1 Nov 2013
One of my favourite Twitter follows, @TwopTwips, tweeted, on the afternoon of Halloween, with the sage advice “SAVE TIME and money this Halloween by always answering the question “Trick or Treat?” with “F*** Off”. While entertaining, it was disappointing, as I took my 11 year old and his friend Trick of Treating in the streets around my house last night, how many people seem to have taken that advice to heart.
The significant majority of houses had their gates closed, the lights at the front of the house switched off, notes on their front door saying “No Trick of Treaters”. Now, I can completely get the arguments that there are some people, usually older people, who feel threatened by Halloween, and some kids who use Halloween as the opportunity to get up to all sorts of mischief.
What touched me though, traipsing around with The Joker and The Crazy GP With the Machete, was what can happen when you do decide to open the door, to create a chink of possibility in your life that engaging with the children in your neighbourhood might actually be a good experience for both you and them.
If you are not a Halloween regular, there is a kind of Halloween ettiquette. You generally only knock at houses that look inviting. Usually if you want to be visited, you put a pumpkin in the front garden, or indicate in some way that you are interested. The houses with the lights off and the gates closed you just avoid. Everyone I saw out Trick or Treating respected that kind of unofficial Code of Good Halloween Practice. But seeing what happened when people opened their hearts to it was really touching.
On one street near me, a group of 5 older women had really gone for it, had dressed up in full witches outfits, with brooms and everything, and were sat in their front garden around a cauldron over a real fire. They were actually, I must say, just a bit on the odd side of odd, almost as though they spent the year looking forward to this opportunity. They were in their element. Every group of kids who approached were asked to tell them a joke or sing them a song before they were given any treats. My two companions thought, as we stood there in the cackling and the swirling smoke, that that all sounded like a bit too much effort, so we headed off to the next house with a pumpkin in the window.
In another street, a woman in full witch costume was sat outside her house, with spectral ghostly music playing, trying to psych out the kids who wandered past and thought twice about whether they would go in and ask her for anything. What was really lovely was the number of older people who had made a real effort. The Joker and the Doctor approached one house, knocked on the door, which was opened by a older man, delightful, really friendly, asking them about their costumes and how it was going, and gave them some treats. Just as they turned to leave, they jumped out of their skins. Right next to them, unseen as it was slightly out of the main lights, was a life-sized witch statue, leering down at them.
Some people had spent the day baking little skull-shaped biscuits. Some took the time to ask the kids where they lived, and were able to piece them into their knowledge of local families and geography. Some just had a big basket of sweets by the door and thrust it at each successive group that came calling. It felt like walking the streets from pocket of welcoming playfulness to pocket of welcoming playfulness, passing through a sea of “go away, leave us alone”.
It is of course entirely anyone’s business if they choose to take part in Halloween or not. It’s an odd festival, it’s silly, and yes, the kids get lots of sweets. And this is just in the UK, where it’s not such a big deal. In the US people have the pumpkins out and the decorations up for up to a month in advance of the day itself. Grist have the story of one woman in North Dakota who instead of giving out sweets, gave out letters addressed to the parents of what she determined to be “moderately obese” trick-or-treaters. The letters read:
Happy Halloween! You are probably wondering why your child has this note; have you ever heard the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child? I am disappointed in “the village” of [blank]. Your child is, in my opinion, moderately obese and should not be consuming sugar and treats to the extent of some children this Halloween season. My hope is that you will step up as a parent and ration candy this Halloween and not allow your child to continue these unhealthy eating habits. Thank you.
I mean, what a bloody miserable curmudgeon. She could have given them fruit, or something else. What a great way to totally bum out some kid’s experience of Halloween. As a psychologist interviewed in the article wrote:
“It’s just that kind of thing that, for some kids, if they’re vulnerable, might trigger major problems.”
What struck me was that part of the community seemed to be having a lot of fun, a lot of laughter, a lot of silliness and getting to meet and connect with local families, while the other half was hunkered down in their sofas with the curtains shut and the front lights off. Also, how much fun the people, especially the older people, who had opened their hearts and their front doors to the whole thing were having.
Whether it’s the tabloid press or whoever, people seem to have convinced themselves that Halloween is all about horrible kids throwing eggs at your house and demanding sweets, and of course if people feel vulnerable they have every right to drop out. But we can also look at Halloween as the opportunity to open our doors to our neighbours, to meet those young people we might never normally encounter, to feel more connected to those around us.
Rather than handing out sanctimonius notes to tubby kids, our friend in North Dakota could have given them fruit, given them cookies she had made, actually chatted to them and got to know them. Rather than shutting the curtains and hoping they will all go away, the delight of chatting to little kids dressed as witches, realising you know their parents or whatever, and helping to make it a fun evening seem to me far preferable.
Think of it as a street party, think of it as community-building, think of it as a way of meeting your neighbours every bit as valuable as Transition Streets or The Big Lunch. Out in the streets was the sound of laughter, of cackling, of a night that kids approach with a certain sense of the magic of the whole thing. The benefits to us all of taking a few steps towards that, getting into the spirit (if you’ll excuse the pun) of Halloween, seem to me to far outweigh the very slight risk of a misdirected egg or one rude Trick or Treater.
