Transition Culture

31 Oct 2013

Imagination: an antidote to the plague of austerity

“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination…. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.”

Sylvia Plath, from Notebooks, February 1956

Our theme for November is austerity and Transition responses to it. It is a subject that our Social Reporters are exploring with great gusto at the moment. Caroline Jackson recently documented what the unfolding of spending cuts look like in her community in Lancaster, concluding with the question “there’s a challenge for us in Transition here – I wonder how we will respond?” That’s what I’d like to explore here, and to ask “what is Transition’s unique contribution to the challenges of austerity?”

In the UK, as elsewhere, debates around austerity tend to polarise along political divides. The Right argue that the economy is saddled with huge debts and that we have to “get our house in order” before anything else, cutting back in all areas of government expenditure (although whilst also bailing out the banks, cutting taxes for the rich and not collecting corporate taxes). The Left argue that’s really the last thing we need to do, that actually what we need to do is to borrow more money in order to stimulate growth and kick start economic growth again. Both miss the point completely. In The Power of Just Doing Stuff I quoted FEASTA’s Graham Barnes who wrote:

“The austerity versus Keynsian spending debate is about as useful as arguing whether the Earth is flat or sitting on the back of a pile of turtles.”

The reality is we have reached the end of the age of cheap energy, and, almost certainly, of economic growth. Our urgent imperative is to begin a steep reduction of carbon emissions (10% a year, if Kevin Anderson is right), and we stand atop mountains of debt accumulated in the process of generating GDP (creating one dollar of growth in the 1970s required $1.74 of debt, it’s now $5.67) and an increasingly fragile economic system. Under such circumstances it’s not about how we recreate the kind of blunt, “gross value added” growth that both left and right have long used as a measure, rather how we get real about our situation and respond accordingly. Whether austerity is the right approach or not, the reality is that as a government-led approach to the economy, it looks likely to be here to stay for some time to come, with Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls pledging to match to coalition government’s spending cuts.

I could spend this entire post delivering a long rant about austerity: how there is easily enough money to overcome it, and to tackle the climate crisis, locked up in offshore banking accounts (beautifully explored in Nick Shaxson’s latest report ‘The Finance Curse‘), how in the US (and almost certainly in the UK and elsewhere too) the bulk of what little economic growth there has been over the past couple of years actually goes to the rich, not to everyone else, or in pointing out, as the Red Cross did recently when looking at austerity across Europe, that it simply doesn’t work as an economic approach:

“Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it. The long-term consequences of this crisis have yet to surface. The problems caused will be felt for decades even if the economy turns for the better in the near future … We wonder if we as a continent really understand what has hit us.”

I could bring it closer to home, stating how the use of food banks in the UK has increased threefold on this time last year, up to half a million people over the last 12 months, how some families receiving food parcels from food banks are sending them back because they are too poor to be able to afford to heat the food the parcel contains, or how, in the case of council funding cuts, the drastic cutting back of public services has only just begun. Newcastle City Council has spoken of how it is being forced to make “bloody great cuts”, cutting all arts funding, and showing how by 2017 it looks like it will be unable to even meet its basic legal responsibilities as a Council. At the same time, bonuses in the City of London are up 64%, and RBS and Lloyds are enjoying combined half-year profits of £3.5bn.

It’s shitty and grim and however much we might rail against it, it looks unlikely that a change of government (all the major parties at least) would do much different. The reality is that the age of cheap energy is over, and our living off the fat of a hundred years of surplus energy is coming to an end. There are, of course, activist avenues open to you if you want to use them, campaigns for transparency in international finance, UK Uncut and so on. I think we need something else though, something that sits alongside those more campaign-based responses, something without which we will never make any headway.

Tim Hunt, Commissioning Editor with Red Pepper magazine, in an article for Adbusters, writes:

“Britain reels from a lack of a creative left. We need some hope, some inspiration, something that shakes us out of a dismally predictable downward spiral”.

A recent article by Naomi Klein in New Statesman talks about “a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner” who gave a presentation at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union called ““Is Earth F**ked?”, his answer to which was “more or less”. But as Klein states:

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

I want to use this post to focus on one of the key and most valuable roles I believe Transition can play, and is playing, in these times, that of keeping alive imagination, that Silvia Plath so cherished, at the community level. Austerity can tend to shut down what Hunt refers to as “some hope, some inspiration”, to close avenues of possibility, bring our focus more and more to the here and now, rather than keeping our gaze on the horizon. I don’t agree with Klein and Werner’s analysis that “resistance” should be only taken to refer to the same tools that oppositional politics has always used. For me, Werner’s “certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture” needs to be viewed more broadly.

And that’s where Transition comes in, with its core focus on imagination and the telling of different stories. Local councils, under such huge pressure to cut spending, rarely have the time or capacity to think creatively about ways forward. In Caroline’s piece she documents how, as a city Councillor, she is part of making decisions about budgets and where cuts should fall. Little room for imagination there. The Left, as Hunt identifies, in spite of the unpopularity of austerity, “without a party or a coherent mass movement, appear unable to capitalize on the situation”. Even Russell Brand’s glorious outburst on Newsnight this week was big on calls for “revolution” and a passionate laying out of what isn’t working, but rather lacking in terms of an imaginative exploration of what we might do instead.

What I want to argue here is that Transition groups can have a powerful role to play in firing the imagination, what Plath describes as “making dreams to run towards”. It’s not just about ideas and campaigns, it’s about doing stuff, showing that a more just, lower carbon, more localised and resilient approach can not only work in practice, but also can meet our needs better as people, as families, as communities. It’s about modelling community resilience as economic development.

Over this month we’ll be hearing from a range of people with useful insights on austerity. Among others, we’ll hear from Jeremy Leggett about energy and austerity, from Dr Tim Lang and Felicity Lawrence about food and austerity, Pam Warhurst about the potential for urban agriculture to be a key strategy for responding to it, and from Jason Roberts of Better Block who says,

“If we are experiencing austerity, create visions. Let’s have a better place together, even when things start getting taken away. We still ultimately want to have a better place. There’s got to be a way. We all know that we get really creative when there’s something we want to have and we just don’t have the money … We typically try to do what we do with as little money as possible. We like to show that if you want innovation, take a zero away from your budget, and if you want ultimate innovation take two zeros away from your budget”.

The only way, it seems to me, to inspire the new structures, new enterprises, new networks, new connections that will enable us to overcome the grinding, wearing, energy-sapping drag of austerity, is through sparking imagination, and imagination that makes tangible, physical, visible differences to peoples’ lives. I see that imagination at work in Transition initiatives all over the place, and in many other places besides, and when it comes together with a “can-do” and “will-do” attitude, magical, extraordinary and desperately-needed things happen.

