17 Mar 2014
Well, I say a ‘quick’ trip… Not flying, and living in a town whose train connection to the rest of the world was severely nibbled by the Atlantic, recently means that a day in Milan requires a full day to get there and a full day to get home again. In spite of once living in Italy for 3 years, I had never been to Milan before. I didn’t see much of it on my arrival, arriving at 9.30pm (after leaving home at 6am and a train journey which, in part, included travelling through snow-topped mountains in the Alps), it was as much as I could do to wander round the corner from where I was staying for a quick pizza before turning in.
The next morning, after a walk through a great park called Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli, I was the guest of Fondazione Cariplo, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in Italy, who fund lots of sustainability, local food and related issues. Their current call for applications is focused on “Resilient Communities”. I had been asked to talk particularly about Transition in the urban context. The Fondazione’s offices are in an amazing palazzo, an incredibly beautiful space. I was speaking to a mixture of Fondazione staff, representatives of local initiatives who have been funded by them, and some other key people from the city and surrounding regions. My presentation led into some fascinating conversations about the challenges of doing this kind of work in Italy.
After a delicious and locally-sourced lunch there, I had a couple of hours until I was due to give my main public talk. I sat in the park in the sun for a while, then wandered down to La Scala, the city’s famous opera house. It was an area full of shops selling Versace and other ridiculous and vastly expensive fashion gubbins. My favourite was this ridiculous suit in one shop window. Never mind the comical stance of the mannequin, but who wants a see-through suit? Call me old-fashioned, but I have never met another man who has pined for a see-through suit.
I wandered into an incredible shopping precinct that is quite breathtaking in its elegance and beauty. I had a rather disappointing straciatella icecream (usually the King of Italian Icecreams). I saw, for the first time, Il Duomo, Milan’s extraordinary cathedral, which is really quite something. It was let down only by the huge TV screen on its side playing adverts.
The plaza in front of the Duomo was buzzing with tourists, basking in the sunshine. It was time to head to the venue for the talk, at Centro Congressi Fondazione Cariplo. It had been well publicised, with quite a lot of advance media in the Italian press (for example, La Provincia, Avvenire, and Valori). I did a couple of interviews and then it was talk time.
About 300 people had shown up, not bad for 3.30 on a Thursday afternoon, and the talk was also being screened live online, which was viewed by nearly 1,500 people. After an introduction, I spoke for about 40 minutes, giving an overview of Transition and where I see the potential in scaling it up. Managing to not repeat my mistake from my last visit of speaking so fast that the translator had to signal me to slow down, it all went very smoothly. You can watch the talk I gave here.
We then had a long questions and answers session where I tried to understand the questions asked of me in Italian (I speak it pretty well, but nowhere near as well as I used to). Topics included how to do Transition where people don’t have a sense of community, the skilfulness or otherwise of engaging with mainstream politics, the role of ecopsychology and how cities might reinvent their relationships to their rural hinterland.
All went rather well I thought. Then I headed off into the evening with members of various Milan or near-Milan Transition initiatives (there’s a fair few Transition initiatives in Italy, check out the map). A fine bunch of folks they were too. Equipped with Brompton bicycles, impressive electric bikes with a box on the front that can carry goods or people, with tales of initiatives to restart local wool production, vegetable gardening, brewing and much more, they were the usual eclectic, friendly and inspiring bunch you find doing Transition around the world. It was a great pleasure to spend the evening in their company.
We went to Upcycle, the “Milano Bike Cafe”, a cafe cum centre of bicycle culture in the city cum shared workspace cum all round rather groovy spot. About 20 of us sat around a long table (see above) and were treated to some rather delicious local food, whilst also working our way through a selection of local craft beers from a couple of local breweries. In particular I was very taken with the beers from La Buttiga brewery in Piacenza, in particular an American Pale Ale called Sogno Doro (“dream of gold”) and an Imperial India Pale Ale called Psycho. Both were exquisite.
