11 Feb 2014
Sometimes in a life a moment happens, when something in you – which was dormant for a long time – suddenly awakes; being triggered by something very unexpected. And never goes to sleep again for a long time…at least that’s what I hope đ This is somehow what has happened to me in regards to Transition. Having been a “silent” supporter of green themes & issues all my life, I never felt quite called to action. Probably lazyness, but perhaps also because often I perceived the suggested solutions to the world’s problems as being too absolute, too dogmatic, too radical and/or too politically extreme.
All aspects I don’t resonate with very well. Yet probably also due to my Buddhist practices and the inspiration I got from wonderful humans like Christopher Titmus (him too being from Totnes; teaching Buddhism globally since 1975 and having stood for Parliament for the Green Party UK in 1986 and 1992 already), Joanna Macy, Stephan Harding, Charles Eisenstein and many wonderful friends and humans all over the world (my “peak oil posse” so to speak) I realized more and more that “silent support” is indeed important, but certainly often not enough.
Thus the question arose:
In which vessel to fill than this newfound longing for a more visible, active role in making the world a better place to live?
Alas: The universe delivered! It first put Auroville in India and than the Schumacher College (Totnes/UK) into my life. There I got into contact with Rob, Ben, Hal, Fiona, Sophy, Naresh & and all the TN team in about 2008/9 (first as teachers and later as friends), and than suddenly – while packing my stuff going back home to Bielefeld after yet another wonderful short course at Schumacher – it hit me:
This is it.
This – the Transition approach – is exactly the real-life “middle way” I was looking for:
A balanced, non-dogmatic, common-sense, people-friendy, result-oriented, inner and out aspects honouring way of attempting the impossible. And all that together with others, in small & large groups and networks of likeminded, yet very diverse people in my street, my neighbourhood, my town, my region, my country, my continent and my world. Wow! Overwhelming; yet somehow so natural that resistance was futile đ
So here I am; having started my transition journey in 2008, still struggling, still having many more questions than answers, still
searching, still sometimes overwhelmed by the challenges, and yet still 100% convinced that this “middle way” is exactly what is needed in our world on a local-to-global scale. To have us all feel much more connected and embedded by our local “sangha” – and still realize that we are in it all together as humans – globally.
So onwards and upwards my fellow Transitioners and _ettes, carry on – and “stiff upper lip”, as you British so aptly put it sometimes đ
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10 Feb 2014
There’s a rather good programme on BBC Radio 4 called ‘The Reunion’, which “reunites a group of people intimately involved in a moment of modern history”. With our theme this month being ‘Resourcing your initiative’, we thought it might be interesting to revisit the beginnings of one of the first Transition initiatives, Totnes in Devon. We reunited 5 of the people intimately involved with its formation, chaired by Peter Redstone, to explore how did it come together, what were the resources that needed putting in place early on, what were the foundations put in place and how was it done? This is Part One, Part Two will follow soon. It is offered, of course, with the caveat that this is just the story of what worked in Totnes, it will be different in every place. We hope you find it interesting and useful.
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10 Feb 2014
My âStep Up Momentâ came in the form of three questions that challenged me, and reframed my sense of how to be on this planet. The first one came when I was persuaded to attend a âBe The Change Workshopâ by my niece. As part of that magical process came the question âWhen you throw something away â where is away?â It completely messed with my head and changed the way I viewed everyday behaviours that I had previously not given a second thought.
A few months later I sat with my 19 year old daughter watching âThe Age of Stupidâ. The question posed by Pete Postlethwaiteâs futuristic Noah character at the end of the film from the year 2055: âWhy didnât we do more to stop this from happening to the planet?â again shook me to my foundations.
I took a sideways glance at my daughter and felt ashamed.
This coincided with a local campaign I was working on stop cuts to funding for our local theatre. I was very surprised to get a phone call from a wonderful French lady who said âI am from Transition Dorking â would you like some help with your campaign to save this local amenity?â I had been active in community campaigns before and I had never had an offer of help so freely given!
