to produce 30% of food locally by the year 2030.

T-Staunton Augusta (VA) are transforming an unkempt lot in to a New Town Community Garden. Co-founder Lindsay Curren (also of Transition Voice) is excited by the amazing response she’s had so far (see right).  T-Port Angeles (WA) held their first public meeting and over 100 people turned up!

Thanks to Trish Knox of T-Woodinville (suburb of Seattle, WA) for sharing this fantastic Valley Vegetables Demonstrate story:

Saturday morning at the old Hollywood Hill Schoolhouse roundabout, valley vegetables crisply demonstrated their concerns over the threat to farming and rural character posed by a recent Woodinville City Council vote. The carrot was heard to sprout that soon urban sprawl would overtake the vegetable’s precious valley and destroy farmers’ ability to purchase land at a reasonable price. Standing in support of the vegetables to squash the vote and beet back urban sprawl were Sammamish Valley Alliance, Transition Woodinville and The Hollywood Hill Association.  Trish is second from left in the picture below:

Photo: Lincoln Potter.

Finally, we’ll keep one of the best to last.  Here is a great film from Chile about Transition in a town called Pucon:

To keep up with developments in Transition between these monthly roundups, keep an eye on Transition Network News, Transition Network Projects and Transition Voice.  If you would like to hear more about any of these stories in the next podcast, please let us know. 

“We’re on a mission here now with this group.  We all are co-ordinated and there’s something powerful about having fifteen people completely dedicated to the degree where we all know we’re going to do absolutely what it takes to make this happen in our community”.

Transition Prince Rupert, in British Columbia, Canada, launches its website today. Nothing extraordinary about that you might say.  But the process that led to it, and its contents, are a story worth telling.  The interview I did recently with Lee Brain, a young man who is one of the group’s founders, was one of the most inspiring I have yet published here at Transition Culture.  So inspiring in fact that it is, in effect, this month’s Transition podcast.  In today’s installment, he gives a fascinating taste of what it looks like when an emerging Transition group gives over some time to getting the foundations of its work as solid as possible before proceeding any further.  Here is the interview:

You can download the full curriculum they developed here.  It is a quite brilliant piece of work.  Here are a few of my favourite quotes from Lee’s interview:

“That’s what I love about Transition the most.  It’s the absolutely unknown process, you never really know if you’re doing it right, you never really know what’s coming next, you have to take it one step at a time, and it all unfolds, and if you can just surrender to the process and to what happens and not be too attached to any one thing or another, it all just kind of magically unfolds perfectly.  The right people come, someone serendipitously knows someone who has the materials to build a greenhouse, things like that.  You’re kind of lost in it, yet at the same time grounded”.

“I feel this movement is going to absolutely define the early 21^st century to mid 21^st century, and I can’t ever see it slowing down.  I think it’s absolutely going to really take this planet to a whole new direction”.

“The role of effective process and the role of facilitation is actually THE most critical aspect of Transition, because how people communicate, how people come together as a group, and the first question they ask themselves should always be “how are we going to work together?” rather than “what are we going to do?”

The first day took place at the Guinness Storehouse, a kind of Guinness Museum/Conference centre which is one of Dublin’s main tourist attractions as well as a great space for events, and the second day at Dublin Castle.  Here are some of my highlights:

1.  The weather:  three days of beautiful, clear, Spring weather back-to-back is rare enough in Dublin, and the city looked amazing in the sunshine.

2.  The view of Dublin from the Gravity Bar at the top of the Guinness Storehouse: the best view in Dublin, in the round, absolutely stunning (here’s a picture of it I took on my phone that’s almost so bad it’s not worth posting.  Almost).

3.  Spending time with some of the 50 amazing social innovators who were there, Lily Lapena, doing great stuff with MyBnk, Brendan Dunford doing brilliant work promoting conservation on the Burren, Ignace Schops who is rethinking our ideas about nature reserves, Mary Nally who is redefining the role of older people in society, Mick Kelly from Grow It Yourself Ireland, Steve Collins with his innovative approaches to treating malnutrition, Geoff Cape who is doing amazing sustainable urban regeneration stuff, Thorkil Sonne who is turning autism into a competitive advantage in business, Bill Thomas, a “nursing home abolitionist”.  What an amazing honour to spend some time with them.

4.  Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny giving the welcoming address at Dublin Castle (see below).  Amazing to see the reach and the support that social enterprise has in Ireland in such a short time.

5.  Tim O’Connor telling everyone on the first day “we are broken and broke and that’s where we must begin”.  Good to have a dose of reality among the positivity.

6. Daniel Ben-Horin using, in a question during a panel discussion, the expression “feeling like the dog that caught the bus”.  This led to fantastic discussion, both among the people I was with, and also on Twitter, as to what on earth that meant.  Did it mean the dog had caught the bus tyre in its teeth and was trying to figure out what to do next, that the dog had got on the bus and was trying to figure out what to do next?  Turned out in the end it meant something like “be careful what you wish for”.  Very entertaining.

7.  The Conversations on Day 2, where each innovator got 45 minutes each with 5 different people, to discuss their work and how the innovator might be able to help.  It was an amazing selection of people Ashoka managed to get along, some of Ireland’s leading innovators and business people.  Hopefully some of what came out of mine will be useful to Irish Transition groups.

Some of the conversations underway at Dublin Castle

8.  Mary Robinson, former Irish President and now running the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice bringing climate change back to the fore, and the need to stay below 2°C.

9. The discussions as to whether this sign was a spelling mistake or if a ‘Protrait Gallery’ (see right) was some expression we’d not heard before that meant a lineup of professionals, or something.  Turned out it was a spelling mistake…

10.  The craic: Ashoka Ireland sure know how to throw a great party… great food, hospitality, drink, music, dancing.  Clearly it was all the result of a huge amount of work, the team were wonderful, and deserve at least a month off when it’s all over!

A fantastic couple of days, I was disappointed not to be able to stay for the third day, when it all opened up to the public.  I made some great connections and it was all so beautifully organised.  My thanks especially to Ross Curran who took such great care of me while I was there, and to Paul, Kathryn, Caroline and everyone who made it all possible.