14 Nov 2013
Naderev Saño is head of the Philippines delegation to the UN climate talks, who gave an emotional speech at the COP 19 climate talks currently underway in Warsaw and is currently on hunger strike until the end of the talks.
Dear Naderev,
I’m writing this in deep admiration for your recent words and actions. The gallery of images that capture the true nature of the hell we are unleashing through our global inability to do anything about climate change grows by the day. Most recently it was the photos taken by the family in Australia caught in the middle of a huge forest fire who had to take refuge in a river. On Saturday, as news of the impact of Typhoon Haiyan was unleashing on your home nation was starting to trickle in, it was a photo of Earth taken from space on the front page of one of the newspapers in my local corner shop that caught my attention:
I stood looking at it in the shop for some time. Here is the enormity, the power, the scale of what climate change looks like. Of what we have unleashed. Of what the future will look like. Haiyan was the biggest and most powerful storm ever to hit land. Images from space can be somewhat abstract though. There are people in the middle of that. Millions of them. Millions of them, in the path of 195 miles per hour winds. People you know. Me, I can’t even imagine what 195 mile an hour wind looks like. I pray I will never have to, and my heart breaks for those that have no choice other than to seek whatever shelter they can find in that maelstrom, in the eye of such savage ferocity.
Then as the news came in, the death toll rose over 2 days from 25 to 10,000, and may yet rise higher. News images were unbelievable. As one BBC reporter put it, the best way to imagine it is as though a nuclear bomb had exploded. The scale of suffering is just dreadful. I pray that by now you have received news of your family, and that they are all safe.
In your speech you firmly linked what your nation has gone through and climate change. You said:
“Science tells us that simply, climate change will mean more intense tropical storms. As the Earth warms up, that would include the oceans. The energy that is stored in the waters off the Philippines will increase the intensity of typhoons and the trend we now see is that more destructive storms will be the new norm.”
Many climate scientists are now making this link, arguing that a warmer world will be one of more intense storms, that Haiyan will not be the last such ‘Super Tornado’. I admire your decision to go on hunger strike until the end of the COP 19 negotiations. I honour your honesty, your willingness to open your heart and speak with passion and to share your tears with us. Thank you. You spoke of what you see as needing to happen now:
“We need an emergency climate pathway. We call on Warsaw to pursue work until the most meaningful outcome is in sight. Until concrete pledges have been made to ensure mobilisation of resources for the Green Climate Fund. Until the promise of the establishment of a loss and damage mechanism has been fulfilled; until there is assurance on finance for adaptation; until concrete pathways for reaching the committed 100 billion dollars have been made; until we see real ambition on stabilising greenhouse gases. We must put the money where our mouths are”.
I share your intense frustration and growing despair at the global community’s inability to find a way to a solution to this crisis, to overcome the intense lobbying and influence of fossil fuel companies and others. I very much hope that your action and, perhaps, the suffering of your people, will provide the impetus such a solution requires. We have waited for it long enough. You also said:
“…these last two days, there are moments when I feel that I should rally behind climate advocates who peacefully confront those historically responsible for the current state of our climate, these selfless people who fight coal, expose themselves to freezing temperatures or block oil pipelines. In fact, we are seeing increasing frustration, and thus more increased civil disobedience. The next two weeks, these people and many around the world who serve as our conscience will again remind us of this enormous responsibility. To the youth here who constantly remind us that their future is in peril, to the climate heroes who risk their life, reputation and personal liberties to stop drilling in polar regions and to those communities standing up to unsustainable and climate-disrupting sources of energy, we stand with them”.
I want you to know that alongside the brave and selfless activists you speak of, those ingeniously and often at great personal risk taking a stand against the continuing and expanding exploitation of fossil fuels, are those who are applying similar passion, dedication and commitment to creating the kind of world we need to see. They are putting a large “Yes” alongside the large “No”. We need both.
I want you to know that those of us involved in the Transition movement, thousands of communities in 44 countries (including recently emerging in the Phillipines), stand with you in solidarity today. Transition is just one manifestation of this though, there are many, whether they identify as that or not. You spoke of “those communities standing up to unsustainable and climate-disrupting sources of energy”, well we represent just one of the many networks of communities doing not just that, but working as communities to put in place sustainable and climate-protecting sources of energy as well as a wide range of other solutions.
While there is much that we can do from outside the Phillipines to send help, as many are doing, and putting pressure on our governments to do more to help, we are also, for the longer term, working to reduce our carbon emissions, changing the story about the future we want to see, setting the example our governments fail to set.
I want you to know that around the world, communities are creating community energy companies, we are draught-proofing houses, inviting our neighbours to come together and support each other in reducing their carbon emissions, to invest in community-owned renewables. We are rethinking our local food systems, starting new farms, better working with existing ones, ensuring that local food goes further by utilising food that might other be wasted. We are becoming developers in order to model what truly regenerative, people-driven, carbon-positive development looks like.
We are showing that new local and regional currencies which support lower-carbon, more local trading habit work at scale. We are showing the economic case for how more local and resilient economies can be more economically vibrant than the current approach. We are showing that lower carbon economies can be more fun, more connected, more resourceful. So much is happening on the ground it is hard to keep up with. It’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t often capture the headlines in the way that more adversarial campaigns do but it matters just as much.
I want you to know that we stand in solidarity with the people of the Phillipines and with their suffering. I want you to know that although it appears as though our leaders seem to have stepped directly from arguing that climate change isn’t much of a problem to arguing that it is too late to do anything, we have not. We have dedicated our lives to this. We do so in the face of a media which feeds people mixed messages – at one moment climate change is a huge crisis, at the next it may not be, and we all need to consume more in the interests of the economy.
We also know what we are doing isn’t enough. We need to up our game. We need to see our action as Transition initiatives wherever we are, as standing in solidarity with the people of the Phillipines, and all the other communities around the world for whom climate change isn’t an abstraction, but is in the reality of extreme weather, failing crops, homes sinking into the permafrost and so on. It is often said that “another world is possible”. While political processes such as COP may yet yield the changes we do desperately need, millions of people are not waiting, but are getting on with modelling this world in practice, and they doing more each day to stand in solidarity with you and your people.
Thank you for your clarity and your courage.
Rob Hopkins, Transition Network.
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11 Nov 2013
Jeremy Leggett’s new book ‘The Energy of Nations: risk blindness and the road to renaissance‘ is an inspirational, page-turning telling of the evolving tale of peak oil, climate change, and economic crisis, and how the three issues intertwine and interweave. I found it gripping, and what comes through strongly is firstly the huge potential of the shift to renewables, and secondly the stubborn stalling tactics and railroading of what Leggett calls “the energy incumbency”. I caught up with him via Skpe, and starting by asking him to introduce himself to any readers who may not have come across his work before. As usual with such pieces, you can either listen to/download the podcast, or read the transcript below.
