There is a section called “What Should You Do?” which is usually the part in such books that picks you up a bit, and makes you believe that you can do something to alter the projections he has previously set out.  There are some great bits of ‘personal advice’ in there, such as ‘focus on satisfaction rather than income’, ‘do not acquire a taste for things that will disappear’, ‘stop believing that all growth is good’, and ‘in politics, remember that the future will be dominated by physical limits’.  Fair enough.  But there is one there that is so spectacularly depressing that I really needed to bring it out here and look at it with some other people.

It is “don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Randers reasons that over the next 50 years we will see the ongoing erosion of biodiversity and wilderness, due to climate change and humanity’s reach into more and more remote areas.  A love for “old, undisturbed nature”, he argues, is something it will become increasingly difficult to satisfy.  ”By teaching your child to love the loneliness of the untouched wilderness, you are teaching her to love what will be increasingly hard to find”, he argues, which will lead to unhappiness and despondency.  ”Much better then”, he concludes, “to rear a new generation that find peace, calm and satisfaction in the bustling life of the megacity – and with never-ending music piped into their ears”.  That must rank as one of the most devastating visions of the future I have read anywhere.

This links to another of his pieces of personal advice, “invest in great electronic entertainment and learn to prefer it”.  I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts.  Might a move to a world that has successfully decarbonised itself only be possible if we are to disconnect from wilderness?  I know what I think about it, but I’d love to hear from you.  Is this something that fills you with horror, or are you pleased to finally see someone taking what strikes you as being a realistic angle on this?  Discuss.

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.

Today we come to the last in the series of ‘A Story of Transition in 10 Objects’ films, produced by the wonderful Emilio Mula at nuproject.  Thanks also to Sharpham House for letting us film there, the closest thing to the British Museum that we could find!  I hope you have enjoyed them.  We go out in style, presenting our final object, a bottle of beer with a tale to tell…

And here is the moment where Portobello and Hexham found out they had won:

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

Louise Evans on the local BBC News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision time

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

The positive impact of the Transition movement

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

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

So where do we go from here?

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

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

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

Links to invaluable info about fracking:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are, in no particular order, the book ‘The Transition Companion’, the online version of the ingredients and tools of Transition, and a beautifully designed set of Ingredients and Tools Cards which can be used to better understand all this.  Together, they represent a sea-change in how we understand what Transition is and how to do it.  So, let’s have a look at those things one-by-one.

No. 1. The Transition Companion: making your community more resilient in uncertain times.

This new book, which replaces ‘The Transition Handbook’, is the result of 18 months of a collaborative process involving people from Transition initiatives around the world.  It reframes Transition as a collection of ‘ingredients’ and ‘tools’ which each initiative assembles in its own way.  It is rich with stories, artwork, case studies and photos contributed by Transition initiatives themselves.  It is rich with insight and the kind of wisdom that can only come from an open-source 5 year global experiment such as Transition.  It represents a quantum leap forward in the Transition movement, a deepening, a maturing, and a very tangible vision of where all of this might go and how we might be most confident of actually getting there.  It has 320 pages, and is in full colour, It’s probably got a picture of you in it somewhere…

You can order it from me (which would be great), from Green Books, from Permanent Publications, from Beetroot Books, from Amazon (if you must), or even better, from your much-endangered local bookshop, or order it through your local library.  If you are in the US you can order it from the US publisher Chelsea Green.  There are no plans for an audio book.  I’ll also be speaking about the book, answering questions, and picking some of my favourite records (Desert Island Discs-style) on the Transition Show on StroudFM, 2pm this Friday.

No. 2. The Ingredients Directory

As well as being gathered together in the book, the ingredients have also been put online in an interactive, interlinked, technologically dazzling kind of jamboree.  Our Transition Network webmeisters have excelled themselves with this, their finest creation to date.  You will notice the homepage now looks rather different, with the ingredients as a major theme.  All the ingredients, and all the tools, are now online, each with space for comments and feedback.  There is also the “Transition Ingredientator”, otherwise known as “Add your own ingredient”, which will give you the opportunity to draft any that you feel we have neglected.  These will be moderated over the coming months. You can either view the ingredients in the 5 stages as set out in the book:

• Starting
• Deepening
• Connecting
• Building
• Daring to Dream

… or see them set out altogether in a directory format. This is an invaluable resource, I hope you find it really useful and link to them often.

