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.

The newly opened Dunbar Community Bakery.

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

Narrative One.  ‘Produce Economic Growth or Die Trying’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter ‘The Portas Review’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back at the summit… tools for building bridges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting male perspective on babies, who in my experience do a lot more than “mewling and puking” (how about “smiling and gurgling”, for example?), but anyway, other than joining their parents at events, there is not really a specific role that babies can actively play in Transition that I can think of, so let’s move onto the next one….

I think this probably tells you more about Elizabethan schools than about the school-age children themselves, but this refers to the age of being at school.  I think, from my experience working with this age group, that this falls into two halves.  For primary school aged children, the best thing is not to talk too much about climate change, peak oil and so on, rather to focus on skills and on low-impact approaches to energy, food and travel just being an everyday part of life.  Kids need that time in their life to be kids.  At secondary age though, there is a lot that can be done, designing into their teaching experience the understanding of the world around them, good critical thinking skills, teaching ecological design, how change happens, the skills for personal resilience, feeling empowered by their educational experience, and feeling that they can shape how their school, their home life and their community develops.

This is the age of perhaps 18-22, which is about breaking away from the family, confronting our parents (not necessary literally, but psychologically), standing on our own ground, the age where “Be realistic, demand the impossible” feels an entirely reasonable ask, and where putting your body on the line feels a natural thing to do.  When I was 18 I marched, I went on roads protests, I ran about a several hundred yards pursued by security guards in an attempt to gatecrash the launch of the much-resisted Bristol spine road (I had no idea what I would have done if they hadn’t caught me and I’d actually got there, probably rather sheepishly crept in at the back).

Had someone asked me to get involved in setting up a community energy company, I would have felt that that was way beyond me, I didn’t have the skills, the interest, the patience.  I was fired by a sense of injustice, of anger, of a desire to rebuild the world from scratch.  In terms of Transition, Transition Heathrow best capture this energy, it brings the aspects of Transition around growing food, working with the community, learning skills, but puts them in a context that is edgy, that has the frisson of making a bold statement on its own terms.  If I were that age again (unlikely), I would more likely be attracted to Occupy than Transition, but I would find Transition’s analysis of things useful, and would see it as part of the larger movement for change.

This is an oft-explored tension within Transition, the extent to which it overtly embraces activism or not.  Rather than being something that will ever be resolved, I think it will remain as one of those open questions, an edge with a lot of energy to it.  In any Transition initiative, it is too simplistic to suggest that young people will engage only where a more radical edge can be created, but when I think of myself at that age, what attracted me to permaculture was that it had a very radical, playful edge to it (such as when Bill Mollison, after a withering take on the uselessness of lawn culture, plants the hazelnut in a lawn, stating “being a good urban guerrilla, we might start by putting a hazelnut in the lawn” at 2.20 into this video).  For me, this is also very much present in Transition.

People with young children often learn to be very productive in very limited time, and to juggle many things.  Often the very innovative ideas such as using social media to promote local currencies and other initiatives, and the sense of how the web can underpin this work will emerge from those in this age.  They would tend to be more present and behind initiatives like the Brixton Pound, which is very funky and which uses social media in really creative and successful ways.

Hmmm. Not so sure about the round belly bit, but I’d say here we move into the late forties, and into the fifties.  Kids grown up, bit more time, life perhaps a bit less hectic (?).  Sometimes this means that engaging in Transition is a great way of meeting people and building a social network that was previously much easier to achieve when you have young children.  Often by this time people have amassed more in the way of practical skills, skills in managing/participating in groups, and more self knowledge, and have a degree more confidence that they can make things happen.  In some places, Transition core groups might consist largely of people at this age, as they tend to have the time available to give to kicking things off, the experience that trying to change things can actually change things, and some of the skills that are needed.

The gifts that this age brings to Transition include a sharing of experience and memories that might be useful to those engaged in more practical Transition work. Indeed there is a case to say that as the economy continues to unravel, that part of the work of Transition initiatives will become offering care and support services to our elders.

I am aware that this piece has consisted of massive generalisations, but given that my research in Totnes found that those under 30 were not so well represented, and that being an observation in many (but by no means all) of the Transition initiatives I visit, I thought it might be worth looking into.  Interestingly, in countries such as Spain and Portugal where the economic and job prospects are that much more precarious, there seem to be a lot more people involved with Transition.  The creation of a more sustainable, more resilient future will need the input of people of all ages, and each will have a role to play.  The aspects of Transition that appeal to someone in their 40s will not be the same as those that appeal to teenagers, but all those roles are vital.  What I do see in many Transition groups is a very respectful space for all the generations to come together and work on a project that they feel excited about. 

So, this has been one of those posts that is offered more as a conversation starter, rather than a complete argument.  It would be interesting to hear your thoughts.  How has your initiative managed to engage younger people?  How does the range of people in your group represent the seven ages?  Have you ever felt excluded from Transition because of your age, or that it was not relevant to you?  How might that more direct approach represented by Occupy look in a Transition context?  Can we design Transition in such a way that whatever age you are, you feel part of a dynamic and deep process that speaks to what you care about, the passion you bring and the skills you have?  Over to you…

This book seeks to answer the question:

“What would it look like if the best responses to peak oil and climate change came not from committees and Acts of Parliament, but from you and me and the people around us?”

It’s a big question, which is why it requires this relatively big book to address it, but I think you’re going to enjoy the pages ahead, and the journey they will take you on. For the first The Transition Handbook, published in 2008, this was pretty much a speculative question, but for this new book we are able to draw from what has, in effect, been a five-year worldwide experiment, an attempt to try to put the Transition idea into practice. I think it is one of the most important social experiments happening anywhere in the world at the moment. I hope that by the end of this book you will agree, that if you aren’t involved you will want to get involved, and if you are already involved, it will affirm, inspire and deepen what you are doing and give you a new way of looking at it.

Transition Town Kingston using large maps for a commuity visioning exercise.

Supported by some simple principles, ingredients and tools – which I’ll introduce you to later – and by a global network of self-organising initiatives, many thousands of people in cities, islands, towns and villages, from the US to New Zealand and from Brazil to Norway, are coming together to ask, “For all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly rebuild resilience (to mitigate the effects of peak oil and economic contraction) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of climate change)?”

While the overriding cultural response is to duck that question and to pop our heads into the sand of denial, these people are responding with creativity, compassion and a deep commitment. They’re also having fun, lots of it, connecting with people they’d never met before, and together creating something far greater than the sum of its parts. What they’re doing is telling a new story about the place they live and about what it could be like in the future.

This book is called a ‘Companion’ because that is exactly what it is intended to be. It is a move away from ‘The 12 Steps of Transition’ that has underpinned the work of Transition initiatives up to this point, towards a more holistic, more appropriate model. It will act as a very useful companion as you try to address the questions set out above. It imagines the work involved in transforming the place you live from its current highly vulnerable, nonresilient, oil-dependent state to a resilient, more localised, diverse and nourishing place, as a journey. It is a companion in the sense that it doesn’t tell you which way to go or what your journey will look like, but suggests some of the especially good views along the way, and provides a rough sense of the different types of terrain you will find yourself travelling across. But the journey itself and where you end up – that’s up to you.

The analogy of the journey is a useful one. Throughout history, we have told stories of heroes who undertook extraordinary journeys, which combined an inner and an outer journey. Often they go something like this: a likeable but flawed character (Frodo, Harry Potter, Jason of the Argonauts) is faced with a challenge/problem that seems impossible and for which they feel hopelessly unequipped. They set out on a journey (either literal or metaphorical), overcome the problem and in the process discover they are a hero. To do this they have to go on a journey that transforms them, and on which they are required to take on challenges they feel unprepared for and find new strengths and inner resources. The process of shifting our society on the scale it needs to shift, in the time that we have available, requires a story of such magnitude. At the moment it looks impossible, yet the situation demands courage, commitment and intention from us. In those stories, our heroes don’t have a clear sense of where they are going, but they know which general direction to head in and some of the key stages their journey will need to pass through. This book is designed as the companion for a hero, such as yourself, setting out on such an adventure, one that we need to be embarking on in our millions, and not as solitary heroes but working with others.  We can’t do this alone. The idea of the solitary hero can be quite an unhealthy one, and we need to pool our efforts and be heroic together!

Here’s a story of my own, which will hopefully give a flavour of how this journey might unfold. Sometime in 1992, I travelled from Bristol to the Snowdonia National Park with my friend Mark, who had borrowed his mother’s car for the day. We left the city, first passing through suburbia, then through industrial estates, then into the open flat country as we headed to the Severn Bridge. Once in Wales we headed up through the valleys, the landscape becoming more mountainous, before entering a very different landscape of small fields and rolling hills.  Finally we entered the national park, with its forests and rocks, as we neared our  destination. The reason for our trip was Tir Penrhos Isaf, an emerging permaculture (see page 98) project that had recently set an interesting planning precedent, having successfully argued that their practising permaculture was a valid reason for them to live on their  smallholding.

On a damp afternoon with leaden grey skies, we were greeted by Chris and Lynn Dixon, who showed us round the site and told us about what they were doing there over a cup of tea next to their woodstove.  Although there was much that impressed me about what they were doing, what was most fascinating to me, and what I took away with me most, was what they weren’t doing. When they had taken on the piece of land, which had been heavily overgrazed by the former owner, they soon fenced off one-third of the site from deer and rabbits to allow it to  regenerate naturally. Chris showed us a series of photos taken of the area year after year, showing what then happened. After just three  years, the pioneer plants, gorse, broom and bracken, were well established,  with young trees emerging. After six years, some substantial trees were established, and the place was starting to look like real woodland.

Most land wants to be forest. If left, grassland will pass through stages, with the arrival of gorse, bracken and brambles, followed by the pioneer trees such as rowan and birch, then the trees that will make up the final woodland, such as oak and hazel. The photos of the evolution of the land  showed the process unfolding. Chris felt that the best way to create new woodlands was not to plough the site, plant trees, fit plastic guards to protect them from rabbits, mulch them, apply herbicides to keep the weeds down and then thin the trees to create the desired final spacings; rather, it was just to protect the site from grazing and allow natural regeneration.

I remember Chris and Lynn’s woodland (which is by now a well-established woodland) when I consider the results of the self-organising response to peak oil and climate change that we are starting to see.  Are we talking about an imposed, centrally coordinated response that starts with a detailed plan and which takes little account of local culture and topography, or should we enable self-organisation and the emergence of something more specific to the site? While there is a need for support from central government, and the statutory removal of obstacles that stand in the way of communities creating their own responses and initiatives, well organised and inspired community groups can do extraordinary things.

There is another useful analogy in that story too. A journey from one place to another can take a number of different routes, but will usually pass through a series of distinctly different landscapes. You don’t necessarily notice when you leave one and enter another, but there are moments when you realise you are in a very different place. The Transition  journey is similar. You find that you move from raising awareness, showing films and trying to interest people, to noticing that you seem to have created an organisation that has different needs from those it had originally, and then later to starting to think about what new businesses and infrastructure your community needs. Each stage is like finding yourself in a distinct landscape. What follows in these pages also tries to capture that aspect of creating Transition.

This book is our best attempt at creating as useful a companion on that journey towards community resilience as possible. It is rich with stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, of tried-and-tested tools, as well as some more experimental ones, and offers many of the ingredients you may find you need to create this process where you live.

