‘Transition Together’, the street-by-street behaviour change programme developed by Transition Town Totnes and now being piloted in 10 other communities, has just completed analysing the data that has come back from the first 4 groups, comprising 32 households in Totnes.  They have completed all 7 of the sessions set out in the workbook, and the data offers a fascinating first look at whether the process works or not.  The results from the other 31 groups currently underway are expected this Autumn.  Here, Fiona Ward of Transition Together shares the results that have emerged. 

Carbon and financial savings so far

Total carbon savings pa: 38.9 tonnes

Total financial savings pa: £19,236

Average carbon savings per household pa: 1.2 tonnes

Average financial savings per household pa: £601

Projection – by the time all 35 groups or 278 households have completed the programme by end of Round 2 in March 2011:

Estimated total carbon savings pa: 338 tonnes

Estimated total financial savings pa: £167,109

One of the Bridge Road Transition Together group's meetings.

The carbon conversion ratings used have all been approved by CRED at the University of East Anglia (the guys behind the gov’s Act on Co2 carbon measures) and are conservative. We have not been able to apply credible carbon and financial savings to all actions therefore the actual results will likely be higher than reported here, and account mostly for home energy and water use savings.

This also doesn’t take into account that the household will likely take on  more of the carbon saving actions  in the workbook once the ‘official’ T-Tog programme has ended – e.g. some of the groups are going round a 2^nd time off their own initiative, and we are not tracking these additional savings. However, some of the actions are of course highly variable in savings, and we are more confident in some measures than others.

Numbers and types of actions

On average each households has undertaken 8 actions from the workbook (these are the only actions that we count in the figures above). They state they had already done, before starting T-Tog, 17 of the workbook actions and that they plan to do 2 more actions.

Top 5 most popular ‘new’ actions:

• Know how much energy you are using (monitor your usage in your home)
• Be a real turn off (always turn things off at the wall when not in use)
• Control your heat (know how to use your heating system and thermostat)
• Know how much you are using (monitor your water use at home)
• Buy local & seasonal foods

Bottom 3 least popular ‘new’ actions:

• Use car clubs
• Get on your bike – cycle don’t drive (tho this is highest ‘plan to do this’ item)
• Loft  insulation (most have already done it)

Top 3 ‘already done’ actions:

• Recycle (food, glass, plastics, tins…everything!)
• Washing clothes (full loads, low temps, wear clothes longer)
• Minimise food waste

Top 3 ’I plan to do this’ actions:

• Get on your bike – cycle don’t drive
• Draught proofing
• Grow your own

Qualitative feedback The 5 (of 10) measures on which we show most impact are:

• I feel well informed about peak oil and climate change.
• I understand how these 2 issues affect me, my family, my local community, and the planet.
• I know what practical, effective actions I can take to reduce the potential impacts on me/others.
• I’m aware there are simple, easy things I can do to reduce household costs – and I know how to do them.
• I feel positive about the future.

It is fascinating to note that from just the first 4 groups that have been assessed, total savings have been £19,236, pretty much what it took to develop and pilot Transition Together.  Given that it is estimated that by the time the 35 initial groups have completed the programme, total savings are projected to be £167,109, it is an impressive return on investment.  The Transition Streets project, which builds off the Transition Together project is now at the stage of installing PV arrays across Totnes, and during August the town’s Civic Hall will have its roof clad in PV, with a launch event in September.

For more information on Transition Together, or running the programme in your community, contact the T-Tog team….

5.4. Food:  Can Totnes Feed Itself?

“… to draw in our economic boundaries and shorten our supply lines so as to permit us literally to know where we are economically.  The closer we live to the ground that we live from, the more we will know about our economic life; the more we know about our economic life; the more able we will be to take responsibility for it”  (Berry 2010:35)

5.4.1. Introduction

Sections 5.4-5.7 now explore the practical application of the concept of intentional localisation, starting with food, then moving to building materials, and then energy and transportation.  What degree of localisation is possible, and what degree is, in fact desirable.  5.4 starts by looking at food, the most fundamental of the four.  Of the four, food is the one people are most familiar discussing in the context of localisation.  5.4 therefore explores the question of the practicalities of relocalisation in the greatest depth, in order to draw comparisons across to the other areas of study.

5.4.2. Conceptualising Local Food Systems

Few areas of modern life are debated as vigorously as the food system.  There are those who argue that the globalisation of the food system stimulates competition and results in cheaper food and wider choice.  This view was summed up by former DEFRA minister Margaret Beckett (2006:unpaginated), who told a 2006 conference;

“…it is freer trade in agriculture which is key to ensuring security of supply in an integrating world. It allows producers to respond to global supply and demand signals, and enables countries to source food from the global market in the event of climatic disaster or animal disease in a particular part of the world. …it is trade liberalisation which will bring the prosperity and economic interdependency that underpins genuine long term global security”.

Conversely, there are also those (Schlosser 2002, Heinberg & Bomford 2009) who argue that our food system is becoming steadily less resilient.  The UK government’s take on food security is moving more in the direction of taking national food security seriously as an issue.  In 2003, DEFRA argued that “national food security is neither necessary, nor is it desirable” (DEFRA 2003:unpaginated).  This perspective had begun to change by 2008, when a  Cabinet Office Strategy Unit (Cabinet Office 2008) analysis of food issues argued that “existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more resource-constrained future”.  DEFRA’s ‘Food 2030’ report (DEFRA 2010b:7) set out its vision for the future of the nation’s food and farming in 2030 thus

• Consumers are informed, can choose and afford healthy, sustainable food. This demand is met by profitable, competitive, highly skilled and resilient farming, fishing and food businesses, supported by first class research and development.
  • Food is produced, processed, and distributed, to feed a growing global population in ways which:
    • use global natural resources sustainably
    • enable the continuing provision of the benefits and services a healthy natural environment provides
    • promote high standards of animal health and welfare
    • protect food safety
    • make a significant contribution to rural communities, and
    • allow us to show global leadership on food sustainability
  • Our food security is ensured through strong UK agriculture and food sectors and international trade links with EU and global partners, which support developing economies.

However, the gulf between the more localised food system of the 1950s, still with its roots in the ‘Dig for Victory’ culture of World War Two (Viljoen 2005, Kynaston 2007), (more intimately revealed in the oral histories featured in the following quotes, the first offering a sense of what a small proportion of food consumed was imported), and just-in-time, carbon intensive, long supply chain supermarkets (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002) remains profound.

“Looking back, practically all our food came from this area.  We had a couple of house pigs that ate the rubbish.  A local chap would come by, cut their throats and cut them up, and make bacon and hams.  We used to preserve it in saltpetre, the wives would make a salt solution and baste it every 2 days, then it was put up on hooks in the dairy to dry.  I still have the hooks out there now.  I suppose we might have had an orange on very special occasions.  Our main meal was lunch, not supper, if the husband worked at home.  Evening meals were a professionals’ thing.  Lunch was normally roast beef, mutton, hot or cold.  Hot or cold chicken, stews, potatoes and veg, peas and beans, potatoes baked or boiled.  We ate meat every day, hot or cold, depending on how the husband and wife were getting on! For tea we had bread and butter, jam and cream.  For breakfast it was bacon and eggs.  Supper was just a snack meal, bits and pieces of what you liked.  For fruit we had apples, pears and plums.  Apples could be kept all year round.  They were kept in a cellar under the house.  Certain kinds of pears could be kept.  We had greengages and plums; we usually made those into jams”.

Oral History Quote 5.1. A Local Diet in Staverton in the 1940s.  (Source: author’s oral history interview with Douglas Matthews).

The major trends in food of the past few decades include the intensification of agriculture, accompanied by a concentration in the control of agricultural inputs, and a trend to larger farm sizes with hired labour globally, accompanied by increasing fragmentation among marginalised smallholders (Wilson 2007, Eriksen 2008), and globally agriculture is coming up against the pressures arising from increasing demand as well as the stresses caused by soil degradation, over-fishing, water constraints and the increasing impacts of climate change (Godfray et al. 2010).  These have been accompanied by increasing concerns over the economic dominance of large corporate interests (Shiva 1998, Pollan 2007, Lawrence 2008) and increased energy use in agricultural systems and food processing (Matson et al. 1997, Pfeiffer 2006).

One study at Cornell University showed that in the mid-1990s the US used over 100 billion barrels of oil per year to manufacture food (Morgan 2008), and in the UK, the average distance travelled by food items is 5000 miles from field to plate (Pretty et al. 2005).  A study by Simil (1999) estimated that in the absence of nitrogen fertiliser, currently produced from natural gas and itself a resource with a depletion profile similar to that of oil (Darley 2004), no more than 48% of today’s population could be fed at the inadequate per capita level of 1900.  In the context of peak oil and climate change, the oil dependency of intensive agriculture is not sustainable, plus as Hirsch (2005) argued, the move from oil dependent systems to oil independent ones requires time, intentional design and focused effort.

In recent years farming has decreased in its perceived significance, and is no longer the dominant economic activity in the overall food system (Eriksen 2008).  The disconnect between communities and the source of their food has grown markedly.  As Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002:349) put it, “as people foster relationships with those who are no longer in their locale, distant others can structure the shape and use of the locale, a problem that is being explicitly rejected by those involved in local food system movements across the globe”.  As Morgan & Sonnino (2008:7) identified, “scientists and policymakers alike are beginning to realise that food systems hold the potential to deliver the wider objectives of sustainable development – economic development, democracy and environmental integration”.

For some, the concept of food relocalisation is central to notions of food security (Pothukuchi 2004), and also to the very notion of sustainability in relation to food. Terms such as ‘local food’, ‘food localisation’ and ‘relocalisation’ are used in the literature almost interchangeably.  For Peters et al. (2008:2) they all share the concept of “increasing reliance on foods produced near their point of consumption relative to the modern food system”.   For Seyfang (2008:5) defining local food is a straightforward matter: “localisation of food supply chains means simply that food should be consumed as close to the point of origin as possible”.  Kloppenburg (2000:18) argued that a sustainable food system embodies a deeper and more far-reaching transformation: “locally grown food, regional trading associations, locally owned processing, local currency, and local control over politics and regulation”, some of the themes explored later in this study.    The idea that food relocalisation will by necessity lead to more sustainable farming practices is also put forward by Renting et al. (2003:398) who believe that “a ‘shortening’ of relations between food production and locality, potentially [configures] a reembedding of farming towards more environmentally sustainable modes of production”.  For Feenstra (1997:28) “the development of a local sustainable food system not only provides economic gains for a community, but also fosters civic involvement, cooperation and healthy social relations”.  However, DuPuis and Goodman (2005:369) warned against what they called the “reification” of the local, arguing for the need to make localism “an open, process-based vision, rather than a fixed set of standards”.  The danger of local food becoming an exclusive, middle-class niche is, they argue, very real, a charge already levelled by some at organic food.  Former Minister David Miliband dismissed the health benefits of organic food and described it as a “lifestyle choice” (Jowitt 2010:unpaginated).

But what geographical and spatial form might a relocalised food system take?  Kloppenburg, drawing from the earlier concepts of the bioregional movement (i.e. Sale 1993) and Getz (1991) conceptualised the notion of a ‘foodshed’, defined by Peters et.al (2008:2) as “the geographic area from which a population derives its food supply”, and perceived these as hybrid social and natural constructs (Feagan 2007:26).  The foodshed is linked conceptually to the watershed.  Kloppenburg et al. (1996:34) stated “how better to grasp the shape and the unity of something as complex as a food system than to graphically imagine the flow of food into a particular place?”

For some, the foodshed concept has much to recommend it.  Starr et al. (2003:303) believed that “foodsheds embed the system in a moral economy attached to a particular community and place, just as watersheds reattach water systems to a natural ecology”.  At the time of writing, much of the literature about foodsheds is conceptual, little has been written that explores the actual practicalities and potential obstacles of such a degree of intentional relocalisation.  A report associated with the preparation of this study has been published (Hopkins et al. 2009), entitled “Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ which set out to explore the potential of the local landbase to support the local population.   This built on Mellanby’s (1975) initial study which asked the same question on a national scale, and Fairlie’s (2008) subsequent update.  It also takes, by way of answering the question of what form of agriculture would be most appropriate within these foodsheds, Tudge’s (2003:357) model for a localised, what he called ‘Enlightened’, agriculture:

“The general answer (by and large) is to give the best, most suitable land to pulses, cereals and tubers (that is, to arable farming); to fit horticulture in every spare pocket – and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort on it, and to invest capital for example in greenhouses; to allow the livestock to slot in as best it can …. in short, farms in general should be mixed: even the most committedly arable areas would in general benefit from at least some livestock, as all traditional farmers knew … the areas that are truly marginal – too high, too steep, too rocky, too dry, too wet – can be ideal for ruminants, notably sheep and cattle … some cereal and pulse can be grown expressly for livestock – but in general, only enough to keep them going through the winter, so they can make better use of the grazing in the summer”.

