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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is some updated information on the Festival of Transition:

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

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

The ‘What if?’ events include:

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

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

 The ‘Transition Walks’ include:

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

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

Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we have capitalism without economic growth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘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”.

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.

Thursday 20 October 2011 was a landmark day in the Vale of Glamorgan and one that will have a knock-on effect around the country and hopefully beyond. It was a day where community power helped to bring about a unanimous decision by the local county council to deny Coastal Oil & Gas the right to test for shale gas at an industrial estate on the outskirts of the village of Llandow.

Louise Evans on the local BBC News.

A few months prior to this, in February 2011, all that stood between the multi-billion dollar highly environmentally damaging fracking industry and a test drill being carried out in the Vale was one individual. Louise Evans runs a nearby caravan park and when she found out what was being planned she started researching the fracking process and raising awareness. Louise set up a web site and the ‘Vale Says No’ campaign was born.

The local Transition towns, Transition Cowbridge and Transition Llantwit, have been active for the past three years. From the work already done we knew that there was a part of the community that did not need any convincing that something that had the potential to cause significant environmental damage, as well as keeping the focus on an unsustainable finite energy source, should be halted. However, as the wider community have not yet seen the light and moved to a more positive and resilient way of life, both Transition groups donned their awareness raising hats to focus their energies on supporting the Vale Says No campaign.

The Vale Says No set up several public meetings to bring the issue of fracking and its consequences to the public’s attention. Both Transition groups used their existing networks to rally as many supporters as possible. This not only helped to generate a significant number of letters of objection, it was during one of these meetings that Coastal Oil & Gas was made aware that they had failed to consider a house only 200m away from the possible drilling site in their application. This resulted in them withdrawing their application and bought the campaign some much needed time to carry out research into the company and gather further evidence.

As soon as Coastal Oil & Gas re-applied for planning, everyone was quick off the mark and Transition Cowbridge hosted a public meeting to a full house in the Town Hall. Word was spread via the website, the local press and by hand delivering invitations to local councillors, Welsh Assembly members and community organisations. A large number of the people attending had not heard of fracking and alarm bells started ringing. This not only resulted in creating greater general awareness but it also helped to bring some key community members together who would go on to directly support the campaign. In addition to this Transition Llantwit hosted a viewing of the feature length documentary Gasland which highlighted to all the significant impacts that could result if fracking was allowed to take place.

Pressure was maintained by Transition and the campaign called for a ‘peaceful protest’ to take place outside Cowbridge Town Hall on the day that the Council were holding a roadshow inside (see right). Students from a local College piled in with banners and some well rehearsed chanting.  The protest headed up the High Street on a day when the town was full of Saturday shoppers.  A Dogs Trust charity shop was in the middle of a celebrity opening. John Barrowan is a patron and three hundred people had turned up.  They all got the benefit of the marching protesters. More awareness raised!

The week of the planning decision arrived and due to the significant awareness raised the council felt it important to hold a scrutiny meeting. This gave both sides a chance to offer their reasonings for and against and resulted in some crucial questions being raised that defiantly helped to added weight to the councils final decision.

The day of the planning decision arrived and following a site visit by the councillors and a screening of Gaslands, the Planning Committee sat.  They had been met on their way into the building by another lively but peaceful protest. BBC and ITV were filming and interviews were given to BBC radio, national and local.

Decision time

Despite the electric atmosphere in the room there was a definite sense that the there was nothing else that could be done. With great relief one by one the councillors made their cases for overturning the application and in most cases a focused and passionate speech was given as to why neither test drilling or fracking should be allowed to go ahead. The decision was rubberstamped by the councils concerns over a letter sent by Welsh Water which had been voiced at the earlier Scrutiny meeting. If groundwater became polluted by drilling fluid they could not guarantee that the situation could be ‘remediated’. “Once polluted, we would be stuck with it”.

The positive impact of the Transition movement

By supporting the Vale Says No campaign, Transition not only helped to quickly spread the issue to a much wider audience but also broaden the argument to one that incorporated the bigger picture of long term community happiness and resilience. And it was this level-headed approach that gave the campaign a real sense of credibility and one that helped convince the local planning committee to vote unanimously against the application.

So from a starting point of just one person it had very quickly become a community supported campaign that has succeeded in putting a very big spoke in the works for an industry blindly focused on finite energy extraction at any cost.

So where do we go from here?

Fracking is definitely not an issue just reserved for the Vale and as has been shown in Blackpool this processes can happen all too fast and undetected if communities are not alert. And this is where Transition Towns all around the globe can play there part in not just being vigilant to fracking but continuing to do the great work they do at providing communities with a positive vision of life without the need for such unconscious acts.

Having invested a lot of energy and time in the campaign you would think that our Transition projects would have suffered. However, not only have we been able to keep our other projects running well, we also have to say that our involvement has actually raised awareness of transition in the region as well as improved our track record.

So now, we are looking forward to making use of the newly gained publicity and keep it coming while being able to re-channel all of our energies back into our projects. Just today we’ve received some funding for our community growing project, which will enable us to purchase more plants, signage etc. Sometimes, Transition does feel like a full time job!

Links to invaluable info about fracking:

1)      http://bridgendgreens.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/how-was-the-llandow-test-drilling-application-overturned/

2)      http://nofrackinguk.com/ , http://thevalesaysno.com/, http://www.transitioncowbridge.org/108-2/, http://transitionllantwit.wordpress.com/anti-fracking-campaign/

3)      http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/14271

4)      http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/sites/default/files/coop_shale_gas_report_final_200111.pdf

5)      http://www.theecologist.org/tv_and_radio/ecologist_film_unit/1074609/fracking_hell_the_environmental_costs_of_the_new_us_gas_drilling_boom.html

6)      http://www.co-operative.coop/Toxicfuels/shale-gas

7)      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-15399052

Last week Bill McKibben was in town, and I was lucky enough to get to interview him for half an hour before his talk to a packed St. John’s Church in Totnes (which Jay Tompt reflected on here).  I had asked for some questions for Bill on Twitter, and apart from the frankly bizarre “will I ever play the piano again?”, tried to weave most of the questions people sent into the interview.  My thanks to Bill for finding time in his hectic schedule:

Hi Bill… great to see you… what brings you to Totnes?

The two things that bring me to Totnes are wanting to get back to Schumacher College for a little while, which is a remarkable place, especially on this 100^th year of Schumacher, and wanting to get back to Totnes and see the ‘Mother Church of Transition’!  (laughs). You know, I spent a lot of my time in motion around the planet and I run into and work with Transition Towns all over the place and get to see all of the amazing stuff that’s going on, but it will be fun to be able to tell them all about what’s happening back at ‘the source’.

You’ve been quite busy the past few weeks in the States!