The way it has been created has embodied this sense of collaboration and creativity. Each of the ‘tools’ and ‘ingredients’ was written in draft and posted to my blog, TransitionCulture.org, as well as on the Transition Network’s site. Comments and feedback were invited. Transition initiatives around the world were invited to send in their stories and photos, which abound in this book. The photoshopped images here were done after I put up a post asking for help with images. Even the title was thought up by Martin Tepper when I put a post on Transition Culture asking for ideas as to what this book should be called.

You will find not just my voice throughout this book, but the voices of many people who are actively trying out these ideas and sharing their experiences. You will hear from Transition trainers, community activists, brewers, bakers, people who have organised a few film screenings in their communities, people who have set up energy companies and local currencies or who have got together to share skills.  I am grateful to them all for sharing their insights.

In any journey, there are times when it looks impossible, when we need to rest and recapture why we set out on this mad venture in the first place. There are also times when the view and the journey are so exhilarating that we feel our hearts might burst.  Transition initiatives all have very different experiences: they have moments when they can feel the world around them shifting in unimaginable ways, and other moments where it all feels flat and becalmed. This book offers an honest look at the work of Transition initiatives around the world, in the hope that it will inform and inspire you to pick up and run with this approach.

The format for this book arose from wanting to better show how Transition has evolved since it was first suggested, and the insights from the work of many hundreds of initiatives. Initially it was modelled on Christopher Alexander’s ‘Pattern Language’ approach,1 a great inspiration to me over many years. I began, through TransitionCulture.org, to suggest that Transition might make a good pattern language, and to draft some initial patterns, and over time these different aspects of Transition began to be called ‘ingredients’, which people found far more engaging. It then became clear that some of them were more like tools, and so the structure of this book began to come into focus.

Being in the privileged position of hosting conversations and being sent stories, photos, posters, ideas and feedback that have shaped this book has reinforced why all this matters to me. Transition has grown up very fast within just four years into a rich, deep movement that has developed a unique approach.  I will speculate at the end of the book as to where I imagine it might go from here, but one of the qualities I hope will come through in this book is Transition’s rigour. In some ways it is an appeal to the environmental movement to get serious about creating a new more localised economy, to create projects and infrastructure that are economically viable, and to engage rigorously with these issues.

It also, I hope, provides a context. You may be helping with a small project: a school vegetable garden, an allotment, the community bus, a community group, or setting up a website. This book aims to set out how all of this might fit together in a spirit of not waiting for permission but just getting on with it, being part of the whole; part of a historic process of rethinking how our communities, our economy and many aspects of our daily lives work. As our economies wobble and contract, the oil price becomes increasingly volatile and the climate breaks record after record, there is no avoiding the fact that now is the time and we are the ones to do this.  We may feel like Harry Potter in the cupboard under the stairs, unequipped to even start on this journey, but hopefully this companion will inspire a sense of heroism and an opportunity. We can do this. As my friend Chris Johnstone says, “life is a series of things we are not quite ready for”.

I remember once reading online about a young couple in the US who built themselves a strawbale house. When they got married, they invited all their family and friends and had a clay plastering party.  Everyone came along, ate, danced, drank, got filthy, and plastered the inside of their house. “What we love most about our house”, the newly weds said, “is that it has been patted all over by all the people we love.” This book is very similar. It has been patted all over by many hundreds of people who have as much day-to-day experience of Transition as I do, and it is infinitely the better for it. My deepest gratitude to them all and to the amazing team at Transition Network, who support the ongoing spread of Transition. Enjoy the journey.

You can order ‘The Transition Companion: making your community more resilient in uncertain times’ here. 

The student march had been refused permission to march past St. Pauls, and the police were keen to prevent that from happening, as well as also to stop a repeat of the rioting that was seen at the same protest last year.  Shortly after I arrived, many of the people at the camp set off on a march to meet the student demonstration.  I set off with them for a while, but knew I had to get back to do my talk, and was separated from the main demonstration by deep rows of police who blocked the road.  It was a pretty scary scene I must say, very heavy.

It all meant that when it came to giving my talk back at the OccupyLSX camp there were only about 20 people.  Shaun Chamberlin, author of ‘The Transition Timeline’ was there too, so we co-presented the session.  I talked about peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis, and how Transition weaves them together.  I ran through a number of different projects that Transition groups are doing and how they are starting to take the step across into creating social enterprises and enabling inward community investment.  Shaun talked about the different cultural stories we tell ourselves, and how Transition represents a new one.  The talk was hard on the tonsils, trying to make myself heard above the helicopter noise (!), but there were some interesting questions and discussion afterwards.

Later in the afternoon Billy Bragg, a long-time hero of mine, played in front of St Pauls’ which was a delight for this old fart who first saw him back in the 80s doing miners’ strike benefits and who WAS ‘The Saturday Boy’.

Some voices of Occupy LSX

During the day I tried to gather some voices from the camp.  Why were people there?  What were they getting out of it?  What was it all about?  I hope the following short audio pieces, from interviews with an unscientifically chosen sample, capture the atmosphere there and a diversity of voices.  Firstly I talked with Chris, who has been there since the start.  Why was he there?

I met Esther, from Spain, who had also seen the demonstrations there during the summer, and who reflected on how they were similar, and how they were different…

Frannie Owen, from Bridport, had come up to visit for the day and found herself manning the Information Tent all day!

Nathan Cravens from Texas was running the Occupy LSX library (to whom I donated a copy of ‘The Transition Companion’:

Some reflections

In my first while at Occupy LSX, I confess to feeling a bit disappointed.  On first impressions, opening a space for people to voice their discontent and their disquiet with what is happening means that in rush all sorts of assorted issues, campaigns and disaffected voices.  There were 9/11 conspiracy theorists, the Zeitgeist movement, Socialist Worker, all manner of single issue groups as well as just some very angry people with a lot of chips on their shoulders.  I had been expecting, from what I had read online over the past few weeks, a very focused and cogent common take on the economic crisis, but many of the people I spoke to, while they had a strong sense that the economic system is broken and needs fixing, weren’t able to really explain why, or what an alternative vision would look like other than being fairer and more equal.  There was also clearly, as has also been observed at other Occupy camps too, a problem with people with drink and mental health issues who had become involved with the camp.

However, as the day passed, it all started to make sense.  What Occupy is doing that matters so much is that it is holding a space.  It is holding a space where the discussions can take place on their own terms about what is broken and what needs fixing.  It is underpinned by a realisation that this is a crucial time of change where everything is on the table, where business-as-usual is no longer an option.  It isn’t making demands because that would put the power in the hands of the people in power to decide whether or not to respond to them.  It is holding the space for the conversations, and is doing so on its own terms.  I admire that.

As with the roads protests I was involved with in the early 90s, keeping a gathering like that together through inclement weather, public scorn, harassment and so on takes people with a lot of guts.  Personally I have never lived through a revolution, and I’ve never seen one, but there was a taste there, for me, of what the beginning of one would feel like.  Everyone I spoke to felt that the camp was there to stay, and that every day more and more people arrive to offer their support (and their money, and vegetables, and socks, and cakes…).  This creation of a sense of possibility, of not waiting for permission, is one of the things that Occupy and the Transition movement have in common it seemed to me.

The systems for managing people with drink, drug and mental health issues began to come into focus, with the Welfare Tent, trained people keeping a look-out and the ‘Love Police’ who deal with drunks and difficult people at night.  In the free newspaper being distributed at the camp there was a story about a suicidal man being rescued from a suicide attempt a few nights ago.  I spoke with Alison Clayford who was setting up the Welfare tent, and has been at Occupy LSX from the beginning:

I was disappointed not to have been able to stay long enough to see the General Assembly which is the key forum for making decisions and which I would have loved to see in practice.   What I tried to get across in the talk I gave, and what feels to me to be a missing part in the discussions, at least in so far as I could tell from a short visit and in what I have been reading online, has been an awareness of the wider energy limits that are underpinning the economic contraction that we are seeing, and also the arguments around how, when combined with the unravelling debt crisis (the Evening Standard headline as I headed home was “Descent into chaos begins”), it means, to all intents and purposes, the end of economic growth.

In this context, calling for the creation of jobs and no cuts is somewhat futile.  But then it’s easy for me to sit and say “what Occupy should be discussing is this and this”, but the fact is I’m not actually prepared to go and camp in the middle of London for 3 weeks in the cold to make those points.  Those who are will form their own conclusions, and will rightly resist other people attributing beliefs to them.  All I can do is keep doing what I’m doing in trying to make Transition happen, accelerating that, and creating some models and stories that they will hopefully find inspiring and useful.

In a recent piece that Shaun wrote for the Transition social reporting project, he made the point that it may be that it is the moment where Occupy recognises “the inherent problem of protesting against the system your lifestyle depends on” when the conversation can go to a much more interesting places.  You can’t, after all, just base deep change on an analysis of what is wrong.  This identification of solutions has to happen in its own time, and OccupyLSX has many people going there to give talks from a range of solutions-type initiatives, and I was honoured to be able to contribute to that.

I hope that as that conversation unfolds, the learning of 5 years of Transition initiatives and some of the really exciting developments (community energy companies, local currencies, local food systems, social enterprises and so on) will feed into those discussions.  I’m not going to wait for them to figure it out, but it’ll be fascinating to hear when they do.

I chatted with Shaun, and asked him about what he saw as the overlaps between Transition and Occupy:

In his article he quoted Sharon Astyk as saying:

“the reality is that the growth we’ve lived with is going away whether we like it or not – I’m hoping that this new emergent consensus that we’ve been screwed comes with a collective response to the end of growth – or the solidarity won’t last as the system pits people against one another”.

I feel privileged to have seen and spent time at Occupy.  While protest culture isn’t for everyone, and there are aspects of it that personally make my toes curl, it struck me that what everyone can do, in a time when it is increasingly clear to anyone who thinks about it, that business as usual is no longer a runner and that new thinking is needed and soon, is to occupy, in their own lives, that sense of possibility, that space for asking the questions that matter.

That’s something we can take into businesses and councils, as well as into our families and our communities.  When I give talks to councils these days, I start by saying “for the next 40 minutes, let’s say that no-one can say ‘when we get back to growth in 2 years’, because I know that if I talked to you on your own, very few of you actually believe that”.  It creates a space where we can have those conversations.  We can all occupy that space, the one that embraces the possibilities these times present rather than shutting down in the face of uncertainty.

It struck me that Transition says to people “take this model and do it where you are”, whereas Occupy suggests coming together to suspend your life while you explore, with others, the question of what’s the best thing to do now.  Transition is about building that into your own life, right now, drawing on the experience of many others.  You might say that Occupy suggests occupying, for example, Wall Street, while Transition suggests occupying your own street, putting up runner beans and solar panels rather than tents.  There is great richness in this diversity of approaches.  I was left mulling the question I should have asked Frannie from the information tent, when people arrive and say “I don’t have the time to be here at Occupy, but what can I do in my own life, at home, in my street?”  It would be fascinating to know the answer they receive.

