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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

Here is some updated information on the Festival of Transition:

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

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

The ‘What if?’ events include:

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

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

 The ‘Transition Walks’ include:

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

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

Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation said:

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

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at TedxExeter, a fantastic occasion with many great speakers (have a look at their website as more and more of the films from the day go online).  I spoke for the first time in detail about Totnes as a case study, and what, after 6 years, we can draw from the experience of Transition Town Totnes.  I hope you enjoy it.

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 

“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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was reminded by this recent piece by Dr Chris Johnstone over at ClimateCodeRed of the meeting that he and I held in June 2006 with Dr Stephen Rollnick. This was back when I was researching the Transition Handbook, and we met for a day to discuss how insights from the psychology of health behaviour change might be helpful when tackling environmental issues like climate change and peak oil. It was fascinating, and I realised as I read Chris’ article that I had never posted the transcript of that conversation here yet.  So here it is, slightly dated, but hopefully containing some insights you will find useful (it’s quite long!).  My thanks to Chris and Stephen for a fascinating day (nearly 6 years ago!). 

Hopkins.  Most of the people who write about peak oil come down to saying the only thing that will be an adequate response to it is something on the scale of a war time mobilisation.  A lot of people use that phrase – ‘a war time mobilisation’ – to get across the scale of what needs to happen in terms of pulling in all the different agencies, and industry and government and so on, towards this thing.  So that question of how we engage communities on a response of that scale is very much what fascinates me and it strikes me that over the last forty years, the approaches environmental organisations have taken just haven’t done it.

I was fumbling around thinking “How will we create the scale of engagement for a problem this big?” when all the tools we’ve had up to this point haven’t been sufficiently effective and won’t get that scale of response.  That’s what led me to looking at this whole addiction thing, because whether or not you can say society is addicted to oil, I think you can argue that society is dependant on oil. I found the Stages of Change model particularly interesting because of the insights it gave into why it is that if you go to a whole town and give them leaflets saying they should put solar panels on their roofs, only 2% of them actually do so, and the rest of them just actually won’t shift.

I’m thinking it’s probably not because they don’t care; then with the Motivational Interviewing approach, it struck me that here’s a tool to work with. Ambivalence is a huge problem on a societal scale – why don’t people do stuff?  They’ll plan in advance in terms of their children’s financial futures but not in terms of the climate or that kind of thing.  As far as I could see it, it had only really been used for individuals and groups, and I’m kind of intrigued. In designing this process we’re going to be starting in September called ‘Transition Town Totnes’, how might we use insights from Motivational Interviewing on a larger scale, and try and address that collective sense of ambivalence?

If you’ve got different stages of change, how do we best work with the people in these different stages?  Because, by my understanding, (and I’m only two months and two books in to all of this!), each of them needs handling in very different ways, and with a very different approach.  If you just go running in with a ‘one size fits all’ approach, then you might engage one third but the other two thirds are going to be more put off probably.  So how do we engage the people at those different stages?  How practically might we design approaches that would bring them on board?

Rollnick.  I think that was very carefully put because you talk about using insights from Motivational Interviewing – not the somewhat over-simplified notion of ‘I want to apply Motivational Interviewing to a community’, which could be one slightly over-simplified way of looking at it, and could plunge us in to discussion about the viability of an individual method based on empathic listening getting out into the social sphere with all sorts of issues to discuss and struggle to overcome, which I notice during the forum I started engaging with recently with Allan Zuckoff.  But you just talked about taking insights – trying to improve our understanding of the way people feel, and what’s the most constructive way of responding to it.  So I’m not wriggling with ethical itches, d’you know what I mean?  Whereas if you’d said ‘apply Motivational Interviewing to a community’ and ‘do MI on a community’, I’d be wriggling with itches.

Johnstone. What kind of itches?

Rollnick. Ethical itches, conceptual itches, maybe some practical itches, wondering how realistic the whole thing was, but certainly conceptual and ethical itches, of the kind that Alan wrote about in the forum.

Johnstone.  What I’m struck by are the different levels of the spirit of Motivational Interviewing and the techniques of Motivational Interviewing.  And the spirit of Motivational Interviewing, as I see it, is very much about not doing things on people to manipulate them in a particular way, but it’s somehow about clearing a space for people to be able to look at the complexity of how they feel about an issue.