I’ve spent more nights in jail than I have at home in the past couple of months, which is probably not a good ratio.  We’ve been fighting very hard this plan to run a pipeline from the tar sands of  northern Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico and I kind of organised the biggest civil disobedience campaign in the US in over 35 years or so.  And we’ve had another huge global day of action at 350.org with thousands of events mostly based around the bicycle, taking place in pretty much every country on earth.  So between those two things I’ve had enough to do.

Why are the tar sands so important in the fight against climate change?

We should have been involved in this fight a long time ago because they are wrecking indigenous land as they mine this stuff and the pipeline is a clear and present danger to the land it traverses, but I didn’t really get involved with it until the great climatologist James Hansen and his team at NASA wrote a paper documenting just how much carbon there was up there in Canada.  It’s the second largest pool of carbon on Earth after Saudi Arabia.  If you could burn all that oil overnight, which thank God you can’t, you would raise the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from its current 393ppm, already much to high, to about 540ppm.  As Hansen said, in technical scientist’s language, and I quote, it would be “essentially game over for the climate”.

So we gotta stop it from happening.  We burned Saudi Arabia, and that raised the temperature of the Earth a degree, we didn’t know about climate change when we went into Saudi Arabia, so no great shame on us.  But if we go into the second Saudi Arabia knowing what we now know, and do the same thing, then we’re the worst kind of idiots.  And we will, without huge uprising to prevent it, because there’s a lot of money to be made there, and a lot of powerful people who want some of that money.

Recently Mark Lynas and Stewart Brand have argued that the green movement has “lost its way” recently.  How do you stand on that?

I don’t think that there’s been, at least around climate, much of a movement.  That’s what we’ve been trying to build over the last 3 or 4 years.  There’ve been all kinds of expert scientists and things saying what needs to happen, but what we’ve lacked has been a movement.  I think we’re just finally now building one.  In terms of nuclear power, I think politically, post-Fukushima, its not actually going to happen in most places that have democracies.  That’s just reality.  The reason it wasn’t happening before Fukushima and this still applies, is because it is too expensive.  It’s one more effort to build big centralised power, but it’s ruinously expensive to do it this way.

At this point, all the hip engineers and scientists are far more interested in what they call ‘distributed generation’ and think it makes a lot more sense to build spread out, redundant grid-tied systems that take advantage of things that nature would just as soon give us for free, sun and wind.  So I hope we head in that direction.  You can make an argument for nuclear power, I just don’t think it’s going to happen, because among other things it’s deucedly expensive to do.

You named your organisation 350.org.  We’re currently at 393ppm.  Is it actually possible to get back to 350ppm?

Oh sure.  Physically it’s possible.  If you stopped burning carbon tomorrow, well before the end of the century you’d be back to 350ppm.  You’d do some damage in the meantime, there’s already a lot of damage being done, but oceans and forests do suck carbon out of the atmosphere, that’s how we got all those oil fields and coal beds in the first place y’know.  Physically it’s possible.  The question is whether it is politically possible or not?  And I don’t know.

It’s a really hard stretch Rob… fossil fuels is a central part of the world economy, so getting off it requires both the kind of local example that Transition provides such good examples of, and, and these are complementary and not at all competitive, a strong political battle to, among other things, change the price of carbon.  And when we do, these battles are complementary, because it will make it much easier for people to understand the need to Transition, once the price of energy reflects the damage it does in the atmosphere.

What’s the role of communities in mitigating and adapting to climate change?

Communities are the integers of this operation.  They are more important than individuals, and probably more important than states and nations.  In terms of adaption, most of my intellectual work, my writing work in recent years has been about the need and the possibility to build strong local economies.  One of the reasons that is so important, perhaps THE reason why that’s so important, is because that’s what we will need in order to adapt to that which we can no longer prevent in terms of climate change.

The problem is that communities by themselves can’t get this job done.  We’re not going to do it in the time that physics and chemistry allow us by addition alone, “my town does this, your town does it, then maybe your brother-in-law sees it and tries to talk his town into doing some of it and so on and so forth”.  That’s happening, and its good to see it happening, but as you know it has not yet bent any of the curves of carbon emissions.

We are also going to have to work by multiplication, and that’s an inherently political process.  That means changing the rules of the game, and the reason that it is such a hard fight is that there are people making so much money doing what they are doing now, and they are willing to spend some of that money to work the political process and make sure we don’t get change.  So it’s a constant, constant battle, and that work we need to carry on at a national and even a global level.

It’s one of the great ironies and paradoxes that at the same moment that we need both stronger communities than we’ve ever needed them before and we really need, almost for the first time, a working global system, because we have the first really global problem.  I mean, nuclear weapons were, in a sense, a global problem, but they were confined to a certain number of states.  Compared to this it was a relatively simple problem, because everyone could picture the destruction that comes with a few nuclear bombs, but it’s harder to picture the destruction that comes with the explosions in millions of pistons that take place every minute of every day.

One of the things that is very live within Transition is that edge between activism and protest culture and ‘doing Transition’.  Where do you sit with that?

One of the reasons we set up 350.org in the way we did was precisely with that in mind.  We didn’t want to build a kind of big, centralised organisation, we wanted to have a campaign that would allow people to spend most of their time doing what all of us should do, be at home working on our own communities, and yet have some way to come together with other communities all over the world and multiply one’s political power.  That’s why when we do days of action it’s thousands upon thousands of places in hundreds of languages in hundreds of countries and it’s beautiful and powerful.

We also need some centralised campaigning around certain particular pressure points because we gotta score some victories and put the other side on the defensive.  So it was really good to be in Washington at the White House at the centre of power and to watch for two weeks as a hundred people a day showed up from every state in the union and got arrested.  Many of them were people who are working on Transition back in their communities, probably most of them.

Yet they also recognised the importance of doing this kind of work.  There’s no either/or, it’s got the be both/and, especially now, because one of the things I think we have come to realise in the past year or so is that peak oil isn’t going to do any of this work for us.   It’s true that we’ve had peak oil in conventional terms, and it’s also true that the high price of oil, and the profits to be made since there’s no carbon penalty attached to it, have driven people to find more than enough unconventional oil and gas to keep us going way past the point where we’ll break the climatic back of the planet.  As I said, there’s as much oil in the tar sands of Canada as there is in Saudi Arabia, and at $80 a barrel, they’re happy to pull it out of the ground for us.

I’ve brought my copy of ‘The End of Nature’ which I read when I was 24…

I wrote it when I was 27!

… it was certainly one of the most impactful books I read in my whole life.  I wonder how you personally, having been immersed in that understanding, that knowledge, for the past 20-30 years, how do you keep smiling and keep going and not just weep in a corner somewhere?

