Transition Culture

20 Oct 2013

Letter from America #5: Fermenting Change in Brew City

Milwaukee was the last stop on a tour that in 18 days had taken me to 12 different places and deliver 19 different presentations.  I didn’t know much about the place before I went, but I have to say that it is quite possible that I saved the best until last.  The two days I spent in the city were fantastic, due in no small part to the organisation of Transition Milwaukee, and to the great stuff already underway in the city.  

I arrived at about 8pm, and went to the Milwaukee Makerspace where I was welcomed to Milwaukee by the students of the Transition Launch training that had just finished.  I was made to feel very welcome, plied with chocolate brownie and ice cream, said a few words and met lots of lovely people. 

Next morning was the ‘Brew City Abundance Tour’, billed as:

“a magic low carbon carpet ride of some of the most innovative and unique local examples of how to create resilient and resource-abundant urban systems within 10 miles of your locale!”. 

It did not disappoint. We started out in the offices of Habitat for Humanity, who have built over 525 affordable homes for local people in some of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.  Their focus is on the Washington Park area of the city, which has a poverty rate of around 40%.  As well as building homes, they also work to address issues around crime and safety.  They have built over 500 raised beds for residents, while another great local project, the Victory Garden Initiative, provides the training.

We then heard from the Mid West Renewable Energy Association, which acts as a clearing house for information about renewable energy, hosts an annual energy fair and runs a wide range of training. 

 

Then it was all aboard the yellow schoolbus and off on our trip …  

Our first stop was Kompost Kids, a community composting scheme, working with different groups to raise the profile of composting in the city. 

The good folks of Milwaukee River Greenway came along to tell us about their work looking after the river, taking regular sampling of water quality, lobbying for the water to the cleaned up, and for more public space along the river.  The Greenway itself is 878 acres of trails and greenspace along the river where it runs through the city.  It’s a beautiful space, great for walking, hiking and biking. 

 

Our next stop was the Riverwest Co-operative, whose shop is a great beacon of local food and co-operative values.  The co-op is a neighbourhood corner store committed to organic, fairtrade and local produce.  The shop is mostly staffed by volunteers, and their hundreds of members get a 5% discount on their shopping.

We also heard about the Riverwest Cooperative Alliance, a team of cooperative organisations dedicated to creating an equitable and democratic economy in the area.  They offer training, support for emergent co-ops and put on events promoting the co-operative concepts.  Lastly, we heard about the Milwaukee Area Time Exchange, a Time Bank in the city that has been running for 4 years and has many hundreds of members.

Then it was off to Walnut Way, in the Lindsay Heights area of the city.  The Walnut Way Conservation Corp was set up by Sharon and Larry Adams in 2002 with the aim of improving the quality of life in the area.  Sharon had grown up there, remembering it as a diverse community where people sat on their porches and community spirit was high.  When a new highway was built, resulting in many homes being pulled down, the place was forgotten, and drugs, prostitution, poverty and crime took hold.  

Since Walnut Way was founded, hundreds of new homes have been built or renovated, a number of urban gardens have been started, water conservation projects have been installed, and young people from the area are being trained to become urban farmers.  They have ambitious plans to significantly step up their urban food production, in order to really address issues around food poverty that blight the area.  They were a very dynamic and inspiring couple.  

Alice’s Garden, an urban farm and community garden has been in existence for 40 years, and hosts 113 family units and organisations who rent plots to grow food.  Gardeners include people from 21 different ethnicities, and the project includes 12 different onsite programme and projects.  During the year, over 600 people volunteer on the project.  It provides food for the participating families, but also supplies for 3 corner stores, 2 grocers, 6 local chefs and 3 local restaurants. 

The site also features a beautiful timber-framed covered space, used for all kinds of events and functions.  A walk around the site identifies a wide range of gardening styles and choices of plants.  One of the key roles it tries to perform, according to one of our guides, was to engage young Afro-American men in urban food production, so as to set good role models for others.  As our guide said, “this is one of the most effective ways I’ve seen of growing community”.  

But the cherry on the cake for me was the tour’s final stop, Growing Power.  Growing Power was once the last working farm within the Milwaukee city limits, with historic greenhouses and other infrastructure, all on a 3 acre site in one of the city’s most deprived areas.  They have sites in other cities, but their Milwaukee site is an amazing showcase of aquaponics, the integration of fish production and vegetable growing.  Here is a great video about it, featuring its founder Will Allen, who unfortunately wasn’t there the day we went:

 

It’s a huge success.  During 2012, Growing Power had over 30,000 visitors, over 5,600 volunteers, trained 1,700 young people to become their own urban farmers, harvested more than $750,000 worth of produce across 200 acres of growing spaces, harvested over 600 lbs of oyster mushrooms, raised 50,000 fish and much more.  They run a number of food stands and markets, supply restaurants and grocers, trainings and all manner of other innovations. 

It’s a fascinating tour too.  Based in the six greenhouses, a series of pond containing different fish species produce nutrient-rich water which is them pumped through a series of shelves on which food is grown in trays.  They grow huge amounts of sprouts such as wheatgrass and pea shoots, which are in great demand.  It’s almost year round, and very productive.  The tanks teem with different varieties of fish (mostly Tilapia, Lake Perch and Black Pacu).  Outside food is grown in more conventional tunnels, and millions of worms are bred every year in their worm composting beds …

Outside there are goats, sheep and chickens. There are bee hives …

… which make ‘Growing Power Urban Honey’ …

It’s a deeply impressive example of urban agriculture and intensive urban food production and job creation.  That was the last stop on our tour.  I then had to whizz off to do an interview for a documentary about local food, and then had a bit of downtime before the evening’s event.  

Billed as ‘The Brew City Abundance Bash’, the evening’s festivities were hosted at the Lakefront Brewery, a great craft brewery which has won awards for the energy efficiency and other ‘green’ measures it has taken.  Very fitting.  The evening began with Matt Filipiak leading a rendition of his song “It’s no Milwaukee”.  Then the Mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett got things underway, talking about the many things that the City Authority is doing to promote sustainability.  It was clear that the committment to these issues, and his admiration for the work of Transition Milwaukee, runs deep. 

Then Matt Howard, who works with Tom as Director of Milwaukee’s Office of Environmental Sustainability talked about, ReFresh Milwaukee, the city’s first sustainability plan.  Its website states that it:

provides a vision for community sustainability over the next 10 years and seeks to make Milwaukee a center for sustainability innovation and thought leadership. 

Then Felicia Hobart and the Hive sang a song about bees, and Ken Leinback of Milwaukee’s fantastic Urban Ecology Centre shared, with great audience participation, his story about when he realised that we needed to do something about the environment rather than just talking about it.  

 

Then it was over to me.  It was my last talk of the trip, and luckily my voice was still holding out.   The talk went down very well, with an amazing crowd packing the place out, must have been well over 400.  It was very enjoyable, and was followed by lots of book signings and meeting people.  

