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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

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

Am home for a couple of days, and spotted that some of the TED talks have started going up. Here, as a sort of Transition Culture Summer Homework, is Paul Romer’s talk on ‘Charter Cities’ which I was so critical about in my write up. It offers a fascinating taste of unbridled human hubris, of an economist with no sense of economic or resource constraints, no sense of living within our means or of peak anything, no sense that perhaps unbridled neo-liberal free trade economics have been anything other than to the dazzling wellbeing of everyone.  Have a look.  Be fascinated to hear your thoughts on it.  My two highlights are his raising the question as to why no-one else has thought of building cities in deserts, and the bit near the end where he says …“there is no roadblock, there is no impediment, other than a failure of imagination that will keep us from delivering on a truly global win win solution”.   See what you think.

The result is stunning computer generated images of Mannahatta (as the native peoples called it) before it was developed and populated. That work in itself, as a tool for understanding one’s bioregion, is the most thorough, poetic, compelling and fascinating such study I have ever seen (his book is incredible, the only book I return home from TED with, and which I will review after the summer break). But what they have then gone on to do, which is fascinating to Transition folks, is to then roll forward, to imagine what New York might look like if it has gone some considerable way towards reintegrating some of the ecology that was there before, reintroducing some of the rivers, the trees and so on, as part of a Transitioned, more resilient city.  Brilliant.

Next was Constanza Ceruti, a ‘high altitude archaeologist’, who studies archeaological sites on the tops of mountains around the world, finding evidence of those peoples who saw them as sacred places.  One of the telling parts was when she spoke of one place where for centuries the people had a ritual where once a year they would go up the mountain to the glacier, chip lumps of ice which they would bring back to their homes as a blessing.  Now, with the shrinking of the glacier, they have to bring home plastic bottles of water instead.

Next was Carolyn Steel, author of the excellent ‘Hungry Cities’.  Her talk was one of the highlights for me, and in the context of Paul Romer the previous day asking why people hadn’t built new cities in the desert, here was a powerful articulation of why not.  Because the starting point of any city has always been ‘how will it feed itself?’  We take it for granted when we live in a city that there will always be enough food for everyone, but when you think about it, it is amazing that that happens at all.  It has led to a system of agriculture that has profoundly changed the world.  She traced the symbiotic evolution of cities and agriculture back 10,000 years to the Fertile Crescent, where temples were, in effect, ‘spiritualised centralised food distribution systems’.  The Roman Empire followed, an empire built, as much as anything, to source food for Rome.  She described the growth of the Empire as “one long ancient shopping spree’, sourcing food from great distances.

London in the 17th century was built around its food supplies, fish and grain markets by the river, still found in street names.  It would not have been possible to live in a city and not be aware of where your food came from.  This has now become much more invisible, thanks initially to rail and then to suburbia and our present day distribution systems.  She looked back through a series of food thinkers, and at the idea of ‘Utopia’, which means simultaneously “good place”  and “no place”… it is an idealised thing that cannot actually exist in reality.  She has coined a new phrase, ‘sitopia’, or ‘food place’, to articulate the need to use food as a conceptual design tool, that in designing anything, we always think of food first.  We can use, she concluded, food as a powerful tool in order to shape our cities for the better.

Bjarke Ingels is a young Danish architect who has won many awards for his work.  An engaging and entertaining speaker, he talked about his work.  This started out OK… he is clearly a talented designer, with good thinking around sustainability, but as the talk wore on, he ventured more and more into the kind of architectural megalomania that architects are often drawn to, creating huge ‘statement’ buildings just because they can.  His first buildings were fine, the idea of creating large buildings like mountains so as to maximise the south facing spaces.  Then it all got a bit carried away, some ghastly thing he designed in China, and then a project in Azerbajan where 7 huge buildings were to be built, each in the shape of one of the country’s largest mountains.  No thoughts of the resource impacts of such a project, and a scale of project that really belonged to the upside of the Age of Cheap Oil, not the downside.  Great speaker though.

Magnus Larsson is another architect, with an initially interesting idea that got rather carried away with itself, although in his defense, he did put forward his talk as an idea, as the early stages of a concept.  His starting point is desertification. Deserts are moving southwards (in Africa) at 1 metre per day.  Trees can slow it down, but often they just get cut down for firewood.  His solution is to ‘make the dunes inhabitable’, creating a green desert from within.  All you need to do, he said, is solidify the sand.  How?  By using some microorganism that one finds in marshes, one can turn sand into sandstone.  It is a far cheaper way than using cement to do the same thing.  His idea is to turn the dunes into ‘linear cities’, one long continuous line of dune houses across Africa, which would hold back the sands, while also creating shelter.  Conceptually interesting, but I’m sure you could spend this morning coming up with a list of the many reasons why it wouldn’t work in practice (here’s a few to start with: water, food, energy, cost, loneliness, boredom….)

