You know those dreadful books? The ones called things like 1001 Places You MUST Visit Before You Die, or 1001 Wildlife Spectacles To See Before You Die, or the slightly more sinister sounding 1001 Escapes to Experience Before You Die. I really hate those books. As if the one thing that will really improve our lives is another to do list.
So, my posts this week will celebrate the coming of the Summer and show you the things I do to squeeze every drop of joy from the most glorious of seasons: not 3 Things You Must Do Before The Swallows Fly, just 3 things I like to do.
First up is appreciating flowers. Every roadside, park and hedge is full of flowers at this time of year. How many times do we pass them with the most cursory of glances, on our way to somewhere else- thinking of somewhere else. So I try to make the effort to stop and really look at them. Admire the intricacy, be baffled by the biology. One of the things I will be sure to do, sometime in early summer, is to find a dog rose and spend some time really looking at it. It's surely the most perfect of flowers, complete in its simplicity.
The dreadfully overused phrase 'Stop and smell the flowers' isn't really talking about flowers, I know, but maybe it should be. My life (and my summer) is certainly improved by paying attention to small and beautiful things, and where better to start than flowers?
As the golfer Walter Hagen put it:
You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry. Don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.
I was in a state of despair about climate change. All the science said we needed an extremely rapid transition away from fossil fuels in order to avoid it spiralling out of control in a runaway greenhouse effect. We have never made such a fundamental transition in society before.
Well, we all know what happened. Copenhagen was a disaster. But I did make it there, (starting in Wales on August 14th, finishing in Copenhagen on December 5th) though not with the army of people I had imagined, and I didn't get nearly as much media coverage as I hoped for. But I did get on TV three times, and had a few radio interviews, and got in lots of local papers. And I visited some really interesting and inspiring examples of the things people can do to get closer to the > zero carbon living which is both possible and preferable. And I did manage to collect these examples together and put them on a couple of datasticks, one of which I presented to Ingrid Nestle, the German Green Party MPs' spokesperson on energy economics, and the other to Colin Challen, who was at the time an MP and chair of the All Party > Parliamentary Climate Change Group (sadly, he didn't stand at the last general election, because the constituency boundaries in Leeds were redrawn and they lost a constituency, and he lost out to Ed Balls in the Labour Party selection for the seat).
Lastly, I met a truly amazing person called Kim Nguyen, who made my > journey from Wales look insignificant, as he cycled all the way from Australia http://www.rideplanetearth.org/. Not only that, he managed to organise rides all over the world just before the climate summit. And this year we are working together, organising rides all over the world, finishing with zero carbon concerts, to show both people and politicians that, not only is a zero carbon world possible, it's also much more fun - the people stopping it are those with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, and it's time we took them on.
We're also working with 350 http://www.350.org/(who are campaigning for an > eventual carbon dioxide concentration of 350 ppm maximum) and 10:10 http://www.1010global.org/ (who made The Age of Stupid, and are now campaigning to get people to cut their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010), joining in the Global Work Party carrying out practical actions to cut carbon emissions by starting preparations for the zero carbon concert events, doing things like building bicycle generators. So, if anyone from Transition Norwich wants to join in, please get in touch by visiting http://www.zerocarbonconcert.org/. And spread the word to everyone you know. Because maybe, just maybe, we can still rescue the world from runaway climate change, and it isn't too late after all.
Chris Keene
En route to Copenhagen: Klimahaus at night and with students, 6 November 2009.
Hello, I’m Tom Foxe, and my cycling travels haven’t taken me very far yet - holidays along the coast of Holland, in Southern Ireland and the Isle of Man. Mostly I cycle to and from work in Norwich, about 5 miles a day. I became interested in bike-powered gennies (short for generator) about 10 years ago, through the internet. There are dozens of bike genny sites and lots of clips on Youtube.
Hello, my name is Matt and I have never blogged before. Now confession over, its time to talk bicycles! It is midway through National Bike Week as hopefully by now you will know.