As is now customary, while there, with help from members of Transition Milwaukee, I asked people involved in the group what, for them, is Transition?  How would they describe it?

Also, why do they do it? 

That evening’s event was really glorious.  I’d say at least 400 came, standing room only at the back of the hall. A great ending to the tour.  On my last morning there before heading home, I went to the People’s Book Co-operative to do a couple of interviews, and then visited the Great Lake that sits alongside Milwaukee, which holds 20% of all the fresh water in the world.  Never seen a Great Lake before, so that was a great thing to do before I left.  And with that, I was off, heading for home.  

It’ll take me a while to digest it all, but I’d like to thank everyone who organised it all, especially the good folks at Transition US and Post Carbon Institute, especially Carolyne, Maggie, Marissa, Asher and Desiree, as well as all the great people I met on the way, all my hosts, and everyone in the Transition groups who had spent so much time putting on such great events.  And Amber, for all her great co-ordinating skills.  And whoever it was who made sure my suitcase, which was lost on my return journey, was eventually found and returned to me.  And Carol Kraco for use of three of her photos above, and Tom for ferrying me around Milwaukee talking about music. Thanks all.  

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15 Oct 2013

Letter from America #4: Five extraordinary days in California

California is vast, a nation in itself.  As a state, it actually is home to the ninth largest economy in the world.  It is home to one in eight Americans, and produces at least half of the nation’s fruit, and a sizeable proportion of its vegetables.  Its climate runs from tropical in the south, to subarctic in the mountains.  It’s a fascinating place.  When I first got to San Francisco, I had, unusually for my madly packed schedule, the rare joy of a couple of hours to myself.  I headed to City Lights bookstore.  I have to say it was one of the best bookshops I have ever been in, specialising in poetry, literature, arts, political books, alternative and counterculture publications.  It describes itself thus:

Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture’s only “Literary Landmark.” Although it has been more than fifty years since tour buses with passengers eager to sight “beatniks” began pulling up in front of City Lights, the Beats’ legacy of anti-authoritarian politics and insurgent thinking continues to be a strong influence in the store, most evident in the selection of titles.

It was great.  I spent an hour in there, I could have spent all afternoon.  

I then travelled to Janelle Orsi’s house in Oakland for an early supper with various San Francisco Transition folks.  An amazing meal of food mostly from within and around the city.  Janelle is a lawyer, doing what she calls ‘Legal Services for a Sustainable, Equitable and Sharing World’, basically doing amazing work to support the legal aspects of Transition, supporting co-ops, housing projects, laws around urban agriculture and so on.  Vital stuff, some of which is captured in her book ‘The Sharing Solution’. 

The evening’s event was to take place at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland.  Before it all began I did an interview with Tara Lohan at AlterNet.  You can read our conversation here.  The evening was being co-presented with Gopal Dayenani of Movement Generation, a group whose work focuses on the concept of ‘Just Transition’, and was chaired by Pandora Thomas of the Black Permaculture Network who is also on the board of Transition US.  There was a great crowd, people from the Bay Area and beyond. 

Following introductions, I spoke and then Gopal spoke about the work Movement Generation do, based on the belief that there can be no Transition without social justice.  Real engagement needs to be designed into groups from the start, and it is not possible to do Transition without acknowledging the struggles, political, economic and racial, that many communities face. 

Our talks were followed by a fascinating discussion about what a more inclusive Transition might look like, on the great stuff already being done but also on the long way there is still to go.  We explored the tensions around this, and the edge between Transition and activism, between Transition and politics.  It was a timely conversation, and one that opened important dialogue and thinking.  Here is the video of the evening:

After the talk there was lots of talking and booksigning and conversations, before heading off back into the city night.  The next day started with an interview on Uprising Radio in LA, part of the promotion for the forthcoming trip there, which you can hear here.  Then, with Asher Miller of Post Carbon Institute and Maggie Fleming of Transition US, I visited La Cocina, an amazing incubator for food entrepreneurs.  While there, I made a short film about it.  Here it is:

Very impressive.  The plan was then to go to The Social Kitchen, a great microbrewery and bar, for lunch, but most disappointingly, it was closed.  So we ate Japanese instead.  Then we headed for Northern California, to Sebastopol, up in the hills.  What a beautiful part of the world.  Olive groves, vineyards, orchards, rolling hills.  Reminded me of Tuscany a bit. 

I was staying with Rick Theis and his wife CJ, in their amazing house.  For many years it was a house that won ‘green building of the year’ awards.  One of the most fascinating bits was the pise walls (a French version of cob building, often stabilised with a small amount of cement, which is blown against shutters rather than built in layers like cob is.  The final result has great thermal mass, and keeps buildings cool in the summer too.  It was a gorgeous place, with permaculture garden, lots of fruit trees, solar panels and reclaimed wood.  What a spot. 

We had supper, joined by Andy Lipkis of Tree People (more about him later), Trathan Hickman of Transition US and others.  Then off to the Laguna Foundation in Santa Rosa for a fundraising event for Transition US.  Lots of people came to celebrate the work of Transition US so far, and rather than the talk I had generally been giving up to that point, Asher and I had a conversation which was really enjoyable.  Helped along by some delicious local craft beer, it was a lovely evening among friends celebrating the work of Transition US. 

The next morning started with a visit to the home of Richard Heinberg, who I imagine needs no introduction for readers of this blog.  He and his wife Janet live in Santa Rosa, in a small house with a great garden, full of fruit trees, vegetables and herbs, as well as a couple of chickens.  We had time to stop and look around, have some lunch, and to do an interview with Richard which will be posted here soon. 

Next it was off to the Building Resilient Communities, the 2013 Northern California Permaculture and Transition Network Convergence, at the Solar Living Institute in Hopland.  The event was described thus:

“The first ever Building Resilient Communities Convergence, at the beautiful Solar Living Institute, brings together the best of the Northern California Permaculture Convergence and the Northern California Regional Transition Network Conference for an action-packed weekend designed to build a powerful movement for community resilience”.

I had read about the Solar Living Institute for years, an iconic early example of scaling up strawbale construction.  I had no idea that was where we were going, so it was a delightful surprise.  A kind of smaller, Californian version of the Centre for Alternative Technology, it featured renewables, natural buildings, ponds and much more.  

And for this weekend it was home to a coming together of Transition and permaculture folks.  Beautiful place.  Sunshine.  Good people.  What’s not to love about that?  While there, Carolyne of Transition US took my iPad off and asked various people “What is Transition?”  Here’s some edited-together highlights of those …

… and “why do you do it?” …

I didn’t get to go to any talks, rather I hung out and chatted to people, which was very enjoyable.  Tried to set myself the task of walking around the Real Goods shop without buying anything.  I failed.  I was part of the final keynote session in the evening.  After an amazing supper in which vast amounts of squash were eaten by the hungry hoards (accompanied by other delicious food), attention turned to the main stage. 

