Transition Streets has already been rolled out in places other than Totnes, but in a few weeks, a whole supported programme will be coming out whereby you will be able to run it in your community (I’ll let you know).  You can see the first section of the Transition Streets workbook here to get a flavour of it.  It is a great example of the tool from ‘The Transition Companion’ called ‘Street-by-street behaviour change’.

The main output from Transition Streets is the ‘Final project report’, which “shares information about the Transition Streets project, funded by the previous government’s Low Carbon Communities Challenge funded: how it worked, what it achieved, what was learnt and where we are heading next”.  You can find a summary of its findings here.  It is a very thorough round-up of the project.

However, the most fascinating to me is “Social Impacts of Transition Together (SITT): Investigating the social impacts, benefits and sustainability of the Transition Together/Transition Streets initiative in Totnes“,which goes into the more qualitative aspects of Transition Streets, what motivated people to get involved, what changes people made as a result of getting involved, what benefits individuals and groups actually experienced, what are the features of a successful group, what issues groups experienced and how they dealt with them, and finally, what role people see for their groups beyond their time doing Transition Streets.

When I meet people in town who were part of Transition Streets, they don’t enthuse about how much carbon they saved, they talk about the new social connections they have made, and that comes through really strongly in this brilliant piece of research.  People’s main motivations for getting involved weren’t climate change or peak oil, but were “building good relationships with my neighbours”.  The main benefit they pointed to from having been involved was social and community benefits.  Here is the word cloud thing from when people were asked what were the most significant benefits they experienced from taking part in Transition Streets.

See how tiny the word ‘peak’ is?  I think there are a lot of lessons to be learnt from the experience of Transition Streets.  It is the first really good piece of research and evidence of how the Transition approach works, and how it is about so much more than just reducing energy use.  These reports give a taste of perhaps where the skilfulness of Transition lies, in making Transition feel like where people are having most fun, where the laughter and the companionship is, where people feel they can connect with each other.  Perhaps the best analogy for that comes from what, for me, is one of the best sequences in the history of film, the opening sequence of Woody Allen’s ‘Stardust Memories’ (between 1:20 and 2:50).  Ultimately, people have a deep sense of which of the two trains they’d prefer to be on.

I was reminded by this recent piece by Dr Chris Johnstone over at ClimateCodeRed of the meeting that he and I held in June 2006 with Dr Stephen Rollnick. This was back when I was researching the Transition Handbook, and we met for a day to discuss how insights from the psychology of health behaviour change might be helpful when tackling environmental issues like climate change and peak oil. It was fascinating, and I realised as I read Chris’ article that I had never posted the transcript of that conversation here yet.  So here it is, slightly dated, but hopefully containing some insights you will find useful (it’s quite long!).  My thanks to Chris and Stephen for a fascinating day (nearly 6 years ago!). 

Hopkins.  Most of the people who write about peak oil come down to saying the only thing that will be an adequate response to it is something on the scale of a war time mobilisation.  A lot of people use that phrase – ‘a war time mobilisation’ – to get across the scale of what needs to happen in terms of pulling in all the different agencies, and industry and government and so on, towards this thing.  So that question of how we engage communities on a response of that scale is very much what fascinates me and it strikes me that over the last forty years, the approaches environmental organisations have taken just haven’t done it.

I was fumbling around thinking “How will we create the scale of engagement for a problem this big?” when all the tools we’ve had up to this point haven’t been sufficiently effective and won’t get that scale of response.  That’s what led me to looking at this whole addiction thing, because whether or not you can say society is addicted to oil, I think you can argue that society is dependant on oil. I found the Stages of Change model particularly interesting because of the insights it gave into why it is that if you go to a whole town and give them leaflets saying they should put solar panels on their roofs, only 2% of them actually do so, and the rest of them just actually won’t shift.

I’m thinking it’s probably not because they don’t care; then with the Motivational Interviewing approach, it struck me that here’s a tool to work with. Ambivalence is a huge problem on a societal scale – why don’t people do stuff?  They’ll plan in advance in terms of their children’s financial futures but not in terms of the climate or that kind of thing.  As far as I could see it, it had only really been used for individuals and groups, and I’m kind of intrigued. In designing this process we’re going to be starting in September called ‘Transition Town Totnes’, how might we use insights from Motivational Interviewing on a larger scale, and try and address that collective sense of ambivalence?

If you’ve got different stages of change, how do we best work with the people in these different stages?  Because, by my understanding, (and I’m only two months and two books in to all of this!), each of them needs handling in very different ways, and with a very different approach.  If you just go running in with a ‘one size fits all’ approach, then you might engage one third but the other two thirds are going to be more put off probably.  So how do we engage the people at those different stages?  How practically might we design approaches that would bring them on board?

Rollnick.  I think that was very carefully put because you talk about using insights from Motivational Interviewing – not the somewhat over-simplified notion of ‘I want to apply Motivational Interviewing to a community’, which could be one slightly over-simplified way of looking at it, and could plunge us in to discussion about the viability of an individual method based on empathic listening getting out into the social sphere with all sorts of issues to discuss and struggle to overcome, which I notice during the forum I started engaging with recently with Allan Zuckoff.  But you just talked about taking insights – trying to improve our understanding of the way people feel, and what’s the most constructive way of responding to it.  So I’m not wriggling with ethical itches, d’you know what I mean?  Whereas if you’d said ‘apply Motivational Interviewing to a community’ and ‘do MI on a community’, I’d be wriggling with itches.

Johnstone. What kind of itches?

Rollnick. Ethical itches, conceptual itches, maybe some practical itches, wondering how realistic the whole thing was, but certainly conceptual and ethical itches, of the kind that Alan wrote about in the forum.

Johnstone.  What I’m struck by are the different levels of the spirit of Motivational Interviewing and the techniques of Motivational Interviewing.  And the spirit of Motivational Interviewing, as I see it, is very much about not doing things on people to manipulate them in a particular way, but it’s somehow about clearing a space for people to be able to look at the complexity of how they feel about an issue.

It’s not just a case of ‘am I for it or am I against it?’  There are often different parts of people…part of them maybe for, part of them maybe against, part of them maybe unsure. When there is that complexity of different parts pulling and pushing in different ways, this can lead people to become stuck. So when you provide a space where people can look at what the pushes and pulls are within them – I find that enormously helpful.  What I also find enormously helpful, working say with people with severe alcohol problems, is when you’re in a space where it’s somehow okay to acknowledge that there are attractive things about drinking, you move out of the space of being the judge and the shamer, which tend to really close people down.

And so I think just applying that spirit and stance to environmental issues is a really good transfer, because quite often I see polarities developing, with one group of people saying ‘you should’ and waving a finger, and other people saying, ‘well, why should I?  That I’m being asked to give up things that are important to me – I’m being asked to give up aspects of my lifestyle that I find attractive.’  And so the people who are being seen as doing that are seen as somehow takers away of joy.  And that polarity is really a polarity that probably exists in all of us.  Certainly with me I acknowledge the part of me that is attracted to aspects of the Western lifestyle – I’m quite attracted to various gadgets; they have incredible utility and allow us to do things.

And the same time I look with horror sometimes at the way I see our culture going, when I read information about what’s happening with climate change.  So one of the things I really value about Motivational Interviewing is this idea of rather than the interviewer challenging the clients, they are holding a space where the challenge can occur within the client, in acknowledging their own mixed feelings.  And the stance is of really respecting their choice – it’s not about trying to get them to do something, but about when you open up a space where they can really look at what they’re doing, they can work out what they want to do themselves, or get clearer about that.

Rollnick.  And I don’t think I’ve got anything about MI to add to what Chris just said – it was all beautifully said and I agree with all of it.

Johnstone.  Thank you.

Rollnick.  Just beautifully put.  And trying to walk over a bridge to what you were talking about…we got in to this MI thing because we became disturbed to the extent to which people were being judged and shamed – to use Chris’s language.  How problems were being attributed to the people when in the relationship it was quite clear to Bill and I that we were part of that.  And since we were the experts and professionals, it’s not our job to pass judgement about lack of motivation in someone else, but to have a look at the way we were communicating in that.

I think that was the big thing for both of us, and we both had different sets of experiences as professionals, and before that in different situations in the addictions treatment field where we thought, ‘For god’s sake, this professionalized shaming and abusing people is not on.’  So our approach has been soft and therapeutic in the way we write, but that’s the passion that’s behind it. One clear bridge that’s over in to your world is shaming on a large scale, so if you make people feel bad they’re less likely to change.

Johnstone.  Yes, although I think I would qualify that because one of the strategies in Motivational Interviewing is to develop discrepancy (where someone is aware of a gap between their behaviour and their values) and when you do this you hold a space where people do feel uncomfortable. After a Motivational Interviewing session it’s possible that someone may feel more uncomfortable than they did at the beginning.  Perhaps it’s more about how you can hold a space that supports people to rise to the challenge created by that uncomfortable feeling.