It’s not just a case of ‘am I for it or am I against it?’  There are often different parts of people…part of them maybe for, part of them maybe against, part of them maybe unsure. When there is that complexity of different parts pulling and pushing in different ways, this can lead people to become stuck. So when you provide a space where people can look at what the pushes and pulls are within them – I find that enormously helpful.  What I also find enormously helpful, working say with people with severe alcohol problems, is when you’re in a space where it’s somehow okay to acknowledge that there are attractive things about drinking, you move out of the space of being the judge and the shamer, which tend to really close people down.

And so I think just applying that spirit and stance to environmental issues is a really good transfer, because quite often I see polarities developing, with one group of people saying ‘you should’ and waving a finger, and other people saying, ‘well, why should I?  That I’m being asked to give up things that are important to me – I’m being asked to give up aspects of my lifestyle that I find attractive.’  And so the people who are being seen as doing that are seen as somehow takers away of joy.  And that polarity is really a polarity that probably exists in all of us.  Certainly with me I acknowledge the part of me that is attracted to aspects of the Western lifestyle – I’m quite attracted to various gadgets; they have incredible utility and allow us to do things.

And the same time I look with horror sometimes at the way I see our culture going, when I read information about what’s happening with climate change.  So one of the things I really value about Motivational Interviewing is this idea of rather than the interviewer challenging the clients, they are holding a space where the challenge can occur within the client, in acknowledging their own mixed feelings.  And the stance is of really respecting their choice – it’s not about trying to get them to do something, but about when you open up a space where they can really look at what they’re doing, they can work out what they want to do themselves, or get clearer about that.

Rollnick.  And I don’t think I’ve got anything about MI to add to what Chris just said – it was all beautifully said and I agree with all of it.

Johnstone.  Thank you.

Rollnick.  Just beautifully put.  And trying to walk over a bridge to what you were talking about…we got in to this MI thing because we became disturbed to the extent to which people were being judged and shamed – to use Chris’s language.  How problems were being attributed to the people when in the relationship it was quite clear to Bill and I that we were part of that.  And since we were the experts and professionals, it’s not our job to pass judgement about lack of motivation in someone else, but to have a look at the way we were communicating in that.

I think that was the big thing for both of us, and we both had different sets of experiences as professionals, and before that in different situations in the addictions treatment field where we thought, ‘For god’s sake, this professionalized shaming and abusing people is not on.’  So our approach has been soft and therapeutic in the way we write, but that’s the passion that’s behind it. One clear bridge that’s over in to your world is shaming on a large scale, so if you make people feel bad they’re less likely to change.

Johnstone.  Yes, although I think I would qualify that because one of the strategies in Motivational Interviewing is to develop discrepancy (where someone is aware of a gap between their behaviour and their values) and when you do this you hold a space where people do feel uncomfortable. After a Motivational Interviewing session it’s possible that someone may feel more uncomfortable than they did at the beginning.  Perhaps it’s more about how you can hold a space that supports people to rise to the challenge created by that uncomfortable feeling.

I recognize there are different sides to this – one is acknowledging that feelings of discomfort can be motivating. But there was also something William Miller wrote and it’s something like, ‘When you have a discrepancy you can respond in different ways.  One is to change your behaviour and another is to change the information.’  So if you’re aware you’re behaving differently from how you’d like to, you can change what you’re doing, or you can also blank out the information that’s telling you you’re out of step with your values. My concern is that this is happening on a larger societal level.  Just thinking for example that Exxon-Mobil the oil company has spent millions of dollars funding public relations companies in America to try and block awareness of climate change issues.

This is very similar to what the tobacco industry did.  The tobacco industry pumped lots of money into saying that we need more research, that there’s still doubt about this issue, that it’s not something there’s universal agreement around yet.  First of all they did that with the evidence showing people smoking were getting ill, and then they did this with the evidence that people around those smoking were getting ill from passive smoking. The tobacco industry specifically targeted key pieces of research that showed the health risks of passive smoking in a way that created the impression of doubt when in fact there was much clearer agreement amongst scientists.

And I see a similar process happening with the climate change issue. Cultivating doubt keeps us collectively in the contemplation stage of change, rather than allowing us to move on to preparation and action.  While part of what’s needed here is awareness raising, I also find it useful to think about different levels of change…there’s raising awareness and there’s changing behaviour – but between those two there’s the big area about how we work with attitude shift and motivation shift and that’s really not down to what the information is but what it means to people.

Hopkins. Exactly.

Johnstone.  And if the information means, ‘My god, this is really scary and I can’t handle the distress created by this information’, that’s what leads to people shutting down.  This also happens in the addictions field…quite often I work alongside people who have to face completely ghastly information, like their children being taken away, or they’ve got advanced liver failure.  Sometimes that information by itself is too much to handle and people close down with it.  But if you can be alongside them in looking at what’s going on, you can support them in finding their courage to face things. I like the word ‘en-courage’.  When you encourage like this, you support people in finding their courage to face the stuff that’s unfaceable.  And I think that’s where some of the skills for motivational interviewing can be really helpfully applied.

