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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

Let’s start with something I came across on YouTube, the caption just says “We are students from 4th of ESO and we are in a project about Transition Towns. Hope you like it :) !”  Turns out it is the students from the High School Joan Segura i Valls, in Santa Coloma de Queralt (Catalonia) (see right) who did a project on Transition (they talked to Rob Hopkins by Skype), set up Transition Santa Colomba, and are going great guns.  After they finished their school project, they were given a video camera.  What did they come up with?

The first Spanish Transition Conference took place this month. Many thanks to Antonio Scotti, Filipa Pimental and Emilio Mula for their accounts of the event which Rob has just posted to Transition Culture.  You can view all the photos from the event here on Flickr.  Here is the group photo of dynamic Spanish Transition activists:

Transition has been getting into the Spanish media a fair bit too.  El Mundo, one of Spain’s biggest national papers, recently ran stories about Transition, one a more general introduction, about Transition Belsize and about the Brixton Pound (with some great photos, such as the great photo below).

Here is a great story from Brazil, from Guarulhos (Sao Paulo).  We’re grateful to May East for sending it in.

Guarulhos is the Brazilian Heathrow; known as the gateway to the country, it is home to the largest airport in South America. It is also the second largest city of Sao Paulo state, with a population of 1.2 million people and 33% preserved area. Last month the first Transition Training took place in the city, hosted by the Secretary of Environment and involving 70 participants from a wide range of backgrounds. The impact of the training was lightening quick and at the end of the 2 days there were 3 working groups and the declaration of intent to re-dedicate a public park to be the first Transition Park of the city. Three weeks later a retrofitted abandoned building painted in earth colours, a medicine herb garden, the children’s play ground cheered-up, a crafts fair, the presence of the authorities, blessings by the regional indigenous people made the opening day of the park front-page news in the local press.

Guarulhos is the latest city to join the ever-growing Brazilian Transition network – has its headquarters in the Julio Fracalanza Park and intends to increase the cycle paths connecting all the city’s parks threefold in one year.

The Mayor of the City being blessed by indigenous people on the opening morning.

To Canada now, and in British Colombia (BC), on April Fool’s Day (April 1^st), Transiton Sooke on Vancouver Island discussed how money in our society is a kind of Fool’s Gold.  Sunshine Coast in Transition (see right) on Vancouver Island is one of the latest groups to join the Transition Network and is well on their way to becoming official.  Read more about their journey so far.

The Northern View wrote an article about the founding of Transition Town Prince Rupert. If you missed Rob’s interview with founding member of TT-Prince Rupert, Lee Brain, here it is:

In an effort to help keep their communities clean, T-Huronia (ON) held a Pitch In Day in Penetanguishene. They also screened The Greenest Building as part of their environmental film series.  Above is a photo of some members of T-Huronia enjoying Earth Day!  From Manitoba, here is an Uptown Mag article on the fledgling Transition Winnipeg initiative.

Let’s start our travels around the UK in Derbyshire.  Here is a film of Transition Buxton’s recent planting of a community orchard:

… and they have also been clearing a new allotment:

Transition Town Totnes has been co-ordinating an innovative campaign to pressure milk processors Dairy Crest to enable the community to take over its abandoned site in Totnes, a campaign which is gaining momentum (see below photo from a recent public meeting).  The project, known as Atmos Totnes,  has made the front page of the local paper, appeared on the BBC News website, generated considerable media attention, gathered 50 ‘Atmos Voices’ of people from across the community speaking up for the campaign, and recently spoke to former agriculture minister John Gummer who gave the scheme a glowing endorsement.

TTT has also just launched a new website.  Rob Hopkins recently gave a talk about Transition in Totnes at TEDxExeter.  Here it is:

TT Exmouth planted nearly 50 trees at the former Dennesdene Farm site in East Devon. Read more here.  Bridport News reports how Transition Town Bridport is training unemployed 18 to 26-year-olds in the use of hand tools and called for people to volunteer as course mentors.  TT-Cheltenham held a ‘Low Energy Show’ which you can read about in more detail here, and you can see the poster (right).

From Lancashire, Transition Town Clitheroe reported that planning permission has been given for constructing a hydro scheme at Whalley weir for generating electricity from the River Calder. Find out more here.  We are grateful to Pete Goffin in Leicestershire for sending us this:

Hello, we are a partnership of two, active in the Transition Towns movement in Leicester. We have worked in people’s houses, are very conscious of carbon footprint issues, have a cycle for work policy, moreover we have helped develop the shared apple pressing project which is proving to be so successful in Leicestershire. Rupert has developed an apple press package which is highly efficient, locally produced and competitively priced. We are also sourcing our timber from as close to home as possible, hence the tree sawing machine. It started with one press for Transition Leicester shared among 20-30 people. They now have two, Market Harborough, Loughborough and North West Leicestershire also have one each. I think Wigston are wanting one now too. It would be great if we could let your network know what a good community development the project has turned out to be.

You can read more about this apple press project here on T-Leicester’s website.  Here (left) is a photo of the new press in action.

To London now.  At St Mark’s Church, Transition Town Wimbledon, Wimbledon Civic Forum and Transition Town Tooting jointly hosted a Local Husting for London Assembly elections. You can read more about that here and see the photo below, right.

Transition Town Hackney held a screening of In Transition 2.0 (you can too!  See here for more details about organising a screening!).  Loads of great ideas for possible Transition Hackney projects were generated in the discussion.  TT Stoke Newington held an Open Space to ask ‘A greener more resilient Stoke Newington, how can we make it happen?’

Transition Town Tooting in London are edging towards the launch of a Tooting Pound.  Two workshops provided lots of lovely ideas for the design of the the notes. Some great drawings were created by budding designers and these will all inform the final designs. Here’s one design.  Bank of England eat your heart out:

Read more about the Tooting Pound here.  Transition Town Tooting’s ‘Monthly Do’ at Wandsworth Borough Council’s Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park saw several members join with gallery staff to offer a drop-in afternoon about on ‘Growing Successfully in the City’ (see right).

Transition Town Shrewsbury held an exhibition over Easter to show what a locally-owned hydro scheme in Shrewsbury might look like. You’ll find more information here.  TT Taunton has been exploring the creative potential of using thermal images to tell stories. To find out more, click here below, and look for the title “Thermalogues”.  There are six films in all, here are two of them …

TT-Taunton Guerrilla Gardeners have also been busy planting up derelict areas of the town with edible herbs! Read more in This is Somerset.

TT Worthing have been promoting a garden share scheme in the Adur and Worthing area. To find out more visit transitiontownworthing.  Former TT-Worthing steering group member Steve Last decided to start up a Transition group closer to home in the village of Findon. Read how a change in circumstances made him revaluate his involvement with Worthing and look no further than his own back yard.

Transition Town Marlborough in Wiltshire submitted a report to town councillors calling for better public transport for the town’s commuters. Read the original article on This is Wiltshire.  The Bromsgrove Standard publicized the ‘Buy from Bromsgrove’ event, which took place at the monthly farmers’ market and was organized by TT Bromsgrove.  In the last round-up we heard about how Marsden and Slaithwaite Transition Towns in Yorkshire had used their LEAF fund grant to do work around energy efficiency and hard-to-treat homes.  As part of that, they made some videos, most notably this great animation:

Doing the work they did led to them reflecting on the imminent ‘Green New Deal’, and here is a short film they made about that:

From France, we are grateful to Kitty de Bruin for sending us this: “In Ungersheim, France, the town decided to use the bottom-up process to start Transition with the citizens. They did not fly in expensive experts but involved the citizens to create awareness and involve them in the Transition process (see photo above).  Read this L’Alcase report (in French) about Transition in Ungersheim”.

DACH (Germany, Austria & Switzerland) have been busy preparing for their nation(s) wide ”In Transition 2.0 Film & Information Day” on May 13th. More than 10-15 (and growing!) Transition initiatives across DACH are planning to show In Transition 2.0 in this fantastic unified event!  If you are in Germany, for more info about how to participate etc. (in German) click here.

In Ireland, Kinsale Transition Town held a Spring Fair. Here is a film about it:

In New Zealand, Transition Oamaru and Waitaki District held their third Sustainable Skills School which had on offer over 30 courses including identifying edible seaweed, wood turning, preparing a hangi, making sauerkraut, making mud bricks and recycling car tyres! Read more about this fantastic event in the Otago Daily Times.

