2 Apr 2014
Monday’s IPCC’s report presented a stark and focused reminder that business as usual will lead to “severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts”, and that the impacts of climate change are already “widespread and consequential”. Our theme for April is “what is the impact of Transition, and how do we know?” In this piece, I want to explore three questions. What is the impact we hoped Transition would have when we first came up with the idea, what impact are we actually having, and what could we be doing differently to increase that impact? Big questions, especially in the light of the IPCC’s report. Although we’ll go into them in more depth as the month goes on, let’s make a first stab at them here. I also want to run an idea past you.
What impact should we be seeking to have?
The draft Strategy for Transition Network captures this quite nicely:
When we use the term “Transition” we’re talking about the changes we need to make to get to a low-carbon, socially-just, healthier and happier future, which is more enriching and more gentle on the earth than the way most of us live today.
In our vision of the future, people work together to find ways to live with a lot less reliance on fossil fuels, much reduced carbon emissions, improved wellbeing for all and stronger local economies. The Transition movement is a social experiment, in which communities learn from each other and are part of a global and historic push towards a better future for us and the planet.
The idea has always been to serve as a ‘detox’ for the West, as an approach that makes the process of reducing carbon emissions and oil dependency feel like a move towards something rather than a move away from something. It has sought to be a depoliticised and viral approach. A call to a mass rolling-up of sleeves and getting to work. It has been an exploration of the extent to which it is possible to influence change from the bottom up in a constructive and solutions-focused manner. The intention has been to be one of the ideas “lying around” in Milton Friedman’s famous quote:
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
In The Transition Companion, Transition is framed as being a number of things simultaneously, an inner process, leading by practical example, an approach rooted in place and circumstance, a tool for turning problems into solutions, a cultural shift, an economic process and a storyteller. Ambitious? Yes. These are times that demand ambitious responses. As does the IPCC report. But how are we doing?
What impact are we actually having?
This is a big question. We shall be exploring it this month in some depth. We’ll be talking to science historian and author of The Merchants of Doubt Naomi Oreskes. We’ll talk to Gill Seyfang, the academic who has probably done more Transition-related research than anyone else and to Jo Hamilton, a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute, who is currently developing ways to enable Transition groups to measure their impact. We’ll ask Michael Shuman for his thoughts on how to evaluate the success or otherwise of any resilience-building/localisation process. We’ll discuss resilience/happiness indicators with Nic Marks and Lorenzo Chelleri.
We’ll ask Eamon O’Hara, author of the recent Local communities leading the way to a low-carbon society report from AIEDL for his sense of the impact Transition is having in the European context. Various researchers who have done interesting research on Transition/community resilience will share their findings, with the only stipulation being that they do so in as plain English as possible.
We will also be hearing from Transition initiatives around the world their answers to the question “tell us one way Transition has affected you or your community?” We’ll also hear, as we do every month, from Sophy Banks on her thoughts on all this from an inner Transition perspective. And if there’s anyone else you think we should be talking to, please let us know.
Let’s do a few quick answers to a few impact-related questions. Firstly, is interest in implementing the Transition model gaining pace? This graph from the AIEDL study of Transition in Europe suggests so:
Do Transition initiatives consider that the work they are doing is going well? According to a recent study from the Walker Institute at the University of Reading, 75.7% of Transition initiatives considered themselves very or fairly successful.
Is their work leading to practical changes at the community level? The evidence of that can be seen in the regular Roundups that we do on this website, and from the stories we’ll be hearing this month. Also, the benefits people experience from getting involved might not always be what you might expect. Research done on the Transition Streets initiative in Totnes found that:
Every person experienced the ‘feeling of taking positive action about issues that concern me’, and all but three had ‘better relationships with my neighbours’ as a result”.
How does Transition contribute to the wider discussions around how to enable behaviour change on the scale demanded by climate change? The AIEDL study concludes:
These initiatives have been shown to be effective in bringing about behavioural change and in helping to establish new norms in society. The wider application of these approaches must, therefore, be seen as an essential element of any broader strategy on climate change.
