Transition Culture

20 Jan 2014

How to discuss Transition with … No.4: Local government

Who  

Michael Dunwell lives in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. He didn’t have a background in local government, nor any training.  He was an artist, a painter, who exhibited his work and was doing fine until Transition came along.  Involved in Transition Forest of Dean and Transition Newent, he found himself picking up the local government aspect of the group’s work when a fellow member stepped aside. 

The group had successfully bid for Local Strategic Partnership funding, although the small print of the grant said it could only be spent by the local council and the Transition initiative working together.  The only problem was that the Council neglected to tell the Transition group that the bid had been successful, leading to the Transition member who had been working with the council to resign on principle.  But the seat needed to be filled, so up stepped Michael.  He told me:

“It was never a desire of mine in the first place, but it has been an amazing learning curve.  It’s been fascinating.  People working in local authorities don’t feel very well connected with the public.  They feel nervous of them, if not actually paranoid.  But at the end of the day, they are ordinary human beings who need our assistance.  My experience has been that Transition ideas are more in line with what they are doing than we may realise”. 

I asked Michael what his advice would be for a group wanting to approach its local council.  “I’d say to first make contact with the Community Support Officers”, he told me.  “They are the key people.  They are very valuable if you are wanting to join in with what’s already happening.  They can link you with all their contacts, which tends to be a huge network”. 

Michael studiously avoided getting involved with local councils all his life, an approach which he now regrets.  Not a naturally assertive person, he found his role to be listening and talking to people and trying to understand what they are trying to do.  As a result, the Transition group’s role on the Council is now valued. 

Another piece of advice is to know what the council is already doing, especially in the field of sustainability.  Being effective involved a process of “getting up to speed”, reading lots of documents in order to get to understand stated policy and the thinking behind it.  It means you are able to understand their priorities as an organisation. 

“You can create an Energy Descent Action Plan through a series of Transition workshops”, he told me, “but if you take it to the Council and expect them to be bowled over by it you’ll be disappointed.  They’ve been working at this stuff, in the light of, and shaped by top-down directives, to the point where they’re exhausted.  You need to acknowledge what they’ve done, to understand the trials and tribulations of running a local authority.  My take is one of extreme sympathy with the officers. 

So what does Michael think he has brought to the Council and its work.  Michael told me “I have consistently said that we do have to take notice of climate change and of how we manage and utilise our local resources.  They have, by now, got used to my saying this over and over.  There’s no real disagreement.  In theory, what we are saying and what they are doing are pretty much the same thing. 

I asked him whether he struggled with getting involved in politics (with a small ‘p’).  Councils can be pretty cut-throat places, how does he cope with that?  He made clear that he works with officers, not with eh elected officials, meaning that he sidesteps most of the politics.  “My stance is apolitical.  I’m an innocent”, he told me. 

Within the Transition group it is now established that having a role on the Council is an important part of the group’s work.  “We have established a bridgehead in the Council”, he told me.  Michael is now standing down, and two new people are taking his place.  Having seen them in action at a recent meeting, Michael says “I am very proud of them”.

We end our conversation by returning to Michael’s original career as an artist.  “Since I’ve been involved in Transition”, he said”, “what I’ve done has been just as creative.  For me Transition has been an enormously creative process”.  Here is a video filmed last May where Michael sets out his vision for the Forest of Dean:

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20 Jan 2014

6 reasons why there’s no community in fracking

This month we’ve been looking at the potential of scaling up Transition, what the obstacles to doing that might be, and a range of perspectives on what’s needed to enable that to happen.  Right in the middle of that, David Cameron announced last week that the UK is now going “all out for fracking”, and urging people to get behind the process.  It’s as clear an indication as you could wish for that David Holmgren’s recent assertion that we are moving into a ‘Brown Tech’ scenario, where concerns about climate change are sidelined by an all-out push for what fossil fuel reserves remain, is what’s actually unfolding.  But, although we’ve debated the pros and cons of fracking here before, is he right to say that shale gas is a good way to benefit communities?

Over Christmas, during some of the most extreme weather the UK has seen, David Cameron visited flooded communities in Oxfordshire and told local people “we are doing everything we can”.  “There is always more to do and lessons to be learnt and I’ll make sure we do that” he told reporters.  Asked about the floods at Prime Minister’s Questions a few days later, he said that he “very much suspected” that the recent floods were the outcome of climate change.  Now, the following week, he has announced this push for shale gas and trumpeted that it will bring great benefits to communities.  

Aware of the widespread public suspicion of fracking, a number of sweeteners were announced by David Cameron last Monday.  Councils will be allowed to keep all the business rates from fracked wells.  Communities are being offered £100,000 for each successful well, and 1% of revenues from each well, which the government are suggesting could be worth up to £10 million per site.  And this from a government whose Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change recently announced that he wanted to see a “community renewables revolution” (“I want to see community energy projects rolled out across the country”), and launched the idea on a rooftop with Brixton Energy (see below).  But how does this push for fracking compare to a different approach, one built around community renewables, community ownership, and energy being seen in a wider context of local economic regeneration and resilience?  Let’s see …

Is fracking the best way to help improve public services?

With spending cuts decimating public services across the country, local councils will now be able to keep all the business rates generated by local wells, up to £1.7 million for each well drilled.  Justifiable concerns have been raised in terms of how the lure of such extra finance will undermine the impartiality of the council’s role as the planning authority that makes the decision as to whether each project can go ahead.  With vital public services under threat, such cash will make a big difference to their being able to sustain essential public services.  

