15 Jul 2014
Saturday 12th July saw the first pilot Transition Roadshow take place, the Transition Northwest Conference. And if the four subsequent Roadshows are to prove anywhere near as good, then it represents a great new evolution in how to celebrate and support Transition at the local level. The conference was held at the University of Cumbria in Lancaster, hosted by the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability. Transition City Lancaster had done wonders in pulling together the event, and their care and attention to detail was clear throughout.
While in the main the 120 or so participants came from Lancaster or from Transition initiatives local to the area, there were people there from as far afield as the US and Edinburgh. The day started with Samagita welcoming everyone and outlining the day to come.
Sarah McAdam from Transition Network then introduced the day in the context of the other forthcoming Roadshows and recognised the amount of work that Transition City Lancaster had put in to making it happen. We then did some mapping, getting people up and moving, looking at questions such as:
- Where have you travelled here from? Where is home?
- How long has your Transition initiative been going for?
- Would you say you were thriving or struggling?
- How old are you? (ranking the hall from oldest to youngest)
![Making a "where are you from?" map.](https://www.transitionculture.org/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/26341cb402_photo-20-2850-29-650x488.JPG "Making a "where are you from?" map.")
Then after a short coffee break, we broke up for the first session of workshops. People could choose between:
- Transition Support – creating and maintaining healthy Transition initiatives
- No to fracking, yes to community energy
- Community currencies and local economies
- How to engage people with Transition
- The Sustainable Communities Act
I went to the one on community energy, facilitated by Kevin Frea, which was an excellent exploration of the issues around community energy schemes, the support available for them, and at which a North West Community Energy Network was formed (these Transition folks don’t hang around).
Then after lunch there was a second session of workshops. The choices were:
- Reconomy Project
- Transition approach to death and dying
- Personal resilience
- Tearing down the fences – retrofitting any street to co-housing: what would it take?
- Local urban food and organic methods.
I went to the workshop on cohousing entitled Tearing Down the Fences – Retroftting Any Street to Co-Housing. What Would it Take?, led by Cliodhna Mulhern of the Lancaster Co-housing project. They recently built an amazing co-housing project, containing 41 units, to Passivhaus standard. Here is a short film about it:
The workshop then focused on what it might take for any street to reinvent itself using elements of the cohousing model. A very interesting discussion followed, starting with ideas like lowering fences and moving on to more ambitious ideas: buying clubs, car clubs and so on.
I only made these two workshops, but if you have a look at the conference’s own self-generated blog you will find some reports on other workshops too. For example, there are write-ups on the Local Urban Agriculture workshop, the Transition approaches to Death and Dying workshop and the Sustainable Communities Act.
The last session, after a coffee break began with a talk I gave called Transition as a many splendored thing (see right), which gave an overview of what is happening in Transition and why what we are all collectively creating is so important.
After some discussion and questions, we had a closing session, facilitated by Sarah McAdam, reflecting on how the day was for everyone, before the day was then brought to a close by Kathy from TCL.
But that wasn’t the end! That evening, in the View Bar at the University was food, followed by music and dancing from Howard Haigh and the Men of the Hour, getting everyone up and moving around, powered by a pedal-powered generator. A great end to a fantastic day. Here’s a couple of bits of feedback from the conference blog:
- “Intergenerational responses in the opening session were very encouraging”.
- “I’ve really enjoyed the experience today – the workshops were very useful – Wish I could have gone to all of them as was spoilt for choice”.
- “Have met some very interesting people here today and hope to be able to keep in contact with them and share our successes and refresh ideas”.
- “Of course it’s not really over, as usual for a Transition meet up, it’s another wave beginning its roll towards the shore. Good to be part of it”.
The next day there was the opportunity for people to immerse themselves more in some of the interesting stuff happening in Lancaster. The day began with a Universe Walk led by Samagita, and then included a cycling trip to visit Lancaster Co-housing and the community hydro scheme, and also the Claver Hill no-dig community food growing project, or a walk to the Fairfield Flora and Fauna project.
The great thing about this Roadshow approach is that it is infused with the experience and enthusiasm of the host initiative. While on reflection there are some learnings for the subsequent Roadshows, especially in relation to the running order and content of the day, it felt me like there is something very dynamic about this way of doing things. It was certainly an event that left me renergised in the way that only spending a day with other active Transitioners can. Our deepest thanks to the folks at TCL for all their hard work in pulling it together, and to IFLS and the University of Cumbria for hosting us.
