Transition Culture

7 Jan 2014

Doria Robinson on scaling up community resilience in the shadow of Chevron

When I was in the US in October I met Doria Robinson, Executive Director of Urban Tilth. Urban Tilth is a non-profit urban agriculture organisation in Richmond, California, in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay Area.  I was blown away by the power of what she does.  How can you even think about creating community resilience in a neighbourhood that suffers from poverty, gangs and guns, and which has, at its centre, a huge Chevron refinery which last year exploded, resulting in 15,000 people seeking hospital treatement of breathing difficulties?  That’s what Doria does, and she does it with humour, passion, and a fire in her belly. It’s a remarkable story, with many lessons and insights for our month’s reflection on scaling up Transition.

Here is the talk she gave at the Building Resilient Communities event we both spoke at in Hopland:

 

… and here is the podcast of our conversation in case you’d rather listen to that than read the transcript below: 

I had a conversation with her on Skype, and started by asking her to introduce Urban Tilth…

“Urban Tilth started as the dream of one man, Park Guthrie (see right). He was really interested in gardening and homesteading and wanted to help people grow food. It started off as just him offering technical assistance to people to start gardens, and schools and other areas.

He floated out a vision paper about this one section of out city that used to be an old railway track that goes 42 blocks down the centre of the city. It was just transformed through ‘Rails to Trails’, this 42 block long park. A huge park, 5 miles of park space.

Park wrote this vision of this whole greenway, it’s called the Richmond Greenway, filled with growing spaces, like it was actually going to become this urban agriculture mecca. It literally is the dividing line in the city. Our city has a lot of problems with violence, gun violence, drugs, gangs. It was literally the dividing line between gang territories.

He envisioned it as this space where both sides would come together and grow together. There would be berry gardens and orchards and open community gardens where anyone could come and harvest food. There’d be free food for all through 7 different neighbourhoods. I got that email that he sent out and thought “that sounds really good!”

I actually came on as a volunteer and kept helping and helping, and eventually Park got really tired as many people who start these things as a labour of love do. He needed to stop, and he asked me to become Executive Director, and I did. I grew up here in Richmond, I’m a third-generation Richmond resident.

For folks who don’t know Richmond, Richmond is this really interesting town in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have the Chevron refinery in our town, so I grew up about 5 blocks from this massive refinery. It has a really huge population of people of colour who came up from the South or from the ‘South-South’, from Mexico and other places to find work at various points in time. It’s really an interesting space.

One of the things that we really need is jobs. There’s an enormous unemployment rate here, 17% for young black or brown boys, really no jobs. If you’re growing up here and you don’t have a college track which most people don’t; most people don’t graduate from high school, your options for employment are Target, Walmart, Taco Bell. Working with Urban Tilth I kept thinking about how can we take this, what we’re doing, this small-scale thing and actually provide food, because that’s the other thing that we need. We have one grocery store for 100,000 people! We now have four gardens on that Richmond Greenway, four pretty massive gardens. But we needed to do more.

For the last 5 years I’ve been growing up this idea that there’s actually, even in a poor city, a lot of money that people spend on food because people have to eat. If we can get them to redirect those funds to pay people to grow food and get healthy food directly to people, that we could create jobs and have healthy food even if we don’t have a lot of money.  So now we have 13 different school and community gardens that all are production gardens. They’re not museum gardens, not just for ooh and aah, but actually to produce food that gets distributed through markets and CSAs.

Now we’re starting with our first relatively large scale farm in the city – it’s a 3 acre farm in the middle of the city – to even scale up more. We’re just trying to grow as much food as possible and employ as many people as possible. We’ve gone from this one man show to now having 9 people year-round and 62 people during the height of the growing season.

You’ve no doubt visited lots of urban agriculture projects in other places as well around the US and other places. What specific challenges, what are the challenges that are specific to doing it in Richmond, do you think?

One of the biggest challenges is making sure that our soil is clean. Living in the shadow of Chevron, there are a lot of places where we just can’t grow because of historic contamination, either from deposition from the refinery or from other uses, people just dumping in and around the city. We have to be really careful about where we grow, and we have to constantly do soil testing to make sure that Chevron hasn’t done some sneaky thing and poisoned us all without us knowing. That’s a huge challenge.

But outside of that, only the fact that people don’t eat real food.  People are really used to opening up a package, putting it in the microwave and calling it dinner. Getting people who don’t even necessarily cook, or even know how to cook, to buy and eat fresh food is a process. It’s a real process. We teach cooking classes in all of our gardens because people literally don’t know how to cook any more, and not just kids. That’s a challenge.

But outside of that, we’re really fortunate to have an amazing city government that is extremely supportive of all of these alternative efforts. They just passed a directive to staff to investigate this new urban agriculture law that has come down in the State of California to give tax breaks for re-purposing vacant land within urban communities for urban agriculture.  Now the city government is taking that on in earnest to create urban agriculture zones throughout the city and they have sponsored an urban agriculture summit. There’s a lot of extremely progressive things happening in the city government because, I think, of a whole crew of people who are pretty progressive, who have been getting involved in various ways.

One of the things that you mentioned in the event in Hopland (see video above) was the solidarity aspect of what you’re doing in terms of standing alongside other communities who are experiencing the downsides of Chevron. You mentioned that you’ve been to Ecuador and were working with communities there. Can you tell us a bit about that?

That has really been a very helpful guiding thing. Chevron is this major player in our city. They dump millions of dollars into city elections, city elections that in our scale of city, when we have elections they would usually spend $50,000 on an election. They would put in $1 or 2 million a year just to get the candidate that they want elected. And other ways, just controlling regulatory departments, giving money to non-profits like hush money – “you can’t say anything bad about Chevron”, and they literally write that into contracts.

So you feel very isolated if you want to say anything contrary to what they want you to say. Last year they had a big explosion and a fire at the refinery (read more about that here or see the video below). The skies burned for about 6 hours. The skies turned black and we were all covered in this toxic soot full of PAHs. Finally the city government was like, “this is ridiculous, we’re suing you. You just dropped our property taxes, everything”. Everybody said, “you’re crazy, you’ll never win”.

The mayor, who has always had contacts with different folks in Nigeria and even in Ecuador was very open to looking for other communities who can stand with us, so we’re not just these little guys picking a fight with the big guy in the bar. We had a march to commemorate the fire one year later, and at that march a representative of the President of Ecuador approached our mayor and said “we stood up to Chevron as well and in our courts we won an $18 billion judgement but they’re refusing to pay. Won’t you come to Ecuador so we can show you what they did and you can stand in solidarity with us?”

[Here is a video about the explosion and how it happened]

A few weeks later they sent us to Ecuador. The mayor, myself and another reporter. We were able to see the damage they did to the Amazon first hand and meet with the affected communities, indigenous people whose lives were just ravaged by this multinational company. It’s pretty profound. We’ve always hosted different groups and shared stories, but this time it was different.

We actually made a point to talk about and take steps to create this International Union of Affected Peoples as a means to stand up to these multinational corporations that go beyond national governments and are beyond international law, beyond international government law, hoping that by standing with other communities that were affected internationally that we can create a way to hold these ominous entities of multinational corporations responsible for their actions. It’s pretty exciting. There are a lot of things that are moving on that front. It’s really helpful that communities, individuals to individuals can actually build power.

What does it mean for a community project that’s got 13 different gardens growing across Richmond when the sky turns black and all the soot comes down – you can’t eat much of that?

Right. We lost all of our produce that summer. We lost 4 months of work. 62 people working for 4 months just lost all of our work. We had to rip everything out and not even compost it. We had to just throw it away, and then spend the next 6 months rehabilitating the soil. We hope that there wasn’t any heavy metals in it because it would be game over. It was traumatic. It was intense.

Especially because a good group of the people we were growing with that summer and we grow with every summer are youth who are getting reconnected with the land and who aren’t used to nurturing anything. To get them to nurture something for so long, and then we’re literally at the end of our summer programme about to have the harvest festival, and then the fire happened. It cancelled everything and the youth were just devastated. We were all devastated.

It must have made people very angry.

Yeah. They were kind of pissed!  Actually, the funny thing is that they were because it was their work and their love and their hope for not having to be stuck in this world with no future, with no promise, with no healthy things, they had really felt the possibility of being able to grow something that they could be proud of. Then to have that destroyed because Chevron decided not to repair some pipes!

They were actually found criminally negligent because they refused to repair pipes that they knew were corroded, that was the cause of the fire. To know that this company just decided that it wasn’t in their profit interests to care for all these 100,000 people who live around them, it was maddening. The youth of the organisation and other members of the organisation rose up. We’re not normally a protest organisation. We’re out in the gardens kicking around with horse manure and stuff, not out with protest signs! But this time, we were out with protest signs.

We actually took a good portion of that food that we had to rip out and brought it to the Chevron community meeting and dumped it onstage in front of them, saying “you poisoned our food. You need to be responsible for this”. They didn’t like that very much. It wasn’t my idea either, it was the kids that we were working with, the young adults who said that we can’t be silent. None of them had ever done a protest before or a press release or anything like that, but it had touched them so they were just like, “how do you do this? Let’s do this”.

When we were in Hopland and I was talking about the realisation I suppose that’s come through the whole Transition movement that actually that if we’re going to scale it up we need to be creating livelihoods for people, jobs for people, that we can’t do all of this through volunteering. You said “if this is a revolution that depends on volunteering I can’t be part of your revolution”. How does Urban Tilth fund what it does, and what are your reflections on that conversation that we had then?

