‘Transition Together’, the street-by-street behaviour change programme developed by Transition Town Totnes and now being piloted in 10 other communities, has just completed analysing the data that has come back from the first 4 groups, comprising 32 households in Totnes.  They have completed all 7 of the sessions set out in the workbook, and the data offers a fascinating first look at whether the process works or not.  The results from the other 31 groups currently underway are expected this Autumn.  Here, Fiona Ward of Transition Together shares the results that have emerged. 

Carbon and financial savings so far

Total carbon savings pa: 38.9 tonnes

Total financial savings pa: £19,236

Average carbon savings per household pa: 1.2 tonnes

Average financial savings per household pa: £601

Projection – by the time all 35 groups or 278 households have completed the programme by end of Round 2 in March 2011:

Estimated total carbon savings pa: 338 tonnes

Estimated total financial savings pa: £167,109

One of the Bridge Road Transition Together group's meetings.

The carbon conversion ratings used have all been approved by CRED at the University of East Anglia (the guys behind the gov’s Act on Co2 carbon measures) and are conservative. We have not been able to apply credible carbon and financial savings to all actions therefore the actual results will likely be higher than reported here, and account mostly for home energy and water use savings.

This also doesn’t take into account that the household will likely take on  more of the carbon saving actions  in the workbook once the ‘official’ T-Tog programme has ended – e.g. some of the groups are going round a 2^nd time off their own initiative, and we are not tracking these additional savings. However, some of the actions are of course highly variable in savings, and we are more confident in some measures than others.

Numbers and types of actions

On average each households has undertaken 8 actions from the workbook (these are the only actions that we count in the figures above). They state they had already done, before starting T-Tog, 17 of the workbook actions and that they plan to do 2 more actions.

Top 5 most popular ‘new’ actions:

• Know how much energy you are using (monitor your usage in your home)
• Be a real turn off (always turn things off at the wall when not in use)
• Control your heat (know how to use your heating system and thermostat)
• Know how much you are using (monitor your water use at home)
• Buy local & seasonal foods

Bottom 3 least popular ‘new’ actions:

• Use car clubs
• Get on your bike – cycle don’t drive (tho this is highest ‘plan to do this’ item)
• Loft  insulation (most have already done it)

Top 3 ‘already done’ actions:

• Recycle (food, glass, plastics, tins…everything!)
• Washing clothes (full loads, low temps, wear clothes longer)
• Minimise food waste

Top 3 ’I plan to do this’ actions:

• Get on your bike – cycle don’t drive
• Draught proofing
• Grow your own

Qualitative feedback The 5 (of 10) measures on which we show most impact are:

• I feel well informed about peak oil and climate change.
• I understand how these 2 issues affect me, my family, my local community, and the planet.
• I know what practical, effective actions I can take to reduce the potential impacts on me/others.
• I’m aware there are simple, easy things I can do to reduce household costs – and I know how to do them.
• I feel positive about the future.

It is fascinating to note that from just the first 4 groups that have been assessed, total savings have been £19,236, pretty much what it took to develop and pilot Transition Together.  Given that it is estimated that by the time the 35 initial groups have completed the programme, total savings are projected to be £167,109, it is an impressive return on investment.  The Transition Streets project, which builds off the Transition Together project is now at the stage of installing PV arrays across Totnes, and during August the town’s Civic Hall will have its roof clad in PV, with a launch event in September.

For more information on Transition Together, or running the programme in your community, contact the T-Tog team….

Often, the terms ‘localism’ and ‘localisation’ are used relatively interchangeably, but it is important at this stage to note that they refer to different things.   Stoker (2007) defined ‘New Localism’ as “a strategy aimed at devolving power and resources away from central control and towards front line managers, local democratic structures and local consumers and communities, within an agreed framework of national minimum standards and policy priorities”.  For Morphet (2004:292) it is “a means of improving democratic accountability, providing a local mandate, and producing inter-agency approaches to localities”.  Localism can therefore be seen as being primarily concerned with governance, while localisation, on the other hand, is a wider, more far-reaching adjustment of economic focus from the global to the local.  Hines (2000a:27) defines localisation as “a process which reverses the trend of globalisation by discriminating in favour of the local”.  Shuman (2000:6) adds that:

“…it means nurturing locally owned businesses which use local resources sustainably, employ local workers at decent wages and serve primarily local consumers.  It means becoming more self sufficient, and less dependent on imports.  Control moves from the boardrooms of distant corporations and back to the community where it belongs”.

One might tentatively argue that localism therefore focuses on political structures, the devolution of governance, the application of subsidiarity to democracy, while localisation focuses instead on the practicalities of building more localised economies, in terms of food, energy, manufacturing and so on, which may necessarily include governance (a distinction explored in Table 6.1).

Assumptions shared by Localism and Localisation

• Local people should have more control over local services and decision-making
• Stronger local government and increased accountability is a good thing
• Community ownership and the Right to Buy are important

Assumptions Not Shared by Localism and Localisation

• Localisation is underpinned by an ethic of sustainability: this does not necessarily enter into localism
• Localisation embodies the Proximity Principle, arguing that where money flows from and to are important, and that what can be produced locally should be consumed locally where possible: localism sees itself within the context of business-as-usual economic globalisation
• Localism seeks to reduce the role of the state and of ‘big government’, localisation can happen within the context of stronger government, indeed it argues that addressing global issues such as climate change or resource scarcity will require strong government alongside community engagement
• Localism seeks to transfer state assets (schools, hospitals etc.) into community ownership: localisation focuses more on control rather than ownership of those assets, and seeks to bring key local functions (food production, building development, energy generation) currently in the private sector into community ownership
• Localisation argues for a different relationship between consumers and producers, localism has no such critique
• Localisation seeks to increase tightness of feedbacks, so that consequences of resource use are felt closer to home (i.e. local food production): localism operates in the context of economic globalisation, with no concept of feedbacks.

Table 6.1. The assumptions shared and not shared by localism and localisation (Source: the author).

For Daly and Cobb (1994), the term subsidiarity means that “power should be located as close to people as possible in the smallest units that are feasible” (ibid:174).  For Ziman (2003:63) it means “decisions should be taken at the lowest competent level in an organisational hierarchy”.  Table 5.1 gave an indication of what subsidiarity could look like in terms of local economics, but in terms of political organisation it is a greyer area.  The term does have its doubters; as Robinson (1996:unpaginated) put it “the chief advantage of subsidiarity seems to be its capacity to mean all things to all interested parties – simultaneously”.

Others add that there is little to be gained by academic debates around subsidiarity, as it is entirely place-specific and the conclusions reached will always be contextual and dynamic (McKean 2002).  For Blond of Respublica (2010a: pers.int.), the role of national government is to enable “the highest level of subsidiarity possible”.  In the context of Totnes, subsidiarity could be interpreted as referring to decision-making being brought as close as possible to the community level, the community response to the Totnes DPD discussed above offers a glimpse of what subsidiarity, in terms of planning, might look like in practice.

Localisation applies the concept of subsidiarity to economic life, as well as to the political.  While localism can perfectly well take place within a globalised growth-focused economy, a ‘business as usual’ scenario (see 2.4.3.) (hence its appeal to mainstream political parties), whereas localisation carries within it an inherent social justice and resource-focused critique of globalisation (Bailey et al. 2010, North 2010), emerging from concepts such as Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 2004), Steady State economics (Daly 1977) and Schumacher’s (1974) concept of ‘Buddhist economics’.  Localisation is a social movement and a principle for social and economic reorganisation, whereas localism is a principle for political organisation.

Although the question of what local government focused on resilience-building and Transition might look like will be explored below, a useful place to start is in considering how the national political context might best enable relocalisation.  Porritt (2008:47) argues that “the tension between centralisation and decentralisation is ever-present in terms of alternatives to the current world”.  In national politics, the concept of localism is very much in vogue at the moment (Parvin 2009).  David Cameron, as part of his ‘Big Society’ concept, has spoken of “pushing power down as far as possible” and of “a massive, radical redistribution of power” (Cameron 2009:unpaginated).

Former Labour leader Gordon Brown called for “a vibrant, reformed local democracy [rooted in] a renewed focus on the devolution of powers and responsibilities to local government” (Blears 2008:51), and the 2006 Power Inquiry called for “the introduction of institutional and cultural changes which place a new emphasis on the requirement that policy and decision-making includes rigorous and meaningful input from ordinary citizens”.

The 2008 White Paper “Communities in Control: real people, real power”, proposed the shifting of “power, influence and responsibility away from existing centres of power into the hands of local communities and individual citizens” and suggested that Participatory Budgeting (see 6.3.3) be undertaken in all local authorities by 2012.  It is worthwhile noting that the concept of localisation, with its more radical ambitions and greater perceived challenge to current-day economics, is never used at this level, rather ‘localism’, focused largely on political governance, is the term of choice.

The previous Labour government made ‘modernisation’, referring to constitutional and democratic modernisation, part of its agenda since its election in 1997.  Most obviously, it introduced Scottish and Welsh devolution, regional elected assemblies in England, a London Mayor and Assembly, but perhaps less obviously, Pratchett (2004:11) points out, it has introduced “modernisation of internal political management structure, experimentation with new electoral processes and technologies, through to exhortation for greater citizen involvement and engagement in local affairs”.  In spite of this, it has been criticised for achieving the opposite, for continuing centralisation strategies and ‘control freakery’ (Wilson 2003).  Stoker (2001:3) argues that New Labour’s approach to central-local relations can be seen as “a classic example of a hierarchist approach”.

Wilson (2003:26) is careful to distinguish between approaches and language used by New Labour, and actual results; noting “an involvement in and commitment to ‘dialogue’ and ‘partnership’, but dialogue does not necessarily convert to influence, and multi-level participation is different from multi-level governance”.  The UK, after 13 years of Labour government, is still one of the most centralised states in the Western world (Hambleton & Sweeting 2004).  Lancaster City Councillor John Whitelegg (2010 pers.int.) is suspicious of politicians who use the term localism.  “Britain is grossly over-centralised and I think that whenever a national politician starts talking about ‘localism’ their nose starts going into Pinnochio mode”.   For Blond (2010a:pers.int), genuine localisation “requires a political economy if it’s going to work”.  Part of this, he argues, is “local councils and local authorities having genuinely independent revenue-raising capacity, the ability to vary, for instance, the national non-domestic business rate, the ability to generate new forms of revenue and share in those new forms of revenue” (ibid), a power that can only be bestowed by national government.

References

Bailey, I, Hopkins, R, Wilson, G. (2010) Some things old, some things new: The spatial representations and politics of change of the peak oil relocalisation movement. Geoforum 41(4) 595-605.

Blears, H. (2008) The Decentralised State. In: Milburn et al (eds). Beyond Whitehall: a new vision for a progressive state. Progressonline.co.uk.

Blond, P. (2010a) Personal interview

Cameron, D. (2009) A New Politics. The Guardian.  Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/25/david-cameron-a-new-politics on 20 March 2010.

Daly, H.E, Cobb, J.B. (1994) For the Common Good: redirecting the economy toward community, the environment and a sustainable future. Boston, Beacon Press.

Daly, H.E. (1977). Steady-state Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company

Hambleton, R, Sweeting, D. (2004) US-style leadership for English Local Government. Public Administration Review. 64 (:4. July/August 2004

Hines, C. (2000a) Localisation: A Global Manifesto. London, Earthscan Publishing Ltd.

McKean, M.A. (2002) Nesting institutions for complex common-pool resource systems.  In: Graham, J, Reeves, I.R, Brunkhorst, D.J. Proceedings of the 2^nd International Symposium on Landscape Futures. Institute for Rural Futures: University of New England.

Meadows, D.H, Randers, J, Meadows, D.L. (2004) Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update . London, Earthscan Publishing Limited.