So I met with the embryonic group of Transition Dorking, bringing a few of my friends along and felt as if I had come home. We talked a lot, planned a lot and drank a lot of red wine! After years of working within the constraints of the more adversarial party political model it felt more comfortable to work towards an aim that I wanted to achieve rather than against things I didnât want to happen.
I love the fact that Transitionâs aims are simple, accessible and can make for tremendous fun.
I now work actively in various teams including our core team as well as Pop Up Shops, Pop Up Restaurants, Golden Ticket Shop Local Events, Foodfloat and I also co-ordinate a team of people who write a column about Transition for the local paper.
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6 Feb 2014
In 2006, Alex Crowe and his family went down the road to self sufficiency. Eight years later, he explains why Transition is a much better idea.
Change was everywhere in 2006. âAn Inconvenient Truthâ was released in cinemas. Rob Hopkins and Naresh Giangrande were developing the Transition movement in Totnes. And in our living room, my partner Clare suggested we sell the house and buy land. âYes,â I said. Not pausing for a second.
Weâd been looking for a way off the hamster wheel of 21st-Century life for ages. Brought up on a TV diet of âThe Good Lifeâ, âRiver Cottageâ, âJimmyâs Farmâ and âItâs not easy being greenâ, self-sufficiency seemed the only way. It had been staring us in the face all this time. Why had it taken so long to see it?
Our Big Green Idea
The idea came almost fully formed. We would buy land, live in yurts and create a smallholding with chickens, pigs, dogs, the latest and great green technology – maybe even a natural swimming pool. We loved the idea so much, we thought other people would, too. So we planned a small-but-beautiful yurt camp to provide income for the things we couldnât make or grow ourselves.
It was 2006, remember? There were only a few yurt camps in the whole of Europe back then – and they were all full.
Acting on instinct
The profit from our tiny house wasnât going to be enough to buy land in England, let alone Totnes. But we found a perfect place in France – 10.47 acres of woodland and meadow, in a shallow valley 300 metres south of the Dordogne river.
During 2007, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report demanded immediate action from the worldâs politicians. The Live Earth concert raised awareness of climate change around the world. The Transition Network was born. And we left the country to pursue our self-sufficient dream.
Massive resistance
Arriving in France, we walked straight into a bureaucratic brick wall. Our simple idea, we were told, was âcomplicatedâ. âNo, really,â we insisted, âit isnâtâ. âI love the ideaâ, they said. âBut someone else will have a problem with it.â More than once, we heard: âYouâll never get permissionâ.
Believing we were doing the right thing in the right place, we went ahead and built our smallholding. We planted an orchard, bought a working horse, introduced pigs to clear a vegetable patch, added chickens to the orchard, and were given rabbits for meat.
We learnt a huge amount from books by John Seymour and Hugh FW, and from websites like selfsufficient(ish), Hedgewizardâs Diary and youtube. But our lessons were mostly trial and error. Like Tom and Barbara in âThe (superbly researched, actually) Good Lifeâ, we felt more alive than weâd ever been. We were living fully as human beings – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Sadly, financially, it was a disaster.
In January 2010, after weâd given up on the idea of the yurt camp, the mayor finally said we could go ahead and build it.
Mud, sweat and years
With no left money for materials, we created âĂ©covallĂ©eâ from our own soil, wood and spare canvas. It was hard, satisfying work, but by that stage we knew what we were doing. Looking back at the photos now, what we achieved on our own is astonishing.
Days before we opened, we had our first help from likeminded people. Weâd had incredible support from what I call the English mafia, but they all thought we were âmadâ. Having permaculture enthusiasts Ben and Anna happily moving mud, rocks and wood with us was a breath of fresh air.
Loving the extra pairs of hands, and realising we were working ourselves into the ground, we signed up as HelpX hosts. Weâve since met some fantastic people with useful skills and heartening stories. Some have become good friends and reminded us that, no, weâre not mad – weâre in transition.
Peak dream
There is one moment, for me, that marks the end of our self-sufficient dream.
A couple of years ago, weâd hand-sown a cereal crop to cut down on our pigsâ food bill (and carbon trotterprint). Weâd harvested the crop with scythes and were in the process of separating the stalks from the weeds for stooking and stacking. I was wearing a battered straw hat and a medieval-style long-sleeved shirt made from an old sheet. It was blazingly hot, and I sat down for a cold drink and a rest. The world went quiet and still. All I could hear was the sound of a horse clomping up the road 200 metres away. It was like being in a Van Gogh painting.