Just first off, I was so thankful when you brought up the concept because I think there is this overwhelming sense, in progressive communities, in the Transition movement, in permaculture that we can do everything for free.  That we can just be a free society and we can barter and we can trade. It’s not that I don’t believe in bartering.  It’s that I live in a community where people can’t pay rent. When they can’t pay rent, they end up on the street or in a shelter somewhere or stacked up ten people in a house with not much to eat, eating ramen noodles or something.  And that’s unacceptable.

It’s unacceptable to assume that everyone has the same amount of security and wealth so they can spend a good portion of their day giving their time away and expect to have a shelter at night. It’s a blind spot in the movement. It’s not sustainable. The only way I can see that it is sustainable is if we have radical land reform. Radical land reform and radical reform around access to water and energy. When we’re generating energy locally and everyone has access to water, maybe then we’ll talk about barter culture. But until then, especially if we want to scale things up, we have to figure out a way where we’re trading so that people can still pay rent.

With Urban Tilth right now, we’re nowhere close to being able to support ourselves with our work, but we’re getting there. We’re about to scale up our CSAs.  We have a CSA at the high school where we grow food for the families that sign up on ‘going back to school’ night. We’re about to scale that up by 4 times, into a for-profit entrepreneurial venture that supports the non-profit, and that will be completely self-sustainable in one year just from the food that we’re growing in partnership with some small farmers in eastern Contra Costa County, so that we can maintain the yield that we need to serve those 500 families.  That’s exciting!  We’re going to have something that actually is financially sustainable and can then support other activities.

That step for you as an organisation, from doing smaller things to be thinking, right, we need to be looking at this as a profit-making enterprise. How was that shift for you in terms of your thinking and in terms of skills. Did you have those skills already, did you have to get them in?

I didn’t have the skills already. I’m learning a lot. I’m learning a lot about how you construct a food-packing facility right now. But it’s awesome. I’ve worked in a food packing facility, I worked for a produce distributor run by women in San Francisco, a co-op. So I know how the work flow goes but I don’t know how to actually construct the space and pass codes and permitting and everything, so that’s what we’re working on right now. It’s exciting.

It’s exciting to think that we’re going to move from being a pilot project to actually serving people’s lives. They’re going to depend on us for dinner. That’s exciting. All of the exchanges around meetings being more structured and having an accountant to take care of the financial side and taxes, all of that worry and all of that work is so worth the thought that we’re going to be actually feeding people in a real way. It’s worth it.

One of the things the permaculture movement and Transition haven’t been great at is inclusion and diversity and having a diversity of faces and people involved. What’s your advice for groups that are starting up and really wanting to make that a central mindfulness as they’re doing Transition in their community?

Maybe from the start thinking about that one of the major barriers for low-income people or people of colour in entering into the movement is not having the financial security and all of the mind space that comes with that, they don’t have that. So as you think of projects to pitch or projects to get involved with, think about ways where if there is a job or position that’s in there, think about ways to hire somebody.

The best way to get people involved with the movement is to make it possible for them to do it and to hire them into those positions, train them up. I feel like there are natural allies in low income communities and communities of colour. In the US, whenever communities of colour are polled, especially African-American communities, around environmental issues or climate change, an overwhelming majority are in favour of all these things. But it’s whether or not we have the wealth to participate.

If you’re thinking about projects, how can you create these projects off the bat knowing that we’re trying to create an alternative economy, where people can actually make a living. Not just creating community amongst ourselves, or amongst yourselves, but creating an alternative economy. I believe that if we’re going to transition we have to create an alternative economy.

And looking at what that means: shorter supply chains, local generation, local growing. All of these other after effects of Transition that could include markets, but local markets where people could actually sustain themselves. What are the lines of resources that are running through the community and how can we redirect them to feed ourselves or to grow whatever we need to grow in a positive, sustainable way?

You’ve talked about how you’re looking to set up the CSA as a profitable venture and look more at the work of Urban Tilth in that kind of way. Can you identify the things that are stopping you from scaling Urban Tilth up to the extent you’d love it to?

Expertise I think, and then capital. In order to get the CSA off the ground we need this packing facility because we’re moving a lot more food around and we need to have cold storage to make sure it arrives to people in good shape and passes food codes, which are fairly minimal around fresh produce, but we still need cold storate. In order to create that facility we needed a good amount of capital. Of course, being poor people, we don’t have capital and we don’t have credit! Here enters the non profit, we can seek grant funding for capital investment.

Capital investment is a huge barrier to entry, but having this vehicle of the non profit to raise that capital has been the only way it’s been possible. We have very little money left to finish raising the funds necessary to finish the packing facility. And then the next chunk of that actually is the warehouse we’re working in is quite large, so half of it is packing for the CSA and the other half is building a commercial kitchen. This will be a low cost commercial kitchen so that people can start food ventures in a legal space that’s cost-effective so they can still make a profit as a mobile vendor or a catering company. People do really alternative food vendor stuff, like ice cream carts and whatnot. We’re creating this commercial kitchen.

It’s just capital. Capital investment and then trying to learn business. This is not something everyone’s exposed to, so people are trying to figure out how to do the budgets correctly and how to estimate expense and how to think about marketing and really target or narrow down on what we need to make it successful so we can actually sustain. The funny thing is we realised with the CSA that as soon as we’re really able to articulate that in the business plan, it’s not that hard. We need 500 families in order to create a living for 7 people. Growing food for 500 people supports 7 people plus all the farmers and everything, so it’s more than 7 people.  It’s pretty cool. 

You were talking about capital. One of the interesting things with 350.org and all their campaigning around divestment is the question about, if you divest out of something then what do you divest into? If we were able to pull together something whereby people were able to divest and then invest into this economy, into the new economy, what from your perspective what would that capital do? How would it behave? What would it demand of you, what would be available to you?

So many other ideas for things that we need in the community – we actually need spaces to create a manufacturing facility or have spaces to buy land or put land into a land trust in order to do these things. It’s just capital investment. Basically it would take us so we were totally out of the foundation world. Not getting handouts from well-off people in order to do this work.

Right now, we’re at a stage where we’re so happy that we’re getting handouts from well-off people so we can create this capital to create this venture. But wouldn’t it be nice if divestment instead redirected those funds to create the capital to do these things, so we would never need to have a population of uber-rich, very well-off people who schlop off a little bit of their money to you?

I would like to make the existence of very wealthy people a non-necessity. We don’t have to have them, we don’t have to have the scraps off their table in order to survive in order that we can actually take our pension funds and whatever it is and redirect them towards building this alternative economy.  That’d be great!

There’s a thing that really struck me when I was in the US and meeting some of the different foundations, was how they like to think of themselves as benevolent and charitable and fantastic and making the world a better place, but many of them have maybe a billion dollar endowment which is invested in coal and gas and all sorts of shit so they can get a 10% return on it every year. Then they take a percentage of what they get as interest and give it out to everybody to try and clean up all the mess they’ve made with their endowment, and then like to think of themselves as being a good thing. It’s hugely negative, quite a nightmare. So my last question is really on that question of scaling up, if we look at all the different things that are going on across the US and across the world in term of local economic things and community renewable energy things and all those things that are going on, what do you see as being the potential of that, scaling up – the challenges of scaling that up and the opportunity of scaling that up?

Definitely one challenge is that we haven’t really identified all of the opportunities. What industries, what practices do we want to scale up? People have their eye on food things, they have their eye on solar, but what else is there? What else are the needs of human communities and how can we supply those needs locally in a sustainable way. I think that one challenge is just identifying those things, so we can start to really see in detail what this new economy would look like, what it’s composed of.

Two is working against this incredible flow of the other, the default economy. Having all of these systems already set up and everything flows so easily into that system, it’s hard to resist. It’s hard to resist not replicating it It’s hard to resist not using parts of it to get what you want to get done, and in fact maybe not doing yourself a disservice by using part of it.

So resisting the existing default economy, resisting participation in it, and then just wrestling resources, wrestling that capital. Getting people to trust in alternative funding. Crowd funding or divestment, reinvestment, it’s a big trust factor. Those three things are the things that I think of: what do we want to build, what are the elements, what are we investing in? How do we not build it so it just replicates what we did before, or helps to continue the existence of what isn’t working and three, how do we build a system of trust around resources so that people trust that we can actually redirect those resources into something positive? I think that that to me seems like what’s up, where the challenges are, definitely.

I was reading about how Chevron and refusing to pay the fine, and how now they’re going after the lawyer who bought the case. How do those people look at themselves in the morning?

I don’t know!  I was standing at one of these pits – they’re like waterbeds because they took soil and dumped it on top of this pit of water and crude oil and you can walk on them a little bit and they shake like a waterbed. You can put your hand on it and it reeks of fuel! If you put your hand in it you literally come back with crud and crude oil all over you. I just kept remembering the movie Crude where they’re saying, “we cleaned it up, we cleaned it up”. Like, really? It was like a kid that’s got chocolate all over their face saying they haven’t been eating chocolate.