Morphet, J. (2004) The New Localism. Town and Country Planning.  73 (10). 291-3.

North, P. (2010a) Eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change – a sympathetic critique. Geoforum 41 (4) 585-594.

North, P. (2010a) Eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change – a sympathetic critique. Geoforum 41 (4) 585-594.

North, P. (2010b) Local Money: how to make it happen in your community. Transition Books/Green Books.

Porritt, J.  (2005) Capitalism – as if the world matters. London, Earthscan Publishing Ltd.

Pratchett, L. (2004) Local Autonomy, Local Democracy and the ‘New Localism’. Political Studies. 52 (2) 358–375

Robinson, M. (1990) Constitutional shifts in Europe and the US: learning from each other. Stanford Journal of International Law 32. 1-12.

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

Shuman, M.  (2000)  Going Local: creating self-reliant communities in a global age. New York, Routledge.

Stoker, G. (2001) Governance by lottery? New Labour’s strategy for reforming local and devolved institutions in Britain. Paper presented to the PSA Annual Conference April 2001.

Stoker, G. (2007) New Localism, Participation and Networked Community Governance. University of Manchester, UK / Institute for Political and Economic Governance.

Whitelegg, J.  (2010) Personal Interview.

Wilson, D. (2003) Unravelling control freakery: redefining central-local government relations. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 5:3.  August 2003. 317-346.

Ziman, J. (2003) Subsidiarity: The science of the local. In: Simms et al. Return To Scale: Alternatives to Globalisation. London, New Economics Foundation.

Fred Pearce (2010) The Climate Files: the battle for the truth about global warming. Guardian Books.

The saga of the hacked, or leaked, emails from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) has gone on to become known, predictably, as ‘Climategate’.  This release of thousands of emails and documents, sceptics argued, proved that climate science was fabricated and fraudulent, and showed scientists deliberately falsifying data. The release of the emails just days before the Copenhagen climate talks couldn’t have been worse timed, and they were dissected endlessly online, often by people with little understanding of the science, selected quotes being used to dismiss climate science in its entirety as a wicked scam (here’s one more lurid example of this). In this, the first book to look in depth at Climategate, Pearce offers a remarkably well balanced and up-to-date account of what really happened, what it all means and where climate science finds itself in the wake of the whole sorry saga.

The implications of Climategate are only just starting to really sink in.  What the emails revealed was that climate scientists can be as territorial, unpleasant, defensive and bitchy as the rest of us.  For anyone who thinks that teachers, for example, in the privacy of the staff room don’t discuss some of their students in rather derogatory terms, or lawyers, or nurses or whoever… this may come as a bit of a shock.  Climate scientists are shown in the emails as having, on occasion, refused to comply with Freedom of Information requests for them to share their data sets, misused their position to try and keep papers they diasgreed with out of journals, and generally tried to shut up shop in the face of a barrage of demands from climate sceptics.  Pearce, in spite of being a leading writer on climate change himself, is frank in his assessment that some of the behaviour within UEA was not up to the standards expected, and has put the process of peer review in a very bad light.

It is clear that several years before the release of the emails, relationships between the scientists and the sceptics had already broken down, and levels of animosity had reached such levels that it gets rather hard to start telling right from wrong.  Like a ‘family at war’ on the Jeremy Kyle Show (such as this one), relationships had soured, and people were happy to block other people’s work on principle, and had started acting so unreasonably that nobody emerges from this story with very much credit.

Pearce does a great job of explaining just what it was that everybody was arguing about.  Much of it relates to what is called ‘paleo-climatology’.  While we have climate data, temperatures and so on for the past 160-odd years (“since records began”), it is the detective work required to build up a picture of temperature changes further back in history that is the source of much rancour.  Debates revolve around which data is used to build up that picture, tree rings data being a bone of particular contention.  Sceptics and critics point to Mike Mann’s famous ‘hockey stick’ graph and argue that he cherry picked the data in order to show flat temperatures followed by the more recent spike, an accusation which Mann himself has argued against for years.  Pearce explains patiently and clearly what all this means, and the different sides of the debates.

The key question of course is whether any of this proves that climate science is wrong, or is part of some vast shadowy conspiracy to usher in a One World Government, or some such nonsense.  Pearce is clear:

“none of the 1,073 emails, or the 3,587 files containing documents, raw data and computer code upsets the 200-year-old science behind the “greenhouse effect”. We might wish it weren’t so, but the world still has a problem.  A big problem”.

This is a point also made by George Monbiot in this recent interview:

The world continues to warm, the first half of 2010 having been the hottest ever recorded.  Evidence of other feedbacks and indicators of rapid warming continue to accumulate – Climategate has done nothing to undermine the science.  Indeed if anything, as this recent report from WWF shows, the science published since IPCC’s fourth assessment in 2007 suggests a far graver picture than that set out in that report.

‘The Climate Files’ does occasionally feel like it was written in a hurry, rather like books about celebrities lives that emerge weeks after their demise, with no index and the odd typo, but the advantage of that is that it is right up-to-date with developments.  Pearce’s style is clear and patient, and although I picked up the book in order to gain a clear overview of the story and implications of Climategate, I found I also picked up a great deal about climate change and the debates within the science.  Clearly, he argues, something went horribly wrong here.  The levels of openness, the practice of good science and, as he explicitly states, the levels of basic human courtesy, were not what one would expect from scientists of such repute.

Pearce argues that in moving forward from the mess of the past 9 months, given the damage and disrepute it has caused not just for climate science, but for science in general, a new principle of openness is required, in effect, the ‘Open Sourcing’ of climate data, the opening up of datasets and information, a new spirit of collaborative learning.  This, Pearce argues, is actually one of the key objectives of the new generation of climate sceptics, who are not like the older generation of sceptics, often funded by petrochemical interests to ‘manufacture doubt’ (watch Naomi Oreskes’s excellent presentation on ‘manufactured doubt’ here), but who rather see themselves as ‘liberators of data’, arguing for the open sourcing of all climate-related data.

‘The Climate Files’ is a highly readable, fascinating account of an event which has been spun by so many different people as meaning so many different things, depending on their views about climate change.  Is it the ’smoking gun’ that proves climate change is all a conspiracy?  Does it prove scientific fraud on an unprecedented scale?  Or does it show that climate scientists are, in fact, human, and that when put under pressure, sometimes people don’t behave to the standards they would otherwise observe?  Pearce’s book is clear, fair and balanced, and a fascinating account of this whole sorry saga.  Essential reading for anyone with an interest in climate change, and a reminder of why alongside good scientific practice we also need to value civility and courtesy.

You can also hear Fred Pearce, along with some of the other key players in ‘Climategate’ in the podcast of the excellent debate hosted recently by the Guardian in London, which explored many of the issues raised in the book, here.

5.4. Food:  Can Totnes Feed Itself?

“… to draw in our economic boundaries and shorten our supply lines so as to permit us literally to know where we are economically.  The closer we live to the ground that we live from, the more we will know about our economic life; the more we know about our economic life; the more able we will be to take responsibility for it”  (Berry 2010:35)

5.4.1. Introduction

Sections 5.4-5.7 now explore the practical application of the concept of intentional localisation, starting with food, then moving to building materials, and then energy and transportation.  What degree of localisation is possible, and what degree is, in fact desirable.  5.4 starts by looking at food, the most fundamental of the four.  Of the four, food is the one people are most familiar discussing in the context of localisation.  5.4 therefore explores the question of the practicalities of relocalisation in the greatest depth, in order to draw comparisons across to the other areas of study.

5.4.2. Conceptualising Local Food Systems

Few areas of modern life are debated as vigorously as the food system.  There are those who argue that the globalisation of the food system stimulates competition and results in cheaper food and wider choice.  This view was summed up by former DEFRA minister Margaret Beckett (2006:unpaginated), who told a 2006 conference;

“…it is freer trade in agriculture which is key to ensuring security of supply in an integrating world. It allows producers to respond to global supply and demand signals, and enables countries to source food from the global market in the event of climatic disaster or animal disease in a particular part of the world. …it is trade liberalisation which will bring the prosperity and economic interdependency that underpins genuine long term global security”.

Conversely, there are also those (Schlosser 2002, Heinberg & Bomford 2009) who argue that our food system is becoming steadily less resilient.  The UK government’s take on food security is moving more in the direction of taking national food security seriously as an issue.  In 2003, DEFRA argued that “national food security is neither necessary, nor is it desirable” (DEFRA 2003:unpaginated).  This perspective had begun to change by 2008, when a  Cabinet Office Strategy Unit (Cabinet Office 2008) analysis of food issues argued that “existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more resource-constrained future”.  DEFRA’s ‘Food 2030’ report (DEFRA 2010b:7) set out its vision for the future of the nation’s food and farming in 2030 thus

• Consumers are informed, can choose and afford healthy, sustainable food. This demand is met by profitable, competitive, highly skilled and resilient farming, fishing and food businesses, supported by first class research and development.
  • Food is produced, processed, and distributed, to feed a growing global population in ways which:
    • use global natural resources sustainably
    • enable the continuing provision of the benefits and services a healthy natural environment provides
    • promote high standards of animal health and welfare
    • protect food safety
    • make a significant contribution to rural communities, and
    • allow us to show global leadership on food sustainability
  • Our food security is ensured through strong UK agriculture and food sectors and international trade links with EU and global partners, which support developing economies.

However, the gulf between the more localised food system of the 1950s, still with its roots in the ‘Dig for Victory’ culture of World War Two (Viljoen 2005, Kynaston 2007), (more intimately revealed in the oral histories featured in the following quotes, the first offering a sense of what a small proportion of food consumed was imported), and just-in-time, carbon intensive, long supply chain supermarkets (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002) remains profound.

“Looking back, practically all our food came from this area.  We had a couple of house pigs that ate the rubbish.  A local chap would come by, cut their throats and cut them up, and make bacon and hams.  We used to preserve it in saltpetre, the wives would make a salt solution and baste it every 2 days, then it was put up on hooks in the dairy to dry.  I still have the hooks out there now.  I suppose we might have had an orange on very special occasions.  Our main meal was lunch, not supper, if the husband worked at home.  Evening meals were a professionals’ thing.  Lunch was normally roast beef, mutton, hot or cold.  Hot or cold chicken, stews, potatoes and veg, peas and beans, potatoes baked or boiled.  We ate meat every day, hot or cold, depending on how the husband and wife were getting on! For tea we had bread and butter, jam and cream.  For breakfast it was bacon and eggs.  Supper was just a snack meal, bits and pieces of what you liked.  For fruit we had apples, pears and plums.  Apples could be kept all year round.  They were kept in a cellar under the house.  Certain kinds of pears could be kept.  We had greengages and plums; we usually made those into jams”.

Oral History Quote 5.1. A Local Diet in Staverton in the 1940s.  (Source: author’s oral history interview with Douglas Matthews).

The major trends in food of the past few decades include the intensification of agriculture, accompanied by a concentration in the control of agricultural inputs, and a trend to larger farm sizes with hired labour globally, accompanied by increasing fragmentation among marginalised smallholders (Wilson 2007, Eriksen 2008), and globally agriculture is coming up against the pressures arising from increasing demand as well as the stresses caused by soil degradation, over-fishing, water constraints and the increasing impacts of climate change (Godfray et al. 2010).  These have been accompanied by increasing concerns over the economic dominance of large corporate interests (Shiva 1998, Pollan 2007, Lawrence 2008) and increased energy use in agricultural systems and food processing (Matson et al. 1997, Pfeiffer 2006).