But there is a very real question of how much of the money potentially given to local authorities will simply go straight back out again in policing extremely unpopular fracking projects.  For example, the policing bill for the protests against the Balcome site, presumably picked up by the local authority, rather than Cuadrilla, runs currently at about £3 million.  The approach coming through Transition and other approaches of community-led development, community-ownership, building solutions to ‘leaky-bucket’ economics, and local authorities taking a central role in resilience-building, using their procurement and other approaches to help it happen, offer a far greater opportunity than money from fracking.  Also, as our recent Austerity Basics series showed, cuts on the scale we are seeing them is not the only way forward from here, and to link much-needed finance to accepting fracking sites reeks of being deeply manipulative. 

Is it the best approach for building local resilience?

I talked to Agamemnon Otero of Brixton Energy in London, the community energy company with whom Ed Davey chose to launch his ‘Community Renewables Revolution’:

 

“The thing about community energy is that it has two vital ingredients, community and renewable energy.  Those are two key ingredients in the creation of resilient communities”, Agamemnon told me.  Every year, London gives £12 billion to the Big Six energy companies to pay for its electricity and gas.  The UK annually gives £178 billion.  Whether that gas comes from Qatar or from gas fracked in Lancashire makes no difference to the resilience of local communities. It also, as is now clear, will make no difference to the cost, indeed both the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the UK government itself (see below) are predicting that the cost of gas will rise, 40% by 2020 according to the IEA.  

On the other hand, renewables, at the small to medium scale at least, lend themselves more to community ownership, to decentralised ownership models and community investment.  Unlike renewables, the economics of fracking operate in the kind of surreal, bizarre and illogical world of high finance.  As Richard Heinberg wrote in Snake Oil: 

In a New York Times investigative article (“After the Boom in Natural Gas,” October 20, 2012), Clifford Krauss and Eric Lipton wrote, “Like the recent credit bubble, the boom and bust in gas were driven in large part by tens of billions of dollars in creative financing engineered by investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Jefferies & Company.” The article details how this “creative financing” forced drillers to keep drilling even when each new well represented a financial loss.

At the local scale things can be done differently.  As can be seen in Germany where half of renewables being put in place are community owned, this makes a big difference.  It is hard to make the same case for fracking.  As Peter Capener of Bath & West Community Energy told me:

“Renewable energy and local ownership means that the energy could, in theory, be used locally to build resilience and self-sufficiency in an increasingly unstable energy environment”.  

Fracking is too capital intensive to allow communities to set up and run their own wells, even if they wanted to. Giving a tiny proportion of the income back really makes little difference. Income such as is being proposed is only one small part of the bigger picture of thinking about what a resilient community needs. 

Why will bribing communities not work?

The idea that you just need to offer people money to get them to accept unpopular energy projects clearly doesn’t work.  Some wind energy initiatives (including the unsuccessful Totnes Community Wind project) offered money to local communities, who saw it as a bribe, and it only strengthened their resolve to stop it happening.  Money isn’t usually what motivates communities. Our experience in the Transition movement has shown us that ownership is. Renewable energy is ideal for that.  As numerous projects have shown, communities can raise some or all of the finance they need in order to own local energy projects.  

If funding from government or elsewhere can enable communities to start building new resilient infrastructure and enterprises, then it’s a valuable approach.  Bath & West Community Energy were provided with £1 million in debt finance at the outset by Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE), which enabled them to go out with a share offer founded on projects already being built that investors could see happening around them, which reduced risk and built confidence.  This then enabled a model where local people invested £750,000 in a share launch, a significant number of them moving Self-Invested Pensions into the new model.  That model is a far better approach than trying to buy off opinion.  Also, as a local resident, it’s not like anyone gets a choice whether to accept it or not, they just get the money.  And who does it go to, and who decides what to do with it? 

What might communities spend their fracking-derived income on?  From a climate perspective, the idea that you might extract shale gas to raise the finance to build an integrated renewable energy system to power the community into the future doesn’t really work either, as given the additional carbon unleashed, you might be better off investing that money in rubber dingies and an Ark.  Or at least adding the money to a fund for better flood defences and rubber dingies for flood-affected communities, or perhaps offsetting the impacts for families in flood areas whose insurance excess has gone up from a few hundred pounds to over £10,000.  That carbon needs to stay in the ground. 

Does it centralise or decentralise power?

When we spoke to Jeremy Leggett just before Christmas, he called what is happening in the energy world at the moment a “civil war”: 

“It’s not a black and white thing, but a civil war it is, and make no mistake, the threatened incumbency, as they see and smell the ultimate demise of their belief system, ever more clearly, are fighting as in many wars, the most bitter and horrid fighting is done towards the end of the war. You saw that with the Second World War in particular. The same thing is happening in the energy civil war right now”.

He also noted how in Germany, renewable energy is rapidly leading to the demise of the large energy companies, as a more decentralised, democratic, people-owned and driven model takes over.  He added:

You can see the big energy utilities dying basically. The top twenty European energy utilities were worth a trillion Euros in 2008. Now they’re worth half a trillion. That’s simply because of the way wind and solar particularly, but also other renewables have driven down the wholesale price and literally taken power out of the monopoly hands of the utilities.

Yet the UK is seen as the place where the old energy incumbency will hang on and fight to the last.  That’s why Total, a French company who are unable to frack in France because it is illegal, are moving into the UK.  But surely the government has the nation’s best interests to heart, and is making its decisions based on an impartial weighing up of the options?  Well, no, as the diagram below, which shows the links between senior members of government and the fossil fuel industry illustrates:

A report last week showed how shale gas executives and government officials worked together to manage the public reaction to last week’s news about fracking, and the cosy relationship between the two, critics arguing that the government was “acting as an arm of the gas industry”. 

