This month’s podcast goes into more depth on three of the stories from the April round-up of what’s happening in Transition.  We hear from the High School Joan Segura i Valls in Santa Coloma de Queralt (in Catalonia, Spain) who have just completed a big project about Transition, from Transition Oamaru and Waitaki District in New Zealand about their Sustainable Skills School, and we hear from Tooting about their Treasuring Tooting event that took place last weekend.  Do note that you can embed it on your own website, and that it is also now available on iTunes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A big HUG from Portugal

Isabel and Luis Gonçalves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

Here is some updated information on the Festival of Transition:

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

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

The ‘What if?’ events include:

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

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

 The ‘Transition Walks’ include:

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

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

Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

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

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

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

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote a while ago about Transition Network’s recent one day conversation on ‘Peak Money and Economic Resilience’, and how it had included a session where people from Portugal, Ireland and Greece gave a sense of what is happening in each place.  Filipa Pimentel, who is co-ordinating the networking of the national Transition hubs, spoke about Portugal, and about how the economic crisis is shaping how Transition is emerging there.  Filipa was in Totnes recently, and I caught up with her for a quick interview at the station as she waited for her train home.  Here it is:

Shortly before we started recording, she realised that she had left her suitcase in the cafe where we had met and had had to go off and get it, hence the laughter about half way through.  She said that the crisis in Portugal is now one that you can really feel.  The average salary is €840, the minimum wage is €480, and some OAPs are on a pension of just €150.  This in a country where supermarket food prices are the same as in the UK.  People are already starting to hungry.

Filipa speaking at the recent Spanish Transition gathering.

Transition is starting to spread in Portugal, but it has made a deliberate decision from the outset to base itself on the concept of the gift economy.  In areas which are in financial distress you cannot, for example, charge for film screenings.  The aim is to decouple money from the message of Transition, to, as Filipa puts it, “try to reduce money exchange in everything we do”.

There are, she said, two reactions to a crisis.  If you really believe that the crisis will go away, you hold on and you hold your activities and you wait.  If you believe that it is here to stay, you start to adapt.  What Transition initiatives have done in Portugal is to accept that it is here to stay.  Initiatives in Portugal have been developing ways to organise low cost events, and to develop relationships with Councils not based on asking them for money, but asking them to share resources.  I hope you enjoy this interview, in which she also tells a few of the most fascinating stories from the emergence of Transition in Portugal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s generally considered unwise to use props when speaking on radio, especially on your first appearance on Radio 4.  However, this talk will contain two props, and here’s the first.  It’s a £10 note from Brixton in London, but it’s a Brixton Pound.  Rather than the Queen’s head, it features David Bowie’s.  I’ll tell you more about it later, but it matters because it leads us into what I want to discuss this evening, the question of resilience. 

The former Crystal Palace manager Iain Dowie once described resilience as ‘bouncebackability’.  In our own lives, and in the lives of those around us, when we encounter difficulties, we either respond with resilience, or we don’t.  Sometimes we are able to adapt to enforced changes, to ‘go with the flow’ as it were, and at other times everything falls apart.  This applies to us as individuals, as communities, and as entire economies.  The degree to which we are resilient matters very much.

But one key question is “resilient to what?”  There’s a conventional view of resilience, but I take a very different view.  The UK Cabinet Office argues that it is up to each community to determine what they build resilience to, but then sets out what it sees as being the key areas of risk the nation faces: floods, pandemics, terrorist attacks.  In this context, resilience is a very practical matter of ensuring we have enough medicines, emergency responders and sandbags in the event of a disaster.  In this context, resilience is about the ability to adapt.  It’s about having the flexibility to get back on our feet.

I take a different perspective though, and what I am presenting in this talk is a kind of ‘Resilience 2.0’ (to use computer language).  The World Economic Forum, whose job it is to advise governments on risk, are clear about what they see as being the key ones: climate change, volatility of energy prices and the economic crisis.  These require very different, and more far-reaching responses, responses that go far beyond sandbags.

