I arrived in Tooting early, and, as usual, got lost, walking around Tooting High Street looking for the venue. I wandered through Tooting Market, a dynamic reflection of this highly diverse community, stalls selling saris, halal meat, Afro-Carribean hairdressing, Islamic texts and a wide range of foodstuffs from around the world.  It is in this context, one of the most diverse parts of London that Transition Town Tooting has been working for the last couple of years, innovatively thinking their way through how to embed Transition with the community.

Events so far have included the Earth Talk Walk, which visited every centre of worship in Tooting to explore how each tradition looks at care for the earth, the soon-to-be-in-its-third-year Foodival, where local growers bring their surplus produce and 6 local restaurants use them to prepare dishes, a celebration both of local food and of the area’s cultural and culinary diversity.

Most spectacular though was the Trashcatchers Carnival, which brought 800 people out onto the streets as a carnival on the theme of caring for the Earth, using an alleged million plastic bags and half a million crisp packets to make amazing floats, in an amazing community celebration.  The story of how the Carnival came to be, how it found its way around red tape when, with only two days to go, it looked like it may well not happen it all, is an amazing testament to persistence and determination, and which I hope to get someone from TT Tooting to write up soon.

So, to the Unleashing.  The hall was decorated with great handmade banners, with photos of what TT Tooting has done so far, with local Indian food on sale at the back, and some of the amazing creations produced for the Carnival adorning the hall, most prominently the Sankofa bird, a West African mythic bird, which carries the seeds of the future in an egg on its back, and which looks forward and backwards in a single glance, a fitting symbol for Transition.  And of course an amazing cake, of which more later.  The evening started with a cycle rickshaw riding into the venue, up to the front of the stage, where the rider welcomed everyone, and then the boy sat in the chair at the front told a short story (see right).

Lucy Neal then welcomed everyone, and the film below was shown which captured some images from the Trashcatchers Carnival, and also included interviews with a range of people from around Tooting answering the questions “what do you love about Tooting?” and “what could be done to make Tooting a better place?”.

Then three people came up to the stage and talked about what Tooting meant to them, and why they loved living in the place.  Then it was my turn to speak.  I started by saying how one of the things I love about Transition is how people take it and make it their own in each different place.  I said that the best people to know how to do Transition in each particular place are the people from that place, and that if someone from Tooting had come to Transition Network 2 years ago and asked how to do Transition in Tooting, we would never have said “well, you need to get a million plastic bags, half a million crisp packets, some shopping trolleys, and march it all down the street”.

I then gave an overview of Transition, of peak oil and climate change, and an introduction to the work in progress that is Transition, using the Pattern Language project to explain it.  I wrapped up by saying that in the face of peak oil, climate change and the unravelling debt crisis, we have a choice.  Do we choose to look at them from a place of concern for self, a fearful response of protecting what we have, of putting our happiness above that of others, a more materialistic take, or do we respond with compassion, seeing that our future lies in becoming better connected, more engaged, more skilled and less focused on materialism?  A wealth of studies show that people who have a less materialistic world view tend to consume less, recycle more, be more mindful about energy use, and, ultimately, be happier and healthier.  The question is whether we can do better than how we do things today, and of course we can, the Trashcatchers event giving a great insight into what is possible.

After me, a young lad came up and sang a song which the audience were invited to join in with, which they did with great energy.  Then people from the different TT Tooting working groups talked about what they have been doing, and invited people to join them to discuss what else their groups might do.  There was then a 10 minute period where people were invited to mill around and go to whichever group interested them, after which everyone came back together again for the Unleashing itself.

The amazing cake, adorned with the Sankofa bird from the Carnival, was brought forward, topped with a fantastic sparkler, and the idea was then for me to say “I hereby announce that Transition Town Tooting is now Unleashed!” while steamers fell from the heavens.  Unfortunately, the woman charged with discharging the banger/steamer thing couldn’t get it to go off, so it took a minute or so for help to arrive and ensure that the cake was cut amid a storm of multicoloured streamers!

Then each working group came back onstage and talked about ideas that had emerged from their conversations.  Finally Lucy Neal thanked everyone for coming and asked “can we do this?” which was met with a resounding “yes!”  And that was that.  People stayed around chatting for some time (always the sign of a good event when nobody wants to go home), before heading out into the warm London night.

One of the hand-stitched banners that had been part of the Carnival said “here in Tooting, great things are”.  When I first saw it I was looking for the accompanying second banner which completed the sentence, but at the end of this wonderful celebratory evening, I realised that it was a self-contained statement and with the work of Transition Town Tooting, now Unleashed, great things, indeed, are. (You can see Mike Grenville’s photos of the event here….)

“Have you heard the one about the Mayor of London, the Leader of the Council, the fox, the octopus, the baby elephant, the Lady of Tooting, the Borough Commander and the plastic bags. Look no further, they’re all to be found in the story of the Tooting Trashcatchers’ Carnival?   We thought we’d start with a Tooting celebration that could lead into an Unleashing a few days’ later and that’s when we thought of building a large scale community carnival all made from trash. Using recycling as a metaphor, we would show the ingenuity and creativity of the town for looking at the changes that could be made in how we live where we live.

All went well until we hit the thorny difficulty of winning over Transport for London (TfL) with our enthusiasm for a sustainable way of living and desire for access to the Upper Tooting Road for a cycle powered carnival with 100s of local carnivalistas. Over a long half year, our case was taken up by the Leader of the Council Edward Lister, Cllr Richard Tracey and many others on our behalf and presented to many along the way including the Mayor of London, the Deputy Mayor of London, and officers inbetween at all levels of transport and public body hierarchies. As a major arterial corridor, the road was considered too significant to London’s traffic; too many other events were happening in London that day (one of which was the Big Dance of which the Carnival is a part) and so despite TfL’s desire to work with communities to accommodate celebrations, ours was considered an ask too far.

Last Friday we considered our options: a Carnival parade only on side roads with the full support of Wandsworth Council or, a direct action approach to lodge the Carnival as a peaceful procession. We consulted as many carnivalistas as we could over the weekend about the route they wanted. The answer was unanimous: ‘The High Road!’.

On Monday we lodged a formal application to the Police for the Carnival as a peaceful procession for the rights of Tooting residents to celebrate peacefully in the hub of their community.   As we explained in our application:

“Everything in the procession has been made from ‘trash’ and the procession marks the local community’s recognition that current ways of living can be transformed in order to sustain life on earth in the face of global challenges. The procession needs to go on the Upper Tooting Road in order to be visible to and significant for the whole community that has resourced and created the Carnival procession. The procession celebrates a positive vision of a low carbon future and the creative ways in which a community can respond collectively to the global challenges of economic recession, climate change and resource scarcity. The procession marks a desire by the local community to come together peacefully to rehearse ways in which such a future can be made to work for current and future generations. The Carnival procession has the full support of hundreds of people in the Tooting area, including local businesses, primary and secondary schools, community groups, sports groups, cyclists, gardening groups. The procession has received support including funding from Wandsworth Council including Arts, Environment, Highways, Waste, Councillors and the Leader.”

We explained there would not be a petition as such, but stories told of Tooting and gatherings beforehand to create and make designs and structures for the Carnival and that the procession would end with a sharing picnic on Fishponds Playing Field.  We spoke to Sadiq Khan MP for Tooting, who spoke to David Musker the new Borough Commander, who considered our application yesterday.

We don’t know the conversations that happened between them and others involved, although we know that Sadiq wrote a letter asking Mr Musker as one of his first acts as Borough Commander to grant permission to the event advocating on our behalf saying:

“Tooting has a wonderful community, and events like this are what makes it such a special place to live and work. It has the backing of hundreds, if not thousands of local residents, and will make a peaceful and valuable contribution to the area.”

Yesterday at 5pm with 4 days to go, we had confirmation from the Metropolitan Police that the Carnival could proceed. Hats off to all who have helped get us this far – and especially Sadiq, our new Borough Commander and the great Tooting Police Safer Neighbourhood team with whom we shall be working to create a magical peaceful carnival procession on Sunday.

So, yes, sometimes rights for joy and shared celebration have to be defended and processed for. Can celebratory communal living transform our world?  Who knows. Join us to find out.  Here’s the poster – printed when we hoped against hope this would be possible and now it is. HURRAH HURRAH HURRAH and for anyone within a bike road of Tooting High Road, drop in at Broadway Studios, help us finish those foxes, turtles, baby elephants and the beautiful Sankofa Bird who looks forward and backwards in a single glance.