The clinging to fossil fuels in spite of the clear dangers to the climate is leading now, in the US, to activists against fossil fuel companies being charged under terrorism legislation for hanging a banner and dropping glitter in an oil and gas company’s lobby.  That’s not a path that a push for renewable energy would bring about, and one we must do everything possible to avoid.  Fracking and nuclear power centralise power into fewer and fewer powerful hands when we need to be doing exactly the opposite.  

Is fracking the best way to decarbonise communities? 

A recent study by BP found that greenhouse gas emissions are set to rise by a third over the next 20 years. According to Fiona Harvey: 

“Shale gas – previously inaccessible because the exploitation of these resources requires technology only recently perfected – will account for a rising proportion of the growth in energy in the years to 2035, but its use will not cause a decline in greenhouse gases”.

The core of their argument is that rather than displace coal, as shale gas advocates have anticipated, increased availability of shale gas has been accompanied by coal consumption rising to record levels.  The world is hungry for hydrocarbons, and with no international cap on their use, it will burn whatever is brought to the market.  It knows no restraint or self-control.

David MacKay and Timothy Stone, in a report for Cameron’s own Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), recently concluded that fracking will do little to reduce gas prices or to reduce carbon emissions, and that:

“The production of shale gas could increase global cumulative GHG emissions if the fossil fuels displaced by shale gas are used elsewhere”.  

Climate scientist Kevin Anderson has recently expanded on MacKay and Stone’s point, challenging three of the key arguments used to justify a shale gas revolution, namely that it:

• has lower emissions than coal. This is true only if the coal displaced by shale gas remains in the ground and is not combusted elsewhere
• offers the prospect of low-carbon energy. Gas is a high carbon energy source, emitting half the quantity of carbon dioxide per unit of electricity generated as the worst and dirtiest energy source we know, coal. Half the worst is still very high emissions.
• is a transition fuel to a low-carbon future. Even the shale gas industry acknowledges that it will not produce significant quantities of shale gas before around 2025, by which time our international commitments on climate change would not permit it to be combusted in any significant quantities.

The best way to decarbonise communities is through a concerted programme of energy efficiency measures, through enabling the widespread roll out of community energy projects, peer-to-peer learning between them, grant aid to get them started, consistent messaging on the need to reduce energy use and through support for community-led initiatives such as Transition Streets.  As Peter Capener told me, “energy efficiency wins every time”.  Yet support for the kind of accelerated programme of energy efficiency measures so desperately needed has dwindled, leading to a situation where, according to The Guardian:

According to DECC figures,1.61m lofts were fully insulated in 2012, but in the year to the end of October 2013, the most recent data released, just 110,000 had been treated, a pro-rata fall of 93%.  For cavity wall insulation, measures fell from 640,000 in 2012 to 125,000 in the year to October 2013, a pro-rata fall of 77%.

Just at the time we need a deep and far-reaching programme of energy conservation measures, we are seeing just the opposite.  This creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, where demand for shale gas can be demonstrated because the nation’s homes are so wasteful.  We end up inviting a French company to help us heat the skies above our homes.  

Perhaps another useful approach could be for the government might also legislate for a different way to charge for energy.  At the moment the Big Six all charge less the more energy you use, and many people live in fuel poverty.  Last winter the UK saw 28,500 excess winter deaths, and huge profits for the companies.  How about instead we say energy is free to everyone up to a very basic level, enough to ensure nobody freezes to death, also building in safeguards for poorer households which are more often all electric heated.  Above that level, the price rises steeply.  Money from those paying the most could go to energy efficiency measures for those on lowest incomes.  It would reduce bureaucracy in terms of things like Winter Fuel Allowance.  Given that many people are now used to the “basic service free, add-ons extra” model (Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube etc), it could prove a popular approach. 

Will fracking create more jobs?

David Cameron has repeatedly trumpeted that shale gas could create 74,000 jobs.  That is a figure I would treat with vast scepticism.  It is double those in a report published by DECC just a month ago which estimated that:

“At its peak, some 16,000 – 32,000 full time equivalent (FTE) positions could be created”.

The 74,000 figure apparently came from a report by the Institute of Directors, not from Cameron’s own government’s figures! Extraordinary. Secondly, an explosion of community-owned renewables and the push for local resilience that they could unlock could, I would suggest, do far better than that.  

A 2012 report from DECC found that just the renewable energy projects announced between 1 April 2011 and 31 July 2012 would create 22,800 jobs.  Renewable Energy UK have stated that the UK offshore wind industry alone, with proper government support, could create over 70,000 jobs.  A report by Centre for Alternative Technology, Zero Carbon Britain: rethinking the future, estimated that looked at across the different sectors, the low carbon economy could create 1.5 million new jobs.  

Most of the jobs created by fracking are not long-term jobs, they are not jobs over which the community has any say. Economies of scale will most likely mean national contractors drilling wells rather than local companies. What we see with fracking is the same extractive model we see with supermarkets and large developments: distant capital moving in to suit its own agenda with concern for their shareholders’ dividends, not the local economy.  Fracking is no different.  A bottom up approach, owned by, and designed to benefit local communities, such as Brixton Energy and Bath & West Community Energy, as well as a host of other community-led renewables projects, are modelling, brings control back to local people, a core foundation of resilience.  

