At the same time that the film was being shown in Totnes, it was being shown around the world, such as this screening in Tokyo, Japan.

I introduced the film by explaining how it was also being watched around the world at the same time, and then the film ran.  It was great to see it on the silver screen, and to see how the bits that moved me were different to those that had moved me when I saw it during the editing process.  It got a great reception from the audience.  After a short break, Emma Goude (the producer) and myself took questions and feedback from the audience and also that were sent in from the other screenings via Twitter.

Among the feedback that was sent in, Rowena, at the Tooting screening, tweeted “Tooting showing of @intransitionmov just finished, great spirit in the room and a hubbub of neighbours chatting. Fantastic work everyone! Xx”.  Project Lyttelton in NZ, whose story closes the film, tweeted “Congratulations! It is great to know we are part of a world wide movement…”.  Kaat in Wayland, who appears in the film, tweeted “Love the bits ab. inner transition, peer support.  Thank u for showing that it can fail and takes hard work. Shows maturity and confidence of the movement”.

The Tooting screening gets underway...

Lucy Neal in Tooting mentioned how a number of the London groups had come together for their screening: “Hurrah!@intransitionmov out in world.@ttooting launch GOOD. gt turn out & now belsizepark,brixton&tooting inpub- neighbourchat over globalfence!”  Another tweet said “Inspirational film from @InTransitionmov let’s hope it generates a new surge of local activism around the world”.

Transition Moss Side tweeted “Really great job on the film! We thought it fantastic and its inspired lots of people who came to our preview last night.”, and Charles Whitehead, who attended the Tooting screening, wrote “Great after-movie atmosphere last night in pub at Tooting Bec: mix of Trans conference, wedding party & confessional”.  Jo Homan in Finsbury Park tweeted that their screening had ended up with a conga!

A number of questions were sent in which Emma Goude and myself did our best to respond to, and people also gave their thoughts on the film.  This was all filmed and will be posted here soon.  Many people picked up on how they liked the sense of empowerment in the film, and how they appreciated the fact that it told some stories about how things don’t always work out.  Emma spoke about the process of making the film, how it was done without anyone having to set foot on an aeroplane, and how it reflected a movement that has made huge leaps since the first one.

Presenting Emma Goude, the film's producer, with a bunch of locally grown irises.

Rebecca Mayes closes the evening with an acoustic version of 'Turn the Lights Out'

The evening closed with a bunch of flowers being given to everyone who was in the creative team that led to the making of the film, Emilio Mula who did the animation, Beccy Strong who did the camera work, composer Rebecca Mayes and Emma herself.  The evening finished with Rebecca Mayes singing a beautiful acoustic version of ‘Turn the Lights Out’, introducing it by saying that she plans to release the song as a single, and is making a video and wants people to send in short clips of themselves turning the lights out.

And then people were off out into the crisp cold night, apart from those who hung around to be filmed for some short vox pops about what they thought of the film (coming soon in an edited version, and something that, hopefully, all the other preview screenings were doing too).  Next steps for ‘In Transition 2.0’?  A premiere in late March (details to follow) and a DVD release with, hopefully, a co-ordinated mass screening to come early April.  Watch this space!

In a second video, Chris and Graham get in off the roof and talk in more depth about how the scheme came into being, and the obstacles it overcame:

TT-Llandeilo in Wales are fighting to save their historic Market Hall while plans are being considered for a new Sainsbury’s supermarket to the north of the town – read more in This is South Wales.  Picking up a story from last month’s round up, which was explored in more detail in the last Transition podcast, here is an article in Treehugger on TT-Whitehead planting 60,000 trees which includes their fantastic video that we featured here last month.

Transition Heathrow: Credit: Kristian Buus

On the same subject, TT-Horncastle in Lincolnshire have been planting hazelnut trees (see above) as part of their plan to have an orchard spread around the town. Ian Westmoreland from Transition Heathrow (see right) came to give a talk in Totnes to talk about their Grow Heathrow project, which explored the place where Transition and activism meet.

TT-Bridport has joined forces with another local community group and have offered placements to unemployed young people to teach them practical skills.  TT-Dorchester and TT-Taunton in Somerset both held a Wassail at their local community orchards (see left)! Dorchester’s was followed by an orchard work day.   For those not familiar with the term, an orchard-visiting wassail refers to the ancient custom of visiting orchards, reciting incantations and singing to the trees in apple orchards in cider-producing regions of England to promote a good harvest for the coming year.

TT-Bolton have written this rational and forward thinking letter to their local council with 2 specific objections and 2 specific (and they believe achievable) aims for the next 14 year period.  At the end of the letter they refer to two articles which may be of interest, here and here.

So, to London.  Here is a very silly indeed video of Transition Crystal Palace:

Transition Kensal to Kilburn, like quite a few other London Transition groups, have been running Draughtbusting workshops.  These 3 videos take us inside what really happens at a Draughtbusting workshop….

Transition Town Tooting met to make some Transition New Year resolutions.  TT-Brixton have started a Family Group (see right) where everyone is welcome (everyone is part of a family in some way)! Read here for more details of their planned activities.  Transition Brixton’s Brixton Pound initiative also got a mention at the recent Davos Economic Summit!  Have a look a 4.30 into this interview with Stewart Wallis of nef:

While we’re on the subject, the Bristol Pound, the first city-wide complementary currency is coming soon, keenly supported by Bristol City Council.  You can keep up to date with developments at their rather impressive new website.

In a follow up to last month’s story, two very worthy hospices benefitted from TT-Shrewsbury’s post Christmas cardboard collecting initiative (which also featured in our most recent podcast). Read the full story here and see pic, left.

TT-Shrewsbury have also been busy as part of The Shrewsbury Hydro Group who are spearheading the new £100,000 power plan for Shrewsbury Castlefields weir (a story we heard about in a special podcast in December).  A lovely example of skills being shared for a good cause as TT-Worthing took part in a Winter Warmer campaign by knitting woollen hats, gloves and scarves for two local charities (see right).

Here’s a great idea: Transition Cardiff have started ‘Show and Tell’ evenings, where people from different sustainability initiatives in the area are invited to come and present what they are up to.  Here’s a film about it:

The Local Energy Assessment Fund (LEAF), run by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) recently announced 82 winning communities, who between them shared £4 million for community energy projects.  A quick look through the list of finalists shows that about 10 of them were Transition initiatives.  Among those, Transition Town Totnes got funding to retrofit Dartington Parish Hall, Transition Eynsham Area are now able to insulate local homes, Taunton Transition Town can now do some research on the best ways to reduce energy in Taunton, and Transition West Bridgford will be rolling out its ‘EcoHouses’ project, to name just a few.

Speaking of Totnes, Transition Town Totnes’ ‘Transition Homes’ project recently held an Open Day in the same Dartington Parish Hall, to inform local residents of their plans:

Internationally, the Transition initiatives that feature in the new film ‘In Transition 2.0′ are getting ready to preview the film tomorrow (Thursday 2nd February).  Transition Town Lewes are showing it in the town hall, and didn’t like Transition Network’s poster and so made their own (see right), Transition City Lancaster are showing it at Dukes, Transition Marsden & Slaithwaite are putting it on at the Watershed, Transition Monteveglio have had to cancel theirs due to arctic winds and snowstorms, Transition Wayland in the US are using the town building, Love Lyttelton in New Zealand will be showing it in their office, in a fire station in Moss Side, Manchester, in a Hindu Temple in Tooting,  in a school in Finsbury Park, in a hall in Koganei, Japan, in ‘Cinema Paradiso’ in Auroville, India and in Aldeia das Amoreiras Sustentável in Portugal.  Its premiere will be announced soon, and it will be more widely available for screenings from the end of March.

