4 Feb 2015
I first heard about Alex Epstein’s book ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’ via an unsurprisingly fawning review over at the SkeptEco blog. Its premise is so ludicrous that normally I wouldn’t read it, never mind review it. There is no “moral case for fossil fuels”, just as there was no “moral case for slavery” in 1860. But given the alarming rise, in the US and elsewhere, of the climate sceptic/pro fossil fuel lobby (witness, for instance, Sen. James Infoe’s ludicrous attack on climate science in the US Senate recently) it feels important to look a bit closer at the arguments presented here.
Epstein recently started something called the ‘Center for Industrial Progress’, and lectures on the need to keep fossil fuels as a key driver for the economy. At other times he can be found, among other things, defending child labour or arguing that animals have no rights. He likes to paint himself and the fossil fuel industry as the misunderstood underdogs, holding the line against the far more influential “greens”. He’s a curious character, as can be seen in this video of him standing in the middle of the hundreds of thousands of people who attended the Peoples’ Climate March in New York last year, heckling them with inane comments like “you know, your clothes are fracked!”
“As you read this”, he writes, “there is a real, live, committed movement against fossil fuels that truly wants to deprive us of the energy of life”. This painting of the oil industry as the good guys, as the misunderstood heroes being undermined by uninformed idiots (i.e. you and I), is the first, but by no means the last, place where Epstein parts company with reality.
He bemoans the fact that fossil fuel companies “have had to fight daily for permission to empower billions of people”. Try telling that to the communities in Ecuador affected by the oil spills for which Chevron was fined $19 billion, people in Richmond, California who live in the shadow of the Chevron refinery which exploded in 2012, communities living near mountaintop removal coal plants, people living near fracking sites, or First Nation people living near the Tar Sands in Alberta. He continues:
“I believe that we owe the fossil fuel industry an apology. While the industry has been producing the energy to make our climate more livable, we have treated it as a villain. We owe it the kind of gratitude that we owe anyone who makes our lives much, much better”.
Central to Epstein’s argument, echoing those put forward by other cornucopians such as Matt Ridley in ‘The Rational Optimist’, is the idea that fossil fuels have been the best thing that ever happened to us (given that Ridley was recently estimated to be personally responsibly for 1% of the UK’s total carbon emissions, one might be forgiven for questioning his objectivity here).
The rise of fossil fuel use, Epstein argues, has led to better air quality, increased life expectancy, rising incomes, better access to clean drinking water, etc etc. This is stated as though it is somehow an insight that has escaped those arguing that we should now, with great urgency, leave fossil fuels behind, because, you see, “fossil-fuelled development is the greatest benefactor our environment has ever known”. The argument that it has led to the improvements he states is one that few would argue with.
However, at the same time, it can hardly be said to have been without its side effects. To name but two, it has appallingly corrupted international politics and undermined democracy around the world. As Naomi Klein put it in ‘This Changes Everything’:
“Fossil fuels really do create a hyper-stratified economy. It’s the nature of the resources that they are concentrated, and you need a huge amount of infrastructure to get them out and to transport them. And that lends itself to huge profits and they’re big enough that you can buy off politicians.”
How many people in Nigeria, for example, dubbed the “world oil pollution capital” and where much of the wealth generated has been siphoned off through corruption, would argue that “fossil-fuelled development is the greatest benefactor our environment has ever known”? It is true that for many people (but by no means all) the fossil fuel age has brought great benefits.
However, Epstein’s argument is rather like staying with a psychotic and abusive partner because the first couple of months of the relationship were very lovely. Just because the first half of the oil age enabled some remarkable things does not mean logically that therefore the second half will be the same. Last year the IPCC stated that unchecked climate change will be “severe, widespread and irreversible”. You would think that that, along with the overwhelming body of scientific opinion, suggests that the second half of the oil age might not quite be the bed of roses the first half was (for some at least). But not for Epstein.
He writes:
“To me, the question of what to do about fossil fuels and any other moral issue comes down to: What will promote human life? What will promote human flourishing – realising the full potential of human life?”
Given that this is the same question we ask in Transition, it’s fascinating to explore how we end up at such resolutely different places (and how he ends up advocating an approach almost guaranteed to put an end of any possibility of human flourishing). Epstein does this by several sleights of hand. The first is by dismissing climate change. His argument is only logical, or even possible, if climate change isn’t an issue. Fortunately for him it isn’t.