After an introduction by Tathen Heckman of Transition US and Daily Acts, Richard Heinberg began by setting out the larger picture, of where we are at in terms of peak oil and climate change, and how fracking will do little to alter that picture.  Then Doria Robertson spoke.  Doria is from Richmond, California and is the Executive Director of Urban Tilth, a community based organization rooted in Richmond dedicated to cultivating a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system. Urban Tilth hires and trains residents to work with schools, community-based organizations, government agencies, businesses, and individuals to develop the capacity to produce 5% of their own food supply. 

She spoke movingly about how Richmond is surrounded by refineries, which regularly pollute the neighbourhood, and the problems with asthma and cancer that plague the surrounding community.  Last year, an accident at one of the plants, run by Chevron, caused, as she put it, “the sky to turn black”, and the resultant pollution meant that much of what Urban Tilth had grown had to be thrown away. 

Then I spoke, talking about my roots in permaculture, my love of it, and my frustrations with it too, and how the challenge of our times is how to scale it up.  I said that some groups I spoke to had a sense that money was bad, and that somehow to create a movement dependent on volunteering was somehow ‘purer’, but that there is an exclusivity to volunteering.  There are many people who cannot afford to volunteer, so it often means that only white, middle class people get involved.  As Doria said in the Q&A after the talks, “if this revolution depends on volunteering, I can’t be part of that revolution”. 

There was then a great discussion and questions from the audience, before the bands and the dancing started up, I signed some books, met some people, and then headed off into the night.  A very enjoyable event, and an amazing thing for the organisers to pull off in a very short run-up period.  

Next morning, Marissa Mommaerts  of Transition US and I flew to Los Angeles.  Approaching LA from the air is quite an experience.  It is vast.  It goes on and on in every direction.  I have never seen a city so vast.  It takes the breath away.  What’s also striking is the many huge square, flat-roofed buildings in the city.  It was hard to see them and not think of their huge potential as rooftop urban farms or as power stations.   

On arrival we went to the home of Joanna Poyourow, the catalyst for bringing Transition to LA, and a one-woman embodiment of The Power of Just Doing Stuff.  One of the first things that strikes you about LA is that the lawn is king.  It’s only when you take a step back and look at the city’s culture around how water is obtained, managed and disposed of, that the absurdity of the whole thing becomes clear.  According to Andy Lipkis of Tree People:

If ever there was a case for applying more holistic thinking, LA, and its relationship to water, is it.  Here’s a short video about Tree People’s work, and their proposal that, as permaculturists are wont to say, the problem is the solution:

On most residential streets in LA, lawns lie in front of every house, including the smaller strip between the pavement (sorry, sidewalk) and the road.  At night they are watered by sprinklers.  No-one ever really seems to use them much, they are ornamental.  Not at Joanna’s house.  Waste water from the house is channelled underground to irrigate plants.  Her garden drips with grapefruit, persimmons, all manner of amazing fruits that I barely even associate with trees (the climate here is similar to that of Israel).  LA has what is pretty much a year-round growing season, a turn of phrase guaranteed to make any British gardener bristle with jealousy.  

After some lunch, we headed off to visit the “Just Doing Stuff” festival taking place at the Emerson Avenue Community Garden.  En route we called by the local Episcopalian church, which has had a water-harvesting, permaculture, food garden makeover, supplying food for the local food bank as well as being a great resource, and banisher of lawns. 

The festival was underway when we arrived.  There was music, and stalls, and a chance to see the very impressive community garden, tended in plots by 38 local families as well as by the local Transition group and the school.  It was great to meet some Transition people who had travelled a long way to be there for the event. 

The evening event took place in the Westchester United Methodist Church.  I spoke first, and then I was joined by Andy Lipkis of TreePeople, D’Artagnan Scorza, from the Social Justice Learning Institute, Joanne, and Meghan Sahli-Wells who is Vice Mayor, Culver City and Transition core team member.  Here we all are…

 

Anneke Campbell of Transition Mar Vista/Venice facilitated the evening.  There was some great discussion about what it takes to step over into doing stuff, what it looks like when that happens.  Each speaker set out examples of where they have seen that in action, and what it can lead to.  The evening ended with a great exploration of what really scaling this stuff up will take, with some great discussion and ideas which I hope were recorded and captured somewhere. 

Then, after signing lots of books and meeting many lovely people, I headed off with the other speakers and organisers for a delicious local curry complete with local beer. 

The next day started with breakfast with Anneke and her husband Jeremy in their home which, like Joanne’s, flies in the face of LA lawn culture.  It features a soakaway from the washing machine, all manner of herbs and fruit trees, both in front of and behind the house.  An ocean of horticultural sanity. 

Her garden included what is called a ‘Little Free Library’, part of a movement across the US I had never heard of before.  The website states:

“It’s a “take a book, return a book” gathering place where neighbors share their favorite literature and stories. In its most basic form, a Little Free Library is a box full of books where anyone may stop by and pick up a book (or two) and bring back another book to share”.

Then it was off through the LA traffic, mercifully light because it was a holiday, to Pasadena, to Throop Church, and an event organised by Transition Pasadena. 

Throop Church has been in a process of Transition itself.  As Reverend Tera Little who is the Pastor at the church told me, “Transition revived our congregation”.  One of the reasons for this was the creation of a water-holding, food-producing garden built outside the church on a very public street corner.  

The place was buzzing.  There was a Repair Cafe, with sewing machines, screwdrivers and other tools being wielded.  There was a “Speed Dating for New Ideas” session.  There was a ‘Transition Town Fair’, with stalls from lots of other local groups.  

The event itself was a delight too.  I had the time to give my full presentation, having been introduced by the Pasadena Mayor, Bill Bogaard.  Some great questions and answers afterwards too.  The Pasadena group had produced lunch for everyone too, and I ate and signed books and met lots of lovely people.  

During the event, a member of Transition Pasadena kindly took my iPad off and interviewed people to ask them “What is Transition?”.  Here’s what people said:

She also asked people for their feedback following the talk I gave, and some of the answers were quite illuminating, so I’ll include that here as well:

After spending time hanging out and meeting people, it was back to Westchester.  That evening saw a gathering of some of the co-ordinators of different Transition groups across the greater LA area.  People had come from as far afield as Joshua Tree.  Over a delicious pot luck supper, people talked about their triumphs and challenges, what would help them move forward, and what they love about feeling part of this Transition thing.  It was fascinating to hear what Transition looks like (or tries to look like!) in such a diversity of settings, as well as to feel part of something that had taken root in what on first appearance appears to be the most barren and unpromising of settings.  Like many of the gardens I saw in the city though, the seeds have established and the roots are being put down.  

