I wrote a while ago about the Festival of Transition, and in particular the 24 Hours of Possibility event taking place on the first day of Rio+20 (June 20th).  I thought that perhaps to inspire your thinking about what you might do where you are, I might share Transition Town Totnes’ emerging plan for the day.  Everywhere will do very different things, and already some places have set out what they are going to do, but here are Totnes’ plans… as you’ll see it is quite tentative, but it is starting to take shape:

The 24 hours in Totnes will be framed by  a series of What If questions  linked to the different activities that we are planning to put on. These will be questions that encourage dialogue, visioning, reflection. There are several What If Events happening as part of the Festival around the country.  This Festival is about Transition in a broad sense- the Transtition to a more sustainable and resilient future that tackles the challenges of today and leads to  better lives for all.

TOTNES ITINERY

6.00 am  Dawn on the Dartington Estate as part of the Home and the World summit - artists/ thinkers from across the UK gathering for a 3 day festival about our relationship to the wider world. Rob Hopkins has been invited to speak/share/be there  at Dawn along with Ruth Potts from New Economics Foundation – The Festival will open up for that event to anyone who wants to join to see the day in..

Breakfast at Atmos site and visioning – What might our daily lives might be like when the Atmost project is in full swing how will we live, work, gather, celebrate? Visions/ hopes  will be written on pieces of Totnes bunting that will be tied to the Fence outside the Dairy Crest site then taken back to the Civic Hall.  Bring a locally sourced breakfast to share and join people waiting for trains or dropping people off.

What would it be like to have a pioneering  housing, business, cultural hub in Totnes? What would it be like if people were involved in desining, building, planning the buildings they use? What would it be like if there was  a home for thriving sustainable social enterprises in Totnes? What would a groundbreaking cultural centre in Totnes be doing? 

Cycle Tour - Following breakfast people invited to go on a cycle tour to various sustainable/Transition projects to celebrate the steps already being taken towards a resilient future – ideas to go to South Brent, Ashburton, Hilly Fields ( more ideas needed …. ) Also to forage food on the way for lunch.  Ideally get the Rickshaw involved for people who don’t want to cycle

What if  local sustainable projects were connected up and felt part of a bigger picture? What if we reduced the level of cars on the streets?

Riverside Wild food Walk- for those not going on cycling tour a riverside foraging walk into Totnes collecting food to add to lunch

What If foraging and wild food became part of our daily life and staple diet? What if food for foraging was planted in our public places avaliable for all?

Shared Local Lunch -in the Market/ Civic Square. Bring locally sourced food to share for a mass lunch in the square  A working, visioning, connecting lunch. An opportunity for local stakeholders to gather with teach other and the public  passing by. A focus on what make us a vibrant community – exploring what a market square of the future  might be like

Followed by an afternoon of swapping, collecting and connecting-  Experiments with the High Street of the future -

There is a section called “What Should You Do?” which is usually the part in such books that picks you up a bit, and makes you believe that you can do something to alter the projections he has previously set out.  There are some great bits of ‘personal advice’ in there, such as ‘focus on satisfaction rather than income’, ‘do not acquire a taste for things that will disappear’, ‘stop believing that all growth is good’, and ‘in politics, remember that the future will be dominated by physical limits’.  Fair enough.  But there is one there that is so spectacularly depressing that I really needed to bring it out here and look at it with some other people.

It is “don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Randers reasons that over the next 50 years we will see the ongoing erosion of biodiversity and wilderness, due to climate change and humanity’s reach into more and more remote areas.  A love for “old, undisturbed nature”, he argues, is something it will become increasingly difficult to satisfy.  ”By teaching your child to love the loneliness of the untouched wilderness, you are teaching her to love what will be increasingly hard to find”, he argues, which will lead to unhappiness and despondency.  ”Much better then”, he concludes, “to rear a new generation that find peace, calm and satisfaction in the bustling life of the megacity – and with never-ending music piped into their ears”.  That must rank as one of the most devastating visions of the future I have read anywhere.

This links to another of his pieces of personal advice, “invest in great electronic entertainment and learn to prefer it”.  I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts.  Might a move to a world that has successfully decarbonised itself only be possible if we are to disconnect from wilderness?  I know what I think about it, but I’d love to hear from you.  Is this something that fills you with horror, or are you pleased to finally see someone taking what strikes you as being a realistic angle on this?  Discuss.

Michael Mann (2012)  The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: dispatches from the front lines.  Columbia University Press. 

Michael Mann is the principal creator of the (in)famous ‘Hockey Stick’ graph which showed that the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100 years is in excess of historic warming, and clearly linked to increased CO2 emissions.  The graph achieved great prominence, as a result of which he became a target of the fossil fuel industry, in particular during the co-ordinated assault on climate science known as ‘Climate Gate’, where emails, including his, were hacked from the University of East Anglia.  In this passionate and compelling page-turner, Mann comes out fighting, puts his side of the story, restates the science behind it all, and what it feels like to be on the receiving end  of an orchestrated campaign to discredit him and his work.  Vital reading.

John-Paul Flintoff (2012) How to Change the World.  The School of Life. 
A big question, but in this small but beautifully laid-out book Flintoff takes it on with great gusto, drawing from Transition to Camila Batmanghelidjh, from Rosa Parks to his tales of leaving vegetables on his neighbours’ front door steps.  Like any meaningful book on how to make change happen, it has one foot in his own experience of trying the make change happen where he lives, in his life, in his community.  That, for me, gives it a richness, a humour, and a depth that I really valued.

Martin Crawford (2012)  How to Grow Perennial Vegetables: low-maintenance, low-impact vegetable gardening. Green Books. 
Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of Martin Crawford, and his amazing work pioneering agroforestry in the UK context.  His latest book is a plant-by-plant guide to over 100 perennial vegetables and everything you could ever want to know about them.  He also sets out the advantages of a perennial garden over an annual one, and how to design for perennial plants.  An essential addition to any permaculturist’s bookshelf.

Jorgen Randers (2012)  2052: a global forecast for the next forty years.  Chelsea Green.

Randers is one of the team that created the original ‘Limits to Growth’ report in the 1970s.  Here he looks forward over the next 40 years, analysing the trends that will define 2052.  It is alternately deeply illuminating, frustrating, at times wildly depressing, hugely clarifying yet always considered and very hard to argue with.  His conclusions are what he calls “quite gloomy … not catastrophic”.  His ‘Twenty Pieces of Personal Advice’ I will explore in later posts here will divide opinion but certainly can’t be accused of taking a safe and unchallenging route.

Stephen R.J. Sheppard.  (2012)  Visualising Climate Change: a guide to visual communication of climate change and developing local solutions. Routledge.

