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)”.

References

Ashraf, K.K. (2007) This is not a building!  Hand-making a school in a Bangladeshi village. Architectural Design 77 (6). 114-117.

Bevan, R, Woolley, T. (2008) Hemp Lime Construction: a guide to building with hemp lime composites. IHS BRE Press.

Broome, J. (2007) The Green Self-build Book: How to Design and Build Your Own Eco-home. Dartington, Green Books.

Clarke, S. (2002) Client Report.  Final Report on the Construction of the Hemp Houses at Haverhill, Suffolk. Suffolk Housing Society Ltd.

Fairlie, S. (2010) Personal Interview.

Gibbs, D, Longhurst, J, Braithwaite, C. (1998) Struggling with Sustainability: weak and strong interpretations of sustainable development within local authority policy. Environment and Planning A 30. 1351-1365.

Hulme, J, Radford, N. (2010) Sustainable Supply Chains That Support Local Economic Development. Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment.

Jones, B. (2009) Building with Straw Bales: A Practical Guide for the UK and Ireland (2^nd edition). Green Books, Dartington.

Jowsey, E, Grant, J.  (2009) Greening the Existing Housing Stock.  Sheffield Hallam University.

Kemp, M. (ed) (2010) Zero Carbon Britain 2030. Centre for Alternative Technology Publications.

Kennedy, J. (2004) Building without Borders: Sustainable Construction for the Global Village. New Society Publishers

Kennedy, J.F., Smith, M.G., Wanek, C. (2001) (eds) The Art of Natural Building: design, construction, resources. New Society Publishing.

Kloppenburg, J, Hendrickson, J, Stevenson, G.W. (1996) Coming in to the foodshed. Agriculture and Human Values 13 (3). 33-42

McLeod, R.S. (2007) Passivhaus – Local House. MSc thesis, University of East London.

McLeod, R.S. (2010) Personal Interview.

NBT (2009) Timber Frame System Passivhaus: the science of nature, the future of construction. Natural Building Technologies http://www.natural-building.co.uk/PDF/Pavatex/090216_Technical_Manual_PASSIVHAUS.pdf

Pearson, D. (1990) The Natural House Book: creating a healthy, harmonious ecologically sound home. Prentice Hall.

Sassi, P. (2008) Taking Construction off-site. In: Hall, K. (ed) 2008.  The Green Building Bible, volume 1. Essential information to help you make your home, buildings and outdoor areas less harmful to the environment, the community and your family. Green Building Press.

Schumacher, E.F. (1974) Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered. London, Sphere Books.

Seyfang, G. (2009a) Community action for sustainable housing: building a low carbon future. Energy Policy doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2009.10.027

Shah, D. (2009) Council to build houses of straw. BBC News.  20^th January 2009.  Retrieved from  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lincolnshire/8266515.stm on 22nd January 2010.

Shuman, M. (2008) The Small-mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition. Berrett-Koehler.

Steen, A, Steen, B, Bainbridge, D, Eisenberg, D. (1995) The Straw Bale House. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Vale, B, Vale, R. (1975) The Autonomous House. New York, Universe Books.

Woolley, T. (2006) Natural Building: A Guide to Materials and Techniques. Crowood Press.

They argue that given the upsurge of interest in biomass, what one might call “The Dash for Logs”, the use of biomass boilers increasing 25% in 2 years, and Government promoting it as zero carbon fuel, it is time to stop and take check of what this would actually look like were it scaled up significantly.  They highlight two main concerns.

The first is “is biomass really low carbon?”  The argument usually goes that burning wood is carbon neutral because trees absorb the carbon emitted by burning wood.  This, however, they argue is a flawed way of looking at it.  The time when we need to cut emissions is now (well 30 years ago actually), not in 20 years when a tree is locking up carbon.  As one of the few natural ways we have of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, to burn wood, they argue, is the worst thing to do with it.  It is much more sensible to store that carbon indefinitely by using the wood for building, in furniture etc.  Burning wood actually produces carbon emissions similar to those of burning coal, twice those of burning natural gas, as well as all the attendent problems of particulate emissions.

