In case you missed it after I was so effusive about it the other day, someone who goes by the improbably moniker of “alfski” has just posted the section of Monty Don’s ‘Around the World in 80 Gardens’ where he visits the organoponicos of Cuba. It is quite wonderful and Monty really comes across here like a wide-eyed child in the best sweetshop he’s ever seen. Should help get you in the mood for the weekend…

The Guide was launched on what was thankfully a drier Friday morning than the launch of the first guide (when it tipped down), and took place on the steps of Totnes Civic Hall. It began with a short talk by the new Mayor of Totnes, Cllr Pam Barnes, who spoke about the importance of local food and how Totnes has so much to celebrate in terms of its vibrant local food culture.

Then Helena Norberg-Hodge of the International Society for Ecology and Culture put the work in Totnes and the directory in the context of globalisation, arguing that rather than a decision to source local food meaning unemployment for the farmers of the Third World, in reality it means a withdrawal of support from an exploitative system of food production which is highly oil dependent and is ravaging both communities and planet. It is only by supporting local food and its producers, she argued, that we can begin to reclaim control of the way in which it is produced.

The final speaker was Noni McKenzie from TTT’s food group, one of those behind the production of the directory. She talked about the power of personal choice, the power that we can reclaim when we shop locally, and the knock on benefits of supporting our local economies rather than creating a demand for oil and the resultant wars fought in our names in order to secure access to it.

Finally, a group of children from the Grove School in Totnes sang two songs about food, which provided a great way to round off the launch. The directory was then available on the TTT stall which is run every Friday, and the press took their photos. The 44-page food guide, which includes colour maps and other colour sections, can be ordered from TTT for £1.50 plus £1 p&p (please make cheques payable to Transition Town Totnes). If you are in Totnes you can buy them in a range of food shops, where you also have the option of paying one crisp Totnes Pound for your copy.

Address for orders: Transition Town Totnes, 43 Fore Street, Totnes, Devon. TQ9 5HN. Any queries call 01803 867358.

This same ‘temporary downtown’ case was again being dished up later in the day by Sir Alan Sugar, who told the BBC that it might be three or four years, rather than two, before consumer markets returned to normal. I was listening to this just days after reading Euan Mearns’ excellent piece on The Oil Drum Europe called A State of Emergency. Clearly Mr. Sorrell and Mr Sugar (sound like Victorian confectioners) hadn’t, or they wouldn’t be insulting our intelligence with such trite reassurances. In his piece, Mearns writes;

“It is time for Alistair Darling and Mervyn King to explain to the British people why they see current problems with energy prices and associated inflation as a transient blip when the UK seems to be in a terminal dive towards insolvency”.

The first graph in his article offers an insight into the basis for that terminal dive, the crippling vulnerability of our energy addiction.

This graph, from Mearns’ article, shows where we find ourselves in terms of how our energy surplus has plunged into a deficit, how we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory

In a nutshell what happened, as shown in the graph above, was that the UK found oil in the North Sea, and either sold it extremely cheaply to other countries or used it to create Thatcher’s ‘economic miracle’ and gave most of the revenues away as tax breaks. Having sold most of ours off cheap, we how find ourselves with North Sea production plumetting, increasingly dependent on imports, just at a time when, as Chris Skrebowski puts it, we are “in the foothills of peak oil”.

Mearns predicts, from data from BERR themselves, that the cost of importing oil and gas to the UK will balloon “to about $200 billion (£100 billion) per annum by 2013″. Zoinks. Of course it is not feasible that we will be able to find that kind of money without bankrupting everything else. The right wing press are currently moaning about the cost of installing renewables and how more renewables will mean higher energy bills all round. Whatever the source, it rather looks like high energy prices are here to stay.

This second graph, again from Mearns’ piece, shows how this will affect the UK balance of trade. Looking at this it is impossible to see where Sugar and Sorrell (actually they sound more like a 1970s folk outfit) imagine the way out of this is. What will power the great new economic powerhouse that will pull us out of recession? I’m not an economist, but it looks to me like this recession is kicking in very fast, and as the BBC report this morning, more and more signs are emerging of this.

It will take a lot more than the World Cup Football Finals or the Winter Olympics to get us out of this one. Some straight talking wouldn’t go amiss for starters. It is not every day that I find myself agreeing with Chief Economists of international Energy Agencies, but rather than placing our faith for the future on sporting events, we might be better to concentrate on “leaving oil before it leaves us”.

We need to stop focusing on big infrastructure projects that are designed to work only in the context of economic growth and cheap energy, and focus instead, as Transition Initiatives across the world are now doing, on resilience, rebuilding local food networks, vastly reducing the need for car use, creating energy systems that are decentralised and community owned, looking afresh at imaginative ways to reuse waste locally rather than as part of far-flung recycling processes, prioritising urban land for intensive market gardens rather than office development and the development of passive house buildings using mostly local materials.

