Michael Mann (2012)  The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: dispatches from the front lines.  Columbia University Press. 

Michael Mann is the principal creator of the (in)famous ‘Hockey Stick’ graph which showed that the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100 years is in excess of historic warming, and clearly linked to increased CO2 emissions.  The graph achieved great prominence, as a result of which he became a target of the fossil fuel industry, in particular during the co-ordinated assault on climate science known as ‘Climate Gate’, where emails, including his, were hacked from the University of East Anglia.  In this passionate and compelling page-turner, Mann comes out fighting, puts his side of the story, restates the science behind it all, and what it feels like to be on the receiving end  of an orchestrated campaign to discredit him and his work.  Vital reading.

John-Paul Flintoff (2012) How to Change the World.  The School of Life. 
A big question, but in this small but beautifully laid-out book Flintoff takes it on with great gusto, drawing from Transition to Camila Batmanghelidjh, from Rosa Parks to his tales of leaving vegetables on his neighbours’ front door steps.  Like any meaningful book on how to make change happen, it has one foot in his own experience of trying the make change happen where he lives, in his life, in his community.  That, for me, gives it a richness, a humour, and a depth that I really valued.

Martin Crawford (2012)  How to Grow Perennial Vegetables: low-maintenance, low-impact vegetable gardening. Green Books. 
Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of Martin Crawford, and his amazing work pioneering agroforestry in the UK context.  His latest book is a plant-by-plant guide to over 100 perennial vegetables and everything you could ever want to know about them.  He also sets out the advantages of a perennial garden over an annual one, and how to design for perennial plants.  An essential addition to any permaculturist’s bookshelf.

Jorgen Randers (2012)  2052: a global forecast for the next forty years.  Chelsea Green.

Randers is one of the team that created the original ‘Limits to Growth’ report in the 1970s.  Here he looks forward over the next 40 years, analysing the trends that will define 2052.  It is alternately deeply illuminating, frustrating, at times wildly depressing, hugely clarifying yet always considered and very hard to argue with.  His conclusions are what he calls “quite gloomy … not catastrophic”.  His ‘Twenty Pieces of Personal Advice’ I will explore in later posts here will divide opinion but certainly can’t be accused of taking a safe and unchallenging route.

Stephen R.J. Sheppard.  (2012)  Visualising Climate Change: a guide to visual communication of climate change and developing local solutions. Routledge.

One of the aspects of Transition revolves around trying to vision the kind of future we want to see.  This book tries, in a similar way, to bring the predictions and the future reality of climate change to life by making it visible.  What does a ton of carbon dioxide actually look like?  How would the place you live look were it to be 2°C warmer than it is today?  How might it look designed around public transport and walking?  Both chilling and inspiring, it uses the latest in computer imagery to show the kind of world that will be created by our inaction today, but also the kind of world we could create if we can muster the collective will.

Looby MacNamara (2012)  People and Permaculture: caring and designing for ourselves, each other and the planet. Permanent Publications. 

While there have been many books on the nuts and bolts of permaculture, the design system, the plants, etc, there hasn’t yet been on that focuses purely on the ‘peoplecare’ aspects of it.  It argues that in order for permaculture to really work and to embed itself, it needs to address relationships, and how we work together as people and as communities.  Containing over 50 practical exercises, it is a rich exploration of how to do permaculture in such a way that it is also attending to the ‘inner’ aspects of the whole thing.

Nicholas Shaxson (2011)  Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world.  Bodley Head. 

Not much to say about this here, as I only recently interviewed the author about this book, but I thought this an extraordinary book.  Something I had vaguely heard of but knew very little about is brought into such clarity and focus, and the book bristles and seethes with the sheer unfairness of the whole thing.  Essential reading.

Michael Shuman.  (2012)  Local Dollars, Local Sense: how to shift your money from Wall Street to Main Street and achieve real prosperity.  Chelsea Green. 

Shuman is one of the great thinkers of the localisation movement, and although this is a US publication and doesn’t necessarily transpose entirely to the UK context, his argument is just as relevant here.  The vast amounts of money sat in pension funds, savings accounts, life insurance and stocks and bonds needs to be moved, her argues, to the creation of resilient local economies, supporting new enterprise and new economic activity, rather than the continuation of the current, morally bankrupt model.  He presents a wide range of possible models that can make this happen.  Nail a copy to the Bank of England’s door.

Ben Pike (2012) The Fruit Tree Handbook.  Green Books.

Here is a beautifully created guide, for the amateur and the expert on the care of all manner of fruit trees.  It covers orchard design, choosing your species, tree care, a great guide to pruning with wonderfully clear illustrations, and how to harvest and store the results of your hard work.  Heavily laden with a rich crop of hard-won experience, it is a delicious companion for anyone who already has, or wants to create, an orchard on any scale.  Figs, peaches, nectarines, cherries… need I say more?

Anthony Horowitz (2011)  The House of Silk.  Orion.

And finally, something completely different.  The first new Sherlock Homes novel approved by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate since his death is an absolute cracker.  I am reading it with my 13-year old at the moment, and it’s an edge-of-the-seat, gripping, unputdownable page-turner, virtually indistinguishable from the original tales.  I don’t get to read many novels, but this one, from page one, had me back in Holmes’ Victorian world of gaslamps, horse-drawn carriages, fog, and dark secrets that only the great detective himself can unravel.  Highly recommended.

[Here's a great story from Portugal.  My thanks to Isabel and Luis for sending it in]. Hello everyone. We are Isabel and Luis, from Cascais, in Portugal. We have lived here (in Cascais) for the last 15 years, with the blue sea and fabulous sand beaches nearby, on one way and amazing mountain sides on the other, sensing the earth and the sea …

… watching beautiful sunrises and sunsets (more sunsets now than sunrises, since our recent embraced work tends to keep us awake till late hours)…

… and live with the constant presence of our history,…

… feel the life in the community and taking part in it,…

 … and watching how climate change is taking its toll with some hot waves in the Summer (2003 was indeed the worst, but some others have already followed) and the sea leaving some of the beaches without much of the sand in the Winter (like in 2010).

Well, as we were saying,… we were thinking how sustainable our lives should be to keep being as good as they have been until then, and so that our two children (with six and three years old) could keep on growing with at least the same chances of having a good and safe future as we did back in the time when we were growing up.

By April of 2010 we knew that our municipality was starting a community garden program and we applied ourselves to it. On July 2011, we were called up to start the program formation on organic farming and we haven’t stopped gardening our vegetables since then.

In fact we have quite a group there, with some good friendships developing and lots of celebrations to bless our crops.

Meanwhile, about that same time, I (Isabel) came in contact with the Portuguese permaculture and transition groups over the Internet… and I found a new world that looked like it was just there waiting to be found!… For years I had been searching for such kind of knowledge and practical information and… there it was!…

On September 17th and 18th took place the Transition Initiative Course in Sintra, but although an attractive theme, it was still just an idea for me.

On November of 2011 I took notice of a meeting of the local (Cascais) Transition Initiative and I knew I had to come. Until then I had never left what I thought was my comfort zone. And then… I found Transition. After that meeting, Transition grew on me.

On early January of 2012, this time with Luis and the kids coming along, we went to another group meeting, where the core group assumed the disintegration of the existing Initiative.

Later on that month, after some thoughtful consideration, we (Luis and I) looked at each other and… as Rob says “if there is no Transition Initiative in your town, start your own” and so… We did!

From late January we started “Cascais em Transição” group on Facebook, we picked up the existing blog (from the previous group), and on early February we went to the Lisbon Initiatives Meeting and were invited to be on the National HUG (HUB) Meeting, the day after. It was so good meeting all of those whom became our Transition companions and they gave us such levels of inspiration and strength to go on with our new mission in Cascais!… We returned home with our hearts full of joy and motivation to carry on our work.

In the beginning of March we saw our Initiative group grow to six members and on March 23^th and 24^th we, Luis and I, did the Initiative Training Course in Linda-a-Velha.

In early April we, on behalf of the ‘Cascais em Transição’ Initiative, presented a proposal to the Cascais Municipality Budget 2012, a program started in 2011 by the Local Government to motivate local residents to have a more active citizenship, to participate in the local decisions and have a saying on how the local funds are spent. This year we presented a proposal and it was approved after being initially voted in the first presenting session!…

Here is Luis presenting the proposal (and you can see the satisfaction on his face, once we knew it had been approved).   

What we are trying to do with this proposal is to pass a vote on a decision to convert a local urban park and to create renewable energy infrastructures on the existing buildings and others like community gardens and community composting area, community wood ovens, cycling school, and a place or building where we can start some sensibilization and capacitation activities.

Now the proposal will be technically evaluated by the municipality budget department and after that it will be voted through the internet by the resident constituents. We shall know the final results in October.  By that time we also concluded we needed a Logo and we needed it fast if we wanted to have an image that presented ourselves to the outside as a Transition group. And this is what we came out with:

Still, on 17^th of March 2012 we were invited by the organization of ‘MUSA CASCAIS’ Festival to join them on a tree plantation campaign to neutralize the carbon footprint of the Festival.  It was quite a group of people gathered in this cause.

 Here is Miguel and Sofia planting their first cork oak trees with mum and dad.

 And here is our Mayor, Carlos Carreiras, carrying the oak trees up the hill. He turned to be quite a dedicated man. On that day he said that he wanted to plant one tree for each newborn child in Cascais while he was in office. Since that number had already been exceeded (65.000), he set a new goal: to plant one tree for each resident. We are 268.000.

On the May 5^th we invited all of Transition Initiatives of the Lisbon Area to join us in celebration for the national (and simultaneous) exhibition of the ‘In Transition 2.0’ film. It took place in the Cascais Cultural Center and it was followed by a picnic in the park where we all gathered afterwards and talked about it, exchanging experiences, expectations and points of view about what we had seen.  It had a good audience, with lots of friends from other Transition Initiatives, and not only from Lisbon, which left us grateful for their presence and for the outcome.

Now, about our most recent adventure on behalf of our Transition Initiative …

After planting some trees to help to neutralize the carbon footprint of the ‘MUSA Cascais’ Festival’, and since ‘MUSA Cascais’ is and has been from 2006 onwards strongly advocating in favor of sustainability, and of an active response to global warming and climate change – its tag is “Preocupas-te?” or “Do You Care?” – this year, we decided to propose to the organization of this Festival to land us a place or a stand in the grounds of the event, where we could promote Transition and demonstrate its practices.

When we met, instead of discussing the conditions or accepting our request, they proposed to us to go a “little” bit further in our ambitions and asked us to speak to our national HUG to know if, as a growing civic movement, we would be interested in turning ‘MUSA Cascais’ into a wide and transversal Transition Festival.

In such short notice, this year, with the help of the other portuguese local Initiatives we will all be able to raise a stand representative of the Portuguese Transition, capable of a good deal of promotion and demonstration of our Transition standards in this Music Festival.  Next year, with time, preparation and due efforts, we hope we will be able to share with the world our first Transition Festival.  This is the current lineup of this year MUSA Cascais’ Festival and it is not closed yet.

What can we say…  That good chances only unveil to those who stand with open heart and mind to what life can accept of them.

A big HUG from Portugal

Isabel and Luis Gonçalves

What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century?  While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site.  However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it).  The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself.  As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.  

I often use the analogy, in terms of food, of a cake.  Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it.  What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing.  In the same way that for food we need to urgently reverse this, for many reasons that will be only too familiar to regular readers of this blog, the same can be argued for building materials.

In the case of these alms houses in Sherborne, it literally was the building’s ‘icing’ that caused the difficulties.  With about 30% of UK road freight now due to the movement of construction materials, many of which already have a high level of embodied energy, I’d like to argue here that we need to think about construction in the same way we are starting to think about food, specifically in the context of the Atmos Project, a community initiative I am involved in in Totnes.

Historically, as well as being the only option people had, the use of local materials also led to the evolution of vernacular styles of building, so that each region had its own distinct styles of building, rooted in materials, culture and tradition.  As John and Jane Penoyre note in ‘Houses in the Landscape’ “in these simple buildings the available materials are the principal dictators of style”.  Mark Gorgolewski writes in The Green Building Bible:

“… as materials closer to their natural state will tend to have had less processing, which often means less energy use, less waste and less pollution.  Local materials can reduce the need for transport and benefits the local economy and community”.

Christopher Day writes that “local materials minimise transport energy, suit local climate, support local employment and society and reinforce locality identity, anchoring buildings into local culture … so roundwood instead of sawn, adobe or brick instead of concrete”.  As well as having far less embodied energy due to requiring so little transportation, they also often have far less embodied energy in their manufacturre, as the graph below showing overall CO2 emissions by weight [kg] released by production of 1 kg of twenty-four common building materials demonstrates (source).  Note that those materials on the right hand side actually lock up more carbon than they emit (depending on how far they are transported of course, a strawbale house in the UK built with Turkish bales would clearly not qualify):

Then there’s also the aesthetics.  The other day I was in Marlborough in Wiltshire, and took a walk around the town.  It is easy to be nostalgic about old buildings, and to assume that they are so characterful and attractive simply because they are old.  I would argue that the ambience that comes through in some of the photos below has more to do with the materials than with the age of the building.

The combination of brick, timber and cobbles is far more attractive than just one single material.