And whose land/gas/resource is it anyway excuse me?

For me there is also an ethical issue here that I haven’t seen addressed anywhere.  Why is it OK for large energy companies to buy the rights from the government to a resource that really belongs to the people of this country, in order that they extract it, sell it back to us, take the bulk of the profits elsewhere, leave us with the mess, and having to live in the warmed and more unstable climate thus created?  

As Aditya Chakrabortty wrote last week, the last time the UK had a fossil fuel energy bonanza in the form of North Sea oil and gas:

“We pumped hundreds of billions out of the water off the coast of Scotland. Only unlike the Norwegians, we’ve got almost nothing to show for it. Our oil cash was magicked into tax cuts for the well-off, then micturated against the walls of a thousand pricey car dealerships and estate agents”.

Norway in the meantime has put away a fund which now holds the equivalent of £100,000 for every man, woman and child in the country to be held for future generations.  We have nothing.  The same will happen with fracking. 

And finally …

So it looks to me to be community resilience 6, fracking 0.  Given the absurdity, the unbelievable cheek of the whole thing and the deeply shady way in which this is being forced upon a disbelieving nation, it should come as no surprise that some aspects of this defy belief.   

I’ll leave you with the most remarkable, which was when energy minister Michael Fallon, on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme last Monday, talked about shale gas in the context of “other renewable technologies”.  It’s a smart strategy, especially when representing a government that has so effectively done so little to support renewable energy and energy efficiency – simply redefine “renewable”!  

It’s genius really, merely stretch the time frame and hey presto, drag it out to about 90 million years, and shale gas is a renewable energy source.  Now, doesn’t that make life a lot easier?  

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17 Jan 2014

How to discuss Transition with … No.3: Young People

• Make it part of you, it’s really important to model the change in your own life
• It has to be fun
• Peak oil and climate change aren’t necessarily the best places to start
• Empower young people with skills that they can then pass on to other people
• Creat a sense of adventure
• Feeling part of a community and making friends is really important

Who 

Robert, Hayley, Jenny and Dan are all participants in the One Year in Transition course being run by Transition Network.  I caught up with them during one of their days together just outside Totnes.  We started off talking about how they each communicate Transition to their peers and what they see as being the hooks to bring young people in. 

Dan: “I tend to concentrate on the internal Transition rather than the external.  I’ve found that talking too much about peak oil and climate change people just switch off.  But if you say to them through this and through that there’s this idea that I can change, and I can change the environment around me, then that has a knock-on effect because they go off and talk about the same kinds of things.  I order to relate to younger people, that’s how I would approach it.  Personalise it, make it part of you, because if it’s not, people will know. 

People know when you’re going through it as if it’s not.  The reason you’ve (meaning Rob) done what you’ve done is because you’re passionate about it.  It’s not an idea, it’s part of who you are.  Once you’ve instilled that idea, and planted that seed, then it just balloons into whatever it balloons into.  You can help guide people in different directions as Transition has”. 

Jenny: “For me, it needs to be fun.  There are quite a lot of young people involved in Transition Cambridge, the thing that integrates them is learning new skills.  We have Cropshare, where people go out to the CSA farm and learn how to grow produce on a bigger scale, learn about organics, learn about permaculture, and basically empower themselves so they can go off and grow their own things and then teach that to other people.  I think that’s one of the big things, learning a skill and being able to teach it. 

People in the group have become empowered, so they’ve taken up their own projects within the Transition network, which you can do, there’s that opportunity all the time, for you to have a voice.  We have a Transition Cafe every other week, and whoever wants to come and show a film or talk about what they’re doing it’s possible.  It’s really open to people having a voice whatever they want to say.  It’s all about fun.  Community is like a big party, we all come together and have great fun, but at the same time we’re creating a sustainable community”.

Hayley: “I agree. There has to be a sense of adventure about it.  When I found this course, it suddenly felt like a new adventure, like something quite different.  That also has an impact when I’m communicating it.  At the allotment I work on we were talking about “what do you do”, and I was talking about the Transition movement, and I was telling them “this is the revolution!” and they were saying “yeah, this is the revolution”, and that suddenly made it more exciting, that it’s not just gardening, it’s a revolution. 

When I first got into environmentalism, it was about giving up and abstaining and being like “now I’m going to eat less meat and do less of this and less of that”, but now, rather than being about abstaining, it’s more about doing something new and it being a new adventure, rather than abstinence and giving something up.  That has inspired my family and the people around me a lot more, because they’re like “it’s new, it’s exciting, we can cook new food, we can do new recipes, we can learn new skills”.  The fun is really important”. 

So what were the tipping points for each of you?  Did you have an “aha!” moment that led you into getting involved in these issues?

Robert:  “I was 21, and I had a big epithany around becoming more open to a less rational way of looking at the world. I went to Uganda, then felt really guilty about my lifestyle, then got bad depression and appendicitis and realised I had to do things differently.  It was a bit extreme, wouldn’t recommend it for anybody else!  But that was when I really started to care about these things”.  

Jenny:  “I was pulled into Transition by film screenings and shared food.  For me local food is a big thing.  I went travelling in Kenya.  I had forgotten about Transition to be honest, and when I got back I was living with a couple who were really involved in permaculture, and I gradually, through them, got really involved in Transition and met lots of people.   

