This month’s podcast goes into more depth on three of the stories from the April round-up of what’s happening in Transition.  We hear from the High School Joan Segura i Valls in Santa Coloma de Queralt (in Catalonia, Spain) who have just completed a big project about Transition, from Transition Oamaru and Waitaki District in New Zealand about their Sustainable Skills School, and we hear from Tooting about their Treasuring Tooting event that took place last weekend.  Do note that you can embed it on your own website, and that it is also now available on iTunes.

I wrote a while ago about the Festival of Transition, and in particular the 24 Hours of Possibility event taking place on the first day of Rio+20 (June 20th).  I thought that perhaps to inspire your thinking about what you might do where you are, I might share Transition Town Totnes’ emerging plan for the day.  Everywhere will do very different things, and already some places have set out what they are going to do, but here are Totnes’ plans… as you’ll see it is quite tentative, but it is starting to take shape:

The 24 hours in Totnes will be framed by  a series of What If questions  linked to the different activities that we are planning to put on. These will be questions that encourage dialogue, visioning, reflection. There are several What If Events happening as part of the Festival around the country.  This Festival is about Transition in a broad sense- the Transtition to a more sustainable and resilient future that tackles the challenges of today and leads to  better lives for all.

TOTNES ITINERY

6.00 am  Dawn on the Dartington Estate as part of the Home and the World summit - artists/ thinkers from across the UK gathering for a 3 day festival about our relationship to the wider world. Rob Hopkins has been invited to speak/share/be there  at Dawn along with Ruth Potts from New Economics Foundation – The Festival will open up for that event to anyone who wants to join to see the day in..

Breakfast at Atmos site and visioning – What might our daily lives might be like when the Atmost project is in full swing how will we live, work, gather, celebrate? Visions/ hopes  will be written on pieces of Totnes bunting that will be tied to the Fence outside the Dairy Crest site then taken back to the Civic Hall.  Bring a locally sourced breakfast to share and join people waiting for trains or dropping people off.

What would it be like to have a pioneering  housing, business, cultural hub in Totnes? What would it be like if people were involved in desining, building, planning the buildings they use? What would it be like if there was  a home for thriving sustainable social enterprises in Totnes? What would a groundbreaking cultural centre in Totnes be doing? 

Cycle Tour - Following breakfast people invited to go on a cycle tour to various sustainable/Transition projects to celebrate the steps already being taken towards a resilient future – ideas to go to South Brent, Ashburton, Hilly Fields ( more ideas needed …. ) Also to forage food on the way for lunch.  Ideally get the Rickshaw involved for people who don’t want to cycle

What if  local sustainable projects were connected up and felt part of a bigger picture? What if we reduced the level of cars on the streets?

Riverside Wild food Walk- for those not going on cycling tour a riverside foraging walk into Totnes collecting food to add to lunch

What If foraging and wild food became part of our daily life and staple diet? What if food for foraging was planted in our public places avaliable for all?

Shared Local Lunch -in the Market/ Civic Square. Bring locally sourced food to share for a mass lunch in the square  A working, visioning, connecting lunch. An opportunity for local stakeholders to gather with teach other and the public  passing by. A focus on what make us a vibrant community – exploring what a market square of the future  might be like

Followed by an afternoon of swapping, collecting and connecting-  Experiments with the High Street of the future -

There is a section called “What Should You Do?” which is usually the part in such books that picks you up a bit, and makes you believe that you can do something to alter the projections he has previously set out.  There are some great bits of ‘personal advice’ in there, such as ‘focus on satisfaction rather than income’, ‘do not acquire a taste for things that will disappear’, ‘stop believing that all growth is good’, and ‘in politics, remember that the future will be dominated by physical limits’.  Fair enough.  But there is one there that is so spectacularly depressing that I really needed to bring it out here and look at it with some other people.

It is “don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Randers reasons that over the next 50 years we will see the ongoing erosion of biodiversity and wilderness, due to climate change and humanity’s reach into more and more remote areas.  A love for “old, undisturbed nature”, he argues, is something it will become increasingly difficult to satisfy.  ”By teaching your child to love the loneliness of the untouched wilderness, you are teaching her to love what will be increasingly hard to find”, he argues, which will lead to unhappiness and despondency.  ”Much better then”, he concludes, “to rear a new generation that find peace, calm and satisfaction in the bustling life of the megacity – and with never-ending music piped into their ears”.  That must rank as one of the most devastating visions of the future I have read anywhere.