This RICO case is outrageous. It’s crazy. It’s like, we held you accountable, we went through this 20 year case, you lost. So now you’re going to call us “the mafia”!. It’s shocking. We’ve been doing report-backs here in Richmond. We showed the film Crude and after we showed the film and the lights went out, somebody came in from Chevron and left these videos on all the seats saying “the real story behind Crude” with these red letters. They’re so ominous, they’re like the bad guys in movies. It’s really unbelievable! My mum calls them ‘dead beat dads’, the only way they’ll ever do anything that’s right is if you force them. 

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6 Jan 2014

The 5 factors that will enable Transition to scale up

Our theme for January is ‘Scaling Up’.  There is no route map to a powered-down, resilient future.  No-one has done this before.  What Transition has achieved in 7 years has been remarkable.  But it’s not enough.  The times we are in, and the escalating challenges we face, bring with them the demand that we demonstrate that what we are developing here is actually proportionate to those threats and challenges.  There’s a balance, between a pressure that prompts us to up our game, to think more ambitiously and imaginatively, and our feeling overwhelmed by that pressure, and as a result pushing ourselves unsustainably or being left feeling hopeless.  It feels to me though that we have only just scratched the surface of the possibilities and potential of Transition, rather than any sense that we have pushed it as far as it will go.  With a mindfulness of that tension, we’ll kick off this month of reflecting on scaling up.  

Over this month we will be speaking to leading practitioners of the art of scaling up social innovations.  We’ll chat with those trying to scale up their community responses in neighbourhoods facing really tough challenges and we’ll hear from a number of voices about their suggestions for “how to discuss Transition with…” a variety of different groups, starting today with ‘Republicans/Conservatives’.  

We’ll hear from Andy Lipkis of Tree People in Los Angeles who are looking at building resilience on the city-scale, from Rosie Boycott on how the Mayor of London’s office have sought to grow urban agriculture across the city, and we’ll also be hearing from some leading practitioners in the world of earthen building as to what the mainstreaming of natural building practices could look like in practice.  We will be unveiling Transition Network’s strategy document for your comments and input, as the organisation seeks to identify how to most effectively support you to sustain what you’re currently doing and have an even greater impact.  And some other stuff too. 

To kick off this month’s theme, I would like to suggest five factors that would help the Transition movement to scale up in a way proportionate to the challenges of our time. They are:

1. Create a learning network
2. Support and resource core groups
3. Bring forward investment for Transition enterprises
4. Become better storytellers
5. Build an evidence base 

There are doubtless many more, but I’ll focus on these five.  Please feel free to respond to these and suggest others in the comment thread below.  Some of these came out of discussions in advance of, and during, my trip to the US in October 2013. Here is my favourite talk from that trip which touches on some of these issues of ‘scaling up’, and includes a very silly hat:

 

So here we go.  If we are serious about Transition scaling up to have the kind of impact it needs to have, and that we want it to have, and in order to be proportionate to the ‘perfect storm’ of crises we’re facing, I would argue that the following five will be vital:

1.  Creating a learning network

It is really important that we avoid Transition initiatives, whether adjoining each other or on the opposite sides of the world, ‘reinventing the wheel’, working in isolation and not sharing the wider learnings from the thousands of other initiatives doing very similar things.  In The Transition Companion, I described a learning network thus: 

Rather than reinventing the wheel, tap into the pool of accumulated insight the Transition movement has generated, as well as feeding into it and enriching our collective understanding.

Part of the reason for Transition’s success has been what Doria Robinson (interview coming tomorrow) calls “trans-local organising”, i.e. initiatives working at the local level to build resilience, but doing so in solidarity and in networks with other initiatives doing the same.  

The recent gathering of representatives of 19 national Transition hubs (see above) was an indication of how this building of a learning network is progressing.  Transition Network’s forthcoming Strategy, which will be posted here soon for your feedback, is also intended to build this network as effectively as possible.  Among other things, we’re working to make it much easier for people to make use of the wealth of information, advice and resources that is available on this site (more information on this within a couple of weeks). Enabling such a network is also a key part of what this blog and this website is all about, so we are always open to new ideas as to how it might best achieve this.  

2.  Support and resource core groups

Transition doesn’t happen by magic. The foundation of any successful Transition activity is a healthy, well-functioning core group which has dedicated the time and thought needed to how they will function together.  It is a group that pays attention to the inner aspects of its work as well as to the outer aspects.  This is one of those areas where there is already a huge amount of learning, both within and beyond the Transition movement.  As we review and revise the way that Transition Network supports initiatives, we’ll be emphasising the value of getting the basics right and making it much easier for people to find relevant advice and resources.  

Also, after a while, it is increasingly evident that core groups, once they have generated some momentum and if they wish to really scale up their activities, need some support for the core of their work.  One of the arguments Transition Network has made repeatedly to funders has been that if they really want to see Transition scale up, one of the most skilful ways is to resource Transition groups to have someone who holds the centre.  Without this, there is a danger of ending up with what people are increasingly calling ‘The Doughnut Effect’.  

With the Doughnut Effect, the initial founding energy of Transition finds itself pulled first into working groups (food, energy, etc) and then into projects and then into the creation of new social enterprises and businesses.  Less and less energy is available to hold the centre, to keep linking the different strands of the group’s work together, to keep telling the story of why Transition matters and how these different elements are part of that.  The danger is that in a few years, what’s left is a few cool projects and a dim and distant memory of a Transition group to which those enterprises have a historical connection.  

… as opposed to:

For example, Transition Town Totnes has had, for the past 3 years, a paid central co-ordinator/manager, which has enabled the production of the Local Economic Blueprint, a whole programme of REconomy events and the new REconomy Centre, the impending Atmos Totnes project, Transition Homes, the Food Link project, the monthly Film Club, the Mentoring and Wellbeing Support programme, lots of networking with other organisations, the regular Skillshares, the recent ‘Caring Town’ conference, and much more.  There is a sense that all those things sit within the context of Transition Town Totnes.  

Transition Town Brixton, on the other hand, doesn’t have that role.  While it has achieved an incredible diversity of great projects, it is, according to Duncan Law from the group, starting to notice the Doughnut Effect kicking in, with no-one there to hold that central piece.  The group recently produced a Local Economic Evaluation (like Totnes’).  I recently asked Duncan what difference having a paid core person would make to their ability to implement the Evaluation report:  

“Oh, it would take off. It would take off. If those of us who are passionate about this could spend more of our time following the leads that that passion throws up, we would be able to have a seismic effect on the direction of Brixton.  As it is, for me, I haven’t got time to build on the REconomy report.  I could be doing it full time, and I would if I could, and we would be able to achieve everything that we set out in that report, if we could just get 3 or 4 people working on it for a sizeable chunk of their week”.

Transition Network continues to try and impress on funders the potential leverage of their funding if they are able to support this work with Transition groups.  Bringing in this kind of support, whether from local or national philanthropists, or, in time, from local entrepreneurial activity, will be key to scaling up. Such an approach is also key to enabling the creation of new enterprises and businesses, offering the right support to enable people to start building livelihoods around Transition rather than imagining the transitioning of their local community can just be done on their Wednesday evenings.  

3. Bring forward investment for Transition enterprises

If a Transition initiative has reached the point of feeling it has the momentum to commit to scaling up what it is doing, and has managed to bring together the people, the passion and the skills to start making a new economy happen, how best to bring in the necessary investment?  At the local scale, there are many ways: crowdfunding; funding applications; community share launches; philanthropy; local investors.  But thinking about scaling up also requires thinking about investment more systematically as a movement.

David Holmgren recently published a new paper, Crash on Demand, which has been creating a buzz online and which I’ll be writing a more detailed response to later this month.  In it (among other things) he argues the need for the creation of new channels for investment so that people can move what assets they have into institutions and models that will underpin the economy that will define the new post-crash, low carbon ‘earth stewardship’ world.  In the context of the current push from 350.org and others for fossil fuel divestment, he writes: 

“Divestment must always be balanced by a conscious plan of re-investment that doesn’t simply recreate the problems in a new form”.  

One of the strands of Transition Network’s efforts, through its REconomy work, has been that of creating an investment model that can enable people to invest in Transition on a larger scale, building in the need for ‘at risk’ support to help get new enterprises off the ground.  Matching up the opportunities to shift investment from the high carbon economy to the Transition one will be one of the key pieces of work needed over the next few years.  

This also picks up on US philanthropist Peter Buffett’s excellent recent article The Charitable/Industrial Complex, which argues that US-based philanthropic organisations are “searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left”.  A well-presented opportunity for such bodies to shift their core endowment into bottom-up community resilience initiatives would be a paradigm-changer.  Buffett continues:

“What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there.  There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff). 

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.  It’s an old story; we really need a new one”.

Scaling up will require some mature thinking about how to bring the resources of philanthropic organisations to unlock much of what we already know is possible. 

4. Become better storytellers

What do you say when asked “what is Transition?”  Chances are that what you say, what you’re wearing when you say it, the language and terminology you use to describe it, make a substantial difference to the degree to which your message is taken to heart.  It is really important that Transition finds new ground to stand on, ground that is distinctly its own, not the safe, traditional territory of the green left.  I have taken great heart over the last year from the mature discussion around fracking within the Transition movement rather than an instant dash to dismissing it out of hand, the story of Transition Laguna Beach and how it mindfully considered how it would present itself to its more right wing neighbours, and the response to my interview with Dr Sarah Wollaston MP.  