In a recent Guardian piece, one contributor asked “Is it OK to ignore trick or treaters? I can’t be the only person hiding in the lounge, hoping they’ll get the message fast and move on (some don’t, and knock twice: awkward)”. Well, of course it’s OK, kinda, but perhaps next year, having tried the “hunker down and turn the telly up” approach, you might carve a pumpkin, light some candles, make some biscuits, and welcome the little kids dressed as witches, ask them where they live, tell them you like their costumes, wish them a Happy Halloween and a good night, and then see which of the two approaches you preferred, and made you feel more part of the world around you. My money’s on the one with the biscuits.
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1 Nov 2013
One of the most inspiring Transition initiatives I visited in the US recently was Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition in Boston. With our theme for this month focusing on austerity, JPNET (as they are known to their friends) have useful contributions to make to our discussions. They formed in 2009, and hosted a Transition Training. Following the training, they sat down to explore how they might set about doing Transition in their community of 40,000 people, an inner-city neighbourhood, where half the people are non-white: Asian, Latino or African-American. They resolved to set about building resilience with a particular focus on livelihoods, but in a way that reflected the neighbourhood’s diversity. I spoke to one of the initiative’s founders, Chuck Collins, to find out more.
What follows is based on our conversation, sections of which will be posted through this piece as audio files you can play or download. Firstly Chuck introduced the group and how it came to be:
As a group, they strive in all their events and meetings to welcome everyone, and produce their materials and run their events in both English and Spanish. The project’s manager and community organiser, Carlos, is fluent in both. I asked Chuck to describe some of the things that JPNET actually does on the ground:
They include:
The annual State of the Neighbourhood Forum: a huge event (between four and five hundred people) which invites people to reflect on the community’s needs and to problem solve creative ways forward. The elected city official are invited, but as ‘keynote listeners’
JP YardSharing: a Garden Share scheme similar to that run in other Transition initiatives
Egleston Farmers’ Market: a community-led initiative to make fresh, healthy, locally-grown food accessible throughout the year, bring people from all parts of Jamaica Plain together, and support the local economy
Supporting existing businesses in the community: it’s not just about new enterprises. For example, they worked with a local butcher’s shop to help him find a local supplier and then expanded his clientelle by letting people in the JPNET network know that it was available
Working with local businesses to reduce the health risk of their operations: in particular beauty parlours and dry cleaners
Boston Food Forest: an ambitious plan to plant food-bearing trees across the community
JP Resiliency Measures: some fascinating work looking into indicators for measuring resilience in the community
Egleston Community Orchard: a community orchard (see below) planted on the site of a former waste ground that was the site of a shooting. The garden has played a part in reducing crime in the area
The Boston Bean: A local currency scheme that is currently being piloted (see below)
I asked Chuck about how he sees the work of JPNet in the context of austerity? “We don’t want to start by assuming that there is a need for austerity”, he told me, quoting a friend who had told him “we’re not broke, we’re just twisted”. However, it is clear that austerity is here to stay and although it’s not entirely necessary, it is, as he put it, “an opportunity to define a sense of community agency”.
As Chuck told me:
“We won’t have the same flow of resources. We have to adapt and make a shift. We are certainly not going to have the same energy resources. Austerity also makes us think about what really matters. What is real wealth? How do we organise so that the resources that the community needs are still there. We can’t sit out the austerity debates, we have to participate in them”.
We discussed the potential of being able to model a new economic model on the ground. Chuck told me:
“Even though the government looks like it’s broke, there’s a lot of private wealth, and one of the things that has happened is that we have become extremely unequal, but some of that wealth can be drawn back into the locality if we invite it in in the right way. We ask the wealthy people in our community to re-establish a stake in our locality. It’s both a personal and an organisational ask.
We invite them to make investments in local businesses. Move their money out of Wall Street and into the local intermediaries that invest in the community. Take your money out of the fossil fuel sector but also put it into the local new economy businesses. That’s where I think we’re trying to move the resources that have moved out of our community, to bring them back or to hold them”.
I was curious as to where he feels JPNET will be in 5 years time:
For Chuck, one of the key powers that a Transition group has is what he calls “The Power to Convene”. By this he means the power to mobilise people around an idea, a new enterprise, a project. If someone comes to JPNET with an idea for a new enterprise, the group can organise an event around it, and invite people who share that passion to get involved. That is something that the group feel committed to continuing.
They also see a role as a broker, working with different local organisations to help them make changes. For example, Chuck outlined the possibility of working with the local hospital, who are committed to promoting healthy lifestyles, to invite them to support a post looking at how the community could produce more calories locally through a range of exciting JPNET activities. The JPNET of the future would never be a huge organisation, never more than 3 or 4 people who could sit round a table, but that catalytic role is central to its evolution.
One of the striking things about JPNET is the degree to which they have put issues around diversity and class central to their work from day one. The group’s leaflets are all done in both English and Spanish, and they have an awareness about how to present Transition, in terms of language and how Transition is presented. As Chuck told me:
“If you put out a call and say “climate change, peak oil, environmental threats”, you get one group of people who tend to rush into the room, and they tend to be people who have a little more social capital, they tend to be white, they tend to be people who understand the environmental threat as the paramount threat. If you put out the call for local jobs, jobs of the future, ways to address rising energy costs, youth opportunity, decent wages, opportunities and livelihoods, and you want to address both race and class inequality, then you get another group of people in the room. Our challenge has been from the very beginning as part of the DNA of our group to say that the equity issues are central to our Transition and sustainabiulity. We want to live in a community that is flourishing and much more equal than the society at large”.
