An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent
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I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
On June 4th 1976, the Sex Pistols played a gig at Manchester Free Trade Hall that has gone down in history as one of the most famous gigs ever, credited as having inspired a huge number of influential bands, record labels, designers, even, according to the late Tony Wilson in the film ‘Joy Division’, with the regeneration and resurgence of the city of Manchester. According to David Nolan, author of I Swear, I Was There: the gig that changed the world, only 35-40 people actually went, but “by my reckoning seven and a half thousand were there” given the number of people who have claimed to squeezed in.
The gig had a huge impact on those attending, even if only, as Nolan puts it, “the audience who were there … looked at the band … and turned to each other and said, in that Mancunian way, “That’s rubbish! We could do so much better than that”. And that’s exactly what they did”. Here’s a documentary about it:
I won’t even claim to have been there. 8 year-old children weren’t allowed into gigs in 1976. But I did grow up inspired by many of the people who had been there and by what they did subsequently. If there was an event in my life that was the equivalent of that night, the incendiary event that lit my life’s blue touchpaper, it would be the evening, in 1992, when I headed to Stroud to hear a talk by permaculture co-originator, Bill Mollison.
Last summer I gave a talk at the West Country Storytelling Festival about Transition, and at the end someone asked “how do you get the confidence to do that stuff?” We all have moments that define our belief, or lack of belief, that we can make change in the world. With this month’s theme being The Power of Just Doing Stuff, I thought I would share that experience with you.
I was a real permaculture newbie at that stage. I had yet to do my Design Course. I had recently been given a copy of Mollison’s classic Permaculture, a Designers’ Manual. I had the bug, so when a friend told me Bill was speaking in Stroud, and that that was the only public talk of his visit, a few of us hopped in a car and high-tailed it from Bristol to Stroud in time for the talk.
A talk by Bill Mollison is an unforgettable experience, not always in a good way. He had a remarkable ability to offend, outrage and upset roughly half of the audience, while changing the life and profoundly inspiring the other half. It’s quite an art (although not something I try to emulate). In Peter Harper’s recent critique of permaculture (which contains much I agree with and much that I don’t – I might respond to at some point when I get a moment), he writes (of a different talk on the same trip):
“The audience could not have been more keen to hear what he had to say. But somehow he managed to turn everybody off by dogmatic statements and an arrogant manner … undoubtedly Mollison is a brilliant man, fizzing with ideas, many of them excellent, but unfortunately, many of them duds. And it is rather hard to tell which are which …”
I asked Matt Dunwell of Ragman’s Lane Farm for his recollection of the evening. His main memory was Bill being “pretty hostile” and “tearing into someone who was questioning how housing coops worked, and he retorted that ‘you are the sort of person that steals chocolate from other peoples’ fridges’” (a phrase that has stuck with Matt ever since).
My main memories were firstly him talking about how he had just come from Africa where one of the things he had done was to show people that you didn’t need tin foil for cooking (since when I have rarely used tin foil ever again), and secondly when a woman in the audience asked him a question about some land she had recently bought.
“My husband and I”, she said, “recently bought 100 acres of land in Devon to run along permaculture lines. But most of our money has been ploughed into buying the land, meaning that we have a very small budget for developing it. What do you suggest?” Quick as a flash Bill came back. “Sell 90 acres” he declared, much to her disappointment (rather good advice I thought).
What stuck with me though was a message of “just do it, just stop talking about stuff, hoping someone will sort it out, roll your sleeves up and do stuff”. It resonated with the Do It Yourself culture I had grown up with, through the still rippling distant aftershocks from the night in Manchester: if you don’t like things as they are, get up and do something about it. His talk, told like a storyteller, with no slides or overheads, was one man prowling that stage, talking from the heart about the projects he had initiated, inspired and seen around the world.
Whether it was people planting thousands of trees, creating new gardens in cities or in the desert, it was (for me at least) a riveting and passionate setting out of the case that change starts with us. That no-one else is going to do it (Bill once famously said “I can’t change the world on my own. It’ll take at least three of us” – inspiring but a recipe for burnout if I ever heard one). That it’s down to us.
What I took back with me on the drive back to Bristol was a kick up the arse that is still propelling me forward today. What Bill did was not just set out lots of inspiring possibilities, but challenged you to leave the hall unaffected, challenged you to see if you could actually live with yourself if you didn’t do anything. While it may not have been everyone’s cup of tea (I think some people did get up and walk out), I was transfixed, and left that night, determined, on some level, that this was the work of my life. The concept that the Earth could be repaired, that there was a way to do it, and that it would only happen if people decided to make it the reason they got out of bed in the morning, hit me hard.
Like that first Sex Pistols gig in Manchester, I had no option than to be one of those people who (metaphorically) started a band, a record label, a magazine. It was a life-changing experience. You can trace this blog, this idea, my sense of the Power of Just Doing Stuff, back to that warm evening in Stroud.
You may feel as though your efforts, working in your local Transition initiative or doing other community resilience work, is just a drop in the ocean. Yet there is a huge power in it, especially when you look at it from the context of what happens when you add all that stuff up. The Fife Diet in Scotland is one of the most inspiring examples of this. What can we learn from them about The Power of Just Doing Stuff? A few weeks ago, they put out a press release, one that has huge implications.
It began:
“Today the Fife Diet releases it’s Carbon Food Report it shows that if everyone in Scotland was on the equivalent of the Fife Diet, we could collectively contribute to 60% of the Scottish Government annual saving target, only by changing the way we eat.