Transition is a social technology designed to work at the local level, where finding common ground and building networks of relationships matter the most.  It cannot be seen as left wing, right wing, liberal, pro-growth, anti-growth, or even necessarily as “green” or environmentalist.  In a recent interview in Resurgence magazine, businesswoman and Dragon’s Den TV panellist Deborah Meaden said: 

“I think greens need to stop calling themselves greens.  Everybody has an image of a green individual and I don’t think I am of that ilk.  I think that makes me more powerful, because people have not put me in that compartment.  When I speak they listen in a different way … behaving well is the issue, and as long as it’s wrapped up in this separate green issue, it’s not going to be accepted by the mainstream.  So we need to engage a little bit more and say ‘green’ less often.  Sustainability is common-sense behaviour.  It’s what we should all be doing.  It just needs that common voice that says that this is what we’re talking about”.  

The other part of becoming better storytellers is Becoming the Media, getting better at telling the stories of what we’re doing.  One of my key observations from my recent trip to the US is that SO much is happening there on the ground, but most of it is never reported.  We need to continue finding creative, touching, dynamic ways of telling the stories.  

5. Build an evidence base 

Transition has been framed from the outset as an experiment. But are we able to say now that Transition actually works?  And if so, how do we know?  How can it avoid the traps of some related movements, for whom sometimes ‘solutions’ that are presented have very little underpinning them other than goodwill and hope.  But an evidence base is building, and the Transition Research Network are doing a great job keeping track of that and seeking to ensure that research on Transition serves the wider movement and the initiatives concerned, rather than just the needs of the researchers.  

Much of what we do here is to try and capture the experience and stories of what Transition initiatives are doing, whether through blogs, our news feed, or our monthly roundups of what’s happening in the world of Transition. Embracing the idea of building an evidence base and pulling that information together will be a key part of being able to show that this works, or doesn’t.  

*** 

Of course, as I mentioned at the outset, one of the dangers of writing a piece that presents these 5 suggestions for scaling up Transition is that it leads people not doing them to feel somehow inadequate. The point of this is not to say that if your initiative is struggling, or small, or focused on a handful of small projects, that somehow it is further away from scaling up, somehow less valuable.  The way I see these five factors is that they can also be used on any scale of Transition initiative.  For example:

Create a learning network: link in with what Transition Network is publishing, with Transition training, connect with adjacent initiatives and meet up to share experience.  Make a conscious effort to make use of it as best as you can.  Make sure someone in your group subscribes to the Transition Network newsletter, keeps an eye on the homepage for news and blogs, follow us on Facebook or Twitter. There is a learning network already in place around you. 

Support and resource core groups: be mindful that being able to increase the impact of what you’re doing needs the due level of attention paid to the health of your core group. Making sure that some (or ideally all) of your core team have done Transition Training will really help. Pay attention to strategies to minimise burn out.  If your group reaches the point of needing a paid core person (you’ll know when you reach that stage), give some thought to creative ways in which it might be possible to achieve that.  

Bring forward investment for Transition enterprises: investment can come in many ways.  You might invite people to support the group’s work with a monthly standing order, and, at your public events, to invite people to support in that way.  You might take the idea that everyone in the community is an investor whatever they have to offer and run an event like a Local Entrepreneur’s Forum, which is a great way to network with investors and entrepreneurs in your community.  You might seek out prominent local philanthropists and invite their support for aspects of your work.   

Become better storytellers: might it be the case that the way your group explains Transition, the way it comes across, is a turnoff to more people than it inspires?  How do you explain what you do?  How do you use the media channels available to let people know what you’re doing, and how they might get involved? 

Build an evidence base: Keep some kind of a record of events, how many people came, key learnings, high points.  Keep the posters.  Take photos. See the Transition ingredient ‘Measurement’ for more ideas.  

 

Ultimately, the thing about Transition, and scaling it up, is that we have no idea where the tipping points are.  That’s the key thing that gives me hope.  Who was to know that 4 years after I wandered into a film company’s office in Totnes and saw an 1810 £1 note issued by the Bank of Totnes framed on the wall, and wondered “what would happen if we printed some new ones?”, that the Mayor of Bristol would be taking his full salary in the city’s own currency and that the Bank of England would have published a paper on its position on local currencies.  

I’ll leave you with this story, told by Paul Loeb, which he cites as “a reminder of how powerful a community based on conviction can be, even though the members of that community may be unknown to each other, or be living in different places or historical times”. 

“In the early 1960s, a friend of mine named Lisa took two of her kids to a Washington, DC, vigil in front of the White House, protesting nuclear testing. The demonstration was small, a hundred women at most. Rain poured down. The women felt frustrated and powerless. A few years later, the movement against testing had grown dramatically, and Lisa attended a major march. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, spoke. He described how he’d come to take a stand, which because of his stature had already influenced thousands, and would reach far more when he challenged the Vietnam War. Spock talked briefly about the issues, then mentioned being in DC a few years before and seeing a small group of women huddled, with their kids, in the rain. It was Lisa’s group. “I thought that if those women were out there,” he said, “their cause must be really important.”

 

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6 Jan 2014

How to discuss Transition with … No.1: Conservatives/Republicans

When I visited the US recently, I met Chris Prelitz, and heard his story about how Transition Laguna Beach had set out, from the outset, to ensure that they appealed to the Republican members of their community.  It led me to wonder whether there might be an argument that such an approach is more useful than just focusing our efforts on those who might more naturally be attracted.  So I recently caught up with Chris via Skype to hear more.  It was both fascinating and illuminating. 

The challenge

How to engage the more conservative individuals and organisations in the process of Transition in your community? 

Key points

• We need to master “bridge language”
• We need to develop the ability to see ourselves as we appear through their eyes, and master the art of “camouflage”
• We need to nuance our language and messages to reflect the values of security, patriotism and safety that underpin much of the thinking
• Many of those in alternative/change movements operate in a sphere of concern, but not in a sphere of influence
• When you look for it, there is a lot more common ground than you might imagine. 

Who 

Chris Prelitz is an author, designer/builder, and sustainability provocateur. Chris is founder and President of Transition Laguna Beach.  His own home is passive solar, net-zero, and strawbale nestled in a permaculture forest in Laguna Beach, California.

The conversation  

At Laguna Beach’s recent Patriot’s Day Parade, the group won the award for Best Float, with their truck hosting a community allotment adorned with Stars and Stripes flags and watched over by Queen Bee.  Here’s a video of it.  It’s really worth watching, it’s quite something.  Can you imagine your initiative doing something similar at a similar event? 

 

I asked Chris how he would describe the Republican mindset:

“There is a deep sense of patriotism, people like to wrap themselves in the flag.  The flag represents safety and security and familar values.  It is a mindset that has quite a small sphere of interest.  Yet within that Republican community there are many natural allies, those who love local food, who value local economies, those who love renewable energy, who are fond of the place and its traditions. 

Talking about climate change, about carbon or proposing that people do things “for the Planet” just don’t work, because their sphere of concern doesn’t extend that far.  It’s more about our city, our neighbourhood, our local businesses, the scale that feels familiar and safe.  We talk about what needs to happen so that their grandchildren will have a world that in any way resembles the world they experienced when they grew up. 

My sense is that we need to lean into the Republican identity and the flags.  We have to meet people where they are. It’s the only way to really make Transition work”.  

This resonates with a recent paper by COIN, A new conversation with the centre-right about climate change: Values, frames and narratives, which identified five key values the centre-right hold in relation to sustainability:

• Pragmatism – responding flexibly to problems as they arise.
• A willingness to defend existing cultural and political institutions from change.
• A preference for socially conservative (rather than liberal) policies.
• Scepticism towards centralist, state-imposed solutions.
• Belief in intergenerational duty

Transition Laguna Beach have deliberately tailored their message to appeal to this mindset since the group was formed. What, I wanted to know from Chris’ experience, are the things that are a definite turnoff for Republicans in talks or events, the things Transition Laguna Beach intentionally sets out to avoid? He told me:

It is vital that we find the “bridge language”.  There is absolutely no way we will be able to scale this without bridges.  We have to play the game or we lose the room.  It’s a skill.  And it starts before we open our mouth.  When I go to talk to groups, I look like this …

I used to look like this ….

It also is in the fonts that we use on our posters, how we word them, and so on. You have to try and squint your eyes and see yourself as they see you.  They are thinking “is this person on my team or not?”  Like any team, there’s a uniform.  Where I live, you can spot the permaculturists a mile off.  There’s a uniform too.  Patagonia is the only brand people feel able to display for example.  It’s just that because we’re in it, we’re unaware of it. 

You could think of it as being like leopards and tigers living side-by-side.  If you’re a leopard and you want to mix with the tigers, you need some stripes!  Smarten up, put on a tie and jacket, it’s the uniform, the camouflage if you like.  For many Republicans, if you’re not on their team, you’re their enemy.  We have to master the aikido approach and the art of camouflage. 

The problem with many greens and permaculturists is that they operate in a sphere of concern, but not in a sphere of influence.  We decided that wasn’t good enough.  We asked “what are our goals?”, and being really clear about that has made a huge difference to our impact. 

Given all that, I wondered, how do Chris and the rest of the Transition Laguna Beach crew communicate Transition when they give talks? 

“We present it as being about patriotism and security.  We argue that our being dependent on oil means that we are giving millions of dollars every year to companies that can harbour terrorists.  When we talk to the Chamber of Commerce, we don’t talk about relocalisation, we tell them we want to help them to enable local businesses to prosper, and to make and sell more produce locally.  If we are talking about the need for more cycling and so on, we talk about the need for safer streets for our children and grandchildren.  Taking this approach, nuancing the language and approach in this way makes a big difference in terms of traction.