They argue that a better approach would be to use the natural gas far more efficiently, and see wood as a way of absorbing emissions from burning that gas, rather than burning the wood itself.  Also, wood that is still growing still absorbs more CO2 than newly planted or newly felled forests, which actually emit more carbon than they sequester. At a time, they argue, when what should be being promoted is the growing of timber to lock up carbon, and then the long term storage of that carbon in buildings, the incentives through policy and various grants are to burn it.

Their second concern centres around lack of available supply, in effect asking the question “Can Britain Heat Itself?” from its indigenous resource.  they cite estimates of sustainable biomass energy potential as being around 10% of total energy use, and the available resouce globally is contracting rather than expanding.  Even sequestering the emissions caused by burning gas through the planting of new trees is not, they argue up to the job, trying to do so to sequester emissions from wood burning is simply not going to work… they write “our point is the biomass is a lot worse than we thought, not that gas is a lot better”.

This leads on to a discussion of energy security, something of great interest to Transition Culture readers.  Would a big rise in the use of biomass, the installation of many hundreds of thousands of woodstoves lead to the UK being more energy secure?  They argue not, that actually timber as a fuel is a more limited resource, and that ‘peak wood’ would arrive sooner than peak gas.  Indeed the last historic occurence of ‘peak wood’ was only overcome “with the grudging acceptance of coal as a replacement for biomass”.  Those who already heat their homes with wood are seeing steep rises in the prices of wood, some providers importing timber from overseas in order to meet demand.  “Suddenly”, they write, “Russian gas feels like the secure option!”

So where does their paper leave us?  They conclude that “the only sure source of energy in an uncertain future is what Amory Lovins called Negawatts – that is “energy conserved or not required thanks to radical energy efficiency measures”.  In my own home, this paper has prompted a rethink.  Rather than installing a woodstove, would that money be better spent on maximising energy efficiency throughout the building?  What else could we do?  I am getting quotes for a range of things and will lay my dilemmas out in front of you all soon for your thoughts…. but there is, as they say, no such thing as a free lunch.

For me, some of this comes back to the debates about community-focused responses and self-focused ones.  If everyone installs woodburning stoves, might we end up back in the age of smogs?  Already on my street 3 homes have them, and you can tell when they are lit.  Are we better to explore group solutions, anaerobic digestion for example, which might still be able to supply us with gas (albeit to far more efficient homes than at present) or other large scale renewables, rather than all fracturing down into small off-the-grid bubbles?

There is no way of keeping warm, illuminated and entertained that doesn’t involve emitting carbon in some way, and the real savings and reductions only come from learning to live well with less.  Certainly looking back at where we have reduced energy use over the last few years, it has mostly come from mindfulness, turning things off, turning things down and from improved insulation.  First thing I did after reading this was to track down a windows engineer who came and overhauled my 15 year-old PVC double glazed doors which have, over time, twisted and shifted so that in winter cold winds rattle through them.  Now they are beautifully tight and sealed and will make a big difference over the winter.  Not straightforward is it, any of this?

Transition West Kirby want new allotments. When do they want them? Now! Whadda we want... etc. etc.

April brought lots more lovely projects for you to enjoy and share…  From Australia, the West Hobart Environment Network (or WHEN), a member of Transition Tasmania, enjoyed a relaxed ‘produce swap’ under the shade of a very large tree, and they’ve also kindly shared with us Annie’s recipe for no-knead bread…perfect for the lazy ones like me!  TT Blackwood had a busy day giving out seeds and sharing knowledge on how to grow them in a forest setting, finding new skills to share, and raising awareness about Transition. And some ideas from Sonya on taking small steps to big lifestyle changes that will help us live more lightly on the Earth.

TT Invercargill in New Zealand has been given some land to establish a community garden, wonderful news! If you could just cast your minds back…you may remember from last month a piece on Berm Bombing in NZ, and I was keen to know what a berm is, so I did a bit of googling… in some parts of the world, wisegeek tells me, a berm is a mound of earth, usually constructed by humans. In New Zealand, however, it’s quite simply a lawn, I’m told here…so ‘bombing’ them (not literally) is a great idea!

Over in the US, Hancock County Transition Towns had a very successful training, and have also shared with us a beautiful song by a beautiful voice. And congratulations, celebrations, champagne, fanfare, cheers… The 54^th US Transition Initiative has just Unleashed, this time it’s T Bloomington.  Up in Canada, we have some lovely pics of TT Powell River and lots of washing hanging out! (the washing has an important purpose)… and here’s an enjoyable little movie of TT Edmonton’s journey towards resilience….

