Transition Norwich Blog

Keep Making Sense - How Transition Changed My Life #2

2012-01-31T09:37:00.002Z

Yesterday afternoon, I interviewed fellow-in-transition Nick Watts for today's installment of How Transition Changed My Life. Nick has been active in Sustainable Bungay since 2008. He co-ordinated the Library Community Garden project, is one of the key organisers of Happy Monday's monthly Community Cafe and is secretary of the initiative. He also grows-his-own vegetables at home and on two allotments.

Nick had come over with his chainsaw to cut logs from the dead elm I've been felling recently, so our interview was informal. We sat by the woodburner with a cup of tea and I said, "So Nick, how has transition changed your life...?"

Nick: In October 2008, I applied to do a Phd at UEA in Norwich, involving action research on how effective the Transition movement was on bringing about change in response to Peak Oil. At that time I knew nothing about Peak Oil.

MW: So that's when you first became aware of it?

Nick: Yes, and it affected me deeply. It was totally life-changing. I thought, 'This is it. I want to spend my my life doing something about this.' I realised our whole society rested on very shaky foundations. I'd been worried for some time about climate change and that there was a real social problem with addressing it. But when I put Peak Oil and Climate Change together it crystallised my thinking. I felt the solutions to these problems went hand in hand. On a personal level it also unleashed a huge surge of creativity - one of the first things I did as a response was make a Peak Oil collage...

MW: Oh, I remember that Nick, have you still got it?

Nick: Yes, I'll send you a picture of it.

MW: So what was your next step?

Nick: Well, I didn't get on the course. But I was totally fired up. I started reading the Energy Bulletin, John Michael Greer's Archdruid Report, James Howard Kunstler's work, got into the 'doomer porn' thing a bit (laughs)...

And then I went to a Transition Norwich Economics and Livelihoods meeting. Again, I didn't really know anything about economics at the time, but my own booksearch business had dwindled after more than a decade of earning a decent living with it, so I was at a bit of a watershed in my own life...

MW: And all this was happening at the same time as the economic crash? Around October 2008?

Nick: That's right. So I went to this meeting and met Tully Wakeman. He said, 'Did you know there's a Transition Group in Bungay?' I had no idea. He told me to get in touch with Josiah...

MW: And the rest is history...

Nick (laughs): Josiah told me later that Tully had warned him, 'I have to tell you Josiah, he's VERY keen.'

So I came to that Xmas party where the only person I knew was Margaret, so I talked to her most of the evening in the living room with a couple of other people. And I kept hearing bits of the conversation everyone was having in the kitchen... about Marx! I couldn't believe I was in Bungay!

MW: Yeah, it's a shame you missed that, it was really interesting... And you know Rob is a Marxist scholar. I'd also just been reading 'Capital' for the first time, an old version I got from the library. Transition gets you like that, especially at the beginning. You want to find out about all sorts of subjects you've never paid any attention to before. And talk about it with others.

Nick: Yes. You get a head of steam up and it takes over your life.

MW: Once you've had that end-of-suburbia moment, you get kind of hooked...

Nick: It's like a transition epiphany!

MW: So once you got involved, how did it affect your life then?

Nick: Well, practically speaking I started to co-ordinate the Library Garden project in 2009, which really got going after the Permaculture weekend in Jan 2010.

MW: What about transition's impact on your social life?

Nick: It's widened my social circle. And it's really good that you become friends with people you're working with on a common understanding, for a common good. You get involved with Transition and it casts a different light on everything you do. You're thinking bigger in a way about the systems that underpin our lives, but acting from where you are.

At the beginning I did want to tell everyone about it. It was a bit like a quasi-religious experience. I couldn't believe that people didn't want to know about how our economic system was so fragile, for example, or how dependent we are on our access to fossil fuels to live the way we do... Sometimes I felt a certain distance from old friends because of this.

I've been headed in the direction of voluntary simplicity for some time and now it seems more relevant than ever. Simplifying your life to where you're less dependent on a high income or high energy use. It makes you more resilient, less dependent on supermarkets and the industrial food system for what you eat. Peak Oil presents the very real possibility of these fossil-fuel energy-intensive ways of life to be taken away. I see it as a responsibility, especially if you have children, to take it seriously.

MW: So three years on Nick, what's your approach to bringing awareness of the Transition approach to others?

Nick: I still tell people about it, perhaps not so zealously though. It's difficult to engage with people in a community where there's a reluctance to new ideas. So you get on with it yourself and with those you can work with. You build it up like that. Do things people can see and join in with. I think Sustainable Bungay's doing pretty well.

MW: Yes, me too. That's great, Nick and thanks for agreeing to the interview. Is there anything you'd like to finish on?

Nick: Perhaps this quote from Vaclav Havel:

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Pics: Nick in Bungay Library for Turning the Tide climate change play, April 2010; Peak Oil collage by Nick Watts; Nick shows me how to chainsaw logs, January 2012

Breaking Isolation - How Transition Changed My Life #1

2012-01-30T12:15:00.009Z

Each day this week we'll be hearing from a different crew member on the TN blog about How Transition Changed My Life.

So to introduce the week I've been looking back at some of the posts I've written on This Low Carbon Life over the past two and a half years and seeing how they chronicle the changes in my own life through my engagement with Transition Norwich, Sustainable Bungay, and the Social Reporting project on the wider Transition network.

Choosing a random selection of six posts what strikes me most is how they all relate to breaking isolation, joining in and working with other people. Bringing myself out of the cupboard, getting involved, sharing the skills and resources I have - and letting others share theirs with me.

From introducing fellow Norwich and Bungay transitioners to wild medicinal and edible plants on a Spring Tonic walk in April 2009, to learning the basics of permaculture (and paying attention to where we are) with Sustainable Bungay on a weekend with Graham Burnett in January 2010 (was that really two years ago?), to exploring all aspects of our food systems as part of The Low Carbon Cookbook team in Norwich, throwing myself wholeheartedly into transition has transformed my experience from that of feeling like a loner on the outside to an increased sense of being part of it all.

I've also come to know a wider circle of people, all of us attempting to come to grips with what is, face the difficulties and work on solutions. And I've learned to chop my own firewood!

At the Sustainable Bungay core group meeting last Tuesday, Josiah spoke about how the original motivating factors for the group coming together - a response to climatic change, diminishing fossil fuels and latterly severe economic constraints – were more relevant than ever as we enter the coming year.

And that all those community events we have organised, websites we have constructed, community meals we’ve shared, projects we have pulled off and conversations we have had together since 2007 have given us invaluable experience in terms of facing and responding to adversity.

And the changes keep coming. Last Tuesday at Sustainable Bungay's AGM, to my utter astonishment, I was voted in as Chairman for the coming year. I thought Josiah was joking when he said he felt someone else ought to take the role he has done so brilliantly up to now. We all did. Then he said it again. He was serious. So Margaret thanked him and we all looked around at each other. I even said let's all be co-chairmen and do it a bit differently. This was not taken up.

"Will you do it, Mark?" said Margaret.

I laughed. I'd never even considered it.

"Go on," said Richard.

"Well, I'm not..."

Then there was a vote and suddenly I'd apparently accepted and was chairing the rest of the meeting looking over at the agenda Josiah had organised. I actually felt slightly dazed for the next fifteen minutes.

"I might need a bit of a hand at first," I said to him. "Okay, I'll help you out if you need it" he said.

And that's one of the best things about Transition and how it changes your life. You get to do things as part of the community you would never have thought of. Call it re-skilling, being flexible, saying yes to opportunities, rising to the challenge, now's the time to resist the desire to remain in that not-so-splendid isolation.

To join up with our fellows to make good our fractured world, make the shift "from empire to earth community".

Later postscript: I've just read Ann Owen's (Transition Bro Ddyfi) excellent skillshare post on the Social Reporters project today (how to make a bender). It really relates to this piece so here's the link.

And keep an eye out for tomorrow's post where I interview fellow transitioner Nick Watts on How Transition Changed his Life!

Pics: Transition Is Also...; omg I thought it was just me; Gemma, Me, Josiah at Introduction to Permaculture Course 2010 (MW)

connecting with our roots - a plants for life talk

2012-01-28T06:45:00.035Z

"Are you sitting comfortably?" I asked the circle of people who had gathered in the warmth of Bungay Library on a Sunday afternoon. "Good then I'll begin. . . right we're going to get up and go out into the garden and look at plants!"

Everyone laughed and went outside into the courtyard garden that in spite of the winter still had 12 vibrant medicine herbs amongst the fruit trees and bushes and ghosts of flowers past: sage, thyme, marigold, parsley, fennel . . .

Writing now it's hard to recall exactly what I said in the 40 minutes that followed, because as you go about Standing Up to Speak you realise that set and setting are everything, the people in front of you are everything, and the words come tumbling out in a completely different order than you expect.

I imagine I am going to give a neatly ordered talk, but plants and speaking are spontaneous right-hemisphere things. You write ideas and concepts in left-hemisphere lines in your blue notebook, and then you look at the audience and those words start inventing loops and connections you hadn't thought of. You find yourself swinging far and wide from those linear concepts, running with a topic in directions you had no idea were there. You find yourself getting up and dancing and making people laugh. And you have to go with that. Because it's not just you speaking and this is the initiating talk in the Plants for Life series Mark has organised for 2012.

So in this post I am giving just a part of what I remember and letting it go where it wants to go. I wanted to start with a flower that was appearing in January and on our way to the Library we found a butterburr on the road to Brampton - a composite flower, known as winter heliotrope to gardeners, related to the native larger butterburr (known as petasites to herbalists). So that was the defining plant, a member of the sunflower family, frequently used as a natural pain killer and anti-allergen. I passed it around so everyone could smell its heavenly vanilla scent.

How do you approach a flower? I asked the circle. Colour, scent, shape, touch, taste we all agreed. With our memory and imagination, poetry and song. How do you approach your day? Ah, that's harder. We think about our day. We drive down the country road and we don't see the flower standing there on a cold January day, clocking the pathway of the sun. We are on the one-way fast track, staring dead-ahead. When you stop you realise you have to slow down and look all around. Notice this earth we are on for such a short while, what time we are in.

Right now we are in root time, coming up to emergence next month with the snowdrops and aconites. We're still in winter, on the edge of hibernation, underneath the soil, in the dark, storing up our energies for the bursting out of spring.

What are the root dishes on our table? Swede, parsnip, carrot, turnip, beetroot, potato, Jerusalem artichoke. What are the root tincture and teas on our medicine shelves? Angelica, burdock, elecampane, horseradish, liquorice. All herbs for resilience, the sweet, the bitter and the pungent. I held up a stringy root many people recognise (nettle), and a root most people don't.

Here we are I said, in root time in sugar beet country. In January the trucks of East Anglia thunder towards the sugar refineries of Cantley and Bury, ferrying these wurzels torn up from the muddy fields. They stand waiting in vast piles by the road. We don't notice them as we speed by. We are barely aware the sugar that goes into our tea and marmalade comes from these pale giants, or anything about the industry that turns these roots into the white stuff that artificially sweetens our indoor lives.

But to connect with the plants is to connect with the rhythm of the year, to locate yourself in time and space. It is to connect with the neighbourhood you find yourself in and discover, that even though your world has apparently shrunk because of economics and peak oil, it has in fact grown hugely. It has by your attention to detail, brought memory, fragrance, belonging back into your life, as you notice the limes in the churchyard, the sage in the library garden, the butterburr along the highway. Each plant a small universe with its own story to tell, its own medicine to bequeath.

You can't make these connections with your straight mind, you have to do it with your wiggly mind that runs along the lines of the rivers and clouds, along the shapes of shorelines and roots and branches. You have to use your imagination to see the invisible underground systems of plants and the connections all the mycorrhizal fungi make. Right now, in root time, you have to go into the depths of yourself and connect with the plans and maps and dreams for the future you hold in store, that will one day burst through into the light of day, come what may.

Once you are rooted in time and space, in synch with the living systems, you can look at the bigger picture, you can be aware of your every encounter with all its ramifications. Where you don't want to be in a time of unravelling is whirling about in your mind only thinking in straight lines, listening to the radio in the car, in air-conditioned 24/7 time. You need to make different connections. Approach the world with all your senses. Stop and look around. Get up out of your comfortable chair on a cold day. See things for yourself.

It's a wiggly world out there with its own beautiful sun-based logic. In this earth-bound time and space the terror that prevents us from seeing what is happening to the planet and ourselves can be evaluated and acted on. You have to use your heart to see like this and not hold on to a fixed world view, you have to get up and shimmy and let those stiff thoughts and habits break up and decrystallise, so you can think and feel about life in a different way, come up with new twists and solutions.

There is one root we have in England that gleefully occupies every space and can give us all a hand in this endeavour: it was the main plant of the talk and is a peerless medicine for this crossover moment, from root time to emergence. Another member of the sunflower family, the Dandelion. This resilient "weed", loved by bees, hated by gardeners, contains in its roots, leaves and flowers all the bitter qualities of heart medicine. It gives us minerals for our bones and helps break up the stiffness we inherit from living in a rigid and heartless society, striking the strange attitudes of snooty politicians and fashion models. Detoxes our system, cools our inflamed and creaky joints. We ended the afternoon with dandelion and burdock tea. Two of the most powerful and most common medicine roots in the realm. Free for the taking.

This post can't do the things that speaking can. Because it misses a vital ingredient. No matter how smart and entertaining the words, how lovely the images, the warmth and vibrancy of people and the physical world are what really matter. Without them we go nowhere. Without these meetings there is no material, no context for anything we write.

We are, like the roadside flower, here for a short time. We have to value our human form, this wiggly mind, that allows us to comprehend this earth and know it for the extraordinary experience it is. We have to know what part we are destined to play in the future as a people. The plants have been with us all our lives, they have been here from the beginning of time when the earth grew her first spring-green coat. They are our link to her and to all our ancestors. We need, right now, to connect with them, because only with strong roots in this earth, can we hold fast in the winds of change that lie before us. This emergence we call Transition.

Photos by Mark Watson and Elinor McDowall: poster for Mark's Plants for Life talks, walks and workshops, 2012; CDC standing up to speak; tools of the trade; anyone know this root? (sugar beet); dandelion clocks in real time; Gemma and Kate checking out resilient herbs; Nick, organizer of the Bungay Library Community Garden.

the terror of the situation

2012-01-27T08:12:00.026Z

There's a scene that I remember from The Heart of Darkness. It comes back to me sometimes in Transition meetings. The hero returns from Africa and tries to tell Kurtz's fiancee about the iniquities of Empire. But she is not listening. He can't bear to tell her the truth of what he has witnessed. The Congo is far away from the polite drawing room in which they now sit and the illusion that everything is nice and safe is too strong for him to bring the cruel realities of the forests and its people to light.

You might be forgiven for thinking that all the bad things that are happening "out there" to our fellow human beings and to the earth, are due to politicians and bankers and the military-industrial complex. And this is true they are. But they are also happening because we shut our ears in our modern version of Joseph Conrad's drawing room, believing that everything is OK really. And I often wonder how in Transition we can bring those kind of shocking, end of suburbia moments to bear, so that we can realise that the times are really not OK, and actually have never been OK and take steps to shake ourselves and everyone else awake?

This week at Sustainable Bungay's AGM something outrageous got into me. We were upstairs in the Library and Sylvia, who is on the pilot for the new version Bungay Community Library, was giving us the low-down on the county council's shifting of funds and personnel in respect to the cuts. Everyone was listening intently.

"What a bunch of crooks!" I exclaimed, breaking the uncharacteristic formal atmosphere, created by the appointment of our new chair (Mark) and confirming our treasurer, secretary etc.

"Sounds like Stalinist Russia!" roared Rob from St. James Village Orchard. We all laughed and Sylvia told us that it might look like everything we had done together was in vain, but it wasn't.

"If none of us had acted, they would have taken everything," I said.

Then a local charity, the World Land Trust came up in passing. "Oh, that dreadful organisation!" I burst out, because I had just read a blog about some of their activities. And when someone added that that David Attenborough was the president, added "He is the worst."

People were shocked. I had broken a taboo. These things are complex, we said to one another afterwards, but we need to know all the facts, not just the ones we like. We need to question everything, and our belief-systems about "population" most of all. Just because a person or an organisation appears to be acting in favour of the planet, doesn't mean there are no consequences to their actions or they that they do not support an unpalatable agenda. We can't take everything as read.

The fact is we do take everything as read. Because we would rather believe that someone we have seen all our lives being kind to animals on television is a good person. We would rather believe that the party we vote for acts in our own interests, that our parents love us, that the energy we use is limitless and that at some point the cavalry will come round the corner. We would rather believe Sustainable Bungay - and indeed all of Transition - was just about friendly community events, but the reality is it is set within a frame of massive degradation of the earth, the power-play of corporations and the global banking system, resource wars and media manipulation and although, as yesterday's post explored, we have to have a positive vision to work towards, we can't do that unless we allow those realities to frame everything we do.

And this isn't just an individual decision this is a social decision. Because a conversation between people who know the facts and one where people are upholding the illusions of the status quo, is a different conversation. You discuss the same things and design the same events, but they contain the ability to change the way everyone sees and thinks about the world, in the same way the Occupy movement has changed the conversation about our financial system.

It will be an Abundance project, where we are really finding out what it means to live on local apples through the winter, a skills, knowledge and resources directory where we are really learning to share everything we have. It will be events like tonight's showing of The History of Oil at Tom Abbott's barn in the Saints, because though we like to be entertained like everyone else, we have a serious reason to meet up. Because the real struggle we face as Transitioners is not so much to design and implement a localised infrastructure, but to change the fixed perceptions about our civilisation. To shift out of a complacent narrow world-view we have been taught to uphold, to one in which the consequences of our collective history can be clearly seen.

What has this got to do with this photograph of an emerging Monkshood shoot? Well this is one of the 52 Flowers That Shook My World. The shoot is emerging after a long winter as a seed, kept in the dark, and this image (by the German architectural design lecturer, Karl Blossfeldt) shows the kind of energy and determination that emergence takes. Monkshood possesses one of the most poisonous roots in the world, but its poison has the power to cure many maladies and was one of the two founding plants of the homeopathic system, a system that recognises a small inperceptable action can change the health and destiny of an entire organism.

In the book I stand beside the 1648 border of the Oxford Botanical Gardens and contemplate the turning point of the English Revolution. In 2012 in the Bungay Library I take part in Mark's Plant for Life series, with a talk called Connecting With Our Roots.

In tomorrow's post I will explore those radical "disruptive" energies in the light of this talk, what they have to do with our own roots, what they have to do with Transition.

Monkshood shoot by Karl Blossfeldt; Bungay Library Read-In, February 2011; poster for the History of Oil by Robert Newman

Mapping the Future

2012-01-26T15:07:00.001Z

Today's post is from the Transition Network's Social Reporters project where we are immersed in our Looking Back (at our 2011 pilot), Looking Forward month . During this second half the Social Reporters have been looking at the year ahead and outlining their plans and visions for themselves as Transitioners, their initiatives, their neighbourhoods and the world. Here is mine:

Visioning is one of the Tools and Ingredients in The Transition Companion. It states that not being able to imagine a low-carbon world is a huge impediment to designing and realising it.

Transition suggests we start by creating a positive vision of a future. It asks:

If you woke up in, say, 2030, and the transition had been successfully managed, what would it look, feel, smell and sound like? What would you have for breakfast? What would you see when walking down the street?

If you woke up in 2012 what would you see?

OK. I'm kidding. But visioning for a future we want, or don't want, is not the same as visioning for a future that might actually happen.

Transitioner. In spite of having an active imagination I am not great at looking ahead. I am more of a dreamer at heart, which means I see things within the complexity of the present moment, rather than in linear time. When Transition Norwich launched their Transition 2.0 personal carbon reduction initiative, in response to the imminence of climate change, fifty of us engaged in a long group visioning process. Afterwards everyone began talking animatedly about community and food projects, about getting in touch with neighbours, sharing stuff. I closed my eyes and I saw myself in the garden and everything appeared the same as it is now. It was perhaps quieter, as if the world beyond the garden had stopped running around chasing its own tail.

The ingredient advises us to imagine a future in the context of a world

that has responded to climate change, has far less net energy than today, has moved beyond economic growth, and has adapted creatively and purposefully.

Listening to everyone speak, I realised I was already living in that future. I no longer had the means to fly around the world and had already rooted myself in the neighbourhood. Most of this had happened by circumstance, rather than design. At the time I felt like a ninny but now, thanks to the Transition Circles that emerged from this meeting and the two projects that came out of them, I have forged some valuable tools for downshifting and am now able to articulate and share these with others as a Transition communicator. The individual moves you need to make with those key drivers - home energy, transport, waste, water, food.

Step one: walk your low-carbon talk

Projects The two projects that came of our Transition Circles were the Low Carbon Cookbook and This Low Carbon Life, a community blog that has been running daily for over two years, and provided the structure for the Social Reporters project. This year, after tracking the growing and harvesting cycles in our gardens and kitchens in 2011, the Cookbook will start taking its written form and the blogs will continue to reporting and reflecting on that future way of being on earth.

One of the blogs' greatest strengths is showing what a low-carbon culture looks and feels like, showing all its relationships with people and with the planet in a vibrant, intelligent and colourful way. This gives heart and strength and meaning to all ventures within the initiative. We inherit a world that is all creation and destruction, in which our presence is arbitrary. Two vital components that make these projects work come between these two states: 1) maintenance and stability and 2) valuing everyone who takes part.

