1 Dec 2014
In 2008, when I was researching my PhD looking at Transition Town Totnes, I went out to visit Douglas Matthews at his farmhouse near Staverton. Douglas was 99, and still slept in the bedroom he had been born in. He died a few months later having just reached the age of 100. He was still sharp and focused, and delighted to share his memories. It is all too easy to imagine that prior to present-day consumption levels life was bereft of pleasure, fun, anything rewarding. I thought it might be useful, in the context of our theme this month, to share my conversation with Douglas as a way of challenging that.
We met in his office room in his old stone farmhouse:
“This is a church commissioners’ property. The church commissioners connected 5 farms together and built this set of buildings, and my grandfather came here with his two sons and his wife. The two sons were Alfred and Richard, one was never married but Alfred married and they produced me on January 5th 1908, in this house in the room I’m sleeping in actually, which is interesting that I have gone back there!
I had a Governess to begin with, I was a precious little boy, and then I went to Totnes Grammar School and then I went away to Taunton to boarding school, and came home and I didn’t really know what I was going to do, but automatically slipped into farming. That was about 1926. In 1934 I got married and my parents moved to the house down the road which is now called Staverton House and I moved in here with my wife when farming was at a very low ebb.
I remember that I had started, it was Schedule D in the old days, the income tax was based on the rent, it was twice the rent, and then there came the day when income tax was to be based on a balance sheet done by an accountant, so before I took over the farm I took over doing the accounts for the farm, for the year before I took over, and the first year I took over we made a loss of £500, and the next year, I took over and I made a profit of £450, the year after that I made a loss of £400! (laughs)
But I farmed the place for 54 years, 250 acres when I started, and I added bits and it was 300 acres by the time I had finished in 1989. The farm has all been sold off, the buildings are all dwellings, and I’ve got the farm house, that’s the basic story. We were all working horses until 1934.
What are your memories of agriculture when you came into it?
When I came into it I think a farm worker got about £10 a week or something like that. There were no holidays, no Saturday afternoons even. I think they had about 5 or 6 men on this place.
People worked 6 days a week?
Yes. We had 20 or 30 cows, 40 acres of cereals and about 50 breeding ewes or something, when I took over. I developed this as a dairy place. When I finshed in ’89 there were 75 cows, a big herd in those days. Nowadays if you haven’t got 400 you are not in the line at all. A complete change of everything.
So it was all run with working horses when you came in?
Yes. We had 5 working horses. A head horseman who had 3 and the second horseman who had 2.
What kind of horses were they?
They were, you know, fluffy things, Shire horses, fluffy feet. We had a cob which my uncle used to ride around checking the cattle, then I took over that job. The cob also ran the two traps, one had hard rubber, that was for Sundays and Bank Holidays, and the other one had iron band, that was the only transport we had. We’d go to Totnes with the butter, my wife’s grandmother and mother used to make butter, it was all hand work.
Then you used to sell the butter in Totnes?
Yes, usually a shopkeeper or someone from Brixham or somebody who ran a dairy shop, you had a contract with them that they would take all your butter and that’s where they used to meet in Totnes, and we used to do the shopping for the household. We used to have a lot more deliveries, we’d have bread delivered, not milk because we didn’t need it, the post of course was delivered, butchers used to deliver, and this was all horse transport, and this gradually changed.
You see two wars have made such a difference. Any thing that would help the war had money added to it in, and the techniques developed in the war were developed into other implements. This is your oil business coming in, fertilisers and pesticides. My first tractor was a second hand Folson in 1934, then I had a Ferguson, when I left farming I had 4 David Browns, just processed through, they had spade lugs on the tractor wheels, then rubber tyres came in, all these developments have been so interesting.
I have been so fortunate to live through 2 wars. You see I registered for joining up but they wouldn’t take me because it was a reserved occupation. My parents weren’t in it then 1934, I married, and war didn’t start until 1939, then I was an air raid warden in 1939, and then as far as I’m concerned there were all sorts of agricultural development committees, the technological development committee, the feeding stuffs committee, I was going to Exeter one day a week, and this is what you felt. You weren’t fighting so this was the thing you could help with. Of course there was a complete fear of starvation from U boats.
The whole Dig For Victory thing of trying to increase production from gardens and allotments, how did that manifest, what was the process that encouraged people…
I was on these committees to try and make farmers produce from every acre of land they could, things like big acres of potatoes that were grown, and we were all rationed as regards meat and all that sort of thing. It seems funny to meet people who haven’t had this sort of thing, you had to do it and that’s it.