I recently signed up for the Bicycle Bonus and was pleased to receive a free map of Norwich cycle paths and a snap band that gets me a discount when I cycle to some shops. This is a great initiative and hopefully it will encourage more people to get on their bikes to go shopping. I live in Little Melton and I can reach the centre of Norwich in 35 mins, which can be quicker than using the car at peak times – the great thing is that I can then park for free and wiz around the centre of Norwich. A couple of good panniers will take as much shopping as I can carry. I have to confess to a smug feeling as I shoot down the Chaplefield underpass and see that the car park sign is showing everywhere FULL and there is a massive queue to get into the multi-storey on the opposite side.
Here is a pic of my bike, twenty years old and good for another twenty with the help of some replacement bits every few years. The lights run off a big rechargeable battery and make it really fun to go out round the lanes after dark and hear the owls and other nocturnal animals.
4.38am sunrise on the sunrise coast, East Anglia. The sky is banked up with cloud yet the light has a presence that is palpable. It emanates over dawn-coloured water, pulsing on the horizon. We stand at the tide-line and sense its unmistakable appearance. All over England today people have climbed hills and beacons and tors, lit fires through the night and waited for this moment. We can’t see the sun but we know it’s there. Not because we have clocks but because we can feel it with our bodies. .jpg)
This morning we had the whole world (and the roads) to ourselves: the scent of elderflowers and wild rose in the lane, mock orange as we sped by the sleeping houses, fennel in the dunes, the purple opium poppies in the allotments, red sorrel on the Common, wrens singing in gardens, larks over the marshes, the slow roar of the invisible sea before the dunes, and then the hugeness of sea and sky
Photos from the top: my lovely 3-speed bike leant up against my favourite tree; cycling through picturesque Woodbastwick; Off-roading through the dunes North of Yarmouth.
'Is the bicycle a natural cycle, or a vehicle of revolution?' So ran the slogan on a London Cycling Campaign badge in the 1970s.
Ballantyne in his book somehow encapsulated the cyclist's psyche, as well as giving sound advice on handling traffic and aggressive car drivers ( and dogs).
As this is my first ever post I will start with a brief introduction. I have just graduated from UEA studying environmental science and alongside my studies I am an active member of TN, involved in everything from carbon conversations groups to organising the reskilling sessions - more on them in the future I am sure.
Now being in the middle of exam revision this seemed like a brilliant opportunity for procrastination! So I decided to take up the challenge. These are some photos of my doodlings. I managed to keep it up for the whole month (and I'm still doing it) and it was a bit of revelation. Not only did it give me an excuse to unleash my creative side on a regular basis it was also very powerful to actually see on the page in front of me everything that I had bought. I am tempted to make excuses about the amount of snacks and alcohol on there being down to exam stress - which they are! - and all the bicycle equipment this month being necessary for my epic adventure this summer (update on Sunday), but I've realised that this isn't really the point! I can justify my consumption anyway I want, but until I can look at my doodles of a month's purchases and not feel slightly disturbed by what is on there I can't fool myself into believing that I'm happy with it and don't want to change it.
There are some drawbacks. I felt a bit like cheating to ignore all of the things that I 'consumed' but didnt pay money for, whether exchanged or given to me etc - but including those starts to get complicated so it is a useful beginning. And it can be quite challenging to work out how to draw some things, but I like a challenge.
I have found this process of drawing everything I buy actually helps me to change my consumption as well making me aware of it (it is truly a wonderous thing!), as it makes me reflect on every purchase that I have made and whether I would go about it differently next time. So having extolled its virtues I now challenge you to try drawing all that you spend money on for a month and see what you discover - drawing ability irrelevant as you don't have to show it to anyone!
On the red wall in the old students’ union there were sign-up lists for all the workshops – Zero Carbon Farm, Tales for Transition, Community Ownership of Assets, Wild Zones, DIY streets... One at the end was covered in signatures. The title was Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil.
