Transition Culture

29 May 2014

Sophy Banks on Bringing Systems Back to Health

“What is the change we want to see in the world, and how will that change happen?” These were the two rather intimidating questions we posed ourselves at the recent Transition Network Awaydays – our twice-yearly retreat for staff and board members. This post shares one piece of the our wide ranging exploration of theories of change, which looks at what it is about human beings that enables us to create healthy, sustainable, pleasurable ways of living – and why we often don’t. 

We started with a very big map of change – and the understanding that the change Transition seeks is towards more “health” in every part of our system. We used the word health not just for our physical state of wellness, but applied to all the different parts of the huge system of which we’re a part. So it includes our mental or emotional as well as physical health, but also applies to larger scales – community or societal health, ecological health, planetary health, and so on. 

We went on to look at a number of “Theories of Change”, including the one below – which looks at how we can get stuck in an emergency state, and continually recreate stressful, unequal systems at all levels of scale. 

Exploring Doing and Being

What follows is a really simplified version of a model which focuses on two aspects of human existence, Doing and Being. The model has lots of layers and facets. My intention isn’t to present something definitive or watertight, but to give an overview of something which I – and many I’ve shared it with – have found helpful. (See here for a video of me explaining this and another model of health / un-health at the Change Day in 2013)

Health = Balance and Flow

The first proposition of this model is that health for humans is a flow between two contrasting (not opposite) qualities of life. Some might call them archetypal qualities. Here are some words that describe them: 

Outer, Doing, Active, Will, Yang, Task-oriented

Inner, Being, Receptive, Love, Yin, Relationship-oriented

So we might draw health as something like this:

 

You can see this natural rhythm resulting from our evolution in a world which has similar cycles – night and day, winter and summer. In fact we have nervous systems which regulate our bodies for both parts of the cycle – parasympathetic for the relaxing, digesting, inward part; the sympathetic nervous system for the active outer phase.

Resilience = Ability to bounce back to health

When we are resilient we can be stressed in this system and bounce back to health. A lot of neuroscience research recently has shown that there are a number of ways we can respond to stress. The sympathetic nervous system often goes into fight or flight response – the most well known. Peter Levine’s work with trauma shows animals and also humans can freeze when threatened. Our evolved response is to take action, and then to release the tension from the body – either through the running away or fighting, or by shaking out after the freeze response. We can then come back to the healthy flow between relaxation and action.

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28 May 2014

Kerry Lane on regenerating urban and rural health

Kerry Lane (see right) is a Transitioner and Social Reporter, and in this post, she shares her thoughts on Transition and health, inspired by her recent move to the countryside. 

Living out in the countryside gives you an interesting alternative perspective on health, you really are faced with an entirely different situation to urbanites. A lot of public health policy and, dare I say, Transition initiatives, have a fairly urban perspective. For a resilient, regenerative and nourishing culture we are going to have to get everyone involved. So having only relatively recently returned to the countryside it is interesting to consider my new health situation. 

My public health situation

In the public health sense I am much further away from emergency medical care, these winding country lanes don’t make for fast response times. I am fortunate that there is a doctors surgery in the next village, which is the case for steadily fewer rural areas, but getting myself registered with an NHS dentist turned out to be a considerable challenge and although I have managed I still have to travel to the nearest big town, 8 miles away. Being pedal, foot and public transport powered means that this is an entire mornings excursion, similarly my nearest pharmacy is 5 miles, 30 minutes cycle away (and no buses in that direction…). 

Wellbeing benefits of living rurally

So with that, less than resilient, public health situation (not even considering the resilience and suitability of the services when I get to them, see previous posts this month for thoughts on that) it is good job that I take responsibility for nurturing my own health, so I don’t need these services as much. In many ways I find it easier to be healthy in the countryside, in general there is a greater abundance of plants species which I use for health maintenance and minor complaints. I also get a lot more exercise as I regularly cycle and walk much further than I did in the town. 

And a really big factor for me is being surrounded by much more nature, having quiet places to contemplate in, many more creatures to watch and get to know, many of whom like to join us in the house! For me connection with nature is fundamental to my wellbeing and I am not alone. The scientific evidence for what many of us intuitively know to be true, is really mounting up. I found a whole plethora of information here. We need nature, not just to provide all our other basic needs; food, drink, shelter, but also because we have evolved to be surrounded by and connected to it. Being ‘separated’ from nature lead to all kinds of psychological and physical health problems. 