A bumper harvest of apples has resulted in an abundance of top Transition stories in the UK!   Local fruit harvesters, now part of Transition Kensal to Kilburn (K2K) were joined by the newly- formed Transition Willesden in setting up stall with traditional apple press in tow on the Kilburn High Road to make juice from locally-picked fruit.  As temperatures soared on an unusually hot autumn day, over 200 shoppers and children helped press the fruit, taste the juice and join in the fun (see above).  Pictures of the stall can be seen here; and local press coverage here, here and here. Thanks to Viv Stein of K2K for this great story!

Many of the north London groups also turned out recently for the launch of ‘The Transition Companion’ that took place at the Food from the Sky project on the roof of a Budgens supermarket in Crouch End.  Here are two short films that give you a flavour of that event, firstly the opening:

and then the main event:

TT-Nailsea also hosted a successful Apple Day to make juice, wine, cider, vinegar and more from the windfalls and TT-Taunton also in Somerset invited people to bring their apples to be pressed outside the local brewhouse.

TT-Harborough held a similar event in Northants and TT-Sturminster Newton in Dorset held an event at Gold Hill Organic Farm where apple games, juicing demos and farm walks and a cake competition were the order of the day.  Transition Hebden Bridge have developed a puppet show to communicate Transition ideas, you can read more about that here.

Still on the theme of food, read all about the new venture of T-Haverfordwest  – Freshly Pembrokeshire Supper Club which celebrates food from the farmers market and other local suppliers. Here is a rather lovely poster they produced for the event:

Inspired by the Brixton, Lewes and Totnes £’s, could Sutton in Surrey be the next town to launch its very own local currency the Sutton Pound (see left)?  Tooting are also moving forward with the idea of a Tooting Pound, you can keep up with developments on their website.  At TTT’s recent ‘Foodival’, the Tooting Pound was trialled, with some specially-printed versions being used for trading during the day.  The idea was officially launched with members of TTT and with local MP Sadiq Khan (see below).

In Marlborough, Wiltshire, the town council has jumped on board with T-Marlborough agreeing to work on an action plan which will ensure the town moves closer to its goal of becoming an official TT.   In Christchurch, Dorset, the local council bought a patch of wasteland for £1 and with the help of the local Transition group plan to make it in to a community garden.

A positive result comes out of Merton council cuts as TT-Wimbledon and Sustainable Merton join forces to launch the Adopt a Green Space scheme.   The Eco Houses Under Construction project started when two members of West Bridgford in Transition (Nottinghamshire) were about to build/refurbish to create their own low-energy homes. They decided to invite other interested home owners to follow the projects with a series of site visits and information-sharing events. With thanks to Tina Holt for this story.

The Kingston Philosophy Festival which was organised by the local Transition and Amnesty International groups with a grant from the council centred around the theme of Happiness.  Finally, from Northern Ireland, here is a great little film about Transition Donabate Portrane and the work they are doing…

In New Zealand, the second annual Eco Festival was put on by the local Invercargill TT in Southlands, and attracted well over 500 visitors. Read the full story in The Southland Times.  From Brazil, here, firstly, is an interview with Mônica Picavêa of Transition Towns Brasil in Portugese…

… and here is another, this time in English.  Thanks to Simon Robertson for doing these… this one gives a good sense of some of the Transition work underway in Brazil:

In Canada, you can see  TGuelph’s (ON) comments on the Occupy movement which has spread to hundreds of cities around the world including Guelph and Toronto (ON).   TT Powell River (BC) screened In Transition 1.0 and hosted a post film discussion as part of the Green Film Series put together by community groups The Gibsons Green Team and Sustainable Coast Magazine in collaboration with the Sunshine Coast Film Society.

Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC held their very first meeting and also on the Island, Sooke TT and Slow Food Canada along with several other community groups organised a day long 33km bike ride (see right).

A small group of people from all over SW Minnesota turned for the first TT Montevideo meeting in the public library (see left). For the benefit of the newly formed Transition Town groups in Brattleboro and Dummerston in Vermont, “Save the Secret of the Seasons” was a participatory musical experience or “co-opera” that invited audience members to address their relationship to global warming and climate change.

TWayland (MA) took people to visit a local Orchard Restoration Project that was planted with around 30 trees back in 1993 and is now bearing fruit for the benefit of the community.   Motown goes Growtown! (I can’t take credit for that – it was Director Baz Luhrmann!)

Keene Transition and Keene Community Garden Connections in New Hampshire put on a film night and discussion following the screening of the film Urban Roots by Tree Media. Check out the Urban Roots website, watch the fantastic trailer below and see how the city of Detroit is taking back some power on the ground and changing its landscape in a most positive way. Truly inspiring.

You might also enjoy this Al Jazeera article, Functional Deficits for Dysfunctional America, which makes reference to the Transition movement.  Also, always worth checking out is the Transition US October newsletter.

Moving to Ireland now, the Kinsale 50 Mile Meal Award has been presented since 2007 at the annual Kinsale gourmet festival. It is awarded to meals made with ingredients produced exclusively within a 50 mile radius of the town. Read the full Monsters & Critics story here.   Also in Kinsale, check out this lovely short video made by TTKinsale to celebrate their Autumn Food Fest:

Cultivate is a practical sustainability organisation in Ireland which works closely with Transition Ireland and Northern Ireland and they have produced this wonderful animation on community resilience called Surfing the Waves of Change. It’s just over 9 minutes long but well worth a look..

From Belgium, here is Eric Luyckx  of Grez en Transition, filmed at last year’s Belgian permaculture convergence, talking about Transition:

In Germany now, and as Gerd Wessling tells, this year’s Transition “Un-Conference” for the German-speaking Transition community took place in in Bielefeld & Oerlinghausen, Germany and was a great success. Nicole Foss (aka Stoneleigh) was the keynote speaker and was an engaging and knowledgeable as she talked about the current energy & financial crisis hitting us all on a global scale.  Here is a short film from the event:

We than had 2 great days of glorious sunny autumn weather in the Teutoburger Forst, busily networking, doing “Stone-Age Re-Skilling” , sharing our best Transition & other practices, “localizing” Transition further into the European & German-speaking context, live music, celebration, dancing, art, fun & laughter from old & new Transitioners alike.  Our deep gratitude to all the wonderful team members, participants and the many helping hands which helped make this event so special.  Event images & reports (in German) can be found here.

Finally, on a lighter note (as they say), here is a great cartoon sent in by Finn at Transition Farnham, which is a great Transition cartoon for Halloween…

Just a reminder that the projects page on the Transition Network website is a constant source of inspiration..  and if you particularly want a story to be covered in the next round up, please e-mail the info with any links, pictures etc. to Amber at pa.robhopkins@gmail.com.  This will be the first roundup to be followed up, two weeks later, by a podcast, going into more depth on some of these stories.  Watch this space!

In 2006, when we started what has since become the Transition movement, we imagined it as an environmental movement. It was conceived as a solutions-focused, bottom-up response to peak oil and climate change. Now, with five years of experimentation and experience under our belts, we see it more as a cultural movement, exploring what the culture of a place needs to look like in order for it to be best prepared for increasingly uncertain times (contracting energy supplies, price volatility, economic uncertainty, and so on).

Transition is founded on three key concepts:

Localisation

Transition argues that once peak oil is passed, globalisation goes into reverse and the local economy becomes increasingly important. It speaks of ‘localisation as economic development’, arguing that meeting more needs locally and plugging the leaks in our local economies will be one of the key strategies for economic development over the next two decades.

Resilience

This refers to the ability of a settlement, an individual or a country to withstand shocks. Former Crystal Palace football manager Iain Dowie once described resilience as ‘bouncebackability’. It is about preparing local economies for uncertain times so that they have enough flexibility and adaptability designed into them to enable them to continue to function and, ideally, to thrive. Transition sees this process as a huge opportunity rather than as a disaster.

 ‘Inner’ Transition

There is an acknowledgement that this is as much an inner process as an outer one. The solar panels, the food growing, the local currencies are the easy part. The harder bit is supporting each other through times of great change, and ensuring both community and personal resilience.

Wherever Transition takes root (now in over 700 communities in 35 countries worldwide) it usually leads to the flowering of a diversity of practical projects. These usually include food, energy, building, economics, education and much more. They are bottom-up and community-owned. Here are three examples of projects being undertaken by Transition initiatives that demonstrate how these ideas translate into practice:

Transition Streets: In December 2009, Transition Town Totnes, the UK’s first Transition initiative, was one of 20 community groups in England and Wales to win the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s Low Carbon Communities Challenge. Its project, Transition Streets, was awarded £625,000. Nearly 500 households have participated, each cutting its carbon emissions by on average 1.5 tonnes. About a third have gone on to install subsidised solar photovoltaic systems. However, the main benefit that people who have participated talk about is the social connections they have made and how they now feel so much more a part of their community. The scheme has also acted as a platform for all kinds of other spin-off initiatives as neighbours start to get a taste for working together. Transition Streets won the 2011 Ashden Award for Behaviour Change.

The Lewes Community Power Station: Ouse Valley Energy Services Company Ltd (OVESCo) is an offshoot of Transition Town Lewes that focuses on the installation of renewables and promoting energy conservation. In 2011 it took on its most exciting and ambitious project to date, installing a 98kW solar photovoltaic array on the roof of local brewery Harveys to create the UK’s first community-owned solar power station. The 544 photovoltaic (PV) panels will generate 93,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year. The community share launch in April 2011 was attended by 300 people. Within five weeks the target of £307,000 had been reached and Harveys brewed a commemorative beer called Sunshine Ale to celebrate the launch of the scheme.

Trashcatchers Carnival: In July 2010, Tooting, London was the setting for the first Transition project to get Arts Council funding. Together with Project Phakama and Emergency Exit Arts, Transition Town Tooting (TTT) created a street carnival celebrating taking care of the Earth and using entirely recycled materials. Over 800 people took part, including local schools, mosques and temples, and over a million plastic bottles and bags, half a million crisp packets, half a tonne of renewable willow and half a tonne of materials were collected over a six-month period to create this extravaganza, which included several structures over 6 metres high. On the day, thousands turned out, the sun shone, local restaurants fed over 1,000 people for free at the end of the event, and the community was left with the feeling “if we can do that we can do anything”.

This is just a very small taste of some of the hundreds of initiatives emerging out of Transition. There are new community farms, community-owned energy companies, new shops, bakeries, markets, school gardens, arts projects, community investment opportunities, local currencies and much more. But can it be argued that engaging with this process of intentional localisation, in ways such as those I have set out above, can actually increase your wellbeing?

Initial indications look positive. For example, research conducted at the end of the Transition Streets programme found a significant increase in the percentage of participants who reported feeling positive about the future, who feel connected to and part of their community and who are aware of what can be done and feel they know what to do about it. I asked the psychologist Tim Kasser for his thoughts:

“All the research I’ve seen, all the thinking I’ve done, and all the people I’ve talked to suggests to me that localisation will do a better job of meeting people’s needs – people will be happier and will live in a more socially cohesive way and more sustainably. Or at least it will encourage all those things… If my intuition about what a resilient community is is correct, then what you would hopefully find is that as time goes on, people will be experiencing more and more satisfaction of their needs. They’ll find that their community is providing them with more opportunities to enact those needs and those intrinsic values. They’ll find that they’re experiencing less barriers to enacting the intrinsic values and satisfying their needs.”