The Transition Canterbury Community Allotment

Here we are again with a long round up of stories, links, film clips and much more that gives a flavour of the eclectic and diverse stuff happening out there in Transition initiatives around the world.  The time of year being what it is, we have foody things at the top of the list. TT Portobello kicks off this month’s update with news of short courses in vegetable growing and raised bed construction.  For all those green fingered people in South London, can you help TT Brixton by training others on their Master Gardener training course?  These start mid-June, so get in quick and share your skills!  TT Sevenoaks was highlighted in ‘This is Kent’ for its rapid success, and news of its community projects including a seedling swap, advice on raising chickens and bees, as well as plans for a Food Hub information centre.  There’s a wonderful Transition City Community Allotment going on in Canterbury: see here for lovely pics and the MOST beautiful pair of wellies!

TT Louth has a little story about their community garden and a yummy rhubarb feast, and I smiled to read that permablitzing has hit the UK!…(or did I miss something earlier?).  TT Worcester has been out blitzing and planting more fruit and vegetables. They’ve also been busy with a pub quiz and a woodland food forage. And what a lot of lovely food projects TT Shrewsbury has going on! New Forest Transition’s Hale Local Food Market has been allowed to go ahead, so if you live close by then try to support it. TT Dorchester is very happy as they’ve been given access to 2 acres of the Duchy of Cornwall’s Parkway Farm lands for their community garden. This is wonderful for increasing people’s access to land and possibilities for growing their own food, not to mention increasing the resilience of their local food system (and decreasing CO2 and…and…)….

In other news, we’ve had a couple of TT launches, one at T Malvern Hills and TT Hebden Bridge, which also had lots of solar and pedal power. Congratulations to you both!  TT Forres in Scotland has started working with a project management group in order to free volunteers up and to enable the group to be more effective.  In case you missed it, TT Totnes recently launched its EDAP, which you can read all about here and here! And hooray hooray for Peter Howe of TT Stourbridge for bringing us the Transition Town Rap! It’s fantastic! In case you missed it on Transition Culture earlier, here is a great short film about the Transition Scotland Gathering late last year….

TT Finsbury has shared lots of goodies with us this month. There are videos galore (24 to be precise), made during their ‘Welcome to Finsbury Park Project’, and they’ve also produced some step-by-step manuals for their video workshop and subjective maps workshop. And we have some wonderful wonderful footage from the Scottish Transition Get Together in December 2009.

Making Do and Mending in Taunton

TT Halesworth has been busily Upcycling… Yes indeed, what IS that anyway? Find out here and see why you should have a go too! TT Taunton had a similar event – make do and mend (see right) – and they’ll have more of them following soon. TT Portobello is in the news again, this time going out and about doing home water checks and helping you save water (and keep the bills down). I like this: anyone for a Nappucino? It’s TT Horncastle’s accompaniment to a cappuccino…but a Nappucino? What on earth…???  Find out here!

Good luck to TT Berkhamstead’s car free day… Let’s hope the town is empty of cars and filled with bicycles. We have more wonderful footage from the Trashcatchers carnival preparatory workshops, which you can enjoy below…

In a similar vein, Transition Hexham recently held an even where people got incredibly funky with old rubbish… check this out…

How is our wonderful Steph getting on with her epic journey through the highlands and lowlands, and the Transition cities and Transition Towns of the UK? Catch up with Steph here and see if she’ll be visiting a Transition Town near you! Ah, we nearly forgot… here’s a great picture of her flipflopped feet (see left) … Steph’s chosen footwear for the duration of her trip, come rain come shine, come mud come stones… We should have laid bets on how many pairs of flipflops will expire enroute…cos it’s a toughie on any type of footwear!

Transition Town Bridport recently held a ‘design a logo for Transition Town Bridport’ competition… and here is a short clip about the outcome of that….

Over to Europe, we have a new TT group that’s started up in Witzenhausen, Germany. Thanks for the good news! And here’s a little piece in French about the Transition Hub in Brussels. In Dordrecht in the Netherlands there is some Transition/permaculture stuff happening (including a rather fine herb spiral, although given that its all in Dutch its hard to figure out what it’s all about….)….

In the US, we have more entertainments with ‘Save the Secret of the Seasons’, which is a participatory musical experience, or co-opera, organised between TT Putney and Sandglass Theatre. It’s based on songs written for the Copenhagen climate conference, and there’s a 3 song CD available too. Congratulations to TT Carrboro-Chapel Hill on their recent Unleashing! Read all about it here and here, and congrats also to TT Whatcome who Unleashed in April, and they’ve made a movie to share with you all (see below). Rob put in a showing in a very remote way…

Could there be another local currency on the way? T San Francisco met to hear about the bernalbucks, have some discussions and do some voting…so we shall see.  Jane Poyourow, Transition US blogger from T Los Angeles, offers five strategies for achieving CO2 reductions down to 350ppm. So what are we waiting for? Then, for the more techie minded amongst us (which excludes me instantly), you might be interested in this: web technology with resilience in mind.  Then we have a great clip from US TV, a show called ‘Sustainable Today’, with David Johnson and Jim Newcomer speaking about the Transition Towns movement in Portland, Oregon, and how it came to be….

Also, here is a great TV newspiece from the US, about Transition Lancaster…

Down under, the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia held a Transition Day gathering where permaculture co-originator David Holmgren was a special guest, and was also the star attraction at an event organised by T Kurilpa and the Brisbane Transition Hub.  The TT group ‘West Hobart Environment Network’ (WHEN) is supporting another local group to get land for a community garden where they can grow food and share skills…a very worthy cause for support.   In Sydney, Transition Towns (Leichhardt) and Permaculture Inner West volunteers have been establishing a ’street verge garden’ outside Greg’s house (he doesn’t seem to mind..).

And finally, we have a resounding cheer for another new TT: Heidelberg west…we surely wish you all the best for the future!

Many thanks once again to Helen and to GoogleAlerts for pulling this piece together…..

“Dear Transitioners,

We’ve been floundering in Nottingham with the Energy Descent Action Plan and it was agreed that I write to you to see if you’ve got ideas that would help..

Part of the problem appears to revolves around what we mean by a “plan” – a plan is a way of attempting to shape the future – yet there is also an explicit ethos in the Transition Movement of “letting things go where they will”. “Letting things go where they will” implies accepting that things will unfold in unexpected ways and being flexible to that, taking up unforseen opportunities as they arise and being prepared to abandon unrealistic aspirations along the route. Instead of shaping the future this is about being prepared to be shaped by the future.

The reason this is important in a city is that a city is a large and very complex beast so the number of unexpected connections and developments is much greater than in a village or small town. It follows that the capacity of Nottingham to generate unexpected developments is hugely greater than in Totnes with 1% of our population. For many years Nottingham had a bike industry and pharmaceuticals – both arose unexpectedly in Nottingham – there was nothing special about Nottingham that led to them being here.

Further – it is not clear to us what the Transition Movement means by planning. For those of us who come to this with a mind-set shaped by business planning for project development the EDAPs that we have seen do not appear to be much like planning. A plan has specific, measurable, achievable targets.

It follows that if the plan is intended as serious thinking about how to achieve an adjusted future then, when you write:

“Nottingham will have a network of community garden hubs in each district to support local people grow more of their own food by 2012″

…then you also have to have something like this written two years in advance of this, by 2010…and written by a group with sufficient capacity to actually deliver it (skills, time, money, organisation, mutual trust):

“In Sherwood the community garden hub will be based at the Sherwood Community Centre gardens with an area of one hectare and with a half hectare extension orchard across the road in Woodthorpe Park. The Sherwood hub will employ one garden worker and an outreach worker and will be open 4 days a week including Sundays. Courses on fruit and vegetable growing and permaculture will be available on one day a week organised in conjunction with Brackenhurst College. There will be 20 regular volunteers and a further 30 occasional volunteers and visitor numbers are anticipated as 1,000 per annum. The budget will be £60,000 – a half of this will be fees from courses, one quarter a reducing grant from Nottingham City Council and one quarter from sales of fruit, vegetables and meals cooked in a joint project with the Community Centre…..”

“….In Wollaton the community garden hub will take over and regenerate the walled garden in the park as well as developing a farm animal training centre on the field opposite the lake which will be used as training for broadscale agriculture in conjunction with Jim Rose of Tinker Bells Farm in Hucknall. 3 people will be employed. 30 people will be trained a year in ploughing with animal skills. Pasture/fodder for the horses will be provided on fields at..

continues….

