13 Jan 2014
It is a rare occurence that I disagree with David Holmgren. One of my heroes, and the co-founder of permaculture, I generally find his intellect formidable, his insights on permaculture revelatory, and his take on the wider patterns and scenarios unfolding around us to be deeply insightful. But while there is much insight in his most recent paper, Crash on Demand, it also raises many questions and issues that I’d like to explore here. I am troubled by his conclusions, and although I understand the logic behind them, I fear that they could prove a dangerous route to go down if left unchallenged.
‘Crash on Demand’ in a nutshell
So what are the paper’s core arguments? It picks up from his ‘Future Scenarios’ work a few years on, reassessing their relevance in a rapidly changing world (you can read Jason Heppenstall’s summary of the new paper here). In essence, he has shifted to thinking that a gradual energy descent isn’t going to happen. Rather than his Green Tech Future scenario which sees a concerted government response (similar to what we’re seeing in Germany) or the Earth Stewardship scenario, an intentional powering down, he argues that in reality we are moving deeper and deeper into what he calls ‘Brown Tech’.
Brown Tech has emerged because “sustained high energy prices have allowed private and national energy corporations to put in place many new fossil and renewable energy projects that are moderating the impact of the decline in production from ageing ‘super giant’ fields”. Most of these new fossil fuel projects, he argues, “generate far more greenhouse gases than the conventional sources they have replaced”.
The pace of the unfolding of climate change has outpaced expectations, and the world, if it continues to pursue Business as Usual, is still on course for a 6 degree rise in temperature, which would be catastrophic. He states that we have left it too late for a planned and intentional ‘Green Tech’ future, and the structural vulnerabilities of the economy mean that the currently emergent ‘Brown Tech’ future will be short-lived.
He suggests that in this context, “severe global economic and societal collapse would switch off greenhouse gas emissions enough to begin reversing climate change”, and that we should deliberately seek to make this happen. That troubles me. I have two key objections to the paper which I’ll set out below.
One: A Post-Growth Economy = Economic Crash? Really?
The first place the paper comes unstuck for me is in his overarching conclusion, namely that a post growth, climate-responsible world is inevitably a crashed economy. Holmgren writes:
“If we accept a global financial crash could make it very difficult, if not impossible, to restart the global economy with anything other than drastically reduced emissions, then an argument can be mounted for putting effort into precipitating that crash, the crash of the financial system”.
He argues that “a radical change in the behaviour of a relatively small proportion of the global middle class could precipitate such a crash”. He goes on:
“I believe that actively building parallel and largely non-monetary household and local community economies with as little as 10% of the population has the potential to function as a deep systematic boycott of the centralised systems as a whole, that could lead to more than 5% contraction in the centralised economies”.
That feels like a huge claim. No research is used to back it up. It’s also a huge leap to state that a post growth economy is unavoidably a crashed economy, as well as being a very Western-centric proposition. Talking to people from China and India recently, it is clear that the kind of ‘post-materialists’ who in Western economies might pioneer this “crash on demand” hardly exist there, and those are the economies where emissions are actually growing.
Also, on what research is this idea that boycotting the economy would bring it to its knees, and that that would be a good thing to do, actually based? The main reference to this thinking is given when Holmgren states:
“By 2008, the work of both systems analyst Nicole Foss and economist Steve Keen had convinced me that deflationary economics would be (and already are) the most powerful factors shaping our immediate future”.
Now I’m no economist. The subject, once it starts getting even vaguely complicated, leaves me rather puzzled. But I do know that there are views other than Foss and Keen, and many of them don’t share their analysis (as an aside, I’m still scratching my head about Foss’ statement, in her response to this Holmgren piece, that “the best way to address climate change is not to talk about it”). There is a wide range of views on what happens when an economy stops growing beyond those of Foss and Keen. Here are just a few. Robert Solow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics has said:
“There is no reason at all why capitalism could not survive without slow or even no growth. I think it’s perfectly possible that economic growth cannot go on at its current rate forever”.
