31 Jan 2014
In a guest post, Ben Brangwyn, Transition Network’s International Development Co-ordinator, tells the story of the scaling up of Transition Network internationally, the emergence of the international Hubs and where it’s all going now.
Introduction
This is a little tale of the spread of Transition internationally. We think it’s a relevant story for Transitioners because of the parallels that happen across all sorts of levels of scale. Some of the conflicts, dynamics and prejudices that I see in my own life also show up in some way in our little organisation of Transition Network, and are reflected back in the Transition groups here and the wider movement around the world. Perhaps some of this international expansion story may yield insights that will help your local initiative with the challenges of maintaining momentum, staying true to the values that inspired you to start or get involved in your Transition group, finding the right balance between exerting control and “just letting go”.
In the beginning…
Transition Network started up on a wing and a (non-denominational) prayer at the end of 2006 in the hope that the early social experiment started by Naresh Giangrande and Rob Hopkins in Totnes might replicate broadly elsewhere. The initial design, with its simple “12 Steps” and “7 Buts”, already had that flavour of replicability that my earlier jobs in business had trained me to spot. And by that time, a few very smart people in early adopter communities in the UK – Lewes and Stroud in particular – were already playing with the idea.
We concentrated on the UK at first, setting up the website, going on the road, connecting initiatives, sharing learnings, writing blogs, putting flags in googlemaps, building a mailing list, launching a newsletter. We even put on our first Transition conference early in 2007 in Stroud – Richard Heinberg played a big role there.
It was clear that we needed an international perspective – Richard Heinberg had told us that, and the levels of interest we were getting even in 2007 from not just English-speaking countries like New Zealand, Canada, USA and Australia but also Italy, Spain and France told us the same thing.
But how could we, as insular, parochial and culturally myopic Brits help catalyse transition in places we’d never visited and which had cultural nuances we couldn’t even imagine?
Beyond the shores of the UK
Before we could figure out a sensible answer, two initial examples quickly showed us that this had already started. First, we saw that people in Spain, Italy and Germany were translating articles and material from our website and adding it to blogs over there. Then, a “Transition Italy” website popped up. We expected that this would get noticed by appropriately concerned potential transitioners in those countries and accelerate the adoption of the Transition model there, and we also suspected that without some kind of coordinating group at the centre in those locations, their initial efforts might get diluted somewhat.
That central coordinating group seemed like a crucial piece of the puzzle for local initiatives. And at a broader level of scale, we’d set Transition Network up as a central resource to “Inspire, Inform, Connect, Support and Train” communities to adopt and adapt the transition model to transform their own locale. In the spirit of scaling up, might we see in some kind of wonderful fractal way, something happen at a national level along similar lines?
First National Hubs
Pretty soon, at the end of 2007, Ireland popped up on the radar. We already had excellent relationships with highly motivated and capable people who had been working in this field for ages, and this made it easy to start off the conversations about a group starting up to represent Ireland and Northern Ireland nationally.
Another island nation turned up next – New Zealand. The guy who we’d recently seen videos of doing awesome Transition presentations said he’d be prepared to help catalyse and support Transition there. Based on our conversations and the available evidence, it looked like if he couldn’t help Transition scale up there, no one could.
Next, we were approached by a pre-existing organisation in the US to represent transition over there. And now, in terms of scaling up, the stakes suddenly took a stratospheric leap – the USA population is getting on for 100 times bigger than New Zealand. The appeal of an existing established and influential operation taking on this catalysing and supporting role was very seductive. On the other hand, how on earth could we make sure that Transition Networks aspirational mishmash of values – experimentation, playfulness, inner/outer, empowering the genius of the local community, non-confrontational, local variability – were replicated appropriately in an organisation in a far away country where we didn’t have any real influence? Should we just go with the flow, or should we start exerting influence strongly? This really was too big to screw up and so, after many brain aching conversations, we came up with a thing we called a “memorandum of understanding” to negotiate the relationship between Transition Network and this new “hub”. Crucially, that memorandum stipulated that the people who were in key roles in that hub had to be in a local initiative.
This last critical criterion proved to be the most effective in maintaining those values and was, I think, a key bit of magic fairy dust that helped build out this fractal model. It’s as though actually getting involved in a local initiative really encourages the playfulness, the collaborative and the systems thinking approach that underpins Transition. Obviously this criterion also is exclusive – if Transition isn’t your thing in your own community, then maybe you’re not the right person to inspire, support and represent Transitioners in your country. This criterion really helped us collaborate well with the US and establish a relationship with an embryonic Transition US and Resilience.org that seems to have really helped replicate the values and approach of Transition in that massive country.
Before the end of 2008, another five hubs had emerged – Scotland, Japan, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands. Scaling up was happening, and yet it wasn’t entirely obvious to us how each country was adopting and adapting the Transition model. Were Transitioners in, say Japan, staying true to the initial values and aspirations that started off Transition in the first place? Should the Transition model change in the light of new things learnt elsewhere?
The Training World Tour
By now, Transition Training was getting into full swing, and a proposal came forward for a trans-global training tour. This would be perfect to help replicate a more refined and nuanced Transition model internationally, to train up an international network of trainers, and to bring back the experiences of other places to enrich the stories of Transition and to evolve how Transition was communicated generally. Sophy and Naresh went to seven countries, training transitioners and trainers in the US, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong. (Since then there have been another seven or so ‘Train the Trainers’ and now there are trainers in twenty four different countries, with the training having been delivered around thirty different countries).
By the levels of interest and response we saw in the wake of this tour, training is an incredible effective means of scaling up. Not just in terms of existing transitioners getting in-depth exposure, but in terms of those people then being able to communicate some of the benefits of getting involved to others in their community.
Questions of relationship between Transition Network and Hubs
I wonder about the relationship between Transition Network and the National Hubs. Does it replicate in any way the relationship between the core group in a Transition Initiative and the theme groups or projects that emerge from it? What kind of influence is it appropriate to exert? How do we best support them? To what extent should we get involved if there’s a conflict in a Hub?
We’re still feeling our way through these questions, and the MoU has been a useful instrument for establishing a baseline to these relationships. But not everyone felt an agreement was necessary. New Zealand, for instance, didn’t feel that any formal arrangement was appropriate, exerting a level of independence from the “British imperial overlord” which initially came as a surprise, and then became completely understandable and taught us that these relationships worked best if they were invitational rather than imposed.
This question of dependence on, or independence from, a coordinating body shows up everywhere in Transition and Transition groups have used a variety of devices to broker their relationship with theme groups or projects – there doesn’t seem to be a one-size-fits-all solution.
The Hubs find their voice
It’s been interesting to see how the Hubs have grown from being a set of separate entities to having their own sense of collective identity and are exerting a stronger and stronger influence on what we do at Transition Network. It’s mirrored how much attention we’ve been giving the entire international dimension of our work here.