Well, I made all that up. It was complete off the top of my head fantasy. But in a real plan it would not be. It would be based on discussions and agreements and research that your group had done, as in a business plan.  Yes, we do realise that that is much more of a tall order. It is much more ambitious. It would be hard work….but it would be real PLANNING.

The point I am making is that a plan mentions specific places, specific numbers and  specific budgets – and that provides the basis for specific actions. Unless you get down to that level of details and start working through tasks to achieve that you will end up, after a few years, with  reams of paper of all the things that you said that you were going to do and almost none of them will have even been started on. By focusing more specifically in this way you have to GET REAL and actually start project developing specific very small scale projects – instead of writing “visions” that a few years later are still no more than that and produce disillusionment about the group that has created them as being no more than a talking shop.

EDAPs have been around for a few years now – so if we go back and look at how much of the things that were said would happen for years that are now in the past, how much of them have actually happened. If the answer is “not very much” then what conclusions does one draw from this for the process of writing EDAPs!

Any comments please?

Brian – for the Nottingham EDAP Group

******

This is a fascinating area for discussion, and what I am offering here are only thoughts and suggestions, in the hope that it stimulates conversation and debate. So, let’s start from the beginning.  What is an EDAP and why would anyone do one?  ‘Create an Energy Descent Action Plan’ is the 12th of Transition’s 12 Steps, intended as the culmination of the preceding eleven.  The idea is that it is one of the key things that distinguishes Transition from other approaches, that rather than being a disparate assembly of projects, Transition pulls together a range of initiatives and puts them in the wider strategic context of intentionally planning for the relocalisation of the settlement as a whole.  An EDAP is, in essence, a Plan B for the community, a mapping out of how the community might get from here to there.  The reality is though, that although the first thorough EDAP (for Totnes) has just been published, still none of us know, in practical terms, what planning for the intentional powering down and relocalisation of a city will look like in practice.

How might a Transition group know when it is ready to undertake such a project?  It is hard to come up with hard and fast quantifiable criteria such as “when over 10% of people in the community have attended a Transition event” (the Totnes survey showed about 25%), “when over 50%, when surveyed state that the work your Transition initiative is doing is relevant to their lives” (in Totnes it was 61%), or “when over 50% have heard of your initiative” (in Totnes it was 75%).  These criteria would be different for every settlement, although clearly some significant degree of community buy-in and support will be vital.  Undertaking an EDAP does, however, require certain foundations to be in place, including;

• a dedicated group of people for whom creating an EDAP is what fires their passion, is the thing they most want to bring about for the Transition initiative
• good links with as many other organisations in the community as possible (i.e. the local council, schools, other environmental groups, community groups and so on), so the plan can represent their views as much as possible, and get them engaged in its creation
• some dedicated resource for the project, it is an impossible project to pull of with no budget whatsoever (you’ll need to run events, hire rooms and halls, produce materials and so on…)
• strong Transition working groups who can drive forward, collaboratively, their parts of the Plan
• a good level of awareness raising to have been done, so that an EDAP process isn’t constantly having to start from square one every time
• space in the Transition initiative’s programme of events for EDAP to become a theme that runs through it
• good web facilities to enable discussion of ideas, collaborative editing of drafts, promotion of events.

Creating the Totnes EDAP, an Energy Descent Plan covering a settlement of 8,500 people and its surrounding catchment of around 23,000 people was a big undertaking.  It required around 2o months of time, a full time paid co-ordinator, additional funding for design and printing, and the voluntary efforts of many people.  I think that what we have produced is an unprecedented piece of work, something with much that can be replicated in other settlements of a similar size (we learnt a lot doing that will be of use to other communities).  A good example of a mini-EDAP, or what was termed a ‘pre-DAP’, can be seen in Transition Forest Row’s ‘Forest Row in Transition’ document, done in a short period of time as a vision document.  I am less confident, however, that the EDAP model, as currently imagined, transfers across intact as an approach,  to, say, Bristol or Leeds, and here are some thoughts as to why.

1. Can Community-led plans ever be comprehensive?

Can communities be expected to cover all the bases that such a plan would require?  One of the things I have done in the PhD I am doing (nearing completion) is to take the Resilience Indicators developed in the Totnes EDAP and drop them into a table generated by Liz Cox at New Economics Foundation of indicators for a sustainable economy.  What emerges is that Resilience Indicators generated by a community (well, Totnes at least) tend to fall within the columns that relate to economics, local resilient infrastructure and so on, and not in governance, social enterprise and interdependence (seeing the wider picture) – these things fall, at least in the case of Totnes, outside of a community’s interests/expertise, yet they are essential to an effective and comprehensive response.

They are areas that are usually the domain of Council planners, enterprise agencies, businesses and so on.  The Totnes EDAP is the community’s plan, reflective of the passions and interests of those that get involved in the process, but how it now intertwines with Council policy remains to be seen, that will be the focus of TTT’s work over the next few months. Might it be that for cities, effective and comprehensive plans of this nature will require the Transition initiative to work together with its local Council, and with other organisations with some of the other expertise lacking within the Transition group?

2. Do cities and towns develop differently?

A few months ago I sat at Birmingham New Street Station with Andy Goldring of the Permaculture Association, discussing this whole question of what EDAP might look in the urban context.  A town like Totnes, every few years, goes through a planning process, where it looks forward over the next 10 years, and plans how it might develop, where to put new homes, services and so on.  Cities, on the other hand, are continually re-inventing themselves, pulling bits of themselves down and rebuilding them, constantly changing and shifting; as Brian puts it in his email “cities are large and complex beasts”.  On a recent visit to Bristol, I sat by the Arnolfini looking across the docks, realising that since I was 16 and used to sit there, virtually all that I could see has been rebuilt.  Andy’s point was that cities are in a process of continual redevelopment, and rarely get the opportunity to sit and plan in the way towns do. In this context, might the role of urban Transition groups be to try, as skillfully as possible, to try and input to, and influence, the process that is already in place, inputting information, vision and the community engagement Transition does so well?

3.  Are we talking about a Plan or a Vision?

As Brian points out, there is a tension between producing a Plan, and producing a Vision.  He warns of visions as things which “a few years later are still no more than that and produce disillusionment about the group that has created them as being no more than a talking shop”.  In creating the Totnes EDAP, we deliberated long and hard about this.  We didn’t want to create something that was purely a vision, something that was a long prose piece about carparks turned into allotments and how quiet everything was and everyone has a spring in their step, nor did we feel able to create something that was a hard and fast plan of the kind Brian outlines above.

What we created in the end was neither, and yet both at the same time.  Although it is called a Plan, I think of the Totnes EDAP as being more like a story.  It starts with a vision, and then backcasts from that.  It sets out, sequentially, the things that individuals can do, the community can do, and the local council can do.  It is clear though, that as a Transition initiative, we can’t make all these things happen.  What we can do is to create a vision that is sufficiently inspiring, enticing, yet also achievable, that it begins to inform the culture of the town as a way forward.  It tells a new story of the future of Totnes in a way that is far more appealing than the future being told by the Council and other organisations.

As a follow-up to the publication of the Plan, TTT’s next step is not to undertake to implement the EDAP in its entirety.  We don’t have the resources, and our role is project support, catalysing others to develop projects, businesses, community responses.  Rather, we hope to create a post focusing on social enterprise, supporting people to make new businesses and livelihoods from the plan, and enabling them to get to the stage of being investment ready.  In parallel to this, there will be a process of trying to work with the local council to embed it in their work, and also spreading it out among the community.  The Totnes EDAP is a lot more than just a vision, but the vision side of it is also critical.

Given these considerations, might we then start to sketch out some options as to how an urban Transition group might best start to approach an EDAP, or something resembling an EDAP?  Here are a few possible models;

1. A Transition initiative-led planning process, like the Totnes EDAP, but which, in the city context, focuses on the neighbourhood scale.  It takes the role of gathering visions from across the community and then backcasting how to achieve it.  It identifies new areas for food production (like the excellent Sow and Grow report recently published in Glasgow), proposes a range of initiatives and projects that could revitalise and build resilience in the community, with a particular focus on a vision for the area and for practical initiatives which, with some support, the Transition initiative could enable.  This ‘A Transition Vision for [insert name of place]‘ could be something that feeds into the wider planning process, as well as galvanising a range of projects.