When I talked to Peter Victor in 2012, author of Managing Without Growth (subtitled ‘Slower by design, not disaster’), I asked him “so the end of economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean an economic collapse?” He told me:
“It could mean that, if you have an economic system that relies on growth. That’s the dilemma we’ve got now. It seems to be that unless the economy is growing it flirts with collapse or it does collapse. The challenge to us is to try to configure an economy that doesn’t grow and doesn’t collapse”.
Tim Jackson, in Prosperity Without Growth, writes:
“The risk of humanitarian collapse is enough to place something of a question mark over the possibility that we can simply halt economic growth. If halting growth leads to economic and social collapse, then times look hard indeed. If it can be achieved without collapse, prospects for maintaining prosperity are considerably better”.
Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill’s book Enough is Enough, which explores the possibilities of a post-growth, steady-state economy, don’t even mention the word ‘collapse’ in the book. Kevin Anderson, one of few climate scientists explicitly stating that staying below 2 degrees excludes economic growth as a possibility, told me when I interviewed him in 2012:
“Of course our view is that to deliver on 2°C, we should plan the economic contraction. It need not necessarily have the devastating impact that it very clearly had, and very inequitable impact, in Russia in particular”.
I have never heard him use the word collapse in relation to his proposals. When I attended the DeGrowth conference in Venice last year, I don’t remember any presentations among that whole 4 day programme of talks and presentations anyone talking about collapse. So I, for one, do not accept this notion that stopping growth, even if attainable, means inevitable collapse, and that striving to cause a collapse is a highly dangerous and irresponsible approach.
In the environmental movement in general, and in Transition in particular, there has long been a tension between “brightsiding” (always focusing on the potential upsides of climate change) and dashing straight to the idea of collapse. As John Michael Greer put it in a 2007 piece called ‘Immanentizing the Eschaton’:
“It’s one thing to try to sense the shape of the future in advance, and to make constructive changes in your life to prepare for its rougher possibilities; it’s quite another to become convinced that history is headed where you want it to go; and when the course you’ve marked out for it simply projects the trajectory of a too-familiar myth onto the inkblot patterns of the future, immanentizing the Eschaton can become a recipe for self-induced disaster”.
But it’s not only one or the other, it’s a spectrum. It’s not clear to me why Holmgren dashes straight to collapse. He argues that in his opinion, regardless of what we do, there is a 50% chance of a crash anyway, as an inevitable outcome of the fragility of our economic system. But no evidence is provided for this.
As a recent paper by the Simplicity Institute (who also published Crash on Demand), entitled The Deep Green Alternative, highlights, between industrial growth and collapse lie a broad spectrum of approaches, all of which explore different routes to “a radically alternative way of living on the Earth – something ‘wholly other’ to the ways of industrialisation, consumerism, and limitless growth”. To simplify this discussion down to such an either/or really does nobody any favours.
All of this leads on to my second point, that of how Holmgren communicates his proposal.
Two: the concept of ‘Skilful Means’
There is a concept from Buddhism called “skilful means” which offers some very useful insights as to what lies at the root of my disagreement with the paper. Skilful means (or upaya in Sanskrit) is sometimes also translated as tactfulness or ingenuity, and refers to the observation that different people have different capacities, different ways of taking in information. If you want to share an insight with a diversity of people, given sufficient insight and wisdom, with some you might sit and explain it, for another you might tell them a story, and another, you might just make a particular comment at a particular time that triggers a train of thought that leads to the same conclusion.
For me, skilful means is what this paper lacks. Personally, I find Holmgren’s analysis, namely that we seem to be moving towards a Brown Tech scenario, that climate change is accelerating, that no leadership looks likely from most government, to be compelling. It is a useful analysis, a useful revision of Future Scenarios. It may be that some people involved in localisation and resilience work choose to see what they are doing in the context of a deliberate attempt to crash the system. But is it in any way skilful to publicly reframe that as the driver for Transition, or permaculture for that matter? That is where I part company with Holmgren.