Step 2: commit to projects and people come what may

Initiative In 2010 a group of Transitioners met in the Norwich Arts Centre and engaged in a day of creative visioning. We were improvising on the theme of Future Beings, preparing for a performance that would happen on Earth Hour outside the Forum on the Spring Equinox. We chose cards that imagined different scenarios and then spoke to each other as if we came from those futures: steady state, techno-fix, paradigm shift, Mad Max . . . During our performance we would speak with the audience as those future beings and they could ask us questions.

I spoke from an unexpected future. It was marked, like my vision, by its remarkable stillness. One day I said, everyone just stopped what they were doing up to then, and began something completely different. The change was absolute and sudden.

One thing I have learned about creativity in Transition: when you provide the space and the opportunity extraordinary things can emerge from people. Everyone that day was an actor, a performer, a speaker, a creator. When you experience those untapped capacities, you can then seize the day and appear in your true colours. You are in this venture, not on your own. You are acting in an ensemble company, backed by all the ancestors and future beings who are yet to come to this earth. When you step out you realise the audience is with you every step of the way.

Step Three: be bold, be on show

World What does it mean to be a dreamer? It means you hold within yourself a vision for the whole earth, not just how your community can feed and clothe itself, but how we need to be as a collective, aligned with the living systems. It means seeing in big time, considering all peoples, all creatures, all lands. You don't do this in linear time, mapping things step by step, but in a present moment in which the past and the future are contained. Where everything that is going down in the room, the neighbourhood, is going down in the world, what some call hologrammic perception.

It means when we meet we are all meeting as a council of all beings deciding on how the future will go. It's an attitude, a frame that brings depth and intregrity and a sense of play into everything we do.

Step Four: live every encounter as if it really matters

This is a small map, drawn up without any previous planning. As I put my attention on each section the material presented itself. All I had to do write everything down. As I sketched its contours, I realised that most of its elements, explored in previous years, were now coming into play. Even though at the time they didn't seem to "go" anywhere, now they were making sense. That is the value of visioning. You plot the map and one day you find yourself in the territory, and because you have drawn the map you know what to do.

Last week five of us met up at Jo Homan's Edible Landscapes nursery garden in London, and then decided on our future weekly topics for 2012 (read all about it here). We're starting in February with a full-on month of skill-share, energy, ingredients and tools, the international Transition 2.0 film and national REconomy project. Meanwhile my fellow reporters have been outlining what will be happening in 2012 elsewhere in the UK . . do check us out!

Photos: still from 2012, the movie; visioning for Transition Norwich 2.0; taiko drummers announcing Earth Hour, 2010; visioning the future, Catton Grove Primary School (with Transition Cambridge); It takes a Billion, Billion Years to Burn Out the Energy I Have in Me by Mark Watson; five meet up in Finsbury Park

Changing the social logic through design

2012-01-25T09:00:00.005Z

In Prosperity Without Growth, the seminal book by Tim Jackson, he concludes that our social logic must change:

The social logic that locks people into materialistic consumerism as the basis for participating in the life of society is extremely powerful, but detrimental ecologically and psychologically. An essential pre-requisite for a lasting prosperity is to free people from this damaging dynamic and provide opportunities for sustainable and fulfilling lives.

He goes on to give some recommendations that focus on this task, which I will describe here, and then use patterns from A Pattern Language (which I blogged about in Monday's post) to describe ways in which those can be "designed out" of our built environment.

Working Time Policy

This is not the first time I have talked about a shorter working week on this blog. In that article, I highlight the benefits that would come about due to reduced stress levels and more time to care for ourselves and family, but there's another benefit that is more economic in nature, to quote Tim Jackson again:

In an economy in which labour productivity still increases but output is capped (for instance for ecological reasons), the only way to maintain macro-economic stability and protect people's livelihoods is by sharing out the available work.

Although I believe that such policy will never really work until we have an economic system that does not rely on continual economic growth, there are a few patterns that will help:

Work Community (pattern 41) - "Build or encourage the formation of work communities - each one a collection of smaller clusters of workplaces which have their own courtyards, gathered round a common square or common courtyard which contains shops and lunch counters." - This sense of community, I feel, would mean that working times could be much more flexible, would build potential for synergy between members, which would mean that more intense but highly productive work could be done whilst people are together in their work communities, at the same time as freeing them to be truly away from work when they are not there.

Self-governing Workshops and Offices (80) - "No one enjoys his work if he is a cog in a machine." - When you step back and question why you turn up to work 35 hours or more a week, it can seem on the face of it absurd, but the real reason is that "the man" requires you to do so. You would work 20 hours if you could, because it would be so beneficial for you, your family, and for society in general, but it is not currently allowed for within our social structure. But when do we "design" self-governing workshops? When we start new enterprises, develop community projects, form teams within companies. And if we form them as self-governing entities, they will be much more satisfying places to work.

Also: Small work groups (148), Flexible Office Space (146), Local Sports (72), The Family (75)

Tackling Systemic Inequality

"Systemic income inequalities increase anxiety, undermine social capital and expose lower income households to higher morbidity and lower life satisfaction," says Tim Jackson.

For this, I point back to the Self-governing Workshops and Offices above. Those who have a say in how their enterprise is run rarely make decisions that would reward those who do no work, whilst cutting pay and jobs for those who earn so little, and need the money so much more. But on top of that, I will also mention these patterns:

Having out-buildings that could be used to run an engineering business from was a factor in my father's choice of home

Home Workshop (157) - "Change the zoning laws to encourage modest, quiet work operations to locate in neighbourhoods." - Part of the reason for systemic inequality is the lack of power people have to make their own livings from home or in their local neighbourhoods. When looking for a job, I was expected (by the jobcentre) to consider travelling up to 90 miles to a workplace, but who knows what enterprise there is the potential for in our local community if there were just the resources available to do so. Why is it almost impossible to find houses which have workshops included, or where the front room could be converted into a local shop?

Also: Small Services without Red Tape (81), Office Connections (82)

Measuring Capabilities and Flourishing

Tim Jackson: "The suggestion that prosperity is not adequately captured by conventional measures of economic output or consumption leaves open the need to define an appropriate measurement framework for a lasting prosperity."

At first I struggled to think which of these patterns really cover this, but then I realised that lots of them are appropriate! Since flourishing is subjective in nature, the patterns which measure our prosperity best are those which attract people to them, and form happy spaces, I therefore bring your attention to the following patterns:

Activity Pockets (124) - "Surround public gathering places with pockets of activity - small, partly enclosed areas at the edges, which jut forward into the open space between the paths, and contain activities which make it natural for people to pause and get involved." - We sometimes don't spend time in public spaces, not because we don't want to be out and about, but because we don't feel comfortable being exposed. The measure of good public space is how much it is used, but it will only be used if people feel comfortable using it, no matter whether its with a small group of select friends, or a city-wide Carnival (pattern 58). This pattern is also closely related to Courtyards which Live (pattern 115).

Sleeping in Public (94) - "It is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep." - Sounds like my kind of park, and my kind of success! On this note, perhaps any kind of doing less could be considered success?

Beer Hall (90) - "Where can people sing, and drink, and shout and drink, and let go of their sorrows?" - If a community has not got places like this, then it's probably a failure, but they do exist. Many of our smaller villages' last pubs have closed and many new housing estates are given no such provision. Norwich, I feel, is quite lucky in that there are so many such places, or at least in places to drink. But it would be nice if Norwich had more places to sing and shout, don't you think?

Strengthening Social Capital

Tim Jackson: "Understanding that prosperity consists in part in our capabilities to participate in the life of society demands that attention is paid to the underlying human and social resources required for this task."

Immediately, two patterns come to mind:

Norwich City Hall, which is too centralised and closed to be the basis for truly participatory local democracy

Local Town Hall (44) - "To make the political control of local functions real, establish a small town hall for each community of 7000, and even for each neighbourhood; locate it near the busiest intersection in the community. Give the building three parts: an arena for public discussion, public services around the arena, and space to rent out to ad hoc community projects." - Sounds idealistic, right? But when you look at what we do have, you do start to wonder why government is so centralised. Occupy Norwich have agreed by consensus that "The House of Commons does not represent the will or interests of the common people, rather the wealthy". Isn't an important part of claiming back our participation in the life of society to ensure that our government is at the appropriate scale for the activities that they undertake. And that society as a whole (rather than just the wealthy) has a representative say in how things are done? Simply building places to represent this would help. I hope that Beyond Green (who I mention in yesterday's post) design into their plans provision for local democracy, because without the provisions, such "democracy" will just end up as plutocracy, thinly veiled.

Necklace of Community Projects (45) - "The local town hall will not be an honest part of the community which lives around it, unless it is itself surrounded by all kinds of small community activities and projects, generated by the people for themselves." - I love this image, and it follows on naturally from the previous pattern. Being involved in society is not just about democratic participation, but also in trial services, research, public consultation and community activities.

Further patterns which are also relevant: Common Land (67), Local Sports (72), Dancing in the Street (63), Self-Governing Workshops and Offices (80), Master and Apprentices (83), Shopfront Schools (85), University as a Marketplace (43) and many more.

Dismantling the Culture of Consumerism

This is the biggie, when it comes to Transition, I feel, because even with all the other social logic changed, if we continue to speak to each other primarily through the language of consumer goods, then there will be no hope of ecological balance. Tim Jackson says this:

Consumerism has developed partly as a means of protecting consumption-driven economic growth. But it promotes unproductive status competition and has damaging psychological and social impacts on people's lives.

The idea of patterns to combat consumerism, then, are those that give us an alternative, non-material language to express our identity and culture:

Connected Play (68) - "Lay out common land, paths, gardens, and bridges so that groups of at least 65 households are connected by a swath of land that does not cross traffic. Establish this land as the connected play spaces for the children in these households." - It seems to me that a huge amount of our economic consumption is demanded by kids who have been confined to their cramped homes by the child-unfriendly nature of the public space outside their homes. But I have seen other places where, by providing rear gardens that link up with each other and even open out into countryside, children can freely be children without demanding the kind of material entertainment that they have been accustomed to in recent years.

Lower Goat Lane, Norwich

Street Cafe (88) - "The street cafe provides a unique setting, special to cities: a place where people can sit lazily, legitimately, be on view, and watch the world go by." - Who suggested to the world at large that "retail therapy" could ever be a legitimate and truly lasting aide to human well-being? Certainly not me. Unless the "retail" is a warming drink and a slice of homemade cake, and one can sit, perhaps with a friend, contemplating life, love, or whatever it is that makes you feel at peace with the world...

...which for many people may be religion or spiritual nourishment, requiring their Sacred Sites (24) - "People cannot maintain their spiritual roots and their connections to the past if the physical world they live in does not also sustain these roots." - One worrying thing about consumerism is that, for the generation that has grown up within the last twenty to thirty years, it is the only world we know. It is the only model of society that is presented to us by TV, glossy mags and even by our schools (arts subjects have been consistently under-supported for many many years now). Consumerism has become akin to a religion, but one that is damaging to society, the environment and even, often to our own psychological well-being. Therefore churches, meditation centres, parks, memorials, graveyards... these are all essential sites in providing spaces where other values are put higher than individualistic materialism.

And further to these, we could also call upon the patterns Identifiable Neighbourhood (14), Dancing on the Street (63), A Room of One's Own (141), Network of Learning (18) and various others to back up the idea of places challenging the sovereignty of materialism, but, if you've got this far, you've probably got the gist by now!

This last recommendation of Tim's could, I know, form the basis for many more thoughts and posts, but this post is becoming long enough as it is!

Images: 21 hours publication by nef; all others are scenes of Norfolk and Norwich by Simeon Jackson.

Places are made of people (and bricks)

2012-01-24T09:00:00.000Z

I blogged yesterday about the book, A Pattern Language. One thing it teaches us is that places aren't just bricks and mortar and concrete, they are a culmination of thousands of years of human activity, and constantly adapt to the patterns of life which occur there. They are shaped by humans to operate for the benefit of humans (or, more usually, a subset thereof).

But this is by no means the end of the story! As Jonathan Smales of Beyond Green said in a lecture I attended at the Festival of Architecture in Norwich and Norfolk (FANN) last year, "We shape our cities; thereafter they shape us." The phrase is based on Winston Churchill's quote which talks of buildings, rather than cities, but it all boils down to the same thing... the designers of our environment have a lot to answer for because of the influence that their perhaps seemingly trivial decisions can have on how we live our lives.

How can we live low-carbon, ethical and fulfilling lives when much of our environment is designed for car-drivers, supermarket shoppers, individualistic materialists and resource wasters? Sure, there are some great places too (which I shall mention in more detail in tomorrow's post), but there's a double waste associated with bad environments: firstly the wasteful environment itself, but also the destruction of the potential for a sustainable environment. Fields, once turned into car parks, cannot be turned back into fields without another huge packet of waste.

Beyond Green Developments are, in some ways, in a great position to try this out, and indeed they are determined to, as developers responsible for an entirely new place to be built in the north-east Norwich "growth triangle", but that doesn't mean that we should just leave all these complex place-making decisions up to them alone. As potential residents, shop-owners, community members, we also should be able to guide these design decisions. Luckily, Beyond Green, unlike other developers, is keen to ensure that the new community members do get a say in the form their community takes.

Such new communities would have the ability to design an "identifiable neighbourhood" (pattern 14), with a "web of shopping" (pattern 19) where "individually owned shops" (87) form an activity node (30), served by "bike paths and racks" (56), encouraging the use of those local shops over bland, out-of-town supermarkets.

But why shouldn't we also try to influence decisions made about places that already exist? What small changes could we make to our environment that would help us to live in a more sustainable way, without having to rely on huge redevelopment? Take, for example, the pattern "Fruit Trees" (170), which suggests that small orchards should be planted "on common land along paths and streets, in parks, in neighbourhoods" for the experience they add of "growth, harvest, local sources of fresh food; walking down a a city street, pulling an apply out of a tree, and biting into it." We could quite easily plant up places like the above open space on Trafford Road with a few fruit trees. It would serve multiple purposes, as it could also create a vibrant "public outdoor room" (pattern 69) by planting up the area near the road, effectively forming a wall (pattern 173) to shield the space from the road.

When people talk to you about how they want to live more sustainably, but lack the ability to follow through, why not ask yourself how much of that is because their environment is shaping their lives more than they themselves are? Perhaps it's time for a change of environment, like moving to Norwich from the middle of nowhere so that you don't have to drive everywhere, for example!

Images: Chapelfield Mall Car Park entrance and park on Trafford Road, both by Simeon Jackson both released under Creative Commons.

The patterns of a low-carbon life

2012-01-23T10:02:00.000Z

This book, A Pattern Language, has been a huge inspiration to me ever since I first saw it. It has helped me to gain perspective and insights into what is wrong with the world, in specific and practical terms, and what good design can do to make the world a better place, again in quite specific and practical terms.

This book, just to give a bit of background, was written over thirty years ago by Christopher Alexander and his research colleagues. It outlines the patterns of human life, and how these are designed for in our built environment, from the large-scale community planning to the details of a window or feature in a building. The book was inspiration for Rob Hopkins, who applied the same kind of structure in the "ingredients" concept of The Transition Companion.

The book is a catalogue (a dictionary, to follow the "language" metaphor) of patterns of human life, and how spaces are or may be formed to serve those patterns. More about what a pattern is is explained in The Timeless Way of Building (again by Christopher Alexander); a great book, but not essential reading. In essence, a pattern is an observation of something that benefits human well-being, and the book will then discuss some of the issues and then comes to a practical conclusion. Here's a summarised example of one such "pattern":

TEEN-AGE SOCIETY

Teenage is the time of passage between childhood and adulthood. In traditional societies, this passage is accompanied by rites which suit the psychological demands of the transition. But in modern society the "high school" fails entirely to provide this passage.

The most striking traditional example we know comes from an east African tribe. In order to become a man, a boy of this tribe embarks on a two year journey, which includes a series of more and more difficult tasks...

In modern society, the transition cannot be so direct or simple... Every culture that has an adolescent period has also a complicated adolescent problem... high rates of delinquency, school dropout, teenage suicide...

Therefore:

Replace the "high school" with an institution which is actually a model of adult society, in which the students take on most of the responsibility for learning and social life, with clearly defined roles and forms of discipline. Provide adult guidance, both for the learning, and the social structure of the society; but keep them, as far as feasible, in the hands of the students.

Summerhill School in Suffolk, famous for its democratic governance by the children

As you can see, architecture is hardly mentioned in this pattern, but such a pattern obviously affects the design brief of the "school" to be built!

So, the book is essentially about human well-being centric design. That is, to provide environments that are healthy, sociable, educational and positively participatory. These are the social goods that are being strived for in the book (although it doesn't mention them specifically!). Designing in line with natural psychological tendencies (by designing places that we feel happy and comfortable in), rather than against our human instincts (designing places that require huge, brash advertising to persuade you to do something that you don't actually want to do anyway) is a key element in this and is just one of many links to Transition principles that naturally comes out of this well-being centric thought process.

In the next couple of days, I will be blogging further on some specific patterns from the book, and how our built environment shapes the lives we lead (and consequentially how sustainably we live)!

This book is one that I recommend everyone to have a copy of on their bookshelf - it's well worth its $65 cover price (although you can pick up a copy on Amazon for £32).

Image of Summerhill School from Wikimedia Commons.

Local Energy, for the World

2012-01-21T13:13:00.002Z

When I was about ten, we lived in Saudi Arabia for a year, where my parents taught in a school in the capital, Riyadh. One day we took a trip out into the desert; and there in the middle of the stark white and yellow sand dunes that marched in all directions to the horizon, stood an oasis, exactly like those you see in comic books and old films about the French Foreign Legion. An oasis of cool green water, surrounded by scrubby grass and great palms, groaning under the weight of dates. Nearby stood a village, and it was this village that really caught my attention; every available space was covered in solar panels. I was really impressed, even as a child, by the thought that this village could be entirely self-sufficient in its electricity needs; that a country unbelievably rich in oil, was, in this village at least, fore-sighted enough not to use oil-powered generators, but to invest in technology that could harvest the sunlight that is freely available in large quantities, and effectively forever.

I listened to a debate on the radio recently where one of the speakers said that in order to feed the world, we must go down the route of genetically modified crops; he was a passionate advocate and cited the moral argument that, given the numbers of starving people and the technology at our disposal, the choice was obvious. The counter-argument, shorter, more succinct, was that the world already produces as much food as we need, but not as much as we want. Feeding the world with a western-style, meat-and-dairy-rich, daily 3000 calorie plus, diet would require radical change in our agricultural methods. Feeding the world more equitably could already happen; the change would have to be in our minds and habits rather than in the job of our farmers.

It's a concept that's echoed in George Monbiot's book Heat - How Can We Stop The Planet Burning. We could, with available technology, and enough will, provide all the power that we currently need, but pretty much not all that we want. Given the amount of energy we waste every day in the UK, and across the world, arguably we wouldn't even have to increase production that significantly to achieve energy equity across the globe.

And this is where I started thinking about the problem. As part of our New Year Aspirations theme week, I talked about local energy generation, using solar or wind power to support a community-led energy collective. I think this could be a real opportunity to both generate power sustainably and from renewable sources, but also to wrest some control back from the utility companies that control how much we spend on our gas and electricity.

But I also started to think about the problem from a more global perspective. Given that climate change knows no political and national boundaries, what could be a global solution? If we as a global community are sufficiently concerned about climate change, would it make sense to invest heavily in, for example, solar technology, right across the Middle East, across North Africa to the west, and across the central Asian countries to the east? They get the most sunshine, so that would make sense, wouldn't it? I'm not talking about the complex carbon trading initiatives that offset holiday flights against energy efficient cooking stoves in sub-saharan Africa. I'm talking about genuine, cooperatively owned, community-owned solutions, harvesting the plentiful sunshine and wind resources for the benefit of the communities that live in those regions. It could provide energy, but also training, jobs, prosperity, autonomy.

Am I just being simplistic, or is the only real challenge to that concept in our own minds?

Even on a (grey and wet) day like today, installing panels in Norfolk is still an effective option. And what else do we have? We have a lot of wind (I'm told that the winds from Siberia heading west cover flat country all the way across Europe until they hit the first high ground here in Norwich - sometimes I can really believe that!). We have the turbines at Scroby Sands, and scattered across the county, plus the beautiful old windmills dotted around the place, some of them still working, many, I'm sure, just ready to be refitted to modern-day usage. In the same way that Iceland uses its locally available geothermal energy, maybe we should be pushing for a new localism in energy production - local, but cooperative, while supporting other countries, so called developing countries, in building their own local energy, based on what is most suitable for their own locality.

I'm not saying that this will solve all our problems - solutions often come with their own complexities, their own new problems. But as part of a mix - localised, community-based energy production, side by side with radical and focussed energy waste reduction and elimination - this could be a real opportunity to create energy sustainability and equity. It just needs to will to make it happen.

Pic: http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2008/09/04/solar-project-brings-water-and-crops-to-desert/

Look after the pennies...

2012-01-20T10:00:00.000Z

I'm going to assume that you know the other half of this little proverb.

I don't want to quote it in full because this is one proverb that I truly can't stand. It makes no sense! It's just not true! If anything, it's the other way round: If you make big investments in things that work well and last a long time, you'll never have to worry about the minute details ever again!

And so it is with energy. When people talk about home energy-efficiency, the first thing that pops into your head is... let me guess... low-energy light-bulbs. Great! But as far as I'm concerned, low-energy light-bulbs are the "pennies" of energy-efficiency. Yes, by all means install them in your homes, but don't expect them to take care of the bulk of your home energy-efficiency.