I also find that a connection to the place where I am, it’s heritage and culture, is important to my wellbeing. It connects me into the story of the area and helps me feel at home. Of course this is not something that is rural or urban specific, in fact it can often be a bit harder to find in rural areas. Living rurally isn’t always better for my wellbeing and health. 

Wellbeing challenges of living rurally

Slightly counter intuitively considering where most of our food is grown, it can actually be harder to get healthy food in the countryside, without easy access to the independent health food shops and markets of urban areas. I do have a village shop near me with some locally grown veg, but it would be quite challenging to have a healthy diet from what it sells. So I currently rely on veg boxes and occasional excursions to the wholefood shops, 8 miles away. I can also imagine it being very difficult to find space to grow your own if you didn’t have land, as allotments are much rarer in rural areas. 

Depending on where you live rurally there is also the health threat of agricultural chemicals. I remember going out for a walk last year and having to turn back as I really did not want to inhale the wind drift of whatever they were spraying on the crop. I suppose it is just different chemicals from the car fumes you get to inhale in the cities, but never-the-less not ones I want to come into contact with if I can help it. 

A challenge which I hadn’t anticipated affecting my health, when I moved out to the country, is isolation. Now I don’t mean there aren’t a good number of people around, as it definitely isn’t deserted where I live, but I have found it much more challenging to find people and local activities I can get involved in which share my values of Earthcare, Peoplecare and Fairshares. I think I took it for granted in urban areas, all of the different interesting activities I could get involved in and how there was nearly always a ‘green’ group of some sort to join with people who were striving towards a similar vision as me.

And my, my is it challenging to do this in the countryside, or at least I am guessing it takes considerably longer to establish your network of friends and activities. In the meantime you feel quite isolated and drawn to doing lots of travelling into your nearest urban area. Isolation really isn’t good for my wellbeing. 

Building bridges to share the yields

But Transition is all about solutions and doing, so surely something can be done? A lot of the posts this month have focussed specifically on public health (it is the theme after all!), but I want to explore the huge opportunities to be found by thinking laterally. 

I am working at the moment on a project which could help share some of the health benefits between urban and rural dwellers. At first glance you wouldn’t think it had much to do with health – Nearly Wild Camping, creating a network of ‘wilder’ locations for basic camping and ambassadors for the countryside across the UK – but in the wider context of health creation and wellbeing it has a lot to offer. It creates the opportunity for both sides to get some of the benefits associated with the other. 

Exploring the world around you

For people living in urban areas it provides opportunities to spend time exploring the wilder corners of our countryside, sleeping under the stars and getting up close to the creatures that make their homes there. It is very easy as someone living in the countryside to think that all people need to do is get out of the cities and find it, but if you’re not familiar with an area or the ways of the UK countryside it is actually very difficult to know where you can go. 

At many Nearly Wild locations there is also the opportunity to learn from the people who live and work there and are passionate about their local wildlife, heritage and culture. We have only been official for a few weeks, but already have a variety of locations that could offer a real range of different experiences, including a private nature reserve and permaculture smallholdings. From experience at the original Nearly Wild location, Underhill Farm, we found that this informal mentoring in exploring the world around you and introducing people to new ways of thinking really inspires them, with unpredictable results. A local woman who had never camped before came with friends to an early Underhill Farm event and is now the local cub scouts leader! 

As I mentioned earlier, this connection to the world around you is really very important in creating and maintaining wellbeing. I even saw some research the other day that sleeping in a tent for a week, without electrics lights could help cure insomnia! Although I imagine where your tent is and what the weather is doing are fairly important factors… 

Creating a community

And the benefits go both ways, for the people providing the locations, being involved can reduce their isolation. Sharing their passions with interested people who come to visit and also being part of a network of people across the country, who are trying to do similar things and can share experiences, advice and support each other. We have set up Nearly Wild Camping as a co-operative to really try and encourage and embed this aspect of it. 

Of course it also gives location providers another source of earth-friendly livelihood, which can also be harder to come by in the countryside. 

As in nature, it is establishing the connections and the beneficial relationships that makes something resilient and abundant. We are hoping with Nearly Wild Camping to enable some of these connections and help create wellbeing both for those living in urban areas and those in the countryside, so if you know any locations or campers who might want to be involved then send them our way. 

This is of course just one of many possibilities out there. I would be really interested to hear of any other ‘unconventional’ routes to health that people know of or are involved in, particularly those that span rural and urban areas. 