We know that 14 of the 15 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000. Yet to make his case that that somehow isn’t a problem, he wheels out lots of the rather tired and unfounded sceptic myths, such as:
Myth #1: CO2 is a “plant food with a fertilising impact”: a ridiculous argument; plants need much more than just CO2. They need water (availability of which reduces as temperatures rise) and other minerals and, er, soil. The fact that plants in a greenhouse grow better when some CO2 is added, doesn’t scale up to the planet as a whole. For example, plants exposed to more CO2 can be more vulnerable to pests, and reduces the quality of crops.
Myth #2: You can’t rely on climate models: Epstein argues that the case for climate change rests largely on climate models, of which he writes “those models have failed to make accurate predictions – not just a little, but completely”. But a recent study has shown that actually climate models have been very accurate, and actually can be more conservative than what is actually unfolding, for example in relation to the speed of melting of Arctic ice. Epstein writes “just about every prediction or prescription you hear about the issue of climate change is based on models”. But it’s not … the whole picture is also supported by a huge body of evidence of the impacts unfolding in the world around us, often in ways predicted by models. To say, as he does, that “every climate model based on CO2 as a major climate driver has been a failure” is simply untrue.
Myth #3: There is no 97% consensus among climate scientists: But there is. Read more here.
Myth #4: Scientists in the 70s predicted global cooling, so what do they know?: Again, a rather tired and silly myth beloved of climate sceptics. Reality is that even in the 70s, when climate science was in its infancy, there were 6 times more scientists predicting global warming than global cooling, it’s just that the cooling folks got the memorable Newsweek covers. Over time, as the evidence built, the case for global warming became clearer and stronger until the consensus we see today.
And so on. The rest of his arguments about climate change are similarly out-of-date, foundationless and silly, the intellectual equivalent of his standing facing in one direction, as in New York in the video above, while science and reason pour past in the other direction. But without them his so called ‘moral case for fossil fuels’ crumbles to dust.
He then argues, remarkably, that actually even if climate change were true, burning more fossil fuels in response will make us safer (I know, just go with me here, we’re in an Alice Through the Looking Glass parallel universe now). Fossil fuels, he argues, “don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, [they] take a dangerous climate and make it safe”.
Fossil fuels, you see, mean that we can, for example, power air conditioning so we can live in hot places in comfort. We can build better flood defences, we can use fossil fuelled technology to adapt to any climate. And of course, he adds, fossil fuels mean we can always up and move somewhere else! He writes:
“If you think about the climate in a real way, not as some vague mystical, “global climate”, but as the climate around you, you are a master of climate just by virtue of the fact that you can change climates”.
Here Epstein situates himself alongside the ‘neo-greens’ such as Stewart Brand, who argues “we are as gods, and we have to get good at it”. The belief that anyone can be a “master of climate” is deeply arrogant and flawed, as was highlighted in our recent interview with Clive Hamilton about geoengineering.
But while that “master of climate” argument may resonate in his air conditioned house in southern California, it doesn’t work so well in, for example, Pakistan. The Asia Development Bank already suggests that environmental factors, including climate change, are “already an important driver in migration”. 10 million people have been displaced by flooding and 2,000 died when 20% of the country was under water. A recent report by the UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition told some of stories of those affected. While you could feasibly imagine that fossil fuels might have a small role to play in creating flood defences in Pakistan, the impacts of the developed world, including the emissions associated with Epstein’s air conditioning, will overwhelm any benefits.
Ideas of fairness, social justice, global inequalities of power and wealth barely register in Epstein’s analysis. For him, fossil fuels are benign, with no noticeable impacts on geopolitics and relationships of power. Their role in creating corruption, war, their role as a driver in the US’s dreadful foreign policy approach, rendition, torture, how the US government has become central to the US pushing fracking on the rest of the world, all go without mention. He argues that it is wrong to deny the developing world the benefits of fossil fuels, an approach Michael Klare terms ‘carbon humanitarianism”, describing it as:
“the claim that cheap carbon-based fuels are the best possible response to the energy-poor of the planet (despite everything we know about the devastation climate change will cause, above all in the lives of the poor)”.
The $1.9 trillion the world spends a year subsidising the fossil fuel industry goes without mention too, as he prefers to bemoan the tiny fraction of that the world spends on subsidising renewable energy. He writes that thanks to fossil fuels, “we don’t take a safe environment and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous environment and make it far safer”. Actually of course the global picture is that while wealthy nations are able to make themselves safer to climate risks (although it didn’t help much with, for example, the great floods in south west England last year), the developing world, where the impacts are felt most acutely, simply are not, nor are the wealthy nations rushing to help.
