11 Dec 2013
It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s just that I never really got the whole keeping fit thing. I share an office with people whose idea of a good time is running across Dartmoor at night with a head torch on, hours in the gym or cycling across mountain ranges in the snow. Never quite got the appeal myself. But what might it take to get this slightly overweight 40-something up and out and exercising? Reading about the risks of not? No. The enthusiasms of exercise-hardened colleagues? No. The near-fatal heart attack of a very dear friend? … Where do I sign up?
I cycle to work and back, a journey that involves a pretty impressive hill, but that’s about it. Most of my days are spent behind a desk, typing. Not conducive to good health, given that sitting down can lead to an increased rate of a range of health problems, including blood clots on the lungs. Yuk. When I’m home, the daily doings of family life keep me on my feet most of the time, but it’s not enough really.
I did try running a few months ago (whatever happened to “jogging”? It seems to be definitely “running” now…), inspired by my office-mates and their tales of the mythical moment when “the endorphins kick in” and you feel amazing. I tried it for two weeks. A distinct lack on endorphins. Lots of puffing and panting in a sweaty blather, looking faintly ridiculous, my body letting me know in several different ways that it really was not enjoying this, until I pulled a muscle in the back of my leg and my career as a long distance runner was prematurely laid to rest. I wasn’t too sad about that, if I’m honest.
I tried yoga. I kind of enjoyed that, even though it was actually surprisingly hard work. I had to pay for 10 sessions, but with work commitments I ended up only making about 6, so I didn’t do that again. Apart from gardening, the odd extra bit of cycling and walking the dog, that was about it really. I used to play football occasionally at events with 12 year old boys where a few similarly out-of-shape dads could convince themselves that they were actually sort of still in shape, and reasonably good at football, neither of which were really true.
Then, two weeks ago, one of my very best friends, who I’ve known since I was 16, had a heart attack. At 46. A year older than me. If he hadn’t been at his brother’s house, who called the ambulance quickly, he may not be here today. He spent 5 days in hospital, had 2 stents put it, and will be on medication for the rest of his life. They did that amazing thing where they insert a tube into your wrist and through that can basically give your heart a full MOT, unblock tubes, install new bits and so on. It was a huge shock to friends and family, I think I’m still feeling it.
He’s the first of my peers to have such an experience. Luckily he’s still here, but he could easily have not been. Since the beginning of Transition, we have talked about how change happens. How can we bring about the kinds of change, on the scale required, to turn things around in time? We challenged the “people will only change when they have no choice” school of thought, because if it were true, there would be no recovered addicts in the world. We speculated on the approach of Motivational Interviewing, which finds that change happens when our actual behaviour and our core, foundational beliefs come into such discrepancy with each other that we have to change.
We’ve tried to model, through Transition, an approach that invites people, without the guilt-trips and cajoling, that change is more fun than no change, and for some, that really works. As someone told me the other day, “I’ve cut my carbon footprint by 60% over the past 2 years, and it’s been an absolute blast”. But I do now appreciate that there is also a place for being shocked into action. I’d known I should be doing more for years, and didn’t do it. This was the kick up the arse that I needed.
As a result, I’ve finally found a form of exercise that suits me. Swimming. Swimming’s great isn’t it? Never really appreciated it before. One of my regularly-exercising colleagues told me that when it comes to fitness things, it takes 3 weeks to form a habit. Well, I’m nearly 3 weeks in now, and it’s starting to feel like a habit. I try to go every lunchtime. The first time I went I could only swim 2 lengths front crawl before I was too puffed and had to do a couple in breast stroke to get my breath back. Now I can do 50. I can feel myself getting fitter, and more resilient when I am swimming. And yes, whether they’re the mythical endorphins or not, I definitely get something from it.
Great thing about swimming also is that you don’t need to fear looking like a big red sweaty blob, because everyone looks red and wet. It is sufficiently solitary to overcome the need for out-of-breath conversation-making, but there is also a social aspect to it. And the whole politics of lane swimming are fascinating. It has introduced my to a whole fascinating subculture of slightly out-of-shape over 40s who plough up and down the lanes every lunchtime. I love it.
For ages I had thought I should give it a go, but I didn’t have any goggles. That was my excuse. But I never got round to getting any goggles. Funny that. When I decided I was going to give it a go, it turned out they sold really good ones at the swimming pool. Just at the counter. Doh. So I guess this post is like my giving up flying post, or my I’m leaving Amazon post, it’s a statement of intent that people can hold me to, that I can hold myself to.
So yes, people, I am now a swimmer. I will do it in whatever lunchtimes I can. I don’t want to drop dead at 46 thank you very much. In the same way that I don’t want a world that has warmed by 4 degrees, a world run by Amazon, a world where the NSA have access to whatever personal data they feel might come in handy at some point, a world that thinks depending on cheap oil into the indefinite future is a smart move, I don’t want to live in a world where I keel over in a few years. It’s time to do something about it. Being of service to these times requires a healthy body to get you around.
Life has given me a kick up the backside, and I intend to be propelled forward by it. And thanks Iain, delighted to have you still with us mate.
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10 Dec 2013
What would our food system look like if the impacts of production on the environment and on public health were taken into account? At present the polluter doesn’t pay, and those producing food sustainably are not rewarded for positive outcomes. How might things work if the true costs of agriculture were taken into account? Tamzin Pinkerton, Food and wellbeing Editor for Transition Free Press, recently attended the True Cost Accounting in Food and Farming conference, organised by the Sustainable Food Trust at the Royal Geographical Society in London. It described itself as “a unique opportunity to discuss the development of a new economic model for a sustainable future”, and featured a great programme of international speakers. So how was it? Over to Tamzin:
“I arrived at the National Geographic Society, the beautiful South Kensington conference venue, early last Friday morning. For two days prior to the conference, many participants had been attending workshops and brain storming sessions together, so by Friday the buzz of ideas and connections had already filled the space. As guests took their seats, (including familiar foody faces from the UK, international growers, writers and NGO representatives, and an encouraging number of young students), I delved into the conference literature in preparation for the day ahead.
For those of you unfamiliar with the notion of true-cost accounting (as I was prior to last Friday), it is, briefly, the idea that the price of a product should reflect not only the cost of production and transport etc, but also the environmental and human health costs incurred to produce that jar of coffee, bunch of bananas or loaf of bread, for example. In simple terms, this would mean that a loaf made from pesticide heavy, GM wheat grown on a monoculture based farm in the US, would cost more to the UK consumer than would one made from organic wheat grown on a biodiverse farm in Suffolk.