Hopkins.  I did a talk at Schumacher College a while ago and Satish Kumar was there.  The talk I do has a little bit at the beginning about peak oil and what it is, but then it’s all about solutions.  At the end he said, ‘that was very good, very interesting, but you know, I do have a problem with you using fear to try and motivate people to do stuff.’  It was interesting and it got me thinking about the film The End of Suburbia, which is the classic way people get in to peak oil – have you seen that?

Rollnick.  I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen it referred to.

Hopkins.  Okay.  For a lot of people…I’ve seen people really, really distressed by it – it’s a very intense film about what the impact of peak oil could be on society.  I’ve done lots of public screenings of it and a few times have had to sort of talk people down afterwards.  A lot of people go ‘yeah, fantastic!’, but some are quite distressed by it.  That sense of what you were just talking about, about breaking the news to people and how you best facilitate that.  There was the thing that Chris put me on to – the FRAMES Model – which I’ve used in the dissertation I’m doing as a thing to pull all the different strands together.

The way they talk about it as feedback in there is really good.  You’re presenting – rather than trying to terrify anybody – you’re presenting honest, clear feedback.  You know, ‘if you carry on drinking another six months you’re finished’, or actually, ‘this is where the world is at’.  The difference comes with what happens after this. If you just present that and just sort of walk off and leave them with it, that’s one of the things that closes people down. I saw James Lovelock speak a while ago, presenting a horrendous gloom and doom climate change scenario – ‘we’re all finished, there’s nothing any of you do when we leave this room tonight that can make any difference, humanity is completely finished.  We’re just talking about a sustained retreat to the poles’ I think that’s so irresponsible because where can you go with that?  You can’t do anything with that. You want to retreat when you hear that, don’t you?

What I very much try and do with my stuff is present feedback in the form of: ‘Here we are, this is peak oil, here are the scenarios, this is like the ghost of Christmas future in a sense, but how about we do this?  Actually it could be fantastic!  Actually by the end of this process our quality of life could be much better and we could be spending more time with our kids and have a garden full of carrots.  It could all be a much better process.’  In that sense I found that FRAMES Model really, really useful as a way of kind of bringing it all together.

Rollnick.  So we could be starting to clarify a number of principles of good practice in promoting change in health related issues on a large scale. On the train, I think I was half asleep when I started dreaming, and I started thinking, ‘Well where are there health concerns that affect a whole community?’…I thought about some aboriginal communities I’ve come across in Australia, settlements where everybody is pissed and addicted to alcohol.  Just a whole place is riddled with it.

There’s a San Bushman community I know of in the North West Cape that has a similar problem.  They happen to both be very socially deprived and devastated, with an explanation in their history, but the way they present right now is everybody sitting around pissed.  So they’re communities where there are clear concerns about peoples’ health and not too dissimilar because I’m sure you could articulate concerns about peoples’ health and well-being in this community or the world as a whole.  So I’m comfortable with the lack of ethical itches there.

Maybe because I’m working with the brief intervention health care, general hospital world, I’m used to trying to pull out some simple guidelines.  There could be principles that come out of what we’re talking about and there are some principles that are coming out.  One’s got to do with how you’re handling information, and how you conceptualise the process of informing people.

Johnstone. I’m picking up there are potential side-effects to the way we present information. We can present the same information in three different ways and have three different consequences, and we need to be aware of the potential for overwhelm and close down when giving bad news.  If we are aware of that then we can think of information giving as having different phases to it.

Whatever news we hear in our head, it has to be digested down to the heart level to really take effect. Digestion involves exploring the meaning component of information – what does it mean to me?  What are the consequences?  And there’s a feeling response to that. Information has to be digested at different levels and if we’re aware of that digestion process, then perhaps we may not give quite so much information all at once, but give it in digestible chunks, and pay attention to the digestion process.

Rollnick.  The word ‘digestion’ is lovely there.  We’ve sort of agreed that hitting people crudely with a whole load of bad news, like that lecture you described, can reinforce shut down a lot of the time. So time and space to digest is needed.

Thinking just about information for a moment – I think another principle we need to get back to is how you deal with discomfort, with people actually feeling it.  And it goes beyond information exchange, it’s a deeper process.  We need to hit that principle somehow in some constructive way.  But just on the information exchange issue – that might be another principle, that it should have to do with exchange rather than dumping.  And dumping fearful information doesn’t lead to behaviour change, especially fearful information that makes you feel ashamed or shut down. We know that in health care.

