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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transition Training has developed a new 2-day course for Transition initiatives who have been going for some time, called ‘Transition: Thrive’.  It had its first pilot a couple of weeks ago, and in this guest post, trainer Naresh Giangrande reflects on how it went, and what learnings  are helping to shape its further evolution.

How well is Transition going in the UK? Is it succeeding, failing or something in between? Is there anything we can do about it when it isn’t going well? How can we help functional Transition initiatives take their next steps in a training? Last weekend,  twenty six dedicated pioneers took the plunge, confronted their inner daemons and came along for a roller coaster ride of a weekend in Totnes, UK.  Along the way we shared our hopes and dreams -and nightmares doing this thing called Transition. I am curious how many reading this might identify with the feelings, and experiences described!

These brave souls were all doing Transition in their communities.  Those Transition initiatives (TIs) were, I suggest, in one of three places:

• Going well, and wondering what can we do next?
• Ticking over reasonably well, and needing some input on how to go to the next level, for instance how to get more people involved.
• Collapsed or confronting crisis and wanting to know how to recover from this.

Jenny McKewan  and I designed what we felt was a programme rich in both process and practical ways forward in order to address  the diverse needs listed above. We wrapped the training in an appreciative inquiry  (more on this below). We also encouraged the group to share their expertise and learn from each other. We had many very knowledgeable people who held sessions on:

• communicating about climate change to the most intractable audience
• another who took people though how to use social media like twitter and facebook, blogs etc, and
• one of our trainers, Mandy Dean  who stepped in with a session on Open Space as a community engagement tool.

Open Space Technology was mentioned, by one TI who used it many times, as over and over proving its worth in generating ideas and moving projects forward.  Jenny also taught a break out session on groups and the creative use of conflict, and I did one on our economic blueprint for a relocalised economy and the REconomy project.  We also created a Test your ability to respond to change game, and told our stories using the Transition Ingredients cards.

The feeling of this course was very different to our original training, Transition: Launch.  In Launch people are new to Transition and there is lots to do and participants go away generally happy having learned a lot. Our participants this weekend, most being Transition veterans, have been at the coal face of Transition for a while. I felt expressions of anger, distrust in the Transition method, personal pain at how hard Transition was sometimes, as well as being full of successes and the satisfaction of facilitating others to proactively engage with fundamental change. Participants also had more specific needs like help with social enterprise models and specific projects that they were undertaking. Sunday morning became particularly ‘hot’ as another issue surfaced that we commonly find amongst Transition groups as well as in our training; the inner/outer dilemma.

Some felt that we were placing too much emphasis on the process side of the weekend. We were introducing a method called Appreciative Inquiry, AI for short. It feels like a very good fit for Transition groups as it uses a process of ‘Discovery’ to find out what has been working well and then helps us to figure out how to do more of that. This is in contrast to a conventional change management approach that focuses on problems and finds ways to overcome them. Many groups and businesses have used this approach to great effect, Project Lyttleton in New Zealand is one of them,  who have built solid community resilience in a short period of time, and who places the AI approach at the heart of everything they do.

Appreciative Inquiry is a good example of an ‘inner’ transition method that helps achieve tangible, practical results. This weekend, and it commonly happens in Transition groups, some found the process side-  ‘navel gazing’, group building, and other such ‘new age’ tomfoolery- uncomfortable and pointless.

However it’s been my experience that  attention to how a group is working for instance, which is often hidden especially to those who are antithetical to this way of working, makes groups welcoming, effective, and convivial places to work. It also helps us to pay attention to our underlying feelings which can easily undermine our personal health and well being (as we become more aware of the un-sustainability of business as usual). Conversely, Visioning, Creating a space for Inner Transition,Running effective meetings, Personal resilience and many other ingredients of Transition testify to the importance of this side of the process.

We make an effort to weave both the inner and the outer into Transition Training, and are aware of the sensitivities of many who wouldn’t wish do process. However it is also our experience that the chance to explore the inner side of things in a spirit of cooperation and safety (we never make anyone in a training do anything they don’t want to do, it is always an invitation), can be deeply nourishing and life enhancing. It is one of the things that makes Transition such an effective process. We solved this inner/outer dilemma on the second day by facilitating different streams, and enabling people to focus on the stream they felt most important to them.