In the UK, TT Exmouth has been busily encouraging the town council to put up energy efficient LED lights on the seafront, and their efforts have been rewarded as they’re soon to be installed! TT Marlow successfully launched their Solar 100 Project to get residents generating energy from their rooftops, with a target of 100 solar systems within a year. And have a look at this:… TT Worthing’s Post-Carbon Gazette.  It’s great!

At this happy time of year, gardening takes over the hearts and minds of many people as they get out into the fresh air to create new raised beds, plant seeds, and share in the work at their community gardens…  Here are lots of pictures of Ealing Transition Community Garden, and Grow N4, the food group for TT Finsbury Park, has been very busy planting urban spaces with orchards of apples, cherries, grapes, soft fruit, rhubarb and herbs. Work continues also on the Transition Canterbury allotment, and they continue to blog beautifully about it!  The idea of a ‘Transition Allotment’ looks like it might be taking off in Brighton too, in Tunbridge Wells, Bramcote and Wollaton, Ashtead, Forest Row, and many others besides.  This idea of ‘community allotments’ seems to be taking off, with Transition West Kirby having done some great research and campaigning on the matter.  On a slightly less practical note, if you ever need a good reason for a food fight, TT Cardiff has found a good one, campaigning against food waste by, er, wasting loads of food… (which would otherwise have been thrown away apparently…).

Congratulations this month to PEDAL, or TT Portobello, which has won a Climate Challenge Fund award for various food projects including an orchard, and also to bring energy saving measures to Portabello residents. TT Norwich is busily encouraging cycle paths and community orchards, and is actively engaged in saving toads on the toad patrol…quite a lot of them too!… TT Haslemere brings news of their green fair, community garden and other activities in their monthly Herald column…  On to other news now beside energy and food… TT Kingston held their Unleashing and made a movie, which is available here for you to watch!

Preparations for TT Tooting’s colourful lively Trashcatchers’ Carnival are going on well, and you can watch pictures and movies to get an early taster of how wonderful it’s going to be! Here is one of those films….

TT Balham held an open mic night and threw in a bit of bartering to the mix of action…sounds fun! In Bournemouth, the Lib Dem candidate has said he wants the town to become a TT… At Southampton University, the Transition initiative is gaining momentum… and here we have some great footage from the Transition SE Conference.

If you’re in Kinsale, Ireland, then take a ride on the environmentally friendly Kinsale Road Train, supported by TT Kinsale. As well as providing a guided tour of the area, the train is also a community service to the nearby retirement village. Here’s a little write up of a meeting with Rob Hopkins on his recent toothache-plagued trip to Dublin, which brought together the ‘founders of two global, groundbreaking sustainability movements’.  TT Kinsale hits the headlines again as it gains increasing support from their local Labour Party leader.

And for the whole world, we have a fantastic trailer of Sara’s and Emilio’s film, Words from the Edge.  This is just a taster, not even an official trailer, but it gives a taster anyway.

Finally, Transition Town Totnes just published its long-awaited Energy Descent Action Plan (not least by them), the UK’s first, and its accompanying website.  The formal launch is tomorrow and everyone is welcome.  Congrats to everyone involved.  We look forward to hearing what May will bring!

With thanks once again to Helen and the wonder that is Google Alerts….

…and here’s mine….

Coppiced trees, Glounbrack.

My in-laws used to live in a house which had about a quarter of an acre of overgrown woodland.  In about 1998, we stripped out all the brambles, coppiced the wood (sycamore and hazel) and planted new hazel and sweet chestnut into the gaps.  The woodland is down an old lane which was by now quite overgrown, but once I got into the wood, the regrowth was very impressive.

The work we did produced a lot of firewood, and left the wood looking very open and bare, with most of the trees reduced to stumps.  These poles could now be harvested and used for all kinds of different uses, and within 6 or 7 years they’d be back again.  Interesting how different the woodland felt with its dense regrowth, as opposed to when it was freshly coppiced.

