12 Oct 2013
I met up with Paul Hawken at the Where do we go from here conference in Rheinbeck NY. I took the opportunity to grab some time for an interview. We discussed growth, change and the power of action. You can either listen to or download the podcast, or read the transcript below. I began by asking him to introduce himself to readers who may not have come across his work before.
“I’m Paul Hawken and I’m a writer. I’ve been writing about the environment since…I can’t remember when, 1973? So 40 years now. But also writing about the environment and business, because I have been in business all my life. My first business was sustainable agriculture and natural foods, and I went into that business for the same reason you eat the food, which is to try to change both myself and where and how food is grown, and learned a lot. For me business has always been a way to make something happen in the world that isn’t happening that should happen, as opposed to how you sell or make money, that’s not been so interesting to me.
In the process of doing that I’ve written a lot about it. The Ecology of Commerce, The Next Economy, Growing a Business, Natural Capitalism – which, by the way, is not about capitalism. It’s about natural capital and has nothing to do with capitalism! But it’s purposely titled in order to ensnare people! My leftist friends go “aargh!”, but there’s no such thing as natural capitalism, not in the way that people understand it.
Schumacher didn’t coin the term, but he used the term ‘natural capital’ to refer to all those things out there, resources, resource flows, ecosystems, services that aren’t on anybody’s balance sheet. Not that we should monetise them, but we should recognise them as being extraordinarily valuable. Natural Capitalism is really about what happens when the limiting factor to human wellbeing is not human capital, you know, roads and highways and hospitals, but actually natural capital.
Like you say, Natural Capitalism is not about capitalism as such, but is it possible to have a form of natural capitalism or any form of capitalism that doesn’t depend on economic growth? Do you think that growth is conducive to the world we need to create?
It’s a great question. What I mean by that is there’s always going to be growth. But whether there’s overall growth, metastatic growth, that’s the kind of growth that can’t happen. That’s not possible. Also, we have to define growth: is it growth in stuff or growth in services, is there growth in quality or is there growth in money? Growth itself isn’t the problem, it’s what’s growing and how prosperity is measured.
Right now, as you well know, the metrics we have for economic growth are just bollocks, they don’t mean anything at all. They have nothing to do with people’s experience or life quality. They may have, at one time, I’m not saying they didn’t, but they don’t now. So it’s possible. But just as when you reach adulthood you don’t grow in size hopefully too much, but you continue to grow in other ways, I can easily imagine an economy that grows in complexity and elegance, people becoming better and more refined, teaching and learning and innovating.
I think it’s very possible not only to grow, but to grow and have a ninefold reduction in energy and material, or tenfold. To reduce what we use by 10% and to grow in the sense of prosperity, an income that is more than the living wage and that provides people with their needs and extra, to provide for those things that they want to be discretionary about in their life, that’s very possible. Right now we’re stealing the future and we’re selling it in the present, we’re calling it GDP.
There’s no reason whatsoever we can’t heal the future and monetise that in the present and work at it. When you do that, you’re creating value for future generations, and that has a present value. The way we do it is a choice by default, by a lack of imagination. There’s no reason why we can’t have inter-generational financing where we’re in a sense financing the future by spending the present by lending to each other to create value that is paid back by restoring natural capital, our land, our forests, our waterways – all those things have so much value. Those choices are there for us. That’s still a growing economy but not growing in impact, not growing in stuff, in fact there’s a radical reduction in both.
You wrote Blessed Unrest a few years ago, which was your mapping of the movement to change the world in its wider sense. What’s changed since then? Is your sense that that movement is stronger than it was when you wrote the book or as strong? What’s your update on this?
I do get asked that, especially when Occupy showed up and people wrote “you predicted Occupy, or the Arab Spring”. I didn’t predict anything, let’s be clear. Nor was I trying to. What I was trying to do, starting in ’99 in the WTO demonstrations in Seattle, which is where the book arose, I just kept noticing the diversity and how these people came there and the way it was organised. It was different to protests I had seen growing up: Civil Rights, anti-war, environmental…
I thought, this is something that’s going on here. I pulled the string on the flour bag and it just kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper. Then I asked the simple question, I wonder how many groups are out there, there must be somebody who knows. There must be a registry, you know?
I started looking through lists of so many things and there was just nothing anywhere. I grew up at a university and Marion the librarian was a hero in our family, so I went to the library and they didn’t know. That’s when I started to get really interested and started counting. Once I started counting and realised that there was over a million organisations. Then we got a grant from a really wonderful man to actually go in and do a typology, a taxonomy – what are we talking about here, environment, social justice, indigenous rights, what does that mean?
We started going through the list of organisations that we discovered and then looking at their mission statements, looking at ‘who we are’, the descriptions, and then saying what category they belonged in. When we started doing that, we started a category for groups about climate justice. At the time it was nascent, though not anymore. We just kept naming, naming, naming, and when it was done we had over two thousand different types of organisations that were inextricably knitted together as this movement, although not necessarily all aware of that.
From my point of view, since it was published in 2007, it continues to grow. The economic shock of ’08-’09 I think created the need for groups to work more closely together. Resources became more limited, but the need became more urgent.
If you look back to the Sixties and the flowering of movements and all that incredible diversity of movements there that flowered in the late Sixties and then tailed away quite steeply going into the Seventies, it felt to me – I wasn’t born until the tail end of it – but looking back on it and reflecting on it, that one of the key things seemed to be that yes there were lots of different groups, but there wasn’t an emotional maturity grounding what they were doing in some kind of process. So everyone just fell out with each other and got stoned and the whole thing didn’t really achieve its aims. Do you have a sense that we’ve somehow learnt from those mistakes, that this is more mature than what happened in the Sixties, or is there a danger that it repeats the same thing with lots of groups that don’t get on with each other?