In this final piece of audio, Chuck reflects on the difference the way in which you message Transition makes to who turns up and gets involved.
If you want to find out more about the group’s work, visit their website. My thanks to Chuck and to the other members of the group who were so welcoming, and for the fascinating tour of their work.
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31 Oct 2013
“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination…. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.”
Sylvia Plath, from Notebooks, February 1956
Our theme for November is austerity and Transition responses to it. It is a subject that our Social Reporters are exploring with great gusto at the moment. Caroline Jackson recently documented what the unfolding of spending cuts look like in her community in Lancaster, concluding with the question “there’s a challenge for us in Transition here – I wonder how we will respond?” That’s what I’d like to explore here, and to ask “what is Transition’s unique contribution to the challenges of austerity?”
In the UK, as elsewhere, debates around austerity tend to polarise along political divides. The Right argue that the economy is saddled with huge debts and that we have to “get our house in order” before anything else, cutting back in all areas of government expenditure (although whilst also bailing out the banks, cutting taxes for the rich and not collecting corporate taxes). The Left argue that’s really the last thing we need to do, that actually what we need to do is to borrow more money in order to stimulate growth and kick start economic growth again. Both miss the point completely. In The Power of Just Doing Stuff I quoted FEASTA’s Graham Barnes who wrote:
“The austerity versus Keynsian spending debate is about as useful as arguing whether the Earth is flat or sitting on the back of a pile of turtles.”
The reality is we have reached the end of the age of cheap energy, and, almost certainly, of economic growth. Our urgent imperative is to begin a steep reduction of carbon emissions (10% a year, if Kevin Anderson is right), and we stand atop mountains of debt accumulated in the process of generating GDP (creating one dollar of growth in the 1970s required $1.74 of debt, it’s now $5.67) and an increasingly fragile economic system. Under such circumstances it’s not about how we recreate the kind of blunt, “gross value added” growth that both left and right have long used as a measure, rather how we get real about our situation and respond accordingly. Whether austerity is the right approach or not, the reality is that as a government-led approach to the economy, it looks likely to be here to stay for some time to come, with Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls pledging to match to coalition government’s spending cuts.
I could spend this entire post delivering a long rant about austerity: how there is easily enough money to overcome it, and to tackle the climate crisis, locked up in offshore banking accounts (beautifully explored in Nick Shaxson’s latest report ‘The Finance Curse‘), how in the US (and almost certainly in the UK and elsewhere too) the bulk of what little economic growth there has been over the past couple of years actually goes to the rich, not to everyone else, or in pointing out, as the Red Cross did recently when looking at austerity across Europe, that it simply doesn’t work as an economic approach:
“Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it. The long-term consequences of this crisis have yet to surface. The problems caused will be felt for decades even if the economy turns for the better in the near future … We wonder if we as a continent really understand what has hit us.”
I could bring it closer to home, stating how the use of food banks in the UK has increased threefold on this time last year, up to half a million people over the last 12 months, how some families receiving food parcels from food banks are sending them back because they are too poor to be able to afford to heat the food the parcel contains, or how, in the case of council funding cuts, the drastic cutting back of public services has only just begun. Newcastle City Council has spoken of how it is being forced to make “bloody great cuts”, cutting all arts funding, and showing how by 2017 it looks like it will be unable to even meet its basic legal responsibilities as a Council. At the same time, bonuses in the City of London are up 64%, and RBS and Lloyds are enjoying combined half-year profits of £3.5bn.
It’s shitty and grim and however much we might rail against it, it looks unlikely that a change of government (all the major parties at least) would do much different. The reality is that the age of cheap energy is over, and our living off the fat of a hundred years of surplus energy is coming to an end. There are, of course, activist avenues open to you if you want to use them, campaigns for transparency in international finance, UK Uncut and so on. I think we need something else though, something that sits alongside those more campaign-based responses, something without which we will never make any headway.
Tim Hunt, Commissioning Editor with Red Pepper magazine, in an article for Adbusters, writes:
“Britain reels from a lack of a creative left. We need some hope, some inspiration, something that shakes us out of a dismally predictable downward spiral”.
A recent article by Naomi Klein in New Statesman talks about “a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner” who gave a presentation at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union called ““Is Earth F**ked?”, his answer to which was “more or less”. But as Klein states:
There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.
I want to use this post to focus on one of the key and most valuable roles I believe Transition can play, and is playing, in these times, that of keeping alive imagination, that Silvia Plath so cherished, at the community level. Austerity can tend to shut down what Hunt refers to as “some hope, some inspiration”, to close avenues of possibility, bring our focus more and more to the here and now, rather than keeping our gaze on the horizon. I don’t agree with Klein and Werner’s analysis that “resistance” should be only taken to refer to the same tools that oppositional politics has always used. For me, Werner’s “certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture” needs to be viewed more broadly.