No. 3.  The Transition Ingredients Card Game

At the 2011 Transition Network conference we trialled a card game based on the Ingredients.  The idea was that they might help you to familiarise people with them, to better understand the ways in which your group is working, and also to identify ways in which it might be more effective.  They were very popular, and so the wonderful Marina Vons-Gupta has produced a set of beautiful cards which you can download for free, print out (instructions are provided) and use.  Some games are suggested, but they are made available on the basis that you are invited to create you own games and share them, so that in the future we can update them.  They should hopefully prove to be a really useful resource.  You’ll find the cards sat awaiting your downloading here.  Let us know what you think.

We have also reworked the Why do Transition? page at TransitionNetwork.org, and what was the Transition Primer has now been condensed into the link-tastic ‘What is a Transition initiative’ page.  The above projects have been inputted into by thousands of people, but I would particularly like to thank a few people who have put an amazing amount of work and creativity into them, namely Marina, Ed, Laura, Amber, Helen, Ben, Naresh, Sophy, Jim and everyone at Green Books.  It is five years since we kick started this whole Transition thing, which is now active in 34 countries around the world in thousands of communities.

These new iterations of what Transition is represent as deep a shift as the emergence of the whole idea was in the first place.  They are a distillation of all the bravery, innovation, generosity, kindness, success, failure and genius that everyone involved in this has poured into it for the past 5 years.  As a result, they embody a richness and a maturity that is quite extraordinary, yet they remain intensely focused and practical, indeed far more practical than what went before.  Today is a landmark, a key milestone, and I’ll leave the last word to Denise Levertov, the poet, who captures how I feel about this:

Brilliant, this day — a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadow cut by sharpest scissors, deft hands.

Here are some photos to accompany the podcast….

Information about the Tres Hombres

Captain Jorne Langelaan telling the assembled visitors about the ship.

Exeter Brewery's beer stowed safely in the hold.

In a world where income disparity is increasing and social regression is inherent in the current structure of the UK’s Feed-In Tariff (FIT), we need to rethink how community renewable energy projects are structured & financed to ensure full community benefit lies at the heart of the process and that energy reduction is still focused upon as part of a community “power down” process.

Community renewable energy projects generally follow one of two structures: developer led or community led. In the former, a developer takes the pre-construction risk and a majority ownership stake in the renewable energy project. If the project receives planning permission then the developer will invite the community to fund the balance of the project up to their agreed equity value.  In the latter, the community raises the finance, takes the planning risk and tenders different parts of the project development to professional advisors.

In both cases, the predominant form of finance is equity-based – typically, for the community, via an Industrial Provident Society (IPS).  In the first structural option, a developer (probably not based within the community) takes a majority share of the profits. In the second, the community investors would receive all / the majority of the project’s profit, yet taking a higher level of risk.

The key message is this- in both cases, it is only those with the capital to invest that receive the benefits (read profit) of the project.

The problem with this is 2-fold.

Firstly, the returns that the developer / community investors receive from the FIT is a result of a slightly increased energy cost for the 20 million plus homes in the UK – socially regressive as anecdotally it is the wealthy who have the money to invest, and the least well-off who do not.

Secondly, investors are focused on energy generation. There is no focus on using their money to solve the real problem of reducing our current energy demand – particularly in the homes of those who are least well-off and do not have the capital to invest in energy efficiencies.

What about the Green Deal? Well, this will only provide loans of up to £10,000 and this will only be for those investments that meet the “golden rule” of savings equalling costs. The average house probably needs investments in the order of £25,000. Hence, more capital will be required to do the job properly and most of the capital investment required will be for investments that are unable to meet the golden rule

But, let me get back to the point.  We need structures that benefit the wider community – especially those that are unable to invest. By taking a slightly different approach to financing community renewable energy projects we can start to generate income for those households that really need help.

The key “tweak” in the current model is to start debt financing a larger proportion of the community renewable energy projects – what I call community renewable energy finance (CREF) 2.0.

Imagine the following renewable energy project. It has a total cost of £500,000 and will generate £100,000 per year in FIT income. By raising 25% via an equity offering (via the local community to pay for development costs) and borrowing the rest (let’s say at 5% via social loans) then the high-level numbers are as follows:

• Equity: £125,000
• Debt: £375,000
• Debt Repayment for 10 years (capital + interest): £56,250 1^st year. & decreasing
• Sinking fund (for a new project after 20 years): £25,000 p.a.
• Profit in year 1 (before other costs): £18,750

In the current model, the entire £18,750 would be distributed to those investors who had capital to invest, leaving none to be re-invested into those areas that find finance difficult to access. In CREF 2.0 there will be 75% of this figure (about £14,000) left to re-distribute where required.

This is the money that can be used to invest in energy efficiency and reduction in those homes that do not have the capital to invest – a radical opportunity from a not-so-radical change in the financing model. In essence, those households within the community that cannot afford to invest, still receive the benefit from the local renewable resources which they generally share i.e. sun, wind, wood etc.