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27 May 2014

Martin McKee on the Manifesto for Planetary Health

One of the most fascinating things I read recently was The Lancet’s Manifesto for Planetary Health (printed in full at the end of this post).  For one of the most august and respected medical journals to argue that “the idea of unconstrained progress is a dangerous human illusion”, to call for “a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society” and to state that “our patterns of overconsumption are unsustainable and will ultimately cause the collapse of our civilisation” is remarkable, and timely.  Here’s a short video in which The Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, explains more about the Manifesto: 

 

We talked to Martin McKee, Professor of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and one of the report’s authors.

Reading around in other things about the manifesto, there’s a term that comes up that I’d not come across before, which was “social medicine”. What’s social medicine?

Social medicine is a term that actually goes back to at least the 1920s and the 1930s. In more recent years it’s been termed public health. This is essentially the idea that we should be looking at the health of populations and in particular that governments have a role to play in promoting health. Quite simply put, there is such a thing as society and individuals do need the support to make healthy choices. As has been said before, we all do make choices but not always in the circumstances of our own choosing.

Is the Manifesto arguing that capitalism is bad for our health?

If you look back historically, back to the late 1980s, we saw that one of the alternatives, communism, clearly was very bad for people’s health. Life expectancy was stagnating under the communist regimes and I think there is now really no doubt that the model of communism that had been implemented in the Soviet Union and in the countries of Eastern Europe had failed and was rejected by the population.

If we look at the model of capitalism – and I stress I’m not talking about either of these in their totality – but if we look at the particular model of capitalism we have at the moment and we look at the way in which it brought about the economic crisis with essentially as Adair Turner said, the global stock markets serving “no socially useful purpose”, we can see that that particular model has failed. Failed in terms of delivering benefits to the wider population. The US and the UK have seen virtually no increase in median earnings over the last three decades, so it’s certainly not working in terms of the economy.

There’s no doubt that both the communist system that was in place before 1990 and the capitalist system that led to the economic crisis have both failed abysmally and we need a new way of doing things. Is the capitalist system that we have at the moment bad for our health? Well clearly it is because we’re seeing a vastly more unequal society. People are not sharing equally in the game. The French economist Thomas Picketty has written a damning critique of the system as it is, showing that things are going to get worse.

So although I’m not talking about capitalism in its totality I would refer back to the work of people like Adam Smith, he of “the invisible hand of the market”. He balanced his call for markets in his second book A Theory of Moral Sentiment recognising that free markets have many problems. The capitalist system has potentially within it the seeds of its own destruction unless it can balance whatever its dong with some socially useful purpose.

In the Manifesto, you write at the end ‘together with empowered communities we can confront entrenched interests and forces that jeopardise our future.’ Is there a case, do you think, that Transition groups and such initiatives could actually gain more profile and by arguing what they do not just in terms of sustainability but in terms of public health?

Yes, I think so. The very heart of what we’re advocating is the idea that the two are linked. We cannot have a healthy population without a healthy planet, but the difficulty is that one of course needs to frame one’s argument differently for different audiences. In the past, the public health community has very much focused discussions on the way better health is better for the economy. But we also have to realise that we need to square that circle to some extent.

I was very interested in the bit about ‘the idea of unconstrained progress is a dangerous human illusion.’ With people like Matt Ridley’s book about The Rational Optimist and James Delingpole writing this week about how young people today have never had it so good and they should stop moaning and just be aware that they live at the pinnacle of civilisation. That’s a really dangerous and complacent perspective isn’t it?

It also ignores the basic laws of physics. And we go back to the issue of entropy. Whenever the earth was formed, without getting too much into geological timescales, all sorts of things were distributed in ways that were easily extractable, rare earths and petroleum in the Carboniferous period, the vegetable matter that lead to the development of oil and gas and so on. Obviously, if we take, we redistribute all of these things or use them up from the settings in which they’re constructed. We’re not going to be able to use them twice, and inevitably we’ll run out of things.

An urgent transformation is required in our values and our practices based on recognition of our interdependence and the interconnectedness of the risks we face. We need a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society and a new principle of planetism and wellbeing for every person on this Earth – a principle that asserts that we must conserve, sustain, and make resilient the planetary and human systems on which health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all. All too often governments make commitments but fail to act on them; independent accountability is essential to ensure the monitoring and review of these commitments, together with the appropriate remedial action.

It’s not just running out of oil. It’s running out of some of the things that we depend on, like tantalum in mobile phones or iridium in GPS devices and things like that. Some of the rare earths that we use, neodymium and lanthanide in some of the low energy hybrid cars and things like that.

