This month’s podcast goes into more depth on three of the stories from the April round-up of what’s happening in Transition.  We hear from the High School Joan Segura i Valls in Santa Coloma de Queralt (in Catalonia, Spain) who have just completed a big project about Transition, from Transition Oamaru and Waitaki District in New Zealand about their Sustainable Skills School, and we hear from Tooting about their Treasuring Tooting event that took place last weekend.  Do note that you can embed it on your own website, and that it is also now available on iTunes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century?  While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site.  However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it).  The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself.  As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.  

I often use the analogy, in terms of food, of a cake.  Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it.  What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing.  In the same way that for food we need to urgently reverse this, for many reasons that will be only too familiar to regular readers of this blog, the same can be argued for building materials.

In the case of these alms houses in Sherborne, it literally was the building’s ‘icing’ that caused the difficulties.  With about 30% of UK road freight now due to the movement of construction materials, many of which already have a high level of embodied energy, I’d like to argue here that we need to think about construction in the same way we are starting to think about food, specifically in the context of the Atmos Project, a community initiative I am involved in in Totnes.

Historically, as well as being the only option people had, the use of local materials also led to the evolution of vernacular styles of building, so that each region had its own distinct styles of building, rooted in materials, culture and tradition.  As John and Jane Penoyre note in ‘Houses in the Landscape’ “in these simple buildings the available materials are the principal dictators of style”.  Mark Gorgolewski writes in The Green Building Bible:

“… as materials closer to their natural state will tend to have had less processing, which often means less energy use, less waste and less pollution.  Local materials can reduce the need for transport and benefits the local economy and community”.

Christopher Day writes that “local materials minimise transport energy, suit local climate, support local employment and society and reinforce locality identity, anchoring buildings into local culture … so roundwood instead of sawn, adobe or brick instead of concrete”.  As well as having far less embodied energy due to requiring so little transportation, they also often have far less embodied energy in their manufacturre, as the graph below showing overall CO2 emissions by weight [kg] released by production of 1 kg of twenty-four common building materials demonstrates (source).  Note that those materials on the right hand side actually lock up more carbon than they emit (depending on how far they are transported of course, a strawbale house in the UK built with Turkish bales would clearly not qualify):

Then there’s also the aesthetics.  The other day I was in Marlborough in Wiltshire, and took a walk around the town.  It is easy to be nostalgic about old buildings, and to assume that they are so characterful and attractive simply because they are old.  I would argue that the ambience that comes through in some of the photos below has more to do with the materials than with the age of the building.

The combination of brick, timber and cobbles is far more attractive than just one single material.

Clay wall tiles that were fired in kilns with variable temperatures produced tiles of a range of colours, from black to orange, which gives the tiled surface much more richness.

This timber frame house is a beautiful example of how the materials available locally dictated the design of the building and its character.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the use of natural and local building materials in recent years.  Cob building, strawbale, lime plasters, roundwood timber, hemp, clay plasters, have all experienced a renewal of energy, but are still almost only ever used in self build projects, and have yet to cross over into mainstream construction.  Yet, as Gill Seyfang points out, they are still very much in a niche and what is needed is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”.  She argues for the natural/local building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime”.  Key to that will be scale.

Of course, running alongside the discussions about materials is the need to create truly low carbon buildings, in their construction, their inhabitation and eventual demolition/recycling.  The Larch and Lime houses built recently in Ebbw Vale are passivhauses (Larch House right), that is they are built in such a way as to require no space heating.  When I talked to the architect behind them, Justin Bere, he told me that most of the materials were local (stone, slate, locally made Rockwool etc) but hadn’t veered too far into the world of very local and natural materials.  Part of the reason for that is that for the kind of accurate modelling needed for passivhaus certification, data for many of these materials doesn’t yet exist.  I would argue that this is a pressingly urgent area for new research.

Enter the Atmos Project.   For the past couple of months, as well as my Transition Network stuff, I have been working a day a week on the Atmos Totnes campaign.  Atmos has been running for the past 5 years, since Dairy Crest closed their 8 acre site next to Totnes station, and since when it has sat and become more and more of an eyesore (you can read the story so far here).  The Atmos Project, as it became known, due to it being home to a building built to house Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s experimental ‘atmospheric railway’, has sought to bring the site into community ownership to develop it as a catalyst for new businesses in the town and as a demonstration of Transition in action.

The initiative did a lot of work, raised bits of funding to do design work, business planning and so on, but seemed to be getting nowhere due to the site’s owners’ unwillingness to engage seriously with the community.  So a couple of months ago we started a campaign, aimed to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the site’s owners.  We gathered voices from around the community, got a lot of media exposure, got people in the town out for a big photo opportunity and for a public meeting, and a couple of weeks ago, had a very positive meeting with Dairy Crest, and all of a sudden the project is moving forward with an energy that is a delight to see.

The tagline for the campaign has been ‘the heart of a new economy’, and it is seen as a development that in all that it does is focused on skills, training, the creation of new businesses and the boosting of the local economy.  It is of a scale where it can do some very exciting things in terms of construction.  One of the founding ideas is that the place that the development starts its very first question, is what are the local materials that we have to hand?  In the same way that I always used to teach on permaculture courses that the question should be “I’m going to cook a meal, what’s in the garden”, rather than “what’s in the fridge?”, that same principle could and should apply to building materials.