There’s the emerging New Economy movement, Jason’s Better Block work, the local food movement, social entrepreneurs, initiatives such as the community of Berlin striving to bring the city’s grid into community ownership and push for 100% renewables, to name just a few. There’s also the powerful role the arts can play in bringing the imagination to life and giving it form and expression, as will be detailed in Lucy Neal’s forthcoming Playing for Time book.  One of the key insights from my recent trip to the US was that, contrary to what one might imagine from outside, so much was going on there, so many amazing projects and initiatives, but in a nation where the media is controlled by about four companies, their stories are never heard, their potential to fire the collective imagination goes mostly unrealised.

Here are a few stories from the Transition network that, for me, represent the use of imagination in response to austerity. If you’d like to tell us about others, please use the comments thread below. In London there’s the great ‘Edible Bus Stop‘ initiative, captured beautifully in the video below. Crystal Palace Transition Town are one of the groups involved, working on an ‘Edible Bus Station’! They wrote:

“The aim is to create a high impact, low maintenance edible garden at the far end of the station, where there’s lawn running against the hedge to the park. In spring, planting will start in earnest with plans to plant fruit trees and fruit bushes – Crystal Palace’s very own Edible Bus Station Orchard”.

It’s an amazing project for focusing the imagination, stimulating the question “what if every bus stop were like this?” It opens the possibility of using land in a different way in the setting of one of the places during many peoples’ daily routine where they have little else to do than sit and wait.

 

There’s Ajudada in Portalegre in Portugal, a city that has been hit hard to EU austerity measures. Ajudada was an event attended by many hundreds of people that explored the resources the city has that aren’t money, and how they might be better connected and better employed in shaping the city’s future. The whole event ran with no money changing hands. Here’s a film about it:

 

It’s what the REconomy Project’s Local Economic Blueprints/Evaluations do so powerfully, opening the imagination to the possibility that economic development can actually come from building on and strengthening community resilience, rather than discarding it. I also love the story of DE4 Food in Derbyshire, a “co-operative social enterprise made up of small-scale local food and drink producers and their customers”, formed by a group of women in Derbyshire who had no previous experience of running a businesses who were inspired to do something to improve local access to affordable, local, fresh produce, while at the same time offering the opportunity for people to generate some income from their back-garden/allotment food growing. As Helen Cunningham from DE4 told me:

“I think we all just really wanted to change the way we live, and change our own personal lives and to change things and live different lives ourselves as well as a different life in our community”.

DE4 recently added the local Tansley Primary School Gardening Club to their list of local producers.  What a great project, giving young people the opportunity to not just imagine contributing meaningfully to the local food economy, but to actually make it happen.  

In Totnes, the Food in Community CIC (see photo below) has taken a different approach to tackling food and austerity.  Feeling that Food Banks can deepen a sense of dependency and sense of inadequacy, they opted for a different approach.  Collecting ‘grade out’ fruit and veg from the nearby Riverford Organic Farm, they now supply it to projects in the local community, over 5,000 kilos since January.  Their thinking is that distributing the food can be a catalyst for so much more than Food Banks do.  The same day they collect, the produce is delivered to 10 organisations who work with people in community settings who use food and cooking to bring people together.  

For example, the Children’s Centre uses it in their after school cooking sessions, which encourage families to eat and cook together, a Nursery School uses it to improve the food they feed their children, they work with a cafe for adults with mental health issues and their carers, and has led to one young volunteer getting cooking lessons from the chef at the Riverford Field Kitchen.  They supply a primary school whose parents took over the school’s catering use the produce to make money go further and to increase the quality of the meals.  They recently teamed up with Transition Town Totnes. To quote from the local paper:

‘Cooking Up A Treat’ will take place in the refurbished Civic Hall kitchen, and offer groups cooking and food sharing sessions, where people can come together, learn new skills and enjoy food and company. Transition Town Totnes will also benefit from the award with support for its hugely successful free skillshare events.

Future plans include creating an enterprise to provide meals on wheels and school meals.  As Laurel Ellis from the group puts it:

“Having the vegetables encourages people to learn to cook, share meals, join in, eat well or sometimes, just eat”.  

During this month we’ll also hear from Chuck Collins of Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition in Boston, seeking to widen the imagination of his community in thinking about its economic future:

“We ask the wealthy people in our community to re-establish a stake in our locality. It’s both a personal and an organisational ask. We invite them to make investments in local businesses. Move their money out of Wall Street and into the local intermediaries that invest in the community. Take your money out of the fossil fuel sector but also put it into the local new economy businesses. We’re trying to move the resources that have moved out of our community, to bring them back or to hold them”.

They also run an annual ‘State of the Neighbourhood Forum’, a huge event (between four and five hundred people, see photo below) which invites people to reflect on the community’s needs and to problem solve creative ways forward. The elected city official are invited, but as ‘keynote listeners’. It creates a space for imagining, with elected officials, the kind of neighbourhood people really want to see.

The Bristol Pound, that highly imaginative local currency scheme, is starting to move towards measures where it starts to really address the needs of those most impacted by austerity. Being backed by a Credit Union really helps of course, but the Pound is now building on the argument that spending money locally prevents money pouring out of the city’s economy. They are looking at setting up a Bank of Bristol, to support people starting new businesses by offering low interest loans. They are also setting up a Farmlink scheme, linking established buying groups in the city with primary producers on the city’s periphery so that the Bristol Pound becomes a channel for regional suppliers.

There are tensions here though. Occupied Times recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, and asked him, “Occupy Sandy and these various movements that have come out in the last year, they are double-edged in the sense that they alleviating the pressure we should put on [governments], but they are also desired responses in many ways”. Chomsky replied:

“What ways? The trouble with saying “the government backs off” is that it only feeds the libertarians. The wealthy and the corporate sector are delighted to have government back off, because then they get more power. Suppose you were to develop a voluntary system, a community type, a mutual support system that takes care of social security – the wealthy sectors would be delighted”.

As governments across Europe continue to “back off”, we must recognise that we have a choice to take back what power we can. Or do we just take the moral high ground, watch everything fall apart, see people suffer, smug in the knowledge that at least we are not doing anything that might delight libertarians and the corporate sector? Fortunately that’s not what Chomsky is suggesting. He adds:

“I thought the most important contribution of the Occupy movement was to recreate this mutual support system which was lacking in society. But it has this dual character: You have to figure out ways to do it which don’t undermine the broader conception of solidarity”.

