17 Feb 2014
One way of resourcing a Transition initiative that has grown in popularity in recent years is crowdfunding. One of the best crowdfunding appeals I came across recently was by author and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project Paul Kingsnorth to crowdfund his new book The Wake. The appeal met its target and used social media very effectively to create a buzz around the book. I was interested to hear more about it, so as part of a longer interview to be published next month, I started by asking Paul whether The Wake campaign was his first experience of crowdfunding:
“No, the Dark Mountain Project which we’ve been running for 5 years now, crowdfunding is very central to what we do. The Dark Mountain Manifesto was originally funded by crowdfunding and the first 4 of our annual collections of writing were all produced by crowdfunding as well. We’ve moved to a subscriptions model now, but very central to what we do was raising small amounts of money from a lot of different people who all pre-ordered the books, which gave us the money to actually produce them because we didn’t start Dark Mountain with any cash.
What happened with The Wake is similar but slightly different. It’s been published by a fairly new publisher which is only a few years old called Unbound, which is a very interesting experiment in combining traditional publishing with crowdfunding. So the way that they work is that if the publisher likes your book or your idea for a book, they will produce a film with you and put the film up on their website along with a description of the book and an extract of it with you, and they’ve effectively then got a package that they will send out to potential readers and you have to send out to potential readers as well. If you get enough supporters pre-ordering your book so you’ve got enough to cover the cost of the initial print run then they’ll go ahead and publish your book in the standard way.
It’s a very interesting response to the decline in the publishing industry and the fact that writers find it difficult to make a living. It’s also interestingly actually a return to the time before we had a publishing industry because obviously although the internet is central to the way that they do it, the idea of funding books by subscriptions is actually something that was very popular in the 18th century. We’re really going back to a time before we had big, central publishers who were able to give writers big advances, and using the web to attract readers to a project.
I’ve enjoyed it actually. I wasn’t sure how I was going to enjoy it, having had books published by traditional publishers before, but I’ve really enjoyed engaging with the readers before the book comes out and you do have this sense that rather than just creating a book which is going to be consumed by people buying it, you’re actually creating a community around it before it even comes out which for a writer is a very nice thing to do. Writing is a very solitary exercise as you know, you sit in your room just bashing stuff out. So engaging with readers before the book comes out is quite a nice thing to do.
With your experience with Dark Mountain, is your sense that crowdfunding is something the potential of which we’re only just starting to scratch, or that it’s somehow reached the end of what’s possible for it?
It’s interesting. It’s a good question because it’s evolving. My co-founder at Dark Mountain, Dougal Hine who introduced me to crowdfunding, I hadn’t really heard of it in 2009. Back then when we crowdfunded the manifesto there weren’t that many people doing it. These days, lots of people are crowdfunding a lot of things. It’s really caught on. It’s got into the mainstream media and there’s a huge amount of it going on, which I think to some degree lessens the impact of it because if everybody’s crowdfunding all of their albums and all their books and all the rest of it, there’s only so much money to go round and only so many projects that you want, or can afford, to support yourself.
I don’t think that means it doesn’t work any more, it does for lots of people. But I think it’s probably going to continue to evolve. Unbound is a bit of an evolution of crowdfunding in that way, in that it combines traditional publishing with crowdfunding. It takes hopefully the best of both. So I think it’s going to continue to evolve, but it’s a really good tool for particular types of project to get support.
Lastly, do you just want to tell us a little bit about The Wake?
Well having said all that, this is a completely different thing for me really. This is a novel, it’s taken me four years to write. It slightly sprung from my work on Real England. It’s set in England 1000 years ago. The relationship with what we’ve just been talking about is that it’s a novel of collapse. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel but it’s set 1000 years in the past instead of 1000 years into the future. It’s set after the Norman conquest and it looks at what happens to a man’s outer and inner worlds when everything that he’s known starts to fall away, and what kind of personality reacts well to that and what kind of personality reacts badly to it.