It got so much bigger, and I started going to the cafe nights and then I got poached into the food group, and I’ve done more and more.  There’s so much stuff you can learn from other people, and you don’t have to pay for it, and it’s open to everybody, with Skillswaps and Skillshares.  The network  is such a supportive community, any idea you have everybody is so supportive of it.  Having a voice is what has kept me involved in Transition”. 

Hayley: “I had a very traditional Catholic education.  From that I always had a sense of guilt!  Because of that I got involved with Amnesty International first, and then I remember watching a film that said something like “why bother about human rights when we’re all going to drown anyway” or something like that!.  I didn’t do very much, every now and then I’d do some recycling, but I wasn’t very passionate about it.  Then I went to Climate Camp, eventually.  That was the big turning.  I couldn’t really imagine it before, I couldn’t imagine what it was going to look like, it was really nice.  I remember making such good friends, that was the thing”.  

You can read more about One Year in Transition here.

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15 Jan 2014

Can earth building scale up to the mainstream? 2: Kevin McCabe’s cob citadel

As part of our month’s exploration of the theme of ‘scaling up’, I recently visited Ottery St. Mary in East Devon to see Kevin McCabe, his wife Rose, and the extraordinary new cob house he has spent the last 3 years building.  In the recent edition of Grand Designs in which the house featured (see below), presenter Kevin McCloud referred to Kevin as the “King of Cob”.  “He doesn’t want to build a cob house”, he continued, he wants to build a cob citadel”, or as his son Ben put it, a “Utopia of cob awesome-ness”.  Kevin, McCloud continued, is “determined to prove that cob has a future as a 21st century material”.  But does it?  Can cob scale up from its present niche status to become a mainstream approach, and what can this building teach us about that process? 

The Cob Citadel

The Cob Cottage Company in Oregon’s newsletter, ‘CobWeb’, describes itself as “a newsletter for people with cob stuck to their souls”. I am one of those.  So visiting the McCabes’ home, which looks like a cob housing complex, is akin to getting the keys to the sweetshop.  There’s the family home, an incrediblely gorgeous cob house, as well another smaller cob “teenager cottage”, a cob workshop, cob outbuildings, a recently-built cob farmyard with storage and more workshops, and now, under construction, the largest cob building ever built (probably).  It’s that new building that was the subject of our visit.

The scale of the new building is breathtaking.  It’s huge.  The scale was, in part, determined by the route to planning.  With further building unlikely on their plot, they applied to be the first people in Devon to take advantage of the Planning Policy Statement 7 which permits “houses of exceptional merit and contemporary architecture to be built in areas not normally designated for development”.  It sets out a number of detailed requirements for buildings in rural areas including use of environmentally friendly resources, materials, overall sustainability and enhancement of the local environment.

The walls are built from 1500 tonnes of cob, all mixed onsite, with subsoil from the site.  Traditionally, cob buildings are meant to only be built during the cob building ‘season’, traditionally from “when the swallows arrive to when the swallows leave again”.  These walls were built during the wettest summer on record, and were still being built, four-storeys high, in December.  One section of wall, at the highest point, 33 feet from the ground, shows deep finger holes in the wall about 8 feet below the top. When I asked why the holes were there, he said that while the last cob was being put on the top of the wall, 15 feet below, the cob was still wet enough to poke.  Kevin likes to push this material to its limit!

Cob as “a 21st century material”?

Kevin and I sat down for a chat (the podcast of our whole conversation is at the end of this post), and I asked him whether he thought, having built this building that pushed cob so far, he felt it had potential to go mainstream:  

“I think it would be difficult to be a mainstream building material. And I’m not that interested in it becoming a mainstream material, which might disappoint you! It could certainly be a lot more mainstream than it is but it’s always going to have some disadvantages. You need a relatively big site because if you try to use the material off the site, which you always can to a greater or lesser extent, that still means digging a hole somewhere to mix the cob in. To do it efficiently you need to get machinery around the building, as you do with any building I guess.

But for large-scale housing developers there are disadvantages of cob: the volume of material, thickness of walls, that sort of thing, which probably don’t make it ideal in a lot of situations. But where you’ve got a bit more space, the kind of development which I would like to see more of, then it is eminently suitable”.  

One of the aspects of this new building that has divided opinion the most has been Kevin’s decision to try and push cob to PassivHaus Gold levels of energy efficiency by adding a skin of external insulation to the outside of the building.  On its own, a cob wall, Kevin is confident, could reach Code 6 in the Code for Sustainable Homes, the standard which all new builds will need to meet by 2016. As Kevin told me: 

“I don’t think you need to insulate cob walls. This house (the farmhouse where we did the interview) has got 3 foot thick cob walls and it’s very well performing. Just to put some figures on it, we’ve got 5,000 square feet heated from one 12 kw heat pump which costs about £1000 a year to run in electricity, a ground-source heat pump. If you compare that with any new building, I think you’ll find it’s pretty favourable.

What we did with the new building takes it to the most ridiculous level of any building, i.e. Passivhaus. I thought well, if I’m going to do it I might as well just really go for it and take it to the most extreme level. I wouldn’t necessarily expect that to be repeated. I’m just really showing that it’s possible”.

It is perhaps Kevin’s choice of insulation that is proving most controversial.  Polystyrene sheets.  

Why wrap a breathing, as locally-sourced as possible, building material in petrochemicals?  It’s a tension Kevin acknowledges:

“The choice of polystyrene is a bit controversial for anyone who’s into natural building. It’s obviously not a natural product, but the natural alternatives had their challenges too:

• Straw bale might actually be quite a sensible way of insulating on the outside of cob,  but I don’t think it’ll last anywhere near as long. People are always quoting particular kinds of buildings in the States which have been there 120 years or something, but I’m pretty confident that you won’t find any straw bale building in this country still in good health in 120 years’ time. 
• Rockwool, which would be quite sensible, but would end up costing almost twice as much to get the same level of insulation in a renderable form
• Wood fibre would be about 4 times as expensive
• Lime hemp about 7 times as expensive.