Popping over to British Columbia in Canada, a Shuswap resident (what a great name for a place) is interviewed about why she became involved in Transition in this lovely Salmon Arm Observer article (Salmon Arm, there’s another great name for a place!).  See also this related article on Ten Resolutions for Resilience.

Also in British Columbia, local resident and farmer Matthew Stewart (see below) has taken the first steps in getting a local Transition initiative up and running in the city of Burnaby which sits to the east of Vancouver. Read a Q&A with Matthew in Burnaby Now.

Growing a greener world: Moreno Zanotto, Matthew Stuart and Sarah Milton aim to create communities free from fossil fuel dependence, starting with community gardening and green transportation. Credit: Lisa King, Burnaby Now

TT-Woodstock is one of only two Transition groups in the East Canadian province of New Brunswick.  The group have built a solar-powered cooker that’s used at public events such as Canada Day, compiled a local food directory and established a community garden. They continue to actively encourage more local people to join them.

Heading south to the US, you can check out the US edition of the January roundup here.  From Massachusetts, this simple Resilience Questionnaire put together by The Jamaica Plain (JP) New Economy Transition seeks to find out direct from their residents just how ready their JP community is for change.  Also in Jamaica Plain, for their first Potluck of 2012, local residents Jenny Jones, Alvin Kho and Andree Zaleska shared their respective experiences of the Festival Garden, Egleston Community Orchard and the JP Green House.

A Senior center in Chelsea, Michigan is to host series of free classes on resilience, sustainability and the transition movement and kicks off with a program on “Chelsea’s Resilience 100 Years Ago.”  In North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, the first Transition Congregation sustainability workshop in the US has taken place with Transition Trainer Tina Clarke.

In Wyncote, Transition Cheltenham have started a Sunday Supper series with an excerpt from the film Gasland followed by a speaker and discussion about fracking.  Also in Pennsylvania, the Penn State Center for Sustainability did this review of The Transition Companion and held its second energy forum, ‘Marcellus Shale and Beyond’ which sought to answer questions such as ‘Why do we need our own energy plan?’ and ‘Who is going to fix a growing list of intractable problems?  Government?  Business?  Academia?’

In Utah, Transition Salt Lake City held a meeting at a local church to showcase their website, take part in a mind map exercise and share a potluck meal (see right).  Following a “Training for Transition” in December, Dummerston is the 9^th town in Vermont to start up a Transition initiative and this month held a potluck dinner, a screening of In Transition 1.0 followed by a discussion.

The spread of Transition in Brazil continues apace.  May East sent us the following reports of two particular recent developments there:

Transition Ametista: Town of 150,000 people, the largest Amethyst mines of South America. The town today stands over a Swiss cheese as they have been digging the subsoil for decades.  Recently they have been influenced by brilliant Brazilian permaculture designers friends of ours and decided to diversify economy, close the loops of extraction, created factory of eco-bricks, went back to grow grapes & vinyards, decided to age wines inside of the amethyst caves… a great case study.

We were hosted by the Major and had many reps of LA of the regional towns.  Marcello co-facilitated with me (see photo below).

Transition Rio – Rio has now many initiatives.  This is the third year; third group and I trust one of our trainers who is visiting the UK at the moment will be able to present all that is happening. Transition Brazil is planning a 2 day conference during Rio+20.

That’s it for now.  The next podcast, telling more about some of these stories, will be out in a couple of weeks.  If there are any stories you would especially like to hear more about, please let us know via the comments box below.

Hopefully that has sufficiently whet your appetite for what is a remarkable film.  We describe it thus:

“In Transition 2.0 is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.  You’ll hear about communities printing their own money, growing food everywhere, localising their economies and setting up community power stations.  It’s an idea that has gone viral, a social experiment that is about responding to uncertain times with solutions and optimism.  In a world that is awash with gloom, here is a story of hope, ingenuity and the power of growing salads in unexpected places”.

It has been produced by Emma Goude, with animation by Emilio Mula, photography by Beccy Strong and with stunning original music by Rebecca Mayes.  They have drawn together stories from around the world showing Transition initiatives at the various stages of transitioning their communities.  In order to be able to feature some of the stories from overseas, they ran a crowd-funding process which raised the money required.  An international team of volunteers have translated the film in 18 languages.

Also, in spite of telling stories from around the world, no-one set foot on an aeroplane in order to make this film, local camera-people being enlisted to film each non-UK sequence, making this one of the lowest-carbon international films ever produced.

Who’s in it?

The film captures stories of Transition from around the world.  You’ll hear about Transition Wayland in the US, and their very first meeting, how Transition Moss Side in Manchester have sought to raise awareness and engage the community by knocking on the area’s front doors, the amazing community visioning work of Aldeia das Amoreiras Sustentável (sustainable village of Amoreiras) in Portugal, how the Whitney Avenue Urban Farm in Pittsburgh has had a remarkable impact on the people around them, how  Transition Kensal to Kilburn have set up the first food garden on a London underground station and how Transition Town Tooting‘s Trashcatchers’ Carnival, London was a remarkable and very memorable celebration of  community and of taking care of the Earth.

You’ll hear about the difficulties of doing Transition too, with the story of how Transition City Lancaster initially fell apart due to conflict but has since risen from the ashes and is now busy with a range of projects, and how Transition groups in London come together to support each other so as to minimise burnout.  You’ll hear the story of Transition Monteveglio in Bologna, Italy and their very successful collaboration with the local council and a ground-breaking resolution, committing the council to deep sustainability and resilience-building.  There’s Transition Streets from Totnes in Devon which works street-by-street, getting people together to meet, form new connections, and reduce their carbon footprints.

And then there are the emerging social enterprises, The Green Valley Grocer in Slaithwaite, Yorkshire which raised shares from the community to take over the local grocers which was closing down, The Handmade Bakery, also in Slaithwaite, a really innovative model for how a young couple can set up a vibrant new business.  They also make exquisite bread.  There’s The Fujino Power Company, Japan, where, following the devastating tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, members of Transition Fujino responded by setting up a community energy company, with the intention of powering their whole valley using renewable energy. There’s The Lewes community solar power station, in Sussex which was funded by over £300,000 raised in community shares, and the Brixton Pound in London, the local complementary currency which can be spent in the area of Brixton in London with local traders – “money that sticks to Brixton”.  We join them on the night they celebrate launching the UK’s first mobile phone-based complimentary currency.

We visit Heal the Soil CSA in Auroville, India, who help people start up small vegetable gardens in the rural villages of India, providing seeds and permaculture training in order to help them get started growing food, and Project Lyttleton in New Zealand, who employ Transition as one of the tools for their work building community resilience.  When the recent earthquakes struck Lyttleton, the value of their work, especially its Time Bank, became apparent.

Screenings

In early February, each of the initiatives whose stories are told in the film have been invited to host a preview.  Most of those will be on the evening of February 2nd, and following the screenings, director Emma Goude and Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins will host an online Q&A session which each screening will be able to contribute questions to via Twitter and which they will be able to screen.  Screenings are still being added, but those confirmed so far are:

• Totnes.  The Barn Cinema, Dartington.  February 2nd, 8pm.  Tickets available here.
• Koganei, Japan.  Transition Japan and Transition Town Koganei in Japan will be hosting a screening on February 2^nd at 8pm at the Maron Hall in Koganei (30 minutes west of central Tokyo).
• Lewes.  Lewes Town Hall (BN7 2DQ).  February 2nd, 8pm.  More information available here.

Further preview screenings will be announced via Twitter (@intransitionmov) and on the film’s forthcoming website.  We have invited each project to organise a screening which tells a story, stories which we hope some of them will subsequently tell as part of Transition Network’s Social Reporters project.