In terms of energy resources, he is, one might say, on the optimistic end of the spectrum. The world apparently has 3,050 years of “total remaining recoverable reserves” of coal left. But you will hear no mention of Energy Return on Energy Invested in these pages, no sense that not all coal is the same, nor all oil. Renewable energy is swept aside as “expensive, unreliable and unscaleable”, as he argues that “modern solar and wind technology do not produce reliable energy, period”.
It’s a book that will often have you pausing to think “did he really say that?” You’ll hear stuff like:
“There is no inherent reason to think that the extinction of any given plant or animal is bad for humans”
and…
“Not only can our way of life last; it can keep getting better and better, as long as we don’t adopt “sustainability” policies”.
For me, in the face of the profound urgency of climate change, and a fossil fuel industry that sows corruption and destruction wherever it goes, there really is no “moral case for fossil fuels”. Yes, they have, in many ways, been amazing. But all the evidence shows that continuing with fossil fuels runs a very high risk of finishing us off altogether. Given Epstein’s love for the infallible power of the market, and the creativity it can unleash, why is it so impossible to imagine that our inventiveness and brilliance cannot solve the challenges of intermittency in relation to renewables, and enable us to use energy far more efficiently?
“Humanity needs as much energy as it can get”, he argues. Quite where the morality of assuming that on a finite planet with finite resources it is acceptable to gorge oneself on energy, and to assume it is your right to always have as much as you need, eludes me. In ‘This Changes Everything’, Naomi Klein quotes Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre as saying:
“Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony”.
It’s that unavoidable reality of the need for “revolutionary change” that triggers Epstein’s denial and compels him to write a book as feeble and poor as this. We have a choice when faced with reality, of either retreating into clinging to what we’ve done up to that point, or stepping out with purpose, vision and creativity, and doing something else. It was, after all, such a bold approach that created the Industrial Revolution in the first place. Why does it dissipate the moment we now have to design something else, something more appropriate to moving forward from now? Sadly Epstein, and most of the US Senate, are unable to take that leap. Their cautiousness does us all a huge disservice.
As Naomi Klein (whose ‘This Changes Everything’ Epstein’s book cover has clearly been designed to echo) puts it “there are no non-radical solutions left”. Epstein speaks for those for whom doing anything other than how we do things at the moment is unimaginable. Rather than being a moral position, it’s the opposite. File alongside those silly Michael Crichton climate change-bashing novels and move on. There’s too much to do, and too little time.
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3 Feb 2015
The words of the ‘Sankofa’ bird were written during one of many dancing, singing, making and music workshops that took place in the lead up to the Trashcatchers’ Carnival in July 2010.
On Fishponds I will find my flock
And fly in formation and
Nest on our Rock’
Sankofa is a mythical creature, carrying a seed of the future under its wing and looking forward to the future and back to the past in a single glance. The bird, along with a Giant Turtle; a Lady of Tooting and the Green Gardener (as tall as houses) led the Carnival down Tooting High Road, accompanied by 800 ‘carnivalistas’ and 1000s of onlookers.
For a year, the Carnival rallied people to re-imagine Tooting; celebrate a relationship to Earth; make beauty from rubbish and use recycling as a metaphor for change. ‘Carnivalistas’ were convened from youth clubs, secondary and primary schools, the Asian elders, Share Community Gardens, Sports clubs, local residents, choirs and arts projects – across generations and cultures. Peak oil and climate change workshops formed part of the work carnivalistas undertook over the year.
Smaller ‘convening’ circles got the process going: TTT, leading the event, worked with professional artists Project Phakama and Emergency Exit Arts who brought scale, humour and skills. Local champions, including the local Police, the Waste department at the Council and the Town Centre Manager were recruited to help find spaces, resources and support. Local businesses, the Tooting Business Network and the Balham and Tooting Community Association, (formed in the wake of the 2005 London bombings to honour Tooting’s strength in diversity) were valuable collaborators. We looked to involve not just the community of Tooting, but the communities of Tooting.
It was a tall order to close one of London’s busiest ‘arterial traffic corridors’ in addition to transforming an abstracted sense of a possible future into a carnival from scratch. Milk containers used by worshippers at the Sivayogam Hindu Temple were diverted to schools to be made into baby elephants. Collection of bags, tins, bottles and crisp packets went into overdrive. Large fish, elephants and octopuses took over entire school halls.
The Carnival, processing triumphantly down the High Road, turned Tooting on its head for the day. As we convened for the finale on Fishponds field, people gathered in a circle to admire what we’d all made. We were Sankofa’s flock nesting on the Rock. A story we’d made had started to make us.