It is our intention that Transition: Thrive will be a valuable tool in enabling TIs to function as effectively as they can. It will also enable those who are having difficulty to find ways to overcome those difficulties and flourish. And it will continue to provide a platform for Transitioners to find their next steps and network with those facing similar challenges.

I was profoundly inspired by our participants this weekend who despite the difficulties in their TIs and the increasing desperation of our times, showed up ready move on. I honour their courage and determination, it touched me deeply.  Our purpose in Transition Training is to support those doing Transition. We will continue to stand beside transition folk and do all we can to enable learning, provide connection and communication, and inspire with transformative, experiential learning.

Naresh Giangrande

To see dates of all upcoming Transition trainings, including Transition: Thrive, click here.

In the UK, the main Transition-related story to make the national news over the past month was the suggestion by Ian Jones, CEO of Volunteer Cornwall, that Cornwall should set up its own currency, the ‘Cornwall Pound’.  The story made the national news and many references were made to the local currencies already in existence via Transition Towns Totnes (Devon), Lewes (Sussex) and Brixton (London).  Jones told the Daily Telegraph “It’s no good if we endlessly talk about our problems, we need to start doing something positive now if we are to avoid being at the mercy of the global storm which is currently raging.”

The discussion even got onto the BBC’s Politics Show (who have previously run stories on Transition currencies), with David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, arguing that “There’s no reason why Cornwall couldn’t have its own banknotes like Scotland, but it’s not viable or sensible for it to have its own central bank.  It can’t have its own monetary policy like we assume it’s not going to have its own army.”  Rather misses the point somewhat.

While we’re talking about local currencies, here’s something I missed at the time, Prince Charles going shopping with Brixton Pounds (see right)!   According to the article, “The Duchess of Cornwall has used some of the currency accepted by businesses in south London – known as Brixton Pounds – on a visit to a local market with the Prince of Wales.  Camilla bought a box of mangoes with a Brixton £10 note, introduced last year to try to keep the money of local people within the community”.  In case you missed it, you can hear a lot more about the current developments of the Brixton Pound in last month’s Transition Podcast (this month’s one will follow in 2 weeks time).

Here is one film about the Brixton Pound which gets out and asks people what they think of it (although it was made before the new notes and the ‘Pay-by-Text’ scheme were launched):

…and then here is a film about going shopping using the new Pay-by-Text scheme:

Heading north into Derbyshire, Transition Wirksworth are one of several local community groups in the town who hope to have more say in the future of their community. The town’s residents with the support of Derbyshire Dales District Council are hoping to secure funding via the UK government’s new Localism Act which was passed this month. Read the full story from the Matlock Mercury.   In Devon, the Newton Abbot Guide to Local Food and Drink has been launched and is an amazing collaboration of efforts by the Newton Abbot Local Food Group, an informal partnership between Transition Newton Abbot, Newton Abbot Community Interest Company, Newton Abbot Town Council, Teignbridge District Council and Devon County Council.

Transition Town Worthing have been running a course in working with willow:

… and work continues on their Energy Descent Action Plan.

The November newsletter of Transition Town Totnes is bursting with all things Transition related in and around Totnes (see right). Click here to see photos from this year’s annual Winterfest, or here to see a film of last year’s.  Transition Stroud liked the idea of a Winterfest so much that they are holding one too, this weekend!

In Dorset, Transition Town Bridport celebrated their last year and look ahead to the coming year at their second Annual General Meeting (see left) and launch a Spend Less Eat Better Campaign.

In Glamorgan, south Wales, Transition Cowbridge and Transition Llantwit joined forces with a local resident who set up The Vale says No campaign and were successful in preventing a test of the controversial shale gas fracking taking place in the beautiful Vale of Glamorgan. Read the full article in Permaculture Magazine.  And there’s more here in Treehugger.

In Gloucestershire, Transition Town Cheltenham held a Transition festival to celebrate their first year of community, environmental and creative activities in town (see poster below):

TTDorchester's Energy saving winner Lorraine Wong

Transition Town Dorchester ran an energy monitoring scheme which  16 local residents took part in over a 6 month period and which led to positive behaviour change (see left).  Jon Orrell of Transition Towns Weymouth and Portland decided to visit Occupy LSX (London Stock Exchange) at St Pauls’ Cathedral and wrote up this report on the website.