The first time we really noticed “international” as a collective voice was at our conference in 2011 in Liverpool. We held a meeting on the last day to talk about international matters. Sixty international transitioners turned up and we were all taken by surprise at the numbers – even though by then another eight Hubs had formed.
It was a year later at the London conference in 2012 that we were able to achieve our broader aspiration to help the National Hubs to become a cohesive group. This was really helped by a rather wonderful individual who had come forward from Brussels to offer her services in helping us with international matters. During the follow-on day to this conference designed specifically to nurture the embryonic group of National Hubs, several working groups emerged covering: Funding, Decision-making, Comms and “Family”. These groups intended to carry forward the collective intentions of the group. A big question here was whether Transition Network was sufficiently resourced and focussed to support this happening. I don’t think we were, and in the end, only the Funding group really delivered on their aspirations.
At this point we realised we were going to have to devote more time and attention to the whole challenge of “going international” if we wanted an international network of Hubs – crucial in our mind – to take off. Our funders had convinced us that we had a sufficiently suitable international recipe and approach, but organisationally, we lacked the strategic capacity to move properly in that direction without potentially losing impact in other areas we were also focusing on. It was clear we needed to substantially reconfigure and strengthen our organisation before making this leap.
Could this be true for local Transition groups? That in order to effectively broaden their impact they’d need to do some powerful internal work to raise capacity within the core team? As I write this I’m struck by how this also applies at the personal level – if I’m going to broaden the reach and impact of my work, I need to pay a lot of attention to my own inner capacities to handle the diversity, workload, potential conflicts and sheer complexity that this might bring.
At each of these levels of scales – international, local group, personal – this “restructuring” in order to be ready to scale up can initially be disruptive. Much soul searching, a lot of difficult work, high levels of uncertainty as these shifts take place. I’ve certainly seen it as Transition Network went through its own reorganisation process, and I’m certainly still going through my own process as I get to grips with the role of International Coordination.
The Hubs get their own conference
Following the restructuring and some dedicated resources becoming available to support the Hubs, we organised a conference in Lyon, France for the autumn of 2013.
I felt it to be a massive milestone in Transition Network’s history. Here were forty individuals, from around twenty countries across Western and Central Europe, from the Far East, from South America, from Scandinavia all coming together to create a cohesive network of national level practitioners. In terms of scaling up, this was, as our US transitioners might say, a “whole new ball game”.
This disparate group coalesced into a set of working groups along the similar lines as London meeting. Now that we have significant dedicated resources helping them, we can see that these working groups are already delivering against their plans. In a very grown-up process of self-determination, they’re answering the questions: “What is a Hub?”; “How do we create a culture of family across our Hubs?”; “What platform should we use for collaboration?”
Is there a mirror process happening in Transition Initiatives? Are the theme groups and projects asserting themselves in as part of a movement towards greater self-determination and greater levels of cohesiveness? Could this be happening at regional levels within countries where a centrally placed resource helps the region coalesce as a cooperative group and become a learning network? In our experience at the National Hubs level is that this only happens when we at the centre are able to support them through this process.
What’s the International picture now?
We’re starting to plan for the National Hubs conference for 2014. The working groups are convening and pursuing the priorities set at the 2013 meeting in Lyon. Other National Hubs are emerging to join this network and enrich its understanding of social change. Transition Network is able to call on this group to help refine its messaging, strategies and priorities.
We’ve got a way to go, but for the first time since this funny little idea with its wildly ambitious dreams got off the ground in 2006, I’m feeling that we’re really getting to grips with what scaling up internationally really means.
The short term future, as ever, is a mystery to me and I’m expecting it to be full of surprises and challenges. I’ll struggle forwards with all my prejudices, uncertainties and sense of the enormity of the tasks ahead. And again, I’m sure I’ll be struck by parallels across all the levels of scale I’m working on. If the aspirational mishmash of values that work at my personal level – experimentation, playfulness, inner/outer, non-confrontational, respecting local variability, systems thinking – can work in the projects that I’m involved in locally, and also in our little organisation Transition Network, and then beyond that within this growing network of National Hubs, then I see this level of alignment at different levels of scale being a sign that we’re heading in the right direction.
My intuition is that the more we see these parallels and the more fractal this model of transition appears at these different levels of scale, then the stronger and more robust we’ll all be in the face of challenges ahead.
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30 Jan 2014
And so our month on ‘Scaling up’ draws to a close. It has been such a busy and thought-provoking theme that I thought I’d pick up on a few of the threads before we draw it to a close. I also generated a new term to describe myself which is always handy. It has been fascinating to see the ongoing debates around David Holmgren’s Crash on Demand piece and my response to it. Dmitry Orlov has waded in, as has Nicole Foss, David MacLeod, Joanne Poyourow, and most insightfully for me, Erik Lindberg and Albert Bates. Albert Bates, in his article Charting Collapseniks, tries to make sense of the diversity of opinions on the issues Holmgren raised, positioning many of the key thinkers on an axis of his devising.
Although I dislike any notion that ends in “opia”, and feel I would diverge somewhat from those closest to me in the graph about the importance of local economies, his article introduced a term that was new on me, describing me as a ‘Cultural Optimist’. I rather like that. I wanted to reflect on that, as it feels like an important insight.
Yes, I’m a Cultural Optimist. I believe that people are capable of doing remarkable things. I believe that our natural instinct, unless it becomes damaged or wounded, is to be nurturing, community-minded creatures. I have seen time and again the delight and creativity which flows from people getting together and making stuff happen, and indeed how natural it feels. I believe change happens when people start living as though the next evolution had already arrived. Indeed, that that’s where most meaningful and sustained change ever comes from.
I also believe that, as Andy Lipkis put it in my interview with him, “our job is to make viable the alternative and have it ready. If we’ve really done our homework, we could scale this thing in a flash”. If we could shift our energy, our resources, our time, away from imagining that engaging with the political system on its own terms will yield much of any use, and into scaling this up and making it happen, we could achieve the changes required. In my review of the new film Local Food Roots this month I quoted Pam Warhurst from Incredible Edible Todmorden, who said:
“We’ve got to try to persuade the powers-that-be, through our own actions, that you can live differently”
It’s that “through our own actions” piece that is most important here. As Lipkis put it:
“The Bush administration was ready for all Americans to be protesting to try to stop the Iraq war. They expected that, they built that into their design. I was so amazed that they could say they didn’t care what the people said, that I had to think through why they did not care about that. How did they make it resilient? Because all they cared about was as long as people kept consuming, especially petroleum, their objective was being met. They were counting on no-one changing lifestyles” The most radical thing sometimes that you can do is actually vote with your feet and vote with your dollars.