2. A Council-led process with Transition intervention. Here, the Transition intiative would work at doing what Transition does best, catalysing at the neighbourhood level, while also engaging the local authority, perhaps first pressing for a peak oil resolution (like Nottingham City Council did) and then for a follow up exploring what this means for the city.  The best example of this is the Bristol Peak Oil report, commissioned by Bristol City Council and written by some members of Transition City Bristol.  This is now an official document, and can start to inform wider planning decisions. In this version, the Transition group pressures to get peak oil and resilience recognised as Council objectives, and then feeds into planning processes, in the same way that Transition Stroud have been inputting into their local council’s food policy.  This is a process that, in more enlightened Councils, could begin with the kind of visioning exercise that Transition Taunton Deane did with their local authority.  The danger, of course, with this approach, is that with an unresponsive local authority, this could be an enormous drain of energy and source of frustration.

3. A collaborative once-off project, with input from local authority, Transition initiative, academics.  A brilliant yet intensely frustrating example of this is the San Buenventura Post Oil Plan, from California, produced by the local authority, with input from academics, transport engineers, architects and planners. An amazing example of visioning and planning done by professionals, but almost entirely lacking in input from the communities affected. Had it been something with input from the local Transition initiatives/community groups, it could have been a very different piece of work.  I wish the Totnes EDAP, for example, had had input from the team behind the San Buenaventura document…

This could either be part of, or run alongside, more conventional planning documents.  Transition would bring the community engagement part (it could perhaps provide that as a paid service to the local authority) and a wealth of other insights, academics could bring a research side to it and Councils could bring the policy side of things, as well as engineering, highways and a range of other input.  The skillful part here is going to be around how these three, culturally very different, bodies talk to each other and collaborate on such a scale.  Facilitation would be key. This would, with such diverse engagement, be more able to be a ‘plan’ in the way that Brian refers to.

I may well, of course, be entirely wrong, and several city groups could be on the verge of publishing amazing EDAPs (I’d love to hear from you…).  In terms of ‘Let It Go Where It Wants to go” though, perhaps the absence of completed EDAPs out there, in cities as well as elsewhere, perhaps indicates the time is right for reflection on this.  I think the principle of creating a story/vision/plan is still central, and I think the Totnes EDAP offers lots of useful indicators for how this might be, but I hope this discussion will generate some focused thinking on next steps.

The three suggestions above are really just starters for discussion.  There may be hybrids between them, or entire other approaches we haven’t yet thought of. I asked Ben Brangwyn at Transition Network for his thoughts, and he allowed himself a flight of fancy, unconstrained by budgetary restraints (!), speculating as to what an EDAP for London might look like in an idealised scenario….

As a baseline document to form the foundation of the EDAP process, for me it would be London’s Carbon Reduction Plan created under Ken Livingston, expanded to cover peak oil and economic resilience and accompanied by;

1. the research that is starting to emerge within the government ministries that’s starting with a common language/understanding for discussing community-led change potential in a volatile world
2. a listing of all of civil society’s groups that could potentially get involved in delivering analysis and actual change
3. an analysis of the city’s disparity of wealth (and some mitigation suggestions) by the Equity Trust
4. a comprehensive list of social enterprises that could arise from this, produced by a combination of Ashoka’s orthogonal thinkers, Unlimited and the School for Social Entrepreneurs
5. a permaculture design team to apply these principles to the all aspects of the baseline document and finally, a bunch of rappers, celloists, fine and graffiti artists to create a non-static art installation that tugs on the heartstrings and inspires engagement among the young and old alike.

This will certainly be a question I will be bringing to the Open Space discussions at this year’s Transition Network conference (coming soon… get your booking in!), and want to then explore further with people who know more about this.  Anyway, some opening thoughts.. anyone want to comment?

Transition West Kirby want new allotments. When do they want them? Now! Whadda we want... etc. etc.

April brought lots more lovely projects for you to enjoy and share…  From Australia, the West Hobart Environment Network (or WHEN), a member of Transition Tasmania, enjoyed a relaxed ‘produce swap’ under the shade of a very large tree, and they’ve also kindly shared with us Annie’s recipe for no-knead bread…perfect for the lazy ones like me!  TT Blackwood had a busy day giving out seeds and sharing knowledge on how to grow them in a forest setting, finding new skills to share, and raising awareness about Transition. And some ideas from Sonya on taking small steps to big lifestyle changes that will help us live more lightly on the Earth.

TT Invercargill in New Zealand has been given some land to establish a community garden, wonderful news! If you could just cast your minds back…you may remember from last month a piece on Berm Bombing in NZ, and I was keen to know what a berm is, so I did a bit of googling… in some parts of the world, wisegeek tells me, a berm is a mound of earth, usually constructed by humans. In New Zealand, however, it’s quite simply a lawn, I’m told here…so ‘bombing’ them (not literally) is a great idea!

Over in the US, Hancock County Transition Towns had a very successful training, and have also shared with us a beautiful song by a beautiful voice. And congratulations, celebrations, champagne, fanfare, cheers… The 54^th US Transition Initiative has just Unleashed, this time it’s T Bloomington.  Up in Canada, we have some lovely pics of TT Powell River and lots of washing hanging out! (the washing has an important purpose)… and here’s an enjoyable little movie of TT Edmonton’s journey towards resilience….

In the UK, TT Exmouth has been busily encouraging the town council to put up energy efficient LED lights on the seafront, and their efforts have been rewarded as they’re soon to be installed! TT Marlow successfully launched their Solar 100 Project to get residents generating energy from their rooftops, with a target of 100 solar systems within a year. And have a look at this:… TT Worthing’s Post-Carbon Gazette.  It’s great!

At this happy time of year, gardening takes over the hearts and minds of many people as they get out into the fresh air to create new raised beds, plant seeds, and share in the work at their community gardens…  Here are lots of pictures of Ealing Transition Community Garden, and Grow N4, the food group for TT Finsbury Park, has been very busy planting urban spaces with orchards of apples, cherries, grapes, soft fruit, rhubarb and herbs. Work continues also on the Transition Canterbury allotment, and they continue to blog beautifully about it!  The idea of a ‘Transition Allotment’ looks like it might be taking off in Brighton too, in Tunbridge Wells, Bramcote and Wollaton, Ashtead, Forest Row, and many others besides.  This idea of ‘community allotments’ seems to be taking off, with Transition West Kirby having done some great research and campaigning on the matter.  On a slightly less practical note, if you ever need a good reason for a food fight, TT Cardiff has found a good one, campaigning against food waste by, er, wasting loads of food… (which would otherwise have been thrown away apparently…).

Congratulations this month to PEDAL, or TT Portobello, which has won a Climate Challenge Fund award for various food projects including an orchard, and also to bring energy saving measures to Portabello residents. TT Norwich is busily encouraging cycle paths and community orchards, and is actively engaged in saving toads on the toad patrol…quite a lot of them too!… TT Haslemere brings news of their green fair, community garden and other activities in their monthly Herald column…  On to other news now beside energy and food… TT Kingston held their Unleashing and made a movie, which is available here for you to watch!

Preparations for TT Tooting’s colourful lively Trashcatchers’ Carnival are going on well, and you can watch pictures and movies to get an early taster of how wonderful it’s going to be! Here is one of those films….

TT Balham held an open mic night and threw in a bit of bartering to the mix of action…sounds fun! In Bournemouth, the Lib Dem candidate has said he wants the town to become a TT… At Southampton University, the Transition initiative is gaining momentum… and here we have some great footage from the Transition SE Conference.

If you’re in Kinsale, Ireland, then take a ride on the environmentally friendly Kinsale Road Train, supported by TT Kinsale. As well as providing a guided tour of the area, the train is also a community service to the nearby retirement village. Here’s a little write up of a meeting with Rob Hopkins on his recent toothache-plagued trip to Dublin, which brought together the ‘founders of two global, groundbreaking sustainability movements’.  TT Kinsale hits the headlines again as it gains increasing support from their local Labour Party leader.

And for the whole world, we have a fantastic trailer of Sara’s and Emilio’s film, Words from the Edge.  This is just a taster, not even an official trailer, but it gives a taster anyway.

Finally, Transition Town Totnes just published its long-awaited Energy Descent Action Plan (not least by them), the UK’s first, and its accompanying website.  The formal launch is tomorrow and everyone is welcome.  Congrats to everyone involved.  We look forward to hearing what May will bring!