One of the aspects of Transition revolves around trying to vision the kind of future we want to see.  This book tries, in a similar way, to bring the predictions and the future reality of climate change to life by making it visible.  What does a ton of carbon dioxide actually look like?  How would the place you live look were it to be 2°C warmer than it is today?  How might it look designed around public transport and walking?  Both chilling and inspiring, it uses the latest in computer imagery to show the kind of world that will be created by our inaction today, but also the kind of world we could create if we can muster the collective will.

Looby MacNamara (2012)  People and Permaculture: caring and designing for ourselves, each other and the planet. Permanent Publications. 

While there have been many books on the nuts and bolts of permaculture, the design system, the plants, etc, there hasn’t yet been on that focuses purely on the ‘peoplecare’ aspects of it.  It argues that in order for permaculture to really work and to embed itself, it needs to address relationships, and how we work together as people and as communities.  Containing over 50 practical exercises, it is a rich exploration of how to do permaculture in such a way that it is also attending to the ‘inner’ aspects of the whole thing.

Nicholas Shaxson (2011)  Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world.  Bodley Head. 

Not much to say about this here, as I only recently interviewed the author about this book, but I thought this an extraordinary book.  Something I had vaguely heard of but knew very little about is brought into such clarity and focus, and the book bristles and seethes with the sheer unfairness of the whole thing.  Essential reading.

Michael Shuman.  (2012)  Local Dollars, Local Sense: how to shift your money from Wall Street to Main Street and achieve real prosperity.  Chelsea Green. 

Shuman is one of the great thinkers of the localisation movement, and although this is a US publication and doesn’t necessarily transpose entirely to the UK context, his argument is just as relevant here.  The vast amounts of money sat in pension funds, savings accounts, life insurance and stocks and bonds needs to be moved, her argues, to the creation of resilient local economies, supporting new enterprise and new economic activity, rather than the continuation of the current, morally bankrupt model.  He presents a wide range of possible models that can make this happen.  Nail a copy to the Bank of England’s door.

Ben Pike (2012) The Fruit Tree Handbook.  Green Books.

Here is a beautifully created guide, for the amateur and the expert on the care of all manner of fruit trees.  It covers orchard design, choosing your species, tree care, a great guide to pruning with wonderfully clear illustrations, and how to harvest and store the results of your hard work.  Heavily laden with a rich crop of hard-won experience, it is a delicious companion for anyone who already has, or wants to create, an orchard on any scale.  Figs, peaches, nectarines, cherries… need I say more?

Anthony Horowitz (2011)  The House of Silk.  Orion.

And finally, something completely different.  The first new Sherlock Homes novel approved by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate since his death is an absolute cracker.  I am reading it with my 13-year old at the moment, and it’s an edge-of-the-seat, gripping, unputdownable page-turner, virtually indistinguishable from the original tales.  I don’t get to read many novels, but this one, from page one, had me back in Holmes’ Victorian world of gaslamps, horse-drawn carriages, fog, and dark secrets that only the great detective himself can unravel.  Highly recommended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A big HUG from Portugal

Isabel and Luis Gonçalves

Here is some updated information on the Festival of Transition:

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

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

The ‘What if?’ events include:

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

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

 The ‘Transition Walks’ include:

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

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

Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation said:

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

What they do is to allow a group to celebrate the things it has already done, and to reflect on possible parts of the process that it hasn’t got round to.  They can be used to lay them out to tell the story of the initiative so far, with reflection on the cards left unused.  They also get away from the idea that Transition is a linear, prescribed process, rather an organic, place-specific assembling of ingredients.  What has been your experience with the cards?  The activities we have come up with so far can be downloaded here … have you developed any other ones?  My thanks to Transition Town Cheltenham for sharing their reflections.

Nick, thanks very much for joining us. For people who haven’t read Treasure Islands, can you describe for us its key findings?

There are a couple of main conclusions. One is that the offshore system of tax havens is much much bigger and much more central to the global economy than almost anybody had thought. It’s seen in the popular imagination as an exotic sideshow to the global economy. But really since the era of globalisation began in the 1970s the offshore system of tax havens has been growing much much faster than the supposedly onshore economy. It has been steadily pushing its way onshore so that a lot of big countries are increasingly resembling tax havens as they try and compete with each other to attract the hot money. So they increasingly offer stronger forms of secrecy and new forms of trust and corporations and so on to try and attract the hot money, and new tax loopholes.

Another big finding is that tax havens are not where most people think they are. Of course places like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Monaco are tax havens, big and important tax havens. But the really big ones are places like the United States and the United Kingdom which runs a huge network of satellite tax havens around it, feeding the City of London. The UK and its overseas territories, which it partly controls, include the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, British Virgin Islands. Massive tax havens. And also the crown dependencies which are Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. And these are all like, in Treasure Island I describe it as a bit like a spider’s web with the City of London at the middle. So these places are capturing money from around the world, and the business of handling the money from around the world and funneling this money up to London.

They are deliberately lowering the standards on secrecy and various other things to entice this money. And so the City of London itself is only indirectly implicated in this stuff. It is at one step remove and there’s plausible deniability. We’re not offering these specific facilities. But this network is. It’s very much a British network and it is, in a sense, a financial empire. It grew up from the 1950s onwards with the City of London, the growth of the oil markets. That was when the formal British empire was ended but the UK has managed to retain a significant degree of influence over the flows of money around the world after the collapse Empire and it now has this new kind of financial empire. So these were my two big conclusions.

Are there any countries that don’t allow the offshoring of capital? And if so, how do they do it? And also, are there any countries that have reintroduced those mechanisms. 

The trouble with this is that there are all shades of grey. Some countries deliberately set out to be tax havens. So Switzerland is a classic example. It has for decades set out to provide banking secrecy and to attract dirty money, criminal money and other sorts of money from around the world. But every country, in a sense, is a tax haven in its own right because there isn’t an international network of transparency, of sharing information between countries that makes any country in the world completely transparent.

If you take your money to Germany, or somewhere like that, it’s going to be difficult – if you’re an African government or something like that – it’s going to be quite difficult to get hold of information about that money, there’s no automatic sharing mechanisms. There are some sharing mechanisms in their fledgling state. The European Union has one called the Savings Tax Directive and the United States is starting to get more active in this area. So there are some international information sharing transparency mechanisms, but it’s still very much a patchwork, an insufficient patchwork. So when money moves across borders very often is able to find secrecy.

But I think when you’re looking at tax havens what you’re really looking at are places that are deliberately setting out on a strategy to do this. Some countries are tax havens kind of by accident but they tend not to the big players. The big players are the ones that deliberately set out to create this stuff.

What’s your view on the supposed benefits of extra liquidity that our internationalised banking and money system provides versus the loss of money in the real economy that Treasure Islands describes so well?

If you take the UK for example, on the one hand you have the UK losing tax revenue to tax havens. So British tax evaders or tax avoiders, that is, for example, corporations that are not technically breaking the law but are still cutting their tax bills substantially. These are costing the treasury billions of dollars, billions of pounds. But at the same time the money that is coming into the United Kingdom from tax havens, there’s this huge kind of feeder mechanism into the UK, is benefiting the City of London.

