22 Sep 2014
Richard Louv is a journalist and author of a number of books, most famously Last Child in the Woods, first published in 2005. His most recent book is The Nature Principle. Last Child in the Woods coined the term ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ to describe the impacts that isolation from nature could be seen to be having on a generation of children. He is also a founder of the Children and Nature Network. When I spoke to him, I started by asking how Nature Deficit Disorder manifests more widely in society.
Many of the kids I interviewed for Last Child in the Woods are adults now. One of the things we know from the research is that almost all environmentalists, conservationists, whatever we want to call ourselves, had some transcendent experiences in nature when we were kids, where we felt close to nature and had a personal relationship with nature. What happens if that ends?
What happens if most experience becomes virtual, disconnected from the natural world? Who will be the future stewards of the earth? It is true that there will always be environmentalists and there will always be conservationists, but if we’re not careful, environmentalists and others who care about the future of nature will carry nature in their briefcases, not in their hearts. That’s a very different relationship and I don’t think it is sustainable. That’s one impact.
The other impacts are extensions of what we know about the effect of the natural world on children. Throughout our lives we have chances to grow, we have chances to grown new neural pathways. We have chances to be healthier psychologically and physically. We have challenges to our cognition or potential cognitive improvement. We of course have to make a living. We raise our families. We have to decide how best to be happy or pursue happiness.
In every one of those areas, the emerging research – and it’s only emerging fairly recently, in the last 12-15 years – whether it’s kids or adults, this research shows that having more nature in our lives can contribute positively. Particularly in the area of mental health. There seems to be more research on mental health than there is on physical health, although physical health is starting to catch up.
There’s some good research being done in the UK – the University of Essex is doing great stuff. Some of it looks at people on treadmills in gyms and compares how they do to another group of people who are expending the exact same number of calories but they’re doing it outside in green exercise, hiking or gardening. In both cases, the same number of calories is burnt. For the people who are on treadmills in gyms, their blood pressure gets better, their psychological wellbeing improves.
But people who burn the same number of calories in green exercise, outdoors, in more natural settings get even better. We really don’t understand why that’s true. This is a terribly under-researched arena. It’s almost an academic scandal that only recently have researchers in the academic world really looked seriously at how exposure to the natural world shapes our development both physically and mentally, and that includes our cognitive development too.
I took my kids on holiday a couple of weeks ago down to Cornwall, further down in the South West here. One evening I took them for a walk down a lane and we saw glow worms in the hedge which was the first time they’d ever seen glow worms, and I think possibly the first time I had since I was a child and my parents took me out one evening to go and see glow worms in the hedge. It was a very magical moment, a very magical experience. I wonder what your sense is of what happens to us when we have experiences like that? Why do they matter so much? What do they do to us?
Rachel Carson wrote about the “sense of wonder” in a book of the same name. She understood this early on. First there is the genetic component of that. E.O. Wilson at Harvard talks about his “biophilia” hypothesis, that we are hard wired as a species to have an affiliation with the rest of nature. Studies have been done about the images that human beings are most attracted to. This work has been done in all kinds of cultures, all kinds of settings; among people who have never spent much time in nature as well as those living fully in the natural world.
What they find is that the images that human beings are most attracted to are images of nature, and of those images, images of landscapes. The number one image that humans are attracted to are images of the savannah. And where are we from? That doesn’t prove that there’s a genetic link or a genetic connection to that past, but it certainly illustrates the conversation. This is part of who we are.
One 11 year old girl I interviewed said – this was in my own grade school, back in Kansas City – this little girl I’d been told to listen to in particular by the teacher there – she called this little girl her “little poet”. This was one of the few schools, by the way, where I found the kinds were still going out in the woods in any kind of number at all.
I asked them “what do you see when you’re in the woods?”As a kid I may have talked about Cowboys and Indians, these kids talked about National Geographic. That’s what they projected into the woods. They talked about space, Star Wars. But this one little girl stood up and she said “when I’m in the woods, I feel that I am in my mother’s shoes. I had a special place. It was a little dug out hole underneath a big tree in the woods and I kept my blanket down there. I would go down there and lie on my blanket and look up through the leaves and branches, and I would think of my poems”. She said “one day I went down there and my tree had been cut down and my blanket was gone, and my special place no longer existed”. And she said “when they cut down my tree, they cut down part of me”.
I don’t think the little poet was speaking metaphorically. She was speaking correctly and realistically. If E.O. Wilson is right and this emerging research about this impact on our health and our development is correct, then literally this is part of us. This is one of the reasons why I’ve argued for some time – I did in The Nature Principle, I did in a piece for Orion magazine several years ago where I argued that this should be a human right, to have a positive connection to nature.
September of last year, the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, with some input from several sources including the Children and Nature Network passed a resolution, saying in fact that children have a human right to a positive connection to the natural world and to a healthy environment. That’s a big step.
What does a healthy relationship with technology look like? I noticed that you have been doing a few media appearances over the summer with the question about surely kids should be outdoors rather than sitting inside playing on their XBoxes all day. What does a healthy relationship with technology look like?
Both in Last Child but particularly in The Nature Principle, I try to make very clear that I’m not anti-tech. You and I are talking via Skype right now. It’s hard to by anti-tech while we’re talking on Skype! I’m not. For a long time I was an early adopter, but now I think I’m a late arrival, I’m falling behind. In The Nature Principle I talk about something called ‘the hybrid mind’.