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15 Jul 2014
Chris Johnstone works in the area of the psychology of resilience, sustainable happiness and is co-author, with Joanna Macy, of Active Hope: how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy. Chris appeared at both the Unleashing of Transition Town’s Totnes and Lewes, and has interacted with different Transition groups ever since. He’s also an accomplished musician (you can hear him playing briefly at the end of the podcast of our interview). I started by asking him why celebration matters:
“I’m just thinking about how important food is. Without food, we wither away. Food is nourishment. We also have needs for psychological nourishment or psycho-spiritual nourishment, emotional nourishment. I see celebration as one of those things that nourishes us psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. I was thinking about this also in terms of how important celebration is in keeping us going.
One of the thought blocks that people bump into sometimes is the voice that says “well what’s the point of doing this?” What celebration does is it gives us an answer to that. I think of it as helping shifting us from a going nowhere story where we feel we’re making no progress and have no direction to what I think of as a going somewhere story, where we feel that we’re on the way somewhere because we’re celebrating and marking important steps along the way.
What are the risks of not pausing to celebrate, do you think?
If you don’t pause to first of all notice that you’ve made any progress, it’s very easy to feel that you’re not making any progress. If you’re not making any progress, one of the risks for burnout is that loss of meaning where you lose the sense that there’s a point to what you do. Basically you run dry.
I see one of the parallels here as sustainable agriculture. One of the keys of sustainable agriculture is to nourish the soil. If you look after the soil, you get good crops. In terms of personal productivity, I think it would be to have sustainable activism. The parallel to topsoil is, I guess, our enthusiasm. We need to look after our enthusiasm for something. If we don’t, our enthusiasm gets thin like thin topsoil and you can get to a point where there’s no enthusiasm left and you just have that sense of, well what’s the point. You lose the oomph, you lose the energy, and you lose the plot.
What does good celebration look like? What for you would be the ingredients of a good celebration?
You can do it alone. It’s good to have ways where we notice the steps that we’re taking by ourselves and find some way of marking those and reinforcing those, but I’d say that celebration generally is much better in company. It’s also socially bonding and there’s very interesting research here about what really makes a difference in relationships.
There’s a psychologist called Shelley Gable who worked at the University of California Los Angeles, and she was trying to work out what are the vital things that really make a difference and she recorded lots and lots of relationships. One area of communication that seemed to make a key difference in relationships was the response to good news.
If one person had good news and shared it with the other and the other person responded to the good news by being ‘joy in the joy of another’, by celebrating the good news, that deepened trust, that deepened the sense of satisfaction in the relationship. But if somebody shared good news and it passed by without notice or even worse, the person tried to persuade them that really it was bad news, that led to a drop in the level of satisfaction in the relationship that was so strong that Shelley Gable found that she could work who was at higher risk of breaking up over the next 12 months just by looking at their response to good news, whether somebody celebrated the good news when it was shared, or whether somebody passed it by or poured cold water on it.
There was a thing that I wrote for this month’s framing editorial that was my attempt at what some of the ingredients of good group celebrations might look like. What does celebration on a more day to day basis in a group like a Transition group – how can we design it into our meetings, our everyday rather than having something we just do once a year?
I’d say there’s something here about celebration needing to be meaningful. It’s asking yourself “what exactly is it that we are celebrating?” What we’re doing with celebration is celebrating the things we appreciate, the things that we value. By having a shared celebration, what you’re doing is reinforcing the system of values, the shared system of values within that group. In terms of what keeps us going, it’s really important to celebrate success. So what comes up there is we need to look at how do we notice success, how do we notice progress and how do we define that?
It’s particularly important when working for social change, for social and ecological justice, that we can often have a lot of disappointment and frustration along the way. If we only celebrate the really big things, the really big victories, we can have long gaps between the celebrations which makes us feel that we’re losing, that we’re not making progress. And so therefore I think what’s really important is to look at the mini victories along the way, and to both celebrate the positive outcomes that happen, but also to celebrate the effort put in, and one way of doing that is just to find some way of appreciating what has been done, so for example research on our mood shows that one of the things that improves mood is both the experience and also the expression of gratitude.