The renal consultant said to me the other day, ‘Steve, we need help with communication training on the ward.’  So I go down and say, ‘What’s the problem?’  He says, ‘They just will not reduce their fluid intake to below a litre a day, and we’ve got the evidence’, because I think they were on dialysis or something… ‘and we actually say to them, look we’ve got the evidence that you’re not restricting your fluid intake. Can you imagine the shaming that’s going on?  ‘We’ve got the evidence that you’re not doing this, and they’re just in denial.

We need communication training to get through their denial.  And I tell you Steve, shall I give you an example?  They’re in such levels of denial – you tell them that if they drink more than that they’re going to die, and guess what happens Steve?  They die.’  That’s how bad their denial is, you know, and if you can imagine what I’m thinking – ‘Man! The way you’re handling information giving – it’s not exchange, it’s dumping! It’s all the things that we know are going to close people down.

But what I found very useful, this is 15, 20 years ago, about these drinkers’ check up studies that Bill did, because they were the first publications on MI that were sort of, of an empirical nature – and he puts these ads in the newspaper that say ‘Are you troubled by your drinking?’, and these folk would come in.

And one group got standard feedback – ‘If you don’t do this, then this, then this…’, variation on soft shaming I would have thought, dumping information, you can see lots of things…as opposed to what he described as MI.  I’m trying to unpack what was actually going on in the process, and it wasn’t just the empathic listening, which was there.  It was making a distinction between information and the interpretation of it.  So I picked that up and I’ve been trying to train healthcare practitioners to consider that distinction.

People have often said to me, ‘But hang on, how can you distinguish between facts and their interpretation?  What’s a fact?’  And I think that’s potentially pedantic because if you allow some blurred boundaries I still think the distinction’s useful.  The job of the practitioner is to present an exchange, present the facts, all the information.  And then their task is to elicit the personal interpretation from the person, so that you’re giving them a chance to personally digest, obviously.  And then you can take them to an empathic atmosphere and many of the qualities of constructive change that Chris has been talking about can take place.  You can pass judgements on how is this person going, – do they need more information?  Are they heading for shutdown?  And all that…So getting over to the bridge, getting over the bridge to your world, distinguishing between the facts and their interpretation and encouraging people to make the interpretations for themselves, maximises digestion.  How’s that?  Do you see what I mean?

Johnstone.  This is really good because this picks up from what you were saying in terms of how Motivational Interviewing developed where you and Bill were acknowledging the impact of the way you give information. When you’re looking at the phenomenon of resistance, rather than blaming them for being resistant clients who are unmotivated, you’re acknowledging that actually you can influence the degree to which they become resistant.  It’s not the whole story, but you are part of a story, and if you’re part of the story, if you can find out what part you can play in that, then you can start doing the opposite of what would create resistance.

I think this is where the ecological movement can really learn – it’s like saying, well actually the way information is presented will have an impact on how resistant people are, and we could be doing things in a way that’s making people more resistant and increasing polarization. If we were to design a campaign that would really turn people off, and if it was to have an opposite effect of what we want, one of the things we would do is present lots of information all at once in a way that was overwhelming, frightening, and then we would blame people for it: ‘This is awful and it’s your fault.’

Rollnick.  And you’d mix up information and peoples’ interpretation of it, you’d confuse the two, you’d lump it all together.

Johnstone.  Or you’d be even telling people what their interpretation should be rather that finding out what it is.

Rollnick.  So you’re kind of saying ‘Here’s a graph that does this – isn’t that scary?’   ‘You should be scared’, or ‘I’m telling you that you are scared’. Yet people react in different ways and sometimes there is a lot of fear, sometimes there is despair, sometimes there’s enormous guilt, but sometimes there isn’t.  Sometimes there’s a sense of ‘What’s that got to do with me?  I’m probably not going to be around when that’s happening anyway.’  Or that sense of the kind of nihilism of ‘I already know this and I don’t need to be told.’

Johnstone.  I remember I did a training session with someone who was working in a hospice, so it was about how to communicate information about peoples’ prognosis with cancer.  And he was saying, ‘Well, sometimes people do want to know, but it’s a bit like if you’re overdrawn, you don’t need a letter from your bank manager every day telling you.  You need to know that you’re overdrawn and once you’ve clocked that, you don’t need more communications telling you that.’  What you then do with that information – that’s what you need support with.