Tudge’s exhortation to “fit horticulture in every spare pocket – and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort on it, and to invest capital for example in greenhouses” was a fact of daily life in Totnes until 1980, with the presence of three working market gardens within the town, as described in Oral History Quote 5.2.

Gills Nursery was one of three market gardens in the town (Heath’s and Phillips being the others).  The nursery was run by Jack Gill until 1973, when his son Ken took over, who managed it until the nursery closed in 1981.  Running a series of glasshouses which were kept warm all year round required a lot of energy.  Initially they were heated using coke, which required 10 tons a year, but they later moved to the less labour intensive oil, necessitating the burning of 2000 gallons of oil a year in order to generate sufficient warmth.  The site behind the shop was not the only site Gills managed.  They also had a site on Harpers’ Hill, where they grew potatoes and sprouts, and one on North Street, where, Ken recalls, “we grew raspberries, in spite of it being north-facing, somehow it was warm enough for raspberries”.  Later they also acquired a 3½ acre site beside the bypass, which was used for field scale vegetable production.  The main nursery was kept fertilised with manure from their own pigs topped up with manure from a local farmer.   “We had no complaints with our fertility”, he told me, “one year we grew 20,000 lettuces”, an extraordinary output from a small piece of ground.  Running a market garden and a shop was hard work.  Ken Gill recalls working 12-14 hour days, seven days a week during the summer months, and David Heath describes his father’s choice of career as ‘bloody hard work’.  Unlike Heath’s, the closure of which was forced by retirement, Gill’s was driven to close by a less predictable challenge.  “A Highways engineer from Devon County Council came into one of the greenhouses one day, and told me and my father “you won’t be picking many more tomatoes here, we’re going to build a road through the place”.  Although the proposed road linking South Street and the newly built Heath’s Way was never built (part of the road building phase which saw Heath’s Nursery opened up), it created enough uncertainty, hanging in the air as a possibility for at least 10 years, that when Jack Gill died, it fell to his son, Ken, to decide whether or not to invest in modernising and expanding the Nursery.  Given the degree of uncertainty, he decided it would be unwise, and the nursery was slowly wound down.

Oral History Quote 5.2. Gills Nursery, an urban market garden in the centre of Totnes: (Source: author’s oral history interview with Ken Gill).

5.4.3. Empirical Modelling of Local Food Systems

Within the Transition movement, a few initiatives other than Totnes have made attempts at answering this question using a variety of approaches, such as Norwich (Transition Norwich 2009), Frome (Sustainable Frome 2009) and Stroud (Transition Stroud 2008), which in turn pick up on earlier work which explored the ability of different regions of the world to feed themselves under various future scenarios (Penning de Vries et al. 1995, WRR 1995).  What such studies have in common, argued Cowell & Parkinson (2003:223), is that they are “based on a belief that regional self-sufficiency of food production and consumption is more likely to increase the food security of individuals than a globalised food system”.  Food security, it is increasingly argued is decreased as the cheap oil that enables our current concept of food security becomes increasingly scarce or subject to volatile prices (Hopkins 2008, Heinberg & Bomford 2009).  The hypothesis explored here, and in the Totnes paper, was that, provided diets were changed to feature predominantly seasonal local produce, less meat, and more grains and pulses (as set out in Fairlie 2008), Totnes and district would be able to produce the bulk of its food requirements, while still being able to export some produce.  It is important here to make the point, as did Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002:361) that localisation does not refer to self sufficiency:  “These alternatives”, they wrote, “require a notion of community self-reliance, rather than either dependency or self-sufficiency”, which echoes the concept from resilience science of modularity (Walker and Salt 2006).  Tudge (2003:378) reinforced this point, arguing that self reliance ought to become a general principle for global agriculture:

“… it makes sense on all levels – ecological, nutritional, gastronomic, financial, social and strategic – for almost all countries in the world to become self-reliant in food.  Most are perfectly well able to do so.  ‘Self-reliance’ simply means that each country should strive to produce all the basic foods that it needs, so that it could feed its own people in a crisis, notably in times of political or economic blockade.  It stops short of total self-sufficiency, which implies that a country produces absolutely all of its own food, including the kinds that it cannot easily grow at home in open fields”.

Using GIS mapping technology developed by Geofutures in Bath, ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ defined its area of study as being the Totnes and District boundary as defined by the Market and Coastal Towns Initiative.  This boundary choice combines some useful and some arbitrary elements (see Figure 4.1.).  Aside from its northern boundary, it reflects the town’s original market town catchment, the boundary within which growers would choose Totnes as the market town of choice and convenience, reflecting Kloppenberg et al.’s (1996:34) earlier description of a foodshed as allowing one to “graphically imagine the flow of food into a particular place”.  In this regard, as a ‘foodshed’ it encapsulates the catchment from which the bulk of the town’s diet would have ‘flowed’ into Totnes town.

The northern boundary is that of SHDC so is an artificial political boundary.  The area was also the area boundary when Totnes was a Borough, which as Chapter 6 will explore, may yet prove to be a more suitable political model for relocalisation.  Although the Totnes and District boundary is not perfect as a foodshed, or as a bioregion, the fact that, in the main, it reflects the historical boundaries of a more localised market town catchment, makes it useful for this analysis.  The question of what is ‘local’ in a geographic sense, has been the subject of much debate.  Hinrichs (2003:6) observed that the ‘local’ is not neat or easy to define: “specific social or environmental relations do not always map predictably and consistently onto the spatial relation”.  For Feagan (2007:34), local food systems “must bear in mind with respect to spatially bound concepts like foodsheds, that the types of food grown, how it is grown, where it is grown, by whom and according to what sorts of cultural, social and economic needs are tied, in complex and somewhat indiscernible ways, to sociocultural factors at the macro economic and political levels”, which in turn links back to DuPuis & Goodman’s (2005) notion of ‘reflexive’ localism.  In the Totnes and district context, the study focused purely on the physical ability of the area to meet its food needs, without also looking at the other elements necessary to a reflexive localism, although this is not to dismiss their importance.

Figure 5.1. Food footprints of settlements in the South West of England with a population of over 800, note location of Totnes and district (Source: Hopkins et al. 2009)

The study analysed land use types, and current levels of productivity, from the most recent data available from DEFRA in 2004.  Initially it looked at Totnes in relation to other settlements with populations of over 800 in the South West, mapping their ‘food footprints’ and how these overlap (Figure 5.1.).  This process confirmed McCullum et al.’s (2005:278) observation that “food systems operate and interact at multiple levels, including community, municipal, regional, national and global”.  The overlaps in the case of Totnes were with the food footprint of Torbay from the east, and Plymouth from the west, highlighting how locations cannot conceptualise food security in isolation from their relationships with neighbouring settlements.

Figure 5.2. The Growing Communities Food Zone Diagram. (Brown 2009)

The paper then looked at the ‘food zones’ model developed by Julie Brown (Pinkerton & Hopkins 2009) at the Growing Communities project in London (Figure 5.3.), which attempted to define the percentages of food that a low carbon London might be able to produce for itself, how much it would need to import, and from what distances.  This ‘dartboard’ approach is stylised, but still gives some insights into what proportion of food production could be more locally produced. It raises the question of what percentage of imports might be feasible in a more localised model.  The Fife Diet initiative in Scotland[1] aims to support people eating a more local diet.  It promotes an 80% local diet, the remainder imported.  When asked where this ratio had come from, Fife Diet founder Mike Small replied:

“It was about saying we didn’t want the eat local movement to be a parochial retreat inwards because we believe that eating locally is an act of solidarity with the developing world in terms of climate change and climate justice. We wanted to show solidarity by buying stuff that we just couldn’t get here. We also wanted tactically to say to people “look this isn’t too scary – you can do this!” Of course people say they couldn’t give up things like bananas or chocolate or red wine. 80-20 make it seem less scary, that’s the thinking behind it” (Small 2009:pers.int).

Julie Brown of Growing Communities, who created Figure 5.2, also advocates an 80/20% ration (but as a UK produced/imported ratio), but is less clear about why that figure was chosen, emphasising the work-in-progress nature of this debate:

“Its a hypothesis, and it needs proving.  It’s an aspiration.  It feels right.  Broadly speaking, in terms of what we’re sourcing for our box schemes, which is all fruit and veg, that’s what we manage to do, but we’re playing around with that.  I am struggling with how we measure this” (Brown 2010:pers.int).

Figure 5.3. Composite Foodsheds for the four largest settlements in Totnes and District, showing how they do not accord with the ‘foodzones’ model (Source: Hopkins et al. 2009)

In the Totnes study, the findings of overlaying food demand on top of the available soil types are shown in Figures 5.3. and 5.4.  The conclusion drawn was that the area could feed itself in most of its key food needs, although not all on land immediately adjoining the town.  Some staples, such as lamb, would need to come from further afield, as appropriate soil types do not exist close to the town.  Questions were also raised about the need to also address changes in climate, the kind of diet that could be supported, and so on.  What was clear was that much of what is currently considered to be available ‘local food’ tends to be seasonal vegetables and high value speciality foods, while bulk carbohydrates, in particular wheat and other grains, are grown at a considerable distance from the area.

Figure 5.4. Foodsheds for the four largest settlements in Totnes and District, broken down into agricultural production types (Hopkins et al. 2009)

At this point the question arises as to how local is ‘local’ food?  Peters et al. (2008:2) argued that, in relation to food, ‘local’ refers to “the concept of increasing reliance on foods produced near their point of consumption relative to the modern food system”.  For Hinrichs (2003:34) it is “a banner under which people attempt to counteract trends of economic concentration, social disempowerment, and environmental degradation in the food and agricultural landscape”.  The question of what is ‘local’ in relation to the Totnes and district food system is clearly important to this discussion.  To what extent does peoples’ sense of ‘local’ overlap with the tentative ‘foodshed’ identified above?  The survey found that 40% felt that for food to be considered local it would need to have been produced within 10 miles of Totnes (see Table 5.2. below).

Oral history interviews conducted for this thesis showed that historically, the bulk of food consumed within the area would have been sourced from within the Totnes and district boundary, which is around 10 miles at its farthest from Totnes.  Val Price, one of the interviewees, recalled the first time she became aware of the idea that food was something that could actually come from further than the local area, when in the early 1950s she was asked to do a school project which involved collecting the paper sheets that oranges came wrapped in at that time and compile a list of where they had come from.  Until that point the idea had never occurred to her that food came from anywhere outside the local area.  Andy Langford relates (see Oral History Quote 5.3.) how much more the casual work then available on farms was a part of young peoples’ lives, especially during the summer.

Andy Langford recalled picking up lots of casual work on local farms from the age of 13 onwards.  In the late 1960s there were “lots of small family farms all over the place.  The average farm size would have been 30-40 acres, 120 acres would have been considered quite upper class sort of farming”.  Many of the farms were short of labour during the summer, especially during hay making and straw baling times.  His favourite was one at East Allington.  “We were out there a lot.  We used to go out there and the farm was pretty much run by the young people.  Andy Strutt was a classmate of mine.  He had 6 sisters, which was part of the attraction. Suddenly I found myself in charge of a little tractor moving around the farm picking up haybales with all these young women about and these big lunches and suppers where you could eat as many roast potatoes as you could get in yourself, that was very lovely.  We basically ran the place.  The children from Andy, 16, down to the rest of us, would man the potato harvester.  That’s what we did.  We’d go out there for the weekend and harvest however many tons of potatoes needed picking, take them, riddle them, sort them into this size and that size, then get in the Landrover and deliver them to the chip shop in Kingsbridge.  It was great”.