Jonathan Goldberg's great photo of Transition beekeepers.

In London, Jonathan Goldberg of Transition Kensal to Kilburn (K2K) is one of 6 photographers featured in a new online photography magazine called Backyard where people shoot pictures close to home and heart (you can see one of his pics to the right, of Transition K2K beekeepers).  Transition K2K were also busy at the recent Queen’s Park Day, where they pressed apple juice and gave it away to passers by:

Also from London, here is a great article about Edible Landscapes London, an initiative of Transition Finsbury Park, and a short film about what they are up to:

One member of Transition Town Bolton, who is also a cycling instructor, is offering bike lessons to adults in an attempt to encourage them to ditch the car in favour of a 2 wheeler.  Transition Town Shrewsbury’s Hydro Group is one of four Transition groups who are going for funding via Energyshare. To read about the other Transition entries or to vote before the December 3rd deadline, see Rob’s related post on Transition Culture.

In Suffolk, one passionate individual from the village of Little Cornard got the ball rolling and helped get Transition Sudbury and District off the ground. Read this lovely report in the local East Anglian Daily News on how it all unfolded.  One of the first things they did was to hold an apple pressing day (see left).

Transition Town Kingston have launched an online directory of eco-friendly businesses in the borough in time for the Christmas shopping season.   In West Sussex, an upcoming event is being held in Lewes and organised by South East Transition Initiatives called Food Resilience Preparation Day. A group has been gathering to discuss the issue via this forum and has identified three main forms of food resilience planning.  You can also see Transition Town Lewes’ December newsletter here.  We’ll be sure to follow up and get a full report on this event for the December roundup.  And I’ll tell you what, that Haslemere Transition Town know how to have a good time:

In West Yorkshire, Hebden Bridge Transition Town and Treesponsibility invited a member of the Beehive Collective to present “The True Cost of Coal”. The Beehive Collective based in Maine (USA) facilitates creative education about issues effecting people and the environment. See their stunning poster (right) and more just like it on their website.

Awww... a heart-shaped potato dug up by Norwich Farmshare...

Transition Norwich recently celebrated the third anniversary of their Unleashing.  A Transition Culture podcast captured some of the voices of those who have been working with the group, and their reflections on where they have got to in that time.  One of their key projects is Farmshare, a Community Supported Agriculture project, which recently held a Potato Day, where the idea was that they would walk behind the tractor and pick up the potatoes it was lifting from the ground.  Unfortunately, the tractor broke down and they had to lift 2 tonnes of spuds by hand!  According to their website, “blisters and creaky joints were more than matched by smiles and banter”.

Transition Town Marlborough, who are well on their way to becoming an official Transition initiative with the full support of the local council (a story told in last month’s Transition Podcast), have rejected claims to restrict cycling in a certain area of town.

Installers Michael Merry, left, and Dan Bowers with Alison Turnbull, project manager for Bath and West Community Electricity, and Shawn Robertson, project manager for Southern Electric, with one of the solar panels for the roof of the Mead Primary School.

Bath and West Community Energy, which emerged out of Transition Bath, have already begun commissioning the first solar PV systems on local schools (see right).  You can see a list of all the installations they’ll be doing before Christmas, and also this piece from the Wiltshire Times about the first systems that went up, at schools in Trowbridge and Corsham.

It is also worth a reminder about the new ‘Communities Living Sustainably’ fund launched by the Big Lottery Fund, which is looking for innovative projects building resilience and responding to climate change.  Could be a very attractive proposition for Transition initiatives.

Glen Ballinger outside his Maldon 50k local.

So, to Australia, where Transition Mount Alexander, Transition Bell and MINTI (Melbourne Inner Northwest Transition Initiative) all get a mention in this article which centres around the sustainable business practices of local Castlemaine outlet Green goes the Grocer.

At a recent event organised by the Municipal Association of Victoria called “Building Community Resilience and Minimising Risk”, which featured, among other speakers, David Holmgren and Sonya Wallace, (you can download their fantastic flyer/poster here), Andrew Lucas gave a presentation called ‘Councils and communities in Transition’:

…and Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins gave a presentation by Skype, complete with slides, which was followed up by a Q&A by Skype:

So, next to Canada.  Transition Comox Valley had a great turnout to their first ever gathering and were inspired by the creativity and vision that local people had to offer. Read more in the BC Local News.  In Ontario,  Transition Town Orillia held their second annual community fair at a local church (see pic below). Stalls, workshops and speakers highlighted items from composting to weight lifting for seniors (!) and affordable housing to knitting.