Now to Sweden.  The spread of Transition Towns in Sweden got a big push forward recently from the Swedish Minister for the Environment, Lena Ek, who expressed her support for the work of  Transition initiatives in the County of Östergötland. She was quoted as saying, “it was so great to get back to Stockholm after the UN climate negotiations to discover all these Transition initiatives. This is exactly what I hoped would start in  Sweden, as transition must begin locally”.  For more information read Stephen Hinton’s full report here. And for information in Swedish, see the (PDF) newsletter from Hela Sverige Skall Leva.

Lastly, let’s see what’s happening in the US.  For starters, you can find the Transition US April newsletter here. In California, an article on NewsReview.com has members of Transition Chico talking about bringing neighbourhoods together to create a self-sustainable community.  Transition San Luis Obispo co-sponsored a free lecture titled The deadly connection: Endless war and economic crisis in the city-county library.

Colorado Springs Independent wrote about TT Manitou Springs Seed Bank. Find out more about the seed bank here.  In Newtown (CT), local resident Barbara Toomey attended a Transition training session and is now well on her way to forming an initiating group. There is already a Sustainable Film Series up and running which started this month with Carbon Nation. Transition Newtown would make the third Transition group in CT joining the communities of Greater New Haven and Litchfield. Go Newtown!

Dr. Steven Chase of Antioch University New England, presented a free lecture “The Global Transition Movement: Innovative Local Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Disruption” at Saint Joseph College, Connecticut.  From Florida, here are a couple of photos from Code Green Community in Tampa Bay taking part in Earth Day.

Framington Patch reports that Transition Framington (MA) took part in the State’s Green Fest.  Keene (NH) Transition Movement Community blog published a timetable for Monadnock Localvore Reskillling Workshops in 2012. See the dates of the workshops and find out more here.  Transition Town State College (PA) held a successful local Foods Forum whilst Transition Town Media held a community pot luck meal and garbage art contest!

Here is an article titled ‘Is the Time Now for R.I. to Make Transition?’ which discusses the potential for Transition towns in the state.  The Citizen reported how Transition Town Charlotte (VT) co-sponsored community viewing and discussion of five films related to Vermont’s Comprehensive Energy Plan. Read the article here.

Transition Viroqua (WI) got busy making a broadcast for local community radio station WDRT which includes interviews with local car share pioneers, a hybrid car guru, information on area bus options, an interview with a local bike shop owner and a discussion about pedal assist bicycles. You can listen to the audio below:

To close, on a more general note, don’t forget to keep an eye on Transition Network’s news and projects for inspiring Transition-related stories from across the globe.  STIR online magazine features an interview with Rob Hopkins by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh and a review of In Transition 2.0 by Charlotte du Cann, and at Permaculture Magazine, Phillip Moore reviews In Transition 2.0.  Also Transition is cited as a grassroots movement that is shaping the future and is mentioned in a summary of the key points from the built environment discussion group also on Guardian.co.uk.  The Christian Science Monitor writes this article titled Transition Towns moves communities beyond sustainability to resiliency.

With many thanks to Lia who helped pull together this month’s roundup!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this month’s Transition podcast, we go into more depth with three of the stories from this month’s Transition round-up.  We hear about Transition Guelph‘s recent ‘Resilience Festival’, what Marsden and Slaithwaite Transition Towns did with their LEAF funding, and what happened when Transition Belper suggested turning a local car park into a vegetable garden.  The last one of these podcasts has already been listened to over 1000 times.  Do note that you can embed it on your own website, and that it is now available on iTunes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transition Town Honiton also held a big tree planting event:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transition Town Leamington's 'Wool Day'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the story in English:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Lincoln Potter.

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

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

You can also read a news story about it here, and you’ll find a film of Transition Prince Rupert’s first public event, which was included in an earlier round-up, here, and Lee himself appears in Part Two).  Michelle Colussi, a Transition Trainer and member of Transition Victoria, BC emailed to tell us that although there is no Transition Canada hub yet, there are over 20 official initiatives across the country and another 20 or so mullers, as well as 10 active trainers.  A summary of Canadian Transition projects in the areas of food and economy (both from last year) are located in blogs here and here.

Also in British Columbia, Alberni Valley TT Society turned the spotlight onto consumerism by screening The Clean Bin Project, a couple’s ‘zero waste, consumer free year’.  TT-Comox Valley held their fourth meeting. Click here (scroll down) to see some photos of the trade show style event.

We’ve heard of Transition Towns, even of Transition Universities (more to come on that later), but a ‘Transition Bus’?  From Quebec comes news of The Transition Bus.  The ‘Another World is En Route’ project comes to us from Charlotte and Camille who blog here about their latest on the road exploits from Québec province to Key West Florida.

And so to France.  Thanks to Kitty de Bruin who provided this story:

“In our community garden of 3000 m2, where we will grow old varieties of vegetables and herbs based in old kiwi storage boxes, given to our Transition group by a organic kiwi producer.  The garden sculpture will be made entirely from recuperated and recycled materials collected by the artist. Driftwood, plastic bottle caps, fish nets and lines, shells, recuperated metal wires and screws, as well as these little wheel-like pieces of plastic that have been washing up by the hundreds of thousands onto the Aquitaine coastline for the past few years now. For the longest time nobody knew what they were or where they were coming from. Now we know that a company in Portugal makes them. They use them in a mechanism to purify used water. When they are finished with them they are dumped into the ocean where they are later found in fish, birds and all over our beaches.

Using these little plastic wheels she is created a sort of picture diagram telling this story. It is mounted on a driftwood board. This board will be on top of a 3 or 4 walled structure made from many pieces of driftwood. Under it will be a hand-carved inscription “No More Pollution in our Oceans” in Portuguese and French.  It’s a little hard to describe in words, but the sculpture will be like a statue of mother earth. On top will be the head like the Earthglobe made from a lot of recycled plastic bottle caps. Built into the sculpture there will be birdhouses, refuges for insects, and shelters for rodents and other little animals.

The sculpture should also be interactive and visitors of the garden could carve their own environmental message onto any of the driftwood walls. It is work in progress, the design is made, and the photographs are the little “wheels”.

"these little wheel-like pieces of plastic"...

To read this story in French click here.  There’s a lot of Transition happening in Germany.  Our thanks to Gerd Wessling for this excellent 19 minute video feature (in German) about Transition Town Witzenhausen (one of the first official TT Initiatives in Germany) and the Transition Training course done there. To watch it click here.  Here is a great photo of TT Witzenhausen demonstrating solar cooking!

TT Witzenhausen -Solar cooking -photo credit - Evidero

From Holland here is a short film of a talk given by Transition Town Houten, and I think them talking about their website?

From Ireland, Davie Philip from the Ireland and Northern Ireland Network sends this story:

Panel discussion at Cloughjordan's Community Farming event : Ella mcSweeney (RTE Television) Andrea Calori (URGENCI) Yvonne O Donovan (Hazelhurst CSA) Bronagh Ui Dhuill (Transition Skerries), Amanda Daniel (Soil Association). Photograph: Davie Philip

“Although this was not an official Transition event, last weekend’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) conference in Cloughjordan Ireland was a great success and was attended by many of Irelands Transition initiatives.  On the weekend of the 17th to 19th of February hundreds of people from all over Ireland, and seven European countries, participated in a three day community supported agriculture (CSA) conference – Growing Together – in Cloughjordan, home of Ireland’s largest ecovillage. With panels hosted by Irish Television’s Ella McSweeney and Peter Young from the Farmers Journal and Open Space sessions facilitated by Cultivate Ireland’s Davie Philip, participants that included people from organisations like the Irish Seed Savers, Organic Centre, GIY (Grow it Yourself), and numerous Transition Towns – discussed what exactly a CSA is, and how they could go about setting one up.  Transition Skerries outlined how they went about setting up their local CSA and Transition catalysts from Dublin, Omagh, Kerry and Kinsale shared their experience in building food resilience in their areas.

