27 Jun 2014
Peter MacFadyen is a founder of Sustainable Frome (a Transition initiative) and Director of Frome’s new Renewable Energy Co-op. He has worked with Comic Relief for 20 years, and was part of a group of Independents who, as Independents for Frome, ran for the town council and got in, a tale documented in his new book, Flatpack Democracy. During June, he shared his 10 Tips for Reinventing Local Democracy. Here they are, all gathered together in one place.
List of Tips
1. Celebrate!
2. Participate!
3. Engage!
4. Big Issues and Sustainability!
5. Ambition and Connection!
6. Food!
7. Tipping points and common sense!
8. New parallel systems!
9. Laughter!
10. Revolution!
Tip 1: Celebrate!
“The Transition Town model uses celebrate very much in its core already, and I think there’s a really clear role for Transition Town groups to be demonstrating the importance of lightness and laughter and celebration. I think councils have got very confused often with the difference between solemn and serious, something John Cleese talks about a lot. We think that we can’t be serious unless we’re solemn. But actually, councils can fund things like Big Lunches, community garden events, street parties, and there’s something that has come up in Frome called the Mens’ Shed Project, which is something that’s very widespread in Australia.
Those sorts of things, which would involve a lot of lightness, laughter and celebration, the role of the Transition Town movement is to really offer those to councils and then support them in carrying them out. To bring a lightness and a celebratory atmosphere to what happens in a community”.
Tip 2: Participate!
“This is about demonstrating and introducing new ways of doing things. One of the things that councils do in my experience is often have a row of men in suits who sit there and then give a speech and then might ask for some opinions from the floor and that’s called participation. Often it’s also called “consultation”, which is even worse. The Transition movement’s got really engaged with things like World Café, Open Space, and then of course there’s the language of the Occupy movement and People’s Assemblies.
There’s a real role for Transition groups to be doing those things in their communities, so to be doing World Café, Open Space proper engagement, proper participation, and effectively embarrassing councils into being forced to revitalise local democracy because people simply won’t put up with that row of men in suits”.
Tip 3: Engage!
I became involved with the Town Council because coming from, effectively, a Transition Town, I engaged with the council, asked about their green strategy, there wasn’t one, so I tried to push them into having one. In the same way, people can be asking councils, so they have an ethical strategy, what happens to their compost, have they ever heard of Incredible Edible?
It’s about asking, pushing, demanding. It’s actually about getting things on agendas and then checking that they’re minuted afterwards. There’s a bit of work in there, and there might be some sort of press stuff, so again it’s about embarrassing people. The Transition Town demands action on closed allotments, things like that where politicians don’t like anything that’s publicly pushing them in a direction. So ‘engage’ is about a local Transition group actually taking the time to go to the council and then asking these questions and then pushing them a bit.
Tip 4: Big Issues and Sustainability!
The Transition Town’s history comes from Peak Oil and climate change and concerns around those things, and I think it’s incredibly important that those things are right up there on the agenda, even in small towns and small villages. I think it’s false that just because you live in a small town with a population of a couple of thousand these issues don’t matter.
Of course they do, and therefore again it’s one of these things where Transition Towns need to keep at it. Keep having those talks. Keep showing those films. Get involved with things like anti fracking. Frome is a ‘frack-free zone’, the council voted for it to be a frack-free zone. In one sense it’s completely meaningless: nobody’s going to frack in Frome. But on the other hand, it keeps it in the public awareness and raises those issues that are really important.
So the role of the Transition Town is to put big national issues on the agenda and keep them there and make sure that councils engage with them.
Tip 5: Ambition and connection.
It’s about linking to the outside world. It’s about moving on from the dog sheds and bus shelters that I mentioned earlier. It’s really saying that a council must be bigger. Frome Town Council’s new Neighbourhood Plan has One Planet Living at its core. So we’ve raised all the issues of the fact that we live on one planet. That’s a way into reduce, reuse, recycle and then maybe the council supporting things like a Restart project.
Again, it’s pressurising the council. Have they got things like a Fairtrade policy or are they part of the Fairtrade movement? Is there an ethical policy? We’ve just got a new ethical policy which interestingly clashes immediately with the pension schemes that all the staff have which are run at a national level, where the investment strategy includes investing in tobacco and arms and Monsanto.
The Transition Town movement is about challenging, pushing but also making things easy possibly. So for example, we’ve twinned all the public toilets in Frome with the community toilet twinning scheme. All the toilets are twinned with one in Africa, which is a scheme you can Google and look up. This costs sixty quid and that fundraises for a toilet in Africa. But the publicity that comes off that is saying we’re not just a little place that does its own little thing. We have ambitions and we want to be connected to the wider world, and I think that’s really important and something which the Transition movement can constantly be reminding the council and councillors, that it’s one world.