The graphs came and went. The patterns of deflation were spelled out. Bubbles burst through the centuries, pyramids collapsed. With fossil fuels the bubble has expanded like never before in history. 1600 trillion dollars of virtual money in 30 years. For every slice of financial cake that exists there are now one hundred claims. Because these expansions are built, as Stoneleigh pointed out, not on the reality of wealth, but on a perception of money. At some point the spell breaks. We are running off a cliff and our legs are still working, but very soon we’re going to look down and realise there is nothing to hold us up. We fall bigtime.
The lecture hall was packed and everyone sat in a stunned kind of silence. Afterwards we reeled out to a second leg of Open Space and after lunch the next day entered a Big Group Process in the Great Hall. It was a new Transition experiment. We gathered into our “home groups” (groups of eight people formed at the Mapping of the initiatives at the start of the conference) and looked collectively into the future. We explored what we felt would happen in one year’s time, then five, then ten. We closed our eyes and put ourselves in a frame to see what would lie ahead, as Sophy asked questions. What does it mean we are so much in debt? What are our feelings about what is coming? Then we discussed the matter between ourselves and drew our thoughts in images and words. At the end we held up our sheets of paper in a living gallery. 2011, 2015, 2020. Everywhere there was a split between breakdown and breakthrough, fall and transcendence. In amongst the dark scribbling emerged butterflies and the phoenix. Through the dualities of hope and despair, the good ship Transition sailed on towards the future.
Transition is well known for its positive outlook, for the fact it sees an opportunity for living very differently on the planet as fossil fuels become scarce and costly. It deliberately steers a different course of activism from environmental or social protest against the old powers; it does not encourage endtimes glee, the mind's arrogant dismissal of life. It works very hard to make new connections between human beings, to forge resilient communities, to enter the field of possibilities rather than follow a trajectory that we have been trained to see is the only way. But the fact is none of this can happen without the old structures that hold that trajectory in place breaking up.
Photos: Sophy introducing the conference in the Great Hall (Ed Mitchell); Tully before the Stoneleigh lecture; mapping the future; Adrienne facilitating our Communication and Media session; bottom up initiative - swimming upriver (Mike Grenville).
There was a seismic shift underway. This was the fourth conference and Transition was no longer at its start-up phase. There are now 350 official initiatives world-wide and hundreds more beginning. Some of these initiatives have been active for years (TN has been active for three). So we’ve got experiences and feedback that are meaningful for the whole enterprise. Up to this point Transition has been structured by a 12-step process – a guide for people and communities starting to respond to those drivers of peak oil and climate change (and the “third driver” of economic breakdown). This year the Transition Network broadened its territory. We were no longer on an energy-descending ladder but standing within a complex weave of essential elements: the subtitle of the conference was introducing a new way of explaining Transition.
The pattern language of Transition was displayed down one of the corridors at the Seale Hayne college and so we walked down them together, discussing and writing notes over them. Because with our experience we can respond to this new structure, strengthen and enliven it. This is not an empty workshop exercise: it has meaning because we are attempting something new. We’re feeling our way to reassemble some key elements that have been within humanity for thousands of years and we’re looking at the ones that work and make us feel OK about living together within a time of turbulence, a time of radical social change. We’re looking for some base notes that underpin a new kind of society that speaks to people everywhere and can be as diversely spoken (as it was at the Conference) everywhere from Norwich to Sao Paulo, from Bungay to Fife, island, city or remote village, north or south.
So where the original Pattern Language is based on things, on nouns, Transition’s Pattern Language is based on activities, on verbs on doing things together. You can download the work-in-progress here (8MB pdf). Many of these are the words and phrases we have had quickly to master and manifest: speaking in public, working with local businesses, great reskilling, great unleashing, food coops, energy descent action plans. Each of the 63-patterns contains a challenge and a solution and all follow a sequence of 6 evolutionary phases - from the groundwork before an initiative begins to Scaling Up. It starts with the personal shock of peak oil discovery and ends where grassroots initatives begin to dialogue with the “top-down” structure and influence how things can shift from an oil-dependent civilisation to a new resilient way of exchanging and interacting as a people, in synch with the eco-systems of the earth.