Oral History Quote 5.3. How local farms were a source of casual labour for the people of Totnes.  (Source: author’s oral history interview with Andy Langford).

So, what did the word ‘local’ mean for Totnes and district residents?  The findings in Table 5.2. would seem to support the usefulness of the Totnes and District boundary, in relation to the traditional food economy of the town.  60% of respondents felt that ‘local’ meant between 10 and 30 miles from the town, more embedded in the wider South Hams.

Table 5.2. “Within what distance of Totnes would meat or vegetables need to have been grown/produced for you to consider them “local”? (Source: author’s questionnaire 2009).

Figure 5.5. The Index of Food Relocalisation. (Source: Ricketts Hein 2006).

This echoes Padbury’s (2006) and IGD’s (2003) observation that UK consumers generally understand ‘local’ to be either within 30 miles, or within the same county.  The Totnes data could be interpreted as inferring that within the culture of the town, the fact that it still holds regular markets, and still has a strong commercial presence from local growers, means that people feel, on some level, situated within the kind of ‘foodshed’ that Kloppenburg et.al (1996) refer to (see above). The role of markets historically in Totnes was also explored in the oral history interviews (see Oral History Quote 5.4).  The continuing presence of a strong culture of the importance of local food is supported by the ‘Index of Food Relocalisation’ produced by Ricketts Hein et al. (2006) which found that Devon was the county in England and Wales with the most local food activity, and that the bulk of the activity was focused in the South West of England (see Figure 5.6.)

Ken Gill recalls how the Cattle Market was what brought farmers and their wives into the town, while the husbands traded, haggled and drank, the wives would go shopping, providing a vital boost for the town’s economy.  Although it created a certain degree of nuisance and put a huge strain on the town’s traffic infrastructure, the Cattle Market’s passing was, for some, a loss.  Ken Gill told me “once you took away the Market it wasn’t the same”.

Oral History Quote 5.4 Totnes Cattle Market: From the oral history interviews.

5.4.4. The Food Culture of Totnes

The concept of the intentional relocalisation of food in the way explored in ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ sits within a wider food culture which is arguably in crisis (i.e. Lawrence 2009).  Fewer people cook with fresh produce or have the time or income to source local produce.  So what is the current Totnes food culture?  In the survey, 97% of respondents stated that they ‘always’ or ‘often’ cooked the meals they ate at home using fresh produce”, but the question was unfortunately sufficiently vague as to not yield much of value.  43% of respondents stated that someone in their household grows some of the food that is consumed there, and 8% have an allotment, above the national average: a study by the University of Derby in 2006 showed a national average provision of 7 allotments per 1,000 population (Crouch & Rivers 2006).

The experience of shopping for food has clearly changed greatly over the past 60 years, as revealed in Oral History quote 5.5.  Respondents were also asked to rank their choices when they went food shopping.  The list of priorities was, in order of priority; good quality, local, low price, organic, fair trade and brand.  This emphasis on ‘local’ is borne out in Totnes High Street, where food retail shops are highly visible, often stressing the local provenance of some of their produce.  The third placing of ‘low price’ is reflected in the focus group on food, and the decisions families make on a daily basis. In Hinrichs’s (2002) study of the Kansas City Food Circle, the “unacknowledged privileged position of the group” (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002:365) was acknowledged, a charge, they state “that can be levelled at many alternative food movements” (ibid). So to what extent did participants find the local food available in Totnes accessible?

“I used to go to the grocers and I could sit down, lovely.  They’d go through your list and say, “yes, yes, we’ve some new whatever it is, would you like to taste some?”  You’d have a little snippet of cheese or something, “great, yes, we’ll have that”.  “Now we’ve got a tin of broken biscuits, but they’re not too bad (half price you see), would you like them?”  As soon as you put a biscuit in your mouth it’s broken isn’t it!  Then they’d say “now Mrs. Langford, you’re going to the butchers, yes, yes, and going to get some fish?  Yes, yes, and paraffin?  Yes, yes… and they used to say to me now bring any parcels in, we’ll put it in the box with your groceries and bring the lot up for you.  And they did.  They’d come and deliver and you’d go through it and say that’s fine and would you like a cup of tea….”

Oral History Quote 5.5. A trip to the shops in the 1950s. (Source: author’s oral history interview with Muriel Langford).

The focus group on food supported many of the survey findings, as well as uncovering many of the choices that people make in relation to food.  One participant, MW, a family counsellor, opted for supermarkets for most of her food shopping “for easiness and cheapness”, but claimed that “if I had more time, and even more money, then I would make the effort to buy local food.  I do believe it’s important, but I don’t think I can afford to do it to be honest, because I think money comes first”.  These findings are also supported by a study of Totnes food culture conducted in parallel to this research (Pir 2010) which found that “while Totnesians have a high level of awareness of environmental and food-related issues, this is not matched by their patterns of behaviour.  First, producers and consumers seem largely motivated or constrained by the costs involving the production or consumption of foods.  Secondly, the convenience of food, i.e. shopping, cooking and consumption, seems to be a priority for most consumers” (Pir 2010:92).

Taken together, this appears to back up Hinrichs and Kremer’s (2003:37) findings from Iowa, US, which showed that local food movement members tended to be “white, middle-class consumers and that the movement threatens to be socially homogenised and exclusionary” (DuPuis & Goodman 2005:362).  Follett (2009:49) warns that “alternative [food] networks can lead to myopic and exclusive decision-making that only benefit the most educated and elite members of society”.   The question of not having enough time is also picked up by Hendrickson & Heffernan (2002), who identify the advantages and disadvantages of the time issue:

“Time may indeed be one of the biggest barriers for alternatives, yet one of the greatest strengths.  Many alternatives do take more time, and thus are less attractive to people squeezed by work and family responsibilities, which has important class-based implications.  However, that becomes a reason alternatives are difficult to replicate by the dominant firms”.  (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002:361)

Kollmus and Agyeman (2002) however, refuse to take arguments of ‘not enough time’ at face value. “What”, they ask, “are the underlying factors of ‘not having enough time’”?  There would appear to be a direct link between the requirement to establish alternatives and people with time available, and the predominance of middle class participants.  As Kollmus and Agyeman (2002:244) add, “people who have satisfied their personal needs are more likely to act ecologically because they have more resources (time, money, energy) to care about bigger, less personal social and pro-environmental issues”.

Another participant, an 18 year old female student, had a high level of understanding about organic food and local food due to working part time at a local organic farm, but her mother shopped for the family.  “When we go in (to the supermarket) I know what’s local as its lots of the same products where I work, and I point it out to Mum, but she says “that’s so expensive!””  When asked about their attitudes towards growing their own food, their responses supported the surprisingly high figure from the survey of those who claimed to be good at gardening.  66% had claimed to be either ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ at food growing.  An initial perception might be that growing fresh fruit and vegetables is a dying art, in spite of the recent revival in interest (Birchley 2009), but the Focus Groups reveal more complexity than whether people are ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ at it.   For example, both DO and MW live on the Follaton Estate, and DO told me “Mum’s got a little vegetable patch in the garden, and she grows them all year round.  So we eat all our own vegetables”.

MW was a newer convert to food growing.  Both families were inspired by a young couple of the estate who garden very visibly in front of their house.  MW was clearly impressed; “they both work and yet they still manage to provide endless amounts of vegetables”.  MW enthused about how she had taken to gardening.  “I got really silly about it, and took people to look at my little plot.  “Look at what I grew!”  But I think my daughter was impressed with it for about two weeks!  “Do you have to keep talking about courgettes mum?” Part of her excitement stemmed from a glimpse at what being more self reliant could be like.  She continued, “one day I came back down the motorway.  I hadn’t been shopping, and it was Sunday so the shops were closed, but I managed to make soup from my garden. I was really excited that it hadn’t cost me a penny, but I’d managed to make really nice soup.  I think that’s really important, the fact that you can sustain yourself if you really need to”.  She also found that it brought other qualities to her life.  “It’s very therapeutic.  In the summer, it’s really nice to go down there and I like looking at it and seeing what’s growing”.

For most people, growing some of their own food was just a fact of life and the landscape of the town reflected this.  Ian Slatter recalled his father’s passion for food growing, a passion he never himself came to share.  At the bottom of his garden were allotments, of which his father had two, as well as a large garden, similarly dedicated to food production, but focused on fruit, whereas the allotments grew vegetables.  Val Price remembers every garden in the street being used to grow food, mostly done by the men of the households.  “Dad grew all our food in our garden”, she told me.  “Potatoes, runner beans, beetroot, carrots, onions, raspberries and strawberries”.  Gardening was, she recalls, the main topic of conversation for the men of the street who would “stand around, leaning on their forks, and telling each other they were doing it all wrong”.  In the late 1960s, the need for productive gardens began to diminish, and the new generation began to see it as boring and unnecessary.  Andy Langford, whose father was a keen gardener, and who initially kept an allotment at Copland Meadow (now housing), and subsequently a very productive third of an acre home garden at the top of Barracks Hill, told me “we used to consider gardening to be something you did because he’d caught you!  My generation was the one that broke the link with gardening.  It was much more fun to take your bicycle to bits, put it back together again and go off racing around the countryside”.  Similarly Val Price recalls never being taught to garden, as gardening was “something Dads did”, and that by the early 60s it had become something that young people only did if they had to.

Oral History Quote 5.6. The Rise and Fall of Back Garden Food Production (Source: the author’s oral history interviews).

In terms of where both households learned the skills needed, there were several sources.  The first was the gardening couple on their street, followed by other neighbours, elderly relatives and the internet.  They found that their enthusiasm for gardening was contagious.  MW told me “it’s (food growing) gone along the street and across.. the people behind me…”.  It was interesting to observe that although she could grow things, she felt underequipped in terms of basic gardening skills, so although she could grow, so was reluctant to describe her skills as ‘good’. It is useful to compare this present-day culture of back garden food growing, and the figure of 66% of respondents believing they are ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ at growing food, with that of the 1950s when food growing was much more commonplace, as revealed in the oral histories in Oral History Quote 5.6.

One older participant in the focus group on work and skills, however, countered the enthusiasm for back garden food growing expressed above.  She told another member of the group who had expressed an interest in gardening, “I had your experience of planting vegetables, and it put me off completely.  As a child I spent a lot of time on my Dad’s allotment, I was born and brought up in cities, trying to grow things, but it put me off completely”.  The root of her disillusionment was twofold, firstly her lack of skills (“I felt it was my ignorance”) and secondly…. slugs.  “I catch them, with a torch, and then take them up to the Arboretum, but what a waste of time and effort, to try and grow a lettuce which is dead by the morning because the buggers came along and got it”.

Many ideas have emerged about how to make this relocalised model a reality through World Cafe events and the process of creating the Totnes and District EDAP.  One key driver of this has been the TTT Food Group, which has been in existence for over 3 years and draws together food activists from across the community.  An MPhil dissertation by Pir (2010) offered a qualitative study of the TTT Food Group, based on surveys and interviews. It acknowledged the diversity of initiatives that have been initiated and maintained by the group, which include:

• Garden Share, matching the owners of unused back gardens with keen gardenless gardeners (over 40 families now have access to growing land through the scheme)
• ‘Totnes: the nut tree capital of Britain’, a volunteer-led programme which plants nut and fruit trees at locations through the town.  At the time of writing, over 180 trees have been planted
• a gardening training course
• links with Dartington and Sharpham Estates, both of which are on the edge of the town
• Healthy Futures: aiming to engage people with chronic health problems in learning how to grow and cook food
• A proposed ‘Food Hub’, a community-owned initiative to make local food available to people at supermarket prices.

However, Pir concluded that “contributions for resilience building at this stage have a symbolic meaning, largely manifesting themselves in considerations or mindsets and not in attitudes and patterns of behaviour… the overall perception of the TTT Food Group has shown that it was best known for raising awareness” (Pir 2010:93).  He also noted that “even though the scale of practical manifestations seemed symbolic, they have been described by some to have had an important psychological effect on the local people”.  From personal experience, many of the longer term, farther reaching initiatives like the Food Hub project, take longer to bring about, and that, as suggested by Pir, much of the initial work of Transition takes place at a deeper level, building networks and momentum.  Pir’s statement that thus far, the TTT Food Group “has not been able to enthuse the average person” is however not borne out in the survey data relating to the wider impact of TTT, explored in Chapter 7.