What else? Farming became very prosperous. The subsidies that were put on various things we produced in order to get as much produced as possible, no Government had the guts to actually cut them after the war, because agriculture meant something. That is partly what has happened now, there has been a big blitz, an arrogant Government in power, and producing things we don’t want that are subsidised. It has all happened at once. You can’t altogether blame this Government because they have tackled it, but if each Government since the war had gradually reduced it, it’d have been alright, but now it is such a shock to agriculture.
What are your memories of Totnes in the 1930s?
Traps, horses and carts. Once or twice a year they had a horse sale on the Plains, it’s a completely changed place. Dartington Hall of course has changed Totnes more than the War I think. We’ve still got relics of Dartington Hall, and the type of people who came in 1923-25 when the Elmhirsts bought Dartington Hall, millions of American money you see. Dartington Hall was just a relic, the roof was falling in of the Great Hall, and I used to know the manager very well of DH Limited, and he said that the Elmhirsts put in £13 million in one fell swoop into the kitty, so that was very helpful. £13 million meant a hell of a lot, my God!
You have talked about how in the 1930s on the farm the energy mostly came from horses, but what about in the house? Was there electricity then?
We had electricity in 1932.
So before that you would have had paraffin lamps?
We had paraffins lamps, log fires and log stoves. But they had a mains supply to the village from Totnes I think it was, because they didn’t have a distribution place here then, and I tried to get them to bring a line up to Furzedon. In the end they agreed to but on the condition that I would spend at least £30 a year on electricity. I agreed and that’s when we had it. That was just ordinary domestic electrics, but as I got more mechanisation I had a 3 phase supply brought in.
So in 1932 when the electricity came in, apart from lights, what would you have had to run on it?
Lights was the main thing. We gradually went over to electric stoves, television, radio, radio of course came in I used to make radio sets with my pocket money, made one for an old aunt, a 5 valve set, I used to make a useful bit of pocket money with it. A loudspeaker with a big horn, and see when I was away at school I had a crystal set there, I used to hang the aerial out of the window. This was in 1922.
Then electric irons I suppose. We had several kinds of iron before that. One was the plain kind I have there against the door as a door stopper, which you put on the stove. Another had an outside case into which you would put a hot iron, which you heated up on the stove. What else did we have? I don’t think we had electric heaters for quite a while. On the farm, when we got the 3 phase supply, as it developed we got a milking machine, a corn dryer, various things.
When you had the horses in the 30s how much of the land would have been required to feed the horses?
No. They were just on fields where there was grass. The horseman would come back in the winter in the evenings to feed them.
So there was a whole local industry that supported the horses?
There was a blacksmith we used to take them to in Broadhempston. A vet, a chap called Sanders from Buckfastleigh, and a chap who used to come from Chudleigh to castrate the lambs. They used to have fire in the corner of the field and the male lambs were brought into the enclosure, and he would sit on a plank that was on something to keep it off the ground he was about the same height as I am, a longish plank and the chap would sit on one end, and the chap who did the castrating would sit on the other, and the one at the far end would hold the lamb by the front legs on their backs, and this chap would sit with his legs apart and the lamb hind legs under his legs cut out the testicles, he’d put a clamp on the testicle bag first of all, then he would cut out the testicles and then with a hot iron he would cauterise it…
Ouch.
He has vegigris (?) I don’t know how he got the verigris but he put verigris on, I remember the smell of it, and that was how we kept the ram population down. The vets, you see we didn’t have tubercular tests in those days but then we had tubercular testing, and I remember I had a pet cow here and she failed the test. There was a little chap called Triggs down the road who had a small holding and I said to him “I’ve got a cow here that’s producing a good amount of milk, she’s failed the test, are you prepared to take her for 12 months, I could understand if you didn’t want to but it’s up to you”. He said “oh yes I’ll take her”. I said that at the end of 12 months I’ll have her back. So I did, I got the back and she passed the test! Extraordinary that. The test was not infallible by any means.
You were asking about other services. It was only really the vet and the blacksmith, they were the main people
In peoples daily lives people were more skilled in a range of practical skills. What could people do?