And that’s where Transition comes in, with its core focus on imagination and the telling of different stories. Local councils, under such huge pressure to cut spending, rarely have the time or capacity to think creatively about ways forward. In Caroline’s piece she documents how, as a city Councillor, she is part of making decisions about budgets and where cuts should fall. Little room for imagination there. The Left, as Hunt identifies, in spite of the unpopularity of austerity, “without a party or a coherent mass movement, appear unable to capitalize on the situation”. Even Russell Brand’s glorious outburst on Newsnight this week was big on calls for “revolution” and a passionate laying out of what isn’t working, but rather lacking in terms of an imaginative exploration of what we might do instead.
What I want to argue here is that Transition groups can have a powerful role to play in firing the imagination, what Plath describes as “making dreams to run towards”. It’s not just about ideas and campaigns, it’s about doing stuff, showing that a more just, lower carbon, more localised and resilient approach can not only work in practice, but also can meet our needs better as people, as families, as communities. It’s about modelling community resilience as economic development.
Over this month we’ll be hearing from a range of people with useful insights on austerity. Among others, we’ll hear from Jeremy Leggett about energy and austerity, from Dr Tim Lang and Felicity Lawrence about food and austerity, Pam Warhurst about the potential for urban agriculture to be a key strategy for responding to it, and from Jason Roberts of Better Block who says,
“If we are experiencing austerity, create visions. Let’s have a better place together, even when things start getting taken away. We still ultimately want to have a better place. There’s got to be a way. We all know that we get really creative when there’s something we want to have and we just don’t have the money … We typically try to do what we do with as little money as possible. We like to show that if you want innovation, take a zero away from your budget, and if you want ultimate innovation take two zeros away from your budget”.
The only way, it seems to me, to inspire the new structures, new enterprises, new networks, new connections that will enable us to overcome the grinding, wearing, energy-sapping drag of austerity, is through sparking imagination, and imagination that makes tangible, physical, visible differences to peoples’ lives. I see that imagination at work in Transition initiatives all over the place, and in many other places besides, and when it comes together with a “can-do” and “will-do” attitude, magical, extraordinary and desperately-needed things happen.
There’s the emerging New Economy movement, Jason’s Better Block work, the local food movement, social entrepreneurs, initiatives such as the community of Berlin striving to bring the city’s grid into community ownership and push for 100% renewables, to name just a few. There’s also the powerful role the arts can play in bringing the imagination to life and giving it form and expression, as will be detailed in Lucy Neal’s forthcoming Playing for Time book. One of the key insights from my recent trip to the US was that, contrary to what one might imagine from outside, so much was going on there, so many amazing projects and initiatives, but in a nation where the media is controlled by about four companies, their stories are never heard, their potential to fire the collective imagination goes mostly unrealised.
Here are a few stories from the Transition network that, for me, represent the use of imagination in response to austerity. If you’d like to tell us about others, please use the comments thread below. In London there’s the great ‘Edible Bus Stop‘ initiative, captured beautifully in the video below. Crystal Palace Transition Town are one of the groups involved, working on an ‘Edible Bus Station’! They wrote:
“The aim is to create a high impact, low maintenance edible garden at the far end of the station, where there’s lawn running against the hedge to the park. In spring, planting will start in earnest with plans to plant fruit trees and fruit bushes – Crystal Palace’s very own Edible Bus Station Orchard”.
It’s an amazing project for focusing the imagination, stimulating the question “what if every bus stop were like this?” It opens the possibility of using land in a different way in the setting of one of the places during many peoples’ daily routine where they have little else to do than sit and wait.
There’s Ajudada in Portalegre in Portugal, a city that has been hit hard to EU austerity measures. Ajudada was an event attended by many hundreds of people that explored the resources the city has that aren’t money, and how they might be better connected and better employed in shaping the city’s future. The whole event ran with no money changing hands. Here’s a film about it:
It’s what the REconomy Project’s Local Economic Blueprints/Evaluations do so powerfully, opening the imagination to the possibility that economic development can actually come from building on and strengthening community resilience, rather than discarding it. I also love the story of DE4 Food in Derbyshire, a “co-operative social enterprise made up of small-scale local food and drink producers and their customers”, formed by a group of women in Derbyshire who had no previous experience of running a businesses who were inspired to do something to improve local access to affordable, local, fresh produce, while at the same time offering the opportunity for people to generate some income from their back-garden/allotment food growing. As Helen Cunningham from DE4 told me:
“I think we all just really wanted to change the way we live, and change our own personal lives and to change things and live different lives ourselves as well as a different life in our community”.
DE4 recently added the local Tansley Primary School Gardening Club to their list of local producers. What a great project, giving young people the opportunity to not just imagine contributing meaningfully to the local food economy, but to actually make it happen.
In Totnes, the Food in Community CIC (see photo below) has taken a different approach to tackling food and austerity. Feeling that Food Banks can deepen a sense of dependency and sense of inadequacy, they opted for a different approach. Collecting ‘grade out’ fruit and veg from the nearby Riverford Organic Farm, they now supply it to projects in the local community, over 5,000 kilos since January. Their thinking is that distributing the food can be a catalyst for so much more than Food Banks do. The same day they collect, the produce is delivered to 10 organisations who work with people in community settings who use food and cooking to bring people together.