Our current system would then effectively be turned on its head, ensuring that polluters in food production would be held accountable for the damage their practices cause. At the same time, it would mean that producers who support environmental and human health would be rewarded with tax breaks and exemption from polluters fees, while their produce would become more accessible and ultimately more profitable. Consumers would also be able to make more informed decisions about the products they buy, having a greater incentive to purchase the safer, healthier and cheaper products. True cost accounting is therefore a way of giving the environment and human health a presence and value within the economic system.
The term ‘externalities’ is used to describe environmental and human health costs currently not factored in to the price of products. An example of these would be the cost to the NHS of treating patients with obesity as a consequence of poor, modern-day diets. Further examples would be supermarket procurement practices that encourage large amounts of waste along the supply chain, or farming methods that require the subsequent clean up of water and ecosystems.
The Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) is working to promote true cost accounting in the food industry, and is also calling for more independent research to look at the nature of these externalities as well as how costs can be assigned to them. The purpose of this conference then was to raise the profile of true cost accounting, to bring together leaders and organisations in the field, and to explore ideas for action.
The list of speakers for the day was diverse and brilliant, and each one could easily have filled an entire morning with riveting stories, research results and plans of action. As it was, time was tight, but by presenting an array of fascinating perspectives the audience was definitely left wanting to find out more for themselves.
Patrick Holden opened the event by discussing the importance of stories to help connect us to our food cultures and embed our relationships to food. Prior to founding the SFT in 2011, Holden had been the director of the Soil Association for 15 years. I was particularly struck by the shift in his views about what is needed to effect change in the food industry. While he clearly still values organic farming, he now sees that all food systems need to be overhauled, and that focusing efforts on the small, organic food market alone was never going to be enough. He argues that work towards the latter was well intentioned, but naïve and overly optimistic. As a result, the focus of SFT is broader than that of the Soil Association, looking to cooperate not only with producers that are certified organic, but with all those using sustainable production methods.
Following Patrick Holden was a video message of support from Prince Charles, who had visited a workshop the day before but who was unable to be present at the Friday conference. Here is that video:
The Prince spoke of the impossibility of feeding the world on the back of weakening ecosystems. He argued that the crucial missing piece in today’s food industry is that the polluter is not held financially accountable, and that this needs to change. The Prince called for more research into finding ways of making ecological farming more profitable, and he ended on a note of cheerful optimism, saying that we do have the capacity to turn the current tide.
We then launched into the first session of the morning entitled Current Food Systems – The Hidden Costs. Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University, kicked off with his keynote address, The Need for Change. He discussed the growing awareness of the impact of farming externalities over the years since the so-called green revolution of the ‘50s and ‘60s. This led to the study conducted by Pretty and others in 1998 that attempted to calculate the cost of these externalities in the UK, (including wildlife damage, soil erosion, food poisoning etc) and the figure they arrived at was £2.4 billion per year – an amount that was in fact higher than the net income from farming at the time.
Pretty also acknowledged that this figure didn’t reflect the full extent of farming externalities – it didn’t for example, include the costs of pesticide-induced harm to human health, which would no doubt have added to the total quite considerably. It was nevertheless an important step towards assessing the true cost of food production, and Tim Lang’s study in 2005 built upon this, coining the term ‘food miles’ and exploring the costs of food transportation. The thrust of Pretty’s argument was that we need to increase yields in sustainable and small-scale agriculture. In doing so, we would protect our natural capital whilst ensuring the world’s population is well fed.
We often hear that we already produce enough to feed the entire world population, but the point illustrated by Pretty’s work on externalities, is that much of that food is produced in a way that is costly and harmful to ecosystems and human health. The focus, then, needs to be on increasing the yields of sustainable growing methods – whether through habitat design, agroforestry, mixed cropping techniques and others – to ensure not only that the environment is cared for, but also that people are eating nutritious, health-supporting foods.
Following Pretty’s keynote address were a series of short presentations by five other speakers. Professor Whendee Silver of the University of California at Berkeley, discussed the importance of locking carbon into the soil and asked whether agricultural practices can help to manage the carbon cycle so as to be part of the solution to rising CO2 levels. She argued that preserving grasslands, as carbon rich eco systems that cover 30% of the globe’s landmass, could be a way of off-setting the carbon we release into the atmosphere.
During the questions session later on, Silver also emphasised the power of word of mouth, saying that everyone at the conference was a communicator and we all have a responsibility to share stories and ideas gleaned from this conference to inspire curiosity and provoke debate.
Professor Tim Lang, of City University, followed with his discussion linking food policy and public health. Lang has been looking at the global burden of disease, focusing specifically on those diseases that are food related. He has estimated that the global costs of treatment for diabetes are approximately $1.7 trillion, that cardiovascular disease incurs $15.6 trillion and that cancer costs $8.3 trillion.
His point then, is that even if our food prices currently don’t reflect these health externalities, we are already paying for them through our taxes and our health care systems. Lang argues that we need to design our food system around ecological and public health, and that a dietary shift – away from the over-consumption of meat and towards plant-based diets – will support health and cost us less.
Next up was Peter Blom, Chief Executive of the Triodos Bank. Blom argued that our environmental, financial and social crises are connected by the practice of borrowing from the future instead of learning to build on the past, and that we need to rid ourselves of the illusion that over indebtedness is acceptable and that money will always be there. He identified three principles that would ensure environmental, social and financial success and that can be applied to any sector: transparency, sustainability and diversity.
Nadia Scialabba, the Senior Environment Officer from the FAO in Rome, then spoke about her work modelling low impact agriculture, for positive environmental impact. She discussed how organics currently internalise the external costs whereas conventional agriculture does not, and how this skews consumer choice and leaves little financial incentive for a shift to sustainable farming methods. And, in the current system, food prices have been so prohibitively high for millions, that it is unrealistic to expect them to pay the cost of natural resources on top of those prices. A new system is therefore necessary. Scialabba also emphasised the huge gap between knowledge and action – that numerous case studies exist proving sustainable methods can produce healthy yields etc, but that action is yet to follow in any meaningful way.
Lastly, Guillermo Castilieja of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation spoke about his conservation work in the Amazon, the role of funding organisations, and the need for collective, multi stakeholder action if we are to effect change in the food system. After a brief (organic, fair-trade) coffee break, the next session followed under the title of True Cost Accounting in Practice. This was where the idea of true cost accounting began to come alive for me, as we dug deeper into the realities of externality costs as well as the complexity of attributing costs.