What are the principal challenges Transition initiatives face? Research by Blake Poland (who we’ll hear from later this month) looking at Transition in Canada, identified the three biggest challenges groups are facing:
‘People’ were the challenge most often reported, including leadership succession, recruiting and retaining volunteers, getting participants out to events and maintaining momentum. Another big challenge was raising awareness, including the ability to reach new audiences, community complacency, lack of perceived credibility, and building partnerships. The third biggest challenge was a lack of available resources such as funding.
Can Transition’s approach of tackling big political issues in a non-adversarial way ever hope to work? Research by Andrea Felicetti (who we’ll also hear from) at the University of Canberra suggests that Transition is:
“…characterised by a markedly non-adversarial approach, and that, whilst pursuing radical objectives, refrains from using confrontational means … although Transition can be understood as a social movement, the above feature represents an interesting difference between Transition and other movements”.
Do we know yet what are the characteristics of a successful Transition initiative? According to the Reading study, they are:
A large number of founders, a good representation of diversity in the broader community, the presence and size of a steering group, the organization in thematic subgroups, the official TN recognition, the acquisition of a legal statutory form, specific training in transition and permaculture practice, resources (time and external funds), location (rural, rather than urban), a favourable context (i.e. perception of the TI by other actors), and cooperation with other actors (e.g. local authorities, business, media, other TIs).
Can Transition work in the developing world? A study looking at Transition in the context of South African townships concluded that “there are also lessons to be learned from the Transition town movement in so-called developed societies”.
Does having Transition, or Transition-like initiatives increase the resilience of a community hit by a natural disaster? Some research focusing on Lyttleton in New Zealand concluded:
There is significant evidence in this research that grassroots action can provide a unique perspective on the needs and requirements of the local communities they are based in. If community support networks such as Project Lyttelton were extended throughout other communities the resilience of wider urban areas and countries may be significantly improved.
Can the kind of bottom-up response Transition, focusing on getting people together to do stuff together, actually be a key tool in engaging communities in responding to climate change? A recent study by Joseph Rowntree Foundation concluded that:
“Improvements in community social capital, while being one of the hardest outcomes to achieve, may ultimately provide the greatest benefit and lead to local championing of pro-environmental change”.
That’s just a taster. I plan to gather more from the growing evidence base during this month to reflect upon once we’ve heard from all our contributors, and they will no doubt throw more light on this question as the month goes by. So let’s move on to our last, and possibly most important question.
What could we be doing differently to increase that impact? And an idea.
So here’s where I want to try something out on you. I have written previously here about some of the ways I think Transition could increase it’s impact, suggesting that key to that are creating a learning network, supporting and resourcing core groups, bringing forward investment for Transition enterprises, becoming better storytellers and building an evidence base (which is kind of what we’re doing this month). So what else might we do?
In Paris, in December 2015, world leaders will meet for COP21, the latest round in the UN’s pursuit of an international agreement on climate change. In the interview with Sir David King which we’ll be publishing later this week he makes it very clear that there is a huge amount of diplomacy going on behind the scenes, and that he is hopeful that this time, finally, a sufficiently ambitious agreement is within reach. I’d like to run past you an idea, still evolving, about what the Transition movement might be able to do to help this push.
Every time these things have happened before, we have seen the standard campaigning response. International campaigns to put pressure on delegates and politicians to “do the right thing”. People in polar bear suits marching with banners. Yet none of those approaches, at least so far as I can tell, have made any difference. I am reminded of what Andy Lipkis said when we spoke to him last month:
The Bush administration was ready for all Americans to be protesting to try to stop the Iraq war. They expected that, they built that into their design. I was so amazed that they could say they didn’t care what the people said, that I had to think through why they did not care about that. How did they make it resilient? Because 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 sometimes that you can do is actually vote with your feet and vote with your dollars. I was going – “wow, yeah, they’re counting on people complaining”. Protesting and not changing. I started thinking that even the Obama administration is still using the same metrics as the Bush administration was, saying people won’t change on energy. “It’s going to take 35 years to reduce our energy use by 30%”. Well that’s BS, because we can choose to do that in a week.
So how would it be if we, as an international movement, ran an international campaign in the run up to COP21 which, rather than the kind of “you should be doing this” type campaign that never seems to get anywhere, was instead a “look what we’re already doing” campaign. It could be called something like “Come on in, the water’s lovely” (although with an awareness that with climate change the water is actually becoming more acidic and less lovely, so we couldn’t call it that), showing that people around the world are already choosing a 2 degree approach and thriving as a result.