The premiere!

The premiere of ‘In Transition 2.0′ will be at a high profile event in late March which is still under wraps but which will announced as soon as we can.

The DVD

Emilio Mula's 'leaky bucket' animation, one of several animated sequences in 'In Transition 2.0'.

Unlike ‘In Transition 1.0′, the DVD of the film will be released around the time of the premiere.  This time it will be a single disc DVD, beautifully packaged, and Transition initiatives will be able to buy discounted copies in bulk to sell at their screenings and other events.  The DVD will also be available to buy singly on the film’s website.  It will feature the following subtitles, all of which have been done by volunteers in their respective countries: Albanian, Basque, Croatian, Dutch/Nederlands, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.

Screenings

Following the premiere, the film will be available for screening by organisations, community groups, Transition initiatives, cinemas and businesses. There will be a sliding scale for screening licences which we hope will make screenings possible for everyone.  More information on this will follow.

We hope Transition groups will use the film as the centrepiece of inspiring events, and that they will also be able to generate some income through sales of the DVD, which will also be a great resource for giving to local politicians, schools and so on.  This film is a rich celebration of the work of Transition initiatives around the world, make your screening a celebration of what your Transition group has achieved so far!  The new website (coming soon) will also have space for you to tell the stories of your screenings.  After the premiere, it’s over to you, make it yours, spread it far, deep and wide!

To keep up to date with screenings, news, stories and information, follow the film on Twitter @intransitionmov and very soon a dedicated website, www.intransitionmovie.com will be launched, for now there is a holding page.  The film is around 68 minutes long. 

• Transition Norwich’s Farmshare CSA project, interviewing one of its founders standing in the very field where the CSA is based and hearing the joys and the realities of running such a scheme
• Bath and West Community Energy‘s recent share launch which raised £721, 350!  Find out their plans, the story so far and their very ambitious plans for energy generation in their area
• Transition Llambed (Lampeter) who have just taken on a 20 year lease from their local council for their local hall, and have great plans to turn it into a Transition resource centre and farmers’ market.

At just over 15 minutes in length it’s rich with stories, inspiration and the voices of people out there doing Transition on the ground.  You can play it here, or download it to listen to on the train, while you’re cooking, or out running.  We do advise against listening to it whilst swimming though, on health and safety grounds.  Do let us know what you think….

A year and a half ago, inspired and guided by Transition US and Northeast Regional Trainer, Tina Clarke, twelve adventurous and committed Northfielders embarked on a project designed to re-localize Northfield.  They were armed with the following mission:

“Transition Northfield is a creative community-based response to economic instability, resource depletion (peak oil), and climate change. Its aim is to engage residents from all aspects of our community to work together in a positive practical process that increases local resilience and economic vitality. It is flexible and fun, encourages local creativity, and results in a stronger, more cohesive community.”

Referred to in The Transition Handbook as the “Initiating Group,” they focused their efforts on awareness raising, communications and community building in a manner that was welcoming, inclusive, fun and informative.

The group realized that they had within their circle a wealth of relevant skills and abilities, from retired minister Alex Stewart, who shared his knowledge of Northfield history to house painter Cliff Phillips, who produced sandwich board signs to announce upcoming events.  Business owner Joan Stoia, shared her substantial business world savvy, communications talents and produced a speaker’s series.  Sam Richardson, a former math teacher whose technology skills enabled the group to launch a community-wide, electronic communications tool called NorthfieldNeighborhoodNews, an online community that encourages interaction between neighbors and the sharing of news, current events, reports, photos and documents.  Massage therapist Melanie Phillips’ shared cookies, optimism and energy, while social worker and mother of three school age children Emily Koester spear-headed projects, deftly facilitated meetings and churned out articles and press releases.

The Marketplace of Ideas.

Local foods maven John Cevasco provided consistency, commitment and healthy snacks, while research consultant Shirley Keech showed steadfastness, willingness to work the details and encouragement. Local jewelry maker Shay Wood kept information flowing to the non-wired community, calling and connecting with interested people and organizations by phone to make sure they weren’t left out-of-the-loop. Full time professor Walter Jaworski shared what he learned in Transition training with the group and organized a film series at the Library.  Veteran volunteer Don Campbell made us believe in the possibility of accomplishing resiliency one person at a time.

Judy Phillips, who recruited the original group, functioned as its heart–pumping oxygen when and where it was needed–as well as its hands – keeping the Northfield group connected with other email universes, cranking out beautiful flyers and posters, devising creative ways to manifest the Transition Town principles and organizing an amazing multi-generational Film Project that encouraged young and old to dream about a transformed and positive future.  The goal of all this learning, communicating and information sharing was the launching, scheduled over three days, of projects that will bring those dreams to fruition.

While the first program, the Transition Towns Film Festival, Looking Back to the Future – Envisioning Our Communities in 2030 had to be postponed due to the storm and electrical outages, the remaining two programs went on and were remarkable.

Ben Hewitt speaking to the group.

The second event, author Ben Hewitt’s talk (“The Town that Food Saved”) set the stage for two days of activities for “Celebrate Northfield: Bringing the Community Together to Create a More Sustainable Future for Northfield.” The principles that supported Hardwick, Vermont’s revitalization clearly apply to all facets and systems needed for our own resiliency. Ben’s reference to the 360-degree spectrum that acknowledges what one sector or individual or group does affects all of us. He encouraged us to come together (as family/friends/ neighbors/residents of Northfield) to rebuild trust, collaboration and interdependence as the real pre-condition for community vitality, economic prosperity and overall well-being.  Many in the SRO crowd of 47 attendees left that evening seeing clearly that we are all connected and we can do this.

The scribes.

The final day of Celebrate Northfield saw the coming together of Northfielders interested in this theme:

“How can we as a community prepare for the uncertainties of the future?”  The day was an extraordinary experience.  Based on the First Principle of such Transition events, “Whoever comes are the right people”, the assembled community of nearly 40 people created 14 working groups to help meet those uncertainties. The responses may surprise you, and we are not finished yet, for this was just the beginning.  The Working Groups (WG) will continue to work and to meet during the weeks and months to come.  And there will be more groups forming as ideas come forward.

So you have a glimpse into this special unfolding, here are the current working groups:

WG #1: Tool Library, to establish a tool lending library in Northfield

WG #2: Third Place, to develop events and a regular place for folks to meet/gather in Northfield

WG #3: Waste Reduction, to find sources of plastics recycling and other waste reduction

WG #4: Regionalize town functions to maximize economy of scale – multi-town consciousness, combining infrastructures for fire, police, senior center, and DPW

WG #5: PVRS Resilient Land Management Plan

WG #6: Barter Bank, “The Source” — create a cooperative or non-profit that provides a sustainable location to house: community kitchen, food pantry, prepared foods, outlet for farmers, and classes

WG #7: Food, Nutrition, Cooking, Food Bank, to establish new site for “Free Food,” one-stop shopping, for community needs, to obtain food close to home, for all seasons

WG #8: How to Cut Firewood without Hurting Your Woodlot, workshops/training offered

WG #9: Regional Trails Network, to develop a regional network of connecting trails to facilitate multi-day hiking trips without carrying a backpack

WG #10: Low Voltage Radio, to create a low wattage radio station especially for emergency situations

WG #11: Community Garden

WG #12: Contingency Planning without Fear

WG #13: Devotion to Thrive: Spiritual, Emotional Wellness: Self & Community

WG #14: Town Water, East Northfield Water Company to be publicly owned

The Community garden working group

This wonderful day manifested out of the residents’ wishes to have a more resilient Northfield in the months and years ahead and with the support of many community businesses and organizations.