I’d be very careful about how to phrase this because what the City does is it says, “this is good for Britain, this is money that is coming into Britain.” But I argue very strongly that it isn’t. This is money that is good for the City but what it does is it creates this international financial centre, this offshore financial centre in the heart of the United Kingdom. Makes it almost unreformable. People are worried about the power of the City of London, the fact that it’s able to suck up the best talent and all the best capital and influence all the policy makers.

This power and this strength comes in very large measure from its international network and the offshore network. So just to say, “oh, money coming into Britain must be good for Britain”, it’s just not true. These hundreds of billions of dollars that have been flooding into the UK. Is Britain any better off than say, Germany or France or Sweden or Canada which have not been playing nearly such a financial game? I would say “no”.  Britain is on many measures much more unequal, worse health outcomes, worse social outcomes than these other countries and I think there’s quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the financial centre has been a very powerful driver rather a contributor, rather than anything that benefits Britain.

Is it possible to reform the financial institutions that we have that are responsible for so much of the world’s current crisis or is building a new financial institution based on co-operative banks, credit unions, regional currencies and so on the only way? How might we start that shift and where might the political support come from?

The lobbyist of the City of London, and the financial industry more generally, always say, they always wheel out this argument, “don’t regulate us too much, don’t tax us too much because then we’ll pull on our horns and we won’t lend anything and the economy will collapse”. But the fact is that there has been almost a fraud perpetrated by the financial sector on the UK. It’s well known now that has been that when times are good all the benefits go to to the bankers and the banks, and when times are bad all those risks and costs gets shifted onto the burden of ordinary tax payers.

This narrative that comes out of the city and is widely repeated, is demonstrably untrue. It is a much more complicated and nuanced picture than that. I would argue that if you have a system that remains unregulated and uncontrolled, you’re going to store up even bigger problems in the future. I think if you did start to regulate banks and banking properly, not just in an offshore sense but in terms of, you know, capital requirements and all sorts of other things, you would end up having a much stronger, much healthier economy. In fact, there is historical evidence to suggest that this is the case.

Back in the period after the Second World War when the Bretton Woods institutions were set up, that was an era when people had really learned the lessons of the Great Depression. There were huge policy mistakes. The Great Depression itself followed a period of extreme financial freedoms and afterwards the international policy makers in the UK and United States and elsewhere decided that the way forward was to powerfully restrain the banks and to prevent them from speculating large amounts across borders and to really curtail them.

In Treasure Islands I describe how the banks were really champing at the bit. In the 25 or so years following the Second World War the banks were really tightly constrained. That was a period of extremely high and broad-based economic growth internationally. It’s now known as the golden age of capitalism and it kind of came to the end in the 1970s. Since then we’ve seen ordinary people’s wages stagnate, lots of financial crises and all sorts of other problems. That has coincided with a period of financial liberalisation and financial freedoms which has been very substantially accelerated by the offshore system.

So financial liberalisation kind of opens up the international markets for the flow of capital but tax havens take that one step further by artificially creating things that will attract cross border money flows, will accelerate those flows, so if you offer secrecy then lots of money will flow in pursuit of that. So the tax havens have been a sort of accelerator of financial globalisation and I would argue, with very harmful effect.

The UK economy is inextricably linked to offshore banking, a relationship you brilliant outline in your book. Assuming that it were possible to regulate that and to curtail its activities, would the impacts of doing that only be beneficial or for the 99%, as it were, might there be a downside?

That’s a very good question. I think there’s a difference between now and the Great Depression. When the Great Depression happened, things were so bad that you did see a major political realignment, particularly in the United States, and you had the New Deal coming in with very progressive legislation and high tax breaks and, as I said, very tight constrains on banks and the financial sector and on capital flows. So you know this political realignment really set the stage for a period of wonderful prosperity for quite some time. Unfortunately this crisis does not seem to have produced that realignment yet.

We have seen tinkering at the edges and at the end of the day it’s all about political realignments, it’s all about citizens collectively forcing the politicians to really change. We are seeing a little bit of a swing now, there does seem to be a swing in Europe against austerity and perhaps that’s the start of something bigger. But I think until we see a much more fundamental political and social change in response to the crisis and maybe the Occupy movement times 10, I think that’s when we’re going to start seeing the possibility of change. I think until then, we do have in Britain particularly and very substantially in the United States, you have the banks calling the shots and telling the politicians what to do. Not much has changed there. I think that is the essential first step.

So the audience for this interview is the Transition movement; people out in their communities trying to build community resilience, local food systems, local energy systems and that kind of thing, which brings up a couple of questions. And the first one is do you think that something like Transition can succeed despite the enormous power and influence which will be fundamentally threatened by a real relocalisation a real programme of community resilience building?

For me, what’s important when one uses the word ‘local’, I think what I’m particularly interested in is the sort of fragmentation of the international financial architecture and the fragments are nation states. That for me is the key fault line that is the problem for me. Because within a nation state you have democratically created tax systems and sometimes inside nation states, you know in Switzerland for example they have the cantons where you have a lot of local tax raising. But essentially it needs the nation state, that is the most important local level.

I think it’s very interesting and useful to have local community organisation. I think that’s a very powerful thing and very important. It’s not something I have particularly paid attention to just because I’m much more focussed on the international level. But I do think, from the point of view of tax havens, it’s the jurisdictional unit of the nation state that is the fundamental building block of the whole process with regard to tax havens. I do think community organising can be fantastic at creating networks and creating awareness. In terms of the actual mechanics of off shoring it doesn’t mesh immediately with that problem, if you see what I mean.

And how do you think people who are involved in Transition and similar things should split their time and energy between trying to stop the corporate looting that you write of and building resilience at the local level?

There is no magic bullet. If there is a magic bullet it is political and local and social organisation. And awareness, the building of awareness. That is the stage we’re at now. I think it is significant. We’ve had groups such as UK Uncut which have protested against corporate tax avoidance and Occupy which has been very important, which many have derided as not having achieving many particular aims, but in fact, what we have seen. We have seen the remarkable spectacle of conservative chancellor, George Osborne, calling aggressive tax avoidance “morally repugnant”.

Also a lot of statements from business leaders such Andrew Whitty of GlaxoSmithKline making some very powerful statements about corporate responsibility and the responsibility of corporations not to just to their shareholders but to wider sets of stakeholders and particularly with tax in mind. I think tax, for me, is a real touchstone of corporate responsibility. If a corporation is prepared to engage in a tax debate, then, it’s so easy for corporations to do window dressing and things that don’t matter to them, but I think when you touch on tax, that’s when you really start to see whether they’re just window dressing or if they’re really interested in engaging.