Is this what attracts people to Transition? Through my website transitionculture.org I asked people why they got involved in Transition. Answers included:

• “It provides a positive, creative and challenging place to apply my energies to those challenges…and it’s fun.”
• “If it wasn’t for Transition I would probably still be trying to work out how me and my family could become self-sufficient in some remote ‘safe’ hideout. Transition has given my life a more positive purpose because I now know we are not alone.”
• “Transition is a principles-based approach that…seeks to imitate natural systems and allows participants to act joyfully, spontaneously and freely in creating a more life-giving way of being.”

A study by Tim Kasser and Malte Klar found that those engaged in activism are more likely to ‘flourish’ than non-activists, and suggested that “engaging in political activism is associated with higher levels of wellbeing”, and the quotes above appear to reinforce this. Transition focuses on the concept of ‘engaged optimism’, suggesting that that would be a more useful energy to harness than despondency and fear. It argues that without an enticing vision of the world we want to create we will struggle to manifest it.

When I visited Lancaster for the local Transition initiative’s Unleashing, one of the founder members told me that even if the whole thing stopped tomorrow, he now knew 200 people he hadn’t known before he got involved. One Transition activist in Tooting told me: “I’ve lived in Tooting for 22 years, but I think I’ve lived more in Tooting in the past two years, since I’ve been involved in Transition, than I have in the last 20 years.”

Of course there is the question, as raised by Janet Richardson, Professor of Health Service Research, at the University of Plymouth, in a Health Impact Assessment of Transition Streets, of whether people are drawn to Transition because they are happier, or whether they are happier because of their involvement in Transition. The anecdotal evidence suggests that what stands out for people about their engagement with Transition is the rebuilding and reweaving of community, rather than necessarily the more tangible outputs in terms of energy savings.

One Transition Streets participant, Jenny Gellatly, commented: “You can go for years without knowing your neighbours; now we go to the pub together. I feel I can go round and knock on a neighbour’s door to borrow tools; our kitchen scraps are eaten by one of our neighbour’s chickens, and our slugs by another’s ducks.” These connections can contribute greatly to a community’s resilience, and to its ability to adapt to rapid change.

Although it is still an experiment, the learning thus far from five years of Transition in a wide range of settings is that a process of bringing low-carbon living, resilience and localisation about in a way that is founded on playfulness, creativity and – yes – happiness has only just begun to demonstrate what it is truly capable of.

The late David Fleming, a great inspiration on the evolution of Transition, wrote: “The change in direction represented by the Transition movement is as profound as any intentional change experienced by a civilisation.” Thus far, the evidence would appear to suggest that this change in direction, if done properly, could be the making of us.

The beautiful illustrations are by Stewart Pawley to whom I am very grateful: www.stewartpawley.co.uk.

While most of the buildings were built in stone, considerable sections were built using cob.  Cob, for those of you who don’t know, is a building material which mixes clay-rich subsoil with water and straw to create a substance akin to plastercine which is then used to build load-bearing walls which set like rock, forming a monolithic structure which has incredible strength.  It can be found in patches across the UK and Ireland, depending on the subsoil available.  Often the houses around the village pond will be cob, as the pond marks the hole from which the subsoil had been dug (and the clay levels needed for cob would be sufficient for the pond to hold water without the need for a liner).  Provided, as the old cob builders used to put it, it has “a good hat and a good pair of boots” it should last indefinitely.

What was so amazing to see with these ancient cob creations was not the fact that they had weathered the centuries so intact, that was no surprise.  After all, I live in Devon which is the cob capital of the UK, and if you know what you’re looking for (rounded corners, stone plinths) you can see cob buildings all over the place, and most of them look like they’ve a few centuries under their belts.  In these days where we’re already tearing down some of the buildings we built in the 1960s, and much of what we built in the 80s and 90s wasn’t exactly created with longevity in mind, running your hands over a 500 year old wall is a fantastic, and very thought-provoking experience.

One of the beauties of building with cob is that it is a truly zero-waste building system.  Any cob that isn’t used can be reworked and put into the next mix.  Then, at the end of building’s life, the whole thing will simply return to the soil.  No PVC soffits, no concrete, no plastic insulation, no plasterboard.  What was amazing was how the wall had become much more than the wall, it had almost become its own ecosystem.  There was a hole where bees were coming in and out of a nest they had made.  There were plants growing up it.  There were bird boxes on the wall.  It felt alive, like a part of the whole place.  I was reminded of one of my favourite quotes from the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, which I put into the Transition Handbook:

“When we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for. And let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred, because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, “see, this our fathers did for us?.

For indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold, its glory is in its age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, or stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in that golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light and colour and preciousness of architecture?”

The walls were in need of a bit of TLC, some guttering would help with their longevity, as would a coat of lime render.  There were some places where they had restored and patched with new cob, which looked great too (see right).   There is something about these materials, which are rooted in the landscape around us, and how they create structure that seem to have grown out of the place, which I find deeply nourishing.  Also, as an occasional cobber myself, to be able to touch the artistry of someone with the same skills, which have changed little over 500 years (although now you can do it with a digger which is fantastic!) gives a real sense of perspective.  When we build, let us think that we build for ever”.  Indeed.

On Monday I did the second webinar for Transition US, looking at the ‘ingredients’ of Transition, and answering lots of questions about Transition sent in by people from across the US.  You can now listen to it in full here.  I started out by telling people that it was, in a way, an illustrated talk, in that I had uploaded a picture online they could look at, taken from the forthcoming ‘The Transition Companion’ (which you can pre-order now).  Beautifully created by Marina Vons-Gupta, it communicates the idea of embarking on Transition being like opening the larder door and picking the ingredients for creating what you have decided to create.  Anyway, thanks to everyone who made it possible, and enjoy the recording.

In July I did a ‘webinar’ thing with Richard Heinberg and Carolyne Stayton of Transition US, about how Transition is developing and about what will be contained in the ‘Transition Companion’.  With deepest gratitude to Rani of Transition Palo Alto, the poor soul who bravely transcribed it and must be utterly sick of the sound of my voice, here is the transcript.  We’ll be doing it all over again on September 12th, and you can hear the audio of the last one here. Maybe see you there.

Carolyne Stayton: Welcome everyone, this is Carolyne Stayton with Transition US. I’m here today with Richard Heinberg. Good morning to you Richard.
Richard Heinberg: Good morning Carolyne.

Carolyne: And Richard will be our host on the call today with Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement. And good afternoon to you Rob.

Rob Hopkins: Good afternoon-morning.

Carolyne: Ha, ha whatever it is.

Rob: Whichever.

Carolyne: I wanted to mention a few things now before we begin the program. One is that Rob’s new book, The Transition Companion, published in the US by Chelsea Green, is expected out, by October 24th I believe, and you can pre-order that through a link on our website, transitionus.org.

Carolyne Stayton (Transiton US)In the US, we now have 93 official Transition initiatives, and several hundreds forming. At this point, official or forming Transition initiatives are in almost all of the 50 states. For those who are mulling, it would be great for us to hear about you and your good work, so please go to our website, which links to the Transition Network and let us know who and where you are.

Join us again on September 12 for another conversation with Rob. Also join our Harvest Share, running September 21 to October 21 where we will measure pounds of food shared or hours volunteered in the process of sharing harvests.

Finally, we ask that you consider making a donation to Transition US so that we can keep on offering these types of programs. You can do that too by going to our website transitionus.org.

Our program today is structured along these lines: expect to be on the call about 75 minutes. For 20 minutes or so we get to hear Rob wax eloquently about highlights from the recent Transition conference and the Transition Movement. Then Richard will ask Rob questions based on those submitted by a number of you. Towards the end, and this is where it gets a little fuzzy in the possibilities, Richard and Rob might engage in some dialogue, or Richard and I might ask additional questions ourselves based on further questioning that we’ve received from all of you. It is possible that we will even have time to open the mic for a few calls, and we’ll see how that runs.

Richard Heinberg (Post Carbon Institute) Now I wanted to introduce Richard Heinberg, our host for this call. Richard is the author of ten books, including his latest The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Senior fellow in residence at the Post Carbon Institute, Richard is best known as a leading educator on peak oil and the devastating impact it will have on our economic, food, and transport systems. His new book argues that limits to debt, plus tightening natural resource constraints, mean that the era of economic growth, stretching back to the end of World War II, is at an end. However, if we adapt wisely, we can enjoy a higher quality of life even as we consume less. As a sought-after speaker, Richard has presented throughout the world, and has been featured on radio and television, and in documentaries including The End of Suburbia, and Leonard DiCaprio’s The Eleventh Hour. Richard, thank you so much for joining us today and hosting this call, and it is my pleasure to welcome you.

Richard: Thank you, Carolyne. It’s a pleasure for me to be on the call with so many Transition folks, and especially to have the opportunity to have this conversation with my friend Rob Hopkins.

For those who don’t know him, Rob is the originator of the Transition concept, and co-founder of the Transition Network. For the 11% on the call who don’t know what Transition is, we have the ideal person on the phone to tell us. He spent many years teaching permaculture, cob-building, mostly, when living in Ireland. He’s now based in Totnes, in Southern England. He’s a member of Transition Town Totnes, works part-time for Transition Network, publishes transitionculture.org, which, if you don’t have that website bookmarked on your computer, that’s a good thing to do.

Rob Hopkins (Transition) He’s the author of the Transition Handbook: from Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, which came out in 2008. And he says, he spends generally far too much time thinking about Transition stuff. He is also a trustee of the Soil Association, the winner of the 2008 Schumacher Award, and a fellow of Ashoka International. He’s hard at work finishing up his new book, Transition Companion, which will be out in the US in October of this year.

So that’s enough introduction I guess. As Carolyne said, we wanted to start this call by hearing from Rob. There’s just been a Transition conference in the UK, and I imagine we would all like to hear a little description of what happened, and what the state of Transition initiatives is at the moment. So, Rob, why don’t you just take over the microphone and spend maybe 20 minutes bringing us up to date.

Rob: Thank you very much, and it’s lovely to be here. As some of you know, I gave up flying five years ago, so this is probably the closest I’ll get to having this kind of event in person. But it’s been wonderful over the last few years seeing how Transition has taken root in the US.

It’s been very very exciting to see that whole process unfold.

I have no idea how anybody should do Transition in the US. I can pass on some of the experience from here, but we’ve always imagined Transition from the beginning as being like a huge social experiment. What we’ve done is to create some simple tools, some simple principles, and an invitation to people to be part of an experiment on an enormous scale, and that’s really what’s happening.

For the 11% of you who don’t know what Transition is, basically it’s a bottom-up, grassroots-led response to peak oil and climate change, which is about making the places that we live more resilient, i.e. able to adapt to shocks, about making them more local, but seeing those as an enormous opportunity. Both Carolyne and Richard mentioned the Transition Companion. What we did five years ago and then with the Transition Handbook, was to put out the idea.

The Transition Handbook said, what would it look like if there was a movement all around the world of people doing this? In doing the book, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to look out at this network and see what people are doing, invite their stories, reflections, photographs, drawings, and so on and so on.

Within five years we’ve gone from just one initiative here in Totnes, in Devon, which I’m looking out on from here with rain and seagulls, to there being 375 official initiatives and 427 mulling initiatives. The indications we get from a number of places is that that’s not scratching the surface. There are many more who just haven’t let anybody know what they’re doing.