“I’m Jeremy Leggett, the founder and chairman of Solar Century, internationally as well as in Britain, and the founder of Solar Aid, the African solar lighting charity funded with 5% of Solar Century’s profits. We have a retail brand Sunny Money, which is the biggest seller of solar lanterns in Africa at the moment.
You’ve just published a book called The Energy of Nations. Could you just tell people in a nutshell what they might expect to find in there?
I worry that the energy industry is in the process of repeating systemically the mistakes of the financial sector, and on multiple fronts. I talk in the book about five big systemic risks that I think they’re running, and the risks that they’re taking get worse and worse as time goes by. I tell the story linearly from 2004 when the oil crisis started to go up. I tell it as a narrative of these five risks and intercut diary extracts from my life as I’ve seen this risk-taking grow and grow, to try and make the point about the five risks as a narrative really, as a story, a true story.
It’s really compelling, it reads like a thriller. One of the things that was difficult in the early days of peak oil was to make those arguments that peak oil and climate change needed to be looked at as overlapping issues. The climate change people didn’t want to talk about peak oil because it complicated things, and the peak oil people were often just focused on how to get new sources of oil. Over time, those communities have come closer together, partly through your work and other people’s. But recently, that’s become a harder narrative to hold together, with people saying there’s more than enough fossil fuels to finish the climate off. What you’ve done is very skilfully here is to bring those two issues back together again. How do you see the overlap, the relationship between those two issues?
No matter who’s right in the peak oil debates, there has always been easily enough oil and gas, combined with coal, to wreck the climate and bring down civilisation. I don’t think there’s any dispute about that in a world where we’re at 420 parts per million of CO2 equivalent already. The thing that’s so striking, even for me writing the book, was how in just a few years the dominant narrative, the widely accepted narrative has gone from one of real constraint on oil supply, indeed transparent, palpable alarm from the International Energy Agency for example, right through to 2011 to where now we’re in some cornucopian paradise for the fossil fuel heads of America heading for Saudi-America status, energy independence, all the rest of it.
This has happened on the basis of evidence that is really flimsy but has been hyped to high heaven by, I think, a very desperate incumbency locked into an almost religious enculturated belief system which is behaving very dangerously. Very dangerously indeed.
One of the things that’s really compelling, as you say, is the extracts from your diary through that time, of different meetings and events. They really leave the reader scratching their head about the detachment from reality and the strange bubble that many of the people who work as executives in the energy industry and the finance industry operate in. Where does that come from, do you think? Where does that stubbornness and cultural oddness come from?
It’s not so surprising when you look at what the neuroscientists are discovering about how our brains work, how we think individually and collectively. As I describe in the book, that’s something I didn’t know about until in the course of my work I went to a couple of seminars on this wave of discoveries in neuroscience.
The neuroscientists tell us that their research shows that we’re individually and collectively very prone to lock into belief systems easily and quickly and then when we do, we defend them, we don’t like to be presented with any kind of rational evidence that we’re wrong in that set of beliefs; we have an incumbency effect we prefer to believe in the potency of things and systems that we have as opposed to other alternatives that might be rationally much more appropriate.
It doesn’t surprise the anthropologists either. When they look at the history of civilisations and how civilisations have failed, they see time and time again this belief in myths and magic that emerges towards the end, as civilisations are about to go under. The parallels are very clear here. They see the power of the markets – all the things that a modern capitalist is supposed to believe in – the market forces and the validity of basing an economic system on the combustion of hydrocarbons that undermine your climate and therefore your ability to even continue with feeding yourself and providing yourself with clean water.
I try and convey that part of the story as well. It’s not all bleak because I think the neuroscientists also tell us that we have this great yearning as human beings for community and all the rest of it, and individualistic or selfish, perhaps what people on the right of the political spectrum constantly try and persuade us that we are. That all points towards the possibility of a road to renaissance and that’s why I titled the book The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance. I talk about the importance of things like the Transition movement as the building blocks for this road to renaissance.
You say there will probably be “only one shot at capitalising a 21st century energy structure”. You also talk about how the UK government has been “busy plotting gas nirvana with the oil industry”, and the UK appears to be set on becoming a “gas hub” through exploiting shale gas. But also presumably, since the book was published, we’ve seen the public announcement of the UK also moving towards becoming a nuclear hub. Have the decisions, do you think, been made about what that energy infrastructure is going to look like, or is there still time and an opportunity to shape it?
Yes, there’s definitely time and opportunity. They may think that they’ve made the decisions, but look at the extent to which the backing of shale is based on transparent myths for anyone who’s prepared to dig below the surface. Just the notion that the United Kingdom, rural Britain, can be peppered with the density of fracked wells that they’ve had in Texas, Pennsylvania and North Dakota, it’s laughable when you look at the public opposition to the first single well. It wasn’t even a fracked well in Sussex. We are not going to tolerate it, the British people. That’s the first thing, that is bewildering.
The second thing is, of course, the mounting evidence that the whole North American shale gas boom story is actually yet another one of these bubbles that we’re terribly good at inflating, and people are losing so much money because of the low gas price, that they’re not going to be able to service the vast amount of debt that they’re borrowing from Wall Street and so that whole system will come off the rails, even in America.
There are real questions as to whether the Osborne-ite and Cameron gas tendency are going to get away with their ludicrous plans. As for nuclear, well, they’ve made a crazy decision to commit vast numbers of billions of our money far into the future for a French and Chinese nuclear power plant on the coast of Somerset. But the first thing they have to do is get state aid permission from the European Union to do that. That decision won’t be taken for quite a while, so I don’t see that they’re going to be able to get away with even that one white elephant nuclear power plant, much less the crazy nuclear renaissance that they’re plotting.
Meanwhile, the energy industry is a civil war zone. That includes in the Conservative party. Not everyone is lined up behind this craziness. There are some Conservatives who really believe in the green industrial revolution and the localisation of power to the people and all the sorts of things that the Transition movement thinks about. That element of the civil war will continue to play on. Even within the big energy companies, you’ve got people who just know in their hearts that the status quo business models are flawed and probably dying in the water for the big utilities, and are thinking of alternative, localised, people power types of alternative models.
When you look at the growth, what’s growing? What’s growing is renewables, and in Europe over the last three years we’ve put in more renewables than we have fossil fuel and nuclear. More money is going into renewables than is going into fossil fuels and nuclear combined, despite all the wrecking tactics deployed by the energy incumbency. So there are reasons to be cheerful.
One of those that comes through in the book repeatedly is Germany’s Energiewende and what they’re doing there. What can we learn from Germany, do you think in terms of practicality and in terms of ambition?
I think that it’s altogether very encouraging indeed. We can learn that it’s possible to renewably power a modern economy like Germany 100% with renewables, and do it much quicker than people anticipate. We can also see that the ownership structures can change radically, so that people power comes into the mainstream. As you know, more than half the renewable assets in Germany are owned by people, by people and communities.