I think touching on tax from a corporate responsibility perspective is very important. The fact that there have been these protest movements is much more significant and have had much more significant impacts than I think many people think because really now the politicians do know that they can’t get away with saying, “ah let’s just get on with this stuff”. They have to at least be seen to be doing the right thing. Whether they do the right thing is another matter, but I think all of this is just an important first step. But I think much more awareness raising is needed.

I also would suggest that the economics profession in particular has had this massive blind spot when it comes to tax havens and offshore and secrecy and tax evasion and things like that. They have just chosen, because it’s so difficult to measure and so difficult to understand, they have basically treated it like a somebody else’s problem, and let somebody else deal with that. As a result it’s been left to fester and grow rapidly without anyone challenging it.  I think if we can get economists to start taking this stuff seriously, because economists are so influential, I think that will also be an important step. But at the bottom of it all is awareness raising of political consciousness and that’s what needs to happen now.

Do you think there is a way out of our current financial crisis and the steady worsening of it that we’ve seen in countries such as Greece and Portugal, without tackling tax havens?

I think it would be very difficult without tackling offshore banking. A lot of these problems have a whole array of causes. Offshore is one of these underlying causes that is very diffuse and very hard to put your finger on, that’s one of the great problems with it and many of these other causes that the size and the power of the financial sector, are very strongly influenced by the fact that financial actors are able to use the offshore escape route to escape financial regulations. Offshore is a kind of thing that’s in the background of so much that’s been going on.

Because it’s hard to point to as a specific, you know, here’s a trigger from offshore, that’s making it much harder for people to see this. I think if you did tackle offshore, and you did also find mechanisms to curb the huge tides of hot money that flow through the global economy, I think you would have a serious chance of getting the financial system on a much better long term footing. But I think that’s a long way in the future.

Lastly Nick, I’m really interested to know, having written the book, how it’s changed your own relationship to how you bank and how you live your life.

One thing I’ve realised is that if you want to avoid tax havens, the best way to do it is to go and live in a cave somewhere, because they’re everywhere.

A cave with broadband by the sound of it!

No you couldn’t have broadband! You basically can’t avoid it. All the multinationals on the high street that you see will be using tax havens in one way or another for various different reasons. The banks, of course, all of them are massively steeped in tax havens. If you’re an overseas resident, as I am, they will try and encourage you to use offshore accounts. You will get a lower interest rate if you use an onshore account. They’re always trying to get you to use offshore accounts.

That’s something actually I didn’t really touch on in Treasure Islands and I do want to research it when I get some time as to just why this is. I have banked with a bank in the UK for many years because I set it up when I was in the UK and that is still my bank, but I actually recently tried to change my account to the Co-operative Bank and I wasn’t allowed to because I was overseas. I would have been allowed to set up an offshore account but not an onshore account, so that wasn’t possible. It’s very difficult. I think if you’re looking to confront this monster and to tackle it, voting with your wallet is important, but I think it’s very hard to do. I think political action is really the way to go and raising awareness is what matters here.

A while ago here we posted the video to Rebecca Mayes’ song ‘The Lights’, her beautiful song written for the closing credits of ‘In Transition 2.0′ (the one everyone goes out after the film singing).  I am delighted to announce that the song is today released as a single, and is now available via. iTunes.  Here is what Rebecca says about it: “I’ve registered it with the UK charts so if enough of us buy it this week we’ll get into the top 40! If you’re outside the UK try and buy it through a UK distributor so it will count towards the charts. All proceeds go to the Transition Network.  Tell your friends, family and local radio stations! Thanks so much for watching the video which has had over 3,000 hits – if you missed it first time you can check it out below.

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

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

Filipa speaking at the recent Spanish Transition gathering.

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

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

A couple of weeks ago, 150 people from across Spain gathered in Zarzalejo for the country’s first Transition gathering.  By all accounts it was an extraordinary event.  This post draws together various accounts of the event, and photos from it (a film is soon to follow), but we start with a short interview with Emilio Mula who attended the event.  How was it?  Who came? How is the emergence of Transition in Spain looking?  How did he leave the event feeling?

You can see a great selection of photos from the event here, and here is how Filipa Pimentel described it:

“More than 150 people from all over Spain, including the Islands, travelled to Zarzalejo, Madrid, and got together to debate ideas in an incredibly positive way, full of hope. I had the sense I was in a celebration – I really could feel that people were ready to start working together – I had the clear feeling that “it was time for Spain!” There were around 20 formed Transition Initiatives but not only – I met people that have been working in isolation in incredible projects, other people came to discover what Transition is…

A lot of constructive ideas came out of the various discussions and activities but the main idea that I got was the deep respect for the planet and the will to work together. Under the theme ”Building the future we want”, the group proposed local and positive solutions to achieve a more sustainable life and more resilient communities.

Emilio Mula's name badge

Susana, Antonio, Javier, Juan and Emilio, proposed a program that would create the conditions to get people to meet, to show their work as initiatives, to create the feeling of belonging to a group and to feel empowered to continue to make the difference; to discuss and collect ideas, examples of inspiration given by Transition initiatives and to create a national network of transition initiatives in case the group would feel that would be helpful for the work done by the initiatives; to give visibility to the Transition Movement as an example of positivity and so on…

This Conference was a true success, in my opinion. It was a very participative and creative meeting, with loads of proposed creative activities and with a lot of fun!  The film In Transition 2.0 was launched by the hand of Emilio Mula! Participants showed a lot interest and posed loads of questions.  There was a concert by a local chorus, and many other activities.

The organizers open the program completely for proposals for workshops by the participants. The human resources in the Spanish network are remarkable: there was a talk about , a talk about “auto-construction” and “auto-consuming” by a manager in the National of Civil Protection (Firefighter Training department manager).  There was a workshop on Transition and education by the TI “University of Santiago de Compostela in Transition” and, among others, a workshop about the collaborative edition of the “Transition Companion” in Spanish (we might here more about this because they are working already in it and proposing strategies of lowering the costs, etc etc)!

A manager group for the national network was created then and met to start working on how the network of initiatives will work, tasks and roles, forming working groups and thinking about the national Hub structure.  The organizers planned to document this event using a film, pictures and completed reports. Meanwhile, you have some pictures here“.

And here is what Antonio Scotti had to say about the weekend:

“On the weekend of April 20th-22nd, a meeting was held in the town of Zarzalejo, in the proximity of Madrid, where many of the existing Spanish Transition initiatives got together for the forst time, with the intention to explore ways of co-creating a spanish-wide network that can support existing initiatives and catalize the emergence on new ones.  The first time when people interested in the Transition Towns movement from many corners of Spain was in Barcelona, in june 2009 when the first Transition training in Spain was held.

There the seed of Transition was sown, and during all this time many transition initiaves have been incubating up to spring of 2011 when many of them first exposed themselves on the internet through their web pages. This inspired the event organizers, themselves belonging to some of the existing Spanish Transition groups (Zarzalejo en Transión, Barcelona en Transició), and a couple of Spanish members and collaborators of the Transition Town Totnes Initiative, to consider the possibility to organize an event, where all these emerging initiatives con meet each other, share their experiences and envision a future where they could all support each other in an organized way. And this is what happened.