Fundamentally we will end up taking the things from fairly concentrated deposits in the earth’s crust and depositing them into land sites all over the world and not be able to have any economically viable way of extracting them again. That’s just an inevitability.

Jared Diamond has written a very good book called Collapse. He describes how so often in the past very well-developed civilisations going back to the Indus valley and onwards have actually presided over their own fundamental collapse as they’ve brought about environmental degradation. It’s nice that people are optimistic but it defies the laws of physics and it also defies the historical experience.

The Manifesto for Public Health

This manifesto for transforming public health calls for a social movement to support collective public health action at all levels of society – personal, community, national, regional, global, and planetary. Our aim is to respond to the threats we face: threats to human health and wellbeing, threats to the sustainability of our civilisation, and threats to the natural and human-made systems that support us. Our vision is for a planet that nourishes and sustains the diversity of life with which we co-exist and on which we depend. Our goal is to create a movement for planetary health.

Our audience includes health professionals and public health practitioners, politicians and policy makers, international civil servants working across the UN and in development agencies, and academics working on behalf of communities. Above all, our audience includes every person who has an interest in their own health, in the health of their fellow human beings, and in the health of future generations.

The discipline of public health is critical to this vision because of its values of social justice and fairness for all, and its focus on the collective actions of interdependent and empowered peoples and their communities. Our objectives are to protect and promote health and wellbeing, to prevent disease and disability, to eliminate conditions that harm health and wellbeing, and to foster resilience and adaptation. In achieving these objectives, our actions must respond to the fragility of our planet and our obligation to safeguard the physical and human environments within which we exist

Planetary health is an attitude towards life and a philosophy for living. It emphasises people, not diseases, and equity, not the creation of unjust societies. We seek to minimise differences in health according to wealth, education, gender, and place. We support knowledge as one source of social transformation, and the right to realise, progressively, the highest attainable levels of health and wellbeing.

Our patterns of overconsumption are unsustainable and will ultimately cause the collapse of our civilisation. The harms we continue to inflict on our planetary systems are a threat to our very existence as a species. The gains made in health and wellbeing over recent centuries, including through public health actions, are not irreversible; they can easily be lost, a lesson we have failed to learn from previous civilisations. We have created an unjust global economic system that favours a small, wealthy elite over the many who have so little.

The idea of unconstrained progress is a dangerous human illusion: success brings new and potentially even more dangerous threats. Our tolerance of neoliberalism and transnational forces dedicated to ends far removed from the needs of the vast majority of people, and especially the most deprived and vulnerable, is only deepening the crisis we face. We live in a world where the trust between us, our institutions, and our leaders, is falling to levels incompatible with peaceful and just societies, thus contributing to widespread disillusionment with democracy and the political process.

An urgent transformation is required in our values and our practices based on recognition of our interdependence and the interconnectedness of the risks we face. We need a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society and a new principle of planetism and wellbeing for every person on this Earth – a principle that asserts that we must conserve, sustain, and make resilient the planetary and human systems on which health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all. All too often governments make commitments but fail to act on them; independent accountability is essential to ensure the monitoring and review of these commitments, together with the appropriate remedial action.

The voice of public health and medicine as the independent conscience of planetary health has a special part to play in achieving this vision. Together with empowered communities, we can confront entrenched interests and forces that jeopardise our future. A powerful social movement based on collective action at every level of society will deliver planetary health and, at the same time, support sustainable human development.

Richard Horton, Robert Beaglehole, Ruth Bonita, John Raeburn, Martin McKee, Stig Wall

You can sign up to the Manifesto here.  

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27 May 2014

A Healthier Community: Margy Henderson on Transition Stourbridge’s Harvest Share

Three or four years ago, I discovered there was a group of us who felt it was time to do something about this waste of a wonderful local resource – so we set up the Harvest Share project. Every year, starting in late summer, we help local folks harvest, process if needed, and store / distribute any spare crops from gardens, allotments, and fields (and the odd skip behind food shops). We pick and gather; we make jams, jellys, chutneys, and cordials; we bottle and jar; and we hold juicing days.

For these, we borrow an apple mill and a press from a local market garden. People bring apples if they have some, or just come to join in the fun, and we wash, chop, mill and press apples (and some pears), all day long. Last autumn we held 6 of these days, with 20 – 30 people at each event. They were in our back gardens, in a local school, at a market garden, at a farm – wherever it was asked for. It is very popular as you no doubt know from similar events you have probably been at!