The best way to describe that is I met a fellow who trains people how to become pilots of cruise ships. We need a few good pilots of cruise ships, apparently. He said he gets two kinds of student. One kind grew up mainly on couches, playing video games, watching television and in front of computers. He said that that kind of student has a great talent and great ability that I need on my ships. That kind of student is really good at the electronics and I have a lot of electronics on my ships.
He said the other kind of student grew up mainly outside. Maybe they were in an agricultural community, maybe they just did a lot of camping and hiking. But he said that that kind of student who grew up mainly outdoors also has a great talent that I need. That kind of student actually knows were the ship is. He wasn’t being facetious or funny – I laughed because I thought it was pretty funny, but he was being serious. He said their senses are more attuned to literally where the ship is in space as it’s moving, and he needs that kind of talent too, obviously.
He said his ideal student would be someone who has both sets of abilities. Both the set that comes from electronics, but also he needs that other balancing set of senses that are developed more in the natural world. That to him would be an ideal student. In The Nature Principle, I call that ‘the hybrid mind’.
I gave a speech in Boston recently. It’s an annual conference called Learning and the Brain, and it’s a very big conference put together by MIT and I believe Harvard and others. It’s heavily focused on technology. I presented this idea about the hybrid mind there. One reason was that the educators there had a sense of relief that I was not accepting the idea that we need to flood our schools with more technology. There’s quite a lot there already.
There is a big economic force for more technology in our schools to essentially immerse kids in technology. That economic force knows exactly what kind of future school it wants. The good news is that testing as we know it will disappear. To me, the not so good news is that we won’t need that kind of testing any more because the machines will be watching kids all the time. Every keystroke, everything they do. That economic force would like schools to be filled with video games, literally, as teaching tools.
None of that has very much to do with going outdoors and having cognitive improvement from what nature gives us. There’s a lot of research on that that really shows significant improvements in test scores and so forth from taking your class outside into nature. So I don’t accept that as the future.
That doesn’t mean I’m anti-tech though. Technology will be there whether we like it or not and some of that is great for education. But the point being, if we focused on the hybrid mind as one of the goals of education, then we would get the best of both worlds.
The technology people in the audience came up to me afterwards and they too were relieved that I’d said that because I didn’t attach technology as evil. That’s not the issue. Being a Luddite is not the goal. Having a sense of balance is the goal. In our schools, for instance, I think that for every dollar we spend on the virtual we should spend another dollar on the real. If we do that, we’ll be ok.
Is it your sense that our separation from nature is one of the key things that’s at the heart of ecological crisis that we face?
Yes. Perhaps I should add, a way to look at technology that I do in The Nature Principle is that the more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need. It’s a kind of equation that we need to apply to, I think, every area of our lives. Our lives are going to get more technological. But we can increase the amount of nature around us.
One of those ways is through conservation, through conserving what nature we have left. I know that the definition of nature can be tricky. I won’t even go into that unless you want me to, but conservation is essential if we’re going to have that sense of balance with technology. It’s essential for many other reasons obviously, for biological reasons, for health reasons and so forth.
But in The Nature Principle, I make the argument that conservation is no longer enough. Now we need to create nature. That’s a different way of looking at environmentalism, I think. By that I mean different kinds of cities. I mean bringing back butterfly and bird migration routes by replanting our yards in native species. Even in the densest urban neighbourhoods, green roofs that can bring back the migratory routes of native species. We can enrich our lives in that way. But if we’re only trying to conserve what we have left, I think that over time, if that’s all we do that’s a losing game.
If we, in addition to conserving every square inch of wilderness that we still have, we begin to create nature where we live, work, learn and play in new ways, that’s a different kind of future and I think it’s the route that the Transition towns are taking. You would be able to talk better to that than I can, of course.
With Transition groups now around the world working at that community level, what would your advice be to them on how to bring the insights from what you do into the work that they’re doing?
I don’t want to presume to tell anyone how to do that, because the Transition movement is so far ahead of so many other efforts around the world that I wouldn’t presume to give a prescription to it or to tell it it could do better. It’s doing great things and I write about it with admiration in The Nature Principle. I think there is an overarching issue that environmentalism in general has ignored often. Not always. I don’t think all environmentalism necessarily, and I don’t think this applies to the Transition movement.
I’ve become increasingly concerned over time about how we talk about the future. Firstly to our kids, but also to ourselves. I’ve become convinced that most Americans – and I think this would be true of most people in the UK and most people in the so-called developed world and perhaps beyond that, any place where there is fast-growing urbanisation and the Western media has permeated – I think most people carry around images of the far future that look a lot like Blade Runner or Mad Max or I guess The Hunger Games.
At least there are a few trees in The Hunger Games. In the United States at least, and I bet this is true of the UK, the number one fiction genre for young adults is called ‘dystopic fiction’. It’s about a post-apocalyptic world. It’s about a world that not even vampires are having a good time in. My feeling is that there’s nothing wrong with dystopic literature. In fact, there’s everything right. 1984 was a good warning.
But what happens when our narrative about the future, our internal subconscious images that we carry around all the time become dystopic, become predominantly post-apocalyptic? I’m talking predominantly about a subconscious view of the future and the far future. Not next week or the year after, but where are we headed.
I spend a lot of time with students these days, and some students at De Paul University took me to lunch. They wanted to talk to me about their future. These were all environmental studies students. They were already committed to the environment. One of them said that he tried to join some of the local chapters of some of the big environmental organisations and he said it didn’t work out for him.
He said “for one thing, they all look like you Mr Louv”, I said “oh thanks a lot!” In other word he was saying they all look old. In fact, one of the largest environmental organisations in the world – and I won’t name it as I don’t like embarrassing them – their average membership age I believe is 78 and their average new member is 74. The old members get together and they haze the new members.