The dangers associated with ‘unreflexive’ localism for Totnes and district, and whether the ‘foodshed’ approach set out in the ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ research could actually lead to some of the dangers outlined above deserves reflection.  As the focus groups revealed, at present, local food consumers in Totnes tend to be wealthier, middle-class people, often with more free time.  Given that Totnes and its surroundings already have a strong local food culture with many producers, and is one of the leading centres in the country for this, there is no obvious sign of Winter’s (2003) ‘defensive localism’.  On the contrary, its local food culture emerged in interviews as something that contributes to the town’s perceived ‘uniqueness’.  DuPuis and Goodman (2005:360) suggested that “there may also be a cost to alliances with local elites that stand to benefit from localisation”, and certainly the realisation/implementation of the foodshed model would necessitate engaging with large landowners and some of the potential risks DuPuis and Goodman suggest.  However, the positive and constructive engagement of the Sharpham and Dartington estates, stemming from a TTT event ‘Estates in Transition’ held in June 2007, suggests that such a ‘cost’ would be minimal.

Following an event in Totnes in May 2009 which introduced the ‘Can Totnes and district feed itself?’ report referred to above, a World Cafe session was held (the full notes from the session are in Appendix 3).  It began by inviting participants to list the elements of a local food system that are already in place, and then to suggest ways of increasing demand for local food.  Suggestions included a Food Hub, a local food festival, local authority and school local food procurement, more education and the less constructive suggestion “burn supermarkets”!  Asked to list elements that could help, suggestions included training and support, enabling more people to have access to land, and “economic hardship”.   Finally, the groups were asked to think of some future events.  Suggestions included “2020 – slugs in Totnes become extinct”, “2014, allotments for all!”, “2020: local food production soars” and “2015: school certification for all in food growing and cooking”.  Some of the more useful information fed into the Totnes EDAP which was, at that point, being edited.

In terms of the views of SHDC with regard to its role in this area, interviewee Alan Robinson argued that they do not see themselves as being able to do much to support the relocalisation of food.  “Apart from an enabling role where we can, I’m not sure where we’d actually plug in.  We’d never be able to say we’ll only procure our sandwiches from somebody who’s actually growing stuff only a hundred yards away in Totnes.  I know that’s a silly example but I’m not sure we can ever define it quite that tightly”.

References:

Brown, J. (2009) The Growing Communities Food Zone Diagram.  Unpublished.

Brown, J. (2010) Personal interview.

Cowell, S.J, Parkinson, S. (2003) Localisation of UK Food Production and an Analysis Using Land Area and Energy as Indicators. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 94. 221-236.

Crouch, D, Rivers, P. (2006) Urban Research Summary No. 23.  Survey of Allotments, Community Gardens and City Farms. Department of Community and Local Government.

Fairlie, S. (2007) Can Britain feed itself? The Land 4 (Winter 2007-08)

Feagan, R. (2007) The place of food: mapping out the ‘local’ in local food systems. Progress in Human Geography 31 (1) 23-42

Hendrickson, M, Heffernan, W.D. (2002) Opening Spaces Through Relocalisation: locating potential resistance in the weaknesses of the global food system. Sociologica Ruralis 42.

Hinrichs, C., Kremer, K.S. (2002) Social Inclusion in a Midwest Local Food System Project. Journal of Poverty 6 (1). 65 – 90.

Hinrichs, C.C. (2003) The practice and politics of food system localisation. Journal of Rural Studies. 19:33-45

Hopkins, R, Thurstain Goodwin, M, Fairlie, S. (2009) Can Totnes and District Feed Itself? Exploring the practicalities of food relocalisation. Working Paper Version 1.0. Transition Town Totnes/Transition Network.

Hopkins, R. (2008) The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience. Green Books, Dartington.

IGD (2003) Local food comes from our country, say consumers. Press release 1 May 2003.  www.igd.com.

Kollmus, A, Agyeman, J. (2002) Mind the Gap: why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behaviour. Environmental Education Research 8 (3) 239-260.

McCullum, C, Desjardins, E, Kraak, V.I, Ladipo, P, Costello, H. (2005)  Evidence-based strategies to build community food security. Journal of American Dietetic Association 105 (2) 278-83.

Mellanby, K. (1975) Can Britain Feed Itself? Merlin Press.

Padbury, G. (2006) Retail and foodservice opportunities for local food. IGD, Watford.

Penning de Vries, F.W.T, van Keulen, H, Rabbinge, R.  (1995) Natural Resources and Limits of Food Production in 2040.  In: Bouma, J, Kuyvenhoven, A, Bouman, B.A.M., Luyten, J.C, Zandstra, H.G. (eds) Eco-regional approaches for sustainable land use and food production. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Utrecht.

Pinkerton, T, Hopkins, R. (2009) Local Food: how to make it happen in your community. Transition Books/Green Books.

Pir, A. (2009) In Search of a Resilient Food System: A Qualitative Study of the Transition Town Totnes Food Group.  Dissertation for MPhil in Culture, Environment and Sustainability. Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo.

Ricketts Hein, J, Ilberg, B, Kneafsey, M. (2006) Distribution of Local Food Activity in England and Wales: an index of food relocalisation. Regional Studies. 40 (3). 289-301.

Small, M. (2010) Personal Interview.

Sustainable Frome (2009) Sustainable Frome: a town in Transition: Energy Descent Action Plan.

Transition Norwich (2009) Outline of a Food Chapter for the Energy Descent Plan for Norwich. Transition Network/East Anglia Food Links.

Transition Stroud (2008) Food Availability in Stroud District: considered in the context of climate change and peak oil. For the Local Strategic Partnership Think Tank on Global Change.  16^th December 2008.

Tudge, C. (2004) So Shall We Reap: What’s Gone Wrong with the World’s Food – and How to Fix it. Penguin.

Walker, B, Salt, D. (2006) Resilience Thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Island Press.

Winter, M. (2003) Embeddedness, the new food economy and defensive localism. Journal of Rural Studies.  19 (1) 23-32

WRR (1995)  Sustained Risks: a lasting phenomenon. Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR).  The Hague.

“I’ve really enjoyed the last three books to come out of the Transition Books stable, so I was pleased to see the latest instalment was out: Local Money – how to make it happen in your community. It’s another big square book, following Local Food, and it’s got the same practical, inspiring, can-do approach. This time, it’s all about creating local money networks.

The Transition Towns movement is all about resilience – preparing towns for the challenges of climate change and peak oil. What’s money got to do with it, you may well ask, but money is a valuable tool in relocalisation. Our current money system doesn’t serve us very well. It is beyond our control, in the hands of bankers and politicians and people we might hesitate to trust. It flows in vast quantities to people who don’t seem to do very much to earn it, while others work hard for very little. It is endlessly available for some tasks, and in short supply for other very necessary things. Most of all, it has an unpleasant habit of vanishing out of the places where we live and ending up in London and New York. Local money is a way of re-imagining money as the tool it should be, rather than the master it often becomes.

Since money is just an agreed mechanism of exchange, there are many different kinds of money, and endless possibilities for re-creating it. Local Money begins with an introduction to money and a history of alternative currencies, and then dedicates a chapter each one to a series of experiments with money. Time banking is one, a currency based on hours of work, and a great way to value all labour equally. Local Exchange Trading Schemes are an less formal way for people to trade skills that were successful in the past. North then explains the four Transition currencies so far, and ends with some tantalizing glimpses of the future of money, including feed-in tariff based bonds, mobile phone money, and tradeable energy quotas.

Among the more interesting systems that the book explores are Germany’s regional currencies, which operate alongside the Euro. Reading at a time when the Euro is in considerable danger, I bet Germany is glad it put the regional alternatives in place. “Monoculture of money,” says Peter North, “just like a monoculture of crops, is not resilient.” I’m not sure why I hadn’t heard about it before, but Germany has “a rich ecosystem of currencies”, as North puts it. Each one serves a different purpose, and this is perhaps the closest to the healthy and resilient model that the Transition Towns are after.

Totnes, Lewes, Stroud and Brixton are the three Transition currencies. They each have a slightly different philosophy, Stroud being the most radical – it is democratic money, owned by a co-op. The main aim of these currencies is to build the local economy and encourage more local supply chains. It’s a little early to tell whether it’s working or not, and North hints that they are “perhaps mere glimpses of what could be” in future. This is the really practical bit if you’re ready to have a go at creating your own money – lots of advice about getting buy-in from businesses, how much to print, why you should think long and hard about the name of your currency, tax implications, and so on.

There are some real strengths to Local Money. Peter North knows that everything in the book is an experiment, and that there’s no one formula. It’s an iterative process, and the book is great at breaking down historical examples to see what worked and what didn’t. It’s honest too, acknowledging the failures and limitations of what has been tried so far as well as the successes. If you’re ready to embark on the rather exciting journey of local money in your town, this is the most helpful book I’ve come across so far.

However, if you’re not that far along, the book is less useful. The previous Transition book, Local Food, had all kinds of different projects of varying levels of complexity. Whatever stage your town was at, there were inspiring ideas to get started. Local Money starts further along the road, with actual currency, when there are lots of smaller ways to build resilience in the local economy. I’d have loved to have read about local loyalty cards, such as the Wedge Card in London, or the 3/50 Project that invites people to pledge to spend money in three favourite local businesses. Both of these are a whole lot simpler, quicker, and less risky than launching a fully fledged alternative currency. But perhaps that’s for another book, a Local Economies title perhaps.

There’s also a lot more that could have been included. Local currencies aren’t the only way to generate local money, and it would have been great to hear more about zero interest banks (see Jak), peer to peer lending, shared equity mortgages, local banking and credit unions, local bonds, microfinance, or the ‘moneyless’ credit clearance schemes that Thomas Greco champions. Some of these get a passing mention, but they could all be considered valid options for making local economies more resilient and deserve more attention.

In other words, Local Money is great on currencies, but could have been much broader in scope. The Transition currencies are wonderful experiments and this book will get you well on your way to launching your own, but there is so much more to try.

It is a very insightful and useful addition to the research literature about Transition.  One of his conclusions is: “I argue that it is the structure of Transition that is crucial to grassroots support.  As a brand and umbrella organisation, Transition is able to facilitate and foster networking potential and collective resources, which encourages participation in the model.  Yet equally important, the self‐organising nature of the model is a key attraction to people and places joining Transition.  This dual structure enables the establishment of a diverse discourse coalition, incorporated through a holistic approach to sustainability”.

You can download the document in full here.

I arrived in Tooting early, and, as usual, got lost, walking around Tooting High Street looking for the venue. I wandered through Tooting Market, a dynamic reflection of this highly diverse community, stalls selling saris, halal meat, Afro-Carribean hairdressing, Islamic texts and a wide range of foodstuffs from around the world.  It is in this context, one of the most diverse parts of London that Transition Town Tooting has been working for the last couple of years, innovatively thinking their way through how to embed Transition with the community.

Events so far have included the Earth Talk Walk, which visited every centre of worship in Tooting to explore how each tradition looks at care for the earth, the soon-to-be-in-its-third-year Foodival, where local growers bring their surplus produce and 6 local restaurants use them to prepare dishes, a celebration both of local food and of the area’s cultural and culinary diversity.

Most spectacular though was the Trashcatchers Carnival, which brought 800 people out onto the streets as a carnival on the theme of caring for the Earth, using an alleged million plastic bags and half a million crisp packets to make amazing floats, in an amazing community celebration.  The story of how the Carnival came to be, how it found its way around red tape when, with only two days to go, it looked like it may well not happen it all, is an amazing testament to persistence and determination, and which I hope to get someone from TT Tooting to write up soon.

So, to the Unleashing.  The hall was decorated with great handmade banners, with photos of what TT Tooting has done so far, with local Indian food on sale at the back, and some of the amazing creations produced for the Carnival adorning the hall, most prominently the Sankofa bird, a West African mythic bird, which carries the seeds of the future in an egg on its back, and which looks forward and backwards in a single glance, a fitting symbol for Transition.  And of course an amazing cake, of which more later.  The evening started with a cycle rickshaw riding into the venue, up to the front of the stage, where the rider welcomed everyone, and then the boy sat in the chair at the front told a short story (see right).