During the 2 and a half days that the meeting lasted, people from the transition initiatives of Coin, Fuegirola-Mijas, Jerez (Andalucia), Barcelona, Argelaguer (Catalonia), Zarzalejo, Mostoles, Aranjuez, (Madrid), Valladolid, Valencia, Bilbao, ….. got together and exchanged experiences. The event included many interesting workshops on transition related matters, celebration, lots of good food and vibes as well as more formal moments of work about the creation of the Spanish network.

Eventually the event concluded with an agreement of organizing a second meeting in two months time, to continue working on the organizational aspects of the Spanish network, but some work on the more technological aspects of the network like creating a website (both about the event itself and about the Spanish network) have been undertaken. Information about the next meeting and the new website will be communicated in due time.”

A while ago, Transition Network held a ‘Thinky Day’ around the Big Society and how Transition might best respond to that.  These bringings together of people to explore the ‘edge’ of Transition are very useful, and yesterday saw the next one, entitled ‘Peak Money and Economic Resilience: a Transition Network one-day conversation’, held at the offices of Calouste Gulbenkian in London.  About 50 people came together to explore the scale of the economic challenges we are facing, what Transition is already doing to respond to that, and what else it might do, or how it might adapt what it does to be more appropriate to these fast-changing times.  I will attempt here to provide a record of the day and of the key discussion points that emerged.  Any misrepresentations due to my note-taking are entirely my own doing…

Peter Lipman (right), the Chair of Transition Network, introduced the day, stating that the initial idea and framing for the day came from Eva Schonveld who had asked what can we do in Transition to best prepare for times of rapid economic change, should we do things differently, or more of the same?  He also referred to the debate I had had a couple of years ago with Richard Heinberg about the extent to which we should be preparing for collapse or for a more gentle descent.  He mentioned how in ‘In Transition 2.0′ the stories from New Zealand and Japan showed how when things became very difficult, Transition was one of the pieces of the solution that they turned to.  Might this offer us a clue to Transition’s future role, he asked?

He compared climate change and economic volatility, saying that ultimately, economic crisis is nowhere near as dangerous, in the long term, as climate change, but when there’s no money, if cashpoints no longer work for example, then the impacts of that could be catastrophic in the short term.  How, he asked, do we bring the implications of financial volatility into our lives, and how to we feel about them? (The complete framing statement for the day can be found at the end of this post).

The first speaker was Tony Greenham of new economics foundation (here are Tony’s slides).  Initially, he said, money was just a way of people recording debts.  Money is a social relationship, a recording of relationships of credit and debit.  1 in 3 people believe that when you deposit your money in a bank it is locked in a safe below the bank, and this money is then lent out to other people, but this is not what happens.  Banks create new money into existence when they lend it out.  There are 2 kinds of money, he said.  Central bank reserves, and commercial money made by banks, which is the one that accounts for 97% of money.  Central bank money is what banks lend between each other, and commercial money is now shrinking as the amount of money in circulation shrinks.

Who, Tony asked, has benefitted from the growth in the amount of commercial money in circulation?  The top 1%.  The lower earners haven’t had much gain at all.  This very small group holds all the money, the rest of us hold the debt.  Although the UK has a sense that it is somehow immune to what is happening elsewhere, he showed a graph from Morgan Stanley which showed the UK having the most debt in the world, the majority generated by the financial sector (see below).  The government, he said, are not on top of this, debt is a blind spot.

There are 4 ways to tackle the debt crisis.   The first he outlined is to pay it back, the current strategy of ‘austerity’  However this requires increases in real income, economic growth or a redistribution of wealth which isn’t going to happen.  The second is to default, which is one approach but the implications of it would be horrible.  The third would be a slow default, with inflation and financial repression, or lastly a debt jubilee combined with debt-free money produced by the state, or by the people themselves.

The second speaker was Molly Scott Cato of the Gaian Economics blog, who is the Green Party’s spokesperson on economics (here are her slides).  She stated that although Transition has been great at creating the pieces of the puzzle that people can pick up when things get difficult, it is not yet part of the wider mainstream debates.  What we are seeing, she said, is that the economic crisis is causing a decline in concern about the environment.  37% of people in a recent poll believe that environmental concerns are exaggerated.  It has also been shown that the richer you become, the more your carbon footprint grows.  She said that she wasn’t a fan of the term ‘peak money’, because ‘ peak oil’ refers to a fixed resource, and it isn’t helpful to see money like that.  We need, she said, to determine between real commodities and fictional ones.

What we need, she said, is a ‘resilience hierarchy’, which moves from abstract resources to real one, from money to fossil fuels to land.  When the national debt is looked at more closely, she said, 20% of it is money that we have lent to ourselves, so we could just wipe that off to everyone’s benefit.  In terms of how to bring about change, she dismissed lobbying as a waste of time.  The financiers have taken over the government, she said.  Community action is very important.  ’Move your money’ campaigns are very important.  So is reframing the debate to be around turning austerity into resilience.  This is a situation that the Transition movement predicted and has been preparing for, and has much to offer.

Gary Alexander gave a talk called “A Transition Economy: looking after people and planet” (you can download Gary’s slides here).  From this point forward, he said, we need to create a vision that evokes a “yes”.  We have to start to see that the real cost is not the same as the financial cost, that we need to also be taking environmental and social costs into consideration.

Before people used money, it was generalised exchange or mutual support and not barter that was used in human societies, and this needs to be brought back into a Transition economy.  We need not just projects, but the infrastructure that supports them. They should have distinct niches to provide stability and avoid competition.  All of this built towards a proposal that we create a toolkit for a community exchange, with a local currency at its heart.

Then there were three short talks, under the heading ‘Commentaries from Europe’ which gave a sense of how the economic situation is playing out on the most affected countries in Europe.  First Filipa Pimentel talked about Portugal.  Portugal, she said, is a country of 10.5 million people, with around 13% unemployment officially, but the true figure is far higher.  The average salary is €800 per month, and the minimum wage is €450.  At the same time, supermarket prices are the same as in the UK.  There has been an 89% rise in unemployment in the last 3 years.  In Filipa’s region, 25% of families are now below the poverty line.  It isn’t about whether collapse is going to happen or not, people are already adapting to it.

There is good news though, she said.  Transition is spreading fast in Portugal, partly due to being based, from the outset, on the idea of the ‘gift economy’.  All films and events are offered free.  It is felt to be vital to decouple Transition from money.  It raises the question of what are people willing to give, and is resulting in lots of exchange.  It is creating ways to feed people, with Transition working like a charity, any money being used to create structure.  They work with local government, but they never ask for money, just for sharing of resources.  She has found that the economic situation has meant that people are more open to new ideas, and that at the local level, people are very concerned about the environment, and about ‘peak land’.