That’s not just the small energy co-ops that are being set up by the multiple hundreds, but whole cities are talking about taking their own power into their own hands, even Berlin, with a membership movement to take control of the way that energy is created in cities. Germany is vital in the whole narrative going forward.
You can see the big energy utilities dying basically. The top twenty European energy utilities were worth a trillion Euros in 2008. Now they’re worth half a trillion. That’s simply because of the way wind and solar particularly, but also other renewables have driven down the wholesale price and literally taken power out of the monopoly hands of the utilities. It’s very exciting.
You talk in the book about, for example, how Shell have meetings with ministers and reflect on what it would be like if actually the renewable sector had even half the access to ministers, the ability to organise meetings with them, that the non-renewable sector has. Is there any way to break that, do you think? Is there any way of turning that around?
It’s a very potent force and a very malign way of operating, so it will be difficult. I think one of the things I’ve learnt during the adventures I describe in the book is that most of these big companies are incapable of change, and they have to be defeated rather than changed. That’s something that I think is a little sobering.
Some of them will change at the margins and ultimately one or two may change wholesale. But you see the way they dig in, the way they defend to the death in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, i.e. BP pulling out of solar energy at a time when the price falls to the point of being competitive in multiple markets. They pull out completely and retreat into unconventional gas and all the rest of it. This is not a company that’s going to change.
It’s a company that will have to be ultimately driven out of business. Shell are pretty much in the same category, not quite so badly. The big energy utilities, EDF, you don’t get any sense that they’re capable of changing culturally. Others are maybe different; RWE are clearly going through some kind of soul searching at the moment and may make it through in the way that IBM managed to change, when main computers were replaced by micro computers.
But ultimately, the whole fabric of society is going to be changed on the road to renaissance by the continuing emergence of people power. People and communities taking control of their own energy, taking control of their own finance. That’s going to be very important as well, with the growth of crowd funding, peer to peer lending, green bonds, retail bonds, and all the rest of this kind of thing. Even the assistant director general of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane has said this is showing signs of becoming such a trend, such a potential mega-trend, that it could disenfranchise the main banks, the high street banks in the way that I think some of these trends in renewable energy are going to disenfranchise the energy incumbency.
Is there any merit at all to that argument that shale gas can be a bridge fuel, that it displaces coal so therefore it has a role as a bridge fuel, or not?
If people were capable of being collectively rational… Clearly we can’t bring in renewables overnight. When we think of how fast we need to bring them in in order to stay below 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent and ideally getting a lot lower than that to have a chance at defeating climate change. But we can’t do that overnight, no matter how fast we mobilise. If you can contain the leaks, gas actually works very well with solar as a combined heat and energy, combined heat and power with relatively low emissions.
The problem, as I say in the book, is that so much of the gas industry has retreated from the mantra that gas is the bridge to the low carbon future and are now pushing this ludicrous myth that gas actually is the bridge to the gas powered future, that unconventional gas is the route to the unconventional gas powered future. And of course, they deploy their lobbyists and their wrecking tactics to try and stall renewables and indeed kill renewables.
Since I finished writing the book, 10 of Europe’s biggest utilities have rocked up in Brussels and told the European Commission, and in Strasbourg the European Parliament, that what they want is all subsidies for renewables stopped, essentially a cap put on renewables, and gas opened up as the main route to powering Europe and also somehow, they say, fighting climate change.
One of the things that you did before this book came out was the Carbon Tracker report about ‘the carbon bubble’, and arguing that 4/5 of the reserves that we know about need to stay in the ground, and that could lead to a big financial bubble. Could you just say a little bit about that, and about how that report has been received and any impact it may have had?
Carbon Tracker is the little financial think tank that I have the privilege of chairing and being able to help to the extent that I can. The folk behind it, Mark Campanale and others have really done something amazing. I think I’ve never seen an argument get more traction with the policy world, the financial world. I’ve never seen an argument upset and discomfit the energy incumbency as much as this one does.
It’s not even recognised at the first level, in the accounting of companies, on the balance sheets. What Carbon Tracker is saying is let’s start recognising the risk. Of course, as soon as the language is put like that, in the terms of the capital markets, it’s difficult for the regulators and the people who should recognise a risk like the accountants and the auditors and the actuaries and all these folk, right across the financial chain to say “no, we’re not going to recognise the risk”.
Some of them are, in their different ways. Some of the financial institutions have already started pulling large sums of investment out of fossil fuels as a result of this whole risk dialogue. It’s terrifically exciting, and I actually think that this could be the argument that breaks the log jam on climate change. I’m that optimistic about it.
One of the things that I couldn’t find in the Carbon Tracker report was any analysis of issues around energy return on investment and whether it would even be economically feasible, even if people wanted to, to extract and burn all of that carbon. What are the economics that underpin that?
The assumption is every time any company brings resources to the market, unless you’re a public offering and ask for money to turn them into reserves, the assumption is that of course all of it can be burnt without constraint. You and I know that there are going to be profound energy return on investment implications. But that’s the next level of argumentation. It’s difficult enough to get traction with these folk just on the basic carbon arithmetic arguments without energy return on investment, dysfunctional as that situation is.
I think if we can continue to make as much headway as we are on simple carbon logic, carbon arithmetic, carbon fuel asset stranding risk arguments then maybe there’s a bridge there to allow the very small number of brilliant folks who are working on energy return on investment to get their voices heard too.
You say at one point in Energy of Nations, “I’m now convinced that capitalism as we know it is torpedoing our prosperity, killing our economies, threatening our children with an unliveable world. It needs to be re-engineered root and branch.” Does capitalism still have a place? What would re-engineered capitalism look like, and what does that mean for economic growth?
It depends on your definition of capitalism. Economic growth as it’s currently measured? I think its days are over. That used to be that the mantras of the people classified as the lunatic fringe, but not any more. You can read this kind of thinking in the commentary in the Financial Times. In a world with a global economy on route to six degrees, how can such a system be viewed as sane any more, much less survivable?
The more of us who start using this language, this new type of capitalism – others won’t call it capitalism at all of course – a new type of capitalism. Certainly my point in the book is that modern capitalism, the form of capitalism that’s evolved in the last few decades is basically suicidally dysfunctional and we have to turn our backs on it and introduce an alternative set of systems. That’s what I think we have the opportunity to do in building the road to renaissance.
It reads like you see that as lying in a combination of large and small things. You talk about a localisation mega-trend and peer-to-peer lending and community-led initiatives like Transition and others, need to sit alongside the bigger things as well in terms of investment etc. How do you see those two things sitting alongside each other?
I think that’s right. The electricity grid might be a very good example of how this will play out. Right now, very few people question the assumption that we need to keep feeding this monster of a national electricity grid system, which is massively capital intensive, very difficult to figure out a way in which that could be upgraded and made fit for purpose decades into the future using new kinds of financing and the rest of it.