We convened around the imaginary. Sankofa and other characters, brought magical qualities to the event. They gave us imaginary space to extend possibilities for ourselves and the town: we were all equal, all capable, all included. A sense of new opportunity became tangible. If we were capable of this, what else was possible?
Five years on, Transition Tooting has two events simmering away that have their root in Transition as Convener and look forward to the future after reflecting back to the Carnival of 2010. These projects are mid-process, and have begun with the idea of holding a space open to conversation, without articulating a specific outcome.
On April 11th this year, TTT will invite local groups to participate in “Looking Out for Tooting”, or LOFT.
This event celebrates the people and groups that care for Tooting and its future. It will be a gathering, engaging the energy of local activism, acknowledging the reality of Tooting today and our unique ability to imagine our collective future. It will offer all those present an opportunity to recognise, celebrate and catalyse those values that are common, whether that be between individuals, groups or the whole gathering.
This idea of celebrating and valuing diversity, born from resilient natural systems and articulated in David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles, is the seed around which this idea has grown. It feels strong as a reason to gather, without dictating outcome. As a frame, it helps us to listen and to share our stories, reflections and care for the future within a supportive environment.
The gathering will help us look at this wonderfully diverse area of South London in a new light, taking inspiration from the idea of Lookout – a place from which we keep watch and observe, in one definition and a person who sees what is coming, either physically or in looking to the future, being aware of change and trends, in another.
From the outset it wasn’t at all about TTT leading a powerhouse of local activism, but about TTT taking the first step onto the dancefloor and ask what makes our local area special to us? Could we look to the future together? How would one encourage multiple, different and ever changing partnerships over time?
“Vision is not seeing things as they are but as they will be” D.Holmgren, 2002
Our second event is a pre-election event about local sustainability. Inspired by 2015 being an election year, we asked the question, “how could we gather as many local people as we can and ask them to come up with a macro-scale vision for Tooting to be addressed within our political structure?”.
Using the World Café format, the conversation will be in three parts, breaking the group up into 6/8 people tables to help us hear from everyone and enable conversation to develop around specific areas. After a welcome, the event will invite personal views of Tooting’s past – what do we value and what lessons can we learn from our individual experiences? The second conversation will be based around local community seeking our collective concerns for the present. The third, perhaps longer, conversation will explore our hopes for the future of Tooting, expanding our thoughts to include the whole local area.
This framing will help us facilitate a conversation without dictating the terms. It also allows us, as conveners, to have a structure, but be able to respond to the participant-developed content to inform the next steps. It will be critical to observe well, and keep light footed to guide the group through the event.
We will encourage a panel of ‘VIPs’ to participate, as Tooting citizens, and come together towards the end of the event to respond to proposals from the final World Café table. The panel will include teenagers, politicians, scientists and local citizens.
We can see synergies in the idea of convening and hosting in the root of Transition thinking, using Permaculture’s Principles as an inspiration for open and rich conversation. Also, Open Space Technology in hosting conversations without dictating agendas is hugely helpful in empowering participants to be heard and World Café’s maxim to create the right environment for conversation encourages us to turn down the volume of ego and increase our ability and sensitivity to listen and give time to points of view.
But most of all, Transition’s sensitivity to heart as well as head, emotion as well as rationality in responding to Climate Change makes for a compelling starting point to instigate conversation and mobilise engaged participation, ensuring a very human scale outcomes to be found.
Lucy Neal and Richard Couldrey.
“Tooting” – a name thought to originate in Saxon times, derived from the verb ‘to tout’, meaning to look out (which is, interestingly, the same derivation for the ‘Tot’ in Totnes [Rob]).
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30 Jan 2015
Something very powerful feels to me like it is starting to move. I see it in the victory of Syriza in Greece on a platform of localisation, resilience building and sustainability as an antidote to austerity. I see it in the explosion of craft breweries, farmers markets, community energy companies and so on, in Scotland’s moratorium on gas fracking. I also saw it in the two days I just spent in Belgium supporting the great work of the regional Transition hub “Wallonia-Brussels” there. The trip was also to support the Belgian release of the French language version of The Power of Just Doing Stuff (“Ils Changent le Monde”).
I arrived on Monday and went straight to a meeting of ministers from the Brussels regional government. I talked about Transition, and we had, along with Belgian Transitioners, a really interesting conversation about how Transition and local authorities can work together. This was followed by a quick supper prepared by Transition 1000Bxl and with a larger group of Transition folk from across the region, including some of the people who translated my book, before heading off to the Tricoterie in Brussels, a beautiful venue for a talk. Beautiful arched ceiling, chairs in a semi circle, and the organisers had even adorned the stage in front of where I was to speak with a potted cabbage plant! That doesn’t happen every day.