Acacias at Glounbrack and The Hollies

One of the trees I mostly keenly experimented with in plantings at various places was Acacia melanoxylon or Blackwood, a fast-growing acacia which is also a nitrogen fixer.  It can be planted in its own right as a timber tree (making a good, solid, durable timber), or as a nursery crop, given its nitrogen fixing qualities.  Although one reads about it as being fast growing, seeing a few that I had planted I saw just how fast growing they are!  These ones (see left, growing behind a willow hedge we had planted which is now regularly coppiced), also planted at Glounbrack, were now huge, at least 30 feet.

There was another that I saw at The Hollies which I had planted there a year later, which looked huge, and when I spoke to Donal who now lives there, he told me that the top half of the tree was blown off in a storm last year, and it had been twice that height!  It can also be coppiced, making it a great, fast-growing, albeit non-native, multi-purpose tree.  It is also rather beautiful.

Coppice / mixed plantation, The Hollies.

On New Years Day 2001, a few of us gathered together on a freezing cold West Cork morning at The Hollies to plant a field as a woodland.  We had designed it as a mixed planting, hazel coppice on the north side, a wide ride, or access road, running through the middle, and a mixed planting of larch, ash, rowan and other trees, to the south.  It was cold, but with the help of a few friends, we got all the trees in during the day.  During my time there, the trees got established, but were still quite small by the time we left.  Visiting after 4 years’ break, the growth was noticeable.  The hazels had already had their first coppicing a year or so ago, being cut down to stumps to encourage their sending up a number of shoots.  They were ably demonstrating the ability of broadleaved trees to not be killed when cut back, rather to send up shoots which can, depending on when you cut them, be used for a wide range of uses (this plantation is intended mainly as a reliable and ongoing source of firewood).

The mixed woodland’s growth was striking.  The larch had really got away and were about 20 feet tall.  Everything was now established and it was starting to have the feel of a woodland.  It was almost at the point of needing to start to coppice some of the trees.  The idea in the design was that some of the trees, the ash in particular, was intended to be coppiced as an understory to the larch, the cherry and some of the others, which were intended to form an overstorey.  The idea with the ride, which runs east/west, is that it creates south-facing suntraps in which to plant fruit trees.  However, these have yet to be planted, but would already find themselves in a sheltered sunny spot.

Red Alder, The Hollies

Red alder (Alnus rubra) is an amazing tree.  Alder as a species grows very vigorously on wet soils, and produces a very high quality, dense timber.  The alder that has been traditionally grown here, Alnus glutinosa, was used for making clogs and machine parts, given its density and rot resistance.  Red alder is a variety I read about in Agroforestry News as a potentially highly useful tree for temperate climates.  In the US, where it is seen as a weed, it is also cultivated for its timber, and used in the same way that IKEA use whatever the wood is that they use in their furniture.  These red alders were planted on the same cold New Years Day as the trees above, and established themselves very very fast.  It had been slowed down slightly perhaps by the bracken that had surrounded it and not been cleared, but even so, it had grown into a fine tall, straight tree, and will, in 15-20 years, offer some useful timber to whoever is living there then.

Reflections

So there you have it, if no other lessons can be learnt from my sock-saturating stomp around the wet grass of West Cork visiting trees, it is that if you plant trees, they will grow.  If you make the intention that you are going to plant them, you design the plantings well, and you get out there and put them in, they will grow.  If you want to place a perspective in your life which straddles time, which enables you to really feel your place in the flow of time, a kind of measuring stick of how time passes that you can feel on a visceral level, plant trees.  It’s like the measurements on the door frames of childrens’ heights that many parents do.  Seeing the stage where they get beyond the grass, and start suppressing it with its leaf fall, and become a woodland, gives a similar sense of pride and sense of a job well done as one gets when your children become more independent, learn to tie their shoe laces.

As a generation which has less of a sense of place, who have grown up always on the move, and who answer the question “where are you from?” with a puzzled look, planting trees means that a part of us is always rooted to that place.  We can return to reflect on our own impermanence, the passing of time, and the power of the day our intention to plant a tree stepped across into the lifting of a spade, the slinging of the bag of saplings over the shoulder, and the stepping out, with our breath hanging in the frosty early morning air, to plant a woodland.  As we endeavour with our work on Transition initiatives, we have that same sense of working with intention but no guarantee of success, but in years to come, our work will also surely likewise be something we will be able to return to and reflect on, and to measure the passing of time against.