It was an evening of great company, good conversation, lovely people and some fine beer. The next morning I was up at 5 for the train home, finally getting home at 9.30pm. Tiring, but great fun. Lastly, I’d like to send ‘Get Well Soon’ greetings to Cristiano Bottone, who was going to join me in Milan but who was laid low with the flu.
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16 Mar 2014
Perhaps those for whom the notion of ‘living with climate change’ is most acutely felt are farmers. Their business models depend on the weather obliging them with good growing conditions, something it is increasingly failing to do. We talked to Guy Watson, the founder of Riverford Organic Vegetables to hear his thoughts and experiences. His main suggestions? We need perennial cereals. And to develop a love for kale.
We’ve had a few weeks of very extreme weather over the last little while. How has that manifested at Riverford?
It has rained pretty relentlessly since early December. We’ve had 10 weeks of rain which seems to have come to an end now. We’ve actually been very lucky in that it’s happened at the dormant time of year where we’ve finished harvesting roots and we would be planting a few things by now and preparing the ground for planting in an ideal year, but hopefully we’ll be able to start doing something next week. A delay of a month in planting sometimes means absolutely nothing when it comes to harvest, because growing conditions in that month can be so variable, what you plant in late March can come earlier than what you plant in late February.
So we’ve been very lucky, but I suppose. We’ve got livestock that we overwinter on some pretty light draining land and it’s all been poached up, meaning that the grass has all been turned to mud. But actually, that was land that we were going to plough and grass up this spring anyway and it won’t damage the soil significantly because it’s quite resilient ground.
We have been lucky. I can see on neighbours’ land, people who sowed autumn cereals late, they just haven’t grown. The ground’s been waterlogged and there’s been a fair amount of soil erosion, and it’s been a pretty sad sight. I think our ground has stood up. I’m quite encouraged actually, walking around. Over the last 5 years I suppose we’ve adopted a more extensive rotation, by which I mean there’s more grass and less cultivation, which has meant that the structure of the ground is better.
There are probably more earthworms, more organic matter. The ground is more open, meaning that water can enter the soil and percolate through it faster so you get less run-off, better drainage and more air in the soil. Where we haven’t driven over it with a tractor – sometimes you have to drive into fields to get vegetables out – or poached it up with livestock, it’s in a pretty good state. I think it will drain and recover quite quickly.
Our winter crops, yes we’ve had to go in there and harvest leeks and cauliflowers and so on. You have to get them out of the field with a tractor and that has made a mess, but it’s in fairly small areas and the crops have been OK. It’s been miserable for our staff but actually it’s been OK.
One of the most striking images of the recent floods was a picture of the UK from space where you could see this brown stain around the South, these plumes of soil being washed out. Can organic farming be seen as a solution to that?
I think organic is probably less likely to result in soil loss when we do get these extreme weather events. The reason for that is I think the soil is in better structure, and more open so you get more percolation and less run-off. I think if you go to the Environment Agency, that’s what they’ll be wanting to encourage farmers, the farming practices that lead to those sorts of things. I can look around at neighbours’ ground where there’s been intensive cereals and you can see the run-off is appalling.
You can see the water just does not soak into the ground, and I think the adoption of autumn sown cereals rather than spring sown cereals, some of the cultivation techniques that are used now – people using power harrows rather than traditional harrows. You can plough and plant cereals in borderline conditions but probably damaging the soil quite a lot. I think I can see the effect of that. Good agricultural practice would be to bring sowing dates forward to ensure you’ve got a good ground cover before winter. People are still sowing well into November. I seem to remember we did have a very dampish autumn and then it dried up in late October- November and I think that’s when most of the cereals were sown this year, and it was too late for a lot of them.
I think organic practice, by virtue of having better soil structure, is likely to result in less erosion. You get virtually no erosion off grass fields. We tend to have a lot more grass in our rotation. Of course, you might argue that that’s not going to feed a population that’s hungry for grain and hungry for animals that eat the grain, chickens and pigs and increasingly dairy cows now, but I suppose one might argue that we shouldn’t be eating so many of those foods. I feel very strongly that it would take more than a shift to organic agriculture to solve the looming problems that we have.