The event had sold out weeks ago, within just 3 days, and about 400 people packed the room. The talk was also streamed live on the internet by Belgian TV station Rtbf, watched by many hundreds of people (around 1100 people “liked” on Facebook during my talk on the live webstreaming).
Brussels is a multi lingual event, so was co-hosted in French and Flemish, beautifully facilitated by Noemie (who spoke French) and Greet (who spoke Dutch). The evening began with people pairing up to introduce themselves to each other, and a show of hands for how many people attending were from Transition groups or other similar projects.
Then Olivier de Schutter, former UN Rapporteur on Food, gave an introduction setting the global context and welcoming me to Brussels. I then spoke for about 40 minutes, a talk that featured a couple of fine Martin Luther King quotes (one quote from which, “the fierce urgency of now”, rather had the translators scratching their heads), slides whose content had mysteriously disappeared, and a very lovely and engaged audience. There was lots of laughter and head-nodding. You can find the (overdubbed in French) film of the talk here. It has already been watched 1,140 times.
The Facebook page that accompanied the talk had many very complimentary comments left. After I spoke, Josue Dusoulier from the Belgian Hub gave a short presentation about what is happening in Belgium as Transition catches fire across the country and new initiatives and projects pop up all over the place.
We then had a great Q&A, with a wide range of questions, and trialling the approach I borrowed from George Monbiot of saying that questions will be taken from the audience in the sequence of man/woman/man/woman (just the suggestion of it generated a round of applause).
When the evening ended, I signed lots of books, met lots of lovely people, and sampled a couple of rather nice Belgian beers before heading off through the city to bed. A lovely event. Here’s how one Belgian blogger reported it.
Next morning I set off on the train with other representatives of the Hub to Grez. Grez en Transition (GET for short) is one of the first Transition initiatives in Belgium, having kicked off in 2009. Here is a film about the group and its work:
The group has lots of projects underway, and exciting new ones planned. They have an Incredible Edible project, they do skillshares, workshops on preserving food and wild food walks, a project to do with growing grains locally, and the place I visited first, Potager Graines de vie ( “Seeds of life”).
It’s a community supported agriculture scheme run along permaculture and biodynamic lines. It supplies food for 100 local families for 8 months of the year. Although clearly late January is possibly the least insightful time to visit a food garden, it was still fascinating to see. The garden is laid out in concentric rings of raised beds, interspersed regularly with beds featuring perennial plantings which attract beneficial insects and increase the overall biodiversity.
The garden also has many beehives at the far end, and although the garden is largely surrounded by monoculture farms, honey yield has risen consistently since the garden started, a fact the head gardener, Herman Pirmez, put down to the biodiversity beds.
We toured the garden and then headed back to the house of the farmer on whose land the garden sits. He is in the process of turning his 60 hectare farm into an agroforestry farm, with alley cropping and mixed tree varieties. His observation was that being a farmer can be a very lonely life. Since the creation of the garden and working with Grez en Transition, he now feels as though he is actually farming relationships, community and connection. Sadly that’s the one key thing the Common Agricultural Policy is unable to subsidise.
I was then given a presentation about the group’s future plans. I heard how in 2012 the group felt it was running out of steam. So around the time of the potato harvest, they held an event called the ‘Frites Party’, where people went out to the field to help harvest potatoes, and then washed them, chopped them and turned them into chips, eaten in the field. Eric Luyckx said it was one of their most popular events that people still talk about to this day. Helped to bring new people into the group, and now it seems to be buzzing.
I heard about their plans to build a brewery, grain mill and bakery on a site next to the garden. I met the local brewer who had created a new craft brewery in the village (very tasty it was too). I heard about their plans for a local currency called Les Blés (see right), due to launch soon.
I was also introduced to their fascinating Charter which governs how they work as a group and to help the local economy to transition, which I hope to get translated soon to post here. We then shared a delicious pot luck lunch, and did an interview for an upcoming programme about Transition, before heading off to Namur.
Namur is a city in Wallonia in the south of Belgium. It was built where the rivers Sambre and Meuse meet, and it’s a French-speaking city. It is also home to Namur University. When we arrived we first had a meeting with the representatives of the Wallonia regional government, and then people from the University and other organisations, about how they might integrate Transition thinking into what they do.