Clay wall tiles that were fired in kilns with variable temperatures produced tiles of a range of colours, from black to orange, which gives the tiled surface much more richness.

This timber frame house is a beautiful example of how the materials available locally dictated the design of the building and its character.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the use of natural and local building materials in recent years.  Cob building, strawbale, lime plasters, roundwood timber, hemp, clay plasters, have all experienced a renewal of energy, but are still almost only ever used in self build projects, and have yet to cross over into mainstream construction.  Yet, as Gill Seyfang points out, they are still very much in a niche and what is needed is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”.  She argues for the natural/local building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime”.  Key to that will be scale.

Of course, running alongside the discussions about materials is the need to create truly low carbon buildings, in their construction, their inhabitation and eventual demolition/recycling.  The Larch and Lime houses built recently in Ebbw Vale are passivhauses (Larch House right), that is they are built in such a way as to require no space heating.  When I talked to the architect behind them, Justin Bere, he told me that most of the materials were local (stone, slate, locally made Rockwool etc) but hadn’t veered too far into the world of very local and natural materials.  Part of the reason for that is that for the kind of accurate modelling needed for passivhaus certification, data for many of these materials doesn’t yet exist.  I would argue that this is a pressingly urgent area for new research.

Enter the Atmos Project.   For the past couple of months, as well as my Transition Network stuff, I have been working a day a week on the Atmos Totnes campaign.  Atmos has been running for the past 5 years, since Dairy Crest closed their 8 acre site next to Totnes station, and since when it has sat and become more and more of an eyesore (you can read the story so far here).  The Atmos Project, as it became known, due to it being home to a building built to house Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s experimental ‘atmospheric railway’, has sought to bring the site into community ownership to develop it as a catalyst for new businesses in the town and as a demonstration of Transition in action.

The initiative did a lot of work, raised bits of funding to do design work, business planning and so on, but seemed to be getting nowhere due to the site’s owners’ unwillingness to engage seriously with the community.  So a couple of months ago we started a campaign, aimed to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the site’s owners.  We gathered voices from around the community, got a lot of media exposure, got people in the town out for a big photo opportunity and for a public meeting, and a couple of weeks ago, had a very positive meeting with Dairy Crest, and all of a sudden the project is moving forward with an energy that is a delight to see.

The tagline for the campaign has been ‘the heart of a new economy’, and it is seen as a development that in all that it does is focused on skills, training, the creation of new businesses and the boosting of the local economy.  It is of a scale where it can do some very exciting things in terms of construction.  One of the founding ideas is that the place that the development starts its very first question, is what are the local materials that we have to hand?  In the same way that I always used to teach on permaculture courses that the question should be “I’m going to cook a meal, what’s in the garden”, rather than “what’s in the fridge?”, that same principle could and should apply to building materials.

So, as the first part of the design process, and as part of what will form a key part of the brief for whoever ends up being the project’s architect, will be a list of the local materials available to such a project in Totnes.  We have commissioned a specialist in this to draw this up, including the places locally where they would be sourced.  My initial list off the top of my head is:

Timber: for construction grade timber, internal studwork, window and door frames, roofing shingles, laths, panelling, flooring, wattles, wood fibre insulation.

Clay: for rammed earth construction, cob walling, daubs, clay plasters, cob bricks, clay paints

Hemp: for use in hemp/lime construction, to make insulation, for hemp/lime or hemp/clay plasters and bricks

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

Reed: for thatching roofs, and also to make ‘reedboards’, an alternative to plasterboard

Lime: for plasters, mortars, renders, as well as in construction systems such as hemp/lime

Straw: baled, and used in ‘straw bale building’, chopped as an ingredient in plasters

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

Recycled Materials:  newspaper processed as an insulation product, car tyres, recycled bricks

It used to be that when a cathedral was built, a temporary village was built around it, with a stone masons’ quarter, a timber framers’ quarter and so on.  On the scale of something like the Atmos project, it may well be possible to do something very similar, processing the timber needed on site, making cob blocks, even hand-making tiles for external cladding.  If done skilfully enough, integrating training and apprenticeships, it could be a vitally needed new approach to development, especially when combined with the potential for the community to invest into the development.

Panels at Charing Cross tube station in London showing the various trades associated with the construction of Charing Cross in the late 1200s.

A development that from the outset seeks to source it’s metaphorical cake locally.  As the Euro crisis continues to unravel at a pace, as the academics are telling us that the only thing that will halt climate change is a massive economic downturn, or at least a huge rethink about how we make economic activity happen, we need a new approach to development.

Work in progress: Cob walls, hemp plaster on the walls, clay plaster onto lath on the ceiling, local timber window frames...

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion?  I think so.  I think the time is right for that, and that’s what we want to do with Atmos.  Watch this space.

Let’s start with something I came across on YouTube, the caption just says “We are students from 4th of ESO and we are in a project about Transition Towns. Hope you like it :) !”  Turns out it is the students from the High School Joan Segura i Valls, in Santa Coloma de Queralt (Catalonia) (see right) who did a project on Transition (they talked to Rob Hopkins by Skype), set up Transition Santa Colomba, and are going great guns.  After they finished their school project, they were given a video camera.  What did they come up with?

The first Spanish Transition Conference took place this month. Many thanks to Antonio Scotti, Filipa Pimental and Emilio Mula for their accounts of the event which Rob has just posted to Transition Culture.  You can view all the photos from the event here on Flickr.  Here is the group photo of dynamic Spanish Transition activists:

Transition has been getting into the Spanish media a fair bit too.  El Mundo, one of Spain’s biggest national papers, recently ran stories about Transition, one a more general introduction, about Transition Belsize and about the Brixton Pound (with some great photos, such as the great photo below).

Here is a great story from Brazil, from Guarulhos (Sao Paulo).  We’re grateful to May East for sending it in.

Guarulhos is the Brazilian Heathrow; known as the gateway to the country, it is home to the largest airport in South America. It is also the second largest city of Sao Paulo state, with a population of 1.2 million people and 33% preserved area. Last month the first Transition Training took place in the city, hosted by the Secretary of Environment and involving 70 participants from a wide range of backgrounds. The impact of the training was lightening quick and at the end of the 2 days there were 3 working groups and the declaration of intent to re-dedicate a public park to be the first Transition Park of the city. Three weeks later a retrofitted abandoned building painted in earth colours, a medicine herb garden, the children’s play ground cheered-up, a crafts fair, the presence of the authorities, blessings by the regional indigenous people made the opening day of the park front-page news in the local press.

Guarulhos is the latest city to join the ever-growing Brazilian Transition network – has its headquarters in the Julio Fracalanza Park and intends to increase the cycle paths connecting all the city’s parks threefold in one year.

The Mayor of the City being blessed by indigenous people on the opening morning.

To Canada now, and in British Colombia (BC), on April Fool’s Day (April 1^st), Transiton Sooke on Vancouver Island discussed how money in our society is a kind of Fool’s Gold.  Sunshine Coast in Transition (see right) on Vancouver Island is one of the latest groups to join the Transition Network and is well on their way to becoming official.  Read more about their journey so far.

The Northern View wrote an article about the founding of Transition Town Prince Rupert. If you missed Rob’s interview with founding member of TT-Prince Rupert, Lee Brain, here it is:

In an effort to help keep their communities clean, T-Huronia (ON) held a Pitch In Day in Penetanguishene. They also screened The Greenest Building as part of their environmental film series.  Above is a photo of some members of T-Huronia enjoying Earth Day!  From Manitoba, here is an Uptown Mag article on the fledgling Transition Winnipeg initiative.

Let’s start our travels around the UK in Derbyshire.  Here is a film of Transition Buxton’s recent planting of a community orchard:

… and they have also been clearing a new allotment:

Transition Town Totnes has been co-ordinating an innovative campaign to pressure milk processors Dairy Crest to enable the community to take over its abandoned site in Totnes, a campaign which is gaining momentum (see below photo from a recent public meeting).  The project, known as Atmos Totnes,  has made the front page of the local paper, appeared on the BBC News website, generated considerable media attention, gathered 50 ‘Atmos Voices’ of people from across the community speaking up for the campaign, and recently spoke to former agriculture minister John Gummer who gave the scheme a glowing endorsement.

TTT has also just launched a new website.  Rob Hopkins recently gave a talk about Transition in Totnes at TEDxExeter.  Here it is:

TT Exmouth planted nearly 50 trees at the former Dennesdene Farm site in East Devon. Read more here.  Bridport News reports how Transition Town Bridport is training unemployed 18 to 26-year-olds in the use of hand tools and called for people to volunteer as course mentors.  TT-Cheltenham held a ‘Low Energy Show’ which you can read about in more detail here, and you can see the poster (right).

From Lancashire, Transition Town Clitheroe reported that planning permission has been given for constructing a hydro scheme at Whalley weir for generating electricity from the River Calder. Find out more here.  We are grateful to Pete Goffin in Leicestershire for sending us this:

Hello, we are a partnership of two, active in the Transition Towns movement in Leicester. We have worked in people’s houses, are very conscious of carbon footprint issues, have a cycle for work policy, moreover we have helped develop the shared apple pressing project which is proving to be so successful in Leicestershire. Rupert has developed an apple press package which is highly efficient, locally produced and competitively priced. We are also sourcing our timber from as close to home as possible, hence the tree sawing machine. It started with one press for Transition Leicester shared among 20-30 people. They now have two, Market Harborough, Loughborough and North West Leicestershire also have one each. I think Wigston are wanting one now too. It would be great if we could let your network know what a good community development the project has turned out to be.

You can read more about this apple press project here on T-Leicester’s website.  Here (left) is a photo of the new press in action.

To London now.  At St Mark’s Church, Transition Town Wimbledon, Wimbledon Civic Forum and Transition Town Tooting jointly hosted a Local Husting for London Assembly elections. You can read more about that here and see the photo below, right.

Transition Town Hackney held a screening of In Transition 2.0 (you can too!  See here for more details about organising a screening!).  Loads of great ideas for possible Transition Hackney projects were generated in the discussion.  TT Stoke Newington held an Open Space to ask ‘A greener more resilient Stoke Newington, how can we make it happen?’

Transition Town Tooting in London are edging towards the launch of a Tooting Pound.  Two workshops provided lots of lovely ideas for the design of the the notes. Some great drawings were created by budding designers and these will all inform the final designs. Here’s one design.  Bank of England eat your heart out:

Read more about the Tooting Pound here.  Transition Town Tooting’s ‘Monthly Do’ at Wandsworth Borough Council’s Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park saw several members join with gallery staff to offer a drop-in afternoon about on ‘Growing Successfully in the City’ (see right).

Transition Town Shrewsbury held an exhibition over Easter to show what a locally-owned hydro scheme in Shrewsbury might look like. You’ll find more information here.  TT Taunton has been exploring the creative potential of using thermal images to tell stories. To find out more, click here below, and look for the title “Thermalogues”.  There are six films in all, here are two of them …

TT-Taunton Guerrilla Gardeners have also been busy planting up derelict areas of the town with edible herbs! Read more in This is Somerset.

TT Worthing have been promoting a garden share scheme in the Adur and Worthing area. To find out more visit transitiontownworthing.  Former TT-Worthing steering group member Steve Last decided to start up a Transition group closer to home in the village of Findon. Read how a change in circumstances made him revaluate his involvement with Worthing and look no further than his own back yard.

Transition Town Marlborough in Wiltshire submitted a report to town councillors calling for better public transport for the town’s commuters. Read the original article on This is Wiltshire.  The Bromsgrove Standard publicized the ‘Buy from Bromsgrove’ event, which took place at the monthly farmers’ market and was organized by TT Bromsgrove.  In the last round-up we heard about how Marsden and Slaithwaite Transition Towns in Yorkshire had used their LEAF fund grant to do work around energy efficiency and hard-to-treat homes.  As part of that, they made some videos, most notably this great animation:

Doing the work they did led to them reflecting on the imminent ‘Green New Deal’, and here is a short film they made about that:

From France, we are grateful to Kitty de Bruin for sending us this: “In Ungersheim, France, the town decided to use the bottom-up process to start Transition with the citizens. They did not fly in expensive experts but involved the citizens to create awareness and involve them in the Transition process (see photo above).  Read this L’Alcase report (in French) about Transition in Ungersheim”.

DACH (Germany, Austria & Switzerland) have been busy preparing for their nation(s) wide ”In Transition 2.0 Film & Information Day” on May 13th. More than 10-15 (and growing!) Transition initiatives across DACH are planning to show In Transition 2.0 in this fantastic unified event!  If you are in Germany, for more info about how to participate etc. (in German) click here.

In Ireland, Kinsale Transition Town held a Spring Fair. Here is a film about it:

In New Zealand, Transition Oamaru and Waitaki District held their third Sustainable Skills School which had on offer over 30 courses including identifying edible seaweed, wood turning, preparing a hangi, making sauerkraut, making mud bricks and recycling car tyres! Read more about this fantastic event in the Otago Daily Times.