I recognize there are different sides to this – one is acknowledging that feelings of discomfort can be motivating. But there was also something William Miller wrote and it’s something like, ‘When you have a discrepancy you can respond in different ways.  One is to change your behaviour and another is to change the information.’  So if you’re aware you’re behaving differently from how you’d like to, you can change what you’re doing, or you can also blank out the information that’s telling you you’re out of step with your values. My concern is that this is happening on a larger societal level.  Just thinking for example that Exxon-Mobil the oil company has spent millions of dollars funding public relations companies in America to try and block awareness of climate change issues.

This is very similar to what the tobacco industry did.  The tobacco industry pumped lots of money into saying that we need more research, that there’s still doubt about this issue, that it’s not something there’s universal agreement around yet.  First of all they did that with the evidence showing people smoking were getting ill, and then they did this with the evidence that people around those smoking were getting ill from passive smoking. The tobacco industry specifically targeted key pieces of research that showed the health risks of passive smoking in a way that created the impression of doubt when in fact there was much clearer agreement amongst scientists.

And I see a similar process happening with the climate change issue. Cultivating doubt keeps us collectively in the contemplation stage of change, rather than allowing us to move on to preparation and action.  While part of what’s needed here is awareness raising, I also find it useful to think about different levels of change…there’s raising awareness and there’s changing behaviour – but between those two there’s the big area about how we work with attitude shift and motivation shift and that’s really not down to what the information is but what it means to people.

Hopkins. Exactly.

Johnstone.  And if the information means, ‘My god, this is really scary and I can’t handle the distress created by this information’, that’s what leads to people shutting down.  This also happens in the addictions field…quite often I work alongside people who have to face completely ghastly information, like their children being taken away, or they’ve got advanced liver failure.  Sometimes that information by itself is too much to handle and people close down with it.  But if you can be alongside them in looking at what’s going on, you can support them in finding their courage to face things. I like the word ‘en-courage’.  When you encourage like this, you support people in finding their courage to face the stuff that’s unfaceable.  And I think that’s where some of the skills for motivational interviewing can be really helpfully applied.

Hopkins.  I did a talk at Schumacher College a while ago and Satish Kumar was there.  The talk I do has a little bit at the beginning about peak oil and what it is, but then it’s all about solutions.  At the end he said, ‘that was very good, very interesting, but you know, I do have a problem with you using fear to try and motivate people to do stuff.’  It was interesting and it got me thinking about the film The End of Suburbia, which is the classic way people get in to peak oil – have you seen that?

Rollnick.  I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen it referred to.

Hopkins.  Okay.  For a lot of people…I’ve seen people really, really distressed by it – it’s a very intense film about what the impact of peak oil could be on society.  I’ve done lots of public screenings of it and a few times have had to sort of talk people down afterwards.  A lot of people go ‘yeah, fantastic!’, but some are quite distressed by it.  That sense of what you were just talking about, about breaking the news to people and how you best facilitate that.  There was the thing that Chris put me on to – the FRAMES Model – which I’ve used in the dissertation I’m doing as a thing to pull all the different strands together.

The way they talk about it as feedback in there is really good.  You’re presenting – rather than trying to terrify anybody – you’re presenting honest, clear feedback.  You know, ‘if you carry on drinking another six months you’re finished’, or actually, ‘this is where the world is at’.  The difference comes with what happens after this. If you just present that and just sort of walk off and leave them with it, that’s one of the things that closes people down. I saw James Lovelock speak a while ago, presenting a horrendous gloom and doom climate change scenario – ‘we’re all finished, there’s nothing any of you do when we leave this room tonight that can make any difference, humanity is completely finished.  We’re just talking about a sustained retreat to the poles’ I think that’s so irresponsible because where can you go with that?  You can’t do anything with that. You want to retreat when you hear that, don’t you?

What I very much try and do with my stuff is present feedback in the form of: ‘Here we are, this is peak oil, here are the scenarios, this is like the ghost of Christmas future in a sense, but how about we do this?  Actually it could be fantastic!  Actually by the end of this process our quality of life could be much better and we could be spending more time with our kids and have a garden full of carrots.  It could all be a much better process.’  In that sense I found that FRAMES Model really, really useful as a way of kind of bringing it all together.

Rollnick.  So we could be starting to clarify a number of principles of good practice in promoting change in health related issues on a large scale. On the train, I think I was half asleep when I started dreaming, and I started thinking, ‘Well where are there health concerns that affect a whole community?’…I thought about some aboriginal communities I’ve come across in Australia, settlements where everybody is pissed and addicted to alcohol.  Just a whole place is riddled with it.

There’s a San Bushman community I know of in the North West Cape that has a similar problem.  They happen to both be very socially deprived and devastated, with an explanation in their history, but the way they present right now is everybody sitting around pissed.  So they’re communities where there are clear concerns about peoples’ health and not too dissimilar because I’m sure you could articulate concerns about peoples’ health and well-being in this community or the world as a whole.  So I’m comfortable with the lack of ethical itches there.

Maybe because I’m working with the brief intervention health care, general hospital world, I’m used to trying to pull out some simple guidelines.  There could be principles that come out of what we’re talking about and there are some principles that are coming out.  One’s got to do with how you’re handling information, and how you conceptualise the process of informing people.

Johnstone. I’m picking up there are potential side-effects to the way we present information. We can present the same information in three different ways and have three different consequences, and we need to be aware of the potential for overwhelm and close down when giving bad news.  If we are aware of that then we can think of information giving as having different phases to it.

Whatever news we hear in our head, it has to be digested down to the heart level to really take effect. Digestion involves exploring the meaning component of information – what does it mean to me?  What are the consequences?  And there’s a feeling response to that. Information has to be digested at different levels and if we’re aware of that digestion process, then perhaps we may not give quite so much information all at once, but give it in digestible chunks, and pay attention to the digestion process.

Rollnick.  The word ‘digestion’ is lovely there.  We’ve sort of agreed that hitting people crudely with a whole load of bad news, like that lecture you described, can reinforce shut down a lot of the time. So time and space to digest is needed.

Thinking just about information for a moment – I think another principle we need to get back to is how you deal with discomfort, with people actually feeling it.  And it goes beyond information exchange, it’s a deeper process.  We need to hit that principle somehow in some constructive way.  But just on the information exchange issue – that might be another principle, that it should have to do with exchange rather than dumping.  And dumping fearful information doesn’t lead to behaviour change, especially fearful information that makes you feel ashamed or shut down. We know that in health care.

The renal consultant said to me the other day, ‘Steve, we need help with communication training on the ward.’  So I go down and say, ‘What’s the problem?’  He says, ‘They just will not reduce their fluid intake to below a litre a day, and we’ve got the evidence’, because I think they were on dialysis or something… ‘and we actually say to them, look we’ve got the evidence that you’re not restricting your fluid intake. Can you imagine the shaming that’s going on?  ‘We’ve got the evidence that you’re not doing this, and they’re just in denial.

We need communication training to get through their denial.  And I tell you Steve, shall I give you an example?  They’re in such levels of denial – you tell them that if they drink more than that they’re going to die, and guess what happens Steve?  They die.’  That’s how bad their denial is, you know, and if you can imagine what I’m thinking – ‘Man! The way you’re handling information giving – it’s not exchange, it’s dumping! It’s all the things that we know are going to close people down.

But what I found very useful, this is 15, 20 years ago, about these drinkers’ check up studies that Bill did, because they were the first publications on MI that were sort of, of an empirical nature – and he puts these ads in the newspaper that say ‘Are you troubled by your drinking?’, and these folk would come in.

And one group got standard feedback – ‘If you don’t do this, then this, then this…’, variation on soft shaming I would have thought, dumping information, you can see lots of things…as opposed to what he described as MI.  I’m trying to unpack what was actually going on in the process, and it wasn’t just the empathic listening, which was there.  It was making a distinction between information and the interpretation of it.  So I picked that up and I’ve been trying to train healthcare practitioners to consider that distinction.

People have often said to me, ‘But hang on, how can you distinguish between facts and their interpretation?  What’s a fact?’  And I think that’s potentially pedantic because if you allow some blurred boundaries I still think the distinction’s useful.  The job of the practitioner is to present an exchange, present the facts, all the information.  And then their task is to elicit the personal interpretation from the person, so that you’re giving them a chance to personally digest, obviously.  And then you can take them to an empathic atmosphere and many of the qualities of constructive change that Chris has been talking about can take place.  You can pass judgements on how is this person going, – do they need more information?  Are they heading for shutdown?  And all that…So getting over to the bridge, getting over the bridge to your world, distinguishing between the facts and their interpretation and encouraging people to make the interpretations for themselves, maximises digestion.  How’s that?  Do you see what I mean?