Like pottery and that kind of thing? The men used to do their gardening on good Friday, they had a day off and they would work overtime to do the farm garden and make a little bit of money that way, and cut the grass and everything… There was the Mother’s Unionand my uncle was in the Farmers’ Union. I took a postal course in agriculture from Bristol to learn the technical side of farming, I wanted to acquire as much knowledge as possible. Staverton used to have a cricket team and a football team, I used to play rugby for Totnes, until I got married and decided that life was worth living! Rugby has changed a great deal, it used to be a great game, but money has changed it.
During World War Two, where did the training for Dig For Victory come from?
I think it used to be via the Agricultural Discussion Societies. There was one in Kingsbridge which was more go-ahead than here. They used to get some really good speakers. I used to go after cars came in, before that it was too far to go in the trap. Once Dartington Hall started up we had much better speakers here.
What local industries were there?
Well there’s Riverford. John Watson arrived just after World War 2. He took over Riverford Farm, and he was a friend of Pete Trumper who was the one that made the connection between the two of us. John used to ask a lot of questions. We had lots of long chats, and we’d come up with a brilliant idea, we’d discuss it, and then two weeks after I’d see John and I’d ask him “how did that idea go that we’d been talking about”, and he’d say “which idea was that Douglas?” Riverford wasn’t organic then, he developed the organic side with his sons. Now their vegetable boxes go a long way, my daughter infBristol gets one.
What are your memories of Totnes after WW2?
Well Dartington Hall had a lot of influence of course. Totnes had a market, there is no real market anymore. The old one used to be at the top of town. It was every second Tuesday and sold cattle, pigs, and sheep. In the middle of the High Street was the pannier market, which nowadays is out in the open, then it was all covered, with old stalls with top and bottom doors and a separate bit in the middle. Anyone could sell anything, rabiits, and so on.
Then the supermarkets came in, but in fairness the markets were more or less stopped by the time they arrived. I used to take produce to Totnes, then to Newton Abbott, and eventually to Exeter, as transport became cheaper. You talk about cheap oil, but it costs me £600 for oil to heat this house for 3 months!
Where did your food come from?
Looking way back it practically all came from this area. We had a couple of house pigs that ate the rubbish. A local chap would come by, cut their throats and cut them up, and make bacon and hams. We used to preserve it in saltpetre, the wives would make a salt solution and baste it every 2 days, then it was put up on hooks in the dairy to dry. I still have the hooks out there now. I suppose we might have had an orange on very special occasions. There are no seasons now. They just go to a part of the world where they can get it. In those days strawberries were strawberries.
What would your normal supper have been?
The main meal was lunch, not supper, if the husband worked at home. Evening meals were a professionals thing. Lunch was normally roast beef, lamb or mutton, hot or cold, hot or cold chicken, stews, potatoes and veg, peas and beans, potatoes baked or boiled. We had meat every day, hot or cold depending on how the husband and wife were getting on! For tea we had bread and butter, jam and cream. For breakfast it was bacon and eggs. Supper was just a snack meal, bits and pieces of what you liked.
Fruit?
Apples, pears and plums. Apples could be kept all year round. They were kept in a cellar under the house. Certain kinds of pears could be kept. We had plums, greengages, and Victoriaplums, we usually made those into jams.
What other things happened on the farm?
We did haymaking, and silage making, we were the first farm around here to make silage. We used to made it in wooden towers. The Saxons used to build these to the height of about 20 feet. In the early days we used to make hayricks, we’d load the hay in the wagon and bring it onto the rick. Then we had sweeps, pulled by horses. The tines would go under the grass, and be picked up by a metal pole and a pulley on top with a wire led down to grabs.
A chap would stand at one end with the grabs, at the other end another chap with the horse, he would back the horse up to load up, then go forwards and tell hum when to stop, and then the control rope would release the hay. Then I had a Buick car with a sweep on the front, I could drive around the field sweeping up the hay at 30mph! Then we made silage, self-feed silage, using an electric bar that we moved forward each day.
Did you mourn the passing of working horses?
It depends very much on the individual. If economics was your objective then the change away from horses brought great pleasure. If you were artistic and poetic, it was a shame. I started retiring my horses in 1934 when the first tractor arrived, I just stopped replacing them as they died out. The horsemen just became tractor drivers.
Tell me about orchards in the area.
Fursedon Farm used to have 26 acres of orchards, growing cider apples. Now we have none. Whiteways, the cider people, had a place next to the farm, and we used to take our apples to them. Hills, was another one. Now it is all sold, buildings and everything. The countryside has become a commuter area. Staverton used to be all houses for railway workers or farm labourers. There are none of them now, it is all commuters.