To demonstrate this point, let's compare boiling a kettle unnecessarily to leaving a light on unnecessarily. Have a look at these calculations:

Boiling a kettle: 3kW for 3 minutes (1/20th of an hour)
3 kW x 1/20 h = 0.15 kWh

Time for a 60W lightbulb to use the same energy:
0.15 kWh / 0.06 kW = 2.5 hrs

Time for a 11W lightbulb to use the same energy:
0.15 kWh / 0.011 kW = 13.6 hrs

What that's basically saying is that to waste the same amount of energy as boiling a kettle, you would have to leave a 60W incandescent light-bulb on for 2.5 hours. Or if it was an energy-efficient light-bulb (11W), a whopping 13.6 hours!

The other thing about kettle-boiling is that it is a huge demand for a short period of time, which, if large numbers of people turn them on at once, as Chris mentioned on monday, causes a peak in electricity demand that can be in excess of the entire electricity production capacity of the country. Electric lights, however, are a more constant demand and can be allowed for much more easily - 273 low-energy bulbs would have to be turned on at exactly the same time to create the same effect as a single kettle switch being flipped!

So which should we pay more attention to? The "penny" light-bulbs or "pound" unnecessary kettle-boiling?

It's still very hard to keep you eye on where you're using your electricity though, because it's so invisible and so available! You can just flick a switch and it's there, but this hides the amount of energy you're really using. Say you've got an electric heater in your living room (as indeed I have, although I rarely use it), it would be quite easy to turn it on and leave it on without a care in the world, and to be barely aware of the energy that is going into it. With a woodburner, however, if you were spending 10 minutes every couple of hours going out to the shed to bring in some more wood and stack it up in the burner to get the same effect as a 2kW electric heater, you'd start to think to yourself "What the hell am I doing? Look at all this wood I'm wasting!"

Perhaps you'd see your electricity bill differently if it was itemised, like a telephone bill:

This week's electricity usage: Cost per Use Total
Dishwasher Use x 8 .................................. £0.15 ......... £1.20
Washing Machine Use x 2 ........................ £0.20 ......... £0.40
Lights in living room x 28 hrs .................. £0.003 ........ £0.10
Cooking x 10 ............................................ £0.15 .......... £1.50
Microwave x 6 ......................................... £0.15 .......... £0.90
Washing hands with hot water x 20 .......... £0.02 ......... £0.44
Power shower using electric immersion heater x 7
................................................................. £1.01 .......... £7.07

Which would you look at first? The lights? Or the power showers?

Whether the shower or the tumble-dryer takes the most amount of energy in your house will depend very much on your set-up, appliance energy-efficiency and heating energy-source, but you can depend on one thing: you're not going to have a big impact on your bill without looking at the pounds, not just the pennies!

Images: Three pounds and one pence by Simeon Jackson (who noticed that there are three pound coins in the bin in the corner of the picture? Who's looking after them now, huh?), Kettle switch found on the internet, annotated by me.

Waking up in Forest Row

2012-01-19T05:18:00.031Z

I am in Forest Row, East Sussex. It's six in the morning and outside high in the trees a thrush is singing in the dark. I have just made coffee, switched on the computer and the lights. I don't think about it (the power that is). Like millions of people each morning I click the switch, press the button and expect light, heat, instant connection. I'm staying with Mike Grenville (thanks to a fossil fuelled train) and we're putting together an idea for a Transition newspaper. Yesterday we went to the local coffee shop where the talk was all about fracking as the village is close to the site at Balcombe where Cuadrilla plan to test for oil. We were going to go to have a sauna (wood-fired) by bicycle (human powered) but the project took up all our attention.

The fact is everything we do is shaped by energy - by electricity, by oil, by gas- and there is not one of these sources of power that doesn't somehow leave blood on our hands and present some kind of dilemma.

To look at where the coffee, the kettle and all those invisible wires go, what grids they are connected to, what industries, means we're looking at big picture: fracking, mountain top removal, coal-fired power stations, all the issues around nuclear power, the burning of rainforest wood and palm oil for biofuels, oil extraction in the wildernesses of the Artic, deep sea drilling. We're looking at dams and tar sands and pollution and climate change and land grabs. We're looking at companies that make billions of pounds profit, at ourselves struggling to pay bills as those prices keep rising and being totally dependent on that power to live our lives and all I want to do this morning is make my cup of coffee and write this blog before I catch the train home. All I want to do is make my breakfast and step outside into the garden and listen to that bird.

But I can't do that because I'm in Transition and this is the energy week and I know that even if we did make it to the woods to have that sauna last night the bender and the stove exist because of the same energy and somehow we're not going to escape that dilemma no matter how right-on and low-carbon I am about not using central heating. Even if the local people in Sussex, Lancashire and Kent and Wales resist the highly controversial, expensive and resource hungry drilling that will damage the water tables of Britain as it has in the United States, the question we need to ask is where do we get the power from?

"It's about narrative," said Mike. What is the energy story are we telling ourselves?

Off Grid This summer we sat the two of us, as the wind and rain shook the tents at the Sunrise Festival and drank our coffee (rocket-stove) as two men chopped wood for the pizza oven. Grateful for heat and shelter, it is experiences like these that bring home exactly the kind of attitude and engagement you need to live without modern power systems. Tin Village had a solar panel and a small wind turbine that kept the computer going for on-line communications and a small cinema. Everything else was run on wood. However this was the summer and a weekend. Most people, including myself, would soon be heading home. We love all that Kelly kettle camping business but we're on holiday. This is not our everyday world.

To live off-grid all year round in 2012 requires either money for alternative power systems (e.g wood chip boilers, ground-source heat pumps) or high principles. As anyone who has slept in a tent at Occupy Norwich can tell you, off grid is cold, damp (and frequently muddy) in a wintry Britain. Some fellow Transitioners have organised their houses to run almost entirely on wood burners for heat and water and cooking, some like the activist initiative Transition Heathrow have a strong supply of wood from a local tree surgeon for their rocket stove kitchen, a bike generator and four solar panels and a very committed crew.

Other Transition initatives have made that strategic step and started to create their own community energy source, most notably the solar power station in Lewes and the community wind turbine set up by PEDAL - Portobello Transition Town. To create the kind of enterprise requires huge commitment and funding and is no small undertaking. It's a big topic. as Forest Row discovered, when Mike set up a debate between Charles Hendry and Jeremy Leggett at the recent Transition Energy Fair.

But however you organise your house and your transport and your neighbourhood, all of them are underpinned by different stories. The first is that you can continue living the same individualist lifestyle, only using alternative sources of energy, and the other two involve an individual and collective powerdown. Which is not, as energy campaigner Mandy Miekle pointed out recently, so much about creating a low-carbon community, but a low energy society:

The more I have looked into the energy crisis, the more I feel that the next big leap forward will not be technological, but psychological. We must reexamine our relationship with nature, for all resources come from nature. We need to stop talking about outcomes like saving ecosystems without also asking why we are destroying ecosystems in the first place. As Paul Kingsnorth points out, this squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all – it is about narratives. We have many cultural narratives to address, but our relationship with energy has to come first.

However there are a few barriers in the way, not least our ability to look reality in the eye.

Techno-fix. In Forest Row the talk is also about free energy and not the kind that comes from the sun or the winds and waves of the earth. The anti-documentary of the moment is Thrive where dodgy looking geezers fly over the ancient sacred sites and crop circles on a disc, discussing how the big oil corporations (controlled by the banks) are squashing all research into this everlasting power source, encapsulated in the symbol of the torus (see left). This key invention, transmitted by extra-terrestrial intelligence, will transform the planet and solve all the problems of the world (cue starving Africans) which according to the film are entirely due to the lack of energy.

This is another narrative entirely. It suggests that we will be saved by outside agencies who somehow will work in our best interests and all former ideas of collective equity are null and void. And instead of looking at the hard facts we just have to fall down a virtual rabbit hole into a wonderland mix of half-truths about the global banking system and conspiracy theory.

This is a bad fairy tale to be believing right now, because it suggests we don't need to do anything about our energy dilemma, that we don't live in a place of limit and or have to face the consequences of our actions. All real stories look at these realities, and the characters in them who are plucky and ask questions, who don't go along with the magic spells, are the ones who live to see a happy ending.

Time to check out those narratives.

DISCLAIMER: Just in case you thought Mike was responsible for showing me Thrive, I twisted his arm, curious to the max. What we were really watching in Forest Row was a film of Alan Watts speaking from a different paradigm altogether in California. . .get wiggly!

Photos: solar panels on Mike's roof in Forest Row: Keystone XL pipeline protest; chai-making at Tin Village, Sunrise Festival; making a wind-turbine at Transition Heathrow; Scene from Thrive.

Creature Comforts

2012-01-18T13:17:00.001Z

I’m currently reading ‘At Home’ by Bill Bryson and enjoying learning all sorts of quirky details about how most of us came to live in relative comfort. Apparently crude oil was first extracted from the ground, in the 1850’s, in order to produce paraffin for lighting and the petroleum fraction was considered worthless and discarded. How times have changed!

A lot of the book is about how the exploitation of energy sources have made our lives comfortable – a concept that we now take for granted but the word ‘comfort’ only assumed its current meaning in 1770 (when it was used in a letter by Horace Walpole). Until then most people had no expectation of being comfortable and in medieval houses people literally huddled together around a single open hearth with no chimney. The exploitation of coal led to heat, steam for engines to power the industrial revolution, gas for lighting and ultimately to electricity and all the labour saving devices that we now depend on.

A biomass boiler

Apparently, if you ask people what they want from life, a common reply is ‘to be comfortable’. So given how recently it is that the working family has achieved a comfortable life, you would think that we would all be motivated to preserve the resources that sustain our comfortable lives. We are now planning to build many thousands of new houses around Norwich and I would hope that planning for a world no longer supplied with cheap oil, would be a priority – but I don’t see it happening. Many of the technologies that could keep us warm in the future (such as anaerobic digesters and biomass fuelled heat and power plants) need to be designed into new communities when they are built – it is much harder to retrofit. And don’t get me started on the need for cycle paths and transport!

I really don’t understand why people who are now in their teens and twenties are not demanding new homes to be designed for the energy deficient future that we all know is coming. Councils are largely run by the middle aged or older – who put in a huge amount of voluntary effort but subconsciously don't expect to be around when energy has become painfully expensive. Young people need to take action now if they want to enjoy the same levels of comfort in their older years. Some of us can keep warm cheaply today by scavenging wood but you can’t keep a whole city warm that way.

An unplanned consequence of the discovery of oil, was that cheap paraffin destroyed the market for whale oil and saved sperm whales from extinction. Predicting the future supply and demand for energy is never straightforward but we have to try harder to be less dependent on finite resources!

We need to get out more!

2012-01-17T06:00:00.000Z

I've just been sawing down a dead elm at the bottom of the garden. There were three trunks originally and I've managed the first two alone with a handsaw.

I began felling last week and published a short account with accompanying precautions:

*CHEERFUL DISCLAIMER: The following pictures are NOT intended for educational purposes. I do NOT recommend this way of cutting trees down to anyone and if you are mad enough to follow the manner presented here you do so at your own risk.

Having said that I had great fun, one or two scary moments, got several week’s worth of firewood and ended up soaked in sweat – terribly masculine!

It was speaking with Rose on the phone on Saturday and her stories of the wild men and women in the New Zealand outback that got me off my backside and up the dead elm. What I’m doing here is tame in comparison. But I felt very proud (in a good way!) when the first trunk fell in exactly the right place, i.e. not on me!

Maybe I should open another blog/twitter account: markintrees?
from Sawing Elm - The Low Carbon Way

Where I live in the Suffolk countryside there are elm ghosts in every hedgerow. Elm burns well and thanks to this dead tree we'll keep warm with the woodburner for the rest of the winter. And talk about renewables. Underground the tree itself is actually still alive and growing again from suckers.

Since our engagement with TN2's Stranger's Circle two years ago we have hardly used our central heating (oil-fired). The first winter of 2009-2010 was cold and it was tough. Sleeping with more clothes on, hot water bottles in the coldest moments and endurance were the order of the day. We used the woodburner once or twice a week.

Last winter was also cold for months on end. We still felt it, but it was less gruelling now as our bodies had acclimatised. I started to feel uncomfortable in centrally heated buildings and got used to wearing thick (and thanks to the Give and Take Days in Bungay, free) jumpers.

This winter has been mild so far. But when it is cold I only feel it when I'm sitting still for long periods (writing blogs for example). When I'm sawing the elm it takes about five minutes before I'm completely warm, sweating even. As Adrienne of Transition Lewes reminded me the other day: "You know the old saying: you warm yourself three times, once cutting the wood, once carting it and once burning it..."

As peaking fossil fuels get more expensive, both for companies to extract and get onstream and for consumers to buy, either directly for household or transport, or indirectly as goods, our whole sedentary lifestyle and desire for comfort will be challenged. Our physical bodies are archaic, they are made for balance between movement and stasis and to respond to weather. We need to get out more!

I used to order my wood in, put the heating on whenever it felt the slightest bit chilly and would never have dreamed of cutting down a dead elm, let alone by myself. Now the combination of environmental awareness, low income, high prices for all fuels including firewood and being in Transition make me approach energy in a very different way. And I feel better for it.

These may seem like small steps. Insignificant. But at this point we need to engage with the source of our energy, both as individuals and communities, with an eye to our common future in any way we can. Whether we are on Energy Lookouts, attending meetings to oppose gas fracking, carsharing or sawing our own firewood, each is a move towards resilience in the coming energy-lean times.

The Energy we need

2012-01-16T11:14:00.012Z

This week's theme is the hot topic of energy - where we get it, what we use it for, how much of it we are using, and what the future holds for energy security.....oh yes, and what this all might be doing to our environment!

Sample any of the daily press and you'd be forgiven for thinking there is an underlying sense of panic around about how we are going to feed the ever increasing demand for energy. And on the flip-side, concern about what this panic seems to be creating in the energy industry in terms of the risks being taken in extracting energy from the earth in ever-more ingenious, and some might say, dubious, ways.

Where we get our electricity from in the U.K. and the balance between sources is interesting from an environmental point of view. At the moment the proportions go roughly like this:

gas 41%
coal 33%
nuclear 19%
renewables 3%
oil 1%

Electricity on it's own has a sense of magic about it. Faraday was indeed a genius, but he could not have possibly foreseen how much of our current everyday infrastructure now depends on it - from heating and lighting homes and businesses, driving trains, to powering the computer I am writing this on. Unlike other commodities we buy, it cannot be stored and then picked off a shelf or ordered over the internet - it has to be produced at the moment it is needed. Apart from its invisibility, this is also part of its magic - or rather the amazing power-generating infrastructure that is needed to ensure we get it when we need it.

In the U.K. that demand can vary enormously with time of year and time of day, and what's on the TV. On a U.K. summer evening, typically the power demand - always measured in multiples of Watts - is around 15 - 20 gigawatts. A gigawatt is a billion watts. In the winter, around 6.00 p.m., the demand can be in excess of 60 gigawatts. So demand has obvious peaks - although the cause of them has some interesting features. The most important feature in any large power station, or more accurately power distribution centre, amongst all the banks of computer monitors, is the humble TV. Why? Because what is being shown on it has a large bearing on what the power demand is going to be, minute by minute. The largest peaks in demand happen toward the time when the credits for 'East Enders' appear, or at the end of a penalty shoot-out in the World Cup. Immediately afterward is when households go straight to the kettle, and nationwide demand for electricity can go so high as actually to exceed the total capacity of generation in the country - at such times the distribution centres usually make a discreet telephone call to France and say, "more power please".

But what of the consequences of using all this power? Our current burning of coal in particular, and its planned increase by our government, is a big cause for concern. Burning anything that releases carbon into the atmosphere is bad news, but coal releases about 40% more CO2 than gas, when it is burnt. Even worse, a coal-fired power station runs at about 40% efficiency, compared to a gas-fired one on 52%. The coal advocates of course point to carbon capture and storage (CCS) as the way forward here, but even such conservative institutions as the International Energy Agency have said that ..." large scale (CCS) is probably 10 years off (development), and is a real potential emission mitigation tool from 2030..." Apart from the UK, the US and China both have enormous coal reserves they are only too keen to exploit.

So later in the week we will be hearing more about CCS and so-called 'gas-fracking', the humble elm tree, how local development plans affect our demand for energy.... and more.

I'll now think about lighting the woodburner. Anybody got any spare wood?

Bye Buy

2012-01-15T11:34:00.010Z

In our final Transition Themes slot we're cross-posting a story from (Transition) Lewes that is dear to our low-carbon hearts in Norwich. The reduction of acquiring and throwing away 'Stuff' is a main focus both within the Transition Circles and Carbon Conversations. Here Adrienne Campbell describes a radical shared project that has already inspired 33 local people to join in . . .

A few years ago a group of friends in San Francisco formed The Compact. Their quest was to buy nothing new for a year. Inspired by them, some of us here are inviting others to join us in A Year of Buying Nothing New. Our plan is to limit our shopping during 2012 to essential consumable items such as food, drink, vital health items and certain necessary things we can’t fix, get second hand or do without.

So yesterday I bought some stamps at the post office but packed my parcels in old cardboard as I’ll not be buying brown paper this year for packaging. Nor will I buy a food dryer I’ve been coveting or a new pair of sandals this summer; the old ones will do. Perhaps for me the challenge will be not to buy newspapers or new books. But maybe not: there is so much you can get for free.

Call me a domestic extremist, but this kind of exploration excites me. It feels good, and like an appropriate response to our broken civilization. We all now know that our level of consumption is fast eating up our non-renewable resources, including minerals, topsoil and water. Making new things uses fossil fuels that have become so scarce that we’re turning to even dirtier means such as tar sands and fracking. And the waste creates toxic landscapes and, worst of all, CO2 which threatens runaway climate change in our time.

The Story of Stuff is a lovely little film that explains all this quite simply and why buying less – much less – is necessary. It’s pretty obvious now that our leaders, our corporations and our media are not going to encourage this behaviour – it’s almost unpatriotic to not help our economy grow. But in this time where we’re having to choose between economic growth and life on earth, I know where I’ll be placing my vote.

Perhaps the most persuasive reason to live with less stuff is that we’re heading in that direction anyway. It may be better to ride the crest of a wave of change than be sucked under it. Adrienne Campbell

Original post from 100 Monkeys.

The Occupy Movement with pragmatist-tinted glasses (i.e. mine)

2012-01-14T13:24:00.017Z

Today's "outreach" post in our Transition Themes Week is by Olaya de la Iglesia and cross-posted from Occupy Norwich's website. Occupy Norwich is still going strong and is in the process of organising an arts festival on 3-5 February: "An amazing assortment of events over a weekend in venues situated across central Norwich. Live Music, DJs, comedians, poets, artists, workshops, great vibes, amazing people, excellent conversation and lots and lots of fun." They are also organising a People's Assembly and have just published the interim results of a local survey.

To be able to put this into context I feel you need some background. I have worked full time since the age of 19 when I emigrated and I have gained a qualification through work and a student loan which I will be repaying for many years to come. I am now a healthcare professional who has worked up the NHS’ ‘ranks’ during the course of 10 years. I am what I would consider middle class with some quirks; I come from divorced well educated parents, grew up in an incredibly nice house for Spain in the 80s and my mother, who raised me, is a self confessed politically minded feminist who grew up in a fascist dictatorship but loves the fact I was hand-fasted for several years before I decided to get married. Up until 3 years ago I was apathetic and uninterested in the state of the world we live in. I did not understand or care for politics and I avoided watching the news because it depressed me slightly. I was asleep.

Then I started noticing that my life was not getting any better despite the promises that getting a better career would be fruitful. I was earning slightly more but with the increase in daily living costs I was still struggling to make ends meet. When I graduated the job market started to deteriorate and I ended up working 25 miles away from home. By this time it was the end of 2008 and nothing had changed much despite the ‘credit crunch’. There were talks of recession; apart from the rising diesel price I was not feeling it. But then came the day that I realised that banks were being bailed out and I started to feel slightly annoyed. I looked further into it and one day, while I was ‘Stumbling’ I came across the Zeitgeist movement movie ‘Addendum’ and then my blood started to simmer. I was outraged that this was allowed to happen. I wanted everyone to know but bringing this up at lunch, the pub or a family dinner, was answered with negativity and a sense that I was scaremongering. They would say ‘there is nothing that we can do about it’, ‘They would not allow things like that to happen’, ‘That is just a conspiracy theory’ . So I stopped talking about it.

In the meantime I was finding myself yelling at BBC breakfast quite often because all I saw was a small percentage of people getting away with huge bonuses for contributing next to zero to society. At work I saw the care I could provide deteriorate and I saw the consequences of lack of social and health service availability for vulnerable people. I was now getting annoyed enough to do something about it. I wrote to my MP and despite the fact I am not allowed to vote in the general elections I looked into manifestos to inform other people of policies and options. But they all turned out to be lies, ‘manipulated truths’. Promises were unfulfilled and the austerity measures were beginning to hit me. It was when the Health and Social Care Bill hit the limelight that I realised politicians were not representing us. They were failing at demanding transparency, accountability and responsible behaviour from the financial institutions that caused the downfall of our economy. They were getting away with it. The more I looked the more I realised the depth of the problem with widespread corruption and profiteering in the US and UK which had done nothing more than crunch numbers and speculate. Now I was angry.

I decided to start looking at the news in Spain to see if things were any better there and a couple of months later, on May 18th 2011, I saw online news of the ‘Indignados’ in La Plaza del Sol. I was awestruck; I kept looking for videos, blogs, Facebook pages, web sites. There were 30,000 people in a square protesting because ‘Politicians do not represent us’ and they were ‘not merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers’. They were camping and by the beginning of June there were reports of camps all over the country where the aim was to take time, sit down, discuss the problems and use each other’s knowledge to provide solutions; this was getting deeper.