That’s how I came to polystyrene. On a project that’s so big, those costs are obviously very significant. We’re on a relatively tight budget for such a large project”.

The kind of polystyrene Kevin is using was chosen for its high insulation value, the relatively low pollution value of its manufacture, and its having an A+ rating as a building material.  It’s completely recyclable and non-toxic.  The other issue this raises is about the breathability of the walls. He will wait until the walls have dried before cladding them, but is confident that the walls will still be able to breathe enough.  

  

Removing obstacles to mainstreaming cob

Kevin is clear that the scaling up of cob building, it becoming more of a feature of new developments, won’t happen by accident, as developers tend to do what they know:   

“Council planning departments can’t insist because developers will appeal against it. You can’t insist on one thing in one part of the country if a developer can show in another part of the country this wasn’t insisted upon. And that’s where the planning laws perhaps need to be altered so that you can.

If you put developers in a position where they have to do things, they actually miraculously find ways of doing them. Unfortunately, the way things are structured, if they can show a precedent somewhere else for not having to jump through these hoops then they will. I don’t think there’s a reason why you couldn’t do a large part of that development in cob, but the reasons are all in the planning. A developer who probably is only interested in the bottom line, will make money more easily, more safely, doing a more conventional build”.

Kevin brought up Cranbrook, a new town of 2,900 homes being built near Exeter:  

“I know for a fact that East Devon District Council were keen to push for cob or at least some cob building at Cranbrook. But they can’t insist – the planners actually have a lot less power than people sometimes think they have. All the local feeling would have been in favour of some cob there at Cranbrook. It probably would have cost slightly more in the short term, but not much”. 

At the moment, both Code for Sustainable Homes and PassivHaus certification fails to take any account of the distance travelled by building materials.  If the government were serious about building new houses, and encouraging innovation and enterprise at the local level, specifying a percentage of local building materials could be a key innovation.  Writing it into legislation would get around situations, like Cranbrook, where people want it, Councils want it, but developers brush it to one side.  If the government is able to, within a short period of time, change tax regimes, subsidy structures, planning legislation and so on in order to roll out fracking on a large scale, surely the scaling up of cob, or other green building measures would be a breeze?  

Another challenge to scaling up cob is the skills gap.  When Kevin started cob building there was only “one old guy in Devon who knew a bit about it.  Aside from a one-day course, Kevin is self-taught.  But how to fill the skills gap?   

“Yes, there is a skills gap, but I think that could soon get filled.  It actually isn’t that difficult to learn. There are quite a few design considerations which are important to understand but I think that learning curve would be quite easily handled. I think the problems are much more in people’s perception than the reality”. 

Why scaling up cob is about much more than just cob

Can cob building scale up?  This month we have been looking at how Transition might scale up, and there are comparisons with the challenges cob building faces.  What I love about what Kevin’s doing is that he is pushing a traditional material and seeing how far it can go.  There are a number of earth building techniques (rammed earth, adobe, clay plasters, clay/straw etc).  What, I wondered, is so special for Kevin about cob?

“I’m probably quite prejudiced. To me, part of the joy of cob, apart from the fact that it is the vernacular material here in this part of the world, is its sculptural nature, which no other earth building technique has to the same degree. It’s also very strong compressively, as I’ve demonstrated with these pillars (see above) – each pillar is holding up several tons. So to me, I would certainly want to put my energies into promoting cob rather than other forms of earth building, particularly as I live in this part of the world. It’s got so much further it could go yet. Yes there are a lot of other things, and people who are expert in them might well have other arguments for how they might be scaled up. I don’t know. For me, cob’s the way forward”. 

Some may argue that Kevin’s house is too big to possibly serve as a model for anything, especially those for whom the most exciting, empowering aspect of cob is how it makes small, mortgage-free, locally sourced, collaboratively-built homes a possibility for people.  Some may argue that wrapping cob in polystyrene undermines the mainstreaming of cob, as it represents a public acknowledgement that it can never attain the insulation levels required (as one green building expert suggested to me “I wonder if he didn’t just set cob building back 100 years in a desperate attempt to prove a point”).  

But for me what matters is that it is happening.  While you may not like the polystyrene cladding (it’s not something I’d do, but then I wouldn’t ever build that big nor feel confident enough to) it introduces cob to a new audience, gets people talking about it, changes the story, challenges orthodoxies and rigid thinking about possibilities.  

Scaling up cob though, like Transition, is not about one-size-fits-all.  Traditionally, each part of England had its own vernacular building traditions, determined by the materials available locally.  In Devon it was cob, in Shropshire oak timber frame, in Yorkshire stone and slate, and so on.  It’s not about building cob everywhere, but about reconnecting to those vernacular materials and techniques as being key to local economic regeneration, rather than reshaping the nation in cob.  As a 2010 report by the Prince’s Trust for the Built Environment showed, there are very real benefits to local economies of doing so.  

Scaling up also needs pioneers prepared to put their heads above the parapet and to take risks.  It requires people who push and educate the authorities, building inspectors and so on, introducing them to new thinking and inspiring them with new ideas.  It requires stories, things that get people talking about “did you see?” and “I heard about this amazing project the other day”, and as Transition shows, you never know where those stories can go.  It also needs people who contribute to building an evidence base, as Kevin his, using moisture sensors and other ways of monitoring how the building behaves.  