With thanks once again to Helen and the wonder that is Google Alerts….

I wrote a while ago about Transition Town Tooting in London, and their winning a grant to do the ‘Trashcatchers Carnival’ this summer.  Trashcatchers is a hugely exciting project, one that combines the arts, music and creativity as a tool for community engagement.  It is a huge project, and one from which Transition groups around the world will learn a great deal about engagement and diversity, and which will result in Tooting having the most almighty party that people will talk about for years!  As an update, here is a press release the TTT group just sent me.

In June 2009 Transition Town Tooting (TTT) became one of four projects to be awarded a Tipping Point commission by Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband. Since then, TTT has been working with Project Phakama and Emergency Exit Arts to create a large scale Carnival in the heart of Tooting. The Trashcatchers Carnival will take place on July 4^th.  Starting from around 2pm at Fircroft School the Carnival will proceed through the heart of Tooting, ending up in Fishponds Playing Fields at around 3pm for a grand finale.

Some images from the Trashcatchers workshops that have already taken place.

Led by 35 artists and working with over 600 local Tooting residents of all ages, the Carnival will show how beauty can be created from rubbish and how the way we live now can be transformed.   Using recycling as a metaphor, the Trashcatchers’ Carnival sets out to show how to build a vision of a low-energy future for Tooting by exploring our relationship with the natural world, using story, art, science, celebration and the collective ingenuity of local residents.

Characters, sculptures, musical instruments, dance, performance, costumes and floats are all being created from discarded materials, such as plastics, bags, bottles and boxes, collected from the public.   Local CARNIVALISTAS who are already working on the project come from: the South London Swimming Club, Share Community Gardens, Springfield Hospital, The Hub, St Georges’ Hospital, Price Close, Beatrix Potter Allotment, The Sprout, The Great Gustos Choir, Balham and Tooting Community Association, the Furzedown Festival, Tooting Safer Neighbourhood Team, South Thames College and the Tooting Town Centre Partnership Board as well as a host of local schools including Ernest Bevin, Chestnut Grove, Graveney, Sellincourt, Franciscan, Hillbrook and Fircroft.

The term CARNIVALISTA is applied to anyone who is excited by the idea of the Carnival. Many have already become involved through the series of workshops since late 2009.  The workshops have included designing, devising and making as well as awareness raising around issues of climate change and peak oil, using stories from our changing world, illustrating the challenges we face and working out the positive ways in which we can celebrate the future we want to see in our community.

Potential stitchers, beaders, makers, designers, dancers, musicians, recyclers, cyclers, and performers are already hard at work, galvanised by the prospect of the Carnival and the vision of transforming ways of living.  And you can join them.   Anyone interested in getting involved should check out the Trashcatchers blog or email transitiontowntooting (at) googlemail.com

So far Carnivalistas have created the story of the Carnival and its 5 major floats: EARTH, WATER, MEMORY, TRASHCATCHERS and THE LADY OF TOOTING. Beautiful designs and costumes are beginning to take shape.   The next workshops will be held on 13^th June (details of the venue will be confirmed on our web site at a later stage).   The Trashcatchers Carnival project can also be seen at:

• the BATCA (Balham and Tooting Community Association) Funday on 12^th June;
• the Furzedown Festival Funday on 18^th June.

There will also be a Trashcatchers’ Carnival Factory the week before the Carnival – details available from the website, here.

Ladies and Gentlemen.  It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website.  The site makes the full version of the UK’s first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.  It is the creation of the good folks at LumpyLemon, to whom we are greatly indebted.  Highlights include the oral history section, Liv Torc’s poem in the section on stories, the Totnes Energy Budget, the photoshopped visions of the future and, if one might suggest a sample chapter, the food section.  Copies of the printed EDAP are available here, and will be formally launched on Friday (do come).  God Bless Her and All Who Sail in Her (sound of tinkling glass as champagne bottle is smashed against the side of the website)….

In the ’12 Steps of Transition’, the model used by Transition groups up to this point, ‘Create an Energy Descent Action Plan’ is the last of the 12 steps.  It aims to draw together the work undertaken so far into what is, in effect, a resilience plan for the settlement in question, a community-generated Plan B, or vision of a relocalised world, accompanied by practical steps by which to reach it.

Our process had 7 distinct stages to it, and here I will set those out, hopefully in a way that feels understandable, and ideally do-able,  to other groups.  TTT was fortunate enough to obtain a grant from Esmee Fairbairn Foundation which enabled us to employ Jacqi Hodgson for a year to hold the project, and a small grant from APE for materials and research, with me in a part-time supporting role.  She was appointed in August 2008, and the project, named ‘Energy Descent Pathways’, began.

Step 1.  Developing a Framework: This involved the background research that such a plan required.  Some of that was researching existing Community Plans, Council publications, relevant literature and so on, and some of it involved oral history interviews and a survey of 220 households in Totnes and Dartington.  A plan was created for how the year would be spent, and the work began.  Two big research projects were initiated, ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ and an Energy Budget for the area.

Step 2.  Key Tools: This stage involved Jacqi creating materials and tools, such as the Transition Timeline (a 15 metre long timeline from 2009-2030, used to ‘harvest’ visions of the future) and other visual materials.  The idea was to create a process that was playful, engaging, and which also developed an articulate and practical plan.  We wanted to create something that members of the community could pick up and feel excited about, and see their own ideas reflected in, but also something that would land on the desks of our local council with a sufficiently authoritative ‘thud’. 

Step 3.  Engage the Community: this stage built off the work of TTT thus far and the engagement it had generated.  Jacqi’s work at this stage involved talks and workshops for a wide range of organisations.  She did a staggering amount of talks and presentations, not just in the town but in the parishes around the town.

Step 4. Public Launch: this was held in September 2008, and was launched by the Mayor of Totnes, the CEO of the local Council, head of the local small farmers association, the Chair of the Chamber of Commerce and others, and featured a cabaret style event with activities and exercises.  It was designed to create a buzz around the writing of this plan, and to be an invitation to get involved.

Step 5. Public Workshops: these took place in two rounds: the first round of 9 workshops focused on visions of the future and the assumptions underpinning them, the second round used those visions as a springboard for ‘backcasting’, setting out the practicalities of moving towards those visions. Also included at this stage was a one-day workshop and cabaret with the local Wondermentalist Cabaret, which created stories and poems about the future.

Step 6.  Backcasting on Strategic Themes: this included an exhibition in the Civic Hall and engaging with local schools, where the gathered visions were presented, and peoples’ ideas for backcasting were gathered.

Step 7.  Drafting the EDAP and Consultation: here a working draft was created which was reworked by the TTT working groups and then opened up for widespread consultation online with the public as well as with experts in particular fields.  This process led to the final draft which was then designed and published as well as being accompanied by an online version.  Also, at this stage, schools were invited to provide drawings, other artwork was gathered, and some photoshopped ‘what the future might look like’ images were created.

Also created at this stage were a set of ‘Resilience Indicators’ for each of the subject areas.  Projects already underway in Totnes that had emerged from TTT were also gathered together as ‘Transition in Action’, to show that this process had already begun.  Step 7 was a lot of work, and Jacqi deserves the Nobel Prize for Transition for the incredible editing job that led to the final document, and thanks are also due to LumpyLemon who did such a beautiful design job on the final document (as you can see in these images).

Which brings us to today.   I’m off to re-inforce those floor joists!

Mara, Jeff, and Steph – the 2009 core group

The Story of Transition Tales by Simon Robinson (MSc student at Schumacher College).

This is the story of Transition Tales, a small group within Transition Town Totnes. One of the aims of this project is to raise awareness within Primary and Secondary School children of the transition solution of community led response to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change by creating positive stories. This is done in partnership with local schools in the Totnes area, either as part of class time, or in after-school clubs. In writing up their story, I hope to highlight many successes, challenges and issues that will be of interest to those who wish to set up a Transition Tales initiative within their own Transition Town or Transition Network project.

Who Are Transition Tales?

In 2009, Transition Tales was organized by Steph Bradley, Mara Green, and Jeff van Zyl. Their workshops with schools were supported by a larger number of volunteers. I spent time with both Steph and Mara, interviewing both of them on the progress that had been made over the last few years, where Transition Tales had come from, what they had achieved, and what their visions and ambitions were for taking this project forward.