That’s a very good question, and actually when the book came out, I was in a pretty dark place for a while, and sometimes still am.  But, two things.  One, there is a certain amount of catharsis in writing and getting your own angst out onto everyone else…

Yeah, thanks for that …

.. and in the second place I have a certain advantage now which is that I’ve been living with this stuff for 23-24 years, day in and day out, and at a certain point it’s like you get over grief from someone dying and you just go on and so in a certain way I’m probably more emotionally prepared to deal with climate change than people who are learning about it for the first time.  It’s part of my mental framework, I know what the stakes are, and now I assuage my grief simply by working very, very, very hard and I find that helps.

I think I would be rather grief-stricken if I didn’t have some way to get up every day and really fight.  Frankly, some of the time I take out whatever grief I have on the people I’m fighting, there are days when I really despise and hate the oil companies and coal companies and take a certain unholy amount of pleasure in trying to make their lives more difficult, even if we don’t win!

Is your sense that the tar sands campaign is starting to have an impact?

Look, it’s changed the odds a little bit.  Most likely we’ll still lose, there’s, at current value, 3 or 4 trillion dollars worth of oil that’s recoverable.  3 or 4 trillion dollars puts a lot of pressure on systems, it’s like a law of nature almost!  The odds are against us, but they’re better than they were a few weeks ago!  We’re fighting real hard.  The one reason we have any kind of chance is because President Obama gets to make this call by himself without Congress in the way, and we’re trying to demonstrate that there’s some political pain if he makes it the wrong way.  It’s a hard thing to do in a country where the alternatives are nutty Republicans, so who knows how it all works out, but we’re fighting hard.

Any last thoughts for the Transition movement?

The good news is, and we’ve talked mostly about bad news, the good news is that every place around the world is starting to kick in in a really strong way.  I watch it in the US and the local food movement is astonishing.  It’s carrying the field before it.  Last year the US Department of Agriculture said there were more farms in the US than the year before, the first time that’s happened in 150 years.  That’s really good news.  The biggest demographic trend in American history has bottomed out and is beginning to reverse.

So I think the good news is that given time, we can do this.  The bad news is that unless we can get carbon under control, we’re not going to have the time to do it, and instead of making a nice beautiful cultural transition to something different, we’re just going to end up fighting and endless series of rescue operations and emergency battles and so on and so forth.  So much as I would like to be at home in Vermont, I seem to spend virtually all of my time on the road, if not in jail!  There you are!

… and we’re very deeply grateful for it….

… and I’m so grateful for all the work you guys are doing because that’s what makes me what to keep going, the thought that there really is some vision on the other side of what the world might look like.  So, we shall see!

Wedges?

Socolow recently wrote a short paper for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ‘The Wedges Reaffirmed’, in which he defended the original paper, and argued that, given the lack of decisive action since the idea was first proposed, and therefore the increased scale of the challenge, the world now needs 9 wedges rather than the 7 that were proposed in 2004.  Let’s just look a bit closer at this whole ‘wedge’ concept.  The idea is that rather than looking at the scale of cuts in emissions and seeing it as a huge, impossible task, it is broken into highly ambitious but manageable pieces.  As Socolow puts it, “we decomposed a heroic challenge into a limited set of monumental tasks”.  This is immensely valuable.  The wedges include things like:

• efficiency and conservation
• shifting from coal to gas
• carbon capture and storage
• nuclear fission
• renewable energy sources
• forests and agriculture

Within that, there are some good things.  The reduction in car use, an increase in public transport, the prevention of deforestation and good treatment of soils, and a big scaling up of renewable energy are clearly vital.  Yet at the same time, there are also strategies such as replacing coal burning with gas, increased nuclear power, the rolling out of carbon capture and storage and the increased vehicle efficiency and electrification of car use.  Yet these are deeply flawed, and exhibit how the approach fails to embrace the wider nature of our predicament.

The replacement of coal with gas is widely seen as a good thing, but given the problems already associated with maintaining demand (the IEA recently stated that it believes both coal and gas production look set to peak in 2020), and the suggestion that the switch from coal to gas may well actually increase emissions due to the associated leaking of methane, this starts to look a bit shaky.  It is also clear that in the UK, this increased reliance on gas is being pushed as an energy security question which necessitates the introduction of gas fracking, which it is now clear the UK government has little interest in regulating in any meaningful way.  Carbon capture and storage, it must be remembered, is still an experimental technology rather than a panacea ready to be universally rolled out tomorrow.  The best form of carbon capture and storage is, ultimately, leaving it in the ground in the first place.

At the same time as these solutions are being represented as being ‘reaffirmed”, UK oil production from the North Sea fell 25% in the last quarter, and if Chris Skrebowski is correct, that peak oil is, to all intents and purposes, the moment at which the oil price means that economic growth is no longer possible, then we have virtually reached that historic landmark.  There is also evidence that the switch to electric cars may actually increase dependency on coal and could have a higher footprint than efficient petrol vehicles.  These wedges all increase dependency on centrally controlled, top-down technologies.  There is also a huge question, given the rapid unravelling of the economy, as to whether we will be able to afford these huge infrastructure projects, in terms of the energy they will require and in terms of what they will cost.  The Right argue that we need deep cuts and austerity, to ‘unfetter’ big business and that we can tackle climate change once we ‘return to growth’.  The Left argue that now is the time for borrowing even more money for a debt-heavy Keynesian infrastructure spending splurge, yet as Richard Heinberg argues in ‘The End of Growth’:

“The Keynesians still see the world through the lens of the Great Depression.  During the 1930s, industrialised countries were in the early stages of their shift from an agrarian, coal-based, rural economy to an electrified, oil-based, urban economy – a shift that required enormous infrastructure investments that would ultimately pay off handsomely for a nation on the verge of realising a consumer utopia.  All that was needed to initiate the building of that infrastructure was credit – grease for the wheels of commerce…. Now is different … both the US and the world as a whole have passed a fundamental crossroads characterised by increasing scarcity of energy and crucial minerals.  Because of this, strategies of growth that worked reliably in the mid- to- late 20th century – via various forms of business and technological development – have reached a point of diminishing returns”.

In his recent paper, Socolow argues that part of the blame for the fact that the world hasn’t adopted the wedges approach can be laid at the door of the environmental movement, for being so upbeat and chipper about the impacts and not acknowledging that there will be ‘pain’ alongside the ‘gain’ (as it were).  Telling the world about climate change is likely to be as unwelcome as Galileo announcing that the world is round, he argues, and the failure to recognise this has hugely reduced the movement’s effectiveness.  Environmentalists are also at fault, apparently, for not acknowledging uncertainties in the climate science, and also for not acknowledging that every proposed solution carries risks.  I think it is far more likely that most of Pacala and Socolow’s wedges are, ultimately, unfeasible due to their own energy intensity and cost in a contracting global economy.