This links to another of his pieces of personal advice, “invest in great electronic entertainment and learn to prefer it”.  I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts.  Might a move to a world that has successfully decarbonised itself only be possible if we are to disconnect from wilderness?  I know what I think about it, but I’d love to hear from you.  Is this something that fills you with horror, or are you pleased to finally see someone taking what strikes you as being a realistic angle on this?  Discuss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A big HUG from Portugal

Isabel and Luis Gonçalves

“Hello.  I want to tell you a story which pulls together a lot of what we’ve heard already and looks at what that might look like in the context of one place. And it’s a story which I think can change the world. It’s a story which already is changing the world. It’s the story of my town, Totnes, in Devon.  A town of about 8,500 people, midway between Exeter and Plymouth.   But before I can tell you the story I really want to tell you about Totnes, I have to get another one out of the way first. 

Totnes was once referred to as the “Capital of New Age Chic”, that’s ‘chic’ not ‘sheep’. The idea of a “Capital of New Age Sheep” is too horrible to imagine. The Western Morning News, the local paper, in an article which I’ll be coming back to later, once referred to the average resident of Totnes as a “sandal wearing, crystal gazing soap carver subsisting entirely on brown rice and organic parsnips”. And Matt Harvey, our local poet, says that when you’ve lived there too long your body starts to secrete a hormone called ‘Totnesterone’, where your masculine and feminine come into perfect balance with each other.

But I think it’s really important that we move beyond the stereotypes of the town into another story that is happening there, which I think is really, really important. Totnes has a much higher than the national average number of families depending on part time work rather than full time work, has 50% more families living below £20,000 a year than the national average, very high house prices, and has seen most of its industry, most of its employment shut down over the last 15-20 years. The bacon factory, the milk factory, the art college, to a point where local businessman and historian Walter King talks about whether what we’re seeing is “the long, slow death of Totnes as a living working town, gathering pace”. And it’s that story, that context that I really want to talk about.

My role in this, I suppose started in 2005 when a friend and myself started showing some films about peak oil, about the idea that we are reaching the end of an age of cheap energy and all that that has made possible. We’re entering a time of increasingly volatile energy prices and that what we need to do with focus, determination, optimism and a sense of possibility is design the way that we’re going to get away from that. Same in terms of addressing climate change.  (Points to slide) It’s the very first talk that I gave in the town and it’s a story that has really started to build from that point because ultimately there is no cavalry coming to the rescue of places like Totnes, of most places where you live.

The current economic situation, these kind of issues around peak oil and climate change, what we really need to do, I would argue, is to harness, engage the collective genius of the people around us and focus on these challenges, seeing them as an enormous opportunity to be more brilliant than we’ve ever been, to do something which is really, really historic.  What I want to do is show you a very short little animation from the film that we’ve just released which is called ‘In Transition 2.0’ which hopefully captures rather creatively how transition approaches making change happen on the ground.

[Audio from video clip] “You can think of the economy of the place that you live as being like a big bucket and into that bucket go pensions, wages, grants and so on, but at the moment things like supermarkets, paying our electricity bills, internet shopping are all drilling holes into that bucket that means that our accumulated wealth and its potential are just draining away. And everywhere that there’s a leak in that bucket is a potential local livelihood, potential local business or a training opportunity for young people. So things like supporting community energy companies, supporting local food where it’s available and boosting that where it is and using local currency are all very skilful ways of plugging the leaks in that bucket.”

So from quite early on of doing Transition Town Totnes as it started to be known, we had a big event called ‘The Unleashing’ which was our launch event and from very early on, very quickly projects started going, people were excited, they were inspired, they wanted to see thing happen where they were. There were projects like the nut tree planting scheme where we wanted to plant productive trees throughout the town. There are now 250 planted, looked after by people who are close to them. A lot of local businesses paid to have them planted. And we had our first harvest of almonds from a park in town last autumn.

The Totnes Pound, the local currency scheme, specifically designed not to fit out through those holes in the bucket because if we take them anywhere else they’re not worth anything. You can’t use local currency, you can’t put it in offshore banking accounts, they‘re not very useful in the Cayman Islands!  A Local Food Directory so people can identify and support local food businesses. A co-housing group looking to build affordable co-housing for people as part of the local development. Awareness raising things like Open Eco-Homes, Open Edible Gardens where people can go and visit other people’s places where they’re already doing that stuff and learn from it. The Garden Share scheme where people who have a garden that they’re too elderly or too busy to use, are matched with people who want to grow food and don’t have anywhere to grow it. And that’s been going really really well.