It would be a positive narrative about how people are rising to the challenge and loving what they’ve learned about themselves, their community, about what’s possible. We could:
- Create a series of short viral videos showing people around the world living in a way consistent to 2 degrees and having a great time as a result
- Create a short manifesto around it, and get a wide range of organisations signed up to it
- We could have one day where every Transition group invites their political representative to “come on in”, and spend a day with them, so that one Monday (say) all the representatives go back into Parliament having spent the previous day with their local group.
- An online campaign which gathers all of this together
- All manner of other inspired stuff
Copenhagen (‘Hopenhagen’) left everyone so flat when nothing happened that it took the movement for action on climate change years to recover. Part of the reason for that was that all the power, all the permission, was given to the people inside the venue drafting the agreement. How about we flip it around, and take the power back to outside the venue, and start living as though we had already created a world consistent with staying below 2 degrees, and celebrate that?
In doing so we perhaps do what has never been possible in previous negotiations like COP, we take the fear out of the necessary changes, we show that we aren’t waiting for their permission, and that communities are thriving, rediscovering each other again, creating new economies and feeling inspired and driven in a way they never have before. Doing so successfully would require engaging the international network of people, initiatives and hubs that have come together around the Transition approach over the last 8 or 9 years.
What do you think?
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1 Apr 2014
Manitou Springs is a small town with a population of 5100, located in Colorado at the foot of Pikes Peak. The town is home to 11 mineral spring fountains which many claim have healing powers. For me, it tastes like Vichy and I am happy to walk outside my door, feel the mountain air and fill my bottles. Transition Manitou Springs has been quiet over the years. Brian & Becky have held the “space” for the transition movement; by keeping up with transition training; hosting cool movie screenings for the community with films like Bag it, Dirt and Dive; permaculture workshops are held regularly and permaculture certification is always available through Pikes Peak Permaculture. Transition Manitou was pretty low key, until about 5 months ago. That is when I decided to open a grocery store here – and make the community part of process.
It all started with a series of “community discussions”. The theme was “Let’s reclaim our local food economy”. I started by inviting a base of people that were interested in local food, then canvassed and went door to door to tell people about the meetings, and finally made sure that word got out around the local university about the cutting edge radical food store in the making. The first meeting drew 40, the second 60, by the fourth meeting, there were close to 140 people.
A Facebook page was created, a Kickstarter campaign launched and we acquired a 501(c)3 partner (registered charity). Yay, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union!. The co-op was then registered, member-investors were secured and here we are, about to open one of the coolest grocery stores that has ever existed on the planet. We are truly in the process of restoring our local food economy.
So how are we doing it? Well first of all, it is definitely an us. Harry Green, Lily Kempf, Dale Childe, Bill Neaves, Heather Ryan, Rhonda Thompson and Angie Stout are pulling hard along my side. We are creating a point of sale for food, that we as a community control. We chose a central location that locals and tourists can access by foot.
We are aggressively seeking out local producers and local food processors. People who have backyard gardens and small greenhouses, now have even a more of a reason to grow food. We have 2 girls who make baby food for example. We’ll be getting them into a commercial kitchen with a professional canner, loaning them our branding person to create labeling, and then on the shelves it goes.
Same with Joe Gameson, who has been making Jo Momma’s BBQ sauce for family and friends for more than 10 years. We’ve discovered Charles Hendrix who has a large aquaponics/hydroponics operation. He will be providing the store with lettuces, Nile tilapia and guess what, he is going to start growing Kiwi – Kolorado Kiwi! Then there’s Nye Gallaway who makes these super energy bars.
We have also discovered Elevation Ketchup. Their motto is “If tomato is a fruit, is ketchup a smoothie?” Two young guys making organic ketchup in Colorado. It seriously is cool, really cool. And the community knows it and they feel it. It’s like everyone in town is running around with this smirk on their face.
The Local First Grocer is here.
Local everything, but let’s start with food.
By: Elise Rothman, Director of Transition Manitou Springs & GM Local First Grocer Cooperative.
Special thanks to Andy Middleton from TYF who is my sustainable dragon hero, my sister Simone who is behind me whenever I turn and Becky Elder who is my radical partner in crime.