If you look on the map for Japan, for example, there are only two or three registered initiatives, but anecdotally we know there are about 40 groups working there. And this is in about 34 countries.

Transition has gone from an idea pulled together over pints in Devon pubs to an international phenomenon. It’s amazing and humbling to see that happening. Often we’ll sit around the computer here in the office and go, “Look at this! My God it’s absolutely extraordinary!”

In the Transition Handbook, and in the Primer, which was the first guide, we have the “Twelve Steps of Transition.” Early on people started turning up here in Totnes and saying “This is great, what are you doing exactly? And how does that work?” We really had no idea quite what we were doing – we were making it up as we went along and drawing together the tools and the ideas lying around us.

So we put together the 12 steps, which seemed to represent what we were doing. That was the state of the art when the first book came out.

But now, three years later, after looking around and seeing what people are actually doing, we became aware of the limitations of that as a model. Some people were feeling tied to a chronological “first you do this, then you do this” approach.

And also, in that model, the last of the 12 steps was to do an Energy Descent Action Plan, i.e. to write a community-led bottom-up Plan B for that place. Here in Totnes we did that last year. Strictly speaking we’re finished now and can go back to our daily lives and say, “Well, didn’t we have fun for the last three years?” But of course that’s really only the beginning of the whole process.

So we wanted to rewrite the Transition model in such a way that it was more reflective of what people are actually doing. What’s come out is the idea of Transition as a collection of ingredients and tools. In the same way that when people want to cook they look in at the same pantry full of ingredients, but they cook different things from them, we’ve come to see these ingredients as being solutions to problems encountered by communities trying to do the Transition process – solutions which we’ve seen happen enough times to have confidence that they are going to work.

The foreword to the book was written by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, a food activist and TV chef-guy over here. He said it’s like giving a great cake recipe to a dozen different cooks, and watching how their particular ingredients, techniques, and creative ideas produce subtly different results.

We’re not saying, you have to do this, then you have to do this. It’s really giving people the range of different things they can do. Although we do note that there are certain overall stages to it. Like when you are making a cake, you don’t just put the flour in a bowl, put it in the oven and expect to get a cake. You have to do the butter and the sugar first, then the eggs and then the flour, but there’s lots you can do within that.

So there are five stages we see in the Transition process:

Starting out, the process where you meet some friends and get together and say why don’t you do this?

And then Deepening, which is where you start to really connect it out and become an organization and start to something really meaningful.

Connecting, which is when you go much deeper in the community and build a broader coalition around what you’re doing.

And then there’s Building, which is one of the things that distinguishes the Transition approach, which is saying, “Look, if we’re serious about the intentional localization of this place and its economy, then we need to start being strategic and start scaling up what we do and our thinking.”

The fifth one is called Daring to Dream, which is about what would it look like if this is what happened everywhere, what does this look like at scale.

Doing the book led to hearing fantastic stories from different places. Lewes Sussex, which is one of the first Transition groups, have just covered the roof of their local brewery with 544 solar PV panels. They raised 310,000 pounds from a community share option in four weeks in order to do that. The brewery brewed a special commemorative beer called Sunshine Ale to celebrate. Two years before, when Transition Town Lewes launched the Lewes Pound, they launched a beer called Quid’s Inn to celebrate that as well.

In London, Transition Town Tooting did this enormous event called the Trashcatcher’s Carnival, which brought thousands of people out onto the street to celebrate taking care of the Earth All the things were made of recycled materials. In an event they had afterward to reflect on it, people said if we can do that, we can do anything, which is a fantastic thing to engender in a community.

Here in Totnes, we just ran a project called Transition Streets, which engaged 500 households in carbon reduction. On average they’ve cut their emissions by 1.2 tons. A third of them have installed solar PV systems. But when I meet people here in the street in Totnes, they don’t say, “I’ve just done Transition Streets and saved myself 1.2 tons of carbon,” what they talk about, because it works on a street-by-street level, is the connections they’ve made with neighbors and the new projects that are emerging from that.

In Norwich they did a big study called, “Can Norwich Feed Itself?” Off the back of that, they identified the key things they needed in order to start moving towards a more localized, resilient food system, which has led to them creating a new mill, new farms, and so on.

As I’m sure all of you have found doing Transition, it’s not all plain sailing. It’s not a magical model that you just plug it and it produces miracles on a daily basis. There’s conflict, there are challenges around engagement, around sustaining momentum over the long term, around whether the people who come together with the passion to do this actually have the skills to move it forward. Maybe we’ll touch on some of that in the questions. In the new book we’ve tried to go into those problems and provide people with skills to get around them.

One of the things that’s emerged for me is this concept – I remember Transition Colorado ran an event a few months ago about food, and the subtitle of it was “Food Relocalization as Economic Development.” This idea of localization as economic development is a really big idea of our times.

And, so, Transition and through the work of Richard, and Post-Carbon Institute, and so on, this process of looking at how do we respond proactively to climate change, to peak oil, to economic uncertainty, to economic unraveling. These things have been largely happening at the margins, and certainly not with much support from the mainstream political establishment.

An extraordinary report came out a few weeks ago from the World Economic Forum, that looked at risk, and tried to set out the key risks that face world governments over the next 10 years. The three risks they identified as having the biggest financial impact and that were most likely occur were: climate change, economic price volatility around energy, and the economic crisis.

Transition has a four or five year head start on central government and local government getting their heads around these things that are inevitably coming our way. We can’t underestimate the importance of what people have been doing in Transition over the last five years.

At our conference Richard talked about a quote that really struck me. It was a quote from Milton Freedman which Naomi Klein uses in Shock Doctrine. Many of you know it but I’ll read it again because it’s very useful:

“Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies and to keep them alive and available, until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

We’re talking about Milton Freedman in this case, so I’m sure his idea of the politically desirable is certainly going to differ somewhat from ours.

But within that, there’s a powerful thing which I noticed at the conference for the first time: the idea we’ve been talking about in Transition for the last five years in terms of moving into times of great change. It is starting to happen around people.

We got a taste at the conference – through people coming from different parts of the world to the conference – of starting to see that in practice. We heard about in New Zealand where they’ve had the big earthquakes recently, of places where the Transition groups, and the work that they’ve been doing over the last four or five years, were a part of communities pulling together and adding to the resilience that meant that they were able to respond quickly.

We heard from people from Japan, about what’s happening there, in terms of how the Transition groups are where a lot of the key thinking is in terms of what happens next. We heard from Brazil, where there was a town the name of which I’ve forgotten now, but which was involved in very bad floods about eight months ago, and largely was washed down the hillside. Transition tools and principles and thinking are underpinning the regeneration of the place.

We heard from people in Spain in Barcelona where they’ve have been having something close to a revolution over the last few months – largely unreported by the news media. The main squares in all the main cities were occupied by people arguing that the politics needed a complete rethink in the country. In those squares Transition was one of the key things that people were organizing themselves around.

Peak oil literature for the last four, five, six years, often likes to put the idea that when things get bad, everybody reverts to being absolutely horrible to each other. Everything unravels very quickly, and what comes to the fore is a selfish, head-for-the-hills approach.

In those places where Transition had got into the drinking water, into the DNA, when things did get difficult, [Transition processes] kicked in. I’m not making any claim that that would be the universal phenomenon, but that’s been fascinating to see it happening on the ground. What I picked up from the conference was a deepening of maturity in the whole thing. The whole thing felt deeper and better rooted.

There was a lot of discussion around social enterprise: the argument that if we’re going to make Transition happen at a community level, we can’t depend on people with deep pockets coming in to resource it for us. We can’t depend on government funding it. We need to work out different ways of doing it. This idea of social enterprise, setting up viable livelihoods to do this, was a big stream throughout the whole conference.

Somebody made a comment, which indicated how far everything had moved in a short period of time. They said, “What would it look like if a Transition initiative was to design its awareness-raising program as a social enterprise?” Two years ago nobody would have asked that. But there was a level of maturity there which I found really interesting.

A couple other things I wanted to draw together. One of the pieces of work we want to do at Transition Network next year or so is to look at the potential of all of this.

One of the big debates happening over here at the moment, which some of you may have been following, is around nuclear power – whether the UK should have a new generation of new nuclear power stations. George Monbiot and Mark Linus caused anguish for some people by saying, of course we need nuclear, if we’re serious about climate change we need nuclear power.

I’m taken with the idea of looking at the carbon savings, the increased resilience, the economic impacts, of a program of localization. At the moment, things like nuclear power plants are always pitched in terms of how much money they’ll create, how many jobs they’ll create, how much carbon they’ll save. Yet we in the relocalization movement never use the same arguments for what we’re talking about. From the perspective here in the UK, if we were to quantify the jobs creation, the skills opportunities, the carbon reduction through localization, I think we have something which could have way more impact and relevance than nuclear power.

That’s a big piece of what we want to do.

There was a piece in the Guardian last week called “Has the Green Movement Lost Its Way?”. At the Transition Network Conference I said that’s the wrong question. The question should be, whether a movement based on localization, resilience, engaged optimism, bottom-up responses, enterprise and culture, has even started to scratch the surface of what it could achieve. I don’t think it has.

It’s been remarkable to see what many of you have been doing over the last five years. Increasingly what we’re talking about is one of the big ideas of our time.

I’ve talked for about 20 minutes, so back to Richard for whatever happens next.

Richard: (laughs) Okay, thank you so much, Rob, that was great. As you were talking about the conference, a question came up in my mind. I wonder if you could just describe the setting – where it was, how many people were there, what kind of facility, and the nuts and bolts of the conference for folks who weren’t there.

Rob: It’s a major activity every year, trying to find a different place where 300, 350 people can come together under one roof in such a way that they can sleep there and eat there and all have a room big enough that they can all fit into it. We’ve managed it in previous years, so this year was the first year that we went quite a long way north in the UK. This year’s conference was in Liverpool at a beautiful place called Hope University. It’s had a history of being a religious-based university but I don’t think it’s so much now. Very lovely place in Liverpool.

We had about 280 people, mostly from the UK, but there were people from Japan and Spain, France, Germany, and a few other places. We had two and a half days together, and a mixture of workshops, going into depth on different issues. There was nuts-and-bolts stuff, there were workshops on how to run energy companies, how to do social enterprise, how to do energy descent plans. There were workshops on how to run groups successfully, how to manage conflict.

Normally we’d have lots of Open Space events, but this year we decided not to do that. Instead we used the Fishbowl technique, which is a way of having very good, focused, deep discussions. Everybody sits around the outside and three or four people sit in the middle, start a conversation. One by one they go out and someone else takes their seat. That enabled us to go into some of the what we were calling the hot topics, things that were very live for people, and to reflect on them in more depth.

We had silly open mic evenings, people making fools of themselves. We had a talk by a woman called Jay Griffiths, who wrote a book about wilderness [Wild: An Elemental Journey]. There was football, lying in the sun, and the food was great. The Transition Network’s website has a complete archive of talks, notes and photos. For the first time we had what we called “social reporting,” where people interviewed each other, rather than having one person going around interviewing everybody. We had somebody filming different people interviewing each other.