One study at Cornell University showed that in the mid-1990s the US used over 100 billion barrels of oil per year to manufacture food (Morgan 2008), and in the UK, the average distance travelled by food items is 5000 miles from field to plate (Pretty et al. 2005).  A study by Simil (1999) estimated that in the absence of nitrogen fertiliser, currently produced from natural gas and itself a resource with a depletion profile similar to that of oil (Darley 2004), no more than 48% of today’s population could be fed at the inadequate per capita level of 1900.  In the context of peak oil and climate change, the oil dependency of intensive agriculture is not sustainable, plus as Hirsch (2005) argued, the move from oil dependent systems to oil independent ones requires time, intentional design and focused effort.

In recent years farming has decreased in its perceived significance, and is no longer the dominant economic activity in the overall food system (Eriksen 2008).  The disconnect between communities and the source of their food has grown markedly.  As Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002:349) put it, “as people foster relationships with those who are no longer in their locale, distant others can structure the shape and use of the locale, a problem that is being explicitly rejected by those involved in local food system movements across the globe”.  As Morgan & Sonnino (2008:7) identified, “scientists and policymakers alike are beginning to realise that food systems hold the potential to deliver the wider objectives of sustainable development – economic development, democracy and environmental integration”.

For some, the concept of food relocalisation is central to notions of food security (Pothukuchi 2004), and also to the very notion of sustainability in relation to food. Terms such as ‘local food’, ‘food localisation’ and ‘relocalisation’ are used in the literature almost interchangeably.  For Peters et al. (2008:2) they all share the concept of “increasing reliance on foods produced near their point of consumption relative to the modern food system”.   For Seyfang (2008:5) defining local food is a straightforward matter: “localisation of food supply chains means simply that food should be consumed as close to the point of origin as possible”.  Kloppenburg (2000:18) argued that a sustainable food system embodies a deeper and more far-reaching transformation: “locally grown food, regional trading associations, locally owned processing, local currency, and local control over politics and regulation”, some of the themes explored later in this study.    The idea that food relocalisation will by necessity lead to more sustainable farming practices is also put forward by Renting et al. (2003:398) who believe that “a ‘shortening’ of relations between food production and locality, potentially [configures] a reembedding of farming towards more environmentally sustainable modes of production”.  For Feenstra (1997:28) “the development of a local sustainable food system not only provides economic gains for a community, but also fosters civic involvement, cooperation and healthy social relations”.  However, DuPuis and Goodman (2005:369) warned against what they called the “reification” of the local, arguing for the need to make localism “an open, process-based vision, rather than a fixed set of standards”.  The danger of local food becoming an exclusive, middle-class niche is, they argue, very real, a charge already levelled by some at organic food.  Former Minister David Miliband dismissed the health benefits of organic food and described it as a “lifestyle choice” (Jowitt 2010:unpaginated).

But what geographical and spatial form might a relocalised food system take?  Kloppenburg, drawing from the earlier concepts of the bioregional movement (i.e. Sale 1993) and Getz (1991) conceptualised the notion of a ‘foodshed’, defined by Peters et.al (2008:2) as “the geographic area from which a population derives its food supply”, and perceived these as hybrid social and natural constructs (Feagan 2007:26).  The foodshed is linked conceptually to the watershed.  Kloppenburg et al. (1996:34) stated “how better to grasp the shape and the unity of something as complex as a food system than to graphically imagine the flow of food into a particular place?”

For some, the foodshed concept has much to recommend it.  Starr et al. (2003:303) believed that “foodsheds embed the system in a moral economy attached to a particular community and place, just as watersheds reattach water systems to a natural ecology”.  At the time of writing, much of the literature about foodsheds is conceptual, little has been written that explores the actual practicalities and potential obstacles of such a degree of intentional relocalisation.  A report associated with the preparation of this study has been published (Hopkins et al. 2009), entitled “Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ which set out to explore the potential of the local landbase to support the local population.   This built on Mellanby’s (1975) initial study which asked the same question on a national scale, and Fairlie’s (2008) subsequent update.  It also takes, by way of answering the question of what form of agriculture would be most appropriate within these foodsheds, Tudge’s (2003:357) model for a localised, what he called ‘Enlightened’, agriculture:

“The general answer (by and large) is to give the best, most suitable land to pulses, cereals and tubers (that is, to arable farming); to fit horticulture in every spare pocket – and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort on it, and to invest capital for example in greenhouses; to allow the livestock to slot in as best it can …. in short, farms in general should be mixed: even the most committedly arable areas would in general benefit from at least some livestock, as all traditional farmers knew … the areas that are truly marginal – too high, too steep, too rocky, too dry, too wet – can be ideal for ruminants, notably sheep and cattle … some cereal and pulse can be grown expressly for livestock – but in general, only enough to keep them going through the winter, so they can make better use of the grazing in the summer”.

Tudge’s exhortation to “fit horticulture in every spare pocket – and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort on it, and to invest capital for example in greenhouses” was a fact of daily life in Totnes until 1980, with the presence of three working market gardens within the town, as described in Oral History Quote 5.2.

Gills Nursery was one of three market gardens in the town (Heath’s and Phillips being the others).  The nursery was run by Jack Gill until 1973, when his son Ken took over, who managed it until the nursery closed in 1981.  Running a series of glasshouses which were kept warm all year round required a lot of energy.  Initially they were heated using coke, which required 10 tons a year, but they later moved to the less labour intensive oil, necessitating the burning of 2000 gallons of oil a year in order to generate sufficient warmth.  The site behind the shop was not the only site Gills managed.  They also had a site on Harpers’ Hill, where they grew potatoes and sprouts, and one on North Street, where, Ken recalls, “we grew raspberries, in spite of it being north-facing, somehow it was warm enough for raspberries”.  Later they also acquired a 3½ acre site beside the bypass, which was used for field scale vegetable production.  The main nursery was kept fertilised with manure from their own pigs topped up with manure from a local farmer.   “We had no complaints with our fertility”, he told me, “one year we grew 20,000 lettuces”, an extraordinary output from a small piece of ground.  Running a market garden and a shop was hard work.  Ken Gill recalls working 12-14 hour days, seven days a week during the summer months, and David Heath describes his father’s choice of career as ‘bloody hard work’.  Unlike Heath’s, the closure of which was forced by retirement, Gill’s was driven to close by a less predictable challenge.  “A Highways engineer from Devon County Council came into one of the greenhouses one day, and told me and my father “you won’t be picking many more tomatoes here, we’re going to build a road through the place”.  Although the proposed road linking South Street and the newly built Heath’s Way was never built (part of the road building phase which saw Heath’s Nursery opened up), it created enough uncertainty, hanging in the air as a possibility for at least 10 years, that when Jack Gill died, it fell to his son, Ken, to decide whether or not to invest in modernising and expanding the Nursery.  Given the degree of uncertainty, he decided it would be unwise, and the nursery was slowly wound down.

Oral History Quote 5.2. Gills Nursery, an urban market garden in the centre of Totnes: (Source: author’s oral history interview with Ken Gill).

5.4.3. Empirical Modelling of Local Food Systems

Within the Transition movement, a few initiatives other than Totnes have made attempts at answering this question using a variety of approaches, such as Norwich (Transition Norwich 2009), Frome (Sustainable Frome 2009) and Stroud (Transition Stroud 2008), which in turn pick up on earlier work which explored the ability of different regions of the world to feed themselves under various future scenarios (Penning de Vries et al. 1995, WRR 1995).  What such studies have in common, argued Cowell & Parkinson (2003:223), is that they are “based on a belief that regional self-sufficiency of food production and consumption is more likely to increase the food security of individuals than a globalised food system”.  Food security, it is increasingly argued is decreased as the cheap oil that enables our current concept of food security becomes increasingly scarce or subject to volatile prices (Hopkins 2008, Heinberg & Bomford 2009).  The hypothesis explored here, and in the Totnes paper, was that, provided diets were changed to feature predominantly seasonal local produce, less meat, and more grains and pulses (as set out in Fairlie 2008), Totnes and district would be able to produce the bulk of its food requirements, while still being able to export some produce.  It is important here to make the point, as did Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002:361) that localisation does not refer to self sufficiency:  “These alternatives”, they wrote, “require a notion of community self-reliance, rather than either dependency or self-sufficiency”, which echoes the concept from resilience science of modularity (Walker and Salt 2006).  Tudge (2003:378) reinforced this point, arguing that self reliance ought to become a general principle for global agriculture:

“… it makes sense on all levels – ecological, nutritional, gastronomic, financial, social and strategic – for almost all countries in the world to become self-reliant in food.  Most are perfectly well able to do so.  ‘Self-reliance’ simply means that each country should strive to produce all the basic foods that it needs, so that it could feed its own people in a crisis, notably in times of political or economic blockade.  It stops short of total self-sufficiency, which implies that a country produces absolutely all of its own food, including the kinds that it cannot easily grow at home in open fields”.

Using GIS mapping technology developed by Geofutures in Bath, ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ defined its area of study as being the Totnes and District boundary as defined by the Market and Coastal Towns Initiative.  This boundary choice combines some useful and some arbitrary elements (see Figure 4.1.).  Aside from its northern boundary, it reflects the town’s original market town catchment, the boundary within which growers would choose Totnes as the market town of choice and convenience, reflecting Kloppenberg et al.’s (1996:34) earlier description of a foodshed as allowing one to “graphically imagine the flow of food into a particular place”.  In this regard, as a ‘foodshed’ it encapsulates the catchment from which the bulk of the town’s diet would have ‘flowed’ into Totnes town.

The northern boundary is that of SHDC so is an artificial political boundary.  The area was also the area boundary when Totnes was a Borough, which as Chapter 6 will explore, may yet prove to be a more suitable political model for relocalisation.  Although the Totnes and District boundary is not perfect as a foodshed, or as a bioregion, the fact that, in the main, it reflects the historical boundaries of a more localised market town catchment, makes it useful for this analysis.  The question of what is ‘local’ in a geographic sense, has been the subject of much debate.  Hinrichs (2003:6) observed that the ‘local’ is not neat or easy to define: “specific social or environmental relations do not always map predictably and consistently onto the spatial relation”.  For Feagan (2007:34), local food systems “must bear in mind with respect to spatially bound concepts like foodsheds, that the types of food grown, how it is grown, where it is grown, by whom and according to what sorts of cultural, social and economic needs are tied, in complex and somewhat indiscernible ways, to sociocultural factors at the macro economic and political levels”, which in turn links back to DuPuis & Goodman’s (2005) notion of ‘reflexive’ localism.  In the Totnes and district context, the study focused purely on the physical ability of the area to meet its food needs, without also looking at the other elements necessary to a reflexive localism, although this is not to dismiss their importance.

Figure 5.1. Food footprints of settlements in the South West of England with a population of over 800, note location of Totnes and district (Source: Hopkins et al. 2009)

The study analysed land use types, and current levels of productivity, from the most recent data available from DEFRA in 2004.  Initially it looked at Totnes in relation to other settlements with populations of over 800 in the South West, mapping their ‘food footprints’ and how these overlap (Figure 5.1.).  This process confirmed McCullum et al.’s (2005:278) observation that “food systems operate and interact at multiple levels, including community, municipal, regional, national and global”.  The overlaps in the case of Totnes were with the food footprint of Torbay from the east, and Plymouth from the west, highlighting how locations cannot conceptualise food security in isolation from their relationships with neighbouring settlements.

Figure 5.2. The Growing Communities Food Zone Diagram. (Brown 2009)

The paper then looked at the ‘food zones’ model developed by Julie Brown (Pinkerton & Hopkins 2009) at the Growing Communities project in London (Figure 5.3.), which attempted to define the percentages of food that a low carbon London might be able to produce for itself, how much it would need to import, and from what distances.  This ‘dartboard’ approach is stylised, but still gives some insights into what proportion of food production could be more locally produced. It raises the question of what percentage of imports might be feasible in a more localised model.  The Fife Diet initiative in Scotland[1] aims to support people eating a more local diet.  It promotes an 80% local diet, the remainder imported.  When asked where this ratio had come from, Fife Diet founder Mike Small replied:

“It was about saying we didn’t want the eat local movement to be a parochial retreat inwards because we believe that eating locally is an act of solidarity with the developing world in terms of climate change and climate justice. We wanted to show solidarity by buying stuff that we just couldn’t get here. We also wanted tactically to say to people “look this isn’t too scary – you can do this!” Of course people say they couldn’t give up things like bananas or chocolate or red wine. 80-20 make it seem less scary, that’s the thinking behind it” (Small 2009:pers.int).