At the University of Prince Edward Island (the setting for the much loved Anne of Green Gables novels), George McRobie (founder of the ‘Intermediate Technology Group’ with E.F. Schumacher and co-founder of the New Economics Foundation) gave a talk on the Transition Movement in Europe & North America.

Some stories from Europe now.  You can listen to and read the transcript (all in German) of an interview with Rob Hopkins by Ursula Rütten for WDR5.de.  Also from Germany, here, as far as I can tell, are Transitioners from Goettingen, Kassel, Cologne and Berlin Friedrichshain who met on a permaculture course (?  Babelfish translator didn’t yield much useful information) and got together to plant a forest garden:

From the Netherlands, from Transition Town Nijmegen to be precise, here is a film, I think, about a community garden project:

Here is a short film from Monteveglio in Bologna, Italy, where the local council and the parks department revived (with, one suspects, some input from Transition Town Monteveglio, although that’s not specified) and old tradition of planting a new tree for every child born in the town that year, 44 to be exact:

In Belgium, Ath en Transition recently organised a screening of the excellent new film ‘Voices of the Transition‘, and the event made it onto the local TV news!  Here’s the clip:

Recently Rob Hopkins of Transition Network gave a presentation, remotely, to the Andalusia Convention on Climate Change and Urban Environment, which has now been put online, complete with Spanish subtitles:

On a similar note, Naresh Giangrande, also of Transition Network, recently visited Malmo (which, according to Wikipedia, is “in the southernmost province of Scania, is the third most populous city in Sweden”).  He gave the talk you can see below, which also featured either someone drilling into the walls of an adjacent room, or someone with a terrible snore who fell asleep during his talk:

So, next let’s hop to New Zealand, and the town of Devonport.   In this North Shore suburb of Auckland, representatives from Transition community Grey Lynn 2030 and Devonport Transition Town held an open evening to “create the community we want to live in” and covered topics such as fruit trees, green screenings, waste, farmers markets and community gardens. Read the full report in the local Devonport Speculator.

Some Kiwi ingenuity! Yolanda Van Den Bemd (left) and Ellen Schlinder (right) are part of the Pt Chevalier Transition Town crew who look after the Old Homestead Community Garden.

In another suburb west of Auckland, Point Chevalier is home to The Old Homestead Community set up by Transition Town Pt. Chevalier in 2009 and now shortlisted for community garden of the year in the New Zealand Gardener Magazine’s annual awards. Check out the bike powered water system (above)!

From Transition Hickory: Robb Riordan adjusts the faucet where water flows off his roof. Rob and his wife Jacqui can store up to 6000 gallons of rain water in their cisterns.

In the US, Transition Ashland, Massachusetts (nb. there is also a T-Ashland in Oregon) introduced proceedings at a meeting to discuss their vision of a downtown Farmers Market which residents hope to make a reality by spring 2012.   A great article about the emerging Transition Missoula appeared in the Montana Kaimin – The University of Montana’s Independent Campus Newspaper since 1898!   The Riordans helped set up Transition Bermuda and now live in Hickory where they have continued their Sustainable Living Project aka Transition Hickory (see left).

It has also been fascinating over the last month to see the debates and discussions about where Transition and the Occupy movement meet.  In Virginia, an Occupy Staunton rally was organized by Transition Staunton Augusta, the Augusta Coalition for Peace and Justice and Virginia Organizing. Unlike a lot of the other Occupy gatherings across the US this group has operated largely with the support and cooperation of city government. Read the full story here in the Augusta Free Press.

Also in the town at another event, Transition Staunton Augusta co-founder Erik Curren led an information session in conjunction with Occupy Staunton and the American Dream Movement titled “How the 1 Percent Crashed the Economy and What We Can Do About It”.   Erik and his wife Lindsay are founders of Transition Voice where this article titled Transitioners debate how to engage Occupy movement was recently posted.  That’s about it for November, see you next month!