That has been true for some time of the major environmental organisations. They’re like newspapers. Newspaper readers have got older and older. The big environmental organisations are worried about that. They’re worried that they’re going to age out. That’s because of two reasons.
One is that they haven’t, until recently, – and they’re doing a lot now – they haven’t done much to reach out to young people. The second reason had to do with what a young woman at that table told me. This student told me, and she’s a very hip young woman. I know that because she had tattoos.
She said “I’m 20 years old. All my life I’ve been told it’s too late”. I thought about that for a minute and then I said “20 years, that’s about the window. That’s about right”. That’s the window that the news media (I was involved with the news media for a long time) and western entertainment media, but also to an extent environmentalism itself, that’s the message that’s been getting through. That it’s too late.
Yes, other messages come through, but I’m talking about the one that settles deeply in people’s psyche. If I’m right, and most people are carrying around those dominant images of the far future as being post-apocalyptic, that is maybe a larger barrier than even climate change. You can’t do much about climate change unless you have the idea that the future can actually be not just adequate but better.
I use the word sustainable, but I think that word has limitations. To most Americans, at least, the word conjures up energy efficiency and that’s it. It’s turned into a technical term. It describes survival, getting by, breaking even. Rightly or wrongly, and I know there are broader definitions and it started out more broadly than that, at least among Americans, that’s how most people interpret that word. I think if that is our goal, we won’t get to sustainability. We won’t get even close to energy efficiency if that’s our goal. We have to set the bar much higher in order to get even to that goal.
That’s why increasingly, rather than talking about sustainability or sustainable cities, I talk about “nature-rich cities”. Nature-rich schools. Nature-rich towns. Nature-rich workplaces. A nature-rich civilisation. The idea that nature brings us wealth, in the deepest sense. It brings us out of our loneliness as a species. Yes, it brings energy efficiency if we do it correctly but it brings an enrichment to our lives that we get in no other way. When we begin to see the far future that way, then we begin to see not just energy efficient cities but nature rich cities.
We see the city like a garden. Simply a city that is beautiful. We bring the idea of beauty back into it when we begin to see those images of the future.
Martin Luther King said and demonstrated in many ways that any culture, any movement will fail if it cannot paint a picture of a world that people will want to go to. I think we’ve been failing at painting that picture. The Transition movement is, I believe, one of the few bright spots where images are being painted, not just of a ‘sustainable’ energy efficient future, but a beautiful future, a wonderful future, a better future than what we have now. If we can’t have that goal, we won’t get to the goal of energy efficiency or survival.
The above is an edited version of our conversation. You can hear that in full, or download it, below:
Read more»
19 Sep 2014
David Nobbs is a writer, mostly of novels, of which he has done over 20. He has also written for television, most famously The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and A Bit of a Do. He is soon to turn 80 but is still working full time, and lives in Harrogate in Yorkshire. He recently published The Second Life of Sally Mottram, the first mainstream novel which includes Transition as a key element of its storyline, which we reviewed here. We talked to him by phone, about the book, its origins, and what makes a good story.
Could you tell us where the idea of The Second Life of Sally Mottram came from, of doing a novel about Transition?
I’ve been interested in Transition almost since it started. I was particularly stimulated by my stepdaughter Kim who lives in the Lot valley in France. When I go to visit her, she has always been putting books on the sort of policies that Transition stands for in my way and has eventually been part of the production team making a film about Transition in the Lot. And I thought I’d like to write something about it, but equally I didn’t want to write a book that just told what it was and also I wanted to have a central character who had a life outside it.
I have done one book before with a woman leading character, Going Gently, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing and I felt it was time I had another female leading character. I don’t know how Sally came to visit me in my thoughts but I thought about her, and then I thought I want this to be an optimistic book and I read The Good Companions by J.B. Priestly which I had read before and regarded as an archetypal feel-good book. And I realised you have to go through bad in order to feel good if it’s not to seem sentimental. And it was these ideas that I took to the writing.
So what was it that attracted you about Transition? What is it that you personally find exciting about it?
I just find the whole concept exciting. I just think it’s a better, healthier, less expensive – and I don’t mean in money terms, I mean less expensive in terms of the environment and obesity and the destruction of things on a human scale. I just think it fights for a lot of the things that I like in the world.
How has the book been received since it came out?
The book’s been very well received. I think there’s a big problem with books now in communication. A lot of people say to me “I’ve read all your books”, but I then discover they haven’t read the last two because they didn’t know they were out. The big bookshops are much less proactive, and when you go for books online or on Amazon, you look for the book you want. You don’t browse. I do find the publicity of getting books to the attention of the readers is very difficult and quite depressing.
One of the things that’s been interesting in Transition from the beginning has been discussion about the role of story in communicating something like Transition. What for you are the key elements of a good story?
The key elements of a good story, for me, are that it makes you care about the people that you’re reading about. When I read I want to identify with people and with their problems. I root for them and hope they have a happy ending, which is not possible all the time or just becomes tedious and predictable. I don’t read a book in order to find out who did it. That’s not my kind of book.
A good story is a story about people who are worth following, who are worth investing emotion in. That’s my fundamental quality. I also like people to laugh. I am now known as a comic writer which is a phrase I don’t quite like. I am a writer with comedy in my books. But I do want jokes, humour anyway, and I don’t turn it down when I can think of it. I would love to write like P.G. Wodehouse, things that are just lovely books that you can take away and throw away your cares. I care too much about things and these get dragged in as well. So it’s a mixture of comedy, of caring and of emotion.