Community farming is a relatively new concept to Ireland, with the Cloughjordan Community Farm being one of the first in Ireland. With community farms, a relationship is built between the farmer and consumers. So both farmer and consumer share the risks, rewards and responsibilities of farming and growing food. Local members invest some of their time and money in the farm, usually as a weekly or monthly payment and some volunteering, like planting, harvesting or weeding. For this, they receive fresh, local, seasonal food and the farmer gets a guaranteed, regular income. Sessions included how CSAs can help strengthen community resilience were outlined by economic think tank FEASTA, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability and URGENCI, the global CSA network. There was also a specific session for farmers and growers on the mechanics of setting up and maintaining a CSA, hosted by NOTS – the National Organic Training Skillnet and films and a wonderful presentation from Amanda Daniel from the UK’s Soil Association. A network of communities and growers wanting to progress CSA in Ireland was launched and a training handbook on community farming is being produced from the findings of the event. Click here for more details.

Former Irish Minister for Food and Agriculture Trevor Sargent making a comment from the floor at the CSA Conference in Cloughjordan Former Irish Minister for Food and Agriculture Trevor Sargent making a comment from the floor at the CSA Conference in Cloughjordan

Also from Ireland, here is a short film about a World Cafe event run by Transition Town Kinsale, the place where Transition all began:

From Japan, after the earthquake and resulting tsunami that hit Japan last year, the option of rebuilding the country using renewable green energy is being seriously considered. In this Aljazeera article reporter Brendan Barrett talks about the Transition movement in general and also to Hide Enomoto of Transition Fujino.

We have this great story from the Portuguese National Hub:

A team composed of TIs from Lisbon invited all the Portuguese initiatives to gather and discuss the future of the National Network and the creation of the National Hub. It was a sunny, chilly day (5th Feb) with a beautiful blue sky.

That was a creative, inclusive and fun group! The truth is that, even in a country going through a widely known serious economic crisis, it is in fact possible to feel positive, to build very strong connections within a heterogeneous group, dreaming the ideal network and, at the same time, being with friends, laugh, sing, dance. All this while keeping in mind how incredibly challenging and serious the role of Transition Initiatives is NOW, in this social context.

In the end, the Portuguese TIs adopted, with success, the new concept of a ‘Transition National HUG” – the Portuguese hub is expected to be a particular one, responding to these particular local challenges – soon enough, there will be news about it (new chapter of this story planned to happen in April)!  For more pictures, music and dance check the video below (if you are not fluente in Portuguese do not worry, just wait for the first couple of minutes and you’ll get there!).

Here are a couple of stories from Australia.  From Tasmania, Andrew Olivier has sent out Sandy Bay’s first newsletter. It was interesting for us here at Transition Network to see a familiar name in there – Adrian Porter, ex resident of Totnes and once active in TTT who was invited to Waimea Heights School as guest speaker! Here is a pdf of their newsletter. Also, Transition Bellingen hosted its first World Café for 2012 and looked at what Coffs Harbour might look like in 2020 if they were a community that embraced the Transition model.

Prince Albert, South Africa.

In Prince Albert, Great Karoo, Western Cape, South Africa, 22 people including Hélène Smit gathered and held a meeting to discuss the possibility of the town becoming a Transition Town! Read Hélène’s blog piece here.

And so now to the UK.  Transition Network has been chosen as one of Britain’s 50 New Radicals – read more in Rob Hopkins’ blog post on Transition Culture or here on the NESTA site. NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative.

From Essex, here is a video clip sent in by Kamil from Transition Southend.  It features Ian Hurd talking about The Fantastic Food Exchange. This took place back in December, however this bartering and skill share fest could be enjoyed at any time of year and is well worth a watch.

TT Musselburgh - East Lothian. Left to right, Roger Knox, Jen Williams, Diann Govenluck, Heather Cameron, Sylvia and Geoff Mason, and Stephanie Kerr

TT Musselburgh are making plans to plant fruit and veg along the river Esk and even get a community orchard going on an industrial estate! Read more in the East Lothian News (see above).  TT Cheltenham are using a £5k govt grant to look at the prospect of the River Chelt providing small scale hydroelectricity.

Transition Town Worthing have made this short film about their recent Seed Swap.  The film uses ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division as its soundtrack.  What’s not to love about that?

Transition doesn’t always manage to gain a foothold or generate enough interest to move it forward.  We were sad to hear that TT Sevenoaks are facing the prospect of closing down next year due to lack of interest from the local community.  If you have any helpful thoughts or suggestions for TT Sevenoaks, please send them here.  The Kirkbymoorside Environment Group, part of the Transition Town movement within this small North Yorkshire market town, outline in this short film how their recently purchased infra-red camera can be used by residents to detect heat loss from their homes.

One of the most fascinating stories of the past month has been the launch of Brixton Energy (see right).  TT Brixton’s Energy group are pushing for London’s first co-operatively owned solar power station and have a launched share option!   A very exciting initiative, the first Transition initiative to launch an energy company for a distinct urban neighbourhood.  We wish the all the best with it.  As we go to press, they just tweeted the following, “Printed Copies of our 100% recycled Share Offer are ready! “They look good enough to eat!..”professional, sleek & energised. Just love it!”.  You can follow them on Twitter @BrixtonEnergy.  There are lots of Transition initiatives on Twitter, it can be a good way to keep in touch with what they are up to between these round-ups.

Volunteers from TT Crystal Palace and Friends of Westow Park are clearing a park to make way for an edible community garden.  TT-Shrewsbury has been awarded £42,725 via the government backed Local Energy Assessment Fun (LEAF) scheme. Read more in this BBC news story.

The Hebden Bridge Transition Trees project

From Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, you can read this story about their Transition Trees project (see left), a truly joint effort between the TT’s Working Woodslands group, Blackshawhead Optimistic Gardeners, Blackshawhead Environmental Action Team and Hebden Royd Town Council.

Also in Hebden Bridge, read more about their HebVeg CSA box scheme (see right). From that part of the world, from the Leeds University Union, here is Ben Jackson, LUU’s Education Officer, to tell us more about the launch of their Transition University campaign:

… and here are Rhianon and Martha from People and Planet Leeds explaining Transition and how they’re involved in the campaign:

… and lastly Sam from People and Planet Leeds giving a really short summary about the idea of “Transition Universities”:

Sonoma Valley - Left to Right Melinda Kelley, Ed Clay, Tim Boeve. Photo Jeff Kan LeePress Democrat

Now let’s hop across the pond (metaphorically, no flights were taken in the making of this round-up!).  You can read the official Transition US February roundup click here.  In Vermont, T-Brattleboro is hosting a ‘sense of place’ series exploring connections to the natural world, mentoring, and regenerative community relations. The series concludes next month with lessons from The Peacemaker and The Haudenosaunee, a fascinating story of tribal war to peace shared  here in Culture for a Healthy World by Sophy Banks of TN.  From Washington State, here is a film of Judith Alexander talking about the Transition initiative she is part of in Port Townsend.  In California, Transition Sonoma Valley has had to turn eager people away due to their highly popular film nights which this month screened The Next Frontier – Engineering the Golden Age of Green. Read more about the collective genius of T-Sonoma Valley here (see pic right).  Here is a film about them too:

Alisa Viego - Kimberley Leeds. Photo credit - Suzanne Chun

In Alisa Viego, local resident Kimberley Leeds’s (left) desire to feel more connected to her neighbours was the driving force behind her starting up a Transition group. Opening up her home for regular pot luck meals served as the perfect catalyst.

In Telluride, Colorado, monthly Green Business Roundtable discussions are taking place. The first session, led by  Michael Brownlee of Transition Colorado and Woody Tasch of the Slow Money Alliance looked specifically at building a more resilient community.  Here is a video of the event:

In Florida, an Occupy Tallahassee event held a presentation on Transition Towns and a Daily Kos reporter who is new to the whole concept of Transition went along to find out more.

Members of Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition at work in the Egleston Community Orchard.

From Massachusetts, Orion Kriegman, founder of Jamaica Plain (JP) New Economy Transition (who featured in last month’s Transition podcast, which I’ll embed here in case you missed it), talks about the local Egleston Community Orchard in this great Q&A session featured in local paper the JP Patch.

In North Carolina, the folks who attend the United Church of Chapel Hill are not only deeply committed to their faith; they are also committed to a carbon fast for lent! This article delves deeper in to the journey of one congregation and the steps they are taking to Transition to a more sustainable way of being.  In New Hampshire, Keene Transition held their 7^th annual seed celebration and sustainable community fair which included workshops, an open space event and a poster competition.