I believe that things can change fast. This month we heard how the UK government published its first ever Community Energy Strategy, a statement of intent from government that it wants to “tap into the enthusiasm and commitment that’s so evident in community groups across the country”. That strategy was shaped, in part, by the input of Transition Network and some community renewables projects that grew out of Transition. Yes it’s not perfect, yes there’s clearly a long way to go, and yes it emerged just days after a public commitment to massively scaling up fracking, but for it’s a powerful response for those who argue that Transition is having no impact on policymakers.
Transition, for me, is in part about withdrawing our support from the existing, climate-destroying, fossil fuel-hungry beast, and transferring it to a new culture, a new economy, a new society. It’s divestment writ large. As Lipkis put it,
I think we’ve been trained to spend time on these battles, on the negativity, and we lose people. We’ve lost precious decades. The crash is on its way. We don’t have to do anything. We need the time to convert people and move people. From the experience of those of us who went through the ‘60s and ‘70s in protest movements, I don’t think that route’s going to succeed. If we focus on that our best leaders are going to end up in jail for too long.
That’s why Transition, for me, is skilful. It works at the local level, it is apolitical and therefore works beneath the radar, and it has the power to make what currently seems politically impossible become politically inevitable. As one commenter on the Lipkis piece put it:
Forty years ago the hippies did stuff too: living off the land, appropriate technology, developing permaculture…. but until [Transition] they didn’t reach out to other groups, they didn’t have an inclusive message. If you aren’t political you don’t have influence. Doing stuff is a good start but it’s a start. Without social influence you cannot sustain a social movement.
Lindberg’s piece Agency On Demand? Holmgren, Hopkins, and the Historical Problem of Agency was very thought-provoking, passionate and deeply honest. In it, he challenged his perception that Transition has framed its argument around the idea that peak oil is inevitable and that so is change. He wrote:
“Just as cultures in ascendance adapt to increasing flows of energy, our job in a post peak world is to make the best of the inevitable crisis or peak and the diminishing energy and consumption that follows. In neither case is human agency the main or structural driver of events”.
He distinguished between the distinctly different narratives behind the peak oil and climate change issues:
“While peak oil is a narrative of historical necessity and the limits of human agency, climate change is a narrative of how a free and independent people must learn how to impose limits on their freedom and power”.
But he then makes the statement that I’d like to take issue with:
“I read his (i.e. my) response to Holmgren as a rather desperate attempt to maintain a course set by a narrative that is crumbling beneath us. For the Transition Movement, in many of its details and specificities—its tone, its inclusiveness, its optimism, its scale, its focus, its projects—was built around a peak oil narrative”
You see, for me, I don’t see that as being so much the case now. In The Transition Handbook, the argument was that peak oil and climate change have to be looked at as interconnected, overlapping, interwoven. But in the latest iteration, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, and in the talks I give now, Transition is framed as a response to the ‘New Normal’, the rapidly moving convergence of issues of which peak oil, or rather the end of the age of cheap energy, is one, as are climate change, the economic crisis and the social justice implications of returning more power to local economies. In this context, Transition argues for resilience, for seeing resilience as a form of economic development, one that makes the most sense at the local level. Lindberg concludes:
“I think much of the debate precipitated by Holmgren’s “Crash on Demand” comes down to the sudden realization that if there is to be radical change of the sort necessary to avert a climate disaster of unimaginable scale, we can’t depend on some sort of historical necessity to make this change for us”.
I would agree. What can make this change for us though is a new resilience-based narrative about where we go from here which is more nourishing, more sensible, more thrilling, than what is presently on offer. With the UK’s economic future being hinged on the idea that we can replicate the US shale gas experience in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, in spite of public support continuing to fall. As Andrew Simms tweeted yesterday:
“One day soon we’ll look back and see as absurd that slight changes in GDP growth was the prime political barometer of success or failure”.
So yes, I’m a Cultural Optimist. I believe that humans are hardwired to do amazing things together. It’s how we got where we are. Are Stonehenge, Bristol Cathedral or the rail network the result of our ability to collaborate and create remarkable things that could only arise from such collaborations, or merely the result of selfishness and competition?
On Sunday night I went to see Robert Newman’s latest show A New Theory of Evolution at Exeter Phoenix. Readers may know Newman from his last show, The History of Oil. In this new one, he draws from a wealth of sources to argue against the ‘selfish gene’ theory of evolution, arguing that evolution is as much about co-operation and nurture as it is about competition.
Drawing on examples of how nurture and empathy in rats is shown to change brain function, how penguins work together to keep warm by taking it in turns to be on the outside of the ‘huddle’ and many other examples, he disputed Richard Dawkins’ version of evolution, arguing that Darwin originally argued for a much more co-operative interpretation.
He argued that this “red in tooth and claw” version of evolution has been used to justify as ‘natural’ an economic system that sees people, communities and ecosystems as expendible and great polarities of wealth as entirely benign. “It’s not survival of the fittest”, he argued, rather “survival of the misfits”. He quoted W.H. Auden from his last collection of poems:
As a rule, it was the fittest who perished. The misfits,
Forced by failure to migrate to unsettled niches,
who altered their structure and prospered.
He also quoted from his latest book The Trade Secret in which the book’s hero Nat Bramble says “those who don’t fit today are the ones who make tomorrow”. This resonated with the discussions we’ve had here about scaling up Transition. The danger in Auden’s quote, which has run through protest culture and the alternative movement for decades, is to assume that it is only in those “unsettled niches” that we can find a home, can have any impact. As Lipkis put it:
We’ve built the right foundation. Our happiness, our health is the answer. It’s infectious. Our job is to be that much more infectious and inclusive. And don’t put up barriers of titles. Don’t put up barriers of shame and blame. Be open to learning fast and welcoming people in. We’re hacking the system and making it so much better. If we invite that kind of creativity, the generation that’s inheriting this right now is really ready to take this home.
Some people have interpreted ‘Scaling up’ to mean becoming just larger as organisations, more anonymous, more top-down, bigger as opposed to more effective. It’s a danger that Sophy Banks picked up on in her post. What we’ve explored this month has been about how to be more effective, and as we’ve seen, effectiveness is not necessarily about size. My sense is that the way of working that Transition is developing is novel, and distinct from previous approaches. That’s not to say it has all the answers, or that it is all we need, but this month’s discussions have shown a distinctly different approach to how to scale up to increase effectiveness.
During February, when our theme will be ‘Resourcing your Initiative’, we’ll be talking to Robert Newman to hear more about how his ideas relate to Transition, as well as with the man in Bangalore whose vision is to grow rice on every roof so that the city becomes a net exporter of rice, and the attorney in Berkeley, California, who is devising the legal resources a Transition future will need. And lots of other stuff too. I hope you’ll join me. We’ll close our ‘Scaling Up’ theme by raising a glass to Cultural Optimists everywhere. We can do this.