Tip 6: Food
Food is already massive in the Transition Town movement. A lot of things relate around food, I think. It’s a fantastic way to bring people together. I’ve touched on things like the Big Lunch and so on before. But there’s a link to councils that can come through that, I think, which is partly to poverty. In Frome we’re now supporting a box scheme and one of the things that’s come out of discussions around poverty in Frome has been a whole new charity and a whole new group called Fair Frome, which is essentially focusing around food. That’s then linked into community meals and training around food, linked to the food boxes, leads into allotments, health and all those sorts of things.
What I’ve just described is part council agenda and part what most Transition Town movements do. Incredible Edible are brilliant I think in lots of ways. Most of the main flowerbeds in Frome are now run by an Incredible Edible group as I know they are in many Transition Town places. That’s a fantastic example of how everybody gains: the town council gets cheaper maintenance of their flower bed, the group gets everything out there. It’s just win win all over the place.
So food is really, really important. In a slightly personal way, I bake biscuits for the council meetings that I chair. And it’s really interesting how that broke down a whole formality, just by starting a meeting with tea and coffee and biscuits that come from a recipe that my mum made. It makes the whole thing more human and acceptable, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that Transition groups are doing all the time.
Tip 7: Tipping Points and Common Sense
Most of what the Transition movement does, really everything that it does, is common sense. When people understand it, they’ll understand that. It’s easy to get bogged down, to run out of energy, to get a bit depressed about everything that we’re trying to do, but I think it’s really important for everybody to do the little things that they can, whether it’s one woman’s window box or another’s allotment.
Tipping points don’t come at 50%. In other words, at a certain point in a community, enough people will be doing things, and then everybody goes “oh right, we get it”. Men and women are social animals. Much of what Transition Town is about is about rebuilding social links. That’s what councils love to do, and actually we can make it easy for them.
They love claiming ownership of things, so keeping doing things, keeping on in there, and even when it feels like it’s all an endless slog, it’s really important to make sure that councils see that because at a certain point, the tipping point comes and the whole thing suddenly goes ‘buddumph’ and you get a Totnes or a Frome.
Tip 8: New parallel systems.
I increasingly believe that the upper levels of the political system are not going to change. That ultimately turkeys will never vote for Christmas. The 23 out of 27 multimillionaires in the cabinet are never going to change the system. Localism, neighbourhood plans and so on are a brilliant philosophy, a great idea, but it’s not going to happen in the timescale that we need.
So what we need is Transition Towns to be running parallel systems which effectively come up and swamp the so-called democracy and make it irrelevant. The best example I can think of is photovoltaics in Germany. You’ve got so much private and small-scale photovoltaic production going on that actually the German equivalent of the Big 6, at some point they won’t be able to sell their electricity, because there’s so much being made off roofs that theirs has no value. Another example perhaps is the sharing of music that happens now on the internet, where the corporate music industry has effectively been completely undermined by the people.
I think with social media and new ways of engagement, particularly, Transition Towns can be part of coming up and around the system and just making it irrelevant. Enlightened councils can support this process. What we’re trying to do in Frome is to support those kinds of movements and accept less and less power for the council. The council does less and less decision making and more and more listening to what people really want. New parallel systems are what’s wanted.
Tip 9: Laughter
Laughter. Now in a way this is a little bit of a cheat, because it goes all the way back to the beginning with celebrate in a way. I’ve been really inspired by Beppe Grillo’s Five Star movement in Italy. The five stars, incidentally, are water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, connectivity and environmentalism. What could be more Transition Town than that?
It’s full of environmentalism and sustainable things. He’s a man who’s come from completely outside the system, a stand-up comic who took 25% of the votes in the last presidential election in Italy. His three steps for raising popular engagement are laughter, information and political action. The real role for Transition Towns is to up the game in terms of laughter, celebration, lightness which will reinvigorate local engagement and draw people in, especially younger ones. It’s based on this: that we’ll get the opportunities for revolution and all the things I mentioned earlier.
The Transition Movement has a real role in creating a situation where we behave in politics and in local democracy in the way that we behave in life. So the things that excite us and enthuse us in life, like laughter, why can’t we have them in the meetings that we have that are meant to be serious and solemn? There’s a real role there for Transition Town movements to make that happen.
Tip 10: Revolution
Anyone deeply involved in the ideas of the Transition Town movement will have a sense of urgency. At a certain point, if all the demonstrating, sharing, offering, all the parallel systems and all that leaves power in the hands of a few non-representative people whose personal agenda and fear of change leaves them making poor decisions or missing opportunities then I think we have to revolt.