Tahrir square had shown a youth that was angry because their problems are worthy of anger. In Spain the graduates that still lived with their parents for lack of jobs and housing, got out on the streets and started to educate each other and devote their time to reach conclusions through consensus led assemblies. Soon older people started to join because those on the streets were their children and because as a worker or a pensioner they also had lost a lot in this crisis. But we were hearing nothing about it… at that point the line between ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘hidden truth’ began to blur.

I woke up. I realised I was not alone in feeling cheated and exploited. Validation brought me new resolve to raise awareness. I started a Facebook group and posted all news I found about Madrid, then the rest of Europe, Greece and, as I searched I followed educational links in sites, YouTube videos, lectures… I started to really look into why; I looked further into economics, politics, corruption, environmental issues. I was convinced this was going to spread far and wide because the conditions were ripe and a lot of ‘developed’ countries were at a tipping point.

Then, in September came Occupy Wall Street. I was amazed at the quick progression but was also confused by the lack of uptake from my Facebook friends and people in general. I was even accused of spamming by some and I have come to believe that too many are still unaware, asleep. They might not be affected enough (yet), they might not realise it, or they might simply be trapped in the freezing stupor that is apathy (I was there not that long ago), all this underlined by the lack of mainstream media coverage of the events.

Thankfully Occupy Wall Street teemed up with ‘Adbusters’ and called a day of ‘Global Occupation’ for the 15th October 2011. I searched day after day and soon found a local initiative and joined under some premises which were the few known characteristics of ‘Occupy’:

There would be no leaders so ‘facilitation’ and contribution to assemblies would be voluntary and shared amongst all.
There would be a ‘consensus’ framework where all had a chance to speak and discuss, finally agreeing on some actions in the future.
There might be a camp that would require maintenance but would outweigh its demands by providing a point of communication and a space for education while raising awareness. The camp was the pebble thrown in the pond.
We would aim to use the knowledge available to us and form Workgroups to educate each other and reach conclusions about the problems we face and possible solutions. Also events would be planned to raise awareness and aim to bring the 99% together in a public and open forum.

A lot of these things did happen but we also realised, like hundreds of other occupations worldwide, that our society is in disrepair and that a community is something some of us have to work at. Really hard. Many occupations became a beacon of understanding and social contact for those that are not able to maintain what we have come to consider a ‘standard’ lifestyle. I was faced with a daily choice between inclusiveness and maintaining a space that the majority of the population (the 99%) would feel identified with. This was for me a hard task. I am goal driven, to some extent I am a ‘means to an end’ and ‘glass half empty’ kind of person and, ironically I just saw Occupy as too big to fail, but highly likely to do so.

Regardless I got stuck in and I have contributed in the ways I could depending on what I felt was most beneficial to the movement. I camped when I thought that was helpful and I stopped when I thought it was more productive to utilise my time in other ways. Through the last 12 weeks I have learned a lot, changed my mind a lot, gone through emotional turmoil (mainly as a result of my impatience with lack of change) but I have come to some conclusions:

The financial system is broken, it’s unsustainable, it’s programmed to funnel wealth to a small percentage of the people in this world at the expense of everyone else.
We need to change financial processes to avoid speculation and overuse of limited resources for the sole purpose of profit and consumerism. In order to achieve this we need to change the law and socioeconomic policy.
The current political system is geared to benefit profit-driven enterprises (neoliberalist to generalise) instead of having social wellbeing at its core.
We need a political system that has dialogue, transparency, reflection-based change and accountability as their pillars.
In order to implement socioeconomic change, politicians and political process must also change.
For politicians to change and for the democratic process to evolve ‘the people’ (or the 99%) that are not represented by elected governments need to exercise this right proactively.
For the people to feel empowered and able to participate they need to educate themselves and others, raising awareness. If we all understand the system we can be involved in the dialogue to find solutions and implement them.
Greed is not, in my opinion, part of human nature. It is a cultural noxious trend and change needs to come from the individual, with the support of the wider community. We need to return to cultural values and a system where being productive to society is much more rewarding than abusing it solely for personal gain. We have to bring out our moral compass and start using it.
I want news establishments I can trust to tell me the truth, not some biased and misleading report or lack of coverage altogether.
Our planet has not limitless resources and the current system works under the premise that it has. We need to change the system but also ourselves to stop the consumerism and waste that is destroying the world we live in.

While ‘the global village’ is a beautiful concept, I feel localisation of resource gathering, markets, politics and general way of life is the only way to make change possible. There was a time when the leader of a community knew all its constituents by first name and probably had shared a meal with them. Now we have been disconnected from each other in a way that is impossible to truly empathise. We need to get out there, speak to each other and gain an understanding of the impact of our actions on others. Take action and once local communities are better managed we can set our sights further afield. There is some truth in the saying ‘You have to look after yourself before you can look after others’.

CONCLUSION

We start by changing ourselves, our way of life, and once enough of us are clear in what our aims are and are actively participating in a open dialogue we will begin to improve this unsustainable and unjust system. We have to think in terms of global community, serving each other rather than ourselves because surely, in a very selfish way, that would be a much nicer world to live in; supporting each other instead of screwing each other for money…

In the meantime, those that are awake can help the rest by condensing years of research and knowledge into bite sized chunks that we can explore at our own pace. And when we need it we can approach an Occupy initiative or other alternative source (i.e. alternative to current corporation funded institutions like news channels or governmental bodies) for further information and dialogue where the information exchange is two-directional, asking questions and getting answers from a physical person that you can build a trusting relationship with.

At the moment Occupy is in its infancy, and given that it is an inclusive movement there are many different standpoints on what we should DO. Some are set on getting the causes of the collapse written on stone, others rather wait for it to hit rock bottom because they can see that many will not join us until they stare at the abyss.

Some of us are keen to begin the discussion about solutions for many reasons but we can also see that we cannot rush the process because we all have different ways of communicating and working. It might just be too soon. One thing is certain, one by one we are all waking up to the injustices we suffer for the benefit of a few, and through revolution or evolution this will change because humanity needs to survive for the next generation to enjoy. The bottom line is self-preservation and nowadays predators wear Armani suits and talk about ‘how the rich contribute to society more than most’. But they do not have the upper hand because we ARE the 99%. Olaya de la Iglesia - Occupy Norwich

Photos: poster and black and white photographs from occupy Norwich gallery; colour photos (Charlotte Du Cann)

Transition Circle West and the Great Reskilling

2012-01-13T01:17:00.003Z

At our next Transition Circle West meeting, we will be discussing skills-sharing, so I thought it would be a good idea to use this guest blog post to explore ideas about reskilling. From storytelling, to textile crafts, to growing and cooking seasonal local food, and creative recycling, reskilling has been a central part of the Transition project, and a common theme on this blog. But why is this so important? What is wrong with our existing skills? And what could reskilling mean for Transition Circle West and Transition Norwich?

My current project

Reskilling can be motivated in part by nostalgia, a desire to retain traditional skills which might be useful in our everyday lives or in future; but also as a statement of shared identity and a connection to our heritage and the places we live. Reskilling is a deeply meaningful activity, but it can also have more immediate benefits. It is extremely satisfying to master a new skill, particularly in a society where we increasingly work with computers or in customer service roles, and people are beginning to talk of the fulfilment of working with their hands.

Working with your hands can help you to engage differently with your task, and enjoy watching your progress and feeling a sense of achievement when it's finished – a feeling many of us experience rarely in our working lives. Learning new skills is also a great way to meet new, like-minded people or to reconnect with people you already know. Reskilling is part of the transition project of building community, and it helps us to improve our own personal resilience: for example growing our own vegetables, making and mending clothes, and learning to maintain our bikes. Therefore reskilling is about living better, helping us to slowly change our lifestyles, not only to adapt to environmental challenges, but also to make them more fulfilling and resilient.

So what might reskilling look like? It can be organised formally through alternative currency networks (like Local Exchange Trading Systems), where participants within the network are able to trade units of their time to either teach or carry-out certain skilled tasks, making the most of their particular skills sets. Such networks can be international in scope, encouraging both virtual and physical interaction and sharing. Perhaps more often, skills-sharing occurs in more informal or ad hoc ways – in fact, we might not even realised we are doing it!

Websites like Gumtree are used to exchange skills such as language and music teaching, and it’s possible to learn to knit, crochet or even cook from scratch with the aid of youtube alone. But reskilling is perhaps most productive when it occurs through our existing social networks, through groups of friends, or common interest groups like transition circles. Close bonds of trust and friendship can stimulate learning and sharing, and it’s always a confidence boost when you know you can call up a close friend or relative for advice about your veg patch, or to fix your latest knitting mistake.

Even bikes as pretty as this can be temperamental!

People are constantly reskilling themselves, without a particular project in mind, just out of necessity and as their lifestyles evolve. I took up cycling properly when I moved to Norwich, and I’m still slowly learning how to look after and fix my bike. Our families are also hugely important in influencing our skills sets. I have my parents to thank for my love of cooking, my musical skills, and my ability to knit and sew; but they might also be responsible for my fear of all technical tasks and dread of gardening! It is also possible to encourage reskilling by design. Transition projects like farmshare offer members opportunities to learn about food growing in a relaxed friendly environment. And our forthcoming Transition Circle West meeting will hopefully stimulate some new skills-sharing networks or encourage people to seek information and help elsewhere.

Reskilling has always been at the heart of the Transition initiative, equipping communities with the skills they need to live well and build their resilience against threats like climate change. We can encourage these activities within Transition Norwich, through both formal and informal initiatives. For example, engaging people through circle meetings and connecting with other TN groups. Reskilling is a wonderfully fulfilling, frequently exciting, and vitally important task for transition. Helen Pallett

Transition Circle West next meets on 25 January. For more information about the group and our forthcoming meetings contact mshelenpallett@gmail.com

How do we feeel about 6 months of seasonal veg? Pretty good actually!

2012-01-12T07:00:00.008Z

We’ve been enjoying FarmShare veg for about 6 months now, and I thought it was a good opportunity to ask a few members what they think about the scheme, to let you know what sort of a difference it’s making to people.

The things which people appreciate most about the scheme vary widely, but there are a few broad themes: People talk about discovering new food, new recipes, new friends and fun things to do.

I think the best thing about Farmshare is that it gives you the opportunity to try vegetables that you might not usually buy, might not know what to do with or thought that you didn't like! …Last year I discovered that I do in fact like broad beans and fennel!

I enjoyed helping out on the farm a few times, it is infinitely more pleasant and satisfying than roaming around [insert supermarket brand] with the rest of the Zombie Consumers bombarded by endless marketing campaigns!

I would say its added a whole new local dimension to my eating. Despite being a grower myself, Farmshare has connected me to other like veg minds and tummies, and its fun to come and plant on such a huge scale (25,000 autumn onions??) in such a short time (a morning!)

Everyone loves how it’s cut down on the dreaded supermarket shop and even how it’s moving a whole lot of food right out of the supermarket system:

I like the fact that we are ensuring that our growers get a fair deal, and they don't have to suffer the whims of supermarket purchasing strategies.

Lots of our members are really pleased to see it’s saving them money too.

But I think the last word should go to Elizabeth, for summing up exactly what it is we all set out to achieve those 3 long years ago:

It's totally changing the way I eat for the better, which is exactly what I wanted as my little girl watches and tries everything I eat!! Also great knowing there is no over packaging, no air miles, jobs for local people and the veg lasts longer than what I used to get from supermarket. Halved what I used to spend on food as my trips to the supermarket have halved and I don't impulse buy so much now. We promise to come help at the farm this year :-)

All of that is why I wanted to be involved from the beginning, and I’m so proud to see how far the farm has come and what a big difference it’s already making to Norwich people.

Thanks to Alice, Bee, Jon, Elizabeth and Laura for letting us know what you think!

An open and shut case

2012-01-11T10:22:00.010Z

Opening doors seem to emerge as metaphors for so many things, and in so many different fields and disciplines. From the football commentator's description of a team's defence being "like an open door", to doorways ( and stairways) to heaven, to many an artist's depiction of light and dark either side of a doorway. This seems to be a very long way from the pure functionality of a door!

When we launched the Energy Look Out initiative a couple of months ago, inviting people to tell us examples of everyday energy wastage in Norwich, we had several comments about the practice of shops and stores wedging doors open, with the consequent huge and rapid loss of heat from inside to out. Years ago, as a Councillor, I had occasion to take up this very issue with particular shops in Norwich following complaints.

The reason that shops do this is based on the belief that the door's position influences their footfall - that rather irritating commercial term used to describe how many customers actually go into the shop. To customers, of course, the feeling of warmth once inside is more important. This also applies often to the shop workers! So here we have a nice little microcosm of what is at the heart of promoting carbon reduction generally:

the differences in perception from one group of people to another over the same issue
a firmly held belief that is not actually supported by evidence (see below)
a linkage between commercial practice and public behaviour
a widespread practice that is actually responsible for high carbon emissions and financial cost, and which does not involve any cost or investment to change

Back to the doors. There is actually a national campaign to encourage the shutting of shop doors in the winter months - see here. To their credit, some shops in Norwich have signed up to this and display the sticker on their door to say so. The one here is at Oxfam in Bedford Street.

The campaign - started by 3 women in Cambridge - has now been endorsed by a number of well known politicians across the political spectrum, and has been signed up to by a range of the larger chains.

The practice of propping doors open persists, however....all the more surprising when the research carried out by Cambridge University on the energy and carbon wastage involved says shutting the door will:

Reduce energy usage by up to 50%
Cut a shop’s annual CO₂ emissions by up to 10 tonnes of CO₂

Maintain energy use at a standard low level
Enable heating to be shut off long before the end of the day without affecting internal temperatures

Stop need for so-called “air curtains” over the door – among the greatest wasters of energy: a single one consumes 24 kWh per day. This is equivalent to emitting 91 kg CO₂ per week.
The research found no conclusive evidence that footfall or transactions were affected by closing the shop door.⁽²⁾

This last point - "air curtains" are the commercial description for those fan heaters placed over open doors - is particularly poignant. Consider that the average household electricity consumption, for a whole house, is calculated as about 9 kWh per day, and you can see just how wasteful these contraptions are. My own household consumption now runs at an average of less than 1 kWh per day - more about that later when we talk about the whole subject of Energy in our theme week next week.

I never thought I would get so excited about doors.

Pictures Top: Waterstones in Back of The Inns, who keep 2 separate doors wedged open; Middle: Jarrolds Stores, Exchange Street, who keep all their doors shut; Bottom: Oxfam in Bedford Street, who keep their door shut and display the sticker

Economics and Livelihoods - Transition's response to Occupy's concerns?

2012-01-10T09:00:00.001Z

Over my Christmas/New Year holiday, whilst I was without internet in the depths of Normandy, I finally managed to finish reading Prosperity Without Growth, the seminal book by Tim Jackson subtitled "Economics for a Finite Planet". His analysis of our current economic problem is in-depth but still logical and understandable to the reader. Every single chapter adds new understanding to the issues, meaning that my copy has practically every other line highlighted and notes scribbled in the margins every few pages.

It was with little surprise that I found that the themes discussed at Occupy Norwich's "What's Occupy About?" meeting last Saturday (which will be continued next Saturday at the same time of 12 o'clock at the Occupy camp, Hay Hill) chimed with so many points I had read only a few days before. The fact that a book which is essentially about economics also covered issues of environmental degradation, fractured society and political dysfunction (which are also the broad theme areas of Occupy Norwich's meeting) just goes to show how inextricably these issues are interlinked.

Even many of those with no involvement or even a hostile attitude to the Occupy movement still have the same societal concerns, if the first few responses to Occupy Norwich's survey (which I urge you and all your friends to partake in) is anything to go by.

Where there is disagreement (which in some cases is really quite extreme) it is within the appropriate responses and solutions to such problems. Even within Occupy Norwich's monetary reform working group, there are highly differing attitudes to a graduated move to full-reserve banking, gold as a medium of exchange, local currencies and the elimination of money altogether.

Notes from the What's Occupy About session. The four central coloured squares are the theme areas, specifics surrounding them, colour-coded.

At the "What's Occupy About" meeting, this presence of disagreement led to discussion on what the movement's role is within this complex and ever-changing discourse. The conclusion, at least as far as I am concerned, was that Occupy is there to initiate discussion, inspire idea generation, inform and educate, but not to be a solution in and of itself, a role carried instead by individuals, organisations and campaigns that may arise out of, but not directly be a part of, Occupy.

Transition Norwich, I feel, is one such "solution organisation". Ok, Transition's actions are always in flux and depend largely on who has time and energy to push forward any particular project, but nonetheless, Transition is about actions. Transition Norwich has already implemented positive responses in all the projects that have been set up in the last three years, but there is still lots more we could do!

Images: Prosperity Without Growth, my copy; Occupy A Few Minutes; notes from What's Occupy About typed up by Robert Vincent.

All the latest! Transition Themes Week #11 - Communications

2012-01-09T19:40:00.022Z

Welcome to our Transition Themes#11, 2012. Uncharacteristically this will be a short informative intro to the week, as your correspondent has a massive deadline ahead of her (normal service will be resumed after Friday!). As well as this comms update, we will be hearing all the news and reflections from different TN groups and affiliates: Simeon will report from Economics and Livelihoods, Chris will discuss the new Energy Lookouts! project in the city, Elena all the latest from the field at Norwich FarmShare. We're also welcoming Helen from Transition Circle West and Vanessa from Occupy Norwich who will write about their plans for this crucial year.

Meanwhile the trusty This Low Carbon Life crew recently met at the Greenhouse to discuss the programme for the year ahead. We decided to continue the editorial style of this blog with its sure-fire mix of individual posts, Transition Theme Weeks and Topic Weeks (Sustainable Relationships to Alternative Currencies). One thing we recognise from working together for over two years is that communications, both real and virtual, play a key role within the initiative, not only as a means of keeping us all in touch, but also as a way of exploring how to work effectively as a group and make strategic links with other local progressive movements for fair and sustainable change.

However to be truly effective, we need to be linked in on a national and international level. Transition Norwich is one of the hundreds of initiatives around Britain and the world, and as a short reminder, here are all the communication links that keeps us connected and inspired by each's others' work.

Transition on film: the movement will be in full multi-media swing in 2012, as the film Transition 2.0 launches this March. This is a following up from the first film Transition 1.0 which we showed at our first birthday celebration. We're hoping to set up a screening in Norwich soon. On the home front there are also plans to expand the 15 minute Norwich in Transition film. directed by Tom Harper (now available on our news blog), to a full-length documentary.

Transition Network News: you can find a monthly Transition Round Up, produced by Rob Hopkins and published on his blog, Transition Culture, followed by a monthly podcast that explores three of the featured stories at greater depth (have a listen to last month's featuring Norwich FarmShare).

Every month Mike Grenville (Transition Forest Row) produces an essential monthly newsletter, which you can also find on the Network news site and sign up to receive as an email (highly recommended).

Transition publications: And if you didn't catch Rob Hopkins talk in Norwich about the new The Transition Companion book, there are still cut-price copies available (see below). This is an invaluable full-colour explanation of the drivers behind the movement and the essential ingredients and tools that make up initiatives (now numbering over 800 in 34 countries). Featuring the Norwich bloggers (Becoming the Media) and Norwich FarmShare. You can find the Ingredients and Tools on line and in card form on the Network site.

Social Reporters: the innovative Social Reporting project came to the end of its three month pilot in December. The project began again last week with a month of Looking Back, Looking Forward. Don't miss the daily blogs by ten writers from initiatives around the UK, including three of the TN bloggers, Charlotte, Mark and Kerry (now at Transition University West of Scotland), reporting and reflecting on all subjects under the sun. You can keep updated with our twitter news at tnnorwich, ttreporters and transitiontowns.

STOP PRESS! Article on Transition Norwich now out in Norwich Magazine - reprinted on Transition Culture. Text by Sabine Virani. Photos by Tony Buckingham. See here.

Copies of the new Transition book, The Transition Companion, by Rob Hopkins (Green Books) still available for £14. To order your copy email: info@sustainablebungay.com

Pix: trailer for the new Transition 2.0 film; the TN bloggers ; Norwich FarmShare picture from Norwich Magazine: poster from Portalegre em Transição (Portugal jam-making day; cover of The Transition Companion.

Daily Bread

2012-01-07T08:30:00.001Z

Yesterday I taught A how to make soda bread.

Shopping and cooking well are such important life-skills, ones that I was taught a long time ago, so since I was little, I've never had a fear of cooking anything, even things I've never cooked before. They don't always turn out right first time, but it's never a problem. A was delighted, both with her efforts and with the result!

Simple Soda Bread Recipe

500g plain white flour

1 level teaspoon salt

1 1/2 (one and a half) level teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda

Sift together in a bowl, then add

100ml milk

300ml yogurt

Mix together until you get a soft dough. Shape into a rough ball.

Put on a greased baking tray, lightly dusted with flour, and bake at 180C for about 40 mins

You'll know it's cooked if the base makes a hollow sound when tapped!

Enjoy!

Shopping for Life

2012-01-06T09:00:00.000Z

Writing about shopping yesterday made me reflect on what a pain in the butt I am to shop with. My food shopping particularly is a long drawn out process while I check every label and ingredients list. It's a bit like people who check the calories and fat content of everything they buy. But I'm looking for provenance and the inclusion of mysterious "ingredients".