I think we need to look very carefully at the balance. Most of our food crops are annual crops. Wheat, barley; if you look around the world, wheat, barley, maize, rice, potatoes to some extent. So they’re annual crops which require intensive cultivation, which inevitably means damage to the soil. Some cultivations are worse than others and you can grow with less cultivation, but annual crops are bad for the soil there’s absolutely no question about it. If you have any sensitivity to it, if you go and look at a permanent grass field you’ll see it’s absolutely teeming with life, earthworms and invertebrates. It will have ten times the population of earthworms if not a hundred and that’s probably reflected in all the other soil species as well.
You then compare that to somewhere which is growing intensive cereals and there’s land in the South West which has probably been in barley and wheat virtually continually for 30 years, and you’ll struggle to find an earthworm. The soil is in a pretty desperate state with very low organic matter. It’s bad for the soil.
But how can we feed ourselves when we’re so dependent on it? We need to develop perennial growing crops. It’s a bit of a bugbear of mine, but wheat, barley, maize, maybe rice, originally they’re all derived from progenitors which would have been perennial plants. Maize certainly comes from perennial ancestry. We’ve bred them to be annuals and to produce big seeds that are easily harvested, which will all ripen at the same time, which is great for farmers and great for seed companies because we go to seed companies and buy the seed every year. What we need is a grain crop that you can harvest and let it recover without cultivation, and go back and harvest it again the next year. If we were harvesting grass seed, when you are harvesting grass seed that’s what you do.
I’m sure if a fraction of the money that’s gone into developing GM crops had gone into perennialising some of our major crops, we would have perennial crops now. You’d be sequestering carbon in the soil because you wouldn’t be cultivating it. You wouldn’t be using fossil fuels to cultivate the soil. We wouldn’t have the run-off problems. The benefits would be just huge, and I’m sure it would be much better for wildlife and I think even potentially it could be more productive. If you think that the soil in this country, from July, August, September, October, so a third of the year, even into October, November, December, there’s no ground cover so for half the year the ground is not photosynthesising, not producing anything. If you can have a crop that is photosynthesising all the year, I’d have thought there’d be the potential for it to be a lot more productive.
But there’s no incentive in our current capitalist system for anyone to develop a perennial seed for anything, because you’d only sell it once. I would like to see some. Maybe Bill Gates would do it, put some money, not looking for a return, into perennialising some of those crops?
That’s my current bugbear. It’s quite interesting in Uganda where I’ve just been. Their main starch source in bananas, which is a perennial crop. It just keeps coming back over and over again and you see them growing mixed up with other fruit crops; mangos, papayas, jackfruits, all major food sources. They tend to be grown in a mixture with the bananas, sometimes with coffee underneath. All perennials. It’s a very healthy system. You get very few pest problems because it is all mixed up.
At Riverford over the last 10 years or so, as the pattern of more changing weather and extreme weather has become more pronounced, how have you adapted? From outside Riverford one of the things you notice is the number of polytunnels that you have has increased exponentially. How else have you adapted?
The overall policy is to mitigate and avoid risk. One way that we’ve done that is to put up polytunnels, which have been very successful financially and in terms of our customers, they like the products that come out of them. It means we have to import less and have interesting salads throughout the year. Another thing is that I spent 15 years pushing into what we call the shoulders of the season. It’s easy to produce a lettuce from the end of May to mid-September. With the use of fleeces and early planting you can be producing them the first week in May and can carry on producing them into November and even up to Christmas by using different varieties and going into growing escaroles and radicchios and whatever.