And so places like Frome, like Liskeard which has done things in a similar way, need to go “you know what, it’s not going to happen in the timescale that we need so let’s actually take over local democracy and support it to do what it needs to do”. Hence Flatpack Democracy which sets out how we did that in Frome, and in some ways its evolution not revolution although thinking about that in the timescale I think we need there to be revolution. There’s a real role for Transition Towns to be the platform for that revolution because they already have a community of people who have that urgency, who can drive this forward in a way that is incredibly crucial.
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26 Jun 2014
The second in our short series of interviews with representatives of different political parties is Greg Barker, Minister of State at the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC). He is also Conservative MP for Bexhill and Battle. He has been very involved in the community energy field, and has visited a number of Transition initiatives, including Totnes and Brixton Energy. We started by asking what, for him, are the defining characteristics of Conservative politics in relation to sustainability and climate change.
“At the heart of the Conservatives approach to the green agenda has been a strong belief in smart financial discipline, driving costs down and innovation up. The reform of the Feed-In tariffs is a good case in point – the quicker subsidies can come down, the greater the scale of deployment that can be afforded. We’ve now reached over 3GW of solar PV deployment and a fantastic half a million homes now generate their own electricity. Thanks to falling costs and rising innovation the UK as a whole is now a leading destination for low carbon investment.
Is fracking really a defensible approach in the context of the urgent need to drive down emissions?
If done to high environmental standards and takes on board the views of local communities, gas can play an important role in helping bring down our emissions. Coal is the biggest threat to climate stability. Gas offers a chance in the short to medium term, as we phase out coal and bring more intermittent renewables onto the system, to massively reduce global emissions.
Do you see any incompatability between economic growth and tackling climate change on the scale required? Does you see any evidence from anywhere in the world that has successfully decoupled growth and emissions?
Here in the UK the Coalition Government is demonstrating in practice that low carbon jobs and growth are an essential part of our long-term economic plan. Since 2010, thanks to Coalition green policies, we have mobilised a staggering £34 billion of private investment into large scale renewable electricity. That’s bigger than HS2 and will potentially support almost 37,000 jobs.
Just last month, Siemens announced plans to build two turbine manufacturing plants in Hull – representing £310 million of investment. This shows the UK is leading the way as the largest producer of offshore wind on the planet. It is a fantastic vote of confidence in the UK’s low carbon economy.
But the bottom lines is that we are bang on track to meet our ambitious 2050 emissions target and the UK now enjoys the highest economic growth in the G7.
Do you think the current government lacks a coherent underlying narrative in terms of climate change? We get proposed airport expansion, new roads, an unstable market for investment in renewables, the Green Deal resulting in very little take-up, a rumoured policy in the next manifesto of blocking all onshore wind farms, tax cuts for fossil fuel exploration. Does this really look like a government committed to being “the greenest ever”, or like greenwash onto a traditional economic growth agenda?
This is a rather loaded question! But surely nothing better illustrates this government’s commitment to being the ‘greenest ever’ than the creation of Europe’s first dedicated Green Investment Bank. This was a profoundly Conservative idea. It was first announced by George Osborne in 2009 – before any other major political party. The idea was then fleshed out by the Conservative, Green Investment Bank Commission of financial experts, under the chairmanship of senior investment banker Bob Wigley. Then the new Bank was incorporated by statute, by the Coalition Government. It is already catalysing billions of pounds of new investment at the cutting edge of the green economy.
In decades to come the GIB will be seen as another great Conservative initiative alongside such historic Conservative measures as the successful agreement of the 1992 Rio Earth Treaty.
You have been a keen advocate of community renewables, and as one that follows you on Twitter I note that you seem to spend most days visiting such projects! Why do you think community renewables matter, and what is their potential do you think?
I’m a very keen advocate of community energy and indeed a much more decentralised energy system generally. I’ve been making the case since 2006, when I published a pamphlet, Power to the People. This called for a radical new approach to usher in an age of popular decentralised energy. At its heart this is about enabling homes, businesses and communities to really take control over their energy bills and create a greener, more local energy sector.
Community energy also plays into my vision of an energy sector not of the Big 6 but of the Big 60,000. This is not only about households but also companies, public sector and third sector organisations grabbing the opportunity to generate their own energy and really starting to export their excess on a competitive, commercial basis. Already, under this government we’ve made great progress. We’ve published the UK’s first ever Community Energy Strategy. But there’s still much more to do and this is where initiatives such as Transition Town Totnes are so important.