As ever, it was taking itself out of its comfort zone, and lovely to meet old people – old friends, lovely to meet new friends, and I came home absolutely exhausted. (laughs)

Richard: (laughs) Great. Since we have limited time, let’s dive into some of the questions that folks have sent in. There were dozens of them, many very good questions. There’s no way we’re going to be able to get to all of them, but Carolyne and I have gone through the questions and tried to highlight some of the ones that look like they’re probably going to be interesting to toss about.

So let’s just dive in. Charles Carson Wood says, “Many people in my region of California seem preoccupied with short-term financial matters, making enough money to pay the rent and so on. They don’t seem to care much about or have much energy left over to address the long-term issues of peak oil and climate change, and so on. With this difficulty in mind, how would you suggest that we help shift people’s focus from short to long-term and therefore encourage them to get more involved in the local Transition movement?”

Rob: Certainly not the first time I’ve heard that question! (laughs) It’s a universal thing I think. My sense is that very often we focus on the need to bring the unconverted on board and reach beyond the usual suspects, as it were. But alongside that is the argument that we need to make sure that the people who are on board have the right tools. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Tipping Point book says that tipping point is around 17-18% of a place, it’s not everybody. It’s important to get the maximum engagement we can, but sometimes that can become an obstacle to actually just getting on with it and doing things.

The cooperative movement that started in the UK in the 1850s-1860s was quite similar to Transition. It really started to kick in when it started to create meaningful livelihoods for people. Certainly here in Totnes, a lot of the problems where people don’t understand what Transition is, or are critical of it, [would be lessened] if we get to the stage where we’re creating a significant amount of activity in the local economy.

Our town council voted at Christmas to become a Transition Town Council. That was based largely on a report we did that showed the economic impact that Transition Town Totnes was starting to have. The Transition Companion argues that we will see the economic possibilities presented by localization, and start to create those new livelihoods, those new trainings, those new businesses.

We need to be open and playful and creative and fun and engage as widely as we can, not beat ourselves up excessively that we haven’t got everybody in town running around going, “Isn’t Transition wonderful?” But our duty, our service, really, is to start to create a livelihood for businesses that would support people in such a way that maybe in 10 to 15 years’ time, it’s not called Transition anymore, it’s just the key way the local economy works. It becomes a complete no-brainer when it’s creating work for people.

So I would say: be inclusive, be open, keep inviting people in, but also don’t let that be a distraction from getting on with that it.

Richard Heinberg: Right, yes, totally agree.

Here’s a question from Elizabeth Thompson who says, “You wrote recently that peak oil may not be the best framing for Transition going forward. Would you like to expand on that?”

Rob: Heh heh, that’s me being naughty. What I was talking about there was misinterpreted a little bit, because I wasn’t saying that peak oil has outlived its usefulness as a way of framing Transition.

I was just trying to voice something that I was starting to notice here in Totnes which has been going now for five years.

A comment was made to me by a member of the community who runs the museum here, who grew up here – an old Totnesian. He was reflecting on where we’d got to after five years, and he’s very supportive of what we do.

He said, “At this stage most of the people in the town have come into contact with the peak oil and climate change arguments and discussions. Most people have made up their minds one way or the other. Some people have decided that climate change is all a con cooked up by Communists – that’s what they’ve decided and that’s their world view. To continue to keep those arguments to the fore at this stage [is not helpful], when you’re really trying to create a broad consensus and bring as many people on board as you can. Maybe there’s something to be gained from making those things more implicit and less explicit. And focusing on the concept of resilience and localization.”

All the people who might come on board are already on board and convinced. All the people who aren’t, aren’t going to be convinced by the current thinking. Maybe it’s just something I’ve observed in Totnes and may not be relevant anywhere else – but my observation was that a more powerful way of moving forward may be to shift the focus to economic resilience, the whole localization as economic development strand, in such a way that you can quantify potential economic benefits to the place. But that in no way substitutes for the base and the thinking that we’ve put in place through focusing on peak oil and climate change.

Richard: All right. Okay, here’s a trick question but it could be open-ended. It’s a big one. Sumukhi says, “How do you see the Transition model needing adaptation for sprawling North American suburbs that lack a sense of community, unique identity, and clear geographical boundaries?”

Rob: As I said at the beginning, I’ve never visited North American suburbia, so I only know about it from The End of Suburbia (laughs). There have been very interesting debates around the time of that film, which still are useful, about: Are we talking about the end of suburbia, and that the whole thing is inherently a disaster? Then there is David Holmgren’s suggestion that if we can rethink suburbia, it could provide the great market gardens to feed our cities.

Having a background in permaculture, my sense is that a re-imagining, a re-inventing of suburbia is really important. Research we did here in Totnes [confirmed] the power of people who just get on with it and get started. The people who start turning their gardens into food gardens.

The other day I was watching Keith Johnson’s Transition Bloomington’s talk on TEDx, where he showed two fantastic slides of his house before and after. Before it was all just lawn and now it’s a food forest.

A study done here recently showed how putting up solar panels in a town, the more there are, the more people – they’re contagious. They become infectious. I suspect the same is true for really beautiful, well thought-out food gardens as well. So, I don’t have a magic wand for suburbia, but my sense is that there’s enormous potential there for those spaces, when the mind becomes focused, as I think it inevitably will be over the next few years.

Richard: Let’s hope so.

Rob: (laughs)

Richard: (laughs) Joanne … As a resident of suburbia speaking.

Rob: You’re one of those people. You’ve got your chickens now.

Richard: Yeah, yeah

Rob: You’re one of those people who’s infecting suburbia with an edible [unintelligible]

Richard: Joanne Poyourow says, “It would be great to hear your take on the speed of societal deterioration. In the Transition Handbook and other materials, you view the unraveling as taking place relatively slowly. In the time you’ve been working on these issues, do you think the Transition, the building of alternative structures, is happening faster or slower than you originally expected?”

Rob: Some things are happening much faster than was imagined. Certainly the economic situation has changed much much faster than expected, certainly in the last few days here, although it has nothing to do with peak oil and climate change. I don’t know how much people and the media in the US have been following what’s been happening in the UK with News International. Rupert Murdoch’s empire in the UK has been crumbling to dust over the space of about a week and a half. In terms of the media in the UK, it’s like the Berlin Wall coming down .

I’ve always been cautious about the argument that everything’s about to collapse catastrophically. I’ve had online debates about this with Michael Burnley and different people, because it’s not what I see happening. There’s certainly more in the idea of the long emergency. A slower move into a contracting economy feels more like what’s happening.

In terms of whether Transition’s happening fast enough to deal with it, I suspect it probably isn’t. Although as I said before, one of the interesting things at the conference was hearing stories from around the world, seeing places where things have gotten very very bad.

Spain and Greece are what I think the UK is going to be like in a couple of years. William Gibson said the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. It was interesting to see how, with the situation they have there, how Transition was coming to the fore as the way people were starting to respond.

But I’m always very wary of people who say, “Everything’s about to collapse, imminently!” My experience is that it’s much more complex than that. Maybe some things are moving very quickly, but in other areas change happens very very [slowly]. You’re far better read on this than I am. What’s your take?

Richard: (laughs) As with many things, maybe it’s good to be prepared for both contingencies. You know, have a bugout bag and backup plan in case of a natural disaster or rapid collapse, and you’ll have a long-range plan that you’re working on, and…

Rob: Yes, yes. Some of the things we’ve been working on in Totnes are good for both eventualities. What was fascinating with the Brazilian thing was how appropriate those tools felt to people when half their town had been washed away down the hillside. Those were the tools people picked up. I don’t have anything to back it up in terms of research, but I always wonder, if you can get [Transition concepts introduced] … It may feel to people as if they’re working in a small community which is largely disinterested, and they’re doing their own projects, and it might feel like it’s small.

But I remember when I was living in Ireland, I used to teach an evening class every Thursday evening at University College Cork. About 20, 25 people came to this class. One evening after class this guy came up and said, “Rob, how many people would you say are doing your class?” I said, “Well, there are 22 here.” So he said, “I’d say it’s way more than that.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, I go home, every Friday morning I’m in my garden. And at least 25 people in my neighborhood walk past and they say, ‘What did they teach you last night?’ ”

We have no sense of where these things go, really, and where these ideas get to. That was the intriguing thing about hearing these stories from places where things have become more difficult.

Richard: Let’s move on to some questions more about working within Transition initiatives and how they evolve.

Michelle Calusi says, “If we want to bring some of the smaller projects to scale and have bigger impacts, we want to see groups ask themselves about the actors and functions in their community systems, housing and economy and land use and energy groups can all work together. For example, what’s the joint effort that comes from that approach rather than staying in their respective groups? Is there a Transition Town where the core group is driving this kind of dialogue and collaboration?”

It sounds like she’s asking about the collaboration between the various groups within a Transition initiative.

Rob: Certainly one of the things that’s emerged here in Totnes after doing the Energy Descent Plan was the idea of a catalyst project. We identified a number of projects that felt integral to moving forward. Some of them are from the building group, some from the business and livelihood group, some from the food group, energy group, and so on. There is a lot of collaboration in that way. Those groups are supporting each other and seeing those things as holding together.

The idea of an Energy Descent Plan underpinned people coming together to do Transition initially because it was based on that pilot work we did in Kinsale. Nearly five years in, though, there are still only about two or three places that have actually done one. It is a big piece of work. To do that kind of strategic overview and to imagine how it might all hang together is a big piece of work.

One of the things that’s being developed here, and in Hereford and Manchester, is the idea of an economic blueprint. Hopefully it will be a lighter, easier piece of work. It is about quantifying the benefits to the local economy of this process of intentional localization, and then looking strategically about how the Transition group working with others can actually deliver that. So, that might be a different tool which is explored in the Transition Companion. But how groups work and how they work together is still emergent in different places.

Richard: Here’s a complementary question from Jim Coale. He’s asking, “How can we expand our partnerships and awareness-raising efforts with other organizations?” He mentions 350.org, Bioneers, Sierra Club, ASPO, and other organizations that can have similar interests.

Rob: It was great to see the event that was done in the US a few months ago – the Garden Day together with Daily Acts and 350. Those kinds of things are fantastic. On the local level, with local initiatives, those kinds of collaborations are useful and important.

We have to be careful with them though. If they go right, if they work well, and if everybody gets out of them what they wanted, then they’re wonderful. But if people go in with different expectations that don’t end up being met, they can be more complicated.

Here in Totnes the local school reinvented itself as a trust school, a cooperative school. They asked Transition Town Totnes to be the first partner in that trust. Although they surveyed the parents and over 90% of them thought that was a good idea, there were some who felt that Transition Town Totnes wasn’t appropriate to be a partner with the school because it’s inherently a political organization, linked to the Green Party, with a political agenda, [a charge] which is easily responded to.

But that perception of Transition as being alternative and emerging from the left can either confound or cement partnerships.

If a Transition group makes partnerships with all the usual people, there may well be things to be gained from that for particular projects. But sometimes, in terms of the wider community, it can cement the idea that you’re deep-green, radical, alternative, left-wing. In a sense the more powerful partnerships are the ones that we can create with people where it’s not expected: the Chamber of Commerce, or the local Rotary Club. Those kinds of partnerships are worth exploring. Maybe they are worth the extra bit of relationship-building and trust-building they might require.

Richard: A couple of related questions about moving beyond the choir of outreach, inclusivity, and accessibility. Brendan Burke says, “How can students best interact with Transition?” Alisa Seed Bennett asks, “What are some good ways to get young people involved? Pre-teen and teenage young people in particular?”