We’re just retreating from all that because those are the ones that tend to fail more often. Indeed all the growers we work with are doing the same. We’re not growing strawberries at all any more. I used to be very dogmatic that I wanted to grow my strawberries outside, that it was unjustifiable to put up polytunnels to grow a crop which historically had been grown perfectly successfully outside and I carried on for 10 years being dogmatic about it and consistently losing money, letting our customers down, frustrating them saying they were going to get strawberries this week, then it rained and we couldn’t pick them. Then we just had to pick them all off because they had botrytis by then, throw them away and hope they’d be better next year.
We were losing money and pissing our customers off. In the cropping year of 2012 we lost half a million pounds growing vegetables, which I would have thought was hardly possible. It was an absolutely staggering sum of money. It was absolutely diabolical, we lost all the strawberries, all the onions, lettuce. All the early crops failed, spinach etc. It did get a little bit better towards the end of the season, but then I think the winter was pretty ghastly as well. We just can’t afford to lose that amount of money, so we just drew back from anything that carried risk, so strawberries have gone and quite a few other crops.
Is there any way, as a farm business, that one can build in resilience to a summer like that?
(laughs) You’re not going to like what I say! Polytunnels, just growing what grows comfortably at this time, and importing, actually. Economically and environmentally I would like to have some research done on this. Is it better to grow something in the South of France and get a full yield fairly reliably, and possibly use lower inputs because wherever you’re trying to grow a crop outside it’s a climatically suitable range. You inevitably end up using higher inputs. For a conventional farmer that would be pesticides to try and fight off disease, because crops that aren’t comfortable are vulnerable to disease. For us it might be finding ground covers or spending more on weed control.
The biggest risk is just not getting the yield at the end. Crop failure or having a reduced crop, or having reduced quality. I suspect there are quite a few instances where it would certainly be economically better and quite conceivably environmentally better just to grow it 200 miles further south or 500 miles further south. It would be quite interesting to do a carbon footprinting exercise on that. Perhaps we need an environmental studies student to do that for us.
Cultivating land is an environmentally expensive. Anything that goes with cultivation is actually bad for the environment, the energy used in doing it, the CO2 that’s given out as a result of cultivating the land. If you square the equation with what it costs to import it, I don’t know. Of course, one might argue that people should eat just what grows in season…
I saw you were in that local food roots film that came out, and said the main thing we need to do towards a local economy is learn to love eating cabbage.
Well that is true. I have been at it for nearly 30 years now. I was having an argument with one of my managers yesterday about the virtues of kale compared to spinach. We can be producing kale, even now going into March and April, and just have it there for when we’re short of greens. We’re desperately short of greens this year because it was so warm earlier in the winter, and now we have very little left. We’re even using Spanish cabbage which is embarrassing and a lot of Spanish spinach. You can’t grow spinach in this country at this time of year.
People, on the whole, would much rather eat spinach than cabbage. It takes a lot of persuasion. Personally, I would rather eat cabbage and kale, but that does require quite a lot of cajoling. Geetie Singh’s pub in London is absolutely hard line UK only produce, most of that local to London and they do produce bloody good food consistently, but it does require a skilled chef and quite a committed team to do that. It is about skills, largely. I think we could eat a 90%, maybe even 95% UK diet without any significant loss of utility in the kitchen, as an economist might call it, but we could still eat bloody well and have varied, good food. But to do that does require quite a lot of skill and commitment.
I can say after 30 years of trying to persuade people to eat seasonally, you can only go so far. If we put out boxes with just cauliflowers, cabbage, onions, swedes, potatoes, parsnips, throughout the winter, especially when you get into February, March, April where you get this first whiff of spring and certainly go off those vegetables, I wouldn’t be in business.
What’s your sense of the impacts, psychologically, of living with climate change? Of that added degree of uncertainty it has brought to our lives. How does it impact on you and the team around you, trying to design a business into the future when it’s so uncertain?