It requires communities to start taking the harder route i.e. not giving up equity stakes to development businesses and maybe taking on more of the risk. This can be mitigated by pre-agreements to buy developments at “cost plus” or by taking on more of the risk of the development themselves – lowering the risk through using affordable renewable energy development businesses.

It does not take a genius to work out that grants are a thing of the past and that we have to get smarter as communities to create structures that have maximum benefit for the maximum number of people.  CREF 2.0 also has an added benefit 9which I have discussed before in other blogs).  The more money that you can keep local, the greater the economic multiplier and the the economic benefits of cash injections into the local economy.

Let’s start getting smarter about the way we finance renewable energy projects at the community level and ensure we all benefit.

Here is the third film in the ‘Story of Transition in 10 objects’ series, this time looking at a part from an old Victorian gas lamp from Malvern. You will be able to read more about this, and many other Transition stories, in the forthcoming ‘The Transition Companion’.

I have, on occasion, reflected here at Transition Culture about how the natural building movement, with its leaning towards natural building materials such as straw, clay, hemp and so on, has yet to really explore how those materials might be used to retrofit existing homes.  Virtually all of the work done around those materials focuses on new build, but finally, it seems some work is happening on retrofits.  An MPhil dissertation done at University of Cambridge by Keven Le Doujet entitled “Opportunities for the large scale implementation of straw based external insulation as a retrofit solution of existing UK buildings: how much of a good idea is it to externally insulate existing UK buildings with straw bales?” explores this very question.  It is a fantastic and comprehensive piece of work which is a pleasure to read.

Keven’s research is very thorough, and looks at the practicalities of using external strawbale cladding to externally insulate the millions of poorly insulated homes and workplaces in the UK.  This is not the work of a romantic idealist, he is clear about the challenges of doing so on a meaningful scale.  He concludes that it “is a good idea but even if it reaches its full potential it will not be sufficient in itself to improve the sustainability performance of UK buildings to the level required to tackle to combined challenge of energy security, climate change and the sustainable use of natural resources”.  It is not, he argues, a “silver bullet”, something that would address the entire retrofitting challenge we face, but it could prove an excellent solution for around 5% of the UK’s housing stock.

The study looks at some amazing case studies (look at the back of the report), where unappealing buildings are transformed.  His sense of realism extends into his setting out of the obstacles to this, which include:

• Thickness (these walls are thick, and require a substantial roof overhang)
• Installation time (it’s a big project)
• Seasonality (you want work outdoors with strawbales all year round)
• Aesthetics (you can use them to make an ugly building more attractive, but not to retrofit a building considered attractive)
• Financial barriers (it is a realistic option for self builders, but quite pricey if you get contractors in to do it)
• Skills and knowledge gaps (it may prove tricky to find builders who know how to do it)
• Lack of persuasive information (in other words, there isn’t yet a robust knowledge base around this approach)

However, what shines through this excellent study, unusually for an academic study, is a real taste of what might be possible, and what it would actually look like if we used local strawbales to retrofit some of our worst housing stock.  The benefits, in terms of reskilling, locking up carbon, supporting local farmers, hugely increasing energy efficiency and so on would be huge.  Unfortunately the trend over the past 30 years in the UK has been to build houses with virtually no roof overhangs at all, which makes this very difficult for many homes.  However, I reached the end of Keven’s study with a sense of this being something that has just scratched the surface of the potential here.  How about pre-fabricated straw panels which can be made offsite and then put up against the wall?  Hemp and lime or hemp and clay bricks?  If we applied some of the creativity and research support that other approaches get I’m sure we could come up with all kinds of things.  If you are interested in natural building, you will find this a timely and fascinating study.

TTT's Fiona Ward accepts the Ashden Award from Kevin McCloud.

On Thursday 16th June Grand Designs TV guru, Kevin McCloud, presented the Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy and Behaviour Change to the Transition Together project run by Transition Town Totnes (TTT).   The award, worth £10,000 plus support and mentoring from the Ashden Trust over the next 12 months, came just 18 months after TTT were awarded £625,000 as part of the previous government’s Low Carbon Community Challenge. This money made it possible to scale up the previous Transition Together programme and make grants available to install solar PV systems in participating households (you can read Ashden’s very thorough case study here). Here’s a short film about Transition Together (aka Transition Streets) produced by the Ashden Awards:

The local news also did an excellent piece about Transition Streets.  Other Ashden Award winners, four from the UK and five from Africa and Asia, are well worth looking at if only to remind us of the stark contrast between the environmental problems and solutions we see here in Britain and those in the Third World.   The other UK winners were Radian Housing Association whose investment in low carbon new homes and retrofits made them a worthy choice for this year’s Gold Prize; Midlands Wood Fuel, who provide locally sourced wood chips to power biomass boilers to replace oil and gas; the Centre for Alternative Technology which has trained thousands of people in renewable energy technologies and Severn Wye Energy Agency which has teamed up with over 30 schools to empower school students to track the carbon footprint of their schools and take action to reduce it.