As Kevin told me: 

I’ve got an experimental mind. I’m still experimenting 20 years later. I’m quite brave, I don’t mind taking risks, because you don’t really push the boundaries unless you take risks. I’ve always found that worthwhile.

I headed home with a bit more cob stuck to my soul than previously, awed by what Kevin has achieved thus far in spite of the wettest summer on record, ongoing extreme weather and financial worries.  The future needs pioneers who are always aiming higher and looking to the next thing.  The really awesome thought is one he’s finished this one, and got twitchy again for another project, where he’ll take it all then…

In case you want to hear our conversation in full, here’s the podcast:

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15 Jan 2014

Can earth building scale up to the mainstream? 1: ClayWorks and clay plasters

Academic Gill Seyfang wrote in 2009 in a piece about natural building that such materials and techniques will only make the step across into the mainstream if they succeed in “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”. Over the next 2 days we’ll be looking at 2 aspects of earth construction, cob and clay plasters, and their potential for scaling up. We start today with Adam Weismann and Katy Bryce, who founded Clayworks, an “award winning UK manufacturer and provider of services and products in unfired clay”, who provide “a beautiful range of backing coat and through-pigmented top-coat clay plasters”.  Walls good enough to eat. But might they become a mainstream building material? 

You’ve been involved in earth building for some time now.  Where do you see it in terms of its penetration into the mainstream?

Our experience is that mass earthen wall building is more difficult to transfer into the mainstream due to the price of labour vs materials. Earth walling systems are generally labour intensive which makes them expensive unless being executed by the homeowner or a volunteer based programme. This tends to keep earth walling as a specialised, niche way to build walls. Our attempts to bring mass cob walling into the mainstream were thwarted by costs, that is why we decided that the best way to get unfired clay into buildings was through the route of finishes, which could be applied onto more conventional materials.

You recently launched Clayworks as a business making and selling pigmented clay plasters.  What has that experience taught you about the potential of these materials to go mainstream? 

Our past and current experiences are that it still remains tough to convince the mainstream market about the value of using unfired clay in buildings. Cost still remains a challenge for us – how can we compete with our direct competitors such as British Gypsum and La Farge? There is still a lot of education that needs to be done to convince large scale and small-scale developers about the durability of using clay plasters. A large portion of our work is in this awareness raising/education.

 

Although programmes such as the dreaded Grand Designs have taught the public that natural materials such as clay and straw are viable options for building a home, many people remain sceptical and unaware of the potential for building with these beautiful and functional natural materials. They are also held back sometimes due to the outdated perception that they are quirky, ‘rustic’ and unreliable. Until real economies of scale can be reached, cost will always be the issue.

With most mainstream building projects cost is the main deciding factor about which materials to be used. Where we have seen success into penetrating the market, is when our clay plasters (a ‘luxury’ product) can be used alongside conventional materials. People can choose to spend their money on the really visible part of the house and achieve the functional, aesthetic, environmental and health benefits that most natural materials bring. This was therefore a key prerequisite behind the design of our clay plaster systems.

What do you see as the key obstacles for natural building materials becoming a more commonplace part of the construction industry?  Are they always bound to remain in a niche? 

Firstly, the technical difficulty of standardising materials that are by their very nature ‘local’, ad hoc, variable and inconsistent. To sell a building product on the open market you need to have tests and technical data that tell your customers that this product will behave in exactly this way every time. It was a huge challenge to develop a clay walling plaster to this level of standardisation when it had grown out of a philosophy which embraces the use of materials that encapsulate the soul of a locale. Everything about creating our product was a lesson in making compromises around these core beliefs, set a against a stronger desire to bring the beauty and functionality of clay to a wider audience and our belief in the power of  building materials to change and enhance  peoples lives – from the physical to the more esoteric levels.

Secondly, as touched on above, the challenge of economies of scale to produce a product that is affordable to a wide variety of customers. Our product remains more expensive than the standard walling finishes such as those made out of gypsum and cement. However, due to the way clay walling plasters and most other natural building products function (regulation of humidity and temperature in a space etc) these costs are mitigated against the costs of health, environment and building longevity. It takes a very aware and environmentally responsible individual to value these long term cost savings and to set the long term gains against the intitial cost. 

Thirdly, this brings us back round to education and the need to engage with homeowners, developers, designer, architects, builders, the general public about the very real need to build environmentally responsible buildings that not only have a lighter impact during their construction but also in the way they function in the long run. Not just greenwash.

Lastly, developing a skilled pool of labour who are trained in producing environmentally responsible buildings out of natural materials to a very high standard within a financially viable business context i.e tension between artist/craftsperson vs businessperson. 

Natural building products can be brought out of their niche, but only with certain compromises. The purest approach will always remain philosophically bound, for its very essence does not allow it to expand and filter outwards. The purely cost-driven, conventional approach will never allow room for natural building materials and techniques that compromise the profitability of the project. The gap must be bridged between the two. Hopefully, a product such as ours and other similar ones on the market, are going someway to laying the foundations for this bridging. 

What construction projects have you seen recently that have given you most inspiration?