That’s not to say I don’t understand why he would think it. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson recently stated “Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony”. He argues that economic growth is no longer compatible with staying below 2 degrees. This entirely justified sense of urgency leads some to take an approach to climate change that resonates closely with the famous words of Mario Savio in 1964:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
But to imagine that a popular movement could be built around deliberately crashing the global economy feels to me naive in the extreme. It would certainly prove virtually impossible to muster any kind of mainstream political support for it. While a number of MPs I have spoken to are happy to state off-the-record that they have doubts that growth is the best way forward, none of them would say so on the record.
My question is, if Holmgren is right to suggest that we deliberately seek to make economic collapse happen (which I personally think is a naive and irresponsible proposal), then how best to communicate that? What is the audience for this paper? Is it written in such a way as to appeal to a broad range of readers? No. It is written for “PLU”s (People Like Us). It isn’t written for potential allies in local government, trades unions, for the potential broad coalitions of local organisations that Transition groups try to build, for the diversity of political viewpoints that are found in most communities.
It is written for the very small sector of people who read this kind of thing. Yet the very issues we need to be creating responses to are felt across society and need responses from across society. It is precisely my frustration with permaculture’s seeming contentment at residing in a niche of its own making that prompted me to start thinking about the need for Transition in the first place.
This paper offers something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we present the alternatives to collapse in such a way that they engage and appeal to nobody, then the opportunity to avert it (assuming its inevitability) becomes even less likely. It’s the antithesis of skilful means.
It seems to me that what we need to be doing, and what permaculture, Transition, and many other movements around the world are trying to do is to build resilience, model a post growth economy, from the ground up at community level, the “actively parallel economy” Holmgren describes.
For example, in Totnes, we produced a Local Economic Blueprint. It set out the case, built on extensive research, for 10% shift towards a local economy. Part of its power was the coalition of local stakeholders who co-published it, Town Council, Chamber of Commerce, Development Trust and so on. But did it present itself as a plan to deliberately crash the global economy in order to save the biosphere? If we had done, almost certainly we’d have been the only group involved in it. Instead it found a wording that everyone was happy with:
“We agreed the overall goal of this system would be to maximise the wellbeing of our entire community, and to do this in a way that uses and distributes resources fairly while respecting natural limits. Economic growth is welcome, certainly within the sectors identified within this project, but not at any cost”.
Enabling the kind of shift of financial capital from fossil fuels to investment in local resilient economies that I set out in last week’s post will be key to enabling this transition. As will building vibrant coalitions of local organisations around the benefits of doing it.
Holmgren argues, in his ‘Nested Scenarios’ graph (below), that what we are seeing is different scenarios unfolding at different scales. “To some extent”, he writes, “all scenarios are emerging simultaneously and may persist to some degree into the future, one nested within another”.
For me, rather than trying to use the local community and household scales to try and deliberately crash the economy, they both have a huge potential, as yet barely scratched, to inspire and model a new economy. One that is low carbon, resilient and which builds social justice. Yet that can only happen with the very broad support, buy-in and engagement that an explicit goal of “crash on demand” and the kind of language and approach embodied in this paper would render impossible.
I may be naive, but I still think it is possible to mobilise that in a way that, as the Bristol Pound illustrates, gets the support and buy-in of the ‘City/State’ level, and begins to really put pressure and influence on ‘National’ thinking. I may be naive, but it’s preferable to economic collapse in my book, and I think we can still do it.
Also, if Holmgren is going to explicitly call for an orchestrated attempt to trigger an economic collapse, this paper should surely contain more about what that might look like? What does collapse mean for someone living in an inner city food desert, whose benefits are being capped, reduced, or taken away altogether, with no access to land for growing food, with no skills, and little interest in acquiring any? How does he intend to “sell” this message to them, to make this seem like an inviting proposition? Given that one of permaculture’s three core underpinnings is “PeopleCare”, this paper is surprisingly lacking in such considerations.
Or is he heading towards a position of assuming that the dangers of climate change are so overarching that the nightmare collapse would lead to in such communities is just what needs to happen, a “can’t make an omlette without breaking a few eggs”-type approach. Can it really be right that “a relatively small proportion of the global middle class” should be able to deliberately plunge those beneath them on the social ladder into such chaos without a clear strategy as to how such large-scale suffering might be mitigated? If so, this placing to one side of issues of social justice is alarming. As Yotam Marom wrote recently:
“We have to re-learn the climate crisis as one that ties our struggles together and opens up potential for the world we’re already busy fighting for”.