As I say, I spent four years quite intensely researching it and I ended up actually writing it in its own language, because I discovered that it’s actually quite impossible to write about Anglo-Saxon English using Modern English. It just didn’t work. So I ended up insanely inventing a kind of middle language between Old English and Modern English which has got it a few nice comments already before it’s come out. It’s published in April by Unbound.
What the relationship is between this and a lot of what we’ve been talking about here I suppose and particularly Dark Mountain, is that what we’re having to do now is reimagine our stories. Because the key thing that we said in the Dark Mountain manifesto is that civilisations are primarily built on stories and the things that we believe about ourselves and our place in the world determine how we act towards it. And so if the world changes, your stories have to change.
When things collapse and when your assumptions collapse and when the environment around you changes radically then the stories you tell yourself about your place within it have to change as well, and if they don’t then you’re in trouble because your old stories are not going to work. The novel is really about a man whose stories don’t work any more. In that sense, although it’s not intended to be any kind of allegory, there’s an obvious connection with England and the world that we’re living through at the moment in which the stories are starting to fall apart but we don’t know what the new ones should be.
Probably the final thing I’d say about all of this is that is Dark Mountain is about anything, and if what I’ve done since I wrote that essay has been about anything, it’s primarily been about holding on to that really uncertain, doubtful place where the old stories have fallen apart but you don’t know what the new ones should be. Where the old systems have gone down but you don’t know what the new systems are going to be. We’re in really uncertain times and it’s very tempting to cling on to any kind of certainty at all, even if it’s unconvincing.
But the really honest and difficult thing to do, which we all have trouble doing, is to try and hold that uncertain place and to be flexible enough to react to what’s actually happening rather than what you’d like to be happening. It’s very difficult, especially for those of us who were brought up in a culture of certainty. It seems to me to be a really useful thing to try and train yourself to do at the moment.
A longer interview with Paul will be part of our theme next month, ‘Living with Climate Change’.
Read more»
14 Feb 2014
I was recently in Amsterdam at an event at which one of the other speakers was S. Vishwanath, better known as Zenrainman. He spoke of his work in Bangalore, where he is working to get the city to look at its resources in a very different way. Could the city of Bangalore really become a net exporter of rice, just from its rooftops? It was a fascinating story, one I knew had to be shared here. So a couple of weeks later we hooked up on Skype, and here’s our conversation:
“My name is Vishwanath, I also call myself Zenrainman. I’m a civil engineer and an urban planner by qualification. I’ve worked for the Government of India for about 14 years and after that have been trying to work on sustainable water and sanitation systems and a bit on ecological architecture and groundwater management systems. That’s all happening in the city of Bangalore in India. A lot of the work happens in other states of India also.
I run a small company called Biome Solutions and that is the professional ecological architectural firm which designs and implements earth architecture and earth buildings. And there’s a Biome Trust which works with schools and helps them access better water, sanitation and education.
When I saw you speaking in Amsterdam, a month or so ago, you were talking about the work you’ve been doing in Bangalore trying to get the city to look at its rooftops in a different way. Could you tell us a bit about that?
The city’s a bit uniquely placed in an Indian context. It sits on a ridge line, so it’s very far away from water systems. Water has to come from over 100 km and has to be pumped 300m. And similarly food also has to come from a long distance to get into the city. There’s a physical ceiling to the water availability of the city, we can only draw about 1,500 million litres per day from the river, and we’ve already drawn, that so there is no more water in the river for us as a city.
The city has to look at alternatives and one obvious one is to look at local resources. Rainwater harvesting was one way the city could start to supplement its water requirements, and what better place to start rainwater harvesting than the rooftops? Once you start looking at the rooftops of the city you start to examine many more possibilities and potentialities. Not only can it harvest rain but we can also start to capture solar energy. Luckily the city has the largest number of solar water heaters of any city in India. So can we then start capturing solar energy for water heating, for cooking, for lighting? That was obviously the next step.