For example, the Children’s Centre uses it in their after school cooking sessions, which encourage families to eat and cook together, a Nursery School uses it to improve the food they feed their children, they work with a cafe for adults with mental health issues and their carers, and has led to one young volunteer getting cooking lessons from the chef at the Riverford Field Kitchen. They supply a primary school whose parents took over the school’s catering use the produce to make money go further and to increase the quality of the meals. They recently teamed up with Transition Town Totnes. To quote from the local paper:
‘Cooking Up A Treat’ will take place in the refurbished Civic Hall kitchen, and offer groups cooking and food sharing sessions, where people can come together, learn new skills and enjoy food and company. Transition Town Totnes will also benefit from the award with support for its hugely successful free skillshare events.
Future plans include creating an enterprise to provide meals on wheels and school meals. As Laurel Ellis from the group puts it:
“Having the vegetables encourages people to learn to cook, share meals, join in, eat well or sometimes, just eat”.
During this month we’ll also hear from Chuck Collins of Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition in Boston, seeking to widen the imagination of his community in thinking about its economic future:
“We ask the wealthy people in our community to re-establish a stake in our locality. It’s both a personal and an organisational ask. We invite them to make investments in local businesses. Move their money out of Wall Street and into the local intermediaries that invest in the community. Take your money out of the fossil fuel sector but also put it into the local new economy businesses. We’re trying to move the resources that have moved out of our community, to bring them back or to hold them”.
They also run an annual ‘State of the Neighbourhood Forum’, a huge event (between four and five hundred people, see photo below) which invites people to reflect on the community’s needs and to problem solve creative ways forward. The elected city official are invited, but as ‘keynote listeners’. It creates a space for imagining, with elected officials, the kind of neighbourhood people really want to see.
The Bristol Pound, that highly imaginative local currency scheme, is starting to move towards measures where it starts to really address the needs of those most impacted by austerity. Being backed by a Credit Union really helps of course, but the Pound is now building on the argument that spending money locally prevents money pouring out of the city’s economy. They are looking at setting up a Bank of Bristol, to support people starting new businesses by offering low interest loans. They are also setting up a Farmlink scheme, linking established buying groups in the city with primary producers on the city’s periphery so that the Bristol Pound becomes a channel for regional suppliers.
There are tensions here though. Occupied Times recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, and asked him, “Occupy Sandy and these various movements that have come out in the last year, they are double-edged in the sense that they alleviating the pressure we should put on [governments], but they are also desired responses in many ways”. Chomsky replied:
“What ways? The trouble with saying “the government backs off” is that it only feeds the libertarians. The wealthy and the corporate sector are delighted to have government back off, because then they get more power. Suppose you were to develop a voluntary system, a community type, a mutual support system that takes care of social security – the wealthy sectors would be delighted”.
As governments across Europe continue to “back off”, we must recognise that we have a choice to take back what power we can. Or do we just take the moral high ground, watch everything fall apart, see people suffer, smug in the knowledge that at least we are not doing anything that might delight libertarians and the corporate sector? Fortunately that’s not what Chomsky is suggesting. He adds:
“I thought the most important contribution of the Occupy movement was to recreate this mutual support system which was lacking in society. But it has this dual character: You have to figure out ways to do it which don’t undermine the broader conception of solidarity”.
He puts his finger on a key question for Transition and other community based responses. How best to withdraw support from the structures and businesses we don’t want to see, while enabling communities to put in place more resilient systems that they own and manage and which better meets their needs? Keeping a mindfulness around issues of solidarity is vital, as is modelled in the projects set out above. The Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland is a great example of this:
It is taking over work that would would have been done by local government but running it in a way that better serves the community, cuts carbon and builds resilience and solidarity. It is in every way as valid a form of “resistance” as any of the others that Brad Werner identifies, but one which feels accessible and resonant to more, and different, people.
But for all the talk from the UK’s government of creating a ‘Big Society’, obstacles continue to be put in the way of communities and individuals wanting to make this happen, as Social Reporter Ann Owen identifies in her post about Universal Credit. This forthcoming replacement for Working Families Tax Credit will make it very hard for people to volunteer for local projects or to set up the kind of new enterprises we need, entirely the wrong thing to be introducing at this time, potentially leading to what she calls “the rise of the Undercover Guerrilla Volunteer”.
In order to be able to create something, first we have to imagine it. That applies as much to the supper you’ll cook when you get home tonight as to social change. While there is much that Transition initiatives can, and are, doing to respond to austerity, it is the holding of spaces where people, their political representatives and others, can come together to imagine the kind of future they want to see, and modelling this in practical ways, which may be one of the most powerful things we can do in these difficult times. It could prove to be, as the world seemingly steps from arguing that climate change isn’t a problem to arguing that it’s too late to do anything about it, missing out that vital piece in the middle, you know, the doing something about it bit, that the “poverty of life without dreams” may turn out in the long run to be the wickest form of poverty.
I’d like to recomment Transition Social Reporter Dr Gail Bradbrook’s an excellent post on what she calls Street School Economics, which offers a useful take on austerity.
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29 Oct 2013
While running the risk of sounding like a Hello! Magazine reporter, I must introduce this post by saying that while in the US recently, I joined Richard Heinberg and his wife Janet in their beautiful permaculture garden in Santa Rosa, California. Richard will be known to most readers of this blog as the author of The Party’s Over, Powerdown, The Oil Depletion Protocol, Peak Everything, Blackout and Snake Oil as well as one of the best communicators on the whole peak oil/everything question. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Party’s Over. Richard has already reflected on this in September’s Museletter, but Richard and I pulled up a chair under a tree in his garden and chatted more about the book, its impact, and other related issues. You transcript follows below, or you can listen to or download the podcast below.