That was a perfect moment, right there. Pure joy.
Harvesting that crop nearly killed us and we didnât even have the strength to bring it in. We just dragged the stooks to the orchard for the chickens and geese. Until the oil runs out and labour is freely available, working like that is just too hard. Why slave away to grow crops to feed animals to eat the animals, we figured, when it would be easier to grow crops and eat crops? Itâs only really obvious when youâve tried.
So we stopped keeping pigs. We stopped working so hard. And we started to wonder how we could live more easily.
As if by magic, transition appeared
On a (shock, horror) family outing to our local paper museum, we met lovely local artist Katya Knight, who works with recycled paper. A few weeks later, she introduced me to the man behind our local annual folk music festival and – to my extreme joy – Transition initiative.
I was so happy to meet him, he probably thought I was dangerous.
He told me that Lalinde was the first in the Dordogne to become a transition town. He didnât need to explain what that meant. It was like Totnes had come to us! I told him how we live, what we know, what I used to do, and said Iâd do whatever I can to help.
Le Transition locale
So far, I havenât done much. Iâve helped them put a blog together, been to a few meetings, explained what itâs all about to passing English speakers and offered some good south-facing land as a space to grow food. But whatâs impressed me is the energy, enthusiasm and positive attitude of the core group. In a country where the default response is ânonâ, theyâve got a whole bunch of people saying âOUIâ!
Thatâs what I love about Transition. It appeals to our human drive to make the world a better place – a universal idea that overcomes the boundaries of race, sex and religion.
Our young group is working on more than we have the energy for: a system of exchange based on the âJEUâ; food to share, based on Incredible Edibles; repairing and reselling items before they go to the dump. They are also planning local money, gardens in schools, shared transport and much more.
As is happening globally, the idea is spreading fast. People are moving to Lalinde because of Transition. A group is starting in the far-larger town of Bergerac, 25 minutes away. The ball is rolling – and picking up speed.
The way ahead
To me, being part of a supportive group of positive people makes far more sense than self sufficiency. Old phrases like âthe more, the merrierâ and âmany hands make light workâ are still with us because they remain true. We have a lot of work ahead and very little time.
In 2007, the IPCC gave us ten years to take action. Weâre seven years into that and all we see is criminal negligence on the part of our politicians. The bureaucrats canât help. Theyâre stuck in a system thatâs taken centuries to evolve and canât adapt in the months required.
We are the only ones who can put the infrastructure in place to cope with the coming crisis. In my experience, thatâs fencing, building beds, improving the soil – all hard, healthy, deeply rewarding work. But others will have other priorities. If youâre already doing it, keep up the good work. If youâre thinking of getting involved, take that first step. Youâll become fitter, healthier, happier and meet some of the loveliest people youâve ever met.
If thatâs not âThe Good Lifeâ I donât know what is.
Alex is co-creator of the écovallée family yurt camp in the Dordogne. He has blogged the whole project at www.thedevolutionary.wordpress.com, has written Part One of a book about it and tweets as @ecovallee. Ben and Anna went on to create the Figo Verde bell tent camp in Portugal.
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6 Feb 2014
I recently saw Rob Newman’s one-man show ‘New Theory of Evolution’ at the Exeter Phoenix. Regular readers will be familiar with Rob’s ‘History of Oil‘ stand-up tour from a few years ago. His new show was about evolution, and he describes it as “an exploration of the exciting new discoveries over the last decade in the field of evolutionary biology, and an attack on Selfish Gene theory, arguing that Darwinism is a much richer thing than Dawkinism, and that Dawkins is totally un-Darwinian”. It was a great night out, highly recommended (you’ll find his remaining tour dates here). I caught up with Rob by email, and started by asking him what his take is, a few years on from ‘History of Oil’, on recent developments (tar sands, fracking etc) and how they influence that show’s conclusions?