Here’s what I think we need to be building resilience to.  Oil prices have quadrupled since 2003, and prices are becoming increasingly volatile.  At the same time, North Sea oil production fell 22.5% last year, a record fall.  The cost of importing oil into the EU has risen from $280bn in 2010 to over $400bn in 2011, and it is clear that the price of oil will strangle any possibility of a revival of economic growth.  Cheap energy underpins most of the goods and services that we depend on in our everyday lives.  You can’t do economic growth without cheap energy, however many bailouts we throw at it.  The two go hand in hand.

Without cheap energy, globalisation goes into reverse.  If petrol and diesel becoming more expensive teaches us anything, it is that far away really is quite far away.  5 years ago, I found myself deeply worried about these issues, and about the kind of world I was leaving for my children.  I wondered whether in seeing resilience just as something we do in order to be prepared for a crisis, we were missing a trick: that we might instead see it as an opportunity.  How might our settlements look if we began to think in terms of resilient food, resilient energy, resilient economies?  Might this shift in thinking actually contain the potential for an economic and cultural renaissance for the places we live?  It felt to me to be a powerful question.

So, I looked around for people to work with to kick off an experiment.  It is clear, when the government argues that the supply of cheap oil to the UK isn’t even an issue for another 20 years, that they are not going to take the lead here.  So, myself and a few others set out a simple template, a simple set of principles and tools, and more importantly, an invitation; an invitation to be part of an historic experiment.  You may have heard of the result, Transition initiatives, or, as they are more popularly known ‘Transition Towns’.  The ‘towns’ bit is a bit of a misnomer: there are now Transition villages, cities, islands, hamlets, streets, schools.  It has spread like wildfire.  There are now many hundreds in the UK, and thousands around the world, in 34 countries.  The idea at its heart is that of ‘resilience-building as economic development’, that by keeping things local we can build richer, stronger and more resilient communities.   It is inspired in part by my friend, the economist David Fleming who died last year, who said:

“localisation stands at best at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative”.

Many people have ideas, theories, models.  Those who have helped to shape this approach have been fortunate enough to have see it gain some traction, indeed to go viral around the world.  It has been a self-organised process, and like Open Source software, has been shaped, refined, deepened and evolved by those who pick it up and try it out.  It’s not our idea any more, and that’s how it should be.  It’s an exploration of what ‘engaged optimism’ looks like as the driver for change.

The idea that making our communities more resilient is the opportunity to also make them more skilled, more diverse, more grounded, better connected, more entrepreneurial, is an idea whose time has come.  Indeed, when I look around myself today, as the economic unravelling gathers increasing pace, it often looks to me like the only viable idea on the table.  I want to tell you some stories of initiatives you may not have heard of but which have arisen from Transition groups around the country and which I think hold the seed of our economic future, one which still trades, but mostly in things that can’t be produced closer to home.

A few months ago I stood in a field on the edge of Norwich as the sun went down, visiting Farmshare, a Community Supported Agriculture project started by Transition Norwich, from an idea that emerged at their launch three years earlier.  The farm has 70 members, and it produces local, seasonal produce for them.  They are recreating the model that supported us until relatively recently, farms on the edges of our towns and cities, sited close to where people live. It has been a steep learning curve, but here they are, modelling in practice a key part of a resilient food system, learning a huge amount by doing so, and building a strong sense of community at the same time.

And now to our Brixton Pound.  3 years ago, I stood in Lambeth Town Hall, watching the launch of the Brixton Pound, (“money that sticks to Brixton”).  It is a local currency that operates only in that part of South London.  The idea is that it is a tool that helps to plug the leaks in the local economy, supporting local businesses and traders.  Brixton Pounds cannot be taken out of Brixton as they instantly lose their value, they can only recirculate.  They cannot be traded internationally, nor banked offshore in tax havens.  During that event, the then leader of the local council told the packed hall “I want the Brixton Pound to become the currency of choice for Brixton”.  More recently they launched a new set of notes and also an innovative system where you can, believe it or not, pay for your shopping by text.  The next development is that later this year, the Bristol Pound will be launched, a combination of pay-by-text and printed notes for the whole city of Bristol, keenly supported by the City Council. It is an experiment in what a resilient economy looks like in practice that could have huge repercussions elsewhere.

At an event in Bath a while ago, a member of Transition Bath excitedly told me of their very ambitious plans for starting a community energy company.  Many months later, Bath and West Community Energy held its first share launch.  They raised over £700,000 in shares and have plans for a range of renewables in the city and its surroundings, and have begun with installing solar photovoltaics on the roofs of local schools.