We talk about Victory Gardens.  How during World War 2, the people grew food in order to support the troops and the war effort.  We teach young people how to make Victory Gardens.  Given that people often have a very fear-based mindset, it is more useful to talk about “emergency preparedness” than resilience.  We talk about how we can reduce our dependence on imported oil by making our homes more energy efficient while also saving money.  Ideas for how to save money and make money always go down well! What matters most is that we learn to stand within the conservative mindset”. 

In Michael Moore’s book Dude, Where’s My Country?, he included a chapter called “How to talk to your conservative brother-in-law”, in which he wrote “you know, there are many things about conservatives that we like and believe in ourselves – even though we usually wouldn’t be caught dead saying them out loud”.  I asked Chris what he felt he had learned from his time with those more to the political right than himself:

“There is a huge amount we can learn from it actually.  They are so much better than greens and the left at doing business.  They have business breakfast networking meetings where people share information on what’s going on. Personally I’ve learnt a lot about how to be a better businessman (Chris runs a building company).  I’ve learnt a lot about marketing and networking. There’s a lot there to be learnt”.  

As the group grows and more and more practical projects unfold, I wondered how, within the group, these two contrasting worldviews sit alongside each other?  How do you manage practical projects where people with such contrasting world views are working alongside each other.  Chris told me:

“For example, we do garden installations once a month, where we mobilise people and create a new productive garden.  We know that people working on that project have very divergent views on, say, Obamacare, but we all agree to disagree.  What we can agree on is that local food is a good thing.  We can all agree on that”.  

Lastly, to return to the COIN report mentioned earlier, it was fascinating to read what it proposes as the “four narratives for engaging centre-right audiences more effectively”.  They are localism; energy security; the green economy/‘new’ environmentalism and the Good Life.  All remarkably close to what Transition advocates.  Perhaps, as Transition Laguna Beach are demonstrating, the gap isn’t as great as some might think it is.  

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19 Dec 2013

Annie Leonard on stuff, "citizen muscle", and what she’s giving this Christmas

What better way to close our month’s theme than to talk to Annie Leonard, creator of the ‘Story of Stuff’ series of videos, who has done more than anyone to popularise the idea of “stuff”?  She now runs the Story of Stuff project, “a community of problem solvers – parents, community leaders, teachers and students, people of faith, entrepreneurs, scientists and more – working to create a healthy and just world”.  Here she talks to us about citizen muscle, Glen Beck and what she’s giving for Christmas this year. But before we begin, in case you might not have seen it before, here’s The Story of Stuff:  

 

As is usual, if you’d like to download or listen to the podcast of my conversation with Annie, here it is.  If not, read on … 

I started by asking Annie how she would describe what she does:

“What I do is I work to change the way that we make and use and throw away stuff, or in fancy lingo I say I’m transforming systems of production and consumption. But making, using and throwing away stuff is a lot more accessible.  Before The Story of Stuff, I really did spend about 20 years travelling around the world in my work for different environmental groups and I was investigating the factories where stuff is made and the dumps where stuff is dumped. I got to see first-hand the often hidden environmental, social, health, emotional, spiritual, economic, all the problems of the way that we use stuff and making new stuff.

When I came back from all those travels I was frustrated at how little people were talking about these issues. If you go through day-to-day life, the only relationship we have with stuff is the advertisements and the buying it, and maybe throwing it out often 10 minutes later. I was experimenting with different ways to talk about the underside of our consumption patterns without being a drag. So many environmentalists are so whiny and wonky and so much of the discussion about stuff is either super-technical and data-heavy, or really about guilt and fear – “shame on you for having a cell phone”. I just thought there must be a better way to talk about this stuff.

So I experimented and came up with this film, The Story of Stuff, which is a 20 minute, fast-paced, fact-filled, even funny look at systems of production and consumption. I put it online in December 2007, thinking that hardly anyone would watch it. I thought that the main avenue of distribution would be mailing DVDs to people who wanted me to come and give this talk live, and I didn’t want to fly there. To my amazement, we had 50,000 views in one day. We’re now at over 30 million views from every country in the world. I can actually go on line and see a map of the world with a dot everywhere someone has watched it, and it is now every country in the world. What I do now is run a small non-profit organisation that harnesses the energy that this film created.

Our theme this month has been “stuff”.  What do you mean by ‘stuff’?

My focus is on consumer goods, all the stuff in our day to day life. Our furniture, our clothes, our electronics, our personal care products. Everything you see when you go to the shopping mall and the supermarket, all this stuff that we have in our lives. I haven’t looked at food. Increasingly, the food production system looks like the industrial production system of other things, but I just haven’t looked as much at food; more the things that clutter our house. All the things we’re untangling the cords for and trying to figure out how to store in our closet and all that junk we have around.

That junk makes us happier though, doesn’t it?

That is such an interesting issue. We were raised, definitely in my country but also in yours, increasingly everywhere, to be told that the more stuff we have the happier we’ll be. We are bombarded with messages that tell us that our professional life will be better and we will be better loved and people will find us more attractive if we have whatever the stuff of the day is, clothes or makeup or cars or furniture or whatever it is.

The relationship between stuff and happiness is not that simple. If it was, the US would be the happiest country in the world because we have so much stuff. We have stuff that only royalty could have imagined, indeed they couldn’t have imagined all the stuff that we would have in our country. Yet happiness levels – our country and a lot of industrialised countries are actually declining and that just confused me. I looked more deeply into this relationship between stuff and happiness and it turns out that there is a relationship – that more stuff makes you happy if you’re really in deprivation. If you don’t have enough food, if you don’t have access to healthcare, if you don’t have a roof over your head, absolutely more stuff will make you happy.

But that relationship becomes more murky and then actually starts to diverge. The example I like to use is shoes, because I personally like shoes, and I know that the second pair of shoes that one gets adds more to your happiness than the twenty-second pair of shoes. The per unit of stuff increment of happiness shrinks. Then say you had 222 pairs of shoes, or 2,222 pairs of shoes. At some point along this shoe accumulation path, more stuff or more shoes actually undermines your happiness for a number of reasons.

One is that you have to work all those extra hours to buy those shoes, then you have to stress about whether you have the most fashionable shoes. Then you have to repair them and sort them and have a storage place for them. The increasing amount of time and energy and attention that it takes to manage all this stuff begins to undermine our happiness and take away time and energy and attention from the things that actually produce happiness. Those are not a new pair of shoes or a new iPhone or a new car or whatever.

If you look at what actually provides happiness across so many different age groups, ethnic groups, nationalities, incomes, once your basic needs are met the things that most provide happiness are the quality of your social relations, having time with friends and family. Another big one is having a sense of meaning or purpose in your life beyond yourself. Another big one I thought was really interesting is the act of working together with others, of collaborating towards a shared goal, be it a civic endeavour or a sports team or anything.  The act of working together with others towards a shared goal.

But we’re in this crazy situation in our hyper consumerised society that we are spending more and more time working and shopping to get more stuff, and less and less time on those things that actually provide more happiness. That’s why the relationship between stuff and happiness is not as clear as “more stuff equals = happiness”.

The film, as you said, has been watched by 30 million people. Has it had much in the way of negative reactions? Have you found yourself on the end of Koch Brothers-funded smear campaigns or anything?

It’s been watched by 30 million people online. We don’t even know how many millions in total, because it’s being used in tens of thousands of schools, it’s been on television in a number of different countries. It’s being used in classrooms and even corporate human resources trainings. I recently met a woman who was a sustainability officer at a huge computer company and she came up to me and said that every single employee in the US in the computer company has to see it as part of their orientation. We really don’t know how many millions of people, but far beyond 30.

It was interesting – I was bracing myself for more critique when it first came out, because the film doesn’t soften its message. It’s fun and it has cute cartoons but it really lays out a pretty systemic critique of our consumeristic society and economy right. I tried to distil it without dumbing it down. I was waiting for people to attack us. For the first year we got nothing but positive feedback, and really interesting positive feedback. A lot of people said I knew that, I just didn’t know how to say it. I felt like the film touched a sense of unease that so many people had, rather than telling them something new. But others wrote and said I never even thought about this and now I can’t stop thinking about it – really positive feedback.

I was glad to have that buffer of a year of love from our movie viewers before the second year. Because in the second year, Glen Beck found out about it. I hope that you in the UK are lucky enough to not know who he is…

… unfortunately I do know who Glen Beck is …

I’m sorry! He had a daily television show, I think it was even on twice a day. He had a huge following, which to me is just an indication of the lack of critical thinking provided in our educational system in this country. He just was a hateful, fear-mongering crazy guy, but was very entertaining. He used to be an entertainer before he had this so-called ‘political’ show. He really latched on to people’s sense of economic insecurity and blamed in on everything from communists to immigrants to terrorists. He really stoked a culture of fear and hatred and paranoia.

He found out about the film because the environmental writer from the New York Times was doing an article on what schools are using for the educational curriculum around environmental issues today. What we know about the environment now is so much more than 10 or 20 years ago. She wanted to know how education is changing. When she called a bunch of schools to ask them what they were using, they all said Story of Stuff. So she called me up and said “who are you?”