Statistics released by the Scottish government last week revealed that, for the second year running,Scotland has failed to meet the legal targets it set itself to reduce carbon emissions. Emissions in 2011 were 848,000 tonnes over the target. Emissions fell by 2.9% between 2010 and 2011, but fell just short of the 2011 target for adjusted figures, which take into account the EU Emissions Trading System.
But Fife Diet estimates that our 5,000 members saved 10820 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2012-13. If everyone in Scotland made similar changes to their food habits, up to a million tonnes of carbon could be saved”.
Their report gives a sense of the Power of Lots of People Doing Stuff, of the potential that comes from lots of people taking measures in their own lives. If you aren’t familiar with the Fife Diet’s work, here is a short video about it:
A couple of weeks ago I caught up with Mike Small, Fife Diet’s Project Director, to discuss this in more depth.
You recently wrote a blog post responding to Jay Rayner’s piece in The Observer, the one that declared that “New Zealand simply has a better landscape and climate for rearing lamb and apples”. Now that you’ve had a few weeks to digest it, what are your thoughts on the arguments he put forward in that piece?
I think he’s been trying to peddle back considerably since then. In the article he said this is the “final nail in the coffin for localism” and “these people need to be told”. It was all very bombastic. He was also really trying to sell a book, but it doesn’t really stand up to any critical analysis. In a sense I’m not so worried about the actual specific report [that he cites] because I think you can or can’t prove this or that good may have a specific carbon saving.
I think the fundamental premise of what he was trying to do was wrong, because the task, as we all know, is to drastically reduce carbon, not to take two very high emitting sectors and say “look, one is marginally better than the other”, which is essentially what he was doing. It seems to me that he lives in a rarefied atmosphere that’s about television and fine dining and he’s not really engaged with the political task, which is about the transition to a low carbon future.
I think that the arguments for localism, as we know, aren’t just about carbon savings. They’re about re-shifting our economy into a circular economy, building resilience, creating local cultures. So I thought it was a massive missed opportunity. I think people like Jay have a certain amount of responsibility because they have such a high media profile, and I suppose he just missed that and it was kind of irresponsible.
It seemed extraordinary, the argument that the UK which has a history of growing 3 or 4 thousand different varieties of apples, where apples are so interlinked with our culture and our history, that it could be a lower carbon solution to import them all from New Zealand.
Yes, it’s extraordinary and goes against any kind of common sense. He was quite odd about shipping as well, saying that these aren’t flown they are shipped. But if you look at the emissions from ships they’re extraordinary. Transportation by ship produces a billion metric tonnes of CO2 emissions and uses 11 billion gallons of fuel a year internationally, so it’s not some kind of benign mode of transport.
You’ve been doing an experiment in Fife for five years now, and you’ve just published a report which sums up of the experiment and your achievements so far. Could you give us a sense of what’s in there, what you feel you’ve discovered?
It’s specifically our carbon accounting. We asked people to take 6 pledges. To create more sustainable food systems there were six things that we asked people to do:
eat more organic
eat less meat or different meat
to compost
to waste less
to eat locally
to grow some of their own food.
Here’s how this is broken down:
We have surveyed our members and monitored behaviour change since they joined us. In 2012/13 the Fife Diet achieved a total saving of 1820 tonnes CO2e (based on an average carbon saving of 0.78kg CO2e per member per diem)
The figures are broken down by behaviour as follows:
Source, Kilograms, Tonnes, Proportion
organic 416773.80 416.77 0.228941
meat 8260.30 8.26 0.004538
compost 85835.99 85.84 0.047151
waste 934123.31 934.12 0.513130
local 368053.53 368.05 0.202178
grow 7394.50 7.39 0.0040
We then take analysis of those pledges and do some carbon analysis on it. We surveyed our members and monitored their behaviour change since they joined us. In 2012-13 the Fife Diet achieved a total savings of 10820 tonnes of CO2 emissions produced (based on an average carbon saving of 0.78kg CO2e per member per diem).
These facts just make a nonsense of Jay’s claims. That’s a quite significant saving and our report shows that we could take some really significant steps just by rethinking the way we do food and creating a sustainable low carbon food culture. It’s something that we can all be part of. There are some problems out there that you need an external agency to help you with. Food is the one that we can be part of, a restorative culture. It’s quite exciting for us.
We are now, through your work, through Transition Network’s Economic Blueprints and others, developing both a carbon case and an economic case for a more localised approach to food. What do you think top-down, government support for this might look like?
It is a good question. Part of this is a cultural shift, part is about international law and structures. I was getting a lift to football the other day and the people in the car were talking about how they used frequent flyer miles. I realised that that this was not just status, but it was also actively encouraged, hard wired into the system. The more you flew was good, something you should aspire to, something you got rewarded for.
We need ways that we can embed into our culture the opposite of that, so we have infrequent flyers, and the same in our food systems. If you look at Denmark for example, their taxation laws benefit organics, so that high-polluting, high carbon-costing food systems are now taxed at a different level. They’ve flipped the idea of organic being more expensive than non-organic. Why should you have to go to a specialist shop to buy healthy food, or an organic shop to buy organic food?
It’s kind of ridiculous. Those are some things that you can do at a national level. I think there are also things that you can do about changing the food infrastructure so that some of our kit like mills or abattoirs or dairies are on various scales and not as at present going more and more towards bigger and bigger which has an impact when right the way down the line.
The Fife Diet advocates a shift to an 80-20% split in our diets between local food and imported food. Do supermarkets have a role to play in this? Do we need to be building a parallel economy which is completely independent of supermarkets or could an enlightened supermarket have a role to play in this?