As George Monbiot wrote yesterday;

“In his speech last week, Gordon Brown said he wanted “to facilitate a reduction in short term global oil prices” while seeking “to reduce progressively our dependence on oil”. He knows that the first objective makes the second one harder to achieve. The government’s policy is to build more of everything – more coal plants, more nuclear power, more oil rigs, more renewables, more roads, more airports – and hope no one spots the contradictions”.

We no longer have the time to listen to the la-la land musings of commentators like Sugar and Sorrell, nor to the “well, we’ll just do a bit of everything in the hope that something might work” approach of the government. It is time to focus folks. This is, as David Strahan calls it, “the last oil shock”. It may well be the last time an economy ever scaled the heights we have. Although the transition away from economic growth won’t be easy, it will be made much more difficult if we don’t begin with an honest assessment of where we start from. Much as I love the World Cup, I’m not pinning all my hopes onto it.

Schools work their way up from Bronze through Silver and up to Gold standards, each of which increase the sustainability of the food provided. For example, the Bronze standard requires that 75% of meals are freshly prepared and that any meat is ‘farm assured’, whereas the Gold standard demands that 30% of food (by value) is organic and 50% is local.

FfL began in April 2007. It is not a process that leads schools, rather it supports them in reaching their goals. This is done through the creation of partnerships which empower the students to ask questions about food and which empower the catering staff. There are now 54 schools involved, which means that over 35,000 students and 3,500 members of staff have been exposed to it, and many more schools are signing up.

The Headmistress of the school, Stephanie Quayle, talked us through how the Partnership has affected the school. St. Katherines is the smallest state school in the area, with 1000 students, most of whom travel out to the school from Bristol. Part of their process of improving school meals was to bring catering in house, they felt that taking control of the food they serve was a key part of their strategy.

Financially this was a significant risk. The new menu is simple, basic, but everything is of the highest quality. One of the ways they engage the children is to make tasters of the following day’s meal choices available while the students are queuing. The students are encouraged to be adventurous. The catering staff are encouraged to not take on too much, but to do what they do well.

Other things the school has done include including 5 ‘collapsed curriculum’ days, where they engage the students in other projects. For the Year 8 students this includes an ‘organic picnic’, and for Year 7 an overnight stay at Ockham Organic Farm near Torbay. They are also close to being awarded £1.2 million for a new purpose built dining room, kitchen and catering school, teaching students how to cook.

In the school’s curriculum work, the science department has refocused much of its teaching onto health, food and exercise. Garden Organic, the organisation which promotes organic horticulture in the UK, has made 10 visits to the school, and a small organic garden in front of the school’s main entrance has begun as a result, but more food production is planned.

When asked what difficulties there had been, the Headmistress answered that the FfL initiative had encountered nothing in the way of resistance. One reason for this had been the very tangible benefits that had been observed. Teachers report that children are more alert and better behaved in the afternoons than they used to be, and that there is more of an increased sense of inclusion and involvement.

Rather than just hear about it, we were invited to have lunch with some of the students. I had a rather nice vegetarian curry, followed by chocolate sponge pudding and chocolate custard (something I haven’t had since, erm, the Transition Network conference…). Talking to the students over lunch it was clear that while they still lamented the days when chips were served up, they had found the food transition in their school to be a positive process.

When I was at school, my memories of school dinners are of squalid slop. I remember once finding a cigarette end in my lunch, and even once, in a plate of appallingly overboiled cabbage, I found a sink plug, complete with chain. I also remember finding wasps in my pudding on at least two separate occasions. School dinners in the UK went from being like that, traditional food made very badly, overcooked, overboiled, but at least using mostly local food and ‘real’ vegetables, to fast food, reheated out of a packet, chips-with-everything type stuff. I remember when the food changed in my school from the traditional gloop to chips and burgers, it was quite wonderful.

Now, thanks in part to Jamie Oliver and his turkey twizlers, and to projects such as FfL, things are starting to change. Perhaps we can have good food that people want to eat and which is good for them, for their local economy, and for the planet. Building food resilience will require engagement across sectors, and getting schools involved will be key. As we left St.Katherines, surrounded by a great deal of land currently all put down to lawn, I hoped that working its way up to the Gold standard would be just the start, and that revisiting the school in 5 years, perhaps it would look more like a small farm than a school. From tiny acorns….

At a time when green groups are campaigning for companies and businesses to turn off their lights at night, and when some are proposing that at least every other streetlight could be turned off in order to save energy and reduce carbon emissions, some bright spark has come up with the idea of the Belisha beacon not just having a flashing top, but to be entirely illuminated.

Has anyone ever accidentally walked into the black and white striped posts of a Belisha beacon? Are the corridors of Accident and Emergency wards full of people with bruised foreheads and broken noses who accidentally walked into an invisible post? Unlikely.