In 2009, when this had been going for about 3 years, we did a survey and we found that 75% of people in the town had heard of what we were doing, 62 % of people agreed with it, thought it was a good idea, and about 30-33% had had some kind of engagement with it at some point. But stories started to reach us of how it was being picked up in other places. And my favourite was the daughter of a woman who is very active in the local churches went on holiday to Canada, a canoeing holiday. She was out in the middle of one of the great lakes, canoeing along, middle of nowhere, sees another canoe thinks “I’ll be sociable”, I’d better go over and say hello, paddles over, gets chatting “Where are you from?”  “Totnes”. “Oh, Transition Town Totnes?”  And it’s amazing how that story has rippled out.

But very quickly we needed to put some foundations under this, this was something that was starting to grow very very quickly and it had a lot of interest, both within the place and from outside people coming along and saying “What do you do?”, “How does that work?”. So Transition Town Totnes was set up as an organisation to offer project support, it’s a ’do-ocracy’. The people who make the decisions are the people who are doing stuff. It employs one and a half posts at the moment, and has brought in, I reckon, about one million pounds to the town over the last five years, and has rapidly become one of the pillars locally of local culture I think.

When we started doing Transition I was always imagined it was an environmental thing.  More and more I see it as being a cultural thing, really more and more I see it as being a cultural thing.  How do you change the story of the place where you are? And within that there’s a whole process of ’we can start lots of different projects’ but what does it look like if we start to see them all together?  If we can create a vision, if we can create a story that the people in the place can start to resonate with, it starts to make sense.

And we’ve done 2 things that have been really sort of strategic pieces around design. One of them was the Energy Descent Action Plan which you can find online, which involved many hundreds of people in trying to envision what the place could be like if we take peak oil, climate change, our economic situation as a huge opportunity to be brilliant. And the other one is called the Economic Blueprint that we’re doing at the moment which is actually now the local council’s Economic Blueprint.

What’s exciting with that is that for the first time that I’m aware of it’s starting to map the potential of the local economy. What passes through it and how could we start to cycle that more locally if we can start to plug some of the leaks?  So what are the initial findings for example?  Every year the area spends £30 million on food.  £20 million of that goes out through just 2 supermarkets. If we could start to shift just 10% of that spent to local food, we’ve brought £2 million into our local economy. We haven’t had to get government grants in, we haven’t had to invite big companies in, we’ve got £2 million in our economy for creating skills, trainings, new livelihoods and new enterprises. That feels like, to me, like a really big, really important idea of our time.

And one of the projects we did a couple of years ago which I think is really really interesting, this is after starting an organisation focussed on community responses to peak oil and climate change, is this thing called ‘Transition Streets’. Transition Streets is based on the idea that maybe change sticks better if you get together with your neighbours and it works on a street by street level.  So you get out on your street, you knock on the doors, you get between 6 and 10 people/households together and you agree to meet 7 times in each other’s houses.

You look at water one week, energy another week, food another week and you make pledges at the end of each session about what you’re going to do. And on average each household that gets involved cuts their carbon by about 1.3 tonnes and saves themselves about £600.  500 households have done this now. That becomes a very significant reduction towards the town’s emissions. But when I meet people in the street who’ve done it, they don’t say: “Oh, it’s great Rob, we did Transition Streets, we saved 1.3 tonnes of carbon, we’re feeling really pleased with ourselves. So great, we really feel we’re doing our bit.” What they say is: “it’s great, I now know Sandra over the road, Dave over the road, you know we’re doing this thing, I didn’t know him, he’s such an interesting guy, he does this and he knows all of this and he’s shown me how to do that.” And all that social side of it is what comes to the fore.

When we asked people in a report at the end that pulled together all the learnings from it “why did you get involved in Transition Streets?”, the key answer was “because I wanted to know my neighbours better.” And when we asked them “What were the key benefits you feel that you got out of being involved in that?” and we turned it into one of those clever Word Cloud things,  ‘Community’, ‘neighbours’, ‘getting to know’.  ‘Climate change’ doesn’t even register, ‘peak’, a tiny little word in the bottom corner, which for me is really really fascinating, that maybe in terms of making change happen, there is a different way of doing it which is about something which is kind of infectious and sort of viral and fun and contagious in that way. I’m using lots of disease analogies and I’m not trying to but they seem to be coming to my mind quickly!

And what we’re really focussing on now increasingly is about how do we make a new economy a reality in the town? If the cavalry aren’t coming, how do we do that? What does it look like if we start to put that in place? So things are now happening like the Totnes Renewable Energy Society, which now has 500 members and is about to put in for planning for 2 wind turbines on the edge of the town.

Transition Tours, which is about turning the many people who come to Totnes to find out about TTT, put on a really good experience for them in such a way that means we don’t kind of drown in it. Transition Homes which is a development looking to build 20 affordable houses but using predominantly local materials, because in the same way when we talk about food, localising food brings more money cycling into our economy, exactly the same thing works for building materials.