The third step was that we can actually use the rooftops for growing food for ourselves. Since South Indians love a lot of rice, one experiment was to grow rice on the rooftops to see how that would perform. And then to look at creative ways with water and what we call ecological sanitation toilets, composting toilets and using the nutrients from the toilet for the rice paddy. The experiment turned out pretty well, so we have been trying to push that too in the whole system of designing and implementing smart roofs.
What one found out of course was that a roof could also become an absorber of all the waste streams that come out from the house, be it the water from the toilets or the kitchen compost or the grey water from the bathroom. The paddy crop was excellently designed to do all that absorption and convert it into food, and stock of course. Paddy, the grass that feeds half the world, is my favourite wetland crop. That’s been the experiment around smart roofs for smart cities.
So all of the toilet waste, liquid and solid from the house can be cycled around the rooftop paddy field?
Completely. What we figured out was that urine can be easily absorbed by the paddy almost on a daily basis, so there’s no surplus available. Solids can be composted for 8-10 months or slightly longer if necessary, and that compost can also be added to the rice on the roof. Everything is absorbed by the rice plants.
And it doesn’t smell?
Well, fantastically, what it does is if you separate number 1 and 2, the smell quotient drops dramatically. If you were to cover it well, the solids especially, with ash that comes from a biomass boiler or a cooker which is there on the rooftop as well, then there is no smell at all from the loo.
How does that work in multiple occupancy buildings, when you have a number of apartments in one block? Can it work there too?
That’s the trickier part. What one realises in this experiment is that everyone deserves their piece of sky. In the context of Bangalore, you actually should have about 35 square metres of roof land in your area. If you have that 35 square metres beaming up to the sky, then that patch of land or that patch of roof can then receive rainwater, can receive solar energy and so on and so forth.
In a multi-story building obviously, you do not have such a large parcel of land for you to live. Therefore my questioning now, internally and as my friends and professionals say, should not cities plan to be self-sufficient with a right to land or a right to sky?
How long have you been promoting this idea and how has it been received, how has it taken off?
For example, rainwater harvesting is now the law in this city, so there are more than 100,000 buildings – I worked on the policy aspect of it, worked with the government on setting up the by-laws for buildings. We’ve got about 100,000 buildings doing rainwater harvesting in this city alone.
As I said, solar water heating now is becoming very common and it’s done almost de rigueur. Everyone picks up solar water heaters and install them for themselves, because it saves a lot of money and energy. The rooftop cultivation is now becoming quite popular too. People don’t grow rice, they find it a bit strange and difficult to wrestle with this idea, but rooftop gardening is exploding all across Bangalore. It’s not me alone. There are many, many people who are part of the movement and who are doing wonderful work.
What’s your sense of what needs to happen in order to scale up the rice growing part of it?
The rice was just an example, sort of like a metaphor because rice is seen as extremely water intensive. If you’re a water harvester or a water conserver, it was automatically assumed that you would be against rice, that you would grow other local crops like millet or other things. But what one could show was that rice a) did not need a lot of water and b) was a very nice plant that could transform waste into nutrients. That idea slowly but surely is spreading and people loved the idea. People don’t necessarily grow only rice but they do grow a whole bunch of things that can take care of waste water on the rooftops.
It must potentially open up potential for employment, particularly for people who’ve moved to the city from the villages and who’ve struggled to find work, but who bring those skills with them?
Absolutely. The construction sector is one of the greatest employers of unskilled village workers in typical cities of India. These village workers are not permanent migrants, many are temporary migrants who come during the non-agricultural season in the rural areas. When they come to the city and, for example, the rice on the roof was such a nice thing that they liked, they almost participated for free. That’s at one level.
However, with their skills of gardening, their ability to take care of plants and vegetables, urban gardening and urban rooftop cultivation would potentially be of great help to them for employment.