But I think inevitably what’s going to happen whether people like it or not, is that communities, towns, individual houses are going to get themselves off that grid and the march of technology is going to help them. People and communities are going to become increasingly self-sufficient. When you do that, where’s the role for the national electricity grid, at a certain point? Where’s the role for a giant company like National Grid?
Aren’t we just going to be devolving down into community-based companies, co-ops and all the rest of it. I think it’s an exciting vision, because you get all sorts of spin-off benefits from a transition of that kind. I don’t have a blueprint template of how we get from A to B, the globalised national, international infrastructure world to the localised world. I think that’s a work in progress that we’re all going to have to be active players in the architecture of.
In the popular media at the moment, a lot of the stuff around energy seems to be becoming an increasingly selfish perspective of “I don’t care about green energy taxes because I want my bills to be cheaper”. Like it is with food, it’s all about cheap – how do we make energy as cheap as possible. The narrative that comes through very strongly in the book is about how a renewable energy revolution could meet all of our needs much better. We could have cheaper energy, we could have a healthier world. You paint that picture very powerfully. But that doesn’t seem to be yet coming through in the national debates, which seem to be more focused on how do we get rid of all these annoying windmills and pesky green taxes that push my bills up. Is that voice not coming through just because of powerful lobbying at certain levels? Why do you think this message isn’t being heard and how can we make it more heard?
Because the incumbency has a nice little scam going hasn’t it? They can pretend to be cheap by using an accounting system that takes their subsidies off the balance sheets, so they get tax breaks and they get their subsidies in different ways than the Feed in Tariffs. But all forms of energy have subsidy, as those of us who pay attention to the game know. The incumbency sits there righteously talking about “the cost of green taxes” and all the rest of it and it’s a desperately unfair tactic.
The other issue that they don’t talk about is the third dimension: time going forward. Our costs and prices are coming down all the time, for the most part, whereas theirs are going up and up. Even where they aren’t, in the case of the US shale gas, they’re dysfunctionally low. So low that the marginal cost of drilling these fracked shale wells is so high that the companies are being driven slowly towards bankruptcy. As Art Berman calls it, the US gas industry is “an industry engaged in a suicide pact” as things stand.
Slowly, these things will become clear to people. People are so busy, they don’t have time to look below the mantras, and very often it’s easy to accept these mantras. But there’s so much fibbing going on and myth-spinning going on as a result of the poisoned belief system of the energy incumbency.
The story that really comes through in the book, as much as anything, is your own personal story. It’s your own story of going in and out of endless, vastly frustrating meetings and meeting people whose heads are deeply in the sand. Half the stories are you just banging your head against a brick wall, it feels like. How, through all of that, have you sustained yourself? Where does the motivation to get up the morning after those dreadful meetings come from?
There are so many grains of hope scattered around everywhere. One of the beauties of working on the front lines of the solar industry is that you see that seeing is believing effect time and time again. Every person who gets a solar roof and sees that this technology works really well, that’s a joy to behold. It’s true of a middle-class Brit getting a solar roof for the first time in our country, and it’s true of African families getting a solar lantern instead of a kerosene lantern for the first time, and realising that they’ve instantly freed up 40% of their family income to spend on other stuff simply on savings against the price of kerosene.
All that kind of hope-laden stuff is very important to me, and of course on the policy front, we have our victories as well. We don’t just get frustrated and have setbacks. The Carbon Tracker is a joy to watch the way that is causing discomfort and anguish to the incumbency. It’s sometimes difficult not to be vindictive in enjoying that discomfort, when big energy companies are confronted with the source of their capital simply being withdrawn from them. I like seeing the looks on their faces.
One of your previous books was called The Carbon War. Does this feel like a war to you as well?
Absolutely. It’s a civil war. Like all civil wars, it’s complex and there are people with opposing belief systems operating under the same roof all the time. That’s been the case with every civil war in history probably. But here you see it very clearly. There are people in the same energy companies who have radically different views of the future. There are people in the same political parties, including the Conservatives, who have radically different views of the future.
It’s not a black and white thing, but a civil war it is, and make no mistake, the threatened incumbency, as they see and smell the ultimate demise of their belief system, ever more clearly, are fighting as in many wars, the most bitter and horrid fighting is done towards the end of the war. You saw that with the Second World War in particular. The same thing is happening in the energy civil war right now.
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6 Nov 2013
When looking for insights into food, policy and politics, the first place I turn is to Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London. For decades he has been at the forefront of debates around public health and the role that food, and food policy, play in that. With our theme for November being austerity, I was keen to hear his thoughts on food and austerity. We caught up by Skype as he grabbed a quick sandwich between lectures. You can listen to/download the audio here or read the transcript below.
You’ve been involved for many years in food policy and issues around food. What’s your sense of how the austerity push over the last few years has affected those issues and those debates and discussions?
At one level what it’s done is bring back a very old theme into both public consciousness and debates around food policy in that here is one of the wealthiest societies on the planet, 5th or 6th by GDP, where there are not just pockets but enormous patches of food poverty, of people cutting back on food to make ends meet.
This is however overlaid onto long-term distortions in the food system between supply and public health. We already have a remarkable social gradient between life expectancy, body shape and income. Essentially, richer people are thinner, live longer. Poorer people die earlier and have more tendency towards obesity.
There are enormous gaps between the richest and the poorest in Britain, in which all of the problems of food are manifest. Availability, access, cost, all of these issues are not new issues. I could take you to debates in the early 1800s and these themes were emerging as industrialisation rapidly developed in Britain, as rural populations went to work in the new factories, as people were fed adulterated food because it was cheaper than good food. A whole complicated raft of cultural issues got laid down into British life, our expectations, like the expectation that food is and should and is good if it’s cheap. Those were arguments all fought out in the middle of the 19th century.
And here we are at the beginning of the so-called ‘new austerity’ at the beginning of the 21st century and some of those themes are coming back with remarkable echoes to the past and from the past. For someone like me – I’m a university lecturer, I’m well paid, but I cut my food policy teeth researching food poverty in Manchester and Sheffield with colleagues in the Thatcher austerity early 1980s. One saw an explosion of food poverty as people lost their jobs, as welfare systems were cut and pruned, and a process like that is now happening again but accelerated.
The only difference I would say between, not just the 1980s and now, but between now and the earlier periods where this theme has come up (and been enormously important by the way, in shaping British politics) is I think we’ve now got a situation where food has never been so cheap, yet even so, the Milburn Report three weeks ago pointed out rightly that five million people are living in really a very poor way, and that work is not the way out of poverty necessarily.
We have this extraordinarily split world of mega-rich bankers, to parody it, with a very very high concentration of wealth alongside a vast, squeezed millions of households at the bottom. The language of politics is not dealing with it, the language of policy is not dealing with it. Actually all that the government is doing is squeezing it further. It’s astonishing.
But it has also posed enormous problems to the environmental movement which has been saying that we need to make food more expensive to internalise cost. How do we get round this? How do we get round that argument in public health which also thinks cheap fat and cheap sugars are too cheap. That’s why people at the bottom of the heap are fatter, they’re eating poor diets.