Given the scale of the challenges you face in making change happen, how can Transition initiatives help you in achieving what you want to achieve?
Transition initiatives like Transition Town Totnes are a fantastic for engaging local communities and driving change. It’s central government that sets the strategic policy direction but ultimately we need local communities to help make things happen at the grassroots level.
I visited Transition Streets last year and saw first-hand the terrific work that’s being done. Not only is the initiative helping to encourage households to take effective and practical steps to reduce their energy use and save money but it’s also bringing neighbourhoods together too.
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25 Jun 2014
When I came across a set of principles for creating a peaceful society that has been working for over a thousand years I got really interested in what they were, and to what extent they were relevant to Transition. Their first principle turns our society inside out – instead of family and home life organising itself around the imperative of work to support the growing economy and “wealth creation”, it puts raising healthy, community minded, well adjusted children at the centre of its decision making – with the adult world of work devoted to this supporting children and parents.
I learnt about these ideas from a movement called the Art of Mentoring, which organise events in the USA and Europe looking at cultural repair and connection with the natural world. I wrote about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and their principles of Peacemaking in a Social Reporters blog a while ago. It is one of the few stories I have come across where a culture mired in violence and destruction turned itself around to create a peace that has lasted for many centuries – and I was surprised that the Haudenosaunee were much respected by Benjamin Franklin, and influenced the creation of the Constitution of the USA.
Thinking about the theme of politics in a broad sense brought me back to those principles – which include an understanding of the priorities which help to organise a society to create peace, and the culture of leadership and service which can sustain it. This blog post looks at those principles for governance and asks whether they are relevant for Transition – and whether our current political system could ever be capable of delivering such a system.
Principle 1: Understanding what Peace Is
How should a society be structured to ensure peace? In the Haudenosaunee tradition there is a clear order of priority. The aim of the society is to raise happy, community oriented, self confident people, so the focus is on how children are raised to give them the experiences that create this. Putting the children at the centre also means ensuring that mothers in particular, and all parents and care-givers are given the support they need. It’s as if these people had an instinctive understanding of what humanistic psychology has told us, and neuroscience is increasingly confirming, that having happy healthy mothers during pregnancy and in the days and months after birth is really important to creating resilient, caring and self-resourced human beings.
So the work of the adult work-force focuses on meeting the needs of children, mothers and parents and caregivers. This includes not only needs for physical subsistence – food, shelter, clothing, energy, transport and so on, but also for learning, self expression, relational intelligence, a strong sense of cultural identity and belonging, and learning how to participate in structures of governance.
The mechanism for keeping the whole society in balance, and preventing one group heading off to serve its own needs is a circle of elders whose responsibility is the well being of the whole. Having raised their family and left behind their individual role their focus attends to how the whole system is functioning, intervening when necessary to get things back on track. It’s an example of a monitoring and feedback loop, with a correcting mechanism to keep the whole system moving in the right direction.
Could our current political system deliver such radical change? The only pathway that I can imagine is if groups of MPs from different parties decided – as they did in the second world war – to abandon the endless critical putting down of the other side, and find a way to work towards unity to address the critical issues of our time. This brings me to the second principle of Peacemaking from the Haudenosaunee.
Second Principle: Unity
The second principle requires that people put the well being of the whole first, and that meetings get to unity to make decisions.
In the 80s I was part of groups who had a strong belief in consensus – that we should all be happy the decisions that were made. This, combined with a belief in equality that prevented informal power structures from being seen and questioned, led to some pretty stuck organisations, where one person’s self interest blocked the progress of the whole. Since then I’ve come across more sophisticated versions of consensus – such as “Consent” used in Sociocracy, or the system used by Quakers in their meetings.
Underpinning the process of reaching unity we need something in our meetings similar to the culture the Haudenosaunee teachings describe – that we need to make decisions from a state of “Upright mind” – where we are in a state of openness, listening, and respecting the wisdom of the whole, rather than pursuing an individual agenda, or thinking that one person can know better than the whole group.
In last month’s blog post I attempted to describe the dynamic that “Upright mind” embodies – a way of valuing and including the whole – and what it is about human psychology and physiology that takes us out of balance and into a distorted sense of identity and view of the world. Speed, over-valuing action, marginalising feelings, disliking vulnerability and unpredictability are all signs of a system which is being run by those who identify with “doing” and “strength”.
In Transition Network we have adopted something which came from the last National Hubs meeting, where we set up three roles at the start of a meeting, in addition to someone who is chairing or facilitating the meeting:
- The keeper of time
- The keeper of the record – taking minutes or noting decisions
- The keeper of the heart – speaking up when the meeting gets charged, tense, tired, conflicted or out of balance in some other way.