And now that TransitionNorthfield is launched into the hands of the residents, the process of transition continues.  On November 13, there was a meeting with the new working group facilitators and Initiators to pass the torch to a fresh group of leaders.  That evening we dined (which is the correct word for the marvelous foods presented for the potluck), created an agenda, went around the room getting to know the 20 some folks there, each saying why they were there and what working group they were with.  Then began the discussion of what’s next for TransitionNorthfield with the Initiators’ role completed, specifically, who would hold TransitionNorthfield as the group expands into various activities and still maintain a center.  This is a worthy unfolding as the new TransitionNorthfield discovers how it will evolve.

People chatting at the Gathering...

Watch for information coming from the working groups and TransitionNorthfieldMA.  In addition to the working groups are the events from this last year that we hope will become traditions.  These include: the postponed Transition Towns Film Festival / Project, the Community Picnic (which was a huge success), the movie series and maintaining a presence at all kinds of community events.  The great unfolding continues!

In the UK, the main Transition-related story to make the national news over the past month was the suggestion by Ian Jones, CEO of Volunteer Cornwall, that Cornwall should set up its own currency, the ‘Cornwall Pound’.  The story made the national news and many references were made to the local currencies already in existence via Transition Towns Totnes (Devon), Lewes (Sussex) and Brixton (London).  Jones told the Daily Telegraph “It’s no good if we endlessly talk about our problems, we need to start doing something positive now if we are to avoid being at the mercy of the global storm which is currently raging.”

The discussion even got onto the BBC’s Politics Show (who have previously run stories on Transition currencies), with David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, arguing that “There’s no reason why Cornwall couldn’t have its own banknotes like Scotland, but it’s not viable or sensible for it to have its own central bank.  It can’t have its own monetary policy like we assume it’s not going to have its own army.”  Rather misses the point somewhat.

While we’re talking about local currencies, here’s something I missed at the time, Prince Charles going shopping with Brixton Pounds (see right)!   According to the article, “The Duchess of Cornwall has used some of the currency accepted by businesses in south London – known as Brixton Pounds – on a visit to a local market with the Prince of Wales.  Camilla bought a box of mangoes with a Brixton £10 note, introduced last year to try to keep the money of local people within the community”.  In case you missed it, you can hear a lot more about the current developments of the Brixton Pound in last month’s Transition Podcast (this month’s one will follow in 2 weeks time).

Here is one film about the Brixton Pound which gets out and asks people what they think of it (although it was made before the new notes and the ‘Pay-by-Text’ scheme were launched):

…and then here is a film about going shopping using the new Pay-by-Text scheme:

Heading north into Derbyshire, Transition Wirksworth are one of several local community groups in the town who hope to have more say in the future of their community. The town’s residents with the support of Derbyshire Dales District Council are hoping to secure funding via the UK government’s new Localism Act which was passed this month. Read the full story from the Matlock Mercury.   In Devon, the Newton Abbot Guide to Local Food and Drink has been launched and is an amazing collaboration of efforts by the Newton Abbot Local Food Group, an informal partnership between Transition Newton Abbot, Newton Abbot Community Interest Company, Newton Abbot Town Council, Teignbridge District Council and Devon County Council.

Transition Town Worthing have been running a course in working with willow:

… and work continues on their Energy Descent Action Plan.

The November newsletter of Transition Town Totnes is bursting with all things Transition related in and around Totnes (see right). Click here to see photos from this year’s annual Winterfest, or here to see a film of last year’s.  Transition Stroud liked the idea of a Winterfest so much that they are holding one too, this weekend!

In Dorset, Transition Town Bridport celebrated their last year and look ahead to the coming year at their second Annual General Meeting (see left) and launch a Spend Less Eat Better Campaign.

In Glamorgan, south Wales, Transition Cowbridge and Transition Llantwit joined forces with a local resident who set up The Vale says No campaign and were successful in preventing a test of the controversial shale gas fracking taking place in the beautiful Vale of Glamorgan. Read the full article in Permaculture Magazine.  And there’s more here in Treehugger.

In Gloucestershire, Transition Town Cheltenham held a Transition festival to celebrate their first year of community, environmental and creative activities in town (see poster below):

TTDorchester's Energy saving winner Lorraine Wong

Transition Town Dorchester ran an energy monitoring scheme which  16 local residents took part in over a 6 month period and which led to positive behaviour change (see left).  Jon Orrell of Transition Towns Weymouth and Portland decided to visit Occupy LSX (London Stock Exchange) at St Pauls’ Cathedral and wrote up this report on the website.

Jonathan Goldberg's great photo of Transition beekeepers.

In London, Jonathan Goldberg of Transition Kensal to Kilburn (K2K) is one of 6 photographers featured in a new online photography magazine called Backyard where people shoot pictures close to home and heart (you can see one of his pics to the right, of Transition K2K beekeepers).  Transition K2K were also busy at the recent Queen’s Park Day, where they pressed apple juice and gave it away to passers by:

Also from London, here is a great article about Edible Landscapes London, an initiative of Transition Finsbury Park, and a short film about what they are up to:

One member of Transition Town Bolton, who is also a cycling instructor, is offering bike lessons to adults in an attempt to encourage them to ditch the car in favour of a 2 wheeler.  Transition Town Shrewsbury’s Hydro Group is one of four Transition groups who are going for funding via Energyshare. To read about the other Transition entries or to vote before the December 3rd deadline, see Rob’s related post on Transition Culture.

In Suffolk, one passionate individual from the village of Little Cornard got the ball rolling and helped get Transition Sudbury and District off the ground. Read this lovely report in the local East Anglian Daily News on how it all unfolded.  One of the first things they did was to hold an apple pressing day (see left).

Transition Town Kingston have launched an online directory of eco-friendly businesses in the borough in time for the Christmas shopping season.   In West Sussex, an upcoming event is being held in Lewes and organised by South East Transition Initiatives called Food Resilience Preparation Day. A group has been gathering to discuss the issue via this forum and has identified three main forms of food resilience planning.  You can also see Transition Town Lewes’ December newsletter here.  We’ll be sure to follow up and get a full report on this event for the December roundup.  And I’ll tell you what, that Haslemere Transition Town know how to have a good time:

In West Yorkshire, Hebden Bridge Transition Town and Treesponsibility invited a member of the Beehive Collective to present “The True Cost of Coal”. The Beehive Collective based in Maine (USA) facilitates creative education about issues effecting people and the environment. See their stunning poster (right) and more just like it on their website.

Awww... a heart-shaped potato dug up by Norwich Farmshare...

Transition Norwich recently celebrated the third anniversary of their Unleashing.  A Transition Culture podcast captured some of the voices of those who have been working with the group, and their reflections on where they have got to in that time.  One of their key projects is Farmshare, a Community Supported Agriculture project, which recently held a Potato Day, where the idea was that they would walk behind the tractor and pick up the potatoes it was lifting from the ground.  Unfortunately, the tractor broke down and they had to lift 2 tonnes of spuds by hand!  According to their website, “blisters and creaky joints were more than matched by smiles and banter”.

Transition Town Marlborough, who are well on their way to becoming an official Transition initiative with the full support of the local council (a story told in last month’s Transition Podcast), have rejected claims to restrict cycling in a certain area of town.

Installers Michael Merry, left, and Dan Bowers with Alison Turnbull, project manager for Bath and West Community Electricity, and Shawn Robertson, project manager for Southern Electric, with one of the solar panels for the roof of the Mead Primary School.

Bath and West Community Energy, which emerged out of Transition Bath, have already begun commissioning the first solar PV systems on local schools (see right).  You can see a list of all the installations they’ll be doing before Christmas, and also this piece from the Wiltshire Times about the first systems that went up, at schools in Trowbridge and Corsham.