I have to confess to being at a loss to explain why anyone, in a Council Highways department anywhere, felt it necessary to redesign something that has always worked perfectly well until now. What next? Perhaps the logical next step is to light up all the white stripes of the zebra crossing so you don’t miss them too. In fact maybe they could light up as you step on them, like in the video of Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’. Clearly we are surrounded by endless absurd ways of wasting energy, many of which we have become so accustomed to that we don’t notice them anymore, but occasionally some rise to the surface, striking in their sheer pointlessness. I will try and investigate and find out the thinking behind this… the people should be told.

Reynolds is one of those great stubborn, persistent and driven people upon whom the dissemination of a great idea often depends. His work began in the 1970s, when having trained as an architect, he decided that what architecture was providing for the world was in fact ‘endless horseshit’, which failed to meet either the needs of people or planet. He became fascinated by the creation of low-cost housing which used recycled materials, and which created self-reliant systems, homes that generate their own power, gather and treat their own water, and grow their own food. In that upsurge of innovation and creativity that emerged from the first oil shock of 1973, he began to build prototypes.

His first structures were at communes, and on radical hippy projects where people had time, energy and enthusiasm but little money. His first buildings were outlandish, highly experimental and each one provided scope for testing and refining. He worked driven by a faith in what he was doing, and a belief that the right doors would open at the right time. “I always thought if you’re doing things right for people, they’ll find you”, he says in the film.

The importance of this scope to experiment comes through in the film as a very strong theme. The Earthship concept was born of trial and error, of operating at the cutting edge. Reynolds was operating outside the law, building Earthship subdivisions which provided little in the way of services, principally because, being autonomous buildings, they didn’t need any. As he puts it “outside the law is the place where the information lies”.

In time though, the law decided it had had enough. Reynolds found the full weight of the New Mexico planning authorities thrown at him, and his work was subjected to relentless scrutiny and regulation. In the end his work was became so restricted that he stopped working. As he puts it “I had lost the freedom to fail”.

His response was to create a bill which allowed areas of land to be identified as zones where experimental buildings can be developed, where the building regulations are relaxed in the aim of developing sustainable housing. Reynolds argues that if the US government can ring fence many thousands of acres to test nuclear bombs on, thus rendering them entirely useless for thousands of years, then why can’t a couple of hundred acres be put aside for unusual buildings?

The film follows Reynolds through the endless corridors of the New Mexico legislature, as he tries to get his bill passed. I won’t spoil the story by telling you if it gets passed or not, but his persistence and his decision, as someone from a strong counter-culture, alternative background, to don a suit (the scene of him buying a suit is priceless) and “climb in through the arsehole of society and get into its bloodstream” (as he colourfully puts it), speaks volumes about his depth of principle and dedication to his art.

Perhaps the most moving part of the whole film is when, with his own architectural practice in tatters, he heads to the Andaman Islands in the wake of the tsunami there to see how he and his team can help. The island’s population has been reduced from 35,000 to 7,500, and the settlements are devastated. Reynolds and the crew set to, building a house which captures its rainwater, stores it in a cellar, draws air in over the water to keep the air cool, and is built using tyres and old bottles (and rather a lot of cement, it must be said).

What sustains the film and keeps it beyond just being about unusual buildings is Reynolds himself. He is an obsessive, who has single-pointedly pursued an ideal, a vision, for nearly 40 years, in spite of all that has been thrown at him. His wife refers to him as a ‘freak magnet’, given the unlikely crew of dedicated Earthship builders he has assembled. It is people like Reynolds, who saw the vital importance of an idea that long ago and have doggedly persisted at refining and developing it, (one could add to the list Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, David Holmgren, Emelia Hazelip, Robert Hart…) to whom we owe an enormous debt.

We can fund all the researchers in all the Universities in the world to research various aspects of how a post peak world might function, but unless we go to those who have been working tirelessly for many years, who have learn as much from their failures as from their successes, our research is pointless. ‘Garbage Warrior’ is a passionate, rousing and engaging look at one of the great mavericks and cultural creatives of our time. It is a study in the power of hard work, supportive community and a good idea. It is about the power of applied common sense. Above all perhaps, it is about the power of being naughty in a world which increasingly disapproves of such behaviour. ‘Garbage Warrior’ is quite wonderful, and I recommend it very highly.

You can find out more about the film and buy copies of the newly released DVD here.

In the film, the main character hires a PA, who is a poor (well compared to the rest of them who seem to be eyewateringly wealthy) but is as obsessed with fashion and labels as everyone else in the film. Anyway, the PA has a handbag, which is some revolting designer handbag, designed by Louis Vitton or some other designer person, of which she is extraordinarily proud.

As the film goes on, it emerges (oh the shame) that she can’t actually afford such a handbag, and that her handbag, because she is poor you see, is actually RENTED. Rented. This is all remedied in the film because the main character takes pity on her and buys her her own handbag, a deeply emotional moment as she now has her own £2,000 handbag. What I was left with though, was this new knowledge that in New York there are companies that rent out expensive designer handbags.