She ended up writing a front page article in the New York Times which is the biggest newspaper in this country about how many schools are using The Story of Stuff. Glen Beck went crazy, and every day for weeks on his show, he would show a clip from The Story of Stuff and he said that I was spreading communism in schools under the guise of recycling. The thing he was particularly upset about in the film, he said it was anti-capitalist because I said we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet, and he also didn’t like the part where I said “it’s the government’s job to take care of us”.

I have clarified so many times, I didn’t mean to remind us to brush our teeth and tuck us into bed at night, I meant it’s the government’s job to make sure rules are fair and products are healthy. I believe there’s a very crucially important role in government to make sure that our economy is fair and healthy.

His camp believes that there is no role for government and we should get rid of it., so he began attacking us. He actually told his viewers to find out if their children had watched it in school and then get their teachers in trouble. We got a flood of phone calls from teachers who were being put on semi trial for having shown this film. The great thing is every time he insulted us we got lots of donations and supporter letters which said “if Glen Beck hates you, we love you”. But the part of it that worried me is the element of the political discourse that his camp represents. During that time, we actually got death threats and hate mail. There’s a couple of people who actually made videos critiquing us, and on one of their Facebook pages there was a discussion for a while about how I should be killed, if I should be chopped up or nailed to a tree or all these other crazy things.

I thought isn’t that sad that our political discourse is such that a woman who stands up and says we’re using too much stuff, our society could be better and healthier and more sustainable. These are not controversial no-brainer facts. The things I’m saying are pretty basic – I had to receive death threats for that?

One of the things that drives the economy of stuff is advertising. I recently asked Adam Corner whether he felt we could ever have any hope of achieving the cuts in carbon emissions that we need in order to avert runaway climate change with an advertising industry in place and no restrictions on advertising. His sense was that he didn’t think that was going to be possible. What’s your take on the power of advertising and what we’ll be able to achieve or not achieve with it still being in place?

A lot of people roll their eyes when we critique advertising because they like to think that we are all self-determined beings and that advertising doesn’t influence us. But I agree with the gentleman you spoke with. Advertising is basically the relentless, constant indoctrination into this consumer society. If you think about it, as I said in The Story of Stuff, is that what’s the point of an advert but to make us feel insecure with the stuff that we have. And so the way that we have set up our advertising culture, in the US it’s 3000 adverts a day targeted at each one of us.

They tell us that our hair is wrong and our clothes are wrong and our furniture is wrong and that we are wrong. We’re absolutely bombarded with these messages promoting our inadequacy and promoting consumption as the solution to that. It really is relentless here. I’ve travelled to over 40 countries and have seen that it’s nothing like here. We have advertisements in our schools, advertisements in our textbooks. It is absolutely relentless.

Sometimes I imagine how different things would be if we were targeted with 3000 advertisements per day telling us about the state of our planet, or telling us that we are good people the way that we are, or encouraging different cultural values about empathy and solidarity and civic participation. We would have a fundamentally different cultural undertone if those advertisements contained different messages. The folks who think advertising is not playing a crucial role in our unsustainable and not fun trajectory, I think, are a little naïve.

I really feel that it’s essential that we restrict advertising. I would start with restricting advertising to kids. Kids don’t have that critical thinking capacity to differentiate between advertising and other contexts. We should definitely limit advertising to kids. Get it out of our schools, get it out of our public spaces. When people ask me what’s something they can do to change our culture in this country, I say that we need to reclaim both our mental and our physical landscape from the constant barrage of messages.

In so many ways, we’re fighting an unfairly stacked battle. We’re going out there trying to promote values of sustainability and collaboration and empathy and participation but the other side is just bombarding folks with incredibly well-designed, psychologically sophisticated messages telling them to just keep on that consumer treadmill. Until we can roll that back, it’s really an unfair battle.

In the time since The Story of Stuff came out, do you think in the world around you as you experience it, do you think our relationship with stuff has got better, or worse? Are we going in a good direction or not really?

I think you can find evidence for either and I swing wildly back and forth. There’s lots of things that I think are changing for the better. I think the fact we went through such a tough economic recession and are still going through it, I think even though it’s been a miserable experience and many, many people have suffered, there’s a small silver lining which is that people are re-evaluating their spending priorities. When you have less money to spend, it is less attractive to rack up all that consumer debt for superfluous, disposable fashion items. So I think there’s a shift happening.

Just last weekend in the New York Times, there was an article I found really encouraging. Some social scientists interviewed high school seniors, the last year of high school, and they’ve been doing so for decades. For the first time in four decades, high school seniors are saying that what’s important to them going forward in their life is having a life full of meaning and purpose as opposed to having a life of comfort and wealth. I find that really hopeful. There’s so much data showing that young people are choosing to not even buy cars, that they want to travel much more lightly.

I think there’s an interesting cultural shift happening with some in our relationship with stuff. When I think about my parents’ generation, they were the first generation that came out after World War II, they had experienced that deprivation and it was the first generation who could have a toaster and a bathing suit every year, and a blender and a microwave. All this stuff. There was a bumper sticker that was very popular in the 70s and 80s, I don’t know if you had it in the UK. It said “he who dies with the most toys wins”. I feel like that bumper sticker captures the acquisition-oriented relationship to stuff. And now I feel like young people don’t want to be burdened with all that stuff. It takes a lot of work and paying of rent to have room for all that stuff.

The shift that I’m seeing is from a focus on acquisition to a focus on access. This is where the sharing economy comes in. How can we have access to the things that we need without taking on the burden of ownership, which means the working and the maintaining and the storing and the worrying about? For example, in my town we have a tool lending library. If I need a power drill to fix one thing, I’m not going to go and buy it and then have it cluttering up my garage forever. I’m going to go down to the tool lending library and borrow it for a week for free, then give it back.

Young people can’t imagine this, but when I was in university people had record albums. The more record albums you had, the cooler you thought you were. So many people had a row of record albums that went their entire dorm room, and if they were really cool they had cinder blocks and a piece of plywood and another thousand records on top of that…

You’re describing my sitting room!

That means you’re giving like 10 or 20 square metres to records! If you tell young people today the idea of devoting 10 or 20 square metres of your living space to music, they think you’re weird because they have it all in a matchbox-sized thing now. So I think through dematerialisation, through sharing, I think there’s a hopeful cultural shift away from actually having to acquire and own all this stuff. That feels very positive.

But then I leave my little bubble where I live here in the Bay Area of California and fly across the country for some talk and I read the local newspaper and they’re celebrating on Black Friday that even more people went shopping this year than last. There was such a depressing article in the paper about how Black Friday shopping has become a social activity and how good it is that entire families were sleeping in line from midnight or were leaving their Thanksgiving dinner table, which is our last non-commercialised holiday that is actually about human relations, our last one. People are leaving that dinner table to get in line with their entire family and these newspaper articles were celebrating that fact.  So I think there’s both hopeful and distressing trends. I choose to screen for the hopeful ones because that helps me keep going.

What do you think this relentless treadmill of accumulation and pressure to consume and debt accumulation, what does it tell us about the deeper underlying psyche, do you think?

I think it tells us that something is hurting inside us as individuals, and as a society. We are tribal animals and we want to have a sense of belonging and a sense of community and a tribe. If we don’t have that through strong family ties and healthy social relations and participation in different civic activities, then we go buy that sense of belonging through a shirt that has a particular logo on it. To me, when I see people spending 50 or 100 dollars on a t-shirt that has a particular logo on it, I feel sorry for them that they feel the need to purchase that social proof or social access.

I have a teenage daughter who loves buying these clothes, so I get to watch the dynamics unfold right here in my house. What I see among her and her friends is the kids who have strong senses of self and strong identity – my daughter is on a sports team so she gets a strong sense of meaning and community and identity through that, those kids are so much more resistant to the advertising messages, that they have to have a certain article of clothing to be cool. I feel that the more that we can invest in our social relations and our sense of identity and our sense of civic participation, the less people will be trying to fill that hollowness inside them with more stuff.

You talked somewhere I read, you talked about the loss of ‘citizen muscle’. What does the reclaiming of that look like, do you think?

I used the term “the loss of citizen muscle” in contrast or corollary to the consumer muscle. I came up with this theory after travelling across the country showing The Story of Stuff to incredibly diverse audiences. It was so interesting to me that the number one question by far also the number one question that we get in our inbox at work, that people ask us, is “what can I do?”

First, I rattled off all these ideas of what people could do, but I just thought it was interesting that people were at such a loss of what to do. The problem is so pervasive that there is an almost infinite number of things one could do to help. I was curious what people were thinking, so I started turning it back to them when they started asking me what can I do. I started asking them – what can you think of doing? The answers that came back were really consistent and to me quite worrysome.

Everyone would say things like: I can recycle, I can carry my own bag to the store, I can buy organic, I can support fair trade, I can stop buying bottled water, I can compost, I can get a clothes line. These are all things that are very, very good to do but they’re not about working together for big, bold, collective, systemic change. They’re about changing our consumption habits and our day to day lifestyles. I want to be really clear, I’m not disrespecting those things. Of course we should be doing those things. But we really need to move from these individual consumer-oriented changes to these collective citizen engagements.

I realised that each of us has two parts. We have a consumer part and a citizen part, a consumer muscle and a citizen muscle. The consumer muscle is what we use when we’re out there consuming. That consumer muscle is spoken to and validated and nurtured so much through these relentless advertisements we were talking about, and we’re called upon to exercise that consumer muscle many times during the day.