He puts his finger on a key question for Transition and other community based responses. How best to withdraw support from the structures and businesses we don’t want to see, while enabling communities to put in place more resilient systems that they own and manage and which better meets their needs? Keeping a mindfulness around issues of solidarity is vital, as is modelled in the projects set out above. The Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland is a great example of this:

 

It is taking over work that would would have been done by local government but running it in a way that better serves the community, cuts carbon and builds resilience and solidarity. It is in every way as valid a form of “resistance” as any of the others that Brad Werner identifies, but one which feels accessible and resonant to more, and different, people.

But for all the talk from the UK’s government of creating a ‘Big Society’, obstacles continue to be put in the way of communities and individuals wanting to make this happen, as Social Reporter Ann Owen identifies in her post about Universal Credit. This forthcoming replacement for Working Families Tax Credit will make it very hard for people to volunteer for local projects or to set up the kind of new enterprises we need, entirely the wrong thing to be introducing at this time, potentially leading to what she calls “the rise of the Undercover Guerrilla Volunteer”.

In order to be able to create something, first we have to imagine it.  That applies as much to the supper you’ll cook when you get home tonight as to social change.  While there is much that Transition initiatives can, and are, doing to respond to austerity, it is the holding of spaces where people, their political representatives and others, can come together to imagine the kind of future they want to see, and modelling this in practical ways, which may be one of the most powerful things we can do in these difficult times.  It could prove to be, as the world seemingly steps from arguing that climate change isn’t a problem to arguing that it’s too late to do anything about it, missing out that vital piece in the middle, you know, the doing something about it bit, that the “poverty of life without dreams” may turn out in the long run to be the wickest form of poverty.  

 

I’d like to recomment Transition Social Reporter Dr Gail Bradbrook’s an excellent post on what she calls Street School Economics, which offers a useful take on austerity.  

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29 Oct 2013

10 Years After ‘The Party’s Over’: an interview with Richard Heinberg

While running the risk of sounding like a Hello! Magazine reporter, I must introduce this post by saying that while in the US recently, I joined Richard Heinberg and his wife Janet in their beautiful permaculture garden in Santa Rosa, California.  Richard will be known to most readers of this blog as the author of The Party’s Over, Powerdown, The Oil Depletion Protocol, Peak Everything, Blackout and Snake Oil as well as one of the best communicators on the whole peak oil/everything question.  This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Party’s Over.  Richard has already reflected on this in September’s Museletter, but Richard and I pulled up a chair under a tree in his garden and chatted more about the book, its impact, and other related issues.  You transcript follows below, or you can listen to or download the podcast below. 

So Richard, it’s 10 years since The Party’s Over came out, which is certainly a book that turned my life upside down and the lives of many others, I suspect.

I have a lot to answer for, I’m afraid…

This guy came up to me at an event I was at recently in Austin, and said “I read your book 4 years ago and after I read it, I gave up the really well-paid job I had and I moved into a falling down house.” I thought, my God he’s going to burst into tears! But it was a story that ended well. What’s your sense, looking back on that book, knowing what we know now and how things have changed through the explosion of unconventional stuff, how well, looking back after 10 years do you feel that the analysis set out in that book has held up over that time?

Since it is the 10 year anniversary of publication, I actually went back and read the book for the first time in years. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised. In the book, although I cite the analysis of a number of different people, theorists if you will, the two people whose work rely upon most are Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère. If you read carefully what they were saying in 1998, and the next few years, what’s actually transpired since then is essentially exactly what they were forecasting.

They were forecasting a peak in regular, conventional oil around 2006 or so, which is exactly what we’ve seen. Yes, crude oil production has increased in the last few years, but all of the increase has been in tar sands or tight oil from North Dakota and Texas. If you take that out of the picture, oil production today is below what it was in 2005-2006.  So that’s correct.

And they went further and said this would cause price increases which would incentivise more production of unconventionals. They didn’t specifically say we’re going to get more oil out of North Dakota, but how specific do you need? To my interpretation, what they were describing was exactly what we’ve been living through over the last few years. We’ve seen higher and more volatile oil prices, the oil industry is spending twice as much on exploration and production and yet producing very little more oil. They’re drilling twice as many wells and the 10 top oil companies have seen their actual production decline by about 25 % in the last decade. So if this isn’t peak oil I don’t know what is.

Now it’s true, there are some peak oil commentators who were saying that the result would be an almost immediate global economic crash and there’d be riots on the streets and mass starvation and so on before 2010, and that hasn’t happened. But if you pick up The Party’s Over and read it, there’s nothing in that book that would make such a claim.

The idea that the ‘party’ is over that’s so strong in the book, there seems that the book has motivated lots of people for whom the working assumption is that the party’s over, but our leaders are still desperately clinging to the fact that the party is revivable and is about to start swinging again with great gusto, based on this obsessive push for growth and what it takes to make that happen. What’s your take on this scale of denial or over-optimism that is gripping our leaders at the moment?

I wouldn’t characterise their attitude as one of optimism. I think their attitude is veering more and more toward desperation all the time, but it’s a failure of imagination. They cannot imagine a Plan B. The only definition of success in their lexicon is more economic growth as in what we saw during the mid-20^th century. Of course, that’s just not on the cards. That presents an impossible situation for them. All they’ve managed to do so far is – and here it’s not only governmental leaders but also heads of central banks – to create a few years of fake economic growth through massive deficit spending and quantitative easing and so on.

That’s staving off economic collapse, but it’s certainly not capable of returning us to the glory days of easy economic growth. I think there’s a general understanding that this can’t go on forever, that there are inherent problems to deficit spending and central bank enlargement of the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve. That can’t go on in perpetuity, but what else do they do?

I described this in one recent essay as fingers in the dyke. With unconventional oil and with quantitative easing and deficit spending, we’re managing to maintain a façade of normality, at least for a large segment of the population. Certainly not for everyone, because every year more and more people fall off the edges of the table. But at what price, in the long run? The longer we try to maintain this false normality, the higher the cost in the end. The worse the crash will be once these back stops fail.

The latest book you’ve written, Snake Oil, has been looking at the whole fracking explosion, which in the UK has been a thing that the government is grasping on to, assuming that the same thing that can happen in the US can happen in the UK, and that’s how the economy is going to be got going again. But you argue there that actually fracking is a bubble, a very dangerous bubble. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

Here in the US, there has been a very substantial increase in natural gas production as a result of the application of hydro-fracking to shale deposits. However, there are only a few geological formations where this can be applied and in each of those there’s only a small core area where production is prolific and profitable. The drillers have, except for one, pretty much drilled out all of those core areas and production is dropping. The Barnett, which was the first of the shale plays, where it all started in Haynesville was the largest and most productive.