How all pervasive and pernicious is this consumer culture that these ghastly handbags, made in some grisly sweatshop somewhere, designed with any sense of taste locked firmly in a box, have evolved in such a way that one’s sense of self esteem and identity requires a handbag rental service? No sense of living within one’s budget or means, rather you simply MUST HAVE a designer handbag or you are nobody.

I guess this ties back to the discussion we were having the other day about solar panels and food gardens becoming the next ‘must haves’, and whether or not we can harness that same sense of desirability. I was impressed the other day with reading about a crowd in Cornwall called ‘Rocket Gardens’ from whom you buy pre-planted salads in a funky box, they come in the post, you pop them in the garden, and hey presto, instant salad! Anyway, I struggle to draw any intelligent observation from the handbag thing, I think I am just still in shock about the whole handbag rental thing. Did you know such a service exists?

Why Oil Crisis Could be Trigger for a Better Future. Western Morning News. 20th June 2008

Crude oil prices trading at a record 140 a barrel. Truck driver strikes leading to panic buying at petrol stations across the country. Saudi Arabia promising to pump more oil after desperate calls from world leaders. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the global economy’s third oil price shock.

Yet among the unremitting gloom - Gordon Brown this week declared spiralling oil prices were “the most worrying situation in the world” - there is hope. The Westcountry-based pioneer of a community movement trying to wean themselves off oil argues that it may presage the most positive lifestyle changes in 30 years. Many others agree.

Rob Hopkins, who two years ago founded the first so-called “transition town” in Totnes, South Devon, reckons that the pain being felt at the pumps is already convincing increasing numbers of people to abandon their cars and move towards walking and cycling, growing their own vegetables and shopping locally.

While acknowledging this is cold comfort for hard-pressed households and oil-dependent businesses, he has said high crude oil prices are “a really good thing” so long as the response is “creative”.

A modern history lesson helps. Mr Hopkins drew comparisons with the oil shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s. The sudden rationing of oil by key members of Opec not only resulted in lower speed limits to conserve the precious natural resource but also an unprecedented burst of groundbreaking ideas. Wind turbines, solar energy and the organic movement were all born out of a desire to break the world’s oil addiction, he argues.

He said: “There is something about oil prices that focuses the mind. We have been aware of climate change for years but it has not stimulated anything like that. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

The cause of today’s oil panic may be different from that 30-odd years ago. In 1973, key Arab producers boycotted oil exports to the US and their Western European allies for supporting Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt. Today a murky alliance of China’s breakneck growth, “peak oil” and market speculators is at play.

Even so, the ramifications could be similar, but not just in terms of filling stations raising fuel prices to almost £9 a gallon for petrol and diesel as one retailer in Exeter did this week.

“If you had not had that period in the 1970s, wind power would have been in its infancy. Solar would have been primitive. It is a bit like Sleeping Beauty. We have been asleep through the 1980s and for 28 years. Now we have been pricked awake,” said Mr Hopkins. “What we are seeing now is really exciting.”

A teacher of natural building, Mr Hopkins says it was awareness of the end of the age of cheap oil - known as peak oil - that triggered the “transition” movement.

Hundreds of people in Westcountry towns and villages, including Falmouth in Cornwall and Seaton and Ashburton in Devon, have been drawn to its principles: using public transport rather than filling their cars, reducing the distance food is transported and local production of goods and services. As many as 700 towns cities and villages have joined, mainly in the UK but also as far afield as Australia.

Mr Hopkins cited the trend for growing vegetables in back gardens, spiralling sales of seeds and the revival of making your own clothes as indicators of how habits are changing.

He recently met a woman on a train who had never travelled by rail before but had opted against the car because it was now too expensive. It is not just about saving money, he contends. A world not reliant on temperamental oil supplies, which we rely on for everything from clothes to medicines, could be a much happier place. Some of the more unsavoury aspects of modern life are underpinned by oil: “We are working longer hours than in previous generations, less time with our family, more overweight.”

Mr Hopkins, hailed by commentators as a post-oil visionary, added that he did not want to rejoice in the face of widespread misery, acknowledging that “this is really starting to hurt people, particularly those businesses that are oil dependent”.

But he went on: “It is important to make the point that the more oil- dependent we are the more vulnerable we are. That vulnerability is only going to grow. The age of cheap oil is finished. EasyJet has said the age of cheap flights is over.

“There is something big happening. It is difficult and we are asking some very tough questions of ourselves. But at the same time we have a choice. We can look at this as an opportunity.”

Asked whether he had predicted that oil prices would touch 140 a barrel so quickly, he said: “Yes. I’m not surprised. It was blindingly obvious. People like Goldman Sachs are talking about 200 dollars a barrel sooner or later.”

Westcountry groups have reported more interest in recent months. Cathy Debenham, a spokesman for Sustainable Ottery, a group of people in the East Devon town of Ottery St Mary who had joined the transition movement, said more than 150 people came to its launch last month.

She said: “It is easier to persuade people to get involved when you see it every time you fill up your car with petrol, or every time you get a bill.