If you would like any stories included in next month’s round up do let us know.  Also, if you have any thoughts as to which of these should be gone into in more depth in this month’s Transition podcast, do put a comment below this piece.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a second video, Chris and Graham get in off the roof and talk in more depth about how the scheme came into being, and the obstacles it overcame:

TT-Llandeilo in Wales are fighting to save their historic Market Hall while plans are being considered for a new Sainsbury’s supermarket to the north of the town – read more in This is South Wales.  Picking up a story from last month’s round up, which was explored in more detail in the last Transition podcast, here is an article in Treehugger on TT-Whitehead planting 60,000 trees which includes their fantastic video that we featured here last month.

Transition Heathrow: Credit: Kristian Buus

On the same subject, TT-Horncastle in Lincolnshire have been planting hazelnut trees (see above) as part of their plan to have an orchard spread around the town. Ian Westmoreland from Transition Heathrow (see right) came to give a talk in Totnes to talk about their Grow Heathrow project, which explored the place where Transition and activism meet.

TT-Bridport has joined forces with another local community group and have offered placements to unemployed young people to teach them practical skills.  TT-Dorchester and TT-Taunton in Somerset both held a Wassail at their local community orchards (see left)! Dorchester’s was followed by an orchard work day.   For those not familiar with the term, an orchard-visiting wassail refers to the ancient custom of visiting orchards, reciting incantations and singing to the trees in apple orchards in cider-producing regions of England to promote a good harvest for the coming year.

TT-Bolton have written this rational and forward thinking letter to their local council with 2 specific objections and 2 specific (and they believe achievable) aims for the next 14 year period.  At the end of the letter they refer to two articles which may be of interest, here and here.

So, to London.  Here is a very silly indeed video of Transition Crystal Palace:

Transition Kensal to Kilburn, like quite a few other London Transition groups, have been running Draughtbusting workshops.  These 3 videos take us inside what really happens at a Draughtbusting workshop….

Transition Town Tooting met to make some Transition New Year resolutions.  TT-Brixton have started a Family Group (see right) where everyone is welcome (everyone is part of a family in some way)! Read here for more details of their planned activities.  Transition Brixton’s Brixton Pound initiative also got a mention at the recent Davos Economic Summit!  Have a look a 4.30 into this interview with Stewart Wallis of nef:

While we’re on the subject, the Bristol Pound, the first city-wide complementary currency is coming soon, keenly supported by Bristol City Council.  You can keep up to date with developments at their rather impressive new website.

In a follow up to last month’s story, two very worthy hospices benefitted from TT-Shrewsbury’s post Christmas cardboard collecting initiative (which also featured in our most recent podcast). Read the full story here and see pic, left.

TT-Shrewsbury have also been busy as part of The Shrewsbury Hydro Group who are spearheading the new £100,000 power plan for Shrewsbury Castlefields weir (a story we heard about in a special podcast in December).  A lovely example of skills being shared for a good cause as TT-Worthing took part in a Winter Warmer campaign by knitting woollen hats, gloves and scarves for two local charities (see right).

Here’s a great idea: Transition Cardiff have started ‘Show and Tell’ evenings, where people from different sustainability initiatives in the area are invited to come and present what they are up to.  Here’s a film about it:

The Local Energy Assessment Fund (LEAF), run by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) recently announced 82 winning communities, who between them shared £4 million for community energy projects.  A quick look through the list of finalists shows that about 10 of them were Transition initiatives.  Among those, Transition Town Totnes got funding to retrofit Dartington Parish Hall, Transition Eynsham Area are now able to insulate local homes, Taunton Transition Town can now do some research on the best ways to reduce energy in Taunton, and Transition West Bridgford will be rolling out its ‘EcoHouses’ project, to name just a few.

Speaking of Totnes, Transition Town Totnes’ ‘Transition Homes’ project recently held an Open Day in the same Dartington Parish Hall, to inform local residents of their plans:

Internationally, the Transition initiatives that feature in the new film ‘In Transition 2.0′ are getting ready to preview the film tomorrow (Thursday 2nd February).  Transition Town Lewes are showing it in the town hall, and didn’t like Transition Network’s poster and so made their own (see right), Transition City Lancaster are showing it at Dukes, Transition Marsden & Slaithwaite are putting it on at the Watershed, Transition Monteveglio have had to cancel theirs due to arctic winds and snowstorms, Transition Wayland in the US are using the town building, Love Lyttelton in New Zealand will be showing it in their office, in a fire station in Moss Side, Manchester, in a Hindu Temple in Tooting,  in a school in Finsbury Park, in a hall in Koganei, Japan, in ‘Cinema Paradiso’ in Auroville, India and in Aldeia das Amoreiras Sustentável in Portugal.  Its premiere will be announced soon, and it will be more widely available for screenings from the end of March.

Popping over to British Columbia in Canada, a Shuswap resident (what a great name for a place) is interviewed about why she became involved in Transition in this lovely Salmon Arm Observer article (Salmon Arm, there’s another great name for a place!).  See also this related article on Ten Resolutions for Resilience.

Also in British Columbia, local resident and farmer Matthew Stewart (see below) has taken the first steps in getting a local Transition initiative up and running in the city of Burnaby which sits to the east of Vancouver. Read a Q&A with Matthew in Burnaby Now.

Growing a greener world: Moreno Zanotto, Matthew Stuart and Sarah Milton aim to create communities free from fossil fuel dependence, starting with community gardening and green transportation. Credit: Lisa King, Burnaby Now

TT-Woodstock is one of only two Transition groups in the East Canadian province of New Brunswick.  The group have built a solar-powered cooker that’s used at public events such as Canada Day, compiled a local food directory and established a community garden. They continue to actively encourage more local people to join them.

Heading south to the US, you can check out the US edition of the January roundup here.  From Massachusetts, this simple Resilience Questionnaire put together by The Jamaica Plain (JP) New Economy Transition seeks to find out direct from their residents just how ready their JP community is for change.  Also in Jamaica Plain, for their first Potluck of 2012, local residents Jenny Jones, Alvin Kho and Andree Zaleska shared their respective experiences of the Festival Garden, Egleston Community Orchard and the JP Green House.

A Senior center in Chelsea, Michigan is to host series of free classes on resilience, sustainability and the transition movement and kicks off with a program on “Chelsea’s Resilience 100 Years Ago.”  In North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, the first Transition Congregation sustainability workshop in the US has taken place with Transition Trainer Tina Clarke.

In Wyncote, Transition Cheltenham have started a Sunday Supper series with an excerpt from the film Gasland followed by a speaker and discussion about fracking.  Also in Pennsylvania, the Penn State Center for Sustainability did this review of The Transition Companion and held its second energy forum, ‘Marcellus Shale and Beyond’ which sought to answer questions such as ‘Why do we need our own energy plan?’ and ‘Who is going to fix a growing list of intractable problems?  Government?  Business?  Academia?’

In Utah, Transition Salt Lake City held a meeting at a local church to showcase their website, take part in a mind map exercise and share a potluck meal (see right).  Following a “Training for Transition” in December, Dummerston is the 9^th town in Vermont to start up a Transition initiative and this month held a potluck dinner, a screening of In Transition 1.0 followed by a discussion.

The spread of Transition in Brazil continues apace.  May East sent us the following reports of two particular recent developments there:

Transition Ametista: Town of 150,000 people, the largest Amethyst mines of South America. The town today stands over a Swiss cheese as they have been digging the subsoil for decades.  Recently they have been influenced by brilliant Brazilian permaculture designers friends of ours and decided to diversify economy, close the loops of extraction, created factory of eco-bricks, went back to grow grapes & vinyards, decided to age wines inside of the amethyst caves… a great case study.

We were hosted by the Major and had many reps of LA of the regional towns.  Marcello co-facilitated with me (see photo below).

Transition Rio – Rio has now many initiatives.  This is the third year; third group and I trust one of our trainers who is visiting the UK at the moment will be able to present all that is happening. Transition Brazil is planning a 2 day conference during Rio+20.

That’s it for now.  The next podcast, telling more about some of these stories, will be out in a couple of weeks.  If there are any stories you would especially like to hear more about, please let us know via the comments box below.

Visually the film is like some kind of Star Trek fan movie crossed with a National Geographic wildlife film, and is largely built around Gamble’s own years of ‘research’ into the question of what it is that “stops life on earth from thriving”.  A reasonable question to ask, but his approach can hardly be called ‘research’ due to the low standards he accepts as ‘evidence’ and his all-round lack of critical analysis.  His research, such as it is, is cherry-picked to deepen and support his established worldview, rather than the worldview being built from a careful analysis of the evidence.  As we’ll see, this is a dangerous foundation.