Lastly it was off to the University for the evening’s talk, which, like the Brussels talk, had sold out weeks ago in a matter of days. When we arrived the queue stretched out of the building. The hall, a much more conventional lecture theatre than the Brussels venue, was packed with 640 people. The evening started with an introduction and formal welcome from Claire Lobet, Vice President of the Sustainable development department of the University. Then Isabelle, from Soignies en transition, set out the evening, and invited everyone to introduce themselves to someone sat next to them.
It’s quite a sight to sit and watch 640 people meeting new people at the same time. I introduced myself to the woman behind me, who spoke little English and I spoke little French, so we attempted in fumbling Franglais until we discovered we both spoke Italian, at which point we were told time was up!
The talk then went well. Unlike the Brussels talk which was translated into French and Dutch using headphones and translators, for this one I was joined on stage by Olivier Chaput, a member of the Belgian Hub, who translated beautifully. Felt like being part of a double act. A very enjoyable and celebratory night.
Because translating that way makes a talk longer, once we had finished and Josue had given his Belgian perspective, the evening was running perilously close to the time of the last train home. There then followed an amazing self-organising lift share process, where in just a few minutes, everyone who was in danger of missing a train was paired up with someone with spaces in their car, and everyone could settle back and relax again.
We had a great Q&A session, wrapping up about 10.20pm. Then lots of book signings, talking to people, the odd selfie, and an interview. After a couple of beers, and meeting more people, we headed back to Brussels and within about 5 minutes of getting in the door I was fast asleep.
Next morning the trip drew to a close with a wrapping-up meeting with the regional Hub Wallonia Brussels folks, at their office in Brussels. After a check in and some reflections on the trip, and what they might do to build on the increased profile and coverage, we all sat down to a fantastic early lunch, with cheeses from different regions across the country, great soup and good conversation. As my leaving present, I was gifted so many different bottles of Belgian craft beer that Antonia, one of the hub’s team, had to gift me their wheelie shopping trolley thing in order to transport them home! Thanks everyone. They will last me about 4 months…
That was it then, off onto Eurostar and so on and so on, my beer bottles chinking gently behind me. Although it had a programme so packed you couldn’t get a piece of paper between its different elements, with little time to take breath, it really felt like it gave things a new boost, built some useful new connections, fired some people up with possibilities. My deepest thanks to everyone who made it such a delight and to the Transition Belgium gang for all their great organisation, and to whoever grew the fine cabbage plant that so beautifully adorned the stage in Brussels. And lastly to the wonderful team of translators who translated the book … here they all are:
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26 Jan 2015
Pamela Boyce Simms is convener of the Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub, which brings together and supports Transition groups from southern Connecticut to Virginia in the US. She is also a very active Transition trainer and is also involved in interfaith work. Given our ongoing exploration of the theme of ‘The Power to Convene’, there is much that we can learn from Pamela’s work in bringing different faith groups together, in particular an event she recently convened around the release of the film ‘Noah’. So we called her via Skype to find out more…
You wrote recently “we often hesitate to override inertia and consistently and compassionately reach out to those who don’t look like us, sound like us, think like us, and who rarely attend Transition events”. Could you expand on that a little bit more? What’s the challenge for Transition groups, do you think?
First, beginning with the idea of convening in and of itself, this particular region and the way I like to approach it, is to create space. To just create an open-ended safe place for possibilities for people to self-express. That permeates the way the operations of the network, the dynamic, and when we convene groups of people that are not necessarily used to being in the same room and spending time with each other, that is particularly important to create that spaciousness. That’s what convening means for us.
We have in this area a mega-city corridor. It’s a megalopolis of cities from New York, Philadephia, Baltimore, Wilmington, Washington DC down to Virginia, Norfolk etc. The diversity in this area is unbelievable. It’s off the chart. I don’t know if there’s a corridor like this anywhere else. Within that we have every country on the globe represented and every faith group represented as well.
It behoves us as Transitioners to try to diffuse a message to invite people to consider how we’re moving towns and villages and hamlets towards resilience to create that space, because we bump up against so many different types of people here. It’s never imposing a matrix, it’s always creating space. For faith groups, given what we see sweeping the planet at this point, it is particularly important to listen deeply, and to give people the opportunity to understand what it means to respect each other deeply in this space. That doesn’t automatically happen.
So convening in this region, with this diversity, with this number of faith groups, just means creating a spacious environment that’s safe for people.
You ask the question “what outreach tools can we develop to reach and organise faith communities?” What are some of those tools that you’ve found to be useful?