Rob: Good questions, yes. There’s been some great stuff happening with students here. This idea of “What’s a Transition University?” – lot of thought has gone into that. I’ve suggested that maybe they look at Transition Edinburgh University. They have a website, which – if you Google “Transition Edinburgh University,” you’ll find what they’ve been up to. They’ve started to look at the whole question of what a Transition community looks like in a place where everybody goes home in the summer, and everybody changes over every three years. They’ve been doing some fantastic stuff working with that. Some other universities as well have started to look at that.

My sense is that a university should be something that you leave not just with your appropriate bits of paper and having had a life-changing three years. It should also be a place where Transition ways of doing things, and local food-growing and energy conservation and so on, is just an everyday part of how everything functions. Hope University where we had the conference the other day would make a fantastic market garden. All these lawns all over the place would be fantastic. It would be a great way for students to support their studies.

There should be courses in a lot of this stuff, hands-on courses. And there should be places that are universities in Transition – as institutions embedding this kind of stuff. There’s huge scope for students to start looking into that. Transition Edinburgh University have developed some good resources and tools for that.

In terms of working with younger people, in school there’s a huge amount that can be done. In the Forest of Dean, Transition Newent got the school to start teaching a course called “Environmental Land-Based Science.” The school was a bit wary and I think the local Transition group resourced them to put up a big, big poly tunnel on the grounds of the school and gave them support with teaching on the course. What they found was that all the kids – and this is unsurprising to people involved in Transition but I think for the school it was a revelation – the kids who did the course spend more time outside, working physically and learning how to grow things. In all their other areas their results went up because of that. So the school is really getting behind that now.

We can learn a lot from the youth climate movements and the work 350.org are doing around engaging young people. At next year’s Transition Network conference we want to have the first day as a Transition youth gathering. Then to move on from that into the main gathering with the young people doing a lot of the facilitation. There’s more that can be done in Transition initiatives in terms of engaging young people but a lot of young people are starting to move on that.

Richard: Brilliant. Several people asked questions about group dynamics, decision-making processes within Transition initiatives, holding meetings, organizing, conflict-resolution tools. An example is Scott McKeown of Transition Sebastopol, who asks, “What new kinds of group dynamic tools and conflict-resolution methods have been found to be effective in some of the more advanced Transition initiatives?”

Rob: Ooh, I’m the wrong person to ask that, really.

Richard: Ha, ha, ha

Rob: I don’t mean that because I always just fall out with everybody (laughs) and I don’t care what anybody thinks.

There’s now a very skilled pool of Transition trainers both in the UK and in the US who bring those skills to Transition projects. Our experience has been that sometimes people do the Transition training and then they’re surprised that so much of it is focused on groups and communication and conflict. We felt that it’s important from an early stage that a Transition group has those tools in place. It makes such a difference in terms of the long-running viability of a project that it gets those skills at an early enough stage. That was one of the reasons why at this year’s conference, group work was given such prominence. There was a big group activity around working together as groups and so on.

Although conflict is something that comes up a lot, it’s amazing that after four or five years, with 800 Transition initiatives that we know about, you could count on one hand the ones that have hideously fallen out with each other. We tried to ingrain those qualities of respectful communication and healthy conflict-resolution. But in terms of the tools that people would find useful, that’s a question for people to put to their local, wonderful Transition trainers.

Richard: There was a big bucket of questions having to do with Heart and Soul and spirituality. I’m just going to read a couple of them.

Alan Zulch says, “I’m curious whether Rob has any new thoughts or impressions regarding the status of Heart and Soul work or other related inner work aspects of Transition.”

Patricia Dee says, “Can the Transition movement also speak to those of us who want the kind of sustainable communities you develop because they’re more soulful, intimate, and right, rather than just as a solution to what we fear is happening to our resources?”

Rob: When we started doing Transition, I thought it was an environmental process. It felt like we were doing a bottom-up environmental response. But after five years I really think it’s a cultural response, a cultural process. What does the culture of this place need to look like in order to be best prepared, most resilient, for uncertain times, whether they’re rapid or more staggered?

And so, the Heart and Soul aspects, the inner Transition side, has a vital role to play. We talk about “What does post-trauma counseling look like?” Part of the role of the inner side of Transition is, “What does pre-Transition counseling look like in that way?”

How can we support people to weather that kind of shock and those kinds of changes? At the conference, you got a sense of how skillful a lot of the tools are that have come through the inner Transition, through the work of Sophy Banks and others. They have fed into the Transition movement the need for good communication, supporting each other, creating a space to digest distressing or bad information or bad news or whatever.

Transition is something which should be nourishing on lots of levels. There’s always that question, “Does Transition build happiness? Does Transition build well-being?” There are lots of projects I’m around where you get a good sense of that. I taught permaculture for 10 years. Nobody ever came up to me and said, “I was doing all right until you taught me how to garden. It was downhill all the way from there.” I think these skills are really enriching. The inner part of Transition is one of the things that distinguishes it from other approaches.

My personal take is that there is a need to make sure that we maintain a balance. [...]

What people should first see about Transition is the “Hands,” what’s happening on the ground, the change that it’s making. Then you get a sense of the “Head,” in terms of the understanding, why people are doing that stuff. But it’s the actual people doing stuff that’s the hook.

When people get into it, then you get a sense of the inner Transition, of where that side of things comes from. If the inner side of it is very up front, there is a danger we become seen as esoteric andwooly. I don’t think that’s the case with what Transition groups are doing.

Richard: There are some questions from an entirely different angle, having to do with politics. Here’s Chris Smith saying, “I’m new to the Transition Town movement. Do you consider this a political movement? A local Transition member says that it’s not, and I find this curious if true.”

Ruah Swennerfelt says, “I’m interested in bridging the political divide in our town. Have you had success with this?” And John Duvall says, “What place does the Transition movement have in the political arena whether at the municipal, state, national, or international level?”

Rob: Good question. I think it would be political with a small “p.” Political in the sense that everything that we do in our life is political. It’s been a very active discussion and debate within Transition over the last couple of years about the role of activism in Transition and the degree to which Transition groups should be involved in campaigning. My sense from the outset is that Transition is more powerful for not being explicitly political, and for not starting out with a big list of whose fault everything is. And for not listing things that immediately identify it with the left or the right.

I did an interview with Michael Schuman a while ago on Transition Culture. He was talking about the need to present Transition in such a way that it appeals to the more conservative members of our community. I think he’s onto something there. Certainly Totnes, although it has a reputation for being quite alternative, is in many ways a quite conservative town. One of our great successes here has been that we are pretty much embraced by the establishment as doing something valuable to the town. As not being a thing of the left or the right, or as being a political campaign.

We are a group of ordinary people who want to make this place more resilient. There are aspects of the Transition approach, aspects of the model and what we talk about, which appeal more to the right than the left. Certainly the whole idea of localization – in UK politics anyway – has more of a historic resonance with people on the right than people on the left. Other elements are more on the left than the right. So I think that although Transition is trying to do something profoundly political, it’s important that we work as hard as we can to come in under the radar and maintain an open dialogue with people with a wide range of positions, and that we try and find common ground with people wherever we can. My sense is that that’s what lots of Transition groups are doing very well.

In terms of the activism debates, very often when people have a background in activist politics and campaigning against things, there’s a certain language that we use, a certain identity we take on, in which we lose a perspective on what a turnoff that can be for a lot of people.

We encourage people in Transition to be mindful about how we communicate and to be as inclusive as we can. If you [follow the thinking of] Bob Hirsch and other people – and you’ve talked about this as well, Richard – we need to create something akin to a wartime mobilization. In terms of the scale of the response and the rapidity with which we need to turn things around, we need everybody on board and everybody playing to their strengths. In terms of politics we need to be really mindful of that.

Richard: Right. We just have five minutes left on the call. There’s one last question here, which is not a particularly thorny one, that might be fun to end with. It has to do with the role of arts and celebration in Transition.

Sandy Hughes says, “I believe that cultural arts – theater, music, painting, writing, et cetera – play a powerful role in promoting and inspiring others to join the Transition movement. Are you aware of any successes in this area that might serve as shining examples, as such community involvement?”

Rob: Good question. The idea that Transition is a creative, playful process is really good. Part of that comes in terms of the whole visioning side of Transition. How do you bring the kind of future that we’re talking about alive for people? Through storytelling and so on. Certainly in the new book there’s more of those silly, made-up stories from the future with Photoshopped pictures to get across what it could be like.

One of my favorite ones – I mentioned it briefly at the beginning – was the Trashcatcher’s Carnival in Tooting, the first Transition project in the UK to get funding from the Arts Council. It was an amazing street carnival with about a thousand people involved in the carnival itself. About 8000 people came out to see it. They used something like a million old plastic bags and crisp packets, lots of willow. Everything in it was reused and recycled. You’ll find films of it on YouTube. Lots of music and dance, and performance. Tooting has also developed “Transition in Two Hours,” an interactive performance piece that gives people a sense of the Twelve Steps through different activities, big, silly props and so on.

The arts have a huge role to play and we’ve only started to scratch the surface. The arts are able to touch people on a different level and document processes in really imaginative ways. And they’re able to give people a taste of what Transition could be like in a way that written words or films struggle to do.

It’s a question to throw back at the person who asked it. What do they think? What are they doing? We need to share those stories even more and hear what people are doing around these things.

Richard: That’s great. We’re just about out of time. This has been a fabulous 75 minutes, collectively picking one of the most wonderful brains on the planet. Your ability, Rob, to switch gears at a moment’s notice and give us some brilliance on so many of these questions has been just delightful. So, … Carolyne, are you there?

Rob: It’s fun though, isn’t it?

Richard: Yes, yes, it’s been a pleasure. Carolyne, are you on the phone still, here?

Carolyne: Yes I am.

Richard: Anything you want to say close off the meeting?

Carolyne: I was wondering, Rob, if you wanted to first make any closing comments, and then I’ll have a few things to share as well.

Rob: Okay. We’re doing this again in September, aren’t we? So, there’ll be an opportunity – it’ll be nice next time to hear from some of the people on the call as well. As I say, it’s flown by and it’s been interesting to hear the questions and also to read the much bigger list of questions that everybody’s sent in. It was interesting to get a snapshot of where people are at in the US and where the thinking is at. I think it’s good as well to give an acknowledgment to the wonderful work Transition US is doing. We’re huge admirers of what you guys have been doing there, as you picked up the question of “What would Transition look like in the US and what support does it need?” It’s remarkable what Transition US has achieved in the small amount of time and the resources that you have there are fantastic.

In terms of creating The Transition Companion, I’d like to thank everybody in the US, some of whom I’ve recognized as being on this call as well, who’ve sent in photos and stories and shared your thoughts and who commented on and pulled a bit from the earlier drafts of the ingredients online. I’m grateful for your feeding into this enormous collaborative effort that we’ve been doing over the last 18 months.

It’s been a pleasure, and thank you very much for inviting me to be a part of it. And I’ll look forward to September.