But the food industry is pouring these things out. The food industry’s the biggest employer in Britain, 3.5 million people work in it. So it’s wrapped up in complications today, in 2013, that would have been unimaginable to people in the 1840s, let alone in the 1930s.
One of the things that we see now is the push towards saying supermarkets can provide cheap food, that austerity means that we need cheap food so we need supermarkets more. Is this a time when we need supermarkets more or when we need supermarkets less?
One of the things that is so interesting, and also worrying, about the present time on food poverty, is that it is coinciding with the first time since the 1870s that food prices are going up. Having said that, let me correct myself. There have been four occasions where the long drop in food process has stopped. The first was World War 1 and you can see it in the figures, the price goes up, and then the long drop in food prices carries on.
Then in the Second World War, prices went up but then came down afterwards. Then in the oil crisis of the early 1970s. And then the deal was done with OPEC and prices again carried on coming down. And then, when in 2007-8 the banking crisis triggered and coincided, was certainly symbiotic with the agricultural commodity spike, as it’s called, again the mainstream, dominant economists and way of thinking said “don’t worry, it’ll carry on coming down afterwards, this is situation normal”.
And some of us – I was one – were arguing “no it won’t, because we’re now entering a very different world, where it’s not just 20 OECD countries that are rich. Half the planet is now getting sufficiently rich to eat differently”. And indeed the western companies have gone in and sold and pushed the soft drink, fast food culture, ready-made food, processed foods, as modernity. That world will actually not be one where prices continue coming down.
Indeed, we’ve been proven right. Now the volte faces have gone on by the conventional dominant economics and the OECD now will say process rising and volatility is the new norm. I couldn’t have said that or written that. It was a totally marginal view that people like me had and, I suspect, you.
But this actually is tricky, because what it’s doing is undermining the consumer bargain. That you’ll get endless choice, endless cheap goods, and you can be in charge of browsing and grazing your way through the hypermarket of life. Even if people are well paid in a country like Britain, their kids aren’t. The bubble of property has blown up and is now re-puffing up again in London and the South-East, but people who are young can’t afford to buy houses. There are structural problems even if you just look within Britain, let alone globally. And food is at the centre.
The new austerity is a litmus test. For example, the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, in what is considered a brilliant piece of politics, has captured the high ground with his ‘the squeezed middle’ and austerity – but around energy prices, completely missing that exactly the same arguments apply in food. They are not unrelated commodities, food and energy. Yet there isn’t even the pretence of saying let’s cap supermarket prices.
There’s actually just a silence, which is interesting. Who knows what might come. But the hypermarket model is what the Conservatives in the Thatcher era and John Major era and indeed in the Blair-Brown era, they adored. When prices looked like they were going up under Blair, Blair sent for Wal-Mart and said “please buy ASDA and inject even greater price competition”.
But how low can food prices go? They can’t if we want to deal with climate change. They can’t if we want people to eat a healthy diet. When 40 -50% of British grain is fed to animals to give cheap meat, it’s not going to be cheap, and hey presto it’s cheaper if you get it from Brazil or Malaysia or Thailand. It just doesn’t add up. The picture of food policy for the last 30-40 years just doesn’t add up. But the politicians aren’t getting a grip of it yet.
But around the edges of politics I think there is rapidly growing agreement that interests of the environment, conservation, public health, social justice, need to come together and indeed have more sharing of ideas for the restructuring that’s now got to go on for food policy and the food system. That’s if we want to address the problem.
If we have a situation where in terms of the national obesity epidemic certain foods are too cheap, but still families can’t afford to feed themselves and that austerity situation is really only going to worsen over the next 5-10 years, what do we do?
Let me just throw in another factor into all of this. In the last 50 years, Britain’s food has come out of the ‘food as fuel’ model that essentially was ushered in in the 1840s onwards. Partly because of travel, partly because of supermarkets and this phenomenal capacity that they have had to control logistics and to improve distribution systems. Partly because of that, the British have got used to having extraordinary choices. They’ve travelled to Spain, travelled to Italy. They go much further now. The Brits think curry is a British food. Pizza is children’s favourite. In my childhood they were unthinkable, absolutely unthinkable.
I’m looking out of my window here, in the middle of the City of London, looking at, as it happens a brand new Sainsburys Local that’s just opened up in an empty set of shops built on a speculative housing block opposite me. Of course, the Sainsburys Local is there because from the 1980s onwards, essentially greengrocers and independent stores were driven out of business. Now the hypermarkets have come back into town with new formats and are on almost every street corner again. Food is plentiful everywhere. I’ve not been into this store. It’s only been open three weeks so I’ve not been into it yet, but I guarantee I could go in there and graze the world. Those expectations are now hard-wired into British food culture.
In that sense, politicians are in a really difficult position. They have expectations in the consumer i.e. voting public’s blood, in their deep veins, where the saturated fat has not yet got to. They have got this assumption that they have the right to go and eat what they like. That’s a very tricky bit of politics. Almost all of us outside know firstly that this has been a fantasy. Secondly that what we choose is class based, culture based, ethnicity based, gender based, social role based, and indeed has been made flotsam and jetsam in culture by the vast power of advertising and the cultural industries. All of that is part of the complexity now. All of that is part of the problem that the food industry knows it’s got to address.
To answer your question, there are great complexities here. But the great irony is some of the very big food companies are now looking ahead and saying “Oh ye Gods, we have got to lower our carbon. We have got to lower the embedded water in our food. We have got to deal with inequalities in Africa or Latin America where we source food, A, because they’re getting richer, B, because eagle-eyed, eager beaver NGOs are watching us and exposing us and so on. But finally, because we want to be around in 30 years’ time for our shareholders and our own pensions”.
So there is a very paradoxical situation in food politics. Right now, the coalition has walked away from food. I think if he has anything between his ears, our Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is obsessed about badgers, for obvious reasons, and is also obsessed about exporting more food to compensate for the yawning food trade gap. In that sense, he’s returned food policy to Thatcher’s time, because that’s what was happening in the early 1980s.
That’s why the British government set up Food from Britain. This lot has abolished it. It’s extraordinary how they’re locked into a very narrow view of what’s really going on in food. There’s much more open thinking about what we’ve got to so in some of the boardrooms of big and small food companies, alongside the radicals, the green, the progressive forces, the academics, the loose group of people who’ve got interested in food policy and contributed the vibrant food policy thinking in Britain that we’ve now very famous for around the world.
People ask me why there is this extraordinary debate in Britain? I always say it was Mrs Thatcher actually. She walked away and said the government’s got no role in this. So for 19 years we had the opportunity to ask big and very fundamental questions and to not take government particularly seriously.
But we ultimately need government to square the circle, to help set frameworks, and I see that coming again. The big companies cannot resolve the problems that have got to be resolved, but they’re beginning to be aware of the enormity of the problems that have got to be resolved. In that sense they’re joining us, the outer circle of people moaning from the margins.