Julie Brown of Growing Communities, who created Figure 5.2, also advocates an 80/20% ration (but as a UK produced/imported ratio), but is less clear about why that figure was chosen, emphasising the work-in-progress nature of this debate:

“Its a hypothesis, and it needs proving.  It’s an aspiration.  It feels right.  Broadly speaking, in terms of what we’re sourcing for our box schemes, which is all fruit and veg, that’s what we manage to do, but we’re playing around with that.  I am struggling with how we measure this” (Brown 2010:pers.int).

Figure 5.3. Composite Foodsheds for the four largest settlements in Totnes and District, showing how they do not accord with the ‘foodzones’ model (Source: Hopkins et al. 2009)

In the Totnes study, the findings of overlaying food demand on top of the available soil types are shown in Figures 5.3. and 5.4.  The conclusion drawn was that the area could feed itself in most of its key food needs, although not all on land immediately adjoining the town.  Some staples, such as lamb, would need to come from further afield, as appropriate soil types do not exist close to the town.  Questions were also raised about the need to also address changes in climate, the kind of diet that could be supported, and so on.  What was clear was that much of what is currently considered to be available ‘local food’ tends to be seasonal vegetables and high value speciality foods, while bulk carbohydrates, in particular wheat and other grains, are grown at a considerable distance from the area.

Figure 5.4. Foodsheds for the four largest settlements in Totnes and District, broken down into agricultural production types (Hopkins et al. 2009)

At this point the question arises as to how local is ‘local’ food?  Peters et al. (2008:2) argued that, in relation to food, ‘local’ refers to “the concept of increasing reliance on foods produced near their point of consumption relative to the modern food system”.  For Hinrichs (2003:34) it is “a banner under which people attempt to counteract trends of economic concentration, social disempowerment, and environmental degradation in the food and agricultural landscape”.  The question of what is ‘local’ in relation to the Totnes and district food system is clearly important to this discussion.  To what extent does peoples’ sense of ‘local’ overlap with the tentative ‘foodshed’ identified above?  The survey found that 40% felt that for food to be considered local it would need to have been produced within 10 miles of Totnes (see Table 5.2. below).

Oral history interviews conducted for this thesis showed that historically, the bulk of food consumed within the area would have been sourced from within the Totnes and district boundary, which is around 10 miles at its farthest from Totnes.  Val Price, one of the interviewees, recalled the first time she became aware of the idea that food was something that could actually come from further than the local area, when in the early 1950s she was asked to do a school project which involved collecting the paper sheets that oranges came wrapped in at that time and compile a list of where they had come from.  Until that point the idea had never occurred to her that food came from anywhere outside the local area.  Andy Langford relates (see Oral History Quote 5.3.) how much more the casual work then available on farms was a part of young peoples’ lives, especially during the summer.

Andy Langford recalled picking up lots of casual work on local farms from the age of 13 onwards.  In the late 1960s there were “lots of small family farms all over the place.  The average farm size would have been 30-40 acres, 120 acres would have been considered quite upper class sort of farming”.  Many of the farms were short of labour during the summer, especially during hay making and straw baling times.  His favourite was one at East Allington.  “We were out there a lot.  We used to go out there and the farm was pretty much run by the young people.  Andy Strutt was a classmate of mine.  He had 6 sisters, which was part of the attraction. Suddenly I found myself in charge of a little tractor moving around the farm picking up haybales with all these young women about and these big lunches and suppers where you could eat as many roast potatoes as you could get in yourself, that was very lovely.  We basically ran the place.  The children from Andy, 16, down to the rest of us, would man the potato harvester.  That’s what we did.  We’d go out there for the weekend and harvest however many tons of potatoes needed picking, take them, riddle them, sort them into this size and that size, then get in the Landrover and deliver them to the chip shop in Kingsbridge.  It was great”.

Oral History Quote 5.3. How local farms were a source of casual labour for the people of Totnes.  (Source: author’s oral history interview with Andy Langford).

So, what did the word ‘local’ mean for Totnes and district residents?  The findings in Table 5.2. would seem to support the usefulness of the Totnes and District boundary, in relation to the traditional food economy of the town.  60% of respondents felt that ‘local’ meant between 10 and 30 miles from the town, more embedded in the wider South Hams.

Table 5.2. “Within what distance of Totnes would meat or vegetables need to have been grown/produced for you to consider them “local”? (Source: author’s questionnaire 2009).

Figure 5.5. The Index of Food Relocalisation. (Source: Ricketts Hein 2006).

This echoes Padbury’s (2006) and IGD’s (2003) observation that UK consumers generally understand ‘local’ to be either within 30 miles, or within the same county.  The Totnes data could be interpreted as inferring that within the culture of the town, the fact that it still holds regular markets, and still has a strong commercial presence from local growers, means that people feel, on some level, situated within the kind of ‘foodshed’ that Kloppenburg et.al (1996) refer to (see above). The role of markets historically in Totnes was also explored in the oral history interviews (see Oral History Quote 5.4).  The continuing presence of a strong culture of the importance of local food is supported by the ‘Index of Food Relocalisation’ produced by Ricketts Hein et al. (2006) which found that Devon was the county in England and Wales with the most local food activity, and that the bulk of the activity was focused in the South West of England (see Figure 5.6.)

Ken Gill recalls how the Cattle Market was what brought farmers and their wives into the town, while the husbands traded, haggled and drank, the wives would go shopping, providing a vital boost for the town’s economy.  Although it created a certain degree of nuisance and put a huge strain on the town’s traffic infrastructure, the Cattle Market’s passing was, for some, a loss.  Ken Gill told me “once you took away the Market it wasn’t the same”.

Oral History Quote 5.4 Totnes Cattle Market: From the oral history interviews.

5.4.4. The Food Culture of Totnes

The concept of the intentional relocalisation of food in the way explored in ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ sits within a wider food culture which is arguably in crisis (i.e. Lawrence 2009).  Fewer people cook with fresh produce or have the time or income to source local produce.  So what is the current Totnes food culture?  In the survey, 97% of respondents stated that they ‘always’ or ‘often’ cooked the meals they ate at home using fresh produce”, but the question was unfortunately sufficiently vague as to not yield much of value.  43% of respondents stated that someone in their household grows some of the food that is consumed there, and 8% have an allotment, above the national average: a study by the University of Derby in 2006 showed a national average provision of 7 allotments per 1,000 population (Crouch & Rivers 2006).

The experience of shopping for food has clearly changed greatly over the past 60 years, as revealed in Oral History quote 5.5.  Respondents were also asked to rank their choices when they went food shopping.  The list of priorities was, in order of priority; good quality, local, low price, organic, fair trade and brand.  This emphasis on ‘local’ is borne out in Totnes High Street, where food retail shops are highly visible, often stressing the local provenance of some of their produce.  The third placing of ‘low price’ is reflected in the focus group on food, and the decisions families make on a daily basis. In Hinrichs’s (2002) study of the Kansas City Food Circle, the “unacknowledged privileged position of the group” (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002:365) was acknowledged, a charge, they state “that can be levelled at many alternative food movements” (ibid). So to what extent did participants find the local food available in Totnes accessible?

“I used to go to the grocers and I could sit down, lovely.  They’d go through your list and say, “yes, yes, we’ve some new whatever it is, would you like to taste some?”  You’d have a little snippet of cheese or something, “great, yes, we’ll have that”.  “Now we’ve got a tin of broken biscuits, but they’re not too bad (half price you see), would you like them?”  As soon as you put a biscuit in your mouth it’s broken isn’t it!  Then they’d say “now Mrs. Langford, you’re going to the butchers, yes, yes, and going to get some fish?  Yes, yes, and paraffin?  Yes, yes… and they used to say to me now bring any parcels in, we’ll put it in the box with your groceries and bring the lot up for you.  And they did.  They’d come and deliver and you’d go through it and say that’s fine and would you like a cup of tea….”

Oral History Quote 5.5. A trip to the shops in the 1950s. (Source: author’s oral history interview with Muriel Langford).

The focus group on food supported many of the survey findings, as well as uncovering many of the choices that people make in relation to food.  One participant, MW, a family counsellor, opted for supermarkets for most of her food shopping “for easiness and cheapness”, but claimed that “if I had more time, and even more money, then I would make the effort to buy local food.  I do believe it’s important, but I don’t think I can afford to do it to be honest, because I think money comes first”.  These findings are also supported by a study of Totnes food culture conducted in parallel to this research (Pir 2010) which found that “while Totnesians have a high level of awareness of environmental and food-related issues, this is not matched by their patterns of behaviour.  First, producers and consumers seem largely motivated or constrained by the costs involving the production or consumption of foods.  Secondly, the convenience of food, i.e. shopping, cooking and consumption, seems to be a priority for most consumers” (Pir 2010:92).

Taken together, this appears to back up Hinrichs and Kremer’s (2003:37) findings from Iowa, US, which showed that local food movement members tended to be “white, middle-class consumers and that the movement threatens to be socially homogenised and exclusionary” (DuPuis & Goodman 2005:362).  Follett (2009:49) warns that “alternative [food] networks can lead to myopic and exclusive decision-making that only benefit the most educated and elite members of society”.   The question of not having enough time is also picked up by Hendrickson & Heffernan (2002), who identify the advantages and disadvantages of the time issue:

“Time may indeed be one of the biggest barriers for alternatives, yet one of the greatest strengths.  Many alternatives do take more time, and thus are less attractive to people squeezed by work and family responsibilities, which has important class-based implications.  However, that becomes a reason alternatives are difficult to replicate by the dominant firms”.  (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002:361)

Kollmus and Agyeman (2002) however, refuse to take arguments of ‘not enough time’ at face value. “What”, they ask, “are the underlying factors of ‘not having enough time’”?  There would appear to be a direct link between the requirement to establish alternatives and people with time available, and the predominance of middle class participants.  As Kollmus and Agyeman (2002:244) add, “people who have satisfied their personal needs are more likely to act ecologically because they have more resources (time, money, energy) to care about bigger, less personal social and pro-environmental issues”.

Another participant, an 18 year old female student, had a high level of understanding about organic food and local food due to working part time at a local organic farm, but her mother shopped for the family.  “When we go in (to the supermarket) I know what’s local as its lots of the same products where I work, and I point it out to Mum, but she says “that’s so expensive!””  When asked about their attitudes towards growing their own food, their responses supported the surprisingly high figure from the survey of those who claimed to be good at gardening.  66% had claimed to be either ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ at food growing.  An initial perception might be that growing fresh fruit and vegetables is a dying art, in spite of the recent revival in interest (Birchley 2009), but the Focus Groups reveal more complexity than whether people are ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ at it.   For example, both DO and MW live on the Follaton Estate, and DO told me “Mum’s got a little vegetable patch in the garden, and she grows them all year round.  So we eat all our own vegetables”.