One of the ways that you can build celebration into everyday meetings and things is just finding some way to appreciate each other, appreciate the steps that we’ve been taking. If you’ve notice that someone’s worked really hard on something, to have some gap in a meeting, some agenda item in the meeting where you just notice the things that have been done and the effort put in, and find some way of valuing them, marking them, noting them.
It might be first of all there’s a slot for anyone who’s got any good news to share and then to celebrate that, but also has anyone got any appreciations of gratitude to express. To actually build that into part of a group culture that we take time to notice and celebrate the steps we notice each other taking, and also if somebody has noticed a step that we’ve taken, for it to be completely more than fine, I’d say brilliant, for us to step forward and say – one thing I’m pleased about, you may not have seen this but one thing I’ve done is… where we take time to notice and to celebrate the steps we’ve taken ourselves.
It’s great when other people can notice it, but we don’t want to end up feeling resentful because no one cheered for this hard piece of work I did. We actually get better at stepping out there and saying – yes, I’m really pleased that I did this, I’m really pleased that I did that, because when we mark the steps that we’re taking, we reinforce that in a way that helps us keep taking those steps.
The environmental movement, in as much as I’ve been around it for the last 25 years or so, feels to be fairly spectacularly bad at stopping and celebrating. The culture is like a marathon, “got to keep going, got to keep going”, so there’s lots of burnout. Why do you think the environmental movement has been so poor at that?
Partly it’s the scale of the tasks that we face. We can’t have a party to celebrate climate change being sorted out, because that’s probably not going to happen in our lifetime. There’s already problems in the post, as it were, from the carbon that’s already been released into the atmosphere. The task is so huge that we could be working, well, there’s 168 hours in the week and we could be working all of those for a whole year and still feel that there’s more and more to do. There’s two things here.
There’s the to-date thinking which is where we look at what we’ve done so far, but there’s also to-go thinking where we look at what we’ve still got to go, the distance we’ve still got to cover. When we look at the distance we’ve still got to cover, it’s further than we can get in our lifetime, so that’s the trouble as I see it. We can just be working, working, working, and feel that there’s always more to go.
But also if we only focus on the work that’s still to be done, the danger is we just get exhausted. We become like what we’re doing to the fields of wheat around the world – we harvest them unsustainably and end up depleting the soil. I’d say that activist enthusiasm is a vital renewable resource, and we need to get much more skilful about how we treasure it. How we look after it in a way that can help it grow.
My last question is, can you think of one celebratory event that you were particularly moved by or inspired by which could be a story that might be useful for Transition groups to hear?
I’ve shared a number with you that I really delight in. One that comes to mind is when the two of us spoke together at the launch of Transition Town Totnes. It was the official unleashing of Transition Town Totnes and that was years ago now. But I think that was in 2006, so eight years ago now. What we do is celebrate launches of things in a way that we’re marking them and saying – hey, this is the beginning of something. We don’t know what will happen, but we’re marking our very clear intention.
There’s a form of energy, I call it ACACI which means A Clear and Committed Intention. It’s like a form of psychological energy. When you have strong, clear and committed intention, it drives you on. One of the ways of building that up is to have a launching celebration. I really enjoyed that event with you. We spoke together at the unleashing of Transition Town Lewes as well and we’ve both been back there since then. You wrote recently in your July 1st blog about being at their 7 year celebration and I was there at their 5 year celebration.
If you have a party to begin something, then you can also revisit that point some years on. So they become markers in time. We can say yes, we were here when this began, we celebrated the launch of this. And now here we are meeting again, this number of years later and we also celebrate the effort put in and the steps taken and the distance covered in that between time.
What you do there is build in the journey approach to change. This sense that we’re on a cultural migration. That’s why I love the term Transition. Transition is about moving from one place to another and we mark the steps along the way. So we celebrate when we begin this journey with the unleashing, the launch, but we keep coming back to that at periodic intervals and say – hey, we’re still on this journey. It’s still important to us.
While there might be some steps forward and some steps back and frustrations and disappointments along the way, there will always be things that we can look at and say yeah, that’s what we did and I feel really good about that.
When you mark the things that you feel good about, you get something which I call afterglow. This is the warm feeling of satisfaction after you’ve done something or noticed something that you feel good about. That’s what keeps us going, it’s fuel for the journey. So back to that original idea that celebration is a form of psychological nourishment and it’s absolutely vital to keep ourselves going.