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29 Jan 2014
Our recent post about Kevin McCabe’s ‘cob citadel’ and what we might learn from it about ‘scaling up’ generated a lot of debate and discussion. Robert Alcock, a cob self-builder living in Spain commented that “the really great thing about cob is that it is an inherently anti-mainstream material”. Intrigued, and wanting to hear more of his own story, I asked him if he might share his thoughts on how to scale up cob building while still maintaining its “anti-mainstream” properties. I started by asking him what he meant in his comment.
“I suppose it depends on what we mean by “mainstream.” If we’re simply talking volume, then I could point out that somewhere between one-third and one-half of the world’s population lives in houses made of earth; it’s probably the most widely used building material on the planet. So, not much scaling up left to do, then!
But even though earth building is widespread globally, most people reading this wouldn’t consider it “mainstream,” because like most local building traditions, it almost disappeared in industrialised countries during the 20th century, in favour of a building industry in which materials were transported long distances and assembled by specialists.
Partly as a reaction against the conventional building industry—its high environmental, social and economic costs, and the buildings it turns out, which are globally homogeneous, ugly, boring and soulless—there has been a resurgence of building with natural materials, especially in the last 25 years. Of all the natural building techniques that are being rediscovered, though, cob is the one that has given rise to an underground self-build movement.
The main reason is that cob is such an amazing material. It’s very simple—a mixture of clay, aggregate (sand), fibre (usually straw) and water—widely available and cheap; yet it’s structurally strong, extremely durable, adaptable, infinitely recyclable, breathable and non-toxic; and, to work with, sculptural, malleable, sensual and, in a word, just plain fun.
Most cob projects around the world are really small—benches, ovens, sculptures, walls or at most small cabins—built by workshop groups, communities, families or individuals. Because it’s such an easy and enjoyable material to use, building with cob is an incredibly empowering experience. It’s labour-intensive, sure, but it’s a form of labour that involves throwing balls of mud and kneading them into shape with your bare hands and feet, getting in close contact with earth, the mother material, and working in the fresh air with other people.
It’s a healthy activity in every sense—the polar opposite of the conventional building industry, which is one of the most dangerous and unhealthy to work in. And, because of its sculptural qualities, cob structures tend to be quirky, individual, organic, beautiful. It’s almost impossible to build something boring or ugly with cob. And if you don’t like what you’ve built, you can always just knock it down, re-mix the cob and start again!
Another factor in the resurgence of cob is that it’s potentially extremely cheap to build with. It lends itself to small scale construction and the use of recycled, local and natural materials. The first cob house I heard about was Cob Cottage Company’s “Heart House,” which is supposed to have been built for $500 in materials. We built our first cob house, Snail Cabin, for around €6000 in materials. In this sense, also, cob self-build is the polar opposite of the conventional housing market. Of course, that doesn’t mean all cob houses are cheap—I was rather shocked to learn that Kevin McCabe’s own first cob house (or complex) was on the market for £1.1 million!
How did you get into cob building in the first place?
I studied ecology and then worked as a technical writer on the environmental impacts of buildings and cities—which is as close as I’ve come to being a building professional. I did have the dream of building my own house, though, nurtured by such books as “Walden” and “A Pattern Language”, which made me aware that the art of building could be a harmonious part of the art of living. I did up and lived on a canal boat for a while, in the English Midlands where I grew up. Also my dad is a scholar of vernacular timber-framed buildings, so I was always being dragged round old houses as a kid.
In 2000 I moved to Bilbao, my partner Almudena’s home town. The region we live in is sometimes called Green Spain. It’s a spectacular area whose climate and landscape are rather like a marriage of Cornwall and Cascadia, with an ancient patchwork of cultures—stone age, Basque, Celtic, Roman, Visigoth…. I was researching for a thesis on rocky shore organisms, mainly algae and limpets, which meant visiting most of the beaches around the Bay of Biscay. Tough, I know.
Around 2002, I realised that my vocation was ecological design. Most people probably have no idea what that is, though they might have heard of permaculture, which is a similar concept. For me, ecological design means designing anything—from furniture to gardens to money to cities—in the light of ecological awareness. It’s something that barely exists as a profession, and certainly didn’t in Bilbao in 2002. But I had found that I could earn decent money as a freelance translator and Bilbao was a pretty cheap place to live; to attain the same standard of living in Britain I would have had to get a “real” job, something I wasn’t particularly keen to do.
So instead, I started doing work that I saw needed doing. In 2003 Almudena and I started a Transition-like initiative—the Forum for a Sustainable Zorrozaurre—in the district where we were living, which was scheduled for urban renewal. Though the Forum was a success and the residents’ houses were saved, the experience taught me that sitting in meetings and organizing events leads to burnout, and is nowhere near as fulfilling as creating something with your own hands. Among other hands-on projects, I created a riverside container garden on a concrete platform, using free materials, which is still in use after almost ten years.
Can you tell us about your own building project and what you feel you learned from it?
In 2005 we bought a plot of land in a small village an hour from Bilbao. Our idea was to create not just a house but an educational centre where people could come to learn about ecology, natural building and sustainable living.
After reading The Hand Sculpted House, we decided to build with cob, for all the reasons already mentioned—plus, we had clay soil on site and the right climate. Closely linked to this was the decision to work with volunteers, who exchange their labour for food, accommodation and experience. Although we have organised one paid workshop and we don’t rule out running more in the future, we didn’t find that an effective way of building. We’ve now hosted more than 200 volunteers from all over the world, who have taught us a lot, as well as (I think) learning from us, the place and the work.
We started off building a small cabin (Snail Cabin, right), as a learning project and also to have a place to stay. We ended up expanding the cabin several times—from about 15 m2 (150 sq ft) to about 50 m2 (500 sq ft)—which is a good strategy for self-builders, but unfortunately, we didn’t design the expansion very well.
In summer 2008 we started on the main house (Abrazo House), a two-storey, 200 m2 (2000 sq ft) hybrid cob/straw bale house which took us four years to build; we moved in in September 2012, and spent last summer finishing the exterior. And after eight years, I’ve still got “cob stuck to my soul”.
If this seems like a long time to spend building your house, well, it is—and then again it isn’t, if you think about how long people spend paying for their houses. The whole project to date, including the land, permits, plans, materials, paid work, and food for volunteers, has cost us about €160,000, which we paid for as we went along, with no mortgage. The average price of a house in Spain, for comparison, is €221,200 —for a 100 m2 (1000 sq ft) concrete box!
Basically, the reason it took us this long comes down to the fact that we had to learn as we went along. We made loads of mistakes, but most of them cost us time rather than money.