The keeper of the heart is the most unusual role, similar to Starhawk’s “vibes-watcher” role in her meetings protocol. Often the person in this role doesn’t say anything – but sometimes their reflection hold the key to unlocking places where the meeting gets stuck or difficult.
I can’t quite imagine the speaker of the House of Commons beginning each session with “Now who is going to be the keeper of the record, time, and heart?” But you never know…
The third principle of Peacemaking: “Use your finest words”.
Put simply, focus on the positive in what you are saying, whether it’s about another person who’s not present, presenting your own ideas or giving feedback.
I have a very strong critical mind so I’m not always so great at this one, but there is one aspect of it which I use a lot – and which I’ve seen makes a huge difference to how it feels to be in a group. It’s to use a LOT of appreciation, and positive feedback to each other within any working group. We often include rounds of appreciations with TN meetings, which can dramatically change the mood. It’s uncomfortable at first – because we’re mostly unused to hearing simple positive feedback, but over time getting through that discomfort pays dividends.
Much of this post contains ideas that are far from “realistic” in our current world. I’m heartened that in the UKat least there is a political movement attempting to get Happiness measured, and included in political priorities, as well as more grass roots organisations for well being such as the Happy City project based in Bristol, and Action for Happiness inLondon. I’m curious whether shifting the focus of political action towards measuring and improving something “inner” rather than “outer” can be an important step in turning our culture inside out – helping us to orient to what truly makes us happy as humans, including creating peaceful and sustainable communities.
Useful links and resources
Schumacher College in Devon, UK is offering a new course in Right Livelihoods, starting November 2014, which includes time with the Gross National Happiness centre in Bhutan, the only country I know which has Happiness as a central political objective.
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23 Jun 2014
Natalie Bennett is the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. Her first degree was in Agricultural Science, which, combined with her Australian heritage, means, as she put it, that she’s “the only British political leader who knows how to shear a sheep”. We caught up with her on Skype, and started by asking her what she would see as the key defining characteristics of Green Party politics…
“To summarise in one sentence, the kind of world we’re trying to achieve is that we need a society in which everybody as access to a decent quality of resources, but we have to do that within the limits of our one planet. I’m sure that no-one who’s listening to this needs to be told that currently in Britain we’re all collectively using the resources of three planets. So that means we really have to fundamentally transform our society, our politics, our economics, have real change to the point where we get that adequate resources for everybody within the limits of the planet.
How would you summarise the current state of British politics? What does the rise of UKIP tell us about that?
We have a failed political model. You can point to the technical aspects if you like, that we have an unelected House of Lords in the 21st century. You can point to the fact that we have an extremely low turnout in elections and widespread public dissatisfaction. But I suppose the positive side of this is that this is clearly, as indeed with our economics and the state of our society, an unstable situation and it can’t continue.
UKIP is one example of this situation. The rise of UKIP is a symbol of dissatisfaction particularly on the Right, and things are going to change. One of the interesting possibilities coming up is that the Scots could vote for independence in September. Someone in a public meeting once asked me “but this would mean constitutional chaos, there are so many questions that haven’t been answered”, and I said “great … some creative chaos is exactly what we need!”
If, for example, the Scots did vote for independence then we’d almost have to create a written constitution for England and Wales and the remainder of the United Kingdom and that would create all sorts of possibilities to really reshape the whole form of our political system. More broadly we should change the content very greatly.
The Greens are the only party that takes a stance against fracking. Why do you think that nobody else will?
It’s really quite surprising that the Lib Dems in particular haven’t taken that stance. In the Coalition the Lib Dems have gone along with a lot of things, but he has come out twice and said “I love shale gas” in case anyone missed it the first time. It’s really quite astonishing.
As to why, I think it’s partly a function of the fact that the oil and gas companies have a great deal of lobbying influence both in Westminster and indeed in Brussels. I think it’s partly a function of the fact that there’s a lot of people in government who really can’t imagine the world changing. They just think the future looks much like the past.
It really is quite astonishing because there really is a total fantasy around fracking. David Cameron came out and said “we’re going to be fracking by the end of the year”, and all the fracking companies went “what? No we’re not!” Lord Brown of Quadrilla says that in five years’ time we’ll know if there’s frackable gas in Britain. Yet everyone’s running around as if this is an established industry that’s already pumping gas out. It does show a really quite disturbing detachment from reality in the whole way that fracking is talked about.
There was a piece in The New Statesman recently about the debates that will accompany the next election and arguing that the Tories are very keen to see the Greens as part of that because they hope that it would split the Labour vote. I wondered what your thoughts were on that.