LFG Kickstarter • LFG FB • LFG website • Transition Manitou
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28 Mar 2014
Today we have a guest post from Luis, an active member of a Transition Initiative in Portalegre em Transição in Portugal.
“We are in a semi-rural area, with a quite old population. There are still a lot of people we know who lived all their lives in direct contact with nature and, often, in my group, we tell stories about enlightening conversations each one of us had at a certain point with old people about changes in climate and its effects around them.
Some of these conversations talk about strong changes, strong effects of the lack of respect human beings express towards Earth. We thought at various times that it would be good to capture one of these conversations and I finally did it! I recorded a conversation with my parents: they are in their eighties, still living in a village near Portalegre and they talk about the changes they perceive in nature, throughout all the seasons they lived.
I will not do a full transcription – I will just share with you some of the highlights of the conversation, I hope it is ok!
I introduced the conversation by saying that we all currently hear talking about climate change but the real question I would like them to answer is if, during their lives, they sense a change in the climate and in the nature. My father answered in a very assertive way confirming that there are changes. He thought, seconded by my mother, that the strongest sign of change he sees is the way now weather is extremely unsettled in the various seasons.
Seasons are not as well defined as they were before – weather varies extremely one day to the next, now… My parents have the clear impression that changes in weather, as seasons went by, were more smooth and permanent. My mother thought that there is a big difference in the frequency of thunderstorms – in the past, thunderstorms were very common. Not anymore.
I asked them about animals and plants. Maybe not as clear and the changes my parents identified in the weather, but they still pointed out some interesting effects: my father said that he has the impression birds are afraid to sleep in the fields. In the end of the day, birds all come to spend the night in the villages. Now, if one walks out, in the nature, when the night falls, you do not hear the noises of the animals. They find that very strange. After I questioned about variations in bird species, they said that now there are many many more storks than before. They are not migrating anymore. Most of them stay all year round here.
Concluding the conversation, my mother pointed out how important is the experience and the empirical knowledge of local people, that changes are not clear in every element of rural live but the truth is that they feel, in the weather and in their body, that, yes, climate changed.
It might be a good idea to keep capturing these conversations. It can be a rich collection of knowledge.
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28 Mar 2014
I live in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England. From 2006, there was an organisation called Marlborough Climate Pledge, which worked to raise people’s awareness around the issues of peak oil and climate change. In 2011, at a Green Drinks, there was a visiting speaker from Romsey, Hampshire, talking about how they had started a Transition Initiative. This led directly to our starting one in Marlborough. This filled me with excitement!
I have been interested in living holistically all my life. The way we have always done things is not necessarily the best way of doing them, when viewed from the perspective of all life on this planet and with an understanding of people and psychology. We have this amazing challenge – step up to create a viable, sustainable future for all of life on the planet, or be destroyed in one of any number of unappealing ways.
Last year, working with the Environment Agency, the Town Council installed a flood protection scheme on the River Kennet, which winds through the centre of town. This worked beautifully this winter, and the only flooding was due to drainpipes backing up, not due to the river. With all the problems of flooding sewage systems, perhaps we should all build composting toilets, that can then go to be composted, instead of wrecking the water system. However, people living here still find it impossible to get buildings insurance because they live by the river; so from that point of view, it was useless.
Personally, we live on higher ground, so our main experience has been a massive increase in wind. Fence panels have blown down. Luckily, the roof is sound. For planting, we are thinking more and more in terms of creating a windbreak (trees) for the prevailing south-westerlies. However, the wind has come from all directions recently, too!
I wish to create a future with dignity and respect for all, where we may reduce the amount of planet we visit, but we live more deeply and meaningfully on ‘our patch’ in relation to everyone else.
For me, being a part of Transition is an act of revolution – the structural inequality of our culture needs to be radically changed, the banking industry needs to be radically changed. The goal should be maximum benefit for the many, and not the few. In my day job, I am a benefits & money adviser, as well as being a transpersonal counsellor and psychotherapist, and an astrologer and teacher.
On an individual basis, I deal with the fallout in financial and mental health issues generated by our current economic climate and culture. I work to change and improve our experience of the world, one person at a time.