And with that, it was off to Milwaukee and the final stop of this great adventure. Before I leave you, I must share something that still makes me giggle.  One of the things that gets rather tiresome rather quickly is either English comedians in the US, or the other way round, who do routines about the funny things the other nation gets wrong in its language, odd turns of phrase or whatever.  However, on Joanne Porouyow and her family’s front door was the following sign …

Although once it was explained, it became clear that in the US, ‘solicitors’ means ‘hawkers’, I was left with a somewhat Monty Python-esque vision of suit-clad solicitors going from door to door in such epic numbers that people have to put up such signs.  “Who’s that at the door dear?  If it’s another bloody solicitor …”

My thanks to Miriam Brummel and Karim Sahli-Wells for use of their photos.  Also to Chris and Patricia, my hosts in LA, to Richard Heinberg for his lovely introduction in Hopland and to Anneke and Jeremy for breakfast. 

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12 Oct 2013

An interview with Paul Hawken: "We choose a path of regeneration"

I met up with Paul Hawken at the Where do we go from here conference in Rheinbeck NY. I took the opportunity to grab some time for an interview.  We discussed growth, change and the power of action.  You can either listen to or download the podcast, or read the transcript below.  I began by asking him to introduce himself to readers who may not have come across his work before. 

“I’m Paul Hawken and I’m a writer. I’ve been writing about the environment since…I can’t remember when, 1973?  So 40 years now. But also writing about the environment and business, because I have been in business all my life. My first business was sustainable agriculture and natural foods, and I went into that business for the same reason you eat the food, which is to try to change both myself and where and how food is grown, and learned a lot.  For me business has always been a way to make something happen in the world that isn’t happening that should happen, as opposed to how you sell or make money, that’s not been so interesting to me.

In the process of doing that I’ve written a lot about it. The Ecology of Commerce, The Next Economy, Growing a Business, Natural Capitalism – which, by the way, is not about capitalism. It’s about natural capital and has nothing to do with capitalism!  But it’s purposely titled in order to ensnare people!  My leftist friends go “aargh!”, but there’s no such thing as natural capitalism, not in the way that people understand it.

Schumacher didn’t coin the term, but he used the term ‘natural capital’ to refer to all those things out there, resources, resource flows, ecosystems, services that aren’t on anybody’s balance sheet. Not that we should monetise them, but we should recognise them as being extraordinarily valuable. Natural Capitalism is really about what happens when the limiting factor to human wellbeing is not human capital, you know, roads and highways and hospitals, but actually natural capital.

Like you say, Natural Capitalism is not about capitalism as such, but is it possible to have a form of natural capitalism or any form of capitalism that doesn’t depend on economic growth? Do you think that growth is conducive to the world we need to create?

It’s a great question. What I mean by that is there’s always going to be growth. But whether there’s overall growth, metastatic growth, that’s the kind of growth that can’t happen. That’s not possible. Also, we have to define growth: is it growth in stuff or growth in services, is there growth in quality or is there growth in money? Growth itself isn’t the problem, it’s what’s growing and how prosperity is measured.

Right now, as you well know, the metrics we have for economic growth are just bollocks, they don’t mean anything at all. They have nothing to do with people’s experience or life quality. They may have, at one time, I’m not saying they didn’t, but they don’t now. So it’s possible. But just as when you reach adulthood you don’t grow in size hopefully too much, but you continue to grow in other ways, I can easily imagine an economy that grows in complexity and elegance, people becoming better and more refined, teaching and learning and innovating.

I think it’s very possible not only to grow, but to grow and have a ninefold reduction in energy and material, or tenfold. To reduce what we use by 10% and to grow in the sense of prosperity, an income that is more than the living wage and that provides people with their needs and extra, to provide for those things that they want to be discretionary about in their life, that’s very possible. Right now we’re stealing the future and we’re selling it in the present, we’re calling it GDP.

There’s no reason whatsoever we can’t heal the future and monetise that in the present and work at it. When you do that, you’re creating value for future generations, and that has a present value. The way we do it is a choice by default, by a lack of imagination. There’s no reason why we can’t have inter-generational financing where we’re in a sense financing the future by spending the present by lending to each other to create value that is paid back by restoring natural capital, our land, our forests, our waterways – all those things have so much value. Those choices are there for us.  That’s still a growing economy but not growing in impact, not growing in stuff, in fact there’s a radical reduction in both.

You wrote Blessed Unrest a few years ago, which was your mapping of the movement to change the world in its wider sense. What’s changed since then? Is your sense that that movement is stronger than it was when you wrote the book or as strong? What’s your update on this?

I do get asked that, especially when Occupy showed up and people wrote “you predicted Occupy, or the Arab Spring”.  I didn’t predict anything, let’s be clear.  Nor was I trying to. What I was trying to do, starting in ’99 in the WTO demonstrations in Seattle, which is where the book arose, I just kept noticing the diversity and how these people came there and the way it was organised. It was different to protests I had seen growing up: Civil Rights, anti-war, environmental…

I thought, this is something that’s going on here.  I pulled the string on the flour bag and it just kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper. Then I asked the simple question, I wonder how many groups are out there, there must be somebody who knows. There must be a registry, you know? 

I started looking through lists of so many things and there was just nothing anywhere. I grew up at a university and Marion the librarian was a hero in our family, so I went to the library and they didn’t know. That’s when I started to get really interested and started counting. Once I started counting and realised that there was over a million organisations.  Then we got a grant from a really wonderful man to actually go in and do a typology, a taxonomy – what are we talking about here, environment, social justice, indigenous rights, what does that mean?

We started going through the list of organisations that we discovered and then looking at their mission statements, looking at ‘who we are’, the descriptions, and then saying what category they belonged in. When we started doing that, we started a category for groups about climate justice. At the time it was nascent, though not anymore. We just kept naming, naming, naming, and when it was done we had over two thousand different types of organisations that were inextricably knitted together as this movement, although not necessarily all aware of that.

From my point of view, since it was published in 2007, it continues to grow. The economic shock of ’08-’09 I think created the need for groups to work more closely together. Resources became more limited, but the need became more urgent.

If you look back to the Sixties and the flowering of movements and all that incredible diversity of movements there that flowered in the late Sixties and then tailed away quite steeply going into the Seventies, it felt to me – I wasn’t born until the tail end of it – but looking back on it and reflecting on it, that one of the key things seemed to be that yes there were lots of different groups, but there wasn’t an emotional maturity grounding what they were doing in some kind of process. So everyone just fell out with each other and got stoned and the whole thing didn’t really achieve its aims.  Do you have a sense that we’ve somehow learnt from those mistakes, that this is more mature than what happened in the Sixties, or is there a danger that it repeats the same thing with lots of groups that don’t get on with each other?

When you generalise you have to be careful.  Are you talking about England, are you talking about France, talking about the US, New Jersey, Arizona? Or Japan? It’s different in every country, the level of maturity is different. I would say that in the US, it’s extraordinarily sophisticated now, and there’s not a chance that the Sixties will happen. The Sixties wasn’t that big, it was just at the time any activism was given a lot of press. It was novel, it was different, it got news because it got news. It attracted followers or activists. There was a symbiotic relationship. You don’t really get that kind of attention now.