Johnstone.  This is really good because this picks up from what you were saying in terms of how Motivational Interviewing developed where you and Bill were acknowledging the impact of the way you give information. When you’re looking at the phenomenon of resistance, rather than blaming them for being resistant clients who are unmotivated, you’re acknowledging that actually you can influence the degree to which they become resistant.  It’s not the whole story, but you are part of a story, and if you’re part of the story, if you can find out what part you can play in that, then you can start doing the opposite of what would create resistance.

I think this is where the ecological movement can really learn – it’s like saying, well actually the way information is presented will have an impact on how resistant people are, and we could be doing things in a way that’s making people more resistant and increasing polarization. If we were to design a campaign that would really turn people off, and if it was to have an opposite effect of what we want, one of the things we would do is present lots of information all at once in a way that was overwhelming, frightening, and then we would blame people for it: ‘This is awful and it’s your fault.’

Rollnick.  And you’d mix up information and peoples’ interpretation of it, you’d confuse the two, you’d lump it all together.

Johnstone.  Or you’d be even telling people what their interpretation should be rather that finding out what it is.

Rollnick.  So you’re kind of saying ‘Here’s a graph that does this – isn’t that scary?’   ‘You should be scared’, or ‘I’m telling you that you are scared’. Yet people react in different ways and sometimes there is a lot of fear, sometimes there is despair, sometimes there’s enormous guilt, but sometimes there isn’t.  Sometimes there’s a sense of ‘What’s that got to do with me?  I’m probably not going to be around when that’s happening anyway.’  Or that sense of the kind of nihilism of ‘I already know this and I don’t need to be told.’

Johnstone.  I remember I did a training session with someone who was working in a hospice, so it was about how to communicate information about peoples’ prognosis with cancer.  And he was saying, ‘Well, sometimes people do want to know, but it’s a bit like if you’re overdrawn, you don’t need a letter from your bank manager every day telling you.  You need to know that you’re overdrawn and once you’ve clocked that, you don’t need more communications telling you that.’  What you then do with that information – that’s what you need support with.

Rollnick.  Right, so ‘Not hitting the message many times’ is another nice bridge, isn’t it?

Hopkins.  Because I’ve been teaching permaculture for the last six or seven years and I use a lot of things that came out of an approach from Australia called ‘Teaching Permaculture Creatively’, which uses lots of things from different creative teaching fields and a lot of that is to do with this thing of rather than teaching people something, you get them to show other people how to do it.  That actually if someone tells you something, you remember 20% of it, but if they go out and show somebody else practically how to do something, they remember 90% of it.

One of the things I’m planning to do in Totnes is run an evening class – it’ll be a ten week evening class called ‘Skilling up for power down’, and in the penultimate week I’m going to get the people to each write their own twelve steps to breaking their own oil dependency.  So they’ll work out their own twelve steps that will be personal to them, their life, and then they’ll come in the last session and they’ll read out their twelve steps of how they’re going to break that dependency.  The evening class will run on a continual loop because lots of people want to do it.

When it starts again in January, the group who’ve done the first evening class will then hopefully undertake to help the next class out. They will commit to supporting each other in doing that, so that then when a second evening class gets to that stage of the 9^th week, then all those people will come back in and talk about what they did with theirs.  So they’ll be passing that down to the next lot and saying, ‘This is where we got to’.  So you have that supporting cycle, which could be really interesting I think.

Johnstone.  One of the things that can really help is being in a context of engagement and optimism, when you see other people are taking these things on and doing things, but also in a way that involves manageable steps.  That’s also what happens in the centre where I work – we have lots of groups, people coming in with alcohol problems, and they see other people making headway.  We have a client coffee room and garden area where they can spend time chatting.  When you see other people making headway with something, this gives you the idea that you can too.  It becomes something where you have a social context that supports the movement of change, which is different from what many people would otherwise experience.

It’s this thing about manageable steps, plotting out pathways of change, that is also important.  But I suppose there’s this need to think of two sides of change; one is developing and strengthening the will, and the other is finding and having confidence in the way.  And I think with a lot of the environmental issues these two are influencing each other, because if people have the belief that we can’t change the world, these issues are too big – this is the interpretation side really – then what happens is when they get more information about the problem, because they can’t see the way, it just becomes more and more overwhelming.

Rollnick.  That’s right.  So it’s not just a matter of coming to believe it’s worthwhile changing the world that’s important, but also, as your story illustrates, enhancing a sense of can-do.

Johnstone.  Which you’ve written about is in terms of readiness for change being based on both how important the issue is, but also how confident they feel that they can tackle it.

Rollnick.  We could talk a wee bit about those concepts and readiness to change.

Hopkins.  Yes, that would be very useful.

Rollnick.  But we’re talking about information exchange, and I think we’re sort of assuming that there’s a lot of people who feel ambivalent – that’s an insight we can take over to your world, that people feel two ways about it.  And I think Chris has described the nub of that very eloquently and how we can be helpful or less so when someone feels that.  So peoples’ resistance to change has at least two origins; one inside them – that’s their ambivalence, it’s not got to do with the way you’re speaking to them, they feel that inside them; and then there’s the way they’re dealt with.

So there’s an inter-personal cause of resistance if you like, and there’s an intra-personal origin.  And so one way this discussion could go is looking at how do you help people that feel ambivalent?  We talked about the inter-personal quite clearly didn’t we?  I think we’ve just about cracked the principles of poor and better practice when it comes to information giving in health promotion.  Just basic principles here…

Johnstone.  What I find so helpful is this distinction between information dumping and information exchange.  Information dumping is just a one-way flow and it’s all about broadcast.  Information exchange combines broadcast with reception. When you’re broadcasting, you are giving feedback, as in the Frames Model. This involves raising awareness. You throw something out but you also then see how it lands.  It is like saying, ‘Well how does that sound to you?’

You’re then looking at what the information means, what the interpretation is, as well as how they’re running with it.  If you can see that this person is struggling with that, then that’s not the time to give more information.  It’s to look out for times when information is getting stuck in their throat, when they’re finding that difficult. That’s when they need some support in processing that information in a way where it can be digested and they can work with it.

What the distinction between information dumping and information exchange might mean for us is having some principles we could put out in a tentative way, but also inviting a response. For example ‘Well here’s some things we’ve come up with – what do you think?’  And one of them will be: if you have an evening talk or film where you’re giving a lot of disturbing information about what’s happening in our world, that you include in the programme some time for eliciting interpretation from people.  Like, okay you’ve just seen this film – what does it mean?  We don’t just close the evening and say goodbye at the end in a way that people are left feeling stunned or shocked.

Rollnick. The healthcare equivalent is of group meetings of people who’ve had heart attacks – this is my little world that I work in, right?  They have these group meetings in cardiac rehabilitation settings and then use this kind of crude approach, but they give lectures, and people shut down, and people go off, and there’s no digestion time…It’s quite widespread, this idea that people will change if an expert tells them how bad things will be if they don’t.

Johnstone.  There is some evidence that advice information say in giving up smoking from GPs and primary care nurses, does have a limited impact, it’s not completely ineffective.  But also, it’s not going to work with everybody, and like any intervention it can go wrong and can have side effects.

Rollnick.  I’ve been thinking about this.  We could talk about that – if you give someone advice, brief information, why is it that some people change?  We could talk about that because I’ve been pondering that, and I’ve sort of resolved it –why it’s taken ten or fifteen years to resolve it I don’t understand – but anyway that’s what happened.

Johnstone.  I’d really be interested in your resolution.

Rollnick.  Well, I spent a lot of time knocking advice giving, and saying hang on, that’s not an effective way of encouraging people to change – here’s a better way, MI.  And yet we know that sometimes people just get a little bit of information and they change, and there’s evidence for it as Chris said, you know?  So this new book that I’ve been writing with Bill distinguishes between guiding, directing and following, or directing, guiding and following as communication styles. Very simple and…it’s resolved for me because there’s no implication of one style is better than another, which was the mistake I’ve been making – you know like the directing style with brief advice is less effective. Each style has it’s place.

It depends on the circumstances and the context.  With behaviour change, the guiding style’s probably the better default for the reasons that Chris has so carefully articulated – encourage, guide.  If you’re going to have a default style for behaviour change, it’s probably the better one.  But directing and advice giving can work well if it’s personally relevant, well timed and you care – that’s resolution right?  I’m sure that might be one of the explanations why brief advice works.  But it will work better if it’s personally relevant, well timed and done with caring – those three qualities.  You can imagine a GP giving advice to smokers has those three qualities, and the smoker comes out feeling contained, cared about, you know what I mean?  It hit the mark because it was well timed…it was relevant to me, it was personally relevant.  So that’s how I’ve resolved it.  So in this new book I’m paying quite a lot of attention to clarifying what good directing, skilful directing might look like.