No, I don’t think they do have a role to play really and I don’t think we’re going to switch round from the 97% domination of retail that they currently have to nothing. We do need to stop their further monopoly in other sectors. In our Food Manifesto we argue for a moratorium on supermarkets and for them to have to make the case. What happened is that when economic times get more desperate, people just flail about, so if a supermarket says they’re going to open somewhere, everybody supports it, that’s fantastic, and we don’t think about the consequences for the local economy. These are organisations that are built around low-skills, poor paid, part-time temporary work. ASDA are now operating stores without any checkout people at all. The idea for jobs, even though they are temporary and low paid, is now less there.
What we’ve proved is there is a real appetite for change and people want to be part of a community of change. But we can’t just pull the rug out when people have become quite dependent on these systems. Absolutely we need to create a parallel for people to go towards, and I think that’s what we can do and want to do increasingly. It needs to be based on real food, not based on niche food – it has to be your basic food at an affordable cost.
I remember going to one of the Soil Association conferences where a guy from one of the supermarkets stood up and said “I can feed a single mother on an estate in Middlesborough for £40 a week. None of you lot can”. Of course there’s all the arguments that you’re more likely to end up with more single mothers on £40 a week if supermarkets take over a community and there’s plenty of evidence to support that now, but how do you get around that “local food is for people who can afford it” accusation?
We need a deeper analysis of what’s going on, because that’s just not the case. If you look at the whole allotment tradition, it comes out of working class culture, it doesn’t come out of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall culture. That whole thriving and reviving tradition is certainly rooted elsewhere.
The issue is really about processed food. That is where you make profit. If we can join the dots between our problems in health, our health epidemic and local food, we can make some inroads here. For example if you grow some simple produce like potatoes and leeks, and make leek and potato soup, there’s no profit in that but it’s very cheap and is going to grow in our climate and it makes food available. We need to look at that.
We also need to look at the kind of cons that are happening psychologically when people enter supermarkets, because although they can provide lots of cheap processed food, they also con people into buying lots of other food and other items that they don’t need. That’s why you get the horrendous situation with food waste that as we discovered earlier this year, runs at about 50% in our system.
What is your sense of what a joined-up, strategic push to grow the local, independent food economy would look like?
Two things are crucial to move us beyond the possibility of remaining quite marginal and ‘fluffy.’ It needs to be connected to the movement for land-ownership (in both urban and rural settings) and it needs to be connected to the movement for food sovereignty.
It’s difficult not to be intimidated by the supermarkets’ dominance in retail but at the same time they are quite fragile. They’re reliant on systems that are very close to the margins so as we saw when there was a really harsh winter 2 years ago, all the major supermarkets just stopped delivering to Scotland. They just drew a line across the country and said “we’re not going to go there any more!” We were like “what, to Edinburgh?!” And they said “no, not to Scotland at all”. It’s because they have this next day delivery system.
The New Economics Foundation printed that document a few years ago, 9 Meals from Anarchy when the oil supply was threatened. The whole system ground to a halt. We need to be clear about how it is very dominant but also based on some very dodgy structures. What we’re building across the country, not just in Fife but across Scotland and across the UK is a much more solid, resilient, nuanced, movement that has people really regaining some kind of sense of food sovereignty.
I think we need to strengthen that, unite that network and allow that network to learn from each other so it’s a kind of critical culture. There are some real lessons that can be learned and shared. I think we’re going to do that with our Carbon report, and we’re hoping to tap into some of the things that are happening in Herefordshire and elsewhere, to make the case for the economic argument. We find that when we’re engaging people, they want to hear both of those arguments. One on its own isn’t going to do it. I think we’re becoming a mass movement and I think that’s key.
Food banks are growing exponentially as the austerity measures impact families on low incomes. Have you done much in the Fife Diet in terms of linking what you do up with food banks? Is there a way that we could link food banks with Fife Diet/Incredible Edible/Transition stuff and do you have a sense of what that might look like?
I think they’re really unhelpful, but they’re essential because of the coalition effect on benefits. You can really chart that as the changes to benefits kick in. Some people are in really desperate situations. They are really disempowering and I think they fit into a narrative about the poor that the right wing has been developing over a decade: helpless, feckless, useless, poor. This act of charity feeds into that whole narrative.
I think instead – there’s a project in Edinburgh, in the Grassmarket, a church project that used to work as an old-fashioned soup kitchen but they’re transformed in the last few years how they do that. Now, people who are often homeless people, people who are destitute, have instead run this project and they learn how to cook and grow and cater for people.
They’ve set up their own social enterprise to do catering now, and they’ve really transformed the soup kitchen from a kind of powerless top-down handout to a much more empowering system of change. If we could do that with food banks, that could be really interesting. It is at all levels about claiming sovereignty and food sovereignty and reclaiming some authority.
Lastly, what’s next for the Fife Diet? You’ve been at this for 5 years, what does the next 5 years include?
We’re launching a project called Blasda (blasta is Gaelic for ‘taste’) which is going to be a food festival across Scotland. It will be launching in the Island of Coll on the West Coast and we’re having dozens of local food celebrations right across the month. We’ll also be operating our Seed Truck, which goes up and down the country helping people grow their own food, doing community projects with schools. So those are two national projects which are really exciting.