If I go back to 2012-13, you were going into February and March with an expectation that the Spring is going to arrive and the sun is going to come out and the birds are going to start singing, just like if you’re lying in bed and wake up before dawn, there’s an expectation that dawn will arrive. I’d start losing confidence that that would ever happen. It’s just so much part of our culture, the seasons. I suppose there was a good deal of anxiety and depression that went on with that. I guess we’ve had similar this winter although it hasn’t gone on for anything like as long. We’ve had 10 weeks at what is normally a pretty bleak time of year anyway, so I don’t think it’s been anything like as bad.
But it is psychologically pretty disturbing. Farming is part of culture. All our agriculture is based on an assumption of weather patterns. That’s what it’s all based around. My whole experience of growing vegetables has changed. I used to log planting dates and harvesting dates and record temperatures and so on, and I had a whole spreadsheet developed on the assumed harvest. A day in June was worth 14 days in December, and I worked out various things, but it’s all just gone completely out the window.
Trying to plan things has become very, very difficult. It’s made it bloody difficult to run a sensible business, and it has made it particularly difficult to source locally actually. If we agree with a farmer that he’s going to plant a crop and we’re going to sell it, everything is very carefully planned that it will be sold in those weeks. Then when it comes earlier or later or doesn’t come at all, that does throw our plans onto total disarray.
As I mentioned earlier, all the greens, it was a very mild autumn this year. Prior to it starting raining in early December, it was actually a fantastic autumn. We had plenty of sunshine, it was warm. All the crops romped away and came very early. Then we had an absolute deluge of green crops through the early winter and now we have virtually none. That’s been quite difficult to cope with.
If you look forward 10, 15, 20 years, what’s your sense of where you’ll be as a business, where farming will need to be?
I’d be very surprised if fossil fuels weren’t a damn sight more expensive. They might possibly quadruple in price. It would take something like that sort of increase in price to radically change transport patterns. Were they to double in price, I think you’d see air freighting of food drop out fairly quickly. You’d see heating of greenhouses drop out fairly quickly. Neither of which we do anyway because they’re complete insanity.
I think probably if you go up to something like 4 times, trucking and shipping would start to become prohibitively expensive. At that point you will see … I have become rather cynical I’m afraid. Most people are pretty damn selfish and what they eat and how they behave is largely dictated by their own selfish thinking. Maybe they just feel powerless, but when things become more expensive people consume less of them. There’s no doubt about that. If we want people to consume environmentally less damaging food and support their local economies we want imported food to be more expensive and hothouse food to be more expensive. An increase in fuel prices is what will bring that about, and I see very little doubt that that’s going to happen.
Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary recently said that climate change “is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting”. There’s this sense with climate change that we can just adapt. For yourself and smaller farmers, to what extent can farming adapt?
To some degree I do absolutely loathe Paterson with a passion, but he does have a point. I do think capitalism does unleash a creativity that planned economies just cannot access. I’m very reluctant to admit to that, but it does seem to be true. People will adapt, and they will adapt surprisingly quickly. They will find different ways of doing things.
But there is a whole infrastructure which I think will take quite a lot of time to change. We’re relying on a capitalist, Adam Smith model, a laissez-faire market based approach to agriculture. So many of the costs of agriculture are actually externalised. You mentioned the wash of the run-off and the flooding. The flooding we’ve just experienced, I’m sure a good part of it could have been avoided with different agricultural practice.
If you go and look at a grass field, a field of permanent pasture this winter, there would have been virtually no run-off this winter, and any run-off would have had virtually no soil in it. If you compare that to a field of late-sown barley, sown in November. It’s the field of barley that’s caused the flooding. Most run-off, a bit of it has come off roads and so on, but most of it’s come off land. That’s where it’s come from. So there’s the effect of growing those crops which has an impact further down the line but which farmers aren’t paying for. You might say that those who are growing the grasses aren’t being rewarded either.
That’s the problem with the Owen Paterson approach, and I think you could apply the same thing to wildlife, landscape, pollution of water. There is no reward for the value of good agricultural practice and virtually no penalty – under Owen Paterson’s regime they had talked about giving penalties, people not getting single farm payments if they didn’t follow good agricultural practice, but I think that’s been largely abandoned. So that’s the problem with leaving things to the open market.