The doctor with the good bedside manner probably had the capacity to shift between these styles appropriately, flexibly and humanely, and when it was time to give advice, gave advice.  But also was able to follow and listen, and also was able to guide.  So I think the idea of a good bedside manner has been written off as ‘Oh, that’s just somebody who’s nice to their patients’, when actually I think there’s probably quite a lot of skilfulness packaged up there.

Johnstone.  Again, in terms of crossing the bridge to environmental issues – there are times when it’s really useful to give clear tips on how to address issues, but it’s also looking for that…where you give tips.  This ties back to what you were talking about right at the very beginning about not responding the same way to everyone, moving away from a one size fits all mentality.  And you mentioned that one thing that would be worth looking at is the danger of over-simplifying the stages of change.  Did I get that right?

Rollnick.  Yuh, because I think it’s been over-simplified. There could be a dose-type way of thinking about it – in that stage you do that, in that stage you do that, in that stage you do that. I just don’t think life is as simple as that.  Typically it’s pre-contemplation: give them information, consciousness raising.  Contemplation: they’re ambivalent, give them MI and if they’re in preparation, give them advice about what to do.  It’s got some intuitive appeal but it doesn’t hang together clinically for me, because you can find people who are in contemplation for very different reasons.  If you think about what you call the will and the way, or why-change and how-change – think about that distinction.  The assumption here with the stages of change is that people in pre-contemplation need help with the will, with why-change, that they need all this information.

People at the other end need help with the how, with the way to change.  And these poor fuckers in the middle, I don’t know, what do they need?  They need MI, right.  What is it that they need?  They still need help with the why, which is weigh up the pros and cons, that kind of idea.  But actually if you take 20 smokers in the contemplation stage and you interview them, you don’t come out with it as clearly as that.  You find smokers who are very unready to change who don’t need persuading about the why – it’s the how that they’re hassling with.  They’re in pre-contemplation and they’re in shut-down.  But it’s not because they lack information, or they need their consciousness raised by some wonderful new insight.  They’re in pre-contemplation but they’re in shut-down – they don’t know what the hell to do about it.  D’you see what I’m saying?

Johnstone.  And presumably people can be in different stages with different issues. You could have a drinker who is in the pre-contemplation stage with his drinking and preparation stage with his smoking and contemplation stage with his relationship with his wife – presumably you can be on different ones.

Rollnick.  Spot on.

Johnstone. I find what you’ve just said very helpful – just moving out of the assumption that it’s the why people need when they’re in pre-contemplation, because I see that too.  Sometimes people know about the issue, but as soon as they look at it, so much fear comes up that they think ‘My god, I can’t handle that’. What’s lacking here is the capacity to respond meaningfully to the information.  And if you can’t respond meaningfully to it, people may think, ‘What’s the point of worrying about something you can’t do anything about?  If you can’t do anything about it, then switch it off.’

Rollnick.  With that in mind I’ve had folk from different parts of the world who work in deprived environments come to me and say, ‘You know, people need help with the how!’  And of course, the more deprived people are, the more that is the case.  If you think about the San Bushmen community, they do need help with the ‘how’, big time.  So I don’t see Motivational Interviewing as just residing in the world of the ‘why’ – it’s got as much to do with the ‘why’ as it has to do with the ‘how’.  I don’t believe Chris, when he’s with some drinker and struggling with the ‘how’ will say, ‘Well I’ll tell you what to do mate, why don’t you bah, bah, bah…’  It doesn’t work, people don’t change like that.  So the style of MI and guiding and encouraging people applies across both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.  And yet I’ve been pigeon holed by the Stages of Change model into apparently defending this idea that MI is for the ambivalent fuckers in the middle and it’s only about the ‘why’.  D’you see what I mean?  And it’s not like that.

Johnstone.  I’m picking two things here – one is Motivational Interviewing as a style, which is about guiding and supporting as opposed to directing.  And that style is something you can apply at any stage of change.  But also there’s the issue of ambivalence, which I feel is likely to always be there anyway, whatever stage of change.  It’s more about the degree to which it’s at the front. I think it’s a useful assumption to have that there’s always likely to be some ambivalence, even if people on the surface appear to be keen, because also motivation is something that can be cultivated and strengthened wherever people are at. If we can give attention to drawing out the ‘why’ then that can strengthen the enthusiasm for change.

Hopkins.  So in terms of this idea of using this questionnaire to assess, to get a snapshot of different communities within a town’s readiness to change, do you see there being value to that – what insights would that elicit and what might one do with them if you did that?

Rollnick.  I don’t think it’s been done before.  So I don’t know. I imagine it’ll be helpful for the very reasons you want to do it, which is you’ll get a photograph of peoples’ different motivational states.  But if we think about the limitations of the Stages of Change model, it’s the implications of action for people in different stages we have to be careful of.  So I suppose we might find it useful to distinguish between the realm of explanation and the realm of action, okay?  This will help you in the realm of explanation in understanding this complex world of where people are at in relation to peak oil.  The implications for action might be something quite different and I can think of lots of examples in my work life and personal life where people will assume that you get fixed on an explanation and action follows immediately from it. CBT’s got that quality.  Your only problem is we need to do a proper assessment. Once we understand your cognitive distortions, the implications for action are quite obvious.

Hopkins.  What’s CBT?

Rollnick.  Cognitive Behaviour Therapy – it’s something that’s in our world.  And when I was trained as a behavioural psychologist, you know…twenty five plus years ago, the only problem I had was to do a proper functional analysis of your behavioural problems.  So to do a proper functional analysis you had to fill out a diary so I could analyse things properly, right?  And then when you didn’t bring the diary back, of course I blame you right?  You’ve got a motivational problem.  But the naïve assumption then was that there’s this realm of explanation, which I’m an expert in and once I know, then the implications for action are obvious. It’s flawed.

So I think with the Stages of Change model, if it helps you understand different motivational things, great, but the implications for action might be something different.  Like you could analyse that San Bushmen community and say, ‘All the buggers are ambivalent and addicted and dependant.  Therefore they all need MI.’ Actually what they’re doing, some smart lawyers have got alongside them and they’ve sued the South African government for taking their land away – the apartheid government before that and before – and they’re getting new land.  And now they own diamond mines right?  And now suddenly they’ve become incredibly wealthy and the whole thing’s going to have to get sorted out.

It happens to the aboriginals as well to some extent.  So the realm of explanation might be they’re a community of addicted, dependent people; the realm of action’s something completely different.  Do you know what I mean?  And in our world we have people with multiple inter-related problems, which is a topic we should return to.  If I come across somebody who’s sexually abused as a kid – this was my standard client in Primary Care that I used to work with. There was a waiting list full of sexually abused as a kid, single parent, history of abuse and physical violence with partner, partner’s buggered off, two or three kids with behavioural problems, agoraphobic, socially isolated and they need a tipple to get out the house.

So now what problem do you focus on there?  Which? They’re all inter-related.  Assumptions about what ‘the problem’ is or what the problems are and therefore what you should do about them…you’ve got to be careful with.  I ended up working in the social sphere – I didn’t become a specialist in sexual abuse because I felt this was the primary underlying problem and therefore the implications for action as sexual abuse counselling…it’s a very tricky one.

But if you get somebody with diabetes with multiple inter-related things it’s a very tricky decision about where should they start?  You don’t necessarily start with the most serious or…you may start with the one that’s easiest but maybe that’s not where they make the most impact.  It’s a very tricky challenge.  And I ended up devising self-help groups for these agoraphobic women so it was a more community response.  So explanation and action aren’t linked. So I think the Stages of Change model would be great for understanding.  I think the understanding might be enhanced by looking at the will and the way, or importance and confidence, or ‘why’ and ‘how’, where their motivational struggles might be, how they feel about how important it is and how confident they are to make some changes in line with something that’s healthier.  Do you see what I’m saying?

Hopkins.  Absolutely.

Rollnick.  So that might be a different questionnaire Rob and maybe that’s something that you take out of it…if you’re doing a thesis you could’ve looked at that, I was just making a suggestion.  But the implications for action I think probably are if the question is good enough you’ll get confused by the data which is a good thing!  It’s compatible with what we find on an individual level – it’s not so simple.  Whereas if you come out with neat, formulaic things like…there’s usually a third, a third and a third – a third will be pretty good and patient, I can make some changes…I don’t know that the implications for action are necessarily…

Johnstone.  What I like about the Stages of Change questionnaire is that it brings a focus on the steps of change that happen before people make the physical change. Often there’s this big focus on have they changed or not, and you’re looking at the end part of the journey when there’s all these steps towards that. If people aren’t making those end changes – like they’re not giving up cars and having solar panels – it’s very easy to feel despondent in the same way that a lot of GPs feel despondent when working with people with alcohol problems. Because even though they’ve been giving all this time they’re still drinking. I think that by applying the stages of change questionnaire a number of times, you can plot movement that happens before the behaviour movement.  So if you think of those levels of change of increase in awareness, change in attitude or motivation, and then change in behaviour, there’s changes that happen before the change in behaviour.