There was a report that was published this week, by Adam Briggs et al. in the British Medical Journal, looking at the impact that if you actually tax the carbon emissions on food that it would lead to all the other health indicators going up. Are there ways in which government could intervene meaningfully to make a difference and not be seen as pricing people who already can’t afford to eat properly out of that food?
There is a difficulty, and the difficulty I have given the codename ‘sustainable diets’ (not my name). You’ll find this is a policy difficulty which is this term sustainable diets, first coined by two American academics, Joan Gussow and Kate Clancy in a paper nearly 30 years ago. Essentially the problem is we know a sustainable diet meaning living lighter on the earth means eating differently. It doesn’t mean you can’t eat some foods that you like, but it means the quantities change, the waste changes, the embedded energy, the embedded water, the impact on biodiversity, the seasonality, the variability will all undoubtedly change. The problem is that’s not the hypermarket model. I could walk into that mini-market over the road and it’s full of packaged goods. Everything’s pre-made, pre-processed, even the green vegetables are wrapped in plastic. The salads are pre-made etc etc.
That world is antithetical to a world of sustainable diets, some of us think. I think there are tensions. Others – and indeed when I was a government commissioner, I argued this – others argue that we can bring public health more in line with the environmental footprints of food than we think we can. It’s not as difficult a route to travel down as one might think. You don’t all have to be hippy Totnes or Hebden Bridge or Stroud-ites and eat the brown sandal when you’ve walked it to death. It’s not like that.
Significant, but not impossible, adjustments will remarkably alter the public health profile of your diet and also alter its environmental impact. The cost of that doesn’t need to go up too dramatically. That is the positive version. I think that’s true. I hold to my own schizophrenia. I think broadly there is a good message, that, by reducing the footprint and meeting public health, the two can align.
But there are some fundamental issues about land use that I think are tricky. One is if we want to have energy, unless the whole of Britain has its roofs covered with PV and we have windmills, I see problems with energy unless we dramatically alter car use, just turning to electric cars. If people want to travel to far-distant places, if they want their homes filled with electric gadgets and labour saving devices – I particularly like my Dyson hoover and I love my washing machine, I could do without the dishwasher but the washing machine I adore – that world has big problems for land use.
But if you look around the whole local food world, the stuff from farmers’ markets and CSAs and the Fife diet, all those sorts of things, can we see that those things could scale up? If they manage to scale up, should they be looking at themselves as being an alternative economy to the supermarket economy or as a complementary economy to the supermarket economy?
This I hope is not read amiss. I’m talking to you from a University, 7 storey glass block in and on some of the most valuable property space on the planet. I’m a University professor, you know where I’m coming from. But I have a totally bizarre world position in that I can look at this crazy world of food but yet I’m well fed and I’ve got a job and I’ve got a nice office here and I’ve got a nice office at home etc.
When I look at my own past, which you don’t know anything about: I left being an academic with a PHD and went and became an anti-hippy farmer for 7 years on the Lancashire hills. I dug ditches, built roads, fenced miles of fencing, planted 5,000 trees, had to go and get water from a river to have a bath, seen the joy of building a proper water system, had sawdust loos and seen the joy of having a loo indoors, etc. with our own septic system, which we built. So I’m not being po-faced and a professor with what I’m about to say. I’ve been there, seen there, done lots, etc.
I look at what goes on in the Fife Diets and the 100 Mile Diets and localism with immense affection and immense respect. I give many, many talks around the world and around Europe where I make reference to them and say these people are the experimental pilots. They’re not the canaries, they’re the pilots. They are ploughing into really stormy seas and daring to experiment in a really important way. That’s what I think they’re doing.
But I think the connection of Fife Diet or 100 Mile Diet, there needs to be a next stage or parallel process which is drawing the lessons of that into mainstream culture and also mainstream culture having to argue with it. Not everyone wants to go and eat a Fife Diet. It’s a magnificent voluntary initiative which experiments in a fantastic way, but I can’t see it taking off in Bermondsey. I can’t see it taking off in Balham. But we need to have those sort of experiments – you’ve tried it: Transition Towns, the Incredible Edibles. This constant attempt to take from rural, small town existence and apply it into big cities.
I think the big thing that’s got to happen is big cities have got to come up with their own big experiments. I see this really interesting process of the sustainable food cities and all of that thinking is coming from the planners, the geographers, my great, lovely friends at Cardiff, we’re part of that network here in our centre. I think that is going to be really important. Not to walk away from the Fifes and the Totneses and the Incredible Edibles. I’ve said I have deep emotional affection for it.
I have some roots in that world as well. But I know that doesn’t apply to cities. It doesn’t apply to Birmingham. It doesn’t apply in a multi-ethnic world. We’ve got to start experimenting with other ways of getting engagement and Transition. And this is why, boringly and academically, I came up with this phrase 20 years ago, “food democracy”. What I meant by that when I gave a talk in Canada about this, was that there’s a messy experimentation, and it’s about building more accountable food systems which meet needs and can evolve and can change.
What we’ve done in the post Second World War period is cede our accountability and reflexivity to very powerful capitalist enterprises which are very finely tuned to our every whim. They monitor us like no organisations other than the National Security Agency and GCHQ do, and right up there I put Tesco and its Clubcard and the intelligence gathering that has been done. They know everything. How we fart. How we breathe. When temperature changes, what we’re likely to want.
It’s astonishing. But it’s not democracy. It’s not accountability. And that’s why Tesco was found wanting when it came to the horsemeat. They knew the price of everything, how to flog anything, but they didn’t even know what was in their burgers. And they’re now in shock internally actually.
In terms of food and the food system and food policy, is there any way that we can see austerity as an opportunity?
It sounds very bizarre, but my answer is yes. I am a realist, as an academic, I can be airy fairy and look into the ether and think big thoughts, ask big questions. But I’m a pragmatist. I’ve been a farmer. I actually think very practically, believe it or not, at the same time as these airy fairy thoughts. But one of the things I’ve learnt from nearly 40 years of working in food policy and contributing in a small way to this really wonderful growth of experimentation that we’re all doing; the Transition Town movement is part of that wonderful democratic stirring. One of the things I’ve learnt is that dire times is one of the only moments when structures get laid bare.
The unease about the consumer bubble that emerged in the commodity crisis was paralleled in the world of food. It has left people making jokes about bankers, but not getting a grip on the politics that is handing over power to them again. There have been rule changes, and they are huge changes. Consumer credit has been reduced dramatically, because they were told to increase the actual rather than the fantasy paper figures, their actual assets.
In food, I don’t think a parallel thinking has gone on. Yet the skeleton of the food system is really being laid bare by food austerity. It is shocking. The Wellcome Trust, the biggest trust in Britain, I think in Europe, which funds a theatre group here in London, wanted to get the theatre group to do some plays around food and public health. They asked me and a whole gang of us from academia and also NGOs to come and brief 5 playwrights. And we did, for a day.