The second ‘Transition Podcast’, which will go into more depth about three of the stories in this round-up, will be posted in a couple of weeks. 

‘Resilient to what?’

The first point of call in any discussion about resilience is ‘resilient to what?’  Fascinatingly, this document states that, when it comes to community resilience, “community resilience work should prepare for all relevant hazards and threats, prioritised as the community considers appropriate”.  So, rather than being determined from above, their suggestion is that it is for communities themselves to determine what they see as the greatest risks.  However, they do also point to the National Risk Register for civil emergencies, which illustrates what it regards as being the key threats communities need to build resilience to in the following graphic:

However, in terms of a recognition of the risks that are most pressing and likely, this chart clearly contrasts with that produced earlier this year by the World Economic Forum, which puts all of the above as way below what it regards as the 4 greatest risks, in terms of likelihood of occurring within the next 10 years and in terms of perceived economic impact: climate change, ‘energy price volatility’, fiscal crises and economic disparity.  None of these even make it into the National Risk Register’s table.  A friend of mine recently attended an event about emergency preparedness in Brussels which explored possible scenarios that could emerge from a collapse of the European economy.  The scenarios presented left him quite traumatised, yet in comparison, the Framework’s scenarios seem pretty tame, and somewhat more ephemeral in comparison!

Yet the Strategic Framework document, if read with the thought in mind that it is referring to resilience to peak oil, climate change, and economic contraction, actually reads in places like something Transition Network might have produced (as we will see).  That certainly took me by surprise.

Defining resilience

Throughout the document, resilience is defined as:

“The capacity of an individual, community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure, and identity”

…and community resilience as:

“Communities and individuals harnessing local resources and expertise to help themselves in an emergency, in a way that complements the response of the emergency services.”

It states that its role is to “invite individuals and communities to prepare themselves in the event of an emergency”, but also makes it very clear that, amazingly, “there is no dedicated funding for the programme”.  It restates the commitment, central to the Big Society concept, “to reduce the barriers which prevent people from being able to help themselves and to become less resilient to shocks”.  Like the Big Society, it assumes that communities can self-organise around community resilience with no resource for any of their work.  They do acknowledge Transition as one of the few community-led initiatives actually looking at resilience, and which is actually manage to inspire people to action around the theme of resilience:

“Resilience is also a key part of other kinds of community activity, for example the Transition Towns movement and the Greening Campaign where resilience is a longer term ambition for communities looking to adapt to climate change”

However, this does rather miss the point, suggesting that they are addressing “longer term” issues like climate change.  It is true that many of the impacts of climate change, and peak oil, and economic contraction, are longer term, but many are not, and indeed the window of time within which to profoundly modify our ways of doing things certainly is not.  And as the World Economic Forum argues, they look likely to be the most significant over the next 10 years.  That looks pretty short term to me.

The aims it sets out rather fascinatingly read like the aims of Transition Network!

• increase individual, family and community resilience against all threats and hazards;
• support and enable existing community resilience, and expand and grow these successful models of community resilience in other areas;
• remove the barriers which inhibit or prevent participation in community resilience at a local level;
• support effective dialogue between the community and the practitioners supporting them;
• raise awareness and understanding of risk and the local emergency response capability in order to motivate and sustain self resilience;
• provide tools to allow communities and individuals to articulate the benefits of emergency preparedness to the wider community;
• and provide a shared framework to support cross-sector activity at all levels in a way that ensures sufficient flexibility to make community

With such a clear recognition in a government publication that these ought to be key aims in terms of resilience, one would imagine that the work the Transition movement has been doing over the past 5 years, and the practical initiatives it has led to the ground, would have deserved more than one sentence in this publication.

Shifting the thinking slightly: a Transition take on resilience

The perspective on resilience that the Transition approach brings to this discussion would be useful to explore in more detail here. Rather than making do with the definition set out in this report, (“the capacity of an individual, community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure, and identity”), Transition adds another layer onto that, of arguing that community resilience, if done properly, could be about much more than just being able to ‘sustain an acceptable level of function, structure and identity’.  Rather, it argues, it offers the potential for stimulating the kind of economic revival at the local level that is so keenly sought at the moment.  A more resilient economy could be a more viable, entrepreneurial, biodiverse, flourishing economy.  As I argue in ‘The Transition Companion’:

“making a community more resilient, if viewed as the opportunity for an economic and social renaissance, for a new culture of enterprise and reskilling, should lead to a healthier and happier community while reducing its vulnerability to risk and uncertainty …. resilience is reframed as a historic opportunity for a far-reaching rethink”.