The Formation of Transition Tales

Transition Town Totnes began informally in late 2005, when Rob Hopkins and Naresh Giangrande initiated a series of talks and film screenings to raise awareness about the issue of peak oil. This rapidly began to build momentum for some kind of a community response, and this was launched as Transition Town Totnes in September 2006, at an event called “The Official Unleashing” of TTT.

Steph: “Rob did a Transition Course in 2006/2007 called “Skilling Up for Power Down” which was an 8 week course. One of things people on the course said was “What about young people?” This is a question that keeps coming up. The profile of Transition Town is still white middle class middle aged people, doing all these things. Where are the kids and where are the young people. So it came up right at the very beginning. Transition Tales was Rob and half a dozen other people’s response to that.”

“They got together a little group which included Hannah Mulder, who had a background in theatre. They had a meeting with Alan Dyer from Plymouth University from the Centre for Sustainable Education, who was involved in the initial consultation, and Steven Jones, then Head of KEVICC (King Edward VI Community College, Totnes). They talked about the feasibility of running a pilot at KEVICC and what it should look like and what include and they came up with three sessions that they were going to run at KEVICC.”

Hannah took over the facilitation of these sessions, and looked for volunteers, which is when Steph first got involved. At the same time Rob was ran some story-related sessions for adults with Matt Harvey a local poet. Matt would tell some of his own stories through poetry and in these sessions the participants were coming up with their own stories of Transition.

The First Sessions with KEVICC, Year 7

I asked Steph to tell me more about what happened in these early sessions:

Steph: “We ran a pilot with a year 9 group, just one session with 14 year olds, and then we had 3 sessions with the whole of the year 7, which was 250 children, over a period of 2 months so it was quite full on.”

“Session 1 was all about awareness raising and we did Rob’s oil bottle t game. [This will be described in more detail in the section below]. We showed them the film “The Story of Stuff” which is quite a good awareness raising film. So an element of the session was very much about telling them what was going on and then the ideal was that they would come up with stories, told as if they were in 2030. These were news stories and were going to be filmed and put onto youtube.”

“In the second session they had the opportunity to develop the stories, and in the third session we had the film studio and Hannah filmed all of them doing their little news casts. Alex in Transition Lewes got these videos into shape and put them on to youtube.”

At the end of this year Hannah left the project and handed over to Steph.

The Second Series of Sessions at KEVICC

The first pilot sessions had been invaluable in terms of the richness of feedback from both the children and teachers involved. The group had run an outdoor session with local storyteller Chris Salisbury, a session which had proven to be the most popular. It also became clear that three sessions was not enough. This was not just in terms of amount of information to impart. By talking about the emotive issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change, children needed time to take this information in, and have time to really process it. This shaped how Steph approached introducing the subject to children in the first session, by limiting the awareness raising and moving into the transition solution, which is about community building and having a positive community-led response:

Steph: “What we did then was limit the awareness raising to the very first session, by showing a short cartoon1, just 5 – 10 minutes long, about the earth being polluted. We didn’t want to come in with this big heavy weight. I often think you can’t do this, come in and drop a big heavy lead weight on to people, especially young people. So we moved away from filling them in about this big horrible picture.”

“We did play the oil bottle game as it is a very good game. In this we have a bottle of water and tell the children that that is all the oil there is in the world. They all take on a role; a car, airplane, toothbrush, washing machine, car, they decide, and they each have an empty glass. We ask them as a class “How much oil do you think you need?” When the bottle gets to half full we then ask them “Now what?” It’s just wonderful to watch them. The ones who have chosen to be airplanes are desperate to give it away. They’re horrified. “I’ve got a whole glass and you’ve only got this much!” They’re sharing it out. That’s their natural impulse to do that. Then we discuss what shall we do with the rest.”

Between the first and second year Steph also introduced an element of Economics. The economic climate had changed within the UK, and the emotional impact this was beginning to have on the children was noticeable

Steph: “We did a piece on Gross National Product and Gross National Happiness and so we introduced Economics. In the first year it wasn’t so evident but in the second year it was much more evident. Woolworth had just closed down and it really mattered to the children and they were worried, so we brought that in and looked at what makes people happy”

“We had a happiness wall and children wrote on yellow post-its on the walls. My pet, my mummy, friends. All of the things that made them happy. We kept these up for the sessions so whatever went on they could look at that and if there isn’t going to be a lot of money or oil, these things are always going to be there for them. So we had something there to hold any difficult emotions. We could say “well remember the things that make you happy. It’s stroking your pet, talking to your friends. These things don’t cost you any money.”

“We had this there ready to catch them as it were. This was something we added that wasn’t there initially. That felt really important.”

The emotional wellbeing of the children is of paramount importance to the Transition Tales team, and one double session which had been split up over lunchtime proved to offer a major insight for Steph. A long-running argument between a boy and a girl had threatened to blow up into a fight, and some older boys had entered their classroom and had been bullying some of the younger boys and all of the children were extremely agitated at the start of the second part of the session. Steph decided that she could not simply ignore this and carry on as planned:

Steph: “So I just scrapped my plan and said “shall we sort this out?” I had never done anything like this before. They tried to not speak at once but it was quite heated. We then reached a stage where I could pick pieces of the session to do. I thought I had ruined the project. I spoke to the head of year 7. I told her what had happened who recommended that I should have ignored it. She said “we do have systems and procedures in school to deal with this kind of thing.”

“What this brought up was that you can not raise awareness about peak oil and climate change with children if there is something right there and then that is impacting on their lives, you just can’t. It was a huge lesson for me and about how you work with children with what is going on in their life right now. You work through that first and then you build a sense of community and then you present “well actually this is going on in the world”. That then felt like the right way around.”

The Outdoor Sessions

Included in the second year of sessions was more time outside. This was done with Year 7 pupils who at that age are not following the national curriculum, but who still have a project-based curriculum. KEVICC has a piece of woodland that is only open to sixth formers. After helping clear up the woodland due to it being littered with every kind of waste material possible, the children were asked to build “structures of resilience” with whatever materials they could find.

Steph: “We had them building structures that showed resilience or non-resilience. They could choose, from a fairy house that would fall over in the wind, or a big strong structure built of corrugated iron. They had to use whatever they found in the woods. They loved doing this. The feedback was that this is what they really loved. Contact with nature and building things. We asked them to create structures of resilience but they were building dens. No doubt at all to them they were dens.”

It was in the planning and facilitation of these sessions that Jeff became involved, and as large numbers of volunteers were needed to ensure that each child had adequate supervision more people got involved, including Mara who became a key player. None of the volunteers, including Steph, had training in outdoor education, and in particular on restricting the children to what were to be considered “safe” activities. Steph’s response is extremely revealing, and depressing at the same time:

Steph: “We found that the outdoor sessions became a massive thing. The feedback we got was overwhelming. “We learnt, we discovered, we found out you can eat plants!” The outdoor sessions were all about connection to nature and the shocking feedback for us was that they didn’t know anything about nature. They climbed trees, they hurt themselves, we did risk assessments but we let them climb trees anyway. There was joy in the children who hurt themselves. It was if they were actually pleased. Some were quite delighted, they were quite proud; they were war wounds. They had never been allowed to do this before, it was a big thing. It felt really important to give them this experience. When I was a child you climbed trees and fell out and that was normal.”

“The joy the children had, they came to life, were enthusiastic, worked hard, and that was the highlight. When they came back inside they wanted to go out again. It was heartbreaking to know they were not allowed in the woods even though they are in the school grounds. I am so happy that we did it in the way we did it as we learnt from the children. ”

Working with Younger Children

As well as working with Year 7 pupils, Transition Tales have also been running sessions in Primary Schools, with 9 – 11 year olds. The objective was to explore what the differences would be working with a younger age group, and to discover what activities would work.

Steph: We did find that some things worked, for example the Quest Game, which is a game we developed to use at KEVICC as a way to enable them to develop their stories. Instead of coming up with stories and drama as we did with the year 7s though, we went very much into craft work. We got them to make model villages of their own village, how it is now and how it could be in 2030. It was much more tactile for the children. Mara took them outside and got them to look for things in nature, leaves and twigs, and again this is what they loved, being outside.