Rollnick.  It is useful.

Hopkins.  Because you come back to it annually in a longitudinal way and assess whether the other things that you’re doing are actually having an effect as well.

Johnstone.  In this whole realm of larger change and addressing ecological issues, it brings the focus to the change before the change, which has often been ignored.  There’s been this idea that if you give people enough information the action will follow, and that’s clearly not the case.

Rollnick.  Yuh.  And I think that’s very useful so don’t take my reservations too seriously because the culture we’re living in, everything is action orientated as Chris is implying, and problem solving.  And the pre-occupation with targets, assessment procedures and healthcare, and deadlines, appointment times, structures, gets people in to the state of mind where it’s all about action and then directing is the obvious style to use.  And I suppose one could build up a critique of health and social care as being all action orientated.  Then with regards to the political spheres, there must probably be similar processes going on.  And understanding change in a slightly more thoughtful manner is a big leap forward.

Johnstone.  As you said, no one has done this before in relation to looking at attitudes about oil use, for example, so just to begin to do it is a step forward. There’s some trial and error whenever you try something new.  It’s like saying, ‘Well this is useful in this field, let’s try it in this field’, and you’ll probably become aware of the problems in the application.  I think what we saying is, ‘These people have thought a lot about difficult behaviour change, and here we have difficult behaviour change, and let’s see if we can transfer some of the insights, understandings and strategies here and see what happens.’

Rollnick.  It’s fantastic, and I’d really like to get right back to the beginning – you used that phrase ‘transfer some of the insights’.  You didn’t use the phrase ‘apply MI as technique across the board’.

***

Stephen Rollnick is Professor of Health Care Communication at Cardiff University and is known internationally for his work developing the motivational interviewing approach. With William Miller, he co-authored the classic text Motivational Interviewing. 

Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and the Transition Network.  You can read more about him here.

Chris Johnstone is an addictions specialist working in the UK health service and trains healthcare professionals in motivational interviewing. He also runs workshops aiming to cultivate empowered responses to global issues and is author of the self-help book Find Your Power.

Last week, on a rather soggy, windswept London evening,  members of Transitions Belsize, Bethnal Green, Brentford, Brixton, Crouch End, Crystal Palace, Finsbury Park, Hackney, Highbury, Kensal to Kilburn, Kentish Town, Lewisham, Peckham, Stoke Newington, Tooting, Tufnell Park,  Walthamstow, Wandsworth, Wanstead, Westcombe, Willesden and Wimbledon (and probably a few more besides), as well as members of the public, gathered at the GLA building in London, to help celebrate Transition in London, and the launch of ‘The Transition Companion’.

The evening was chaired by Lucy Neal of Transition Town Tooting (see below), who started by talking about what an amazing city London is, and how important the river is to the city, and how much cleaner it is now than it was, and that it now contains 120 fish!  The audience soon corrected her mistake, although it left me with an image of London’s official ‘fish counter’ bobbing around counting the fish.  Anyway, I digress.

So the first part of the evening was short talks by 4 people involved in other sustainability initiatives across the city.  First, Sue from London Low Carbon Communities Network talked about their work, followed by Ross of Merton Low Carbon Zone, Chris of Richmond Low Carbon Zone and Nick of Project Dirt, each of whom in just 5 minutes each set out the work they have been doing and the lessons they have learned from it.  They then took some questions and offered more insights into behaviour change and engagement.

Then it was over to me.  I gave an overview of why ‘The Transition Companion’ was written, how it differs from the Transition Handbook, and how the idea of ‘ingredients’ came about.  I stressed that at most book launches the author will speak about his/her book for 30 minutes of so, and then maybe take some questions.  This one would be different.  Although the first two parts of the book are quite linear (see an overall outline of the book here), looking at why do Transition and then what Transition is, the third part is a collection of ingredients and tools that is meant to be used, to be tested out and added to. Consequently, this wasn’t going to be a sit-down evening, but was to be interactive, moving-around kind of an evening, one that started with pushing all the chairs to one side.

So, the first activity we did was a milling one, where the room was divided into two halves, and the cards dealt out so that everyone had one.  People were then invited to mill around and to tell each other what’s on their cards.  They did this for about 15 minutes and seemed to find it a really useful way to quickly become familiar with the ingredients, much better than me showing them one after the other on Powerpoint slides.

Then we did a mapping exercise, inviting people to map themselves in a giant map of London.  Once we had done this, I asked if 5 groups might like to tell their stories.  Once we had 5 groups who had offered to do that, each group was given a pack of the Transition ingredients cards.  They were invited to lay the cards out in a sequence that told their story, how they had started and what had happened as the initiative unfolded.  We did this for about 30 minutes.

It was fascinating to see how different the stories were, and how differently they laid out the cards.  There was then 5 minutes for people to go round the room and to visit the other groups and to see each story.  We then all came back together in a big circle and people talked about how they had found the exercise.  This then led into a more general questions and answers session, where people from London groups chipped in their experience and talked about what they were doing.

This for me was really the highlight of the evening, everyone sitting around and chatting about Transition in London.  Unfortunately we couldn’t do it for a couple of hours!  The evening wrapped up with Sophy Banks talking for a few minutes about the role of inner Transition and about Transition Training, and Lucy mentioning that the possibility had arisen for funding to create a Transition London co-ordinator post, and that there would be a meeting in January to discuss it.

Dishing out the cocktails!

Then it was time for more social time, drinking wine, cocktails, or even some of Transition Leytonstone’s rather wonderful ‘Transition Ale’.  I signed quite a few books, and met some great people.  It is always amazing to see the diversity and the richness of what different Transition groups are up to in London, and to participate in events where they all come together to share their learnings is always an inspiring experience.

Deepest thanks and congratulations to Anna O’Brien who organised the whole thing, and to the team of helpers who ensured it all ran smoothly.  Sterling work all.  Also to Jonathan Goldberg, John Fellowes and Anastasia Harrison for use of their great photos of the evening.  You can see more of Jonathan’s pictures here. 

Interesting male perspective on babies, who in my experience do a lot more than “mewling and puking” (how about “smiling and gurgling”, for example?), but anyway, other than joining their parents at events, there is not really a specific role that babies can actively play in Transition that I can think of, so let’s move onto the next one….

I think this probably tells you more about Elizabethan schools than about the school-age children themselves, but this refers to the age of being at school.  I think, from my experience working with this age group, that this falls into two halves.  For primary school aged children, the best thing is not to talk too much about climate change, peak oil and so on, rather to focus on skills and on low-impact approaches to energy, food and travel just being an everyday part of life.  Kids need that time in their life to be kids.  At secondary age though, there is a lot that can be done, designing into their teaching experience the understanding of the world around them, good critical thinking skills, teaching ecological design, how change happens, the skills for personal resilience, feeling empowered by their educational experience, and feeling that they can shape how their school, their home life and their community develops.

This is the age of perhaps 18-22, which is about breaking away from the family, confronting our parents (not necessary literally, but psychologically), standing on our own ground, the age where “Be realistic, demand the impossible” feels an entirely reasonable ask, and where putting your body on the line feels a natural thing to do.  When I was 18 I marched, I went on roads protests, I ran about a several hundred yards pursued by security guards in an attempt to gatecrash the launch of the much-resisted Bristol spine road (I had no idea what I would have done if they hadn’t caught me and I’d actually got there, probably rather sheepishly crept in at the back).

Had someone asked me to get involved in setting up a community energy company, I would have felt that that was way beyond me, I didn’t have the skills, the interest, the patience.  I was fired by a sense of injustice, of anger, of a desire to rebuild the world from scratch.  In terms of Transition, Transition Heathrow best capture this energy, it brings the aspects of Transition around growing food, working with the community, learning skills, but puts them in a context that is edgy, that has the frisson of making a bold statement on its own terms.  If I were that age again (unlikely), I would more likely be attracted to Occupy than Transition, but I would find Transition’s analysis of things useful, and would see it as part of the larger movement for change.

This is an oft-explored tension within Transition, the extent to which it overtly embraces activism or not.  Rather than being something that will ever be resolved, I think it will remain as one of those open questions, an edge with a lot of energy to it.  In any Transition initiative, it is too simplistic to suggest that young people will engage only where a more radical edge can be created, but when I think of myself at that age, what attracted me to permaculture was that it had a very radical, playful edge to it (such as when Bill Mollison, after a withering take on the uselessness of lawn culture, plants the hazelnut in a lawn, stating “being a good urban guerrilla, we might start by putting a hazelnut in the lawn” at 2.20 into this video).  For me, this is also very much present in Transition.