“I have known for a long time that driving at 70mph or less saves you money and petrol. But it is only in the last month or so that I have started measuring it. And it makes a big difference.”

David Mathews, acting chair of Transition St Austell, a like-minded group in Cornwall’s clay country, said: “The Government’s call for more production is simply madness.

“They should be taking steps to reduce consumption now. One way would be to bring back the speed limit of 50 mph, which was introduced in the oil crisis of 1973-74. Such a limit would reduce fuel consumption, save motorists money and save lives.”

So here we go, The Story of a Cob Oven, Told in Pictures

Measuring out the dimensions of the inner void onto the pre-existing brick base

The shape of the inner void is made like a big sandcastle, with damp sand, and then smoothed by being ‘rolled’ with a board

Mixing the inner layer, no straw, just clay and sand mixed in a very particular mix, roughly 7:1, very dry, just enough moisture to hold it together

The mix is built up in layers around the sand form….about 3″ thick. Here we are very nearly at the top

Then the scary bit, cutting the opening and taking the sand out. Hearts in mouths….

It worked! Then, when all the sand is out, light a fire to start the drying process straightaway (in theory you should be able to start cooking in it already)

A couple of weeks later, mixing the cob for the outer layer

A fine pile of cob loaves ready to be passed to the stove for building

Building up in layers, as before, taking care not to press against the inner layer, and to keep a regular thickness

Nearing the top. The gap above the door was filled with specially made cobs called ‘corbel cobs’, where the straw all runs in the same direction.

The second layer completed and with a fire in it to hasten the drying process. The outer surface is scored and marked so that when the kids come to decorate it by adding some kind of animal design, it will attach itself easily. Not bad for 2 days work!

Here’s just a quick and not really fully-formed thought for a Thursday morning. I have finally, as part of the Transition Town Totnes Solar Hot Water Challenge‘, signed up to get solar panels put on our roof. Took a while, but I am going for flat bed panels rather than evacuated tubes (to see why read this). The plan is to get them up while there is still some summer sun to take advantage of. The question I find myself asked though when I tell people about it is “but what is the payback on them?” Now I have to say honestly that I have no idea, I haven’t sat down and worked it out, but what intrigues me is that nature of that question.

It is not a question we ask when someone buys a new TV, a car, an i-pod, mobile phone, a swimming pool, a boat, a sofa, new carpets, a DVD player, a jacuzzi, a fitted kitchen, a new cooker, a motorbike, timber decking for the garden, a new conservatory, a caravan, a new fridge, a holiday, a computer, a printer, a double bass, a new chest of drawers or a painting.

Somehow all these things it is OK to buy because we want them, we think they will make us happier, or because we feel we need them. When it comes to solar panels those criteria no longer apply. Odd that. I am buying them because they will increase the resilience of my family, they will reduce our footprint, make us less oil vulnerable, but ultimately it is actually because I want them, in exactly the same way that people want the things on the list above.

I have no idea of the payback (although I guess I am assuming that there will be one), I suppose for me I see them as being essential, whereas most of the other things on the list aren’t. Will rising oil prices move people in the same direction, or will such things become seen more and more as an unaffordable luxury? I suppose it depends to what extent people want them, and what we can do to help generate that….

“The Transition Handbook is skillfully structured to help you and your neighbours move from oil dependency to local resilience.  Its author, Rob Hopkins, argues that making changes to your lifestyle makes you feel more in control, ready to cope rather than collapse with post petroleum stress disorder.  He should know: Hopkins is not just a brilliant communicator, he is the founder of the Transition Town movement - a grassroots burst of empowerment that provides solutions to the twin changes peak oil and climate change must bring.  If Hopkins is right about the viral spread of the Transition concept, then he has to be a runaway contender for a Nobel Prize.  Until then the Transition Town story is powering up The Archers plot on Radio 4″.  Reviewed by Melissa Garcia (from ‘The Spark’ magazine)

“With Transition Towns cropping up across the South West in Bristol, Bath, Forest of Dean, Stroud (to name just a few) a comprehensive guide to what they are, and why we need the couldn’t be more timely.  Don’t panic if terms like peak oil and transition towns stumpted because Rob Hopkins starts from the beginning.  Accompanied by quotes and graphs, a straightforward case is made for the argument that the age of cheap oil is on its way out, and as an oil dependent society huge adjustments will have to be made to prevent collapse.  The facts prevented are stark but Rob’s positive approach and belief that humanity can make powerful changes stops this from being a depressing read.  Throughout the book tools and exercises useful for anyone who wants to run a course or work with groups to take action.  A chapter is dedicated to “How To Start a Transition Initiative”, and brilliantly challenges all the ‘buts’, like “But Surely It’s Too Late To Do Anything” that stop us from acting.  If you still need inspiration, have a look at the sections on Totnes and Kinsale, Ireland, and see how other communities have started bringing about change”.

There is also one in New Internationalist Magazine, and in Carbusters Magazine.  The Transition Handbook, published in early March ‘08, is already into its third printing, with over 11,000 copies sold.