Lucy Neal then welcomed everyone, and the film below was shown which captured some images from the Trashcatchers Carnival, and also included interviews with a range of people from around Tooting answering the questions “what do you love about Tooting?” and “what could be done to make Tooting a better place?”.

Then three people came up to the stage and talked about what Tooting meant to them, and why they loved living in the place.  Then it was my turn to speak.  I started by saying how one of the things I love about Transition is how people take it and make it their own in each different place.  I said that the best people to know how to do Transition in each particular place are the people from that place, and that if someone from Tooting had come to Transition Network 2 years ago and asked how to do Transition in Tooting, we would never have said “well, you need to get a million plastic bags, half a million crisp packets, some shopping trolleys, and march it all down the street”.

I then gave an overview of Transition, of peak oil and climate change, and an introduction to the work in progress that is Transition, using the Pattern Language project to explain it.  I wrapped up by saying that in the face of peak oil, climate change and the unravelling debt crisis, we have a choice.  Do we choose to look at them from a place of concern for self, a fearful response of protecting what we have, of putting our happiness above that of others, a more materialistic take, or do we respond with compassion, seeing that our future lies in becoming better connected, more engaged, more skilled and less focused on materialism?  A wealth of studies show that people who have a less materialistic world view tend to consume less, recycle more, be more mindful about energy use, and, ultimately, be happier and healthier.  The question is whether we can do better than how we do things today, and of course we can, the Trashcatchers event giving a great insight into what is possible.

After me, a young lad came up and sang a song which the audience were invited to join in with, which they did with great energy.  Then people from the different TT Tooting working groups talked about what they have been doing, and invited people to join them to discuss what else their groups might do.  There was then a 10 minute period where people were invited to mill around and go to whichever group interested them, after which everyone came back together again for the Unleashing itself.

The amazing cake, adorned with the Sankofa bird from the Carnival, was brought forward, topped with a fantastic sparkler, and the idea was then for me to say “I hereby announce that Transition Town Tooting is now Unleashed!” while steamers fell from the heavens.  Unfortunately, the woman charged with discharging the banger/steamer thing couldn’t get it to go off, so it took a minute or so for help to arrive and ensure that the cake was cut amid a storm of multicoloured streamers!

Then each working group came back onstage and talked about ideas that had emerged from their conversations.  Finally Lucy Neal thanked everyone for coming and asked “can we do this?” which was met with a resounding “yes!”  And that was that.  People stayed around chatting for some time (always the sign of a good event when nobody wants to go home), before heading out into the warm London night.

One of the hand-stitched banners that had been part of the Carnival said “here in Tooting, great things are”.  When I first saw it I was looking for the accompanying second banner which completed the sentence, but at the end of this wonderful celebratory evening, I realised that it was a self-contained statement and with the work of Transition Town Tooting, now Unleashed, great things, indeed, are. (You can see Mike Grenville’s photos of the event here….)

At the CLT conference, the new Housing Minister, Grant Shapps MP, gave a rousing talk about how the government is committed to CLTs (albeit in a slightly altered version called ‘Local Housing Trusts’), and wants to see them everywhere.  They want to see communities taking charge of creating their own housing, raising their own financing and building housing which is in community ownership in perpetuity.  All sounds great.

One part that was slightly alarming was when he said that in the forthcoming ‘Localism Bill’, there will be a provision that if 90% of a community supports a development, it will be able to bypass the planning process.  This raises a number of questions.  90% of which population?  Street?  Neighbourhood? Parish?  Town?  How do they vote?  Then, even if you did get 90% support, is it really, at a time where the need is to promote zero carbon housing, sensible to allow housing to bypass planning?  Will it just lead to rubbish housing?

Will Day speaking at the launch of 'The Future is Local'

At the ‘Future is Local’ launch yesterday, the various speakers offered different insights to the whole Big Society discussion.  Will Day of the SDC said that the aim of the report is the explore “integrated area-based approaches to upgrading infrastructure”.  The thinking goes like this: we have x million homes that need to be retrofitted, the government has no money (well, not much), and we need to promote retrofitting and use that to also create energy security, quality of life, a sustainable economy (fascinating term that…) and jobs.  The idea is that a piecemeal approach isn’t anywhere near as cost-effective, the ideal is to work street-by-street and to use that also as an opportunity to engage communities.

Richard McCarthy of the Department for Community and Local Government spoke next, starting by talking about why localism is important.  It is about, he said, giving people the freedom and space to develop their own responses, free of government regulation and interference.  For him, the Big Society represents “an opportunity for things to happen at a local level”.  The new government plans to get rid of Regional Development Agencies and of Regional Spatial Strategies, and to reprioritise Local Plans, and for those plans to focus on neighbourhood led plans.

Mike Reardon of the Greater Manchester Environment Commission spoke about the work they are doing there to retrofit the city.  He said that they are looking at the process trying to work out how to maximise the economic benefits to the city of the retrofitting work, working on, as he put it, “the engine of retrofitting”.  The challenges they have faced, he said, are their own capacity and capability, realising that there is a significant skills gap, and that they need a new workforce capable of delivering it, hence they are planning to create “A Low Carbon Centre of Excellence” (sock darning MScs…).

Ged Edwards of Sustainable Blacon Ltd talked about the fascinating work they are involved with in a suburb of Chester, which offered some insights into what a post-EDAP Transition initiative might look like.  Blacon is an area of significant disadvantage, and Sustainable Blacon are focusing on 4 things, green transport, green energy, green spaces and green social enterprises.  They are set up as a not-for-profit, with 3 functions, firstly offering services, secondly working as a regeneration consultancy, and lastly promoting Sustainable Blacon.  Their board is made up of resident stakeholders, organisational stakeholders, and expert advisors.

The last, and the most challenging speaker, was Philip Blond of Respublica, who was interviewed recently here at Transition Culture.  Blond is one of the architects of the Big Society concept, and has the ear of David Cameron, for whom he acts as a great inspiration.  I took a lot of notes of his talk, which I will reproduce here because it will inform some of the following discussion.  What, he asked, is the great difficulty with all this talk of localism?  The fact that there is not actually much society, society has become very disassociated.

Very few people out there are ready to engage, the poorest people are 2.5 times more likely to be lonely than the wealthiest.  People, he continued, no longer associate, there has been a diminution of social capital, the different classes mix less often than they used to.  So how do we get to a more associated society?  The answer, he argued, is to begin where people are at.

What we need is a Big Society, and that requires something for people to associate with first.  What do we do when there is no collective identity?  How might we, in an increasingly fractured society, get people to form together in groups?  The environmental movement has, he argued, gone about things in a very dangerous way.  It took an issue of concern to all, and captured just one part of the political spectrum which meant that those on the Right and in the Centre had no interest in it.  Secondly it has failed to communicate carbon reduction in a way that anyone can visualise and care about.

The New Age of Austerity Begins Now: 'refreshments' at the back of the hall during the launch of 'the Future is Local'....

The solution, he proposed, is to begin where people are.  If their idea of environmental work is to beautify their place , or plant trees, then start there.  What people will gather around and form groups around will vary between communities, it might be crime, or it might be beautifying an ugly place.  These projects can then become hubs for other projects.  The state’s role, he said, is to “facilitate civil association”.  The aim should be to create different groups with different intents, and then provide quick wins for these groups.. the role of civil servants then becomes to facilitate this.

In many ways, the new political landscape which I hope I have captured in the above snapshots looks like one in which Transition should feel instinctively at home.  Indeed, I do think that the ‘Big Society’ agenda creates a space in which Transition initiatives should really be stepping up to the plate, and seizing it with both hands.  Local community-led responses, delivering the low carbon agenda from the ground up, facilitating inward investment, returning power to local government and so on, all offers a new context that Transition initiatives should seize with both hands.   There is a very real difference though, between the concepts of ‘localism’ and ‘localisation’.

Localism is about the devolution of power, a devolving of decision making to the lower levels, to communities and to local government.  Localisation is about shifting the focus of economic activity to local markets, to meeting local needs, where possible, though  local production.  Localism certainly creates a more conducive context within which localisation can flourish, but localism, as promoted by the current administration, still takes place within the wider context of globalised economic growth, which in turn drives energy dependency and carbon emissions.

I do however have some problems with this new localism agenda.  As I listened to Blond’s talk, I thought, well is it actually true that we live in a country with not much society, that society has now disassociated?  I remember just before the election hearing Eddie Izzard, who had just run all around the country, doing 50-something marathons for charity.  He said he didn’t believe in ‘Broken Britain’.. everywhere he had gone people were much more community focused than he had expected.  My experience from visiting Transition initiatives is that community is there, everywhere, sometimes more obvious than other places, but the point is that community will organise when it wants to, it doesn’t need permission from government.

In the short film at the top of this post, Cameron says “I don’t believe that civil society springs up of its own accord”.  Well there are thousands of community organisations around the country, run mostly by volunteers, Transition initiatives, Low Carbon Communities, Greening groups and so on, none of them waited for permission from government.  They certainly sprang up of their own accord.  What matters is for the State to offer such projects meaningful support, and to remove the obstacles strewn in their paths.

Perhaps they might say, for example, that for communities wanting to install community owned renewables through a community ESCO, or similar model, they will put up 50% of the money, matching whatever the community raises through community share options or bonds.  Perhaps the £10-15,000 loans soon to be offered to homeowners for retrofits on a ‘Pay-As-You-Save’ basis could also be offered for individuals so as to raise the initial capital for a community energy company.  Perhaps government might give communities first refusal on land zoned for development, and allow the use of compulsory purchase orders by community groups for sites they want to develop.  Perhaps they might introduce something like the Low Carbon Fund which has run so successfully in Scotland, to which community groups can apply for anywhere between £1,000 and £1,000,000 for low carbon projects.

One of the bits I struggle with is the idea that government’s role is to devolve responsibility to communities, to devolve leadership.  In one way, I love it.  Of course communities have a key role to play in Transition in the wider sense, and need to be given that responsibility and trusted to take some leadership.  Transition has long argued that without active communities taking leadership, national decarbonisation/resilience building will struggle.  However, climate change, and the need to cut emissions sharply, also very much need strong government.  In Germany and Denmark, emissions have been cut by decisive and focused government action, while also empowering communities.

We need the empowerment of communities, the enabling of community responses, but we also need strong, imaginative government based on a strong agenda of slashing the nation’s emissions.  I’m not sure that we have that. For example, I live in Devon.  Almost every planning application for wind farms are refused by the predominantly conservative Council.  So, if the move then is towards local communities being able to decide whether they want wind farms or not, we’ll probably end up with even less. Without strong government, we will never get anywhere near the nation’s targets for installed wind capacity.  We need both.

Of course the cynic might point out that the reason for the Big Society is the sweeping cuts in public spending that are only just beginning.  If you replace the word ‘localism’ with ‘privatisation’, it is not that different in some ways from the Thatcher government’s agenda.  There is a challenge within it around what people are actually capable of doing in their spare time.  Working full time, and also running a school?  Working, managing a family, looking after an ailing relative, and running a Community Land Trust?  Of course there are incredible people out there who do that, but it will have its limits unless people are supported in other ways too.

Having said that though, I welcome the potential that the Big Society represents.  It offers a context within which Transition can really step up to the plate.  It explicitly states that it wants to see communities stepping up and taking control, and that can only be to the good.  It has lots of hooks onto which Transition groups can hang their projects, and it also raises lots of questions which Transition initiatives have hard-won experience they can feed into.

We need inspired, motivated communities taking ownership and responsibility, but over that, I would argue, we also need to be laying localisation, seeing that, for example, retrofitting Manchester could stimulate not just new trainings, but also a wide range of other potential businesses and livelihoods.  While localism is a great first step, it will be when localisation is woven in too that we really start to get somewhere interesting.  When the Big Society meets the Local Economy, then we’re really moving, and it is that localisation piece of the puzzle that Transition brings to this discussion. This brings us to the need to redefine resilience, not as a state of maximum preparedness for the ghastly, but as a desired state, as a positive.  But that’s a subject for a later post…

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts on this…

Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival stops the traffic.