The main house was really a bit too big for a self-build project. Often I felt like the project was consuming my life—like I had spawned a cob monster. I felt like starting a group called “Autoconstructores Anónimos”—“Hi, I’m Robert and I’m a self-builder. I’ve dragged my family through the mud…” Now, of course, it’s great that we’ve got the extra space!
Our most serious set-back was to do with straw bales, not cob. Originally the load-bearing wall of the house incorporated straw bales, for their added insulation value. But we suffered a very wet, windy winter and the bales started rotting (see right). Eventually we had to tear out two-thirds of the lower storey wall, and support the upper storey on jacks for a year while we rebuilt the wall, using solid cob this time. It was a dark time. In hindsight, I would say that if your area is too wet for growing grain, as ours is, it’s definitely too wet to build with straw bales! But the resulting design—cob lower storey, bale-cob upper storey—is, I dare say, quite a nice compromise between durability, structural strength, and insulation value.
Building a house has definitely been the most intense learning experience of my life, comparable only to being a parent. I’ve learned a great diversity of things—many of them not directly transferable to other contexts, of course, like how to mix cob in large quantities with a rotavator, how to apply plaster to irregular surfaces, how to use an azada (Spanish hoe) and a wheelbarrow without doing your back in…
But there were also a lot of things that are much more widely applicable—like how to work with nature instead of opposing it, how to organize work, get on with people, and the confidence and flexibility to try out ideas at a small scale and see how they work. I think the key difference between self-build and conventional building is that self-build is not just about building houses profitably—it’s also about building yourself, becoming a better, more resilient and more capable person. Self-build is about bringing your dreams to life, making them real. At the same time, many other things that may have been hidden—in your life, in your relationships—become real and tangible. At the moment I’m trying to write a book about the experience of self-build with cob, but it’s a lot less fun to write about it than it is to do it!
If “scaling up” cob doesn’t mean building huge houses but means lots of small, self-built, locally-sourced materials, what are your thoughts on the obstacles to that, and how we might get there?
Well, I definitely don’t think the way forward is to build pharaonic cob complexes! Nor, speaking personally, would I wish to become a professional cob builder who builds other people’s houses for money.
For me, the best way for cob to scale up is the same way it has been spreading up to now—the mycelium model, in which a spore of knowledge lands somewhere and then spreads gradually out from that point. This means people who have experience guiding others up the steep slope of the learning curve, while allowing them the freedom, and the responsibility, to make, and to own, their mistakes.
This “facilitated self-build” is something I’m involved in now. A friend and neighbour has started building his own cob house—a 45 m2 (450 sq ft), one-and-a-half-storey cottage, for which I’m giving design advice and practical help. We also have a project to build two more cob houses in the small village where we live, and we’re looking for people, preferably families, to invest and get involved as self-builders, with a view to forming the nucleus of an eco-village.
I would like to see cob moving away from extremely tiny, under-the-radar projects and toward scales which are more practical and economical. Sure, a tiny cabin is very cheap to build—but you can build a 50m2/500 sq ft cottage for only about twice the cost of a 15m2/150 sq ft cabin, and heat it for virtually the same cost.
I think the major obstacles to the expansion of self-build with cob and other natural materials are not economic or practical, but cultural and political. Sure, there is a “skills gap”—in working with cob, as with almost every traditional skill—but these skills can be learnt or rediscovered. More fundamentally, I think, there is an “empowerment gap”. Most people who dream of building their own house will never be able to, because of the many, almost insurmountable obstacles: finding and buying land, obtaining permission, and having the confidence to begin the process.
You could argue that shelter, which is a vital need for human beings, should also be a human right—within ecological limits, that is, provided you don’t make a negative, irreversible impact on the locality or the planet. Building your own ecological house is something that should be open to all, rather than being a status symbol for the wealthy, and the laws need to be changed accordingly.
The housing market, as it currently exists, is the primary engine of poverty and inequality in most “wealthy” countries. Housing, as well as being a vital need, is an artificially limited good, so excess demand leads to rising prices and speculation. What it comes down to is that we are all playing a game of Monopoly, but one in which a few players started with almost all the money and the richest players get to make the rules. (Not many people seem to realise that Monopoly is meant as satire.) So nobody should be surprised to see the gap between rich and poor getting wider and wider. As a board game this would be rather predictable and pointless; in real life it’s tragic. And not much can be done about it unless we change the rules and play a different sort of game.
History teaches us that human rights, once denied, can only be reclaimed through sustained campaigning, of the kind pioneered by the suffragettes or the Civil Rights movement—including (but not limited to) direct action and civil disobedience. Recall the case of Tony Wrench’s roundhouse, which eventually led to the planning laws permitting ecovillages in Wales—though as I understand it, there are so many hoops to jump through that very few projects have taken advantage of this.
From your perspective, is there no role for professionalising and bringing more business acumen into cob building? Can you imagine developers building large scale cob developments?
Well, yes, I can easily imagine it. Take the example of Cranbrook, the new town near Exeter mentioned by Kevin McCabe. Just suppose the Devon planners—instead of knuckling under to the developers’ demands for homogeneity—actually stood up to them and required that all 2,900 homes be built out of cob (and using passive solar design, I trust, which adds no extra capital cost, being mainly a question of size, shape and orientation of the house and the windows). You would be amazed how quickly the companies would get their skates on and learn to do it—it’s not rocket science! If there’s one thing Kevin’s project has proven, it’s that you can build huge volumes of cob quickly and cheaply. With those economies of scale, and the raw material right to hand, I suspect it would end up a bit cheaper than brick—whereas if only a few token houses were built with cob, it would naturally be more expensive. Also, I reckon people would be queuing up to live in the “cob new town”—think of all the free publicity!
But this scenario, unfortunately, wouldn’t lead to the empowerment of people, nor would it deal with the issue of affordability—at least, not directly. However, with all that cob flying around, I’m sure some of its magic would rub off. You could make a case that a proportion of the houses should be designated as self-build projects. Or perhaps some people would choose to save money by finishing their houses off themselves, little by little and working together, and getting a more individual result—basically self-build except that the heavy work has been done for you. Construction waste from the developer-built houses could be recycled by the self-builders. A local cob culture would spring up (again). That, I think, could be a viable hybrid between mainstream construction and cob.
The real question is, are people going to allow developers who are only interested in the “bottom line”, to dictate the pattern of development? I would never hire a builder who was only in it for the money—I’d hire one who showed pride in his work! I went to the Cranbrook website and followed the link to their sustainability policy —which leads to an error message on the Eon electricity company’s website. Something tells me there is not much due diligence going on here!
There’s also a place for the opposite kind of hybrid—i.e. professionalism within self-build. Skills like roofing, plumbing and electrical work are just as necessary in cob as in any other form of building, and their specific application to cob could lead to specialist businesses developing. We hired a plumber and an electrician on our main house and we’ve not regretted it. And perhaps most importantly, designing houses in ways that facilitate self-build (like the Segal method of timber building, but with other materials) is a skill that I hope will become much more widespread.