When you generalise you have to be careful. Are you talking about England, are you talking about France, talking about the US, New Jersey, Arizona? Or Japan? It’s different in every country, the level of maturity is different. I would say that in the US, it’s extraordinarily sophisticated now, and there’s not a chance that the Sixties will happen. The Sixties wasn’t that big, it was just at the time any activism was given a lot of press. It was novel, it was different, it got news because it got news. It attracted followers or activists. There was a symbiotic relationship. You don’t really get that kind of attention now.
It’s not that you don’t have activist groups. At the moment there’s 350.org with Keystone XL, that’s very active, and there are lots of splinter groups that have spoken out at that. What you see now is much more boots on the ground, and it’s about getting the work done. It’s not about being active, it’s about being collaborative, it’s about listening. It’s about working with communities and places and towns. It’s about really bringing diversity together instead of being right.
From my own perspective, you’re still seeing growth. But like any biological organism you’re seeing death too, it’s about turnover and learning. It’s a movement of movements and there’s no centre, there’s no head, there’s no ideology, no-one needs one nor wants one, so therefore when you talk about it you have to be really careful. You have to always be careful not to generalise.
One of the things that was really interesting in your talk today was when you talked about Pacala and Socolow’s wedges (seven ‘wedges’ representing different carbon-reducing technologies that combined could lead to the desired scale of overall reductions). I’ve always shared your sense that actually one of the dangers with those wedges is that they’re all things that other people do, or don’t do, on our behalf. Like you say, you lose agency with them. It’s occurred to me for a while that something like Transition or actually the movement in Blessed Unrest has the potential to be a wedge. I wondered if you could talk about that a little bit.
I think the movement has a chance to be almost every wedge, actually. Not the Socolow wedges but the wedges we spoke about today (in his presentation at Omega) in terms of I think we had 92, or 102, you saw the scrolling list is not complete but these are the real wedges. The wedge thing is so linear, mechanical, [laughs] only a PHD could do a drawing like that!
I think what Blessed Unrest was trying to describe, and didn’t name, because I don’t think it has a name, is doing exactly that, and inventing ways as we speak too. Some may be considered marginal, but marginal things add up and are significant, and that’s what the wedges didn’t do. We’re brushing up on all that stuff, these are the 8, the big headliners, most of which are never going to happen. It’s like Golden Rice, 22 years and counting, it’s like the stalking horse for the GM companies: “are you going to let these kids go blind from your foolish objection of GMOs?”
To me, you’re seeing the same thing with those. If you capture the [carbon emissions from] coal, tell me about it, but in the meantime you have to do something, and that’s why I like Transition Towns and Transition movement because it’s “let’s do it!” What happens, as you so beautifully explained and illustrated (in your talk here at Omega) is that people know what to do. They just need the question really.They know what to do.
It’s not like you or me or somebody saying, I know what to do, not at all. It’s like creating the conditions for people rise up and they want to rise up. They want meaning in their life. They want their life to be relevant. They want their children to grow up in some semblance of stability and economic security.
The movement to localise is so important. Most of it concentrates on food and other things. What Janine Benyus and I do and what she was talking about in her discussion, we’ve been trying to make a solar panel so that you can have local energy. Local means you make it and recycle it right there. You don’t go to China. You don’t go to some big company in Germany. You don’t use exotic materials, you don’t have cadmium-coated glass, which you have on 15% of all solar panels right now. You have things that are safe, and children can go to the factory and breathe and don’t cause fish to die like they do in China from solar companies. But it’s local.
When you have that kind of control over food and energy and materials, that resilience, what I would call that ‘ecological sovereignty’ with other villages, cities, towns. Now you have something really interesting which is when Lewis and Clark got to the Pacific North-West there were Native Americans there who had shells from Patagonia. From there all the way down to Patagonia people were obviously doing business. That’s why I say that commerce is sacred. Commerce is actually beautiful. It’s when you aggregate and scale it, that’s when you get into really big problems, but when people are serving each other by their hands and their wit and their services and their craft, it’s really a very beautiful thing.
That’s what localisation does. We just wanted to create something where nobody would benefit from centralising it. Nobody can make it cheaper in some other country. Nobody can lord over you. Nobody can lord over you with carrots! We think solar should be like that right now. Solar is not a great technology.
Jeremy Leggett has just published a book in which he tells a story about when he met Tony Blair and discussed peak oil with him. Blair said “if it does happen, it’s going to be horrible, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If it doesn’t happen, everyone will say that you were alarmist and will blame you and will vote you out as well, you’ll scare people and they won’t vote for you”. Tony Blair’s thing was that we just have to hope that the oil companies are right. On issues like climate change and peak oil, these big, defining issues, can we expect any leadership from government do you think?
No. I think there’s another thing that I’d throw in with peak oil which is Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI). It’s not just energy. There’s kinds of energy, but then there’s how much you’re getting for the energy you’re putting in to retrieve that energy. Peak oil – who knows when that is, because you can frack the whole bloody planet. But EROEI is just dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping. The tar sands are, on a good day 2.5:1. I doubt it, given the huge ecological footprint, the damage that it’s done, I don’t read it that way, but I’ll give them 2.5:1, that’s what they say. Hunter gatherer societies were 10:1, so let’s see, we’re 25% of a hunter gatherer society!