Last thoughts
There is a progression of thinking in this paper, and a point at which I part company with Holmgren. Economic growth and the current financial system means we are on course for a 6 degree rise in global temperatures. Yes, get that. Current approaches aren’t working. Yes, fine. We need, with great urgency, to move beyond the growth paradigm to a different approach built on local economies and so on. Yes, I’m with you. And as Naomi Klein sets out in her recent New Statesman article, there are grounds for building a popular movement around that. But then to state that we need to deliberately, and explicitly, crash the global economy feels to me naive and dangerous, especially as nothing in between growth and collapse is explored at all.
This month on the Transition Network website we are exploring the theme of “scaling up”. It seems to me that if there is one sure and certain way of ensuring that we won’t scale up all the great work already being done around the world to build community and local economic resilience, it will be by framing it as being about deliberately bringing around an economic crash. It would set us back years.
Holmgren argues that:
“bringing these issues out into the open might inspire desperate climate and political activists to put their substantial energy into permaculture, Transition Towns, voluntary frugality, and other aspects of positive environmentalism”.
That’s as may be, but if we are to make anything happen, we need to also bring the wider community and other organisations on board. We have to speak beyond the People Like Us. Unless we’re able to do that (last week’s piece about Transition Laguna Beach showed a brilliant example of such skilful means in practice), a rallying flag of Crash on Demand will be entirely self-defeating. ‘Crash on Demand’ is a case of, as they say, being careful what you wish for.
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13 Jan 2014
As Transitioners, what’s the most skilful way to approach decision makers, both civil servants and national government? I talked to Peter Lipman, Chair of Transition Network and Director of Projects and Innovation at Sustrans, who spends a fair amount of time in and out of meetings with government officials/civil servants at national and local level. What tips might he have for Transitioners wanting to most skilfully engage?
The challenge
How to best interface with government officials, so as to make sure that any meetings are as productive as possible and enhance, rather than diminish, your credibility, and open more doors for future dialogue and interest?
Key points
- Be clear about not only what you want from your meeting, but also what the people you’re meeting might want
- Make time to think about it and research in advance
- Pitch your message to what you know they will be interested and what will help them to meet their objectives,while never forgetting your own objectives
- Find the balance between being assertive and being friendly
Who
Peter Lipman is Chair of Transition Network and Director of Projects and Innovation with Sustrans. His work often brings him into contact with government officials, MPs and civil servants.
The conversation
Pete’s first suggestion was that the place to start is with a clear assessment of what it is that both parties want to get out of the dialogue. If you are only concerned with what you want out of it, it could well end up a waste of both people’s times. He continued:
“There’s a thought process. “Who’s my MP? What are they coming from? What do they want? Who am I? What do I want?” It’s best to start by mapping out who it is that you’ll be talking to. What are they trying to do? What are his/her department’s objectives? Be really clear as well as to what you want from the meeting, as you will need to hold onto that”.
He added, “it is also important to think “am I the right person to be doing this, or might someone else be better?”” He stressed that in meetings it is important to really listen to the person you’re meeting, to be clear and succinct, as well as being assertive and friendly. You might find yourself being pushed to try and fill a hole that they need filling, rather than to what you want out of the meeting. “Be clear of your mandate”, Pete said. “If you aren’t sure of an answer, it’s fine to say “I need to think about that. I’ll get back to you on it”.
There is also no point in taking an adversarial stance. People will act massively defensively, in much the same as any of us would if confronted directly in such a setting. As Pete puts it, what we need to seek is the “sweet spot” of tension between offering sufficient debate and discussion and exchange and holding firm to what we think is crucial and important.
In such a setting, I wondered what is it that gives us respect and credibility? “It will come partly from your behaviour, and partly from the credentials you bring with you, and those of your movement or group” Pete told me. Reassuringly, he added that “it gets easier with experience and a breadth of knowledge”.