It wasn't always such hard work as I mainly focussed on Fairtrade for things like coffee and chocolate, but now that's just the starting point, the baseline for my scrutiny. It takes me a long time to get round the shop; but each visit with the girls is an education - they're obviously drawn to the stuff marketted for kids with the garish colours and cartoon characters and I have to take quite a lot of time to explain why some of these things just aren't good for them. And we talk a lot about why it's important to shop carefully, with a clear view of what you're buying and why. Teaching children to shop well, I think, is a great life skill, teaching them to make good choices and avoid all the hype.

First of all, I'm looking for local, which in a standard family shop means made in England or Britian. It's amazing how many standard food items look like they're made / produced in the UK, but actually aren't. Given that we allegedly export as many biscuits to the EU as we import, it's amazing how many of our nation's favourite "family brands" are actually produced outside the UK. The strange thing is that you actually have to look quite hard to work out whether they're made here or not. The other one that winds me up is meat - a lot of things like bacon or sausages are actually "made" here, but using pork from Europe. All that hard work by the likes of Jamie Oliver seems to have been completely ignored, and given that Norfolk and Suffolk seem to be full of pig farms, it seems totally illogical. We're basing an economy around just shuffling things around from one region to the other, without adding any value on the way.

We try not to eat too much meat, for health, cost and environmental reasons, and whenever we can, we buy our meat from the great butcher at the Earlham Road shops, where much of it is truly local (from Blythburgh), but I recognise that relatively few people go to a butcher nowadays, and most people shop in supermarkets. Given this, and given that most people (I think) don't worry too much about where their food comes from, it's a shame that supermarkets don't even clearly label their produce, far less actively support local produce. There doesn't seem to be too much pressure on the supermarkets from their customers to change, either.

"Natural flavourings" is another one - what on earth does that mean? I'm naturally very suspicious if someone can't be open and transparent about the ingredients - after all there are a whole number of natural things out there that I wouldn't want anywhere near my food. Is it something natural but so hideous no-one would want to eat it? I'm not suggesting it it, but it makes you wonder!

And the ubiquitous palm oil, often hidden away in the unassuming phrase "vegetable oil". Palm oil surfaces in so many damn products, it's almost impossible to avoid now. And how about this list from a chocolate product: Vegetable Oil (Illipe, Kokum Gurgi, Mango Kernal, Palm, Sal, Shea)! I'm not kidding you!

So one of my things for this year, is to cook more food from scratch, with ingredients that would be recognised by anyone. Most of our full meals are already cooked that way, but I'm thinking more about things like bread and snacks for the children's lunchboxes. Children are notoriously fickle, so I've got a new recipe book just for kids to engage them in cooking with me, so we'll see how well they take to it. I love cooking with them so I'm determined to make it work!

Pic: http://www.samsill.com/top-10-reasons-to-buy-local

Shopping for Britain

2012-01-05T09:00:00.000Z

I couldn't help noticing the number of sales being advertised on my way into work this morning.

Nearly every shop on Gentleman's Walk had big signs - "50% off", "Up to 75% off" - there seems to be a frenzy in the air to sell of the last of the unsold stock. Which makes me think that all those shops must have overstocked in the first place. Or maybe shops make a calculation that if they order 1000 items before Christmas, they'll sell 600 of them before Christmas at full price, and the remaining 400 at next to nothing after Christmas, and still make a profit. And they probably know that the psychological impact of the "Sale!" sign means that people will buy more than they intended, get sucked into the madness of buying just anything, simply because it's on sale. It's all a bit crazy.

I won't pretend I'm immune to the craziness, but so far this year, I haven't been in any of the shops so have managed to avoid any impulse buys. Though having said that, I was very much hoping to pick up a Christmas pudding at a knock-down price, but it looks like the real bargain hunters got there before I did and there were none left...

We're so often encouraged to spend our way out of the recession, as if the culture of spending money we don't have wasn't one of the things that got us into this mess in the first place. So I was very intrigued by Mark's link yesterday to Adrienne's "Buy Nothing Year 2012" - I'd completely missed last December's "Buy Nothing Day" which I usually support - but a whole year would be a great challenge. I'm looking forward to seeing how she gets on!

Pic: www.telegraph.co.uk

Transition Dad and Other Unofficial Initiatives

2012-01-04T07:23:00.033Z

My father lives in a mobile home on an ex-airfield in central England with electricity but no running water. The surrounding land is used for farming and until recently there was a scrapyard next door. There is also a caravan onsite. In the ten years he’s been there he has completely renovated the place himself, made a garden and built a shed, all re-using scrapped and salvaged materials.

The following excerpts are from emails he has written to me in response to This Low Carbon Life, where he talks as a lifelong craftsman and maker about his own experiences of rebuilding, repurposing and reusing.

When I was growing up, in the way of children, I took for granted the kitchen he made out of scrap wood and old insulator crates from the railway. Now I'm older and in Transition I've come to realise just how valuable this practical expertise is. My father's name is Richard and in three days time he will be 72.

2010/2011

Hi Mark,
I have been reading your transition blogposts and find them very interesting. Did you get the photos of my abode? The whole exercise was one big re-purposing. I am pleased to see that you were paying subliminal attention to me when you were growing up in regard to finding new uses for things as that has been my way of looking at life…

Water and Heating

Hi Mark,
I have just been reading your latest blog and admire your push for simpler living. As you know I have electricity but no other utilities. I have seven water butts which collect rain from the roof, one of which I have now connected up to pump water to the sink for washing. I came into possession of a redundant central heating pump which is 250v. This had been scrapped. I stripped it down and found the impeller was blocked and not allowing water to pass though. After cleaning it out and reassembling the pump it worked perfectly.

Prior to this I was experimenting with 12v narrow boat pumps which were not really practical as batteries and some form of charging was needed. I used 1/2" plastic pipe which I salvaged from scrap. I had to buy some connectors and elbows and tap fittings. The electrical stuff I had collected over the years (sometimes it pays to hoard). The cost of it all was about £15.00. My next project is to make a solar water heating system out of scrap black plastic pipe which I have. This will be mounted in a large frame painted black inside with a silver reflective surface on the bottom. A thermostat will control the flow into a 45 gallon drum for storage. This will be in an insulated box.

If you know any Transitioners who have experience of making something similar I would be interested to hear from them. Give them my email address.

Love, Dad XXX

Garden

Hi Mark,
I thought you might like a few pictures of my garden. It was all done from recovered materials from the airfield and was completely covered in rubbish and nettles before I started work on it. The Sparrow hawk I took this morning. The greater spotted woodpecker flew off before I could get him properly…

I hope you are ok for the coming cold spell (Nov 2010). I have been collecting wood from the site but my chain saw is playing up so it's all hand sawing which warms me up anyway. Love, Dad. XXX

Waste

Hi Mark,
Glad you liked the photos. In reference to your blog on energy waste, I remember that in the 70's when we had the last energy crisis, we were told that oil would run out in twenty years. We had the three day week and were told to share a bath (with our neighbours?), pick up people at the bus stop and keep to a 50mph speed limit among other things. In carrying out service work around the country at the time, I remember that the businesses most profligate were the public utilities. When the time to clean up came I was astonished that in most cases the water was actually scalding hot, lights on in all the offices etc.

Since then car ownership and usage has increased dramatically with the focus on larger 4wd's. We don't need the brains of Einstein to see that politicians and governments only pay lip service to the concerns of peak oil and climate change.

You might be interested in what the farmer here told me recently. He has materials delivered by a transport firm who also collect paper and plastic waste from a massive depot near the MI for shipping to China to be sorted.

The driver told him that once sorted by Chinese children on a vast tip in a remote location they then burn the paper waste. If true, so much for the UK commitment to recycling and eco concern, as it must be sanctioned. Export licences and so on. I have long held the view that global and international trade and finance govern worldwide behind the scenes and that politicians and governments are just the puppet frontmen, paying lip service to the concerns of the people.

I know many people think this way and it is heartening to know that the transition movement is going some way to reclaim the imbalance. It seems the next logical step is transition communes where all the ideas and skills can be combined. Dad XXX

Shed

Hi Mark, the following photos are of the shed I made from 100% recovered materials that I scavenged from the airfield. The timber would have been burnt.

The space is at the back of the mobile home between two brick buildings. As you can see I had to extend the floor to get the size needed.

The side with the ladder was an old shed side that was on the bonfire, waiting to be burnt, as was all the other timber. The bath I took from the mobile to make more space inside and to use as water storage. The roof is 8x4 chip board with heavy asbestos sheets on top. As I said all the materials were on site.

An amazing thing happened. I needed a door which I was going to make. Having no windows the shed would be dark inside.

The morning I was about to begin, I went over to the the site where the fire is and there was the door with a glass panel in it laying there ready to be burnt. The only things I bought were the guttering elbows. Even the paint was free.

When I look at it now I am glad I did it a couple of years ago as my back is no longer up to it . You can add any of this to your blog if you want.

Love, Dad XXX

Chip Off The Old Oak

Nov 2011

Hi Mark,
Hope you are well, although I was a bit worried seeing your photo that you were in the process of being blogged up to Transitionland. Dad. XXX

Dec 2011

Hi Dad,
Got your message and hope you're keeping well. I've got some Bungay Community beeswax for you. Elinor, our beekeeper, did a great job of purifying it. On Sunday I went to her house and taught people from the bee group how to make yarrow salve using the beeswax. It turned out really well and smells amazing. I'll get some to you as it's excellent for the kinds of cuts, burns and abrasions you get when you work a lot with your hands.

It's really mild here still, twelve degrees with a strong south wind. I'm doing quite a bit of writing. And I haven't been transmigrated to Transitionland entirely yet!

What kinds of things are you making from the wood turning?

Keep well and warm,
Mark x

Hi Mark,
I continue reading your work with interest and I am sure it has an influence on peoples' thinking about the way forward towards a different society which I believe will come as more people are seeing through the bull**it that is disseminated through the media by those trying to cling to power. You know all this anyway.

I have been making various items from the old oak I got when they the replaced the canal lock gates, so the wood is possibly 400 years old. The beeswax is ideal for getting a nice finish and I’ll make the polish myself. One of the things I hope to do is make a pole lathe from the scrap wood I have. The thing about working in wood is that it is entirely natural, and has for me a spiritual connection. When you take a piece of wood that was destined to be burnt as scrap and expose the inner beauty through either turning or planning it is a satisfying process. The next item I make I will send you before and after photos of the wood.

The weather has been very changeable with wind and rain but cold at night. I have been keeping warm as I hope you have. I have got loads of old logs and stuff to burn that are no good for making things from.

Lots of love, Dad. XXX

Everything is Material and Everybody Knows

2012-01-03T10:03:00.019Z

(i)
It's 2nd January 2012 and I'm sawing logs off a big old hawthorn branch which is blocking the footpath. I'm thinking, if anyone asks me what I'm doing I'll tell them I'm clearing the path and sawing some logs for the fire.

But isn't this private land? Well, yes but it's a public footpath and the branch is blocking it. I’m thinking that there’s far too much private land in the world and far too few Commons.

And I'm thinking that I would welcome any kind of conversation, because I'll write about whatever happens tomorrow on the blog. It's all material.

But no one came along the path. I took some photographs. And a bag of firewood home.

(ii)
This plant is probably cow parsley, but I could be mistaken. Common as it is and despite the beauty it brings to the lanes in May, I’ve never paid close attention to it. Umbellifers can be tricky to distinguish and these leaves seem just a bit too dark and shiny. Cow parsley is edible and is also known as wild chervil. I've never eaten it but I shall this year, and get to know it better.

However this plant, which I discovered along the footpath yesterday when we went for a walk (actually it was Lesley who pointed it out - "Is that a plant in flower over there?" she said, as we all turned to see the white blooms glowing in the pre-dusk light), also looks quite like hemlock, which I don't want to eat, fond though I am of it. But it lacks the signature purple spots of hemlock. And doesn’t smell of mice.

Whatever plant it is, one thing I do know. January 1st is not its normal flowering date.

(iii)
Yesterday a neighbour came round and asked me if I'd do her a favour. And handed me a tower of treats. No, really.

"I got it as a Christmas present," she said. "And I'll never get through what's inside it. I’m not quite sure I know what's inside it."

I was delighted and horrified at the same time.

Delighted because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool freegan these days. I love receiving (and giving) gifts, especially of the reskilled, recycled, past the best-before date, handmade, homemade, homegrown or secondhand kind, and I immediately saw all sorts of uses for both the round boxes and the contents: the boxes as seed stores, containers for food or presents. The contents – sweets, biscuits and mince pies - for when children come to visit.

And I like to see my neighbours.

Horrified because of the scandalous packaging. Five strong boxes all glued on top of one another and tied with a ribbon. When I opened them there were a few chocolates in one box, some biscuits and fudge in the others, four mince pies and ALL of the contents fitted into the bottom box. On the base the usual list of industrial food ingredients (including ‘vegetable fats’, read palm oil).

And suddenly I saw this unwanted Xmas gift multiplied to the power of millions. All over the world people giving each other things they don't want or haven’t asked for. Made in factories of precious resources. By people working in appalling conditions on low pay.

How much of this stuff goes to a scavenger neighbour, a charity shop or a Give and Take Day? How much of it ends up in landfill?

What’s it really being made for in the first place?

It was mean inside the tower of treats.

(iv)
“Let’s listen to the Leonard Cohen one,” Charlotte said. Shaun Chamberlin of Dark Optimism had put together an 'album' of fourteen songs he’d chosen at New Year 'all in some way pertinent to the state of the world as we enter 2012.'

"Everybody knows,” growls Cohen in his bass voice that sounds deep even through the tinny built-in speakers on our shared laptop, "That the boat is leaking... and the captain lied."

"Does everybody really know?" I asked Shaun, in an off-the-cuff pun on Twitter.

"I'd say they do, somewhere inside," he said. "But there's a certain logic to ignoring a problem if you can't see any way to change it. That's why sharing practical responses to that nagging, suppressed knowledge can be such a powerful, motivation-unlocking thing."

And I suddenly felt ashamed at my own flippancy.

Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

(v)

Some practical responses to these things:

(i) Transition Heathrow

(ii) Plants for life talks, walks, workshops

(iii) Buy nothing year - Adrienne, did you get your ten people?

(iv) Dark Optimism, Transition Social Reporting Project and an article on global meltdown by Guy McPherson

Deep inside everybody knows

Pics: Sawing logs on the footpath; flowering umbellifer Jan 2nd; Charlotte and Lesley in Oak Jan 1st; tower of not so many treats Jan 2 (all by MW)

Shift Together - Working Title

2012-01-02T07:47:00.019Z

I wrote the original version of this post as part of last month's Arts and Creativity week on the Transition Social Reporters project (beginning again tomorrow 3rd January), and have amended it slightly here for This Low Carbon Life. It looks at some of the huge creative output that has helped shape Transition Norwich (and Sustainable Bungay). May we continue to flourish in 2012!

October 1 2008 Transition Norwich Unleashing I have no idea that sitting at the 'Well-Being, Culture and Arts' table in a packed room at St. Andrews church, with fellow writers, dancers, photographers and nurses, none of whom I know yet except Charlotte, will lead three years and ten thousand blogs, photographs, banners, meetings, parties and news bulletins down a long and winding transition road to writing this Social Reporting post on a windy wet pre-crepuscular December morning sitting up in bed. Yes that was just one sentence but this is the creativity week!

I spend a lot of my life taking photographs of and writing blogs about the Transition initiatives I’m involved in, but until I came to write this post I hadn’t considered it as creativity or art or thought about the enterprise that goes into them. I’d just been getting on with it, mostly in enjoyment, sometimes getting narked about having no funding or how admin and marketing seem always to be seen as more important than creativity and editorial.

But creativity underpins everything.

This Low Carbon Life - Transition Norwich Blog came into being a year after the Unleashing. Charlotte, Jon and Andy met and worked out the format and design between them, and it was launched at our first birthday party. It was to be (and still is) editorially-based, a daily reflection with photographs by transitioners in the Norwich groups and guests, of the experience of being in transition and the move towards living a low carbon life. For my contributions I picked up the Canon Powershot A40 digital camera I’d found at Sustainable Bungay’s first Give and Take Day, and the Olympus Camedia and old Nokia phone cameras Andy had given me, and started shooting and writing.Now over two years later This Low Carbon Life is a living storehouse of the creative output of Norwich transitioners. All of the writing and most of the photography is original.*

So here are some of those pictures and how they represent our lives in Transition Norwich. There is so much, that not everyone or everything will feature. So please do use the comments box below for links to any other This Low Carbon Life people, posts and pictures and your own recollections.

Reconnection with Nature is the most popular label for the posts on This Low Carbon Life. I took the above picture of snowdrops on an early Spring visit to a local wood. One of the things about creativity is its link with the wild, what lies beyond the tamed, cultivated or managed. Which is not to say wild good, cultivated bad. Just that there needs to be awareness and balance.

This is a homegrown chilli, organic pasta, grains and pulses circle arranged and photographed by Charlotte Du Cann for Transition Norwich Strangers' Circle's discussion about (our households') food consumption.

Plastic Bag Dress, Helen and Kerry (by helenofnorwich)

Helen is an artist, TN blogger and wicked photographer. She originated and co-organises the annual Magdalen Street Celebration, which grew out of a Transition Norwich group called NR3 after the postcode. We were sitting at the same table at the Unleashing and were together in the first Heart and Soul, Arts, Culture and Well-being group, known in those early days for its feisty and dynamic meetings and workshops on everything from reskilling to reconnection with nature to clowning, authentic movement and organising Transition Norwich parties. Kerry, also in that early group, was a full-on mover and shaker, blogger, reskiller, event organiser and unremitting downshifter in Transition Norwich until her move to Glasgow in March. We miss her. But she's still blogging, thank goodness... both for This Low Carbon Life and as a Social Reporter on the Transition Network project.

Every month for the Transition Norwich News bulletin I make a banner out of the previous months blog and website pictures. Andy did the first ones and I just fell in love with them. This is the one for December 2010 including the Zero Carbon concert organised by Chris Keene in support of the Cancun climate negotiations.

Celeste the Transition Norwich dragon was created by Bel Greenwood in her front room and made a dazzling appearance at the 2009 Lord Mayor's show. Bringing transition into the city with a fiery blue flash, she was elegantly chauffeured by TN blogger, cyclist, downshifter and original steering group member Chris Hull.

And here is megablogger and co-creator of the Social Reporting project, Charlotte, Dancing at Lughnasa, next to a 'temporary shoreline sculpture' (I just came up with that one, hope it doesn't sound too rarefied!!! I promise not to mention found objects) I made last September called 'Work -> ?' Indeed.

There is music too. Taiko drumming as part of TN's Low Carbon Roadshow at Earth Hour in March 2010 outside the Forum and to open both Magdalen Street Celebrations. And even a rainbow recording.

Tom Harper, who made the film for this year's third birthday celebrations (see on line on our news blog), wrote a gentle song called "In Transition", which he sings at TN's gatherings and parties. I also sang a set with Andy at our First Birthday Party as Fret 6, along with The John Preston Tribute Band (Transition Downham Market and Villages).

In fact, here are the lyrics to Shift Together – Transition Rap (Mostly Sustainable Bungay Version)** which I wrote on a bus from Lowestoft to Norwich and sang at our Big Meeting in August 2010. To the tune of ‘Come Together’ by The Beatles.

We run on chip fat, we down
Shifting quickly, she got
low carbon gumboot, we got
Handmade beehive
We say grow your own and
Plant for bees
Our soap’s biproduct glycerine
And we wash when we please

He pushing pedals, he got
Roadshow genny,we got
Solstice sunrise, he make
Medicine jelly, she say
Blog and blog and blog in threes
Got to be Transition
Coming up from our knees

Shift together, right now
It’s in the we

She on the network, we got
No-spam filter, we got
Neighbourhood plug-in, we do
Group newsletter, we say
Meet, greet, eat and
Set the scene
Got to be where we are and
Know where we’ve been

Shift together, right now
It’s more than green

We stitch up old sock, we do
Library courtyard, we swap
Local home-grown, we start
Old Spot pig club
We say you and you and you and me
Let’s forage in the the hedgerows and
Eat roots, shoots and seeds

We own production, we got
Sweet jar banknotes, we got
Solar panel, we know
Birch sap tapper, we say
Give and take and take the lead
Join the dots together and
Share what you don’t need

Shift together, right now (oh yeah)
Sow the seeds

And a few words about Sustainable Bungay:

Setting up the Library Courtyard Community Garden between 2009-10, now in its third year and flourishing, was an enormous labour of the love and creativity of many people, from the planning to the plant bed building to the fundraising. The garden opened to the public on 19th September 2010 (see video below). Here a group of us at the end of July are shovelling earth into the new beds, and having a bit of a song and dance!

At this point I could not resist the temptation to do a pogo dance and sing X-Ray Spex's punk classic Oh Bondage Up Yours! (well, just one verse) whilst tamping down the soil. It didn't take long to realise I was no longer a teenager and the year was actually 2010 not 1978!

Pics: First Birthday party poster (Andy Croft); Snowdrops (Mark Watson); Food Circle (Charlotte Du Cann); Plastic Bag dress, Helen and Kerry (Helen Simpson); Magdalen Street Celebration crew 2011 (Helen Simpson); December Newsbanner 2010 (MW); Celeste the Dragon; Dancing at Lughnasa and Work > ?(MW); Bungay Beehive Day banner(Banner by Bungay Community Bee group, photo MW); Shifting Earth Together (MW) and Oh Bondage Up Yours! (CDC)

*All original photos by the Transition Norwich bloggers are Creative Commons with Attribution. We're happy for people to use them as long as the author is credited.