The second session of the afternoon was called ‘Enquire Within’.  First up, Dan Pink, who applied observations from science to how to run a business.  He showed something called ‘the Candle Problem’ a simple initiative test.  When people were presented with it, some were given a cash incentive to solve it, and others were just asked to do it.  Logic would tell us that the cash incentive inproved performance, but it didn’t.  The opposite was the case.  However, he said, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.  He looked at various models for how people can be encouraged to give their best at work which include creating time for them to be creative outside of what they already do.  He offered the example of wikipedia, as an example of something done using peoples’ passion and enthusiasm, as opposed to Microsoft’s Encarta, which worked in a more traditional way, and was left in the dust by Wikipedia.

Next was my personal highlight of the whole 2 days I was there.  It was so brilliant that I could not do it justice, and you will have to wait for the film of it.  Conductor Itay Talgam (left) talked about inspiration and leadership, using the work of famous conductors to illustrate his points.  It was stunning stuff, but as I say, you will have to wait for the film!

Then Daniel Birnbaum, the curator of the Venice Biennale.  His talk was about the role of a curator, but I have to say it didn’t do much for me, given that I think that much modern art has become so removed from reality, like some the architecture presented during TED, that it has attained levels of abstraction that make it rather irrelevant.  Interesting footage though of a house built as a typical US suburban home being brought up the river to Venice as a centrepiece of the exhibition, sinking in the harbour.

Last speaker was Brother Paulus Terwitte, a Cappuchin monk, who talked about what he saw as the important things in life and the power of silence.  Felt like a slightly condescending and patronising conclusion to the event, whereas most other speakers had clearly honed their talks and put a lot of work into them, that Brother Paulus just gave his usual thing, which was disappointing.  Anyway, then Tom O’Reilly, one of the organisers, gave a very funny recap of the conference, accompanied by hilarious powerpoint, taking off many of the previous speakers.  Final thing was an improvised musical piece from Imogen Heap.  Beautiful.  A great way to conclude.

The TED staff take to the stage for some well-earned applause

So, altogether, an extraordinary event.  I think that TED is a bit like a really good record shop.  As a teenager, I virtually grew up in Revolver Records in Bristol, one of the great independent record shops.  The people who worked there were such music obsessives, that usually when you went to the counter clutching whatever record you wanted, they would say “you don’t want to buy that rubbish, listen to THIS”, and then proceed to play you something extraordinary.  They were usually right, and you usually went home with their record instead.  In the same way, the speakers at TED create an eclectic list which, on first inspection, reveals no-one familiar at all.  However, the skill with which they are picked, and the diversity of what they bring, and the professionalism of the whole event, is extraordinary.  They are clearly quite an extraordinary organisation, with a great power to communicate powerful ideas.  I wish I had been able to make the whole thing.  If you haven’t already done so, check out Ted.com for more information.

What an extraordinary day.  I missed days one and two of TED, which, if they were anywhere near as good as today, was a big loss.  A day of fascinating speakers, even the ones I disgreed with were interesting…  Set in the Oxford Playhouse, the day was well presented, well hosted, and had a great buzz. It divided into 4 sections.  I’ll just give a few thoughts on some of the presenters.  Over at the TED blog is a detailed write up of each speaker and some good photos, far more detail than I am going to manage!  So the first session was called ‘Radical Development’.

First speaker Paul Romer was, to my ears at least, dangerously deluded.  The solution to the world’s problems, he argued, was the building of new ‘Charter Cities’, in effect free-trade zones.  Guantanamo Bay, he argued, should be turned into a free-trade zone run by Canada, and we could build new cities in the deserts of Africa which could house the growing world population and be a driver to the world economy.  No talk of resource constraints, resource depletion, the possibility that free trade hasn’t been an unbridled success everywhere, no mention of food growing, no mention of lots of reasons why building new cities in the desert is really not a very good idea and that there are very obvious reasons why it hasn’t been done before.

Mark Koska talked about his invention, a new kind of syringe that could not be reused, thereby meaning that in the developing world millions of people would not get hepititus or AIDS from dirty needles.  Great idea.  Then Michael Pritchard, who has invented the LifeSaver bottle, which you can use to filter even raw sewage and it will turn it into sterile water.  To demonstrate he filled a tank with river water, sewage and other horrible stuff, stirred it up, filtered it through his invention and drank it.  An amazing thing, and the role it can play in disaster areas and in the developing world is huge.  Fantastic.  I want one.

William Kamkwamba is a young man from Africa whose parents couldn’t afford to send him to school, and so he taught himself physics by reading books, and then built wind turbines for his village using scrap materials.  Fabulous.  Really inspiring.  Then it was me.  Seemed to go OK to me, I just about remembered everything I wanted to say.  Tim Brown, a designer, then talked about the need to lift design from thinking about individual products to big thinking, taking Brunel as an example.