Part of the motivation in Kevin’s work is trying to push cob building to higher energy efficiency standards. In the UK from 2016 all new buildings will have to be built to Code 6, and PassivHaus ratings are growing in popularity too. Is your sense that cob should be striving to keep up with those, trying to adapt itself to that agenda, or does it offer a different route to achieving those objectives?
Energy efficiency is certainly an important goal, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. You can’t let an arbitrary standard in one aspect of design, work to the detriment of other areas.
Our house isn’t built to PassivHaus standard, but it’s free and carbon-neutral to heat. Our average winter (December to March) temperatures here, at 43°N and 140m above sea level, are about 8°C—only a tad warmer than Devon, in other words.
In the main house we burn about 1.6m3 (half a cord) of firewood each winter, which also heats our hot water when it’s cloudy and the solar panels don’t work. I cut most of next year’s firewood from our forest garden last week, with a borrowed chainsaw—the rest we will scavenge, pallets and so on. The trees we’ve planted on our 8000 m2 (2 acres) of land absorb far more carbon every year than we burn. We have a wood stove instead of TV.
I recognise that burning wood does contribute to air pollution—though not as much as TV contributes to mind pollution!—but there are ways to make it much cleaner, such as rocket stoves, which is something we are going to try out in my friend’s cottage when it’s finished.
In any case, there are plenty of ways to improve energy efficiency short of cladding your house in polystyrene. Most of these are straightforward, proven, cheap techniques of passive solar design—like south-facing glazing, earth sheltering, and unheated buffer spaces (garage, porch, storage, workshop) to the north, east and west. I don’t know whether things like this are included in the building codes, but they certainly should be.
Most architects, unfortunately, aren’t even taught to locate the path of the sun across the sky in winter and summer. You can also improve the insulation value of cob by including more fibre—we used wood shavings in the wall of our main house.
What for you is the magic of cob? What does earthen architecture do that nothing else can?
All natural materials—wood, stone, straw, earth, snow—have their own forms of magic, but I do think that cob is perhaps the most magical of all. Cob moves in mysterious ways and has the power to create a new culture of building—and of living.
I suppose I’m biassed, because I had cob in my blood long before I was aware of it. My mum grew up in the Pacific Northwest—which would later become the birthplace of cob in North America—whereas my dad’s family are from Devon, where cob originated. In fact I was born in Exeter and used to spend holidays at my grandfather’s house in a small village nearby. It wasn’t until 2007, after I had built my own cob cabin, when I returned to the village to visit my grandfather’s grave, that I realised, to my amazement, that all the houses—except my grandfather’s—were made of cob.
Meanwhile, my partner Almudena’s family came from Castille, another area where earth building (though not cob) is the rule; her dad used to build rammed earth houses with his dad. And I discovered that building with cob brought me closer both to my dad and to my father-in-law, with whom I’d previously struggled to find things in common.
So natural building (in our case, with earth) can help connect us to our roots. But what it also does is connect us to the place where we choose to live—even if that is not where our ancestral roots lie. By building with materials from the site, we link our structures intimately with the place. And the act of working to create your house also makes you a part of the place, makes it a home—far more so than putting down a deposit on a new semi!
It is especially in the process of building, I think, where the magic of cob lies. I can’t justify this scientifically, but I think that there is an energy in raw, unfired earth and that we tap into that energy when we work with cob—apart from the obvious benefits of working with non-toxic materials in the fresh air and in good company. If I spend the day working with bricks or cement, I end up exhausted and burned out—and most of the conventional builders I have met have work-related health problems and/or grumpy characters. If I spend the day working with wood, by the end I am tense and bruised, though pleasantly tired. If I work with cob, I finish up tired but relaxed and energised. And because it doesn’t stress you out, you’re much less likely to have serious accidents. The biggest problem with working in cob is that it’s very dirty—it just sticks to everything!
Cob also encourages a playful attitude to building, and to life. Everything is malleable—even after it’s dried, it can always be wetted and reworked. In contact with cob, things—and people—cease to be what we think they are and are thus permitted to become what they really are. A shelving unit from a well-known Swedish megastore can become a ladder for getting up to the loft. An old pair of skis can become a shelf. A broken fridge can become a cool cabinet set into the north wall.
If you’re building a concrete house and your plans turn out to be a mistake, tough luck. They’re “set in concrete”. With cob, you just change it. In fact we pretty much threw away the plans for the main house after we finished building the cabin, because we had learned so much by then that they were obsolete. Then we were blessed by the unexpected arrival of some enormous wooden beams from a demolition job—longleaf pine, an outstanding structural timber that’s no longer available commercially—and basically redesigned the house around the beams. That’s the flexibility of self-build and especially of cob. And I have no doubt that that is the mindset we need for the 21st century, whether we’re working with cob or not. Some people think cob is the material of the past, but I’m convinced that it’s also the material of the future.
If you were able to leap 20 years into the future into a world where cob had “scaled up” (however you choose to interpret that), what would it look like?
Obviously, I would expect to see a lot more people building their own mortgage-free houses with cob and other natural materials, as an accepted and respected practice. Of course, this will mean that people are less dependent on the banks, the construction industry, and the money economy in general. That would be good news for people and the planet, but bad news for the money economy. Since the UK’s formal economy is now based on financial services, the bankers will have to find something else to do—they had better start volunteering on natural building projects sooner rather than later!
However, anything can change in 20 years, and as they say, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. In the words of Antonio Machado:
Caminante, en tus huellas es el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
Walker, in your footsteps is the only path;
walker, there is no path, you make the path by walking.
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28 Jan 2014
Today we have a post from Sophy Banks, the first of what will become a monthly column.
“I have to confess I had a bit of a reaction to this month’s theme “Scaling up”. I’ve been unpicking it in a number of conversations with others in Transition, and what follows is an attempt to convey some of this exploration. It includes ideas about the different directions which are needed for a movement like ours to grow, and a look at the dangers and risks of wanting to get bigger.
I’ll say first that there are lots of reasons why it’s great that Transition is successful and grows – obviously that’s why I’ve put my energy and time behind it from the early days. I remember hearing Rob talk about his vision for a community project creating local solutions and thinking “That might just work..” and something which had been kind of asleep in me woke up and did everything I could to help its success. We’ve seen in Totnes that if it’s possible to get to a certain size, for instance when we’ve brought in major pieces of funding, organisations and people who dismissed us before started to take Transition seriously. So as we’ve grown more and more possibilities came into view.
I often say on the Transition Launch training “Transition has a big vision – to create a localised way of living – and needs a lot of people”. In the pathway we’ve discovered in Totnes there are theme groups, projects, central supporting activities, a board of Trustees.. I guess between 100-200 people are actively holding responsibility, attending regular meetings or doing something in projects. It’s a hugely ambitious dream, to do this work with little funding, in the spare time of whoever feels called to take part.