Dr Pete Myers, the founder and CEO of the not-for-profit organisation Environmental Health Sciences, was the first to speak. The focus of his research is a matter close to my heart, and looks at the human health consequences of chemical contamination in our environment, particularly from agricultural pesticides and herbicides. This is an area that highlights the need for far more research into farming externalities, as Myers pointed out that only the tiniest amount of chemicals have been subjected to independent studies and only a fraction of studies currently connect the cause and effect of widespread chemical usage in our environment. Much headway has been made in recent years however, particularly in the field of epigenetics, exploring endocrine disruption as an effect of chemical exposure and how events in the womb play out over a person or animal’s lifetime.
Myers emphasised the point that low doses do matter, citing studies conducted on mice that show how the most minute traces of hormone disrupting chemicals can cause obesity. Worryingly, Myers also pointed out that the tools we currently use to assess what is safe in the chemical world, are deeply flawed and based on out of date science from the 1950s. I was thrilled that Myers was included in the line up though as I often feel this is a crucial, but much neglected and misunderstood area of the debate around food – one that does however, have an important role to play in the true cost accounting approach.
Nadia Scialabba then spoke once more about her FAO report, published earlier this year, that looked at the environmental impact of food waste along food chains across the world. This is the first, large-scale study of its kind into food waste and its findings are staggering. They calculated, for example, that the cost of food waste, based on producer prices, is $750 billion USD per year. The full summary of this report can be downloaded here.
Tristram Stuart, the food waste campaigner and founder of Feeding the 5k, next spoke on the same topic of food waste and the costs it incurs. He estimates that a 1/3 of all food produced is wasted, and calculates that if the land used to grow this food were simply left untouched, we would sequester 26 billion tons of carbon in its soil. Stuart is particularly keen on the idea of feeding food waste not fit for human consumption, to pigs. This is a practice currently banned by the EU, but one that he argues would be 67% more energy efficient than passing it through anaerobic digesters. Stuart also pointed out that food companies are so concerned about their brand image, that forcing them to internalise the cost of waste through a true cost accounting mechanism would have a dramatic, positive effect on their practices.
Adrian de Groot Ruiz, Executive Director or the organisation True Price, then took the stage to discuss the methodology of calculating the true cost of food products. Together with the SFT, True Price conducted a study on the price of coffee produced in Brazil, comparing true cost pricing of conventional and sustainable coffee products. They found that, by factoring in the cost of all externalities present in the production methods, a 250g pack of conventionally grown coffee (with a current retail price of $2) would have the true price of $5.17. By contrast, the true price of a 250g pack of sustainably produced coffee, was found to be $4.58.
De Groot Ruiz added though that as these sustainable methods improve in efficiency and yield, they estimate that the true price of the same pack of coffee could be reduced to $3.79 by 2018. This was a fascinating breakdown of how true cost accounting would work. The gap between current, cheap retail prices and true prices assigned to the more sustainable option, remains however. How this can be addressed in the context of increasing levels of food poverty around the globe, is an issue that was raised a number of times during the day and is one that clearly requires much careful research and attention.
Last to speak in this session was Helmy Abouleish, managing director of SEKEM, an organisation that works for sustainable development, community building and biodynamic farming in Egypt. I found his story particularly inspiring and he delivered it with passion and humour. Abouleish inherited the vision from his father of reclaiming desert soil, whilst also tackling social and economic challenges faced by Egyptian society. He quoted Mandela saying that ‘It always seems impossible until it is done’, and despite much scepticism, they have, since 1975, created communities and lush, productive farms in what was formally a barren desert. Abouleish explained that their focus on producing rich, nutritious compost and protecting the living soil, means they use 40% less water than their neighbours. The scale of their vision and extent of their achievements is quite staggering – do have a look at their website to get a full picture of the many projects they are engaged in.
By this point, my head was bulging with inspiration, and I spared a thought for the hard-working graphic designer, busy capturing the day’s highlights on a very long piece of paper running alongside the stage. Below is the first section of her work – I am hoping the full piece will be posted on the SFT website soon. Once this last session ended, off we all went to enjoy a delicious organic lunch that would sustain us through the afternoon.
The first session after lunch, Ecosystems and Food Systems: Valuing the Connection, began with a talk by Pavan Sukhdev of the global initiative, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). Sukhdev, an environmental economist, has been leading TEEB’s work to assess the value of what they refer to as ecosystem services – those mechanisms within our ecosystems upon which our economies depend. One example of this would be the crucial role that bees play as pollinators, and as Sukhdev pointed out, ‘No bee ever sent you an invoice’. That was my first favourite quote of the day. My second came later in his talk when he described externalities as ‘the biggest free lunch in the history of the world’. He described how, for example, the true costs of cattle ranching in South America are actually 18 times higher than the apparent costs.
TEEB also works to determine the cost of the loss of biodiversity and of environmental damage, and their aim is to ensure their findings are incorporated into decisions made by businesses and governments across the world. Sukhdev argued that the reason change isn’t happening on any grand scale is simply because the changes needed to protect our environment and health do not, in our current system, increase profit for corporations. He also referred to the work of the organisation Trucost, who are collecting data and attributing cost to the externalities produced by practices of the top 3000 global companies. In closing Sukhdev was keen to draw attention to TEEB’s recently initiated study on agriculture and food, a scoping workshop for which will be held in January 2014. See here for more information.
Following Sukhdev’s talk were three brief presentations by leaders in the field of conservation. Peter Seligmann, Chief Executive of Conservation International, began by focusing on the role of corporations and their relationship to conservation work. He was broadly optimistic about the shifts happening within corporations, which he saw as being driven by enlightened self-interest and a growing awareness of their own dependence upon the health of the environment. This elicited some scepticism from members of the audience, but Seligmann remained firm in his outlook as he spoke of the growing desire amongst corporations to act as partners with, rather than predators of, our ecosystems.
Ann Tutwiler of Biodiversity International then followed, with a stark picture of the rapid decline in biodiversity in recent years. She began by describing how of the 250,000 globally identified plant species, 7,000 of them have been used by humans throughout history, but now only 3 of these provide 60% of our total energy intake. Specific plant families tell a similar story: there are 3,000 varieties of the quinoa grain but we largely consume only 2; there are 1,000 varieties of banana but we mostly eat only one, known as the cavendish; and there are thousands of varieties of rice, but only a dozen are now widely grown.
Tutwiler pointed out that the regions of the globe that are rich in biodiversity also have high rates of poverty and that this is a precarious position to be in, as farmers struggling on the bread line won’t choose to conserve their ecosystems unless they have a perceived use for biodiverse species. Lastly, Tutwiler sited some fascinating research recently conducted in post-disaster zones in Central America, that found that those farms with greater biodiversity experienced only 50% loss of crops, as compared with the 100% losses experienced by conventional farms in the same areas. The biodiverse farms were also able to recover more quickly than their conventional counterparts.