We’ll close with an example Pete offered that captures much of the advice offered above. He was recently invited to attend a big European Union event about reconsidering EU energy policy representing Transition Network. He was invited to attend for the full 2 days, but could only attend for a couple of hours to talk at a workshop:
“It was attended by 200 people, a third of them senior employees at the EU, a third national government and national institution employees, like the head of energy policy for France, and a third big corporations. It was interesting to see that the people being consulted don’t include not civil society. I did a presentation, a couple of other people did presentations, there was questions and answers, following which, one woman who seemed to be representing every big energy company in the world said “fascinating, be really interesting to talk”. The next day I had an email from her, and rather than responding immediately, I did some homework, I set about following up web links, to be clear what shemight want. It’s so important to understand that before launching into the discussion with her”.
But, I asked him, when you speak at an event like this, presumably you nuance it differently than you would if you were speaking to a Transition group in a village hall somewhere?
“Inevitably. For that EU event I only went to try and jolt a top-down approach so that they would take the possibility of bottom up community action seriously. So rather than read the endless reams of papers they had sent me in advance, I thought “what is it that would actually make them pay attention?” So I thought there are two things. One is the potential scale for community action, and I gave a couple of good examples like Brixton Energy and BWCE to really show the potential for scale. I highlighted those kinds of examples, and linked that through to the breadth of the movement.
The other thing is how vulnerable those markets they all assume are going to be there in their current form are to systemic change. The market in Europe which has most shown that is the German market, where RWE, one of their big energy generators has lost, I can’t remember exactly, two-thirds to three-quarters of its market value over last three or four years, due to the effect of both renewables generally and more specifically community-owned renewables on the German energy market.
Those are the 2 things to highlight, that combination of “you think you’re in control but actually look what’s happening under your nose in the biggest, most sophisticated most valuable energy market in Europe, Germany, and look at this potential”. I just banged those 2 points home, and it got an enormous response. My guess is that I certainly wouldn’t have got someone who works with all those big companies immediately following up saying “we really need to talk” if I hadn’t pitched it at what I thought was where they’re interested. What communities might want from them, if anything, is something I then need to refine before I then have that conversation with her.”
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10 Jan 2014
The Transition movement isn’t the first idea/movement to grow rapidly and then wonder how to take the next step forward. Within the field of social enterprise, the question of scaling up is faced by many diverse enterprises and innovations. How to take the next step up? I talked to Nick Temple, director of business and enterprise at Social Enterprise UK (the national membership body for social enterprise in the UK) for his thoughts, via Skype as he sat in a London coffeeshop. One of his key suggestions? Get on TV.
What for you is a social innovation? What does that mean?
A social innovation I guess, for me that’s broader than a social enterprise. A social innovation would be really an idea that’s being implemented that’s totally new. I think people tend to confuse innovation with novelty at times, so it’s not a new idea but one that’s implemented.
I think the difference with social innovation as opposed to social enterprise is that that can be really across any sectors. It could be happening in the public sector, private sector, social sector or often in a partnership across different sectors.
What are the most common challenges with scaling these things up, in your experience?
I would say we tend to see quite a lot of ambition early on, so we tend to see quite a few unrealistic business plans which maybe underestimate the extent to which scale requires an investment in systems, an investment in people and infrastructure. An investment in some of the central functions that takes time, resources and capacity. Often that can be one of the main challenges.
I think as a sector we tend to be incredibly impatient for scale, understandably because the scale of problems we’re facing are still huge and significant and often growing. But often if you look at those social enterprises and other social innovations that have scaled, the thing that tends to connect them, if anything, is the amount of time they’ve taken and not necessarily anything else.
Where do you sit in terms of the danger at the moment, where there are massive cuts in public spending and government appears to be expecting the social enterprise world to step in and fill those gaps. In terms of the politics of that, do you think government is embracing social enterprise because it’s committed to the ideas of social enterprise or because it sees it as something that can pick up the leftovers that the private sector doesn’t want?