That’s the reason given. I think it might have something more to do with me being a barrier to Mr Farrage for Mr Cameron actually. But I said to the BBC debates – any time, anywhere, any place. I mean that almost literally. We have a very strong case to present, very strong policies. We would like to be given the chance to present it to the wider public.
And we actually know that in places where we have strong local parties, we’re able to put boots on the ground and people really get to understand what the Green party stands for, we win strong support. So I would be delighted to take part in a debate, and as I keep telling the broadcasters, it’s the only way they’re going to get any gender balance!
Does the Green Party really believe that economic growth and tackling climate change on the scale it requires are compatible? And might the Greens be the first political party to explicitly question economic growth?
I think we already have, although I think it’s very easy to get bogged down into growth/degrowth arguments. I’m not going to say we should stop metering GDP but we should stop thinking about it. What we should be thinking about is doing all the kinds of things that we need to do, which is improving public transport, improving walking and cycling facilities, insulating homes, building renewable energy, all that sort of thing, and stop doing lots of the things that we know we can’t continue environmentally to do and which actually make no economic sense at all like expanding and building new airports and all those sorts of things.
I’m very taken with the idea that’s been suggested of the traffic lights system, where you have maybe five or six meters that meter social wellbeing, that meter environmental wellbeing, and you say we’re going to keep those meters above the minimum level and we’ll make sure each one of those doesn’t get below that minimum level. One of those is the foundation of environmental standards and you often hear Caroline and me say we have to remember that the economy is a complete subset of the environment. They’re not two separate things.
Is an industrial society possible without growth?
What we’re heading towards, what we have to head towards, is a very different shape of society. Globalisation has very clearly hit the buffers and if we think of a very extreme example, that giant ship that arrives bringing loads of plastic tat from China, most of which will be in landfill three months later, what we need to do is relocalise our economy, bring manufacturing and food production back to Britain, to rebuild small-scale manufacturing, building things that last.
One of the things at the moment which at the point we are now looks hard to imagine, I go back to the fact that my grandparents, when they got married, they bought a suite of furniture, very good furniture and probably very expensive by the standards of the time and they’ve celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with the same furniture and fully expected to pass it on to their son as the really good furniture, and that’s the kind of direction we need to go in, rather than the kind of stuff you buy from a certain Swedish store that I won’t mention that falls apart after a year or two and you go and buy another set.
From a Green perspective, is the challenge of staying below 2° best served by being in or out of Europe?
In Europe very much. One of the vital things that Europe does is make a foundation of environmental standards. That’s obviously important to Europe in terms of the fact that all states in Europe are inter-dependent of each other. If someone dumps a whole load of pollutants into one river it’s going to affect other states as well.
But in terms of the broader climate change aspect, Europe has been an insufficient but somewhat effective force in starting to get people to think about these issues, and it’s really important if we set the foundations of standards in Europe and Europe is then a force in international negotiations. That’s much greater than we would be if we were on our own.
At the local scale, in some communities such as Frome, groups of Transition-minded people have successfully run for the town council and made big changes but as independents rather than as Greens. What’s your sense of the appropriateness or not of party politics at the local scale? Can it be self-defeating?
I think it’s very useful, because having a Green Party ‘label’ explains to people where you’re coming from. If you just look at a label that says Independent, that means a wide range of things ranging from people who think that UKIP are a bit soft and wussy to people who are basically indistinguishable from Greens. I’ve got no problem with people doing that, and there are many parts of the country where Green would be seen as too radical and people stand as independents who are very Green-minded and get elected on that basis.
What having people standing for the Green Party does is that we have a whole suite of policies democratically chosen by members of the party. There’s a whole background and framework of support there. Obviously someone who’s an Independent can form views very much on local issues and have their own views on national issues, but they are just their own views. If you have a whole party where we have democratically-formed policy with lots of people and experts putting into it, that really is an important and useful support structure.
What’s your sense of what a Green government could do at a national level that could best support the work that Transition groups are doing at a local scale?
We’re going to transform our economy. I was at the Bristol People’s Assembly last weekend and had a really interesting discussion there about how do we make transformation happen. One of the things is at the moment big multinational companies just ride utterly rough shod over the rights of their workers, they ride rough shod over the environment. They ride rough shod over local communities.
In Camden where I live in central London, we had a Green Party pop-up shop that was opposite one of the main chains’ mini stores. It was doing things like coning off the road for an HGV-sized space 24 hours a day and 4 or 5 times a day the HGV would draw up and park illegally, and they weren’t entitled to cut off the road either.