Now to Sweden.  The spread of Transition Towns in Sweden got a big push forward recently from the Swedish Minister for the Environment, Lena Ek, who expressed her support for the work of  Transition initiatives in the County of Östergötland. She was quoted as saying, “it was so great to get back to Stockholm after the UN climate negotiations to discover all these Transition initiatives. This is exactly what I hoped would start in  Sweden, as transition must begin locally”.  For more information read Stephen Hinton’s full report here. And for information in Swedish, see the (PDF) newsletter from Hela Sverige Skall Leva.

Lastly, let’s see what’s happening in the US.  For starters, you can find the Transition US April newsletter here. In California, an article on NewsReview.com has members of Transition Chico talking about bringing neighbourhoods together to create a self-sustainable community.  Transition San Luis Obispo co-sponsored a free lecture titled The deadly connection: Endless war and economic crisis in the city-county library.

Colorado Springs Independent wrote about TT Manitou Springs Seed Bank. Find out more about the seed bank here.  In Newtown (CT), local resident Barbara Toomey attended a Transition training session and is now well on her way to forming an initiating group. There is already a Sustainable Film Series up and running which started this month with Carbon Nation. Transition Newtown would make the third Transition group in CT joining the communities of Greater New Haven and Litchfield. Go Newtown!

Dr. Steven Chase of Antioch University New England, presented a free lecture “The Global Transition Movement: Innovative Local Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Disruption” at Saint Joseph College, Connecticut.  From Florida, here are a couple of photos from Code Green Community in Tampa Bay taking part in Earth Day.

Framington Patch reports that Transition Framington (MA) took part in the State’s Green Fest.  Keene (NH) Transition Movement Community blog published a timetable for Monadnock Localvore Reskillling Workshops in 2012. See the dates of the workshops and find out more here.  Transition Town State College (PA) held a successful local Foods Forum whilst Transition Town Media held a community pot luck meal and garbage art contest!

Here is an article titled ‘Is the Time Now for R.I. to Make Transition?’ which discusses the potential for Transition towns in the state.  The Citizen reported how Transition Town Charlotte (VT) co-sponsored community viewing and discussion of five films related to Vermont’s Comprehensive Energy Plan. Read the article here.

Transition Viroqua (WI) got busy making a broadcast for local community radio station WDRT which includes interviews with local car share pioneers, a hybrid car guru, information on area bus options, an interview with a local bike shop owner and a discussion about pedal assist bicycles. You can listen to the audio below:

To close, on a more general note, don’t forget to keep an eye on Transition Network’s news and projects for inspiring Transition-related stories from across the globe.  STIR online magazine features an interview with Rob Hopkins by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh and a review of In Transition 2.0 by Charlotte du Cann, and at Permaculture Magazine, Phillip Moore reviews In Transition 2.0.  Also Transition is cited as a grassroots movement that is shaping the future and is mentioned in a summary of the key points from the built environment discussion group also on Guardian.co.uk.  The Christian Science Monitor writes this article titled Transition Towns moves communities beyond sustainability to resiliency.

With many thanks to Lia who helped pull together this month’s roundup!

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

“Sunday May 13th 2012 will be declared “In Transition 2.0 film and information day” in Germany, Austria and Switzerland!  We kindly ask all German, Swiss & Austrian Transition initiatives to self-organize screenings of the movie at that date in their regions/towns/cities.  More info for the organizers (in German) & about the coordination here.

A screening in Bielefeld is already fixed; see details here.  We would love to generate a lot of broad, positive reviews and excitement about the movie and Transition in general at that date in the German-speaking region(s) of the world”.

From Transition Town Hannover, here is a short film called “Im Rausch der Rohstoffe”  which according to Google Translate means “In the intoxication of the raw materials”, which, erm, doesn’t really tell us very much.  Anyway, here it is:

… and here is an interview with Fabian from the local group:

From Holland, here is Paul Hendricksen speaking about a project he is involved with to build a new settlement of Earthships near Deventer:

From Ireland, Davie Philip from Transition Ireland and Northern Ireland National Hub reports that on March 22nd as part of the Ashoka Change Nation event, a number of Irish Transition catalysts met Rob Hopkins to discuss progressing a number of new Transition projects in Ireland.

While at Change Nation (which he wrote about here) Rob was interviewed for Ireland’s RTE Television:

Also, this Easter, Dermot Higgins and his son Fionn (from Rush, Fingal) will attempt to paddle across Ireland by kayak, from Dublin to Donegal (330km) in just six days.  The money they raise from their exciting expedition will go to their local Transition Town – Rush Open Organisation for Transition Status  (ROOTS). Read more in The Final Independent. Good Luck Dermot and Fionn!

From Portugal, here is a piece from the newsletter sent in by the Transition Portugal (a National Hub), entitled “In Portugal, creativity is used to find alternative ways of financing the 2-day Transition Launch Course”.   

Celebrating Spring, Transition Portugal stepped a little further towards a more sustainable and inspiring paradigm: during the weekend of 23/24th of March, the Linda-Velha Transition Initiative organized the 3rd Transition Launch Course in Portugal, the first led by Portuguese Trainers.

Adding to this special occasion, the organizing team and trainers decided to step outside of their comfort zone and test an alternative financing model inspired by the “Gift Economy”. Participants, who were also co-responsible for the course logistics (food and props), registered in the course paying a basic registration fee of €30 (confirming the intention and interest to enroll). At the end of the course, all people involved (including participants, trainers and organizers) were faced with the following question: “how much did this course worth for me; what are my true financial capacities; and how much am I going to offer to this course as a way of gratitude, supporting its continuity in the future?”

At the same time, the organizing team and trainers presented their ‘dream budget’ on the blackboard, specifying not only the real costs of goods acquired (mainly stationary) but also how much the organization and trainers would like to get for their work. The dream budget was €1290 … and a couple of minutes after… the sum collected was €1211 … Waw!!!… A dream came true… It did work!… Congratulations to everybody!

So in this time of change, notably for a country like Portugal, our recent experience demonstrates that blooming and flowering are here to stay. Lets show our dreams and colours! Trust we will be pollinated and tasty fruit will develop… Lets believe that bees will spread our pollen … Let’s create that magnificent Garden we envision to live in!

Reading Transition Town volunteers Charlotte Selvey, Sabrina Piergorossi and Ornella Trevisan in Palmer Park.

Over to the UK now, and TT-Reading have been busy planning sweet chestnut and walnut trees as part of their edible planting project in the town (see right).  In Cheshire, T-Wilmslow who were recently awarded a substantial grant from the Governments Local Energy Assessment Fund (LEAF), held a public meeting inviting local residents to share thoughts about the future resilience of the town.  In Derbyshire, T-Belper want to transform a local church car park in to an allotment and have met with a plethora of reactions from the towns councillors! Read more in the Ripley and Heanor News.

On the subject of tree planting, TT-Exmouth in Devon planted almost 50 trees opposite local Greenfingers Garden Centre who kindly provided a soup lunch to the many volunteers who turned out to dig.

TT-Honiton held a Seedy Saturday to mark Climate Week and to encourage people to swap and grow seeds. Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall (who wrote the foreword to The Transition Companion) just happened to be in the neighbourhood and popped in (see left).  See a full write up and more pictures on the TT-Honiton website by Rufus Duffin.  Here’s a film about the Seedy Saturday:

Rufus also writes here about a successful evening of lively discussion with Rebecca Hosking and Tim Green after a viewing A Farm for the Future.  Here are Rebecca and Tim and some of the group at the event:

L to R: Rufus Duffin (TTH), Rebecca Hosking, Tim Green, Geoff Wilmot (TTH), Christine Planel (TTH). Photo copyright M.Wilmot 2012

Transition Town Honiton also held a big tree planting event:

Transition Town Totnes (TTT) with the Totnes Development Trust have launched a 6 month campaign called the Atmos Project in a bid to transform a derelict site in the town to a low-carbon mixed development for the community. If you missed Rob’s blog on the launch, you can read it here. This story was also picked up This is South Devon, and as part of the campaign, every day a new ‘Atmos Voice’, a member of the community speaking about the campaign, is posted on the site.  Jonathan Dimbleby popped by to launch the campaign outside the site itself:

Here is a great video of A Little Patch of Ground, by Encounters-Arts, a Transition supported inter-generational food growing and performance project which took place just outside Totnes, on the Dartington Estate.  TTT also held, together with Transition Network’s REconomy Project, a ‘Local Entrepreneurs’ Forum’ at the town’s Civic Hall, which brought together entrepreneurs, mentors and potential investors.  You can read about how it went here, or watch this film of the occasion:

In Ashburton, Totnes’ neighbouring town, Ashburton Futures, part of the Transition Network, recently, thanks to the LEAF Fund which many Transition initiatives have benefitted from, have made a series of films about how to make a diversity of local house types more energy efficient.  One of the hosts is Fraser Durham of Anahat Energy, who is also an active member of TTT.  Here are a few of them:

To neighbouring Dorset, where in Blandford, the relatively fledgling TT group held a Local Food Evening to engage the community.  The picture below shows an activity to map all their local food producers and suppliers:

Also in Dorset, TT-Dorchester’s energy group held an information road show on retrofitting and much more.

Penrith Action for Community Transition (PACT) organised a ‘Big Spring Clean’, in association with Eden District Council, Churches Together and Soroptimists (who I must confess I’ve never heard of, but Google reveals is “an international organization for business and professional women who work to improve the lives of women and girls, in local communities and throughout the world”).  Here is a film about it:

In London, Transition Kensal to Kilburn held a ‘Big Dig’, at Queens Park Allotment where a group of volunteers prepared an allotment ready to plant vegetables.  Here is a great time-lapse film of it:

In Hertfordshire, TT-Berkhamsted held an event during Climate Week called ‘What On Earth should we do about Climate Change?‘, and in Kent, Tunbridge Wells just got its first electric vehicle charging point in the town.  Transition Harborough and the Rural Community Council are hoping to gain a substantial investment from the Big Lottery’s Communities Living Sustainably Fund. In this Green Building Press article you can read their many proposals for positively transforming the town.  There’s more on this story in the local Lutterworth Mail.

Transition Town Leamington's 'Wool Day'

TT-Leamington held a wool day where people could learn to the crafts of spinning and felting.  Also in Warwickshire, T-Shipston are saying no to a proposed supermarket moving in to their town.  Marsden and Slaithwaite Transition Town (MASTT) are running a ‘Warmer Homes’ campaign, looking at how to make the area’s hard to treat houses more energy efficient.  As part of that, the Green Building Store made the following video to promote the campaign:

Thanks to Anita van Rossum of T-Chichester, in West Sussex, for sharing this great video of some of their activities.

Over now to Canada.  TT Sooke on Vancouver Island, hold a regular Transition Town Café to discuss ideas and engage the local community.  TT-Powell River featured this great Self-Repair Manifesto on their website – a must for any Transition up cyclers and fix-it fanatics (see poster, right)!

Also in British Columbia, Nancy Hofer of TT Comox Valley recently presented to the CVEC. The Comox Valley Environmental Council is a 21 year old ‘Not for Profit Society’ which acts as an umbrella organization for 20 local environmental organizations and local Municipal and Regional representatives. Read more about the meeting here in Canada.com.  In Ontario, T-Guelph held their second Resilience Festival over two days, read more in the Guelph Mercury.

From Barrie, Canada, comes this presentation, seemingly filmed on a phone from the back of the hall, about Transition in Barrie:

… and also to mention, in case you missed it, the launch of Transition Prince Rupert’s new website and fantastic Transition crash-course they developed.  You can read about it here, or here is Lee Brain from the group to tell you all about it:

In Tasmania, Derek Leahy ponders five thought bubbles (one of which is Transition) and tries to connect the dots regarding the forthcoming Day of Action on tar sands on May 5^th.  TT-Guilford in Western Australia held a successful weekend to build community resilience with over 100 attendees.  From Victoria, while browsing  the TT-Maroondah website, we came across this wonderful banner:

To Brazil.  Thanks for Isabela Maria Gomez de Menezes for this wonderful story and picture from T-Brasilândia who celebrated a Beauty Day dedicated to the beauty and strength of the women of Brasilândia.

Here is the story in English:

The beauty day, was a day totally dedicated to the beauty and strength of the women’s of Brasilândia. The event honoring the month of women was organized by women of the Transition Brasilândia, in the community of Vila Teresinha in Brasilandia.

Throughout the day the visitors could enjoy the hairstylist and treatments offered by Institute Embelleze, and also learned how to make turbans and braids with the girls of the collective ”Manifesto Crespo”or the Curly manifest, with the project ”weaving and braiding art”, which enhances and strengthens the memory and afro brazilian self-esteem. They also had massage available and the women from the “Brasilianas”,  selling their products made with recyclable materials.

During the event, an street art artist from the community,   painted a wall with themes of the event.  Closing the day they raffle a free registration in a Gym Club and distributed seasonings seedlings provided by the Office of Sustainability, to promote the habit of cultivating food crops at home.

For the Transition US March roundup of what’s happening in Transition in the US, click here.  In California, TT- Berkeley celebrated their first birthday with a Potluck meal.  The event also doubled up as an informative get together for those wanting to know more about Transition and how to get involved.  Frances Bigda-Peyton of Bedford-TT (MA) writes an article following her attendance at a recent comprehensive plan workshop and suggests that resilience is crucial for the towns’ future. 