Surplus energy is the mother’s milk of civilisation. It created towns. It created religion and education and dance and music and opera and all the things that are not about survival, but are about celebration of humanity. Surplus energy is a good thing, there’s nothing wrong with that. But putting aside carbon, putting aside CO2, putting aside combustion, putting aside pollution, it’s the wrong way to go. It’s diabolical.
Tony Blair’s comments are so interesting because there’s such a lack of leadership in them. Whether you think of it as a precautionary principle or however you wish to think about it, let’s have a no regrets policy which says, if we do that, no matter how it turns out, you’ll have no regrets whatsoever.
So energy independence, reducing our footprint, cleaning up our energy metabolism so it’s not poisoning us or others with this pollution, creating jobs that are endemic to the country or region rather than going outside somewhere, getting rid of political corruption which follows energy like flies around poop, as does war. When you take away those stakes, when you take away that concentration of power, all those things benefit from a no regrets energy policy. And if you’re wrong, your country is cleaner, stronger, more economically vibrant, more resilient. If you’re right, then look what you’ve done for others. So his answer, to me, is upside down and backwards.
Blessed Unrest was about that bottom-up movement, what it looks like. As you say, there’s no sign of any leadership coming from the top. How do those two things interact with each other? What does it look like when a vibrant bottom-up Blessed Unrest movement meets the top-down?
I think we’re in a stage of devolution of the big, centralised political institutions. They’re going to collapse. I don’t think governments are going to collapse, I’m not apocalyptic that way at all, but I think the thinking and the way it informs itself and conducts itself will collapse in maybe 10, 15, 20 years. It’s just inevitable.
I think that what civil society is doing is not trying to replace government or not trying to replace the church or the universities or venerable institutions. I think what it’s trying to do is permeate them with new ways of being and thinking and relating in the world. Government is so ripe for that because there’s no reason now to have the government we have, which is behind closed doors and good old boy and smarmy corruption, wink wink nudge nudge. It’s so outdated.
In an age of the internet and instant feedback, in an age in which we can set up new memes where people govern themselves, the ‘present-ess’ I talked about, the wisdom of the crowds, the idea that democracy is really bad. The crowd, if it knows it, has that power. It’s very pre-considered. It doesn’t vote its emotions, it actually considers things.
Then what happens in that kind of situation is that if you have true democracy and don’t have corruption, you actually have information flowing to people which is open and transparent. From good information, people can make good decisions. If you have bad information as people do now, the decisions get skewed.
We’re going to see the bankruptcy of the existing political systems become more and more evident. I think of Vaclav Havel, he was a playwright and he and his colleagues kept practising parliamentary democracy in Czechoslovakia, under the nose of the Communist party. The secret police were always trying to find out where they were meeting and what they were doing, and they found them and threw them in jail, and humiliated them and took away all their possessions, and they’d get out and they’d do it again.
When the Berlin Wall fell, there were these people who had practised, they’d rehearsed. I feel like when you look at this movement, we’re all rehearsing, we’re all practising. What’s going to happen, I believe, is that the larger world, if you will, the world that’s asleep, the world that’s numb, the world that still has faith in the inertia of the existing system, when that crumbles, cracks, then they’re going to turn around and ask, what is working? Then you get this exponential change. You got this sudden change in Czechoslovakia from Fascism to democracy and it was a very smooth transition because people had felt depressed by the old system but they also had really great leadership.
People are practising leadership in real time, but they will be the go-to organisations, the go-to people, the go-to spokesperson, and we’ll have that really phased transition where things change overnight, very quickly. Rob, I don’t know whether it’s 5 or 50 or 15 years, I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but it’s all set up for that to happen.
This is the first time I’ve ever been to America, and one of the things that’s really struck me is the amount of flags you see everywhere. In front of people’s houses, everywhere, the Stars and Stripes. You rarely see that where I come from. That whole idea of people saying ‘unAmerican’ to mean a bad thing, can that degree of nationalism be squared with a love of the environment and the care ethos that we need to move forward or is that kind of flag-grasping really something that really keeps us in the past, do you think?
Well, as they say, “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels”. There are people who are rigidly holding on to a symbol. Then there are people who are really frightened of change in the world, the people who are representative of that, gay marriage is a threat, and so on and so on.
Then there are the demagogues and the people who use that totemic symbol as a means to insert fear and use fear as a way to mobilise. That’s what we’re seeing in America. Adam Curtis talked about that in ‘The Power of Nightmares’. It’s taking grip, it’s very powerful here. We can imagine the end of the world very easily now, we’re all getting really good at it, the end of civilisation, but what’s unimaginable is the transformation of the world, and we have to work on that.
What you see in America is really a sunset effect. It could also be a prelude to fascism of course. Fascism was born in Germany of Versailles. That treaty was humiliating and was a breeding ground for demagoguery and too bad that Adolf went to the Wagner opera and thought he was going to be a hero and save his people.
I’m not saying America will be this way or that way. It was Churchill that said “Americans do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else” and they really do try everything else. But there is a deep core of goodness in America which is being, I think, misdirected and exploited by media, by the person outside the country, Rupert Murdoch, who’s not even American.
I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I do think that the reason the cities in the US are so effective in their government, senators and the president is so ineffective is that that’s a level of sovereignty where our difference is. The things that unite us are much more important than our differences. That’s true on any scale, even in a city as big as New York.
That’s where you find mayors who signed the Kyoto Protocol and met it and surpassed it and are moving very rapidly to making their cities the greenest city in the world. I can’t tell you how many cities I go to in the world where the mayor says “we’re going to be the greenest city in the world”!. What a great competition. More and more now, you get elected as mayor, if you don’t have a programme you’re almost unelectable. A joke.