What does this project and your work teach us about what, conventionally, our city authorities would think of as resources, and actually what with a more imaginative approach we could think of as resources?
So far the city authorities in India, perhaps for historical reasons, have seen themselves as providers of services and products, so the city utility looks at itself as providing water and providing the sanitation system to take it away.
Now I think they must and surely there will be a slow shift to where they see people providing it for themselves, and they being just managers and making sure that things are alright, and that there’s no negative externalities. It takes a lot of dialogue and a lot of convincing to do that. The city governments and city utilities are generally a bit suspicious about it. At scales below a certain level, they don’t see it as threatening. But one has to wait and see how the dialogue will develop.
From outside India, it seems like the rush, the push for economic growth means that concerns about the environment or concerns about climate change are really at the bottom, or any kind of questioning of economic growth as a model is being pushed to one side. You’re promoting something which is about bringing food production very much to the forefront in urban areas. How do those two things sit alongside each other? Do you see that there’s an openness to thinking beyond the current economic model, or are you very much having to work within it?
People generally don’t see the economic potential of all this. Even such a thing as rainwater harvesting, how much money can come into the sector, how much livelihood and employment can be provided? How much innovation can be postured, people designing wonderful systems of filtering rainwater, separating the first rain and so on and so forth?
But when the numbers are stacked up, it really starts to show you that you could tap into what’s called the green economy more, very easily. Productivity need not necessarily be sacrificed at the cost of the environment.
The fact remains that in India there is a really huge water crisis. So climate and climate change is seen more through the lens of water a lot more by the population. If you’re able to figure out solutions for people and demonstrate it, I think the government would necessarily come in line with it and not necessarily be in conflict with it.
When I saw you speak in Amsterdam, you talked a bit about the potential of growing rice on roofs in terms of feeding the city. Could you give us a taste of the potential of this, or what would be your vision of how far this could go?
The total city area of Bangalore is about 800 square km, of which about 60% is roofs. There’s something like 1.8 million properties. If all of them started to grow rice on the rooftop, the city can actually be a net exporter of rice, that’s the potential at the ultimate end.
One doesn’t see that happening, but one definitely sees smart roofs, growing roofs, productive roofs, harvesting grain, using solar energy, absorbing waste streams and nutrient streams as a distinct possibility for the city.
What are the obstacles that you need to overcome in order to move towards that?
Seriously, it’s just a question of small groups starting to spread the work as it’s already happening and a bit of a skillset. If you just want to grow rice on the rooftop, that’s possible, but if you want to put in grey water systems or put in eco-san systems as nutrient flows for the rice then it needs a lot of skills to be able to do that and that is not available enough in Bangalore right now. Growing that would be important.
In terms of selling the idea, is the most persuasive argument around climate, around the environment, around public health, around saving money, around biodiversity – what catches most with people?
I think it’s the simpler ideas, not the more complex ones like climate change. It’s about growing your own food and having fun doing that, and being able to do it with limited resources and limited money, not really needing big money to do it. Having fun on the way. I think that’s the best hope, and it especially resonates with a lot of the younger people who populate Bangalore a lot, people from the IT sector who participate for the fun and the knowledge that growing your own food gives them.
Read more»
14 Feb 2014
When Rob asked me to recount my “Stepping up” moment, I immediately experienced that stomach lurch again that is probably more familiar to you in moments of utter panic when you realise you’ve tripped and are about to tumble down the stairs, or when you’re going too fast to take that corner without crashing; so I was reminded of my “Peak Oil Moment”.
It all happened in an old marquee on a sunny day at the Big Green Gathering in 2007 as I was listening to a nice man with an infectious grin, telling me in a strangely entertaining way that the world as I knew it was about to end. Or so it felt at the time. I vividly remember the slide of Asterix and the magic potion Rob Hopkins used to illustrate how fossil oil, this stuff that we were all taking for granted, was almost just as magical.