MW was a newer convert to food growing.  Both families were inspired by a young couple of the estate who garden very visibly in front of their house.  MW was clearly impressed; “they both work and yet they still manage to provide endless amounts of vegetables”.  MW enthused about how she had taken to gardening.  “I got really silly about it, and took people to look at my little plot.  “Look at what I grew!”  But I think my daughter was impressed with it for about two weeks!  “Do you have to keep talking about courgettes mum?” Part of her excitement stemmed from a glimpse at what being more self reliant could be like.  She continued, “one day I came back down the motorway.  I hadn’t been shopping, and it was Sunday so the shops were closed, but I managed to make soup from my garden. I was really excited that it hadn’t cost me a penny, but I’d managed to make really nice soup.  I think that’s really important, the fact that you can sustain yourself if you really need to”.  She also found that it brought other qualities to her life.  “It’s very therapeutic.  In the summer, it’s really nice to go down there and I like looking at it and seeing what’s growing”.

For most people, growing some of their own food was just a fact of life and the landscape of the town reflected this.  Ian Slatter recalled his father’s passion for food growing, a passion he never himself came to share.  At the bottom of his garden were allotments, of which his father had two, as well as a large garden, similarly dedicated to food production, but focused on fruit, whereas the allotments grew vegetables.  Val Price remembers every garden in the street being used to grow food, mostly done by the men of the households.  “Dad grew all our food in our garden”, she told me.  “Potatoes, runner beans, beetroot, carrots, onions, raspberries and strawberries”.  Gardening was, she recalls, the main topic of conversation for the men of the street who would “stand around, leaning on their forks, and telling each other they were doing it all wrong”.  In the late 1960s, the need for productive gardens began to diminish, and the new generation began to see it as boring and unnecessary.  Andy Langford, whose father was a keen gardener, and who initially kept an allotment at Copland Meadow (now housing), and subsequently a very productive third of an acre home garden at the top of Barracks Hill, told me “we used to consider gardening to be something you did because he’d caught you!  My generation was the one that broke the link with gardening.  It was much more fun to take your bicycle to bits, put it back together again and go off racing around the countryside”.  Similarly Val Price recalls never being taught to garden, as gardening was “something Dads did”, and that by the early 60s it had become something that young people only did if they had to.

Oral History Quote 5.6. The Rise and Fall of Back Garden Food Production (Source: the author’s oral history interviews).

In terms of where both households learned the skills needed, there were several sources.  The first was the gardening couple on their street, followed by other neighbours, elderly relatives and the internet.  They found that their enthusiasm for gardening was contagious.  MW told me “it’s (food growing) gone along the street and across.. the people behind me…”.  It was interesting to observe that although she could grow things, she felt underequipped in terms of basic gardening skills, so although she could grow, so was reluctant to describe her skills as ‘good’. It is useful to compare this present-day culture of back garden food growing, and the figure of 66% of respondents believing they are ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ at growing food, with that of the 1950s when food growing was much more commonplace, as revealed in the oral histories in Oral History Quote 5.6.

One older participant in the focus group on work and skills, however, countered the enthusiasm for back garden food growing expressed above.  She told another member of the group who had expressed an interest in gardening, “I had your experience of planting vegetables, and it put me off completely.  As a child I spent a lot of time on my Dad’s allotment, I was born and brought up in cities, trying to grow things, but it put me off completely”.  The root of her disillusionment was twofold, firstly her lack of skills (“I felt it was my ignorance”) and secondly…. slugs.  “I catch them, with a torch, and then take them up to the Arboretum, but what a waste of time and effort, to try and grow a lettuce which is dead by the morning because the buggers came along and got it”.

Many ideas have emerged about how to make this relocalised model a reality through World Cafe events and the process of creating the Totnes and District EDAP.  One key driver of this has been the TTT Food Group, which has been in existence for over 3 years and draws together food activists from across the community.  An MPhil dissertation by Pir (2010) offered a qualitative study of the TTT Food Group, based on surveys and interviews. It acknowledged the diversity of initiatives that have been initiated and maintained by the group, which include:

• Garden Share, matching the owners of unused back gardens with keen gardenless gardeners (over 40 families now have access to growing land through the scheme)
• ‘Totnes: the nut tree capital of Britain’, a volunteer-led programme which plants nut and fruit trees at locations through the town.  At the time of writing, over 180 trees have been planted
• a gardening training course
• links with Dartington and Sharpham Estates, both of which are on the edge of the town
• Healthy Futures: aiming to engage people with chronic health problems in learning how to grow and cook food
• A proposed ‘Food Hub’, a community-owned initiative to make local food available to people at supermarket prices.

However, Pir concluded that “contributions for resilience building at this stage have a symbolic meaning, largely manifesting themselves in considerations or mindsets and not in attitudes and patterns of behaviour… the overall perception of the TTT Food Group has shown that it was best known for raising awareness” (Pir 2010:93).  He also noted that “even though the scale of practical manifestations seemed symbolic, they have been described by some to have had an important psychological effect on the local people”.  From personal experience, many of the longer term, farther reaching initiatives like the Food Hub project, take longer to bring about, and that, as suggested by Pir, much of the initial work of Transition takes place at a deeper level, building networks and momentum.  Pir’s statement that thus far, the TTT Food Group “has not been able to enthuse the average person” is however not borne out in the survey data relating to the wider impact of TTT, explored in Chapter 7.

The dangers associated with ‘unreflexive’ localism for Totnes and district, and whether the ‘foodshed’ approach set out in the ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ research could actually lead to some of the dangers outlined above deserves reflection.  As the focus groups revealed, at present, local food consumers in Totnes tend to be wealthier, middle-class people, often with more free time.  Given that Totnes and its surroundings already have a strong local food culture with many producers, and is one of the leading centres in the country for this, there is no obvious sign of Winter’s (2003) ‘defensive localism’.  On the contrary, its local food culture emerged in interviews as something that contributes to the town’s perceived ‘uniqueness’.  DuPuis and Goodman (2005:360) suggested that “there may also be a cost to alliances with local elites that stand to benefit from localisation”, and certainly the realisation/implementation of the foodshed model would necessitate engaging with large landowners and some of the potential risks DuPuis and Goodman suggest.  However, the positive and constructive engagement of the Sharpham and Dartington estates, stemming from a TTT event ‘Estates in Transition’ held in June 2007, suggests that such a ‘cost’ would be minimal.

Following an event in Totnes in May 2009 which introduced the ‘Can Totnes and district feed itself?’ report referred to above, a World Cafe session was held (the full notes from the session are in Appendix 3).  It began by inviting participants to list the elements of a local food system that are already in place, and then to suggest ways of increasing demand for local food.  Suggestions included a Food Hub, a local food festival, local authority and school local food procurement, more education and the less constructive suggestion “burn supermarkets”!  Asked to list elements that could help, suggestions included training and support, enabling more people to have access to land, and “economic hardship”.   Finally, the groups were asked to think of some future events.  Suggestions included “2020 – slugs in Totnes become extinct”, “2014, allotments for all!”, “2020: local food production soars” and “2015: school certification for all in food growing and cooking”.  Some of the more useful information fed into the Totnes EDAP which was, at that point, being edited.

In terms of the views of SHDC with regard to its role in this area, interviewee Alan Robinson argued that they do not see themselves as being able to do much to support the relocalisation of food.  “Apart from an enabling role where we can, I’m not sure where we’d actually plug in.  We’d never be able to say we’ll only procure our sandwiches from somebody who’s actually growing stuff only a hundred yards away in Totnes.  I know that’s a silly example but I’m not sure we can ever define it quite that tightly”.

References:

Brown, J. (2009) The Growing Communities Food Zone Diagram.  Unpublished.

Brown, J. (2010) Personal interview.

Cowell, S.J, Parkinson, S. (2003) Localisation of UK Food Production and an Analysis Using Land Area and Energy as Indicators. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 94. 221-236.

Crouch, D, Rivers, P. (2006) Urban Research Summary No. 23.  Survey of Allotments, Community Gardens and City Farms. Department of Community and Local Government.

Fairlie, S. (2007) Can Britain feed itself? The Land 4 (Winter 2007-08)

Feagan, R. (2007) The place of food: mapping out the ‘local’ in local food systems. Progress in Human Geography 31 (1) 23-42

Hendrickson, M, Heffernan, W.D. (2002) Opening Spaces Through Relocalisation: locating potential resistance in the weaknesses of the global food system. Sociologica Ruralis 42.

Hinrichs, C., Kremer, K.S. (2002) Social Inclusion in a Midwest Local Food System Project. Journal of Poverty 6 (1). 65 – 90.

Hinrichs, C.C. (2003) The practice and politics of food system localisation. Journal of Rural Studies. 19:33-45

Hopkins, R, Thurstain Goodwin, M, Fairlie, S. (2009) Can Totnes and District Feed Itself? Exploring the practicalities of food relocalisation. Working Paper Version 1.0. Transition Town Totnes/Transition Network.

Hopkins, R. (2008) The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience. Green Books, Dartington.

IGD (2003) Local food comes from our country, say consumers. Press release 1 May 2003.  www.igd.com.

Kollmus, A, Agyeman, J. (2002) Mind the Gap: why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behaviour. Environmental Education Research 8 (3) 239-260.

McCullum, C, Desjardins, E, Kraak, V.I, Ladipo, P, Costello, H. (2005)  Evidence-based strategies to build community food security. Journal of American Dietetic Association 105 (2) 278-83.

Mellanby, K. (1975) Can Britain Feed Itself? Merlin Press.

Padbury, G. (2006) Retail and foodservice opportunities for local food. IGD, Watford.

Penning de Vries, F.W.T, van Keulen, H, Rabbinge, R.  (1995) Natural Resources and Limits of Food Production in 2040.  In: Bouma, J, Kuyvenhoven, A, Bouman, B.A.M., Luyten, J.C, Zandstra, H.G. (eds) Eco-regional approaches for sustainable land use and food production. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Utrecht.

Pinkerton, T, Hopkins, R. (2009) Local Food: how to make it happen in your community. Transition Books/Green Books.

Pir, A. (2009) In Search of a Resilient Food System: A Qualitative Study of the Transition Town Totnes Food Group.  Dissertation for MPhil in Culture, Environment and Sustainability. Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo.

Ricketts Hein, J, Ilberg, B, Kneafsey, M. (2006) Distribution of Local Food Activity in England and Wales: an index of food relocalisation. Regional Studies. 40 (3). 289-301.

Small, M. (2010) Personal Interview.

Sustainable Frome (2009) Sustainable Frome: a town in Transition: Energy Descent Action Plan.

Transition Norwich (2009) Outline of a Food Chapter for the Energy Descent Plan for Norwich. Transition Network/East Anglia Food Links.

Transition Stroud (2008) Food Availability in Stroud District: considered in the context of climate change and peak oil. For the Local Strategic Partnership Think Tank on Global Change.  16^th December 2008.

Tudge, C. (2004) So Shall We Reap: What’s Gone Wrong with the World’s Food – and How to Fix it. Penguin.

Walker, B, Salt, D. (2006) Resilience Thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Island Press.

Winter, M. (2003) Embeddedness, the new food economy and defensive localism. Journal of Rural Studies.  19 (1) 23-32

WRR (1995)  Sustained Risks: a lasting phenomenon. Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR).  The Hague.

What work are we doing?

Although these are early days, we are already delivering the innovative Energy Resilience Assessment (ERA) on a professional, commercial basis. This diagnostic service investigates direct and indirect energy use in a business or organisation. Focusing on key products or services, it calibrates a company’s vulnerability to energy shocks and disruption.

The ERA meets businesses and organisations where they are today, using language and processes that are familiar to them, yet it also acts as strong call to action. It makes the issues around peak oil, energy security and economic uncertainty very real to a business, identifying their particular vulnerabilities, and quantifying the risks to their revenues, costs and profits.

A recently completed  ERA with the National Trust focused on the 6,400 acre Killerton Estate near Exeter, and explored their vulnerabilities in three main areas:

1. Fuel price impacts on their visitors 94% of visitors drive to the property, with an average round trip of 66 miles. The likely impacts of fuel price increases on visitor driving behaviour were modelled, and the impact on admissions and retail revenue for different scenarios assessed.
2. Energy price impacts on tenants in their let estate (250+ cottages in the local communities), and the related property maintenance costs required to achieve a minimal energy efficiency standard and protect rental income and alleviate potential for fuel hardships.
3. Direct energy costs were explored using different future price scenarios including increases of up to 70% by 2015.