Oil Crisis: £100 to fill up the tank? Just get used to the idea.

By Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff, Lisa Bachelor and Tim Webb. The Observer, Sunday June 15 2008

Queues at petrol stations may be a chilling taste of things to come. Prices are soaring, experts warn of shortages ahead, and some say the world is running out of fuel. Already people are getting out of their cars and finding other ways to travel, while less scrupulous drivers are stealing diesel. Has the motor car just stalled - or are our driving habits changing for ever?

Last Thursday evening, Shafna Chowdhury was visited by a gloomy portent of things to come. Following weeks of dire warnings of soaring oil prices presaging a bleak future in which petrol shortages and queues at the pumps are never far away, Chowdhury, 31, was forced to drive to six different service stations before she could fill up her Mercedes coupé.

‘I went to my local BP station and they weren’t allowing people on to the forecourt,’ she said. ‘I then went to two Esso stations and two Shell stations and there were huge queues at all of them. Some had bags wrapped around the nozzles of the pumps so it was obvious there wasn’t any petrol, but people were still queuing right into the main road.’

Chowdhury, from Ilford, east London, eventually managed to fill up at her local Tesco station, but was shocked at how much she paid. ‘I don’t usually fill my tank to the top, but I thought I’d better,’ she said. ‘It came to £60 - this has gone up dramatically since I last filled my tank.’

In Chowdhury’s case, this time around the queues were caused by shortages due to a tanker drivers’ strike rather than by any fundamental depletion in the world’s oil stocks. But this latter scenario is not without foundation, according to a growing body of analysts.

Suddenly it seems everyone is watching the petrol pumps, the final delivery points in a global distribution network that connects countries, ideologies, governments and money markets. From the traders on Wall Street betting on further oil price hikes to the Russians planting a flag under water at the North Pole to stake their claim to as yet untapped reserves; from a nervous Gordon Brown battling to keep the UK economy afloat, to the makers of Humvees and Britain’s road hauliers facing a bleak future, everyone has an interest in what is happening on the forecourts. Whereas once house prices were the talk of many dinner parties, now the question is: ‘How much does it cost to fill up your car?’ Experts predict that very soon, for most people, the answer will be £100.

However, a small but increasing number of unscrupulous people are paying ‘absolutely nothing’. Insurer NFU Mutual, which handles the bulk of insurance claims for farmers, reports a 30 per cent rise in thefts of red diesel in the first five months of this year as thieves in rural areas snaffle fuel from easy targets. ‘Farmers have improved security on their tanks, but we’ve now seen an increase in thefts, perhaps not surprisingly in view of the oil price increases,’ said Tim Price, spokesman for the insurance firm.

Meanwhile, petrol retailers say fuel sales have dropped sharply over the past few weeks and there are suggestions demand for petrol in Britain has slumped by as much as 20 per cent over the past 12 months and that people are taking to public transport.

According to the AA, the clock is turning back to the Seventies, to a time when only the middle classes could afford to drive and the less well off had to take public transport. ‘The worst affected groups are pensioners, people on low incomes, those living in rural areas and youngsters,’ said an AA spokesman. ‘We have already seen volunteer drivers dropping out of their good samaritan services in substantial numbers.’

Sarah Macmillan, who works in Oxford and lives 12 miles outside the city in Witney, is typical of many motorists concerned about soaring prices. ‘I’ve noticed the cost of petrol creep up from £1.08 a litre to £1.14 or possibly even more,’ she said. ‘I use the car every day and am seriously considering a move to Oxford later in the year so I can save money on petrol by cycling to work.’

More motorists may be getting on their bikes in the coming weeks. Next month marks the start of the holiday season in the US, the time when millions of Americans get motoring or take to the skies for their summer vacations. Historically this is a time when prices at the pumps tick upwards as demand for petrol in the US soars. Nervous British motorists watching the pumps are now asking themselves two urgent questions: how much further will the oil price rise and for how long can it be sustained?

A new phrase has crept into the lexicon of oil analysts: ‘the super spike’ - an unprecedented hike in oil prices that dwarfs anything before it. For a world teetering on the edge of recession, such a prospect borders on the apocalyptic. For beleaguered British motorists, who have seen the price of petrol rise by almost a quarter over the last 12 months, it is the stuff of nightmares.

And yet there seems to be a growing consensus among economists that the current high oil price is here to stay, even if it does ease off from some of the more stratospheric predictions made for its upward trajectory in the coming months.

The Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs predicts a $200-a-barrel super spike is a very real possibility in the near future. In layman’s terms, this is a near 50 per cent increase on current oil prices that if transferred to the prices at the pump (a sustained $2-per-barrel increase in crude normally equates to a 1p-a-litre rise on the forecourts) means the day when it costs almost £100 to fill up the average car may not be far off. Meanwhile, the Russian oil giant Gazprom sent shockwaves around the world last week when it warned prices could rise to $250 a barrel.