So there are really good reasons for growing, and I’m all in favour of Transition having as much impact as possible. I’m also cautious about putting too much emphasis on scaling up. I think there are traps behind this way of thinking. Particularly if the impetus behind it has the quality of pushing ourselves, and if there is a feeling of anxiety, that if Transition can’t get big enough to impact the huge system we’re part of, things are looking pretty bad. None of these are necessarily there in the desire to grow, but I think it’s worth unpicking some of the unconscious assumptions that can underlie this desire or drive – especially as time passes and the continuation of business as usual means the future (and present) looks ever more challenging.
The first trap that we could fall into is to believe there is only one way to have an impact, and that’s to be the biggest, most active, thing around. Beneath this is an assumption around power – that size is what matters. To push the system to a new path we need to be big enough to affect it, to compete with its size and scale.
With this assumption, influencing the future is a competition where the biggest wins. I recently read a quote by Margaret Wheatley that said the drive to grow in the business world arises because of their fear of uncertainty and their desire to control the world around them. It’s different to the relational way of understanding power which Starhawk describes as “power-with” – power through cooperation, negotiation, committing to solutions that benefit everyone not just those who have most weight.
It feels important to keep remembering that the pathway of growth that was possible in Transition Town Totnes has not emerged in the majority of Transition projects. I’ve talked and worked with many initiatives where, despite following the usual Transition recipe, there has not been enough people involved to start theme groups and lots of separate activities. A common shape is that one dedicated and hardworking group alternate between awareness raising events, workshops, getting funding for new projects, running those projects, taking some time for renewal and reflection, gathering momentum again for more activities and so on. Burnout is a real issue for some people in this situation (as it is in Totnes). To create a push towards scaling up when most of our movement has found this to be impossible can be dangerous, creating a sense of demotivation and even failure among many of us.
There’s another story that can underlie the desire to push ourselves to get bigger -thinking is that Transition is the only game in town. It’s the narrative of the “heroic” journey – and most popular books and films – there is one hero, with one magical arrow or plan that kills the monster, and when the hero acquires that the happy ending is possible. This is a really powerful story that structures our thinking – and is often unconscious. I don’t think our situation is going to play out like that (or that most of us consciously do) – if the system changes it will be through a vast tapestry of actions, movements, individual choices, protests, new organisations, changing the old ones, disasters, wake ups, wrong pathways abandoned, emerging possibilities and other things we cannot even dream yet. It’s messy, fragmented, complex and unpredictable.
An image I have for the shape of this journey is that there’s something like a wave of change moving through time.. some are at the front of the wave, others are further behind. If a Transition project (or any other) tries to push too far ahead of where the groundswell of the people in its community are, it loses touch with them and will meet resistance and opposition. But it also needs to be encouraging, inspiring, challenging, the status quo to keep people moving forward on the wave and to keep the whole wave moving forward. Transition is just one of many, many groups keeping this wave moving – partly by pushing, and partly just being carried – because the truth of our situation is there for all to see, and people are waking up to it all the time. From time to time major incidents like Fukoshima inJapan, hurricanes, floods, or national collapsing, bring a whole new rush of energy forwards into the wave.
On such a journey we need to be really connected – not only to the leading edges of the wave of change in the form of other change agents, but also to other groups, people and issues in our communities. One of the vital ingredients we need to prioritise in these times is building networks and partnerships. I wonder if can be a result of the extraordinary success of Transition, and the relative absence of lots of other movements working at the community level of scale, that it’s possible to fall into the trap of thinking that it’s down to us to bring about the change.
Being a part of a variety of networks as we ride this wave of change is about being connected, reaching out and moving with others. There’s another direction that is often left out, that of deepening – which also has something useful to offer to the debate about scaling up.
My thought about deepening comes from Marianne Williams, who spoke in Totnes in 2008 in the early days of Transition. One of her ideas which has really stayed with me is that there are two dimensions to building a movement. The one which most people see is about expanding – growing in size, reaching more people, gaining momentum. It often has the quality of pushing – how can we reach beyond the usual suspects, how can we bring in the early majority? It’s essential and important work.
The second dimension is vertical, and is about the nature of what the movement seeks to bring into the world. Movements which put out profound truths which speak to universal human issues have the potential to spread widely and last because what they talk about touches everyone. Those which touch the surface of problems, or address short term issues gain less traction and pass. So people like Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, who not only could understand profound issues about the human condition but also could articulate solutions which they embodied in the way they lived, created movements that appealed to millions, and have lasted for decades or centuries.
I’m not suggesting that Transition become a spiritual movement. But I think it’s worthwhile spending time exploring the deep truths that Transition can speak to. What is the most profound and way of speaking about the issues we are facing, and what kind of solutions does Transition propose. Are we about relocalising our economy? Are we about the move away from materialism to a focus on human well being? Are we about creating a sense of reconnection, to self, other, society and the natural world? Are we wanting to Transition from a culture of exploitation and competition to one of peace and unity? What are the deepest values that we want to see embedded in our communities?
I would like to encourage the hundreds of leaders, thinkers, do-ers and seekers in our movement to pause from time to time and reflect together on how we understand our true purpose and mission. What is the deepest expression of the Transition vision? How are we living that? What qualities do people see in us when we speak or act? I’m not suggesting that we use this as the basis for our public conversations, but I think it’s helpful to be clear within ourselves. Within any Transition group I doubt all would agree what the deepest vision is, but I hope we can at least have the conversation about what we truly long for.
Reflecting on all these ideas I can see the unifying theme is about how to be with what is – the challenges, frustrations, limitations – and still be as effective as possible. Scaling up our practical activities is one way to increase our effect – and it’s not the only way. Exploring these other dimensions of building a movement and having an impact has helped me to feel more spacious, curious and open to the many different ways we can create success, and to see that the variety of shapes and sizes that we have in Transition is welcome, resilient and powerful.
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28 Jan 2014
You know how sometimes someone will just put something you were thinking far more eloquently and clearly than you would have been able to? On Thursday we’ll be posting an interview with Andy Lipkis of TreePeople in Los Angeles. When I talked to Andy last week, it was 80°F, and a state of drought emergency had just been declared (in LA, not Totnes, it was raining here, as usual). At the end of the interview, I asked for his thoughts on the recent debate sparked by David Holmgren’s Crash on Demand article. I asked him “Can we achieve the action on climate change that we need within the existing paradigm, or do we need to deliberately bring the economy down, to deliberately crash it?”. Here’s what he told me.