Also in MA, T-Ashland have started a new programme called Grounds around Town which is a fantastic and innovative way to make use of the towns used coffee grounds.  Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition held an event called Education not Deportation.  Canton Public Library in Michigan has been hosting a Transition Towns series and this month was Getting Started in Organic Gardening with Bettylou who says you don’t need lots of space to start growing food.  T-Keene (NH) has launched a Neighbourhood Food Security (NFS) program which has a very specific goal – to produce 30% of food locally by the year 2030.

T-Staunton Augusta (VA) are transforming an unkempt lot in to a New Town Community Garden. Co-founder Lindsay Curren (also of Transition Voice) is excited by the amazing response she’s had so far (see right).  T-Port Angeles (WA) held their first public meeting and over 100 people turned up!

Thanks to Trish Knox of T-Woodinville (suburb of Seattle, WA) for sharing this fantastic Valley Vegetables Demonstrate story:

Saturday morning at the old Hollywood Hill Schoolhouse roundabout, valley vegetables crisply demonstrated their concerns over the threat to farming and rural character posed by a recent Woodinville City Council vote. The carrot was heard to sprout that soon urban sprawl would overtake the vegetable’s precious valley and destroy farmers’ ability to purchase land at a reasonable price. Standing in support of the vegetables to squash the vote and beet back urban sprawl were Sammamish Valley Alliance, Transition Woodinville and The Hollywood Hill Association.  Trish is second from left in the picture below:

Photo: Lincoln Potter.

Finally, we’ll keep one of the best to last.  Here is a great film from Chile about Transition in a town called Pucon:

To keep up with developments in Transition between these monthly roundups, keep an eye on Transition Network News, Transition Network Projects and Transition Voice.  If you would like to hear more about any of these stories in the next podcast, please let us know. 

You can also read a news story about it here, and you’ll find a film of Transition Prince Rupert’s first public event, which was included in an earlier round-up, here, and Lee himself appears in Part Two).  Michelle Colussi, a Transition Trainer and member of Transition Victoria, BC emailed to tell us that although there is no Transition Canada hub yet, there are over 20 official initiatives across the country and another 20 or so mullers, as well as 10 active trainers.  A summary of Canadian Transition projects in the areas of food and economy (both from last year) are located in blogs here and here.

Also in British Columbia, Alberni Valley TT Society turned the spotlight onto consumerism by screening The Clean Bin Project, a couple’s ‘zero waste, consumer free year’.  TT-Comox Valley held their fourth meeting. Click here (scroll down) to see some photos of the trade show style event.

We’ve heard of Transition Towns, even of Transition Universities (more to come on that later), but a ‘Transition Bus’?  From Quebec comes news of The Transition Bus.  The ‘Another World is En Route’ project comes to us from Charlotte and Camille who blog here about their latest on the road exploits from Québec province to Key West Florida.

And so to France.  Thanks to Kitty de Bruin who provided this story:

“In our community garden of 3000 m2, where we will grow old varieties of vegetables and herbs based in old kiwi storage boxes, given to our Transition group by a organic kiwi producer.  The garden sculpture will be made entirely from recuperated and recycled materials collected by the artist. Driftwood, plastic bottle caps, fish nets and lines, shells, recuperated metal wires and screws, as well as these little wheel-like pieces of plastic that have been washing up by the hundreds of thousands onto the Aquitaine coastline for the past few years now. For the longest time nobody knew what they were or where they were coming from. Now we know that a company in Portugal makes them. They use them in a mechanism to purify used water. When they are finished with them they are dumped into the ocean where they are later found in fish, birds and all over our beaches.

Using these little plastic wheels she is created a sort of picture diagram telling this story. It is mounted on a driftwood board. This board will be on top of a 3 or 4 walled structure made from many pieces of driftwood. Under it will be a hand-carved inscription “No More Pollution in our Oceans” in Portuguese and French.  It’s a little hard to describe in words, but the sculpture will be like a statue of mother earth. On top will be the head like the Earthglobe made from a lot of recycled plastic bottle caps. Built into the sculpture there will be birdhouses, refuges for insects, and shelters for rodents and other little animals.

The sculpture should also be interactive and visitors of the garden could carve their own environmental message onto any of the driftwood walls. It is work in progress, the design is made, and the photographs are the little “wheels”.

"these little wheel-like pieces of plastic"...

To read this story in French click here.  There’s a lot of Transition happening in Germany.  Our thanks to Gerd Wessling for this excellent 19 minute video feature (in German) about Transition Town Witzenhausen (one of the first official TT Initiatives in Germany) and the Transition Training course done there. To watch it click here.  Here is a great photo of TT Witzenhausen demonstrating solar cooking!

TT Witzenhausen -Solar cooking -photo credit - Evidero

From Holland here is a short film of a talk given by Transition Town Houten, and I think them talking about their website?

From Ireland, Davie Philip from the Ireland and Northern Ireland Network sends this story:

Panel discussion at Cloughjordan's Community Farming event : Ella mcSweeney (RTE Television) Andrea Calori (URGENCI) Yvonne O Donovan (Hazelhurst CSA) Bronagh Ui Dhuill (Transition Skerries), Amanda Daniel (Soil Association). Photograph: Davie Philip

“Although this was not an official Transition event, last weekend’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) conference in Cloughjordan Ireland was a great success and was attended by many of Irelands Transition initiatives.  On the weekend of the 17th to 19th of February hundreds of people from all over Ireland, and seven European countries, participated in a three day community supported agriculture (CSA) conference – Growing Together – in Cloughjordan, home of Ireland’s largest ecovillage. With panels hosted by Irish Television’s Ella McSweeney and Peter Young from the Farmers Journal and Open Space sessions facilitated by Cultivate Ireland’s Davie Philip, participants that included people from organisations like the Irish Seed Savers, Organic Centre, GIY (Grow it Yourself), and numerous Transition Towns – discussed what exactly a CSA is, and how they could go about setting one up.  Transition Skerries outlined how they went about setting up their local CSA and Transition catalysts from Dublin, Omagh, Kerry and Kinsale shared their experience in building food resilience in their areas.

Community farming is a relatively new concept to Ireland, with the Cloughjordan Community Farm being one of the first in Ireland. With community farms, a relationship is built between the farmer and consumers. So both farmer and consumer share the risks, rewards and responsibilities of farming and growing food. Local members invest some of their time and money in the farm, usually as a weekly or monthly payment and some volunteering, like planting, harvesting or weeding. For this, they receive fresh, local, seasonal food and the farmer gets a guaranteed, regular income. Sessions included how CSAs can help strengthen community resilience were outlined by economic think tank FEASTA, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability and URGENCI, the global CSA network. There was also a specific session for farmers and growers on the mechanics of setting up and maintaining a CSA, hosted by NOTS – the National Organic Training Skillnet and films and a wonderful presentation from Amanda Daniel from the UK’s Soil Association. A network of communities and growers wanting to progress CSA in Ireland was launched and a training handbook on community farming is being produced from the findings of the event. Click here for more details.

Former Irish Minister for Food and Agriculture Trevor Sargent making a comment from the floor at the CSA Conference in Cloughjordan Former Irish Minister for Food and Agriculture Trevor Sargent making a comment from the floor at the CSA Conference in Cloughjordan

Also from Ireland, here is a short film about a World Cafe event run by Transition Town Kinsale, the place where Transition all began:

From Japan, after the earthquake and resulting tsunami that hit Japan last year, the option of rebuilding the country using renewable green energy is being seriously considered. In this Aljazeera article reporter Brendan Barrett talks about the Transition movement in general and also to Hide Enomoto of Transition Fujino.

We have this great story from the Portuguese National Hub:

A team composed of TIs from Lisbon invited all the Portuguese initiatives to gather and discuss the future of the National Network and the creation of the National Hub. It was a sunny, chilly day (5th Feb) with a beautiful blue sky.

That was a creative, inclusive and fun group! The truth is that, even in a country going through a widely known serious economic crisis, it is in fact possible to feel positive, to build very strong connections within a heterogeneous group, dreaming the ideal network and, at the same time, being with friends, laugh, sing, dance. All this while keeping in mind how incredibly challenging and serious the role of Transition Initiatives is NOW, in this social context.

In the end, the Portuguese TIs adopted, with success, the new concept of a ‘Transition National HUG” – the Portuguese hub is expected to be a particular one, responding to these particular local challenges – soon enough, there will be news about it (new chapter of this story planned to happen in April)!  For more pictures, music and dance check the video below (if you are not fluente in Portuguese do not worry, just wait for the first couple of minutes and you’ll get there!).

Here are a couple of stories from Australia.  From Tasmania, Andrew Olivier has sent out Sandy Bay’s first newsletter. It was interesting for us here at Transition Network to see a familiar name in there – Adrian Porter, ex resident of Totnes and once active in TTT who was invited to Waimea Heights School as guest speaker! Here is a pdf of their newsletter. Also, Transition Bellingen hosted its first World Café for 2012 and looked at what Coffs Harbour might look like in 2020 if they were a community that embraced the Transition model.

Prince Albert, South Africa.

In Prince Albert, Great Karoo, Western Cape, South Africa, 22 people including Hélène Smit gathered and held a meeting to discuss the possibility of the town becoming a Transition Town! Read Hélène’s blog piece here.

And so now to the UK.  Transition Network has been chosen as one of Britain’s 50 New Radicals – read more in Rob Hopkins’ blog post on Transition Culture or here on the NESTA site. NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative.

From Essex, here is a video clip sent in by Kamil from Transition Southend.  It features Ian Hurd talking about The Fantastic Food Exchange. This took place back in December, however this bartering and skill share fest could be enjoyed at any time of year and is well worth a watch.

TT Musselburgh - East Lothian. Left to right, Roger Knox, Jen Williams, Diann Govenluck, Heather Cameron, Sylvia and Geoff Mason, and Stephanie Kerr

TT Musselburgh are making plans to plant fruit and veg along the river Esk and even get a community orchard going on an industrial estate! Read more in the East Lothian News (see above).  TT Cheltenham are using a £5k govt grant to look at the prospect of the River Chelt providing small scale hydroelectricity.

Transition Town Worthing have made this short film about their recent Seed Swap.  The film uses ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division as its soundtrack.  What’s not to love about that?

Transition doesn’t always manage to gain a foothold or generate enough interest to move it forward.  We were sad to hear that TT Sevenoaks are facing the prospect of closing down next year due to lack of interest from the local community.  If you have any helpful thoughts or suggestions for TT Sevenoaks, please send them here.  The Kirkbymoorside Environment Group, part of the Transition Town movement within this small North Yorkshire market town, outline in this short film how their recently purchased infra-red camera can be used by residents to detect heat loss from their homes.

One of the most fascinating stories of the past month has been the launch of Brixton Energy (see right).  TT Brixton’s Energy group are pushing for London’s first co-operatively owned solar power station and have a launched share option!   A very exciting initiative, the first Transition initiative to launch an energy company for a distinct urban neighbourhood.  We wish the all the best with it.  As we go to press, they just tweeted the following, “Printed Copies of our 100% recycled Share Offer are ready! “They look good enough to eat!..”professional, sleek & energised. Just love it!”.  You can follow them on Twitter @BrixtonEnergy.  There are lots of Transition initiatives on Twitter, it can be a good way to keep in touch with what they are up to between these round-ups.

Volunteers from TT Crystal Palace and Friends of Westow Park are clearing a park to make way for an edible community garden.  TT-Shrewsbury has been awarded £42,725 via the government backed Local Energy Assessment Fun (LEAF) scheme. Read more in this BBC news story.

The Hebden Bridge Transition Trees project

From Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, you can read this story about their Transition Trees project (see left), a truly joint effort between the TT’s Working Woodslands group, Blackshawhead Optimistic Gardeners, Blackshawhead Environmental Action Team and Hebden Royd Town Council.

Also in Hebden Bridge, read more about their HebVeg CSA box scheme (see right). From that part of the world, from the Leeds University Union, here is Ben Jackson, LUU’s Education Officer, to tell us more about the launch of their Transition University campaign:

… and here are Rhianon and Martha from People and Planet Leeds explaining Transition and how they’re involved in the campaign:

… and lastly Sam from People and Planet Leeds giving a really short summary about the idea of “Transition Universities”:

Sonoma Valley - Left to Right Melinda Kelley, Ed Clay, Tim Boeve. Photo Jeff Kan LeePress Democrat

Now let’s hop across the pond (metaphorically, no flights were taken in the making of this round-up!).  You can read the official Transition US February roundup click here.  In Vermont, T-Brattleboro is hosting a ‘sense of place’ series exploring connections to the natural world, mentoring, and regenerative community relations. The series concludes next month with lessons from The Peacemaker and The Haudenosaunee, a fascinating story of tribal war to peace shared  here in Culture for a Healthy World by Sophy Banks of TN.  From Washington State, here is a film of Judith Alexander talking about the Transition initiative she is part of in Port Townsend.  In California, Transition Sonoma Valley has had to turn eager people away due to their highly popular film nights which this month screened The Next Frontier – Engineering the Golden Age of Green. Read more about the collective genius of T-Sonoma Valley here (see pic right).  Here is a film about them too:

Alisa Viego - Kimberley Leeds. Photo credit - Suzanne Chun

In Alisa Viego, local resident Kimberley Leeds’s (left) desire to feel more connected to her neighbours was the driving force behind her starting up a Transition group. Opening up her home for regular pot luck meals served as the perfect catalyst.