Before the end of the decade, probably round 2017 or so, we’ll begin to see the end of the bubble. Already, companies that got in late and missed the sweet spots are writing down assets and selling off leases. There are all the signs of a bubble bursting.

Shell pulled out of somewhere didn’t they…

Most of Shell’s assets were in liquid plays in Texas, in other words, oil. But the same principle applies with tied oil as with shale gas. We did a study at the Post-Carbon Institute called Drill, Baby, Drill. David Hughes, a retired petroleum geologist who worked for the Canadian geological survey gathered all the available data. Our study, actually, I’m very proud of it, is the best study that’s been done to date on shale gas and tight oil. It’s clear from the numbers that this is a short-term boom.

Is the same thing going to happen in the UK? I think it’s extremely unlikely. Firstly because if it’s such a short-term bubble here, is it likely to be any better there? No, probably not. But second, because the ownership structures are different. Here, it’s all private landowners who stand to make a little money from drilling leases. So there’s an incentive for people to accept the noise, the bad air, the compromise of water quality and all the other things that go along with fracking. The incentive to overlook those things is they’re going to get an immediate economic bonus from it. But in countries where some surface mineral rights are owned by the government, there’s no such incentive for ordinary people.

When people are confronted with these environmental and human health insults, there’s no reason why they should go along with it. There’s likely to be a much greater citizen backlash. The citizen backlash here in the US has been pretty substantial. A poll released just a couple of days ago showed that Americans are generally opposed to more fracking. So again, that kind of backlash is likely to be much greater in the UK and other countries.

You and I a while ago had a debate about planned descent strategies preparing for emergency. What’s your thinking about those issues there? Could you give us an update on your thinking about that?

I’d have to go back and refresh…

I guess it’s the ‘Powerdown’ scenarios, ‘Building Lifeboats’ and stuff. It seems to be that the governments are dashing off over the hill in ‘Last One Standing’, ‘Drill Baby Drill’ scenarios. But in terms of us as communities, which ones do you think we’re left with; are we ‘Building Lifeboats’ or are we ‘Powerdown’-ing?

We have to continue doing as much of both as we can. A few minutes ago I mentioned the fingers in the dyke scenario. We don’t know how long these back stops are going to last. We don’t know how long quantitative easing and deficit spending can go on for. It could be weeks: what’s going on with the US Congress and the debt ceiling right now could precipitate a global economic crash within a matter, literally of weeks. On the other hand, it could be years.

I think we have to assume that we have time to build community resilience, but while we’re doing that, it really makes sense, as families, as individuals, to have a well-stocked cupboard. The more prepared we are as households for disaster, the more resilient our communities are. If you have a whole community where nobody has any food put by, nobody has any backup systems ready, then the whole community is much less resilient. There’s every reason for people to have a sense of preparedness.

But when I say that, I don’t want to encourage a survivalist mentality. It’s quite the contrary. The big thing that the survivalists miss is that the only way we’ll get through this is together. If it’s lone individuals with shotguns then kiss the human race goodbye … game over. 

You mentioned the thing about what’s happening here. I’m sure there’s no connection, but the government shut down the day I arrived. I’m sure it’s not going to open again the day I leave – if it does I’ll get a bit worried!  [Editors note: it did]  What are the implications of that, do you think? Where could that take this country? Could it be just a couple of weeks where people don’t get paid and then it all goes back to normal, or could the outcome of it be more serious?

Oh yes, it could be very serious. This is revealing a fundamental political dysfunction within the country. The insular, rightward drift of the Republican Party over the past three decades is really dramatic. One can argue whether a two-party system is a good idea, but in order for a two-party system to even work minimally, you have to have two healthy political parties. What we have now is one establishment, mainstream, centre, marginally centre-left but mostly centre political party which is the Democratic Party and one party that’s basically gone crazy.

It’s boxed itself into a corner but it has a die-hard base that is so radicalised and so cut off from reality that nothing is going to come between them and their cherished nutcase candidates. They’ll support them to the end. And I know that the crazier these politicians get, the more support they have. So if you look at the incentives on both sides, they need to have a stand-off, a constitutional crisis.

Surely that’s something that just happens in the White House. How does that create a knock-on that’s going to ripple through the world economy?

If they fail to increase the debt limit for the US, that will have enormous implications for the global economy, certainly for the US economy. Almost immediately, interest rates in the US would skyrocket, the stock market would crash, the US dollar might cease to be the currency of account for other countries. The whole global economic financial system would be hurtled back to the days of 2008 and possibly much worse.

How far can we just carry on going piling up those debts. Isn’t the Republicans saying let’s not increase the debt ceiling, isn’t there a good aspect of that? The party may be over, but we still keep on borrowing to keep the illusion going that there is a party. When is debt a good thing and when is debt a bad thing?

Debt is a good thing in the present instance, only to the extent that it enables business as usual to continue for a while so that people like you and I can go about our business and try to help systemically to build more resilience in society. Buying more time otherwise is not a good idea, because it just means we’re going further out on a limb as a society, from an ecological standpoint.

The argument could be made that the Republicans are doing everybody a big favour by forcing the issue, and basically forcing a global economic crash sooner rather than later. I’m a bit torn with that really.

It’s a little extreme, isn’t it?  We’re sitting here in your very beautiful garden with fruit and nuts…you’ve been writing about this stuff for 10 years and been one of the world’s foremost analysts of these issues. How does Richard Heinberg’s daily life reflect those things? You’re quite clearly not one of those academics who is able to just study something and then have a life that completely doesn’t reflect that. How does all of that appear in your daily life?

My wife, Janet and I have spent more than 10 years, probably more like 20 years trying to develop as much self-sufficiency and ecological sanity in our lives as possible. We’re proud of what we’ve done so far but at the same time we’re painfully aware of what we haven’t done and what’s really hard to do.

We just have to content ourselves with what we can do. We’re happy to have friends and neighbours who are supportive and we try to encourage them also and work with them on all sorts of interesting local efforts like creating community energy and so on. Is it enough though?  But at the end of the day, we have to do what we can and enjoy life. This life is a gift and we don’t know how many days of normal life we have. Being with friends and family, playing music, being out in the garden, spending time with nature, this is not something to take for granted.

My last question is now, looking back 10 years after The Party’s Over came out, and it’s been translated into lots of different languages, are you able to get a sense of its impact, of its legacy as a publication at this stage?

I wouldn’t want to try to be too bombastic about it. It’s one of a number of books about Peak Oil that have been written. I think it probably was one of the more influential ones, certainly it didn’t have the highest book sales and I think Jim Kunstler’s The Long Emergency sold two, three or four times what The Party’s Over did.