Patriotism can come together in a way, because people can feel like values of children and education and safety and security, autonomy and resilience are starting to all blend together in a gestalt that makes sense to those who fought the war and have medals, and doesn’t make sense to a generation who just thought those wars were crazy. So we’ll see. Sometimes I just think we could just veer into fascism.
My last question was, we just passed 400 parts per million a few months ago. The IPCC report that just came out was hardly a clean bill of health in terms of the climate. What’s your sense of the movement that Blessed Unrest captures? Is it going to be enough to turn things around, do you think?
It’s only good enough to turn it around if it doesn’t become ‘it’. The whole purpose of any movement is to become ‘we’ in the largest sense of the word. There’s no ‘they’ there. I think that the question we have to ask ourselves is, is climate change happening to us or for us? Because if it’s happening to us, then we’re victims and we’ve been screwed and got the short end of the stick. And when it’s happening to you then you’re thinking, who did that? If it’s happening for us, which I believe by the way, then everything is wide open. Everything has to change. Our hearts, our minds, what we do, what we think of as patriotic…
How do you mean ‘for us’?
On our behalf. We are doing this. We in the bigger sense are doing this. We have created a situation, this shadow of our catabolic, thermal, industrial economy, in order to wake up. If we don’t wake up, then it’s fore-ordained, roughly, what will happen. And it’s very rough, that ‘roughly’.
For us means that one by one by one, people are waking up. It’s not like one by one by one people are going to sleep, it’s the other way around. You can easily say that we’re all losing, but no, we’re not. I really radically disagree with that. We have to really be careful not to conflate the momentum, the inertia, the concentration of capital and the corruption attendant thereon, of large-scale fossil fuel companies and institutions that are allied with them or kin to them which are benefiting from and expressing momentum that goes back 50, 100, 150 years in industrialism.
With the mindset and the economic principles that aren’t principles, or economic, and the momentum, we don’t want to conflate that with the birth of a transformative humanity that takes shape in terms of groups and NGOs and collectives and co-ops in so many different ways, to address the salient issues of our time.
People say the momentum is exceeding the effort to halt it, the damage, therefore you’re failing. I say “no, no, no, no”. That momentum has nothing to do with growth. This started small and it’s growing, and it’s growing much faster than anything else. It started small because it started in response. You could say there’s a lag time and a delay, sure, but it’s in response. You can’t conflate the response to the instigation that caused the response. I don’t buy into this idea that somehow we’re losing.
Are we losing diversity, elephants? Yes, no question, the data is robust. But when we conflate it all together, then we just go dark, and despair, and we go numb, and lose our narrative. We lose a story that’s meaningful to us. There’s a great book by Jeremy Lear, The Crow People, about ethics in the face of cultural devastation and what happens when the narratives that inform the culture and made you and gave meaning to your life are taken out from underneath you.
If you buy into this ‘to us’ and you’re the victim, you’re also giving your narrative over to that which is dying. It may be big, but that doesn’t mean it’s thriving. It may have more and more money in the world, it may be that incomes are getting more concentrated, but that is a sign of death, that’s not a sign of life.
It’s really important that we don’t do that, that we understand that there is a deeper story that’s being enacted out, being written by you and by so many people. You’re there, I know you know it, you’re in the towns, you listen, you watch, you see. Now you’ve been here and seen what it’s like here. Of course people are marginalised economically, they’ve chosen that, they know they can do better, make more if they do this, if they gave up, they can’t give up. What you see you can’t unsee. They’ve chosen a path of regeneration.
What I’ve learnt, I was talking about my youth today, I spent a lot of time outside because I didn’t trust the adult world, I didn’t trust it at all. What I learnt young, and didn’t have the words for it, no matter what you do to nature, burn it, scrape it, scorch it, clear cut it, extract it, poison it, the moment you stop, life starts to regenerate. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s the default mode of life. And we are life. We really are. It’s our default mode.
It’s really important that we see that and that it’s happening, that movement to regenerate. With all our ignorance, like we’ve woken up and what happened, definitely people are startled by a newfound literacy of where we are, because they’ve been lulled asleep by things and advertising and TV and all that stuff. But one by one people pass over and they wake up and that awakening is before us. That is what this is here for. None of us will be the same person we are today when we make this transition.
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10 Oct 2013
I grew up watching Dallas. It’s a TV show with a lot to answer for. When I lived in Ireland, I met an Irish academic doing their Masters research in architecture around the question “why is it that a culture that created something as beautiful as the Book of Kells creates such dull and horrible architecture?” (I’m sure her actual question was couched in slightly more academic language). One of her key findings was that it can be traced back to ‘Dallas’, the TV show that arrived on Irish screens just at a time when Ireland was starting to find its feet economically.
A trip around Ireland, especially the west coast, can leave one with the impression that everyone wanted to create their own private Southfork, a phenomenon made worse by a book called ‘Bungalow Bliss’, a pattern book for bungalows, a kind of restaurant menu of uninspired and ugly buildings (“I’ll have a number 13 with arches please”).
So now, a week into my US adventure, I find myself in Texas. My mental picture of the place comes from watching Dallas as a child. Cowboy hats, leather boots, huge cars, oil derricks. I was visiting Houston and Austin, both oil cities. Surely searching for a sustainability initiatives in these cities would prove as challenging as searching for a beautiful home among the pages of ‘Bungalow Bliss’? Well no. Both cities proved to be a pleasant surprise.