Last to speak in this session was Mike Clarke, Chief Executive of the RSPB. Clarke also presented a bleak and shocking scenario, currently faced by bird populations around the world. He told us that since 1980, birds have been dying at a rate of 1 every 8 minutes. Many species are heading towards extinction, and Clarke gave the example of the turtle-dove which, according to current levels of decline, will be extinct within 7 years largely because of a decline of wild flowers. Clarke referred us to the brilliant publication entitled The State of the World’s Birdlife, which was launched earlier this year and is available to download here. He concluded by saying that the cost of a declining link between nature and human beings is too great, and that it is crucial that the SFT succeeds in making true cost accounting happen.
After a short break, we reconvened for the final session of the day: Testing the Proposition: Debate. A panel of five experts was gathered to discuss ideas and plans for action, and was comprised of the following:
John Humphrys of Radio 4 chaired the panel and opened the discussion with a flurry of media related (and food unrelated) jokes. I was hoping this session would be a fitting end to a rich, thought-provoking day; that it would be an opportunity to digest what we had learnt, and to identify, or at least begin to discuss, what steps would come next. It did seem though that Humphrys misjudged the mood at the conference – it had been buoyant, serious and determined – and instead, by unnecessarily and quite patronisingly grilling most people that spoke, he created one of antagonism and frustration.
As a result, most of the questions that came from the audience were attempts to defend organics, local food or the SFT vision, when instead it would have been more helpful to integrate lessons and ideas that had arisen in earlier sessions. That aside, the panel were robust in the face of Humphry’s interrogations, and Gustafson was particularly eloquent as she defended the need for affordable, healthy and safe food for all.
Having now digested the day, there are a few questions that remain for me. For one, there are clearly some externalities that are easier to quantify, in terms of cost, than others. We can be certain of the cost of a short term clean up job, but how would we establish the financial cost of child labour, life-threatening disease or the extinction of a native bird species? Complications of assigning costs arise not only because such externalities have multifaceted and complex consequences, but also in that there might be a danger of reducing what is invaluable – life and health – to a matter of economics. Reframing ecology in terms that policy makers understand may push the debate into political circles, but aren’t we then ignoring the sacredness and preciousness of the ecosystems that sustain us, and the value that they hold far beyond the market place?
A further question I have is around what would need to happen to make true cost accounting a reality. It would require support and commitment from policy makers if the market is to be restructured in such a way that protecting the environment becomes more financially profitable than damaging it. And I wonder whether being so reliant on the current system and the political will within it, could prevent the radical changes hoped for by the SFT. But I am still deeply excited about the SFT vision and am optimistic about their ability to realise it. Most of my optimism comes, I think, from the strength of feeling and collective dedication to this vision, displayed from so many sides of the food debate at this conference.
I am also particularly encouraged by the broadening of the definition of sustainability that was evident throughout many presentations and discussions – one that is concerned not only with the lowering of CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but includes also the need to protect our bird populations, to eliminate child labour, to support community cohesion, to prevent the use of pesticides that cause life-threatening diseases, to halt the destruction of virgin forests, to make affordable, nutritious food widely available, and to create an economic system that values all of the above.
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9 Dec 2013
What’s it like to set off, shod only in a pair of flip-flops, with only as much “stuff” as you can fit in a rucksack, to spend months walking the land in search of Tales of Transition? In 2010, through wind and rain, sun and sleet, Steph Bradley journeyed forth, and she has now gathered the experience into a new book called ‘Tales of our Times’. A book given physical form by artists, bookbinders, printers, and even felters. We caught up with Steph to find out more:
So Steph, you set off around England, visiting Transition groups, to gather and tell stories. Can you tell us how this walk came about?
Well, whilst I was working with Transition Network from 2008 -2010, I became very inspired by the stories pouring in on a daily basis from people all over the country, having fun, doing Transition. I’d been down to visit my parents for a weekend and quite literally had a dream in the middle of the night that mapped out the whole journey for me. The dream was very precise; to hear the stories for myself by walking from initiative to initiative, visiting a wide range of settlement types, and talking to different groups of people at different stages of Transition.
Once I’d collected the stories they were to be written up in such a way as to inspire people of all walks of life all across the world.
What was the over-riding impression you came back with?
That what people love, more than anything else, once their basic needs have been met, is to be of service to something greater than themselves. I discovered they are happiest when given opportunities to be generous, spread abundance evenly, and to work towards creating meaningful changes in situations and environments to which they have developed a connection. They feel most empowered and thrilled to do this when they have a sense of having, or being able to access, the skills and resources (both inner and outer) to be able to act effectively.
What were the main challenges you had to overcome during the journey?
It was a journey of few challenges, to be honest. There is something timeless and simple about walking with hedgerows as your companion each day. It is a very powerful experience and the challenges of everyday life fade into insignificance very quickly. I can remember a few occasions when I had to work hard at remaining in the moment with my walk though; mud, when a foot deep, is definitely a challenge for flip flopped feet (it only happened once; I soon learnt to avoid heavily trampled paths), and cows, inquisitive souls that they are, frightened the life out of me, on occasion.
They may be gentle in nature, but in physique they can be plain insensitive and clumsy, and they are bigger than us! Poor transport planning was probably the most challenging aspect of the walk. Leaving Leicester city centre on foot is not an experience I would care to repeat. I think the final thing that did have an impact on me was lack of contact with like-minded people in the stretches I walked where I had not identified a Transition, or similar group, to present their views of the area.
What did you take with you?
I carried one small green rucksack with a change of clothes; waterproof trousers, a netbook for writing up my blogs, a tin of Lush nettle all purpose soap, (it’s amazing for showers, hair, and clothes washing). I also wore a bumbag with my second hand blackberry, a pen, hankerchief, purse, & notepaper inside. I was lent a wind shirt, (an incredible 100g light windproof top that fits into a bag the size of a fist), and a pair of walking sticks, given a whistle, and bought one pair of knee length rainbow coloured socks along the way, because they reminded me of someone. I wore everything else, layering up skirts and tops when it was chilly and keeping the extras in my rucksack when it was hot. I walked in a pair of flip flops, and had a spare pair in case of emergency, along with a pack of sorboskin blister plasters.
Our theme on the website this month is ‘stuff’. How did living for months with just what you could carry on your back affect your relationship with “stuff”?
It’s funny, I was just talking about this the other day. I found walking with everything I needed to be a very freeing experience. It made me really hone down what I could comfortably carry. It was very satisfying learning how little I needed and I loved not having the pressure of buying “stuff”. It was liberating to walk around town centres observing rather than being drawn by the consumer magnet.