People with young children often learn to be very productive in very limited time, and to juggle many things.  Often the very innovative ideas such as using social media to promote local currencies and other initiatives, and the sense of how the web can underpin this work will emerge from those in this age.  They would tend to be more present and behind initiatives like the Brixton Pound, which is very funky and which uses social media in really creative and successful ways.

Hmmm. Not so sure about the round belly bit, but I’d say here we move into the late forties, and into the fifties.  Kids grown up, bit more time, life perhaps a bit less hectic (?).  Sometimes this means that engaging in Transition is a great way of meeting people and building a social network that was previously much easier to achieve when you have young children.  Often by this time people have amassed more in the way of practical skills, skills in managing/participating in groups, and more self knowledge, and have a degree more confidence that they can make things happen.  In some places, Transition core groups might consist largely of people at this age, as they tend to have the time available to give to kicking things off, the experience that trying to change things can actually change things, and some of the skills that are needed.

The gifts that this age brings to Transition include a sharing of experience and memories that might be useful to those engaged in more practical Transition work. Indeed there is a case to say that as the economy continues to unravel, that part of the work of Transition initiatives will become offering care and support services to our elders.

I am aware that this piece has consisted of massive generalisations, but given that my research in Totnes found that those under 30 were not so well represented, and that being an observation in many (but by no means all) of the Transition initiatives I visit, I thought it might be worth looking into.  Interestingly, in countries such as Spain and Portugal where the economic and job prospects are that much more precarious, there seem to be a lot more people involved with Transition.  The creation of a more sustainable, more resilient future will need the input of people of all ages, and each will have a role to play.  The aspects of Transition that appeal to someone in their 40s will not be the same as those that appeal to teenagers, but all those roles are vital.  What I do see in many Transition groups is a very respectful space for all the generations to come together and work on a project that they feel excited about. 

So, this has been one of those posts that is offered more as a conversation starter, rather than a complete argument.  It would be interesting to hear your thoughts.  How has your initiative managed to engage younger people?  How does the range of people in your group represent the seven ages?  Have you ever felt excluded from Transition because of your age, or that it was not relevant to you?  How might that more direct approach represented by Occupy look in a Transition context?  Can we design Transition in such a way that whatever age you are, you feel part of a dynamic and deep process that speaks to what you care about, the passion you bring and the skills you have?  Over to you…

In 2006, when we started what has since become the Transition movement, we imagined it as an environmental movement. It was conceived as a solutions-focused, bottom-up response to peak oil and climate change. Now, with five years of experimentation and experience under our belts, we see it more as a cultural movement, exploring what the culture of a place needs to look like in order for it to be best prepared for increasingly uncertain times (contracting energy supplies, price volatility, economic uncertainty, and so on).

Transition is founded on three key concepts:

Localisation

Transition argues that once peak oil is passed, globalisation goes into reverse and the local economy becomes increasingly important. It speaks of ‘localisation as economic development’, arguing that meeting more needs locally and plugging the leaks in our local economies will be one of the key strategies for economic development over the next two decades.

Resilience

This refers to the ability of a settlement, an individual or a country to withstand shocks. Former Crystal Palace football manager Iain Dowie once described resilience as ‘bouncebackability’. It is about preparing local economies for uncertain times so that they have enough flexibility and adaptability designed into them to enable them to continue to function and, ideally, to thrive. Transition sees this process as a huge opportunity rather than as a disaster.

 ‘Inner’ Transition

There is an acknowledgement that this is as much an inner process as an outer one. The solar panels, the food growing, the local currencies are the easy part. The harder bit is supporting each other through times of great change, and ensuring both community and personal resilience.

Wherever Transition takes root (now in over 700 communities in 35 countries worldwide) it usually leads to the flowering of a diversity of practical projects. These usually include food, energy, building, economics, education and much more. They are bottom-up and community-owned. Here are three examples of projects being undertaken by Transition initiatives that demonstrate how these ideas translate into practice:

Transition Streets: In December 2009, Transition Town Totnes, the UK’s first Transition initiative, was one of 20 community groups in England and Wales to win the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s Low Carbon Communities Challenge. Its project, Transition Streets, was awarded £625,000. Nearly 500 households have participated, each cutting its carbon emissions by on average 1.5 tonnes. About a third have gone on to install subsidised solar photovoltaic systems. However, the main benefit that people who have participated talk about is the social connections they have made and how they now feel so much more a part of their community. The scheme has also acted as a platform for all kinds of other spin-off initiatives as neighbours start to get a taste for working together. Transition Streets won the 2011 Ashden Award for Behaviour Change.

The Lewes Community Power Station: Ouse Valley Energy Services Company Ltd (OVESCo) is an offshoot of Transition Town Lewes that focuses on the installation of renewables and promoting energy conservation. In 2011 it took on its most exciting and ambitious project to date, installing a 98kW solar photovoltaic array on the roof of local brewery Harveys to create the UK’s first community-owned solar power station. The 544 photovoltaic (PV) panels will generate 93,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year. The community share launch in April 2011 was attended by 300 people. Within five weeks the target of £307,000 had been reached and Harveys brewed a commemorative beer called Sunshine Ale to celebrate the launch of the scheme.

Trashcatchers Carnival: In July 2010, Tooting, London was the setting for the first Transition project to get Arts Council funding. Together with Project Phakama and Emergency Exit Arts, Transition Town Tooting (TTT) created a street carnival celebrating taking care of the Earth and using entirely recycled materials. Over 800 people took part, including local schools, mosques and temples, and over a million plastic bottles and bags, half a million crisp packets, half a tonne of renewable willow and half a tonne of materials were collected over a six-month period to create this extravaganza, which included several structures over 6 metres high. On the day, thousands turned out, the sun shone, local restaurants fed over 1,000 people for free at the end of the event, and the community was left with the feeling “if we can do that we can do anything”.

This is just a very small taste of some of the hundreds of initiatives emerging out of Transition. There are new community farms, community-owned energy companies, new shops, bakeries, markets, school gardens, arts projects, community investment opportunities, local currencies and much more. But can it be argued that engaging with this process of intentional localisation, in ways such as those I have set out above, can actually increase your wellbeing?

Initial indications look positive. For example, research conducted at the end of the Transition Streets programme found a significant increase in the percentage of participants who reported feeling positive about the future, who feel connected to and part of their community and who are aware of what can be done and feel they know what to do about it. I asked the psychologist Tim Kasser for his thoughts:

“All the research I’ve seen, all the thinking I’ve done, and all the people I’ve talked to suggests to me that localisation will do a better job of meeting people’s needs – people will be happier and will live in a more socially cohesive way and more sustainably. Or at least it will encourage all those things… If my intuition about what a resilient community is is correct, then what you would hopefully find is that as time goes on, people will be experiencing more and more satisfaction of their needs. They’ll find that their community is providing them with more opportunities to enact those needs and those intrinsic values. They’ll find that they’re experiencing less barriers to enacting the intrinsic values and satisfying their needs.”

Is this what attracts people to Transition? Through my website transitionculture.org I asked people why they got involved in Transition. Answers included:

• “It provides a positive, creative and challenging place to apply my energies to those challenges…and it’s fun.”
• “If it wasn’t for Transition I would probably still be trying to work out how me and my family could become self-sufficient in some remote ‘safe’ hideout. Transition has given my life a more positive purpose because I now know we are not alone.”
• “Transition is a principles-based approach that…seeks to imitate natural systems and allows participants to act joyfully, spontaneously and freely in creating a more life-giving way of being.”

A study by Tim Kasser and Malte Klar found that those engaged in activism are more likely to ‘flourish’ than non-activists, and suggested that “engaging in political activism is associated with higher levels of wellbeing”, and the quotes above appear to reinforce this. Transition focuses on the concept of ‘engaged optimism’, suggesting that that would be a more useful energy to harness than despondency and fear. It argues that without an enticing vision of the world we want to create we will struggle to manifest it.

When I visited Lancaster for the local Transition initiative’s Unleashing, one of the founder members told me that even if the whole thing stopped tomorrow, he now knew 200 people he hadn’t known before he got involved. One Transition activist in Tooting told me: “I’ve lived in Tooting for 22 years, but I think I’ve lived more in Tooting in the past two years, since I’ve been involved in Transition, than I have in the last 20 years.”

Of course there is the question, as raised by Janet Richardson, Professor of Health Service Research, at the University of Plymouth, in a Health Impact Assessment of Transition Streets, of whether people are drawn to Transition because they are happier, or whether they are happier because of their involvement in Transition. The anecdotal evidence suggests that what stands out for people about their engagement with Transition is the rebuilding and reweaving of community, rather than necessarily the more tangible outputs in terms of energy savings.