Last week I attended an extraordinary occasion in Paris, which felt momentus and historic, but in the somewhat confused and mixed way these things often do. Hosted in the incredible, palatial National Assembly, with its statues, chandeliers and gold leaf, the event, called ‘An Innovative Society for the Twenty-First Century’ was hosted by IDDRI (the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations) under the aegis of Francois Hollande, President of the French Republic (although the President himself didn’t actually attend). It was the first event I have been to which has had such high level support and an explicit questioning as to whether economic growth is the best way forward from here.
This is going to be one of those long posts compiled from the notes I took during the event. Any omissions or misquoting is entirely my own responsibility. So I will go through each session and the key points of what was said by whom, as well as chucking in a few photos of the place just so you can marvel at how the French do palaces. At the end I will give a few of my reflections on the event,
The opening paragraph of the conference booklet stated:
“The first industrial revolution opened up an extended period of intense economic innovation. New technologies, new energy sources and new forms of work organisation were invented and rapidly diffused, this leading to the growth of material prosperity and wealth as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. Today, some economists are highlighting the fact these growth rates in industrialised countries have been in decline over the course of several decades, raising the issue of the exhaustion of this economic model and the related social and budgetary issues”.
The Opening Session
This began with Claude Bartolone, President of the National Assembly. He began by stating that we are at a pivotal point in history where we readapt our growth model to the changes that are coming. We must, he stated, be sober in our consumption and move to a renewable energy model. This is a new era. The western world has been on a downward curve for several years in terms of growth. This need not, however, mean the end of progress. We should also still be helping developing nations to improve their economies. It should also not mean a rejection of technology. This is about the need to change our thinking.
Renewable energy targets are not a constraint, they are a vision, an opportunity for new jobs. Bringing in smart grids across Europe to better enable renewable energy is a huge opportunity to stimulate the economy. It is important to prepare for social acceptance of this. We know who it is in our economy, in our society, who is suffering, we must learn to live differently, less ostentatiously, and in greater solidarity with others.
Having the necessary tools to make a green economy happen are important. But we must have the necessary tools. Taxes are powerful, but they should not just be seen as an opportunity to reduce the deficit. We have to prioritise. We can live with 4% of our budget going to pay off the deficit, but not with 4°C climate change. In the 1970s, France responded to the oil crises by going nuclear. Now, as those plants near the end of their lives, the question is what next? You are the thinkers of this rethinking, he concluded, and this event is designed to enable this.
He was followed by Laurence Tubiana, Director of IDDRI, who started by saying that this occasion was an invitation to think outside the box. We are seeing, she began, a sense of worry and concern that is stopping people thinking about the future. We tend to look back, to try and make things like they were before.
Growth is key to our thinking about the future. The fact we depend on growth is a problem, because we no longer have any growth. The debate is open. Are we looking at a structural end of growth in mature economies? IDDRI felt this was the right time to bring these people together, given that growth has fallen in France from 5% a year to 1%. The 30 halycon years for the French economy are behind us.
This is complex. We cannot rule out the assumption that things will continue to stagnate. Growth is not the only possible situation. I am delighted that this event brings us together as a group to look at a post growth economy from a number of different perspectives.
There are real movements around this question, people who are not waiting for state funding, and everyone can participate in this, things like Fair Trade, local produce, the sharing economy, not a single system but a multitude of innovations. It is vital that to really take off, these initiatives are allowed to breathe, to move around, to develop. We must find resilience. So how best to proceed.
Session 1: Have our models of growth entered into an exhaustion phase?
Thisstarted with Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the seminal Stern Report. He came out from a start as a firm believer that tackling climate change, if done properly, will lead to economic growth, not to the end of it. The cuts we need to make are substantial, he said, and they need to start now. The only way to do it, he stated, is to break the relationship between production and emissions. If we don’t manage this, we won’t manage the change we need to see.
Maintaining a position that growth is desirable is essential because telling a story that it is over would mean our international policy ambitions will be dead in the water. All previous periods of great innovation and technological advance have been led by private sector investment, and this one is no different. The difference with this one is that the government has to set the right framework to make sure we end up with what we want to see.
We need a realistic price on carbon, but to be able to harness private finance, policy is central. One way to boost this is to have a strong emissions reduction target by 2050. We must strongly embrace carbon capture and storage and nuclear. Narrowing the range of choices available to us will get us into deep trouble, let us, he stated, embrace all the technologies. If we start ruling out technologies we will close off opportunities. Let us embrace the full range. If gas substitutes for coal it could be a bridge, and if we go down that route we must make clear that it is a bridge. Let us ensure that whichever energy sources we choose are either low carbon or could become low carbon.
We need a new industrial revolution. Part experience of industrial revolutions is that they drive growth. Now is a time where interest rates are low, unemployment is high, this is our option. Now is the time to invest in the future.
He was followed by Andrew Simms of New Economic Foundation and author of the recently published Cancel the Apocalypse. He started by stating that there are points where he agreed with Nick. Andrew was part of the group that created the Green New Deal report, which shared much of Nick’s thinking , but now feels that in OECD countries the climate challenge means growth is no longer tenable. It is incredible that this conference is happening here. Such an event still feels a long way off in Westminster.
We have a major problem, he stated. We recently passed 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. You might have thought that on the day this became news the media might have been excited to mention it. One paper’s front page on the day offered a free trip into space, another free trips to Legoland. The Guardian, who you might have expected to take it seriously, ran on the horsemeat saga.
Climate scientist James Hansen has said “we are dancing on the edge of losing the climate in which civilisation emerged”. He quoted Winston Churchill who said “it is not enough that we do our best, but that we do what’s necessary”. We think of growth in relation to our children or our gardens as being a good thing. But in nature things grow up to a certain stage, and then they mature in other ways.