Harvest Share brings great benefits for the health of local folks – physical, emotional, spiritual – through working together, drinking fresh juice, eating more local produce, knowing we are reducing waste and making a positive difference. And it is helping us all get out and about more, and feel more connected to our neighbours and local environment.

People are happy to have help with making the most of their glut of fruit or vegetables – they are mostly unhappy to see it rot away! However, a lot of the oldendays skills are getting forgotten, so together, we are re-learning how to harvest, store, and process foods in different ways. This is immensely empowering! We are looking forward to many more wonderful Harvest Sharing experiences.

Margy Henderson on behalf of Transition Stourbridge

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23 May 2014

Four reasons why too much local democracy can be a bad thing

So the European and local elections are over, and once again it looks like a result underpinned by low turnout and a general lack of interest, especially from young people.  Parties seemed to be falling over themselves to say how much they love communities and want to give them more powers.  It’s the UKIP manifesto that takes it the furthest, raising the interesting question I want to explore here, namely “is it possible to give communities too much say in local affairs?”  Is giving communities a say always a good thing?  It’s not an assumption I saw challenged at all in debates around the elections, so it feels important to make a space to explore it here.

The UKIP Manifesto states:

“Real decision-making should be given to local communities”.  

Well hear hear, I’d be all for that.  Sounds very Transition.  Tell me more…  

Local referendums

It’s time to bring power back to the people. So major decisions should be subject to binding local referendums if the people demand it. On the petition of 5% of the population within 3 months, major planning and service provision decisions should be put to a local vote.

Skirting around the pedant’s point that it should surely be ‘referenda’, let’s look at what they add to this: 

Democracy: Introduce binding local planning referendums on major decisions, such as out-of-town or large-scale supermarket developments, wind turbines, incinerators, solar farms, major housing developments and transport schemes like HS2. 

One might imagine that from a Transition perspective, giving powers over local decision-making can only be a good thing.  But there are a few very real flaws in this proposal which I’d like to explore here.   

1. Rights without responsibilities. 

Giving people rights to decide local planning decisions is all very well.  I’d be for it, up to a point.  But it should be remembered where UKIP, and increasingly, the Conservatives, are coming from on this.  Later in the Manifesto UKIP pledge to:

“end wasteful EU and UK subsidies to ‘renewable energy scams’, such as wind turbines and solar farms”.

Such extreme devolution of decision-making is relatively do-able in a world where you don’t believe in climate change, a position UKIP held until about 4 weeks ago. Roger Helmer, UKIP’s Environment Spokesperson, who in 2009 accused the Church of England if having “abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate alarmism instead” and recently wrote “believe me, I should like nothing better than to re-open the mines, and to restore a once-great British industry”, as well as proposing banning the teaching of climate change in schools, now believes in the science at least, but not necessarily doing anything about it.  

But if you do take a view that climate change is a huge and pressing issue, and that cuts in emissions are now a matter of survival, then things look very different.  With the pressing need to reduce emissions, giving power to communities to decide everything without any corresponding responsibilities is insane.  

What we should be doing is to say that each planning region is given certain targets by central government.  For example, this town needs to build 400 new homes, but also to cut its emissions by 20% over the next 5 years, and we could even throw in a target that 70% of homes built need to be genuinely affordable and in community ownership.  

Then, for sure, give communities the power to decide key decisions, but if they fail to press developers to build genuinely low carbon homes with renewables installed, then they will need to make up the carbon cuts needed by either either allowing a wind project, or using Section 106 money to fund a major retrofitting scheme.  We can’t have it both ways.  

UKIP proposes giving the power to communities to decide on housing developments, solar farms, wind turbines and HS2 precisely because they don’t like housing developments, solar farms, wind turbines and HS2 and feel they can rely on communities to turn them down for them.  It would be a scenario that gives communities all of the rights, but none of the responsibilities to be part of a collective response to the collective challenges we face.   

2. We can do better

In the current mad scramble to recreate the very housing bubble that caused the economic crash in the first place, it’s all about numbers of new houses built.  No consideration of who builds them.  Or how well they’re built.  Or what they’re built of.  Or how much energy they’ll use once built.  Ministers and, it is assumed, the rest of us, are supposed to feign wild delight and gratitude at any old shit housing thrown up anywhere.  “It’s good for the economy” apparently.  Public health professional Angela Raffle told us this week:

“Economic growth and jobs in the pharmaceutical industry are now more important to the government than human health”.  

You could say the same thing about building and housing. 