But I think The Party’s Over appealed to folks who were perhaps a little more open to or interested in a communitarian response to the Peak Oil crisis. I’ve met thousands of people over the past decade who are doing amazing things in their own lives and communities and I feel very happy to have had some positive influence.

Thank you. Well it certainly had an enormous impact on me anyway. And it had the best cover of any of the Peak Oil books as well!

I had nothing to do with that actually. It was all the British publisher’s doing.  The original North American cover was pretty bad, actually. Then the British publisher chose a completely different cover and then as soon as I saw it I thought that’s it, we’ve got to have that. I had to talk the North American publishers into it. First they thought it was too depressing, but then the British publisher wanted money for it and I had to really insist. But of course, everyone says what a great cover it was now…

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28 Oct 2013

To boldly train where no trainer has trained before: a chat with May East

May East is the Transition trainer who reaches the parts that other trainers don’t reach, geographically speaking at least.  She has pioneered Transition with rubber-tapping communities a day’s travel up a river into the Amazon rainforest, in Brazilian favelas, on kibbutzim.  I spoke to her by Skype as she sat in the sunshine on a balcony in Buenos Aires where she was preparing to give a Transition training that weekend.   

May has been a trainer and teacher for many years, based at the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland.  She has been involved in ecovillage trainings and in facilitation training, driven by a belief that, as she puts it, “the destiny of the biosphere is going to be decided in the cities of the world”.  When she first heard about Transition, and that a training was due to take place shortly afterwards, she had what she calls her ‘Alice in Wonderland’ moment, feeling “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date”. 

She attended one of the first Transition trainings run by Sophy Banks and Naresh Giangrande, and it was a revelation.  She found the merging of inner and outer Transition, the 12 Steps, the use of participatory tools, to be the perfect compliment and refreshing of the work she had been doing until that point.

May’s roots are in a range of social movements, anti-military, anti-nuclear, feminist.  As she told me, “I had spent my life waking up in the morning and putting all the energy that I had to deconstruct dysfunctional patterns of society”.  She now sees her role differently.  Quoting Joanna Macy, she refers to herself as “a nurse of a terminal system, and a midwife of the Transition world”. 

Whether you are teaching in what she calls “the Over-developed or the Under-developed worlds”, change needs two key ingredients May told me, the will of the people to effect that change and the right tools.  What most impressed her about Transition training was that “it offers very effective tools that can be adapted to a wide range of different circumstances”.  Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking, given the places she has subsequently run Transition trainings, that she took the “wide range of different circumstances” bit as a personal challenge. 

With that, she was off, starting with a teaching trip with fellow Transition trainer Nick Osborne, to give trainings in 6 cities in Brazil, including the favela of Brasilandia.  Transition took off, and went viral across the country.

She has given trainings in the Amazon rainforest.  May is herself related to one of the indigenous peoples who live in the Brazilian rainforest, who are related from early rubber tappers who settled between the two world wars.  Although the rubber tapping ended, the communities remained, embedded in the forest.  They had set up an embassy in a nearby city, The Embassy of the Forest People, and asked her to be their cultural attaché! 

Gaia University had been invited to run their Designing for Sustainability training, as the community had been rather forgotten by development for many years apart from some aid, but were now being offered aid for houses and for 3000km power lines to reach them.  The question they were asking was “what kind of development do we want?”  When May arrived to teach the course, thinking that it would be the ecovillage material that was most relevant, it actually turned out to be the Transition training that people needed the most.  So what, I asked her, came out of the training, what did it lead to?

What is it, I wondered, that she gets out of teaching Transition in this way?  “Sometimes”, she told me, “there are critical moments when your input as a trainer can be very effective, when people have reached a certain point in thinking about these issues, and the tools and processes that the course gives them allows them to make better-informed choices about their future”.  As an example she mentioned Friburgo in Brazil, the town that suffered the appallingly catastrophic mudslides in January 2011 which led to the loss of around 500 lives and the destruction of much of the town. 

“What usually happens in these tragic situations”, she told me, “is that such a crisis attracts funding and aid money, but if the local economy is acting as a ‘leaky bucket’, with most of that money pouring back out again, it does not effect or enable any sustained change”.  She was part of a team leading a Transition training in a town close to Friburgo when the disaster happened.  The group put out an offer that anyone from the town could come and be part of the training free of charge, an offer a number of people took up.  As a result, Transition is now one of the key approaches that is being used in the rebuilding of the town. 

What, I wondered, did May consider to be the unique quality of Transition training?

One of the challenges many Transition initiatives encounter is how to sustain the momentum after the initial glowing feelgood phase.  For May, one of the key things is the ability to step across into turning the ideas coming through Transition into social enterprises.  If Transition remains a hobby, not our main job, then it will always be struggle.  As she puts it, “we have to enable the possibility of putting both feet into the Transition paradigm”. 

Lastly, having trained for a long time, and having delivered many trainings, I was intrigued to know what it is that she think makes a good trainer?

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20 Oct 2013

Letter from America #5: Fermenting Change in Brew City

Milwaukee was the last stop on a tour that in 18 days had taken me to 12 different places and deliver 19 different presentations.  I didn’t know much about the place before I went, but I have to say that it is quite possible that I saved the best until last.  The two days I spent in the city were fantastic, due in no small part to the organisation of Transition Milwaukee, and to the great stuff already underway in the city.  

I arrived at about 8pm, and went to the Milwaukee Makerspace where I was welcomed to Milwaukee by the students of the Transition Launch training that had just finished.  I was made to feel very welcome, plied with chocolate brownie and ice cream, said a few words and met lots of lovely people. 

Next morning was the ‘Brew City Abundance Tour’, billed as:

“a magic low carbon carpet ride of some of the most innovative and unique local examples of how to create resilient and resource-abundant urban systems within 10 miles of your locale!”. 

It did not disappoint. We started out in the offices of Habitat for Humanity, who have built over 525 affordable homes for local people in some of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.  Their focus is on the Washington Park area of the city, which has a poverty rate of around 40%.  As well as building homes, they also work to address issues around crime and safety.  They have built over 500 raised beds for residents, while another great local project, the Victory Garden Initiative, provides the training.

We then heard from the Mid West Renewable Energy Association, which acts as a clearing house for information about renewable energy, hosts an annual energy fair and runs a wide range of training. 

 

Then it was all aboard the yellow schoolbus and off on our trip …  

Our first stop was Kompost Kids, a community composting scheme, working with different groups to raise the profile of composting in the city. 