Already our use of ecological services means that nature needs a year and a half to deal with the waste we generate every year. The idea that growth is needed in order to reduce poverty is rubbish. With our current ‘trickle down’ model, getting to a stage where everyone in the world has $1 a day would require 15 planets worth of resources.
Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre argues that if you really go through the science, staying below 2% requires cuts of 10% per year, starting now. When looked at more closely, the UK government’s target for staying below 2°C is based on a 60% chance of going past 2°C. If you were playing roulette with a pistol with 10 chambers and 6 bullets, those are not good odds. The International Energy Agency recently stated that we are on course for a rise of between 3.6 and 5.3°C. That’s a catastrophe.
This debate about economic growth is one that has captured the political imagination. It is in the world of better, not bigger, that our future lies, he concluded.
Neither of the two following speakers were quite so engaging. Michele Debonneuil, Administrator at the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies and Inspector General of Finances, basically said that a sharing economy, in which goods were made to last and people paid for services not goods was one tool that could both be a new driver for growth as well as solving a range of problems.
Robert Boyer, of the Institut des Ameriques, argued that the role of an economy should be to satisfy the real needs to the people. We need a limit to what bankers can make. The future will not be a simple repetition of the past. We need to focus on our collective long term future, not the short term interests of finance. We need to identify the models whereby top-down and bottom-up can meet.
Session 2: Can we build a post-growth society?
Laurent Baumel, MP for Indre-et-Loire, started by stating that he is a socialist, but that it is good for the Left to question and discuss growth. We urgently need to find new tools to measure wellbeing. The loss of resources and pollution are also a limit to growth. We cannot accept the idea of a dual society where some people make lots of money and others are left behind, dependent on benefits. We do need growth though, so that we can have jobs for everyone which is what gives a society its dignity.
Dan O’Neill, from the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy in Leeds, began by arguing that growth no longer brings happiness. In a Steady State economy, resource use would be kept stable. GDP would be replaced with measures focused on improving peoples’ lives. A Steady State economy is one where it doesn’t matter what happens to GDP.
It is often argued that growth is invaluable because it addresses inequality, the idea that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, but this is not the case. It is also argued that growth is invaluable for creating jobs, but it is shown that the two do not necessarily follow in the way you would want. We need to reduce working hours, and take the power to issue money from thin air taken away from private banks and transferred to the European Central Bank. We need to change our goal from the accumulation of more stuff to better lives, and from growth to wellbeing.
Jean Pisani-Ferry, Commissionaire general a la strategie et a la prospective, said the growth is mysterious, you never know how it is triggered. In a political world, how and who should determine that prices of key resources should be fixed? I think discussing the idea of a post growth economy causes fear and isn’t helpful. We know what a Steady State Economy feels like because we are living in the middle of it. We can see the results of it. I don’t see this as progress of any kind. We should borrow more money to finance the changes we need and pay this off in a few generations time. He concluded by saying, like Stern, that we should borrow money at the current low interest rates.
Lena Sommestad, former Minister for the Environment in Sweden gave a talk entitled ‘Towards a European Social Investment Model’. Her starting question was how to make our societies more resilient. The age profile of our population is growing. The number of working people as opposed to those who are dependent and in need of care is falling steeply. We need to see investment in society as an investment in the economy of the future.
The ongoing cost of social exclusion is huge, she said. This serves to undermine the cohesion and joint purpose that we need in order to be able to tackle climate change. The EU is still one of the world’s richest regions. This can still be the case as our population ages, but our capacity to tackle climate change depends on social cohesion, so investing in this is central.
The question though is how to make such investments in a low growth economy? It will cost, but it is cost effective. We spend large sums of money on the results of social exclusion, and dealing with this will bring more people into paying taxes and will help to reduce dependency.
Session 3: The construction of innovation.
I was the first speaker in this, the last session of the day. I introduced Transition as an experiment in what a bottom-up response to the issues discussed so far might look like. My experience, I said, is that the real innovation is happening at the local level, it’s where the energy is. I set out 9 innovations that have come through the Transition movement:
Visioning: the idea that we can create a dynamic vision of a post-growth world
Transition itself: as a social technology, a learning network, seeing challenging times as an opportunity
The idea of ‘community resilience as economic development: as set out in the two Economic Blueprints/Evaluations done so far
The Pay-by-text mobile payment system developed for the Bristol/Brixton Pounds: available for anyone to use, anywhere
Transition as an approach to development: as seen in, for example, Brasilandia in Brazil or in Greyton in South Africa
Transition as a bridge between bottom-up and top-down:
Innovative local food systems that enable ‘patchwork farming’: unlocking the potential of urban agriculture, such as DE4 Food and Crystal Palace Transition Town’s ‘Patchwork Farm’ initiative
Models of ‘internal investment’: such as Bath & West Community Energy, using inward investment to stimulate internal investment
Transition Streets: a way of engaging communities in carbon reduction and lower consumption while also building community. Also its role as something that can be rapidly disseminated and spread between initiatives.
Stephane Fourier, of Superagro Montpellier, argued for the role of food and farming in this shift. We need to bring farmers and consumers back together again he argued. More local farming systems will bring a greater diversity and will play a fundamental role in building food security. These models already exist all around us, he said, they just need our support.
Nicholas Colin, Inspector of Finance in France, looked at the role of innovation and where it arises from. It used to be the case, he said, that innovators and entrepreneurs were different people, but now they are the same people. Innovators usually weren’t the heads of their own organisations, they worked in big organisations. Now innovators have become entrepreneurs.