In response to what?

Socolow and Pacala’s wedges were conceived and proposed solely as responses to climate change.  Yet, of course, climate change is not the only challenge we face.  As the World Economic Forum’s recently-released analysis of the risks facing the world over the next 10 years identified, extreme energy price volatility and the fiscal crisis sit alongside climate change, closely followed by economic disparity, collectively leading the field in terms of risks we need to be building resilience to as a matter of urgency (see below).

Therefore when I look at their wedges, and particularly at Socolow’s new paper which argues the case for adding two additional wedges but doesn’t actually say what they are, I am led to speculate that a more effective approach to the wedges would necessitate ditching those that are massively costly, centralised and energy intensive infrastructure projects, and to adding one vital strategy, currently missing from Pacala and Socolow’s very ‘business-as-usual’ approach, but which, I believe, could take up a few wedges-worth of wedge space.  It would be a wedge which, unlike the others, also addresses the other challenges rather than centralising power and economic benefits to a small number of corporations in the way that, say, a new programme of nuclear power would.  It is what Peter North terms “intentional localisation”.

The localisation wedge

North has argued that peak oil means that:

“transport again becomes significant in terms of cost, resource use and emissions.  Currently very cheap goods produced through globalised production networks will become, and remain, more expensive.  The currently near will become further away, again, in a process of ‘reverse globalisation’.”

This ‘reverse globalisation’ would mean that either we lay back supine and allow the impacts of this to wash over us as they like (our current situation), or that we engage proactively with it.  A programme of ‘intentional localisation’ would strive to boost production of local food and other essential produce for local markets, use the building regulations to introduce a shift in building materials so as to create new markets for local and vernacular building materials, would incentivise decentralised energy systems where possible for new developments, and community ownership of renewable energy generation.  It would seek to implement a favouring of the local through procurement policies which would necessitate a rolling back of much that has been dismissed under the term ‘protectionism’.

It would ensure that the true costs of, for example, the UK exporting the same amount of potatoes to Germany each year as it imports from Germany each year, would be reflected in the costs of doing so, and would actively discourage such silliness.  It would cap the size companies could grow to and break them up if they went above that.  It would introduce a national ‘maximum wage’ to sit alongside the national minimum wage.  It would recognise urban agriculture as a key element of urban land use planning.

It would take the new economics foundation’s ‘leaky bucket’ metaphor, which sees local economies as being like leaky buckets, and each hole in that bucket as a potential livelihood/business/enterprise, and turn that into a policy objective.  It would turn ‘localism’ into ‘localisation’.  It would be a mature facing-up to our current situation, rather than the UK government’s current approach of assuming that all development is ‘sustainable development’ and that we need to reduce all obstacles to business, such as the absurd new policy of increasing the speed limit on the UK’s motorways because “increasing the motorway speed limit to 80mph would generate economic benefits of hundreds of millions of pounds through shorter journey times”.

Of course, an active programme of intentional localisation would require a huge and genuine shift in power, given that the shift in focus in the planning system is away from community empowerment and on corporations being able to ride roughshod over local economies, as George Monbiot so brilliantly highlighted recently. Some of the policies that this would require are set out in nef’s excellent ‘The Great Transition’ document.

It’s a new paradigm out there…

Yet this is, if ever there was, a time for new thinking.  The internet is still abuzz with discussion as to whether Alessio Rastani, who appeared on BBC News earlier this week and left everyone reeling, was for real, a Yes Man, or a chancer.  Here’s the clip in case you didn’t see it:

It certainly amplifies the ‘Titanic groaning’ sensation I wrote about last week.  But the reality is, as ‘Kid Dynamite’ blogged the next day, that nothing Rastani said should come as any news to anyone.  The candour with which he said what he said is something with which we are hugely unfamiliar, hence its impact, but that’s all.  We have reached the end of growth, the end of the age of cheap energy, the end of the time where we can ignore climate change, or assume its something we’ll deal with in the future when we have a growing economy again. It’s a different world now. It feels different.  It does to me anyway.

In this context, much of what Socolow and Pacala feature in their wedges are rapidly becoming hugely expensive infrastructure projects that the world simply can’t afford any more.  While the UK’s High Speed Rail project is proving hugely controversial, I can’t imagine that there will ever be the funds to make it happen, nor the surplus net energy to commit to such a project.  I did an interview with national business news TV when I was in Brussels the other day.  The interviewer said “can we live without oil?”, to which the only possible reply I could give was “I really don’t think we’re going to have much choice”.

Why Transition matters

This is why Transition is such a hugely important thing.  Clearly government is still at the stage of hoping, on some deep irrational level, that it can still pull economic growth out of the fire, even though all that is happening at the moment is that their fingers are getting more and more burnt.  It sees the way of achieving that as being to remove ‘red tape’ and to allow the construction industry access to whatever building land it chooses.  It focuses on a return to growth above all else, peak oil and climate change shoved into the “to deal with once growth is restored” box (George Osborne recently ambitiously declared “we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe”).  Yet, increasing the speed limit increases oil dependency, gas fracking increases carbon emissions.  In spite of recent improvements in domestic energy efficiency, increasing consumption leads to increased energy use, and so it goes on.

So, increasingly, modelling this localisation wedge in practice is vital.  No-one else is going to do it.  Transition groups are already:

• Showing that community energy companies bring a wide range of benefits and are viable.
• Creating new local food systems that benefit local farmers and growers and allow more money to cycle locally.
• Developing and trialling innovative new local currency schemes such as the Brixton Pound which have huge potential replicability and scalability.
• Finding productive ways to work with their local councils on a range of projects
• Creating initiatives like Transition Streets which show that just giving grants for domestic renewable isn’t enough, that underpinning it with a street-by-street behaviour change process greatly increases the all-round carbon reduction, while building local economic activity and sense of community.

These models, this experimentation, is vital, because it leads by example, and does a better job of addressing our challenges than the government take does.  They also build, rather than diminish, equality.  As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in ‘The Spirit Level’:

“How might greater equality and policies to reduce carbon emissions go together? Given what inequality does to a society, and particularly how it heightens competitive consumption, it looks not only as if the two are complementary, but also as if governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without reducing inequality.”

Current policies are doing exactly the opposite.

Doing the maths

Yet where we fall down in arguing the above isn’t the reasons that Socolow argues above, but rather because we don’t have the research on localisation.  We have the data in terms of how much carbon could be saved through a new programme of nuclear power, how many jobs it would create, how much it would cost and what the measurable benefits would be (at least I’m assuming we do!).  Likewise for vehicle efficiency and carbon capture and storage (which it must be remembered doesn’t actually work yet).  But we don’t have that for localisation.  This is a piece of research that desperately needs to be undertaken.