In Telluride, Colorado, monthly Green Business Roundtable discussions are taking place. The first session, led by  Michael Brownlee of Transition Colorado and Woody Tasch of the Slow Money Alliance looked specifically at building a more resilient community.  Here is a video of the event:

In Florida, an Occupy Tallahassee event held a presentation on Transition Towns and a Daily Kos reporter who is new to the whole concept of Transition went along to find out more.

Members of Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition at work in the Egleston Community Orchard.

From Massachusetts, Orion Kriegman, founder of Jamaica Plain (JP) New Economy Transition (who featured in last month’s Transition podcast, which I’ll embed here in case you missed it), talks about the local Egleston Community Orchard in this great Q&A session featured in local paper the JP Patch.

In North Carolina, the folks who attend the United Church of Chapel Hill are not only deeply committed to their faith; they are also committed to a carbon fast for lent! This article delves deeper in to the journey of one congregation and the steps they are taking to Transition to a more sustainable way of being.  In New Hampshire, Keene Transition held their 7^th annual seed celebration and sustainable community fair which included workshops, an open space event and a poster competition.

If you would like any stories included in next month’s round up do let us know.  Also, if you have any thoughts as to which of these should be gone into in more depth in this month’s Transition podcast, do put a comment below this piece.  

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.

Also in Buckinghamshire, members of TT-Marlow are now trained in using thermal imaging cameras so they can help local residents see where they are losing heat from their homes and take appropriate action (see left).  In Lincolnshire, TT-Louth have teamed up with another community group called Groundworks to help those living in fuel poverty. Funding will enable them to carry out draught busting and other energy reduction techniques in around 20 local homes.

Transition Town Cheltenham recently held a festival at the Gardens Gallery, Montpellier Gardens, Cheltenham, celebrating one year of Transition activity in the town, an event captured in this great video:

Chesham market has been crowned the Greenest Market in Britain. The market was established in 2010 by TT-Chesham in partnership with the local council.  Congratulations all.   Moving into Hertfordshire, Abbots Langley TT just has received a council grant to help them promote their activities within the wider community.  Also in Hertfordshire, Transition Northaw have started Community Beekeeping.  This video shows them “moving the new nucleus into our top bar hive”:

Incredible Edible and Transition Town in Wilmslow, working with Cheshire East Council, recently planted an orchard of fruit trees, captured in this film:

Clearly planting community orchards is very much in the air, because the good people at Transition Town Worthing have been doing it too, and have made one of their great films about it:

TT-Harborough is making a bid on behalf of the town for a slice of The Big Lottery’s Communities Living Sustainably fund and have asked the community to come forward with ideas.  Heading west into Shropshire, when the local council ditched kerbside collection of cardboard waste, two members of TT Shrewsbury decided to jump in and do something. In the run up to Christmas they decided to collect and recycle local residential and businesses cardboard themselves and all money raised from the innovative scheme was split between two worthy causes. You can also read more about it here in the Shropshire Star.

In Surrey, a local councillor has put forward a proposal for making Horley a Transition Town which has created much follow up discussion around the idea of a Horley Pound including who might grace the currency notes.   TT-Kingston get a positive write up in this SW Londoner article.

Transition Stroud held a ‘Winterfest’ that brought together the wide range of projects underway in the area:

One of the most exciting bits of news from December was that Transition groups were 3 of the 4 winners in the Energyshare/British Gas Energyshare vote (a story captured here and in this recent Transition podcast).  One of those was Portobello TT and Greener Leith in Edinburgh, who won £50k from Energyshare for their wind turbine proposal. If planning permission is granted for the site on a local water works, the turbine could be up and running by 2013 and powering up to 1300 homes. Read the full story here in the Scotsman.  Portabello TT have also been busy this month creating their own Free Energy Saving Guide which is a free download and really rather lovely.

In West Lothian, T-Linlithgow have an ambitious million pound action plan for sustainable travel around the town and hope to source the funding to enable their vision to become a reality. Go Linlithgow!

From Monmouthshire, we are grateful to Marcus Perrin of T-Chepstow for submitting this lovely story to us:

Children from Chepstow’s Pembroke Primary School ‘evening bike club’ were thrilled to receive an invitation to Llandaff Cathedral last month to meet Princess Anne and celebrate their achievements The after-school club was started by keen cyclist and parent Jayne Worrin before the summer holidays with Transition Chepstow members Jennifer and Nik Peregrine helping to maintain the bikes. Following huge interest from pupils and securing funding from the organisation Bike Club, the group is going from strength to strength. Additional volunteers are being trained to teach the children vital cycling skills and it is hoped children will be able to repair their own cycles with the purchase of a tool kit. While most children have their own bike to ride, the club has accepted repairable ones kindly donated by the local community, for those who do not. Bike Club is a joint initiative led by ContinYou, UK Youth and CTC, the national cyclists’ organisation. In Wales key partners also include Youth Cymru and ContinYou Cymru. More info on the bike club here…

Leaving the UK now and heading to Australia, in Queensland, over in the Scenic Rim, one of the Tamborine Mountain Transition founders is assisting the Southern Gold Coast in its Transition efforts. Part of their awareness raising included screening In Transition 1.0 at the Gold Coast Arts Centre.  In case you haven’t seen it, here it is:

http://vimeo.com/8029815

News to follow soon about the sequel, ‘In Transition 2.0′ which will be out in late March.  T-Nambour in the heart of the Sunshine Coast held info and conversation tables at their local Big Pineapple Growers’ Market throughout December.  Scroll down the page a short way to read their thoughts and vision about a Big Pineapple Revival (see right)!

From the US, you might enjoy Rob Hopkins’ responses to 9½ Questions in this article for TheAtlantic.com, and also this piece about the first ever Transition Congregations, offering a training and workshop specifically to interfaith groups.  For other stories from the US, check out their December round-up here.  In Chatham-Kent in Canada, Ignite Chatham-Kent is a high-energy evening of five-minute talks by people who have an idea, and who have the guts to get on stage and share it. Organized by local volunteers, Ignite Chatham-Kent is a force for innovation, excitement, and fun in the community.  One of their presenters was Lance Meredith, who gave a talk called ”Transition Initiative for Chatham-Kent”.

In Ireland, TT-Tralee held a Transition Christmas Fair which celebrated the many positive things happening within their community, and in Transition Voice, Kurt Trumble gives a traveller’s perspective on Kinsale, the birthplace of the Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) which led to the setting up of Transition in Totnes.

TT-Whitehead took to the airwaves on youth station Tune FM to talk up Power NI’s BIG Energy Saving Challenge (see left).  They have also been out planting trees, as captured in this wonderful film (tree planting with a Sigur Ros soundtrack, quite made my morning).  The tree planting captured in the film is just a warmup, in a few weeks they plan to plants 60,000 trees!

http://vimeo.com/34400137

From Holland, here is a film of a presentation about Transition which unfortunately loses its sound after about 3 minutes, but given that most of you probably don’t speak Dutch anyway, and if you can you can probably read her slides which is some compensation, we thought we’d put it in anyway:

Lastly, let’s go to Portugal, where Portalegre em Transiçao held a community winter jam-making event.  You can see photos of it here, or read a more detailed report of it here.  Basically, they facilitated a completely self-organising event, where people decided what they wanted to make with winter fruits, the local council made a kitchen available free of charge, and 30 people gathered and taught each other how to make jams and preserves.  I love the poster, and it sounded like a fantastic occasion.

Claudian Dobos in Romania wrote to us the other day: “Last month we had the first seminaries organized in Romania with the tematic of TT.  The first was held in Cluj Napoca and was facilitated by Anne Ambles (TT Mayenne). A Romanian premiere. with the participated more than 24 person in this first moment. The organization was facilitated by the Romanian Permaculture Nework. The other cities were Baia Mare and Sighet.  Anne just took part of her holidays to facilitate this moments.  In January it will be held a seminary in Bucharest, Iasi and Cluj Napoca by Claudian Dobos.  Great news for Transition Movement in Romania for 2012!”

And finally, here’s an article on Resilience and the Resource Crunch as featured in US industrial news website Thomas Net.  Thanks, and do send us your stories for next month’s roundup.  In 2 weeks time we’ll put out the podcast of this roundup, going into more depth on 3 of the stories here.  To hear the December podcast click here, and for the November one, click 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!

Local Transition groups put in a strong showing at Hillbrook school's local Sustainability Day, Brisbane, Australia.

It’s time for the monthly roundup of all things Transition from across the globe.   We’ll start down under in Brisbane, Australia where a Sustainability Day was held at a school in Hillbrook. The all-day event included music, speakers, practical demonstrations and workshops. Local Transition groups were one of many represented at the event which encouraged people to connect, enjoy and celebrate the school’s 25th year.

Much further north in Queensland, RealFood network together with Friends of the Earth invited people to a Recharge Kuranda Initiative which supports the aim of turning Kuranda in to a Transition Town. People gathered to discuss how this unique village in the rainforest could enjoy a future that is “energy- lean, less stressful, happier and healthier”.  Meanwhile, airing across the entire continent via Radio National, Rob Hopkins could be heard taking on Dr Chris James on ABC Radio’s Bush Telegraph.  Also, Transition Bellingen in New South Wales have just posted this film of a ‘Visioning Fair’ that they ran a couple of years ago…

Across the water, James Samuel of Transition New Zealand sent us this heart warming and inspiring film about a small town at the epicentre of a big earthquake. This film portrays the healing power of arts and the connected nature of the community in Lyttelton, the port for Christchurch, NZ. In case you missed it on Transition Culture, here it is…

Transition Ashville

Over now to North America where Transition Town Manchester (VT) invited residents to join them for an evening of ‘Green Drinks’.  Green Drinks is an organic, self organising international network which encourages people to meet up over social drinks to discuss a variety of environmental issues/concerns. Click here to find Green Drinks from Argentina to Zambia and a whole lot in between!  Down in North Carolina, here’s a great picture of the folks of Asheville who are now officially calling themselves a Transition Town (see right). Go Asheville!  At a meeting in Southern Humboldt County called ‘Beginnings in Briceland’ on May 15, 2011, Willow gave a talk to a rather small audience about Transition:

A few miles South in neighbouring Hendersonville, a forum titled ‘Who Turned out the Lights?’ was held at Henderson County Public Library which invited discussion on how the town can thrive in the face of higher prices for gas, energy and food.   Read about Transition Town Lyons in Boulder County, CO who get some great coverage in this Lyons Recorder article which focuses on the town’s ongoing success as it encourages all core community groups “to feel they are a healthy part of the fabric of Transition resilience”. One of the main goals of Transition Town Lyons this year is to tap in to “the collective genius of the community in the process of working towards the creation of an Energy Descent Action Plan” (EDAP) “.   Transition Albany just held their Unleashing (see left)!  Sounds like it was a fantastic evening.  You can read Transition US’s June update of other Transition happenings across the US here.

Further north and across the border in Canada, it was Transition Time for a Community Garden in Meaford, ON where an Eco class at GBSS (Georgian Bay Secondary School) handed over responsibility of running the garden to Transition Town Meaford and the Golden Town Outreach Food Bank (see right).  Transition Toronto just hosted a screening of The End of Suburbia with film-maker Greg Greene to kick-start their very own Transition Toronto film contest. Participants are invited to depict the future of Toronto communities in the year 2030, either after or during a successful transition away from fossil fuels.  Click here to read more…

In the Netherlands, it looks, as far as my understanding of Dutch will permit, as though Transition Town Breda have been giving away plants for free:

As for this one, also from the Netherlands, quite frankly I have no idea what’s going on:

Transition Rotterdam have been making a great community garden in the city, here someone walks us round it with a video camera:

…and Transition Town Dordrecht have been out in their neighbourhood picking up rubbish, followed by a relaxing evening by the river:

Transition Town Tilburg did some sort of an event that involved food, and also people talking… beyond that, frankly I have no idea:

From Germany, here’s a talk by Norbert Rost about Transition and the potential role of regional currencies (in German):

In Ireland, at Cloughjordan House in Co.Tipperary, people were invited to join a series of conversations called Networking for Resilience by members of FEASTA (the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) and Transition Ireland and Northern Ireland.  Transition initiatives from across Ireland and Northern Ireland will be meeting over the weekend of 30/31st July and 1st August for ‘Transition 2011′, their all-island gathering.  You can read more about it here.    You can also download ‘Transition Times’, Transition Ireland and Northern Ireland’s newsletter of stories of what Transition initiatives are up to across the island, here.  It is well worth a read, inspirational stuff.  In Transition Donabate/Portrane, they’ve been getting great TV coverage for their Chicken Link initiative:

In the UK, let’s start with my favourite film of the week.  Transition Bath recently created a vegetable garden in Hedgemead Park in the city, and produced this lovely film about the process…. inspirational stuff…

A proposal to build Scotland’s first urban wind turbine on the north Edinburgh coast has been launched by Greener Leith and PEDAL – Portobello Transition Town.   Penrith Action for Community Transition (PACT) are proposing a car club:

Transition Rutland having a good time...