The new market in Portobello.

For example, setting up a food hub to create viable links between local producers and consumers, adding infrastructure for local food processing (such as Transition Norwich’s new community mill, or Portobello Transition Town’s new organic market, see right), creating urban food production and identifying new sites for that, mapping local foodsheds and supporting small farmers, setting up Community Supported Agriculture systems, all build food resilience and a community’s ability to respond in an emergency (much more than food stockpiles), but also have very beneficial impacts on the local economy too.  These kinds of things would have helped greatly in building resilience to, for example, the lorry drivers’ dispute of 2000 when food supplies in shops became dangerously low.

Likewise, setting up community energy systems that are in community ownership can also put in place infrastructure that would also be beneficial in terms of an acute emergency, while also boosting local economies.  It is for this reason that Transition Network and others are arguing for a Community Tariff to emerge from the Feed-in-Tariff review.  With Greg Barker, Energy and Climate Change Minister, recently tweeting that “Under Labours #FiTs, there is no way 2 differentiate btwn community projects + a hedgefund. We will change + create a new community tariff”, things look hopeful.  This could have a huge impact.

The document clearly states the principle that “the Government role is to support, empower and facilitate; ownership should always be retained by communities who have chosen to get involved in this work”.  This feels like an acknowledgement of Transition’s role of not waiting for permission but getting started building community resilience from the bottom up.  That’s not to say that a bit of more formal support wouldn’t be a good thing from time to time to actually accelerate the creativity that the Transition process can unleash!

Likewise, the building of social capital, creating a stronger sense of community and sense of optimism about that community’s ability to respond, as was observed through Transition Town Totnes’ ‘Transition Streets’ programme, is a key aspect of emergency preparedness.  Local currencies, such as the Brixton Pound (see left) and the forthcoming Bristol Pound, can be a powerful catalyst for rebuilding the connections between local businesses that a resilient community will need, and can focus thought on how local traders can best support and trade between each other.  Whether an emergency happens in 6 months or in 6 years, the additional resilience they will have created will still have a valuable impact.

Given the current government focus on localism, enterprise, decentralisation and resilience, I would argue that reframing community resilience as being about much more than how it is presented in this document would have huge benefits across the board.  It would focus the mind on what kind of new infrastructure would be needed, what new business opportunities emerge, and add an additional layer to the current obsession with recreating growth at all costs.  Does new housing which is not both built to very high standards of energy efficiency and built using local materials represent a huge missed opportunity, and actually reduce community resilience?  Is the continued undermining of local food economies through the enforced imposition of supermarkets ultimately self-defeating from a resilience perspective (as New Economics Foundation’s ‘Plugging the Leaks’ work suggests)?  Let’s have a bit of ‘joined-up thinking’ here please.

Certainly the Transition take on resilience is at odds with the one set out in this Framework, and to that set out in most academic literature on resilience, but as a paper by Alex Haxeltine and Gill Seyfang of UEA argued:

“Transition has been framed in terms of building (or rebuilding) resilience in local communities.  So far, the movement seems to have successfully used resilience as a motivating framing concept.  The lack of specificity used in the framing of resilience has probably contributed to resilience being perceived as an appealing goal by the wide range of citizens who have become involved with the movement”

In other words, it’s not resilience explained in the conventionally accepted way, but something about this expanded definition seems to be working, so maybe we’ll let them get on with it…

Features of community resilience

The Framework also identifies what it sees, from looking at a number of communities, as the key features of community resilience.  Viewed with the slight shift in thinking that allows us to imagine it is referring to communities responding to resilience in the way set out above, it makes fascinating reading:

• “People in resilient communities use their existing skills, knowledge and resources to prepare for, and deal with, the consequences of emergencies or major incidents.
• They adapt their everyday skills and use them in extraordinary circumstances.
• People in resilient communities are aware of the risks that may affect them. They understand the links between risks assessed at a national level and those that exist in their local area, and how this might make them vulnerable. This helps them to take action to prepare for the consequences of emergencies.
• The resilient community has a champion, someone who communicates the benefits of community resilience to the wider community. Community resilience champions use their skills and enthusiasm to motivate and encourage others to get involved and stay involved and are recognised as trusted figures by the community.
• Resilient communities work in partnership with the emergency services, their local authority and other relevant organisations before,  during and after an emergency. These relationships ensure that community resilience activities complement the work of the emergency services and can be undertaken safely.
• Resilient communities consist of resilient individuals who have taken steps to make their homes and families more resilient. Resilient individuals are aware of their skills, experience and resources and how to deploy these to best effect during an emergency.
• Members of resilient communities are actively involved in influencing and making decisions affecting them. They take an interest in their  environment and act in the interest of the community to protect assets and facilities.

Implications and reflections

So, having read the Framework, here are some of the standout thoughts for me:

• Community resilience, they seem to be arguing, is really important, it needs to be led by communities, but there’s no money to help them with that
• The best people to organise and enable community resilience are those communities themselves
• No thought appears to be being given to how the need for enhanced community resilience, the engagement of people in this work, sits alongside the localism agenda and the Plan for Growth, and the inherent conflicts that emerge between the two
• You need to figure out yourselves what it is that you want to build resilience to

But the question for government is whether the urgent dash for growth at all costs (which they are taking to calling ‘positive growth’), could actively undermine the ability of communities to respond in the way argued for in the Framework.  I was recently sent a very attractive hardback book (see right) called ‘Working together. Delivering growth though localism‘ produced by the Department for Communities and Local Government. It contains a section where the term ‘sustainable development’ is redefined thus:

“‘Sustainable’ means ensuring better lives for ourselves, but does not mean worse lives for future generations, and

‘Development’ means growth.  Accommodating new ways by which we earn our living in a competitive world, housing a rising population, and responding to changes new technologies offer”.

In other words, sustainable development is now any development which sustains growth.  So here we have two agendas, one that is about stimulating economic growth at all costs, downplaying climate change and peak oil and removing all obstacles to large businesses doing what they like, and another which is about enabling communities to self-organise and actively respond to those things that they think reduce their resilience.  Both are central to the UK government’s agenda, yet they run in complete parallel to each other, seen as entirely distinct and separate.  However, if they were seen as being part of the same thing, as the Transition movement has argued, and has modelled in practice for 5 years, the benefits could be enormous.  It would take only a fairly subtle shift in thinking, but it may turn out to be the thing that actually stimulates the economic activity, skills, training and investment they are presently so desperately scrabbling for.

Often flooding, and the other risks in the National Risk Register, are challenges that people don’t feel drawn do much about because they feel they are beyond their being able to usefully have an impact and they tend to be seen as issues emergency services deal with.  What the Transition movement has done over the past 5 years is to bring the subject of resilience to life for people, to make it relevant, exciting even.  People can sense new possibilities in the concept of resilience that weren’t there 5 years ago.  It would be great if the next time this Framework is published, rather than just citing Transition initiatives as some kind of brief case study, it was able to argue that, as well as the sandbags and other elements of community emergency preparedness, an accelerated programme of economic localisation must also be a key component of any realistic programme of community resilience.  Perhaps as well as the bodybags and the sandbags we also need foodhubs and SPIN farming?

The spirit of the Framework is that the onus is on communities to organise around resilience.  If nothing else, the fact that Transition is now mentioned specifically creates a very useful basis for discussions with your local emergency response team, local NHS, or your local police.  There is now a more common language, it’s over to us to demonstrate that the work of Transition initiatives is not peripheral, but has the potential to be central to any effective programme of community resilience.  This Framework is a very useful tool for initiating those discussions that matter.  As Robert Jensen argues in a piece in the latest Yes! magazine, “no political project based on denying reality can be viable for the long term”.

This book seeks to answer the question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some voices of Occupy LSX

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

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

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

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

Some reflections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In his article he quoted Sharon Astyk as saying:

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

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

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

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

Some of these stories feature in ‘The Transition Companion’, and you can subscribe to Transition Network’s monthly newsletter here.

Here are some photos to accompany the podcast….

Information about the Tres Hombres

Captain Jorne Langelaan telling the assembled visitors about the ship.

Exeter Brewery's beer stowed safely in the hold.