It changed my way of approaching shops for good. I now go out with very clear ideas of exactly what I am looking for and I search for that; nothing else distacts me. If there is something unusual and worth my while, I can identify it, rather than being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of “stuff” on offer.
One of my favourite games if I am in a town centre nowadays is to count how many kinds of chain stores I no longer have any need for and would not miss if they simply disappeared overnight.
You’ve just published your reflections on the journey, ‘Tales of our Times’. How was the process of creating the book, and what are your hopes for it now?
Publishing “Tales of Our Times” has been a journey in itself. From the decision to self-publish to ensure the use of local artisans, and retain control over presentation, design, content, and materials, to actually having 200 books to sell, took 6 months. I learnt so much; I wrote about the process of printing a book in my blog “A visit to the Bookmakers”. The real learning, though, came in the first hand experience of understanding the true, and often hidden, cost involved in creating anything; the creatives’ (writer, illustrator, cover designer) and the artisans’ (printers, stitchers and binders) time coming in as an-also-ran as the cost of materials and any associated costs pushed the cost of producing the book up into the sorts of figures that immediately put its purchase out of reach for many.
The finished book has been described as a real treasure and a modern classic. To quote NEF’s Perry Walker:
“The book is a delight, a work of art, and a pleasure to hold and to browse.”
My ambition for the book is to see a copy in every Transition Initiative, to inspire new ideas, to re-awaken those feeling bogged down in challenging situations, and to remind every Transitionista everywhere that they are a Hero of Our Times; a living part of our history, which is why I have chosen to retain what is essentially an oral rendition of the tales as the style of the book.
What is the role of storytelling for Transition do you think? What does it bring that other approaches can’t?
Without doubt, for me, Transition is all about storytelling. Not only are we creating new stories for a paradigm shift, but also remembering the old stories, passed down to help us to retain connection with our roots.
Oral storytelling has always been the most effective way of ensuring certain essential truths are passed down through the ages. What I discovered as I walked and shared stories from one initiative to another was that people were not only enchanted by the folktale rendering of the stories, they were remembering them in a way that is often not possible when presented with a set of facts and figures, graphs and charts. For many, often those with more dominant right brain activity, the stories were able to teach things a powerpoint presentation or a report could not.
For me, one of the reasons for Transition’s worldwide appeal is the positive ‘it’s- fun- and- everyone-can-be-a–hero’ message. Capturing this element of Transition is something that storytelling can do as effortlessly as people are discovering it is to make Transition projects begin to happen when they are passionate about them.
From seeing Transition in so many different places, what’s your sense of why it matters, what it brings, what people get from it?
Without doubt, Transition empowers people. It’s a creature of its time. As old structures show their cracks, and fear and apprehension about the future rear their heads, the idea that anyone can make the changes we all want to see, sets us free from the bondage of the hierarchical system we have lived as part of for so long. It’s a collaborative process being created as we go along. It challenges out moded ways, questions deeply held beliefs, and offers opportunities for everyone to shape the future, together. It aims to ensure no one’s voices are left unheard, and that we take with us into the future everybody’s skills and resources in such a way that all feel they can serve their community in a meaningful way.
People are enlivened by the process of working together towards needs meeting goals that are personally satisfying, as well as life enhancing for their communities, for the global community, and potentially paradigm shifting.
What’s next for you?
Well, I have 180 beautiful limited edition hardback books left to sell, and I am writing my next book. It will be a paperback version of the tales. I am in discussion with the publishing cooperative Vala in Bristol, and am also going to be crowdfunding its production. I feel strongly that my walking project will not be complete until the paperback book is widely available.
So why go for the limited edition when there is a paperback version coming out?
The hard back book which is already available from my website and from Arcturus bookshop in Totnes, has been written in honour of all those Transitioners who were active in and before 2010; a lasting testament to their work, something to share with their grandchildren. Every person who I came into contact with on that walk is mentioned, many with a story character name, and with all the people and groups listed in the comprehensive thanks pages, and handy information boxes that pop up here and there throughout the folktale telling pages, it also serves as a valuable resource for those new to, and/or researching Transition. To this end one copy has already gone winging its way across the ocean to inspire the good folk of Transition Vermont, and another is in the hands of a PhD researcher from the University of London.
The paperback, though it will take the “Tales of Our Times” as its structural backbone, will be altogether a different book. Its aim is to fulfil the last directive of my dream; to spread the tale of Transition across all walks of life and in all directions, reaching people who might otherwise never consider picking up a book which they might perceive as having a green agenda. It will be much shorter, have a tighter novel like storyline, be multifacted in the layers of meaning that can be understood, and designed to be picked up and enjoyed as simply a good read; an antidote to what Sarah Bird of Vala Publishing describes as ‘that perennial problem of only preaching to the converted.’
Lastly, how can Transitioners support this project?
[Here is the video from Steph’s recent book launch event in Rattery Village Hall]
All proceeds from sales of the hardback book, once the costs I incurred during publication have been met, will go towards funding the writing process of the new book. I am passionate about making this dream come true, and am believing in the possibility of receiving the support I need to make it happen. For anyone who feels they are in a position of being able to offer some of this support, I have set up various payment choices on my website ranging from sponsoring me a one off or regular amount, buying their copy of the limited editon collection of all the tales, to investing in a £2 raffle ticket for a draw to be held at my next storytelling event in Totnes on the 18th December.
Also for those who would like to hear me perform my tales in their area, I am planning a storytelling tour for early next summer. I will raffle a book at each venue. I can be contacted on transitiontales@googlemail.com.
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6 Dec 2013
The mental image we were brought up with of Santa’s workshop was of hoards of elves working away making new stuff, painting wooden trains with paintpots and so on. But what if we were able to shift that image, and instead tell our children that the elves aren’t making stuff, they’re repairing it? That Santa’s crack team, with their little screwdrivers and soldering irons, were breathing new life into tired laptops, mobile phones with cracked screens, and TVs with buttons missing? That new vision already exists, it’s called a Restart Party. We caught up with Ugo Vallauri of London’s Restart Project to find out more.
I started by asking Ugo to explain what the Restart Project is. He told me:
“The Restart Project is a new social enterprise in London creating a network of community repair events in the UK and abroad, helping people to regain skills around the repair and reuse of small electrical and electronic objects and devices, and developing and delivering services to businesses based on the same concept.
We bring repair back to the mainstream by creating engaging opportunities for teens and small organisations through team building and to learn about engaging ways to bring together teams around discussions and repair and reuse of objects.