I was hosted in Houston by Mark and Kathy Juedeman. Mark is one of the co-ordinators of Transition Houston, as well as being on the board of Transition US and a thoroughly nice guy too. His and Kathy’s house is surrounded by mature pecan nut trees, and their kitchen contained baskets of last year’s harvest. Delicious they were indeed. By the way, in the UK, ‘pecan’ is pronounced in a way that rhymes with “freakin”, whereas here it is pronounced “peek-ahn”. Just thought you’d like to know that.
Transition Houston has a number of neighbourhood groups as well as a city-wide hub. Activities so far have included a great event promoting cycling, a number of ‘permablitzes’ (one-day intensive make-overs of gardens), training and skillshares and tours of the homes of people who have done energy efficiency measures. One of the things that is most fascinating to me is that a number of those involved work, or worked, in the oil and gas industry. It’s not something I expected, but it’s logical when you think about it. People are people, and people care about things.
I gave two talks in Houston, both with Justin Roberts of Team Better Block. Justin in an inspirational activist, whose work is mentioned in The Power of Just Doing Stuff and featured in a great TED talk he gave a couple of years ago.
His work has many overlaps with Transition. The first talk we gave was at lunchtime at Rice University. Being lunchtime it wasn’t that well attended, but was very enjoyable nonetheless. In the afternoon I spent some time with some members of Transition Houston, discussing their challenges and experience. It was a great group, a wide range of ages. Like many groups, they were concerned about not engaging more people, about not having achieved what they wanted to have.
I suggested we go round and hear about the things that Transition Houston has done that they have been proudest of, something groups so rarely do. That took us some time, hearing the various activities that meant things to those who had been involved. We discussed some ideas for broadening appeal, for supporting each other better, and the need to actually celebrate more what they have achieved.
The evening’s event was again at Rice, but this time drew a much larger crowd. This time Jason gave a longer presentation about his work with great slides, inspirational projects based around healing unloved places in short bursts of inspired activity. One of the things from Jason’s presentation I liked was his idea that if you want to get things done, you need to ‘blackmail yourself’. “If your apartment is messy, don’t tell yourself you’ll tidy it sometime next week, ring a few friends and invite them over for supper that evening. You’ll get the space tidy”. Jason’s work is great, and an interview I did with him will appear on this website in early November.
In an unexpected and very moving conclusion to his talk, he revealed that a year before he had been diagnosed with cancer, and that his friends and people in his community had rallied round, holding fundraisers around the idea of “Build a Better Jason”, raising $25,000 towards his medical bills. He is now free of cancer.
For me, giving a talk in a city built on the oil and gas industry, at an event supported by the Shell Sustainability Institute at Rice University and stating that four-fifths of fossil fuels need to stay in the ground, and that the age of cheap energy is over, was an odd experience. But it seems like it really is not news to anyone anymore. The talk generated a great response, and was followed by lots of conversations and book signings. Especially interesting was the number of younger people excited by the possibilities of Transition.
One of the challenges Transition Houston face is that of trying to find their niche in a city that already has so much going on in terms of sustainability. There are all sorts of initiatives, around local food, cycling, renewable energy and so on. The University campus contains three community gardens. I met Dr Bob Randall of Urban Harvest, who run permaculture courses all year round, who run an annual fruit tree sale where in one day they distribute $140,000 worth of trees, set up Farmers’ Markets and a lot more besides. Transition Houston has identified a niche for themselves, but exactly what that niche is and the role it plays in the larger picture will be constantly evolving.
At the end of the Houston event, we asked people what Transition is, how they would describe it (my huge thanks to Sarah, who fixed my iPad enabling me to upload this video, as well as the ‘”What is Transition?’ and ‘Why do you do it?’ films I made in Portland, Maine. Thanks also to Kathy for filming this). Here’s what they said:
The next day Mark and I travelled to Austin for SXSW Eco, a huge sustainability conference in the city. The conference took place in the Austin Conference Centre, a vast, sprawling, impersonal space, more akin to an airport than an intimate conference venue. First thing I did was a Mentor session, where I chatted to a couple of people about their ideas and shared any thoughts I might have.
The first person I spoke to, a young guy from Houston, began by saying “I read your book five years ago, I had a well-paid job, and after I read it, I gave up my job, and moved into a semi-derelict house…” I was a bit concerned that he was going to burst into tears and say I had ruined his life, but just the opposite, he is now doing all sorts of great stuff, and feeling like he is living a life much closer to his values. Phew, that was a relief …
My talk at SXSW went well, with a very attentive audience, and great questions. The book signing afterwards sold out of books, and I met some lovely people while signing books, including a man whose first name was Sheffield. Anyone ever meet a Sheffield before? Nice guy. He had never been to Sheffield, but as a child found it very exciting when he found cutlery with Sheffield written on it (isn’t that sweet?).
It was fascinating to meet a lot of people involved in sustainability stuff in Austin. It is a city projected to double in size over the next 20 years or so, and already has a reputation as a “weird” city, as a place that likes to do things differently. I spoke to various people involved in that process, all committed to the possibilities of doing something different that would really put the city on the map. Their most frequent comment was that there is so much happening in Austin, but the media doesn’t report any of it, and seems unable to figure out how it might do so. I wonder how much that is also the case elsewhere across the country.
After a quick pop to the SXSW end-of-conference party in an upstairs club venue with a DJ playing funky rare groove breaks, above a bar called ‘Bikinis’ (where all the women serving at the bar wore … well I imagine you can guess … you don’t get that in Totnes), we were off to meet Transition Austin.
Transition Austin has struggled to gain much traction in the city, failing to find its niche with so much other stuff going on, in the way Transition Houston has. It has struggled to find the best scale to work at. We went out to what has to be one of the oddest talks I have ever done. We drove to an ‘RV Park’ (recreational vehicles, like motorhomes), next to which was a small farm/homestead. A group of around 50 people were sat in front of an old barn in the nightime air, having an evening gathering with food and drink, to explore whether, and how, to give Transition Austin a renewed push.