It is also worth a reminder about the new ‘Communities Living Sustainably’ fund launched by the Big Lottery Fund, which is looking for innovative projects building resilience and responding to climate change.  Could be a very attractive proposition for Transition initiatives.

Glen Ballinger outside his Maldon 50k local.

So, to Australia, where Transition Mount Alexander, Transition Bell and MINTI (Melbourne Inner Northwest Transition Initiative) all get a mention in this article which centres around the sustainable business practices of local Castlemaine outlet Green goes the Grocer.

At a recent event organised by the Municipal Association of Victoria called “Building Community Resilience and Minimising Risk”, which featured, among other speakers, David Holmgren and Sonya Wallace, (you can download their fantastic flyer/poster here), Andrew Lucas gave a presentation called ‘Councils and communities in Transition’:

…and Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins gave a presentation by Skype, complete with slides, which was followed up by a Q&A by Skype:

So, next to Canada.  Transition Comox Valley had a great turnout to their first ever gathering and were inspired by the creativity and vision that local people had to offer. Read more in the BC Local News.  In Ontario,  Transition Town Orillia held their second annual community fair at a local church (see pic below). Stalls, workshops and speakers highlighted items from composting to weight lifting for seniors (!) and affordable housing to knitting.

At the University of Prince Edward Island (the setting for the much loved Anne of Green Gables novels), George McRobie (founder of the ‘Intermediate Technology Group’ with E.F. Schumacher and co-founder of the New Economics Foundation) gave a talk on the Transition Movement in Europe & North America.

Some stories from Europe now.  You can listen to and read the transcript (all in German) of an interview with Rob Hopkins by Ursula Rütten for WDR5.de.  Also from Germany, here, as far as I can tell, are Transitioners from Goettingen, Kassel, Cologne and Berlin Friedrichshain who met on a permaculture course (?  Babelfish translator didn’t yield much useful information) and got together to plant a forest garden:

From the Netherlands, from Transition Town Nijmegen to be precise, here is a film, I think, about a community garden project:

Here is a short film from Monteveglio in Bologna, Italy, where the local council and the parks department revived (with, one suspects, some input from Transition Town Monteveglio, although that’s not specified) and old tradition of planting a new tree for every child born in the town that year, 44 to be exact:

In Belgium, Ath en Transition recently organised a screening of the excellent new film ‘Voices of the Transition‘, and the event made it onto the local TV news!  Here’s the clip:

Recently Rob Hopkins of Transition Network gave a presentation, remotely, to the Andalusia Convention on Climate Change and Urban Environment, which has now been put online, complete with Spanish subtitles:

On a similar note, Naresh Giangrande, also of Transition Network, recently visited Malmo (which, according to Wikipedia, is “in the southernmost province of Scania, is the third most populous city in Sweden”).  He gave the talk you can see below, which also featured either someone drilling into the walls of an adjacent room, or someone with a terrible snore who fell asleep during his talk:

So, next let’s hop to New Zealand, and the town of Devonport.   In this North Shore suburb of Auckland, representatives from Transition community Grey Lynn 2030 and Devonport Transition Town held an open evening to “create the community we want to live in” and covered topics such as fruit trees, green screenings, waste, farmers markets and community gardens. Read the full report in the local Devonport Speculator.

Some Kiwi ingenuity! Yolanda Van Den Bemd (left) and Ellen Schlinder (right) are part of the Pt Chevalier Transition Town crew who look after the Old Homestead Community Garden.

In another suburb west of Auckland, Point Chevalier is home to The Old Homestead Community set up by Transition Town Pt. Chevalier in 2009 and now shortlisted for community garden of the year in the New Zealand Gardener Magazine’s annual awards. Check out the bike powered water system (above)!

From Transition Hickory: Robb Riordan adjusts the faucet where water flows off his roof. Rob and his wife Jacqui can store up to 6000 gallons of rain water in their cisterns.

In the US, Transition Ashland, Massachusetts (nb. there is also a T-Ashland in Oregon) introduced proceedings at a meeting to discuss their vision of a downtown Farmers Market which residents hope to make a reality by spring 2012.   A great article about the emerging Transition Missoula appeared in the Montana Kaimin – The University of Montana’s Independent Campus Newspaper since 1898!   The Riordans helped set up Transition Bermuda and now live in Hickory where they have continued their Sustainable Living Project aka Transition Hickory (see left).

It has also been fascinating over the last month to see the debates and discussions about where Transition and the Occupy movement meet.  In Virginia, an Occupy Staunton rally was organized by Transition Staunton Augusta, the Augusta Coalition for Peace and Justice and Virginia Organizing. Unlike a lot of the other Occupy gatherings across the US this group has operated largely with the support and cooperation of city government. Read the full story here in the Augusta Free Press.

Also in the town at another event, Transition Staunton Augusta co-founder Erik Curren led an information session in conjunction with Occupy Staunton and the American Dream Movement titled “How the 1 Percent Crashed the Economy and What We Can Do About It”.   Erik and his wife Lindsay are founders of Transition Voice where this article titled Transitioners debate how to engage Occupy movement was recently posted.  That’s about it for November, see you next month!

The second ‘Transition Podcast’, which will go into more depth about three of the stories in this round-up, will be posted in a couple of weeks. 

‘Resilient to what?’

The first point of call in any discussion about resilience is ‘resilient to what?’  Fascinatingly, this document states that, when it comes to community resilience, “community resilience work should prepare for all relevant hazards and threats, prioritised as the community considers appropriate”.  So, rather than being determined from above, their suggestion is that it is for communities themselves to determine what they see as the greatest risks.  However, they do also point to the National Risk Register for civil emergencies, which illustrates what it regards as being the key threats communities need to build resilience to in the following graphic:

However, in terms of a recognition of the risks that are most pressing and likely, this chart clearly contrasts with that produced earlier this year by the World Economic Forum, which puts all of the above as way below what it regards as the 4 greatest risks, in terms of likelihood of occurring within the next 10 years and in terms of perceived economic impact: climate change, ‘energy price volatility’, fiscal crises and economic disparity.  None of these even make it into the National Risk Register’s table.  A friend of mine recently attended an event about emergency preparedness in Brussels which explored possible scenarios that could emerge from a collapse of the European economy.  The scenarios presented left him quite traumatised, yet in comparison, the Framework’s scenarios seem pretty tame, and somewhat more ephemeral in comparison!

Yet the Strategic Framework document, if read with the thought in mind that it is referring to resilience to peak oil, climate change, and economic contraction, actually reads in places like something Transition Network might have produced (as we will see).  That certainly took me by surprise.

Defining resilience

Throughout the document, resilience is defined as:

“The capacity of an individual, community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure, and identity”

…and community resilience as:

“Communities and individuals harnessing local resources and expertise to help themselves in an emergency, in a way that complements the response of the emergency services.”

It states that its role is to “invite individuals and communities to prepare themselves in the event of an emergency”, but also makes it very clear that, amazingly, “there is no dedicated funding for the programme”.  It restates the commitment, central to the Big Society concept, “to reduce the barriers which prevent people from being able to help themselves and to become less resilient to shocks”.  Like the Big Society, it assumes that communities can self-organise around community resilience with no resource for any of their work.  They do acknowledge Transition as one of the few community-led initiatives actually looking at resilience, and which is actually manage to inspire people to action around the theme of resilience:

“Resilience is also a key part of other kinds of community activity, for example the Transition Towns movement and the Greening Campaign where resilience is a longer term ambition for communities looking to adapt to climate change”

However, this does rather miss the point, suggesting that they are addressing “longer term” issues like climate change.  It is true that many of the impacts of climate change, and peak oil, and economic contraction, are longer term, but many are not, and indeed the window of time within which to profoundly modify our ways of doing things certainly is not.  And as the World Economic Forum argues, they look likely to be the most significant over the next 10 years.  That looks pretty short term to me.