The second session was called In the Shadows, and as the name suggests, it went into some of the darker issues of our times.  First up was Taryn Simon, is a photographer who specialises in taking pictures of the things we never see, the inside of long term nuclear waste facilities, CIA headquarters and disease laboratories.  Beautiful but chilling. Then Misha Glenny, the former BBC correspondent, talked about organised crime, and how 15% of global GDP is now generated by organised crime, as he set out in his book McMafia.  Very sobering.  There was also a guy whose name I didn’t catch who is a photographer who photographs the landscapes created by oil extraction.  He was the second person (as well as me) who talked about peak oil, very passionately, accompanied by his striking images. 

Loretta Napoleoni talked about terrorism, and its role in the world.  The session finished with Emmanuel Jal, an extraordinary young man.  He told the story of his youth in Sudan, seeing his village burnt down, some of his family killed, and by 8, he was a boy soldier.  His life was hellish (he refers to himself as a ‘war child’), until a few years later he was smuggled out of Sudan by an aid worker.  He now travels the world as a hip hop artist, raising money for building a school in his village.  He ended his part with a rap song about Emma McCune, the aid worker who rescued him, which moved many to tears. 

First session after lunch was called Revealing Energy.  First up was Ross Lovegrove, a designer who talked about how his work is inspired by forms from nature and biomimicry.  He was followed by music, the Radio Science Orchestra, and then Nick Veasey.  I was immediately drawn to him due to the fact he was wearing a New Order t-shirt, and his talk was very interesting too.  He is an x-ray artist, taking amazing photos of ordinary things using xrays.  Very striking. 

Steve Cowley is a researcher into nuclear fusion.  His talk was about the potential of fusion as an energy source.  There are about 40 years worth of oil and gas he told the audience, but over 30,000 years worth of lithium for fusion, which can be found in seawater.  Lots of people say that nuclear fusion is 30 years away, he told the audience, but in fact at his laboratory they have already managed to create a fusion reaction.  So when might we actually see it come on stream?  Well, ah, 30 years.  Although he is clearly excited about it, for me it is so far away as to be almost irrelevant given the rapid onset of other energy depletions. 

Eric Giller was the one that a lot of the geeks in the audience were excited about and had been buzzing about in the breaks.  He has developed a form of wireless electricity, which means that electricity can be sent through the air rather than needing cables.  Devices could recharge themselves withut being plugged in, we’d not trip over leads any more, and save loads of copper in cables.  The demonstration went fine, for people who find that kind of thing exciting.  He didn’t do it over great distances, just a couple of feet, but it seemed to work.

Bertrand Piccard is a French balloonist who has gone on to develop a solar powered plane, and intends to fly round the world in it non-stop.  He told the audience that his aim is not to create planes that can carry 200 people commercially, but rather it is a symbol that renewables can do anything.  It is about what can be achieved when we believe in the impossible, and when we thrown uncertainties overboard.  Very impressive, and also realistic about the potential of what he can achieve.

The last session was called Worldview Rethink.  First speaker, Parag Khanna, gave an absorbing account of how borders are changing, and the geopolitics of the world affect us all. Geoff Mulgan gave a great talk about capitalism and how, following the economic collapse we are only just starting to see the beginning of, we will need to prioritise and put other thing up there as important.  When the government bailed out the banks, he said, they were bailing out the past, not the future.  Why should we now boost consumption, rather than think about what we consume, he asked.  He called for a different kind of economy, one based on care and relationships, mentioning Transition as one of the things we need more of.  The only way to progress, he said, is by doing experiments.

Rory Bremner was fantastic, a much needed bout of hilarity, great impressions and funny reflections on the conference.  The day ended with Karen Armstrong, a religious scholar, talking about the Charter for Compassion that will be unveiled in November.  A fascinating project, and her talk about the power of compassion was very touching.  And that was that.  Ah but no, there was more.  What was termed the ‘Bonus Session’ at another venue round the corner.

After some odd but intriguing music made by ‘Felix’s Machines’, TV comedy producer James Balog talked about the things we can’t see, which was a humourous chat.

Then there was one of the highlights of the whole thing, Manuel Lima, of the Extreme Ice Survey.  He is a nature photographer who specialises in ice.  His organisation has set up time lapse photography on glaciers and on the ice sheets, and he showed speeded up sequences of huge ice fields collapsing.  Amazingly presented, agonising to watch, something everyone should see (check out their website).  The day ended with Nigeran novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who discussed the power of stories and how people often only want to tell, and hear, one story about Africa, whereas there are many more than the usual ones about hunger and war.  It was a beautiful speech, a testimony to the power of writing.

By then, I actually had a cracking headache!  So I had something to eat and headed off into the night.  What a day though.  Quite astonishing.  From the madly deluded and the frankly pointless to the life saving and the world changing.  I laid my head down to sleep with the Manuel Lima’s images of melting ice shelves in my mind.  Boy do we have a big task on our hands.