The good folks of Milwaukee River Greenway came along to tell us about their work looking after the river, taking regular sampling of water quality, lobbying for the water to the cleaned up, and for more public space along the river.  The Greenway itself is 878 acres of trails and greenspace along the river where it runs through the city.  It’s a beautiful space, great for walking, hiking and biking. 

 

Our next stop was the Riverwest Co-operative, whose shop is a great beacon of local food and co-operative values.  The co-op is a neighbourhood corner store committed to organic, fairtrade and local produce.  The shop is mostly staffed by volunteers, and their hundreds of members get a 5% discount on their shopping.

We also heard about the Riverwest Cooperative Alliance, a team of cooperative organisations dedicated to creating an equitable and democratic economy in the area.  They offer training, support for emergent co-ops and put on events promoting the co-operative concepts.  Lastly, we heard about the Milwaukee Area Time Exchange, a Time Bank in the city that has been running for 4 years and has many hundreds of members.

Then it was off to Walnut Way, in the Lindsay Heights area of the city.  The Walnut Way Conservation Corp was set up by Sharon and Larry Adams in 2002 with the aim of improving the quality of life in the area.  Sharon had grown up there, remembering it as a diverse community where people sat on their porches and community spirit was high.  When a new highway was built, resulting in many homes being pulled down, the place was forgotten, and drugs, prostitution, poverty and crime took hold.  

Since Walnut Way was founded, hundreds of new homes have been built or renovated, a number of urban gardens have been started, water conservation projects have been installed, and young people from the area are being trained to become urban farmers.  They have ambitious plans to significantly step up their urban food production, in order to really address issues around food poverty that blight the area.  They were a very dynamic and inspiring couple.  

Alice’s Garden, an urban farm and community garden has been in existence for 40 years, and hosts 113 family units and organisations who rent plots to grow food.  Gardeners include people from 21 different ethnicities, and the project includes 12 different onsite programme and projects.  During the year, over 600 people volunteer on the project.  It provides food for the participating families, but also supplies for 3 corner stores, 2 grocers, 6 local chefs and 3 local restaurants. 

The site also features a beautiful timber-framed covered space, used for all kinds of events and functions.  A walk around the site identifies a wide range of gardening styles and choices of plants.  One of the key roles it tries to perform, according to one of our guides, was to engage young Afro-American men in urban food production, so as to set good role models for others.  As our guide said, “this is one of the most effective ways I’ve seen of growing community”.  

But the cherry on the cake for me was the tour’s final stop, Growing Power.  Growing Power was once the last working farm within the Milwaukee city limits, with historic greenhouses and other infrastructure, all on a 3 acre site in one of the city’s most deprived areas.  They have sites in other cities, but their Milwaukee site is an amazing showcase of aquaponics, the integration of fish production and vegetable growing.  Here is a great video about it, featuring its founder Will Allen, who unfortunately wasn’t there the day we went:

 

It’s a huge success.  During 2012, Growing Power had over 30,000 visitors, over 5,600 volunteers, trained 1,700 young people to become their own urban farmers, harvested more than $750,000 worth of produce across 200 acres of growing spaces, harvested over 600 lbs of oyster mushrooms, raised 50,000 fish and much more.  They run a number of food stands and markets, supply restaurants and grocers, trainings and all manner of other innovations. 

It’s a fascinating tour too.  Based in the six greenhouses, a series of pond containing different fish species produce nutrient-rich water which is them pumped through a series of shelves on which food is grown in trays.  They grow huge amounts of sprouts such as wheatgrass and pea shoots, which are in great demand.  It’s almost year round, and very productive.  The tanks teem with different varieties of fish (mostly Tilapia, Lake Perch and Black Pacu).  Outside food is grown in more conventional tunnels, and millions of worms are bred every year in their worm composting beds …

Outside there are goats, sheep and chickens. There are bee hives …

… which make ‘Growing Power Urban Honey’ …

It’s a deeply impressive example of urban agriculture and intensive urban food production and job creation.  That was the last stop on our tour.  I then had to whizz off to do an interview for a documentary about local food, and then had a bit of downtime before the evening’s event.  

Billed as ‘The Brew City Abundance Bash’, the evening’s festivities were hosted at the Lakefront Brewery, a great craft brewery which has won awards for the energy efficiency and other ‘green’ measures it has taken.  Very fitting.  The evening began with Matt Filipiak leading a rendition of his song “It’s no Milwaukee”.  Then the Mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett got things underway, talking about the many things that the City Authority is doing to promote sustainability.  It was clear that the committment to these issues, and his admiration for the work of Transition Milwaukee, runs deep. 

Then Matt Howard, who works with Tom as Director of Milwaukee’s Office of Environmental Sustainability talked about, ReFresh Milwaukee, the city’s first sustainability plan.  Its website states that it:

provides a vision for community sustainability over the next 10 years and seeks to make Milwaukee a center for sustainability innovation and thought leadership. 

Then Felicia Hobart and the Hive sang a song about bees, and Ken Leinback of Milwaukee’s fantastic Urban Ecology Centre shared, with great audience participation, his story about when he realised that we needed to do something about the environment rather than just talking about it.  

 

Then it was over to me.  It was my last talk of the trip, and luckily my voice was still holding out.   The talk went down very well, with an amazing crowd packing the place out, must have been well over 400.  It was very enjoyable, and was followed by lots of book signings and meeting people.  

As is now customary, while there, with help from members of Transition Milwaukee, I asked people involved in the group what, for them, is Transition?  How would they describe it?

Also, why do they do it? 

That evening’s event was really glorious.  I’d say at least 400 came, standing room only at the back of the hall. A great ending to the tour.  On my last morning there before heading home, I went to the People’s Book Co-operative to do a couple of interviews, and then visited the Great Lake that sits alongside Milwaukee, which holds 20% of all the fresh water in the world.  Never seen a Great Lake before, so that was a great thing to do before I left.  And with that, I was off, heading for home.  

It’ll take me a while to digest it all, but I’d like to thank everyone who organised it all, especially the good folks at Transition US and Post Carbon Institute, especially Carolyne, Maggie, Marissa, Asher and Desiree, as well as all the great people I met on the way, all my hosts, and everyone in the Transition groups who had spent so much time putting on such great events.  And Amber, for all her great co-ordinating skills.  And whoever it was who made sure my suitcase, which was lost on my return journey, was eventually found and returned to me.  And Carol Kraco for use of three of her photos above, and Tom for ferrying me around Milwaukee talking about music. Thanks all.  