So here’s the film’s argument in a nutshell.  Humanity is killing itself and the world around it because free energy sources are being deliberately kept from us, cures for cancer are being kept from us, all because we are controlled by an invisible elite who want to create a ‘new world order’ to control us all and prevent us from thriving.  So let’s look at some of the film’s central arguments in turn.

Free energy machines

One of the key threads of the film revolves around free energy, the idea that we can generate unlimited clean energy by just tapping into the ‘torus’, a shape that supposedly pervades the universe (see right), and which could yield endless free energy.  ’Thrive’ would have you believe that there are dedicated independent scientists around the world bravely defying the laws of thermodynamics only to have their work seized by the FBI, their patents bought up and ‘lost’, or harassed into silence.  Yet all we are offered as evidence is some grainy film of machines that could be anything doing anything, and some smart computer graphics of spinning torus shapes.

If this amazing breakthrough that would rewrite science and win Nobel Prizes for anyone involved were actually a reality, and if you were going to spend huge amounts to make a film to argue for their existence which you would then put out into the public arena, surely you would get a working model of such a device into the studio with some impartial scientists to verify it in operation?  If they actually exist, and actually work, then this wouldn’t be a big challenge surely?  As Kyle Hill writes in his review of the film, “wanting something to be true does not make it more possible”, and “someone wanting to invent such a device is not evidence”.  ‘Free energy’ is a world notoriously riddled with charlatans and cranks.

Gamble argues that these technologies could provide “enough energy to transform the entire earth”, and here’s a key point I want to challenge.  The idea that free energy would be a universal good (even if it were feasible, which it’s not – the US Patent and Trademark Office gets so many nonsensical requests for patents on perpetual energy devices that they now refuse to even look at them without a working model) is deeply dubious.  Kimberly Carter Gamble, Foster Gamble’s partner, states at one point in the film that:

“… so much of the pain on the planet has to do with the lack of access to energy”.

Wow, now there’s a statement.  How many people on this planet would argue that much of the pain on the planet has to do with the developed world having lack of access to energy?  While of course for millions in the developing world, lack of access to energy is a huge impediment to being able to attain a reasonable standard of living and to move beyond poverty, in the developed world, cheap energy (you could argue that for the past 150 years fossil fuels have been so cheap that they might as well have been ‘free energy’) has allowed Western nations to conquer, plunder, colonise, mine, clearcut, dominate and oppress.

While it has also allowed us to do many good things, energy cannot be seen in isolation from our relationship with other resources.  Free energy would mean we would drain the aquifers faster, degrade the soils faster, work our way through the earth’s other depleting resources at an accelerated rate.  Nowhere in the film is the idea of limits even mentioned, apart from occasional mentions that believing in ‘scarcity’ is one of our problems.

Can anyone seriously argue that the United States (which is principally the focus of this film) with a new free source of energy would be a more responsible member of the global community?  Would they happily share it with the rest of the world? (the current stand-off about Iran’s nuclear energy programme rather indicates that they wouldn’t).  I would argue that it is only the realisation that we are nearing the end of the age of cheap energy, cheap fossil fuels, that is finally bringing some sense, some awareness of the fact that we live on a finite planet and that we need to live more responsibly.  Gamble’s argument that we could have enough free energy “to transform the entire earth” fills me with dread and foreboding rather than excitement.

We are told that oil companies are spending “huge amounts of money” suppressing free energy, with no evidence presented to support that at all.  I would hazard a bet though that if even any money at all is spent on such things, it is a tiny fraction of what is spent on climate change denial, funding dubious organisations which attempt to undermine climate science, all of which gets no mention here.  Of course we already have technologies that can harness natural energies and which provide clean energy – they are called renewables, we know they work, and we can install them today.  ‘Free energy’ is a fantasy, and will always remain so.  As Kyle Hill writes in his review, ”just because the universe is hard to understand and many times mysterious, does not mean that anything goes”.

Down the conspiracy rabbithole

Then we are bombarded with the full range of conspiracy thinking.  9/11 was an inside job, there is a conspiracy to suppress natural medicines, “Big Brother’s not coming, it’s already here”, we are one step away from a “military dictatorship”, a climate treaty in Copenhagen would have been “a tax base for tyranny”, there are ‘chemtrails’ in the sky to deliberately poison us, there is a deliberate attempt to reduce the world’s population underway, there is only a cancer epidemic because all the cures have been suppressed, etc, etc.

UFOs are also brought into the picture, which is odd as they serve little to deepen his argument, rather the argument seems to go like this: there are UFOs and they are extraterrestrial craft, and in order for them to have got here, they must have free energy machines, so therefore the Elite must know about this and be keeping it from us.  As he writes on the film’s website, “if we can expose the suppression, reveal the truth about ET visitation, and further develop new energy technologies that ETs apparently rely on, then we can decentralize power and make massive strides toward a thriving future”.  I’ll leave you to decide whether that 2+2+2=9 kind of logic makes any sense to you, and whether the word ‘apparently’ constitutes an evidence base.  Naturally, no evidence is presented to support this other than a few fuzzy videos of lights in the sky in different parts of the world.

Wheeled out as ‘experts’ to support the film’s arguments are Deepak Chopra and, erm, David Icke, among others.  Gamble is keen on talking about “my research”, yet his research, such as it is, is so undemanding that I am reminded of Sir Terry Frost’s words, “if you know before you look, you cannot see for knowing”.  Gamble wheels out the classic conspiracy theorists’ gambit, “could I be wrong?  Perhaps.  But what if I’m not?”  No, you are wrong.  And even if you were right, you have presented us with so little evidence to back up you claims that you would have no way of knowing whether you were right or not.

He also does the other classic conspiracy theorist’s trick of saying “don’t just take my word for it, do the research yourself”, offering links on the film’s website that all back up his arguments, rather than giving a rounded balanced view of arguments and counterarguments.  There’s some dreadful rubbish on there, the film ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ is presented as evidence that climate change is probably not a problem, for example, and the appalling section on climate change beautifully states “those who point to solar activity as a cause of global warming are often ridiculed and accused of being funded by the oil industry, even when that’s not the case”.  “Even when”?

Ah, so that’s what ‘Thrive’ is all about …

Then, at the end of the film, we finally get into Thrive’s manifesto, it’s vision for the future and how we might get there.  There is lots in there that I wouldn’t disagree with, more local food, renewable energy, local banking, local shopping and so on, apart from free energy being thrown into the mix too.  But now, it is in this final section of ‘Thrive’ that the dark side of the film emerges.  One of the things put forward, alongside local food, renewables and so on, is “little or no taxes”.  Eh?  Where did that come from?!  Ah, now we get into the real agenda of the film, a kind of New Age libertarianism, a sort of cosmic Tea Party, and it all starts to get deeply alarming.

Gamble sets out his 3 stages to get to humanity’s being able to thrive.  Firstly, he argues, we need to hugely scale back the defence industry and the Federal Reserve.  Well I could go along with that, but then the second is “shrink government’s role in order to protect individual liberty”, and the third is then, because we are now freer, with “no involuntary tax and no involuntary governance” and with “rules but no rules” (?), we can all now thrive.  OK, whoa, let’s pause here for a moment.  Indeed the film’s website goes further, describing ‘involuntary taxation’ as “plunder” and ‘involuntary governance’ as “tyranny”.

Thrive's vision of a thriving world: no taxes, no government, 'free energy charging stations' and community markets.

In her review, Georgia Kelly quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying “taxes are what we pay for a civilised society”.  In spite of all it’s cosmic graphics and pictures of forests from the air, it is in essence a kind of New Age Tea Party promo film, arguing for a society with no government, no taxes, no laws, alongside “interplanetary exploration”, which somehow combine to create a world that respects the rights of all.  Apparently, this would lead to a world where “everyone would have the opportunity to thrive”.  In reality, it would lead to a world in which the wealthy would thrive, but the rest of us would lose healthcare, social welfare, libraries, public transport, pension entitlement, social housing etc etc.  Sounds more like a surefire route to the kind of Dickensian world that led to the creation of a welfare state in the first place.