The aims it sets out rather fascinatingly read like the aims of Transition Network!

• increase individual, family and community resilience against all threats and hazards;
• support and enable existing community resilience, and expand and grow these successful models of community resilience in other areas;
• remove the barriers which inhibit or prevent participation in community resilience at a local level;
• support effective dialogue between the community and the practitioners supporting them;
• raise awareness and understanding of risk and the local emergency response capability in order to motivate and sustain self resilience;
• provide tools to allow communities and individuals to articulate the benefits of emergency preparedness to the wider community;
• and provide a shared framework to support cross-sector activity at all levels in a way that ensures sufficient flexibility to make community

With such a clear recognition in a government publication that these ought to be key aims in terms of resilience, one would imagine that the work the Transition movement has been doing over the past 5 years, and the practical initiatives it has led to the ground, would have deserved more than one sentence in this publication.

Shifting the thinking slightly: a Transition take on resilience

The perspective on resilience that the Transition approach brings to this discussion would be useful to explore in more detail here. Rather than making do with the definition set out in this report, (“the capacity of an individual, community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure, and identity”), Transition adds another layer onto that, of arguing that community resilience, if done properly, could be about much more than just being able to ‘sustain an acceptable level of function, structure and identity’.  Rather, it argues, it offers the potential for stimulating the kind of economic revival at the local level that is so keenly sought at the moment.  A more resilient economy could be a more viable, entrepreneurial, biodiverse, flourishing economy.  As I argue in ‘The Transition Companion’:

“making a community more resilient, if viewed as the opportunity for an economic and social renaissance, for a new culture of enterprise and reskilling, should lead to a healthier and happier community while reducing its vulnerability to risk and uncertainty …. resilience is reframed as a historic opportunity for a far-reaching rethink”.

The new market in Portobello.

For example, setting up a food hub to create viable links between local producers and consumers, adding infrastructure for local food processing (such as Transition Norwich’s new community mill, or Portobello Transition Town’s new organic market, see right), creating urban food production and identifying new sites for that, mapping local foodsheds and supporting small farmers, setting up Community Supported Agriculture systems, all build food resilience and a community’s ability to respond in an emergency (much more than food stockpiles), but also have very beneficial impacts on the local economy too.  These kinds of things would have helped greatly in building resilience to, for example, the lorry drivers’ dispute of 2000 when food supplies in shops became dangerously low.

Likewise, setting up community energy systems that are in community ownership can also put in place infrastructure that would also be beneficial in terms of an acute emergency, while also boosting local economies.  It is for this reason that Transition Network and others are arguing for a Community Tariff to emerge from the Feed-in-Tariff review.  With Greg Barker, Energy and Climate Change Minister, recently tweeting that “Under Labours #FiTs, there is no way 2 differentiate btwn community projects + a hedgefund. We will change + create a new community tariff”, things look hopeful.  This could have a huge impact.

The document clearly states the principle that “the Government role is to support, empower and facilitate; ownership should always be retained by communities who have chosen to get involved in this work”.  This feels like an acknowledgement of Transition’s role of not waiting for permission but getting started building community resilience from the bottom up.  That’s not to say that a bit of more formal support wouldn’t be a good thing from time to time to actually accelerate the creativity that the Transition process can unleash!

Likewise, the building of social capital, creating a stronger sense of community and sense of optimism about that community’s ability to respond, as was observed through Transition Town Totnes’ ‘Transition Streets’ programme, is a key aspect of emergency preparedness.  Local currencies, such as the Brixton Pound (see left) and the forthcoming Bristol Pound, can be a powerful catalyst for rebuilding the connections between local businesses that a resilient community will need, and can focus thought on how local traders can best support and trade between each other.  Whether an emergency happens in 6 months or in 6 years, the additional resilience they will have created will still have a valuable impact.

Given the current government focus on localism, enterprise, decentralisation and resilience, I would argue that reframing community resilience as being about much more than how it is presented in this document would have huge benefits across the board.  It would focus the mind on what kind of new infrastructure would be needed, what new business opportunities emerge, and add an additional layer to the current obsession with recreating growth at all costs.  Does new housing which is not both built to very high standards of energy efficiency and built using local materials represent a huge missed opportunity, and actually reduce community resilience?  Is the continued undermining of local food economies through the enforced imposition of supermarkets ultimately self-defeating from a resilience perspective (as New Economics Foundation’s ‘Plugging the Leaks’ work suggests)?  Let’s have a bit of ‘joined-up thinking’ here please.

Certainly the Transition take on resilience is at odds with the one set out in this Framework, and to that set out in most academic literature on resilience, but as a paper by Alex Haxeltine and Gill Seyfang of UEA argued:

“Transition has been framed in terms of building (or rebuilding) resilience in local communities.  So far, the movement seems to have successfully used resilience as a motivating framing concept.  The lack of specificity used in the framing of resilience has probably contributed to resilience being perceived as an appealing goal by the wide range of citizens who have become involved with the movement”

In other words, it’s not resilience explained in the conventionally accepted way, but something about this expanded definition seems to be working, so maybe we’ll let them get on with it…

Features of community resilience

The Framework also identifies what it sees, from looking at a number of communities, as the key features of community resilience.  Viewed with the slight shift in thinking that allows us to imagine it is referring to communities responding to resilience in the way set out above, it makes fascinating reading:

• “People in resilient communities use their existing skills, knowledge and resources to prepare for, and deal with, the consequences of emergencies or major incidents.
• They adapt their everyday skills and use them in extraordinary circumstances.
• People in resilient communities are aware of the risks that may affect them. They understand the links between risks assessed at a national level and those that exist in their local area, and how this might make them vulnerable. This helps them to take action to prepare for the consequences of emergencies.
• The resilient community has a champion, someone who communicates the benefits of community resilience to the wider community. Community resilience champions use their skills and enthusiasm to motivate and encourage others to get involved and stay involved and are recognised as trusted figures by the community.
• Resilient communities work in partnership with the emergency services, their local authority and other relevant organisations before,  during and after an emergency. These relationships ensure that community resilience activities complement the work of the emergency services and can be undertaken safely.
• Resilient communities consist of resilient individuals who have taken steps to make their homes and families more resilient. Resilient individuals are aware of their skills, experience and resources and how to deploy these to best effect during an emergency.
• Members of resilient communities are actively involved in influencing and making decisions affecting them. They take an interest in their  environment and act in the interest of the community to protect assets and facilities.

Implications and reflections

So, having read the Framework, here are some of the standout thoughts for me:

• Community resilience, they seem to be arguing, is really important, it needs to be led by communities, but there’s no money to help them with that
• The best people to organise and enable community resilience are those communities themselves
• No thought appears to be being given to how the need for enhanced community resilience, the engagement of people in this work, sits alongside the localism agenda and the Plan for Growth, and the inherent conflicts that emerge between the two
• You need to figure out yourselves what it is that you want to build resilience to

But the question for government is whether the urgent dash for growth at all costs (which they are taking to calling ‘positive growth’), could actively undermine the ability of communities to respond in the way argued for in the Framework.  I was recently sent a very attractive hardback book (see right) called ‘Working together. Delivering growth though localism‘ produced by the Department for Communities and Local Government. It contains a section where the term ‘sustainable development’ is redefined thus:

“‘Sustainable’ means ensuring better lives for ourselves, but does not mean worse lives for future generations, and

‘Development’ means growth.  Accommodating new ways by which we earn our living in a competitive world, housing a rising population, and responding to changes new technologies offer”.