He told us how no other fuel came close in energy density and ease of use. He pointed out that our economy, our life styles and our food production and distribution system were all totally dependent on the ongoing availability of cheap oil and that it wasn’t an unlimited resource. Indeed, he said, we were just about to run out of the easy to get stuff and as a consequence of “peak oil” we would experience huge changes in our lifetime. This was the first I’d ever heard about peak oil, but the logic of the argument seemed beyond doubt and the realisation of what the consequences would be, hit me like a sledgehammer.
A little while later I found myself standing outside that tent, blinking at the incongruously bright sunshine and somewhat wobbly on my legs. The rest of the day had an unreal quality to it while I was trying to integrate this bombshell of information into my existence. I thought about how it would affect my life and more importantly, my children’s future. At some point during that day my friend Mandy steered me into a “Despair to Empowerment” workshop and I think that was the single most serendipitous thing that could have happened. We visualised the future, talked to our descendants and it became totally clear to me that not only, as a parent, did I have the responsibility to take action, but with Transition as a model, I also now saw how it could be done.
The next years became a blur of frantic Transition related activity; I joined the local Transition initiating group and we ran an amazingly successful awareness raising campaign. My husband and I took on an abandoned market garden and dug and mulched it back into productivity. There was so much to learn; the pile of books next to my bed grew and grew, I went on quite a few courses and became a Transition trainer. I trained groups in several countries on how to bring transition forward in their communities. With a seemingly endless demand for trainings to deliver, talks to give and meetings to go to, I was run off my feet and my family was suffering from my absence. The other members of our Transition initiating group were equally run ragged and after a rushed “Unleashing”, our local transition initiative now slumbers.
By now I had come to realise that “transitioning” to the new paradigm was not going to happen overnight. The urgency that followed my peak oil moment has matured into a cold resignation that I’m in this for the long run and I have found a more realistic pace, which I imagine, I’ll keep at for the rest of my days. After a period of relative quiet in our area, it now looks like transition-y things are stirring again and I’m ready to join the others who, just like me, will keep plodding on to help bring about something a whole lot better than austerity.
Read more»
13 Feb 2014
To Jamie Angus, the Editor, Today Programme.
Dear Jamie,
I am writing to complain in the strongest terms about your piece on this morning’s programme on climate change and the current floods which featured Sir Brian Hoskins and Lord Nigel Lawson. I write both in my own capacity and on behalf of Transition Network, a charitable organisation supporting thousands of communities around the world taking practical and positive local action in response to the climate crisis, and for whom the distraction such articles present is deeply unhelpful.
The overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed science on climate accepts that human activity is resulting in the warming of the climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have reviewed all the published science on climate change, and concluded:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.
Yet Lord Lawson has repeatedly stated his belief that climate change is “a belief without any serious scientific substance” and today argued there is no link with the extreme weather and flooding of recent days. Yet a 2012 report published by DEFRA identified flooding as the greatest threat to the UK posed by climate change, with up to 3.6 million people at risk by the middle of the century. Every 1 degree of warming leads to the atmosphere being able to hold 7% more moisture than previously (as this paper from the journal Climate Research shows), and we have already increased 0.8°C on pre-industrial levels. Dame Julia Slingo, presenting a Met Office report on the recent flooding, told Sunday’s World at One programme:
“All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change. There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”
My specific objections are as follows:
- That you had Lord Lawson on at all: Lawson is not a climate scientist, he is an ex-politician. He has published no peer-reviewed science on climate change. His Global Warming Policy Foundation actively lobby for pro-fossil fuel policies, for the eradication of policy and legislation on climate change, while refusing to reveal the sources of their funding, while somehow taking advantage of charitable status. He has nothing of value to say on this subject.