You’re a very gifted musician and you managed to weave music and getting everybody moving and joining in as well. What’s the role of music in that, do you think?
It’s so interesting, because they’ve found bits of bone that have been turned into flutes that are 20,000 years old. I see music as a form of social glue. It draws people together. There’s something very remarkable that can happen when people move rhythmically together. It’s where we shift out of just seeing ourselves as separate individuals to where we sing and dance together it reinforces our connectivity, our sense of being part of something larger.
That’s great – actually ‘great’ is an understatement. I talked about psychological nourishment, also how do we reinforce and grow social capital? Social capital is the wealth that comes out of relationships. Shared music and dance is one of the ways that happens.
Here is the podcast of our interview with Chris.
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10 Jul 2014
Transition Network’s Ben Brangwyn interviewed author, social entrepreneur, thinker, blogger and systems thinker, and also member of Bowen in Transition, Dave Pollard, while he was at Schumacher College recently for their Dark Mountain course. Our month’s theme of Celebration ran through their discussion.
Dark Mountains aren’t really the kind of places many of us would choose as places to have a celebration, and the theme of Dark Mountain (civilisational collapse) is perhaps not a subject that immediately brings up thoughts of celebration. Can you tell us if celebration featured at all in the course and how it might help us navigate through the Dark Mountain (or not)?
The term ‘celebration’ is interesting in the context of movements like Dark Mountain and Transition that are substantially in opposition to prevailing popular thought — etymologically and originally it meant a ‘large and solemn gathering to honour something’. So, I don’t think Dark Mountain was celebratory, either in the original sense or in the current sense of a collective and congratulatory acknowledging of some happy event.
What we did practice, I think, is Tom Robbins’ advice, to “insist on joy in spite of everything”. Dark Mountaineers are, by profession, artists, and TS Eliot, writing of poetry, one of his forms of art, said:
“Poetry has to give pleasure… [and] the communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for, which enlarges our consciousness or refines our sensibility… We all understand I think both the kind of pleasure that poetry can give and the kind of difference, beyond the pleasure, which it makes to our lives. Without producing these two effects it is simply not poetry.”
If that is our purpose as artists — to give both pleasure and the kind of fresh understanding that makes a difference to people’s lives — then I think we need to come at our work from a place of joy. And we certainly did that at our recent course. It is amazing and exhilarating to find a group with which one can speak fearlessly and unapologetically about collapse, who appreciate worldviews as diverse and complex as those of John Gray, David Abram, Guy McPherson, Charles Eisenstein, Paul and Dougald, and you and Rob.
As recently as five years ago talking about collapse was lonely and difficult work. But now, the New Political Map (see right) is populated with at least seven “camps” of past-denial thinking about our future: Humanists, Transitioners, Radical Activists, Communitarians, Dark Mountaineers and Voluntary and Near Term Extinctionists. There’s a growing appreciation, I think, that all of us who are ‘beyond denial’ can and must work together, that we share a common purpose, and that our numbers are growing. All of that is a cause for joy, and perhaps even celebration.
You and some of the team of Bowen in Transition (BC, Canada) have run a successful 1-day “Intro to Transition Course”. To what extent did celebration feature in that course, and did you cover the “when” of celebration?
Our course was designed to give our 3800 Bowen Island residents a sense of the energy, economic and ecological challenges we will face specifically on the island, and some of the things we are doing and might do to prepare for that. It also includes an “inner transition” session and a set of exercises to help attendees see how much work remains to be done.
While the first part of the workshop is pretty sobering (there are, always, some tears), the exercises in the second half, which focus on identifying our preparedness for living in a relocalized, post-growth, post-cheap-energy, post-stable-climate world, have taught us that we’re better prepared than we might think. In these exercises we’ve discovered that our neighbours have skills we would never have imagined, we’ve practiced dealing with crisis scenarios and gained a sense that we’re less helpless than we thought, and we’ve envisioned a future for our island that is highly resilient in core areas like food security, local livelihoods, and health & wellness.
When you’re on a small island, there’s a sense that you might be cut off in a crisis, and it’s comforting and energizing to realize that, when we must adapt, we will probably do remarkably well. And of course our workshops include a potluck meal, which is always a type of celebration.
You very deliberately retired from the Industrial Growth System not that long ago. How did you celebrate that retirement in the short term and also the longer term?