Things like perennialising crops will require a government or an NGO to take the lead, because you’re not going to get that from the free market, and I do see that as very important. I’ve argued for 20 years that if you want to nudge people in the right direction, just put a bloody great tax on fossil fuels. Forget about all your carbon trading and everything which has just been totally ineffective.
But it’s just politically unacceptable isn’t it? Every government that’s tried to do that has even backed down from the relatively modest attempts to. What it would do is nudge you towards a state that we’re going to have to get to anyway, and probably develop technologies which we would possibly be leading in. Technologies which are going to be needed in 5 or 10 years’ time. Oil price has just stabilised at just over 100 dollars a barrel, but I would be very surprised if the world economy picked up a little bit if that didn’t shoot up to 150 fairly quickly
Or if Russia turns the taps off?
Well that would be interesting, wouldn’t it…
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13 Mar 2014
I have been ‘living with climate change’ for the last few years, living on the Somerset Levels with the highest ever recorded rain fall events causing vast flooding to the area. For me this year it all started around Boxing Day when the road from the next village of Muchelney to Langport flooded and became un-passable. As I write in the first week of March, it is still underwater. It is not unusual for that road and surrounding fields to flood during the winter, but not in living memory has there been so much recorded rainfall over winter.
Nor has there been the widespread flooding across Somerset causing so many main roads to be underwater and impassable for many months, as well as many homes, communities and businesses affected by the flood waters. It is only in the last few days that I can no longer see the flood from my front door across the road filling half of Thorney (and sadly neighbours homes) making it look like I live in a West Country version of Venice.
Yes I live on the edge of a floodplain and so am aware that the area floods, but to have two successive winters with yet more water causing friends and neighbours to be flooded two years in a row where no recorded flooding had been before? Something is changing and it’s not just the fact that the waterways haven’t been dredged of silt as they were back before the early 90s.
Speaking to the elders they even recall widespread flooding of other homes locally not affected this time by the floods back when the dredging was a regular activity and there was less recorded rainfall. To me this demonstrates that these recent severe floods are not directly linked to the lack of dredging. Quite clearly the problem has come from the deluge of rain, the most ever recorded since records began around 250 years ago.
I felt that these floods were coming, I felt this after last winter’s excessive flooding here had gone that that was just a taster of things to come. I felt that since the focus on climate change by the Government and media had diminished that the planet would do something to show what the effects of increased CO2 levels created by humans since the industrial revolution to date would look like and here it showed a very very wet and very very windy retaliation.
It has, however, split opinions of people locally. Last time it was an “Act of God”, a one in one hundred year effect that people living on the levels have to cope with once in a while and maybe climate change was impacting but it was just life. This time though the majority of the loudest opinions are those blaming the Environment Agency for not dredging the silt from the rivers and spending too much of public money on saving birds not people. Though no person died on the levels during this flooding, many parts of the ecology and wildlife did. Humans want to blame someone for their pain. The psychology of change is interesting and in this instance shows that its easier to blame an Agency than look at the bigger picture where we are all part of the problem but equally part of the solution.
The positive aspect of all this is that it did bring the community closer together and tightened our bonds. It has enabled those with an understanding of climate change and it is effects to discuss and debate what caused the excessive weather effects creating these floods in the community.
The floods have reignited my desire to live an even more low impact lifestyle. I have felt so guilting driving long ways around the floods to “civilisation” so have been planting trees and am making plans to switch to an EV (I am fortunate that I work from home for an environmental charity so I have drastically reduced my daily transport CO2 emissions) and i’m looking to move to an off grid small holding up hill 😉
The local community group Transition Langport formed in 2007 as a way to help people of the Langport area reduce our impact on the climate as well as supporting local renewable resources and supporting each other in working together to transition from a fossil fuel based society to one sustained by renewable non polluting solutions. The group have also been reinvigorated to make a difference within their own lives as well as with the community to reduce their use of fossil fuels and to inspire others to do the same.