Rollnick.  Right, so ‘Not hitting the message many times’ is another nice bridge, isn’t it?

Hopkins.  Because I’ve been teaching permaculture for the last six or seven years and I use a lot of things that came out of an approach from Australia called ‘Teaching Permaculture Creatively’, which uses lots of things from different creative teaching fields and a lot of that is to do with this thing of rather than teaching people something, you get them to show other people how to do it.  That actually if someone tells you something, you remember 20% of it, but if they go out and show somebody else practically how to do something, they remember 90% of it.

One of the things I’m planning to do in Totnes is run an evening class – it’ll be a ten week evening class called ‘Skilling up for power down’, and in the penultimate week I’m going to get the people to each write their own twelve steps to breaking their own oil dependency.  So they’ll work out their own twelve steps that will be personal to them, their life, and then they’ll come in the last session and they’ll read out their twelve steps of how they’re going to break that dependency.  The evening class will run on a continual loop because lots of people want to do it.

When it starts again in January, the group who’ve done the first evening class will then hopefully undertake to help the next class out. They will commit to supporting each other in doing that, so that then when a second evening class gets to that stage of the 9^th week, then all those people will come back in and talk about what they did with theirs.  So they’ll be passing that down to the next lot and saying, ‘This is where we got to’.  So you have that supporting cycle, which could be really interesting I think.

Johnstone.  One of the things that can really help is being in a context of engagement and optimism, when you see other people are taking these things on and doing things, but also in a way that involves manageable steps.  That’s also what happens in the centre where I work – we have lots of groups, people coming in with alcohol problems, and they see other people making headway.  We have a client coffee room and garden area where they can spend time chatting.  When you see other people making headway with something, this gives you the idea that you can too.  It becomes something where you have a social context that supports the movement of change, which is different from what many people would otherwise experience.

It’s this thing about manageable steps, plotting out pathways of change, that is also important.  But I suppose there’s this need to think of two sides of change; one is developing and strengthening the will, and the other is finding and having confidence in the way.  And I think with a lot of the environmental issues these two are influencing each other, because if people have the belief that we can’t change the world, these issues are too big – this is the interpretation side really – then what happens is when they get more information about the problem, because they can’t see the way, it just becomes more and more overwhelming.

Rollnick.  That’s right.  So it’s not just a matter of coming to believe it’s worthwhile changing the world that’s important, but also, as your story illustrates, enhancing a sense of can-do.

Johnstone.  Which you’ve written about is in terms of readiness for change being based on both how important the issue is, but also how confident they feel that they can tackle it.

Rollnick.  We could talk a wee bit about those concepts and readiness to change.

Hopkins.  Yes, that would be very useful.

Rollnick.  But we’re talking about information exchange, and I think we’re sort of assuming that there’s a lot of people who feel ambivalent – that’s an insight we can take over to your world, that people feel two ways about it.  And I think Chris has described the nub of that very eloquently and how we can be helpful or less so when someone feels that.  So peoples’ resistance to change has at least two origins; one inside them – that’s their ambivalence, it’s not got to do with the way you’re speaking to them, they feel that inside them; and then there’s the way they’re dealt with.

So there’s an inter-personal cause of resistance if you like, and there’s an intra-personal origin.  And so one way this discussion could go is looking at how do you help people that feel ambivalent?  We talked about the inter-personal quite clearly didn’t we?  I think we’ve just about cracked the principles of poor and better practice when it comes to information giving in health promotion.  Just basic principles here…

Johnstone.  What I find so helpful is this distinction between information dumping and information exchange.  Information dumping is just a one-way flow and it’s all about broadcast.  Information exchange combines broadcast with reception. When you’re broadcasting, you are giving feedback, as in the Frames Model. This involves raising awareness. You throw something out but you also then see how it lands.  It is like saying, ‘Well how does that sound to you?’

You’re then looking at what the information means, what the interpretation is, as well as how they’re running with it.  If you can see that this person is struggling with that, then that’s not the time to give more information.  It’s to look out for times when information is getting stuck in their throat, when they’re finding that difficult. That’s when they need some support in processing that information in a way where it can be digested and they can work with it.

What the distinction between information dumping and information exchange might mean for us is having some principles we could put out in a tentative way, but also inviting a response. For example ‘Well here’s some things we’ve come up with – what do you think?’  And one of them will be: if you have an evening talk or film where you’re giving a lot of disturbing information about what’s happening in our world, that you include in the programme some time for eliciting interpretation from people.  Like, okay you’ve just seen this film – what does it mean?  We don’t just close the evening and say goodbye at the end in a way that people are left feeling stunned or shocked.