They tend to be radical revolutionaries, more like artists than business people. They are also able to harness the masses through social technology which revolutionises entrepreneurship. We need to do everything we can as society to support our innovators.
Finally, Benoit Hamon, Minister Delegate at the French Ministry of the Economy and Finance, whose work focuses on the role of the social economy in France, spoke. Social innovation, he said, is about trying respond to needs that are not met elsewhere. How are we to finance this, he asked? We will need both public and private finance. It can be very hard to replicate social innovations and to take them to scale, and this needs to be considered. He stated that the government would be truly innovative as that is what the current situation demands. We must focus on social innovation. We must also mobilise public resources to deal with inequality. The individual, the citizen, has to be right at the heart of decision-making, and government needs to focus on social impact.
I was unable to stay for the second day, which contained just two sessions, A New Global Context for Innovation and What Development Model for the Twenty-First Century? Among others, the day was due to hear from Spain’s former Secretary of State for Climate Change, Georgios Papandreou, former Prime Minister of Greece, renowned economist Jeffrey D Sachs, and the Prime Minister of France.
Reflections on the event
This clearly felt like a timely and remarkable event. I suspect that we are still some way off an event such as this. On the positive side, the speeches by the President of the National Assembly and the Director of IDDRI in the opening session laid down a challenge, created an opening, a space, which the bulk of the presenters then failed to embrace. Apart from those who had clearly been invited in order to bring a more radical post-growth/Steady State perspective (myself, Andrew Simms, Dan O’Neill) and Lena Sommestad, there was little to offer much insight into where we go next.
Laurence Tubiana of IDDRI had set it up beautifully in her speech when she said “the fact we depend on growth is a problem, because we no longer have any growth”. Yet many of the speakers approached the subject from the angle of “when we choose between growth and no growth, I choose growth”, which rather missed the point. It was especially interesting to see how the Left, in the form of the French socialists, finds itself unable to go there. The academics often approached the issue by breaking it down and focusing on one small part of it.
For me, most disappointing was Lord Nicholas Stern. By looking at climate change in isolation from issues of energy security and the economy, his vision that we can grow our way out of the climate crisis brought to mind Einstein’s oft-cited quote that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. His argument that we have to talk about growth or else India and China won’t take us seriously is so alarmingly flawed that I will address this in a later post.
Perhaps the most important thing about this event though is the fact that it took place at all. And also the fact that the Transition movement was invited to be a key part of it. It really felt like significant people in government and positions of power are now starting to realise that economic growth is an outdated model, are waking up to the scale of the multiple challenges we face, and as they cast around for solutions and responses as to what bottom-up responses and the innovations for a post growth economy might look like, are discovering Transition. An experiment that didn’t wait for permission, or funding, or validation from anyone, but just got on with it. As I sat there, beneath the golden ceilings and chandeliers of Paris, I felt something shifting beneath my feet. Barely, almost imperceptably, but definitely shifting.
Finally, a couple of days later, I asked Andrew Simms for his reflection on the event. Here he is:
Addition: Notes on Saturday’s session by Corinne Coughanowr of Paris 15 en Transition, to whom I am very grateful.
Session 5: What development model for the twenty-first century?
Moderator: Laurence Tubiana
Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, opened the session by referring to the trend throughout the history of economics of countries trying to catch up with the ones just ahead. With planetary boundaries and their bad consequences making themselves felt, this model is no longer viable.
For the past 40 years, efforts have been made to incorporate ecology into economics, and awareness has been achieved, but not effectiveness. The momentum of the catch-up model has continued, but this is not even viable any more for the poor countries.
We need a new model, he explained, which requires violating the follow-the-next-country approach. For this, we also need new expertise. Questions of population stabilization, CO2 reduction and food supply will need to be addressed.
Two areas of promise, according to Sachs, are the information revolution, with its one-billion-time improvement in data management, and new materials science advances, such as nanotubes, which use abundantly available materials and vastly improve efficiency. Direction on a global level is needed in order to harness such potential in the time-scale required, as well as to manage the profound effects on work and income distribution.
In conclusion, Sachs emphasized that all countries have the right to development that respects planetary boundaries. Certain terms are difficult – we can’t speak of “developed” countries, rather “maldeveloped” ones. Instead of “growth”, it is better to speak of “well-being”.
George Papandreou, former Prime Minister of Greece, addressed the subject of how Europe could be a model for humanizing globalization. He recounted how, four years ago, three problems were being addressed in the EU: the Greek deficit, the Lisbon treaty and the Copenhagen conference. At the time, he said, the collective response of the EU was wrong: these issues were dealt with separately. However, they are all related, and the opportunity was missed to take an innovative, integrated approach. Greece, for instance, could have shifted to a green economy, but fear and scapegoating dominated, instead of understanding.
Among the problems widely prevalent, Papandreou pointed to the global nature of power and markets. Money is buying and corrupting politics and media, so governments are often impotent. Democracy is challenged; citizens are very frustrated with politics. On one hand, the disempowerment of citizens is creating extremism, on the other hand, governments, lacking the trust of the people, cannot make changes.
So what can we do? There are planetary limits – we should build a narrative around this in a positive way. Papandreou suggests a new paradigm at the EU level to pool resources, work together and slow down the crisis so that people have time to adapt. If we can get away from fear and empower the citizens, they can be innovative, take risks and change in positive ways.