You write at the beginning of the book that Potherthwaite isn’t a real place, but are you able to say if there was a particular place you had in mind? You’ve got maps drawn of it and everything at the beginning of the book.
I’d never done a map before! I did the map because I just wanted the proper book to look as attractive as it can. I didn’t draw the map, and I felt it could have been a little more imaginative. But I just wanted it to look real. No, I haven’t got a place that I based it on. In some of my other books, my Henry Pratt series, I’ve got a place called Firmarsh whose name derives from two places near Rotherham, Fircroft and Rawmarsh which were mining villages. It’s a town and that I can say is a kind of mixture of Barnsley and Rotherham.
But I don’t have a proper place for this, and while I was writing it, I did in fact visit the Pennines. I know them quite well because I live not far from them, but I didn’t make special trips and go round making notes. I created it in my head as my fictional place.
One of the things that struck me that I mentioned in the review that I did was about how they managed to do Transition with virtually no use of email or Facebook anything like that.
You made the point that maybe one or two things weren’t perhaps totally convincing. I don’t know enough of Transition and I suspect I’d probably agree with you if I did. I suppose it reflects things I’m interested in. I’m sure a lot of it was done in real life through computers and email and all these things. I can’t say I don’t use them – I’m on Twitter so I can hardly say I avoid social networks.
If I was deeply involved politically or in any movement, I’m sure I would have contacted people mainly through those. I just thought it’s more entertaining for me, and I hope for the reader, to do it on a more human scale.
I think a book about people sitting around tweeting each other probably doesn’t have a lot going for it! I really loved it and I think you beautifully capture the sense of momentum, of feeling part of something changing around you, something positive and optimistic that you can actually see changing. Did you draw on that from anything that you’ve personally experienced?
Not in a way that I can be specific about. One or two people occur who reflect people that I’ve met in my life. Sir Norman, the rich industrialist who doesn’t really know how to enjoy his life is loosely based on someone I and my stepchildren knew near Marlow a very long time ago and who is now long dead I would think. I do use experiences that I’ve had but not to any great extent. I really do like making things up.
You frame what Sally does in Potherthwaite in terms of responding to climate change and peak oil like Transition does, but it seems like actually what happens is a response to much, much more than that. You put it very beautifully at the beginning when she’s talking to her friends in a restaurant and she says “I see my town dying and I’m not happy to put up with that.” What, for you, does what she creates in that town, what else is she responding to there, do you think?
I think she’s responding to a sense that there’s a creeping lack of humanity and much less contact between people in our lives today. The supermarket is a case in point, where you don’t really speak to the people who serve you and you don’t speak to the other people shopping. You try to avoid them as much as possible. And in a lot of our lives we try to get in and out without communication.
My wife broke her finger and we were in A & E last week. We saw a friend in there and she didn’t see us. We talked about it afterwards, and we only just caught sight of her before we went because we were sort of not wanting to make contact with people. There’s a lot of that going on, I think, now, and we try to fight against it.
Read more»
17 Sep 2014
I like the idea of ‘making space for Nature’. I like space, gaps and emptiness. I like Nature. Yet as I began to unpack the topic in readiness for this blog I began to feel like I was sitting in a box looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Nature is all we have, we are nature, the idea of making space is a no-brainer, but to me it means making space in our brains for thinking about nature in a different way. A way that involves rights for Nature as well as responsibilities for humans, a concept of citizenship that includes being a steward of a place, the knowledge that all economies are underpinned by ecologies and if we don’t start taking care of our ecologies the future is pretty bleak.
In 2013 I was part of a small team of people that worked with the local communities in and around Falkirk (near Glasgow, in Scotland) to draw up a Community Charter in opposition to the first application in the UK for commercial drilling for unconventional gas. I had just come out of a group enquiry about what an effective community response to a local ecocide (harm caused to an local ecosystem beyond its capacity to regenerate) would look like. And here was a potential ecocide in the making that was calling to be addressed, and a community looking for help.
Unbeknownst to the peoples of Falkirk, the Australian company Dart Energy had been prospecting for coal bed methane in the area for the previous 20 years. With their application for a drilling licence, Dart’s intent became public knowledge. Families with long-term ties to the area who had recently moved back into new housing—to a place that had been scarred with coal mines and industry but was now green and health-full—found that some of the drilling would go right underneath their homes.
A small group of residents formed and compiled an impressive community mandate, detailing the harm that would be potentially caused to human and environmental health by the toxins used in the drilling (similar to fracking), the wholesale disruption to the environment and the release of underground gases into air and water. This was the point at which we connected: an area that had historically been dumped on, now in recovery, looking for a way to say not just what it was against but what it wanted its economy and ecology to be like for its children and grandchildren.
What we came up with was a process and a document. The process was a community consultation in the form of a world café at which we convened conversations around very simple questions such as: When you were considering buying a house here, what did you picture? How would we like our children to enjoy this place in 20 years’ time? What are the local places in the landscape that are important to me and why? What do you enjoy about living here and why? There were sub questions too:
- What types of green spaces are there?
• How will ‘sense of community’ be maintained (e.g. events/public spaces)?
• What kind of job opportunities are there?
• What kind of leisure activities are there?
From off the densely-written sheets of flip-chart paper the community, at a further gathering, pulled a list of all the tangible and intangible assets that had been surfaced, as well as the values that the community had in common. We knew how important it was for the words of the community to be faithfully transferred to the document, the Charter. To give you a flavour of them here are two out of the 16 assets that the Charter for the peoples of Larbert, Stenhousemuir, Torwood, Airth, Shieldhill and California (the Concerned Communities of Falkirk) is calling to protect:
[6] Our natural resources and our aspiration for them to be used sustainably: to never allow our renewable resources to be diminished faster than they are generated, to ensure our non-renewable resources are reused and recycled effectively, and to avoid all related activities that might compromise our ecosystem.