One Transition Streets participant, Jenny Gellatly, commented: “You can go for years without knowing your neighbours; now we go to the pub together. I feel I can go round and knock on a neighbour’s door to borrow tools; our kitchen scraps are eaten by one of our neighbour’s chickens, and our slugs by another’s ducks.” These connections can contribute greatly to a community’s resilience, and to its ability to adapt to rapid change.

Although it is still an experiment, the learning thus far from five years of Transition in a wide range of settings is that a process of bringing low-carbon living, resilience and localisation about in a way that is founded on playfulness, creativity and – yes – happiness has only just begun to demonstrate what it is truly capable of.

The late David Fleming, a great inspiration on the evolution of Transition, wrote: “The change in direction represented by the Transition movement is as profound as any intentional change experienced by a civilisation.” Thus far, the evidence would appear to suggest that this change in direction, if done properly, could be the making of us.

The beautiful illustrations are by Stewart Pawley to whom I am very grateful: www.stewartpawley.co.uk.

This is a question that the staff team at Transition Network have been mulling over for some time.  Our discussions have journeyed from responses to inequality need to be somewhere in Transition towards responses to inequality need to be everywhere in Transition, and perhaps at the centre.

A Transition Finsbury Park project that works with Turkish mothers to provide access to bicycles.

We’ve come up with a possible new purpose statement to reflect this. It says:

“Transition Network supports community-led responses to climate change, inequality and shrinking supplies of cheap energy, building resilience and happiness.”

Of course this statement is fairly familiar except for the addition of the word “inequality”. If we are to change Transition Network’s purpose statement in this way, it will be because people involved in Transition want this to happen.

We asked a few people to write about their thoughts on inequality in Transition. We then realised that very few of these people were against the idea and yet we didn’t seem to know people in Transition who would be against it.  So we put a note on the Transition website to invite anyone and everyone to submit their thoughts.  We received 21 responses of which the overwhelming majority were for the idea.

We’ve laid out all the submissions in the following blogs and would love to hear your comments on this discussion.

What next?  Will Transition Network be adopting a purpose statement that includes inequality as a central driver?  Well that all depends on you… please use the comments box below.

• Responses from 21 people involved with or linked to Transition who responded to our question about this posted on the Transition Network website in August 2011
• Peter Lipman, Chair of Transition Network
• Louis Alemayehu, community elder involved in Transition US and Transition Minneapolis
• Sophy Banks, co-founder of Transition Training and very involved in inner TransitionPeter Ruczynski from Transition Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote it when I was 27!

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

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

Yeah, thanks for that …

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

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

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

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

Any last thoughts for the Transition movement?

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

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

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

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

Transition Toronto recently held a film competition for people to use film as a way of communicating Transition.  The winner was Mariko Uda with her film ‘The People in my Neighbourhood’.  Rather lovely it is too.  Here it is:

The judge, Gregory Greene, producer of ‘The End of Suburbia’, said of why he chose this film as the winner:

“I really enjoyed Mariko’s film. Her vision of a possible urban future based on local skills and innovation, progressive resource-and-energy taxation, future compost “consultants”(loved that one) and Ministry of Transportation folks on bikes – embraces so many Transition principles. I found myself learning quite a bit and developing new ideas about what the future might feel like. I also loved the friendly, up-beat tone and diversity of faces, so reflective of our city! This video is the winner by a long-shot. I’ll say it again I LOVED IT!”

Mariko makes the point that the various stories in the film are already a reality… she writes:

“Yes, that rooftop garden really exists! It’s one of a number of urban agriculture projects at UofT.

The composters are at the Stop’s Green Barn.  Check out the Farmers’ Market there every Sat. morning!

When I thought of buildings for the future, I thought of Rohan Walters. Get to know him here.

Need something fixed? Go to a repair shop like Fix-It-Again Sam! Want to make a skateboard?

For the composting toilet I had to go all the way to Vaughn to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s Restoration Services Building.

I kid you not – they did not smell at all!

The lovely singing at the end were UofT students in Hot Yam! who prepare yummy vegan lunches every Wed. at noon. http://hotyam.ca/

If you’ve watched this film, and want to know what to do, start by discovering and enjoying the treasures in your neighbourhood. Go to a Farmers’ Market. Walk, ride your bike! Smile & talk to your neighbours Nourish yourself, envision a positive future & work together with others towards it.

Here is the second in the ‘Story of Transition in 10 Objects’ films, which tell some of the stories from the forthcoming ‘The Transition Companion‘.  It tells the story of Bertie and Gertie from Tooting.

Today is the 5th anniversary of the ‘Unleashing’ of Transition Town Totnes. Feels like quite a landmark to me. On Saturday, TTT held an event to celebrate and reflect on the journey so far and on where we might go from here. In spite of it starting at 9am on a Saturday, over 70 people came, and we had a fantastic day. The day was chaired by Chrissie Godfrey and Paul Birch from Taunton Transition Town, who beautifully facilitated a very energising day. In the forthcoming ‘The Transition Companion’, one of the ingredients is called ‘How are we doing?’ and it looks at how groups can pause and reflect. What I want to do here is to set out the process we did on Saturday, in the hope that your Transition initiative might find it useful for having similar reflections.

Starting with a song

The day started with a group song as a four-part harmony, nothing too challenging, but very enjoyable.

Appreciations

When everyone arrived, they were presented with a certificate (see above). The wording read:

“This is to certify that …. has been officially appreciated at the Transition Town Totnes 5th Birthday celebration, and roundly applauded for being an integral part of “the biggest urban brainwave of the century” (Nicholas Crane, BBC2, August 2011). Great stuff”.

They were invited to write their name on them, and then someone pinned it to their back. Then, once everyone was together, people were invited to move around and write on each others’ backs something they have enjoyed about working with that person over the past 5 years.

Then everyone stood in a big circle, and each person presented the person to their left with their certificate, and read one of the comments from it.

Creating the Transition Town Totnes timeline

A very long piece of paper was laid out over several tables, with dates along it, and people were invited to add their memories of events, when they arrived in the process, and any particular developments, either written or drawn. Over the day this evolved into a fascinating record of the process so far.

The moment I met Naresh Giangrande and the idea of what was to become TTT was first discussed is captured in the TTT Timeline...

Exploring the different dimensions of what we do

In advance of the event, the key areas of what TTT does were identified, and these (internal communication, outward facing communication, programme of public events, how we meet as groups and make decisions, how people join us, structure, personal and organisational resilience and wellbeing, and overall direction/mission/dream) we then laid out on the floor around the room.

On another table, lots of small cards bearing single words were arranged, and people were invited to take some of these and place them where they felt they were relevant. The words captured a wide range of positive and negative qualities, and for about 10 minutes, people circulated, placing the cards where they felt most appropriate.

Then chairs were circled around each one, and a World Cafe-style session was run, where each group was asked to consider what is working well and not so well in that area of TTT’s work, as well as strengths and weaknesses and learnings and intentions to take forward. These were then shared with the whole group.

Then it was time for a fantastic lunch prepared by by the amazingly talented Holly, who’s Brunch Cafe is highly recommended (next one in the Methodist Hall on Saturday 24th Sept) and the equally amazingly talented Sima, who will soon be starting her own catering company (watch this space) both of the TTT Food Group (naturally!).  During this break, people were able to contribute more to the Timeline and spend time catching up with each other.

Mapping the external context

The first activity after lunch was a mapping of the external context of TTT, who we have created partnerships with, arranged in a big mind map. This identified the wide range of relationships that have been created, whether they are formal partnerships or more informal relationships.

Mapping with people

We then did a mapping with people, with one end of the room being focusing on individual change, on practical action at the household or very local level, and the other end of the room being focused more on structural change, big projects or impacting on the political scale. People arranged themselves in terms of where they felt they were putting most of their energy. Chrissie then moved among people, interviewing a few of them about where they were and how it felt to be there.

“Who don’t you know yet?”

People were then invited to move around the room and to find someone they didn’t know, to spend a minute introducing each other, and then to ask the question “if we knew each other better, what becomes possible?”. This was done three times, I certainly got to meet people I have never met before, and it was great to hear what they are doing and their experience of being part of TTT.

Short visualisation about moving into the future

We then did a short imagination activity focused on the question “if everything TTT is doing now came to fruition in 5 years time, what would it look like?”  We were invited to try and imagine it in as clear detail as possible, and then to turn to our neighbour and to tell them what was most compelling for us in that vision.  We then re-mapped TTT imagining us in that future, observing if there were any differences between that and the earlier mapping.

The ‘Timeline of Future Possibilities”

We then extended our timeline into the future over the next 5 years, mapping out developments we’d like to see and things we imagine happening at different stages.