So Richard, it’s 10 years since The Party’s Over came out, which is certainly a book that turned my life upside down and the lives of many others, I suspect.
I have a lot to answer for, I’m afraid…
This guy came up to me at an event I was at recently in Austin, and said “I read your book 4 years ago and after I read it, I gave up the really well-paid job I had and I moved into a falling down house.” I thought, my God he’s going to burst into tears! But it was a story that ended well. What’s your sense, looking back on that book, knowing what we know now and how things have changed through the explosion of unconventional stuff, how well, looking back after 10 years do you feel that the analysis set out in that book has held up over that time?
Since it is the 10 year anniversary of publication, I actually went back and read the book for the first time in years. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised. In the book, although I cite the analysis of a number of different people, theorists if you will, the two people whose work rely upon most are Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère. If you read carefully what they were saying in 1998, and the next few years, what’s actually transpired since then is essentially exactly what they were forecasting.
They were forecasting a peak in regular, conventional oil around 2006 or so, which is exactly what we’ve seen. Yes, crude oil production has increased in the last few years, but all of the increase has been in tar sands or tight oil from North Dakota and Texas. If you take that out of the picture, oil production today is below what it was in 2005-2006. So that’s correct.
And they went further and said this would cause price increases which would incentivise more production of unconventionals. They didn’t specifically say we’re going to get more oil out of North Dakota, but how specific do you need? To my interpretation, what they were describing was exactly what we’ve been living through over the last few years. We’ve seen higher and more volatile oil prices, the oil industry is spending twice as much on exploration and production and yet producing very little more oil. They’re drilling twice as many wells and the 10 top oil companies have seen their actual production decline by about 25 % in the last decade. So if this isn’t peak oil I don’t know what is.
Now it’s true, there are some peak oil commentators who were saying that the result would be an almost immediate global economic crash and there’d be riots on the streets and mass starvation and so on before 2010, and that hasn’t happened. But if you pick up The Party’s Over and read it, there’s nothing in that book that would make such a claim.
The idea that the ‘party’ is over that’s so strong in the book, there seems that the book has motivated lots of people for whom the working assumption is that the party’s over, but our leaders are still desperately clinging to the fact that the party is revivable and is about to start swinging again with great gusto, based on this obsessive push for growth and what it takes to make that happen. What’s your take on this scale of denial or over-optimism that is gripping our leaders at the moment?
I wouldn’t characterise their attitude as one of optimism. I think their attitude is veering more and more toward desperation all the time, but it’s a failure of imagination. They cannot imagine a Plan B. The only definition of success in their lexicon is more economic growth as in what we saw during the mid-20th century. Of course, that’s just not on the cards. That presents an impossible situation for them. All they’ve managed to do so far is – and here it’s not only governmental leaders but also heads of central banks – to create a few years of fake economic growth through massive deficit spending and quantitative easing and so on.
That’s staving off economic collapse, but it’s certainly not capable of returning us to the glory days of easy economic growth. I think there’s a general understanding that this can’t go on forever, that there are inherent problems to deficit spending and central bank enlargement of the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve. That can’t go on in perpetuity, but what else do they do?
I described this in one recent essay as fingers in the dyke. With unconventional oil and with quantitative easing and deficit spending, we’re managing to maintain a façade of normality, at least for a large segment of the population. Certainly not for everyone, because every year more and more people fall off the edges of the table. But at what price, in the long run? The longer we try to maintain this false normality, the higher the cost in the end. The worse the crash will be once these back stops fail.
The latest book you’ve written, Snake Oil, has been looking at the whole fracking explosion, which in the UK has been a thing that the government is grasping on to, assuming that the same thing that can happen in the US can happen in the UK, and that’s how the economy is going to be got going again. But you argue there that actually fracking is a bubble, a very dangerous bubble. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
Here in the US, there has been a very substantial increase in natural gas production as a result of the application of hydro-fracking to shale deposits. However, there are only a few geological formations where this can be applied and in each of those there’s only a small core area where production is prolific and profitable. The drillers have, except for one, pretty much drilled out all of those core areas and production is dropping. The Barnett, which was the first of the shale plays, where it all started in Haynesville was the largest and most productive.
Before the end of the decade, probably round 2017 or so, we’ll begin to see the end of the bubble. Already, companies that got in late and missed the sweet spots are writing down assets and selling off leases. There are all the signs of a bubble bursting.
Shell pulled out of somewhere didn’t they…
Most of Shell’s assets were in liquid plays in Texas, in other words, oil. But the same principle applies with tied oil as with shale gas. We did a study at the Post-Carbon Institute called Drill, Baby, Drill. David Hughes, a retired petroleum geologist who worked for the Canadian geological survey gathered all the available data. Our study, actually, I’m very proud of it, is the best study that’s been done to date on shale gas and tight oil. It’s clear from the numbers that this is a short-term boom.