** Shift Together – Transition Rap Mostly Sustainable Bungay Version) Lyrics by Mark Watson (sung to tune of Come Together by the Beatles) (lyrics Creative Commons with Attribution see * above)

Power to the People!

2011-12-31T11:02:00.000Z

I'm a little obsessed with my energy bills, and having lagged the loft, carpetted the most draughty floors and put in an energy efficient boiler, I've probably done about as much as I can within the budget I have. I've seen my energy bills drop significantly year-on-year, but I'm still not satisfied. I can use less, but I'm still at the mercy of the utility companies and their horrendously opaque billing systems. If they want to raise the price of my gas and electricity, there's not much I can do about it.

Is there?

At the TN Third Birthday bash, Rob Hopkins showed slides covering various transition schemes across the country - from community gardens to community shops, from bakeries to breweries. And the one that got me sitting up in my seat - the Lewes power company with the solar panels on the brewery roof. It's the UK's first community-owned solar power company, and that is a really exciting prospect. That, coupled with what's proposed in Totnes with the Totnes Renewable Energy Society, shows a real sea change in people's ability to take control over the things they need in everyday life.

I don't imagine that it will be easy. We would need to come together, raise the money, find the premises, navigate the legal and logistical complexities of making it happen, and find someone to actually do the work. It might not be solar, it could be wind, biomass, anything. There are no easy answers, no quick solutions or magic bullets. Solving the problems will be a challenge. But on the way, we could do something great!

So, a Norwich Renewable Energy Society anyone? That would be an amazing aspiration for our fine city in 2012!

Bees and Trees

2011-12-30T11:24:00.000Z

From the many, many conversations I have with people, I have come to the conclusion that it is very difficult to get people to stop doing something. Not impossible, by any means, but difficult. We have become socialised over the last twenty or so years into an individual mindset that tells us we can do whatever we like; I want it all, so I will have it all. That's one tanker that will take some time to turn, to use a particularly apt metaphor in this instance.

So, my experience tells me that, rather than just trying to get people to stop something, could we get people to start, or do more of, something else? Can we incentivise people to do the things that are less harmful, to the environment, for example, or more beneficial, to our communities, say, on the other? What enterprises are there out there that make it easy for people to choose a different lifestyle?

Earlier in the year, at the Spring Scheming, we sat around tables and discussed things we could do in Norwich, that would really make a difference. We talked about going into schools, into workplaces, communicating with people. We also talked about creating schools, creating workplaces, creating the kinds of communities we wanted to be part of. Can we challenge the current paradigm - the consumer-led, in-it-for-myself world-view - by creating a new way of living? What structures would work? What businesses would we need?

Out of that session was born Norwich Community Bees - a community-led, not-for-profit cooperative beekeeping venture. It's taken a lot of hard work and time from many people, but we're up and running, with one hive of bees established, and ready for an exciting 2012. It might not change the world overnight, but then again, it just might - that's the beauty of possibility.

Another idea out of that Spring Scheming that really caught my imagination was that of a community-managed woodland. It came around the time when the government was thinking of selling our public forests to private companies. I was all fired up. Then I discovered just how much even a modest piece of woodland would cost... That idea went on the backburner, if you'll excuse the pun.

But recently I had a conversation with someone about how much more UK-grown building timber costs compared to imported tropical hardwoods. And I mean, significantly more! I was shocked, but it made me think - maybe there's an opportunity there. Yes, it would be a business, yes, it would need to make money to be viable, yes, it was about chopping trees down. But could it be done locally, in a truly sustainable manner, in a way that provides employment, protects and promotes habitats, and provides pleasure and opportunities for our community? Some parts of the country are already exploring ways to make this happen. Maybe it's an idea whose time has come again.

So there are just two of my hopes for 2012 - that Norwich Community Bees will grow from its small start into something really great, and that we can explore the possibilities for setting up a community woodland somewhere near Norwich. If you'd like to be part of either of these visions, do get in touch - or if you've got anothere great idea, suggest it on the comments page!

Look forward to hearing from you!

Pic: from www.climateark.org

Changing The Climate

2011-12-29T09:13:00.001Z

Jon has asked us to write about the aspirations that we hope will become realities during 2012. My own ambition is to ensure that people can cycle directly and safely between Hethersett, Little Melton and the UEA/Research Park/Hospital. A planning application to build nearly 1200 homes in Hethersett has recently been submitted and many of the people who will live in the new houses, will work just a few miles away at the UEA/Hospital/NRP.

Cycling is not just about reducing traffic pollution and oil consumption but also provides both physical and emotional health benefits. Cyclists can easily stop at local shops and can exchange greetings with other cyclists instead of fuming at each other in traffic jams. Making it attractive for people to cycle to work ticks so many boxes that I struggle to understand why so little provision has so far been made for cyclists. Cars are cosseted indoors in multi-storey car parks whilst my bike is lucky to get a rail to lean against, out in the rain. I’m forced to conclude that too few of the people with the power to make things happen ever get on their own bikes and they don’t see cycling as a ‘proper’ mode of transport.

NCC proposed cycle links

Which is where Transition comes in. By getting on our bikes at every opportunity and turning up to in our cycling gear, we change the climate of what is ‘normal’ – and it is surprising how rapidly this can have an effect. If I always cycle to see someone, then they cycle when they come to see me – and all these little actions add up. Since we started our cycle path campaign in Little Melton, mainly in response to the needs of children cycling to school, there has been a noticeable change in people’s attitudes. What once seemed like a cranky idea, now features on developer’s plans and NCC plans. There is still a long way to go but I like to think that all the talking and blogging about the path has changed the climate around it for the better.

Picture of MP Richard Bacon joining children on ride to school in Hethersett

Let's Hear it for the Plants in 2012!

2011-12-28T10:33:00.016Z

Food, textiles, medicine. Capturers of carbon, oxygen providers, soil stabilisers. Source of nectar for pollinators, inspiration and materials for artists farmers, permaculturists and ale-brewers. Companions, healers. The presence of plants on this planet, from the humblest goosefoot to the grandest oak, makes everything about our lives possible. And beautiful.

Seriously. Where would we be without the plant world?

Reconnection with Nature continues to be the most frequently used tag by Transition Norwich bloggers. As we head into a 2012 of continued planetary degradation with no conventional political will to stop it, becoming aware of ourselves within the living systems takes on a more urgent and meaningful tenor. It also makes economic sense as the present financial system collapses, whether you grow more of your own food at home or join a local veg box scheme.

Many of the posts I write on This Low Carbon Life are about plant-human relationships. From the tricks (and trickiness!) of gardening, to the joy of discovering wild herbs and wasteland flowers, to the bounty of beetroot, which put in a major star turn in 2011. Plants really do inspire conversations between people which otherwise might not happen. Carrying around John's enormous beetroot (did I say humble goosefoot earlier?!?) at the Transition Norwich party in November, I found myself talking with several people I hadn't met before. "Where did you get that?" they asked me. "It's so BIG!"

Plants as ice-breakers. Terra firma.

So what am I doing to help everyone reconnect with nature in 2012, in Transition Norwich, Sustainable Bungay and within the wider Transition movement?

I’ll continue with the Low Carbon Cookbook project, now ready to be written up after 15 months of sharing and storing recipes, experiences, facts and figures along with low carbon growing, cooking, eating and buying tips. The LCC group will also be showcasing ancient and modern superfood plants at Grapes Hill Community Garden – which I’ll write about later in the year.

I’ll also keep writing for This Low Carbon Life and the Transition Network Social Reporters project. And I intend to do more transitional speaking in public after a guest slot on Stroud FM’s Transition Show earlier this month speaking about Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay. It was nerve-wracking and fun at the same time. [Note to self for future speaking: reduce stuttering and stumbling to a minimum. Breathe and let go, hence reduce overwhelm by all the things you COULD say but can’t get out. That’ll come with practice.]

Oh, and talking of practice, I've made a deal with Rob Hopkins to perform "What Goes On" (Velvet Underground) at the Transition Conference 2012 together.

But my biggest Transition project this year is with Sustainable Bungay. I’ll be heading up the Plant Medicine Bed 2012 at the Library Community Garden, growing and showcasing plants-for-medicine and hosting monthly talks, walks and workshops with fellow plant people on everything from Medicine Roots to Spring Tonics to Wild Plant Oils to Adopt a Herb (part of the Norfolk and Norwich festival). The first three events take place at 3pm on Sundays 15th January, 18th February and 19th March. Everyone is welcome from Bungay, Norwich and the hinterland. Keep an eye on the Sustainable Bungay and Transition Norwich News websites where I’ll post all the details as well as write-ups here on This Low Carbon Life. NB: There is no charge for these sessions but donations appreciated.

For details of the Plant Medicine bed and related talks, walks and workshops throughout 2012 in Bungay and elsewhere contact me, Mark Watson, on markintransition@hotmail.co.uk or 01502 722419

And to all fellow plant people, bloggers and transitioners everywhere, may 2012 be a fruitful year, the year where growth is of the healthy, organic, wild and cultivated plant kind. Keep pushing through!

Pics: Me at Winter Solstice 2011 under Great Oak (CDC); Feel the Beet TN Bloggers Visiting Card; Transition Norwich party Nov 2011; St. Johns Wort, Ribwort Plantain at Lowestoft Station Summer 2010; Purple Coneflower (Echinacea) Bungay, July 2011

Entering the Fifth Zone - 2012

2011-12-27T07:41:00.029Z

I confess. I am having an affair, and looking ahead as we are this week, I see it's going to become serious. I love Transition and the whole resilience thing. I have been faithful to the max to her for three years, but someone else came back into my life this month and my attention and my typing keeps wandering in her direction.

Her name is 52 Flowers That Shook My World. She is a book about plants and thanks to this blog (and Simeon who inspired me to write about it in our Sustainable Livelihoods week), the Uncivilisation Festival and Two Ravens Press, she is about to be published this summer. I love writing blogs, but there is something about the printed page. There is something about wild and medicine plants that takes me to places no meeting or community event can ever reach.

You could say the affair was inevitable given the times we are living in, where the symptoms of systemic collapse are all about us - financial markets crashing, methane spouting through the Arctic tundra. One thing I learned from experience: pushed to the edge, the best of ourselves can come to the fore. Close to death, no one worries about social niceties, about paying the mortgage or what people think of their hair. They remember the plum tree as it blossoms, or people they once cherished. And often they ask themselves: did I live life as I could, was I bold or free enough, did I love people as I could have, and the world?

52 Flowers was written at an edge time, when I had just returned from travelling. It's subtitle is A Radical Return to Earth and it looks at the steps modern people need to take to get back down to earth, the tools that will turn the tanker around as Jon put it yesterday. Most of all it considers the wild places, the fifth zone of permaculture, without which nothing in the zones closer to home and garden makes sense. It looks at the big frame in which Transition sits, the physical nature of the planet and our position in the vast wheel of time. 2012 is a big year, crunch time for civilisation, discussed as the culmination point in some spheres, as the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. It is the end of a huge cycle of time in a calendar that stretches across 5,000 years.

Oh, no, Charlotte! Not the Mayan calendar, you cry. But listen: to be truly resilient we need other ways of looking at life and ourselves if we are going to weather the storm that's brewing on the horizon. We need to connect with all our relations on the planet and know we are not just consumers and house-owners/renters, stuck in what we call History. This is how the book begins in 1991, with a Mexican plant called epazote that leads me on a journey to discover that we are more interesting, more powerful, than any of our parents or teachers or "leaders" would like us to think we are. I'm not talking woo-woo workshop or crystals here, I mean being activists for change in a real way, in our minds, bodies and hearts, in everyday life.

Here's an idea about time that I discovered on my travels. The Mayan people call the human being winclil which means vibratory root. The harmony and beauty of the spheres is perceived on earth by different “tribes” or types of human beings (which correspond to the different days of the week in their three calendars). These human roots vibrate in the fabric of life at different frequencies. Most modern human winclils however are deactivated. Lacking connection with the living systems of the planet, we vibrate only when artificially stimulated by sex and war, which creates an incoherent, low frequency. Mayan systems (such as we understand them in the modern world) activate the life-forces in order to create a high and coherent frequency. In short, instead of making noise, human beings make music. You only have to look at their textiles to know what this colourful world looks like.

In the forest where the passionflower grows, where its leaves have been used as a poultice for thousands of years, the Maya sit in small straw huts and weave patterns of extraordinary complexity, the most beautiful fabrics of the world in all the colours of the quetzal bird. In their imaginations and in their hearts they hold calendars of equal complexity, that rotate at different speeds like the stars around the sun. They have held these complex patterns inside them for thousands of years – patterns of time, of colour, of beauty. They held them before the cities came and after they fell into ruin. The temples did not hold them. The temples never do (2: Passionflower, 52 Flowers That Shook My World)

So forecasting ahead and describing what I wish to see happen, or think I might see happen (which are different things) is a year of living within a wider perspective. A year in which the bigger forces come into play, whether we like it or not. A year when Transition is understood within a frame of the wild places. When all activists, all social movements for change, are understood as vital strands in a worldwide web. As the bringers of colour and vibrancy and harmony, within a black-and-white, dissonant culture. The collective butterfly emerging from an all-consuming, caterpillar world.

On the ground I plan to continue the Social Reporting project that had its successful pilot this year, this blog, the Low Carbon Cookbook and the communications work for Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay. I'll keep spreading the word about our myriad projects and events, our community-building and low-carbon ethos that are key to resilience in downshifting and difficult times. But elsewhere I'll be coming out with 52 Flowers, speaking about life in the fifth zone, connecting with our wildness and our inner transformative abilities. This will start next month with a talk on Roots for the Plant Medicine Bed at the Library Community Garden which Mark will write about tomorrow. Watch this space!

Climbing the Temple of the Magician, Uxmal, Mexico, 1991; Wild by Jay Griffiths and Martin's woodworking tools, Uncivilisaiton Festival, August 2011; with Teresa and Cecilia in Real de Catorce, 1993, from 52 Flowers that Shook my World; fairtrade textiles from Mayan Traditions; speaking about medicine plants at Transition Camp, October 2011;

New Year Forecasting

2011-12-26T09:43:00.002Z

Every year, people wake up after the Christmas and New Year festivities and make a little promise to be different during the new year. We'll eat less, do more exercise, maybe take up a new hobby, find a new job. Magazine and TV adverts indulge this fantasy, suggesting that all the stresses and strains of the old year will somehow dissolve and we'll emerge, butterfly-like as new creatures full of energy and resolve. Every year, we make those promises, and usually by the end of January or February we've settled back into our usual routine.

But, but...

Research says that we're more likely to keep our resolutions if we do them together, and what better community support network to help than Transition.

Last year on the blog we talked about the personal things we wanted to see in 2011 (check out the blog posts to read our hopes). This year, we're writing "forecasts" rather than resolutions, things we would like to see happen, and some suggestions for making it happen. Transition is all about the people, so ideas are only ideas until people get behind them and make them happen.

If you like the sound of something in this "New Year Forecasts" theme week, get in touch. Only with your help can we make the ideas a reality!

Happy Hollydays!

2011-12-25T08:34:00.019Z

Winter green gifts from the blog storehouse: mistletoe and holly in Suffolk by Charlotte,; solstice tree on Mousehold Heath by helenofnorwich; stored apples by Erik Buitenhuis; woodburner and cat by John Heaser.

Winter pictures from the river bank

2011-12-24T10:10:00.005Z

In summer, the countryside is full of colour and there is much to catch the photographer's eye. At the time of the Winter Solstice the days are so short and the weather so cold that it is easy to miss the subtle things that are going on in the natural world. Today our guest blogger is Tamsin, who learnt about Transition from the initiative in Nayland where she lives, and has been out with her camera along the river Stour that runs through the village JH.

The river in a dormant state. On the bank you can see piles of weeds and bulrushes, recently cleared from the river and left to decay on the banks. It's hard to believe that by summer this stretch of the river will be so full of plants that only a very narrow channel, just wide enough for a canoe, is left.

The leaves have fallen from the trees to return nutrients to the soil and growth all but stops

A teasel seed head. After the seeds have formed in autumn the plant starts to die, but the dried stems and seed heads will still be around all winter

Dead and decaying wood provides a home for a wide variety of saproxylic (deadwood-dependent) organisms including fungi, lichens, invertebrates, mosses and birds

A dead female stag beetle, found earlier in the year and normally kept on my mantlepiece. I've photographed it here on a log, where it would have spent it's larval stage (which may last up to five years) feeding in rotting tree stumps. Sadly, stag beetles are a threatened species, partly due to the loss of dead wood habitats Tamsin Preston

The Winter Solstice: Time To Let Go

2011-12-23T08:00:00.001Z

Today we have a cross-post that from guest blogger Rachel Lalchan's own ecomonkey blog. The original post was written on Wednesday and has some interesting further information about the physics, history and spirit of the Winter Solstice JH

Whilst our Southern Hemisphere readers are celebrating Summer Solstice, our Sun ends its waning cycle in the Northern Hemisphere today, the shortest day of the year. Winter Solstice heralding the return of lengthening days, falls tomorrow on Thursday 22nd December. From then on, the days will grow longer and brighter until the height of next year's Summer.

Since Stone-Age times (at least), evidence suggests that humans have marked the winter and summer solstice as significant times of the year, the longest and shortest days. For our ancestors, these days were a vital indication of the food growing seasons and the changing of darker days to lighter periods and vice versa.

Today, many of us have lost touch with seasonal changes as our lives seem entrenched in artificial environments immersed in technologies and thought patterns that seem to negate the need for nature. Even where the Earth's provisions are relatively direct, such as for food, clothing and warmth, we tend to either ignore the source of these sustaining goods or take them for granted. How many of us or our children, for example, think and act as though our food and clothes emanate from the supermarket or the high street, rather than from the Earth! Our lifestyles allow us to forget that cotton and food are grown in the soil beneath our feet.

Reversing this conception is easy. It is simply a matter of making time to appreciate what we have. So, when sourcing new clothes, or throwing on a favourite sweater, for example, we can look at the fabric and label, think about where the materials were grown and all the people and elements that played a part in getting the items from soil to us - the sowing, caring, harvesting, designing, producing, transporting, selling and so on. And we can feel grateful. When we eat a meal, we can take a moment to think about how it was grown, who was involved in putting the ingredients together and appreciate all the efforts made by people and elements involved in the sowing, caring, harvesting, storage, transporting, selling, washing, preparing, cooking... Two simple words can change our whole outlook on Life - "Thank You"!

When asked to recall our happiest times, we tend to envision and remember people and places rather than technologies and material things. Breathtaking landscapes, fresh air, open fires, endless oceans, loved ones. These are the things that make us feel alive. Re-Membering our connection to nature and taking time out to acknowledge that we are part of the natural world, gives us the opportunity to grow, to accept the nurturing gifts provided in abundance by the Earth and use them to enhance our well-being.

When we acknowledge the influence of Nature and her seasons on our physical and spiritual well-being, we become aware of the profound links that exist between us, each other and our world. Our connection with the Earth, all its inhabitants, the skies, stars, galaxy and universe beyond run deeper than we can ever wholly know.

The return from dark days into lighter at the Winter Solstice is a chance to look back over the year and see how we have grown, the lessons learned, those we continue to learn, the changes made, what worked well, what worked out differently from how we had imagined at the start of 2011, what made us frustrated, angry and sad, what made us smile, glow and weep with laughter. It is an opportunity to give thanks for the blessings received and the hard lessons learned. It is a chance to look forward to all that we want to be in the coming year and let go of all the things, thoughts, relationships, attitudes, feelings and habits that are holding us back from being who we truly want to be. We can bid farewell to that which no longer serves us.

Racheblue

Sun, sun, sun here it comes!

2011-12-22T08:33:00.018Z

Dawn in the Garden. Dead sunflower faces the sunrise, toward the sea down by the compost heap. Ghosts of hogweed and cosmos, wild carrot in threadbare nests, frost-bitten leaves - all the old forms are breaking down, providing mulch for new life.
Out in the lane the jackdaws are flying out to the fields, owls still hooting. Ivy berries now ripe in the bare hedges. A waning moon in the sky. We set out to sit under our neighbourhood oak and wait for the turn . . .

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes! Rising above the oaks and the barley fields on a peerless morning, fresh breeze, curlews calling.

Breaking down old forms Thinking about John's theme for the week on the way home and getting an idea (notice jumping in air!).

Solstice is the moment you let go of what you don't need in order to go forward into the lightness and clarity of the new solar year. Providing mulch from our earthtime and blowing on those sparks for the future all around us.

Pull to climax In the natural world there is a movement known as “the pull to climax”, a condition in which natural systems become complex and symbiotic, interweaving with one another in a web of extrordinary intricacy. The poet and activist, Gary Synder once wrote that in a climax situation, such as a mature oak or rainforest, a high percentage of the energy is not gleaned from the living biomass, but from the recycling of dead matter – dead trees and animals – that lie on the forest floor. This “detritus energy” is liberated from these dead forms by the transformative actions of fungi and insects.

“As climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so ‘enlightened mind’ is to daily ego mind, and art to the recycling of neglected inner potential.”

Transforming old thoughts and feelings, composting our past becomes the life-energy that fuels our present lives. Within the personal life and within the collective, the individual and the creative writer, act like mushrooms. We liberate energy from what is dead and give energy to the living, and thus become symbionts rather than parasites within the collective consciousness of the earth.