We’re seeing businesses starting to emerge through the kind of culture that’s been created of saying “we need new enterprises for this, who’s up for that?”.  We recently held a thing called the ‘Local Entrepreneur Forum’, where we brought together people with business ideas in the town, about 40 people who had great ideas for different enterprises with local potential investors and mentors to really try and kick start what this new economy could look like. We have a micro brewery project which is in the offing, The Kitchen Table which is really about catering but trying to catalyze lots of other things around local food as well.

It’s looking for businesses which have a number of criteria, that they’re about:

• promoting local resilience
• that they’re low carbon
• that they are not just purely for personal profit
• that they are working within natural limits
• promoting localisation, and
• that they’re about bringing assets into the local community.

I’m really glad I remembered all 6 of those, because lots of people talked about their anxiety dreams in advance. My anxiety dream before TED was that DeLaSoul came round to my house to stay for the night, the 80‘s rap trio, and I couldn’t find enough bedding for them. And so the fact that I’ve remembered all those things is great, I’ve broken through that barrier, that’s fantastic!

And when I was preparing this talk I asked various people “What were their highlights of being around this process for the last 5 or 6 years?” One person said it was the event at the end of Transition Streets where we showed a film called ‘Start something together’ which you can find on YouTube, which documents that process.  All the people from all the different Transition Streets came together to the Civic Hall and had a big kind of celebration. She said that she was almost moved to tears by the energy that that had created. Another friend of mine who organised a hustings event in the run up to the election where we invited all the local candidates rather than just having them sit there answer questions, we talked about this, about the kind of economy we wanted to create for the place, and then asked them “how are you going to support that, how are you going to help that into being?”

My personal highlight was this headline from the Western Morning News, the lead editorial no less, which contained this sentence: “In an interesting twist to the climate change debate, communities and individuals once seen as quaintly idiosyncratic for their way out views, have now become mainstream and may yet provide some of the answers to the biggest questions we all face”.

One day a German guy came, about 2 years ago, into the office of TTT. He said: “I have come all the way from Germany to see the famous Transition Town Totnes and you still have cars!” Well, you might like to temper your expectations a little bit you know!  But it’s really interesting reflect over the last 5 years about how this has spread. And the best kind of analogy that I can come up with is like mycorrhiza, an incredibly fine fungus, one of the main things which gives forests their resilience, it gives soil their resilience. If I had an inch cube of mycorrhiza-rich soil here it would contain 10 miles of mycorrhiza. And what it does, it’s like a neural network between all the different parts of it that enable it to spread excess nutrients around, communicate risk, communicate disease or threats to it and so on, it’s an extraordinary thing.

In a sense Transition is a bit like inoculating a community with something like that in that it runs and so our German friend who came he was looking for all the fruits, but a lot of what it does, it runs under the surface, it fruits where you expect, but it also fruits where you don’t expect. Research that we did showed that for example when Transition Streets had only just started, it hadn’t had any publicity or anything, we did a focus group completely on the other side of town and a woman talked about the first place where we had a pilot going on and said ”it’s great over there, it’s like the war, they’re like a village, they have street parties and everything.” That sense had started to percolate through.   One local councillor I talked to said: “the best thing TTT has done is bring people together.”

If it had just been something that happened in Totnes, that wouldn’t really have been that much use, but actually what happened is something has germinated there, has spread and spread and spread. There are now Transition initiatives in 34 countries, thousands of initiatives places all of this in their own context, whether it be Brazil or Barcelona, Bologna or Brixton, and using it to create their own banks, their own energy companies, their own food systems and so on. It’s an exhilarating thing to see and observe the spread of.

It’s a story which is able to bring 300 people from the town out about 2 weeks ago down onto the former derelict industrial site in the town for a big photograph to launch a campaign about bringing this site, which used to employ 163 people back into community ownership. To develop it as a catalyst for a Transition economy for the town, what we call the Atmos project.

It’s a story which is really about communities seeing community resilience as where their economic future lies. And Jay Tompt who works with us, wrote a beautiful blog about it which contained this sentence I wanted to read to you:

“There is plenty to keep and our children busy for a long time to come, the important thing is that we’ve begun, we know that we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for, so we’re just doing it, we don’t need the cavalry, we’re already here”.

So this has really been a process about ordinary people and a process that has dirt under its fingernails and has seen the opportunity this time around, it’s a really really exhilarating thing to be part of.  I just want to finish with one of my favourite quotes which is from my children’s favourite story book which is ‘Comet in Moominland’, written in 1946 by Tove Jansson. I think captures what the essence of Transition more than any academic paper on the subject I ever heard or I’ve ever written about it.