My colleague and co-founder Janet Gunter we worked, both of us, in international development for many years. I was living for a few years in Kenya where the repair culture has obviously never died and in fact is thriving. No-one would ever dream of throwing something away. I was working in an area which tries to bridge international development with the use of new communication and new media technologies [here is a good video introduction to Restart].
All these projects always involve, in one way or another, bringing technologies to the developing world. Every time I came back to Europe I had a sense that the more technology we were bringing to other people, the more we actually have to question how we use this technology in general back home, and how non-resilient our technology is, in terms of continuously upgrading and moving on, always being excited about the next big thing; the new technology, the new tablet, the new printer and not really having the same approach. Particularly for people that care about the environment and climate change, not having the same approach we have, for example, around food.
We want to know everything about where our food comes from but the same people might be people that instead keep upgrading their phones or their laptops and not sure about what is involved in the manufacturing and disposal of these objects. That’s where the idea really came from.
If people came to visit, what would they find? Where are you, what happens, what’s your place?
We have an office in central London. We don’t really exist here in the same way we exist through our events. Our events are all pop-up events that happen in all kinds of different places where a network of volunteer repairers, experts, coaches with all kinds of technical skills help all participants at our Restart parties in resuscitating devices that people had lost hope on.
Giving a second life to things such as toasters, printers, tablets, laptops, mobile phones and the like. We have hosted such events in all kinds of places, from community centres to pubs, art galleries, schools, universities, even in a church in North London.
How fixable are things nowadays? My sense is that most people’s experience is that you can buy a printer for 40 quid and they go wrong so easily. Can you actually fix those things? Most people would just throw it away and get another one.
Most consumer products that we use today still are fixable but obviously manufacturers have made certain compromises and trade-offs in the way they miniaturise products, which has led to consumers accepting certain products non knowing the trade-off that they were accepting. So in many cases we can still fix quite a lot of things.
However, the cost of doing that, if you were to pay someone per hour to do it, would not be comparable to buying a new product, which is also due to all the externalities linked to the disposal of products and the manufacturing of them, and the whole distribution networks are not taken in to consideration, not to mention all the technological costs linked to production, rare materials, disposal and appropriate disposal [here is Janet Gunter of Restart speaking recently at TEDx Brixton].
Even when we accept that things are recycled and disposed of in ecologically approved ways, we really often don’t realise that a lot of the substances go through a massive shredding process where we are led to believe that recycling is the right thing to do. We really should be questioning this and focusing more on reuse and repair before we even consider recycling.
What does the time you’ve spent taking these devices to bits and trying to reuse them tell you about the mindset of, and the pressures on, the people who design them in the first place?
Certainly designers are aware of the trade-offs. In my experience it’s quite easy to agree with them that things could be done differently. But the pressure they are put under by whoever does the brief reduces their chances of having a say when in comes to making decisions that could change the upgradeability of products. If you look at today’s modern small laptops, the ultrabooks, the thinner laptops, nothing prevents manufacturers from making choices that would make it still possible for users to upgrade their products, for example by increasing the amount of RAM memory after they are purchased.
Some manufacturers, the majority of them actually, are now soldering the memory to the motherboard of the computer which means you no longer have the freedom to change the memory or increase the amount of memory, let’s say after two or three years use of the product. That is not really due to a need to further reduce the size of the product. In fact there are comparable products that don’t make that kind of trade-off.
How do you find or train people who actually have the skills to be able to repair these things?
This is one of the most interesting aspects. We didn’t know about this when we started. There’s a wonderful community of people out there that were basically waiting for these kinds of events to happen, to be able to be given a chance to contribute and inspire a community of users. The most extraordinary thing is that we’ve actually just promoted this event and a lot of people have come forward and they were ‘one of us’. There are fantastic skills out there. Actually, the massive projects are actually reskilling entire communities, making sure we have more widespread access to tools and to the knowledge that will help us live in a more resilient way.
Our relationship with technology is actually possible because there are people that until now were quite hidden, maybe working on the side and not appreciated for the kind of technical hardware and software skills that they had. They are extraordinarily happy to provide those skills for the rest of their communities. What I always tell people who want to start a Restart party in their community, and Transition Town or other organisations that want to get involved is “don’t worry, repairers will come”.
What’s more crucial is that you organise an event, publicise it properly, and that you have a few initial technicians that you already know. But many more technicians and people eager and happy to help will come up and share their skills. People love to share their skills. It’s really an old myth, the fact that people with technical skills don’t like to share them. We’ve found an incredible community of people who work day and night to increase this movement because they just have a variety of wonderful skills and they’re so much up for sharing them.
Is it not the case that our Western economic model, which depends on economic growth, depends also on us buying things and throwing them away? If everyone started doing Restart Projects everywhere and repairing everything and not throwing anything away, would that not bring our economy to its knees?
Clearly we see this project at the crossroads of the old economy and the new economy that we would like to see. The new economy is one that sees growth in terms of services and providing a new meaning for local economic development: one less centred around products and use and abuse of resources and one more centred around skills and people and making sense of human relationships. Quite contrary to of the criticism around this, we believe firmly in using this project to create more awareness and demand for commercial repair services as well as community oriented ones.
We are looking at models where the use of new resources and the disposal of old ones only happens when people are empowered to make that decision. So they will go out and buy a new computer or a new mobile phone when indeed it is what they need and not what they’re led to believe is the right thing to do.
Obviously this is a model that scares a lot of people because it implies a rethink of how we create value. Currently we create value, funnily enough, out of the disposal of electronic waste. There’s what we call the outer circle of the circular economy which tries to make products more easy to disassemble at the end of life, as opposed to focusing on what’s really crucial for us, which is making products easier to repair so that less waste is generated to begin with.
In this way we create more value and more jobs around the repair of things at a community level, where it’s cheaper, there’s no shipping back and forth, and we can rebuild more meaningful relationships considering specifically that our high streets, as we all know, are dying. So many shops have closed and so many spaces are empty and this we see as an opportunity to really reinvent how this service is delivered and redefine creative values to our goods here and now.
What’s the relationship been with Transition? There’s some connection between yourselves and Transition Brixton, am I right?
There’s been connections with Transition both in Belsize where I’m from and Transition Brixton and we’re now talking to other groups. We’ve done an event together with Transition Dartmouth Park, one with Primrose Hill, one we’re discussing with Kensal to Kilburn and we’ve been in touch with other Transition initiatives across the country who want to get involved and replicate the model. We see this as a great opportunity, because the Restart party, and you’ll find more information about this on our website therestartproject.org.
Restart is a format that every organisation can incorporate and reuse locally as long as it’s kept as a free event supported by donations but open to everyone and very inclusive, as well as being centred around joint learning between people who repair and people who want to learn how to repair the things that they have broken at home.