The National Trust's Killerton House, subject of one of TT&C's first ERAs...

The National Trust Case Study has further information about this work and its impact on the Killerton Estate.

The Totnes Kayaks Case Study describes our work with a retailer of boats and canoes, where an exploration of the oil and energy aspects of the full supply chain, including raw materials, manufacturing and distribution, led to significant positive changes.

The ERA is a valuable, timely and relevant service, helping to reduce oil dependency, but we need to reach many more businesses and organisations.  Could a business or organisation that you know be interested in working with us? Please contact Fiona Ward to discuss further.

What other services are on offer?

Five services are on offer at the moment. All are described in the ‘our services’ section of www.ttandc.org.uk (along with PDF versions of service overviews and case studies).

Two of the workshops, Opportunities in a Low Carbon Future and Designing for Organisational Resilience are now in final development, and we are seeking friendly businesses and organisations to run initial pilot projects. Please let Fiona Ward know if you have any suggestions, or if you work somewhere that might be interested.

Many transition groups recognise the need not only to engage with their local business community, but also to start to stimulate a new type of economy. Do let us know if your transition initiative may be interested in piloting activity in these areas with TTandC.

Interesting in helping us deliver TTandC services?

TTandC professional services are delivered by practitioners with experience of delivering training and consulting services to businesses and organisations, and who are also involved in their local transition initiative. Collectively we form the TTandC Practitioner Network (meet some of us here). You can join the Practitioner Network by attending one of the practitioner training courses, or by making a significant contribution to developing one of the services.

At this time we are only offering practitioner training in the ERA service. We will offer practitioner training courses in the other services once we have completed the pilot stage and are sure that what we are offering achieves its aims.

So far we have run one ERA practitioner training in October 2009, and we now have 11 of us across the UK. This group is increasingly delivering work commercially, and playing a key role in helping develop and pilot the services, shape our organisation, develop new business and define how we work together.

More information about the next ERA practitioner training is available in the training section.

What about non UK countries?

At the moment TTandC only operates in the UK with businesses and organisations. However we receive an increasing number of requests from potential practitioners in other countries where transition is taking off, and are considering the best way to roll-out our services and processes to other places that want them. Meanwhile see information about the next ERA practitioner training if you are not from the UK, but are interested in attending the next one we run here.

For more information about TTandC or to join our email listing please contact Fiona Ward.

“I’ve really enjoyed the last three books to come out of the Transition Books stable, so I was pleased to see the latest instalment was out: Local Money – how to make it happen in your community. It’s another big square book, following Local Food, and it’s got the same practical, inspiring, can-do approach. This time, it’s all about creating local money networks.

The Transition Towns movement is all about resilience – preparing towns for the challenges of climate change and peak oil. What’s money got to do with it, you may well ask, but money is a valuable tool in relocalisation. Our current money system doesn’t serve us very well. It is beyond our control, in the hands of bankers and politicians and people we might hesitate to trust. It flows in vast quantities to people who don’t seem to do very much to earn it, while others work hard for very little. It is endlessly available for some tasks, and in short supply for other very necessary things. Most of all, it has an unpleasant habit of vanishing out of the places where we live and ending up in London and New York. Local money is a way of re-imagining money as the tool it should be, rather than the master it often becomes.

Since money is just an agreed mechanism of exchange, there are many different kinds of money, and endless possibilities for re-creating it. Local Money begins with an introduction to money and a history of alternative currencies, and then dedicates a chapter each one to a series of experiments with money. Time banking is one, a currency based on hours of work, and a great way to value all labour equally. Local Exchange Trading Schemes are an less formal way for people to trade skills that were successful in the past. North then explains the four Transition currencies so far, and ends with some tantalizing glimpses of the future of money, including feed-in tariff based bonds, mobile phone money, and tradeable energy quotas.

Among the more interesting systems that the book explores are Germany’s regional currencies, which operate alongside the Euro. Reading at a time when the Euro is in considerable danger, I bet Germany is glad it put the regional alternatives in place. “Monoculture of money,” says Peter North, “just like a monoculture of crops, is not resilient.” I’m not sure why I hadn’t heard about it before, but Germany has “a rich ecosystem of currencies”, as North puts it. Each one serves a different purpose, and this is perhaps the closest to the healthy and resilient model that the Transition Towns are after.

Totnes, Lewes, Stroud and Brixton are the three Transition currencies. They each have a slightly different philosophy, Stroud being the most radical – it is democratic money, owned by a co-op. The main aim of these currencies is to build the local economy and encourage more local supply chains. It’s a little early to tell whether it’s working or not, and North hints that they are “perhaps mere glimpses of what could be” in future. This is the really practical bit if you’re ready to have a go at creating your own money – lots of advice about getting buy-in from businesses, how much to print, why you should think long and hard about the name of your currency, tax implications, and so on.

There are some real strengths to Local Money. Peter North knows that everything in the book is an experiment, and that there’s no one formula. It’s an iterative process, and the book is great at breaking down historical examples to see what worked and what didn’t. It’s honest too, acknowledging the failures and limitations of what has been tried so far as well as the successes. If you’re ready to embark on the rather exciting journey of local money in your town, this is the most helpful book I’ve come across so far.

However, if you’re not that far along, the book is less useful. The previous Transition book, Local Food, had all kinds of different projects of varying levels of complexity. Whatever stage your town was at, there were inspiring ideas to get started. Local Money starts further along the road, with actual currency, when there are lots of smaller ways to build resilience in the local economy. I’d have loved to have read about local loyalty cards, such as the Wedge Card in London, or the 3/50 Project that invites people to pledge to spend money in three favourite local businesses. Both of these are a whole lot simpler, quicker, and less risky than launching a fully fledged alternative currency. But perhaps that’s for another book, a Local Economies title perhaps.

There’s also a lot more that could have been included. Local currencies aren’t the only way to generate local money, and it would have been great to hear more about zero interest banks (see Jak), peer to peer lending, shared equity mortgages, local banking and credit unions, local bonds, microfinance, or the ‘moneyless’ credit clearance schemes that Thomas Greco champions. Some of these get a passing mention, but they could all be considered valid options for making local economies more resilient and deserve more attention.

In other words, Local Money is great on currencies, but could have been much broader in scope. The Transition currencies are wonderful experiments and this book will get you well on your way to launching your own, but there is so much more to try.

It is a very insightful and useful addition to the research literature about Transition.  One of his conclusions is: “I argue that it is the structure of Transition that is crucial to grassroots support.  As a brand and umbrella organisation, Transition is able to facilitate and foster networking potential and collective resources, which encourages participation in the model.  Yet equally important, the self‐organising nature of the model is a key attraction to people and places joining Transition.  This dual structure enables the establishment of a diverse discourse coalition, incorporated through a holistic approach to sustainability”.

You can download the document in full here.

I arrived in Tooting early, and, as usual, got lost, walking around Tooting High Street looking for the venue. I wandered through Tooting Market, a dynamic reflection of this highly diverse community, stalls selling saris, halal meat, Afro-Carribean hairdressing, Islamic texts and a wide range of foodstuffs from around the world.  It is in this context, one of the most diverse parts of London that Transition Town Tooting has been working for the last couple of years, innovatively thinking their way through how to embed Transition with the community.

Events so far have included the Earth Talk Walk, which visited every centre of worship in Tooting to explore how each tradition looks at care for the earth, the soon-to-be-in-its-third-year Foodival, where local growers bring their surplus produce and 6 local restaurants use them to prepare dishes, a celebration both of local food and of the area’s cultural and culinary diversity.

Most spectacular though was the Trashcatchers Carnival, which brought 800 people out onto the streets as a carnival on the theme of caring for the Earth, using an alleged million plastic bags and half a million crisp packets to make amazing floats, in an amazing community celebration.  The story of how the Carnival came to be, how it found its way around red tape when, with only two days to go, it looked like it may well not happen it all, is an amazing testament to persistence and determination, and which I hope to get someone from TT Tooting to write up soon.

So, to the Unleashing.  The hall was decorated with great handmade banners, with photos of what TT Tooting has done so far, with local Indian food on sale at the back, and some of the amazing creations produced for the Carnival adorning the hall, most prominently the Sankofa bird, a West African mythic bird, which carries the seeds of the future in an egg on its back, and which looks forward and backwards in a single glance, a fitting symbol for Transition.  And of course an amazing cake, of which more later.  The evening started with a cycle rickshaw riding into the venue, up to the front of the stage, where the rider welcomed everyone, and then the boy sat in the chair at the front told a short story (see right).

Lucy Neal then welcomed everyone, and the film below was shown which captured some images from the Trashcatchers Carnival, and also included interviews with a range of people from around Tooting answering the questions “what do you love about Tooting?” and “what could be done to make Tooting a better place?”.

Then three people came up to the stage and talked about what Tooting meant to them, and why they loved living in the place.  Then it was my turn to speak.  I started by saying how one of the things I love about Transition is how people take it and make it their own in each different place.  I said that the best people to know how to do Transition in each particular place are the people from that place, and that if someone from Tooting had come to Transition Network 2 years ago and asked how to do Transition in Tooting, we would never have said “well, you need to get a million plastic bags, half a million crisp packets, some shopping trolleys, and march it all down the street”.

I then gave an overview of Transition, of peak oil and climate change, and an introduction to the work in progress that is Transition, using the Pattern Language project to explain it.  I wrapped up by saying that in the face of peak oil, climate change and the unravelling debt crisis, we have a choice.  Do we choose to look at them from a place of concern for self, a fearful response of protecting what we have, of putting our happiness above that of others, a more materialistic take, or do we respond with compassion, seeing that our future lies in becoming better connected, more engaged, more skilled and less focused on materialism?  A wealth of studies show that people who have a less materialistic world view tend to consume less, recycle more, be more mindful about energy use, and, ultimately, be happier and healthier.  The question is whether we can do better than how we do things today, and of course we can, the Trashcatchers event giving a great insight into what is possible.

After me, a young lad came up and sang a song which the audience were invited to join in with, which they did with great energy.  Then people from the different TT Tooting working groups talked about what they have been doing, and invited people to join them to discuss what else their groups might do.  There was then a 10 minute period where people were invited to mill around and go to whichever group interested them, after which everyone came back together again for the Unleashing itself.

The amazing cake, adorned with the Sankofa bird from the Carnival, was brought forward, topped with a fantastic sparkler, and the idea was then for me to say “I hereby announce that Transition Town Tooting is now Unleashed!” while steamers fell from the heavens.  Unfortunately, the woman charged with discharging the banger/steamer thing couldn’t get it to go off, so it took a minute or so for help to arrive and ensure that the cake was cut amid a storm of multicoloured streamers!

Then each working group came back onstage and talked about ideas that had emerged from their conversations.  Finally Lucy Neal thanked everyone for coming and asked “can we do this?” which was met with a resounding “yes!”  And that was that.  People stayed around chatting for some time (always the sign of a good event when nobody wants to go home), before heading out into the warm London night.

One of the hand-stitched banners that had been part of the Carnival said “here in Tooting, great things are”.  When I first saw it I was looking for the accompanying second banner which completed the sentence, but at the end of this wonderful celebratory evening, I realised that it was a self-contained statement and with the work of Transition Town Tooting, now Unleashed, great things, indeed, are. (You can see Mike Grenville’s photos of the event here….)

Acknowledgements.

Author’s Declaration..

Chapter 1. Introduction.