Initiatives for which the EU could provide encouragement and resources include:
support the role of intellectuals, R&D, and platforms to inform citizens
encourage investment to leverage private money, for example via a green eurobond
create an “Erasmus” program for the unemployed, to retrain citizens for a green future
create platforms for innovations in different areas, such as apps, where citizens can participate.
promote a global CO2 emissions tax, to develop green economies and practices in the developing world
The environment is an issue for all citizens, including the working class, which is more impacted. Let us imagine a different future.
Luciano Coutinho, President of the Brazilian Development Bank, oriented his presentation around five big trends in today’s world:
1. Demographics
In Africa and other developing areas, we have high birthrates, whereas in other parts of the world, an aging population overburdens retirement and health systems. We do not need to project such high population growth, it is already tailing off. For aging populations, we can innovate new services.
2. Climate change
We need to fight climate change strongly – this is a big agenda. Developed countries need to change their mode of growth first, otherwise they have no moral position from which to speak.
Energy efficiency is a good place to start, since wind and solar cannot completely replace oil. Most industries can achieve energy reductions and reduce CO2 emissions, for example for cars, houses and appliances. Old appliances can be retrofitted.
Wind and solar should be promoted with incentives.
3. Acceleration of IT progress
Coutinho recommends large-scale optimization of systems, for example smart grids for electricity, water and transport. All urban systems should be optimized. Biotechnologies can create new services and opportunities. We should create incentives for tracks we wish to emphasize.
4. The changing geography of growth – for example, in China, growth is decelerating.
5. Persistence of social inequalities
To combat this, training for unemployed workers and policies for employment inducement and income transfer are necessary.
Pascal Canfin, Deputy Minister for Development in France, stated that, with the challenges facing us, the realists are those who want to change the system. We need to ask the right questions and to change our way of thinking.
The situations of instability and degrowth in some countries, such as Greece, and of unsustainable growth elsewhere, such as China, represent two “anti-models” for the future. Canfin says he is an “agnostic” with regard to the debate on growth versus degrowth.
Concerning globalization, he recommends:
globalizing certain domains, such as consciousness raising and climate politics
deglobalizing others, such as food and agriculture.
Two cooperative research programs should be undertaken:
convergence of IT and green economies
use of carbon as a resource for a closed-loop economy
Citing the example of a small town in the north of France, where the mayor and the citizens have been working together to come up with car-sharing schemes and photovoltaic installations, even on the town’s church, Canfin said we should all be innovators for the future. The planet’s resources are limited, but two things are not: human intelligence and human greed. It’s up to us to choose!
Added remark:
There is a lot of talk about optimization, IT advances and technological solutions.
But for what, for whom? Which of these actually has the good of the people and the planet in mind? Which takes into account all the true costs? Or has a complete cost-benefit analysis?
On Sunday, I spoke at the Ways with Words literary festival at Dartington, to a sold-out Great Hall. The stage had earlier that morning been graced by Richard and Judy, and I was soon to be followed by Sandi Toksvig. I talked about 10 Transition innovations that could save the world. It was very enjoyable. Here is the audio of my talk.
On Saturday 18 May a river of fruit and nut trees appeared along Salusbury Road as part of the Chelsea Fringe Festival in an initiative of Transition Town Kensal to Kilburn (TTK2K). Shops and businesses along the street sponsored 22 edible trees which were placed outside their premises for the three weeks of The Chelsea Fringe. After three weeks brightening up Salusbury Road, the trees were planted out in local schools and community gardens. I spoke to Molly Fletcher, one of the drivers behind the project, to ask her about the project, how it came about, and how being part of it affected her sense of what’s possible. You can either listen to this podcast of our conversation, or read the transcript below:
So Molly, what is an ‘Edible High Road’?
We did a fruit and nut tree outside all the shops on our local high street in a tub, with salad and herbs around the base for 3 weeks of the Chelsea Fringe Festival. After that, in the autumn when the trees go dormant they will be planted out all over our local area and will be producing fruit and nuts for the next 50 years we hope.
What was the thinking with doing them on the high street?
I’ve been quite active with our Food Group, and have been growing food on our flat kitchen roof which isn’t very big but it’s really light, and there are no slugs and snails up there. I just got interested in it! I run some chutney workshops as well in our Transition group and foraging…So wanting to promote local food growing and get down food miles.
Was it difficult? Did you have to get lots of complicated permissions in order to do that?
Well no. The amazing thing was… maybe I wouldn’t have had the confidence to do it off my own bat but it was the idea of Abundance London. Karen Liebreich came up with the idea last year for the Chelsea Fringe on Chiswick High Road and she got 55 shops and businesses along there to get involved and so really it was from all her pitfalls that she came up across last year … she’d ironed them out so we didn’t have to go there this year. We just followed her pattern, her template as it were …
How was it received? What was the impact?
It was really good, such a positive thing. All the people passing by loved it, the high street looked amazing, it was all pulled together with having fruit trees and nut trees in blossom outside. It just pulled it all together and made it look wonderful.
It was outside the library so that was part of it. The library put on a display for us all about the fruit and nut trees and things for the week before the launch day and – it was great!
Do you think there’s any hope that it might become a permanent fixture on the high street?
It’s quite a narrow pavement there but also they’re large, half-size trees which means that they’re going to produce a proper amount of fruit and nuts. They’re not going to stay in their tubs, they’re going to be planted out when they’re dormant. In the autumn, they’re going to be planted out in the area, in parks, in a local school, the farmer’s market, on a station platform near us. Brondesbury Park have asked for one. Also Kids Company, a local organisation helping deprived children.
How does a project like this help Transition Kensal to Kilburn reach out and become more visible?