It was interesting to find that awareness of environmental issues is becoming more noticeable in this age group, compared with just two or three years ago. And again these issues were having en emotional impact too, which led to Transition Tales developing some methods to help them work through these emotions and reactions:

Steph: “We found that the children did know about Transition Town, about climate change, it is starting to come into the schools anyway. We are changing as they know more. They know more than children their own age two years ago when the project started. In the two years of doing this project we are constantly changing because the kids are far more aware. In the first year we were telling them about climate change and peak oil. In the second year they were already coming in frightened and worried and saying “My mum says we have no money in the bank what are we going to do?” They had stories to tell and were already being impacted.”

“Our approach had to change quite a lot. Now in primary schools they are already being taught a lot. There is a lovely display on the walls in the reception of the Grove which is where we are working right now showing them where vegetables come from. So they have apples and bananas with huge long arrows going right across the world, and then they have Riverford which is our local farm with carrots, potatoes and peas, coming from just down the road. That is already there. They are doing Transition activities already now, just naturally.”

Plans for 2010 and Areas for Development

In the first quarter of 2010 Transition Tales plan to continue running workshops with the Primary School children in the Totnes area. Outdoor sessions will certainly form part of the sessions due to the positive impact they have:

Steph: “Our plan is for the next session to ask “What would you like to do next?” They have shown us their little garden. Maybe we could do some stories around that? We took them outside for some games outside. They have pent up energy from sitting indoors, and you let them run wild and they are then focused again. You really notice the impact that has on children, sitting inside, on chairs, following the agenda of whoever that might be. You give them 10 minutes to do what they want and the difference is noticeable, the motivation, the focus is back. You can them ask them how they would like to work, it’s amazing.”

For the Year 7 pupils at KEVICCs, it was decided that it was important to have continuity between sessions. If sessions ran with a gap of too many weeks in between, the children would often lose the thread of the content. Therefore in June, all 250 children will spend all 8 contact hours on a field trip at Embercombe, an outdoor centre in Devon created to teach children and adults about environmental issues and also to help develop the practical skills that will be needed in the coming years.

What is also becoming clear to the Transition Tales team is the need to support teachers, and development training materials and workshops for them:

Steph: “Another thing was that there was no point us going in for 6 or 9 sessions as that meant we are only there occasionally. What came from that was that we knew we needed a Transition Tales Teacher Training course. We have been slowly developing this. We have run a single day course, and in March we hope to run a 2 day course. We need to work with the teachers and then they can work with the children as they know if there are problems going on with the children. They can follow up too afterwards and this is important.”

“What we hope to develop on the training course is both Outer Transition and Inner Transition. It may not be so explicit, but we do hope to include some reflection on personal transition including quiet time for the teachers. They have so much bureaucracy it is no wonder many don’t have time to look at these other aspects so we hope to give something to them too. It felt like that if you can not support the teachers you can not support the children as we are bringing things up that are so big that they then need their teachers. If the teachers are not being supported in turn, then what?”

At present the Transition Tales Team are looking for more volunteers to get involved. Building on the need to support teachers, Steph sees a need to map out the English curriculum:

Steph: “Because we are working with schools and teachers, we need to map out the curriculum, see what is already there, find the links with what we are doing. I was giving a workshop on Transition Tales in Scotland in Glasgow. After the workshop one of the people got really excited and said “But we’ve got something here within the Scottish curriculum that will fit beautifully”. It’s called “Promoting Health” which is a Scottish Government scheme where they work with personal resilience. It’s perfect as they use all the same keywords as us. We use the keywords Diversity leading into Trust leading into Cooperation leading into Resilience. As soon as he heard that he knew the way in to schools in Scotland so we are going to follow that up.”

“So what is needed here is to look at the English curriculum and see what the ways in are for us. We need to see if we can offer teachers courses that do match the curriculum. It is then not making extra work for them, it is supporting them, use Transition Tales games and activities to help them teach what they already have to do. We need to look at that and other things such as Eco Schools which is something schools can sign up for. They can get badges and awards for ticking boxes. This is not a very Transition thing, ticking boxes, but we do need to map what it is that schools are doing already. “

There is also a need to find a film editor who can edit many hours of video tape produced by the pupils at KEVICC. The funding that Transition Tales had for filming was only for the first year of the project. As Steph says, the content of these films feels extremely precious to her as:

Steph: For the second year of sessions we also did the videoing of stories, but what changed is that we did not want to limit them to news stories. We wanted them to tell us what they wanted to do, and we had a whole range of things. Fairy tales, news stories, dramatizations, filming outside in their dens. In the first year of filming in the scenarios we had a lot of techno-fix solutions represented, for example a giant electric mouse that could produce food. This time we had techno-fix, mad max, power down, denial stories, as well as what I call the fifth scenario of going back completely to how it was in the past. All of those 5 scenarios came out. So when we had no agenda about making news we had the whole range.

Afterword

In the New Year both Jeff and Mara chose to leave the project to move into new areas, and Steph, while remaining passionate about the schools work, has chosen to take 1 year out to walk around England co-creating and collecting transition tales using some of the techniques developed through working with the project so far, to write up into a transition publication. The Totnes based work in 2010 will be project managed by Inez Aponte, transition trainer and storyteller.

In March the planned 2 day Transition Tales training will go ahead with Steph and Inez facilitating.

Further Information

Transition Town Totnes: http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/

One of the videos produced by the pupils of KEVICC can be viewed here:

Embercombe: www.embercombe.co.uk/

Hopkins, Rob Energy Descent Pathways: evaluating potential responses to Peak Oil (self-published MSc manuscript) available here.

It is, after all, what is expected.  Activists and experts all head to the venue, with huge carbon implications, in the hope that this is “the one”, new police powers get passed, activists are subject to harassment and intimidating policing (George Marshall’s piece on his Copenhagen experience is well worth a read, especially for his despair at the amount of polar bear costumes on display), the media can run its “climate change demonstrations turned ugly today” stories to divert interest away from the lack of progress, in the fringe event people inspire and challenge each other, and in the main talks, most representatives arrive, as one does at any auction, with their preferred bids and the extra they will offer if pushed already worked out long in advance.

It had also been made clear in advance that Obama would be arriving without the support of Congress, so that anything he promised there would struggle to become a reality. In the end he promised $100bn from no-one yet knows where, the Chinese were blamed by everyone for the failure, the world was condemned to at least a 3.5 degree rise, and the focus was on lowest common denominator compromises… It was, as Ed Miliband writes in today’s Guardian, “a chaotic process dogged by procedural games”.  In the end, what had been trailed as’ the last change to save the planet’ was turned into “something we can build upon”.  A failure, in other words.  The statements from politicians that the protests were useful and that NGOs were playing an important role in the process began to sound increasingly patronising.

Miliband praised the efforts of NGOs and the many campaigns run in support of meaningful outcomes from the talks.  “The challenge for all of us is not to lose heart and momentum. The truth is that the global campaign, co-ordinated by green NGOs, backed by business and supported by a wider cross section of the public, has achieved a lot. We would never have had targets from so many countries, the engagement of leaders, and the agreement on finance without this sort of mobilisation”.  I am left wondering though if perhaps that campaign, and that mobilisation, which of course we need, could take a markedly different form next time.

How would it be if we all took a very different tack, if the approach of activists was one of ‘practically modelling the world we want to see’?  Clearly, one of the challenges among those sent to negotiate is that they have no vision of a post carbon world. This was driven home to me last week on a more local scale, when I interviewed a senior planner in my local council about climate change, Transition and so on as part of this PhD research I am still limping along with.  I asked him, as my final question, what his vision was for our area of Devon in a scenario where it had successfully reduced its emissions by 90%.  It was clear he had never thought about it. When pushed, all he could come up with was akin to 1950s Britain, rather like a Hovis advert, and when I asked him if it was something that would appeal to him personally, he replied that at his age, the idea had some appeal, but to younger people he thought they would see it as rather dull.

Similarly, for the negotiators at Copenhagen, a world emitting 90% less carbon than it does today is not an attractive proposition.  Their mental picture is of denial, austerity, misery, giving up things, losing things, certainly not a future they bounce out of bed each day determined to bring about.  It is not a problem exclusive to them.  The same is true for many of us.  We expect the negotiators to come up with a deal that ’saves the planet’, but hope that we don’t have to make many actual changes to our own lives.  This is what, nationally and internationally, makes it so difficult for politicians to offer any meaningful response, the fact that they are, in effect, trying to make unelectable policies electable.