We are also working on reinstating a train station in Langport to run on biomethane from food waste to enable the community to use sustainable transport as the nearest train station is 17 miles away and this would give transport resilience to the community as the train lines here were less effected by the flooding than the roads. Details of our group and how to get involved or seek advice can be found on www.transitionlangport.org
Most excitingly the Town Clerk is supporting our idea of a community renewable energy project as well as the planting of a wild flower meadow at the cemetery. We are empowered by the effects on our door step to do something about climate change and to improve the lives of the people as well as the ecology on the Levels which makes this part of the world such a wonderful place to live.
Cara Naden, member of Transition Langport, resident of Thorney/Muchelney Somerset Floods 2014
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11 Mar 2014
One of the things Transition can bring is the ability to turn ‘living with climate change’ into inspired and positive action. We asked Chris Rowland of Ouse Valley Energy Services Company (OVESCO) to tell us his story:
“The triggers which got me involved with Transition Town Lewes started with the 2000 flood in Lewes, a talk by James Lovelock about Gaia in Brighton and the TTL open space events, at which I met the future directors of OVESCO directors for the first time. Following those events I distinctly remember taking a call from Adrienne Campbell on the roof of a car park in central Birmingham, I was working as a design manager on several construction projects, including a shopping centre in Birmingham and at Terminal 5.
Adrienne asked when I could attend the next TTL meeting and something just switched in my brain saying the job I am doing is madness, its everything I don’t need, it takes me away from my family, has no connection with the place I live in, its working for carbon intense companies and my wife Suzanne said the stress was going to kill me! So right then I made the decision to give up my job, a company car, pension and what seemed like security, to work part time for OVESCO in Lewes to help deliver a microgeneration grant scheme for Lewes District Council.
My first day at OVESCO was wonderful, we opened a small office in Lewes, I also had a part time job as a designer for a Lewes NGO exhibition company and I had just completed a short Permaculture course run by Pippa Johns at the weekend. I have to give credit to the other OVESCO directors and especially Howard Johns, because he gave us the confidence to believe OVESCO could work and make a difference. Over the years we have learnt that you have to focus on building up a viable company.
The microgeneration grant scheme was the first step and is was Lewes District Council’s trust in or ability to deliver the grant scheme that paid for the office and my part time employment. In the first year we delivered all the grant funding, so the council ran the scheme again and by 2011 we had helped 250 homes install solar thermal, wood stove, heat pumps and PV systems.
[Here is a video by Chris Bird, of a visit to Lewes where Chris Rowland showed him various OVESCO projects]
We also offered a free energy advice service taking about 1000 calls up to 2011. In 2011 we raised our first share issue and raised over £400,000, which we invested in locally owned photovoltaic (PV) projects starting with 545 PV panels installed on the roof of the Haveys Brewery Dept in Lewes. Each step meant we were reducing carbon emissions, building local resilience and developing a decentralised energy supply.
There are dark moments when you see the potential effects of climate change such as flooding in the UK, forest fires in Australia or the spreading of malaria in Africa, it feels like you are just not doing enough to combat climate change, but it’s important to realise that as individuals we all have the ability to contribute to change by taking many steps. It’s also not enough to work on your own, so recently with the help of our new director Ollie Pendered, we have formed an umbrella groups in the South East called Community Energy South (CES.)
Using the Community Energy Peer Mentoring Fund (CEPMPF), OVESCO is helping up to twelve groups set up local energy coops in Sussex learning from the work we have already done. CES is there to support new emerging energy groups in Sussex and we are working with SESP and West Sussex County Council to grow energy groups in Sussex. CES are holding their first public talk at the Brighthelm on 18th March called ‘Power to the People’ and a second talk by Doug Parr from Greenpeace later in the year.