Just think about your day. You are presented with a huge number of opportunities to engage with the consumer and use that consumer muscle, so our consumer muscles are really well developed. We can really identify with that consumer muscle. So much that it often becomes our primary identity. The media often uses the words consumer and human being interchangeably as if that is the totality of who we are.

But we have this other part of ourselves, our citizen muscle that we are not called upon to use as much as our consumer muscle. That citizen muscle has atrophied and what worries me about that is that when we’re faced with problems as enormous as the disruption of the global climate, or babies being born pre-polluted with the 160 industrial chemicals already in their blood at the moment of birth, these are really big systemic problems – and the best we can think of is carrying our own bag to the grocery store?

What I say is of course do those responsible consumer things, but those are a good first step, a good place to start, not a good place to stop. What we really need to do is engage our citizen muscles. What that looks like is thinking about people beyond your household. Thinking about making change beyond your kitchen and into your broader community and into your country. It involves things like working together to change the rules of the games, rather than trying to perfect your day-to-day behaviour within a fundamentally unsustainable context, let’s change that context so that the more sustainable choice becomes the new default.

When I think of engaging our citizen muscles, it’s really about how we show up in our community. It can be anything from getting your neighbours together to turn a vacant lot into a garden, to getting folks together to change the law that allows community garden CSAs to sell their food. Anything that’s just about making change beyond your household but in your broader community. Talking to people. Networking to find people to get involved. It could be political lobbying, it could be protesting, it could be supporting those who do the protesting. There’s really an infinite number of ways how being a citizen can actually show up. But the point is we’ve got to start showing up in those ways if we want to implement bigger, bolder change than we can in our kitchens or in our supermarkets acting alone.

My last question is what does Annie Leonard buy her friends and loved ones for Christmas this year?

I’m so lucky that my friends and loved ones share these values. I know a lot of people who just can’t get their relatives to stop sending them all this schlop. In my community, we only do gift exchange for kids, and they have to be a used gift. For kids, they don’t care if the book or the game or the toy is new or used. That’s great, so in my community – I live with a bunch of neighbours and we’re all really good friends, all the kids draw a name from a hat, so they each have to give one gift and it has to be home made or used.

Within my family, we do the same thing. We draw names, so you only have to give one gift, and anything you want to give beyond that one gift has to be used or handmade, but there’s absolutely no pressure to do that whatsoever. We have a 25 dollar limit on purchased gifts. So when I look at all these people standing in line and stressing about their long lists, I just feel so sorry for them. What a chore! Holidays should be a time about relaxation and rejuvenation and if I had to go to the mall, it would be neither relaxing nor rejuvenating. We turn to gifts of experiences, used gifts, home made gifts, anything that allows us to participate in the joy rather than the frenzy of the holiday period. 

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18 Dec 2013

Oliver James on ‘affluenza’, Love Bombing and strengthening our "emotional immune systems"

Over this month of looking at “stuff” from different angles, I came to see that one of my first lightbulb moments in terms of understanding consumerism and the roots of our relationship with “stuff” was Oliver James’ books Affluenza and The Selfish Capitalist.  Both books pulled together a remarkable case for the psychology that underpins our consumer culture, and the extent to which it exploits our pursuit of happiness to sell us something designed to never make us happy.  It felt like this month wouldn’t be complete without a chat with Oliver …

Oliver James is a chartered clinical psychotherapist registered at the Bowlby Centre. He has written a number of books over the past 10 years, including They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life, Affluenza, The Selfish Capitalist, Office Politics: How to Thrive in a World of Lying, Backstabbing and Dirty Tricks and Love Bombing: Reset Your Child’s Emotional Thermostat.  He is also writes magazine columns and appears on TV. You can either listen to/download this podcast, or read the transcript below: 

The first book that you wrote that I became aware of was Affluenza and in that book you describe ‘affluenza’ or consumerism as a modern-day virus. Could you give us a sense of what the symptoms of that virus are?

Placing too high a value on money, possessions, appearances including ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’, fame, places you at greater risk of the commonest emotional distress and disorders. Depression, anxiety, personality disorders like me-me-me narcissism and substance above.  People who have placed too high a value on these things are more at risk of suffering the commonest emotional problems that people have. In Affluenza, I explored how this was working out in 8 nations, obviously the UK, but then New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Shanghai, Moscow, Copenhagen and New York.

I used anecdotal stories to illustrate the scientific evidence. The most important scientific fact comes from the World Health Organisation international survey about mental illness, which shows that the countries which are English-speaking, in particular America and New Zealand, but if you also include Australia, Canada and the UK, on average, averaged across those 5 nations you get an average of 23% of the population having suffered a mental illness in the last 12 months. Compared with mainland Western Europe, the six nations studied in that survey, France, Italy, Germany and so on, the average there is 11.5%.

The explanation I offered for that, the primary reason was that we are more materialistic, or what I call ‘the affluenza virus’. The reason we’re more materialistic is because of our form of political economy. Since 1979 in this country, 1980 in America, we have had free-market economics or what I would call ‘Selfish Capitalism’.  Selfish Capitalism jacks up levels of materialism. It follows that if greater materialism always goes with greater levels of mental illness, if you increase the materialism of a population you would expect there to be an increase in the amount of mental illness in that population.

There are also cross-national studies which show that mainland Western European nations are less materialistic than English-speaking ones. It’s not surprising that we’re more mentally ill than mainland Western Europe. In fact, this has been going on for around about 50 years. America spent four times more per capita on advertising to its population than mainland Western Europe. In the UK and other English-speaking countries it’s twice as much per capita. Of course, advertising’s purpose is to try and persuade you that you need something which you don’t actually need. It’s a want, it’s an affected want.

So the affluenza-stricken Selfish Capitalist society is all about generating false means and getting people to conflate what they really need with what they want, or at least what the advertisers want them to want.

One of the things that you recommend in The Selfish Capitalist is that people need to “increase the strength of their emotional immune systems” in that context. What does that process look like, do you think?

Part of it is a shift away from extrinsic motives and goals towards intrinsic. Extrinsic means doing things to please other people and for rewards. That, of course, can start in early childhood and frequently does. It even starts in early infancy. So you have what I would call essentially Selfish Capitalist methods for shutting babies up, like Gina Ford, where you leave babies to cry onwards through into the education system.

You have love conditional on performance in the Selfish Capitalist system. That of course also happens in Asia. As we saw yesterday, the Asians put an awful lot of pressure on their children from a very young age to do well academically, so it’s not exclusive to Selfish Capitalism.

But increasingly, in contrast to 30 years ago, the education system is a sort of battery farm for creating extrinsic motivation. You don’t really care about your homework so long as you tick the boxes. The exam system has become similarly box-ticking, quite extraordinary really if you have children. O-Levels and A-Levels have become a ridiculous exercise in just finding out what the examiner wants and giving it to them. It has nothing whatever to do with scholarship, learning, just about going through hoops.

There is extrinsic motivation of course in the workplace. I wrote a book recently about office politics, which was arguing that because we now have a service sector based economy thanks to Thatcherism having destroyed our manufacturing base, office politics become critical. There is no objective matching for measuring your performance, it’s really all about the subjective evaluation of your boss.

In terms vaccines against the materialistic affluenza virus, the fundamental principle is you need to rediscover the intrinsic; accentuate the intrinsic and eliminate the extrinsic. The intrinsic being things that actually interest you, things that give you what’s known as ‘flow’, in other words when you look at your small children when they’re playing, they’re completely lost in that world, completely absorbed by it. As adults, we frequently, and from all too young an age, we’re not in that state. We’re basically in a state where we’re worrying about whether we’re pleasing other people, if we’re going to achieve things and get our reward.

You wrote recently about an idea called ‘Love Bombing’. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that and also because Transition is something which is designed as a community-wide response, whether you could imagine something like that working on a community scale, and if so what it might look like?

The idea of Love Bombing is very simple. It’s something that really people of any educational level can do. It’s simply the idea that – it works with any kind of child, your child doesn’t have to have problems, although all children do of course have some problems – it works pretty well for things like ADHD. Even somebody, there was one case described in the book of autism. What it is, is essentially giving your child an intense, condensed experience of feeling in control and of feeling loved.

The book itself doesn’t really get into the question of why children might need this, although it does explore the causes in the individual cases. It’s essentially illustrated through case histories. But the method itself is not really the same thing as ‘quality time’. People sometimes confuse it with that.

What you do is, you say to your child, your 3 to early puberty child, “would you like to have a bit of time away with me?” This might involve going away for a night or two. You can go to a B&B or something, or it might involve having the house to yourself and getting rid of the family, perhaps swapping with the grandparents, getting them to look after the family so you can go to their house. Any practical arrangement that you can fence up to get you alone with your child.

“Would you like some time away with me? You will decide what we do. It will be completely up to you and you can do anything you like, within reason. Obviously things we can’t afford are off the agenda but anything within reason”. So it’s not a hard sell to most children.

You then set about planning it. Obviously a proportion of children will say let’s go to the sweetshop and buy all the sweets in the shop. But actually, interestingly, that very rarely is where the children start. If there’s a lot of antagonism between the parent and the child – I have come across one case out of thousands where the child did actually just use it as a way of completely maliciously upsetting the parent, so I assume that something pretty ghastly had been going on between the parent and the child, but this is the only example I know of. In every other case I’ve come across, the child very quickly gets the hang of it. It really appeals a lot, to have the exclusive attention of the parent, it’s nearly always the mother.