So, to my second prop.  This is a bottle of beer, called ‘Sunshine Ale’, brewed by Harveys Brewery in Lewes in Sussex.  It was brewed to celebrate the installation of 544 solar PV panels on their roof by the Ouse Valley Energy Services Company, one of the spin-offs from Transition Town Lewes.  They raised over £300,000 in shares from local people.  We are talking here about new renewable energy, but owned by, and for the benefit of, the communities affected by it.

In November 2009 I went to Slaithwaite in Yorkshire for a coming-together of Transition initiatives from across the north of England.  On a noticeboard at the back of the hall was a poster that read “a fresh idea: a new community-owned fresh local food shop for Slaithwaite”.  The local greengrocer was about to close, and members of Marsden & Slaithwaite Transition Town and others were considering taking it on as a community business.  Shortly afterwards, they successfully raised £15,000 in shares from local people to do so, and The Green Valley Grocer was born.  Business is thriving.  The shop has acted as a catalyst, inspiring the creation of a local food-growing co-operative which now supplies the shop, and more recently they, along with other local food businesses, announced ‘A declaration of independence from the global food system’!  Although perhaps a tad premature, it highlights the scale of their ambition.

What we are seeing happen in communities across the country is deeply exciting.  It is enterprise, but it is enterprise in a context.  They are implementing what Lloyds wrote in a report about why businesses need to take oil depletion into consideration. They wrote:

“Energy security is now inseparable from the transition to a low-carbon economy and businesses plans should prepare for this new reality”.

They are going beyond this though, and seeing this change of direction as a huge opportunity.  They are not just creating standalone one-off businesses, rather businesses emerging to meet what they see as a very real need to build community resilience.  They are not hoping that the challenges outlined by the World Economic Forum will simply go away, they are, without waiting for permission, rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it.

Another key function that many of these enterprises offer is the ability for people to invest inwards into their communities.  I visit many of these communities, for their launch events, or other public events they have organised.  These are ordinary people, coming together in extraordinary times, to do extraordinary things.  To know and meet these people has been one of the greatest honours of my life.

The recent Review by Mary Portas which looked at the future of the UK’s High Streets stated:

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

Herein lies the tension.  The current push for economic growth at all costs fails to determine between job creation and job displacement.  It also fails to distinguish between strategies that build community resilience and strategies that undermine it.  There is a Big Idea here I think, a vital one, and I hope I have managed to excite you with its possibilities this evening.

I often end talks I give with Arundhati Roy’s quote “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day I can hear her breathing”.  I think we might adapt her quote, so that, in the context of this bottom-up drive for more resilient communities, communities better prepared for uncertain times, it is not only a case of hearing another world breathing, but being able to see her around us, already setting up local businesses, reviving her local economy, setting up bakeries, breweries, food hubs, mentoring scores of young people with business ideas, attracting inward social investment finance, creating the models whereby people can invest in their communities and see them being strengthened and supported.

That’s why I get out of bed in the morning, because I feel that the potential in our getting this right is so exquisite that it’s all I can do, and because the grim predictability of what will happen if we do nothing is just unthinkable, especially in relation to the challenge of climate change.  If we are able to turn things around on the scale we need to turn them around on, to replace vulnerability, carbon intensity and fragility with resilience, it will be an achievement our children will tell tales about, sing songs about.  I hope I am there to hear them.  Thank you.

Many of these stories are told in more detail in The Transition Companion and in the forthcoming film ‘In Transition 2.0′.  

“Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Culture movement, believes that “engaged optimism” is the best way to face the global challenges of the future, be it climate change, oil supplies running out or the economic downturn. He believes initiatives enabling people to produce their own goods and services locally – from solar powered bottled beer to micro currencies like the Brixton pound – are the best way to build community resilience. Four Thought is a series of talks in which speakers give a personal viewpoint recorded in front of an audience at the RSA in London”.

I hope you enjoy it.  I’ll post the text of it tomorrow…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Close to home

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

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

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

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

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

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

A different form of action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Low Carbon Life

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

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

Three years and counting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://vimeo.com/8029815

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

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

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

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

http://vimeo.com/34400137

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

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

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

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