Responding to any of the truly global issues, such as climate change (which ‘Thrive’ clearly dismisses as part of the conspiracy), would no longer happen due to intergovernmental co-operation presumably being interpreted as steps towards a ‘one world government’. The film presents its suggestions in complete isolation from any notions of ‘society’ and community, presenting a vision of the future where the entire global population is living the same lifestyle as Gamble, the resources to enable this presumably being imported from other planets, or perhaps created afresh using magic?

Nowhere in the film do you hear the words ‘less’, or anything about reduced consumption in the West.  Just as free energy and cures for cancer are our birthright, so, presumably, is the right to consume as much as we like – to think otherwise is to lapse into a ‘scarcity’ mindset.  What I find most alarming about ‘Thrive’ is that most of the people who have asked me “have you seen Thrive?” are under 20, and they seem genuinely excited by it.  Perhaps it is the simplicity of the message that appeals, the “all we need to do is” clarity of its ask.  But having to discuss why free energy machines are impossible and the shortcomings of conspiracy theories with otherwise educated young people who are inheriting a warming world with its many deep and complex challenges is deeply depressing.

How we might actually help the world thrive

‘Thrive’ is dangerous because it invites us to put our faith for the future in a fantasy.  A fantasy that free energy is possible, a fantasy that the only thing that is preventing us from creating a benign and enlightened society is a handful of powerful families.  Things that are already very successfully preventing the world from thriving include:

• climate change (you try thriving in a world with a world whose temperature has risen 11°F, as the IEA warned this week)
• the fact that we fail to see reducing our oil demand as a key as a key aspect of energy security, oil prices having quadrupled since 2003 and going nowhere other than up, UK North Sea oil production falling by 22.5% in 2011 (a record fall) and North Sea natural gas production falling by 29.5% (a record fall) in 2011
• Social inequality, which as the book  ‘The Spirit Level’ so brilliantly showed, underpins many of our other social problems
• Our economic system, designed to channel money upwards rather than downwards and to enrich the 1%, but this is a sufficiently abhorrent system (see, for example, Nicholas Shaxson’s brilliant ‘Treasure Islands’, review coming soon) without invoking secret societies and conspiracies to explain it

The solutions are already out there, there are proven technologies, proven strategies, and we need to work on all levels, as indeed the film argues, and to withdraw our support from a corrupt and ineffectual model which is taking us over the brink, and put that support into creating a more resilient, localised and accountable model.  However, it’s not about ‘interplanetary travel’, it’s about finding our feet, here and now, in the communities and the soils that surround us.  It’s not about ‘free energy’, it’s about learning to appreciate what a precious thing energy is and learning to live well with less of it.  It’s not about ‘no involuntary taxation’, it’s about taxes that disincentivise the things that are narrowing our future options, and incentivising the things we need to get in place urgently.  It’s not about ‘no government’, it’s about truly democratic government using its considerable powers to build resilience, decarbonise society, shift the collective focus.  The few countries in the world that are actually seriously engaging with the climate issue are those with stronger government, not weaker government.

I have occasionally been interviewed for a film and then squirmed with embarrassment when I have seen the final context in which my interview has been used.  I can only imagine that some of the progressives, such as Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, who appear in this film, are similarly horrified with ‘Thrive’.  It is a film that offers us nothing, and which, taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to our having thrown away the few options for actually thriving that remain open to us.  It is the film equivalent of a self-published book, with no critical editor rounding off the corners, and as a self-funded film a sense that you can do what you like.  Avoid.

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.

Surely in our present and unfolding predicament, to recalibrate our economy as a Steady State economy requires an enormous amount of infrastructure, investment and maybe we don’t have that kind of resource any more. Might the kind of more localised world that Transition is talking about be what we get by default rather than by design?

There are many possible futures out there.  I think that what I see is a huge amount of resources in our economy, both in terms of capital equipment, intellectual effort, finance, being directed towards the growth agenda. A different agenda, a different ambition for our society and our economy away from the pursuit of growth, would automatically free up, at least in principle, a lot of these resources.

I see it much more as a question of re-allocating the resources that we have towards an economic structure that isn’t based upon the pursuit of growth rather than thinking well somehow we’ve got to keep all those expenditures that we’re currently maintaining in the pursuit of growth and then worry about where all extra money and resources are going to come from to pay for and effect a transition in the economy?  The dilemma to me is a little bit different. It’s that the institutions that control all of these resources, both in the public and private sector, themselves are busily pursuing growth and so they’re not freeing up resources to lead into a different direction. I think it is possible, but it’s not happening as a result of the normal functioning of our current system.

I think the idea that we’ll default to more local economies whether we do it deliberately and maybe reasonably pleasantly, or whether we’ll be forced into it, is a very good question. The subtitle of my book is “Slower by design, not disaster.” If you have an economy predicated on growth that slows and maybe growth goes negative, that’s a disaster formula. That’s mass unemployment, deep poverty. Greenhouse gas emissions would go down but the social consequences of would be horrendous. That’s surely something we want to avoid.

That, though, I believe is the kind of scenario that we should be comparing to an alternative, which doesn’t pursue growth. Not a naïve notion of some kind of golden age where we were growing steadily and wondering why that can’t continue. I don’t think it can continue for the various reasons that have come up in this conversation. So, what are our alternatives? That’s really what we need to discuss. By the way, I hardly use the term, in fact I probably don’t use the term “Steady State economy” in my book at all.  I’m quite interested in the Steady State but I just think the danger is that it conjures up in some people’s mind a rather stagnant image and they don’t warm to it. So whilst I’m actually on the board of the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy here in North America, it’s a term that, well, if more people would find it favourable I would be happy to use it, but I don’t think it’s one that communicates very well.

Could you, tell us or describe to us, what does a post growth economy look like to you? Can you describe it? What would it look like, smell like and sound like? How would we know we were living in one? What’s the kind of vision that that conjures up in your mind of what it would be like?

I can give you some dimensions of it. This is something that requires a much broader public discussion than we’ve had to date. But the sorts of things that I would see are first of all, when we look at how our economy uses resources, and produces waste and occupies land, those numbers would be going down instead of up. So, efficiency of course offers us some possibilities there. We can and we have become somewhat more efficient in how we use our resources and we’ve produced less waste of many kinds per unit of economic output. The trouble is the growth of our economic output has gone up faster than the gains in efficiency, so it’s sort of overwhelmed them.

If we’re not growing so fast but we’re still getting the gains in efficiency and I do believe that’s possible, then we would see a lightening of the burden we’re placing on the biosphere.  In terms of how our lives would be lived, transportation is one aspect to look at. We’ve got a transportation system particularly in North America that’s built largely around the car. There is plenty of room, I believe, to move to much more use of public transit, so that’s a fairly simple thing to do.

I would see a shift to renewable energy, away from fossil fuels.  Some of that’s happening, but it’s happening partly as an addition to our use of fossil fuels as opposed to a replacement of the fossil fuels which is what we have to accomplish. One of the things I discuss in my book quite extensively is the idea that if we continue to become more productive as workers and employees, but the overall output of the economy’s not growing, it could be a formula for massively increased unemployment.

One answer is to work less. That would free up our time, we’d have more discretionary time. To me that’s a great element of personal freedom that I highly value. So that would be important. Some people, like Juliet Schor have taken this a bit further to consider what people might do with that extra time. This comes back, I think, very much to the Transition idea and to the use of time for more self-provisioning and local provisioning, which could be outside of the market system. That would be interesting.

They’ve done better at this in continental Europe. Maybe Britain isn’t much better than Canada, but in continental Europe they have benefitted from shortening the amount of time spent at work as compared with Canadians. It’s even worse in the US where people work some 100 -150 hours a year more than other people. I think this is a real missed opportunity: that we should be benefiting from increased productivity by working less rather than by producing and consuming more.

I think we would likely see less physical travel and less physical movement of goods, partly because I do expect energy prices to rise anyway and that will discourage these activities. The electronics revolution is a partial compensation for that. We can all now, well those of us with access to the equipment at any rate, see other parts of the world without actually physically having to go there.  I’m not sure that would be a perfect substitute, but maybe it’s the kind of sacrifice we have to make as we pass seven billion and head towards nine billion inhabitants of the planet. These are some of the things that I see, but as I say this is a subject that requires widespread public discussion and debate.

One of the things that’s put forward here is the idea of the Green New Deal, as a kind of Keynesian project of borrowing massive amounts of money in order to try and stimulate a green economy. What’s your sense of the degree to which we should go further into debt in order to create this?