We see a fantastic opportunity to help Transition Towns use a format that will bring them a new way of getting in touch with their local community, both in terms of new types of volunteers who might not have had a chance to share their skills and not seen themselves as valuable resources for their communities. It’s also a way to create events that speak to a wider portion of society.
What we noticed during these community repair events is that there is an easy way to talk to people of all kinds, from people who really care about the environment and see it as a matter of principle not to throw things away, to people who might not be able to afford a commercial repair and have been harder to reach out to for whatever reason.
The nature of popping up in all kinds of different venues really helps create a dialogue with a much wider set of groups in the communities around us. We’d love to collaborate further with the Transition movement in establishing many more Restart parties across the world.
You talked about how you see and how you’ve planned and designed Restart as being a social enterprise. Could you tell us a bit more about that – how do you see this becoming something that’s able to be financially self-supporting and create livelihoods for people and so on? What’s that model?
We’ve just launched a series of services called Restart Your Workplace, and we see this as a quintessential part of our plan. We noticed that the kind of services we provide to communities obviously make a lot of sense especially in their complete, independent nature. But some of the key values of those events make sense in all kinds of other environments. So we designed a few services that we’re promoting to businesses.
One is around what we call Restart Pop-Up, which is like a clinic that we can take to any organisations for any number of hours, where community repairers will help fix and repair things that belong to employees or things that belong to the company creating a service that people can use during one hour, their lunch break, during a corporate event and creating a buzz and sharing some of our best resources and the best learnings and our wonderful repair culture.
Then we’ve created a more professional service called Restart for Teams which is based on creating a more learning-oriented half-day team building event where a team works in small groups with our best coaches learning the key skills that could transform you from a passive consumer to a much more engaged repairer, getting to know your products; learning how to take a smartphone apart and change the battery and double its future life and learning how to use the basic tools. Using this as a collaborative effort that brings things together, enhances problem solving and is also a lot of fun.
The third one is aimed at small organisations. Not-for-profits are particularly stressed about their IT costs and we help them figure out a way through our trainings to be more resilient and use what they already have in terms of technologies in their business at its best and reducing unnecessary costs in terms of hefty fees paid to an external consultant.
We see this as exactly the same philosophy as what led to the launching of the Restart project but taking some of these key elements to new audiences and reinforcing our message. We’re talking exactly how the same resilience and the same skill sharing are taken into new environments where people see value for them and helping us further develop the community services that we want to develop and provide for free to everyone.
How’s that going? Are you pleased with how it’s been developing and the interest it’s been generating?
In terms of interest it’s going great. We’ve run some wonderful pilots with a number of organisations and we are now relaunching it and marketing it more aggressively. It looks like a lot of people really enjoy this fresh approach and we are lining up quite a few events for the beginning of next year.
You were one of the businesses that appeared in the New Economy in 20 Enterprises report that REconomy did. Do you feel part of a wider new economy movement, and if so, what does that mean or look like for you?
We obviously feel part of a much wider movement. Even just in terms of repair, we’re clearly not alone. There’s an ecosystem of new services and products that are creating value in this area, from companies producing tools that help make it easier for repairers to do their work, to other projects similar to ours but perhaps without the drive to reach social enterprise status and focusing more on community values around repair.
But of course we feel very much part of this new wave, trying to create economic value around new ways of approaching environmental challenges and local engagement, local community development.
It’s very hard at the moment because it’s much easier to come up with a great idea and to push it these days with the internet to reach global visibility around that than to really create a business case for it of course. But we find it a particular time, both in terms of the environmental awareness that seems to be happening in this community and the push for a rethink of our relationship with waste, very much in line with all the social enterprises that are working around food and trying to create a more meaningful relationship between our skills and how we can create value that makes sense for our communities around it.
If you’re successful and the idea that you have really takes off and we see Restart happening everywhere, in an ideal world, what does our relationship with ‘stuff’ look like? It seems at the moment our relationship with stuff is an unhealthy one which generates disappointment and debt and waste and so on and so on. What does a healthy relationship with stuff look like?
It’s a great question, because we have just come up with a new tag line for the Restart project, which says ‘let’s fix our relationship with technology’. We are not just looking at fixing products per se, but really using this as a way to reflect on how we relate to specific objects that are so commonplace in our daily life at this point.
We believe that getting to know a product, including getting to know how you take it part, and having much more open information about where its components come from will help us appreciate in a much more detailed way and fall in love in sense with the things we have as opposed to basically having a very transient relationship with them.
The more we see groups wanting to replicate our work from New Zealand to the US, from Italy to South Africa, we have started to realise that a focus on bringing people together and solving problems at a community level helps people realise that it’s much more important to focus on what we can learn together through these objects than to be always bombarded with marketing messages trying to push to us innovations that are often just perceived innovations, not bringing any more value or better relationships with the people surrounding us.
We believe that ideally, we should come to terms with how much stuff, technologically speaking, we are surrounded by, and learning to make sense of what we have, using it at its best and learning how to repair and reuse. Not everything, obviously, we can’t expect everyone to learn how to repair everything, but to be aware that repair should always be the first option and the fact that something stops working is not an excuse to really move on and go and buy the next flash thing. We should always be mindful of the kind of relationship we have with things.
In a way, people have developed a relationship with objects, we know a lot of people who wouldn’t ever throw away an old mobile phone because it still contains memories, whether in terms of an old SMS from someone special or the memory of a time when that phone was operational. We want to help increase this relationship, just reduces the chance of having to give up on things just because of the way consumer society has been pushing us to move on without us really wanting to necessarily [lastly, here is an interview with Ugo from Smart Monkey TV].
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5 Dec 2013
I’ve done it. I’ve closed my Amazon account. I now stand before you as an ex-Amazon account-holder. I feel curiously shaky, but at the same time empowered, excited even. While opening a new Amazon account is easy as pie, closing one is another matter altogether. I’d like to share with you how, and why, I did it.
Was it the recent Panorama programme about working conditions in those vast Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’ that tipped me across into doing something? Was it the stories about the appallingly low levels of tax Amazon pay in the UK? Was it the recent video showing Amazon’s plans to be delivering across the UK within 30 minutes through the use of drones? Was it hearing the level of taxpayers’ money that goes in sweeteners to attracting Amazon to open up in different communities, while the profits generated pour out of those same places? What actually tipped me across was a conversation I had with a book seller in my town. It was that that led me, finally, to build the steely resolve needed to close down my Amazon account.