Composting the past If you don't let go you don't get any compost for the future, or any fuel. We've been living on borrowed energy for aeons, now we have to find our own. Not just fossil fuel but life force for ourselves. For that we need to key into the living systems, learn to break stuff down - possessions, habits, unnecessary desires - in order to provide ourselves with energy and vigour for the big year ahead. We need to throw new light onto our old organisational structures, into our social and political institutions and question everything.

Are all those antiquated traditions and costumes, those hostile and haughty shows necessary? Are they impeding new ways of doing things? Are they dampening down those collective sparks we see in Transition, in Occupy, in all the dynamic dialogues and ideas that are going on as we move towards 2012? Get some clues from those mushrooms! Get in touch with the ants! Happy Solstice everyone!

Quote from Gary Synder in a talk based on his essay, Poetry, Community and Climax. Photos of moon, sun, tree, flower and fly agaric by CDC and Mark Watson. Ants, Angels and Human Nature, from the blog, Peak Oil Blues by Kathy McMahon.

What Moulds, Breaking Down?

2011-12-21T09:19:00.018Z

Last week I made this beetroot ink. I meant to take a picture of the actual beetroot which was becoming soft and beginning to decompose from the outside. But I didn't so this is the ink itself, which comes out a light purple-red on paper, as you can see on the label:

Now I know this week is a photoblog of winter and decay, but as I was "Cleaning the Downstairs Toilet Window Frame of Mould for the Landlords Inspection" yesterday, some thoughts I'd had for ages and been unable to express started to cohere. So I hope you don't mind John if this post is a decayed mix of photo and poem! The text above in bold is the working title.

I wipe black mold from the window frame
Oil-painted white,
I think of all the plastics.
How will it biodegrade?
Will it 'bio' degrade?
In the end.

We don't know what the planet has in store.
For us. For these things. For us.
How they will go
In the end.

What microbes, what subtle processes,
What break-ups-and-downs,
What surprise detoxifications,
What decompositions

I don't like to say these things
In our marketed world
In our money-mind-dominated world
In our arbitrary world of no consequence

I don't want to offer space for any more excuses
for the comments:
'that's all right then, the planet will come up with
something
to get rid of us, bye-bye humans
ha-ha
just pass me the deeds to those tar sands
as big as ten countries
and let the show go on, and the lights,
and let the land and the people and the plants
go detoxify themselves!'

we don't know what the planet has in store,
what unwritten and undreamt-of-yet procedures
what creativities,
what subtle and invisible armies,
what moulds, breaking down

even if we did
it would be no excuse.

Mark Watson Dec 20 2011

Pics: Beetroot Ink, December 2011, Mould on Window Frame by Mark Watson

Life in decay

2011-12-20T06:44:00.000Z

Maybe our memories are short, but it seems somehow colder this year than last. It might just be that the awareness of the increased cost of fuel makes the same cold harder to bear. As I walk around the city, I'm constantly on the lookout for abandoned bits of wood that I can put in the wood-burner.

However, here in my garden there's a small pile of logs that I won't burn, and that I leave alone as wintering homes for bugs, spiders and ladybirds. The wood's soft to the touch, breaks open easily and inside you can see a fine latice-work of fungus lacing the structure. Small creatures I can't name scurry and wriggle away when disturbed.

Even with Saturday's dusting of snow, this wood was still a shelter for the life that we don't normally see or think about. It's a reminder that life flourishes even in decay, even in the "bleak midwinter" of the carol, and how the great cycle of the seasons, and of life, constantly whirls around us.

Winter photo week

2011-12-19T08:30:00.000Z

This week we are marking the turn of the year with our own pictures.

On Thursday at 5:30 am the sun will be at its furthest distance from the earth and the winter solstice will occur. The sun barely gets above the trees and all life seems to have departed from the earth, even the birds are quiet.

The pond looks dead but a few bubbles in the ice may be from some frogs escaping the cold by staying at the bottom of the pond.

The cold is important for many plants to germinate and to create buds for fruiting next year

Blackcurrant buds forming

Beech seeds freed from their cases, split by the frost.

Life continues below ground and worms pull the decaying leaves underground in order to eat them

This leaf hangs mysteriously from a spider's thread

But after only 7hours the sun is already going down

The earliest sunset was on Dec 13th, so the evenings are already getting lighter - however sunrise continues to get later until Jan 1st.

You don't have to be mad to be a transitioner but it helps

2011-12-17T07:04:00.005Z

This politically incorrect statement used to be around every office in the '90s in the form of 'You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps'. I was out with my mother shopping in Peterborough and was surprised at how friendly everyone was and how many people she knew. It then dawned on me that she didn't know any of them and this was an aspect of her dementia. I have since heard of other neurological conditions with a similar outcome. But why do you have to have some kind of brain impediment before you will smile and say hello to someone you do not know?

Living transitionally means you may behave in ways that look a little odd. You may ask to borrow something that is really cheap to buy such as a cake tin. If you are cycling places then you tend to arrive slightly sweaty and multi-layered. You might eat strange things in the lunch break such as last nights leftovers. The other day I walked round the office asking if anyone was driving to our headquarters and felt rather embarrassed as people looked me up and down in wonderment at my lack of transport. 'Is she too poor to have a car?' 'Perhaps she has something wrong with her and is not allowed to drive'. Our company has now joined liftshare which means you can log on and find someone else going on the same journey and cadge a lift. Its kind of like a computerized hitchhiking with the knowledge that the person works for the same people as you.

You may also look generally poor by not flying abroad on holiday or buying the latest flat screen TV. So as well as being odd you will be poor and odd thereby lowering your status further.

However you will be oblivious of all this because you will be having such a good time connecting with people you share lifts, food and cake tins with. Different things will be important to you, for example I nearly crashed my car the other day ( yes I still have one) because every year I decorate the pine tree on the puppet theatre roundabout with secondhand baubles. This year I drove past looking for a place to park when I saw that someone else had already done it! I threw my head back with laughter! I have created a TRADITION.

Oh and the photograph? I just googled 'baubles' to look for someone who looked stranger than me and it didn't take long.

Don't read this if you think I might be giving you a present

2011-12-16T01:16:00.001Z

So its Christmas time and I have been trying as usual to buy low carbon presents without alienating too many people. I think that Jesus would not want us to celebrate his birthday by destroying the planet that he spent all week (and possibly longer) making.

A few months ago I had all these amazing ideas for presents but with only a few days to go I am panicking slightly as not everything has quite worked out. Somethings I was going to make I never really did make and ended up on facebook playing scrabble instead. Other things didnt really turn out as they should have because they involved such random processes as boiling knitting in a washing machine. On the up side I have a new girlfriend and I decided to make her a scarf out of all the wool I had left over from various projects. You can see the result here. I am very pleased with it and she is buying me a ticket for the pantomime which I am very much looking forward to.

My brother specifically asked for a clock radio so I shall be buying that. Dad is getting a new jumper. My friends who are less specific in their requests are mostly getting the sloe vodka I made after I met Charlotte and Mark for the weekend and we collected sloes. Some other people will get crab apple jelly. At work I usually go round giving out fudge that I buy from the market. It is actually made on the market so low food miles!

I don't really do cards and I would like to say that this is to save trees or that I give the money to charity but the truth is I just can't be bothered. I don't actually see the point in giving a card to someone I will see so I have decided to send emails to anyone I won't see and tell them something that I have appreciated about them that year. I got the idea from a friend of mine who recently had a leaving do for work and said it was like being at his own funeral and hearing nice stuff about you but without having to die.

So that is really it. Oh and I have been invited to a winter solstice tree dressing which I am very excited about as I have photographed the oak tree on Mousehold heath for a number of years but never knew who dressed it and then I bumped into a woman at a conference and she invited me to join the group who do it (strangley this was still without her knowing that I had photographed it). The only trouble is she didnt tell me what time and I am wondering if I can be bothered to wait by a tree all day like someone has been stood up for a pagan ritual.

So there you have it, my guide to low carbon Christmas and I will be getting the train to Peterborough to see my family and probably finishing presents as I travel. So look out for someone sewing on the train, it may be me!

Esther Rantzen has made us all love funny shaped vegetables

2011-12-15T07:49:00.002Z

If you were watching television in Britain in the '80s you will see funny shaped vegetables differently from other people. This is due to a programme called 'That's life'. If I remember rightly members of the public would send in root vegetables that looked a bit rude. So in honour of this programme I have uploaded a picture of my first carrot from farmshare. This one is rather demure I think.

Anyway if you haven't joined farm share then I would recommend it. You get fresh vegetables every week and if you have time you can chat over a cup of tea with others as you collect every Thursday. I didn't join at first because I thought I would have to a lot of digging but I can actually volunteer in different ways. So now I just have to make sure I use all the veg every week. Last night I cooked vegetable pie and as my flat mate complemented the sweetness of the carrots I was regailing her with the advantages of organically grown food when I remembered I bought them at Morrisons... well it is Wednesday, I had to restock!

the spark that lights the stove

2011-12-14T07:27:00.035Z

i
"People don't want to be told about those things anymore," said Diana. We're at a Dark Mountain meeting on a dark December night in a small house in Pottergate. Nine of us, arts and science PhD students mostly, are sitting in a circle. We're working out a way we can create an event, based on Iain McGilchrist's work on the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

One of the characteristics of the left hemisphere is that it gets overloaded with too much information. It can only cope with one problem at a time, segregated into boxes with right and wrong, yes and no solutions. Phil, a marine biologist, who also helps run Norwich's weekly FoodCycle Cafe, has suggested we show what lies behind the industrialised food machine.

To face that kind of reality and make complect, consensus decisions you need to enter the right hemisphere and see everything it takes - plants, animals, people, land, systems, water - to bring our daily bread on to the table. You need imagination, feeling, connection and right relation. To understand all-things-at-once and undergo a complete change of heart is what sages once called illumination - the light bulb moment when everything becomes clear. It's the fire-brand that all creators steal to bring warmth and nourishment to the people.

ii
At The Nectar Cafe off the Unthank Road a small circle of people, Transitioners mostly, are sitting before a midwinter meal of spicy dahl, chickpea stew, millet, buckwheat, pumpkins, sprouts, parsnips, almond cheese, wild mushrooms and red bean hummus. We're closing up the year and discussing how to proceed with our Low Carbon Cookbook. I'm eating something I have never tasted in my life. It's dried curly kale that tastes of cheddar. Chewy, strange and very very more-ish*.

Jo's shelves are stacked with local herb teas and hedgerow cordials and jars and jars of lacto-fermented vegetables, chutney and salsas. A tall jar of sliced preserved carrots stands on the side, next to our brewing chai from redbush and home-made almond milk. Jo has been preparing all autumn for next year's hungry gap. Her cafe, like our Low Carbon Cookbook, is seasonal to the max. To live within these kind of constraints happily, as we have discovered, requires a whole different approach to cooking and living life. It's something that all cooks and creators find as they bridge the gap between the left and the right ways of seeing the world - the spark that lights the stove.

The spark is what you look for when you write a book, a creative way to mix that left-side heavy-duty information and the right-side possibilities of living lightly in synch with the planet. None of us wants to write an entertainment, or a text book. What makes you pick up a cookbook? we are asking each other around the table. To proceed towards a low-carbon future an imaginative relationship with the physical world is necessary, which certain key commitments have already been made. What wastes time is convincing people you think don't want to know. What we need is an encounter that illuminates the dilemma our industrialised culture is in. What we need is to be rekindled by something stronger, more alluring than any feel-bad information. Something you never thought of before, like curly kale tasting of cheese.

What you need is a practice. A spark that lights up your mind.

Field kitchen
In Japan a sixty year old farmer decided to write a book about farming and food. It is called The One Straw Revolution. For forty years, contrary to all modern Japanese agricultural practices after the war, the ex-scientist Masanobu Fukuoka tended his small fields of rice and wheat and orchards of tangerines without any pesticides or technology. He did not till or weed the soil or use machines and his fields yielded as much grain as the monoculture that surrounded his traditional hillside farm. When pests swept through the land his crops survived. He called his way of interacting with the land natural farming and maintained (until his death in 2008 aged ninety five) that a healthy body came out of a healthy environment. To keep sane and sound you needed to eat according to nature and the territory in which you live. Food that needed to be struggled for to obtain was the least beneficial. Nature or the body itself was the guide you needed to follow,“but this subtle guidance goes unheard by most people because of the clamour caused by desire and the discriminating mind.”

To restore the body requires a readaption to nature. To renovate exhausted soil or soil rendered sterile with pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertilizer requires perseverance. It takes time for the body, revved up by an exotic, highly processed, high-fat Western diet, to reorganise and recover its natural appetite. It takes time to learn how to absorb the kind of food Fukuoka (and several contemporary Western writers on food) are talking about: plenty of plants, not much meat, not much. It takes time to break habits and to let go of the complexity of diets and science in one’s mind and the emotional reactions caused by an unnatural way of life. To engage in a way of being where food is naturally limited by place and time.

Once engaged in this process however your body self-organises in a revolutionary way: you don’t suffer from depression, anger or restlessness, you are not filled with the desires and cravings of the modern snack-and-go culture, the hostility that comes as a consequence of eating unnaturally formed plants and caged animals. However this transformative re-naturalisation process is rarely discussed. Our present Western diet, with its glamour, its comforts and its treats, fully backed by a corporate food industry, is the elephant in the room. And no one wants to go there.

Except that we have to go there, because it’s killing us and everything else in the room. The industrial food machine has substituted lifestyle for life, a way of thinking that convinces us we have a choice and that the choices we take have no consequence. But this does not mean that consequences do not exist. To continue to uphold our lifestyle, to choose cheap and convenient food, means we choose to compromise not only the natural life of eco-systems and the livelihoods of farmers everywhere (including those in East Anglia) but also the very nature of our own bodies and minds. For the future to happen we don’t need choice in the kitchen, we need to make decisions.

This decision starts as we stand at the chopping board and by the stove. It doesn’t mean facing another direction so we don’t see the elephant, it means facing reality and undergoing a radical shift of values. Reality is what we are doing everyday with our hands, our ability to ask intelligent questions: What does it mean to eat and cook in connection with the living systems, ecologically, to take account of the consequences of our actions? What does it take to live and eat within our means?

Our book is about growing food and about eating food. As well as the bring-to-share recipes, resources and carbon calculations, we look at the decisions people are making not only to re-establish links with the living world but also with each other. The industrial food machine, powered by cheap fossil fuel, has enabled some of us to dine like Roman emperors. Eating for resilience means we will eat a lot more like peasants, more simply and more often together.

This book looks at what it takes to make these kinds of practical decisions, what happens in an energy descent kitchen, what kind of food you cook in downshift cuisine. How you go about putting life back into plants, into the pot, what Hopi farmers call navoti, the life in the seed, and Mexican cooks call chispa, the spark that fires up human beings.

The pilot light that fires us all from within.

*CRISPY CURLY KALE: Marinate small pieces of curly kale in olive oil, garlic, ginger and tamari overnight. Dry in dehydrator or low oven for a couple of hours. Store in an air tight container. The key with processing any raw food is not to cook it over 39 degrees, the point at which the enzymes are destroyed. The Nectar Cafe is at 16 Onley Street, Tue-Sat, 10am-5pm.

Photos: Gwyl y Golau or the Festival of Light in Machynlleth from Ann Owen's Social Reporting post on Arts and Creativity in Transition; Masanobu Fukuoka in the field; wheel of the local food year from One Straw Revolution; chia, food plant of the future by Mark Watson

walking the time-line - a torch song

2011-12-13T05:55:00.038Z

. . .in reparation and honour to a notable and courageous leader in the long struggle of the common people of England to escape a servile life into the freedom of just conditions (memorial to Robert Kett, Norwich Castle)

In 2009 four of us from TN's Transition Circles– myself, Mark, Helen and Alex - began a project called The Dreaming of Norwich. We would meet up for a day, go walkabout in the city and then reconvene and share our findings. We walked along the river, through the market, visited buildings, sat in gardens, by ourselves and together. Helen photographed the streets, Mark wrote notes. Alex and I sparred under the willow trees outside Julian of Norwich's cell.

During our first journey I climbed the steps to the Castle. It was a hot day and in the meadow below the ramparts I counted 42 species of flowers and trees. Norwich Castle was built by the Norman as a fortress and overlooks the old Saxon settlement and the historical quarters of this small modernised city. I had just been reading John Berger's Hold Everything Dear about the occupation of Palestinian land, and the image of the Israeli watchtowers on the hills kept coming into my mind.

Same domination, same mindset, different century.

To find the dreaming of places requires you to shift your attention into what some call the right-hemisphere - a perception of the world brilliantly conveyed by the psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and the Emissary. For a 12 minute whistlestop tour of the relationship between our left and right hemispheres and how these affect behaviour and culture do watch this video:

Kett's Rebellion
Last week some of us from Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay went with Occupy Norwich on a memorial march up to the Castle to commemorate Robert Kett and the Norfolk uprising that took place in 1549. Ian lit several flambards as we stood at the spot where Kett was killed, and listened to Andy Wood, professor of social history at the UEA, talk about the commonwealth and the people's struggle for fairness and liberty in the face of a "hard-hearted" elite. At the height of the rebellion the camp on Mousehold Heath housed 10,000 people until it was brutally suppressed by foreign soldiers under the Earl of Warwick.

Something happens at night when you gather together, when you gather beneath the citadels of power. All those experiential right-hemisphere connections that link centuries and nations, Mousehold Heath with the Occupy camp at Hay Hill, the barons with the bankers. At the Uncivilisation Festival this year all the great events - music, storytelling, performances - happened in the dark, in the woods, by candlelight and firelight.

By night we remember something else of ourselves. Something our 1066 civilisation doesn't want us to see.

The dreaming is in the people
Our year of dreaming together did not complete itself. By winter an argument had broken out between us and even though we explored our differences, using a method known as conflict resolution, we could not come to an agreement. The allegiance demanded by history and civilisation destroyed our every attempt.

That's when I realised new ways of proceeding would not be found within these kinds of self-absorbed endeavour, no matter how intelligent or well meaning, but within another context entirely.

Finding our way back
The reason I am writing about this today is because time is a mysterious thing and in order to proceed within Transition we need to see ourselves within a bigger political frame, to access our deep memory of how life works beyond the way we have been taught to look at it, as resources for the few. We live in a culture that keeps us trapped in a fearful present, afraid of looking back, afraid of looking forward (what future? is there a future?), trapped in the objectifying, separating, hierarchical world of the left hemisphere.

When you allow yourself to look back you can find treasures that you didn't see when you were fiercely embedded in the present moment (even in those conflicts many of us have experienced in Transition), what Roberto Calasso in his great work on the French Revolution, The Ruin of Kasch, calls the douceur of the past, the sweet essence of experience, tempered by time. We live on an island where time and memory have a great influence on our imaginations. Some of this is called History and is carefully managed and exploited by the custodians of civilisation. It is praised and worshipped in the form of buildings and possessions and figures of power, whilst the knowledge of how the earth and the people really are remains elsewhere, hidden from view.

In the mysterious all-encompassing universe of our right hemisphere consciousness and the empathy of the heart.

This is the part of ourselves that can make connections, that can step outside the official version of history and see the pattern of things. This is the perception, for example, that Justin Kenrick, in Land Reform: losing and recovering the Commons employs as he juxtaposes the present land-grabbing in Africa, with the historical clearances of Scotland and England.

Same domination, same mindset, different continent.

In many ways capitalism began here in East Anglia with the enclosure of the commons, said the historian, as we stood beside the plaque where Kett was hanged on a freezing December day.

As the almost-full moon appeared in the sky.

Finding our way back
Our last dreaming journey took place outside the city in the East Anglian waterlands. We walked toward the estuary, through the marshland, along the shoreline, sat in a grove of sweet chestnut trees and found a tiny slow worm basking in the autumn sun. What we concluded that day was that the medicine of the heart this majestic nut tree embodied, was key to our reestablishing proper relations with the earth.

Our quarrel, such as it was, was the quarrel that breaks out between the left and the right hemisphere when such attempts at return are made. The Master knows he needs the Emissary to carry out the task in hand, but the Emissary believes he is the master of the universe and denies any other authority exists. This is the big problem in our world. One the Kogi Elders of Colombia call the struggle between the Older and Younger Brother. It plays out in ourselves and our societies. The 1% dominator mindset that refuses to listen to anything but its own voice.

When you struggle through the conflict zone however and don't give up, that's when you realise that the dreaming of cities is not in the buildings or History, or even the land that supports them, it's held within the people. The people who live there and the visitors who come to meet them, who come together to work out a way to proceed. To walk the time-line is to remember that time lives inside human beings, who are capable of seeing in all-at-once time, in which each moment holds the key to the past and the future. Everything can be changed when we tap into this way of seeing, whether in Norwich, New York, Madrid or Cairo.

To witness the butterfly effect as it plays out in every city in the world.

For press release on the relationship between Kett's Rebellion and Occupy Norwich by Nick Watts (Sustainable Bungay) see here

Kett's Memorial March at Norwich Castle, organised by Occupy Norwich; under the torchlight; tee at Mt Elgon, Kenya by Justin Kenrick; painting of sweet chestnut, Walberswick Marshes and butterflies drinking the nectar from a city buddleia bush, from a video by Helen Wells.

the fire stealers - a love story

2011-12-12T09:04:00.004Z

Today's blog is cross-posted from the Transition Network's Social Reporting project and was originally written during our People and Connections week. The pilot is now entering its twelfth and final week (see Justin Kenrick's great intro on Land Rights), but will be re-emerging in a new form in 2012.