[Here is a short video introducing all the community groups who will be part of OVESCO’s peer mentoring scheme].
What next for me at OVESCO? I just want to see the growth of community energy and develop ways to supply direct the community. And OVESCO has been short listed for the 2014 Ashden Awards, which is fantastic, because Ashden supports grass roots initiatives from all around the world to help combat climate change and most of the projects are taking many small steps to make this happen.
When we started TTL in 2007 I thought we could do everything ourselves and it was that wonderful feeling of empowerment/excitement that got everyone together in Lewes. Over the years we have learnt that it is a combination of the community (TTL & OVESCO etc), working with their local authority (at Town, District and County levels) and guiding/lobbying Government for grant funding, but also the right incentives/support to scale up.
Finally I want to say thank you to Adrienne Campbell, because she helped me take my first steps. Ultimately you just have to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ and that’s my strategy for living with climate change.
[The attachment below is a wonderful ‘timeline’ of OVESCO since it began in 2007]
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10 Mar 2014
What does Transition look like in a place with just 4″ of rain a year? This is the challenge faced by Transition Joshua Tree (population 8,000) in the Mojave desert. Dr Karen Tracy from the group told us more:
“Even without climate change, the Mojave Desert looks dry, daunting, and even fearsome. Here in Joshua Tree, average rainfall per year measures 4” (100mm). In 2012 we received less than 3” (75mm). Transition Joshua Tree (TJT) members know how precious are both the dwindling water in our ancient aquifer and the occasional gift from the sky.
Current levels of water use in California burn up a sizzling 19% of electricity use, just to pump water around! Importing water from the State Water Project (SWP) can only be considered a temporary measure. Source of SWP is 500 miles (almost 1000km) away in the Sacramento Delta! Joshua Basin Water District recently installed a pipeline at great cost; the pipeline was completed just in time for the SWP to cut off all allocations due to drought. Governor Brown officially declared a state of emergency on January 17 due to the severity of the drought.
Drylands Permaculture (the only reasonable response to permanent or mega drought) uses all the tools in the toolbox to change lifestyles around water use. Gone are the days when turning off the tap while brushing one’s teeth will address shortages. Time for industrial-strength water decisions.
Five members of TJT now have Permaculture Design Certificates (PDC). We are putting our education to work, hosting lectures and workshops for the community. Lectures and workshops encourage community members to incorporate permaculture ideas into their lifestyles. Examples of Drylands Permaculture being tested by Transition Joshua Tree members include:
- Rainwater harvesting in the form of earthworks or rooftop catchment.
- Earthworks can mean swales or berms.
- Rooftop rainwater catchment is becoming fashionable and even talked about at governing levels.
- Using and re-using water as many times as possible before it leaves the land.
- Well-designed graywater systems can move water from showers or washing machines to fruit or shade trees.
Harvesting the rivers of rainfall, which erode our mainly un-paved, sandy streets during rare storms, has recently been a topic of discussion at Joshua Basin Water District. This is a much-needed step in the right direction. Intercepting rainwater before it reaches big gullies and dry lakebeds, only to evaporate, may mean long-term survival here is possible. That is a very big mandate.
TJT still has heavy lifting ahead to push though regulatory changes that will legalize household graywater systems. Channels to dialogue with the Water District are open. Our progressive and very active Water Team and Permaculture Design Team set the achievement bar high for water use standards.
Adding to our careful use of diminishing water resources, we must also consider summers that are warmer than ever before, wildlife driven into our gardens, starved by declining habitat and howling 50mph (80kph) winds several times per year.
Before “climate change” we used to see the occasional day above 109F° (43C°) Now we spend most of July and August there. Humidity can drop to single digits. We liberally drape 80% shade cloth over porches and gardens.
Longer, hotter summers and the politics of water in the desert fuel much of the fiery enthusiasm that is Transition Joshua Tree. We can see how to make this work. We’ve earned our designation as TransitionUS’ 96th Transition Town.
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