- “Nobody knows”: on several occasions, Lord Lawson stated that, in relation to the science on climate change, that “nobody knows”, referring to climate science as “this extremely speculative and uncertain area”. This is grossly misleading, and, in the light of recent extreme weather events, sows seeds of doubt for which there is no basis. As discussed above, there is a clear consensus that human activity is affecting the climate. He stated on Today “I don’t blame the scientists for not knowing … I just blame them for saying they know when they don’t”. Climate scientists always present their findings in degrees of certainty, degrees of likelihood, never in terms of certainty. To present that lack of certainty as “not knowing” does the entire scientific community a huge disservice.
- Cherry picking: Lord Lawson stated that there has been no increase in extreme weather events, taking as his example tropical storms, stating that “last year was unusually quiet” for tropical storms. Yet no mention of 2013 being the hottest year in Australia since records began, or recent floods in Thailand or the US, melting permafrost in Siberia and Alaska, to mention just a few. To pick tropical storm activity in one year is cherrypicking. Anyway, as seen with Typhoon Haiyan, the intensity of those storms is increasing.
- The ‘Pause’ myth: He stated that there has been “no recorded warming over the last 15-17 years”, a myth promoted by climate sceptics. He cited the latest IPCC report as agreeing with him, but the IPCC report was actually very clear on this: 90% of warmth is being absorbed by the world’s oceans, as a result of increased trade winds, as well as blaming the solar minimum the world is currently going through. In fact, the temperature of the world’s oceans is rising sharply as they absorb the equivalent of, according to Skeptical Science, 12 Hiroshima bombs per second, with impacts on sea level, marine life and the oceans’ acidity levels, which are at their highest for over 300 million years.
Your piece presented the illusion that there is still a debate about the science that human activity is changing the world’s climate. At its close, your presenter said “it’s a combination of the two, as is this whole discussion”. No, it’s not. Nigel Lawson is an ideologue, not a scientist. To put him alongside a scientist who has published peer-reviewed science on climate change is like asking a qualified aviation engineer and a florist for their advice as to whether an aeroplane is safe to travel on, and attaching equal weight to their opinions.
I usually enjoy the Today Programme, but today I could quite happily have hurled my radio from the window into the unseasonal hail storm lashing the windows outside. There is no need for “balance” in pieces about climate change. Does the BBC now feel compelled to have someone who thinks that smoking is good for you every time smoking is discussed? Are we now to expect a member of Occupy to be offered the right of reply every time Robert Peston discusses the economy? The BBC has a duty to reflect reality, rather than allowing dinosaurs like Lord Lawson to fill the airwaves with unscientific and deeply-irresponsible views.
Thanks
Rob HopkinsTransition Network
43, Fore Street, Totnes, Devon. TQ9 5HN.
Read more»
12 Feb 2014
In times of great uncertainty one needs to find an anchor and hope. In the spring of 2009, just coming up to the age of 60, I went to a Be The Change Symposium in search of hope and solutions. I wanted to help make a difference in the world but what I was already doing didn’t feel like any where near enough. Within weeks of this incredibly inspiring event I did a Permaculture Intro course, which “just happened” to cross my path, via a close friend. This gave me so much hope and a means of being able to step into the next phase of my life.
Eight months later I did a “Building Sustainable Communities” Permaculture Design Course with Brighton Permaculture Trust and this led me to the discovery of the Transition Movement. To my astonishment, I found out that our town was actually a Transition Town so I joined immediately and have never looked back.
I am now in my fourth year as a Permaculture Design Apprentice and Transition Worthing has given me a rich source of projects and a medium through which I can connect to like minded souls who, together, create a never ending flow of possibilities!! Our latest projects are a sustainable local food hub and also a local energy co-op – all very exciting stuff and I know they will make a huge difference to our town and environment. Once up and running, we hope to be able to mentor others to do the same.
Transition gives me community, structure, resources, connection, access to information and people from all walks of life and allows me to “be the change that I wish to see in the world” – to be effective, useful and for that I am extremely grateful. Thank you everyone who has been and will be part of my journey.
Pauline Cory, Transition Town Worthing.
Read more»