I wanted to imagine myself as having resigned like Patrick McGoohan did in The Prisoner. But the truth is that none of us can resign from civilisation; I am as dependent on it as the next person. And I am immensely grateful for the enormous good fortune I have been blessed with all my life, and specifically for the opportunity it gave me to critically explore and learn how the world really works and to imagine better ways to live and make a living. This is kind of what it felt like to me to retire from civilisation; a bewilderment that will probably last the rest of my life, wondering what ‘uncivilized’ life might really be like.
One of the things I did immediately was to move to Bowen Island, a more sustainable place in a more sustainable part of the world than where I worked. The view out my window, of forest and ocean with little evidence of civilisation’s existence, is an endless source of joy.
I take every opportunity to celebrate the freedom I have now — to wake up in the morning with nothing that must be done that day, and do whatever I feel like doing; to walk naked in the quiet forest beside my home; to talk about the state of the world without fear of being silenced or subjected to violence; to eat local, healthy, organic food and drink fresh well water; to surround myself with natural beauty; to connect with bright, inspired, caring people here and all over the world. It is such a privilege to have such freedoms. If being grateful, every day, is a form of celebration, then that’s what I do.
You’re focusing heavily right now on “presencing”. Can you explain what that is, and to what extent celebration is a feature of “being present”?
Perhaps I’ll be able to celebrate if I can ever actually achieve it! I think that because I am fortunate enough to have the capacity (time, knowledge, skills, intelligence, and access to resources) to be of service to others I have a responsibility to do so. Like so many humans coping with our industrial civilisation culture, I have been damaged by it. I have dealt with depression much of my life, and still suffer from far too many fears and anxieties for my own good. I also have ulcerative colitis, one of the many chronic autoimmune diseases that are epidemic in our culture.
My purpose for trying to become present is to enable me to heal and hence to be able to be of better service to others. I also hope it will bring me more clarity about exactly what my role is, going forward, how I can best be of service. That’s a theme of my book, Finding the Sweet Spot, but I am still learning about it, and I expect it to be a lifelong process.
In those rare moments when I feel myself fully present, whether it be when I’m really “on” in some mentoring or collaboration with others, or in a moment of meditation when I feel time stop and my ego vanish and the separation between ‘me’ and all-life-on-Earth fall away, that very presence is, I think, a celebration of connection, what I think wild creatures must feel most of their lives.
As a systems thinker, you’re often producing excellent diagrams that depict systems (social, ecological, inner personal) that show actions, reactions, impacts and feedback mechanisms. Have any of your diagrams included “celebration” or similar?
Thanks — my systems diagrams are all part of the thinking-out-loud process on my blog, my attempt to make sense of the world and what it means to be human, and I’m delighted others have found my ‘diary’ of that process useful to them.
If celebration has not factored into these diagrams, I suspect it’s because I’m drawing what I perceive to be the current state of things, and my experience and sense of things is that there is not much cause for celebration, either external or internal, in most of our lives. This is a celebration. When such events occur to us personally, or when we are instrumental in helping such events happen, then we can celebrate.
That’s why I think most of our work, most of our occasions to celebrate, will be small scale and local, what Joanna Macy calls “holding actions” against a tide of growing atrocities aimed at keeping civilization culture alive. In my suggestedPattern Language for Effective Activism (pattern languages being another way of documenting and making sense of systems) I showed “Celebrate” as one of the patterns.
And I’d like to thank all of those reading this who are doing that “holding action” work — rescuing, liberating, blocking, disrupting, seizing, undermining — and those who support them, and those building alternative systems and models. In short, all of those who are making a small, real difference now, putting themselves on the line, taking real, personal risks.
As a chronicler of civilization’s collapse, I do not foresee much opportunity for celebration myself. But the other, related approaches to dealing sanely with the knowledge of what is to come — insisting on joy in spite of everything, giving and taking pleasure and meaning from our creative and other work, discovering new and unexpected areas of resilience and possibility, breaking bread together, being grateful for this magnificent life and all that we have — are small ways of ‘nodding with a smile to the sacred’, which is perhaps a more modest definition of celebration, one that we can all partake of, every day.