[11] Our vision of a truly sustainable local economy, and our achievements to date: our commitment to developing a local economy based on managing and improving our Assets through, for example, leisure activities, tourism, renewable energy, ethical business and farming, recovering and restoring our historical and natural heritage, in ways which promote civic pride and continuity for present and future generations. Our aspiration for local economic development which offers long term job security and satisfaction for our children, and prosperity and time to enjoy our lives; where locally generated money remains in local circulation; that paves the way to an economy that does not risk the long term integrity, viability and resilience of our planetary boundaries, and thus contributes to the overall well-being of our community and ecosystem.
Just above the place in the Charter where the assets are listed is this statement:
“We the peoples of the Concerned Communities of Falkirk have come together and agreed that the following tangible and intangible Assets constitute our Cultural Heritage and underpin the qualities fundamental to the health, well-being, cohesion and identity of our communities, our natural environment and of the Earth itself.”
The point we were trying to get at, and that is enshrined in the 1985 Environmental Impact Assessment directive from the EU, is that human culture needs to be included as an integral part of the environment when any decisions about development are to be taken. We were offering a definition of sustainability that includes process: the process by which the local community has a voice in decision-making. We also wanted to make a case for participatory democracy that could sit within the planning framework.
The Charter was presented to local MSP Angus McDonald in July 2013 who then took it to the Scottish Cabinet. You can see it here. It has been signed by Larbert, Stenhousemuir and Torwood Community Council, 31 local farmers, hundreds of local residents and over half of Falkirk Council. At the public enquiry that took place this March and April following objections to Dart Energy’s application the Charter played a key role in uniting the community behind a shared vision. We are still waiting to hear the outcome of the enquiry, which is due this month. Meanwhile, St Ives in Cornwall is going to embark on creating its Charter in early 2015 and Totnes is thinking about it as part of the Neighbourhood Plan.
And what, you may ask, has all this got to do with people in Transition communities making space for nature? Firstly, we can work hard at reviving our local economies and creating green jobs but if we neglect to pay attention to the wellbeing of our air, water and soil we are by-passing what makes economies long-term sustainable and humans and other species healthy. Second, I see communities up and down the country opposing inappropriate developments of roads, industry, resource extraction and housing case by case. Raising fighting funds, spending huge amounts of energy and volunteer time, getting exhausted and then floored when the landowner or developer submits a second modified application.
That’s not sustainable, and it means that local government isn’t working in the interests of communities. It’s not that all development is bad and needs to be stopped. No, it is rather that communities should have a voice at the planning table in which they can point to their agreed assets and values as a benchmark for deciding which developments they see as beneficial and which detrimental, both from the point of view of the environment and of the community itself. Without that agency, communities become demoralised and the values of social and environmental concern decline while the values of big business and state dependency come to dominate. Governance may seem boring, but it is the linchpin for communities that want to make space for Nature and sustainable Transition-type local economies.
Isabel Carlisle is Education Coordinator for Transition Network. She is also a Trustee of Transition Town Totnes and a founder of the Community Chartering Network: www.communitychartering.org
Read more»
17 Sep 2014
Transition Langport started with the appreciation and love of nature at its heart, for nature, with its abundance and support for life, is what brings so many of us together. We want to protect, enhance and value nature’s life supporting qualities. As a community we are lucky to live at the heart of the Somerset levels surrounded by the natural environment. As humans we are part of nature and our awareness of wildlife and seasonal changes also highlights the effect climate change is having on our weather and wildlife.
The Somerset Levels have in the last few years seen some of the worst flooding in summer as well as winter which has impacted greatly on the people and wildlife that live here all year round. Our first gathering of the community was over a shared meal of local seasonal food, which stimulated our local food co-operative called Elderflowers Food co-op, launched during the late spring when elderflowers were in full bloom.
The activities that bring most people to interact with Transition Langport are those involving nature. Hedge laying was one of our first activities at a field near the entrance to the town. A group of all ages and abilities came together to learn a rural skill and to create an attractive traditional hedge creating a sense of pride and natural habitat.
The field was also the location for our first community tree planting which lead to engagement with another project working to bring the elders and younger members of the community together in positive activities in the community and skill sharing.
The field has now become allotments for local people to grow their own food. It is amazing what happens when people came together for a common positive action and the conversations and ideas that flow during these activities out in nature. I believe we all have an inherent bond with nature. It makes us feel happy and healthy and makes us feel we are doing something positive and worthwhile for the benefit of wildlife, each other and ourselves.
Litter picking is another regular activity we do seasonally. Being a town so close to the countryside, the impact humans make by their consumption of fast food and mass-produced packaged sweets and snacks, quickly impacts on our green spaces and waterways. Most people living here love the locality to nature and don’t want to have a negative impact on it. Litter picking as an activity gives people an opportunity to highlight the impact packaging (made from oil) has on their own habitat and environment as well as the impact on nature.
These activities enable the wider community to make comment and join in with their passion for looking after nature and dislike of rubbish too! It was during these litter picks and conversations that stimulated the Plastic Bag Free town campaign for Langport, an ongoing project to rid the town of plastic bags. Demonstrating the volume of litter and plastic bags collected by the community and showing the local businesses has helped to greatly reduce the number of outlets supplying plastic bags to shoppers.