In Rutland County, volunteers from Transition Rutland (see left) have been busy encouraging people to get on their bikes though confidence training and free bike servicing. Read more in this local Rutland & Stamford Mercury article. Transition Hebden Bridge are exploring the possibility of setting up a water turbine near the town.

London Green Fair in early June was a free event held in Regents Park and Transition Belsize, Kensal to Kilburn, Kentish Town, Primrose Hill and Tufnell Park all worked together on the stall.  Alexis Rowell reported at Transition Culture about the emergence of two new Transition initiatives in north London, bringing the total of active initiatives in north London to 12.  Transition Town Brixton are fundraising to buy land 5 miles from London as a community farm.

it's Transition Dorchester's third birthday party!!

In Dorset, Transition Town Dorchester celebrated their third birthday with an outdoor party and AGM. They have all kinds of interesting projects underway, including the Under Lanche Community Farm.  London and Thames Valley Transition groups gathered at the Grow Heathrow gardens to share experiences, workshops and presentations and a tour of the site.  Click here to view a lovely photo essay compiled by Jessica Sumerling of the Grow Heathrow site over the last year.  You can also read Ben Brangwyn of Transition Network’s reflections on the gathering here.

Transition Town Kingston are compiling a database of all the productive trees in the area so they can get permission to harvest unwanted fruit and donate it to homeless shelters and nurseries.  Transition West Kirby are planning ‘Fruitshare’, which will, similarly, collect peoples’ spare fruit and give it away to the local community.  Transition Town Worthing are holding a story-writing competition:

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

Now, a small section devoted to Transition Town Totnes (TTT) in Devon who were recent finalist winners of a 2011 Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy and Behaviour Change via TTT’s Transition Together programme.   Read Chris Bird’s full article and view the video here on Transition Culture.  This fantastic achievement was picked up in the international press, the national press and the local press. Well done TTT!  Here’s a film about the award produced by the Ashden Awards folks.

A few Transition projects have been bidding for the Energyshare funding, which invites people to bed for different proposals.  Transition Town Poole have been bidding for a tidal scheme, a number of North London Transition groups have been applying to do energy efficiency work, Teign Estuary Transition wants to do lots of energy conservation work too, PEDAL (Transition Town Portobello in Edinburgh) want to put up an urban wind turbine, and the Totnes Renewable Energy Society is also bidding for funding.  Loads of other Transition initiatives are registered on the site, which is turning out to be a very interesting tool.  Please give them your support.  The site is easy to register on and you can vote for more than than one project, so give the Transition projects a boost!

Here are two Transition-related articles to read at your leisure; one is a blog piece for Forbes by Haydn Shaughnessy and the other is an article in the Sustainable Business section of the UK’s Guardian Newspaper which appeared following Rob’s attendance at this year’s RESOLVE conference in London.   Finally, a reminder that you can meet many of the people behind many of the projects outlined above at this year’s Transition Network conference at Hope University in Liverpool.  There are still tickets available, so hopefully we’ll see you there!

My thanks to Amber Ponton for pulling this month’s update together…

Martin Crawford recently launching his book 'Creating a Forest Garden', at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

Last week I cycled round to Martin Crawford’s house to interview him.  Martin runs the Agroforestry Research Trust, is one of the world’s authorities on the subject, and recently published ‘Creating a Forest Garden‘.  I had wanted to ask him about the drought in the southeast and the implications for the future of farming.  On the day I visited Martin though it was pouring with rain, but as you’ll see, that made little difference to his thoughts on the matter.  I have included a couple of films about his work as well, mixed in with the interview. 

So Martin, the thing that inspired me to think I wanted to come around and talk to you was the drought situation in East Anglia and the southeast, which has been very much in the news in the last few weeks – although it does seem to be slightly superseded by events, as we sit here with the rain pouring down outside!  But I wondered firstly what your thoughts are on that and also what that tells us about farming as it’s currently practiced in that part of the country.

Yeah, it’s very easy to look outside and see it’s pouring with rain and think, “Oh, it’s actually fine now”.  And it’s even pouring with rain in the east of the country sometimes too now.  But it’s not all fine – the damage has been done.  Yields from arable crops in the East of the country, (which is where the main arable crops like wheat are grown in this country), are going to be down by at least 25% and maybe more, because the damage has been done.  It can’t be recovered – it’s too late for that now.  It’s not all fine now and it really shows that a spring like this, which seems to be becoming the norm…..for the last four years we’ve had pretty dry springs – not as dry as this one but it seems to be becoming a pattern.  Whether that continues or not, it’s impossible to say.

In such a dry spring, the value and resilience of perennial plants is very obvious, so in my forest garden for example where everything is perennial it has been looking lush this spring and not drought affected at all.  I haven’t watered anything in there and it’s been absolutely fine.  So I haven’t been one of the people complaining about lack of rain all the time – it’s people who are wanting to grow lots of annual vegetables or farmers growing annual plants that have been screaming about the weather because if you’re sowing annual plants in spring, you’ve got to have water – they’re not going to grow without it, and put their roots down and so on.

In terms of looking at the future – if we’re going to grow more of our own food as a country and as a region, this is going to have a significant impact.  And on a larger, world-wide scale, it’s actually quite bizarre in some ways.  If you look at it in an ecological way, it’s quite bizarre we’ve based almost our whole agriculture on annual plants because if you look in nature, annual plants are rare.  You only get them if there’s been a soil disturbance, and then for a short time because they’ve been taken over by perennials.  So in a sense our whole agriculture is quite unnatural, based on annual plants, and very prone to any kind of climate extremes – whether it’s drought or water-logging from extreme events or whatever.

Unfortunately, because of climate change,  those extreme events are going to get more and more frequent – all extreme events, not just droughts.  Annual crops are going to get more and more susceptible to crop failures as time goes on, certainly in the next few decades.  And that could have quite serious effects.  In terms of grain stores in the world – grain stores are lower than they’ve ever been because there are increasing failures of harvest in some of the big grain producing countries.

Why is it that your forest garden is green and lush while everyone else is having to water their garden – why aren’t you having to dash around there with a hosepipe?

It’s partly because the plants are perennial.  They’ve been planted several years ago, most of them.  They’re well established, they have deep root systems already so they haven’t got to have that constant moisture in the top few inches of the top soil, which annual plants need to get the seeds to germinate and the roots to grow down.  So it’s partly that but it’s also to do with the system as well – it’s not just them being perennial plants because even perennial plants can sometimes be prone to drought problems.  But it’s the system as well so a forest garden system, or any agro-forestry system with a large proportion of trees in tends to protect the soil from drying influences.  So any shade protects the soil from drying; wind speeds are reduced so that reduces the evaporation from the soil as well.

Then there’s all sorts of effects that are very subtle and we often don’t ever see – for example there’s an effect called a ‘hydraulic lift’, using a horticultural term, and that is when, in a very dry or drought situation you’ve got deep rooted trees, what actually happens is that they can tap in to water reserves deep down in the sub-soil.  For their own use they bring that water up but when it’s very dry a big proportion of that water leaks out of their roots higher up in to the top soil and actually enables some of the other plants to use some of the water that they’re actually bringing up.  So there are some really fascinating effects that we don’t know the half of yet because the soil’s a mysterious place and not much research actually goes in to what happens there.  But it’s not just plants competing with each other, it’s much, much more complicated than that.

So it’s like the ‘trickle-up’ process…

It is, yes!

If you were an enterprising cereal farmer in East Anglia who was sitting there looking at the yield being 25% down this year and looking at the data about climate change and thinking, “Well, this is where we are now”, what would you do?  What would be your advice?

Martin Wolfe on his trial agroforestry farm in Sussex.

My advice would be to think carefully about what you’re going to do in the future because these droughts are likely to get worse not better as the years go on.  If you want to keep growing cereals, then probably the simplest agro-forestry system to do that in is called alley cropping and there’s a guy called Martin Wolfe over in Sussex who does this on his own farm and he grows cereals and does a lot of research as well.  And it basically means having lines of trees and alleys of your cereal crops cultivated in between.  You still get some benefits from those trees – you get shade, you get shelter benefits, and that will help to some degree.

But if you’re still growing annual wheat, say, it is still going to be prone to annual drought problems, whatever tree system you grow it in.  I don’t think there’s any way really of getting away from that.  The only alternative is to look towards perennial crops and unfortunately, as the last 100 years of agricultural research has progressed, it’s all gone into annual plants – very little has gone into perennial plants.  If the same effort had gone into perennial plants, we would now have perennial plants and it wouldn’t live forever but maybe 8 years, 10 years…it would have very deep roots and you wouldn’t have to keep cultivating it and so on.  Instead of which, perennial wheat is around – it hasn’t been highly developed but various small organisations have been doing some work on it, particularly in North America.  But it’s probably going to be 20 years, 25 years maybe until the work of their breeding and selection comes to a good fruition.  So there’s a gap there.

Wes Jackson’s working on that.

Yes, Wes Jackson and Tim Peters as well – there’s another guy working on that.  They’re not working together, they’re doing it independently but they’re both doing some fascinating work.

If there isn’t perennial wheat yet and the annual wheat’s buggered, or there’s certainly much, much less dependable, then we’re talking about perennial-based crops instead.  So what potential crops are we looking at there then?  Obviously the cereals that are grown there are a big source of carbohydrate that feed very easily into an industrial food system – what would be the most viable substitute?

Well to take you back one step, I would say that’s not how a big cereal farmer would see it.  A big cereal farmer in East Anglia would think, “Well, I need to keep growing big cereal, therefore I need water, not perennial crops.  I need water so I can keep the thing watered and keep it growing.  And you can surely irrigate wheat – you look in Australia where they grow wheat and they can grow it with masses of irrigation systems if you’ve got the water available.”  It could be done – it’s a huge infrastructure thing.  We’re not set up for massive irrigation in this country, although we would like to still get plenty of winter rainfall.  So if you can store it from winter, you could use it in the summer.

In the meantime, I think people are practically likely to try and go down that route if they can get access to water.  And it’s naïve to think people will easily or quickly move from a wheat based diet as their carbohydrate staple, to something perennial and more unusual.  It might happen slowly and hopefully it will but people are fairly conservative about what they eat and to try and change diets massively wouldn’t be a quick thing.

We’re way off walnutabix then!

Walnuts...

(Laughs)  I think we are!  Nuts are an obvious route to take if you’re looking at high energy foods, which are perennial – either carbohydrate nuts like sweet chestnut or oil based nuts like walnuts.  Both of them have fantastic potential in this country and elsewhere.  If the infrastructure was there to process it – if you dry chestnuts you can then make chestnut flour and that’s an easy ingredient for people to make stuff out of.  The processing of nuts on a small scale is labour intensive and that’s probably what puts people off buying more nuts in shells because you have to crack them and that’s a faf – it’s nice doing a few but if you have to do pounds and pounds, or kilos and kilos then it starts to become a big of a drag.

It needs those processing facilities to make them more accessible for people to use.  It’s not high tech stuff.  All the processing equipment is around in places like France – they grow a lot of nuts there – but it’s not around in this country yet because there aren’t enough growers to warrant big equipment, like cooperatives as you see in France.

I guess the other approach that you would put forward from a different perspective would be to have some genetically engineered wheat that was more drought tolerant?

Yes…..they may well be working on that – I don’t know what they’re doing.  I do know they’re trying to introduce the genes for nitrogen fixation in cereals for example, so you have to use less fertilisers – that’s the theory.  But I don’t know if they’re working on drought resistant genes, they may be.  Frankly, I think the GM route is a red herring.  Personally I think there’s probably not that many dangers in GM – there’s a lot of stuff about GM and a lot of people are very frightened about it because it’s relatively untested technology.  I think the dangers are probably over rated – I think there are probably not that many dangers.

But actually I think it is a complete red herring and a waste of time and effort going down that route because I don’t think that is the answer to solving the world’s food problems, which is what it’s claimed.  The world’s food problems at the moment are caused not by lack of varieties of wheat or whatever else – it’s much more complicated than that, socio-economic stuff, food wastage, food miles, all sorts of other stuff that actually, if you could work out all of that, you don’t need GM.  It’s irrelevant.

In terms of agroforestry, there’s the work you’re doing, there’s Martin Wolfe’s work, there’s other bits and bobs – other individual projects that others have – but in terms of it being able to scale up as something that’s seen more widely as a solution, or part of the solution to the impact that climate change is already having on food production in East Anglia, how might it scale up?  How might it take that step across?

That’s a tricky one and I work on the smaller end of agroforestry – the intensive, forest gardening type, which is obviously more appropriate to people with their own gardens, or people with small amounts of their own land.  Now I estimate there’s between 3 and 400 acres of forest gardens in this country, most of which have been started relatively recently.  In terms of larger scale agroforestry systems, and getting them adopted by farmers, that is more difficult.

Probably the biggest player of that now is the Organic Research Centre at Elm Farm, which Martin Wolfe is very involved with and they are actually taking a much more pro-active stance towards agro-forestry and putting a lot of research and doing trials – trials of different agro-forestry systems for farmers to go and visit.  They’re in Berkshire so they’re not far away from a lot of arable farmers.  So perhaps that’s going to have a big influence  in the future.