Ah well, there’s so much in your question! First of all, if Keynes was writing now he’d be on side with those of us who understand that the economy is embedded in the biosphere and that that relationship has long been neglected and now can no longer be. If you read his 1931 paper on ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ you see that he was a man of great vision, not that his expectations for the future all came to pass, but just that he could conceive of a time when, as he put it, the economic problem would be solved. We’d be producing enough and we could divert our attention to, even in his own terms, much more important things, such as the arts.

I think Keynes would have been with us in this discussion. The ideas that he produced in the 1930s were for dealing with short-term unemployment. The question now is to what extent do those ideas have to be changed because of these additional considerations that we have. I’m still enough of a Keynesian to think that there’s no reason why governments have to balance their budget, except on average over a goodly length of time.

So the idea of a green Keynesianism, the idea that when governments see the need to stimulate the economy they should do so by either spending money or inducing the rest of us to spend money on activities that will help transform the economy in a green direction, I think that makes good sense. But, you know, Keynes did make it very clear in his writings that most of his interest was in the short term.

This discussion we’re having is not just about the short term. This discussion is about the medium and the long term. What’s the new direction we should be heading in? The sort of short term stimulus that he stressed shouldn’t just be expenditure on anything. It should be geared towards the transformation of the economy to something that’s more viable in the long term.

Do you think there is a case to argue that economic growth makes an economy less resilient? Can you kind of correlate it in that way? Would a more resilient economy by necessity be one that has moved beyond economic growth?

One of the main, if not the main arguments, for globalisation, by which I mean the deliberate dismantling of national restrictions on the flow of capital and trade in goods and services, has been that it’s good for economic growth. I think that that agenda has led to the decline in resilience of national and sub-national economies. We see this very much in what’s happening in Europe at the moment, where individual nations are very vulnerable to circumstances outside their borders, so it’s not so much growth itself I would say that threatens resiliency and undermines it, it’s the measures that we take in pursuit of growth that move us in one direction only.

That is, they continually weaken the capacity of communities at all levels, from local up to national and even a little bit beyond that to really have much control over what’s happening to them. That’s the problem. So it’s a little bit more complicated than saying growth it’s growth that threatens resilience, it’s what we’ve allowed our institutions to do or prevented them from doing that, as much as anything, has made our economies and our society less resilient.

Where do you see the seeds coming from for this? When you wrote this book the Occupy movement didn’t exist and that seems to have really created a space in which we can more freely question the very idea of economic growth much more freely than we could a couple of years ago. Where do you see the next steps as coming from?”

I have a passing interest in the history of ideas. To me, economic growth is an idea. It’s the modern incarnation of progress. It’s often regarded as synonymous with progress. What I discovered is that a lot has been written in the past, a lot of really interesting material that has largely been forgotten, and yet when there’s a sort of a growing awareness of an issue, such as the one we’ve been talking about, it’s really nice to know we’re not actually starting from scratch.

There’s a lot of ideas that we need to go back to and bring forward and make sure they’re in the public domain and are informing the public discussion. I’m just reading an essay written in the 1950s, it’s hard to tell from the publisher, entitled “Size of Nations and Living Standards” by Leopold Kohr.  The author’s arguing that as an economy gets bigger, as a society gets bigger, living standards eventually decline, and he does some early quantitative estimates. He reckons that the US peaked in about 1950 and that living standards have been in decline since then.

Here’s another book, “The Social Costs of Private Enterprise” by K. W. Kapp, written in 1950, all about the increasing burden that the economy is placing on the environment. They’re just fresh in my mind. There’s lots of stuff there, and what I would like to be better at is to find ways of getting these ideas out to a wider audience so that movements such as the Occupy movement, and perhaps the Transition movement, realise that there’s a considerable body of work on which to draw.

We don’t all have to make it up over the next couple of weekends. I think that’s a big part of the4 next steps. How do I put this in more simple terms? It’s about changing the stories we tell ourselves about our economy, our society, and our own selves, in terms of what we think success looks like. The pursuit of economic growth for a long time has been based on the idea that economic growth is the mark of success that we should all strive for. We need more meaningful objectives for ourselves and our economy.

Fortunately a lot of this is now being picked up. For example, the Sen/Stiglitz report of a couple of years ago, written at the instigation of Sarkozy, was about defining and measuring quality of life and sustainability. This report has been quite influential. Statistics departments around the world are looking at how they measure progress and whether they should make changes. There hasn’t been a lot, as far as I can tell, a lot of real action at the national levels yet, but there’s there’s the OECD work and in Canada we’ve just had the release of the Canadian index of well being and so on.

So there are things happening, there’s local community work, there’s the sort of thing you’re doing, there’s interest from student populations, there’s academic research, there’s more, there’s stuff going on in officialdom to make changes. The problem is it hasn’t yet congealed into a new story, which says “you know what, we should be looking to rather different objectives and using different means of getting there than we’ve been accustomed to in the past.” I can’t tell you what’s going to trigger that, maybe nothing and then we’ll be in for it, but maybe it’ll all flip pretty quickly and we’ll be on our way.

One of the ideas that I found really surprising from the book was that the whole idea of growth and that economies should grow on a continuous basis is actually a relatively new idea. I wonder if you could give us a quick potted history of where the idea of economic growth came from?

The idea of economic growth per se could probably be dated back at least as far as Adam Smith who was interested in the wealth of nations. What I think is new, and I think what you’re referring to, is the idea that governments should take responsibility for trying to ensure that economies achieve a certain rate of economic growth.  That is relatively new, and only really came to be around about the 1950s / 1960s.

It happened more or less along these lines. The work of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s convinced most in the economics profession that full employment was not a natural outcome in capitalist economies and that the government could play a useful role in stimulating demand to generate employment when the economy was not capable of doing that itself. This was adopted as a policy by many western governments after the Second World War, but then it was pretty quickly realised, in the space of a decade or so, that when you encourage expenditure to stimulate employment, some of that expenditure is likely to be on new equipment and infrastructure which expands the capacity of the economy, and therefore you have to keep increasing the amount of expenditure simply to keep your growing capacity employed.

This of course is just another way of saying what economic growth is. So economic growth was first adopted by governments in about the 1950s as a measure, as an approach to achieving full employment.  In other words, not for its own sake, but as an employment measure.  However, within about a decade or so things got switched around, and you can see by looking at some of the older literature, that governments started to put the pursuit of growth as their number one priority and employment was reduced to a second level consideration.

Can you give us, in a nutshell, the argument you set out in Managing Without Growth as to why that is something that we should be thinking of doing?

What’s happened in the last half century in particular is that we’ve become very aware that our ever-expanding economies require more and more energy and materials to support that expansion. Now I’m not saying that economic growth as measured by changes in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is automatically and inextricably related to increases in materials and energy because of gains in efficiency over time, but the historical record is such that clearly there’s been a positive link between the two.

What we’re seeing is mounting evidence that the planet can’t cope with all this extraction of materials and disposal of waste and occupancy of land by humans that we’re imposing on it. And so the question I decided to address was whether we could manage without growth, at least in advanced economies, which are pretty rich certainly by historical standards.

Could we achieve full employment? Could we eliminate poverty? Could we significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? And could we do all that without the government going bankrupt and in the context of an economy that isn’t growing? That’s really what I tried to look into and concluded that it is possible at least from an analytical point of view to show that you can have an economy that can do all that and doesn’t have to grow.

Is your argument that growth is undesirable or that it’s no longer feasible?

I’m interested in both of those lines of argument. I did cover in the book some of the fairly modern literature on the disconnect between economic growth and happiness. If that’s true, if really getting richer doesn’t make us happier then you really have to wonder why we put so much effort into doing it. But then there’s also the question of feasibility.  It doesn’t look like it’s feasible to continue to have economies that just keep growing and keep growing.

It’s good to know, I think, that if growth is not the secret to a happy life, certainly after you’ve achieved a certain level of  material well-being, that not having something that’s not particularly desirable is not such a bad outcome! I think both lines of argument are really important, that there are likely to be ways of leading more fulfilling lives if we pay much less attention to the pursuit of growth and that in doing so we’ll lighten the load that we’re placing on the biosphere.

At the moment here in the UK the government is obsessed with growth at all costs. Everything else seems to be being thrown out of the door in terms of this obsession with trying to get the economy to grow again. What do you see as the dangers that are inherent in trying to do that at a time when all the other pressures are becoming so clear upon us?