Transition Langport has now planted over 1,000 trees with community members including families of several generations. People have a connection and understanding of the value trees have to absorb CO2 to reduce one of the climate change greenhouse gases, creates oxygen for us to breath, fruit for us to eat and support wildlife habitats and food resources.
Plus tree planting is a great outdoor activity for all ages and leaves people with a feeling of achievement, giving something back to nature, helping to combat climate change and leaving a legacy for the future for both people and nature. We also have an annual apple picking and traditional cider making event. which is a great way to make use of the traditional cider orchards that have started to dwindle over the years and also a great social event.
Our most recent project for nature is the Barn Owl Box we are the new custodians of (donated from the Hawk and Owl Trust and Somerset Wildlife Trust) and have enjoyed looking for the best tree in our community to place it in where the Owls will have access to the best mice hunting fields and breeding habitats.
All these activities bring people together creating a space to share interests and an opportunity to get away from computers or the TV, but most importantly, a space to get to know each other and share a common love of nature. We enjoy looking after nature as after all it looks after us.
The added value is that there are always new ideas being discussed, an opportunity to be outdoors together doing something good for the heart (both physically and metaphorically) and of course the best part is the laughter.
Cara Naden. Transition Langport.
Read more»
16 Sep 2014
Ted Trainer’s recent paper, Transition Townspeople, we need to think about Transition: just doing stuff is far from enough!, generated a certain amount of attention at the recent Degrowth conference in Leipzig. Most of what I would say in response to it I have already said in previous exchanges with Trainer, and his arguments remain much the same. But given that it’s always useful to reform and re-examine assumptions and beliefs, and that several people asked for my thoughts on it, here are some reflections.
The core of Trainer’s argument in this paper is that:
“The path the Transition Towns and related movements are presently on will lead only to a grossly and increasingly unsustainable and unjust consumer society, containing lots of community gardens etc”.
It’s a statement that offers a really useful opportunity to reflect on both Trainer’s arguments and how he presents them. The crux of Trainer’s issue with Transition appears in the following paragraph, where he argues that greens and the left:
“…fail to recognise a) that rich countries have resource and ecological impact rates that are utterly unsustainable and cannot possibly be spread to all people b) if a sustainable and just world is to be achieved these rates must be cut by something like 90%, c) that cannot be done unless we scrap a growth economy, reduce GDP to a small fraction of present levels, stop market forces from determining our fate, radically restructure the geography of settlements, largely scrap the economy, switch almost entirely from representative democracy to participatory democracy, and, above all, abandon affluence”.
Many of us read so much writing like this, that it’s really worth pausing and looking at this more closely. It falls into exactly the trap that some on the green Left have fallen into for 40 years, which for me is one of the factors, alongside capitalism’s growth imperative, the normalising of hierarchical habits and ways of thinking, the promotion of extrinsic values and other factors, which combined mean that we are so catastrophically losing the struggle to save the climate.
It is a mindset that seeks differences rather than common ground. Talking to each other is more important that talking to everyone else. There is little mindfulness about how the way in which we communicate our message comes across to people beyond the bubble. George Lakoff puts it beautifully in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, which looks at how to build and message an effective progressive movement:
“There are six basic types of progressives, each with a distinct mode of thought. They share all the progressive values, but are distinguished by some differences.
- Socioeconomic progressives think that everything is a matter of money and class and that all solutions are ultimately economic and social class solutions.
- Identity politics progressives say it is time for their oppressed group to get its share now.
- Environmentalists think in terms of sustainability of the earth, the sacredness of the earth, and the protection of native peoples.
- Civil liberties progressives want to maintain freedoms against threats to freedom.
- Spiritual progressives have a nurturant form of religion or spirituality, their spiritual experience has to do with their connection to other people and the world, and their spiritual practice has to do with service to other people and to their community. Spiritual progressives span the full range from Catholics and Protestants to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Goddess worshippers, and pagan members of Wicca.
- Antiauthoritarians say there are all sorts of illegitimate forms of authority out there and we have to fight them, whether they are big corporations or anyone else.
… The problem is that many of the people who have one of these modes of thought do not recognize that theirs is just one special case of something more general, and do not see the unity in all the types of progressives. They often think that theirs is the only way to be a true progressive. That is sad”.
Yet if we are to have any chance of achieving Trainer’s ambitions, we need to not only successfully bring together the different strands of the progressive movements as set out by Lakoff, we must also engage beyond that, creating common platforms and engagement across political spectrums. Trainer’s article is written in such a way that his arguments, many of them entirely reasonable, can be guaranteed to be largely ignored by everyone other than a small handful of people. The words we use really matter. Trainer argues that we need to bring about:
“extreme, rapid and unprecedented structural change, away from some of the most fundamental ideas, practices and values in Western culture, especially away from the commitment to economic growth, freedom for market forces, corporate control, competitive individualism and, most problematic of all, affluent lifestyles. It is a far bigger task than just getting rid of capitalism”.
That’s quite an ask (even “just getting rid of capitalism” is somewhat ambitious!). Unless he is proposing some sort of coup, an armed uprising of organic growers and solar panel installer militias, storming the barricades in their fetching home-knitted balaclavas, he needs to get a whole lot more skilful, and fast. His call that Transition focus more on “taking collective control of our town”, while communicating in language guaranteed to exclude most of the community, is whatever the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy is.
Let’s look again at the paragraph I quoted earlier, only this time I’ll highlight the words, the language I would suggest is guaranteed to turn off 98% of the population.