“The rise in the oil price has made these more costly extractive processes more ‘economical’ – although that words is a bit of a misnomer isn’t it, because of the vast benefits handouts the oil and gas transnationals receive (eg ÂŁ3bn last year as an incentive to sink boreholes in the West Shetland Deepwater Basin). But the fact remains that the oil and gas have to stay in the ground. I think I was wrong about nuclear in History of Oil and I am now thinking that very expensive integral fast reactors are part of our post-carbon future.
Your new show is called ‘A New Theory of Evolution’. Can you give us a sense of the case you make in that show?
For the last 40 years we have been told that humans are born ruthless, selfish and duplicitous and that everything else is a disguise. This is certainly not what Darwin thought. Not only is it is a long way from Darwin, but recent science – from mirror neurones to epigenetics – points the other way, confiming that, as Darwin says, we are born endowed with innate social instincts.
You make the point that the current Dawkins-led version of evolution, that of “red in tooth and claw” and survival of the fittest, has been used to validate an economic model that presents disparity and inequality as “natural”. Could you explain how you see that working?
Well, I’m not saying that Dawkins is a Social Darwinist, himself, but ‘selfish gene’ theory does emerge at the same time and from the same ideological soil as Keith Joseph and Maggie Thatcher’s ‘There Is No Such Thing As Society.’ And as Nobel Prize winner, Wallace-Darwin Gold Medallist and founder of modern biology Ernst Mayr, (described by Jared Diamond as ‘the greatest Darwinist since Darwin’) says:
‘The idea of people like Dawkins that the gene is the target of selection is totally un-Darwinian’ and ‘evidently wrong’ because ‘the gene is invisible to natural selection.’
Tennyson, meanwhile, (who you quote) is wrong to say that nature is all red in tooth and claw (especially on the Isle of Wight where the poet lived). I mean a bit of it is, but rather more of it is green in stalk and leaf or furry yellow and black stripes making a buzzing sounds and building hexagonal shaped honey combs. “I’m sorry your friend kicked the bucket, m’lord, but don’t take it out on the wild flowers, the bison or the millipedes”.
If the Dawkins version leads to neo-liberal economics, what kind of economy/society does your new theory of evolution lead to?
The philosopher GE Moore warns us importantly of the dangers of what he calls the naturalistic fallacy. Just because a thing is so in nature that is no recommendation for its use as, say, a law among humans. I think we would get into a lot of trouble if we take baboon behaviour as a template for human rights.
You argue, quoting Auden, that the story of evolution is not “survival of the fittest” but “Survival of the misfits”. Could you explain what you mean?
In one of the last poems he ever wrote, Auden writes:
As a rule it was the fittest who perished. The misfits, who,
Forced by failure to migrate to unsettled niches,
Altered their structure and prospered.
I argue that since only tiny populations of misfits living on the edges of ecological tolerance generate new species, survival of the misfits better describes evolution than Herbert Spencer’s phrase “the survival of the fittest”. Also I believe that Misfit Theory is a helpful way of looking at the world.
Morrissey once said something to the effect that if you have people’s attention in a pop song you have a duty to educate, inspire, introduce new ideas, politics or to move people. Do you share that belief in your shows?
Was this before he became a bigot or after? By the introduction of new ideas, does he he mean the Enoch Powell tax exile rants? But also he has put the cart before the horse hasn’t he? You tend to get people’s attention in a pop song – if you take, say, the Shangri-Las, by having already moved and inspired people by the pop song itself. Otherwise what’s the point?
Where, for you, does the most hope (if indeed you feel there is any) lie in terms of responses to climate change and peak oil?
Well, I think what Climate Camp have achieved is pretty inspiring. Thanks to their brave actions and West Burton and Kingsnorth there will be no new coal-fired power stations for a generation. I also think Greenpeace have scored some great victories, and their Save The Arctic campaign which aims for an international moratorium against oil drilling is a wheel we should all put our shoulder to.
You are now touring this show until the end of April, and people will be able to see it across the country. Then what? Is it too soon to give us a taste of what might follow?
I am hoping to do a book and a radio series based on Misfit Theory.
You can read more about Rob and his work at his website.
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In which vessel to fill than this newfound longing for a more visible, active role in making the world a better place to live?