Traffic on Tooting High Street came to a stop today when the Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival came to town!   Over 800 participants from local schools, community groups and clubs took part in this unique carnival made almost entirely from household rubbish. Over 1 million plastic bottles and shopping bags, half a million crisp packets, half a ton of renewable willow and half a ton of materials were collected over a six month period to create this extravaganza.  Check out the great piece on local ITV News… and this film, filmed from the Turtle, which gives a flavour of the event…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePOx9H3Llxs

Organisers of the carnival were jubilant that it had gone so smoothly and according to plan. Lucy Neal, Co Chair of Transition Town Tooting speaking this morning to ITV London Tonight news had this to say, “individually we may seem insignificant, but when we connect up in a community, we are very strong, we can make a huge difference. We are thrilled at how well it’s come together and amazed at the support we have received from the people of Tooting”.

One of the more amusing floats we saw today were the cycle powered living rooms transporting some of the elders of the community. Sitting comfortably on her recycled armchair, Jaya Patel, born and bred Tooting resident said “ the best bit about this carnival is that its bought the whole community together from all sections young and old from all ethnic backgrounds”.

The South London Swimming Club had a cycle-powered float with swimmers, iceberg and sea made entirely out of plastic bags and bottles. The swimmers themselves came dressed as the colourful doors of their changing rooms at the Tooting Lido.

The Lady of Tooting, a 6 metre high animatronic creation told the story of Tooting on her crinoline Victorian dress decorated with over 170 faces of the ladies of Tooting.

Antonia Field-Smith, a Tooting resident said “It was great to see Tooting High Street without traffic and to be able to walk down the road without worrying about getting run over. I loved it, what a fantastic event”.

Steven Cooper of the Metropolitan Police thought the carnival was a fantastic idea and one which he would like to see happen again next year.  The grand finale at Fishponds Playing Fields with a shared picnic followed by dancing and music performed by local school children was a fitting end to a spectacular day.  (Check out this great blog post about the day too…)

For further information please contact:

Malsara Thorne – malsaraw@gmail.com

www.transitiontowntooting.org

“Have you heard the one about the Mayor of London, the Leader of the Council, the fox, the octopus, the baby elephant, the Lady of Tooting, the Borough Commander and the plastic bags. Look no further, they’re all to be found in the story of the Tooting Trashcatchers’ Carnival?   We thought we’d start with a Tooting celebration that could lead into an Unleashing a few days’ later and that’s when we thought of building a large scale community carnival all made from trash. Using recycling as a metaphor, we would show the ingenuity and creativity of the town for looking at the changes that could be made in how we live where we live.

All went well until we hit the thorny difficulty of winning over Transport for London (TfL) with our enthusiasm for a sustainable way of living and desire for access to the Upper Tooting Road for a cycle powered carnival with 100s of local carnivalistas. Over a long half year, our case was taken up by the Leader of the Council Edward Lister, Cllr Richard Tracey and many others on our behalf and presented to many along the way including the Mayor of London, the Deputy Mayor of London, and officers inbetween at all levels of transport and public body hierarchies. As a major arterial corridor, the road was considered too significant to London’s traffic; too many other events were happening in London that day (one of which was the Big Dance of which the Carnival is a part) and so despite TfL’s desire to work with communities to accommodate celebrations, ours was considered an ask too far.

Last Friday we considered our options: a Carnival parade only on side roads with the full support of Wandsworth Council or, a direct action approach to lodge the Carnival as a peaceful procession. We consulted as many carnivalistas as we could over the weekend about the route they wanted. The answer was unanimous: ‘The High Road!’.

On Monday we lodged a formal application to the Police for the Carnival as a peaceful procession for the rights of Tooting residents to celebrate peacefully in the hub of their community.   As we explained in our application:

“Everything in the procession has been made from ‘trash’ and the procession marks the local community’s recognition that current ways of living can be transformed in order to sustain life on earth in the face of global challenges. The procession needs to go on the Upper Tooting Road in order to be visible to and significant for the whole community that has resourced and created the Carnival procession. The procession celebrates a positive vision of a low carbon future and the creative ways in which a community can respond collectively to the global challenges of economic recession, climate change and resource scarcity. The procession marks a desire by the local community to come together peacefully to rehearse ways in which such a future can be made to work for current and future generations. The Carnival procession has the full support of hundreds of people in the Tooting area, including local businesses, primary and secondary schools, community groups, sports groups, cyclists, gardening groups. The procession has received support including funding from Wandsworth Council including Arts, Environment, Highways, Waste, Councillors and the Leader.”

We explained there would not be a petition as such, but stories told of Tooting and gatherings beforehand to create and make designs and structures for the Carnival and that the procession would end with a sharing picnic on Fishponds Playing Field.  We spoke to Sadiq Khan MP for Tooting, who spoke to David Musker the new Borough Commander, who considered our application yesterday.

We don’t know the conversations that happened between them and others involved, although we know that Sadiq wrote a letter asking Mr Musker as one of his first acts as Borough Commander to grant permission to the event advocating on our behalf saying:

“Tooting has a wonderful community, and events like this are what makes it such a special place to live and work. It has the backing of hundreds, if not thousands of local residents, and will make a peaceful and valuable contribution to the area.”

Yesterday at 5pm with 4 days to go, we had confirmation from the Metropolitan Police that the Carnival could proceed. Hats off to all who have helped get us this far – and especially Sadiq, our new Borough Commander and the great Tooting Police Safer Neighbourhood team with whom we shall be working to create a magical peaceful carnival procession on Sunday.

So, yes, sometimes rights for joy and shared celebration have to be defended and processed for. Can celebratory communal living transform our world?  Who knows. Join us to find out.  Here’s the poster – printed when we hoped against hope this would be possible and now it is. HURRAH HURRAH HURRAH and for anyone within a bike road of Tooting High Road, drop in at Broadway Studios, help us finish those foxes, turtles, baby elephants and the beautiful Sankofa Bird who looks forward and backwards in a single glance.

“If you’ve had enough of the Transition Conference at Seale Hayne – sorry! I’ve written this for those interested in the process of designing and running the event, particularly because what happened gave such an opportunity to explore what happens when something shocking lands in our communities and really shakes people up. In this post I’ll talk about what I’ve learnt – in particular how key it is to be able to marry the practical, outer, doing side of Transition, the factual knowledge of what’s happening, the ability to express and hold strong feelings, and then to reflect and make a deeper meaning from what’s happened. Holding this conference became a powerful job of weaving together these different qualities and skills in a frame of mutual respect and trust, with an amazing group of over three hundred people who brought all the different elements that were needed. The underlying intention for the conference was recognise the strength that comes with inclusion and diversity, and learning how to handle challenges and conflict – and we kind of got more than we bargained for!

Designing the Fourth Transition Conference

The fourth Transition conference finished a week ago in bright sunshine in South Devon. More than 300 people attended over three days, coming from just down the road and from overseas – Ireland, France, Brazil, Australia, US, and many other countries were represented.

My role in the conference team is to get an overall conference programme that will be interesting, varied, and useful for the Transition movement. This means creating lots of spaces where people get to meet each other, with interesting questions or themes, a good range of workshops, social time and other activities. While the conference runs I usually hold one or two pieces of creative or deepening processes that I’ve contributed to the programme, and share with the team responsibility for responding to anything that occurs during the event.

It felt important in the design of this year’s event to include the fact that Transition has been going for four years – and that the wider context around us has moved on since we started back in 2006. I wanted there to be a journey in the flow of the three days, so that as well as sharing information and meeting people, having fun and gathering inspiration, there would be an element of deepening together, a sense of building trust and engaging with something challenging.

This was reflected in a number of new elements.

• People were invited to form “Home Groups” at the start of the conference – about 6 people who get to know each other at the start, and meet fixed times throughout the three days, as well as meeting informally if they want to at other times.
• We scheduled a longer, 3 hour workshop session to give a chance to go deeper into topics.
• We included a session where the whole conference came together in their “Home Groups” to explore thoughts and feelings of what is really coming in the next one, five and ten years into the future. This was not a “positive visioning” session such as we often do in transition, but a wider ranging naming of what we fear as well as hope for, what could be really dangerous or challenging as well as what might not change at all, and what might transform to something wonderful.

The ‘Stoneleigh Factor’

Sophy, Peter and Rob find a novel way to show people what Lost Property has been handed in....

The wildcard in the conference design was the inclusion of “Stoneleigh”, a American researcher who blogs widely in the States and is a very respected voice on the economic situation. She looks at  OECD countries’ debt, GDP, and the rest of the global financial system, and predicts that this system will collapse in the near future – within 6 – 18 months. I didn’t know much about her, but others in the team felt she would bring something very valuable, and so we included a talk by her that we had to schedule at the same time as open space on the first afternoon because this was the only slot she could make.

The conference opened pretty much according to plan – with mappings showing a much greater variation in “how far on are we?” across all population sizes. The age spectrum included more young people. After forming home groups and setting up the open space sessions we broke into interest groups – another piece we thought would be relevant as many more transition projects have formed theme groups than in previous years.

The first we realised of the wildcard taking effect was that the first open space session – with Stoneleigh running parallel – looked pretty empty. Last year in Battersea we set up 25 tables for open space conversations, and added a further 10 – giving an average of about 10 people per table. The main hall was packed, buzzing, overflowing with people and movement and the hum of intense discussion. This year in the main hall a few tables had a group discussion going, many were just two or three people.

At the end of the afternoon I talked with some of those who had been to the Stoneleigh talk, who looked in a state of shock. One was wondering what to do with a mortgage and children to feed. In fact over 100 people – about a third of the conference – had attended Stoneleigh’s session, which had gone on longer than expected.  Shaun has already written something about the content – the scenarios she predicts, and the subsequent advice. The impact of the information on many of those listening was substantial – perhaps a similar experience to the “peak oil” moment that we know well in Transition.

The evening progressed – England scored a terrible own goal. There was a great Open Mike session with many people performing. At breakfast the next day the conference team met and discussed what to do. (Obviously we couldn’t do anything about the England football team, but we did feel a need to respond to the impact of Stoneleigh.) We already had the Future Context process (see below) planned for the morning which would give people a chance to talk about what they saw coming in the future, and several sessions after that would give people places to take explore their feelings or other responses, so we decided to stay with the format we had and see what happened.

Exploring the Future Context of Transition – a Process for 300 people

It’s an interesting challenge to design a process for over 300 people which allows for deep reflection, as well as something creative, to include something other than heady thinking and talking. We were adapting a piece from the last Transition Network Awaydays – exploring what we really believe the future context for Transition will be. So in the Great Hall everyone sat in their Home Groups with three sheets of flip chart paper, and were invited to reflect inwardly on what is already happening in communities, countries, families..  how shifts in our financial, ecological, social systems might change the landscape of our world one year ahead… what might be forming anew, continuing or evolving, and what might be breaking down or going through rapid change. There was time to talk in the small groups about images, ideas, feelings from the reflection. And then silence in which the group captured these possibilities for how the world around us will look one year from now in images and words on the paper. A recording of this session is available here.

We repeated the same process for five years ahead, and then ten years, collecting up the art works at the end of each. To finish we created an instant “Art Exhibition” of the images – clearing the space in the hall and inviting some to become Art Stands, holding up the pictures in small groups in time zones for 1, 5 and 10 years into the future. Others could wander through the exhibition alone or in pairs, reflecting on what they saw. The hall soon started to sound remarkably like an art gallery, with soft murmuring conversations, some art stands revolving to display their work better, and swapping with the viewers so they too could get a sense of what the different visions of the years ahead were.

Our final piece was to invite short reflections from people in each time zone – what common themes do you see here? And how are you feeling, seeing these? You can see all the images created here.

Many of the images showed mixtures of things falling apart and new possibilities emerging, especially after five years. For one group the journey was a lot of grief in five years as old ways were lost, and then becoming peaceful as we got to ten years’ time. Many had extreme and polarised energies represented – breakdown, chaos, conflict as well as new hope – stronger, healthier, more connected communities emerging. Transition often appears as a seed below the ground while power politics plays out above. The process took a little longer than we had anticipated, but the feeling in the room was of a lot of interest and engagement despite some frustrations and a bit of discomfort with the limited space.

Workshops to Follow the Process

In the afternoon we moved to another variation on previous conferences – workshops that lasted three hours, rather than the 1½ that we have had before. Several were specifically included to be places to continue to work with anything that had come up in the large group session, (though I think we could have done more to signpost them clearly).