Well of course they’re not on their own in that!  I think that’s true of many governments.  The problem I see is that it’s an approach that’s entirely focussed on the short term. Now of course the long term is made up of a series of short terms, so the problem I see is that if we keep focussing on the short term we will lose sight, I think we’ve lost sight, of the sort of broader priorities which call upon us to change our direction.  So I have a lot of sympathy for governments that see the immediate problems and strive to deal with them, but I have much less sympathy if they don’t have a longer term vision that makes sense of where we’re heading.  That’s what I think is lacking.

I’m very concerned that trying to pull out all the stops to re-stimulate economies, to use the cliché, “to get back on track”, is actually a formula for far worse things to happen, probably in the not too distant future.

You wrote the book in 2008.  In terms of economics, rather a lot’s happened since then! If you were updating the book or re-writing it now, how would the crash and the implications of the last three years strengthen or weaken or change what you would have put in the book?

The book was published in 2008 by an academic publisher, Edward Elgar, a very good publisher, but they took about a year to produce the book.  I completed it in 2007 and I wrote most of it in 2006, so it’s actually a longer period of time than the three years that we’re talking about here. Anyway, when I wrote the book, Canada was in a particularly healthy economic position as is currently understood. In particular, our governments were running substantial budget surpluses, (of course it’s changed now, they’re running deficits) so that alone makes the problem of a transition to an economy which isn’t madly pursuing economic growth somewhat more problematic, but I don’t think it brings the whole pursuit to an end, if I can put it that way.

What I think of course has happened is that we know a lot more about the fragility of the financial system than was apparent when I was doing my research and I didn’t pay much attention in the book to that aspect. I simply assumed that the central bank in Canada, the Bank of Canada, would continue to try to keep the level of inflation in the standard range, something like 2% plus or minus a little bit, and adopt a monetary policy that would do that. That wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, and I think it’s the same sort of assumption that I would make going forward if I was doing the work again, but they’d be starting from a more difficult position because of the other problems the economy’s having.

I should say though that Canada has been patting itself on the back during these last three years because our banking system turned out not to be as vulnerable as those of many other countries, because they didn’t get involved in some of the more suspect and precarious investments. That was as much by luck as it was by judgement I think, but that’s another story.

In fact, that’s some of the work that I’m doing right now with my good friend and colleague in Britain, Tim Jackson. We are building a better macroeconomic model of national economies in which the financial sector is much more front and centre so that we can better understand the links between the financial sector, the real economy and the biosphere – trying to track all those three systems at one go. But, you know, I think on the one hand the financial system and its situation has to be better understood, but on the other the fact that we’ve gone through these very difficult economic times has led a lot of people, who used to think that everything was moving along pretty nicely, to question just how robust our economic and  environmental systems are.

That’s been good. I think it’s generated much more interest in this kind of work than was there when the book first came out. I think this is positive. On the negative side I think that the information we have about the state of the world’s eco-systems just tells us things are going from bad to worse. So the urgency has actually increased over the last three to five years to say we’ve really got to look at alternatives and take them on board. I think one of the encouraging things of the Occupy movement which sort of started from nothing and went around the world very fast, indicates an appetite for change that wasn’t there three years ago.

One of the points that I found very interesting from a Transition Network perspective was that you look at localization as a part of the response, and say that actually without appropriate policies from government it’ll be insufficient, but then you also say that you don’t see a national government response coming unless it’s led by the grass roots and by communities. I wonder where you see the, how you see that log jam might be broken?

I don’t have a good answer to that question!  What I try to do is to put before people an alternative economic future that I hope they find credible.  Up until now, and I would say even right now, the pursuit of growth is really a showstopper for many other alternatives. If you propose some policy or measure to reduce environmental damage inevitably someone says, “Well what would that do for economic growth, for competitiveness or productivity?”, and many many good ideas along those lines get shot down because growth is used as the test for these other initiatives.

What I’m trying to suggest is that it’s not a reasonable test. We can just, to re-state the title of the book, “manage without growth”. Whilst it’s true that I do think there’s a very important role for policy to establish the framework within which we all operate, I’m also very focussed on the idea that these ideas and initiatives have to come from the grassroots. No government of the sort I’m interested in can be expected to take what we would call leadership unless there’s a lot of people out there who want to go in this direction. It’s as much a push from the bottom as it is a sort of a pressure from above, and I think what’s happening right now is we’re seeing more push from the bottom, through movements such as yours, and very little take-up from the top, although there are glimmers of hope in some places.

In Canada we have three levels of government, all quite significant: the federal, provincial and municipal.  Municipal governments seem far more aware of the limits within which they have to operate than the more senior levels of government. Go up to the provincial level of government and there’s a fair bit of understanding of these issues. At the federal level it seems to evaporate entirely.

Can we have capitalism without economic growth?

I’m going to give two answers to that question. First and foremost, although I talk about managing without growth for pragmatic reasons and because I want to take part in the current dialogue I focus on GDP, the growth that we really have to stop, and in fact turn back, is growth in the use of materials and energy and land use. Clearly water is also one other material, but I don’t otherwise mention water separately. Those are the points at which we as a species really interact with the biosphere, and that’s where we’ve gone too far.

We have to, I believe, find ways to discipline ourselves so that we are much gentler on the planet. What our economies will then be capable of doing within that set of constraints is hard to say. I personally don’t think that the pursuit of growth as measured in conventional terms is a good way to deal with those biosphysical limits because they get sacrificed in the pursuit of growth.  Can capitalism survive if it has to operate within limits? You see when it’s put that way it sounds like a very ordinary question because the standard definition of economics is about making the best use of scarce resources.

Economics and economists have understood for a long time that economies are always constrained by available resources, so that in itself has never been a threat to capitalism, the efficient use of limted resources has always been seen as one of its virtues. So I don’t think that a stricter limit on the extent to which we draw resources from nature and put waste materials back is necessarily a threat to capitalism.

If I have to look for support for this idea, there was a quote that I refer to many times by Robert Solow, a great economist particularly known for his work on economic growth, who says very much the same thing, that he sees no reason why capitalism can’t survive with low, or even no-growth. Now that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many questions to be answered, such as what sort of institutions could work if the economy was not pursuing growth or wasn’t growing? To what extent and in what ways do our institutions have to change?

These are questions that I and some others are investigating right now and whether we end up with a view of an economy that we’d say doesn’t look anything like capitalism, we don’t really know yet. My own sense at the moment is that if we do effectively come to terms with these limits on how we interact with the biosphere, we’ll be looking back maybe half a century or a century from now and saying well, there was no one time when the economic system was transformed but it has evolved into something which we may or may not chose to call capitalism at that time.

So the end of economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean an economic collapse?

It could mean that, if you have an economic system that relies on growth.  That’s the dilemma we’ve got now. It seems to be that unless the economy is growing it flirts with collapse or it does collapse. The challenge to us is to try to configure an economy that doesn’t grow and doesn’t collapse. I think that’s really what I try to do in my book. As some of the simulation work suggests, and it’s no more than a suggestion because the work is somewhat preliminary, that yes, of course you can have a steady state economic system, just like you can have a steady state eco-system.

Think of a forest that is in what might be called a mature state. It doesn’t mean it stays that way forever, but for a good length of time its total biomass is roughly constant. Now within that, trees are being born and are growing and dying all the time. And I think that’s quite a good parallel to make with a steady state economy. In some overall sense it’s in a steady state. Perhaps that’s because the material and energy flows through the economy are being maintained at a more or less constant level, but what’s going on in the economy can be very vibrant and exciting, just that the whole system’s not growing.

• Transition Norwich’s Farmshare CSA project, interviewing one of its founders standing in the very field where the CSA is based and hearing the joys and the realities of running such a scheme
• Bath and West Community Energy‘s recent share launch which raised £721, 350!  Find out their plans, the story so far and their very ambitious plans for energy generation in their area
• Transition Llambed (Lampeter) who have just taken on a 20 year lease from their local council for their local hall, and have great plans to turn it into a Transition resource centre and farmers’ market.

At just over 15 minutes in length it’s rich with stories, inspiration and the voices of people out there doing Transition on the ground.  You can play it here, or download it to listen to on the train, while you’re cooking, or out running.  We do advise against listening to it whilst swimming though, on health and safety grounds.  Do let us know what you think….