They were basically seizing public space. What we really have to do is force big companies to behave like decent corporate citizens, not allow them to trample all over the law and their workers’ rights. By doing that what we then do is allow co-operatives, small local businesses, local economies a chance to compete against them. At the moment it’s just a hopelessly un-level playing field.
Green politics and I suppose the environmental movement and Transition as well to some extent have generally failed to engage beyond what people call the ‘post-materialist’ or I suppose middle class constituencies. What’s your sense of how best to widen the appeal further?
We’ve really got to talk about the transformation and how it works for people, not just how it works for the physical environment. One of the Green Party policies which is getting real traction and starting to excite lots of people is the idea of citizens’ income or basic income, which is the idea that basically there’s a safety net. Everyone gets a payment every week which means you have your subsistence guaranteed and you don’t have to worry. Trying to take away people’s worry and fear at the moment is really critically important because with all the holes that are being rent in the welfare net, people are really living in fear.
Again, at the Bristol Assembly, one of the speakers was talking about someone affected by the bedroom tax who now feels they don’t have the right to have a home any more. We have to restore people’s sense of security and give them a sense that a Green society is one where they will feel secure and safe. We’re not taking things away from them, we’re guaranteeing them the basics.
If in 20 years’ time we’ve done everything that’s necessary and we’ve successfully managed to stay below 2°, what would that world look like?
First of all we’ll have homes that are warm and comfortable. We’re not going to get them all to Passivhaus standard, but heading in that direction as fast as possible. We’ll have vastly more locally grown food, so each town or city will have a ring of market gardens around it and a large amount of the food on your plate has come less than 10 miles. Not everything, I’m not talking about everything. I personally like my coffee and spices, but the bulk of the food on your plate comes from there.
You’re wearing clothes that you will expect to last for a long period of time. If you go back historically, people once a year, summer and winter, went shopping and bought one or two new items of clothing. That’s the kind of situation we’re in, but it’s a situation where hopefully we have to offer people a better life so there’s less stuff in it. People have more time and more sense of security. So we’re looking at dropping working hours down. In some of that working hours’ time you might be growing some of your own food rather than buying it. You’re not worrying where your next meal’s coming from and we have no more food banks.
The above is lightly edited from a longer interview which you can hear below. In the interest of balance, we did also ask representatives of Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and UKIP for interviews, but we are still waiting to hear from them.
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23 Jun 2014
One of the most delightful things about Transition is time spent with those who are making it happen in such a wide diversity of communities. The top up of inspiration and new ideas as to what’s possible that I get from such visits is vital stuff. I was recently in Liege in Belgium for a couple of days, and it proved no exception. Apart from a football result. But more of that later.
Liege is a city in the Wallonia region of Belgium with a population of almost 200,000. It is in the French-speaking part of Belgium, and is the city where the European industrial revolution started. It sits at the crossroads of central Europe, as a place where many transport links meet. Much of that industry has now gone, but Liege remains a principal economic and cultural centre of the region. Liege en Transition has been in existence since late 2011.
I arrived courtesy of Eurostar on Wednesday afternoon, and went to Barricade, a centre for activists and Transition in the city (whose bookshop has sold more copies of the French version of Transition Handbook (Manuel de Transition) than any other single outlet, and who produce some great French language reports and pamphlets about Transition, as well as other subjects. Many of the core team and others had come together for the evening to share a meal, to meet with me and to bring me up to speed on what they’ve been up to.
The first person to speak gave an overview of the group’s history so far. In 2009, about 10 people got together to discuss founding Liege en Transition, but decided the time wasn’t right. In December 2011, Barricade published Introduction to Ecological and Economic Transition, the first of a series of papers on Transition and Transition-related topics.
On 9th November 2011, 70 people met at Barricade and decided to form Liege en Transition. Two weeks later, 420 people came to a screening of Voices of Transition. In March 2012, 25 associations, NGOs and trades unions organised the Week of International solidarity in Liege, which focused on the theme of Transition.
In April 2012 the idea of the Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liegéoise (CALT) was born (more of that later), and June 2012 saw the first ‘Transition Day’; which attracted around 50 people. Around that time, an article in the paper about CALT led to funding of €66,000 from the regional government.
2013’s ‘Transition Day’ attracted over 500 people, and focused on a debate around the future of local agriculture. November 2013 saw the official launch of CALT, attended by over 50 organisations in a large venue, followed up the next day by a workshop attended by 350 people, an event which designed the organisation. The event made regional television.
This month has seen the launch of the ‘Valeureux”, a local currency for Liege, which made national TV here and here. The launch was part of this year’s Transition Day, attended by over 1,000 people. Here’s a video about the day:
There is a sense that Transition is beginning to gain some traction, with some meaningful and substantial projects underway, some of which we then heard about.