Anything built out of natural materials – unfired clay walls, floors and finishes, strawbale, stone, wood, thatch – built on a large scale: 

• Studio Mumbai Projects (an architectural/craftspersons firm in India) who create a fantastic synergy between building vision and execution due to the fact that the designers and builders are one and the same firm.
• School in Bangladesh by German architect named anna (can’t remember last name!)
• Japanese temple architecture
• National Trust visitors centre in strawbale – Lake District, UK
• Cobtun, Totnes –  Paul and Ivana Barclay –  a beautiful testimony to a family with no experience of building with cob to create a unique and indvidual work of art as a home.
• Econest projects in Santa Fe, USA
• The Globe Theatre – Southwark, London – a beautiful building made out of natural materials that nestles softly amongst the London skyline

With the green building world becoming increasingly focused on performance (i.e. Passivhaus) at the expense of the localness and low impact of the materials, how might we change that? (if indeed you agree with that statement?) 

We agree with this statement! Our core philosophy has always been to use low impact, functional materials – making a building work from the bottom up, before using add on technology (which does not have a low environmental impact to make) to make it function better. To change this, it comes back to education.

The most important people to educate about this are those designing our homes for the future. An example of this is the use of unfired clay to regulate humidity and temperature in a building. The Passivhaus concept is fantastic, but many people get caught up in making a building perform better with add-on technology, and using materials such as plastic sealing tapes throughout the entire building. They fail to think about the impact of these products on the environment from their production to their afterlife, whilst thinking their conscience is clean because they are using very little energy to heat their building. Our other bugbear about Passivhaus and the failure to consider the use of natural materials in their construction, is the fact that a sealed building envelope is created holding a veritable soup of off-gasing building materials – not good for the health of the inhabitants or mother earth.  

Most ‘natural building’ projects tend to be one-off self-build projects.  On larger developments, with larger economies of scale, what do you think is possible with sufficient imagination and determination?  Is natural building always going to be the most expensive option?  

Anything is possible with the right intention. It would take a collective of very determined individuals who all hold a strong environmental vision. We see a larger development being created through the use of intermediate technology, such as a cob block maker to turn local clay soils into building blocks, a min-miser for milling local timber, large paddle mixers for making mortar etc. A strong core of skilled leaders leading a collective of physically fit, enthusiastic people working towards the same vision.

The project would also need strong financial leadership to ensure that it remained commercially viable.  A project such as this would need to be situated somewhere in the world where there were plentiful local materials that could be used for construction materials. As in the past, the designers of these buildings would need to be skilled in understanding how the local materials could be used to their best effect. 

What role does design play?  Most houses in the early ‘cob revival’ were what many people dismiss as ‘Hobbit houses’.  What can design do to make cob funky, modern and desirable, and who is working in this field already would you say? 

To bring earthen buildings more into the mainstream and make them more modern and desirable, design is absolutely essential. Not just for how the building looks, but also in how it functions – using the materials to do what they are good at, and in the environment that they are situated (local climate etc) and creating design details that ensure their longevity and hence the longevity of the structure.

Natural buildings will grow in viability once people gain confidence in a legacy of optimal functioning and longevity. For people that we see working successfully in this way, see point 4 above. Two astounding people (an architect and master timber framer) who have really managed to bring together excellent design with the use of local, natural materials, are Robert and Paula Baker-LaPorte in the USA (EcoNest). They design exquisite earthen buildings of all scales, that have exemplary design detailing. They look highly modern and classic, but remain earthy and wholesome, so can appeal to a wide audience of people. They have taken natural building to the next level in our eyes.

You’ve spent a lot of time in and around earthen buildings.  If you had to summarise how they are different, how the experience of being in them differs from conventional building, what would you say?  What was it about earth buildings that you fell in love with however many years ago it was that you fell in love with them? 

Aha, a very long and intense love affair indeed that is set to continue into infinity! Where to begin. 

• The way the walls absorb sound
• The ability to create rounded, sculptural shapes as well as very linear, angular lines
• Living inside of nature – the ground beneath your feet rearranged to create walls, floors, plasters
• Earthy colours and pigments pleasing to the eyes and senses
• Healthy indoor climate – humidity and temperature regulated
• Walls warm to the touch
• Walls and floors that remain alive and in dialogue with their environment – unfired clay materials never chemically set, they just harden, meaning that they remain fluid within the realms of aliveness
• The sheer vastness of different ways, methods, styles, techniques of building with this one ubiquitous material around the world, and the way they tell the story of the people and the places in which they are situated

All the above points come together into one elating feeling within the sub-conscious mind whenever we walk into a clay house!       

If natural building and its vision is to truly scale up, what skills, observations, expertise and shifts in thinking do we need to bring into the movement?  

• Compromise, whilst maintaining core values and ethics of natural building.
• Expertise in natural building skills and trades of a very high standard, inspired and grounded in traditional crafts and building skills  – arranged through the traditional apprenticeship scheme (training with masters for years instead of months)
• Marrying together expertise in natural building skills with strong business training to make financially viable businesses that make commercial sense

Be brave and take your vision out into the ‘conventional’ mainstream building world i.e stop preaching to the converted. If you believe in what you do with a strong passion and you have sound technical grounding behind it, you will be amazed at how appealing this can be to even the most conservative amongst society.

Adam and Katy founded ‘Cob in Cornwall’ which is now called ‘Clayworks’.  They are the authors of Building With Cob: a step-by-step guide and Using Natural Finishes: Lime and Clay Based Plasters, Renders and Paints – A Step-by-step Guide.  They also work as earth building/clay plastering practitioners.  

Tomorrow we head to East Devon to visit the the largest cob house ever built and to hear what lessons it can offer for the scaling up of cob construction. 

 

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