In front of the barn was a microphone illuminated with a spotlight on one of the buildings. It meant that when I went up to speak, I could hardly see the audience. I talked a bit about the challenges groups face in reviving themselves, and some insights from other places, as well as how important it is to avoid some of the pitfalls that can keep Transition rooted in the ‘alternative’ community, rather than stepping across and being truly inclusive. We had lots of questions, and great discussion and conversation. And a rather nice bottle of local IPA craft beer.
That was that really then. Back to the hotel to prepare for the next day’s early flight to San Francisco. At the airport, waiting for the plane, I picked up a copy of USA Today. A glance through its pages presented, somehow, for me, the kind of mental split I have observed in most of the places I visited, in the culture here. The kind of split you see when standing on the edge of a tipping point.
There was an article about a study in the journal Nature predicting record heat waves in the US by the middle of the century, for New York by 2047 and 2048 for Los Angeles and Denver. It quoted lead author Camilo Mora as saying “what’s shocking is how soon this is going to happen”.
It also carried an article about permafrost melting in Alaska, and the impacts it is having on peoples’ homes and the regional infrastructure, such as roads, which are buckling as the permafrost melts. Roads are having to be rebuilt with a layer of polystyrene foam beneath the tarmac to prevent buckling.
It included this sentence:
“Alaska’s temperatures are rising twice as fast as those in the lower 48, prompting more sea ice to disappear in summer. While this may eventually open the North-West passage to sought-after tourism, oil exploration and trade, it also spells trouble as wildfires increase, roads buckle and tribal villages sink into the sea”.
Makes it sounds like that’s somehow a tough decision, like there’s an upside to what is, in effect, a catastrophe. On the opposite page was an article called That Outer Space Sparkle is More Than Stardust which reported new research suggesting that Jupiter and Saturn could contain large amounts of diamonds, joining Neptune and Uranus, which have long been thought to be diamond-rich. It ended by quoting Scott Edgington of NASA as saying that to find out for sure:
“We would have to go and drill for them. Who knows? Maybe this will give DeBeers the opportunity to send missions to Saturn to go find diamonds”.
The article also featured “an artist’s rendering showing a robot ship mining Saturn for diamonds in the distant future”.
For heaven’s sake. My favourite story though was the short piece stating that October 14th is National Chocolate-Covered Insect Day, and that the Audubon Butterfly Garden in New Orleans will be setting up a chocolate fountain this Saturday. I hope you will also be marking this important national occasion in your own dignified way.
It also contained an article headlined ‘Kochs claim no role in efforts to derail health law’, in which the Koch brothers, prolific funders of climate scepticism and efforts to block any restrictions on fossil fuel use, stated that they hadn’t in any way influenced the current situation in the US, where a small minority of right-wing Republicans have caused a government shutdown which began on the day I arrived in the US (I am assured there is no connection). President Obama’s meagre attempts to introduce some fairness into the appalling injustice of the healthcare system here is being presented as the cause.
So the impacts of climate change are becoming clearer, through melting permafrost, record temperatures, forest fires and so on, those funding the denial and misinformation are becoming clearer, the wealth inequalities are widening, but the real danger is that people say “well it’s too late now to do anything”. That leap from “there’s no problem” to “it’s too late to do anything” is deeply dangerous. If this trip, and all these meetings and talks can do anything, it is hopefully to inject the possibility that there is still a window to do something, and it needs the leadership of the people, because it isn’t coming from anywhere else. That there is another way that can actually meet our needs as human beings, as well as the needs of the biosphere, and in such a way that we end up in a better place. That feels like a desperately-needed message.
To return to my opening thoughts on ugly Irish houses inspired by Dallas. As we drove through Texas, one of the many advertising hoardings alongside the road was for a business called WeBuyUglyHomes.com. Their website states:
“We buy ugly homes every day – and we’d like to buy yours – regardless of how ugly it is … frankly we couldn’t care less how ugly your house is”.
From my brief travels through the area, they have plenty to choose from. While up until recently, the key exports from the region may have been ugly houses, big hats, oil and bars with waitresses in bikinis, things are changing fast. There is a real sense of purpose around resilience and sustainability, a sense that the future rests in a different mindset, in an unflinching look into the future, in engaging the passion young people feel about the future. One student I spoke to at Rice University told me how he had studied engineering there, a course designed to bring people into the oil industry, but he was committed to seeking a future in renewable energy. “That’s the future” he said. Indeed it is.
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8 Oct 2013
I just reached the end of my first full week in the US, and to say it’s been hectic would be an understatement. After two days in New Orleans, Peter (Lipman, Chair of Transition Network and my travelling companion) and I headed to Boston. That evening I spoke at an event, at Tufts University, which was very well attended. It brought together students, Transitioners from quite a radius around Boston, and others too.
After I spoke, Medford Mayor Michael McGlynn and Mayor Lisa Wong of Fitchburg also spoke about what they are doing to make their places more sustainable. It was actually rather impressive, with initiatives from recycling to renewable energy to urban agriculture. The talk was streamed live online. You can read an article about it from the university paper, with the unlikely title of Hopkins, local mayors discuss community here.
That night we stayed that night in the home of Chuck Collins of Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition and his family. Very delightful to sleep in a proper bed in a proper home after the sterile anonymity of hotels. The next morning Peter and I co-presented a talk to a breakfast gathering of community activists, funders and others at the Brewery, home to a number of innovative local businesses, which was well attended and went really well.