“It was a funny little path winding here and there, dashing off in different directions, sometimes even tying a knot in itself from sheer joy. You don’t get tired of a path like that and I’m not sure that it doesn’t get you home quicker in the end.”

Thank you very much.

Here is some updated information on the Festival of Transition:

The nationwide ‘Festival of Transition’, coordinated by nef (the new economics foundation) and the Transition Network, has begun, running until 20th June, the first day of the 20th UN Earth Summit in Rio.   Instead of flying to Brazil, the Festival gives people the opportunity to do something positive about climate change and the economic crisis in their own communities.

The Festival is a unique mixture of walks, talks and a DIY day of action on 20th June.  It combines a series of organised events at festivals, museums and institutions around the country with an open invitation to schools, workplaces and community groups to stage their own ‘real-life experiments’ in living differently on 20th June.  Full details of Festival events can be found at http://www.festivaloftransition.net.

The ‘What if?’ events include:

• 19^th/20^th May (this weekend!) at the Bristol Festival of Ideas: ‘What if… we left the oil in the ground?’ with author James Marriot and ‘What if…  we could create money as well as the banks?’ with nef and the newly launched Bristol Pound
• 30^th May at the Hay Festival: ‘What if… we turned back the climate clock?’ with poet Lemn Sissay and Greenpeace chief executive John Sauven and ‘What if… cities produced our food?’ in association with the Soil Association

• 6^th June at the Royal  College of Art: ‘What if… creatives redesigned economics?’ with nef and Occupy Design
• 13^th June at the Museum of East Anglian Life: ‘What if.. the sea keeps rising?’
• 14^th June at Manchester Museum: ‘What if… Manchester was as sustainable as Havana?’

 The ‘Transition Walks’ include:

• 22^nd May: ‘In the shadow of the City: A walk through the history of the Corporation’,  with author Nick Robins
• 23^rd May: ‘On London’s Oil Road: A journey to the heart of the energy economy’, in association with Platform London

Community groups and Transition initiatives have already started pledging to stage 24-hour experiments in living differently on 20th June via the Festival website.  Does your Transition initiative have any plans to do anything?

Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation said:

“This summer thousands of people will fly to Brazil to wait and watch as politicians struggle to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, hoping for action to meet the scale of the climate crisis. International political action is vital, but we’ve moved beyond leaving it all to big, global conferences. People are impatient and want to take action themselves. The Festival of Transition is an opportunity to question, taste, and experiment with living better within life-preserving environmental limits. We believe that once people take a first step, they’ll want to keep on walking.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

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

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

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

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

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

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

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

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

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

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

What they do is to allow a group to celebrate the things it has already done, and to reflect on possible parts of the process that it hasn’t got round to.  They can be used to lay them out to tell the story of the initiative so far, with reflection on the cards left unused.  They also get away from the idea that Transition is a linear, prescribed process, rather an organic, place-specific assembling of ingredients.  What has been your experience with the cards?  The activities we have come up with so far can be downloaded here … have you developed any other ones?  My thanks to Transition Town Cheltenham for sharing their reflections.

Nick, thanks very much for joining us. For people who haven’t read Treasure Islands, can you describe for us its key findings?

There are a couple of main conclusions. One is that the offshore system of tax havens is much much bigger and much more central to the global economy than almost anybody had thought. It’s seen in the popular imagination as an exotic sideshow to the global economy. But really since the era of globalisation began in the 1970s the offshore system of tax havens has been growing much much faster than the supposedly onshore economy. It has been steadily pushing its way onshore so that a lot of big countries are increasingly resembling tax havens as they try and compete with each other to attract the hot money. So they increasingly offer stronger forms of secrecy and new forms of trust and corporations and so on to try and attract the hot money, and new tax loopholes.

Another big finding is that tax havens are not where most people think they are. Of course places like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Monaco are tax havens, big and important tax havens. But the really big ones are places like the United States and the United Kingdom which runs a huge network of satellite tax havens around it, feeding the City of London. The UK and its overseas territories, which it partly controls, include the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, British Virgin Islands. Massive tax havens. And also the crown dependencies which are Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. And these are all like, in Treasure Island I describe it as a bit like a spider’s web with the City of London at the middle. So these places are capturing money from around the world, and the business of handling the money from around the world and funneling this money up to London.

They are deliberately lowering the standards on secrecy and various other things to entice this money. And so the City of London itself is only indirectly implicated in this stuff. It is at one step remove and there’s plausible deniability. We’re not offering these specific facilities. But this network is. It’s very much a British network and it is, in a sense, a financial empire. It grew up from the 1950s onwards with the City of London, the growth of the oil markets. That was when the formal British empire was ended but the UK has managed to retain a significant degree of influence over the flows of money around the world after the collapse Empire and it now has this new kind of financial empire. So these were my two big conclusions.