1.1.      The Background to this research..

1.2.      The Research Gap.

1.3.   Aims and Objectives.

1.4.      Structure.

Chapter 2.  Peak Oil, Climate Change and the Challenge of Energy Descent

2.1. Introduction.

2.2. Energy Use.

2.3. Peak Oil and Climate Change.

2.4.   Future Scenarios: Assessing the Scale of the Challenge.

2.4.1. Introduction.

2.4.2. The Scale of the Challenge.

2.4.3. The Concept of ‘Energy Descent’ .

2.4.4. Future Scenarios.

2.4.5. The Post Peak Scenarios Model.

2.5. Resilience.

2.5.1. What is Resilience?

2.5.2. What does resilience thinking contribute to sustainability?

2.5.3.  Does Resilience Mean Relocalisation?

2.5.4. Resilient to What?

2.5.5.  Measuring resilience.

2.5.6. Resilience and Communities.

2.5.7.  Government Views on Resilience.

2.5.8. Case Studies of Community Resilience.

2.5.9. Resilience as an Opportunity/Adaptive or Transformational Resilience.

2.6. Energy Descent – a Crisis or an Opportunity?

2.6.1. Introduction.

2.6.2. Relocalisation as a Possible Response to Peak Oil.

2.6.3.  Localisation.

2.6.4.  Critics of Localisation.

2.6.5.  The Transition movement as a positive response to energy descent.

2.7. Lessons from Behavioural Studies.

2.7.1. Introduction.

2.7.2. Insights from Behavioural Studies 1: why people don’t change.

2.7.3. Insights from Behavioural Studies 2: w hy People Do Change.

2.8. Conclusion.

Chapter 3.  Methodology.

3.1.  Introduction.

3.2.  Aims of this Chapter.

3.3.  Case Study Approach.

3.3.1.  An Introduction to Totnes – the basis for this study.

3.4. Methods.

3.4.1. Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches.

3.4.2 Oral Histories.

3.4.3. Quantitative Questionnaire Surveys.

3.4.4.  In depth interviews with contemporary stakeholder groups.

3.4.5.  Focus Groups.

3.4.6. Public Participatory Tools.

3.5.  Data Analysis.

3.6.  Conclusions.

Chapter 4.  Transition Town Totnes: The Case Study.

4.1.  Introduction.

4.2. The Case Study: Why Totnes?

4.3  Totnes and District: some socioeconomic data.

4.4.  Totnes; a crucible of alternative culture?  Typical town or ‘unique’?

4.5.  Transition Town Totnes, its inception, objectives and process.

4.6.  Reflexivity and Positionality.

4.7. Conclusions.

Chapter 5.  Meeting Basic Needs: Constraints and opportunities for the adoption of relocalised energy descent pathways in Totnes.

5.1.  Introduction.

5.2.  Attitudes to energy and relocalisation.

5.2.1.      Community Attitudes.

5.2.2.      Local Government Attitudes.

5.3.      The Practicalities of Relocalisation: the scale of the challenge of meeting basic needs .

5.3.1.      ‘Reflexive’ and ‘Unreflexive’ Localism.

5.3.2.      Might Localism Better Meet Key Psychological Needs?

5.3.3.      The Localisation/Globalisation Tension.

5.3.4.      Beyond Economic Growth.

5.3.5.      Localisation and Local Economic Regeneration.

5.4.  Food:  Could Totnes Feed Itself?

5.4.1. Introduction.

5.4.2. Conceptualising Local Food Systems.

5.4.3. Empirical Modelling of Local Food Systems.

5.5.  Energy: Can Totnes power itself?

5.6.  Housing: Can Totnes house itself?

5.7. Transport.

5.8. Conclusions.

Chapter 6. Community Structures Required for Relocalisation.

6.1. Introduction.

6.2. Do existing political structures enable/support relocalisation?

6.2.1. Existing political structures in the area.

6.2.2. Shortcomings in the current system.

6.2.3. The Totnes Development Plan Document.

6.3. Governance for Transition.

6.3.1. ‘Localism’ or ‘localisation’?  The national context.

6.3.2. Principles for Transition Local Government.

6.3.3. A Tentative Approach to Governing for Transition.

6.3.4. What Might Transition Local Government Look Like?

6.4.  Which stakeholders need to be involved?

6.4.1. The Challenges of Inclusion.

6.4.2. Other Stakeholders.

6.4.3.      Why Visions Matter?.

6.5.  Conclusions.

Chapter 7.  Resilience: a Gentle Descent or Emergency Preparedness? Finding the most practical direction for a community’s efforts.

7.1. Introduction.

7.2. Heinberg’s ‘Powerdown/Building Lifeboats’ debate.

7.3. What Levels of Resilience Were There Historically in Totnes?.

7.4.      Assessing Emotional/Personal Resilience.

7.4.1. Can Transition Facilitate Psychological Resilience?

7.4.2. Measuring happiness.

7.4.3. The Qualities of Human/Psychological Resilience.

7.4.4.  Community Scale Resilience.

7.5. ‘Transition Together’, ‘Transition Streets’ and the Totnes EDAP.

7.6. The concept of ‘Resilience Indicators’.

7.7.  Social Enterprise: the key to stepping across from thinking to doing?

7.8. Transition Town Totnes’s ability to create parallel public infrastructure.

7.9.      Conclusion.

Chapter 8.  To what extent can lessons learned from the Totnes case study inform similar debates on energy descent pathways in other localities?

8.1. Key Findings.

8.2. Lessons for Elsewhere.

8.3. My Positionality.

8.4.  Future research.

8.5. Final Remarks.

References.

Appendices.

Appendix 1.  Survey Questionnaire.

Appendix 2.  A Sample Transcribed Oral History Interview:  with Douglas Matthews from Staverton.

Appendix 3: Transcriptions from notes taken at World Cafe session, ‘Can Totnes Feed Itself?’ event, Methodist Hall, Totnes.

Appendix 4.  Powering Totnes Beyond Cheap Oil.  Notes from an Open Space Day on Energy.  Saturday 14^th October 2006.

Appendix 5.  A Condensed History of Totnes.

At the CLT conference, the new Housing Minister, Grant Shapps MP, gave a rousing talk about how the government is committed to CLTs (albeit in a slightly altered version called ‘Local Housing Trusts’), and wants to see them everywhere.  They want to see communities taking charge of creating their own housing, raising their own financing and building housing which is in community ownership in perpetuity.  All sounds great.

One part that was slightly alarming was when he said that in the forthcoming ‘Localism Bill’, there will be a provision that if 90% of a community supports a development, it will be able to bypass the planning process.  This raises a number of questions.  90% of which population?  Street?  Neighbourhood? Parish?  Town?  How do they vote?  Then, even if you did get 90% support, is it really, at a time where the need is to promote zero carbon housing, sensible to allow housing to bypass planning?  Will it just lead to rubbish housing?

Will Day speaking at the launch of 'The Future is Local'

At the ‘Future is Local’ launch yesterday, the various speakers offered different insights to the whole Big Society discussion.  Will Day of the SDC said that the aim of the report is the explore “integrated area-based approaches to upgrading infrastructure”.  The thinking goes like this: we have x million homes that need to be retrofitted, the government has no money (well, not much), and we need to promote retrofitting and use that to also create energy security, quality of life, a sustainable economy (fascinating term that…) and jobs.  The idea is that a piecemeal approach isn’t anywhere near as cost-effective, the ideal is to work street-by-street and to use that also as an opportunity to engage communities.

Richard McCarthy of the Department for Community and Local Government spoke next, starting by talking about why localism is important.  It is about, he said, giving people the freedom and space to develop their own responses, free of government regulation and interference.  For him, the Big Society represents “an opportunity for things to happen at a local level”.  The new government plans to get rid of Regional Development Agencies and of Regional Spatial Strategies, and to reprioritise Local Plans, and for those plans to focus on neighbourhood led plans.

Mike Reardon of the Greater Manchester Environment Commission spoke about the work they are doing there to retrofit the city.  He said that they are looking at the process trying to work out how to maximise the economic benefits to the city of the retrofitting work, working on, as he put it, “the engine of retrofitting”.  The challenges they have faced, he said, are their own capacity and capability, realising that there is a significant skills gap, and that they need a new workforce capable of delivering it, hence they are planning to create “A Low Carbon Centre of Excellence” (sock darning MScs…).

Ged Edwards of Sustainable Blacon Ltd talked about the fascinating work they are involved with in a suburb of Chester, which offered some insights into what a post-EDAP Transition initiative might look like.  Blacon is an area of significant disadvantage, and Sustainable Blacon are focusing on 4 things, green transport, green energy, green spaces and green social enterprises.  They are set up as a not-for-profit, with 3 functions, firstly offering services, secondly working as a regeneration consultancy, and lastly promoting Sustainable Blacon.  Their board is made up of resident stakeholders, organisational stakeholders, and expert advisors.

The last, and the most challenging speaker, was Philip Blond of Respublica, who was interviewed recently here at Transition Culture.  Blond is one of the architects of the Big Society concept, and has the ear of David Cameron, for whom he acts as a great inspiration.  I took a lot of notes of his talk, which I will reproduce here because it will inform some of the following discussion.  What, he asked, is the great difficulty with all this talk of localism?  The fact that there is not actually much society, society has become very disassociated.

Very few people out there are ready to engage, the poorest people are 2.5 times more likely to be lonely than the wealthiest.  People, he continued, no longer associate, there has been a diminution of social capital, the different classes mix less often than they used to.  So how do we get to a more associated society?  The answer, he argued, is to begin where people are at.

What we need is a Big Society, and that requires something for people to associate with first.  What do we do when there is no collective identity?  How might we, in an increasingly fractured society, get people to form together in groups?  The environmental movement has, he argued, gone about things in a very dangerous way.  It took an issue of concern to all, and captured just one part of the political spectrum which meant that those on the Right and in the Centre had no interest in it.  Secondly it has failed to communicate carbon reduction in a way that anyone can visualise and care about.

The New Age of Austerity Begins Now: 'refreshments' at the back of the hall during the launch of 'the Future is Local'....

The solution, he proposed, is to begin where people are.  If their idea of environmental work is to beautify their place , or plant trees, then start there.  What people will gather around and form groups around will vary between communities, it might be crime, or it might be beautifying an ugly place.  These projects can then become hubs for other projects.  The state’s role, he said, is to “facilitate civil association”.  The aim should be to create different groups with different intents, and then provide quick wins for these groups.. the role of civil servants then becomes to facilitate this.

In many ways, the new political landscape which I hope I have captured in the above snapshots looks like one in which Transition should feel instinctively at home.  Indeed, I do think that the ‘Big Society’ agenda creates a space in which Transition initiatives should really be stepping up to the plate, and seizing it with both hands.  Local community-led responses, delivering the low carbon agenda from the ground up, facilitating inward investment, returning power to local government and so on, all offers a new context that Transition initiatives should seize with both hands.   There is a very real difference though, between the concepts of ‘localism’ and ‘localisation’.

Localism is about the devolution of power, a devolving of decision making to the lower levels, to communities and to local government.  Localisation is about shifting the focus of economic activity to local markets, to meeting local needs, where possible, though  local production.  Localism certainly creates a more conducive context within which localisation can flourish, but localism, as promoted by the current administration, still takes place within the wider context of globalised economic growth, which in turn drives energy dependency and carbon emissions.

I do however have some problems with this new localism agenda.  As I listened to Blond’s talk, I thought, well is it actually true that we live in a country with not much society, that society has now disassociated?  I remember just before the election hearing Eddie Izzard, who had just run all around the country, doing 50-something marathons for charity.  He said he didn’t believe in ‘Broken Britain’.. everywhere he had gone people were much more community focused than he had expected.  My experience from visiting Transition initiatives is that community is there, everywhere, sometimes more obvious than other places, but the point is that community will organise when it wants to, it doesn’t need permission from government.