But some believe that the ballooning oil price is being driven by wild and irresponsible claims made by speculators and oil firms looking to make a quick killing. US regulators have already begun an investigation into claims that global energy markets are rigged. True, the amount of ‘hot money’ pouring into the oil markets, as with all commodities, has soared. According to investment bank Lehman, the total value of commodities held by investment funds has ballooned from $70bn at the beginning of last year to $235bn in April. With stock markets becoming more volatile as the credit crunch bites, investing in commodities has become a lucrative business.

But this is only a fraction of the trillions of dollars of oil traded each year. And analysts at Barclays Capital deny that the oil price is a ‘bubble’ similar to the dotcom boom and bust. Instead, they argue ‘current prices are rational and fair’ and suggest oil will remain at around $135 a barrel for Brent crude in the mid to long term.

Ultimately, many argue that, this time around, prices are rising for one reason: the world’s population will rise by half in the next 40 years, oil production is flatlining, and demand from the developing world keeps on rising. The International Energy Agency estimates that, if incomes in developing Asian countries increase by just 10 per cent, their demand for oil will soar by 70 per cent. What this means for the world economy can be summed up in one word: trouble. There are 150 net importer countries of oil, and only five nations export more than two million barrels a day.

Andrew McKillop, an oil analyst and author who has advised the European Commission, admits a looming global economic downturn may send prices down to as low as $85 in the short term. But he argues ‘the floor-price profile will stay inclined, upward. In 2009, $200-a- barrel oil will have every chance of becoming real.’

McKillop reels off a list of reasons why the fundamentals in the oil market have now shifted irrevocably: the failure of the Kyoto treaty to reduce demand; a 50 per cent increase in oil demand from China and India in the last five years; supply shortages; geopolitical instability in the Middle East …

Nestled in the picturesque Dart Valley, the sleepy Devon market town of Totnes is an unlikely place to start a revolution. But it is one of a growing handful of so-called ‘transition towns’, communities trying to wean themselves off relying on oil by changing the way they live - walking and cycling or using public transport rather than filling their cars; growing their own vegetables; and shopping locally to avoid trucking their produce for miles. In Totnes they are not waiting for petrol to get cheap.

Two years ago the town’s inhabitants were the eccentric fringe of the green movement. But now, as petrol prices soar, others are clamouring to join them. Rob Hopkins, of the Transition Town movement, says it currently has up to 700 communities registering an interest in joining, most from the UK but some as far afield as Australia.

To Hopkins, the high oil prices that have driven petrol through the pain barrier are more of an opportunity than a threat: he points out many ‘green’ energy technologies flowered only after the oil shocks of the Seventies, when the West could not afford to waste fuel.

‘My take is that high oil prices are a really good thing, and the higher they go the better in some ways, if we can respond creatively to it,’ Hopkins said. ‘At the end of the day, it’s the only thing that really focuses the mind. We are already starting to see an upsurge in the number of people getting back to growing food again, making clothes again. It’s not going to be easy, but the thing is the longer you leave it, the harder it is.’

Politicians, fearing a lynching at the ballot boxes, are not so bold. Gordon Brown has concentrated on showing he feels voters’ pain. In the aftermath of the local election meltdown, Downing Street was quick to signal that the rise in fuel duty planned for this autumn could be shelved and Brown has campaigned for Opec to increase oil production in the hope of lowering prices and bringing relief to garage forecourts.

But Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor and a former chief economist at oil company Shell, is sceptical as to whether this will achieve anything. ‘I don’t think Gordon Brown has any control whatever over this,’ Cable said. ‘All this posturing and demanding that Opec produce more is silly.’

Indeed, there is a growing consensus in government that, as one senior Treasury source puts it, expensive petrol is with us for the long term: therefore the logical answer is to re-engineer the economy to rely on it less - for instance by investing in hydrogen-powered cars and buses. But it will be hard for a government already lagging more than 20 points behind in the polls to start warning motorists that they should accept costlier fuel or buy eco-friendly cars.

The government’s one attempt so far to persuade more drivers out of gas-guzzlers has already met fierce resistance, with Labour MPs demanding a U-turn on plans to increase road taxes for older models of several popular family cars.

For those with even half-decent memories, the current situation seems little short of astonishing. After all, it was only a decade ago that talk in the oil industry was of over-capacity: as a result, compared with today’s prices, petrol was seriously cheap.

Now the overriding concern is whether we are reaching the end game, the era of ‘peak oil’ and the point when the world is at maximum production, after which supplies start to dwindle. Once little more than a cultish view, the peak oil theory has gained increasing currency in recent years.

Some - like McKillop - argue we are already there. Others suggest it is not far off. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (Aspo) predicted earlier this year that the peak would come in 2010, others claim it is 10 to 20 years away. Optimists point out there is a huge amount of untapped oil in the globe that until now has been uneconomic to access, but, thanks to soaring prices, has now become viable.