Are there any countries that don’t allow the offshoring of capital? And if so, how do they do it? And also, are there any countries that have reintroduced those mechanisms. 

The trouble with this is that there are all shades of grey. Some countries deliberately set out to be tax havens. So Switzerland is a classic example. It has for decades set out to provide banking secrecy and to attract dirty money, criminal money and other sorts of money from around the world. But every country, in a sense, is a tax haven in its own right because there isn’t an international network of transparency, of sharing information between countries that makes any country in the world completely transparent.

If you take your money to Germany, or somewhere like that, it’s going to be difficult – if you’re an African government or something like that – it’s going to be quite difficult to get hold of information about that money, there’s no automatic sharing mechanisms. There are some sharing mechanisms in their fledgling state. The European Union has one called the Savings Tax Directive and the United States is starting to get more active in this area. So there are some international information sharing transparency mechanisms, but it’s still very much a patchwork, an insufficient patchwork. So when money moves across borders very often is able to find secrecy.

But I think when you’re looking at tax havens what you’re really looking at are places that are deliberately setting out on a strategy to do this. Some countries are tax havens kind of by accident but they tend not to the big players. The big players are the ones that deliberately set out to create this stuff.

What’s your view on the supposed benefits of extra liquidity that our internationalised banking and money system provides versus the loss of money in the real economy that Treasure Islands describes so well?

If you take the UK for example, on the one hand you have the UK losing tax revenue to tax havens. So British tax evaders or tax avoiders, that is, for example, corporations that are not technically breaking the law but are still cutting their tax bills substantially. These are costing the treasury billions of dollars, billions of pounds. But at the same time the money that is coming into the United Kingdom from tax havens, there’s this huge kind of feeder mechanism into the UK, is benefiting the City of London.

I’d be very careful about how to phrase this because what the City does is it says, “this is good for Britain, this is money that is coming into Britain.” But I argue very strongly that it isn’t. This is money that is good for the City but what it does is it creates this international financial centre, this offshore financial centre in the heart of the United Kingdom. Makes it almost unreformable. People are worried about the power of the City of London, the fact that it’s able to suck up the best talent and all the best capital and influence all the policy makers.

This power and this strength comes in very large measure from its international network and the offshore network. So just to say, “oh, money coming into Britain must be good for Britain”, it’s just not true. These hundreds of billions of dollars that have been flooding into the UK. Is Britain any better off than say, Germany or France or Sweden or Canada which have not been playing nearly such a financial game? I would say “no”.  Britain is on many measures much more unequal, worse health outcomes, worse social outcomes than these other countries and I think there’s quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the financial centre has been a very powerful driver rather a contributor, rather than anything that benefits Britain.

Is it possible to reform the financial institutions that we have that are responsible for so much of the world’s current crisis or is building a new financial institution based on co-operative banks, credit unions, regional currencies and so on the only way? How might we start that shift and where might the political support come from?

The lobbyist of the City of London, and the financial industry more generally, always say, they always wheel out this argument, “don’t regulate us too much, don’t tax us too much because then we’ll pull on our horns and we won’t lend anything and the economy will collapse”. But the fact is that there has been almost a fraud perpetrated by the financial sector on the UK. It’s well known now that has been that when times are good all the benefits go to to the bankers and the banks, and when times are bad all those risks and costs gets shifted onto the burden of ordinary tax payers.

This narrative that comes out of the city and is widely repeated, is demonstrably untrue. It is a much more complicated and nuanced picture than that. I would argue that if you have a system that remains unregulated and uncontrolled, you’re going to store up even bigger problems in the future. I think if you did start to regulate banks and banking properly, not just in an offshore sense but in terms of, you know, capital requirements and all sorts of other things, you would end up having a much stronger, much healthier economy. In fact, there is historical evidence to suggest that this is the case.

Back in the period after the Second World War when the Bretton Woods institutions were set up, that was an era when people had really learned the lessons of the Great Depression. There were huge policy mistakes. The Great Depression itself followed a period of extreme financial freedoms and afterwards the international policy makers in the UK and United States and elsewhere decided that the way forward was to powerfully restrain the banks and to prevent them from speculating large amounts across borders and to really curtail them.

In Treasure Islands I describe how the banks were really champing at the bit. In the 25 or so years following the Second World War the banks were really tightly constrained. That was a period of extremely high and broad-based economic growth internationally. It’s now known as the golden age of capitalism and it kind of came to the end in the 1970s. Since then we’ve seen ordinary people’s wages stagnate, lots of financial crises and all sorts of other problems. That has coincided with a period of financial liberalisation and financial freedoms which has been very substantially accelerated by the offshore system.