Is the same thing going to happen in the UK? I think it’s extremely unlikely. Firstly because if it’s such a short-term bubble here, is it likely to be any better there? No, probably not. But second, because the ownership structures are different. Here, it’s all private landowners who stand to make a little money from drilling leases. So there’s an incentive for people to accept the noise, the bad air, the compromise of water quality and all the other things that go along with fracking. The incentive to overlook those things is they’re going to get an immediate economic bonus from it. But in countries where some surface mineral rights are owned by the government, there’s no such incentive for ordinary people.
When people are confronted with these environmental and human health insults, there’s no reason why they should go along with it. There’s likely to be a much greater citizen backlash. The citizen backlash here in the US has been pretty substantial. A poll released just a couple of days ago showed that Americans are generally opposed to more fracking. So again, that kind of backlash is likely to be much greater in the UK and other countries.
You and I a while ago had a debate about planned descent strategies preparing for emergency. What’s your thinking about those issues there? Could you give us an update on your thinking about that?
I’d have to go back and refresh…
I guess it’s the ‘Powerdown’ scenarios, ‘Building Lifeboats’ and stuff. It seems to be that the governments are dashing off over the hill in ‘Last One Standing’, ‘Drill Baby Drill’ scenarios. But in terms of us as communities, which ones do you think we’re left with; are we ‘Building Lifeboats’ or are we ‘Powerdown’-ing?
We have to continue doing as much of both as we can. A few minutes ago I mentioned the fingers in the dyke scenario. We don’t know how long these back stops are going to last. We don’t know how long quantitative easing and deficit spending can go on for. It could be weeks: what’s going on with the US Congress and the debt ceiling right now could precipitate a global economic crash within a matter, literally of weeks. On the other hand, it could be years.
I think we have to assume that we have time to build community resilience, but while we’re doing that, it really makes sense, as families, as individuals, to have a well-stocked cupboard. The more prepared we are as households for disaster, the more resilient our communities are. If you have a whole community where nobody has any food put by, nobody has any backup systems ready, then the whole community is much less resilient. There’s every reason for people to have a sense of preparedness.
But when I say that, I don’t want to encourage a survivalist mentality. It’s quite the contrary. The big thing that the survivalists miss is that the only way we’ll get through this is together. If it’s lone individuals with shotguns then kiss the human race goodbye … game over.
You mentioned the thing about what’s happening here. I’m sure there’s no connection, but the government shut down the day I arrived. I’m sure it’s not going to open again the day I leave – if it does I’ll get a bit worried! [Editors note: it did] What are the implications of that, do you think? Where could that take this country? Could it be just a couple of weeks where people don’t get paid and then it all goes back to normal, or could the outcome of it be more serious?
Oh yes, it could be very serious. This is revealing a fundamental political dysfunction within the country. The insular, rightward drift of the Republican Party over the past three decades is really dramatic. One can argue whether a two-party system is a good idea, but in order for a two-party system to even work minimally, you have to have two healthy political parties. What we have now is one establishment, mainstream, centre, marginally centre-left but mostly centre political party which is the Democratic Party and one party that’s basically gone crazy.
It’s boxed itself into a corner but it has a die-hard base that is so radicalised and so cut off from reality that nothing is going to come between them and their cherished nutcase candidates. They’ll support them to the end. And I know that the crazier these politicians get, the more support they have. So if you look at the incentives on both sides, they need to have a stand-off, a constitutional crisis.
Surely that’s something that just happens in the White House. How does that create a knock-on that’s going to ripple through the world economy?
If they fail to increase the debt limit for the US, that will have enormous implications for the global economy, certainly for the US economy. Almost immediately, interest rates in the US would skyrocket, the stock market would crash, the US dollar might cease to be the currency of account for other countries. The whole global economic financial system would be hurtled back to the days of 2008 and possibly much worse.
How far can we just carry on going piling up those debts. Isn’t the Republicans saying let’s not increase the debt ceiling, isn’t there a good aspect of that? The party may be over, but we still keep on borrowing to keep the illusion going that there is a party. When is debt a good thing and when is debt a bad thing?
Debt is a good thing in the present instance, only to the extent that it enables business as usual to continue for a while so that people like you and I can go about our business and try to help systemically to build more resilience in society. Buying more time otherwise is not a good idea, because it just means we’re going further out on a limb as a society, from an ecological standpoint.
The argument could be made that the Republicans are doing everybody a big favour by forcing the issue, and basically forcing a global economic crash sooner rather than later. I’m a bit torn with that really.
It’s a little extreme, isn’t it? We’re sitting here in your very beautiful garden with fruit and nuts…you’ve been writing about this stuff for 10 years and been one of the world’s foremost analysts of these issues. How does Richard Heinberg’s daily life reflect those things? You’re quite clearly not one of those academics who is able to just study something and then have a life that completely doesn’t reflect that. How does all of that appear in your daily life?
My wife, Janet and I have spent more than 10 years, probably more like 20 years trying to develop as much self-sufficiency and ecological sanity in our lives as possible. We’re proud of what we’ve done so far but at the same time we’re painfully aware of what we haven’t done and what’s really hard to do.
We just have to content ourselves with what we can do. We’re happy to have friends and neighbours who are supportive and we try to encourage them also and work with them on all sorts of interesting local efforts like creating community energy and so on. Is it enough though? But at the end of the day, we have to do what we can and enjoy life. This life is a gift and we don’t know how many days of normal life we have. Being with friends and family, playing music, being out in the garden, spending time with nature, this is not something to take for granted.