‘The argument in its crude literal form that we are at peak oil and that is why prices are going up is nonsense,’ Cable said. ‘There are a mixture of reasons why oil production is not expanding, most of which are political, rather than to do with geology or economics.’ Abdallah Jum’ah, chief executive of Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, agrees, estimating the world has used only about a sixth to a third of its supplies.

But pessimists such as McKillop are not convinced. For a start there are concerns about how much oil even mighty Saudi Arabia has left. The secretive country doesn’t publish data and there are suggestions that its major fields are starting to run low.

Nor will drilling new fields be the panacea many hope - at least in the short term. ‘It takes time,’ McKillop said. ‘Take the Tupi field: 200 miles off Brazil and 1,500 metres deep. They hope to extract three to five billion barrels over 20 years - but some estimate it’s going to cost as much as $240bn to develop that field. That oil is going to be very expensive when it comes out.’

The world uses 32 billion barrels of oil a year. ‘You’ve got to develop six new fields like Tupi, and nothing like that’s been found for five years,’ McKillop said. ‘The future is coming towards us very fast.’

Britain’s love affair with the car may be heading for a crash.

Mollison states that “earthworks are necessary and ethical where they;

• reduce our need for energy (underground housing in deserts)
• diversify our landscape for food production (fish culture ponds)
• permanently rehabilitate damage (contour banks, interceptor banks)
• save materials (house site design)
• enable better land use, or help revegetate the earth”.

The power of earthmoving is extraordinary, unimaginable for our ancestors, for whom any earthmoving was powered by muscle rather than by the internal combustion engine. Clearly as tools in the hands of those who want to put profit before care of the Earth, they are hugely dangerous weapons. In the hands of those wanting to create sustainable land-based systems, they can be fantastic.

When I lived in West Cork, I was lucky enough to be around some projects which really impressed on me the utility of a well-used digger. Indeed, seeing a skilled digger driver at work, the digger arm becomes an extension of their body. My friend John Dolan, the master pond-builder, used diggers to create amazing water bodies, and to sculpt landscapes in such a way as to maximise their long term productivity, such as the beautiful pond create in what had previously just been a boggy field you can see right.

Another friend Tom, who is building a house also in West Cork, has done wonderful terracing and earth sculpting on his site. The site has been designed so as to maximise south-facing productive space while at the same time minimising run off of soil and nutrients. By applying the intelligent design in advance, diggers can be judiciously used to create landscapes best prepared for the challenges of maximised productivity and resilience. In the long run, the site development work Tom did has greatly increased the site’s potential output, as well as enhancing its beauty.

My weekend earthmoving was nothing on the scale of this earth-artistry however. Basically I am going to be putting a lean-to-greenhouse up in a couple of weeks (very exciting, I’ll keep you posted), and so I needed the site cleared and levelled, something that would have taken me a fair old while with my shovel… . I am also putting up fencing for chickens which needs a trench for the fencing to keep foxes out, and I’m adding to my raised beds. A local guy who has a minidigger came along for a few hours and levelled and dug and moved soil around … had I set to with my shovel, it would have taken me days to achieve what he did in a few hours. As part of my long term strategy of my back garden becoming an intensive food production system, it felt to me like a worthwhile investment.

The guy with the digger told me that his machine did the work of ten men, and I can believe it. Sometime to look at the move to a low carbon as a steady journey in a downward direction is to oversimplify. Given that we have moved so far away from using land productively, there will be a need to repair landscapes destroyed by modern development and reclaim them for food production, aquaculture and so on. Breaking up the tarmac to allow the soil beneath to breathe once more. Enabling the use of local building materials such as clay. In terms of identifying what we do with some of the remaining hydrocarbons, there is certainly a role both for their intelligent and sparing use in developing the intelligently designed landscapes a post oil world will need, as well as in measures needed for climate change adaptation. It is what David Holmgren calls ‘Transitional ethics’, that is, the doing of things that may not be what we want to see in the long term, but which best facilitate our getting there.

The winners of the ‘Using Natural Finishes’ competition are Angie C, Tom Atkins, Vivian Hayes, Nick Lishman and Alistair Farrell. They answered correctly that ‘pargeting’ is “the formation of three-dimensional raised designs on external walls, traditionally created by forming relief work in the lime render finish”. Disappointingly no-one got it wrong. Wikipedia expands;

Pargeting derives from the word ‘parget’, a Middle English term that is probably derived from the Old French ‘pargeter’ / ‘parjeter’, to throw about, or ‘porgeter’, to roughcast a wall. However, the term is more usually applied only to the decoration in relief of the plastering between the studwork on the outside of half-timber houses, or sometimes covering the whole wall. The devices were stamped on the wet plaster. This seems generally to have been done by sticking a number of pins in a board in certain lines or curves, and then pressing on the wet plaster in various directions, so as to form geometrical figures. Sometimes these devices are in relief, and in the time of Elizabeth I of England represent figures, birds and foliages.

So there you have it. Well done all, and thanks to all who entered.