Transition is about working-together in the face of immense physical and emotional challenges, learning to take matters into our own hands. It’s about creating a way of living that is fair both to the planet and to its peoples. One in which we are by virtue of our task capable of divesting a heavy, materialistic way of life for one of necessary lightness and simplicity. One which will require us to let go of our illusions of grandeur and separation and face a common reality - to transform within and without us the consequences of the power-hungry, acquisitive, high-drive, domineering Western world.
We need to be conversant, fluid with this language because it is what we have in common, what will enable us to hold together when everything else is falling apart. It is the language that makes it easy, for example, for 300 people from diverse places to be in complete harmony with one another. This is because we are speaking to one another from the material. Not just our mind’s opinion of Transition, but words that match our physical and emotional shared experience of Transition – a language spoken by people who matter, who have the matter in hand. Patterns of language that configure a different world. Because the network of Transition is communication, and we can’t weather this shift on our own.
Why we can’t create the future on our own I’ll be reporting about tomorrow . . how the 2010 Transition Conference received its own shock and how some of that reality came home. Meanwhile if you'd like to read more about the Conference do check out Rob Hopkins's blog http://www.transitionculture.org/ or the Network's coverage on http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
I hadn't been out of the region for a long time. In fact this journey to the 2010 Transition Network Conference was going to be my third venture beyond East Anglia in eight years! Six hours cross-county in midsummer by train. Moon daisy country, elder blossom country.
There are several highlights I'll be reporting on during the next few days: Pattern Language (a new way of explaining Transition), Stoneleigh's shocking report on the Economic collapse, meeting my old friend Adrienne Campbell from Transition Lewes and how five of us went swimming without our clothes up the River Dart..jpg)
This weekend Transitioners from all over the country have been meeting up in Devon for the yearly Transition Conference. Charlotte, Tully and Christine have all been in the action and it finishes at lunchtime today, so this week (from tomorrow) we’ll have posts from the West. There should also be a guest post or two from other initiatives, so do stay tuned.
I was having a chat with a friend of mine, about consumerism and the need to become more aware of its impact on the environment. We had a really good debate. It was fun. We were putting the world to rights.
I've been reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which is described as a "thought experiment" imagining a world where humans have simply vanished. Despite this potentially rather bleak premise (depending on your point of view!) the book is actually a fascinating exploration of the lasting impact we have on our planet, for good and ill.
Another example. I've had eczema since I was a small child. It went for a few years in my late teens and then came back with a vengeance just after A was born. Over recent years I've used a variety of things to try and control it (see a small selection to the left). Nearly all of them have a petroleum base with a host of unpronounceable chemicals making up the rest, and (I'm guessing here) most of them probably don't biodegrade that easily... I've also tried the other stuff too - diet, allergy tests, appallingly smelly Chinese herbal stuff, accupuncture - the lot. None of them worked. But eczema is a funny thing that we still don't understand properly. A number of studies point to environmental factors. It's made me think how about how the things we put into our environment maybe have a habit of coming back to us, how maybe some of the things we do for the good of our health could actually be the things that in the longer term come back and damage our health in ways that we don't yet understand.
Can you be here as the bringer of space in any situation? Eckhart Tolle
Millions of us on this planet dream of freedom, of a liberation from that old restrictive mindset that holds the physical world in chains. We don’t know what shape it will take. We look back at History and we shudder. We look forward and see a blank space. What can we do? We can meet within the frame of Transition to see our predicament in a way that is not bound by form. By our compulsion to repeat what we have been told by our parents and teachers. We can create conditions and ways of exchange that are not hostile. We can provide the space and the time to allow something else to happen. Something that hasn’t been done yet. Because even though people may live bound by the laws of the ancien regime, they also carry the dream of the Earth and self-governance of the people within them.
It happened last night. Just as we arrived back from our Strangers' Circle we came into the wet dark garden and the scent was everywhere. And so we opened the letter box to let the fragrance of the flowers permeate the house, come up the stairs and into our dreams.