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15 Oct 2013

Letter from America #4: Five extraordinary days in California

California is vast, a nation in itself.  As a state, it actually is home to the ninth largest economy in the world.  It is home to one in eight Americans, and produces at least half of the nation’s fruit, and a sizeable proportion of its vegetables.  Its climate runs from tropical in the south, to subarctic in the mountains.  It’s a fascinating place.  When I first got to San Francisco, I had, unusually for my madly packed schedule, the rare joy of a couple of hours to myself.  I headed to City Lights bookstore.  I have to say it was one of the best bookshops I have ever been in, specialising in poetry, literature, arts, political books, alternative and counterculture publications.  It describes itself thus:

Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture’s only “Literary Landmark.” Although it has been more than fifty years since tour buses with passengers eager to sight “beatniks” began pulling up in front of City Lights, the Beats’ legacy of anti-authoritarian politics and insurgent thinking continues to be a strong influence in the store, most evident in the selection of titles.

It was great.  I spent an hour in there, I could have spent all afternoon.  

I then travelled to Janelle Orsi’s house in Oakland for an early supper with various San Francisco Transition folks.  An amazing meal of food mostly from within and around the city.  Janelle is a lawyer, doing what she calls ‘Legal Services for a Sustainable, Equitable and Sharing World’, basically doing amazing work to support the legal aspects of Transition, supporting co-ops, housing projects, laws around urban agriculture and so on.  Vital stuff, some of which is captured in her book ‘The Sharing Solution’. 

The evening’s event was to take place at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland.  Before it all began I did an interview with Tara Lohan at AlterNet.  You can read our conversation here.  The evening was being co-presented with Gopal Dayenani of Movement Generation, a group whose work focuses on the concept of ‘Just Transition’, and was chaired by Pandora Thomas of the Black Permaculture Network who is also on the board of Transition US.  There was a great crowd, people from the Bay Area and beyond. 

Following introductions, I spoke and then Gopal spoke about the work Movement Generation do, based on the belief that there can be no Transition without social justice.  Real engagement needs to be designed into groups from the start, and it is not possible to do Transition without acknowledging the struggles, political, economic and racial, that many communities face. 

Our talks were followed by a fascinating discussion about what a more inclusive Transition might look like, on the great stuff already being done but also on the long way there is still to go.  We explored the tensions around this, and the edge between Transition and activism, between Transition and politics.  It was a timely conversation, and one that opened important dialogue and thinking.  Here is the video of the evening:

After the talk there was lots of talking and booksigning and conversations, before heading off back into the city night.  The next day started with an interview on Uprising Radio in LA, part of the promotion for the forthcoming trip there, which you can hear here.  Then, with Asher Miller of Post Carbon Institute and Maggie Fleming of Transition US, I visited La Cocina, an amazing incubator for food entrepreneurs.  While there, I made a short film about it.  Here it is:

Very impressive.  The plan was then to go to The Social Kitchen, a great microbrewery and bar, for lunch, but most disappointingly, it was closed.  So we ate Japanese instead.  Then we headed for Northern California, to Sebastopol, up in the hills.  What a beautiful part of the world.  Olive groves, vineyards, orchards, rolling hills.  Reminded me of Tuscany a bit. 

I was staying with Rick Theis and his wife CJ, in their amazing house.  For many years it was a house that won ‘green building of the year’ awards.  One of the most fascinating bits was the pise walls (a French version of cob building, often stabilised with a small amount of cement, which is blown against shutters rather than built in layers like cob is.  The final result has great thermal mass, and keeps buildings cool in the summer too.  It was a gorgeous place, with permaculture garden, lots of fruit trees, solar panels and reclaimed wood.  What a spot. 

We had supper, joined by Andy Lipkis of Tree People (more about him later), Trathan Hickman of Transition US and others.  Then off to the Laguna Foundation in Santa Rosa for a fundraising event for Transition US.  Lots of people came to celebrate the work of Transition US so far, and rather than the talk I had generally been giving up to that point, Asher and I had a conversation which was really enjoyable.  Helped along by some delicious local craft beer, it was a lovely evening among friends celebrating the work of Transition US. 

The next morning started with a visit to the home of Richard Heinberg, who I imagine needs no introduction for readers of this blog.  He and his wife Janet live in Santa Rosa, in a small house with a great garden, full of fruit trees, vegetables and herbs, as well as a couple of chickens.  We had time to stop and look around, have some lunch, and to do an interview with Richard which will be posted here soon. 

Next it was off to the Building Resilient Communities, the 2013 Northern California Permaculture and Transition Network Convergence, at the Solar Living Institute in Hopland.  The event was described thus:

“The first ever Building Resilient Communities Convergence, at the beautiful Solar Living Institute, brings together the best of the Northern California Permaculture Convergence and the Northern California Regional Transition Network Conference for an action-packed weekend designed to build a powerful movement for community resilience”.

I had read about the Solar Living Institute for years, an iconic early example of scaling up strawbale construction.  I had no idea that was where we were going, so it was a delightful surprise.  A kind of smaller, Californian version of the Centre for Alternative Technology, it featured renewables, natural buildings, ponds and much more.  

And for this weekend it was home to a coming together of Transition and permaculture folks.  Beautiful place.  Sunshine.  Good people.  What’s not to love about that?  While there, Carolyne of Transition US took my iPad off and asked various people “What is Transition?”  Here’s some edited-together highlights of those …

… and “why do you do it?” …

I didn’t get to go to any talks, rather I hung out and chatted to people, which was very enjoyable.  Tried to set myself the task of walking around the Real Goods shop without buying anything.  I failed.  I was part of the final keynote session in the evening.  After an amazing supper in which vast amounts of squash were eaten by the hungry hoards (accompanied by other delicious food), attention turned to the main stage. 

After an introduction by Tathen Heckman of Transition US and Daily Acts, Richard Heinberg began by setting out the larger picture, of where we are at in terms of peak oil and climate change, and how fracking will do little to alter that picture.  Then Doria Robertson spoke.  Doria is from Richmond, California and is the Executive Director of Urban Tilth, a community based organization rooted in Richmond dedicated to cultivating a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system. Urban Tilth hires and trains residents to work with schools, community-based organizations, government agencies, businesses, and individuals to develop the capacity to produce 5% of their own food supply. 

She spoke movingly about how Richmond is surrounded by refineries, which regularly pollute the neighbourhood, and the problems with asthma and cancer that plague the surrounding community.  Last year, an accident at one of the plants, run by Chevron, caused, as she put it, “the sky to turn black”, and the resultant pollution meant that much of what Urban Tilth had grown had to be thrown away. 