In other words, sustainable development is now any development which sustains growth.  So here we have two agendas, one that is about stimulating economic growth at all costs, downplaying climate change and peak oil and removing all obstacles to large businesses doing what they like, and another which is about enabling communities to self-organise and actively respond to those things that they think reduce their resilience.  Both are central to the UK government’s agenda, yet they run in complete parallel to each other, seen as entirely distinct and separate.  However, if they were seen as being part of the same thing, as the Transition movement has argued, and has modelled in practice for 5 years, the benefits could be enormous.  It would take only a fairly subtle shift in thinking, but it may turn out to be the thing that actually stimulates the economic activity, skills, training and investment they are presently so desperately scrabbling for.

Often flooding, and the other risks in the National Risk Register, are challenges that people don’t feel drawn do much about because they feel they are beyond their being able to usefully have an impact and they tend to be seen as issues emergency services deal with.  What the Transition movement has done over the past 5 years is to bring the subject of resilience to life for people, to make it relevant, exciting even.  People can sense new possibilities in the concept of resilience that weren’t there 5 years ago.  It would be great if the next time this Framework is published, rather than just citing Transition initiatives as some kind of brief case study, it was able to argue that, as well as the sandbags and other elements of community emergency preparedness, an accelerated programme of economic localisation must also be a key component of any realistic programme of community resilience.  Perhaps as well as the bodybags and the sandbags we also need foodhubs and SPIN farming?

The spirit of the Framework is that the onus is on communities to organise around resilience.  If nothing else, the fact that Transition is now mentioned specifically creates a very useful basis for discussions with your local emergency response team, local NHS, or your local police.  There is now a more common language, it’s over to us to demonstrate that the work of Transition initiatives is not peripheral, but has the potential to be central to any effective programme of community resilience.  This Framework is a very useful tool for initiating those discussions that matter.  As Robert Jensen argues in a piece in the latest Yes! magazine, “no political project based on denying reality can be viable for the long term”.

Some of these stories feature in ‘The Transition Companion’, and you can subscribe to Transition Network’s monthly newsletter here.

A bumper harvest of apples has resulted in an abundance of top Transition stories in the UK!   Local fruit harvesters, now part of Transition Kensal to Kilburn (K2K) were joined by the newly- formed Transition Willesden in setting up stall with traditional apple press in tow on the Kilburn High Road to make juice from locally-picked fruit.  As temperatures soared on an unusually hot autumn day, over 200 shoppers and children helped press the fruit, taste the juice and join in the fun (see above).  Pictures of the stall can be seen here; and local press coverage here, here and here. Thanks to Viv Stein of K2K for this great story!

Many of the north London groups also turned out recently for the launch of ‘The Transition Companion’ that took place at the Food from the Sky project on the roof of a Budgens supermarket in Crouch End.  Here are two short films that give you a flavour of that event, firstly the opening:

and then the main event:

TT-Nailsea also hosted a successful Apple Day to make juice, wine, cider, vinegar and more from the windfalls and TT-Taunton also in Somerset invited people to bring their apples to be pressed outside the local brewhouse.

TT-Harborough held a similar event in Northants and TT-Sturminster Newton in Dorset held an event at Gold Hill Organic Farm where apple games, juicing demos and farm walks and a cake competition were the order of the day.  Transition Hebden Bridge have developed a puppet show to communicate Transition ideas, you can read more about that here.

Still on the theme of food, read all about the new venture of T-Haverfordwest  – Freshly Pembrokeshire Supper Club which celebrates food from the farmers market and other local suppliers. Here is a rather lovely poster they produced for the event:

Inspired by the Brixton, Lewes and Totnes £’s, could Sutton in Surrey be the next town to launch its very own local currency the Sutton Pound (see left)?  Tooting are also moving forward with the idea of a Tooting Pound, you can keep up with developments on their website.  At TTT’s recent ‘Foodival’, the Tooting Pound was trialled, with some specially-printed versions being used for trading during the day.  The idea was officially launched with members of TTT and with local MP Sadiq Khan (see below).

In Marlborough, Wiltshire, the town council has jumped on board with T-Marlborough agreeing to work on an action plan which will ensure the town moves closer to its goal of becoming an official TT.   In Christchurch, Dorset, the local council bought a patch of wasteland for £1 and with the help of the local Transition group plan to make it in to a community garden.

A positive result comes out of Merton council cuts as TT-Wimbledon and Sustainable Merton join forces to launch the Adopt a Green Space scheme.   The Eco Houses Under Construction project started when two members of West Bridgford in Transition (Nottinghamshire) were about to build/refurbish to create their own low-energy homes. They decided to invite other interested home owners to follow the projects with a series of site visits and information-sharing events. With thanks to Tina Holt for this story.

The Kingston Philosophy Festival which was organised by the local Transition and Amnesty International groups with a grant from the council centred around the theme of Happiness.  Finally, from Northern Ireland, here is a great little film about Transition Donabate Portrane and the work they are doing…

In New Zealand, the second annual Eco Festival was put on by the local Invercargill TT in Southlands, and attracted well over 500 visitors. Read the full story in The Southland Times.  From Brazil, here, firstly, is an interview with Mônica Picavêa of Transition Towns Brasil in Portugese…

… and here is another, this time in English.  Thanks to Simon Robertson for doing these… this one gives a good sense of some of the Transition work underway in Brazil:

In Canada, you can see  TGuelph’s (ON) comments on the Occupy movement which has spread to hundreds of cities around the world including Guelph and Toronto (ON).   TT Powell River (BC) screened In Transition 1.0 and hosted a post film discussion as part of the Green Film Series put together by community groups The Gibsons Green Team and Sustainable Coast Magazine in collaboration with the Sunshine Coast Film Society.

Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC held their very first meeting and also on the Island, Sooke TT and Slow Food Canada along with several other community groups organised a day long 33km bike ride (see right).

A small group of people from all over SW Minnesota turned for the first TT Montevideo meeting in the public library (see left). For the benefit of the newly formed Transition Town groups in Brattleboro and Dummerston in Vermont, “Save the Secret of the Seasons” was a participatory musical experience or “co-opera” that invited audience members to address their relationship to global warming and climate change.

TWayland (MA) took people to visit a local Orchard Restoration Project that was planted with around 30 trees back in 1993 and is now bearing fruit for the benefit of the community.   Motown goes Growtown! (I can’t take credit for that – it was Director Baz Luhrmann!)

Keene Transition and Keene Community Garden Connections in New Hampshire put on a film night and discussion following the screening of the film Urban Roots by Tree Media. Check out the Urban Roots website, watch the fantastic trailer below and see how the city of Detroit is taking back some power on the ground and changing its landscape in a most positive way. Truly inspiring.

You might also enjoy this Al Jazeera article, Functional Deficits for Dysfunctional America, which makes reference to the Transition movement.  Also, always worth checking out is the Transition US October newsletter.

Moving to Ireland now, the Kinsale 50 Mile Meal Award has been presented since 2007 at the annual Kinsale gourmet festival. It is awarded to meals made with ingredients produced exclusively within a 50 mile radius of the town. Read the full Monsters & Critics story here.   Also in Kinsale, check out this lovely short video made by TTKinsale to celebrate their Autumn Food Fest:

Cultivate is a practical sustainability organisation in Ireland which works closely with Transition Ireland and Northern Ireland and they have produced this wonderful animation on community resilience called Surfing the Waves of Change. It’s just over 9 minutes long but well worth a look..