My last question is now, looking back 10 years after The Party’s Over came out, and it’s been translated into lots of different languages, are you able to get a sense of its impact, of its legacy as a publication at this stage?
I wouldn’t want to try to be too bombastic about it. It’s one of a number of books about Peak Oil that have been written. I think it probably was one of the more influential ones, certainly it didn’t have the highest book sales and I think Jim Kunstler’s The Long Emergency sold two, three or four times what The Party’s Over did.
But I think The Party’s Over appealed to folks who were perhaps a little more open to or interested in a communitarian response to the Peak Oil crisis. I’ve met thousands of people over the past decade who are doing amazing things in their own lives and communities and I feel very happy to have had some positive influence.
Thank you. Well it certainly had an enormous impact on me anyway. And it had the best cover of any of the Peak Oil books as well!
I had nothing to do with that actually. It was all the British publisher’s doing. The original North American cover was pretty bad, actually. Then the British publisher chose a completely different cover and then as soon as I saw it I thought that’s it, we’ve got to have that. I had to talk the North American publishers into it. First they thought it was too depressing, but then the British publisher wanted money for it and I had to really insist. But of course, everyone says what a great cover it was now…
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28 Oct 2013
May East is the Transition trainer who reaches the parts that other trainers don’t reach, geographically speaking at least. She has pioneered Transition with rubber-tapping communities a day’s travel up a river into the Amazon rainforest, in Brazilian favelas, on kibbutzim. I spoke to her by Skype as she sat in the sunshine on a balcony in Buenos Aires where she was preparing to give a Transition training that weekend.
May has been a trainer and teacher for many years, based at the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland. She has been involved in ecovillage trainings and in facilitation training, driven by a belief that, as she puts it, “the destiny of the biosphere is going to be decided in the cities of the world”. When she first heard about Transition, and that a training was due to take place shortly afterwards, she had what she calls her ‘Alice in Wonderland’ moment, feeling “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date”.
She attended one of the first Transition trainings run by Sophy Banks and Naresh Giangrande, and it was a revelation. She found the merging of inner and outer Transition, the 12 Steps, the use of participatory tools, to be the perfect compliment and refreshing of the work she had been doing until that point.
May’s roots are in a range of social movements, anti-military, anti-nuclear, feminist. As she told me, “I had spent my life waking up in the morning and putting all the energy that I had to deconstruct dysfunctional patterns of society”. She now sees her role differently. Quoting Joanna Macy, she refers to herself as “a nurse of a terminal system, and a midwife of the Transition world”.
Whether you are teaching in what she calls “the Over-developed or the Under-developed worlds”, change needs two key ingredients May told me, the will of the people to effect that change and the right tools. What most impressed her about Transition training was that “it offers very effective tools that can be adapted to a wide range of different circumstances”. Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking, given the places she has subsequently run Transition trainings, that she took the “wide range of different circumstances” bit as a personal challenge.
With that, she was off, starting with a teaching trip with fellow Transition trainer Nick Osborne, to give trainings in 6 cities in Brazil, including the favela of Brasilandia. Transition took off, and went viral across the country.
She has given trainings in the Amazon rainforest. May is herself related to one of the indigenous peoples who live in the Brazilian rainforest, who are related from early rubber tappers who settled between the two world wars. Although the rubber tapping ended, the communities remained, embedded in the forest. They had set up an embassy in a nearby city, The Embassy of the Forest People, and asked her to be their cultural attaché!
Gaia University had been invited to run their Designing for Sustainability training, as the community had been rather forgotten by development for many years apart from some aid, but were now being offered aid for houses and for 3000km power lines to reach them. The question they were asking was “what kind of development do we want?” When May arrived to teach the course, thinking that it would be the ecovillage material that was most relevant, it actually turned out to be the Transition training that people needed the most. So what, I asked her, came out of the training, what did it lead to?
What is it, I wondered, that she gets out of teaching Transition in this way? “Sometimes”, she told me, “there are critical moments when your input as a trainer can be very effective, when people have reached a certain point in thinking about these issues, and the tools and processes that the course gives them allows them to make better-informed choices about their future”. As an example she mentioned Friburgo in Brazil, the town that suffered the appallingly catastrophic mudslides in January 2011 which led to the loss of around 500 lives and the destruction of much of the town.
“What usually happens in these tragic situations”, she told me, “is that such a crisis attracts funding and aid money, but if the local economy is acting as a ‘leaky bucket’, with most of that money pouring back out again, it does not effect or enable any sustained change”. She was part of a team leading a Transition training in a town close to Friburgo when the disaster happened. The group put out an offer that anyone from the town could come and be part of the training free of charge, an offer a number of people took up. As a result, Transition is now one of the key approaches that is being used in the rebuilding of the town.
What, I wondered, did May consider to be the unique quality of Transition training?
One of the challenges many Transition initiatives encounter is how to sustain the momentum after the initial glowing feelgood phase. For May, one of the key things is the ability to step across into turning the ideas coming through Transition into social enterprises. If Transition remains a hobby, not our main job, then it will always be struggle. As she puts it, “we have to enable the possibility of putting both feet into the Transition paradigm”.
Lastly, having trained for a long time, and having delivered many trainings, I was intrigued to know what it is that she think makes a good trainer?
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