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27 Mar 2014
In the market town of Totnes in Devon, a small group of volunteers are redistributing produce that would have otherwise gone to waste, with inspiring results (an article I wrote for the Live Better section on the Guardian’s website).
It’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m in a large and gloomy food storage shed at Riverford Organic Vegetables near Totnes in Devon with a small group of volunteers called Food in Community. We’re working in the small corner of the shed that has been allocated to us, sorting ‘grade-out’ produce not quite perfect enough for sale or nearing the end of its shelf life, into boxes for local distribution.
There are avocados, carrots, cauliflowers and apples. Broccoli and bananas, spinach and peppers. There are even some kiwi fruits. And one solitary leek.
Each box has a card stating who it’s for. There’s the Totnes Food Bank, the Drop-In Centre, Cool Recover – a local charity working with young adults with mental health issues, a local primary school, Rainbow Nursery, as well as several boxes for individuals and a few other local projects. One box goes to a community radio station offering volunteers and vulnerable adults the chance to make radio programmes. If we weren’t doing this, it would all be fed to the farm’s extremely fortunate pigs. Amid reversing forklifts and vast crates of organic produce we fill the boxes, and within an hour we’re loading volunteers’ cars for the trip back to town.
Food in Community started last year and is the brainchild of Laurel Ellis and David Markson. Initially imagined as a food gleaning project, wanting to mobilise volunteers to gather perfectly edible but uneconomic produce from local fields, their current focus sees the distribution of grade-out as “a catalyst for creating more cohesive communities and building community confidence and resilience”.
One recipient of Food in Community’s boxes is local primary Grove School, which had until recently outsourced its school dinners, with only 30 out of 200 pupils taking them. When the PTA decided to take over the catering, employing a chef, take-up doubled. When Food in Community showed up and was able to bring weekly deliveries, the PTA no longer needed to buy in prepackaged and frozen produce, and could spend more on better quality local ingredients. Take-up rose to 100.
On arrival in town, we deliver boxes to people in recovery from cancer, and to others struggling to make ends meet due to the impacts of the bedroom tax. We drop four to Rainbow Nursery, housed beneath the town’s library. I ask Julie Tweed, pre-school co-ordinator, what difference the weekly deliveries make to them. “Although Totnes looks like an affluent area,” she tells me, “it’s an area of rural deprivation. We feed 50 children here every day. These deliveries mean our menus have become more seasonal, more experimental. We are a charity, so free and quality produce helps us hugely. We work with families that are hungry. Some of my staff team are hungry. We can support them with free bags of fruit and vegetables, which are very deeply appreciated.”
Food in Community’s thinking goes beyond just delivering produce. They have started running cookery classes at the local family centre and also in the newly-established community kitchen in the town’s Civic Hall, for people with mental health issues and older men living alone. On the drive back from Riverford I asked Laurel, where does she think this could all go?
“To really make the most of this, we need cold storage”, she tells me. “I’d love to be able to do catering for local schools with a strong training and employment element, and perhaps an evening cafe.”
But how replicable is this model? It may work in Totnes, with the input of small amounts of funding, its wider ‘transition town’ context and a dedicated team of volunteers, but elsewhere? “This could be done in most places”, Laurel tells me, “there is surplus everywhere.”
Guy Watson of Riverford Organic Vegetables loves it. “It is always painful to see good produce being wasted. It’s great to see it find a home. I especially like the way they’ve just got on with it.”
Food in Community aren’t the only people looking beyond food banks, as Pam Warhurst, founder of Incredible Edible Todmorden, told me. “It doesn’t start and end with the food bank. They’re a necessity, an immediate response. But they’re the first, not the final response. It’s about providing opportunities for people to feed their families well.”
If Food in Community are anything to go by, rethinking our relationship to the 15mn tonnes of food the UK discards every year could unlock much more than food, it could also be a source of health, education and community involvement.
Back at Rainbow Nursery, Julie Tweed is telling me what several other recipients of boxes have told me. “It’s like christmas when the boxes arrive, the joy of finding out what’s in the box that week.” She cradles a celeriac, a root vegetable unknown to most of her young charges but which they are eyeing with fascination. “It’s like a character from Doctor Who.”
Interested in finding out more about how you can live better? Take a look at this month’s Live Better Challenge here.
The Live Better Challenge is funded by Unilever; its focus is sustainable living. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.
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