Phoebe Bright works with FEASTA in Ireland, and lives in the south west.  Ireland, she said,is a very conservative nation, used to being the underdogs.  There is almost a sense that we’re back where we deserve to be, she said, that during the Celtic Tiger years “we lost the run of ourselves”.  The thing that no-one really wants to consider is that we might not actually get back to ‘normal’.  Events keep knocking their confidence.  ”Who can we trust?” she said. There is a feeling that the politicians have let people down.  The recent Tribunal on political corruption showed far-reaching levels of corruption.  People knew there was some, but not to the extent revealed.

Listening to Phoebe Bright skyping in from Ireland.

Irish banks have been given €63bn.  Allied Irish Bank, for example, was given €23bn, 99% of which was loaned by the State, but it is still not lending to businesses.  Small businesses are finding it hard to find work, and if they do then they struggle to get paid for it.  Tescos supermarkets have spread all over the country, and Ireland, Phoebe said, is their most profitable country.  The suicide rate has doubled since 2007.  Where she lives in West Cork the farmers are doing OK (especially those that didn’t borrow too much during the Celtic Tiger years), there is some money there, her local town is still active, but that’s not the case everywhere.  Food growing and new food businesses are a big thing, and the IT sector isn’t doing too badly, but there is little money for new goods.  So while there are a few positives, the overall picture is grim.

Johan van As gave a perspective from Greece.  Things have moved there very quickly he said.  Greece has been in recession since 2008.  There is now 50% unemployment among the under 30s.  For those people who do have jobs, many have experience cuts in their salaries of 30-40%.  This has led to a huge liquidity squeeze, with demand for goods and services imploding.  The country is in a state of shock. Johan was there recently, and said that it felt like the calm before the storm.  On the buses in the cities, the drivers don’t bother to check anyone’s tickets as an act of passive resistance.

There are elections coming up, and it is the first time since 1974 that the centre right and centre left won’t be dominating.  Usually they look to share 70-80% of the vote, this time it looks more like 35%, with splinter parties and far-right and far-left parties who are usually anti-European, anti-Troika, and some are even anti-democratic.  There is also a rise in conspiracy theories and a search for scapegoats.  While people looked shocked to hear the news about the resurgence of far-right groups, Johan asked “well if in the UK there were wage cuts of 40% do you think things would really be that different here?”

All the positive reports we hear about Greece, he said, should be read with the view that it is not talking about the mainstream.  It looks in the upcoming elections that the Green Party will get one seat, great news until you also see that the fascist party look set to get about 10.  There has been an explosion in buyer co-ops, there is at least one new local currency, there are new allotment schemes and an explosion of interest in food growing, but driven more by necessity than green concerns.  Economic hardship is catalysing innovative thinking, but the prevailing school of thought seems to be to throw the police and the bankers in jail and leave Europe, not that practical as a solution to the complexity of the issues.

This was followed by a Q&A session, and then a tea break.  I introduced the next session, called ‘So where it Transition at?’  I talked about how I get sent a lot of books that are about peak oil, economic collapse and so on, that at the end say “but there’s this great thing called Transition that might sort it out”… this puts a lot of pressure on Transition, and it feels like we have achieved a huge amount in 5 years, but the aim of the day is to look at how we might reframe things in this context.  There is some amazing work emerging in Transition now around the creation of new economies, and it feels like where all this is going.

Fiona Ward (you can download her slides here) gave an overview of REconomy, Transition Network’s initiative to help Transition initiatives their capacity for creating a new economy.

The idea is to encourage an economy with the following characteristics:

• Resilience outcomes
• Being about more than just personal profit
• Respecting resource limits
• Appropriate localisation
• Serving the community
• Big enough to provide the jobs and goods that we need

At the moment REconomy is working with 10 Transition initiatives around the UK.  There are 4 parts to it, Leadership, Vision, Transforming businesses and starting enterprises.  As a microcosm, she talked about what is emerging in Totnes. REconomy is seen as the ‘Engine Room’ for a new economy for the town.  The process is seen as cyclical, going from ‘Get inspired’ to ‘Get help’ to ‘Get money’ to ‘Give back’, and then round again.

She talked about the work underway to create a model whereby people can invest into the Transition economy, a fascinating and vitally important piece of work.  She finished by saying that the day before the 2012 Transition Network conference, September 13th, will be a day dedicated to REconomy.

She was followed by Ciaran Mundy of the Bristol Pound (you can see Ciaran’s slides here).  He talked about how most local currencies so far have been printed notes only, and that a few of those, most notably the Chiemgauer and Berkshares, have been very successful, but it has been a significant limitation for others.  What has been developed recently by Transition Network, nef, QOIN and others has been an electronic currency, and the software has now been made available to anyone.  Bristol is a good scale for a complementary currency, it has a strong identity and good social capital.  Their initial target is 300 businesses accepting it and 1000 account holders in time for the launch.

They ran an art competition to design the notes which reached over 1 million people.  The slogan is “your city, your money, your future”.  The council was nudged into accepting the currency in business rates by the ‘buzz’ that was created by the art competition.  The plan is to go live by the end of June.  The artwork for the £1 note was unveiled, but I am not allowed to show it to you.  You’ll just have to wait!  So instead here is the template people were asked to design into…

People then divided into groups.  Here are a few of the findings from that.  One group looked at stories, and felt that we need to get new stories about Transition as an alternative out there, and to show that there are other options.  We need to be telling stories of positive alternatives.  They also stressed the importance of stories from our past.  The second group looked at the gaps in what Transition Network is doing to respond to the economic crisis.  Thoughts included that one key gap is the degree of confidence people feel in understanding economics as it is presented in the media.  As an organisation it is also limited in its capacity and needs to think about how to resource telling its story better.  One thought was to work to include the local economy more in resilience planning, asking what thinking has been done in terms of cash resilience, i.e. what happens if one morning the cash machines don’t work?

Another group looked at what we have learnt from 5 years of Transition.  One point was that still most people aren’t aware of it, and we need to work hard at making it more attractive.  It may be a good blueprint but we are working from low levels of awareness.  Although the label can often be very useful, and can bring a holistic take on things that are often not viewed in that way, it can sometimes be problematic.  The last group looked at the need for a common strategy, and suggested that people already have values, it is just a case of bringing them out.  We should also, it was stressed, really acknowledge and celebrate all that has been achieved over the past 5 years.

After lunch, there was a World Cafe session looking at 4 key questions:

1. What does a Transition response to these times look like?
2. What might government do in response?
3. How can the business sector respond, and what would it look like if it gave its support and shared its skills and expertise with Transition groups?
4. Who else do we need to connect with and how to we reach them?