Then the first two plays came out, one by a very well-known playwright. It’s now about to go on tour around schools and educational things. In the first reading of this play, that I went to in the Bloomsbury Festival, and we had a debate with a fellow academic. This playwright was there, and professional actors read through this play, and it was just stunning. I spoke with the playwright afterwards – it was in private so I won’t say who it was – and I said this is just wonderful. How have you done this? Your skill is just breathtaking. To get these emotional nuances – it’s their trade, their skill, but it’s still wonderful.
This person said “two motivations got me to try and deal with this complexity you all poured at me. One was my fury that this rich country of Britain could have food banks. And the other was much more personal”. And I said, “you’re right, all is explained”. And she ended this play, you could see why, you could see that anger. But the play was actually a process of realisation. Once this person had said that about this play, I understood why she had written it.
There was a core anger, as if to say how has this come about? We’re awash with food, but there are people in food banks. The indignity! I, who have worked on food poverty since 1980 exactly, so 33 years, it just made me livid that when the Trussell Trust came out reporting on World Food Day, October 16th, that its food banks had trebled in throughput in the last year. In other words, in the first third of the year they served as many people as they did in the whole of the previous year. The government’s response to that was that this is because there are more food banks. They didn’t see that this is because of need.
What we’ve got is a debate now exposed that is purely 19th century in its moralism of the distinction that writers from Emmanuel Kant, Karl Marx, right across the spectrum, it’s the distinction between needs and wants. That is absolutely at the heart of what we’ve got to address.
So, austerity at one level is shocking. Absolutely shocking. Is it an opportunity? Yes. Would we rather it wasn’t there? Yes. But we are where we are. We have to be pragmatic and say we cannot turn a blind eye to this. We have to see it for what it is, explain it for what it is, dissect the dynamics and get organised. Ultimately the reading of food policy that I and many of my colleagues around the world have is things aren’t made by experts. Things aren’t improved by technical fixes. Things are made by movements. We haven’t got an anti-food austerity movement yet, but I think we are poised to have one. I think we’re poised to have a really interesting period of food politics, and frankly, it’s about time we did.
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5 Nov 2013
The talk on my recent US tour that I enjoyed most was the one I gave at the ‘Building Resilient Communities’ conference at the Solar Living Institute in Hopland in Northern California. It was the first gathering I know of that drew together the Transition and permaculture communities in a single event and it was great fun, speaking to a couple of hundred people under the stars at the end of a great day of workshops, talks and music.
I was one of the evening’s keynote speakers, along with Richard Heinberg and Doria Robinson, and the evening was facilitated by Trathen Heckman (see photo above). Here is my talk, which begins with a very flattering introduction by Richard. It is also the first (and last!) talk I have ever done in which I quote George W Bush. So, settle back, imagine the starry sky, the expectant audience, the distant noise of traffic, and the plumetting temperature as the talk progresses …
It was a real joy to be able to reflect on my relationship with permaculture, how Transition and permaculture overlap, that strengths and weaknesses of both, and that challenges and opportunities of scaling both up. I really enjoyed it. By half way through though it was also freezing cold, and you will note in the recording that I get colder and colder until someone in the audience lends me a silly hat.
I hope you enjoy it.
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4 Nov 2013
When I was in Houston, Texas recently, I was fortunate enough to meet, and to share a platform with, Jason Roberts of the Better Block project and of the organisation he founded called Team Better Block. Jason hails from Dallas, and his approach has inspired people around the world. It has been described as “a demonstration tool that acts as a living charrette so that communities can actively engage in the buildout process and provide feedback in real time”. For a crash course in his work, check out this talk he gave at TEDxOU:
We caught up at Rice University in Houston, and took half an hour to go and sit under a tree in the sun to have a chat. As usual, you could either download or listen to the podcast, or read the transcript below:
Over to you Jason:
Can you give us a sense of what Better Block is?
Sure, Better Block takes, typically, blighted blocks but not always, in vacant, underused areas typically nestled inside a neighbourhood. We rapidly transform them with communities. So let’s say we’ve got a series of old buildings that are falling apart, lots of graffiti. We quickly go in there and create local businesses: local coffee shops, flower shops, art galleries, book shops, spaces for kids.
Then we’ll take it out in the public space, the streets and transform them rapidly to allow for bike infrastructure and put out café seating to allow for a café seating experience. Then we go off and take the rules and the ordnances that won’t allow all these things to occur, because typically we’ve created all these rules.
We print them off and show them in the street so that the community can actually see what’s holding the place back. Really the project is kind of a combination of this urban planning exercise meets a block party.
Where does the initial ‘pulse’ come from for the stuff that you do? Is it people in the place going, we’ve had enough of this, or is it that someone somewhere thinks this place needs a makeover?
It’s both, actually. There’s that bottom-up with people from the community that come out and say, we need to have a neighbourhood destination, a place for us. But it’s also top-down in some cities. People are saying, we recognise that these areas are missing these things, and could you at least come and educate them on the value of these things.
The beauty of the project is that it’s very bottom-up, and it allows the community to take ownership. It takes away this assumption that you’re going to manage and take care of this for me and puts it back onto the community. If we want these great places, we need them together, how can we create them together?
What’s your experience in terms of the response from the communities where that happens?
It’s been huge. At the very least, people see the images from the project and there’s definitely a visceral response, because changing a place from blight to beauty has a transformative effect. But really the big effect is getting everybody talking and connecting again. You probably get that with your work. That’s the stuff that we walk away from, and we come back six months later and wonder what’s changed.
Maybe there haven’t been a whole lot of physical improvements, but it’s all of this social capital that’s been raised that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. When that works and that’s healthy, the natural by-product is the great stuff. You need to get down to the root cause of what’s causing these problems.
At the very base root, whether it be in Dallas, Texas or London or Tehran, or Melbourne, where there have been Better Block projects, the lack of social connection the lack of social cohesiveness, and creating exercises and activities for the community to restitch themselves.
When you go in with those ideas, there’s a lot of things you said happen when this arrives. It takes a resource to make that happen. Where does that resource come from? Do you get funded to do particular projects?
We typically try to do it 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 project. I have this concept that you have to blackmail yourself. Give yourself a short deadline so you have to get these things done. But what happens when you strip away the funds?
Then you rely on people, and what people can bring to the table. Since this is a temporary project, it’s not that hard to go in. We have three concepts. First, let’s try to borrow. That was out of necessity initially, but we learnt how powerful the idea of borrowing was. In the US, maybe they have this overseas as well, we talk about this idea of if you move into a neighbourhood, how if you don’t know your neighbour initially, let’s say you’re making cookies and you run out of sugar. You go next door and rather sheepishly ask: ”I’m new to the neighbourhood, I’m Jason, I’m making some cookies, could I borrow some sugar?”