After that, I went on a group guided tour of JPNet’s work, led by Chuck. The group’s work is a fascinating manifestation of Transition and will be the subject of a future, more detailed post.
We then drove to Portland in Maine, initially along highways lined with sprawl, shops, restaurants and so on, all strung out along the side of the road for mile after mile. After a while this tailed away and we were driving through landscapes lined with amazing autumn-coloured forests: vibrant reds and orange, all shades of yellow, vibrant dark burgundy. Incredibly beautiful, especially when reflected in the lakes we passed.
When we reached Portland, we went to The Resilience Hub, a centre for permaculture, Transition and other local resilience initiatives and met Rachel Lyn Rumson and Lisa Fernandes, permaculture teachers based there. Then it was off to the Unitarian Church, venue of the evening’s talk, entitled Local Action Can Change The World. We arrived and got set up before people started arriving. The event was a sell out, and by 7.30 was absolutely packed. It was introduced by Rachel and Lisa, and I was joined on stage by John Rooks of the SOAP Group who talked about what Transition looks like in the business world.
I really enjoyed giving the talk, and it seemed to go down well, with a standing ovation, lots of book signing and lots of talking to people. We then went to a bar in the middle of Portland which was having some sort of craft beer festival taking place, with all sorts of amazing beers on offer. To hear about the craft brewing revolution taking place in the US is one thing. To be handed the menu at the bar is quite another.
After a couple of delicious brews, we headed to the ferry, and crossed to Peaks Island, off the coast of Portland. We were staying the night at the home of Mark Swain, a permaculturist whose garden had been designed with old friends Charles and Julia Yelton, international permaculture designers/teachers, who were also there. His home was set deep in the woods, alive with autumn colours.
The following morning we had a tour of the garden, with its ponds, protected cropping beds, fruit trees and much more, before heading back across on the ferry to pick up a hire car in order to drive to Rhinebeck (NY) to the Omega Institute to speak as part of the Where Do We Go From Here? Conference. Omega is a kind of upmarket spirituality/activism kind of retreat centre place, set in the woods in a beautiful place. Bill Clinton had spoken the day before me, and I was on after Paul Hawken and Janine Benyus (the biomimicry author).
Omega did feel slightly (in terms of buildings) like the Dharma Initiative in Lost, but it was very beautiful, with amazing food, some fascinating people, and a chorus of cicadas from the surrounding forest. It felt very relaxed and friendly. I met up with Paul Hawken and did an interview with him which will be posted here soon, and then had a very good night’s sleep.
Next morning we were up and off for the train to New York. Nothing quite prepares you for New York. Once you get over the heady bouquet of urine that follows you everywhere in the city (I did check, it wasn’t me), what strikes you most is the sheer scale of it. A visit to Time Square revealed that in the planters along the street were cabbages and kale! An unexpected surprise.
We had a bike ride through the city with a few local cycling enthusiasts who had kindly offered to show us the sights, sampling the recently-added cycle lanes and green corridors added to the city. Most remarkable was the Highline, a length of elevated train line turned into a forest corridor running through the city for about 30 blocks. It is planted up with trees and shrubs and is quite gorgeous. I even spotted some chokeberries ready for harvest. At one point there was an orchestra playing surrounded by a big crowd which was a delight.
While in New York we went to a couple meetings with gatherings of funders, including one the following morning that was also attended by Michael Shuman, expert in local economies, and author of a number of books on the subject. I had spoken to Michael via Skype before but this was the first time we met in person. I enjoyed it when he said “local economic development is the only form of economic development that works”. Fascinating discussions ensued about what it might look like if philanthropy were to get behind Transition.
On our way to that meeting we passed again through Time Square and enjoyed Steve Lambert’s “Capitalism works for me!” installation in the square. It’s a huge illuminated sign which allows people to vote yes or no. At the time of visiting, the no votes were in the lead by 247 to 217.
That lunchtime we spoke at a Resilience Roundtable at the Municipal Arts Society of New York which was great fun. All sorts of community resilience activists from across the city. The microphone didn’t work, so given that it was a long thin room, we had to stand halfway down the hall and shout. All added to the resilience theme of the event! Great questions and discussions.
To visit New York was a fascinating experience. Buildings so tall that in the cloudy misty weather that featured most of the time we were there meant you often couldn’t see the tops of the tallest buildings. New York somehow embodies the worst excess of economic disparity, what happens when the free market is allowed to rule unfettered, but at the same time some of the best, in terms of the spirit of the people, the diversity, the food, the sheer breathtaking enormity of everything. I’m delighted not to live there though.
And that was that for our New York experience. Peter headed home and I headed for Houston for the next leg of the trip. More to follow.
I must just give some thanks here, to Maggie, Asher, Irene, Carolyne, Amber, Desiree and everyone who has made this whole trip work. Thanks so much.
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6 Oct 2013
Coming from England, one of my first impressions of the US is how the word “awesome” is, to my ears at least, somewhat overused. To my English sensibilities, the Karakorum mountains at sunrise are awesome. The Grand Canyon, I imagine, is awesome. To be able to see all of Van Gogh’s paintings in one place would be awesome. A pancake, or a TV programme, or a new phone app, don’t really warrant “awesome” for me. But there is something about New Orleans, the city I just left as the first stop on my dash around the US, and the thinking it introduces you to, that actually is rather awesome.