I don’t have all the notes from all those discussions, but at the end, Alexis Rowell pulled together 9 things that had emerged from those, and earlier, conversations, in terms of concrete things Transition Network might now do.  They were:

• Create a ‘local currencies kit’ that simplifies the process of getting started with a local currency scheme
• Work more with councils, offering support and training around economic resilience
• Keep pushing REconomy, a toolkit, how to do Blueprints etc
• Look at lenders beyond credit unions such as CDFIs
• Develop responses to cash resilience, perhaps with your local emergency planning group.  If there is no cash, then what?
• Need to up Transition Network’s communications work to get our story out there
• Repackage the resources list from this event (which I have attached to the end of this piece)
• Put out something to local groups about how they can best communicate economic issues
• Collaborate more with others like Timebank UK to tell positive stories about economic resilience.

And that was that.  Most people went to the pub to continue conversations, some people ran through the April showers to get trains home, and people felt stimulated and full. There was a call that we should do this more often, perhaps 6 monthly ‘Thinky Days’.  Sounds good to me.

Thanks to everyone who made it happen, most notably Peter, Eva, Justin, Gary, Ciaran and Jules, and with deep gratitude to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Marmot Charitable Trust who sponsored the event.  If you tweet, the hashtag #peakmoney will guide you to the tweets from the day.  By way of a couple of appendices, here is firstly, the day’s framing statement, and secondly the recommended reading (and viewing) list that was circulated in advance of the meeting.

The day’s Framing Statement

The sudden disruption of the financial system, which became apparent in 2008, is affecting many people already. However the greatest impacts of ‘peak money’ may yet unfold. ‘Peak money’ could change many aspects of ‘normal’ life, from the personal to the governmental level, much as peak oil and climate change do, but in a much more abrupt way. The Transition movement needs to think through consequences and responses. What are we doing in our communities to create economic resilience and where are the gaps? What might our response be when governments make sweeping changes in services or propose draconian measures?

The purpose of the day will be to begin to develop a ‘toolkit’ of ideas and information for others in the Transition movement and kindred spirits to use and add to. It could also be a starting point for similar meetings in other places, networks and groups around the world.

We will gather information from a range of sources inside and beyond the Transition movement, consider and evaluate these and create proposals for the wider movement, then disseminate this as the start of a larger and wider discussion around the movement.

The emphasis will be on the positive and constructive: What can we do in our communities? However, we will also include background information on what has happened in the past in response to financial crises (e.g. Argentina, Iceland) and some basic background on the nature of the economy to help us evaluate constructive ways forward.

A reading (and viewing) list on the basics of money, debt, economy

Short articles and videos

• The End of Growth (5 min. video) Richard Heinberg
• Debt: The first five thousand years David Graeber interview
• Debt: The first five thousand years (15 min video) David Graeber
• Imagining the Post-Industrial Economy Sharon Astyk
• To build community, an economy of gifts Charles Eisenstein
• The History of Money – Part 1
• The History of Money – Part 2
• Punk economics (9 min video)
• Understanding Economics
• Suggested features of a new economy
• Automatic Earth Blog 

Books

• Managing without Growth, (final Chapter) Peter Victor
• Debt: The first five thousand years David Graeber
• The End of Growth Richard Heinberg. New Society Publishing
• Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson

 Lessons from elsewhere

• Argentina in the Red: What can the UK’s Regional Economies Learn from the Argentinian Banking Crisis? Molly Scott Cato
• Remembering the Social Movements that Reimagined Argentina: 2002 – 2012 Francesca Fiorentini 
• Lessons From Iceland: The People Can Have The Power Birgitta Jónsdóttir
• Greece on the Breadline (Guardian series of articles) Jon Henley

Local/alternative/complementary currencies

• Liquidity Networks: local trading systems using a debt-free electronic currency Graham Barnes
• Local Money (interview about book) Peter North 
• Local Money Creates Wealth Outside the Bubble Mira Luna
• Brixton and Bristol Pound websites

 REconomy

• REconomy and Me Fiona Ward 

In an abandoned lot in Pittsburgh a boy is selling lettuce. Down Tooting High Street a carnival is in full swing. In a village in Portugal two men are walking in a field beside horses. In a fire station in Moss Side a film preview is taking place: “There was silence. You could have heard a pin drop.  And then a sound, kind of like a pin dropping. There it is again. And again, many times in rapid succession. Then silence. Nothing.”  This is Joel Prittie, writing about his experiences previewing  the film, In Transition 2.0, simultaneously with eleven other initiatives worldwide in February. He’s telling us how the machine jammed, how he resolved the dilemma, and how everyone cheered at the end.

It’s a small story. These are all small stories. You might not know they are happening or take much notice of them. But if you were curious, you would discover how that lettuce came to be growing in such an unlikely neighbourhood; why everyone in the carnival was wearing clothes made of rubbish; why the elders of the village were teaching the young people to plough; why Joel Prittie, ex double-glazing salesman, knocked on 1100 doors in the rain in Manchester. If  you pulled these stories together, you would notice they all had a common thread. That’s the moment  you realise it’s a big story. The story in fact. The story of how people are coming together in the face of difficulties and making another kind of future.

That’s the story of Transition 2.0.

Background

The Transition movement began in 2005 in the market town of Totnes in Devon and since then has sparked off 900 initiatives worldwide. There are initiatives in cities and rural villages, towns and bioregions. Originally billed as a “community-led response to climate change and peak oil”, Transition provides a structure for communities to engage in order to become resilient in the face of these challenges.  The term, borrowed from ecology, means the ability for systems to adapt and survive great shocks.

Living within a dominant corporate monoculture where communities are often fragmented and there is little mainstream media attention on these global realities, this is a big ask for most modern people. Every aspect of our industrialised lives has been made possible by cheap fossil fuels, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. We live, however, mostly in the dark about these facts, or the effects of our daily actions on the environment. Or if we do know them, we see them as information and do not take action.

In Transition 2.0  focuses on the moves groups of people are making to look at the future squarely, to make connections with one another and to find ways to thrive in challenging times. In 2012, resilience also means the capacity to deal with Transition’s third driver, the economic crisis. The shock of the shock doctrine — the crushing blow of austerity, as people everywhere feel the consequences of our growth-at-all-costs culture and the increasing consolidation of wealth for the few.

In its typical pragmatic, positive way In Transition 2.0 doesn’t analyse this situation within a political frame. It acknowledges the big picture, and then gets down to work relocalising the neighbourhood. The film lays out the three drivers briefly at the start, then follows the track of the second book, The Transition Companion, dividing its attention on the different stages Transition initiatives go through, from the start up phase — forming a group and raising awareness — to building up local social enterprises. Rob Hopkins, the co-founder of the Transition Network, explains these stages, and the film looks at the projects that best illustrate the way Transition works.

In many ways the documentary is a tool, a showcase for people who may know nothing about Transition’s aims and structures. It is a mild watching experience, with interviews and information, and you might wonder why someone who has been involved in two initiatives and immersed in Transition communications for almost four years would have anything to find in it. What more did I need to know?