I would hazard a guess that a far more effective and appropriate set of wedges, which would actually address the confluence of challenges we actually face, would include, among other things:

• Intentional economic localisation backed with meaningful support of emerging new businesses and organisations
• A crash programme of energy efficiency across all sectors
• A crash programme of renewable energy, where possible in community ownership (the figure I suggest in The Transition Companion is around 25%)
• A big increase in public transport
• Preventing deforestation and promoting the building of soils
• Reducing consumerism through restrictions on advertising

My guess is that such a piece of research would find that localisation would generate more economic activity at the local level as well as saving more carbon, reducing oil dependency, and boosting equality and democracy.  It would also cost much less.  As Paul Kingsnorth argued this week, our future lies in smallness not by removing any obstacles that stand in the way of bigness becoming even bigger.  Such a piece of research would also identify the elements of this transition that can be held, led and managed by communities, and which need to be more top-down.  If anyone has already done such a piece of research, I’d love to see it (I would think that CAT’s ZCB2030 would provide a strong foundation for parts of it), if not, let’s do it shall we?  It may well turn out to be one hell of a wedge.

I wrote the other week about a debate I had been on on ABC Radio in Australia with writer, artist and psychotherapist Dr Chris James about Transition.  The discussion was chaired by host Michael Cathcart and it explored her idea that Transition “a way of opting out while consumer society carries on business as usual” and, quite bizarrely, seems to blame Transition for the increase in attacks on refugees in Australia!  You can listen to the piece, or download it as a podcast for your listening pleasure, here.

As one respondent put it after I posted the picture on Twitter, “had an idea: ask someone their birth date, calculate how long ago that was, there’s your body age”.  Just saved you 15 minutes (plus a few quid I imagine…).  I love the idea of their being a “registered official test centre”.  Anyway, I digress…

So, RESOLVE is a group of academics and researchers looking at various aspects of the transition to a low carbon society.   The day brought together some of the RESOLVE team to present their research and also to hear from other speakers (one of whom was me).  I arrived late, due to travelling up early from Devon (how I love Newton Abbot at 7am.), so I missed Tim Jackson’s opening address and Juliet Schor, author of ‘The Overworked American’ talking about the role of working hours in the transition to sustainability.

The first session I went to included a talk by Alexia Coke (see right), who is doing a PhD about Transition and food.  Hers was the only talk I actually took any notes on, so here they are… Her focus is on the south of England and on food, acknowledging that food is where most Transition initiatives start.  She referred to an ‘evolving repertoire’ or strategies they are adopting, including growing food locally, buying local food, gathering wild/unused harvests, courses, mapping local food, local processing and local provisioning.

She told the story of the garden share scheme in Totnes and how it began to inspire other groups to do the same thing.  Some groups started their own versions in partnership with other organisations, for example Transition Farnham also drew on a similar scheme their Parish Council had set up, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall visited Totnes, was inspired, set up Landshare, and now some Transition groups, such as Guilford used Landshare to enable them to set up their own version of garden share.  Landshare now has 40,000 members.  She referred to this as “circulation and reinvention” within the Transition movement.

She talked about how the Transition movement has a wide range of mechanisms for sharing and collecting project concepts and experiences, but that equally as useful are the links between initiatives and the support they offer each other.  She noted how Transition is open source, experiemental, non-prescriptive and adapts to local circumstance.  She talked of how the vision of the future is important and how Transition is about creating local food systems, “creating parallel infrastructure”, within a discourse about local food.  It is, she said, “as much about livelihoods as it is about lifestyle” (I liked that bit… I might have it printed on a Tshirt).

After lunch Baroness Julia Neuberger spoke about behaviour change and the inquiry she is part of in the House of Lords about behaviour change and public policy.  She talked about the extent to which government can ‘nudge’ people into changing their behaviour and where it is appropriate for government to intervene and when not.  Especially interesting was her floating of the idea that government needs consent from the wider public for such behaviour change programmes.

Then I went to a session of presentations about “perspectives on governance and change” which I have to say mostly went over my rather tired head and made me very glad that I’m not an academic.  In the final session I spoke about the idea of ‘Transition as cookery’, offering a pretty-much graph and conceptual model-free look at what Transition is doing, what seems to be working and what isn’t.  I think I was the only talk with props (a bottle of Sunshine Ale from Lewes and a horrible jumper from Taunton), and there were some great questions after I had finished.  I was very happy that, given the academic qualifications of many of those attending, I was able to understand all the questions I was asked.

The event was drawn to a close by Tim Jackson (see left).  What’s great about Tim is that he is an academic who is able to speak with passion and poetry, with great eloquence and clarity.  He set out the insights that are emerging from RESOLVE’s work and the importance of making sure they underpin the shifts that society needs to make.  And that was that… I set off back to Paddington station, late because the event overran, got lost, sweaty, missed my train, and got home late.  Anyway, it was good to see some old friends and to meet some new ones, and to be part of this stimulating event.  And I managed to get some time on the train home to sit and work out just how old my body is.  It took me way less than 15 minutes.

“To take in what is happening an inter-disciplinary vision is necessary in order to connect ‘the fields’ that are institutionally kept separate”.

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear

“No is one of the most honourable words in the English language,” said Deepak. “It needs to be reclaimed.” Deepak Rughani is a campaigner and co-director of Biofuelwatch and he’s talking about the defence of natural ecosystems, an area he feels the Transition movement ignores. Without action to prevent the exploitation of the wild lands reduction of carbon emissions becomes meaningless. Without stringent protection of the pristine grasslands and rainforest in the Amazon basin the world’s rainfall patterns are dramatically disturbed and thus our ability to feed ourselves.

I’m researching a piece for the Transition newsletter about the relationship between activism and Transition and finding it’s a giant subject. Too large really for one voice and one blog. And when we say activism what exactly do we mean? Does this include campaigning and grassroots community activism, as well as direct action and civil disobedience?

I had met Deepak at our meeting to discuss Nicole Foss’s talk on financial deflation and our economic future where he had given an introductory overview. That’s when I noticed a shift that was happening in Transition. We had been working diligently on our community projects, building culture and infrastructure, when BAM! the world stormed right back into the room. Although we were talking about local solutions we were also debating the big global issues: civil liberties, civil disobedience. There was a buzz in the air I hadn’t felt in a long while. It brought a reality and an urgency into play that had been missing.

2011 is not 2010. It is the year when politics came back into all our lives, as we found ourselves marching against the Government’s public spending cuts, watching the uprisings in the Middle East with fast-beating hearts – a time when we are being challenged to take a stand in a way that was no longer just about saying Yes.