We put up a big banner during the 3 weeks when all the tubs with the trees were lining the high street, so it looked like a river of trees really. That was the idea and it really did look like that. We put up a big banner and then people also saw us planting out the trees in the local park when we were planting the trees into the tubs.
People were asking about it then and who we were and what we were doing. I was quite surprised how positive people are. They really like the idea of trees and tree-producing things.
How long have you been involved in the group for, in the wider Transition Kensal to Kilburn?
It’s quite a long time now, about 7 years or something like that? It was when people from the Transition Town were giving out flyers for the film The Age of Stupid. We saw it in our local cinema, the Tricycle Cinema. I took my two sons along and that was it. That for me was completely… it had such an impact on me. I just thought – right, everything I’m gonna do from now on has got to be to do with trying to get our carbon down and trying to make a difference and change things.
The title of the new book is The Power of Just Doing Stuff. From your involvement over those 7 years through Kensal to Kilburn and this tree-planting project, do you feel there’s some way in which you feel like there’s some kind of power that you’ve taken back? What’s that experience been like for you?
It’s been a really positive experience actually. Just for instance, The Age of Stupid was talking about flying and how bad flying is. We just started to look at our transport, and then we started taking the train everywhere instead of flying, wherever we could we’d take the train instead. It was just brilliant, it was so much better than taking the plane. You can really travel.
We’ve always loved travelling but you can really see a country if you travel by train and you’re sitting talking to people from that country. Then we gave up our car and started walking and talking to our neighbours more, started cycling everywhere, we got fitter. In lots of ways – we’ve just become more local.
One of the questions I remember I was asked at a talk I did recently was “where do you get the confidence to do that?” Where do you feel that idea of “let’s plant loads of trees in the high street and then plant them in other places”; that takes a certain degree of confidence to do that. Where do you feel that’s come from?
I think it’s a sense of urgency. I really feel a sense of urgency. All of the people saying “you can’t do it” and “this terrible thing will happen”. Like with the Edible High Road, people said “oh, the pavement’s too narrow, it’s going to block up the pavement, you’ll never get permission, and anyway the trees will get stolen and they won’t last a minute outside the shops”. You just have to ignore it. You just have to ignore it and get on with it and do it. Especially as somebody else has already done it, as they had in Chiswick, that gave me the confidence.
Also I was struggling with getting the money together from the shops and library and various cafes and things. It was January and February and people were really struggling and trying to visualise a river of trees growing in the high street in January was quite difficult. It’s very hard. Times are very hard at the moment so it was tough going round asking for the money but they could see that there was a vision here. It was some sort of hopeful thing happening.
Did you find that that’s kind of infectious, that sense of hope?
It did… I think the fact that other shops were getting involved, so that sense of “well, somebody else is doing it, it must be worth doing”. And if everybody does something then we can change things.
If you were talking to somebody who was thinking about doing a project like this, what would your advice be to them?
My advice would be to get somebody who’s already done it and then take it on from there. Add to it or take away what you don’t want to do. It’s like a chain effect. You’re not really starting from the beginning, there’s nothing new about planting trees. Actually, for me, I’d never planted a tree before and didn’t know anything about it so I’ve learnt a lot about trees and how they’re fertilised. I didn’t even know that you had to have a certain other tree that pollinates a certain other tree!
A plum tree doesn’t just have to have a certain type of plum tree, but has to have another type of fruit tree to pollinate it. I’ve learnt a lot. Also going into all these local shops and businesses: I’ve made a personal connection with them which I didn’t have before which is really quite eye-opening. I really feel like I’m becoming connected to the area more.
Also, get a group of ‘yous’ together. Groups have much more elbow than individuals. I could not have, would not have, even attempted to do an Edible High Road without the Transition Town back up. I had a right hand person all the way through who I met through Transition Town and a willing group of 5 – 10 helpers for the hands on stuff like the planting, label making and the launch day.
There was a pivotal point in the beginning of the project when I thought I’d never be able to get the shops to pay up, athough they’d all said they would. I was ready to give up, then I got backup from the Transition Town core group and it was just enough to keep me going. So my advice is to get a group together, dont go it alone although you’ll still probably land up doing a lot more than you thought you would.
What other changes have you made in your own life?
Lastly I wanted to add to the ways we’ve changed our lives since seeing The Age of Stupid and realising how ‘carbon’ we were:
Joined the local residents association and got recycling of kitchen waste established
Stopped flying, except for essentials like work or family
Given up the car and taken up the bicycle and the train
Put solar panels on the roof and insulated our windows with home made double glazing
Only buying food grown locally from supermarkets and from the farmers market and we have a not-for-profit organic food bag that we collect
Cut down on meat and dairy – now we eat meat for a treat once a week on Sundays and we eat a lot more nuts
We’re growing spinach and beetroot on our flat kitchen roof – more sunlight and no slugs
Stopped buying physical presents and buying trips or experience presents instead
We’re running childrens workshops in solar and wind powered sculpture and through Spacehive we’re crowd funding Dandelion – a wind sculpture made from recycled bottles for our local high street
We’re not being do gooders with all this, I just feel a low carbon future will be better and worth fighting for, so our grand children will have one.
My last question is what’s next for Transition Kensal to Kilburn?
I think I’m going to recover for a bit! The Food Group is carrying on with the fruit picking so I’ll join in with some fruit picks and also juicing: for various public occasions, we take the juicer along and juice apples and pears that we’ve picked, so I’ll probably be doing that in the autumn.
Thanks to Jonathan Goldberg for his wonderful photos.
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