It’s not that you don’t have activist groups.  At the moment there’s 350.org with Keystone XL, that’s very active, and there are lots of splinter groups that have spoken out at that. What you see now is much more boots on the ground, and it’s about getting the work done. It’s not about being active, it’s about being collaborative, it’s about listening. It’s about working with communities and places and towns. It’s about really bringing diversity together instead of being right.

From my own perspective, you’re still seeing growth. But like any biological organism you’re seeing death too, it’s about turnover and learning. It’s a movement of movements and there’s no centre, there’s no head, there’s no ideology, no-one needs one nor wants one, so therefore when you talk about it you have to be really careful. You have to always be careful not to generalise.

One of the things that was really interesting in your talk today was when you talked about Pacala and Socolow’s wedges (seven ‘wedges’ representing different carbon-reducing technologies that combined could lead to the desired scale of overall reductions). I’ve always shared your sense that actually one of the dangers with those wedges is that they’re all things that other people do, or don’t do, on our behalf. Like you say, you lose agency with them. It’s occurred to me for a while that something like Transition or actually the movement in Blessed Unrest has the potential to be a wedge. I wondered if you could talk about that a little bit. 

I think the movement has a chance to be almost every wedge, actually. Not the Socolow wedges but the wedges we spoke about today (in his presentation at Omega) in terms of I think we had 92, or 102, you saw the scrolling list is not complete but these are the real wedges. The wedge thing is so linear, mechanical, [laughs] only a PHD could do a drawing like that!

I think what Blessed Unrest was trying to describe, and didn’t name, because I don’t think it has a name, is doing exactly that, and inventing ways as we speak too. Some may be considered marginal, but marginal things add up and are significant, and that’s what the wedges didn’t do. We’re brushing up on all that stuff, these are the 8, the big headliners, most of which are never going to happen. It’s like Golden Rice, 22 years and counting, it’s like the stalking horse for the GM companies: “are you going to let these kids go blind from your foolish objection of GMOs?”

To me, you’re seeing the same thing with those.  If you capture the [carbon emissions from] coal, tell me about it, but in the meantime you have to do something, and that’s why I like Transition Towns and Transition movement because it’s “let’s do it!”  What happens, as you so beautifully explained and illustrated (in your talk here at Omega) is that people know what to do. They just need the question really.They know what to do. 

 It’s not like you or me or somebody saying, I know what to do, not at all.  It’s like creating the conditions for people rise up and they want to rise up. They want meaning in their life. They want their life to be relevant. They want their children to grow up in some semblance of stability and economic security.

The movement to localise is so important. Most of it concentrates on food and other things. What Janine Benyus and I do and what she was talking about in her discussion, we’ve been trying to make a solar panel so that you can have local energy. Local means you make it and recycle it right there. You don’t go to China. You don’t go to some big company in Germany. You don’t use exotic materials, you don’t have cadmium-coated glass, which you have on 15% of all solar panels right now. You have things that are safe, and children can go to the factory and breathe and don’t cause fish to die like they do in China from solar companies. But it’s local.

When you have that kind of control over food and energy and materials, that resilience, what I would call that ‘ecological sovereignty’ with other villages, cities, towns. Now you have something really interesting which is when Lewis and Clark got to the Pacific North-West there were Native Americans there who had shells from Patagonia. From there all the way down to Patagonia people were obviously doing business. That’s why I say that commerce is sacred. Commerce is actually beautiful.  It’s when you aggregate and scale it, that’s when you get into really big problems, but when people are serving each other by their hands and their wit and their services and their craft, it’s really a very beautiful thing.

That’s what localisation does. We just wanted to create something where nobody would benefit from centralising it. Nobody can make it cheaper in some other country. Nobody can lord over you.  Nobody can lord over you with carrots! We think solar should be like that right now. Solar is not a great technology.

Jeremy Leggett has just published a book in which he tells a story about when he met Tony Blair and discussed peak oil with him. Blair said “if it does happen, it’s going to be horrible, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If it doesn’t happen, everyone will say that you were alarmist and will blame you and will vote you out as well, you’ll scare people and they won’t vote for you”.  Tony Blair’s thing was that we just have to hope that the oil companies are right. On issues like climate change and peak oil, these big, defining issues, can we expect any leadership from government do you think?

No. I think there’s another thing that I’d throw in with peak oil which is Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI). It’s not just energy. There’s kinds of energy, but then there’s how much you’re getting for the energy you’re putting in to retrieve that energy. Peak oil – who knows when that is, because you can frack the whole bloody planet. But EROEI is just dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping. The tar sands are, on a good day 2.5:1. I doubt it, given the huge ecological footprint, the damage that it’s done, I don’t read it that way, but I’ll give them 2.5:1, that’s what they say. Hunter gatherer societies were 10:1, so let’s see, we’re 25% of a hunter gatherer society!

Surplus energy is the mother’s milk of civilisation. It created towns. It created religion and education and dance and music and opera and all the things that are not about survival, but are about celebration of humanity. Surplus energy is a good thing, there’s nothing wrong with that. But putting aside carbon, putting aside CO2, putting aside combustion, putting aside pollution, it’s the wrong way to go. It’s diabolical.

Tony Blair’s comments are so interesting because there’s such a lack of leadership in them. Whether you think of it as a precautionary principle or however you wish to think about it, let’s have a no regrets policy which says, if we do that, no matter how it turns out, you’ll have no regrets whatsoever.

So energy independence, reducing our footprint, cleaning up our energy metabolism so it’s not poisoning us or others with this pollution, creating jobs that are endemic to the country or region rather than going outside somewhere, getting rid of political corruption which follows energy like flies around poop, as does war. When you take away those stakes, when you take away that concentration of power, all those things benefit from a no regrets energy policy. And if you’re wrong, your country is cleaner, stronger, more economically vibrant, more resilient. If you’re right, then look what you’ve done for others. So his answer, to me, is upside down and backwards.

Blessed Unrest was about that bottom-up movement, what it looks like. As you say, there’s no sign of any leadership coming from the top. How do those two things interact with each other? What does it look like when a vibrant bottom-up Blessed Unrest movement meets the top-down?

I think we’re in a stage of devolution of the big, centralised political institutions. They’re going to collapse. I don’t think governments are going to collapse, I’m not apocalyptic that way at all, but I think the thinking and the way it informs itself and conducts itself will collapse in maybe 10, 15, 20 years. It’s just inevitable.

I think that what civil society is doing is not trying to replace government or not trying to replace the church or the universities or venerable institutions. I think what it’s trying to do is permeate them with new ways of being and thinking and relating in the world. Government is so ripe for that because there’s no reason now to have the government we have, which is behind closed doors and good old boy and smarmy corruption, wink wink nudge nudge. It’s so outdated.

In an age of the internet and instant feedback, in an age in which we can set up new memes where people govern themselves, the ‘present-ess’ I talked about, the wisdom of the crowds, the idea that democracy is really bad. The crowd, if it knows it, has that power.  It’s very pre-considered. It doesn’t vote its emotions, it actually considers things.