In the short film at the top of this post, Cameron says “I don’t believe that civil society springs up of its own accord”.  Well there are thousands of community organisations around the country, run mostly by volunteers, Transition initiatives, Low Carbon Communities, Greening groups and so on, none of them waited for permission from government.  They certainly sprang up of their own accord.  What matters is for the State to offer such projects meaningful support, and to remove the obstacles strewn in their paths.

Perhaps they might say, for example, that for communities wanting to install community owned renewables through a community ESCO, or similar model, they will put up 50% of the money, matching whatever the community raises through community share options or bonds.  Perhaps the £10-15,000 loans soon to be offered to homeowners for retrofits on a ‘Pay-As-You-Save’ basis could also be offered for individuals so as to raise the initial capital for a community energy company.  Perhaps government might give communities first refusal on land zoned for development, and allow the use of compulsory purchase orders by community groups for sites they want to develop.  Perhaps they might introduce something like the Low Carbon Fund which has run so successfully in Scotland, to which community groups can apply for anywhere between £1,000 and £1,000,000 for low carbon projects.

One of the bits I struggle with is the idea that government’s role is to devolve responsibility to communities, to devolve leadership.  In one way, I love it.  Of course communities have a key role to play in Transition in the wider sense, and need to be given that responsibility and trusted to take some leadership.  Transition has long argued that without active communities taking leadership, national decarbonisation/resilience building will struggle.  However, climate change, and the need to cut emissions sharply, also very much need strong government.  In Germany and Denmark, emissions have been cut by decisive and focused government action, while also empowering communities.

We need the empowerment of communities, the enabling of community responses, but we also need strong, imaginative government based on a strong agenda of slashing the nation’s emissions.  I’m not sure that we have that. For example, I live in Devon.  Almost every planning application for wind farms are refused by the predominantly conservative Council.  So, if the move then is towards local communities being able to decide whether they want wind farms or not, we’ll probably end up with even less. Without strong government, we will never get anywhere near the nation’s targets for installed wind capacity.  We need both.

Of course the cynic might point out that the reason for the Big Society is the sweeping cuts in public spending that are only just beginning.  If you replace the word ‘localism’ with ‘privatisation’, it is not that different in some ways from the Thatcher government’s agenda.  There is a challenge within it around what people are actually capable of doing in their spare time.  Working full time, and also running a school?  Working, managing a family, looking after an ailing relative, and running a Community Land Trust?  Of course there are incredible people out there who do that, but it will have its limits unless people are supported in other ways too.

Having said that though, I welcome the potential that the Big Society represents.  It offers a context within which Transition can really step up to the plate.  It explicitly states that it wants to see communities stepping up and taking control, and that can only be to the good.  It has lots of hooks onto which Transition groups can hang their projects, and it also raises lots of questions which Transition initiatives have hard-won experience they can feed into.

We need inspired, motivated communities taking ownership and responsibility, but over that, I would argue, we also need to be laying localisation, seeing that, for example, retrofitting Manchester could stimulate not just new trainings, but also a wide range of other potential businesses and livelihoods.  While localism is a great first step, it will be when localisation is woven in too that we really start to get somewhere interesting.  When the Big Society meets the Local Economy, then we’re really moving, and it is that localisation piece of the puzzle that Transition brings to this discussion. This brings us to the need to redefine resilience, not as a state of maximum preparedness for the ghastly, but as a desired state, as a positive.  But that’s a subject for a later post…

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts on this…

Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival stops the traffic.

Traffic on Tooting High Street came to a stop today when the Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival came to town!   Over 800 participants from local schools, community groups and clubs took part in this unique carnival made almost entirely from household rubbish. Over 1 million plastic bottles and shopping bags, half a million crisp packets, half a ton of renewable willow and half a ton of materials were collected over a six month period to create this extravaganza.  Check out the great piece on local ITV News… and this film, filmed from the Turtle, which gives a flavour of the event…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePOx9H3Llxs

Organisers of the carnival were jubilant that it had gone so smoothly and according to plan. Lucy Neal, Co Chair of Transition Town Tooting speaking this morning to ITV London Tonight news had this to say, “individually we may seem insignificant, but when we connect up in a community, we are very strong, we can make a huge difference. We are thrilled at how well it’s come together and amazed at the support we have received from the people of Tooting”.

One of the more amusing floats we saw today were the cycle powered living rooms transporting some of the elders of the community. Sitting comfortably on her recycled armchair, Jaya Patel, born and bred Tooting resident said “ the best bit about this carnival is that its bought the whole community together from all sections young and old from all ethnic backgrounds”.

The South London Swimming Club had a cycle-powered float with swimmers, iceberg and sea made entirely out of plastic bags and bottles. The swimmers themselves came dressed as the colourful doors of their changing rooms at the Tooting Lido.

The Lady of Tooting, a 6 metre high animatronic creation told the story of Tooting on her crinoline Victorian dress decorated with over 170 faces of the ladies of Tooting.

Antonia Field-Smith, a Tooting resident said “It was great to see Tooting High Street without traffic and to be able to walk down the road without worrying about getting run over. I loved it, what a fantastic event”.

Steven Cooper of the Metropolitan Police thought the carnival was a fantastic idea and one which he would like to see happen again next year.  The grand finale at Fishponds Playing Fields with a shared picnic followed by dancing and music performed by local school children was a fitting end to a spectacular day.  (Check out this great blog post about the day too…)

For further information please contact:

Malsara Thorne – malsaraw@gmail.com

www.transitiontowntooting.org

Transition Maastricht in the Netherlands open their new community garden (see below)...

This month we’re starting with some Transition snapshots from the US…and here we see the US is permablitzing too, with a potluck to follow up, while T Mill Valley has combined their potluck with a rambling hike along local trails. They recently held a very successful and enthusiastically received first event focussing on ‘Resilience from the Ground Up’, so we wish them success for the future. T Putney has now got a community garden to divide into twelve plots…great for improving people’s access to land. We look forward to seeing some pics of work in progress! Here’s a piece about TT Albany written by an interested follower. From TT Milwaukee we have lots about their Powerdown Week 2010: there’s a week’s events calendar, a report with an audio story too, and a slideshow. Also from the US, here is a young man who has a penchant for doing video diary things about his travels, usually with his shirt off for some reason, and here he is talking about his getting involved with Transition Pittsburgh on creating some urban forest gardens…

In Australia, the TT group West Hobart Environment Network have been busy again with a fantastic event to give tips, advice and demonstrate equipment that can all help save energy and so reduce power bills. And a fantastic draw prize – the South Hobart Ecoblitz! Find out more what that is here… Here’s a piece on how Transition Towns are spreading in Victoria, and TT Hervey Bay has shared this little movie of their community garden as shown on local TV.. they also mention their EDAP, which we’re intrigued to see!

In nearby New Zealand, a new vision for making Otago’s transport system sustainable is being discussed, while TT Mount Eden, formed by the Mount Eden Village People, has lots of lovely projects and is asking for more people to join them… Finally from that side of the world we have a podcast with the great James Samuel on the ‘Breakfast with Spanky’ Radio Show!

Also from Australia, here’s a film of Karen Jones telling followers of her video blog (or should that be ‘vlog’?) what Transition is….

Over to Europe, there’s a new Community Garden at Buurttuin 6211 in TT Maastricht…great news for the local community and other neighbourhoods as this is a pilot project to be replicated in other local areas. And a big welcome to Ibiza Transition Island! Yes, you guessed it; we’re all fighting over who will get to visit them!  For any Italian speakers, here’s Jacopo Fo explaining Transition….

From the UK,  we have some great slides of Outta Place arts busy at TT Hebden Bridge’s Transition Zone at the Big Green Weekend. TT Stroud’s Green Councillor, Philip Booth, has been sharing lessons from TT Stroud with TT Exmouth…great news! Congratulations to TT Taunton, which has been awarded a grant by Taunton Deane Borough Council to set up some pilot projects to help people cope with these challenging economic times… activities include a food co-op, food growing skills, energy efficiency parties and ‘make do and mend’… and here’s a report of their family fun day.

North Howe T Toun will be at the Big Tent Festival (24-25 July) and they’re looking for volunteers to help raise awareness about Transition…can you help? And here’s a Green Communities’ film all about North Howe T Toun…(it looks a bit chilly though). More about TT Tooting’s carnival and their pre-carnival factories, and there’s more here and here…and I can’t wait for the film of the carnival’s story! In the meantime, here is an interview with Tooting’s Lucy Neal, we think from last year’s Transition Network conference…

We’ve got new TT groups just starting or trying to gather local interest… In Upottery, Devon, there’s a call from Sharon to join her in transitioning Upottery village, and here’s Charles wishing to make Laugharne in Carmarthen a Transition Town too, and there’s also been talk of a TT King’s Cross too. If you’re an interested local person, do get in touch with them.

TT Brixton has given us an update on the £Brixton, and the group is also supporting the Brixton Splash street party. Also in London we congratulate TT Sydenham for becoming official! Congratulations also go to another new London group – TT Crystal Palace – who are looking for more people to join them and someone with artistic flair to help them design an eye-catching logo…is there anybody out there?

Adrienne Campbell of TT Lewes has emerged victorious from a planning tussle with her council and is now allowed to install solar PV on her roof. Besides inspiring others to follow suit, perhaps this will also make it easier for other local people facing the same barriers to get the go ahead. Over at Amersham, the TT group have been working with the local council to ensure the litter-picked rubbish collected on their clean-up day gets recycled instead of binned….

Transition Horncastle presenting Transition books to their local library

TT Horncastle has donated a set of the Transition books to their local library in celebration of their first birthday…Happy Birthday to you! … there’s also a look back over their year’s achievements and a great pic too. There’s lots of news from TT West Kirby including free bike maintenance courses and an update on their battle to get more land for allotments.  TT Shipston is holding a midsummer festival, so try and get along there if you live locally.

At the recent Transition Network conference, some participants enjoyed a woodland walk and were inspired to start up a ‘Trees for Transition’ forum – to be hosted by transitionnetwork.org – to explore and share information and project ideas on the important role of trees in Transition. TT Farnham has started a Low Carbon Communities Newsletter: here’s number 2, and you’re all invited to contribute your news to them too. TT Totnes is busily planning to make affordable homes available in an area where second home purchases have pushed house prices beyond the reach of many people, so it’s a very worthwhile project.  While we’re on the subject of the Transition Network conference (which we’re not any more, but we were…) here’s a film of the workshop the good people who came from Brazil ran…

And lastly we go into the gardens…  in TT Clitheroe, where the shortage of allotment space is desperate, the garden-share scheme is fast gaining momentum. TT Wandsworth has been leased some disused land for 18 months by the local council for a community garden, and they plan to grow flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables. Transition Brockley has also been busily planting Brockley Common with foodie and non-foodie plant seeds, and the plans have been laid to plant an orchard in November as part of the London Orchard Project.  There’s an update on TT Dorchester’s community farm to be developed on 2 acres of the Duchy of Cornwall’s land, which they’ve secured on a peppercorn rent.

Local people and organisations are welcome to join in, so go along and see what it’s all about. Shaftesbury TT has helped create some beautiful Active Travel Maps to show cycling and walking routes in the Shaftesbury and Gillingham areas, and their project ‘Shaftesbury Homegrown’ has a new website and with lots of exciting news!

Finally for this month, TT Tooting is looking for people to help with their third Foodival, a fantastic event for Transition and diversity that encourages local restaurants to cook up their traditional cultural feasts, all with locally grown fruits and veggies. The organisers are looking for volunteer heads and hands (better bring hearts too, as this is Transition after all) to bring inspirational ideas and practical assistance to make the third foodival even more of a success than the second. Have a great month!

Thanks again to Helen for creating this!