Rollnick. The healthcare equivalent is of group meetings of people who’ve had heart attacks – this is my little world that I work in, right?  They have these group meetings in cardiac rehabilitation settings and then use this kind of crude approach, but they give lectures, and people shut down, and people go off, and there’s no digestion time…It’s quite widespread, this idea that people will change if an expert tells them how bad things will be if they don’t.

Johnstone.  There is some evidence that advice information say in giving up smoking from GPs and primary care nurses, does have a limited impact, it’s not completely ineffective.  But also, it’s not going to work with everybody, and like any intervention it can go wrong and can have side effects.

Rollnick.  I’ve been thinking about this.  We could talk about that – if you give someone advice, brief information, why is it that some people change?  We could talk about that because I’ve been pondering that, and I’ve sort of resolved it –why it’s taken ten or fifteen years to resolve it I don’t understand – but anyway that’s what happened.

Johnstone.  I’d really be interested in your resolution.

Rollnick.  Well, I spent a lot of time knocking advice giving, and saying hang on, that’s not an effective way of encouraging people to change – here’s a better way, MI.  And yet we know that sometimes people just get a little bit of information and they change, and there’s evidence for it as Chris said, you know?  So this new book that I’ve been writing with Bill distinguishes between guiding, directing and following, or directing, guiding and following as communication styles. Very simple and…it’s resolved for me because there’s no implication of one style is better than another, which was the mistake I’ve been making – you know like the directing style with brief advice is less effective. Each style has it’s place.

It depends on the circumstances and the context.  With behaviour change, the guiding style’s probably the better default for the reasons that Chris has so carefully articulated – encourage, guide.  If you’re going to have a default style for behaviour change, it’s probably the better one.  But directing and advice giving can work well if it’s personally relevant, well timed and you care – that’s resolution right?  I’m sure that might be one of the explanations why brief advice works.  But it will work better if it’s personally relevant, well timed and done with caring – those three qualities.  You can imagine a GP giving advice to smokers has those three qualities, and the smoker comes out feeling contained, cared about, you know what I mean?  It hit the mark because it was well timed…it was relevant to me, it was personally relevant.  So that’s how I’ve resolved it.  So in this new book I’m paying quite a lot of attention to clarifying what good directing, skilful directing might look like.

The doctor with the good bedside manner probably had the capacity to shift between these styles appropriately, flexibly and humanely, and when it was time to give advice, gave advice.  But also was able to follow and listen, and also was able to guide.  So I think the idea of a good bedside manner has been written off as ‘Oh, that’s just somebody who’s nice to their patients’, when actually I think there’s probably quite a lot of skilfulness packaged up there.

Johnstone.  Again, in terms of crossing the bridge to environmental issues – there are times when it’s really useful to give clear tips on how to address issues, but it’s also looking for that…where you give tips.  This ties back to what you were talking about right at the very beginning about not responding the same way to everyone, moving away from a one size fits all mentality.  And you mentioned that one thing that would be worth looking at is the danger of over-simplifying the stages of change.  Did I get that right?

Rollnick.  Yuh, because I think it’s been over-simplified. There could be a dose-type way of thinking about it – in that stage you do that, in that stage you do that, in that stage you do that. I just don’t think life is as simple as that.  Typically it’s pre-contemplation: give them information, consciousness raising.  Contemplation: they’re ambivalent, give them MI and if they’re in preparation, give them advice about what to do.  It’s got some intuitive appeal but it doesn’t hang together clinically for me, because you can find people who are in contemplation for very different reasons.  If you think about what you call the will and the way, or why-change and how-change – think about that distinction.  The assumption here with the stages of change is that people in pre-contemplation need help with the will, with why-change, that they need all this information.

People at the other end need help with the how, with the way to change.  And these poor fuckers in the middle, I don’t know, what do they need?  They need MI, right.  What is it that they need?  They still need help with the why, which is weigh up the pros and cons, that kind of idea.  But actually if you take 20 smokers in the contemplation stage and you interview them, you don’t come out with it as clearly as that.  You find smokers who are very unready to change who don’t need persuading about the why – it’s the how that they’re hassling with.  They’re in pre-contemplation and they’re in shut-down.  But it’s not because they lack information, or they need their consciousness raised by some wonderful new insight.  They’re in pre-contemplation but they’re in shut-down – they don’t know what the hell to do about it.  D’you see what I’m saying?

Johnstone.  And presumably people can be in different stages with different issues. You could have a drinker who is in the pre-contemplation stage with his drinking and preparation stage with his smoking and contemplation stage with his relationship with his wife – presumably you can be on different ones.