Time spent here, and talking to people, gives a sense of just how powerful the forces of nature are, and how we tamper with them at our peril. Here’s a city which basically floats on a swamp, many parts of which were completely trashed by the floods that took place following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with extensive accompanying human suffering, and which is now clawing its way back to vibrancy. As one person I spoke to told me, during Katrina, most of the residents of New Orleans left and were scattered across the country (the year after Katrina, the population was 56% of what it was before the flooding). Many of them chose not to return, although population is now pretty much back to what it was before 2005. One of the key changes to the place has been a sense that everyone who is here made a conscious decision that they wanted to be here, that New Orleans was a place they wanted to be. That can change how a city feels about itself.
It’s a place that pulsates with music, culture, a passion of the human spirit that is, really, quite awesome. During my time here I heard from a woman who represents Vietnamese fishing communities impacted by Katrina and then by the BP oil spill, who find themselves increasingly impacted by changes to the water courses, inflows of fresh water, and a general sense that they don’t matter much.
I heard from a woman representing a Native American people, indigenous to the area for many generations, for whom rising sea levels and changes to waterways made by large oil and gas companies mean that it is a very real possibility that they will lose their land to the sea and have to relocate within her lifetime (she was in her 50s). “When I grew up”, she said, “from my window all I could see were fields and trees. Now it’s mostly open water”.
I heard from the guy who had left New Orleans the day before Katrina hit, persuaded by his family to leave (he had been planning to stay home and have a ‘Hurricane Party’), who had come back to live in the city after four years in Houston because that’s where his family was. I saw a group of musicians performing a piece about their experience of Katrina which included the line “I no longer trust in the water”. The Hurricane Party guy mentioned that one of the big changes since Katrina had been that before it, news of a hurricane would be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders and a sense that it would blow over. Now word of a hurricane coming and most people up and leave.
I met with social entrepreneurs who had started an incubator for social enterprises (The Propeller, see above), a place buzzing with young people ambitious and positive about the city’s future and its potential to embed sustainability and resilience on a number of levels. New Orleans pulses with music, food, colour, smells. On our last night here, walking around, we saw this fantastic street band of local kids playing on a corner in Frenchmen Street:
There has been much written about the IPCC report published a week or so ago (here is a great succinct summary of it). Transition Network’s Social Reporters have been giving their personal reflections on it over the past week. As usual, the contrarians have been trying to pick holes in what is probably one of the most extensively peer-reviewed pieces of science ever created, trying to make out that it is alarmist, that it exaggerates the risks.
In reality though, it is a relatively conservative take on things, usually a couple of years behind the science due to its extensive process of peer review. Take, for example, the report published by the International Programme on the State of the Oceans recently which concluded, according to the chilling article in the Guardian, that:
“The oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300 million years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may already be almost inevitable as a result”
It also stated:
The report says that world governments’ current pledges to curb carbon emissions would not go far enough or fast enough to save many of the world’s reefs. There is a time lag of several decades between the carbon being emitted and the effects on seas, meaning that further acidification and further warming of the oceans are inevitable, even if we drastically reduce emissions very quickly. There is as yet little sign of that, with global greenhouse gas output still rising.
Now that’s awesome. And not in a good way. The UK’s idiotic new Environment Minister Owen Patterson told the Conservative Party conference that the IPCC Report “is not as catastrophic in its forecast as we had been led to believe early on” and “remember that for humans, the biggest cause of death is cold in winter, far bigger than heat in summer … it would also lead to longer growing seasons and you could extend growing a little further north into some of the colder areas”. As Adam Vaughan points out in his demolition of Patterson’s stupid statements, he feels able to make such statements because his focus is just on the UK, not elsewhere, the politics of pure self-interest.
But the oceans report made me think that I’m guilty of that too. My sense until now had been to focus on the impacts of climate change on the parts of the world that I see: the air, the land, the soils, the climate. But it may well be that the most acute impacts that will hit us hardest, initially at least, will be on the sea, given that at least a third of all the CO2 we produce goes into the oceans. Spending time in a city built on the sea, dependent economically on the sea, culturally connected to the sea, and recently left reeling from the sheer unbridled power of the sea, this moves from an abstract concept to a tangible reality.
But equally awesome is the sense of human resilience that comes through in the people rebuilding their lives, setting up new businesses, giving their time and passion to the future of the city. Given the scale of what the city suffered so recently, that was quite remarkable. As the seas rise, some very hard decisions will have to be made. The city is also facing that challenges, identified in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, of ‘crisis capitalism’ taking the shock of Katrina and buying up cheap real estate and land in and around the city. The Native American woman told of how many of their houses were damaged by Katrina, but nearby fishing holiday homes, built by wealthy city-dwellers, built in far stronger ways unaffordable to her people, withstood the storms. And of course there’s the ever-present risk of future hurricanes.
The challenges are real, but from the people I spoke to in my brief visit, the spirit is there to turn it round and to heal the city. My time in New Orleans left me reflecting on the concept of resilience. It is often defined as relating to somehow “bouncing back” from a crisis, a somewhat silly notion in the context of the ‘New Normal’ of climate change, energy scarcity and the impending end of the age of economic growth. We couldn’t ‘bounce back’ even if we wanted to. In Resilience by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, resilience is defined as:
“The capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances”.
While there is much that could be discussed in terms of the extent to which the rebuilding of New Orleans is being done with a consciousness that it is being done in “dramatically changed circumstances”, what shines through is a resilience of the human spirit. As Paul Hawken told me in an interview I did with him today after a conference we were both speaking at (transcript coming soon):
“No matter what you do to nature, burn it, scorch it, scrape it, clearcut it, extract it, poison it, the moment you stop, the life starts to regenerate. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s the default mode of life. And we’re life. That’s our default mode”.
That’s resilience. And that’s awesome.
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