Dave Pollard retired from paid work in 2010, after 35 years as an advisor to small enterprises, with a focus on sustainability, innovation, and understanding complexity. He is a long-time student of our culture and its systems, of history and of how the world really works, and has authored the blog How to Save the World for over ten years. His book Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work, was published by Chelsea Green in 2008. He is one of the authors of Group Works: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings, published in 2012. He is a member of the international Transition movement, the Communities movement and the Sharing Economy movement, and is a regular writer for the deep ecology magazine Shift. He is working on a collection of short stories about the world two millennia from now. He lives on Bowen Island, Canada.
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8 Jul 2014
Given that our theme this month is ‘Celebration’, this feels like a good time to share the story of the oddest talk I ever gave, which took place at a celebration, and which left me with a question I have been unable to answer to this day, one that perhaps you might be able to help me out with. Sometime around 1998, I was invited to give a slide show at a wedding, thankfully not something I have been invited to do before or since.
I was living in South West Ireland, and a couple I knew were getting married at Cool Mountain, a kind of travellers community on the side of a hill near Dunmanway. Locally it was known as a mostly incomer/alternative/’hippy’/traveller community, who lived in an assortment of vans, caravans, temporary structures, but also some very interesting low impact buildings and some great people, on a hillside renowned for its high levels of rainfall.
My friends were getting married (well ‘handfasted’ actually, a kind of pagan wedding), and for some reason, I was invited to give a talk about straw bale building as part of the festivities. It’s certainly the first, and last, time I’ve been asked to give a talk about straw bale building at a wedding. I had recently been part of building the first straw bale house in Ireland, Marcus McCabe’s house in Monaghan (see photo above), and had a slide show showing most stages of the process which I have given a few times locally.
The actual ceremony had taken place in the early afternoon, to be followed by a big knees-up in the evening, and I was asked to come and speak at about 5pm. I turned up, with my slide projector, to an old farmhouse on the side of the mountain, got set up, and then people started turning up to listen.
It rapidly became clear that while about half the people had come expecting to hear me speak, the other half had arrived already expecting the party. Quite a few of them had, we might say, imbibed levels of alcohol more suitable for a party than a slide show about straw bale construction.
One guy in particular was already very drunk. He sprawled on the sofa, but still managed to fix his attention onto the talk, just about. I started by talking about the history of strawbale building before moving onto the story of the Monaghan house. We began with the foundations. I showed how they were built and the learnings from that. The guy on the sofa roused himself. “Foundations”, he just about managed to get out coherently, “foundations are what goes under the walls to carry the weight”, before slumping back again. “Thanks” I said, before moving onto walls.
It soon became clear that whatever stage of the building process I mentioned, our friend had to have an informed (ish) opinion on them. “Walls, yes, that’s what the roof sits on”, “Roof, that’s the bit that goes over the top and keeps the rain off” etc. Each time he spoke he was shooshed by everyone else, and after about 15 minutes, he proceeded to be sick all over himself and left the room.
During the talk more people arrived, the majority of whom were here clearly to party rather than listen to me. At the end of the talk, I came to the bit about how much this beautiful, circular, thatched house had cost to build. “So this family”, I told the crowded farmhouse sitting room, “built a three-bedroom house for just £30,000!”. I had given this talk many times before, and every time this fact generated an appreciative sense that that was quite something, that here, perhaps, was an affordable and technically feasible building solution at a time when conventional construction was out of the reach of many. For many people it was the high point. Not on Cool Mountain.
One guy, who had spent the talk either listening intently or was too drunk to move, it was hard to say, looked shocked at this statement, and his indignation moved him to sit upright. “Thirty grand?” he said with a tone of great disgust. “Thirty grand?? Baz built his house for a hundred quid”. History does not record what Baz lived (or perhaps even still lives) in. Quite what Baz managed to build for a hundred quid will forever be left to future generations to speculate upon. Me, I never found out. As soon as I finished, the partiers were able to finally begin partying properly, let off the leash at last. I headed home, celebrating Baz’s ingenuity, creativity, and, quite possibly, highly creative accounting.
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7 Jul 2014
It’s just as well I enjoy travelling on trains, as Germany is a long way from Totnes. That enjoyment however does not extend to the train I’m writing this post from. It’s the 40 minutes-delayed Koln to Brussels train, packed with people, and I’m in the carriage in which the air conditioning is broken, on a day when it is over 30 degrees outside. I’m surrounded by lots of sweaty faces. I’m on my way back from 2 packed and inspiring days in Germany, helping with the promotion of the German version of The Power of Just Doing Stuff (Einfach. Jetzt. Machen!).