Then what happens in that kind of situation is that if you have true democracy and don’t have corruption, you actually have information flowing to people which is open and transparent. From good information, people can make good decisions. If you have bad information as people do now, the decisions get skewed.

We’re going to see the bankruptcy of the existing political systems become more and more evident. I think of Vaclav Havel, he was a playwright and he and his colleagues kept practising parliamentary democracy in Czechoslovakia, under the nose of the Communist party. The secret police were always trying to find out where they were meeting and what they were doing, and they found them and threw them in jail, and humiliated them and took away all their possessions, and they’d get out and they’d do it again.

When the Berlin Wall fell, there were these people who had practised, they’d rehearsed. I feel like when you look at this movement, we’re all rehearsing, we’re all practising. What’s going to happen, I believe, is that the larger world, if you will, the world that’s asleep, the world that’s numb, the world that still has faith in the inertia of the existing system, when that crumbles, cracks, then they’re going to turn around and ask, what is working? Then you get this exponential change. You got this sudden change in Czechoslovakia from Fascism to democracy and it was a very smooth transition because people had felt depressed by the old system but they also had really great leadership.

People are practising leadership in real time, but they will be the go-to organisations, the go-to people, the go-to spokesperson, and we’ll have that really phased transition where things change overnight, very quickly. Rob, I don’t know whether it’s 5 or 50 or 15 years, I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but it’s all set up for that to happen.

This is the first time I’ve ever been to America, and one of the things that’s really struck me is the amount of flags you see everywhere.  In front of people’s houses, everywhere, the Stars and Stripes. You rarely see that where I come from.  That whole idea of people saying ‘unAmerican’ to mean a bad thing, can that degree of nationalism be squared with a love of the environment and the care ethos that we need to move forward or is that kind of flag-grasping really something that really keeps us in the past, do you think?

Well, as they say, “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels”.  There are people who are rigidly holding on to a symbol. Then there are people who are really frightened of change in the world, the people who are representative of that, gay marriage is a threat, and so on and so on. 

Then there are the demagogues and the people who use that totemic symbol as a means to insert fear and use fear as a way to mobilise. That’s what we’re seeing in America. Adam Curtis talked about that in ‘The Power of Nightmares’.  It’s taking grip, it’s very powerful here. We can imagine the end of the world very easily now, we’re all getting really good at it, the end of civilisation, but what’s unimaginable is the transformation of the world, and we have to work on that.

What you see in America is really a sunset effect. It could also be a prelude to fascism of course. Fascism was born in Germany of Versailles. That treaty was humiliating and was a breeding ground for demagoguery and too bad that Adolf went to the Wagner opera and thought he was going to be a hero and save his people.

I’m not saying America will be this way or that way. It was Churchill that said “Americans do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else” and they really do try everything else. But there is a deep core of goodness in America which is being, I think, misdirected and exploited by media, by the person outside the country, Rupert Murdoch, who’s not even American.

I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I do think that the reason the cities in the US are so effective in their government, senators and the president is so ineffective is that that’s a level of sovereignty where our difference is. The things that unite us are much more important than our differences. That’s true on any scale, even in a city as big as New York.

That’s where you find mayors who signed the Kyoto Protocol and met it and surpassed it and are moving very rapidly to making their cities the greenest city in the world. I can’t tell you how many cities I go to in the world where the mayor says “we’re going to be the greenest city in the world”!. What a great competition.  More and more now, you get elected as mayor, if you don’t have a programme you’re almost unelectable. A joke.

Patriotism can come together in a way, because people can feel like values of children and education and safety and security, autonomy and resilience are starting to all blend together in a gestalt that makes sense to those who fought the war and have medals, and doesn’t make sense to a generation who just thought those wars were crazy. So we’ll see. Sometimes I just think we could just veer into fascism.

My last question was, we just passed 400 parts per million a few months ago. The IPCC report that just came out was hardly a clean bill of health in terms of the climate. What’s your sense of the movement that Blessed Unrest captures? Is it going to be enough to turn things around, do you think?

It’s only good enough to turn it around if it doesn’t become ‘it’. The whole purpose of any movement is to become ‘we’ in the largest sense of the word. There’s no ‘they’ there. I think that the question we have to ask ourselves is, is climate change happening to us or for us? Because if it’s happening to us, then we’re victims and we’ve been screwed and got the short end of the stick. And when it’s happening to you then you’re thinking, who did that? If it’s happening for us, which I believe by the way, then everything is wide open. Everything has to change. Our hearts, our minds, what we do, what we think of as patriotic…

How do you mean ‘for us’?

On our behalf. We are doing this. We in the bigger sense are doing this. We have created a situation, this shadow of our catabolic, thermal, industrial economy, in order to wake up. If we don’t wake up, then it’s fore-ordained, roughly, what will happen.  And it’s very rough, that ‘roughly’.

For us means that one by one by one, people are waking up. It’s not like one by one by one people are going to sleep, it’s the other way around. You can easily say that we’re all losing, but no, we’re not. I really radically disagree with that. We have to really be careful not to conflate the momentum, the inertia, the concentration of capital and the corruption attendant thereon, of large-scale fossil fuel companies and institutions that are allied with them or kin to them which are benefiting from and expressing momentum that goes back 50, 100, 150 years in industrialism.

With the mindset and the economic principles that aren’t principles, or economic, and the momentum, we don’t want to conflate that with the birth of a transformative humanity that takes shape in terms of groups and NGOs and collectives and co-ops in so many different ways, to address the salient issues of our time.

People say the momentum is exceeding the effort to halt it, the damage, therefore you’re failing. I say “no, no, no, no”.  That momentum has nothing to do with growth. This started small and it’s growing, and it’s growing much faster than anything else. It started small because it started in response. You could say there’s a lag time and a delay, sure, but it’s in response.  You can’t conflate the response to the instigation that caused the response. I don’t buy into this idea that somehow we’re losing.

Are we losing  diversity, elephants?  Yes, no question, the data is robust. But when we conflate it all together, then we just go dark, and despair, and we go numb, and lose our narrative. We lose a story that’s meaningful to us. There’s a great book by Jeremy Lear, The Crow People, about ethics in the face of cultural devastation and what happens when the narratives that inform the culture and made you and gave meaning to your life are taken out from underneath you.

If you buy into this ‘to us’ and you’re the victim, you’re also giving your narrative over to that which is dying.  It may be big, but that doesn’t mean it’s thriving. It may have more and more money in the world, it may be that incomes are getting more concentrated, but that is a sign of death, that’s not a sign of life.

It’s really important that we don’t do that, that we understand that there is a deeper story that’s being enacted out, being written by you and by so many people. You’re there, I know you know it, you’re in the towns, you listen, you watch, you see. Now you’ve been here and seen what it’s like here. Of course people are marginalised economically, they’ve chosen that, they know they can do better, make more if they do this, if they gave up, they can’t give up. What you see you can’t unsee.  They’ve chosen a path of regeneration.