So financial liberalisation kind of opens up the international markets for the flow of capital but tax havens take that one step further by artificially creating things that will attract cross border money flows, will accelerate those flows, so if you offer secrecy then lots of money will flow in pursuit of that. So the tax havens have been a sort of accelerator of financial globalisation and I would argue, with very harmful effect.

The UK economy is inextricably linked to offshore banking, a relationship you brilliant outline in your book. Assuming that it were possible to regulate that and to curtail its activities, would the impacts of doing that only be beneficial or for the 99%, as it were, might there be a downside?

That’s a very good question. I think there’s a difference between now and the Great Depression. When the Great Depression happened, things were so bad that you did see a major political realignment, particularly in the United States, and you had the New Deal coming in with very progressive legislation and high tax breaks and, as I said, very tight constrains on banks and the financial sector and on capital flows. So you know this political realignment really set the stage for a period of wonderful prosperity for quite some time. Unfortunately this crisis does not seem to have produced that realignment yet.

We have seen tinkering at the edges and at the end of the day it’s all about political realignments, it’s all about citizens collectively forcing the politicians to really change. We are seeing a little bit of a swing now, there does seem to be a swing in Europe against austerity and perhaps that’s the start of something bigger. But I think until we see a much more fundamental political and social change in response to the crisis and maybe the Occupy movement times 10, I think that’s when we’re going to start seeing the possibility of change. I think until then, we do have in Britain particularly and very substantially in the United States, you have the banks calling the shots and telling the politicians what to do. Not much has changed there. I think that is the essential first step.

So the audience for this interview is the Transition movement; people out in their communities trying to build community resilience, local food systems, local energy systems and that kind of thing, which brings up a couple of questions. And the first one is do you think that something like Transition can succeed despite the enormous power and influence which will be fundamentally threatened by a real relocalisation a real programme of community resilience building?

For me, what’s important when one uses the word ‘local’, I think what I’m particularly interested in is the sort of fragmentation of the international financial architecture and the fragments are nation states. That for me is the key fault line that is the problem for me. Because within a nation state you have democratically created tax systems and sometimes inside nation states, you know in Switzerland for example they have the cantons where you have a lot of local tax raising. But essentially it needs the nation state, that is the most important local level.

I think it’s very interesting and useful to have local community organisation. I think that’s a very powerful thing and very important. It’s not something I have particularly paid attention to just because I’m much more focussed on the international level. But I do think, from the point of view of tax havens, it’s the jurisdictional unit of the nation state that is the fundamental building block of the whole process with regard to tax havens. I do think community organising can be fantastic at creating networks and creating awareness. In terms of the actual mechanics of off shoring it doesn’t mesh immediately with that problem, if you see what I mean.

And how do you think people who are involved in Transition and similar things should split their time and energy between trying to stop the corporate looting that you write of and building resilience at the local level?

There is no magic bullet. If there is a magic bullet it is political and local and social organisation. And awareness, the building of awareness. That is the stage we’re at now. I think it is significant. We’ve had groups such as UK Uncut which have protested against corporate tax avoidance and Occupy which has been very important, which many have derided as not having achieving many particular aims, but in fact, what we have seen. We have seen the remarkable spectacle of conservative chancellor, George Osborne, calling aggressive tax avoidance “morally repugnant”.

Also a lot of statements from business leaders such Andrew Whitty of GlaxoSmithKline making some very powerful statements about corporate responsibility and the responsibility of corporations not to just to their shareholders but to wider sets of stakeholders and particularly with tax in mind. I think tax, for me, is a real touchstone of corporate responsibility. If a corporation is prepared to engage in a tax debate, then, it’s so easy for corporations to do window dressing and things that don’t matter to them, but I think when you touch on tax, that’s when you really start to see whether they’re just window dressing or if they’re really interested in engaging.

I think touching on tax from a corporate responsibility perspective is very important. The fact that there have been these protest movements is much more significant and have had much more significant impacts than I think many people think because really now the politicians do know that they can’t get away with saying, “ah let’s just get on with this stuff”. They have to at least be seen to be doing the right thing. Whether they do the right thing is another matter, but I think all of this is just an important first step. But I think much more awareness raising is needed.

I also would suggest that the economics profession in particular has had this massive blind spot when it comes to tax havens and offshore and secrecy and tax evasion and things like that. They have just chosen, because it’s so difficult to measure and so difficult to understand, they have basically treated it like a somebody else’s problem, and let somebody else deal with that. As a result it’s been left to fester and grow rapidly without anyone challenging it.  I think if we can get economists to start taking this stuff seriously, because economists are so influential, I think that will also be an important step. But at the bottom of it all is awareness raising of political consciousness and that’s what needs to happen now.