“…fail to recognise a) that rich countries have resource and ecological impact rates that are utterly unsustainable and cannot possibly be spread to all people b) if a sustainable and just world is to be achieved these rates must be cut by something like 90%, c) that cannot be done unless we scrap a growth economy, reduce GDP to a small fraction of present levels, stop market forces from determining our fate, radically restructure the geography of settlements, largely scrap the economy, switch almost entirely from representative democracy to participatory democracy, and, above all, abandon affluence”
Lakoff refers to President Nixon, who in a national address during the Watergate affair, said:
“I am not a crook”.
As Lakoff puts it, “And everybody thought about him as a crook”. I’m also reminded of Gary Larson’s cartoon with the dog listening to his owner (see right)…
In the same way, trying to inspire and engage people to step across from feeling disempowered and that something needs to change to actually doing something about it requires a different language, certainly not the kind of disempowering language used here. Compare Trainer’s writing with Transition Town Tooting’s invitation to take part in their Foodival this weekend:
“Now in its seventh year, we want you to help break the record set last year of feeding over 300 people in one day, using locally grown food, cooked by local people. Foodival takes place 13th and 14th September. We’re aiming to explore and celebrate the range of food that can be grown in the city and the diverse cultures found in Tooting, giving local people a chance to meet, learn from each other and have some fun.
Last year’s Foodival was a huge success. We want to build on that, so we’re inviting everyone from Tooting and the surrounding area to get involved – be it growing, cooking or simply coming together on the day to celebrate tasty local dishes with very few food miles. We’re always amazed by the amount of produce that people are growing in even the smallest space. People have been adding some wonderful pictures to our map to show what’s growing in Tooting” says Dave Mauger, Foodival’s event director”.
What are the words that leap out at you here? “Break the record; local people; explore and celebrate; diverse cultures; meet; learn from each other; have some fun; huge success; tasty”. And so on. See where I’m going here?
As George Monbiot put it in Heat, “nobody ever rioted for austerity”. However, if we can be sufficiently skilful and inclusive, they might “long for localisation” though, or “yearn for empathy”. Trainer is right that the scale of what needs to change is huge, and his sense of frustration at the glacial rate of change is palpable and understandable. But this is only going to work if we find the skilful means to take people along with us, indeed, the skilful means to enable people to long for the world we need to create, because the very possibilities it presents make their hearts sing.
Transition has clearly not achieved all that it needs to, far from it. But Trainer’s analysis of Transition in this piece is horribly out of date. There’s much more to it than community gardens. Much more. Where is the mention of the impact initiatives like the Bristol Pound are having in nudging their City Council and other organisations to reimagine their procurement policies in favour of more local procurement? The Transition groups who have shifted, as in Berlin, the city authorities to a policy of only planting edible and useful species in their landscaping? The role Transition has played in the explosion of community energy projects and the UK government now having, for the first time, a Community Energy Strategy?
What about successful crowdfunding campaigns that are seeing social enterprises such as Vin de Liege in Belgium raising nearly €2m in shares from local people? Initiatives like Atmos Totnes, modelling a new approach to community-led development which has the potential of undermining the current development model? Of the REconomy Project, working with communities in 10 countries to help them turn their ideas and projects into vibrant new social enterprises rooted in principles of resilience, low carbon, bringing assets into community ownership and rebuilding local economies?
Yet, the uninitiated reading this piece would assume that all Transition is about is community gardens. Trainer appears fixated on community gardens. The photo that accompanies the piece is, we assume, of one. He mentions them five times, usually in a disparaging “is that all you’ve got?” kind of a tone. It is important, however, at this point to speak up for community gardens, as they, and ‘smaller’ projects like them, are far more important than Trainer gives them credit.
You could think of them as a ‘gateway drug’, as a way in to help people think about what’s possible. Not everyone has Trainer’s confidence, nor even a sense that change is even possible. For many people the idea that you can even influence the place you live feels remote and impossible. The question I hear when I do work with communities isn’t “how do we “take collective control of our town?” (one of Trainer’s recommendations of what Transition initiatives need to be doing), but rather “where do we start, or how do I engage my neighbours in doing something?”
In The Power of Just Doing Stuff I tell the story of Portalegre em Transição in Portugal. Sonia Tavares told me that when she first heard there was going to be a talk about Transition in her town she “went beserk”:
“I felt finally that in Portalegre, my town, the town where I was born and live, there were people that were in need of changing something, just like me. I thought that was amazing, and when I saw so many people going to this presentation, I thought “this is it, we can do something. We can actually change something”.
The first thing the group did was to work with the community in Sonia’s apartment block to create a tiny community garden in front of the building. Sonia told me:
“I’ve been living in Portalegre for ever, 37 years, and I have felt my community and my city crumble, people turning backs to each other. This community garden we created tells me it is possible to do things with other people. It is possible, we just need to wake up to each other again”.
Community gardens can give people a sense of “can do” that no amount of reading articles advocating, as Trainer does, “radical politics, confronting capitalism, fundamental structural change and “revolution”” can. We need a new language to communicate this stuff. That’s what Transition does. We need to speak to peoples’ values, of community, of family, of the things they love, of place, of possibility, of things their children love and value.
Our values also play a key role in this. Writing in the latest Transition Free Press, Tom Crompton of Common Cause distinguishes between intrinsic values (“values associated with greater concern about social and environmental problems. They include values of connection to family, friends and community; appreciation of beauty; broadmindedness; social justice; environmental protection; equality; helpfulness”) and extrinsic values (“money; social status; public image; authority”). He writes:
“If we are serious about building irresistible public demand for ambitious policy change, the implications seem clear: we should always prefer to communicate about issues in ways that communicate with intrinsic values; we should avoid communicating in ways that connect with extrinsic values”.