So how about this, as a co-ordinated approach for the next time there is such a gathering, which will again, no doubt, be trailed as ‘the last chance to save the planet’?  We (that is, those who care passionately about climate change and the need for a proportionate response), confound expectations, and stay at home.  Using the web-based technologies we now have at our disposal, we co-ordinate an international festival of meaningful change.  We stay home and insulate whole streets, create community gardens, work meaningfully with our local authorities to do projects with them, eat local food diets for the duration of the conference, live without cars, insulate our schools, set up an area of the settlement in question as a model for what it would look like transitioned.  We start bringing the future that we can imagine but which is still beyond the comprehension of so many, into focus.  We would have enough lead-in to the conference to be able to do something meaningful and which tells a powerful story.  We could even chip in what we would have paid to get there towards helping to resource it.

This would only be capable of being more effective than all going there if it was brilliantly organised and brilliantly co-ordinated by an exceptional web presence and an exceptional media team.  After all, if a tree falls in a forest and no-one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound (or something).  If we can co-ordinate things like Avaaz, 350’s day of action, and other similar online events, surely we could do this?  It could be like an online Live Aid type thing, people around the world telling stories of what they are doing and why, celebrating their projects, and making the point that this is improving their quality of life rather than diminishing it.

This approach would save a great deal of carbon, would give greater permission and leadership to world leaders and negotiators, would completely confound what is actually expected of us, would shift the focus away from people concerned about climate change being equated with people who attack policemen, save a fortune in policing bills that could instead be spent on loft insulation, and would be far more likely to bring about meaningful behaviour change at a community level than the current approach.

As usual, I’m sure I will be accused of being naive, of misunderstanding oppositional politics.  Of course we have to hold politicians and negotiators to account, and to show our displeasure, concern and anger at their actions.  Yes, the bringing together of activists from the Global North and South is a vital and visceral reminder of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, as Ben Brangwyn’s recent post set out, creating powerful and vital networks.  But might we not be more creative and playful about this?  Might it not be us that actually shows the leadership next time, rather than expecting these negotiators to do so?  Might we not look at Copenhagen as not just a huge failure of the political process, but also a huge failure of protest culture to have any meaningful impact on that process?

I didn’t go to Copenhagen.  Other people from Transition Network did (you can catch a short view of Naresh and Sophy running a workshop there in the 4th ‘Stupid Show’, see here), and their input was well recieved and I’m sure was useful and impactful to those who attended.  I’m sure that some dynamic networking took place that will prove to have been very useful.  However, how about next time we take the lead; we show not just from our Powerpoints and placards that another world is possible, but also that by staying home and working with those around us to start practically building a low carbon economy, loft by loft and street by street, that a leaner, lower carbon future could be, and will be, fantastic.  Just that once, just for that one conference.  The conference that they ran, and no-one came.

Coca Cola ads on billboards around Copenhagen

As many have now written, the Cop15 conference, which is focussed on creating a treaty that will prevent our climate from undergoing a systems state change and re-establishing itself in a new stable state that much less conductive to human survival, seems certain to fall far short of what is needed or fail completely. In describing what the treaty has to do I am calling attention to the meta narrative in the story of these negotiations. That is we have a self referential system, our economic and politic systems which takes little account of the ecology of our planet. We think in terms that ignore the basis of life.

Amazonian representatives at a Kilmaforum event

Let’s be clear that if we as a culture (Arne Naess called it Industrial Growth System- IGS), the culture that invented the current dominant form of human society, are to make a transition to something more in line with long term survival of life on earth we must bear a collective responsibility for the collective failure to achieve what is necessary. The politicians have not failed us; we – all of us- have failed to create the conditions for a political settlement. It is a shallow reading of the current paradigm to see one part of the system as wrong or to blame. The politicians and business are only doing their job.

We have not redefined what that job now should be or how to go about it. Blaming politicians or business is a mistake. I don’t mean we who are at the Klimaforum, but we all of us.  For we are all part of the same system and it will be by only seeing ‘us’ rather than ‘them’ that we will create the conditions for a real systems change. The slogan de jour of this conference has been System Change not Climate Change. Where is the systems change? There is none, here in Copenhagen it’s business as usual. When the conditions for a systems change are in place we will be in a position to achieve a political treaty.

A workshop about Transition at the Klimaforum

We are all dependent on the IGS, like it or not, for most of the things we need to live. When you begin a process like Transition, then it’s as if you start putting a foot on a conveyor belt going in the opposite direction while having the other foot on the IGS belt. I can get really uncomfortable really quickly! So we hop on and off on conveyor belt to the to the other. When we get to a place where we have created enough of what we need on the Transition conveyor belt we then don’t need the IGS or only occasionally. Of course this is a simplification, but it goes something like this, my point is you can’t leave one system without having another in place.

We hear lots of ‘noise’ from the conference about the treatment of the Global South by the Global North, and the ins and outs of the Kyoto process track vs the USA and European track, and the long negotiations involved in having to negotiate parallel tracks. I was talking to a member of a UK government commission who has been in on the talks. She said that they were going sentence by sentence, and taking ages to decide on “A comma or a full stop?” The really important work? Nothing, just avoidance.

There has been more noise created as a result of confrontation with police, who I feel have reacted deliberately so as to make the most of any aggression with heavy handed tactics and mass arrests. I spoke with several who were in the alternative community of Christiana last night. The police surrounded the whole area where people were partying and relaxing in a good natured atmosphere. One who was there said she had never seen so many police before; they streamed into the community with CS gas and baton charges arresting 179 for no apparent reason.

One Swedish boy who couldn’t have been more than 17 told me he had been held for over 20 hours in a cage with no food, water or access to a toilet after the march on the 12th. Many other arrested were held in freezing conditions, made to sit hand cuffed together on the frozen ground for 5 hours. Many pissed themselves. It feels like the police actions are designed to make more noise and distract us from the real issues. Why all this noise?

We are faced with a system that cannot and will not make the changes necessary to create a resilient world in the face of climate change and peak oil. It would go against everything the system is designed for. Economic growth and non renewable resource use are not the marks of a system that is ‘fit for the purpose’ of 21st century life. These talks so far are engaged in somehow allowing the present system to go on for a time longer, that’s all. Gordon Brown might have flown in 48 hours earlier than planned to ‘bang heads together’. But what does he hope this head banging will achieve? The necessary steps to halt CO2 emissions would be too painful to achieve and would not be accepted by the electorate in any industrial country.

From where I am standing the best thing that could happen right now is for the talks to fail. There is talk of the G77 nations on Wednesday staging a walk out and holding a summit with demonstrators outside the Bella Centre where the main negotiations are taking place. It feels like the best solution right now would be to not have a treaty that politicians can wave in front of the folks back home and say, ‘see we succeeded!’. Rather it would be better if we confronted them with the failure of the present system to create a world that our method of determining truth – science- says will be stable and fit for the purpose of life.

What should we in turn do? There are many pieces that will need to be put into place but one of the biggest and most important will be to go on with the business of creating a new system that makes the present system obsolete. Transition is in that business and that’s its purpose, to make a world that is fit for the purpose of life on planet earth. Whoever and whatever system, persons, or organisations that are in the same business we will happily collaborate with, and I am sure they will also be happy to join in. Indeed I have met some of them this last week.

Naresh addresses a Transition event at the Klimaforum

Only when the necessary conditions for a paradigm shift are in place that will allow us to make the necessary changes that a resilient culture demands, will we get a society ‘fit for the purpose of life’. The Transition approach is designed to start creating those new structures and systems of living right now and start putting into place alternative arrangements for every system we now depend. Only where there is enough in place that we can start to depend on it will the size and scale of change occur. We can’t just throw away the present mind set and life support systems. We need something in place, a parallel system that can begin to carry us and support us. A space craft would not be able to turn off its life support systems without having a back up in place. That is the position we find ourselves in.

If nothing else has come out of Copenhagen then failure of the current system then this would be a great step forward. A paradox? Only if you see nothing else. There are bill boards all around Copenhagen proclaiming Hopenhagen, supported by mendacious green washing corporations like Coke (see pic at the start of this piece). For me hope springs from the eventual withering away of our current system and its gradual replacement with one that can allow to emerge, using all of our technological prowess and creativity, a life supporting- for all of life- human presence on the planet. The Shambala Warrior tradition, part of the ancient Tibetan Buddhist tradition, talks of the setting sun culture that looks to death and the Great Eastern Sun culture that looks to life, that can care for the planet. Our present system is a setting sun culture. We look to death, we celebrate death. Let’s choose life.

Naresh Giangrande