International winners were Abellon Clean Energy in India, who turn crop waste into fuel pellets to replace fossil fuels; the Agha Khan Planning and Building Service in Pakistan, a project to improve health, save trees and make homes warmer by improving wood burning stoves in remote villages; Husk Power Systems which uses rice husks to power electricity production at the village scale in rural India: ToughStuffInternational, whose simple, affordable and robust solar kits are bringing electricity to rural locations in Africa and Gold Medal winners, Toyala Energy, whose fuel efficient charcoal stoves are already meeting the needs of over a million people in West Africa.

The previous day the finalists all met Prince Charles...

In tandem with the awards ceremony was a conference on sustainable energy with forthright speakers like Jonathan Porritt – “Why won’t the government fund a comparison between the cost effectiveness of energy efficiency and generating more power? Why all the lies suggesting nuclear power is cheaper than solar PV?” – and slightly less inspiring speakers such as Greg Barker, Minister of State for Climate Change and Stephen O’Brien, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for International Development.

UK award winners were challenged to explain what they would say to David Cameron and Chris Huhne if trapped in a lift with them for two minutes. We can imagine the relief the award winners would have felt as the lift doors finally opened. However, the prospect of Porritt in the same situation would surely see Cameron and Huhne as by far the most uncomfortable travelers! No wonder that Porritt was kept well away from the ministers who spoke.  Here is a film of this event:

Not that they got off completely. Anna Ford and Kevin McCloud both challenged the government to do more by providing the legislative framework to make things happen.   Among the debates was a discussion about how to increase the uptake of energy saving solutions such as the Green Deal and other grants that are already available. The success of Transition Streets in achieving just this, particularly with low income households, may hold valuable lessons about the role of community involvement as the way forward.

One last thought? When we pat ourselves on the back for installing a kilowatt or two of solar PV, which might meet 25% or less of our needs, lets spare a thought for rural people without electricity. Among the stories told at the Ashden Awards were those of people who walk many hours to charge a mobile phone or children struggling to do their homework by the light of candles or smoking kerosene lamps. Just a few watts of power, costing $10 or less, can transform the lives of these people.

If you are interested in finding out more about Transition Together/Streets or want to start up your own version of the project then please see here.  Thanks to all of the Transition Together/Streets project team for their enthusiasm and dedication, and of course, to all of the households that have participated so far.

Chris Bird is author of ‘Local sustainable homes: how to make them happen in your community’ and is very active in the Transition Town Totnes Building and Housing Group and the Transition Homes initiative.

Receiving my certificate from Brian Harper, one of three Gasketeers who travelled to the Tagore Festival...

On Saturday I did a talk at the Tagore Festival which I hope to get a film of up soon.  Instead of using powerpoint, I told the story of Transition using different objects which different initiatives had sent me.  It went really well, and was a really enjoyable way of doing it.  One of the most substantial ‘props’ was a fully functioning Victorian gas lamp which the Malvern Gasketeers had brought all the way from Malvern that morning.  My thinking had been that the crescendo of my talk would be to invite them onstage and that they would light the lamp for all to see.  However, while setting up we were told that in order to light it we would have needed a licence from the local Council, so it remained unlit, albeit rather beautiful nonetheless. 

My talk at the Tagore Festival, with the gas lamp in pride of place...

After the talk, the three Gasketeers presented me with a beautiful certificate certifying that I will “henceforth be known as a Gasketeer”.  Very lovely of them.  It is an amazing initiative…  They have reduced the costs of maintaining 104 of Malvern’s historic gas lamps (the inspiration for the lamp post in C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’) from £580 each per year (£130 for gas, £450 for maintenance) to just £70 per year (£20 for gas and £50 for maintenance).  They have made them 10 times brighter than they were before, and they now produce no light pollution at all.  Here’s a short film about them…

The current expense of running the lamps brings them to costing the same as sodium or LED lamps, but they are now working on a scheme to power them with gas produced through anaerobic digestion, which would make them genuinely carbon neutral.  Also, sodium lamps last around 30 years before they need replacing, these last 100 years.  All repairs are done by Lynn Jones, the UK’s first female gas lamp technician, who does her maintenance rounds with everything she needs (including her ladder) on a bicycle trailer.  It really is a wonderful scheme, and my certificate now has pride of place in my house…