Yes, I confess, I had an Amazon account. I buy music from my local record shop, I support my local book shops, but there are times when I need a book quickly, or feel I do, and it’s just easier and more convenient. And, if I’m honest, I love getting exciting parcels in the post. And isn’t it cheap? But as Carole Cadwalladr, who went undercover in Amazon’s Swansea ‘fulfilment centre’ for The Guardian puts it:
Our lust for cheap, discounted goods delivered to our doors promptly and efficiently has a price. We just haven’t worked out what it is yet.
I’ve always had that nagging conscience that it’s not OK really, but I have just had it ticking away in the background and carried on using it on occasion. The conversation that tipped it for me, with my local bookseller, was around “what would it take for you to stop supporting Amazon?” His example was Primark, recently implicated in child labour in the manufacturing of some its clothes. We know that’s the case, but we still shop there. If we knew that 8 year olds work there, would we stop shopping there? Or 5 year olds? If we knew that every day they arrive for work they get hit with a stick, would we still pop in there for a cheap new shirt? And if they got hit 3 times, and then again in the middle of the day? Where do we draw the line?
Our tendency is to draw a line, but then for that line to slip. What swung it for me was thinking that actually, what I already know should be enough to make me withdraw my support. Also, it was thinking about where the world will be in 5 years time if we continue to give Amazon our support. More and more low paid jobs, with little Union protection, in conditions described in the BBC documentary as “… all the bad stuff at once. The characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”
We’ll see Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’ that look like a wasp’s nest, with drones flying in and out. High streets swept clean of bookshops, indeed of most shops, as Amazon spread into selling virtually everything that local economies sell, but far cheaper. It made me think about what kind of a world I’m creating for my sons as they enter the work place. What kind of opportunities will Amazon offer them, as they gut local economies and focus economic activity into vast warehouses along the side of motorways?
I give so much of my time every day to trying to create a different, more just, more resilient world, yet my shopping decisions undermine that. There is also an extraordinary arrogance to thinking that it is OK for you to fill peoples’ airspace, the sky above their heads, with your drones, delivering your products to people for your profit. What happens for a company to get so huge that that is considered acceptable? It is about getting too big. Amazon is too big. Far too big. But it clearly sees that it has only just started. That’s not good.
So, decision made, and with a commitment to source those things in other ways, I went to the website to close my account. Closing an account with Amazon is like breaking up with a girlfriend whose level of obsessive denial is such that the possibility you might want to split up with her doesn’t even enter her consciousness. It’s a fascinating process. Opening an account with Amazon is so easy. Closing an account is, as my 15 year-old son might put it, a right mission.
Click on ‘Your account’ and there is no option anywhere of “Close my account”. Nothing. Like it’s not even a possibility that it might entertain. I had to Google (and don’t get me started on them) “closing your Amazon account”. If you search the Amazon site for “close my account” it yields no results. See below:
The Google link took me to their Help section, on pages that bear the slogan “we’re the people with the smile on the box”, prompting the thought that the inside of their box-like warehouses are probably somewhat bereft of smiles. If offers you a drop-down menu under the helpful title “what can we help you with?”. Surely that’s where I’ll find “Close my Account”? No. You get a range of choices, “An order I placed”, “Kindle”, “Digital services” and, er, “Something else”. Guess I’m “something else” then. So I click that.
I’m then given another 4 options, none of which are “Close my account”. I’m asked to “tell us more about your issue”, and given another list where my option is “other non-order question”. Given that still, the idea that I might have got this far could mean I want to close my account is clearly unimaginable, I am then given an option to email, to phone, or to “chat”. So I click on “chat”, and am told “a customer service associate will be here in a moment”.
A charming man then begins to chat with me. Here’s how our conversation went:
Me: I want to close my account please. How do I do that?
Tom (not his real name): Thank you for contacting Amazon.co.uk. My name is Tom. May I know your name, please?
Me: Rob
Tom: Thank you. I’m sorry to hear that you want to close the account. May I know the reason for closing the account please?
Me: Certainly. I am appalled by the way Amazon operate as highlighted in the recent BBC Panorama programme. I am appalled at the recent story on Amazon considering deliveries in future by drone. I am appalled by the low level of tax Amazon pay in the UK. I have been a customer for years, but I feel Amazon has become too big, and eats everything in its path. It is no longer something I wish to support.
Tom: I’m sorry for the situation. For confidentiality reasons, I’m not able to close your account for you in chat, so I’m going to send you an e-mail with the information to close the account. When you receive it, please respond to that e-mail so that we will close your account.
Me: Thank you Tom. I would really like my reasons for leaving to be registered somehow, as I think a lot more people will be closing their accounts for similar reasons, and it would be good for that to be noted by those in charge. Will that be possible?
Tom: Unfortunately we will not be able to comment on this issue. However, I will send you an email regarding the closing of the account. Is there any thing else I can help you with?
Me: I am not asking you to comment on the issue. I am asking you to make sure that the reasons for my closing my account are passed on to management. If I ran a business I would want to know why my customers were closing their accounts. Is that not the case at Amazon?
Tom: Sure, all the information’s will be recorded and forwarded to the appropriate department.
Me: Thank you Tom. I appreciate your help.
Tom: Thanks for your understanding. We hope to see you again soon! Have a Nice Day!
I later received an email from Customer Support to say:
“We appreciate your feedback and have forwarded it to the appropriate team internally. We are proud to provide a safe and positive working environment for all of our associates. Information about working at our fulfilment centres can be found at the following link: www.amazon.co.uk/fcpractices“
Amazon may be cheap, but cheap comes at a cost for someone else. And, after all, much of what is bought on there is throwaway rubbish. As Carole Cadwalladr puts it:
The warehouse is 800,000 square feet, or, in what is Amazon’s standard unit of measurement, the size of 11 football pitches (its Dunfermline warehouse, the UK’s largest, is 14 football pitches). It is a quarter of a mile from end to end. There is space, it turns out, for an awful lot of crap.
Me, I resolve to buy less, but better. Less, but longer-lasting. Less, but local. The thought of where we will end up in 5 years time, 10 years time, 20 years time, if companies like Amazon continue as they are, really frightens me. It’s not good, it’s not right. It’s not about our needs, it’s about the needs of huge investors. I want a different world for my boys.
I can’t, on my own, do that much about it. I can’t insist that the UK government legislate so that, as in Holland, the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) is the legal minimum at which any book can be sold, although I think that is grounds for a really timely campaign. Because of that, Amazon don’t really operate in Holland. Bring back the RRP for books here, and let’s have a level playing field. As I say, I can’t do much, but I can withdraw my support. I just have withdrawn my support. It feels surprisingly unsettling, as one does after ending a relationship, but it was the right thing to do. It may be a drop in the ocean, but if enough people do it….
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