From Belgium, here is Eric Luyckx  of Grez en Transition, filmed at last year’s Belgian permaculture convergence, talking about Transition:

In Germany now, and as Gerd Wessling tells, this year’s Transition “Un-Conference” for the German-speaking Transition community took place in in Bielefeld & Oerlinghausen, Germany and was a great success. Nicole Foss (aka Stoneleigh) was the keynote speaker and was an engaging and knowledgeable as she talked about the current energy & financial crisis hitting us all on a global scale.  Here is a short film from the event:

We than had 2 great days of glorious sunny autumn weather in the Teutoburger Forst, busily networking, doing “Stone-Age Re-Skilling” , sharing our best Transition & other practices, “localizing” Transition further into the European & German-speaking context, live music, celebration, dancing, art, fun & laughter from old & new Transitioners alike.  Our deep gratitude to all the wonderful team members, participants and the many helping hands which helped make this event so special.  Event images & reports (in German) can be found here.

Finally, on a lighter note (as they say), here is a great cartoon sent in by Finn at Transition Farnham, which is a great Transition cartoon for Halloween…

Just a reminder that the projects page on the Transition Network website is a constant source of inspiration..  and if you particularly want a story to be covered in the next round up, please e-mail the info with any links, pictures etc. to Amber at pa.robhopkins@gmail.com.  This will be the first roundup to be followed up, two weeks later, by a podcast, going into more depth on some of these stories.  Watch this space!

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

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

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

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

No. 2. The Ingredients Directory

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

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

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

No. 3.  The Transition Ingredients Card Game

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

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

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

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

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

As I write this in May 2011, some amazing things are happening. A report¹ from Australia shows that car ownership there has peaked, having been in steady decline since 2004. John Lewis report that, over the last year, trade at their UK out-of-town stores has fallen by 12 per cent while it has remained steady in their stores in town centres, the drop being partly blamed on the rising costs of fuel. A survey² by B&Q showed that 37 per cent of adults plan to grow some of their own food this summer. In the Sussex town of Lewes, the community energy company OVESCO (Ouse Valley Energy Services Company) has raised over £300,000 to put 540 photovoltaic panels on the roof of the local brewery, Harveys. The brewery brewed a commemorative beer called ‘Sunshine Ale’ to commemorate the event. While there is gloom and doom-a-plenty for those who choose to go in search of it, communities across the UK are just rolling up their sleeves and getting on with building the kind of future they want to see. Clearly they are seeing a gleam of opportunity here.

One of the most infectious and rapidly spreading approaches is the Transition movement. It began in Totnes in Devon in 2005 and has now spread to many hundreds of initiatives in 30 countries around the world. The premise is a simple one. We are now moving into an increasingly uncertain future, whether because of the debt mountain we sit on, the impending peak in world oil production or the impacts of climate change that we are already seeing around us. The Transition movement argues that our communities have become alarmingly unresilient; that is, they have lost the ability to respond to shock from the outside at exactly the time when we need them to be more resilient.

In effect, the Transition movement, in communities as diverse as Totnes, Tooting, South Liverpool and Tynedale, has been running an experiment for the past four years. The experiment gives people a simple purpose and a set of tools, and invites them to see if they work in that community. It stresses that no one knows how to do this and that the only way we will be able to figure it out is by having a go. It invites creativity, inventiveness and entrepreneurship. Every initiative will look very different, a place-specific assembling of ingredients to create something that is recognisably Transition but which is also distinct to the place. As Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall put it recently, Transition is ‘rather like giving a great cake recipe to a dozen different cooks and watching how their particular ingredients, techniques and creative ideas produce subtly different results’.

Keeping it local

Here are a few stories from what we see starting to emerge in UK Transition initiatives:

Topsham Ales: Transition Topsham (in Devon) decided that the one thing that united their community wasn’t peak oil or climate change, but good beer, and so set out to create a community-owned brewery. They worked out they needed £35,000 to get started, and within five weeks had raised the sum from 56 members who bought shares for a minimum of £500 each. They are now brewing, using local hops, the waste yeast going to a baker and the waste hops to local pigs.

The Malvern Gasketeers: Malvern is home to 109 listed Victorian gas lamps, which were the inspiration for C.S. Lewis when he wrote about the lamp Lucy first discovers in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Unfortunately, keeping each lamp in working condition was costing the local council £580 per year (£130 for gas, £450 for maintenance). Enter the Transition Malvern Hills ‘Gasketeers’, local energy enthusiasts who have now reduced that to just £70 per year (£20 for gas and £50 for maintenance). They were also able to make the lights ten times brighter than they were before but with no light pollution at all. They are now planning to run the lamps on locally produced methane, which would create local jobs and offer many other spin-off benefits.

Slaithwaite Green Valley Grocery: When their local grocer’s shop announced its closure, a group of people, mostly from Marsden and Slaithwaite Transition Towns (MASTT) suggested a community take-over, an idea strongly supported at a community meeting. Three weeks later they held another meeting and said it would only happen if they were able to raise £15,000 in shares from the community. And three weeks later, they had. The shop is now open and thriving, and has catalysed a growing co-op called ‘Edibles’ set up to supply the shop with local food.

Collective design

What we are starting to see emerging in Transition is an approach founded on the idea of localisation, which is distinctly different from the idea of ‘localism’ being promoted by the present government. Localism is about the transfer of political power to the local level, whereas localisation is about the shifting of economic focus to meet local needs locally where possible, plugging the leaks in the ‘leaky buckets’ that twenty-first-century local economies have become. As such, Transition promotes the idea of localisation as economic development, arguing that if we are serious about our local economic regeneration, we need to seek to create a culture of entrepreneurship and creativity, one in which communities become their own energy companies, their own farms and market gardens, their own developers.

Key is the idea of this not being a process that will come about by accident; it is, at heart, a collective design project. A fascinating example of this comes from Norwich where the local Transition initiative undertook a detailed study called ‘Can Norwich Feed Itself?’, which mapped the local area and its potential productive land in order to answer that question. Their conclusion was that they could, assuming a simpler more seasonal diet. The report identified a number of projects that would be essential for making this happen. These included a new grain mill in the city, two community-supported agriculture projects and an initiative to get local farmers growing oats and beans for local markets. Tully Wakeman, who co-ordinated the initiative, told me:

‘It is important to have a sense of the whole food picture for a settlement such as Norwich. A trap a lot of non-government organisations (NGOs) fall into is overthinking about vegetables. The tendency for people to equate renewable energy just with electricity rather than the range of different ways we use energy is even truer when we look at food. Only one-tenth of what we consume, in calorific terms, comes from fruit and vegetables, yet that is often the main focus for community NGOs looking at food security. Yet where is the other 90 per cent going to come from? Growing vegetables in gardens, allotments, community gardens and so on offers a degree of food security and can happen relatively rapidly. However, the other 90 per cent requires the rebuilding of the infrastructure required for growing, processing, cleaning, storing, milling and distributing grains and cereals, and that takes longer and requires more planning.’

Around the world, communities are actively exploring this notion of localisation as economic development. Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, recently stated: ‘[this] is not like an ordinary recession where you lose output and get it back quickly. You may not get it back for many years, if ever, and that is a big long-run loss of living standards for all people in this country.’ Might it be that engaging with this as an opportunity rather than as a disaster, seeing the strengthening of local economies as a historic opportunity to rethink our economy from the ground up, might be a better approach? The experience of Transition initiatives in the five years since the idea was first mooted would seem to suggest so.

References

¹ Millard-Ball, Adam, and Schipper, Lee, ‘Are We Reaching Peak Travel? Trends in Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries’, Transport Reviews: A Transnational Transdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 31, Issue 3, first published 2011, pages 357–378

² Research carried out by OnePoll for B&Q; date of press release: 11 April 2011

You can read more about these stories, and many more, in the author’s new book, ‘The Transition Companion’, which you can pre-order here.

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5