Adopting a mindset that is a listening mindset. There’s no set of coalition building or alliance building or community organising toolkits that can be used in this domain of extending oneself to another person. It is getting oneself in a place where you are seeing through someone else’s lenses. You are not ‘othering’ them, you are opening to who is in front of you.
It takes practice. It takes a dynamic within one’s own Initiating Group, or within one’s group, so that you’re already doing that amongst yourselves, so that you can offer that and be that for groups that are not like your initiating group, or different from you. It’s a mindset as opposed to the community organising toolkit per se.
You wrote very interestingly about the recent film Noah which touches on issues about climate change, but in a faith context. Could you just tell us that story about how you used that film as a way of bringing different faith groups together?
We were putting together a resilient response group. We no longer use the term ‘emergency preparedness’ around here. This included every faith tradition that was in our area. The very open-ended faith traditions as well as very established faith traditions. We had the Jewish congregation, Baptists, all denominations of Christian faiths as well as Buddhists, and we had been talking for a time on how to create resilience in our area when Noah came on the horizon.
It came as an opportunity/catalyst to bring people together around some really difficult questions that it’s difficult for people to walk up to. So the Rabbi offered the temple as a place for fellowship and we developed a set of questions. It was a big potluck thing, very Transition-esque.
All the people at the meeting about resilient response developed a set of questions that really boiled down to how prepared people were. The visual of the film itself went right to the limbic system, the non-thinking brain. The brain that thematically takes in images so you don’t have to preach, don’t have to say anything to anyone. Russell Crowe and the cast of Noah did it for us.
They made those points, and from there we were able to discuss with people having that visual. Then prior to the movie, we had dinner together. We did a round table thing, kind of a World Café discussion of the questions to prompt thought. Went to the movie together and then debriefed once people had internalised just that set of possibilities of walking in deluge.
It was a fascinating discussion. People were put right in front of how little preparedness had taken place in their community, in a very safe environment, and then was brought home without a lot of verbage. Then people’s very deep emotional reactions afterwards was the learning for everyone. It wasn’t mass prescriptive, or “we’re going to do this”, or the next steps. Then the debrief was – my goodness, this is what this has brought up for me. Let me take this deeper into my understanding of what I should be doing myself and for my family and my community…
I’d like to discuss the practicalities of convening, bringing people together. What’s the best preparation that you can do in advance? What’s the best way to invite people? What are your thoughts on that?
Really the best way, when you have the time to do it, is slow going. We are actually rolling out a programme, a curriculum called ‘Transition Neighbourhoods’ in the mega-cities along the coast at the moment. There is what we call a prequel in that curriculum. The prequel is specifically to figure out how to feel into your neighbourhood, feel into the different groups, ethnic groups, racial groups, socio-economic groups, networks that are in your neighbourhood.
It’s to sit and contemplate for a moment who’s there. Why are they there? How did they get there? What is their history? Do they intersect? Who are the mavens in your community? Is there a café where everyone hangs out or spends time, where people are very comfortable with each other and is heavily trafficked? Who owns that, who is part of that? Go to the places, and consider the places where people already are comfortable. Be there, connect with people and it is a person to person – can I have coffee with you, can we get a bite to eat?
Let me tell you about this interesting way of community building against the backdrop of climate change with conversation. If you have the time person to person, really having scoped out what’s going on in your neighbourhood is the best bet. Call people. Invite them over. Invite small groups of people. Then start coalescing and convening groups of people once you’re friends already.
That’s how that resilient response group came together that orchestrated the Noah event. We were friends. We actually brought together a number of different interfaith councils. I had been representing actually a monastery on one of the inter-faith councils that spearheaded this, that actually convenes a lot of the inter-faith folks. So we were all friends and had been meeting together for a while. That’s what really needs to happen. It’s very labour intensive and very slow going but it is a person to person kind of thing. Email blasts are lovely after the fact, social media are lovely after the fact, but it’s the relationships that cement it.
In terms of the event itself, when you get people together. What’s the best way to host that and to prepare the space in which it’s going to happen?
Food is essential! We’re doing something on January 21st in New York City that’s bringing together all the different boroughs and different neighbourhoods within the boroughs. Everyone is asked to bring a dish that represents their national heritage. We have an international cuisine tasting event that sets up the entire tone of celebration of who’s in the room before we start talking about Transition Neighbourhoods or Transition. In and of itself, a colourful buffet is truly representative of who’s in the room.
Questions, as opposed to heavy-duty programming. Questions that you and your group have thought might spark discussion, inviting questions on the spot, and just facilitating in such a way that people feel like they can say anything they want and it’s going to be honoured, as long as it doesn’t harm another person, obviously. It’s the Transition way.