Rollnick.  Spot on.

Johnstone. I find what you’ve just said very helpful – just moving out of the assumption that it’s the why people need when they’re in pre-contemplation, because I see that too.  Sometimes people know about the issue, but as soon as they look at it, so much fear comes up that they think ‘My god, I can’t handle that’. What’s lacking here is the capacity to respond meaningfully to the information.  And if you can’t respond meaningfully to it, people may think, ‘What’s the point of worrying about something you can’t do anything about?  If you can’t do anything about it, then switch it off.’

Rollnick.  With that in mind I’ve had folk from different parts of the world who work in deprived environments come to me and say, ‘You know, people need help with the how!’  And of course, the more deprived people are, the more that is the case.  If you think about the San Bushmen community, they do need help with the ‘how’, big time.  So I don’t see Motivational Interviewing as just residing in the world of the ‘why’ – it’s got as much to do with the ‘why’ as it has to do with the ‘how’.  I don’t believe Chris, when he’s with some drinker and struggling with the ‘how’ will say, ‘Well I’ll tell you what to do mate, why don’t you bah, bah, bah…’  It doesn’t work, people don’t change like that.  So the style of MI and guiding and encouraging people applies across both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.  And yet I’ve been pigeon holed by the Stages of Change model into apparently defending this idea that MI is for the ambivalent fuckers in the middle and it’s only about the ‘why’.  D’you see what I mean?  And it’s not like that.

Johnstone.  I’m picking two things here – one is Motivational Interviewing as a style, which is about guiding and supporting as opposed to directing.  And that style is something you can apply at any stage of change.  But also there’s the issue of ambivalence, which I feel is likely to always be there anyway, whatever stage of change.  It’s more about the degree to which it’s at the front. I think it’s a useful assumption to have that there’s always likely to be some ambivalence, even if people on the surface appear to be keen, because also motivation is something that can be cultivated and strengthened wherever people are at. If we can give attention to drawing out the ‘why’ then that can strengthen the enthusiasm for change.

Hopkins.  So in terms of this idea of using this questionnaire to assess, to get a snapshot of different communities within a town’s readiness to change, do you see there being value to that – what insights would that elicit and what might one do with them if you did that?

Rollnick.  I don’t think it’s been done before.  So I don’t know. I imagine it’ll be helpful for the very reasons you want to do it, which is you’ll get a photograph of peoples’ different motivational states.  But if we think about the limitations of the Stages of Change model, it’s the implications of action for people in different stages we have to be careful of.  So I suppose we might find it useful to distinguish between the realm of explanation and the realm of action, okay?  This will help you in the realm of explanation in understanding this complex world of where people are at in relation to peak oil.  The implications for action might be something quite different and I can think of lots of examples in my work life and personal life where people will assume that you get fixed on an explanation and action follows immediately from it. CBT’s got that quality.  Your only problem is we need to do a proper assessment. Once we understand your cognitive distortions, the implications for action are quite obvious.

Hopkins.  What’s CBT?

Rollnick.  Cognitive Behaviour Therapy – it’s something that’s in our world.  And when I was trained as a behavioural psychologist, you know…twenty five plus years ago, the only problem I had was to do a proper functional analysis of your behavioural problems.  So to do a proper functional analysis you had to fill out a diary so I could analyse things properly, right?  And then when you didn’t bring the diary back, of course I blame you right?  You’ve got a motivational problem.  But the naïve assumption then was that there’s this realm of explanation, which I’m an expert in and once I know, then the implications for action are obvious. It’s flawed.

So I think with the Stages of Change model, if it helps you understand different motivational things, great, but the implications for action might be something different.  Like you could analyse that San Bushmen community and say, ‘All the buggers are ambivalent and addicted and dependant.  Therefore they all need MI.’ Actually what they’re doing, some smart lawyers have got alongside them and they’ve sued the South African government for taking their land away – the apartheid government before that and before – and they’re getting new land.  And now they own diamond mines right?  And now suddenly they’ve become incredibly wealthy and the whole thing’s going to have to get sorted out.

It happens to the aboriginals as well to some extent.  So the realm of explanation might be they’re a community of addicted, dependent people; the realm of action’s something completely different.  Do you know what I mean?  And in our world we have people with multiple inter-related problems, which is a topic we should return to.  If I come across somebody who’s sexually abused as a kid – this was my standard client in Primary Care that I used to work with. There was a waiting list full of sexually abused as a kid, single parent, history of abuse and physical violence with partner, partner’s buggered off, two or three kids with behavioural problems, agoraphobic, socially isolated and they need a tipple to get out the house.