How affected would you say your life has been by cheap oil?
Completely affected by it. Compare driving 3 horses to driving a tractor! It is a viable product so to speak. Horses, if you start them at 8am, you have to bring them in by 5pm they are tired out. With tractors on long summer evenings you can just go on, you can continue working after your tea.
Well I guess there is some research going on about growing oil but it won’t really affect me. I shan’t be here to deal with it! For a long time I have thought that we are using up the storage of supply, we just keep on using it, but we have to stop. It’ll be a slow change but a colossal one. Green fuels may be a part of it but there are so many vehicles now! We buy a lot of new cars, but we don’t get rid of enough, so there are more and more.
Would you say that cheap oil has been a blessing or a curse?
A blessing. But it was also a blessing for the type of war we were able to fight. Is it a blessing if you put the two together? I don’t know. I am very glad though to have lived through the period that I have lived through.
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1 Dec 2014
I have sometimes been asked “if you had a prime time TV advertising slot to promote Transition, what would you put on it?” This is a good time to ask that, as our TV channels pour out relentless TV adverts in the run-up to that special time of year when the UK gets set to shell out £74.3bn it can ill afford on its credit cards to buy stuff, half of which will be in landfill by the end of the year.
In this post we’ll explore that, as part of our theme of ‘Less is More’. The questions that underpin this month are:
- What does it look like when people intentionally set out to live with less?
- What can we learn from those alive now or historically, who are living in a way consistent with staying below 2 degrees?
- How does the idea of living with less sit alongside the political reality that lots of people already don’t have enough?
- What benefits do people living with less feel they get from it? What does it add to their lives?
I thought it might be fun, for this December blog, to put on our Transition glasses, and have a look at the various Christmas adverts being put out by the UK stores, and then to have a go at suggesting what the Transition Christmas ad might look like that might fill our one minute airtime. OK, so first of all, it’s that supermarket behemoth, Sainsburys:
This really is so nauseating, manipulative and abhorent, the corporate adoption of the suffering of millions of people to sell bars of chocolate, that it offers nothing to our contemplation of our Transition ad, other than possibly the idea that football is a nice thing to do with other people. It should really have proceeded no further than the brainstorming session at the ad agency, so I think we’ll just move straight on to the John Lewis one:
This is very lovely. Made my wife cry (but then that’s not saying much, she has been known to cry at the opening credits of a film). The reality is though that Mum here could just as easily have bought the second penguin from a charity shop, or actually made it herself. She needn’t have set foot in John Lewis. In fact, as an advert for a Transition Christmas, reshooting the last frame with Mum or Dad coming into the room holding their knitting needles and their black and white wool would have been close to perfect.
Marks and Spencers instead opt for fairies:
Which is kind of odd. Not sure what the message here is. Again, like John Lewis, it’s an ad that takes something we are perfectly good at creating ourselves thank you very much, i.e. a sense of magic, and sells it back to us. Magic is always a good thing to weave into what you’re doing (unless you’re Lord Voldemort of course), but this ad is puzzling really. The Waitrose ad, on the other hand, is fascinating:
Although it is, of course, trying to sell us something, the key thing it ends up selling us is the company’s economic model. It’s an interesting insight into a country racked by austerity and a sense of disempowerment cultivated by corporations and government, that the key selling point of their Christmas ad is “everyone who works at Waitrose, owns Waitrose”. Again, some interesting potential ingredients for our Transition advert. Perhaps Christmas can provide a key breathing space to reflect on our values? Right, on to Tesco (not very often I say that):
Clearly this is not an ad that has a role to play in the creation of a low carbon society. Firstly, it suggests that you’re not doing Christmas properly unless you are illuminating an amount of lightbulbs that wouldn’t look out of place on the Eiffel Tower. Secondly, most people’s experience of the opening part of this ad is that getting your Christmas lights out of the loft is inevitably followed by finding they don’t work, and you need to buy some new ones, generally just because one of the non-replaceable bulbs has gone. So it’s an ad that could be seen as a celebration of planned obsolescence and wasteful energy use. Not good. What about Boots (a UK chain of chemists)?