“This system is so armoured to defend itself from a deliberate crash that much of our resources and intelligence networks are focused on exactly stopping that. On the flip side, the crash is already happening. We don’t have to engineer it: it’s already been engineered into the system. Check it out: Infrastructure systems are in breakdown in major cities around the world, with severe climate exceeding the designed capacity for storms, floods, water shortages, heat events resulting in increasing numbers of people being dislocated, injured or killed. In the US, taxpayers are unwilling or unable to pay for the rapidly inflating costs for upgrading and climate-proofing the outmoded infrastructure systems, all the while, climate change denial campaigns prevent communities from preparing for and protecting themselves from the impacts.
I think our job is to make viable the alternative and have it ready. If we’ve really done our homework, we could scale this thing in a flash in California right now because this crash is upon us. And I hope we’re going to be able, perhaps within months…I invented a cistern that could replace the backyard fence or wall, that could hold 5,000 – 20,000 gallons and could be manufactured locally. The City’s going “hey, maybe we should do that now”. Now. Because it’s going to rain again, even if this drought lasts some years, we could deploy them quickly, just as they did in Australia’s 12 year drought.
I think we’ve been trained to spend time on these battles, on the negativity, and we lose people. We’ve lost precious decades. The crash is on its way. We don’t have to do anything. We need the time to convert people and move people. We need to use examples of Australia and what’s happening now in California to tell those stories, because I agree, denial, defending the system is keeping it pumping. But as you saw from Snowden and all the evidence, for those of us who went through the ‘60s and ‘70s in protest, I don’t think that’s going to succeed. If we focus on that our best leaders are going to end up in jail for too long.
When you look at how fast people change when you add inspiration, when you add attraction, people change on a dime! When we were growing up, there were – I don’t know if you had The Munsters? One of the only people who we all knew who was doing yoga and eating yoghurt was Uncle Fester. But when we started seeing beautiful, sexy male and female bodies doing that, it started selling, moving people by the millions and then billions to choose these lifestyles.
I’m not saying the marketplace is the only answer, I’m just saying that if we choose attraction and inclusion we can create those markets, as you’re starting to do. Your stories over and over again on what’s happening with local currency – it’s time to tell the stories better and use those market forces, because people will choose those because they’re less painful and more attractive. And to be smart, to say wow, yeah.
The Bush administration was ready for all Americans to be protesting to try to stop the Iraq war. They expected that, they built that into their design. I was so amazed that they could say they didn’t care what the people said, that I had to think through why they did not care about that. How did they make it resilient? Because all they cared about was as long as people kept consuming, especially petroleum, their objective was being met. They were counting on no-one changing lifestyles.
The most radical thing sometimes that you can do is actually vote with your feet and vote with your dollars. I was going – “wow, yeah, they’re counting on people complaining”. Protesting and not changing. I started thinking that even the Obama administration is still using the same metrics as the Bush administration was, saying people won’t change on energy. “It’s going to take 35 years to reduce our energy use by 30%”. Well that’s bullshit, because we can choose to do that in a week.
So, I decided that I was going to show that that’s possible even in my own lifestyle. I drive a Prius which is especially fuel efficient, but I’m going to stop driving that car two or three days a week. I told my secretary to book meetings downtown where I could get the bus to. I got out of the car, took the bus, and it actually became a really cool thing. I started investing my dollars in the local bus system. I did it for over two years. I blogged about it. A lot of other people stopped full time car use, and right at the right time as gasoline prices were spiking, a proposal came out to build a new transit system. It’s always been rejected in LA, but the voters at that moment chose to fund 40 billion dollars to build a new subway system in Los Angeles so we could get out of our cars. It’s a radical move, but it’s starting to happen.
So maybe that’s a long complicated answer, but we’ve built the right foundation. Our happiness, our health is the answer. It’s infectious. Our job is to be that much more infectious and inclusive. And don’t put up barriers of titles. Don’t put up barriers of shame and blame. Be open to learning fast and welcoming people in. We’re hacking the system and making it so much better. If we invite that kind of creativity, the generation that’s inheriting this right now is really ready to take this home.
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Transition Network started up on a wing and a (non-denominational) prayer at the end of 2006 in the hope that the early social experiment started by Naresh Giangrande and Rob Hopkins in Totnes might replicate broadly elsewhere. The initial design, with its simple “12 Steps” and “7 Buts”, already had that flavour of replicability that my earlier jobs in business had trained me to spot. And by that time, a few very smart people in early adopter communities in the UK – Lewes and Stroud in particular – were already playing with the idea.
Before we could figure out a sensible answer, two initial examples quickly showed us that this had already started. First, we saw that people in Spain, Italy and Germany were translating articles and material from our website and adding it to blogs over there. Then, a “Transition Italy” website popped up. We expected that this would get noticed by appropriately concerned potential transitioners in those countries and accelerate the adoption of the Transition model there, and we also suspected that without some kind of coordinating group at the centre in those locations, their initial efforts might get diluted somewhat.
Pretty soon, at the end of 2007, Ireland popped up on the radar. We already had excellent relationships with highly motivated and capable people who had been working in this field for ages, and this made it easy to start off the conversations about a group starting up to represent Ireland and Northern Ireland nationally.
Next, we were approached by a pre-existing organisation in the US to represent transition over there. And now, in terms of scaling up, the stakes suddenly took a stratospheric leap – the USA population is getting on for 100 times bigger than New Zealand. The appeal of an existing established and influential operation taking on this catalysing and supporting role was very seductive. On the other hand, how on earth could we make sure that Transition Networks aspirational mishmash of values – experimentation, playfulness, inner/outer, empowering the genius of the local community, non-confrontational, local variability – were replicated appropriately in an organisation in a far away country where we didn’t have any real influence? Should we just go with the flow, or should we start exerting influence strongly? This really was too big to screw up and so, after many brain aching conversations, we came up with a thing we called a “memorandum of understanding” to negotiate the relationship between Transition Network and this new “hub”. Crucially, that memorandum stipulated that the people who were in key roles in that hub had to be in a local initiative.
By now, Transition Training was getting into full swing, and a proposal came forward for a trans-global training tour. This would be perfect to help replicate a more refined and nuanced Transition model internationally, to train up an international network of trainers, and to bring back the experiences of other places to enrich the stories of Transition and to evolve how Transition was communicated generally. Sophy and Naresh went to seven countries, training transitioners and trainers in the US, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong. (Since then there have been another seven or so ‘Train the Trainers’ and now there are trainers in twenty four different countries, with the training having been delivered around thirty different countries).
It’s been interesting to see how the Hubs have grown from being a set of separate entities to having their own sense of collective identity and are exerting a stronger and stronger influence on what we do at Transition Network. It’s mirrored how much attention we’ve been giving the entire international dimension of our work here.
Following the restructuring and some dedicated resources becoming available to support the Hubs, we organised a conference in Lyon, France for the autumn of 2013.