The problem with farming is that it’s all got subsidy based and farmers depend on their subsidies from grant schemes via the EU and the Common Agricultural Policy.  It’s a great big mess – that’s how it seems to me.  A very unhealthy system for farmers to have been forced or enticed onto this system where they feel they don’t have much choice but to do what the bureaucrats in Brussels hand down.  For them to start putting in agroforestry systems, half the time they find they start loosing grant money when they do that.

Although agroforestry is gradually getting into the European mentality and the CAP, it’s still very patchy and it’s not applied in the same way in every country.  So for example, in France with agroforestry systems – if you’re setting one up, you get grant money to do that.  You don’t here – we have the same rules but they’re applied very differently.  So clearly government has a role here as well because government doesn’t understand what agroforestry is and how important it can be.

So if it’s the case that the way to be able to get that very large-scale, intensive farming to move more in this direction, it’s almost that you need political lobbying at that kind of level.  And these days when that world is so evidence based, do you feel that after the 15, 20 years that you’ve been doing this work that there is now a strong enough evidence base that could underpin lobbying in that kind of way?  Could a case be put forward that’s coherent enough to shift the EU subsidy patterns more in that direction?

Alley cropping.

I think it could, particularly the large scale trials of agroforestry. There have been a lot of these – alley cropping systems and so on – from this country, from France.  A lot of research has gone on in France and there’s plenty of evidence out there.  I don’t think it’s the lack of evidence – I don’t think it’s that.  It’s perhaps a question of who’s going to do it, who’s going to take that on.  It’s not going to be me – that’s not what I do!  It’s unfortunate that it’s needed in a way because I’m a believer in actually transforming your own life and starting from that basis – affecting others by doing something good yourself.  That’s my belief.  I don’t believe in big government – I don’t think it’s good in any way to have big government.  But we’re lumbered with it and unfortunately somebody’s got to tackle them on it.  I don’t know who that’s going to be.

You don’t see that push coming from any other bodies?

Well, there’s Martin Wolfe and the Organic Research Centre in this country – they’ve done some.  And certainly Martin Wolfe has been invited up to the House of Commons on occasion to give presentations about what he does.  But last time I spoke to him he said he’d been invited up and not one MP turned up – there were some other people there but it was a room in the Houses of Parliament.  So what can you do if nobody turns up to start with… it’s a bit of a problem, isn’t it?

If you were able to throw your mind forward 20 years to that part of the country, if actually there had been a shift in policy and agroforestry was supported and enabled……at the moment you walk around that part of the country and it’s just massive, open-prairie style farming – can you describe to us what you think it could be like then?

If you were driving along a road you would see masses of trees.  It would probably develop into alley cropping systems, mainly I would think.  It still wouldn’t look like a natural environment because you’d have lines of trees – not necessarily single lines, it could be multiples lines of trees – with gaps in between with cultivated ground with wheat or other arable crops there.  But basically there would be a lot more tree cover as a proportion of the land –there’s almost none in parts of East Anglia now.

Going through that area would have a very different feel about it.  And the trees, as well as giving some benefits to the arable crops – and trees can be crop trees as well, so they could be nuts for example and as they matured and gave crops, and their crops increased, that would off-set any reduction in yields of cereals.  Obviously, as the trees get bigger and bigger, depending on what spacing you put them at, the shade increases and arable crops can’t tolerate very much shade so as the shade increases the arable crop tends to decrease in time.  If you’ve got a productive tree, you gradually move from one crop to another and you could end up, after a few decades, with mainly tree crops there.

The question I should have asked you at the beginning – it’s presumptuous everyone knows what we’re talking about – could you just give us a little elevator pitch of what agroforestry is?

Agroforestry is basically growing trees and crops – lower crops that is – in the same space.  It can vary – there’s a lot of different types of agroforestry, so probably the most intensive type are called forest gardens and that’s a very intimate mixture of trees and perennial shrubs and so on, usually on about 4 acres or not much more than that.  That’s an intensive form and at the other end of the scale there are extensive forms that are used on a much bigger scale.

In terms of arable cropping, it’s usually alley cropping in lines of trees – they may be productive trees themselves like fruit trees or nut trees or maybe timber trees for the future – with cultivated alleys in between where normal harvesting or sowing operations take place.  Or you can have, in areas like the west of Britain where there’s not so much arable land and more grassland, you can have trees in pasture, which is sometimes called silvopasture.

Silvopasture: trees mean happy cows...

Those trees can have a lot of benefits in terms of benefits to the pasture but also in terms of benefits to the animals that are grazing on the pasture.  Because animals actually love having trees around; they love the shelter of trees in hot weather, and perhaps in wet weather as well.   Generally, with the extra shelter they get, animals actually do much better than in an open grass field.  Old fashioned parkland is a kind of agroforestry system where you have scattered big trees dotted around pasture and that’s one of the very old, traditional agroforestry systems that’s been around or hundreds of years here.  So some systems have been around for a while.

My final question is, we’re talking about what’s been the grain bowl of the UK having its yields down by 25%, and presumably at this stage, in terms of research around yields and so on, could agroforestry feed the world?  If we talk about an allotment on a small scale….an allotment is always talked about as being the most productive use of a small amount of land, can a forest garden on the same size out-yield that?  Can agroforestry feed the world?

There’s lots of strands to that question.  First I’d say the overall answer is yes.  Could you have an intensive forest gardening system that yields more per unit area than an allotment?  Yes you could.  But I would argue that just looking at yields and the maximum you could get out of a piece of land is the wrong way of looking at it.  That’s what agricultural scientists have let us down to – everybody looks at what you can get out of a piece of land.  Is it enough to feed the country, the world, whatever?

From my perspective, that’s the wrong question.  The question should be, what can a piece of land provide sustainably, without degrading the environment, without reducing wildlife value dramatically, and obviously still produce useful stuff for people – which is a different question entirely.  What a piece of land can produce sustainably isn’t always as much as a field in East Anglia that has chemicals piled on all year round – fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides etc.  You probably can’t match that very easily in terms of output, with any agroforestry system.  But that’s not sustainable.

So it’s a much more complicated question.  If you start with the question, ‘What is a sustainable output?’, then that will lead you on to the inevitable question – ‘What is a sustainable human population?’.  And that’s the thing that is almost never discussed because it’s a very sensitive topic.  But it should be because actually human population can’t go on forever getting bigger and bigger because there’s only so much the earth can provide sustainably.

Thank you very much.

Context

The actual practical work of implementing STRATEGIES FOR PLUGGING THE LEAKS (5.6), making LOCAL FOOD INITIATIVES (3.10) a reality, creating a community culture of  SOCIAL  ENTERPRISE/ENTREPRENEURSHIP (5.2)  and enabling the COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP OF ASSETS (5.8) and COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE/FARMS/BAKERIES etc (5.9), all ideally in a way that has, perhaps, been identified in your ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN (5.1), will require new infrastructure, whether physical or notional, to be put into place.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The Challenge

The infrastructure required for a more localised and resilient future, the energy systems, the mills, the food systems and the abbatoirs, has been largely ripped out over the past 50 years as oil made it cheaper to work on an ever-increasingly large scale, and their reinstallation will not arise by accident.  They will need to be economically viable, supported by their local communities, owned and operated by people with the appropriate skills, and linked together.

Core Text

“ The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity.  The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”.

Winston Churchill.

The picture above shows the last working mill to close in Totnes.  It was situated in the centre of the town, was powered by the river than runs past it, and deliveries were made to and from it using a horse drawn wagon.  How’s that for a low-carbon local food enterprise?  Now it is the town’s Tourist Information Office, and a very good one at that., but clearly it is much easier to turn a flour mill into a Tourist Information Office than it is to turn a Tourist Information Office into a mill again.

Much of the infrastructure that would have traditionally supported a more local food economy, and have generated much of the employment in our communities has since been dismantled, converted into flats, converted to other uses.  Quite clearly, the infrastructure most settlements have today is completely unequipped for functioning in an energy-scarce context.  We aren’t able to grow much of our own food, process the milk from our local fields, turn our local timber into useful things, process milk into cheese, apples into cider, wool into, well, wool (clean, useable wool that is).  We will need to put it back, but it won’t look like it used to look, and it probably won’t work the way it used to either.  It will be appropriate to now, based on the best way of doing things that we have figured out thus far, and it will be managed for the benefit of the community.

So what new businesses, buildings, livelihoods and infrastructure might a Transitioned community need?   Here is a list I came up with in order to get your Transition initiative started with coming up with its own…. just a few initial thoughts…  you will notice that actually there are lots of things, lots of opportunities for local economic development, that actually require very little in the way of infrastructure, or perhaps it shifts our thinking away from a nuts and bolts interpretation of the word ‘infrastructure’:

Looks to me like a huge range of opportunities for new livelihoods.  In an interview I did with someone who grew up in Totnes in the early 1960s, he told me:

“…all of the little back streets had some kinds of artisans or builders yards or something going on in them.  You didn’t have to go very far out of the High Street before you were in light industrial premises.  All of the top of town, like Harris’s ironmongers, they had their big ironmongery shop, but on the other side they had … an agricultural machinery shop.  Can you believe it?!  There was agricultural machinery sitting there which was for sale!  They sold harrows and seed drills and things to go on the back of tractors!  They had a little showroom of all that sort of stuff.  Then they had the blacksmiths forge just round the back there”.

This diversity of businesses, workshops and enterprises gives a place a far richer, more vibrant tapestry than most places have today, with our ‘Clone Town’ High Streets and out-of-town arcades and business parks.  A more resilience community will surely be a richer and more nourishing place that what many of our towns and cities have become today. 

The Solution

Make one of the key focuses of your Transition initiative’s work and thinking the practicalities of stimulating the infrastructure required by a more localised future.  Ideas as to which will be the key pieces of infrastructure will emerge from the EDAP process.  Ensure that thinking is strategic and connected, and that it is based on considering the viability of each enterprise.  Where elements still exist, find innovative ways, such as the community support model (as in CSAs) to enable them to continue.  Where they don’t exist, your Transition initiative might create some, some might be created by social entrepreneurs, some by private businesses, and some by the local authority.

Connections to Other Ingredients

The creation of such an infrastructure will require THINKING LIKE A DESIGNER (1.4) in order to design it to be as efficient as possible, BUILDING STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS (2.12), ENGAGING THE COUNCIL (4.4) and WORKING WITH LOCAL BUSINESSES (3.12) and other organisations in the community who may well have been planning to do the same thing anyway.  It is worth thinking how such enterprises can contribute to FINANCING YOUR WORK (3.3).  The role of a Transition initiative is not, it should be remembered, to necessarily actually do all this, rather, as is captured in the ‘PROJECT SUPPORT; CONCEPT (2.13), to inspire and support it.  You may also find that you learn a lot about what might be appropriate when it comes to a new infrastructure though ORAL HISTORIES (4.7), although always with the consideration that this is not about ‘going back’, rather about applying CRITICAL THINKING (1.2) and good business planning to planning the most appropriate way forward.

Please leave any comments here.

“The process of building with bales includes the possibility of making a profound change in the fabric of human societies around the world.  In fact this vision is not exclusively a matter of straw bales: the questions we are trying to pose…. are basic: how do we build, and how does that process occur in relation to the community and to the life around us?  Straw bales happen to be the material that has inspired many to look at the process of building in a different light”.  (Steen et al.1994: xvi).

In the same way the local food movement shifts its focus from out-of-season, long supply chain, high embodied energy foods towards more locally sourced, low impact foods rooted in the local region or ‘foodshed’ (Kloppenberg et al. 1996), an emerging branch of architecture and construction examine similar transitions with building materials.  The ‘natural building movement’ (e.g. Kennedy et al. 2001, Kennedy 2004, Woolley 2006, Broome 2007, Bevan & Woolley 2008, Jones 2009) argues that an architecture based predominantly on local materials is the most appropriate for  a lower-energy context.  Seyfang (2009) noted the evolution of the natural building movement from the ideas of Schumacher’s (1974) concept of ‘appropriate technology’, through to the Vales’ (Vale & Vale 1975) concept of the ‘Autonomous House’, to Pearson’s (1989) term the ‘natural house’.

She observed how, given the need for reductions in carbon emissions from buildings (around 50% of total emissions), there is a need to go beyond focusing solely on energy efficiency and building performance, and to look at the materials and techniques developed/rediscovered by the natural building movement to scale up.  However, she noted “fundamentally different discourses, practices and governance of sustainability between the mainstream system of housing provision and green builders” (Seyfang 2009a:1), adding that “the challenge therefore is to better understand and therefore harness the creative energies of community-led solutions and adapt them for wider mainstream setting” (ibid).

Figure 5.7. Overall CO2 emissions by weight (kg) released by production of 1kg of 24 common building materials (Source: MacMath, 2000).

The concept of using local building materials in a modern context is not novel.  Seyfang (ibid.:3) wrote that “there has been a resurgence in traditional building materials which could be locally sourced from renewable or recycled materials such as strawbale, wool, cob (mud and straw mixtures), reed and thatch, as well as alternative formulations of concrete-using natural materials such as ‘papercrete’ and ‘hempcrete’”, due in part to an emerging recognition of the potential of such materials to lock up carbon, rather than to emit it (see Figure 5.7).  A number of architects working in the developing world now argue that the use of local building materials offers the advantage of sustainable materials which produce healthier buildings while also strengthening the local economy.  One of these is award-winning German architect Anna Heringer who has worked in Bangladesh to build a school, predominantly from earth and bamboo (Ashraf 2007:114).