Very nice. But again, do we need Boots in order to bring families together? It’s doing what advertisers love to do, promoting the things we love and cherish back to us in order to sell us stuff. Makes us feel warm and fuzzy, and then says “oh and by the way, would you like to buy a toothbrush and some emery boards?” Don’t know about you, but I really don’t need that, I can do that myself thanks very much. The department store Debenhams suggest that you will “find your fabulous Christmas” there:
The implication is that you won’t find a “fabulous Christmas” unless you go there. The ad features a gang of kids who have somehow broken into their local Debenhams store and proceed to run amok, but in a good, Christmassy kind of way. In reality of course, the police would be called and child protection officers would want to know where the parents are and why they’re letting their kids roam around closed department stores unattended. This is more of an explicitly “stuff-based” ad, we sell stuff, come and buy it, and then your Christmas will be fabulous. And Argos?
Again, pretty stuff-centric, “here’s all the stuff we sell, get in here and buy it” kind of approach. But they do have Run DMC on the soundtrack, so we can be a bit forgiving, even if it is one of their worst-ever records. There are many more Christmas ads of course out there, you will no doubt be saturated with them by the time we get the other side of Christmas.
So here’s my first stab at our Christmas ad. It draws considerably on elements of the ads above.
It opens with a clearly wealthy business-tycoon, Sir Alan Sugar-type, sitting at a lavish Christmas meal with his family. He is surrounded by the glittering sparkly gifts in the Debenhams ad. There’s a knock at the door. He opens the door to find a queue of people bringing back The Broken Crap of Christmas Past. A good Run DMC track starts. He is handed armfuls of broken Christmas tree lights, battery operated plastic toys that only lasted two weeks, digital radios that went a bit wonky, slippers whose soles decided to part company with the rest of the slipper. The mood is celebratory, that people have a unified sense of purpose, they feel part of something important.
Leaving him looking bewildered, the people head across to a park over the road where a game of football is underway, all ages playing together on the ‘pitch’, lightly dusted as it is with snow. Around the side, people are talking, laughing, people are bringing food out from their homes, setting up a shared Christmas meal. We see people teaching children sewing and other hand crafts. A father is showing his kids and their friends magic tricks. We see people pulling up parsnips from their gardens, chatting to each other and pointing out the solar panels on their roofs, arriving on bicycles. Two elderly women sit talking while knitting penguins. People exchange laughter, stories, companionship rather than lavish gifts. People who haven’t been out of their houses for some time emerge blinking to join the party.
The scene fades to a black background with the caption “Transition”. Then fading in slowly, “It’s not just for Christmas”.
I’m wasted in this Transition lark. I should be working for Saatchi and Saatchi. Enjoy the month.
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17 Nov 2014
Reading a Naomi Klein book is always a deeply absorbing experience. In a sense, the sheer size of them means you have no choice other than to be absorbed (This Changes Everything runs to almost 600 pages). Her two previous masterworks, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine were mind-altering and life-changing for me. This Changes Everything is Klein’s climate change book. It is a powerful, deeply felt, painstakingly-researched book which takes the reader on an incredible journey and makes a radical yet common-sense case. So why is it that by the end I felt underwhelmed?
There is much about the book that is fantastic. She brilliantly unpicks the complexities of our headlong plunge into climate chaos. She destroys the “austerity or extraction” myth, reframing it as “poverty or poisoning”. She sets out the passionate case that:
“climate change is, in fact, a massive job creator, as well as a community rebuilder, and a source of hope in moments when hope is a scarce commodity indeed”.
She identifies capitalism, in particular our current what she calls “extractivist” version, as the central driver of the crisis, but argues that climate change should be the rallying call around which the alternative is built. We’ve tried it the neo-liberals’ way for the last 20 years, she says, and “the soaring emissions speak for themselves”.
We meet the climate denying Heartland Institute, we meet scientists proposing geoengineering (mirrors in space, sulphur pumped into the upper atmosphere, iron filings in the sea etc) and the billionaires claiming to be doing something about it while doing very little (this is not a book Richard Branson will be giving to many people this Christmas). She looks into the right wing mindset behind much of this, writing:
“You would think that turning down the sun for every person on earth is a more intrusive form of big government than asking citizens to change their light bulbs. But that is to miss the point: for the fossil fuel companies and their paid champions, anything is preferable to regulating ExxonMobil, including attempts to regulate the sun”.
She takes the reader deep into the heart of the movements around the world who are doing something about it. We hear about the divestment movement that is spreading with such urgency through universities and other organisations. Her response to the criticism that it will just lead to the sold shares being picked up by other people?