The fact is many people in Transition are also activists and campaigners and as I began speaking with some of them I realised that we don’t talk about it much. We live our lives in separate stories. In our meetings we are Transitioners and in the “outside world” we are someone else. It’s a phenomenon of our culture that Paul Kingsnorth writes about in the second issue of Dark Mountain. In Transition Norwich there are people who are activists for Greenpeace, for CND, who go on climate actions and marches, who sign petitions, who fight for the NHS, for the forests, for the libraries, who protest against Tescos, against the Northern Distributor road, who lobby politicians and councillors, who are those councillors, who are the people who speak with everyone and do not close down.

Some of us find that saying yes inevitably means saying no. Chris Hull, a founder of TN and also an active anti-Tesco campaigner (see right as Darth Vadar!) observes that being involved in local business and local food production means you will be against supermarkets by default and no matter how far you go to speak with those in power and civic office, “you get to a point where you are pulling in different directions in subtle and sometimes in subliminal ways, where the business-as-usual model is directly conflicting with Transition.”

Christine Way has just returned from successfully blockading a port in Scotland to bring attention to the containers of “green” bio-mass woodchips from Brazil for electricity. A fellow founder of TN she has always maintained that both forces for change need to work together. And that just as Transition needs to keep the bigger picture in mind in all it does – those drivers of climate change, peak oil and economics – so activism needs to include the positive moves that Transition works hard to provide, and not become snared up in battling against the Establishment.

What alternatives are you providing?

One of Transition’s strengths is its fluidity and I’m becoming aware of this fluidity the more I speak with everyoone. It’s not stuck in ideology or dogma and deliberately doesn’t fight the enemy. It works by including many kinds of people and a diversity of approach. In this it has a unique ability to connect and work alongside the many forces for change that already exist. The empire divides and conquers. To embrace activism as a dynamic force within the whole pattern of Transition strengthens it. We need to include those dramatic actions that highlight our planetary dilemmas because our consciousness is shifting towards what Rifkind calls the dramaturgical and the bio-spheric. Acting within the collective consciousness of the earth. And that means making moves in real life, not just in our heads. Because This Is It is not longer a slogan.

For a long time we have been able to be the audience to history, to live our lives theoretically. We can watch everything on our screens, at arm’s length. But now history is coming into our streets and into our lives and we need to know how to act, or support those who act on our behalf. If we cheer for those bold protesters in Tahrir Square, in Wisconsin, for the thousands of campaign groups that Paul Hawken wrote about in Blessed Unrest, we need also to cheer for those who occupy Fortnum and Masons and the Royal Bank of Scotland, who protest against the corporations who threaten those fragile eco-systems on which we depend. The people who climb nuclear power stations and coal smokestacks and oil rigs to bring attention to the crucial debate about energy and the citizen journalists that write and blog about them.

In the current forum on the Transition Network you can find the famous quote: Be the change you wish to see in the world used to enforce the positive nature of Transition. Many people have fled environmentalism and activism and joined initiatives because they felt to say only NO was an exhausting and often deeply negative experience.
However in this desire to get away from the bad stuff we forget that Ghandi was an activist par excellence and encouraged people to put their bodies before the brute force of Empire. And went to prison for it more than once. We forget that The Guardian newspaper came about when the media of the day failed to report the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in which 60,000 peaceful protesters were attacked by the army. We live in a society that is the end result of thousands of civil uprisings and direct actions: thousands of people whose names we do not know who have put themselves on the line. Understandably we would rather be working steadily on our energy descent action plans over the next 2o years and shifting happily towards a low carbon way of life.

The recent riots in Bristol were right in the middle of Transition Montpelier’s neighbourhood. They focused around the new Tesco, although there was a lot more to it. A local campaigning group (No Tesco in Stokes Croft) had been peacefully protesting against the supermarket for well over a year.

What was most appealing about the transition model for us is that it is about the direct action of everyday life. We all know that governments and corporations are failing us when it comes to environmental issues and so clearly we need to take matters into our own hands. This is why transitioners “just do it themselves.” So when we wanted to plant stuff – we did some guerrilla gardening. And when we wanted a site we squatted some abandoned land and brought it back into use. When we wanted to support the BA cabin crew strikes we took part in a solidarity bike ride through terminal 5. (Joe Ryle, Transition Heathrow).

It takes a lot of courage to take direct action, to cross the line, to look the public and the policeman in the eye as you challenge the status quo. Even in small ways. The first time I took part in an action was a simple thing: we were a group defending a patch of green land in Oxford against developers and rode in a barge up the canal to paint the builder’s hoardings with our loud protest. But my hands were shaking as I wrote Blake’s lines on the wall:

Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire.

That day something changed utterly within me. I had taken a step that a whole lifetime of well-behaved conditioning had tried to prevent. We all have those preventions in place inside. Our cultural conditioning keeps our minds compartmentalised, our emotions trained to seek stabilisation at all costs, to appear to be moral and upstanding citizens at all times. We have to see that without talking about our actions, without coming out about our radical nature, without sharing our private thoughts about the future, all our self-education that includes Marxist theory, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, the history of Levellers and Diggers, without connecting with all the land sovereignty movements that now exist around the world, Transition does not have the strength or wit or daring to challenge the dominant worldview. It runs the risk of becoming hidebound by convention and fragmenting, as indeed some initiatives have done in different places.

Without an ability to embrace different aspects and incentives for change, the Yes in the No and the No in the Yes, we run the danger of living in a never-never land of allotments and spiritual cliches. Being the change we want to see as a result, rather than the being change that is the (often messy) process.

Not all activists who are also Transitioners agree with the two things working together. In Lewes currently there are two interesting things happening: the construction of the UK’s first community-owned 98kW solar power station, and the occupation of three acres of green land near the centre of town. The first is seen as a Transition project and the second is not. Superficially unrelated but in fact close in aim (localisation of production), the two activities have many people involved in common including councillors, Transition members and residents:

This is quite hard for most people to grasp in my experience. Long- term strategic planning and R&D are understood in terms of industry but not in terms of cultural and social change which mostly comes about through single-issue campaigns resulting in pieces of legislation which can also unfortunately be reversed. Transition is a design framework for cultural change which does not require changes in the law.Which is not to say that designers can’t also be campaigners and vice versa. Many initiatives have convergent aims but differ in methodology. These range across political, philosophical, economic, social and psychospiritual pursuits. So for example someone who protests in London against tax evasion can also be setting up a local food group in her home town and developing personal effectiveness and empowerment. She’s engaging in activism, transition and transformation! While these categories overlap and provide mutual positive reinforcement, they preserve functionality best by remaining distinct.(Dirk Campbell, Transition Lewes) 

This is a working document. It’s an ongoing conversation that’s happening in Transition at the moment, one that has only really just begun. So I’ll leave off now with a review of a documentary about activism that brings home the kind of courage and energy and risks many people take on our behalf. It’s a grassroots film that like Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change is a story told from the people who take part. It’s not Hollywood, it’s not the BBC but it is what is happening right now in a town near you. Lock on.