I’m not quite as cynical. Social enterprise has had cross-party support for quite a while now, from 2008 onwards. That’s for a couple of reasons: if you’re from the left, some in the Labour party tends to see social enterprise as the embodiment of the Third Way, of social justice combined with economic development. From a Conservative perspective, the fact that it’s enterprise and focuses on enterprise and individuals is something that appeals to Conservative sensibilities perhaps more than a traditional volunteering kind of approach.
I think we’re always quite clear that social enterprise isn’t a panacea. The reality is a lot of decent sized social enterprises get a lot of money from the public sector through contracts they win, so cuts to public funding affect social enterprises just like they affect private sector organisations who work in the public sector and the public sector itself.
I suppose the more positive side of it is that we are having to come up with completely new solutions to some of this stuff. If you’re running a local authority right now and the cost of adult care and children’s care is going through the roof at the same time as your income is going down, the ‘graph of doom’ as it’s known in local authority circles, then the pithy way of putting it is you can only slice the salami so much and then you don’t have a salami any more.
At some point you actually have to find different ways of doing things that are more preventative, that can save you money in multiple budget lines, help you deliver multiple outcomes and help you make much better use of your resources. I think that’s where social enterprise does have a role to play in providing some of those answers.
So something like Transition which has been around for 7 years and has scaled from nothing to being in 44 countries and is fostering that idea of social enterprise. When you have something like that, which has gone to a certain scale but needs to take that next push on into the mainstream, that move from the early adopters to the early majority, what’s your sense or your experience of some suggestions about how to do that? What would your advice be in that context?
There’s no single answer obviously specific to Transition. But what I’ve grown to understand a bit more is the power of the media. This might sound a bit superficial but it’s extraordinary to me the power of the traditional media and social media, television in actually increasing awareness of what’s going on.
It’s interesting, if we looked at something like Teach First, which is very different to Transition, it has huge political support which helped it get off the ground very quickly, cross-party buy in, private sector support, and just recently they’re now having a TV programme made following Teach First teachers. That will permeate it even further into the mainstream. What we’re very aware of in terms of trying to raise people’s awareness of social enterprise, which is our job, because actually the primary source of income for social enterprises is the general public, ahead of the public sector. Actually when we’re looking to raise awareness we don’t really bother with our sector press, we only focus on the mainstream media.
In terms of breaking through, recognition, awareness and understanding, it’s having a co-operatively run shop on The Archers or having a social entrepreneur on The Apprentice or the likes of a Jamie Oliver’s 15 etc. etc. that actually help you reach a huge audience and that trickles down to a smaller number who will pick that up and get involved. And it plays into influencing other groups, whether that’s local authority, local enterprise partnerships, whoever that might be in terms of needing to get the actual stuff done. I didn’t expect myself to be sitting here saying it’s about TV, but the power of the media in terms of building that awareness across a whole range of different audiences is really critical.
With something like Transition, a lot of the people who would be involved with it would be people, as with a number of social innovations, who are drawn to it because they are attracted by the social change aspect of it and the social aspect, they don’t necessarily come from a background in commerce or business or enterprise in that kind of sense. What can something like Transition or other social innovations learn from how business approaches are scaling up, do you think?
I would start by saying, what you’ve said in terms of Transition and who’s attracted to it is common across social enterprise as well. Historically we tend to have people who may have come from the more traditional voluntary sector or from a public sector background, who may not have some of those skills. The bit I’m really interested in at the moment is the system stuff, which is the very unsexy, undocumented types of things that people don’t want to talk about, so your CRM database, your IT system, the operational people you have, their project management skills and so on and so forth.
It tends to be those things that you find in a lot of the really impressive business organisations, their ability to do marketing exceptionally well. I think we tend to be a bit shy at times in the social enterprise sector generally – I think it’s relatively weak at marketing. It’s viewed as if we’re spending money on marketing and sales, we’re taking money away from work we could be doing on the ground. Obviously if marketing and sales is successful then it brings you more business and more money that you can use to do more of the good work that you want to do.
For me, that being unashamedly commercial often is not necessarily about being ruthless or red in tooth and claw. It can be about investing in those things that you might not otherwise, and that’s often sales and marketing and communications.