But we can do better than that.  The problem isn’t that communities need to be able to decide on every development proposed in their area.  The problem is that what is proposed, and what they feel is possible, suffers from a chronic lack of imagination, a paucity of possibilities, one of the reasons Transition can be such a powerful thing.  The spirit in which these powers are offered is not one of genuine empowerment, but rather in a miserly spirit of stopping development going forward.  With a dash of imagination and a few pinches of genuine empowerment and support, we can do a lot better than that. 

3. We also need stronger government alongside stronger communities

There is also a need for strong leadership here, rather than devolving everything (you’ll note that UKIP don’t devolve the powers of referendum for communities to vote on the degree of protection for workers, the levels of tax millionaire businessmen should be paying, and so on).  At the moment we have a government riven over the importance, or not, of climate change, which gives it secondary priority to economic growth, to saving money and the removing “red tape”.  They pass this schizophrenia down to local government along with the starting point of a presumption in favour of all development which is now reclassified as “sustainable development”.  So then the decisions taken at the local scale need to take place in this confused context.  

Imagine if we had a government clear on the need to rapidly cut emissions. A government that encouraged a national conversation about climate change and what actually needs to be done in order to reduce our emissions far quicker than is currently the case. A government that takes action nationally and internationally.

As part of that it could set binding targets for local government, and support them in achieving them.  It would be a government which sees economic activity as arising not from doing things exactly the same as before, but differently.  A government that sets a clear context for planning, setting out both rights and responsibilities.  It is their role also to create as many opportunities as possible for community involvement, for social enterprises and cooperatives.  If the community then wants to come up with other solutions, they are entirely empowered to, but in a context.  

4. Referenda are not neutral

There is a real question as to whether referenda for everything is actually a more democratic way to go.  I spoke to Peter MacFadyen, Independent Mayor for Frome (who we will be interviewing next month here), who told me: 

“People elect people like me as a councillor and then say “I trust you Peter.  I’ve elected you in order to make the decisions for me.  I did it so I don’t have to read all these papers and get involved”.  Giving that level of power to what would inevitably be, at least initially, a very few people who showed up, would be deeply dangerous”.  

Who tends to mobilise to vote in referenda?  Generally those with time, skills and money.  And often those who already own property. It leads to an intergenerational deficit, where people mobilise to vote against wind and solar projects because their house values and view are more important than the needs of future generations, vote against new housing developments for similar reasons, rather than because they don’t create sufficient opportunities for young people locally, whether in terms of work or affordable housing.  Bugger the climate, bugger creating a town with opportunities for young people.  As Helen Lewis put it in the Guardian recently: 

Because owning a house is like having an extra vote – a vote for house prices to keep rising, mortgage rates to stay low and for supply to be constricted to prop up the whole shebang. By owning your own property, you get a say in planning law too – your objection to that new tower block counts for far more than the indirect, dissipated unease of all the people hunting desperately for somewhere affordable in the vague vicinity of their work.

She then went on to argue, wrongly in my opinion, that the solution is to build on Green Belt land, but her opening analysis still stands.  

While the government’s Localism Bill gives communities many useful powers, such as the Right to Build and the Right to Bid, it doesn’t factor in the need to support, inspire and train them in how to make best use of them.  As a result, in spite of the bill being passed in 2011, there has still not been, to the best of my knowledge, a Community Right to Build Order applied for anywhere in England or Wales.  We need to invite communities to sit down to a feast of possibilities.  Instead what seems to be happening now is that communities are being given partial and selective rights but in the absence of a wider discussion about our responsibilities to future generations and for each other, with no care given to what support and empowerment communities need to actually be able to take wise decisions together.  They’re not the same thing at all. 

Referenda offer a huge opportunity to educate, engage and inspire communities with new ideas.  As the Atmos Totnes initiative nears the end of its negotiations over the future of a derelict industrial site and starts to gear up for what we think is the first Community Right to Build Order in the country, we are seeing the referendum that it results in as a huge opportunity for public engagement, building of the community’s self-confidence and sense of what’s possible.  If done properly, referenda can be extraordinary.  If done in the way the UKIP manifesto promotes, it could all too easily be a tool of the curmudgeonly, the selfish, the short-termist.  As a new report states that the collapse of the West Antartica ice sheet is now inevitable, and the White House warn that “the old normal is broken”, that’s the last thing we need.  

Note: Transition Network is avowedly non party political. In previous blogs we have taken both this and the previous administration to task over policies.  Next month our theme is ‘Transition and Politics’, and we are aiming to speak to representatives of all the main political parties.  

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