Just Do It reviewed by Adrienne Campbell (Transition Lewes)

Just Do It is a new documentary film that follows the lives of several environmental activists over a year of civil disbedience and direct action.

Watching the various actions, I started to feel involved and even concerned for some of the young people as they put their bodies in the way for the sake of what they believed in. Although I’m a dyed in the wool transitoner, I’ve done a little playful, lawful activism on the side, and was inspired and emboldened.

I recommend this film to transition groups who might want to attract a younger audience and who also might wish to explore the wide, largely unexplored zone of playful activism, which sits beween normal behaviour and unlawful behaviour. Of course, Transition isn’t about campaigning or activism but there is significant overlap and perhaps attitudes and skills to be learned.

The world launch of the film, which was funded through crowdsourcing, at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival in June will be followed by showings at local cinemas. If your transition group would like to encourage your local cinema to show it, please contact the film makers from the informative website here

Holding the banner at The Wave, 2009 (Mark Watson); protest banner, Greenpeace USA; Writing on the Wall in Bristol (Ed Mitchell); Poster from Grow Heathrow; ZAD (Zone a Defendre) demonstration, France; South East climate camp, St Anne’s School, Lewes.

Personally speaking, while there is much in the post that I agree with, there is a fundamental point I profoundly disagree with.  Charlotte writes “to embrace activism as a dynamic force within the whole pattern of Transition strengthens it”.  My very strong concern is that in fact it does just the opposite, and I will try here to explain why I think that.  Transition is often portrayed as somehow ignoring politics, as being about a retreat from politics.  As our Australian academic friend I wrote about last week wrote to me in another example of completely missing the point, “there are many good elements in the transitions movement, but it is in danger of becoming localised cultural relativism.  The lack of political voice lends itself to a bystander culture. If we truly want to empower people we need to put the politics back into discourse. Everyone has a right to fully understand the world they live in”.

I would argue very strongly that Transition’s non-embracing of activism has actually been one of its great strengths, and is in fact deeply political, but in a different way.  Charlotte quotes a member of the Rhizome Co-operative writing on the Transition Network Forum who wrote that “Climate Camp not only highlighted problems but modeled a sustainable eco-village of thousands with its own energy production, grey water, compost loos, vegan food, democratic decision making structures etc. Far more than just opposing stuff”.  Later in the piece Charlotte wrote:

“We have to see that without talking about our actions, without coming out about our radical nature, without sharing our private thoughts about the future, all our self-education that includes Marxist theory, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, the history of Levellers and Diggers, without connecting with all the land sovereignty movements that now exist around the world, Transition does not have the strength or wit or daring to challenge the dominant worldview”.

I think it is important here to take a step back here and take a closer look at that.  There is often a lament within Transition, although there is a great deal of great work going on to tackle it, that Transition is a white and middle class movement, that it is failing to gain traction beyond the ‘usual suspects’.  Danielle Cohen of Transition Stoke Newington recently published the research she did there about diversity, which included an interview with one young black woman who was one of the group’s founders.  She said:

“I didn’t feel there were that many people like me … I remember being in a meeting and there was someone just chatting complete s*** for 15 minutes… I often just found it really hard to talk”.

I think that Transition has been quite skilful over the last 5 years in  creating an approach and a vision that appeals beyond the usual suspects.  While “compost loos, vegan food and democratic decision making structures” may inspire those who go to Climate Camp, they may well have the opposite effect on those we are actively trying to engage.  We talk of people being ‘hard to reach’, but often the language activists use, the way they communicate, dress, speak, and present their arguments means, ironically, that they make themselves ‘hard to reach’ for most ordinary people.

Likewise, “sharing … all our self-education that includes Marxist theory, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, the history of Levellers and Diggers” is almost certain to relegate Transition to being seen as yet another deep green, left wing campaign group. If Transition groups are expected now to make space for the sharing of such insights, are we also prepared to create space for sharing for those who come from very different cultural backgrounds, as well as those who enjoy ‘Top Gear’, who work in industry, or who drive trucks for a living?  For me, a Transition group comes together to pursue an explicit mission, to make their community more resilient, more viable, more diverse, more entrepreneurial and happier.  That’s the focus, not explicitly on each person’s personal political influences.  If it were, we might just as likely have Transition groups that are only open to people who like particular genres of music or support particular football teams.  Charlotte argues that not incorporating an explicit role for activism in Transition “risks fragmenting” it, my very real fear would be that the opposite is far more likely.

Let me give you a couple of examples from Totnes, the Transition initiative I am most familiar with.  Ben Brangwyn, my colleague at Transition Network, has recently begun running ‘Dr. Bike‘ on Saturdays at Totnes market (see right).  The overt political statement goes no further than the tagline on his website “Keeping Totnes on two wheels rather than four”.  He offers free bike maintenance to anyone who turns up.  When, having had their bike fixed, they are told it is free or just for donations, some people have been known to well up with tears.  I don’t have any figures to back it up, but I would hazard that Dr Bike has probably done more to get people cycling again in the town than all manner of political lobbying or campaigning that has taken place in recent years.

Another example.  The secondary school in Totnes is proposing to turn itself into a co-operative Trust school, a really exciting development that offers many opportunities for the community to really get involved in the future of the school, as well as to take ownership of the site on which it stands.  A Trust needs partners, and the first organisation to be asked to be a partner was Transition Town Totnes (the other initial one was the Co-operative Society).  We think this is a hugely exciting opportunity to really explore with them what a ‘Transition School’ might look like in practice.  It hasn’t been a choice without controversy though.  A letter in this week’s Totnes Times argued “I am not sure I wish to have any pressure group directly involved and able to influence my children’s school”.  In response I wrote:

“TTT is not a campaigning organisation.  We do not have any party political allegiances and indeed have people engaged with us from all political perspectives.  We do not lobby or campaign.  Our focus is on making change happen on the ground, on helping the economy of this place to become more robust and reduce its impact.  Indeed in that way we are very similar to KEVICC’s other initial partner, the Co-operative, who were set up 150 years ago with similar aims of promoting bottom-up economic resilience”.

Last week's first meeting of the Economic Blueprint group in Totnes. Participants include Tony Whitty (former Mayor) and Richard Sheard (CEO South Hams District Council)...