The neighbour typically says: “Hey, I’m Joe, I’ve been wanting to meet you. I’ve been looking for an excuse and I’m so glad we’re connecting right now, absolutely, let me give you some sugar”. So this dialogue occurs. Some trust occurs because they’re giving you something, you have these conversations. Then I go home and make the cookies and what do I do afterwards? What we’ll do here is we’ll share them with the neighbour afterwards.
We say thank you for this. I found that by accident, borrowing and allowing people to give over things to help transform a space and to feel that they’re helping to improve it together and that they can enjoy it as a community is so powerful.
Secondly, if we can’t borrow it, we build it together. Which is also a concept we talk about here in the States, a barn building exercise, which comes out of the Amish getting together and building barns together. It’s what you do when couples get married to help them become part of the community. That barn building exercise, working together creating physical activity to improve a place together, gets you to a deeper level of connectivity as a community.
We know that when we start adding physical activity for some reason in a dialogue, it gets you deeper, faster. We’re having a conversation now, but if we were sitting here playing cards together or some other activity, we’re going to get some deeper, more interesting anecdotes that are going to tell me more of your story, and you’re going to hear more of my story and we’re going to get to an even better place. I don’t know what it is about that but we’ve found that that’s important.
Lastly, if we have to, we buy things. But we try not to. We try to tell communities, this is really how you make a better place. All places have two major issues. The problem’s scale, the problem’s too big, and not enough money. How do you fix a problem whenever you have those two issues? It’s just a different way of problem solving.
The first experience of it is the one you talk about in your TED talk. How did that give you confidence that this might work?
The first one was in a little block in my community. My friends had started a little bike shop and it was zoned poorly. It was zoned as light industrial and not retail. I don’t know what that means, but the takeaway was that they were only allowed to have 10% of their space for retail, the rest had to be for service-oriented business. But they didn’t do that. They were a bike shop, 90% of the floor needed to be for retail and 10% for service. They broke the rules to make something that the community wanted.
That made me realise – what other rules are there? I started cataloguing all the rules we put in place in this area and found that we weren’t allowed to do any of the stuff that makes the place great. Then when I asked people about it, they’d say that these rules had been in the book since 1941 and nobody knew why we were doing them.
I’m also a musician, so I had a pretty strong arts community to pull from in my project. We thought, let’s all get together and treat this like a giant museum installation. We’re going to create a better block simply so we can live in our neighbourhood. Let’s put in all the resources we can so that we can live in our neighbourhood, so I don’t have to get in my car to get a gallon of milk … just simple ideas.
This stuff is not complex. But when we started putting it out there, it was amazing how powerful people’s response was to transforming this space in their neighbourhood and making it into a shared neighbourhood destination.
At that point a friend, as a little side project, made a 6 minute video and it went viral. That led to the TED presentation. Better Block was actually one of about 10 projects I had put together for that week, and specifically trying to get people to think differently about our community, and do things. It accidentally became an international movement.
It was not premeditated. I’ve just become friends with the guys at Rebar who started PARK(ing) Day and we were talking about our projects together. They open-sourced their project which became an international movement too, out of necessity because people asked them to come and do it there. They said that they didn’t have time but gave out a how-to. Ours is the same. People keep emailing me, asking how you do it. I just say here’s how you do it, do it yourself and tell us what you learn so we can share that information and create the best practices out of it.
That first project was where it all started, with the community and people that I knew and loved, and said let’s work together to make this a better place. Out of necessity, I started to wish I had a bookshop, a café. We started discussions like how do we get a coffee shop for two days, what can we do. When you get 30 people in a room, someone says “well I can roast coffee beans”. “I’ve got a spare coffee pot that doesn’t get used”. “I’ve got a spare this…and does anybody have any spare seating, does anybody have any spare tables and chairs?” And someone says “yeah, in my garage, in my office. They just closed down a building over here, there are tons of tables and chairs”.
When you start connecting all the dots you start realising all of the waste we create, this waste is basically things that we have that aren’t being put to use. We fill our houses and storage units with this stuff. Instead of it being waste, why don’t we make it a shared asset?
One of the big contexts at the moment is the whole austerity push, the squeezing of public budgets and people feeling they have less and less and less control over the places around them as they start to unravel. What do you think are the main lessons from what you’ve learnt that really relate to communities that are suffering under austerity?
A lot of this work came at a time when the economy was really depressed. There is really interesting innovation that can occur whenever you start taking these zeros away. I’ve got mixed emotions about it. You definitely want to take care of the most marginalised in your society who are super old, infirm, ill, or the young. How do we create environments that allow them to just live?
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. That’s the lesson, I think, from that.
The last question – I mentioned that my recent book is called The Power of Just Doing Stuff. What, for you, is the power of just doing stuff? What is it when people take that step across and say “let’s do it” rather than just moaning about why nobody else is doing it? What is it that people find in themselves, what do they discover?
I think that for me, I just wanted to have some accomplishments. I realised I was working for other people. I had a transformative moment when my grandfather was dying, he had a stroke and I remember him saying he didn’t do all the things he wanted to do in life. He said that over and over again. I remember thinking I don’t want to be like that. I need to get things done.
I started doing all of these little projects, for my sake. I realised that when you start looking back, hey, I did a ton of stuff! I started Better Block, I brought a streetcar back, I created bike lane infrastructure, I ran for US congress, I had dinner with Michelle Obama, I got kids to cycle to school with punch card projects. Random little things.
At the end of the day I feel that the short deadlines are important so you don’t talk yourself out of the things. Blackmailing yourself to publish it, put it out there so it puts you on the hook is so important.
The analogy I use all the time is if my apartment is a mess, you get to a state where you can’t get anything done, it’s going to take me a week to get this thing knocked out, how can I clean this? Just call your friends and say you’re going to throw a dinner party in four hours. It’s amazing how clean your place gets and how efficient you get. All the distractions go away and you start making things happen.
We actually work pretty well as human beings under these constraints. We all know it because when we have term papers due, we’ve got two weeks to do it but we get it done in the last 24 hours. We have the deadline and it’s short, and things happen.
We have this mindset that the great things that happen in communities and society are because of someone’s inspiration – they have to sit around and drink coffee and think about what they’re going to do. The reality is you look at some of the great music that came out of the Tin Pan Alley area in the ’20s and ‘30s like Irving Berlin and Gershwin. Were they just sitting around drinking coffee thinking up ideas for songs? No! They had a deadline.
A Broadway play came out that needs 12 songs. They needed to have great themes for all those songs, needed to get things done. At the end of the day though, you end up getting a catalogue of standards we have that we know we love, like oh, that was so inspired. It was actually probably George and Ira fighting with each other saying, “I’ve got to get this done, quick. This’ll do, we need a slow song in ¾ in a minor key, the girl has just left the guy”. When we create these boundaries and constraints, we can be ultimately creative with that out of necessity. And at the end you look back at the catalogue two or three years later and think yes, I’ve got some things done.
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