Writing about Common Cause’s work, George Monbiot recently challenged the idea that the more information we give people, the better decisions they will make:
“Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information which confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social identity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their resistance to change”.
Unfortunately that’s just what Trainer’s article does. His writing could really benefit from studying the work of Crompton and his Common Cause organisation. His article cries out for deep and urgent change, but in such a way that very few, other than those already on his wavelength, are ever likely to follow him. He writes:
“In my experience, people who are attracted to these movements (i.e. Transition) tend to be very nice, polite, sensitive, respectable citizens who find words like “radical”, “capitalism” and socialism”, let alone “revolution” quite off-putting and distasteful”.
From this he assumes that movements like Transition aren’t thinking in terms of deep systems change, that they don’t see the revolutionary potential in what they do. That “nice” people can’t affect deep change. My sense, and it’s a point I made in my last Trainer response, is that Transition tries to take a different route, albeit what I think of as a more skilful one. Banging on at people about the need to “revolution” and peppering sentences with “radical” and so on have clearly failed to bring about the change needed. It doesn’t work. It’s a busted flush. It has failed in nearly everything it has tried to achieve. What we’re trying to do with Transition is to model this stuff in action and to be more skilful about how we communicate.
If Trainer is looking for a thorough and complete Theory of Change, we don’t have it yet, although at Transition Network we are working on it. I was struck by the recent film Disruption, designed to inspire engagement in the Peoples’ Climate March next weekend (I’ll be going to the London march – see you there?).
Its opening quotes Frederick Douglas:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”.
Well, yes … but. The film uses “demand” in its banging-the-fist-on-the-table, “I’ve got half a million people outside who don’t agree with you” kind of a way, and of course, that is an important way in which change can be triggered. But I would argue that we could reinterpret that quote using “demand” as in “supply and demand”. Power never concedes anything unless we withdraw our support for it, and give our support to something that better meets our needs, better resonates with our values. As Andy Lipkis put it in our interview with him last year:
“The Bush administration was ready for all Americans to be protesting to try to stop the Iraq war. Why did they not care about that? How did they make it resilient? They expected that, they built that into their design. All they cared about was as long as people kept consuming, especially petroleum, their objective was being met. They were counting on no-one changing lifestyles. The most radical thing you can do is actually vote with your feet and vote with your dollars. They were counting on people complaining: protesting and not changing”.
I struggle when I read sentences like this from Trainer’s piece:
“The key to cutting present rates (of consumption) is not primarily to reduce personal consumption. It lies in designing local settlements to provide for us without needing much non-renewable resource consumption”.
“Designing local settlements” will only happen if it is a part of a democratic process that provides livelihoods, which feels like progress and which better meets our needs than the current approach and which speaks to a majority of people. Of course community groups can tinker at the edges and do something things, but at the moment our settlements are mostly designed by big developers and powerful organisations.
If we want to “design local settlements”, we need to mobilise people and demand change, yes, but also create demand for a better approach by getting real and scaling up our ambition and becoming developers ourselves, but a different kind of developer, as we’re soon to start modelling with the Atmos Totnes initiative here in Totnes.
Trainer states “of course the economy has to be scrapped eventually” adding that to do so “will require a huge amount of effort consciously and deliberately devoted to the task”. But there is no way that will happen unless we have the different models in place which are able to provide the things we need: schools, jobs, homes and so on. The ambition of Transition, in stark contradiction to the impression Trainer paints of it, goes far beyond community gardens, into reimagining local economies, shifting their focus, modelling how it can meet public health ambitions better than the current approach, how it can create better and more meaningful livelihoods, create healthier communities, create safer investments offering a social return. We’re not there yet, but it’s where we’re headed.
It may be that the future will reveal Transition to have been “a reformist project posing no threat to consumer-capitalist society”. We’ll see. Whether it ends up being called ‘Transition’ is of little matter. But what I do know is that whatever gets us to where we need to go will need to think bigger, reimagine the language it uses, and seek to build common ground rather than talking itself into a corner while everyone else is looking in a different direction.
Trainer’s is a bewildering perspective. On the one hand he argues that “sudden or noisy calls for more radical goals would harm these movements” and on the other he argues that the path Transition is on “will lead only to a grossly and increasingly unsustainable and unjust consumer society, containing a lot of community gardens etc”.
I would suggest that the goals of Transition Network’s REconomy Project, to create an economy based on the principles of appropriate localisation; resilience; being low carbon; recognising that we live in a world of limits; not purely being for profit but serving a wider social purpose and, where possible, bringing assets into community ownership, are already deeply ambitious. And Transition is just one “app” in the change activist’s toolkit, designed to enable the push towards more resilient communities. It’s not intended to do everything. But it is capable of doing a whole lot more than Trainer’s rather out-of-touch critique gives it credit for. It’s evolving. It remains open to new ideas and to processes that work with people to ask questions and shape then where the process goes, what was termed “let it go where it wants to go” in The Transition Handbook.
Time will tell, but of course time is one of our most limited resources. Which makes it even more imperative that we learn the art of communicating this stuff in a way that actually has any chance of leading to the change we all want to see.
Read more»
At least there are a few trees in The Hunger Games. In the United States at least, and I bet this is true of the UK, the number one fiction genre for young adults is called ‘dystopic fiction’. It’s about a post-apocalyptic world. It’s about a world that not even vampires are having a good time in. My feeling is that there’s nothing wrong with dystopic literature. In fact, there’s everything right. 1984 was a good warning.