My strong sense is that if we had spent the past four years campaigning against things in the town, very visibly aligning ourselves to particular causes or political perspectives, railing against things we felt ideologically opposed to, that opportunities such as being a partner with the local school simply wouldn’t arise.  Nor would the opportunity to work with our Town Council that is now keen to be a ‘Transition Town Council’.  Nor would the work we are now starting to develop an ‘Economic Blueprint’ for Totnes and district with the Town Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the District Council and other local organisations.  Nor would we have been asked to be on the steering group of Dartington Hall Trust’s Land Use Review, which is nearing completion (one of the largest landowners around the town) and which, in its current draft states “we believe that this will enable Dartington to model localisation as a vehicle for a new economics in transition, for rural regeneration, social entrepreneurship and job creation”.  Nor would the BBC programme ‘Towns’ which will be screened in September which we hope will present Transition thinking to a much wider audience.  I could go on…

What I am trying to say I guess comes back to that quote I keep using from Tove Jansson’s ‘Comet in Moominland’:

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

What I take from the Moomin quote is that perhaps an approach which approaches change like innoculating a community with mycorrhizal fungus that runs and spreads and pops up in the most unexpected places but which operates below the radar will, in the long run, be more successful than traditional activism.  Joanna Macy, as Liz Day points out in the forum thread on this subject, argues the need for three strands to change:

1. Creating alternatives (local currencies, eco-housing, farm share schemes, etc etc)

2. Shift in consciousness – deepening insight about our planet and the place of human beings in the cosmos, and increased understanding of what needs to change, ie. the nature of the Industrial Growth System and what’s unsustainable about it.

3. Holding actions in defence of life – lobbying, campaigning, etc.

What I am arguing here, in essence, is that for the first and second of these to be most effective and to go a deep as possible, they will be far more effective if they stand on distinctly different ground from the third.  That is not to say that I don’t see many of those involved in more traditional activism and direct action as incredibly brave, ingenious, compassionate, creative and resourceful.  What Transition Heathrow have done has been extraordinary.  The stepping up of 350.org and its new focus on activism is very exciting to see.  But I also agree with Dirk Campbell who Charlotte quotes as saying “while these categories overlap and provide mutual positive reinforcement, they preserve functionality best by remaining distinct”.  Both things are more skilful and powerful through standing on their own distinct ground, in my opinion.

I appreciate the danger that for those engaged in Transition it might lead to a sense of perhaps being slightly schizophrenic, of living an ‘activist life’ and a ‘Transition life’ and having to keep changing hats.  However, I think that there is much to be gained from seeing that as an opportunity rather than an inhibitor.  When involved in Transition we often hope that people with a background in commerce, creating enterprises, the legal aspects of Transition, local councillors and so on will get involved in the Transition process and bring those vital expertise … but are we as interested in hearing their stories, where they were for the weekend while we were off protesting in Scotland against imported woodchip biomass, or who their sources of inspiration are?

Charlotte writes that “2011 is not 2010. It is the year when politics came back into all our lives”.  This is undoubtedly true, as libraries are closed, public services are slashed and so on.  Yet for me, rather than thinking that therefore Transition needs to explicitly don an activism hat and “lock on” as Charlotte puts it, I feel that the opposite is true, that it is even more urgent that we are successful in arguing the case for economic localisation and resilience, and that we model it in practice, creating new viable businesses, influencing Council decisions, creating broad networks of organisations, working with local business, bringing investment and expertise in to support this.  The question, ultimately, is does creating a culture of explicit activism slow this work down or accelerate this?  My sense, very strongly, is that it hinders it, and risks pushing the initiative, and the very idea of Transition, into a siding from which it will struggle to re-emerge.

When I was 24 and living in Bristol, I got over, as often as I could, to Batheaston, for the protests against a new bypass which was carving a slice off the side of Solsbury Hill, clearing ancient woodland, trashing some of the most beautiful English countryside in order to save commuters 2 minutes journey time.  It was insanity, and it was heartbreaking.  I remember one Sunday arriving there in time for some big action where the contractors were trying to move a digger or something, and there was a big rush to try and get on it.  I found myself in a huge crush of people, nose to nose with one of the security guards, in his luminous jacket and hard hat.  The security had mostly been brought in from low-income estates in the North East, and I said to the guy, “why are you doing this?  Why are you giving your time and energy to protecting something like this?”  “For my family” he said.  “Well, that’s why I’m here too” I replied.

It struck me really hard that day that perhaps the route to real change, long-lasting and deep change, isn’t through deepening polarity, but through a re-weaving of what has been torn apart, a seeking of common ground, an appeal to universal values, creating a safe space where people can sit together and not feel judged, and through the creation of viable, nurturing and life-affirming alternatives that have a strong and broad sense of ownership.  For me, the idea that  “activism as a dynamic force within the whole pattern of Transition strengthens it” is deeply flawed, and risks undoing much of the good work of the last 5 years.   Discuss!

Special Royal Wedding packs of Top Trumps available for sale on Paddington Station yesterday

I spent the day yesterday in London.  I arrived thinking it was going to be packed with people, but actually it was remarkable how few people there were.  I’ve never seen Paddington station so empty.  The London underground was positively spacious.  Where was everybody?  I did see one plastic Union Jack hat, but that was about it.  Anyway, here’s a rather entertaining story from the day….  I met Peter Lipman (Chair of Transition Network) and we headed over to Ladbroke Grove for a meeting we were having there.  We had about 20 minutes before the meeting, so went round the corner from the meeting venue and sat on a wall to catch up about this and that. 

Earlier that morning I had seen Tweets about the ludicrous police raid on the Transition Heathrow project, as well as on another 4 squats in London, ostensibly on various pretexts, but almost certainly a ‘just behave yourselves’ operation in advance of the Royal Wedding.  With this sense of police-centred edginess we noted, as we sat on the wall, that in the road we were overlooking were 2 riot vans, and about 6 police cars, with more police cars arriving every few minutes.  The conversation moved to whether we were sat next to an impending raid of some kind, or something to do with the policing of the wedding.  Some kind of crack team preparing a rapid response should anything untoward happen at the wedding perhaps?

As we were having this conversation, two policemen walked by.  “Excuse me”, called Peter.  They came over.  “We were just wondering”, he asked, “why there are so many police cars here?”  The two officers looked at each other, and then at us in bemusement.  “Because this is a police station” he said, pointing to the building we were leaning against.  Ah.   That’ll be it then.

I don’t intend to give much time to today’s nuptials, but having told my police station story, I do feel duty bound to also share with you this splendid Royal Wedding pizza I saw advertised in the Evening Standard yesterday.

On this day of celebration, please do share a compassionate and sympathetic thought for whichever poor soul’s job it was over the last few weeks to recreate, hundreds and hundreds of times, detailed portraits of the happy couple in olives, pepperoni, mozzarella, peppers, and mushroom.  I’m sure they were looking forward to the arrival of today far more keenly than any of the rest of us…