What I’ve learnt, I was talking about my youth today, I spent a lot of time outside because I didn’t trust the adult world, I didn’t trust it at all. What I learnt young, and didn’t have the words for it, no matter what you do to nature, burn it, scrape it, scorch it, clear cut it, extract it, poison it, the moment you stop, life starts to regenerate. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s the default mode of life. And we are life. We really are. It’s our default mode.

It’s really important that we see that and that it’s happening, that movement to regenerate. With all our ignorance, like we’ve woken up and what happened, definitely people are startled by a newfound literacy of where we are, because they’ve been lulled asleep by things and advertising and TV and all that stuff. But one by one people pass over and they wake up and that awakening is before us. That is what this is here for. None of us will be the same person we are today when we make this transition. 

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12 Oct 2013

Visiting La Cocina: cultivating food entrepreneurs

While in San Francisco, I visited La Cocina, a fantastic incubator for new food enterprises in the city and I project I have wanted to visit for years.  It describes its mission as being “to cultivate low income food entrepreneurs as they formalize and grow their businesses by providing affordable commercial kitchen space, industry-specific technical assistance and access to market opportunities. We focus primarily on women from communities of color and immigrant communities. Our vision is that entrepreneurs gain financial security by doing what they love to do, creating an innovative, vibrant and inclusive economic landscape”.

It is a great model, replicable in a Transition setting too, for bringing diverse communities into the creation of new food-based social enterprises.  I was particularly interested in the role that something like it could play in the Atmos Totnes project.  I was shown around by Michelle Fernandez, who very kindly explained how the whole project works.  I also made this short film which hopefully gives a sense of it:

Thanks to Michelle for her time showing us round, and to the other people I spoke to too, including the woman whose film I couldn’t use due to the noise from the adjoining food blender that was going at the time!

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10 Oct 2013

Letter from America #3: Something powerful stirs in Texas…

I grew up watching Dallas.  It’s a TV show with a lot to answer for.  When I lived in Ireland, I met an Irish academic doing their Masters research in architecture around the question “why is it that a culture that created something as beautiful as the Book of Kells creates such dull and horrible architecture?” (I’m sure her actual question was couched in slightly more academic language).  One of her key findings was that it can be traced back to ‘Dallas’, the TV show that arrived on Irish screens just at a time when Ireland was starting to find its feet economically. 

A trip around Ireland, especially the west coast, can leave one with the impression that everyone wanted to create their own private Southfork, a phenomenon made worse by a book called ‘Bungalow Bliss’, a pattern book for bungalows, a kind of restaurant menu of uninspired and ugly buildings (“I’ll have a number 13 with arches please”). 

So now, a week into my US adventure, I find myself in Texas.  My mental picture of the place comes from watching Dallas as a child.  Cowboy hats, leather boots, huge cars, oil derricks.  I was visiting Houston and Austin, both oil cities.  Surely searching for a sustainability initiatives in these cities would prove as challenging as searching for a beautiful home among the pages of ‘Bungalow Bliss’?  Well no.  Both cities proved to be a pleasant surprise. 

I was hosted in Houston by Mark and Kathy Juedeman.  Mark is one of the co-ordinators of Transition Houston, as well as being on the board of Transition US and a thoroughly nice guy too.  His and Kathy’s house is surrounded by mature pecan nut trees, and their kitchen contained baskets of last year’s harvest.  Delicious they were indeed.  By the way, in the UK, ‘pecan’ is pronounced in a way that rhymes with “freakin”, whereas here it is pronounced “peek-ahn”.  Just thought you’d like to know that. 

Transition Houston has a number of neighbourhood groups as well as a city-wide hub.  Activities so far have included a great event promoting cycling, a number of ‘permablitzes’ (one-day intensive make-overs of gardens), training and skillshares and tours of the homes of people who have done energy efficiency measures.  One of the things that is most fascinating to me is that a number of those involved work, or worked, in the oil and gas industry.  It’s not something I expected, but it’s logical when you think about it.  People are people, and people care about things. 

I gave two talks in Houston, both with Justin Roberts of Team Better Block.  Justin in an inspirational activist, whose work is mentioned in The Power of Just Doing Stuff and featured in a great TED talk he gave a couple of years ago.

His work has many overlaps with Transition.  The first talk we gave was at lunchtime at Rice University.  Being lunchtime it wasn’t that well attended, but was very enjoyable nonetheless.  In the afternoon I spent some time with some members of Transition Houston, discussing their challenges and experience.  It was a great group, a wide range of ages.  Like many groups, they were concerned about not engaging more people, about not having achieved what they wanted to have. 

I suggested we go round and hear about the things that Transition Houston has done that they have been proudest of, something groups so rarely do.  That took us some time, hearing the various activities that meant things to those who had been involved.  We discussed some ideas for broadening appeal, for supporting each other better, and the need to actually celebrate more what they have achieved. 

The evening’s event was again at Rice, but this time drew a much larger crowd.  This time Jason gave a longer presentation about his work with great slides, inspirational projects based around healing unloved places in short bursts of inspired activity.  One of the things from Jason’s presentation I liked was his idea that if you want to get things done, you need to ‘blackmail yourself’.  “If your apartment is messy, don’t tell yourself you’ll tidy it sometime next week, ring a few friends and invite them over for supper that evening.  You’ll get the space tidy”.  Jason’s work is great, and an interview I did with him will appear on this website in early November. 

In an unexpected and very moving conclusion to his talk, he revealed that a year before he had been diagnosed with cancer, and that his friends and people in his community had rallied round, holding fundraisers around the idea of “Build a Better Jason”, raising $25,000 towards his medical bills.  He is now free of cancer. 

For me, giving a talk in a city built on the oil and gas industry, at an event supported by the Shell Sustainability Institute at Rice University and stating that four-fifths of fossil fuels need to stay in the ground, and that the age of cheap energy is over, was an odd experience.  But it seems like it really is not news to anyone anymore.  The talk generated a great response, and was followed by lots of conversations and book signings.  Especially interesting was the number of younger people excited by the possibilities of Transition.

One of the challenges Transition Houston face is that of trying to find their niche in a city that already has so much going on in terms of sustainability.  There are all sorts of initiatives, around local food, cycling, renewable energy and so on.  The University campus contains three community gardens.  I met Dr Bob Randall of Urban Harvest, who run permaculture courses all year round, who run an annual fruit tree sale where in one day they distribute $140,000 worth of trees, set up Farmers’ Markets and a lot more besides.  Transition Houston has identified a niche for themselves, but exactly what that niche is and the role it plays in the larger picture will be constantly evolving. 