These included –

• Somewhere to express your own, and witness others’ feelings (a Work that Reconnects “Truth Mandala”),
• To explore more creatively Stories for Transition – using Storytelling as a way of working.
• Workshops on Diversity, on Community and Conflict, and on Inner Transition – all pieces of building the inner structures that can help a community cope with the fall out of shocks – whether they are economic, physical, or emotional.
• For those who wanted practical support for the Transition process we included sessions on Holding Good Meetings, the Energy Descent process.
• And for those wanting to get on with building the business, organisations and systems we will need to create there were sessions on Working with Business, Local Food, Social Entrepreneurship, Local currencies. There were also visits to projects in Totnes and Occombe farm to see some pieces of the resilient future already up and running.

Feedback and Conference Team Reflection

First conference team meeting on the Friday evening...

As the conference progressed we had different bits of feedback about how participants were doing – some reported strong feelings and the need to have a space to specifically address these. Others expressed surprise that the information had such an impact – surely people working in transition are aware of the vulnerability of our systems, and ready to welcome their collapse?

In the conference team we reflected on the contrast between holding the wider view – that we need the old systems to weaken and give way to the new, which might welcome information about their imminent demise – and the immediate personal fear of losing the security associated with savings, pension, home, job. Allowing these to exist side by side, and accepting that as people we can move from the expansion and acceptance of one to the contraction and fear of the other from moment to moment is part of the job of leadership or the holding role in groups and projects such as Transition. This gets us to the territory where we really need the insights of psychological or wisdom traditions to understand, for example, how these views are held in different parts of our psyche, and can co exist despite the apparent contradiction. So we can be genuine in our belief in the need for the collapse and present in our fear for the safety of ourselves and our children when it comes.

Another polarisation that seems to be common in Transition initiatives is between speed and slowness as a response. This might emerge into voices that say things like:

This polarity often matches up with people who are interested in doing, practical actions, and people interested in inner work. Both have a healthy important aspect, and on each side is a danger that is good to avoid. These might be simplified to something like this:

I was interested that this dynamic came up in the workshop on Community and Conflict – as it did in another workshop recently exploring conflict in Transition. I’m curious about how widespread it is in Transition groups.

There are many other responses – some that I’ve heard include:

• Someone should have told me! Why wasn’t I informed? ..
• Surely we all know about this already, why all the fuss?
• Some of us never benefited from decent incomes, mortgages, pensions, paying for the kids’ education. What about us? Why should we care about those who are losing out now?..
• If we focus on negative ideas about the future we’ll just make them happen..
• We should welcome the breakdown of this destructive economic system – why would anyone be scared of it?..

I’m not suggesting answers to any of these, or that any are true or otherwise, rather that the job of the facilitator is to let these different positions surface and speak. If emotions are felt and expressed they pass; if they are shut down they will go underground and emerge in other forms – sometimes as blame or conflict in a group; sometimes as depression or stagnation, and in other more or less useful ways.

Expressing feelings and moving to new realisations

The first place where some of the depth of feeling was expressed was in the Work that Reconnects workshop held by Hilary Prentice and Toni Spencer. This included a Truth Mandala, a practice from Joanna Macy’s work, which gives a structure that supports people to speak and feel their feelings – fear, grief, anger and sense of not knowing, of hopelessness.. Seventeen people attended this, an even balance of men and women, bringing feelings about many things – ranging from the very personal through oceans and oil, what the future holds for young men and masculinity and much more.

“One repeated theme as people held the stick for anger, was grief at our own feelings of impotence, and a recognition of the pull to ‘beat people with the stick’ of transition and of the urgency of the situation, and the awareness coming in strongly and spontaneously that this is not the way to go; a clear arising of insight and compassion in the moment.” (from the workshop write up – see the full version on the Transition Network website).

Part of the understanding that helps to hold this process is that our feelings tell us something about what is true for us – our fear tells us about the danger we are in; our grief tells us what we care about that we are losing; our anger tells us what injustices are being committed. If we can express these we get in touch with the depth of our capacity to care, to act, to respond to the danger.

At the end of the workshop a number of people expressed feeling transformed by the process – more open to connection, more tolerant, feeling clear of things carried for years.

A Spontaneous Sharing Space

In response to requests we also added an evening session on Sunday for those wanting to talk further about the impact of the conference so far. Facilitated by Peter Lipman and Jo Hardy this was shaped into some time for feelings, and then a time for answering factual questions about the economic situation that were still unanswered. Between 30 and 40 attended, expressing many different responses to what people had been engaging with.

The most important effect of this kind of space is simply to be able to express and accept what our responses are, and that there is nothing particularly “right” or “wrong” about any of them. Having a space to explore them allows deeper insights to come into what is happening inside us – for example Peter talked about his realisation that when he explored his relationship with money he was actually finding out about his relationship with fear – that money had become the thing that promised “security” in the future, something that appears to give control over life. So when my financial security is threatened I have to meet my insecurity directly.

The other effect that a group session can bring is to recognise in what others say the pieces that are harder for me to hear – for example when someone speaks about their anger I can feel that resonate in me, though it might not be the thing I am aware of. So hearing all the pieces creates a greater sense of wholeness – in each person and in the group.

Bringing it All Together – the Closing

We decided to focus on the job of holding the conference in the closing session, trusting that what had been most striking for us would also be of use to others. We talked about the way that what’s happening in the wider world – dealing with the unexpected, the impact of fear about economic security – comes into our projects and groups, sometimes in unexpected ways and with unexpected force. The skill in the facilitation role is not to be able to anticipate everything, or to keep the unexpected out, but to use it in a way that strengthens us all, that deepens connection and generates useful learning. In this way we use the impact of the information of coming shocks to prepare us for the shocks themselves.

One piece of feedback in the closing plenary was in the Future Context exercise a group felt that after a lot of turmoil in 5 years there came a “Sweet spot” after 10 years – where life was peaceful again. For me the roller coaster of the three days resolved to a sweet spot in our final closing – all the pieces come together to make a more complete whole which has a feeling of resolution and greater meaning.

Here are some of the learnings I’ve had, or heard others say, from what happened at the conference:

-          The dynamics of the wider group come right into the facilitation team – many of the conference team talked about feeling jangled, fearful, reactive, upset, sleepless, during the three days. Knowing that this is part of the job of holding the overall process helps to not take things personally, or get stuck in the fear or upset, and not to take it out on colleagues!

-          It has strengthened my appreciation of and respect for those who hold a different perspective to me – how much I need the people who really focus on the “doing” to be great at that. And how good and rich it feels when they really appreciate and respect what those of us on the “inner” side bring as well.

-          I felt an enormous gratitude for the depth of awareness and experience that was present in the whole conference of over 300 people – how many of us are able to reflect on our own responses and able to help in the holding of the wider circle. Without these qualities permeating the whole conference I imagine it would have been a much rockier ride for everyone.

-          From a conference participant after the closing.. “I’ve finally really understood why we need inner work as part of Transition…!”

As I sit and look out at the amazing beauty of another Devon summer day I have another familiar feeling which comes after an intense process – “What was that all about?!” Sometimes it can feel as if we’ve been in a shared trance – did we need to go through all that? How can I describe it to those who weren’t there? Is it a storm in a teacup?

I’ve been in and with groups working with many different challenging situations – and the intensity of feelings that come up of fear, conflict, scarcity, competition are often surprising when we look back from a place of calm. This is also part of the nature of the territory, and I’m glad to know enough not to dismiss the reality of how challenging those times feel when you’re in it!

I leave you with something that Peter quoted, from the Totnes Heart and Soul group (thanks to Emily Ryan) – a way of expressing one of the tensions of the times we live in. I hope you can find – within yourselves and within your project – a balance between the need for speed and the need for stillness.

“In these times we need to be able to hold a place of profound patience in the face of extreme urgency”.

Sophy Banks – Transition Network Conference Team

If you are interested in the inner dimension of Transition there is a ning site www.transitionheart.ning.com for connecting with others, or email innertransition@transitionnetwork.org to be part of a national networking project.  To find out more about The Work that Reconnects see www.greatturnningtimes.com or www.joannacmacy.net.

Sophy is running a workshop which brings together the Work that Reconnects, Inner Transition, Ecopsychology and more at Sharpham House near Totnes August 27 – 30. See www.sharphamtrust.org calendar for 27 August for more information.  Thanks to Mike Grenville for the photos, his full collection from the conference can be found here.

When we talked before, you mentioned some practical stories about how people in the US and how people in Transition projects were making use of the Crash Course – could you tell us about those?

Certainly, a number of people have used the Crash Course to great effect.  It’s available online for free but not everybody watches 3½ hours of material on a computer, and it really wasn’t my intent for people to sit down alone and watch 3½ hours of stuff on the computer.  It’s meant to be shared.  So we produced it as three separate discs – they come in a single DVD case – and each of those discs is an hour and a half or less, and that was produced so that people would take that and bring it to their communities, maybe run three separate sessions a week.

That’s what we recommend because you have to integrate the material – I would not recommend watching it all at once.  Some people really picked that up and ran forward with it.  In January 2010 this year I was out in Sonora, California where a gentleman whose an architect in town had taken the crash course, had the 3 disc set.  He put the first disc on on Thursday night, invited everybody back next Thursday, and for the third and final disc.  On the fourth Thursday he led a discussion and people talked about it, and then he repeated that the next month.  He went from 12 people to 48.  Then he repeated it the next month and it went up to 90 odd people, and then he had to move to a larger space.

He did that for 6 months in a row, and when I showed up out there to give a talk they were going to use that talk as a springboard event to introduce the concept of becoming a Transition Town, organising themselves together around this idea that there’s things they might want to do together as a community.  When I showed up they rented the largest auditorium – it seemed very ambitious to me, it seated 440 people.  They ended up having to turn maybe 50 or 70 people away at this event because the hall had been filled to capacity.  To capture the feeling of it – it was very exciting, there was a lot of energy in the room, it was really fantastic.

Somebody who stood up afterwards just captured it perfectly.  He said, ‘before I ask a question I just want to make a statement.  I see everybody in town here, I see lawyers, I see council people, we’ve got our hippies in the room, our conservatives – we’ve got everybody here.  This reminds me of 3 years ago when we had that forest fire that was threatening our town, and everybody dropped their social walls and we just came together because we knew that there was something facing us that was larger than our daily lives and we banded together.  That’s what it feels like.’

To me that’s just a fantastic success story because that’s exactly how I envision the Crash Course being used: as a way of taking a very complicated bit of information and putting it into one spot so that we don’t have to keep reinventing that particular wheel, and put just enough in there so that people can see the context that underlies the actual set of conditions that we find ourselves in today, so that we can come to the conclusion that we need to start doing something.  That’s where the Crash Course leaves off and then it’s up to each community to go forward and take their interpretation of that that’s unique for them.

Everybody’s got different land, different water, different socio-economic, different sources of wealth – everybody’s got a slightly different condition.  That’s why I’ve just been so pleased that they were able to go and pick up the Transition Handbook because the Transition model is all about individual communities holding up a framework and then adapting it to their situation and particular condition.  They had a great kick-off and they’re up and running and I’m getting reports back from them, and the best part about that whole story is that yes, there’s an urgency, yes, there’s some anxiety, but they’ve just done it with a real sense of excitement and purpose and joy.

To me they’re an absolute model of how this can be done – the fact that we not only can, but we have to find ways to reach everybody in town, not just the usual people that show up to change things.  We need everybody to pull on this.  Everybody’s got to contribute, and everybody has something to contribute.  So I’m just really pleased with that particular outcome out there, I love what they did.

That’s a great example.  On that subject of reaching everybody, when you came and spoke in Bristol, one of the people that came up on the platform afterwards for discussion was the person was the senior officer leading on this sort of energy planning work for Bristol City Council.  And he sat there and he said, ‘Thank you Chris, that’s a real eye opener but what do I do with that now?  How do I actually create organisational, infrastructure level, meaningful change in response to this, because what you’re really saying is we need to fundamentally change our practices, and most organisations are not built up to enable fundamental change – they’re built up to respond to either business as usual or incremental change.