So then, what next?

We then moved into small groups and discussed the most important things to take forward from this point.  Each group was given a number of strips of paper and invited to write down the tangible projects or initiatives that it would like to see/make happen.  These were then arranged on the wall and people allocated a number of dots they could use to ‘vote’ on those they had most energy and enthusiasm for.  People were invited to put their names next to the ones they felt most enthusiastic about helping to make happen.

The day closed with singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and having some of the wonderful TTT birthday cake.  It was a fascinating day, a real celebration of where we have come from, a deep appreciation of those working on this project, and a re-focusing and re-energising for the next 5 years.  Thanks to Paul and Chrissie for their facilitation, to Holly for the amazing food, and to everyone who has helped us over the last 5 years.  I left with a very powerful sense that actually, we’re only just getting started.  I hope these activities (with thanks to Paul and Chrissie for letting me share them) might be of use in your Transition group’s reflections.  Happy birthday TTT!

Most of the photos here are ones I took, but thanks also to Peter Redstone and Jonathan Crinion (get well soon!) for use of theirs.

A Fishbowl conversation at the 2011 Transition Network conference, Liverpool.

The ingredients in the forthcoming ‘The Transition Companion’ are nearly done, but a few have spaces we need to fill, such as this one called ‘How are we doing?’ and I’d love to add your stories to it.  It looks at the value of initiatives stopping to evaluate what they are doing, reflecting honestly before adjusting what they are doing and continuing.  They might use Open Space, World Cafe, Appreciative Inquity, Fishbowl, or any range of other things.  I’d love to hear your stories, in no more than 300 -350 words. about your Transition initiative’s experience of doing that.  How many people came?  What did you do?  What did you learn from it?  You could either post below or email me at rob (at) transitionculture.org.  To get your thoughts flowing thus far, here is the main text for that ingredient.  Thanks!

All projects need to reflect on their progress, be honest about their shortcomings and listen to constructive criticism. If they can’t do these things, they will begin to lose connection with reality.

In the swirl of keeping your initiative moving forward and doing exciting things, it is easy to stop asking if the process is moving in the right direction, in a healthy way. Stopping regularly to ask ‘How are we doing?’ is an essential safety check.  This can take place on a range of scales. Adding five minutes at the end of each meeting to discuss how effective it was and how it could have been better run can be very useful. For a more in-depth process, you could plan a day for assessing how and where things are going.  Shortly after the publication of its Energy Descent Action Plan, Transition Town Totnes (TTT) held a day to consider how those actively involved in the initiative had found the project and where  they saw it going next.
A more public reflection can also be good. TTT also held a ‘How Are We Doing?’ evening, which invited the community to say how they were finding the
process. It began with each of TTT’s working groups giving a three-minute report on what they were doing, and on projects that were under way. An ‘Appreciate Enquiry’ followed, which asked ‘What is going well?’, ‘What could we do differently?’ and ‘What concerns do we have?’ The evening yielded
useful insight that fed back into the initiative.  Sometimes tools such as a Fishbowl can be very useful for this kind of reflection.

Put time aside regularly to evaluate how your initiative is doing. These evaluations could be either internal or public events that offer the opportunity for honest appraisal of your work. Make sure the ideas generated and the information gleaned are made widely available and acted upon.

Had a great time yesterday on the webinar call thing to Transition US.  It lasted about 75 minutes and we covered lots of things.  We’ll be doing it again in September but for now, click here to hear the recording of the event.  The very end is especially good, when you can hear lots of the callers saying goodbye… lovely that was…  Thanks to everyone who organised it, especially Carl, Carolyne and Richard.

We had a great few days at Hope University in Liverpool.  This will not be an attempt at a complete document of that event, you will find the most comprehensive record over at the Transition Network’s conference feed.  What I am going to share, with links to some of the key pieces of media from that feed, is some of the notes of my reflections at the end of the conference.  As the event drew to a close, I went around and asked people for their brief reflections on what they saw as the character unique to this conference in comparison to others.  Three words came up again and again, deepening, focus and maturity.

The Fishbowl discussion on "scaling up".

In terms of my personal highlights, firstly there was the moment on Sunday night when Ben Brangwyn told me the international Transition hubs were “on fire”, and had really clicked in working on a productive way forward with their work.   There was the moment in the Fishbowl activity about ‘scaling up’ and the role of social enterprise in Transition, where someone asked whether it might be possible to imagine an awareness-raising programme as an enterprise that could help support a Transition initiative.  It is not a question I have any answers to, but it is also certainly not a question we’d have heard anyone asking two years ago or even a year ago.  I think we have seen a new level of maturity around social enterprise.  I think that also, in the processes we have held, and also just in the way the whole event was run, we have seen the deep and very practical integration of the ‘inner Transition’ piece which Sophy has fed in so strongly over the last few years.

The opening slide from the presentation about Transition in Brazil, showing how they approach Transition with a unique Brazilian twist!

One delight for me is that this year’s ran so smoothly and well that I actually managed to get to some of the workshops, which was a first!  The workshop on local currencies wasn’t so much about what they are, but was very detailed discussions about how to get started, and how to learn from the pioneering projects that have gone before.  Another highlight for me was the workshop about Transition in Brazil, where one of the speakers mentioned that her group holds regular “Solidarity Exchange Fairs”, where people bring things to swap.  “We exchange everything apart from husbands and dogs”, she said, adding that if someone does bring her husband along to give him away, they say “well if you don’t want him, why would I want him?!”

Every Transition Network conference has its emerging edges, the areas that feel new and uncomfortable but which demand deeper exploration.  My sense for this year was that those edges were around Transition and activism, the need to be starting to create livelihoods for people, and the  need to deepen international networking.

One of the things that was also clear over the conference was that there were people from initiatives on a range of scales, from the very small to the much larger, and it is important to value the challenges and opportunities of both.  For those smaller groups, it is important, even though it can feel as though not much is happening, to keep those fires burning and to keep doing what you do.  You never know when tipping points will happen, they can occur at the most unexpected times.  Even though it might feel that you are not having much of an impact, you never know where those impacts might occur.

Preparing for the opening of the first session, Saturday morning.

When I lived in Ireland I taught an evening class every Thursday evening at University College Cork on permaculture.  During one class, a man asked me “how many people do you think do this evening class?”  “22” I told him, the number of the people sat in the room in front of me.  “Ah, no”, he told me.  “I’d say it is way more than that.  Every Friday morning I’m at home in my garden and at least 20 people stick their heads over the fence and say “what did he teach you last night?”

An article in the Guardian last week asked “has the green movement lost its way?” I think that is the wrong question.  The right question should be “has a new, emergent culture which embraces resilience and localisation, equity and partnership, even scratched the surface of its potential?”  I think the answer is a resolute no.  We’ve all had a taste of that this weekend.

In Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’, a book which grows more prescient with each month that passes, she quotes Milton Friedman, one of the key architects of neo-liberal economics.  The quote is:

“Only a crisis—actual or perceived––produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.  . . That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”.

Over this conference we have had, for the first time I can remember at a Transition Network conference, a tangible sense of how this relates to Transition.  We have heard how in one town in Brazil which was hit very hard by floods last year, is using Transition principles and processes in designing the process by which it rebuilds itself.  We heard how during the recent ‘Spanish revolution’, where the main square in Barcelona was turned into a huge protest camp for several weeks, Transition thinking was what many people brought to the situation.  We have also been hearing about how in New Zealand in some places hit by earthquakes, the work done prior to that by Transition initiatives proved to be extremely useful in terms of building community resilience.

From these, we get a sense that we are now in the times we have been talking about for some time, that Transition is already in the DNA, in the drinking water, and is already informing how people respond to crisis.  It is extraordinary to see that, and for it to have emerged in less than 5 years.

One of the great joys of this conference has been to finally get copies of the book David Fleming, who is much missed this year, and who always attended these conferences, was working on when he died, ‘Lean Logic’.  The book contains a section I hadn’t seen before in the various drafts I had seen of it, which focused on Transition.  It contains this beautiful quote, which forms a fitting last gift from David to everybody here:

“The change in direction represented by the Transition movement is as profound as any intentional change experienced by a civilisation”.

It is worth reading that twice, and letting it sink in.

Playing with the 'Transition ingredients' cards at the Saturday workshop (more on this tomorrow).

So I am deeply grateful once again to have spent time with this extraordinary movement of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.  Personally I go away with three big to do’s.  The first is to finish ‘The Transition Companion’ because I think you will find it an extremely useful resource in doing this work.  The second is to develop the ‘Ingredients’ card game that we played with in my workshop as I think it is a tool you will find very useful.  Lastly, we’ll continue the work on REconomy and on trying to set up a revolving loan fund so there is some actual investment into these emerging projects.