But the fact is: this is a big story. Resilient systems enforce their connections by constant feedback. You are consciously connecting with others through a vast communications network, that works like the mycorrhizal fungi in soil. I might know what is going on in the neighbourhood, but I don’t know what is going on in Portugal or Maryland. You don’t know for example that the first Transition initiative in India has created 400 vegetable gardens in Tamil Nadu. You don’t know how the co-operative Handmade Bakery in Yorkshire set up business, how the Brixton Pound (Britain’s first e-currency) works in the market, or that the mayor of  Monteveglio in Italy has adopted an energy descent plan for the whole region. Most of all you realise that the crisis which up to this point has seemed academic is now very real in many places.

Unlike the first film which focused on the start up exhilarating phase of Transition, this had a darker, deeper tone. Here are initiatives who are undergoing the shocks of climate change and the collapse of top-down infrastructure. Here is Japan after the nuclear disaster, New Zealand after two earthquakes. Transition groups that had already been working together were able to respond collectively to the crisis. Thanks to the connections already made though the Lyttelton time-bank, the initiative was able to pull in help to deliver water and food all over the devastated town.

“We are setting up structures, pioneering them and putting them in place for the future,” explained Dirk Campbell of Ovesco in Lewes, Britain’s first community owned solar power station (see right). “It’s difficult and takes enormous amounts of effort, commitment and time.”

Facing the crisis

There are many criticisms of Transition. It is not political, realistic, activist enough; it is white and middle class; it lacks structure; it’s too structured, too fluffy and feel-good. It doesn’t fulfill everything. It’s true, it doesn’t fulfill everything. But you would be hard pushed to find another method that can bring diverse people together within a frame of change. There are plenty of adversarial organisations that address climate change (Climate Rush, Greenpeace) and the financial system (UK Uncut, Occupy); there are plenty of low-carbon incentives (10:10, 350.org) and urban growing projects (Growing Communities in Hackney, Abundance and city farms in Sheffield). But what Transition does is address all these aspects simultaneously. It allows for many kinds of people to sit in a room together and work out ways to proceed. What is the most important ingredient or tool in the book (87 in all)? I asked Rob Hopkins at the Twitter launch of the Transition companion. The first one, Working in Groups, was his reply.

Our number one challenge is working in groups when we have been raised in an individualist hierarchical culture, taught to be hostile to the max. The film doesn’t show the struggle that most groups go though in dealing with this, though it does talk about conflict (including the testimony of Chris Hart from Transition Lancaster that collapsed and then reformed itself successfully a year later). Nor does it show the massive fall outs that happen when an old way of doing things (my will against yours) clashes with a new (our way together). How these old structures cling on. How the new ones demand massive inner shifts, but that if you manage to hold together extraordinary things start to happen.

What it does show is how Transition as a method, culture and network brings people together to work out solutions in places suffering from massive downturn. In the Portuguese village of Amoreiras the initiative held a meeting and asked everyone to dream. The village had suffered the fate of many rural places where most of the population had left for work in the cities. The group listened to everyone’s desires and then put their collective vision into motion. They painted the whole village, set up a local market, organised a working party to bring about better healthcare.

Here is Fred Brown in Pittsburgh, a city that in the 1970s and ’80s, lost 100,000 jobs when steel mills transferred their manufacturing to countries around the world. It’s a city where marginalised low-income neighbourhoods are threatened by incoming gentrification and big businesses. In his community of Larimer, Google have recently built a new facility, benefiting from millions of urban redevelopment funds that were intended to help the residents:

“The community doesn’t need or want more experts telling them what to do. We want partners and we want help to develop and implement our dream. Transition is helping us come together, deepen the vision, create working groups, get practical work done, and understand community-wide needs. It is also giving us language and a process for negotiating with those who seek to take, or to give on their own terms — empowering us to be proactive and co-creators.”

This is the hardest task. We are taught to listen to experts and to obey rules. Transition puts the decisions back into our hands and asks everyone to take the lead, become knowledgeable about how towns and councils work, talk with other local groups, find out about waste, alternative energy, sustainable food systems, how to write a press release, give a talk, keep bees, grow a lettuce. We are discouraged in our every attempt by the status quo. Keep shopping, keep distracted, keep listening to the old story! But there is new narrative out there, what Paul Hawken calls the greatest untold story of our time. Some of this is embodied in Transition. It’s hard work and rarely paid, but it brings rewards you don’t see on the surface, that are difficult to show on a film. These are the invisible connections between people, feelings of belonging, of meaning, of self-worth, boldness and possibility, the simple joy of sharing things, tools, knowledge, apples from your tree.

“I feel proud of where I live at and it’s changed me.”

Most of all it gives you an opportunity you never knew existed. Here’s next week’s schedule with my home initiatives of Sustainable Bungay and Transition Norwich: showing a documentary with Waveney Greenpeace in a local barn (Crisis of Civilisation), working in our monthly community kitchen (for a sit-down supper for 50), helping out at our Give and Take Day (free exchange of stuff), introducing people to medicine plants in an event called Walking with Weeds,  writing on two community blogs (one local, one national), setting up a newspaper (Transition Free Press).

None of these activities would happen without this small band of people I have been working with for the last four years. We would never have met. History and consumerism and the class system would have kept us separated from one another. Our library community garden would be bare brick. The bee-friendly wildflower meadow would be unsown. Norwich would not have an urban farm. I would never have met any of my fellow transitioners I am in daily contact with, or the many affiliated groups that write in our blogs from Occupy Norwich to BiofuelWatch to the new bicycle workshop off Magdalen Street.  I would not be writing this piece. You would not be reading it. The film and everything that happens in its 66 minutes would not be happening.

Except that it is happening: and it’s worth seeing if only to know that these seeds are being sown in a time when everything seems set against us and all life on earth.

There is a story that underpins what we do and sometimes we tell it to each other in the hard times. The caterpillar keeps munching his way voraciously across the green planet. One day he buries himself in a cocoon, and unknowingly begins the process of transformation. His body starts to dissolve and as it does imaginal buds start to appear from nowhere. At first the caterpillar’s immune system attacks and defeats this new form. Then the buds rise up again. This time they link up and the defence system can not destroy them. They hold fast. The old structure dissolves. The butterfly begins to emerge.

It’s a form you would never have imagined, something beautiful emerging in world that appears only to profit the greedy and antagonistic. But sometimes in our struggle we catch a glimpse of the butterfly wing. In the flash of carnival costume, in the mists over a Japanese mountain, in the sound of each others’ voices, in the smile of a boy holding a lettuce grown against all odds.

_____

Charlotte Du Cann is a writer and community activist, working with the Transition Network and the Dark Mountain Project. An ex-journalist, she now edits several community blogs, This Low Carbon Life, The Social Reporters Project and the OneWorldColumn. Her book 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth i(Two Ravens Press) will be published on August 1. You can find a selection of recent writings on http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com.  This review was originally published at STIR, an excellent online magazine.

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.