“This misses the power of the strategy: every time students, professors, and faith leaders make the case for divestment, they are chipping away at the social licence with which these companies operate”.
We meet communities mobilising to fight fracking, oil extraction, pipelines and mountaintop removal around the world. We meet ordinary people of all ages standing up and putting their bodies on the line to keep the carbon in the ground and to protect their air, water and future. To me, it felt like this is where Klein feels most comfortable as a writer, reporting on demonstrations on mountainsides, blockades and the politics of resistance.
So why my reluctance to give what is, in so many ways a brilliant book, 10 out of 10? Firstly, I’m not sure how many people actually read books this big any more. It’s a sad reality that less and less people read anything of any length, given the kicking the internet has given most of our attention spans. I was reading this book on the train, and the guy sat next to me told me, almost apologetically, “I haven’t read a book for 3 years!”
Klein has stated that she wrote this book for people who don’t read books about climate change. I would be hugely surprised if any such people read this book. Surely to encourage them to read a book on climate change, making it 564 pages long with no pictures isn’t the smartest place to start? I struggled, and I read this stuff all the time.
Secondly, I had to wait until page 397 for her to write:
“…there is no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real alternatives. Just the glimpse of another kind of economy can be enough to energise the fight against the old one”.
Those words came like water in the desert at that point. I was three quarters of the way through the book, and struggling. We get a paragraph or two on Transition (which feels about 4 years out of date and behind what is actually happening, an occupational hazard of a book that takes 5 years to write), and then we’re back into how to fight fossil fuel companies again.
The stories of native peoples in the US and Canada standing up to fossil fuel companies are inspiring stuff. But this leads to my third problem with it. The subtitle of the book is ‘Capitalism vs the Climate’, yet what I didn’t find here was a reasoned and robust alternative to capitalism. We get a strong dose of what it won’t be like, the many ways in which the current system is deeply flawed. But what might the alternative look like? We are told that a 100% renewable economy is entirely possible, as is a low carbon food system, a transport system fit for a low carbon world and so on.
None of that will come as news to anyone involved in Transition. But what is the alternative economic model to underpin it? Is it an adaptation of capitalism, or something else? We don’t get that, and that feels like a big thing that is missing. This isn’t a problem unique to Klein, a spectrum of different models exists, from Steady State models, to green growth models to complete localisation approaches. Although Transition’s REconomy work is a tool for local economic regeneration, it isn’t a new economic model, although it would form part of one. But the question of what an economic Plan B would look like goes largely unanswered.
By the time I reached page 417, I felt drained, exhausted. I had reached saturation point: “not another story about why fossil fuel companies are the bad guys, please!” We were convinced of that within the first 10 pages. She falls into the classic rational deficit strategy, i.e. if you give people enough depressing information they will respond. But it is clear now that that usually doesn’t work. Appealing to values is also really important. Writing in Transition Free Press, Tom Crompton of Common Cause (whose work is mentioned in this book) wrote:
“An understanding of values … points to the importance of not getting hung up on the issues (energy insecurity or climate change, for example). Rather, any group working for social change would do well to free itself from a narrow issues-focus and ask in more free-ranging terms: “What are the issues that matter most to the people whom we most need to engage?” and then, crucially, “How do we campaign and communicate on these more resonant issues in a way that connects with intrinsic values?”
Although there are occasional sparks, it feels to me that this approach of speaking directly to those values that will resonate across the political spectrum is somewhat lacking (at least, until the end of the book, as we shall see). She fails, it seems to me, to consider the impact on the reader of chapter after chapter of grim events, people, news and statistics. This is a surprise, given that in her brilliant Guardian Live interview she recently said, of Transition:
“The other thing that I think the Transition movement does really well is to create spaces for people to talk about the emotional side to this crisis … That it isn’t just an outer transition, but also we have to go through our own personal transformation, and that also involves expressing that grief. It’s something that the feminist movement has done well, and a lot of people in the Transition Town movement who are part of this Inner Transition piece of it, come out of the feminist movement, because there’s an understanding that if you’re going to collapse peoples’ world views, you have to stick around to pick up the pieces”.
Yet it isn’t until the penultimate chapter of the book, ‘The Right to Regenerate’, that Klein creates some space for herself to “talk about the emotional side to this crisis”. Before then it has been a relentless wave of dreadful people, ghastly things happening, and the climate science which is deeply, deeply troubling. In a very moving chapter she takes us through her numerous attempts to conceive a child, numerous miscarriages, and her own lifestyle and work patterns that were injurious to her, and potentially, to her fertility. We hear of her visits to communities so damaged by the pollution from oil and gas companies, and plastics manufacture, that fertility is being decimated.