You can’t get from Totnes to Berlin by train in a single day, so I had to break the journey with an overnight in Brussels. I arrived just in time for the start of the Belgium/USA game, one of the finest games of football I have ever had the pleasure to watch, and then took quite a while getting to sleep due to the people driving around the centre of the city beeping their horns to celebrate the Belgian victory.
The following day I reached Berlin by about 4pm, with Gerd Wessling of Transition Germany, who had joined me on the train as it passed through Bielefeld. We walked to the Heinrich Boll Foundation, who regular readers may remember hosted a talk I gave about 18 months ago. We were straight into an hour of interviews after which was a short period of downtime before the evening’s event.
On the bill was myself, Gerd, and Dieter Janacek, an MP and the Green Party’s economics spokesperson. The evening was moderated by Dorothee Landgrebe. I spoke for about 30 minutes and then Gerd talked about what is happening with Transition in Germany. We then had debate and discussion with Dieter about the meeting of bottom up activism and top down policymaking, and just how far a bottom up approach like Transition can go. It was billed as a debate, but we pretty much agreed that of course Transition can’t do everything, but it can help politicians who want to make the necessary changes by just getting on with it and changing the culture.
Then there were lots of good questions and dialogue from the packed room. When it was all over there was lots of book signing, chatting, questions, and meeting great people from all over the country (and a guy from Chile who was all excited and wanting to take Transition home with him). After a trip to a bar for pizza and a beer to round the day off, it was off to bed.
The next morning started with Gerd and I travelling by tram across Berlin to visit Leila, a free shop set up by Transition Pankow, who are very active in their neighbourhood of the city. The shop, in the basement of a community centre, has three parts, a free shop, where people can bring stuff and take stuff away for free, a borrowing shop, where … I think you’re getting the point by now .. you can borrow stuff (lots of board games for example). And lastly a Tool Library, with a wide range of tools.
After a tour of the shop, and meeting the dedicated people who run it, a big group of us had breakfast on the street in front of the shop, including some of the most delicious strawberries I have ever eaten. Then about 8 of us got onto bicycles and set off across the city to our next stop. My bike was an old GDR bike, one of the ones you pedal backwards as a brake. Never ridden one of those before. Not sure I have any immediate plans to do so again. But it got me around.
Our next stop was Goerlitzer Park in the Kreuzberg part of the city. We met members of Kiezwandler, the local Transition group, among the 26 heritage variety fruit trees they planted in the park. Goerlitzer Park is, as our hosts put it, loved by many and hated by many. It suffers from overuse, from rubbish and littering, and from open drug dealing in the park, as well as from parties and loud music. For some the park is a nice clean green oasis, for others it is an anarchist free zone that operates without state interference. It proves to be a tricky balance.
Kreuzberg had, until a couple of days before I arrived, been under something resembling a siege. Between 500 and 1000 police from across Germany had closed off part of the area due to a large group of mainly African refugees occupying a school building. It had been squatted for around 18 months, and over time the situation had deteriorated within the squat, with drug and alcohol problems, fights, inadequate sanitation and even one murder.
The district government offered to resettle people to other districts, and around 200 people left voluntarily, but about 40 remained, some threatening to leap from the roof if the police entered. The night before I arrived, an agreement was reached to allow the occupants to stay in part of the building while work begins to transform it into a centre for refugee organisations. It is in this context of a part of the city where social and political problems and disputes are very visible that our friends have been working since 2009 to try and make Transition happen.
In this context, the group proposed, at a series of meetings with neighbours, local politicians and park authorities, planting an orchard of heritage varieties in the park. A rota of people now look after the trees and water them regularly due to the poor, free-draining soil in which they stand. The plantings have suffered minimal vandalism, and have had good feedback, and are seen as being one of the key contributors to the recent decision by the district to redefine Kreuzberg as an “edible neighbourhood”, meaning that any plantings, where possible, will be edible species. That’s quite an achievement.
Although the group has done lots of things, they have also struggled with engaging a critical mass of people in a neighbourhood defined by high levels of left wing dissident activism, high levels of diversity, low incomes, and many groups already existing before Transition. The group is currently, apart from maintaining the orchard, on a hiatus, due to burnout and over-reach. There were very interesting discussions about how an approach more rooted in REconomy might have been a better way to do things, as the group definitely felt it has reached the extent of what was possible as a group of volunteers.