At the end of the Houston event, we asked people what Transition is, how they would describe it (my huge thanks to Sarah, who fixed my iPad enabling me to upload this video, as well as the ‘”What is Transition?’ and ‘Why do you do it?’ films I made in Portland, Maine.  Thanks also to Kathy for filming this).  Here’s what they said:

 

The next day Mark and I travelled to Austin for SXSW Eco, a huge sustainability conference in the city.  The conference took place in the Austin Conference Centre, a vast, sprawling, impersonal space, more akin to an airport than an intimate conference venue.  First thing I did was a Mentor session, where I chatted to a couple of people about their ideas and shared any thoughts I might have. 

The first person I spoke to, a young guy from Houston, began by saying “I read your book five years ago, I had a well-paid job, and after I read it, I gave up my job, and moved into a semi-derelict house…”  I was a bit concerned that he was going to burst into tears and say I had ruined his life, but just the opposite, he is now doing all sorts of great stuff, and feeling like he is living a life much closer to his values.  Phew, that was a relief …

My talk at SXSW went well, with a very attentive audience, and great questions.  The book signing afterwards sold out of books, and I met some lovely people while signing books, including a man whose first name was Sheffield.  Anyone ever meet a Sheffield before?  Nice guy.  He had never been to Sheffield, but as a child found it very exciting when he found cutlery with Sheffield written on it (isn’t that sweet?). 

It was fascinating to meet a lot of people involved in sustainability stuff in Austin.  It is a city projected to double in size over the next 20 years or so, and already has a reputation as a “weird” city, as a place that likes to do things differently.  I spoke to various people involved in that process, all committed to the possibilities of doing something different that would really put the city on the map. Their most frequent comment was that there is so much happening in Austin, but the media doesn’t report any of it, and seems unable to figure out how it might do so.  I wonder how much that is also the case elsewhere across the country.  

After a quick pop to the SXSW end-of-conference party in an upstairs club venue with a DJ playing funky rare groove breaks, above a bar called ‘Bikinis’ (where all the women serving at the bar wore … well I imagine you can guess … you don’t get that in Totnes), we were off to meet Transition Austin. 

Transition Austin has struggled to gain much traction in the city, failing to find its niche with so much other stuff going on, in the way Transition Houston has.  It has struggled to find the best scale to work at.  We went out to what has to be one of the oddest talks I have ever done.  We drove to an ‘RV Park’ (recreational vehicles, like motorhomes), next to which was a small farm/homestead.  A group of around 50 people were sat in front of an old barn in the nightime air, having an evening gathering with food and drink, to explore whether, and how, to give Transition Austin a renewed push. 

In front of the barn was a microphone illuminated with a spotlight on one of the buildings.  It meant that when I went up to speak, I could hardly see the audience.  I talked a bit about the challenges groups face in reviving themselves, and some insights from other places, as well as how important it is to avoid some of the pitfalls that can keep Transition rooted in the ‘alternative’ community, rather than stepping across and being truly inclusive.  We had lots of questions, and great discussion and conversation.  And a rather nice bottle of local IPA craft beer. 

That was that really then. Back to the hotel to prepare for the next day’s early flight to San Francisco.  At the airport, waiting for the plane, I picked up a copy of USA Today.  A glance through its pages presented, somehow, for me, the kind of mental split I have observed in most of the places I visited, in the culture here.  The kind of split you see when standing on the edge of a tipping point. 

There was an article about a study in the journal Nature predicting record heat waves in the US by the middle of the century, for New York by 2047 and 2048 for Los Angeles and Denver.  It quoted lead author Camilo Mora as saying “what’s shocking is how soon this is going to happen”. 

It also carried an article about permafrost melting in Alaska, and the impacts it is having on peoples’ homes and the regional infrastructure, such as roads, which are buckling as the permafrost melts.  Roads are having to be rebuilt with a layer of polystyrene foam beneath the tarmac to prevent buckling. 

It included this sentence:

“Alaska’s temperatures are rising twice as fast as those in the lower 48, prompting more sea ice to disappear in summer.  While this may eventually open the North-West passage to sought-after tourism, oil exploration and trade, it also spells trouble as wildfires increase, roads buckle and tribal villages sink into the sea”. 

Makes it sounds like that’s somehow a tough decision, like there’s an upside to what is, in effect, a catastrophe.  On the opposite page was an article called That Outer Space Sparkle is More Than Stardust which reported new research suggesting that Jupiter and Saturn could contain large amounts of diamonds, joining Neptune and Uranus, which have long been thought to be diamond-rich.  It ended by quoting Scott Edgington of NASA as saying that to find out for sure:

“We would have to go and drill for them.  Who knows?  Maybe this will give DeBeers the opportunity to send missions to Saturn to go find diamonds”.

The article also featured “an artist’s rendering showing a robot ship mining Saturn for diamonds in the distant future”. 

For heaven’s sake.  My favourite story though was the short piece stating that October 14^th is National Chocolate-Covered Insect Day, and that the Audubon Butterfly Garden in New Orleans will be setting up a chocolate fountain this Saturday.  I hope you will also be marking this important national occasion in your own dignified way. 

It also contained an article headlined ‘Kochs claim no role in efforts to derail health law’, in which the Koch brothers, prolific funders of climate scepticism and efforts to block any restrictions on fossil fuel use, stated that they hadn’t in any way influenced the current situation in the US, where a small minority of right-wing Republicans have caused a government shutdown which began on the day I arrived in the US (I am assured there is no connection).  President Obama’s meagre attempts to introduce some fairness into the appalling injustice of the healthcare system here is being presented as the cause. 

So the impacts of climate change are becoming clearer, through melting permafrost, record temperatures, forest fires and so on, those funding the denial and misinformation are becoming clearer, the wealth inequalities are widening, but the real danger is that people say “well it’s too late now to do anything”.  That leap from “there’s no problem” to “it’s too late to do anything” is deeply dangerous.  If this trip, and all these meetings and talks can do anything, it is hopefully to inject the possibility that there is still a window to do something, and it needs the leadership of the people, because it isn’t coming from anywhere else. That there is another way that can actually meet our needs as human beings, as well as the needs of the biosphere, and in such a way that we end up in a better place.  That feels like a desperately-needed message.  

To return to my opening thoughts on ugly Irish houses inspired by Dallas.  As we drove through Texas, one of the many advertising hoardings alongside the road was for a business called WeBuyUglyHomes.com.  Their website states:

“We buy ugly homes every day – and we’d like to buy yours – regardless of how ugly it is … frankly we couldn’t care less how ugly your house is”.

From my brief travels through the area, they have plenty to choose from.  While up until recently, the key exports from the region may have been ugly houses, big hats, oil and bars with waitresses in bikinis, things are changing fast.  There is a real sense of purpose around resilience and sustainability, a sense that the future rests in a different mindset, in an unflinching look into the future, in engaging the passion young people feel about the future.  One student I spoke to at Rice University told me how he had studied engineering there, a course designed to bring people into the oil industry, but he was committed to seeking a future in renewable energy.  “That’s the future” he said.  Indeed it is.   

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