There are ground rules, and there’s a container and there’s a spaciousness and anything goes. Let it go wherever it wants to go, basically. But convening is always about openness – I believe anyway. It produces the best results, as opposed to having a trajectory that’s already laid out that you try not to deviate from. That’s very constrictive.
Once you’ve run your event, you mentioned using email after that. How would you harvest and distribute the outcomes from that?
Immediately the day after the event, a follow-up gratitude email goes out. And all the people who you’ve noticed in that meeting are on fire about what you talked about. Whoever the group is convening goes into that meeting really watching and observing and listening deeply for the people who are your champions just naturally ‘get it’ and want to run with it.
There’s also the email blast, which is a gratitude email the next day. Preferably the next morning, but definitely within the next 24 hours. Those people, the champions, get a call and then the cultivation of the relationships with those champions that go back to their groups or go back to their neighbourhoods and are your ambassadors. It’s not always you speaking. You’re automatically diffusing and decentralising the message with people who can be champions where they are.
This is followed by an offering of something tangible, a tool people can use, whether it is an event that is on mission with what you talked about that evening, that’s happening in the area. A really interesting article that ties into what you’ve talked about during the evening, bringing up quotes from some of the conversations that people will remember from the evening.
You’re anchoring over and over again what a great time everybody had, that their contribution was very much appreciated and that this is about spreading the root system, the mycelium, the web of Transition, so reach out and share your enthusiasm with everyone else. Once you’ve communicated that, and your champions are taking the message out after your meeting, then a strategically timed email or newsletter, or something that does not clog up inboxes with too much.
Time it strategically so they’re getting a feeling that they’re connected to a network of people that’s not flapping in the breeze thinking “that was a nice experience, but it’s a flash in the pan that doesn’t connect to anything”. In those connective follow-up emails the message is constantly ‘belonging’, ‘part of’, ‘the network’ and ‘the community that we’re building’.
Those terms are also a part of whatever you’re sending out. It’s always that balance between too much and too little, knowing when to time it, when people are at their computers, when they’re most likely to be in a receptive mode. So follow up can be very strategic, but very friendly, very connecting. The idea is don’t let the ball drop after you’ve done an event.
Lastly, do you have any last thoughts for Transition groups who are thinking “we’re not doing this convening thing very well. We can see that in order to be more effective we need to get more different organisations, different people from different backgrounds in the room together”. What would your last bits of advice be for them?
Your Initiating Group, whoever is hosting, whoever is creating the space, would be wise to deeply and compassionately understand each other, your own motivations for doing this work, your own reasons and motivations for reaching out to people who are not like you. Why this is important to you? Get on the same page before you open the door to your potluck to invite people in.
Take the time to consider group dynamics, not in a formal organisational development way of forming, norming, storming etc. But literally understand who you are, personally, together as a group because anyone walking into your space will feel who you are, will know who you are intuitively. The degree to which that hangs together and your groups can continue to move forward and make things happen and gain traction and momentum is a direct function of how well you know yourselves and know each other as a group and how truly open you are, having explored this, to the people you’re inviting into your space.
A superficial “we should do this because it’s a good idea” will be felt by the people walking in the door at some point. Maybe not that night, but as you begin to work with them, if you continue your outreach effort, things start to fray and melt and become diffuse and people drop away because they feel your intent and how well you know each other and what your intent is in reaching out to them. So it’s a very Inner Transition process that I suggest that people do before opening the doors to anyone. Anyone period, but especially folks that you don’t typically reach out to in your work.
Here is the podcast of our full conversation:
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22 Jan 2015
One of the most ambitious examples of The Power to Convene to come through a Transition initiative is Atmos Totnes in Devon, England. It has brought together the site’s owner Dairy Crest, a mainstream developer and a community, to plan the future of the former manufacturing site. Its recent community consultation reached over 2,200 people, and the next stage of consultation starts again soon. The project is being driven forward by Totnes Community Development Society, formed by members of Transition Town Totnes, Totnes Community Development Society and others. Atmos Totnes have just put out this video, which tells the story so far, and offers a powerful taste of how The Power to Convene can feel when it goes well.
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Central to Epstein’s argument, echoing those put forward by other cornucopians such as Matt Ridley in ‘The Rational Optimist’, is the idea that fossil fuels have been the best thing that ever happened to us (given that Ridley was recently estimated to be personally responsibly for 1% of the UK’s total carbon emissions, one might be forgiven for questioning his objectivity here). 