Then it was back on the bikes and off to ThinkFarm, a social enterprise incubator on one floor of a great old 1930s factory complex. ThinkFarm is a community of entrepreneurs, and was founded inspired by Transition values. They are home to a number of innovative enterprises, and one of the founders, Boris, showed us round and introduced us to many of the businesses there.
There was Milpa Films, who made the very influential Voices of Transition film (now out on DVD!). There was a media company specialising in ecological/social businesses. There were some designers. There was TransitionLab, a research organisation doing research into Transition. There was Quartermeister, who brand beer brewed in a local brewery and sell it in bottles with all profits going towards local charities They operate as a not for profit, as a transparent business, with a social purpose, and with a membership who choose the local charities the profits are distributed between.
There was Fairbindung, an organisation doing education work with schools and also selling Fairtrade coffee from Nicaragua. They all share the space, have a kitchen area in which they try to eat shared meals on a regular basis, and which feels like a really creative community. At the end of the tour, they asked me to wax lyrical to their camera about ThinkFarm, not easy with 1 minute’s preparation! Very inspiring, something that could be replicated in many Transition communities.
Then back onto the bikes and off to Prinzessinnengarten, in the centre of the city, one of the best known urban agriculture projects in the world. Given that the site has no soil, the garden is raised in boxes of compost, often stacked two or three deep. Runner beans scramble up very sturdy supports. All manner of produce flourishes in boxes. The place is fascinating from a financial model perspective.
It has become a key tourist attraction, and its cafe, which appears in many tourist guides as a “must visit”, serves delicious meals under the trees, in a unique setting. 60% of its income comes from the cafe, and the rest from consultancy. The group who run the garden also have installed and manage a number of rooftop gardens across the city and act as contractors on others. They receive no funding from anywhere and the site is thriving.
I met a woman who is the site’s beekeeper. She’s clearly a woman who loves bees, to the extent of having a beautiful bee tattoo on her arm. She showed me the site’s hives. I was fascinated by how close to people they are. Just feet away from people sitting having lunch, the bees are minding their own business. Apparently they travel up to 5 kilometres from the garden in pursuit of pollen, and the beekeepers have mapped where they get their pollen from within that radius.
After lunch under the trees and a couple more interviews, Gerd and I set off for Bielefeld. Bielefeld is a city of around 300,000 people, and is a University city with the largest single-block university building in Germany. It was to the University that we headed for the evening event.
When we arrived, a Transition ‘market place’ had been set up, with stalls from many of the Transition initiatives in that region of Germany. The way to it was marked by boxes full of plants. It was great to see the different groups and what they’ve been up to. Always a fascinating and inspiring experience. Here’s a short video someone made of impressions from the event:
Then a couple more interviews, a sandwich, meeting more great people, and then at 7.15pm, it was time for the talk. A great crowd piled into the huge lecture theatre, hardly an intimate space, and for the next 45 minutes or so I talked about Transition and the steps people are already taking around the world to bring a new culture into being. We then had good questions and answers and discussion, and I signed lots of books for people. We also asked people doing Transition in Bielefeld what, for them, Transition is:
… as well as asking why they do it:
In my talk I had discussed how important it is to start things, to get projects underway, to take the step across into action. I met a woman from Transition Town Witzenhausen who said “starting projects isn’t our problem. We’ve started loads. We now own and manage a building, we’ve started gardens” and a huge range of other projects I can’t remember now. “Our problem is maintaining them all!” she told me. She showed me one of two folders packed with all the press coverage they’ve had over the last couple of years. Impressive.
Then I went for supper and a drink with a lot of the Transition Town Bielefeld crew which was very enjoyable, before heading back to Gerd’s for the night. Then up early the next day and onto the sequence of trains that led me home again, including this extremely hot carriage. A great trip, full of inspiration, and delightful as ever to see Transition popping up in different places, and to hear people’s experience of it. My thanks to Gerd and everyone at Transition Germany as well as my German publisher OEKOM for organising it and to everyone who hosted me and came up to say hello.
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![Making a "where are you from?" map.](http://www.transitionnetwork.org/sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files/uploaded/u4740/photo%20%2850%29.JPG "Making a "where are you from?" map.")