So, as the first part of the design process, and as part of what will form a key part of the brief for whoever ends up being the project’s architect, will be a list of the local materials available to such a project in Totnes.  We have commissioned a specialist in this to draw this up, including the places locally where they would be sourced.  My initial list off the top of my head is:

Timber: for construction grade timber, internal studwork, window and door frames, roofing shingles, laths, panelling, flooring, wattles, wood fibre insulation.

Clay: for rammed earth construction, cob walling, daubs, clay plasters, cob bricks, clay paints

Hemp: for use in hemp/lime construction, to make insulation, for hemp/lime or hemp/clay plasters and bricks

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

Reed: for thatching roofs, and also to make ‘reedboards’, an alternative to plasterboard

Lime: for plasters, mortars, renders, as well as in construction systems such as hemp/lime

Straw: baled, and used in ‘straw bale building’, chopped as an ingredient in plasters

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

Recycled Materials:  newspaper processed as an insulation product, car tyres, recycled bricks

It used to be that when a cathedral was built, a temporary village was built around it, with a stone masons’ quarter, a timber framers’ quarter and so on.  On the scale of something like the Atmos project, it may well be possible to do something very similar, processing the timber needed on site, making cob blocks, even hand-making tiles for external cladding.  If done skilfully enough, integrating training and apprenticeships, it could be a vitally needed new approach to development, especially when combined with the potential for the community to invest into the development.

Panels at Charing Cross tube station in London showing the various trades associated with the construction of Charing Cross in the late 1200s.

A development that from the outset seeks to source it’s metaphorical cake locally.  As the Euro crisis continues to unravel at a pace, as the academics are telling us that the only thing that will halt climate change is a massive economic downturn, or at least a huge rethink about how we make economic activity happen, we need a new approach to development.

Work in progress: Cob walls, hemp plaster on the walls, clay plaster onto lath on the ceiling, local timber window frames...

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion?  I think so.  I think the time is right for that, and that’s what we want to do with Atmos.  Watch this space.

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

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

Filipa speaking at the recent Spanish Transition gathering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… and they have also been clearing a new allotment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening to Phoebe Bright skyping in from Ireland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The day’s Framing Statement

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

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

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

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

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

Short articles and videos

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

Books

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

 Lessons from elsewhere

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

Local/alternative/complementary currencies

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

 REconomy

• REconomy and Me Fiona Ward 

I am delighted to be able to announce today the Festival of Transition, an initiative of new economics foundation, Transition Network, the Ramblers Association, Mission Models Money and UKYCC.  The idea is that rather than flying to Rio, putting nearly 4 tons of carbon dioxide into an atmosphere that really doesn’t need 4 tons of CO2 put into it, we stay at home, and do stuff that models the kind of world we want to see.  It is a celebration of change, of practical responses, of community, and we hope that it will be a global event, not just in the UK.  All kinds of great events are already being planned over the time of the Festival.  The crowning glory will be the 24 Hours of Possibility, a real life experiment in living differently, in showing what’s possible, on the day the Earth Summit begins, 20th June.

The idea is simple. You imagine different ways in which a post-transition society might also be a better one, and then try them out as a real-life experiment during a 24 hour period starting at dawn on 20th June 2012. Activities could involve family, friends, work colleagues, fellow students, community groups or even people you’ve never met before. It could involve the whole town or it could be more personal. You can come to the website to explore a menu of suggested ideas and activities, or add your own.

Here’s some ideas to get you thinking:

24 hours of only eating local food
24 hours of exchange without using money
24 hours of dawn breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight feasts out on our street
24 hours of life lived outdoors
24 hours of dancing in the streets
24 hours of guerrilla food growing
24 hours of bringing disused premises back into use
24 hours of talking with strangers
24 hours of slow everything
24 hours of consensus decision making in my school
24 hours of imagining a day in 2062
24 hours of transforming a derelict site
24 hours of getting active
24 hours of not using a car
24 hours of inter- generational gatherings
24 hours of swapping roles in my workplace
24 hours of activity in my local museum
24 hours of feasting and planning for the next generation
24 hours of getting the high street closed and having a carnival on the street
24 hours of making things for other people
24 hours of working less and living more
24 hours of reading together
24 hours of new community celebrations and ceremonies
24 hours of creating a community garden
24 hours of installing solar panels
24 hours of sharing your skills
24 hours of random acts of kindness and spontaneous beauty
24 hours of dreaming a new world awake

So this is an invitation to start having a think about what you might like to do for it, having some conversations with the people around you, and seeing what ideas it stimulates.  We think this could be a great celebration of what Transition does best, showing on the ground the kind of change that is possible when we gather together with our friends, neighbours and colleagues.  It’s over to you…

You can also read what Andrew Simms of nef said about it here.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transition Town Honiton also held a big tree planting event:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transition Town Leamington's 'Wool Day'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the story in English:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Lincoln Potter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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