Yes, and certainly that’s one of the great challenges.  I don’t know any other way to begin to approach that, besides starting with developing a critical mass of awareness within the community, within the town, within the organisation.  Once that critical mass of awareness is there and you have enough people on board who are saying, ‘yeah, I get it, we have to fundamentally do things differently’, I think you can open it up to the second part of the conversation.  That’s when we can start to explore ways in which we can culturally realign ourselves so, what is the culture of an organisation and how does that adaptability work?

Here’s a perfect example of this.  Katrina comes into Louisiana and makes a mess of things, and it turns out that FEMA is mortally embarrassed.  There are life long members of FEMA that are mortally crushed by the lack of ability to respond to that type of crisis.  So they commissioned a study, they said, ‘why did that happen?’  They realised that they’d built themselves up over time in these siloed types of organisations, so there’s somebody who’s responsible for water, and there’s somebody who’s responsible for shelter, and there’s somebody whose responsible for food.

That person who’s on the ground doing food will move to their particular corner of the disaster and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I need water’.  They have to go all the way up to the top, jump over and go down to the water people, and it’s a very poor response.  So they said, ‘is there any example that we can look to that says, here’s an example of a major disaster that was dealt with really well – we’d like to know how that happened and why they were organised.’  It turns out there was another hurricane, hurricane Aniki, just an amazing blow and it came across Hawaii and the community on one of the islands got the full brunt of this thing and it was absolutely destroyed.

By the time anyone got there three days later, the town had its own water set up, it had taken care of its injured, it had basically gotten everything under control….so FEMA went back and did a study and asked, ‘how did this happen?’  It turns out it was the culture – they still had this indigenous culture there such that when this storm came in, people knew that if their children weren’t with them, they’d be with someone else and they knew they’d be fine; they had cultural means of managing chaos and disruption, they did a lot of things horizontally.

Everybody within each of their areas felt empowered to do whatever they needed to do in their areas, but felt perfectly empowered to do other things that needed doing.  Everybody just more organically did what needed doing, right where they were at that moment of crisis.  So FEMA wrote this whole report up and said, ‘no, we didn’t suffer from a lack of resources, we totally had enough resources to manage this particular crisis….what we had was a cultural problem.  Our culture was geared towards one set of circumstances, and it couldn’t realign itself, couldn’t be flexible, couldn’t reorganise itself in the face of a crisis that was actually larger than our organisation’s current ability.’

So I don’t know how you have that level of discussion about how Bristol City Council could benefit from changing itself culturally, until people have that critical mass of awareness that there’s a hurricane like Aniki? coming, and that it’s in our best interests.  It’s something we have to do.

Because we either respond now, while we can, with the luxury of time, or we respond later when pressed by circumstances.  Between those two particular responses there’s just a world of difference, night and day.  I just think that step one is building that awareness, building that sense of urgency, getting that critical mass, and then we can step into that next box.  It’s cart before the horse to start talking about fundamental, non-status quo changes until people are ready and receptive to really have those conversations.

Does what’s going on in Greece at the moment mean that the cultural stories can change very quickly because the crisis becomes far more obvious to people and you can move pretty much immediately onto fundamental infrastructure change? Also, what lessons do you think the UK could be learning from what’s happening in Greece?

I think both lessons are ones that we’ve learnt before and that we’re going to relearn again, that is that financial crises are incredibly quick.  They’re like bush fires – one day everything is fine, and a couple of weeks later everything is not fine.  This is particularly true to the extent that our entire financial system is one global construct so when they say that Greece is about to default the first question is, ‘default on what, and who do they owe it to?’  It turns out that France is exposed, Germany’s exposed, the UK is exposed, America is exposed, a lot of countries are exposed to this debt.

The lesson there is that when these things finally break, they break incredibly quickly.  So I would extrapolate that just a little bit and go forward and say, ‘Greece has a problem because it had spending mismanagement at the government level, but really it has a problem  of living beyond its means, and it was piling up debt.  A debt edifice creeps to a higher and higher level and then it suddenly breaks, and we saw that in Greece.  Well let’s fast forward – there are a number of other countries out there right now, and the UK is one of them, whose debt level should be creating some pretty serious cause for concern amongst people because those debt levels are really at the same sorts of levels we’ve been seeing in Greece.

The chief lesson is, don’t be complacent.  Be aware of the risks.  You should be asking yourselves if these risks are getting larger, or are they getting smaller.  One of my chief criticisms on the way in which this economic bailout was handled on both sides of the Atlantic, was to increase the level of indebtedness of the public sector, and it’s therefore increased the threat of a Greece-like event.  I really believe individuals should trust themselves, look at the numbers, read them, say, ‘Does this make me feel better or worse about our future prospects?’

A lot of people are coming to the conclusion that this whole notion of just piling up ever higher larger amounts of public debt to cover up a shortfall in private borrowing – yes it’s a solution, but it’s not addressing the root cause of the problem.  This is a crisis rooted in debt, we’re going deeper in debt, and that creates higher levels of risk.  For the UK I think there should be hard, fundamental questions around the level of indebtedness, how this is going to be serviced, how it’s going to shape the future, and really question is it that important that we get consumers back consuming at any cost, or should we maybe consider that this is the time when should be retrenching?

We’ve lived beyond our means for a period of time, maybe we have to consider living below our means to offset that, get the yin and the yang balance again, and then come out of this crisis stronger, more structurally sound, with a better functioning economy after taking a run down.  That makes a lot of sense, but it’s not the direction the UK has chosen, it’s not the direction the US has chosen, and it looks like it’s not the direction the EU is going to choose with Greece.  It looks like they’re going to print and add more public debt to cover up debt that’s essentially already gone bad.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  I’m hoping I’m wrong and that their strategy will work, but the risks are still there – in some cases I think we can make an argument that they’re higher than they used to be, and that’s a cause for concern.

What we’re seeing in Greece is that as the kind of cuts that are required to get an economy out of that mess kick in, we’re starting to see some significant public order issues and big strikes.  Is it inevitable that the way out of that amount of debt is going to involve major hardship across the board and we just have to accept that’s how it is?

Public disorder is something that concerns me because it just shows what happens when people have one set of expectations or a set of entitlements and those are not met, or are dashed.  Often that does result in social strife.  That’s certainly a very well understood dynamic.  There’s something called an IMF riot – those used to happen all the time down in South America, and in Africa and other places.  What’s interesting is that a little bit of the IMF medicine is now coming to the Western world and so we’re seeing it get better television coverage, but the dynamic itself is really well understood.

Greece got itself into some trouble, and yes they over spent and so now we’re seeing the early stages of IMF riots in their country as austerity measures are imposed and that’s a predictable sort of a reaction.  When I cast forward and I look at peak oil and this lack of energy expansion and its impact on the economy, it will create kind of that same condition all across the western world.  We could be entering a period – and I try to make a case for this in the work I do – it’s a serious option and I think people should consider it as a possibility.

We could be facing that same sort of circumstance across much of Europe and across the United States, Japan as well, China is a bit of a wild card to me.  I see those countries as being heavily exposed to this particular story.  So in some ways I look at Greece and I see that in some ways it a harbinger of things to come.  I try to understand how the official sectors respond to this, what do the policy makers do on the fiscal side, on the monetary side.  There’s a larger lesson in this: the same story is playing out in Greece now that I saw play out in General Motors when they bailed it out, which is that they’re going to print money in order to protect the current holders of the bonds from experiencing significant losses.  That’s one way you can do it, but all that does is it makes the holders of the bonds whole in the story, and transfers the cost of that onto everybody, through the pernicious effects of printing money out of thin air, which creates inflation and a truly regressive tax because it hits everyone at once, it punishes savers.  So really we could see this in some ways as rewarding the imprudent at the expense of the prudent – I’m not a big fan of this because people are quick learners and it doesn’t take them long to figure out it doesn’t pay to be prudent.

The next thing you know, you’ve got a worse problem on your hands.  So I think we’re seeing very predictable, short sighted responses which are, ‘let’s just keep the pain in Greece down as much as possible now, we’ll just make it through next week, we’re just trying to manage a crisis.’  But inevitably, we find that the long term health and very important sources of sociological and cultural impact are really swept under the rug in the name of battling a crisis.

History shows that when these sorts of crises come around, when governments resort to the printing option instead of the bitter pill option – the printing option has not yet worked in a long term capacity.  It’s all descended into some sort of pain: currency collapse, major inflation, sometimes hyper inflation.  We had hyper inflation in Yugoslavia, hyper inflation in Germany before World War II.  Inflation is the absolute number one thing I would want to avoid at any possible cost, but we’re seeing our early responses are to print our way out of this and so there are some concerns there as well.

If I could give any advice it would be to say, ‘why don’t we just try to see what happens if the people who have been imprudent have to live with the consequences of that, and not sacrifice the prudent at this particular order.  Is there any way we can make the outcome of this rest on the shoulders of those who are most responsible?  So far that’s not the course we’re taking, at least as far as I can see.

You could argue that the imprudent ones are the ones that are taking the decisions still!  I have a final question for you – I know you strove in the crash course to stick to fact and not opinion, but this is definitely one on opinion.  It’s to do with the depth of the crisis you’ve very convincingly argued we’re hurtling towards, and whether in fact, given the deep grained nature of our industrial growth system, we would have had any opportunity to change in a meaningful way without such a crisis?

I absolutely think we could – if everyone woke up tomorrow with an entirely different view we could do things completely differently.  It is entirely possible for us to use energy in ways that are much more clever, efficient.  We are wasting enormous amounts of resources at this particular point in time.  My understanding of energy is that this is a once in a species bequeathment, it was built up over hundreds of millions of years and we’re going to use it in a roughly 200 year time frame and so we could actually be giving ourselves the most important gift.  We could absolutely be giving ourselves the gift of time by entering into very aggressive conservation programmes, and being much more clever about how we use our energy.

Here’s an example – if someone wants to come forward and have a great idea for say turning algae into biofuel then they’ve found a way to recycle nutrient loss coming out of sewage plants and that want some energy to go forward and do that – if I was king for a day I would say, ‘okay, here’s what energy is going to cost you for that particular use.’  But if Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft wants to take a 400 ft yacht around the world, I would have a different cost for that fuel.  I think that instead of pulling all of this energy out of the ground as fast as possible and then allowing ‘the market’ to decide where it gets used, I think we could be a lot more directive and a lot more specific about where it’s going.

In my own little corner here on my property we’re starting to work with a wonderful, bright young guy with permaculture principles for growing food.  I understand that it’s possible to use a lot less energy and still have a very good quality of life, in my own small corner of the world and I don’t understand why that can’t be possible elsewhere, why we couldn’t be much more clever and creative about the ways in which we use energy.  I think this doesn’t have to end in crisis, there are lots of ways we could restructure currency systems that we already know about, there are already the technologies that exist – we don’t need any new ones to be developed –  that can allow us to use our energy much more efficiently and usefully.

We don’t need any new thinking, we don’t need any more books to be written, we don’t need any more technology, we could absolutely apply what we’ve already got and make enormous differences.  But – we are not.  That’s why I think that of the things we need most, we need political will, more than anything, to be serious about this, to confront the issues on the basis of the data, to really face the facts as we know them.  If we do that, I can see ways that this could be really positive, that this could actually turn out that we have many generations of time in front of us.

If we do it poorly – meaning status quo, all engines full, must get back to consumptive lifestyles, must bet back to full spending then we’ll talk about the real issue – I see a lot of ways that that story could fall of the rails and have an accident.  I’m hopeful because I see ways it could turn out, I have a loss of hope in some ways because I don’t see us being serious, really serious about the nature of the predicament we’re in at that stage.  But we could close that gap, that’s where Transition Towns come in, that’s where I come in, that’s where Daly comes in, that’s where all the people that you  mention come in, to try and change the narrative where there’s still time.

To me, that’s where the work needs to happen.  It’s about changing the stories we tell ourselves, it’s about having a different narrative.  The most important one, that we’ve touched on a couple of times today, if we could just change this one sentence then a lot would fall off and it could all be beautiful: ‘the economy must grow’.  If we could just drop that concept and be really serious about finding economic models that aren’t reliant on continuous exponential growth, then a lot of great things would fall off of that.  Big changes, but they’d be exciting changes and I think a lot of people, particularly young people, would find a very purposeful set of ideas and jobs to throw their hearts and minds into.