I have, like most people in this country, been able to avoid History and do not know how things would be in England if our social fabric breaks. I have however been through many individual shocks. A lot of them forced me to leave places and people, set-ups I had taken for granted, to look at the flimsy things I had depended on: spiritual fancies, culture, friendships, beliefs, reputation, innocence. Some of them made me abandon my biography entirely and start again. All of them broke me out of a small space. All of them made me more human. Only a heart that is broken and bitter knows how to feel beyond its personal circumstance and reach out for its fellows. When you have nothing to lose is when life opens up. When you are terrified of losing, you close down and don’t see the bigger picture, you only care for yourself, your space, your cherished beliefs about the world. 
I had wanted to go back there for as long as I can remember. The small cove had lingered in my imagination, beckoning me through the years. A strip of river sand with soughing wind-bent pine trees on the cliffedge and a stretch of shining water. Only accessible by boat.
And then last week I went back. Mark and I set out up the Alde River with our neighbour Philip in his gaff-rigged boat Snow Goose. Philip spent a childhood sailing on the Deben further down the coast and now we all live alongside the Blyth. To live happily in East Anglia is to be kin to the water and its relationship with the land – reedbed, estuary, broad, marsh, fen. .jpg)
Eastern rivers are slow-moving but tidal, tricky to navigate. The Alde is broad, so at high tide you can have a good sail if the wind is fair. I know this because I used to spend all my summers here with the friends of my youth. This place urged me to leave the city, my desk, to make a leap into freedom. For years I yearned for this scent of salt and reeds, of open water and sky and the haunting curlew’s cry.
We rounded the bend and there it was: the shoreline dotted with pied birds, a small breeze on the green water, the squiffed red pines still guarding the clifftop. Utterly beautiful in the way that East Anglia is beautiful for those of us who love the waterlands.
It was perfect, a perfect place for a picnic, as it had always been. I held the moment in my heart, and then I let it go. We couldn’t land because Snow Goose has a fixed keel and this is a shallow inlet, and so we went about and tacked upriver along Blackwater, where the rhododendrons shimmered along the bank. A swan took off and flew past us. The spell of the past broke inside..jpg)
What has this got to do with Transition – apart from the obvious fact that sailing is about as low-carbon a way of travel you can imagine, only using the dynamics of wind and tide and current and your own human ingenuity and skill? Apart from the realisation that Transition has made us socially bold and confident on almost any topic - economics to ecology - so that we could have a dynamic friendship with our neighbours that might not have happened otherwise?
It’s got to do with Transition because nostalgia, a yearning to go back to places and times in a possible future, prevents us from living in the now, where we now most urgently need to live.
Because if we don’t love where we are and who we are with we won’t make it. We’ll be looking to be someplace else all the time, wrapped up in ourselves and our great sadness. We won’t put the best of ourselves on the line. We won’t have a reason to be in this neighbourhood, with this group of people, happy to be holding this dish of humble vegetables in our hands..jpg)
My three posts this week are about loving where you are. Not escaping into a holiday Earth that requires vast amounts of fossil fuel, but making steps to belong wherever you find yourself. Getting together with people and doing things in the creative way that Helen was talking about last week, taking care of the physical world in the craftsmen’s way John was talking about, paying attention to small things and thinking of the bigger things the visionary way Mark was talking about Bolivia: what some people call hologrammic imagination. Tapping into the workings of the world.
You see, Little Japan was called Little Japan because the quirky-topped trees look like the stylised trees in Japanese paintings. Of course they are nothing to do with Japan; they’re Scot’s pine, our oldest native trees, guardians of burial grounds and often planted as windbreaks in the sandy soils of Suffolk and Norfolk . Now I know about trees I don’t need to cover the place up with cultural references. It is as it is. Just as the Alde is all rivers, The River, and we are all people, navigating with the tiller in our hands, listening to the sound of water running underneath the boat, feeling the wind on our faces, in tune with ancestral fabric of the place, with each other.
On a broad reach, coming home to who we really are.
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Sailing upriver towards Snape; rigging the Snow Goose with Philip at Slaughden Quay; Mark at the tiller; approaching Little Japan.
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