Do you think there is a way out of our current financial crisis and the steady worsening of it that we’ve seen in countries such as Greece and Portugal, without tackling tax havens?

I think it would be very difficult without tackling offshore banking. A lot of these problems have a whole array of causes. Offshore is one of these underlying causes that is very diffuse and very hard to put your finger on, that’s one of the great problems with it and many of these other causes that the size and the power of the financial sector, are very strongly influenced by the fact that financial actors are able to use the offshore escape route to escape financial regulations. Offshore is a kind of thing that’s in the background of so much that’s been going on.

Because it’s hard to point to as a specific, you know, here’s a trigger from offshore, that’s making it much harder for people to see this. I think if you did tackle offshore, and you did also find mechanisms to curb the huge tides of hot money that flow through the global economy, I think you would have a serious chance of getting the financial system on a much better long term footing. But I think that’s a long way in the future.

Lastly Nick, I’m really interested to know, having written the book, how it’s changed your own relationship to how you bank and how you live your life.

One thing I’ve realised is that if you want to avoid tax havens, the best way to do it is to go and live in a cave somewhere, because they’re everywhere.

A cave with broadband by the sound of it!

No you couldn’t have broadband! You basically can’t avoid it. All the multinationals on the high street that you see will be using tax havens in one way or another for various different reasons. The banks, of course, all of them are massively steeped in tax havens. If you’re an overseas resident, as I am, they will try and encourage you to use offshore accounts. You will get a lower interest rate if you use an onshore account. They’re always trying to get you to use offshore accounts.

That’s something actually I didn’t really touch on in Treasure Islands and I do want to research it when I get some time as to just why this is. I have banked with a bank in the UK for many years because I set it up when I was in the UK and that is still my bank, but I actually recently tried to change my account to the Co-operative Bank and I wasn’t allowed to because I was overseas. I would have been allowed to set up an offshore account but not an onshore account, so that wasn’t possible. It’s very difficult. I think if you’re looking to confront this monster and to tackle it, voting with your wallet is important, but I think it’s very hard to do. I think political action is really the way to go and raising awareness is what matters here.

A while ago here we posted the video to Rebecca Mayes’ song ‘The Lights’, her beautiful song written for the closing credits of ‘In Transition 2.0′ (the one everyone goes out after the film singing).  I am delighted to announce that the song is today released as a single, and is now available via. iTunes.  Here is what Rebecca says about it: “I’ve registered it with the UK charts so if enough of us buy it this week we’ll get into the top 40! If you’re outside the UK try and buy it through a UK distributor so it will count towards the charts. All proceeds go to the Transition Network.  Tell your friends, family and local radio stations! Thanks so much for watching the video which has had over 3,000 hits – if you missed it first time you can check it out below.

I wrote a while ago about Transition Network’s recent one day conversation on ‘Peak Money and Economic Resilience’, and how it had included a session where people from Portugal, Ireland and Greece gave a sense of what is happening in each place.  Filipa Pimentel, who is co-ordinating the networking of the national Transition hubs, spoke about Portugal, and about how the economic crisis is shaping how Transition is emerging there.  Filipa was in Totnes recently, and I caught up with her for a quick interview at the station as she waited for her train home.  Here it is:

Shortly before we started recording, she realised that she had left her suitcase in the cafe where we had met and had had to go off and get it, hence the laughter about half way through.  She said that the crisis in Portugal is now one that you can really feel.  The average salary is €840, the minimum wage is €480, and some OAPs are on a pension of just €150.  This in a country where supermarket food prices are the same as in the UK.  People are already starting to hungry.

Filipa speaking at the recent Spanish Transition gathering.

Transition is starting to spread in Portugal, but it has made a deliberate decision from the outset to base itself on the concept of the gift economy.  In areas which are in financial distress you cannot, for example, charge for film screenings.  The aim is to decouple money from the message of Transition, to, as Filipa puts it, “try to reduce money exchange in everything we do”.

There are, she said, two reactions to a crisis.  If you really believe that the crisis will go away, you hold on and you hold your activities and you wait.  If you believe that it is here to stay, you start to adapt.  What Transition initiatives have done in Portugal is to accept that it is here to stay.  Initiatives in Portugal have been developing ways to organise low cost events, and to develop relationships with Councils not based on asking them for money, but asking them to share resources.  I hope you enjoy this interview, in which she also tells a few of the most fascinating stories from the emergence of Transition in Portugal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… and they have also been clearing a new allotment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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