Some commercial projects in the UK that feature local materials are already underway.  The first Council houses built using straw bale construction, by North Kesteven District Council, are soon to be completed (Shah 2009), two Council houses were built by the Suffolk Housing Society in 2002 using hemp and lime construction (Clarke 2002) and a new school in Newquay, Cornwall, is to be built from cob (Yeoman & Taylor 2006).  The challenge though, is that although these building techniques and materials have undeniable advantages in terms of embodied energy and healthy building, what is lacking, according to Seyfang (2009a:8) is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”.  Also, most of the techniques require intense manual labour and tend to be built on one-off cheap rural sites rather than in urban development contexts.  What is required, as Seyfang put it, is the natural building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime” (Seyfang 2009a:8).  This is starting to emerge with examples including prefabricated straw bale panels (MacKeown 2008), offsite construction (Sassi 2008) and hemp/lime construction (Bevan & Woolley 2008), although they still have some way to go before becoming a feature of mainstream construction.  It is instructive to note, from the oral history interviews, how the shift from traditional natural building materials to modern industrial materials did not necessarily bring the benefits that it was hoped they would (see Text Box 5.8.).

Alan recalls his grandmother, with whom he and his mother lived, keenly moving out of an old house that was a converted cider press.  “She just wanted modern.  She wanted electric fires, electric cookers, electric everything.  She wanted automatic this, that and everything.  So we moved, at my grandmother’s insistence, from this wonderful rambling old building…. to a brand new house, typical of its time.  Wooden framed, single glazed windows, open fire for a chimney which she quickly replaced with an electric fire, “I’m not having any more of that dirty coal business”.  The winters were actually colder than the previous house!  You’d wake up in the morning, and your breath would have condensed on the window, frozen on the inside. Inside it was cold, outside it was cold.  Eventually my mother paid for an electric fire to be put in so you could reach out of the bed and turn it on.  Electricity was cheap in those days”.
Text Box 5.8 The Energy Efficiency of Modern Housing in the early 1960s.    (Source: author’s oral history interview with Alan Langmaid)

A recent paper by the Prince’s Foundation (Hulme & Radford 2010) explored the economic and social impacts on local economies that the move to building systems that utilised local building materials would deliver, in particular in relation to using locally manufactured aerated clay blocks.  As well as analysing the potential of this one product, the authors reflect on the potential of scaling up the approach;

“Although this study only explored a single element of the building supply chain – structural clay blocks – these findings suggest that certain general lessons include tailoring construction techniques to local skills, designing building components which provide a range of secondary and tertiary benefits, and taking advantage of the positive impacts of simplified, generalisable approaches to complex, high-tech, specialised ones” (ibid:18)

The paper identifies a range of benefits that such an approach would bring:

• The simplicity of the systems means “it enables a local workforce to be used … this ensures that a greater proportion of economic value is captured in the local economy”
• Jobs would be created by the manufacturing of the materials
• It would also result in “professional skills development, a heightened sense of personal dignity and respect resulting from long-term professional employment, enhanced social well-being, improved social capital, healthier buildings, a more resilient building supply chain, reduced CO2 emissions, and increased longevity of the building stock” (ibid:15).

While many of the natural and local building materials and techniques outlined above have advantages from a Transition perspective, what has almost never been mentioned in the natural building literature is the potential for local materials in the retrofitting of existing buildings.  Given that, of the country’s approximately 24 million homes, at least 87% are projected to still be standing by 2050 (Kemp 2010), and that retrofitting existing homes saves 15 times more CO2 than demolishing and rebuilding them (Jowsey & Grant 2009), this is clearly an important future focus.  This theme of retrofitting is, however, picked up in the Prince’s Foundation paper; “beyond new build construction, a natural approach to materials sourcing means many of the products identified are equally suitable to retrofit in buildings of traditional construction” (ibid:19).

The recently completed 'Larch House', one of the two local Passivhauses.

Rob Scott McLeod, Technical Manager for the Building Research Establishment in Wales and the South West has been developing the concept of the ‘local passivhaus’.  A passivhaus has been defined as “a building in which thermal comfort is guaranteed solely by re-heating (or recooling) the fresh air that is required for satisfactory air quality” (NBT 2009:2).   McLeod is taking the idea one step further, seeking to build homes that reach passivhaus standard, but use predominantly local materials (McLeod 2007).  Currently under construction in South Wales are two houses built to passivhaus standard, one of them using 80% local materials (mostly timber and recycled newspaper, ‘local’ here being defined as from within South Wales), and one aiming to go beyond 90%.  The approach is one of on-site construction, site-specific design, minimisation of waste, and of a close coupling of design and materials (McLeod 2010:pers.int.).  Some of the ‘natural’ building materials discussed above are not, as yet, felt appropriate for inclusion in such buildings, hempcrete due to not demonstrating sufficiently high levels of insulation, and strawbale due to not yet having sufficient certification to satisfy insurers.  The key to reaching and exceeding 90% is training local companies to build windows to passivhaus standard using local timber, and this is already happening in South Wales as part of these projects.

The area of building and housing was explored in the TTT EDAP.  It suggested how the current building standards could be improved and used to not just address carbon emissions but also to build resilience and strengthen local economies.  One key element of this is what was called the ‘Transition Code for Sustainable Homes’.  This suggests that by 2014, SHDC has taken a proactive stance of low carbon building, developing the Transition Zero Carbon Homes Code (see Table 5.4.).

Such an approach would lead to a more vernacular building style and opening up of a potential market for local manufacturing and processing of building materials.  This principle of what Shuman (2008) called ‘import substitution’ would mean that money currently leaving the area for imported building materials would be retained in the local economy, creating new livelihoods and new small-scale industries.   Some of the building materials that could potentially be produced within Totnes and district are identified in Table 5.5.

SP1 reflected on the practicality of such an approach of deliberately promoting and prioritising local materials through the planning process.  He argued that, in the current context of planning driven by land availability and commercial viability, such restrictions would be unfeasible.  “That’s quite a challenge”, he argued, “because the planning system isn’t all-powerful.  It has to work within the government framework (i.e. Building Regulations, the Appeals process and so on), and of course you can set all those targets.  However, you have to be confident that if a developer says “no, I’m not doing it”, you are able to defend it at a planning appeal, because if you make a hash of it you’re going to get pretty big costs against you”.  He continued;

“[We can’t] say “you must use….” because then you almost create a ransom for the developer to be tied in with those local businesses.  Now I don’t think you’d ever get that through the planning system, where you actually created a complete local monopoly because the developer would still want to go for value”.

Simon Fairlie, a planning consultant specialising in low impact development agrees that imposing ‘green’ conditions through the Planning System is close to impossible.  According to Fairlie;

“At the moment even conditions imposing Code 3[1] are being overturned at appeal, because government guidance is so weak. Local materials would be resisted by builders as being “anticompetitive” and both a Tory or a Labour government would see it that way” (Fairlie 2010 pers.comm).

Some recent developments however offer the prospect of a more proactive, but less problematic approach to insistence on local building materials.  The first is “the Merton Rule” introduced by Merton Borough Council in 2003, and widely copied in other council plans.  It demands that at least 10% of energy needs must come from on-site generation, and comes into force at a threshold of 10 homes (residential) or 1,000m² (non-residential).  North Devon chose to demand 15%, and Kirlees Council are currently considering 30% by 2011, and the Merton Rule is now part of Plymouth’s Local Development Framework.  The Merton Rule was sustained on appeal from the Building Federations which argued that it made developments commercially unviable.  The Merton Rule is now endorsed in PPS1 Climate Change[2] which requires all UK local planning authorities to adopt a ‘Merton Rule’ policy.  As Fairlie (ibid) points out, renewables are different from local materials, given that renewables can be sourced from anywhere in the world and hence circumnavigates concerns about ‘protectionism’ and lack of ‘competitiveness’.

The Merton Rule has since been incorporated into the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH), which sets out the stages of the UK’s move towards zero-carbon housing by 2016.  It includes the requirement for on-site generation which rises as the Code level rises, with the expectation that Code 6 buildings install “on or near-site zero carbon generation for all energy needs” (Hall 2008:89).  In terms of building materials however, CSH is disappointing.  It defines a ‘zero carbon home’ as one in which “net carbon emissions resulting from ALL energy used in the dwelling is zero” (DCLG 2008a:46), focusing on the performance of the final building rather than the carbon embodied in the materials.

If a legislative approach to scaling up the use of local building materials looks unfeasible, how about a criteria-based system?  This, Fairlie (2010:pers.comm) argues, would “create an opening for best practice in places where conventional development would not be allowed”.  The best current example of this is the Welsh Assembly’s ‘(Draft) Technical Advice Note 6. Planning for Sustainable Rural Economies’, published in July 2009.  This presents the concept of ‘One Wales: One Planet’.  It states that:

“the Sustainable Development Scheme, “One Wales: One Planet” includes an objective that within the lifetime of a generation, Wales should use only its fair share of the earth’s resources, and our ecological footprint be reduced to the global average availability of resources – 1.88 global hectares per person” (Welsh Assembly Government 2008:21).

This objective is then linked to planning, and in particular to the criteria that “planning applications should be accompanied by supporting information confirming that the development will be zero carbon in construction and use” (ibid:23).  Fairlie notes that “priority for local, renewable building materials can be quite easily written into a policy like this, there are no anticompetitive issues, because it is a “consumer choice” rather than a trade restriction, and builders and other vested interests do not object” (Fairlie 2010: pers.comm).

There is a chicken and egg situation here though of course.  If SHDC tomorrow were to pass a policy enshrining that a given percentage of materials were mandatory in all new buildings, there would not currently be capacity to meet demand.  Conversely, nobody would invest in setting up such businesses without the knowledge that those markets will be in place.  Hence the suggestion of a change in planning policy, flagged now, to come into effect in, say 2014.  Perhaps the key is to begin developing buildings in the area that utilise these materials, in order to start creating demand and to lead by example, an idea explored in more depth in 7.4 in an exploration of the role social enterprise might play in Transition.

In terms of what is emerging through TTT and other local initiatives, some initiatives are starting to gain momentum in modelling this approach to construction.  As with energy, housing projects are much higher capital and longer term, although some strong projects have begun to emerge.  These include;

• The Totnes Sustainable Construction company, set up to pioneer these kinds of development
• Transition Homes, which is proposing to build a small settlement of low impact houses on the Dartington Estate
• ATMOS Project (see Section 7.9.), which aims to convert the derelict Dairy Crest site into a mixture of affordable housing and business start-up units
• Work is also beginning in relation to the drafting of a policy along the lines of those outlined above.

As Seyfang (2009a) notes, there is more to low carbon, community-led building than just materials.  Other elements include what she calls ‘new living arrangements’, such as co-housing and low impact development, as well as the importance of communities owning and developing their own assets.

No questions specific to housing were asked in the survey or in the focus groups, although in the focus group of work and skills, unhappiness about the most recent large development in the town, the Southern Area development, and its low standards of energy efficiency, were voiced.  One participant said “why did they put heating in those Southern Area houses?  Why didn’t they make them energy efficient?  All of them….”  This was picked up in more depth in the in-depth interviews, which highlighted the fact that SHDC’s insistence on the lowest possible levels of energy efficiency in new buildings currently runs counter to the approach set out above.  DC2 said “SHDC don’t impose the highest standards in new build, which I think disappoints a lot of us”.  SP1 justified this approach when I asked him “the perception that is often voiced in terms of SHDC’s take on climate change and building standards is that rather than some other local authorities in the UK who take a visionary and bold stance, SHDC is happier taking the minimum set by Government?”

He replied that SHDC had tried to impose more stringent standards, but “you’ve got to make it viable.  You can make your visions so challenging to deliver that nothing happens”.  When asked whether actually taking a more stringent approach would mean that that would be precisely why businesses would want to come to the town, i.e. a selling point rather than just an insurmountable obstacle,  he replied “yes, that could be a choice… my gut response would be that it would mean we had very little development in the town over the next few years.  There’s an incredible pressure for housing in Totnes, and there are people coming through our reception facing homelessness.  It is getting that balance between the vision and somebody facing homelessness today”.

SHDC’s approach is hardly unique.  According to Gibbs et al. (1998), their approach is common.  Sustainable development or environmental issues, they argue, appear to be a relatively unimportant concern for local authorities.  Among the reasons cited for this are the limited influence local authorities are able to exert over private businesses and individuals behaviour, due, in part, to constraints imposed by central government.  Sustainable development, they argued, is “a fundamentally political concept” (ibid:unpaginated).  Ultimately, “creating and keeping jobs are ranked higher than environmental protection, and members remain to be convinced that the two areas are compatible” (ibid).  Although written in 1996, the above could still apply to SHDC in 2010.

[2] Planning Policy Statement: Planning and Climate Change.  Supplement and Planning Policy Statement: December 2010 (CLG 2006). States its aim as being to set out: “how spatial planning should contribute to reducing emissions and stabilising climate change (mitigation) and take into account the unavoidable consequences (adaptation)”.

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