Then I spoke, talking about my roots in permaculture, my love of it, and my frustrations with it too, and how the challenge of our times is how to scale it up.  I said that some groups I spoke to had a sense that money was bad, and that somehow to create a movement dependent on volunteering was somehow ‘purer’, but that there is an exclusivity to volunteering.  There are many people who cannot afford to volunteer, so it often means that only white, middle class people get involved.  As Doria said in the Q&A after the talks, “if this revolution depends on volunteering, I can’t be part of that revolution”. 

There was then a great discussion and questions from the audience, before the bands and the dancing started up, I signed some books, met some people, and then headed off into the night.  A very enjoyable event, and an amazing thing for the organisers to pull off in a very short run-up period.  

Next morning, Marissa Mommaerts  of Transition US and I flew to Los Angeles.  Approaching LA from the air is quite an experience.  It is vast.  It goes on and on in every direction.  I have never seen a city so vast.  It takes the breath away.  What’s also striking is the many huge square, flat-roofed buildings in the city.  It was hard to see them and not think of their huge potential as rooftop urban farms or as power stations.   

On arrival we went to the home of Joanna Poyourow, the catalyst for bringing Transition to LA, and a one-woman embodiment of The Power of Just Doing Stuff.  One of the first things that strikes you about LA is that the lawn is king.  It’s only when you take a step back and look at the city’s culture around how water is obtained, managed and disposed of, that the absurdity of the whole thing becomes clear.  According to Andy Lipkis of Tree People:

If ever there was a case for applying more holistic thinking, LA, and its relationship to water, is it.  Here’s a short video about Tree People’s work, and their proposal that, as permaculturists are wont to say, the problem is the solution:

On most residential streets in LA, lawns lie in front of every house, including the smaller strip between the pavement (sorry, sidewalk) and the road.  At night they are watered by sprinklers.  No-one ever really seems to use them much, they are ornamental.  Not at Joanna’s house.  Waste water from the house is channelled underground to irrigate plants.  Her garden drips with grapefruit, persimmons, all manner of amazing fruits that I barely even associate with trees (the climate here is similar to that of Israel).  LA has what is pretty much a year-round growing season, a turn of phrase guaranteed to make any British gardener bristle with jealousy.  

After some lunch, we headed off to visit the “Just Doing Stuff” festival taking place at the Emerson Avenue Community Garden.  En route we called by the local Episcopalian church, which has had a water-harvesting, permaculture, food garden makeover, supplying food for the local food bank as well as being a great resource, and banisher of lawns. 

The festival was underway when we arrived.  There was music, and stalls, and a chance to see the very impressive community garden, tended in plots by 38 local families as well as by the local Transition group and the school.  It was great to meet some Transition people who had travelled a long way to be there for the event. 

The evening event took place in the Westchester United Methodist Church.  I spoke first, and then I was joined by Andy Lipkis of TreePeople, D’Artagnan Scorza, from the Social Justice Learning Institute, Joanne, and Meghan Sahli-Wells who is Vice Mayor, Culver City and Transition core team member.  Here we all are…

 

Anneke Campbell of Transition Mar Vista/Venice facilitated the evening.  There was some great discussion about what it takes to step over into doing stuff, what it looks like when that happens.  Each speaker set out examples of where they have seen that in action, and what it can lead to.  The evening ended with a great exploration of what really scaling this stuff up will take, with some great discussion and ideas which I hope were recorded and captured somewhere. 

Then, after signing lots of books and meeting many lovely people, I headed off with the other speakers and organisers for a delicious local curry complete with local beer. 

The next day started with breakfast with Anneke and her husband Jeremy in their home which, like Joanne’s, flies in the face of LA lawn culture.  It features a soakaway from the washing machine, all manner of herbs and fruit trees, both in front of and behind the house.  An ocean of horticultural sanity. 

Her garden included what is called a ‘Little Free Library’, part of a movement across the US I had never heard of before.  The website states:

“It’s a “take a book, return a book” gathering place where neighbors share their favorite literature and stories. In its most basic form, a Little Free Library is a box full of books where anyone may stop by and pick up a book (or two) and bring back another book to share”.

Then it was off through the LA traffic, mercifully light because it was a holiday, to Pasadena, to Throop Church, and an event organised by Transition Pasadena. 

Throop Church has been in a process of Transition itself.  As Reverend Tera Little who is the Pastor at the church told me, “Transition revived our congregation”.  One of the reasons for this was the creation of a water-holding, food-producing garden built outside the church on a very public street corner.  

The place was buzzing.  There was a Repair Cafe, with sewing machines, screwdrivers and other tools being wielded.  There was a “Speed Dating for New Ideas” session.  There was a ‘Transition Town Fair’, with stalls from lots of other local groups.  

The event itself was a delight too.  I had the time to give my full presentation, having been introduced by the Pasadena Mayor, Bill Bogaard.  Some great questions and answers afterwards too.  The Pasadena group had produced lunch for everyone too, and I ate and signed books and met lots of lovely people.  

During the event, a member of Transition Pasadena kindly took my iPad off and interviewed people to ask them “What is Transition?”.  Here’s what people said:

She also asked people for their feedback following the talk I gave, and some of the answers were quite illuminating, so I’ll include that here as well:

After spending time hanging out and meeting people, it was back to Westchester.  That evening saw a gathering of some of the co-ordinators of different Transition groups across the greater LA area.  People had come from as far afield as Joshua Tree.  Over a delicious pot luck supper, people talked about their triumphs and challenges, what would help them move forward, and what they love about feeling part of this Transition thing.  It was fascinating to hear what Transition looks like (or tries to look like!) in such a diversity of settings, as well as to feel part of something that had taken root in what on first appearance appears to be the most barren and unpromising of settings.  Like many of the gardens I saw in the city though, the seeds have established and the roots are being put down.  

And with that, it was off to Milwaukee and the final stop of this great adventure. Before I leave you, I must share something that still makes me giggle.  One of the things that gets rather tiresome rather quickly is either English comedians in the US, or the other way round, who do routines about the funny things the other nation gets wrong in its language, odd turns of phrase or whatever.  However, on Joanne Porouyow and her family’s front door was the following sign …

Although once it was explained, it became clear that in the US, ‘solicitors’ means ‘hawkers’, I was left with a somewhat Monty Python-esque vision of suit-clad solicitors going from door to door in such epic numbers that people have to put up such signs.  “Who’s that at the door dear?  If it’s another bloody solicitor …”

My thanks to Miriam Brummel and Karim Sahli-Wells for use of their photos.  Also to Chris and Patricia, my hosts in LA, to Richard Heinberg for his lovely introduction in Hopland and to Anneke and Jeremy for breakfast. 

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