Here’s a short video of some members of a youth group from one of the national political parties having a ‘Transition Tour’ of some of the projects described above:
The second talk was about Vin de Liege (‘Liege Wine’). The idea was to create a wine business which is based on social and civic values of being local and environmentally friendly, while also generating a social output and community involvement. It now has 1,200 members and has planted 1.3 hectares of vines. This will produce 101,000 bottles of wine, all of which are already spoken for. People were invited to buy shares at €500 each, and they raised €1,850,000. Investors came from across Belgium. “People want to invest in Liege”, he concluded.
Then we heard about CATL, which is trying to look at the land around the city in a different way, reconnecting the city to its peri-urban land. They started by mapping what people eat in Liege, and what proportion of that could be grown locally. It’s a fascinating approach, one that reminded me of the debates around Simon Fairlie’s Can Britain Feed Itself?, and the issues it raised about whether we should be striving to design for a more local, seasonal diet, or to replace the one we already have. A diagram showing their model can be seen below and a detailed proposal (in French) about the project can be found here.
CATL have created a model by which they think they could shift their food system to supply the city, in such a way that it could generate €3.9 billion by feeding 3.5 million people on one third of the area’s agricultural land. This would, they estimate, create 44,000 jobs. The project is currently underway with its first site (see below).
The last speaker was Sybille Mertens from the Centre for the Social Economy at the local university. She talked about the need to get Transition into business schools, something she is doing in her university, which has over 2,000 students. They run a course called “If not for profit, for what? And how?”
For her, social enterprise is the model that can liberate much of what we want to see, because it avoids the pressure to be attaining a return on investment. Her course is evolving now to include modules on Transition and Social Enterprise, and is also looking to weave some of her modules into other courses. She closed by saying that at the moment, half of the theses being written by her students are looking at different aspects of Transition.
We then had a fantastic supper (see above, everyone heading in), using lots of local food, some fantastic bread, wine and great conversation. One of my favourite things anyone said, so good I had to write it down, came out of a conversation with an academic, who was telling me about the freedom he has in Transition that he doesn’t find in his day job. “Transition is a space in which I can breathe different air”, he told me.
That evening I also saw this great article online in one of the regional papers about the visit, which included the following accompanying photo:
Next morning began with the CATL conference which was held in a redeveloped old swimming pool complex. About 150 people came, and the day started a framing which set out how the project aims to have social, environmental and economic benefits. The aim is to deeply change the food system in Liege over the next 20-30 years.
Fiona Ward of the REconomy Project kicked off the event giving a talk about REconomy, and about the tools and approaches being developed to support communities in developing new, more localised, economies.
Then there were several different presentations, one in more depth about CATL, announcing the launch of their first production site, Le Compagnons de la Terre. There was a presentation about Vin du Liege, and one about AgriBio, a network of organic farmers in the area. After that, I said a few words, and then after lunch, the afternoon was a series of World Cafe-style theme group discussions.
I sat in on one discussion about local currencies, and a second about what a local food restaurant might look like. Then Fiona and I went off for a walk around town, which included some time in a fine second hand record shop called ‘Carnaby Records’, where I could happily have spent many hours.
The evening’s event took place the Complexe Opera, in the centre of town, for the evening’s talk. In a huge theatre, a former cinema, now owned by the University, over 500 people had come to hear my talk! The event was co-presented with a range of organisations, including Job’in Design, the local design school.
The talk went down very well, a very engaged audience, some good questions, and a great buzz in the place (see left). Lots of people wanted to ask questions afterwards, and then there was a party at a nearby bar, with food, drinks and a DJ.
I stayed for a little while and then sloped down the road to watch the second half of the England/Uruguay World Cup match. As is so often the case, watching England was infuriating, stressful, and ultimately, disappointing. A fair few people joined us to watch the game, and a few beers eased the pain slightly.
Next morning we travelled out to a place called Ecotopia, a 5 hectare former tree nursery on the edge of Liege, being developed as a Community Supported Agriculture site. I did a long interview with a journalist from one of the national papers, and then had a look round the site>
I met a woman who I had last met 9 years ago when she and her boyfriend volunteered at The Hollies, the sustainability centre I co-founded in Ireland! Fiona and I also paid our respects at the grave commemorating the demise of the oil age.
I also planted an aubergine plant in the still-being-erected polytunnel at Ecotopia, at Compagnons de la Terre, the first CATL site. I’m sure it will be the first of many.
And then it was off back to the train station for the long journey home. My deep thanks to everyone who made it happen and who pulled it all together. I’m very grateful.
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