There is the well known model of social innovation (the ‘Innovation Adoption Curve’) that moves from early adopters to early majority and so on (see below). Often social enterprises and social innovations are very good at appealing to those early adopters, the people who are always scanning the horizon for new exciting ideas and pounce on them and run with them, then taking that step across into the early majority requires a tweaking of message maybe or how it’s presented, are there any examples that come into your mind of things that have successfully stepped across what some call “the gap”, and if so how did they do that?
What we tend to see is some real focusing of message, often to reach that bigger audience you need to really hone down on the essence of what it is and what it’s about so there’s less room for nuance. If I took something like a bottled water company like Belu (which the Transition Network would probably not be too happy about) which was a great idea and had a lot of early support from the social sector, but actually didn’t really break through.
It was only when it really clarified and simplified its business model and its marketing honed that, which is basically very simply: “we’re a bottled water company, all our profits go to Water Aid, one day every bottled water company should be like us, we bring you mineral water with ethics”. It distilled (no pun intended) their message into something really understandable by the mainstream. I think that’s why, rather than just seeing them at social enterprise conferences, you now see them in Strada, in Sainsbury’s and a whole range of other outlets. They simplified it into something that people can understand very intuitively and very quickly.
I think often it can be about just really honing those messages and getting to the kernel of what this is about so that you can make that really understandable and really accessible to that broader group of people.
Any last thoughts or advice for the Transition movement around scaling up?
The Transition movement’s been very successful in reaching that scale. I like the approach which is a move from ideas through to quite detailed plans and then into action. Now it tends to be about the more you can raise up those examples of action and have that modelling of behaviour and build a healthy competition between peers about who’s doing best. In terms of developing that enterprising culture, I think it’s best to reiterate the mantra of what it’s about, those simple messages about what Transition is all about and its purpose, keeping people aligned to that and understanding that this activity is all building towards that, and continuing to name those really great examples that there are across the world to inspire and encourage and incentivise others to do similar.
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9 Jan 2014
Today I want to present you with an idea which has the potential to really inform our thinking about scaling up. When I was in Jamaica Plain in Boston I interviewed Chuck Collins of Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition, an interview published here. At the end of our discussion I mentioned that at a JPNET event I spoke at, I was approached afterwards by a woman who said she was working with the group exploring the idea of a ‘Cancer-Free Jamaica Plain’. I was intrigued, so I asked him to tell me more about it:
Chuck told me:
“I had the same reaction you did. A woman named Polly Hoppin who had worked for something called the Lowell Centre for Sustainable Production. She’s one of these people that looks at waste and garbage and all the toxins in our environment. She sat me down and said “look, Jamaica Plain has much higher levels of cancer than the rest of the state and particularly among women. And we also have higher levels of exposure to carcinogens and other toxins and neurotoxins and things that hurt people than other communities. So what would it mean to create a cancer-free economy? We want to make a transition to a healthy, cancer-free, toxin-free economy”. When she said that, a lot of bells rang in my head.
[According to JPNET’s website, “Jamaica Plain has higher incidences of some types of cancer than the state average. According to recent Massachusetts Cancer Registry statistics, JP women had more brain, cervix, leukemia, liver, melanoma, oral cavity and thyroid cancer than expected compared to women living elsewhere in Massachusetts. And JP men had more melanoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and thyroid cancer than expected compared to the rest of the state”].
So we formed a partnership with them to work with our local businesses, for instance the dry cleaners, to help them make the transition to become wet cleaners, using a green, healthy cleaning process. Working with our beauty parlours to stop using toxic chemicals, and we’re actually going to do a community forum on building a cancer-free economy, sponsored by our Transition Town. It’s woven in the public health. Our economy shouldn’t be making us sick! One of the partnerships that’s come out of that is that we have all these hospitals in our community, the biggest employer in our neighbourhood is a hospital, but they’re very siloed.