If you go away for a night, the parent is forced to check themselves from trying to control the child, and forced to check themselves from their usual pattern of relating. Most of us get sucked into a pattern of “have you done this, have you done that”.  It’s not how we want to be as parents, but partly because the system requires us to regulate our children in order to make them do their own work, in order to make them extrinsic.

Love bombing rather surprised me. I first did it actually for a TV series, and I was amazed at the results. I did a modified version of it. You go away, you hang out with the child and you’re forced to stop yourself telling them what to do. They’re in charge, you tell them you’ll love them whatever they say. It’s unconditional love. It sounds like a prescription for catastrophe, especially if your child is very needy, which often they are. But interestingly, it has the opposite effect to the one you might expect. They stop being so interested in screen time. If they want to spend hours watching telly you just sit and watch it with them but eventually they do get fed up with that and they do want to relate to you, to be with you, be cuddled by you, you to sleep in the same bed as them, and at the end of it you have an emotional top up and you or they give it a name.

It’s important that they choose the name, ‘mama time’ or ‘love time’ whatever they choose to call it. You then can institutionalise it as a period when the two of you hang out together and they’re in charge. Having established the principle they very quickly like that idea of having some brief time, even if it’s just watching an episode of The Simpsons. My son is quite happy if I sit and watch it with him, it’s so different for him than watching it on his own.

Very surprising changes seem to take place. The child, I think it resets their cortisol, resets their emotional thermostat. But also I think it does the same for the parent in relation to the child. The parent comes back home and suddenly notices that they’ve got into this pattern of trying to control the child and of forgetting to express affection and to start to try and express affection and stop just trying to control them all the time. A much more benign cycle is started. I’ve thousands of examples of this. It’s very gratifying to see.

And could you imagine that same principle being extended beyond the family? Could you Love Bomb a community, do you think?

When it comes to communities, the idea that the people who are in charge, who are in a sense making us extrinsically motivated, you could say through the rule of law. I would put it more in terms of democracy. What has happened in the Selfish Capitalist world particularly but also because of globalisation and the extent to which corporations are now taking over, there is a huge problem of control. The people are not in control.

A tiny ruling elite who loot corporations and loot the taxpayers are in control. Personally I think it’s very unlikely that this ruling elite are going to give these things up very easily. What I predict, and I think it’s very dangerous to predict these things; I personally think the present situation is unsustainable not only ecologically.  The sooner East Anglia goes under water or something the better, but unfortunately it’s probably not going to happen for some time. Especially because of fracking – we were told oil had run out, OPEC told us that Peak Oil had happened some time in the last decade. Unfortunately that’s not the case because of fracking.

We’re going to fry because, as George Monbiot pointed out, we’re stuffed. The oil’s going to keep coming or the gas and the ecological problem is going to get worse. It might happen quickly but it’s probably not going to happen quickly, in such a way that people really change their behaviour. For me, what is unsustainable is Selfish Capitalism. I think neo-liberalism is being completely disproved as indeed neo-classical economics is being disproved. Just as genes have been shown by the human genome project to be unimportant, but nobody’s paying any attention to this.

I think there’s a point at which a population has had enough.  We’ve seen it in the Soviet Union, we saw it just disappear, up in smoke with hardly anyone predicting that. We’ve seen the Arab Springs happening. In the media, nobody’s pointing out that we don’t have democracy. Russell Brand stood up and said it and look at the reaction. He got a strong positive reaction from the population and then a load of censorious, patronising drivel from the commentariat.

I honestly would question whether the present situation is sustainable and I think there’s a very significant possibility that at some point, although it’s impossible to predict how or when, I think at some point there will just be an uprising. I don’t think, I certainly hope it isn’t a violent revolution. I think there’ll be a downing of tools and saying “we’ve had enough of this. We’re not putting up with it any more.”

One of the things that’s been very interesting in terms of that, recently, has been the beginning of a kick back against Amazon. In terms of a company that builds on those extrinsic values, and the recent Panorama programme and so on and so on. What’s your sense of what a company like that, although it all seems very quick and very simple and “one click and you’re done” and all that sort of thing…what does a company like Amazon do to us?

I remember when the internet started and thinking, this is just going to be a commercial thing. Everyone said it’s going to be so exciting, it’s going to be liberating. Actually, to some extent it has. As a scholar, it’s fantastic. You’re able to go to Google Scholar and find scientific papers. Of course, there have been huge benefits, maps, all sorts of things.

But the reason Amazon is a problem is purely because of the way that corporations have managed to destroy national identity, and the globalisation of corporations. The problem with Amazon is not the business, not the principle of being able to click on something and being able to get things delivered. Ecologically, the fact that superstores are now delivering saves journeys and saves a lot of petrol. It’s not a bad model actually, to have things delivered. The journey to the bookshop, obviously people like me are going to be slightly weepy about the loss of bookshops but I think if the Amazon platform was better developed it could be like a bookshop.

The problem isn’t the model in and of itself of a platform on an internet site, the problem of course is the way the tax system works and also the monopolistic dangers, and they are very considerable. I didn’t see the Panorama programme so I don’t know exactly what it was talking about, probably about the way they don’t pay tax and the way they have the potential to ultimately control what DVDs we see and what books we read.

No, it was about the working conditions in the factories and the degrees of psychological stress that they put workers under.

I didn’t know about that. Funnily enough I did manage to make contact with an employee at Amazon who said it was terrifying. But I didn’t know about that aspect of it. It doesn’t surprise me in the least. But what I’m more concerned about is the monopolistic risk. There will eventually be books that we can’t get hold of any more because they’re not on Amazon because there aren’t any bookshops.

How are corporations going to be controlled? The only way I think ultimately it’s going to be done is if you have a meeting of minds amongst powerful countries in the world. And that’s actually not going to be easy to see how that’s going to come about, because as we saw with Leveson, there really is a revolving door within the ruling elite. The politicians move in and out of business, the businessmen move in and out of politics. So politics has no longer become the mechanism by which these problems are going to be dealt with.

Again you come back to, at what point does it become apparent to the population that this system doesn’t work and in what way will they apprehend it? All I can say is that people are not going to put up with it. If you’ve got The Daily Mail baying against the amount that bankers are paid, that must tell you something.

One of the things, you mentioned Google and Amazon, and I suppose the way in which that now, or a Tesco Clubcard, knows more about us than probably our partners do in terms of what we do on a daily basis and the degree to which it enables advertising targeted to you to be popping up in your email every time you open your email. There’s an extrinsic values machine that’s almost able to read our minds these days. How important is it that we somehow create space in our lives where those things can’t reach?

To a certain extent it doesn’t really matter if my wife knows if I’ve bought this or that on Amazon. The most alarming purpose that information serves is partly to be able to advertise to us, so we get an increasingly limited view of the world because when you go for information on Google it uses your past history to control the search terms. So if you’re very right wing and live in America, you’ll only get ‘right wing live in America’ information. If you’re left wing and live in England, you’ll get the same thing. You get a rather limited world view.

That’s a worry. But more irritating than practical is the differential pricing. Although they can’t tell your IP address, through your past usage they pretty much know who you are. Using that you get differential pricing. You could say there is no such thing as an air fare. If I googled for an air fare on my computer now, I would be offered a different price than somebody who lives in Brixton who’s never tried to get an air fare before or who’s only able to afford very cheap ones, whose expenditure and consumption pattern shows that they’re a young person, they will get offered a lower air fare. You could say that’s democratic but I would say it’s very startling and not how it should work at all.

I think also the Edward Snowden, that kind of snooping stuff is also potentially worrying and certainly in some respect we are living in Oceania, Big Brother has come to pass. If you’re on a computer that contains a camera, if GCHQ want to watch what I’m doing it’s very easy for them to do that. If for some reason they wanted to, they’d be able to switch on my camera and watch me and hear what I’m saying and doing. That is spooky and in the wrong hands, but I think one doesn’t want to get carried away with conspiracy theories either.  But the means by which Oceania could come about is now all there, it’s all sitting waiting to happen in a sense, if you want to get paranoid about it.

One of the things that I’ve asked everybody this month is given your analysis of things, what are you buying for people this Christmas?

Hopefully very very little. My take on Christmas (I offered it on You and Yours recently) is that if you’ve got children, club together with other family members and choose something that they’re still going to want in three months’ after Christmas.  So it’ll probably be a fairly high-end, expensive item. Then just ask everybody to contribute to it. Whether it’s an iPad or a bicycle or whatever it is, keep it simple.

Obviously if you’ve got under 5 year olds or small children, in a way it’s even more important, because that pile of plastic and paper that you end up with on Christmas morning or on birthday mornings is just such a nightmare. It’s so depressing for everyone including the child.

That’s my top tip for avoiding that happening. Indeed, we have agreed in our family to do a ballot. We did a ballot and each person is going to be given one present by the group. I can’t remember who I’m giving my present to, and I can’t remember who’s giving me my present, but only one present is all I’m going to get or give within the group of people who I’ll be together with on Christmas day. That’s a way to control it.

Christmas is for children really. For adults it’s when you all get together and there is a sense of community, although a lot of it’s quite tense and bad tempered, but then that’s families for you. But it doesn’t have to be like that and for many families it isn’t and for the adults. But I think it’s primarily for children. It does have a sort of wow factor and it is a magical moment potentially. 

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