Carolyne: Thank you so much Rob, and thank you so much Richard, for joining us today. I wanted to mention that there will be a recording of this on our website, so please share with others. And also, if you could make a donation for this, and to help us continue offering this type of work and all of the work that we’re doing to support Transition initiatives all over the nation and in other countries as well to some degree, as well as our work in expanding the training to be more comprehensive for the needs of Transition leaders. That can be done on our website, transitionus.org

There are several webinars coming up. One is on “Engaging Local Government” with Karen Studders who was with the EPA for 35 years. She understands federal government concerns as well as Transition and is a really good translator for us to government.

“Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making” is on August 9 with Tim Hartnett who’s just got a new book out with New Society Publishers. And we have a monthly tele-salon – the next one’s August 11th, and it’s an audio open space, where we discuss what’s up for people on the call at that time. They’re really rich and rewarding, and a lot of great information gets shared, so please avail yourself of any of those things.

Remember the Harvest Share coming up, and we’ve got some information on our website about that. And just now I’m going to turn it over to Carl so he can un-mute everyone and we can give Rob and Richard a hearty thank you.

All: Thank you (chorus of voices) Thank you Rob and Richard.

Rob and Richard: Wow. Thank you.

Let’s start with Transition Town Kingston in Surrey who ventured out  on bikes and skateboards to celebrate a Zero Carbon day which included a fossil- fuel free time trial. Here is their report of the event, here’s a report from the local paper, and here’s a video about what they got up to:

http://youtu.be/2Lmy9wVkDiw

CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture schemes) seem to be all the rage these days.  Hebden Bridge TT in West Yorkshire have a HebVeg box scheme which plans to become a fully fledged CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project. Discussions took place at the local Riverside School about the project’s future direction and how to build on its success. Click here to read the related article in the Hebden Bridge Times.

Transition Norwich are excited about their local Farmshare CSA, which grew out of the Transition Norwich food group, and East Anglia Food Link, and is now producing veg, in spite of the “the near Saharan conditions endured early in the growing season”. Transition Town Worthing are moving closer to setting up a CSA scheme for the area, and recently held a public meeting about it.  Here is a film they made about their progress so far:

Also taking place in Hebden Bridge this month is a project to become The Greenest Town in the Land. And to round off this lively Transition Town here is a great article entitled The Wombles go Skipping in Hebden Bridge. For those not familiar with The Wombles, click here to read about these much loved national treasures whose motto was “make good use of bad rubbish”. Also, on the waste theme,Stamford TT (Lincolnshire) is gathering support for their Bottling Out campaign which aims to rid the town of plastic bottles.

Transition Kensal to Kilburn in London are in running for the ‘London in Bloom’ award thanks to the allotment they have created on the platform of Kensal Underground station.  The beds, which were rather sad and neglected, are now a riot of edible produce, and commuters are invited to help themselves. Michael Stuart, from the group, said: “We want people travelling on the tube to see the plants, and help themselves to the fruit.  “We hope to show people that if we can grow fruit, vegetables and flowers on a busy tube platform, then they can easily grow the in their gardens, on their windowsills or in their front drives.”  You can read a piece from one local paper here, and another here.  Our picture (above) shows the great sign which now adorns the station platform.

The Transition Belsize Premier Inn Food Growing A-Team!

Also in London, here’s an update from Jo Homan of Transition Finsbury Park on ‘Edible Landscapes’, the social enterprise they are establishing setting up productive gardens in the area. Transition Belsize, on July 22nd held the ‘Grand Opening’ of their food growing project in the car park of the Premier Inn Hotel on Haverstock Hill (see left).  The launch, among other things, featured a local magician.

Anne Rickard of Transition Bridport with Young Transitioner of the Year Ellie Holt.

In Dorset, a local school impressed the Transition Town Bridport group at their inter-house gardening competition (see right). The Transition Town Louth Food Garden Group in Lincolnshire has been busy making a community garden to inspire local people.   In Craigmillar, Edinburgh,  PEDAL – Portobello Transition Town, reported the opening of the new Green House advice shop. This fantastic local resource helps people save money while help­ing the envir­on­ment.

In case you missed it, Transition Town Totnes last week premiered a new short film it had made about oral history in the area and what it can do to inform Transition.  ‘Totnes: the past can teach us about the future’, went down very well at the premiere, and you can now see it below:

An artist's impression of what the inside of Sustaining Dunbar's community bakery will look like when it's finished...

Sustaining Dunbar’s efforts to create a community bakery are moving along nicely.  They have already raised £38,000 from 270 people, who are now the collective proud owners of a community bakery.  They are still seeking another £12,000 and are inviting investment, with a minimum shareholding of just £20.  They’ve currently got the plasterers in, and they are recruiting for bakers.  Sustaining Dunbar have also been setting up a community energy company, and have been working on their version of an Energy Descent Action Plan, called ‘The Dunbar 2025 Project’.

Transition Town Whitehead in Northern Ireland is one of 6 community organisations that has been shortlisted in NIE’s BIG Energy Saving Challenge in which 20 Whitehead families are competing in this yearlong competition. Read more about this fantastic project here in the local Carrick Times and here is a great picture of the group from the local paper:

Neil Coleman and Caitriona Butcher from NIE Energy present members of the Transition Town Whitehead group with their energy saving starter pack also present is Councillor Isobel Day. Picture courtesy of Carrick Times.

UK viewers might be interested in Nicholas Crane’s new 4-part BBC2 series called ‘Town’ (see below) which starts tomorrow (Thursday) at 9pm.  One of the town Nicholas visited was Totnes, and we expect Transition to be a strong theme of that programme.  If you miss it you’ll be able to see it on iPlayer, but for non-UK viewers that might be a bit trickier…

In Portugal, Transição em Telheiras held a great workshop called ‘A garden in the house’ which  showed urban apartment dwellers how to grow food on their window ledges.  Everyone went home with a “homegarden” with some garlic, lettuce, tomatoes and parsley (see left).  You can see a great selection of photos of the workshop here.  They also ran a ‘Make your own bag’ workshop and seem to be busy with all kinds of things.

Now over to Canada where there is an update to the community garden set up by TT Meaford (ON) in partnership with Georgian Bay Secondary School which featured in last month’s roundup (see pic right). Read more about the ongoing project in the local Meadford Independent.

Food preservation display at last year's Dunbar Harvest Festival.

Also from Canada, Shelby Tay kindly sent some sets of photos from Flickr of various Transition happenings there.  There was “Village Vancouver’s ‘Neighbourhood Transition Village’ collaborative demonstration of projects and initiatives that build community resilience and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels”, Dunbar (the other Dunbar) Transition Village’s canning workshop, and some lovely ones from their Harvest Festival (see left:  check out the fantastic Transition aprons).

In the US, Richard Heinberg hosted a conversation with Rob Hopkins via a web event which had several hundred people listening in! To read more about it and listen to the recording click here.  KRCL Radio in Utah did an interview with Carolyne Stayton, Director of Transition US and local residents of Salt Lake City Jake Hanson, Jim French and Jen Hamilton who are working towards making SLC a Transition Town. Listen to the full RadioActive! interview by Ashley Anderson.

Transition Ambler/Upper Dublin (PA) showed the film In Transition 1.0, the first of a planned monthly screening and pot luck event.  The DVD of this film is no longer available via the Transition Network website but you can view it on Vimeo. The next film In Transition 2.0 is due out later this year.

Transition Durham in North Carolina put on the first of a five-part film-event series they have called “Feeding the Bull City” which will be followed by discussion on what is happening in the local, sustainable food scene.  Speaking of films, you might have missed this great little short film about Transition Houston.  As one comment on Transition Culture put it, “It’s fantastic to see a city built on the oil industry taking up the Transition challenge. If they can do it, anyone can!

The Windham County Transition Towns of Putney, Dummerston and Brattleboro (VT) hosted a forum event on Coming Together in a Time of Challenge & Change; Transitioning to a Positive Future facilitated by Tina Clarke, the East Coast Transition Trainer.   Tour de Fresh 2011 is the result of a partnership between Bike Ypsi and Transition Ypsilanti in Michigan and is the 5th annual garden and healthy food system tour featuring the work done by community groups and individuals to make the Ypsilanti-area greener, healthier, and more sustainable. Read more about Tour de Fresh and watch a video in which it appears that Health and Safety in Ypsilanti extends to the need to wear protective headgear in the kitchen!

Transition Milwaukee was recently unveiled as the 93rd official initiative in the US, allowing them to tick off the next thing on the list of tasks they have set for themselves…(see left).  They  celebrated by holding ‘Powerdown Week’ which had 2 simple objective,firstly”make your carbon foot print as small as you can” and secondly,”do it with others”, not so easy to do during one of the hottest summer months on record!

Transition Pittsburgh recently held a ‘Sustainability Jam’.  I’ll let them explain why it was called that…

If you would like to read the full and rather wonderful Transition US July monthly roundup, a kind of sister publication to this one, you can do so here.  I finish the US section with the Final Frontier of Alaska and an article in the local Anchorage press which encourages people to join Transition Anchorage and asks some important questions such as ‘would you share food with your neighbors in a crisis’ and ‘can we feed ourselves’?

In New Zealand there is currently a lively debate flowing on the Transition Towns New Zealand blog section.   There was also a National Day of Action – Rail Against the RONS (Roads of National Significance) for sensible, sustainable transport solutions.

In India, Heal the Soil CSA in Auroville in the state of Tamil Nadu, is adopting the Transition model. With the help of organic farming experts, community leaders and volunteers, they help start-up small vegetable gardens in village homes; provide seeds and permaculture training to local people which enables them to grow their own organic veg and fruits in their own premises. Snehal Trivedi has uploaded more information on Heal the Soil as a muller initiative on the Transition Network website.

From Japan, in case you missed it, here is beautiful piece about the world’s 100th Transition initiative, told by Hide Enomoto of Transition Fujino:

There was also a great piece on Japanese national television about Transition in Japan, which also featured Fujino.  The bit about Transition starts at 14.20, but the whole clip is worth watching because in Japan, on summer solstice, the tradition is to turn off the electricity and to just use candlelight.  In accordance with that, the whole studio where the presenters are sitting and talking is lit only by candles!  Although not understanding Japanese is a distinct disadvantage with this clip, it is well worth a look nonetheless.  Thanks to Paul Shepherd in Tokyo for sending us that.

Before I go, there’s the Transition Network Diversity Newsletter put together by Catrina Pickering, and the trailer for Just Do It, a tale of modern day outlaws.  Thanks for letting me share yet more great stories on this constantly growing and evolving Transition Movement. If you have any events that you would like me to feature in the August roundup please do not hesitate to e-mail them to me at amberponton@transitionnetwork.org.

Now, ‘and finally’, as they say.  You will hopefully have seen this round up of this year’s Transition Network annual conference which took place in Liverpool, which draws together the many resources available from videos, photos, workshop write ups and blog posts.  What you may not have seen (a fact for which you may soon be immensely grateful) is the contribution to the Sunday evening’s Open Mike session which featured various Transitioners doing a Transition-themed homage to the Rocky Horror Picture show.  As the blurb that accompanies the film on YouTube says:

“The North London Transitionistas supporting Frankly Ridiculous, AKA Jo Homan from Finsbury Park in a lively rendition of Sweet Transitioner, a mostly original creation. They were: Ros from Leytonstone, Alexis from Belsize, Sarah and Andy from Crouch End, Debbie from Finsbury Park and Peter from Narnia”.

Brace yourselves.