They’re sitting down the hill and they’re just treating the symptoms of the people that walk in, but we could invite them and say “shouldn’t you be looking upstream at community health issues like exposure to toxic chemicals, shouldn’t the role of the hospital have huge tax breaks and huge profits that why don’t you help us make these businesses safe? Why don’t you help all the restaurants use safer cleaning substances? Why don’t you as hospital and a vendor buy your produce locally so that it isn’t trucked from thousands of miles away but is grown 10 miles away?
I think it does open up resources for the organisation, by partnering with hospitals and with people who are just thinking about overall wellness. In Boston there are probably 10 walks a year raising money for research against cancer. Huge amounts of money, bikeathons, everything. Actually people are just getting kinda tired of walking for research in preventing cancer and treating cancer. People want to walk for the cure, “we want to cure the cause of cancer, the things that are making me sick”.
It’s fun to say that core to our Transition is health. If we could work with our beauty salons and automotive companies and hospital and artists. We have a lot of artists in our communities. They use a lot of toxic chemicals in their studios and a some of them live in their communities with toxic chemicals and they have all kinds of illnesses related to that. If we could help everybody make those safe alternative transitions that will also create livelihoods and markets for the products of the future”.
I will do little other than leave this with you as a thought. Seeking to eradicate cancer from a community, when you think about it, leads to most of the same activities a Transition initiative does anyway, but it opens up a range of partnerships, funding opportunities and different kinds of engagement. Intriguing eh?
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8 Jan 2014
I went to a conference once where at the beginning of each day, for the first 10 minutes, people were invited to share any dreams they had had the previous night. The thinking went something along the lines that when a large group of people spend time together, their dreams may often resonate or provide insights for other members of the group. Or something.
Every morning we’d hear a few dreams. I rather enjoyed it. A few nights ago, I went to sleep thinking about scaling up, as I was thinking about what to write for Monday’s opening blog on the subject. That night I had a curious dream which I can’t make heads nor tail of, so in the spirit of that conference, I thought I would share it with you.
I dreamt that myself and a few other people had a seemingly great idea to help Transition scale up, which was to reintroduce football (or soccer for US readers) in the way it was originally played in medieval times. That early version is described thus:
According to a legend, the people of one village would try to kick the “ball” (a skull in many cases) along a path to another village’s square. The opposing village would try to stop them and kick the ball to the first one’s square. Surely, it must have sparked a considerable amount of riots.
It was also known as “mob football”, and often took the form of a near-riot. According to some accounts, any means could be used to move the ball to a goal, so long as it did not involve murder or manslaughter.
Football was actually banned between 1324 and 1667, a ban covered by over 30 royal and local laws. Yet repeated legislation failed to stamp it out. King Edward II was so disturbed by it that in 1314 he issued a proclamation stating:
“Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future.”
The game has actually had something of a modern revival. In Ashbourne, Derbyshire, the game is played every Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, during which time, apparently, “Ashbourne becomes a war zone”. In Alnwick in Northumberland their version, called ‘Scoring the Hales’ survives and is kicked off (so to speak) with the Duke of Northumberland dropping a ball from the battlements of Alnwick Castle. It is still played in several other places too, and has only stopped being played in several other places relatively recently. In Teddington, where it no longer happens, “it was conducted with such animation that careful house-holders had to protect their windows with hurdles and bushes”. Here is a short video giving a sense of what it looks like when it’s played in Alnwick:
So anyway, back to my dream. So we had this idea that reintroducing mob football through Transition initiatives could be a great way of giving Transition a boost. We trialled it first in a few small places and it went really well, people really enjoyed it, it proved to be a real community celebration and brought people together. My thinking was that communities need the opportunity to come together and let their hair down and go a bit wild, like the Pamplona bull run, that festival in Spain where everyone throws tomatoes at each other, Brazilian carnivals, or Holi festival in India where everyone chucks coloured powder at each other.
In my dream though, suddenly the idea really took off. It started happening all over the country, but it rapidly got out of hand. People come to associate Transition with mob violence, people looting shops while the ‘mob’ is passing through a shopping area, and before long, Transition is associated with civil disorder and chaos. The dream ended with a sense of deep anxiety about what we had unleashed. No idea what that’s all about. Any suggestions welcome. Or maybe I just ate some particularly strong cheese before I went to bed!
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