So now what problem do you focus on there?  Which? They’re all inter-related.  Assumptions about what ‘the problem’ is or what the problems are and therefore what you should do about them…you’ve got to be careful with.  I ended up working in the social sphere – I didn’t become a specialist in sexual abuse because I felt this was the primary underlying problem and therefore the implications for action as sexual abuse counselling…it’s a very tricky one.

But if you get somebody with diabetes with multiple inter-related things it’s a very tricky decision about where should they start?  You don’t necessarily start with the most serious or…you may start with the one that’s easiest but maybe that’s not where they make the most impact.  It’s a very tricky challenge.  And I ended up devising self-help groups for these agoraphobic women so it was a more community response.  So explanation and action aren’t linked. So I think the Stages of Change model would be great for understanding.  I think the understanding might be enhanced by looking at the will and the way, or importance and confidence, or ‘why’ and ‘how’, where their motivational struggles might be, how they feel about how important it is and how confident they are to make some changes in line with something that’s healthier.  Do you see what I’m saying?

Hopkins.  Absolutely.

Rollnick.  So that might be a different questionnaire Rob and maybe that’s something that you take out of it…if you’re doing a thesis you could’ve looked at that, I was just making a suggestion.  But the implications for action I think probably are if the question is good enough you’ll get confused by the data which is a good thing!  It’s compatible with what we find on an individual level – it’s not so simple.  Whereas if you come out with neat, formulaic things like…there’s usually a third, a third and a third – a third will be pretty good and patient, I can make some changes…I don’t know that the implications for action are necessarily…

Johnstone.  What I like about the Stages of Change questionnaire is that it brings a focus on the steps of change that happen before people make the physical change. Often there’s this big focus on have they changed or not, and you’re looking at the end part of the journey when there’s all these steps towards that. If people aren’t making those end changes – like they’re not giving up cars and having solar panels – it’s very easy to feel despondent in the same way that a lot of GPs feel despondent when working with people with alcohol problems. Because even though they’ve been giving all this time they’re still drinking. I think that by applying the stages of change questionnaire a number of times, you can plot movement that happens before the behaviour movement.  So if you think of those levels of change of increase in awareness, change in attitude or motivation, and then change in behaviour, there’s changes that happen before the change in behaviour.

Rollnick.  It is useful.

Hopkins.  Because you come back to it annually in a longitudinal way and assess whether the other things that you’re doing are actually having an effect as well.

Johnstone.  In this whole realm of larger change and addressing ecological issues, it brings the focus to the change before the change, which has often been ignored.  There’s been this idea that if you give people enough information the action will follow, and that’s clearly not the case.

Rollnick.  Yuh.  And I think that’s very useful so don’t take my reservations too seriously because the culture we’re living in, everything is action orientated as Chris is implying, and problem solving.  And the pre-occupation with targets, assessment procedures and healthcare, and deadlines, appointment times, structures, gets people in to the state of mind where it’s all about action and then directing is the obvious style to use.  And I suppose one could build up a critique of health and social care as being all action orientated.  Then with regards to the political spheres, there must probably be similar processes going on.  And understanding change in a slightly more thoughtful manner is a big leap forward.

Johnstone.  As you said, no one has done this before in relation to looking at attitudes about oil use, for example, so just to begin to do it is a step forward. There’s some trial and error whenever you try something new.  It’s like saying, ‘Well this is useful in this field, let’s try it in this field’, and you’ll probably become aware of the problems in the application.  I think what we saying is, ‘These people have thought a lot about difficult behaviour change, and here we have difficult behaviour change, and let’s see if we can transfer some of the insights, understandings and strategies here and see what happens.’

Rollnick.  It’s fantastic, and I’d really like to get right back to the beginning – you used that phrase ‘transfer some of the insights’.  You didn’t use the phrase ‘apply MI as technique across the board’.

***

Stephen Rollnick is Professor of Health Care Communication at Cardiff University and is known internationally for his work developing the motivational interviewing approach. With William Miller, he co-authored the classic text Motivational Interviewing. 

Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and the Transition Network.  You can read more about him here.

Chris Johnstone is an addictions specialist working in the UK health service and trains healthcare professionals in motivational interviewing. He also runs workshops aiming to cultivate empowered responses to global issues and is author of the self-help book Find Your Power.

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.

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.

The newly opened Dunbar Community Bakery.

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

Narrative One.  ‘Produce Economic Growth or Die Trying’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter ‘The Portas Review’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back at the summit… tools for building bridges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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