She identifies as one of the worst side effects of the ‘extractivist’ approach, alongside climate change, as the impacts it has on fertility, and the ability of life to regenerate itself. She quotes Native American writer and educator Leanne Simpson, talking about her peoples’ teachings and governance structures: “our systems are designed to promote more life”. At this point in the book (page 442), I sat bolt upright for the first time. Here is the distinction. This is what we strive to do in Transition, and in so many other movements trying to sort this out by applying holistic thinking to problems caused by siloed institutions and linear thinking. We are all striving to create communities that create more life, rather than destroy it.
What I wish is that this was where Klein had started This Changes Everything. I would have so loved her to apply her passion, her visionary writing, her unrivalled power as a writer, to what is breaking through rather than what is breaking down (to borrow an expression from Positive News). If it’s a book written for people who don’t read books about climate change it needs a different approach, one I could only find in the last couple of chapters. In the Guardian Live interview she says:
“A lot of what we call apathy is just people not knowing how to deal with the overwhelming emotions. So you just push it away”.
My sense is that the relentless presenting of grim information, morally-bankrupt politicians and oil company executives, deranged geoengineering scientists, corrupt governance systems are something most people, on some level, already know about, as she suggests above. But as she says, people don’t know how to deal with it. This Changes Everything is heavy on numbing information, and sparse on suggestions about how to deal with it. George Marshall of COIN, in a blog sharing his thoughts on Klein’s book, wrote:
“Crucially – and where Klein’s book is surprisingly disengaged with the evidence base – we also need to have a plan for building the widespread public support necessary for getting there in the first place”.
I wondered if a better approach, and one that might have taken less of a toll on Klein personally, would have been to write a smaller, more easily-digestable book, built around the last two chapters. It would have been powerful, seminal, rousing, inspirational. As it is, I don’t know how many people would have made it that far into its abundance of pages. Klein is too valuable to this movement, and as a reader I got a clear sense in places of how much this book took out of her. It needn’t have. Less can be more.
Her comparisons at the end of the book between the battle to save the climate and the campaign to end slavery are very powerful. Abolition is the closest thing she can find historically to change on a huge scale that happened in a short time frame. It’s inspirational stuff. Her argument that climate change is the moment to push for everything that progressive movements have worked towards for hundreds of years is a persuasive one, and it was refreshing to see Owen Jones, one of few emergent voices on the Left but who has spoken little about climate change, chairing her Guardian Live event. Her argument that climate justice, social justice and ecological justice are the same thing, is timely and urgently needed. My only fear is how many people will make it that far.
My favourite bit came near the end of the book, and has powerful implications for Transition. It’s an important point, so I will quote it in full:
“Though these movements (that led to the end of slavery) all contained economic arguments as part of building their case for justice, they did not win by putting a monetary value on granting equal rights and freedoms. They won by asserting that those rights and freedoms were too valuable to be measured and were inherent to each of us. Similarly, there are plenty of solid economic arguments for moving beyond fossil fuels, as more and more patient investors are realising. And that’s worth pointing out. But we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game – arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous, since they imply that there is an acceptable price for allowing entire countries to disappear, for leaving untold millions to die on parched land, for depriving today’s children of their right to live in a world teeming with the wonders and beauties of creation”.
It is an important reminder as we promote and discuss Transition, that the economic case, the REconomy side, is vital, but by also arguing that a low carbon future will meet our needs better, and that living in “a world teeming with the wonders and beauties of creation” resonates with everyone. It needs to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a good way. Although brilliant, insightful, powerful, timely and undoubtedly vitally-needed, This Changes Everything could have articulated that world far better, as an invitation, as a painting of what must inevitably define our future. George Marshall’s latest book, as captured in the talk he gave to launch it, offers a number of other, sometimes counter-intuitive, approaches to engage more widely around this issue.
I’ll leave the last word to the Beautiful Solutions section of the This Changes Everything website, which puts what feels missing from the book better than I have been able to above:
“Resistance is essential, but it’s not enough. As we fight the injustice around us, we also have to imagine — and create — the world we want. We have to build real alternatives in the here and now — alternatives that are not only living proof that things can be done differently, but that actively challenge, and eventually supplant, the power of the status quo”.
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