Once upon a time the world was dark, very dark indeed and cold. The people moved around in the darkness like great lumbering beasts, afraid of everything, of the invisible forces that threatened them on every side. Then they discovered fire: they had warmth and light. They could see each other, cook meals, feast and dance and sing. How did the fire come to the people? In the Far North it was brought by the trickster bird, Raven, who stole the sun from the grandfather; in Greece by the rebel Titan, Prometheus. Both were hounded and punished for their acts of generosity. All creators follow their dangerous path and become fire-stealers by trade. They steal the fire from the gods and give it to the people. They can’t keep the fire for themselves, or it burns their house down.

Some people in Transition stand on the earth and dig the soil. They are the ones who run the the food projects. Some people look at roofs and spaces. They are the builders and organisers. Some of us write blogs and bulletins. We are the communicators. We keep the lines open, cross-reference, untangle, make live, feed back. We do this because we're good at it, but most of all because we know what happens if we don't.

The fact is our rulers, gods or government, corporate CEOs, the 1%, however you like to look at it, want to keep the fire for themselves. They like to govern over the people, but they do not like the people. They do not like you. Some part of you doesn't like you either. That's the hard part. Psychologists and mystics can chip away at that part for years, and yet the only thing that transforms us is doing the one thing it is terrified of: connecting with the heart.

The heart changes the game completely. So we are trained to be like our cold-blooded ancestors, like empire builders, to struggle in a frigid and loveless world, to attack and put each other down: criticise, mock, humiliate, dismiss. To be as successful and cruel as Alexander, as brilliant and heartless as Newton, inhuman, grasping for power, governed entirely by will and policed by terror. To bring the fire, to hold the fire, means we have to love the people, though for sure the people do not love us. We don't love in a squishy way, a mummy and daddy, best friend way, or even in a comradely, Quakery way. We love each other as fellows because we know that without these heart connections we fall big time. We end up in that cold sunless universe, without a dream to sustain us, without a voice.

And so something deeper in us pushes us out of our houses and our comfort zones to go to meetings and events and workdays. Pushes me out today into Lowestoft High Street to stand beside the striking workers, to stand by the Sustainable Bungay stall, pushes me toward the Community Centre to edit this month's Transition Norwich bulletin, though no one will thank us for it, or cares whether we do it or not.

The fact is some of us can see in the dark, and we know what's coming if we don't pass on the fire.

Climate Change

"What if climate change were about something else, so that instead of fighting for resources it made us come together. What if climate were about memory, about the snow in the mountains?" I am in the Alexandra pub in Norwich on a Friday night and we're discussing a Dark Mountain project, looking at ways to encounter climate change, beyond data and stats. Mathis and Jeppe are from the UEA, we are from Transition Norwich. I'm remembering when I first joined Transition and how, even though we talked about climate change and peak oil, it was really about people. Right from the start.

At first it was about opening my mouth. It was about going into those Heart and Soul circles and speaking about our experiences, sharing what we knew. About being welcomed into both the initiatives that have become integral to my life for the last three and a half years. About meeting a lot of people after being isolated and disenfranchised for a long time. Exploring the lexicon of Transition in a kind of wild collective jubilation, events, films, shared meals, posters and press releases. It was about our first Transition East Gathering at Downham Market, about Carol and John, Gary and Josiah, Chris and Christine.

And then it was work: about resisting those ancien regime forces that tried to pull Sustainable Bungay apart around its Unleashing in 2009; it was about standing up to those caterpillar forces pushing for censorship on our Norwich blog in 2010. Those people who kept trying to push us down and out: you don't belong here, you can't write, you are a communist/vegan/scrounger, middle class, a suspect. Learning to say I am not moving. It was engaging in the Transition Circles, reducing carbon emissions, teaching peak oil in a primary school, throwing a party, writing a cookbook, creating culture. About Andy and Elena, Helen and Tully and Tom.

And then it became about branching out, finding the connections with Dark Mountain, with Occupy, with Greenpeace, with Stopclimatechaos and the OneWorldColumn. Seeing the pattern - the butterfly emerging from the collapse. It was working at the Transition Conferences and Camps, the Sunrise Festival, Unciviliation Festival. Going to the Bee Summit, talking to politicians, standing up for our library, our recycling depot, our woods, our seas. In solidarity with indignados, with occupiers, striking workers, with the 99%. It was Mark and Trevor and Rupert, Nick and Kate, Kerry, Simeon, Jeppe and Mathis.

Connections

How you hold the connection is by learning not to take things personally and realising that sometimes you have to feel everything personally in order to know it is not. How you keep going in Transition, especially if you are the kind of communicator who brings elephants into the room, is by seeing what you do, beyond your personal involvement. By knowing that everything, and I mean everything, conspires against our holding this pattern, against bringing this warmth and this light to the people. All the rulers of Empire, all the gods of the universe.

We are trained to think in left-hemisphere ways, in ever-diminishing circles of power and hostility, to worship data and systems and hierarchy. We abide by autocratic religions, by creeds that tell us to scarifice our hearts to invisible entities, who rule the universe like Goldman Sachs. Transition is as much full of these controlling forces and egoic fantasies as any other sphere of human activity. It’s not the fault of the movement, of its ingredients or philosophy, it's what each of us brings to the meeting table, into the room, unwittingly by virtue of being human at this point in time.

In order to live in a different paradigm we need to be different people. Powerdown people, who are capable of self-organisation, warmth and generosity and who can see the universe at play in all our small moves and relationships. How I treat you is how I treat the world. To evolve our indoctrinated individualism needs to undergo a social alchemy, whose first process pushes all the dark hidden stuff into the light for ruthless examination. Our primary materia is the the nuclear force by which all Empires fuel themselves: hate thy neighbour.

We think we are smart and enlightened and know about peak oil and fractional reserve banking, but none of us have got it down about social relationships. At least no one I’ve come across in Transition. None of us love each other as we need to love each other, which is to say, without condition as people. We are all creatures of Empire, deracinated, separated, traumatised by history, educated to resist change and right-hemisphere imagination. We gush about community and sharing, but in reality we are all Wizards of Oz, running our small-minded empires from our IPhones. We say We, but it’s still Me in control 24/7, full of self-pity and self-importance, blind to the beauty and suffering of the people who stand before us. Our flesh and blood.

In 2009 conducting an inquiry into 29 initiatives of the Eastern Region for the second Transition East conference, no group reported they were without fallout and bad relations. By 2011 some of those intiatives had disappeared. The ones that flourished underwent reorganisation. Most of us are split off into small groups, working on practical and creative projects where we can shine and get on with things unimpeded. It’s not the best of all possibilities, and we know it, but don't necessarily know how to proceed.

The fact is sometimes we don't make it in Transition. Even the best of us. And that is a hard thing to acknowledge for a movement characterised by optimism and possibility. If we had a language that allowed us to recognise these difficult shifts it would be easier. The world is tranformed when we transform ourselves, and the truth is sometimes we don’t want to. Or our overworked wife doesn’t want to, our bolshy children, or the conventional small town where we tried to make it happen. Or our bodies and our minds can’t cope with the challenge. We’re too old or too sick. Many people leave or disappear without trace, And mostly it's because the old forms inside haven't wanted to change and relinquish their power over our consciousness, and the rest of us lack the lexicon and the humanity to give each other a break.

But sometimes we do change radically and come together in sudden surprising ways. And this is really a post about the people who keep linking up, and all those difficult people who challenge us, so we keep doing it, in spite of the violence of the status quo and the wrath of gods. It's about the Norwich bloggers and the Social Reporters, all the communicators and connectors. It's about the thousands of emails we write to each other and the hundreds of blogs.

It's about all the times you didn't send the email, didn't walk out of the meeting, let your antagonism and offendedness slide. It's about all those fellow feelings you have for the occupiers in Zuccotti Park and Oakland as they are truncheoned and pepper-sprayed by an increasingly militarised police force. All those times you don't go unconcious and you keep reading those difficult reports that Peter Lipman keeps sending in the small hours.

Transition is the people, because the strength and the wit to change is in the people, not the things, not the trees, not the mountains.Climate change brings us together so we can do this, because this transformation not a self-only task. We have to do this together.

So this is for all the fire-stealers and for those of us who are in it for the long haul: for Mark, for Adrienne and for Ed who made this project happen, for Chris Keene who cycled all the way to Copenhagen, for everyone at Occupy Norwich, for Nick who took me there, and to all the people in Transition who keep meeting in rooms, sitting in those circles of intent, in churches, in squares, in village halls, in the back rooms of desolate pubs on a windy night, and to those who in spite of everything keep remembering. having seen at one point in their lives the incandescent light that fills everything on this earth, each tree, each mountain, each wave that races to the shore, each beat of our hearts as they radiate outward. And for you, dear readers, all of you and all of us. We are not going to make it unless we keep connected. Hold that space. Hold that fire.

Photos: with Mark and Erik testing the rocket stoves, at Low Carbon Cookbook meeting, Norwich, Nov 2011; with Elena and fellow marchers at Great Norfolk Anti-Cuts March, December 2010; a darkling thrush, Suffolk, 2010; with Mark and Nick at the Greenpeace Fair, Sept 2011; Mark, Elinor and Gemma of Bungay Community Bees en route to London Bee Summit, Dec 2010; with Helen at the Magdalen Street Celebration; Occupy Norwich General Assembly, Nov 2011; Sustainable Bungay at The Wave. 2009.

Sharing the Load - A Permaculture Workday

2011-12-11T06:31:00.021Z

Last Saturday, December 3rd, I joined a group of East Anglian perma-culturists and transitioners for a work day at Eloise and Kris's place on the Suffolk -Norfolk border.

"The idea of work days is simple and great!" said Eloise, who has been studying permaculture for the past year. "Invite your friends round to help with some big jobs or projects you want to get done in exchange for lots of nice food, company and good fun! And help on their plot another day!"

Shared work days are part of permaculture's ethos and practice, including in Transition Norwich's own permaculture group.

It was sunny, mild and dry and over twenty people had come to help out with building a new compost area, preparing raised beds, rotavating, mulching, chopping bundles of kindling in the coppiced wood area for an earth oven and making chicken tractors.

Chicken tractors are small tunnels bound together with long sticks and covered in wire netting under which you grow plants for chicken feed. The chickens can't get in whilst the plants are growing but when they're ready you make a door so they can enter. The long sticks were made straight from from the coppiced wood out of ash, oak and horse chestnut.

I went to the kitchen and made a pumpkin and carrot soup with Brenna. Her first baby was due the following week and I was really struck by how relaxed both she and her partner Callum were about it all.

There was fresh bread, delicious bean stew and coleslaw for lunch along with all sorts of cakes and biscuits. Everything was homemade and a lot of the veg homegrown. At lunchtime everyone crowded in the kitchen and the stew was devoured, but it was so filling there was no room for the pumpkin soup - no problem, it would be just right for dinner.

I was also on a deadline for This Low Carbon Life, so whilst I did cook, rotavate, help with a raised bed and take down some old runner bean stalks, my attention was rather divided. Several times I tucked myself away in Eloise's office until I'd knocked a very different post into shape from the one you see in the top picture.

Meanwhile Charlotte was seriously reskilling in the field: learning from Brenna how to make a solstice wreath (now on our front door) out of the boughs of yew, ivy, cypress, bay and holly as they sat around the fire in the yurt; from Callum, who is a carpenter, how to make a raised bed from four pieces of wood without nails (with luck we'll make our first raised bed here next year); from David - a maker and blacksmith who spent many years working in Africa on low-tech solutions - how to sharpen secateurs and shears, and to use her Opinel knife to whittle sticks into pegs; from David and Lee how to make a compost bin out of wooden pallets.

"What I really liked was being shown directly by the makers how to do these things," she said "You're finding out how to it physically, with your hands, with your eyes, listening and watching. You can ask them questions, they can guide you. This is very different from reading about how to do things in a book or on the internet."

I did learn how to use the rotavator Kris picked up for £50. And that after you rotavate you put the compost on, then the topsoil. "You can borrow it next year for your raised bed," said Kris "It can cost you £50 a time just to rent one."

I'm off to do a bit of teaching myself today with Bungay Community Bees: how to make a Yarrow herbal salve. We'll be using this year's beeswax from the group's hives (and sampling our first honey!) Gotta get going....

Pics: Hammering the psts for the pallet compost bin; Preparing raised beds; Pumpkins for soup; Lunchtime stew; Kindling; Solstice wreath

Hethersett and Little Melton Circle

2011-12-10T11:47:00.001Z

Much of the last few weeks have been taken up with two things that are at the opposite ends of the spectrum of rural life but have led me to think about whether modern communications have given us more or less control over our own destinies.

The first task has been the restoration of the Little Melton village sign. What started as a simple repainting of the coloured bits has led to a replacement of rotting wooden parts and redesign of the base in an effort to ensure that the new post lasts at least 100years! (the pic was taken many years ago before it all rotted). Looking at the sign has led me to consider whether the agricultural workers shown on the sign and in the village logo were more in control or less in control of how the village evolved than the current residents – who are mostly much better educated and wealthy but very few of whom work within the village.

This is relevant to my other task, which has been to respond to the planning application to build close on 1200 houses between LM and Hethersett. The application must contain over 5000 pages, so there is no shortage of information but people feel overwhelmed and very few wade through it all. My priority is to ensure that new developments make it possible for people to walk and cycle to shops and workplaces, so I have dived in and made comments on behalf of LMPC.

Other members of Transition Hethersett have started a Green Spaces group to ensure that the green spaces in the village continue to enhance the lives of the villagers.My guess is that people are now much better informed and that the way things are done is more open and transparent but the irony is that few people take advantage of this. I suspect that the ordinary men and women who lived here when it was an agricultural community had to fight to make their voice heard but took a much keener interest in what was going on around them.

I’ve just cut up one of the huge squash that I grew this year and have managed to keep all my fingers so I’m now off to ask my donkey friends for some manure for next year’s crop. Some things carry on much the same!

Who wants to talk about economics?

2011-12-09T08:50:00.002Z

The first post that I wrote on this blog, for the relaunch of the Economics and Livelihoods group back in May this year, was entitled "Do we control money, or does money control us?" and I wondered whether the provocative theme would ring true with many people, or whether economics is a subject which people shy away from when at all possible.

Little did I know that there would be the worldwide Occupy Movement on this very theme, starting with protests on Wall St, New York, but spreading to thousands of cities across the world, including our beloved Norwich.

Occupy Norwich's Capitalism/Monetary Reform working group, which formed after a great talk from Dr Rupert Read on monetary reform, has continued to discuss the issues in detail, and I've found it very rewarding to attend their meetings and learn so much about the nature of money, whilst we also look for a monetary system which would satisfy society's needs.

There is a great cross-section of religious and political ideologies and backgrounds amongst those who have been attending the meetings, but one thing is clear to all of us - the present system is broken, and needs to change. So far the discussion has mostly revolved around what money is and is for, and what the deficiencies of the current system are which require a rethink, but we hope to establish in later meetings what action we can take to change things, whether it be campaigning for national monetary reform, or for promoting local currencies which use an alternative monetary model.

What money is for: a medium of exchange, a way of measuring and comparing value, and a store of wealth (and debt, but I'll come to that in a moment). Looking at each of these functions, we tried to establish how our current system is deficient.

Firstly, as a medium exchange, the scarcity of it - although value can be created anywhere, money is not always available in the same place to be exchanged for that value. Although other means of exchange could be (and sometimes are) used, there is only one system that is recognised by law - legal tender - that has been imposed on us by the government, causing a monopoly of money creation with banks. We don't have a choice about whether we use it or not (because it is the only currency recognised by law to be valid for meeting financial obligations) and therefore we are forced to abide by its rules.

As a method of comparing value, our currency is insufficient, because its value is fluid, and is artificially adjusted by those with the power to set prices that do not match their real value (by limiting markets and gaining monopolies, for example, and speculative investing).

As a store of wealth, our currency is deficient for the same reason - its value changes, and in fact continuously diminishes, as is evident through inflation. This only covers the average value of that money, of course. When money is created as debt, as it is in the loans made from banks, the money is a store of debt, rather than wealth, and because it must be paid back at interest rates that are far beyond inflation, the value diminishes quicker, meaning that families with poor credit ratings are paying far more than what something is worth for the same goods.

When exploring some of these deficiencies, we realised that we had to distinguish between money and value. Value is subjective, and always will be, but because of our need to trade, there are some common values which make up the prices we historically see things traded at - one is the production value - how much time and effort it took to obtain or create that value; another is utility value - the nutrients that a food gives you, for example, or the pleasure that a good book brings; and these combine to form an historic value - the value which we really see in a product or service.

I could go on about the things we discussed. Many of them are typed up here on facebook and on the Occupy Norwich forum.

However, the discussion is far from over, and we're still meeting regularly at the Haymarket each Wednesday evening at 7pm to try and find out more, so please join us!

Images: Occupy Norwich protester with "Who has taken our money?" placard; a monetary reform meeting in progress, where our Muslim friends are talking about the concept and dangers of usury; A selection of books in the Occupy Norwich library, including The Future of Money, which discusses the possibilities of complimentary currencies as a solution to our economic problems. Courtesy of Ann Nicholls.

A season on the farm

2011-12-08T08:00:00.008Z

Today's bitingly cold winter wind has inspired me to look back over the year and remember how it all began: with a bare brown field and that same cold wind. It wasn't long before the brown gave way to the first flush of green, which was swiftly usurped by the frenzied luscious growth of summer (too much, in some places!) and the mounds of produce. Now just the hardy winter veg are left, beautifully touched by frost of a morning.

Keeping the home fires burning

2011-12-06T09:25:00.008Z

At a lecture I attended many years ago presented by Matthew Fox, I was struck by his observation that as a member of homo urbanus, I was cut off from the elements.

So much so, that in our homes we no longer really feel them - the earth is covered over and built on, fire is boxed up in boilers, water travels through pipes, and the air is often messed about with by conditioners, humidifiers, and any number of interventions. In many modern offices you can't actually open the windows.

This sense of disconnection is also true of our energy usage. Anyone living little more than 100 years ago would be astonished at our steady supply of energy in the form of electricity and gas, and the assumption that we can have it exactly when needed, instantaneously, on demand, invisibly driving everything that heats, powers, and makes our home work. Faraday was indeed a genius.

Before the oil and coal revolution, fetching fuel (usually wood), and water, was an integral and time consuming part of survival. And, of course, two-thirds of the current world's population are in this position. It has been calculated that on average, today, an African living in a rural location spends 2 hours per day simply fetching water. So.... glad to be out of that, we think. Fine, as long as we continue to be aware of and value where our resources come from now, and how much we consume. But most of the time we are oblivious of this, because the process is invisible.

If this is true of the home, it is even more true of our workplaces, given that we are not usually responsible for the bills. 3 years ago, Mark Crutchley and Maria Price of the then TN Energy Group, invited the BBC locally to record on camera apparent energy wasteage late at night in Norwich - this ranged from office block lights left on, to car sales showrooms and shops with very large outputs of lighting on at 11.00 p.m. It featured as an item on BBC Look East and clearly the media team thought this was a striking and newsworthy piece.

This great idea is now being re-shaped and formed as our very own Energy Look Out initiative. So now, everyone has a chance to report us examples of energy waste - or indeed any kind of resource waste ( what about those constantly running taps in some of the cafe chains?) - and members of the Look Out team will contact the retailer or company concerned. See this month's bulletin.

However, unlike the mainstream media approach, we are not out to 'name and shame', but to firstly alert the company, and suggest ways they could save energy - and money. We will then publish the companies where positive change has been evidenced.

Research shows that in comparing companies that have adopted carbon and energy-saving measures, with those that have not, the latter group, when asked 'why not?', simply did not believe any significant savings could be made. Given some of the first group managed savings of 20% and more, this was yet another example of the need to change behaviours, assumptions and attitudes. So right on the transition agenda then!

Keep those reportings and sightings coming, and thanks to those who have already written to us.

Report your concern by e-mailing here . We will also be meeting informally at Take 5, Tombland, Norwich on December 12th 6.30 p.m. to further develop this initiative

Forging Alliance – Transition Themes Week #10

2011-12-05T09:30:00.018Z

Welcome to our tenth Transition Themes Week! We’ve been running these weeks for a year now, in order to showcase and feed back what the different TN groups and projects have been engaged in. By the end of 2011 it’s clear that the shape and the style of the original theme groups has shifted. When we began in 2008, the “comms” group spent a good deal of time debating how to organise stalls, what our message should be, taking part in local events, setting up a website, We sat in intense circles at the Playhouse, upstairs at Take 5, debating where that “message” should go, taking minutes, introducing ourselves and our ideas.

Two years later we are less involved in marketing Transition than in creating a resilient culture and alternative media. There are the people who organise events and there are the people who co-ordinate and contribute to the news blog and This Low Carbon Life. Simeon Jackson wrote an excellent roadmap recently for establishing a new Outreach Programme, but this is on the back burner right now because there are other things at play in the world, in which Transition has a distinctive role.

One of the main functions of communication is to forge and maintain connections. It has a singular ability to be fluid and enter many spheres of activity and to cross-reference and make dynamic links.

In a recent social reporting week on Navigating Community Chaos Mike Grenville described how during the process of transformation the imaginal buds of the emerging butterfly link up. They do this in order to resist attack by the immune system of the caterpillar, which is holding on to its old form. This metaphor appeared many times in TN’s early Heart and Soul meetings, as a way of understanding what was happening on the planet. But there is one thing voicing a spiritual idea and another undergoing it in the real world. One thing to breezily state: well hey, we’ll just go into our cocoon and dissolve!, and another actually allowing those old caterpillar forms to break down, uncomfortably, inside ourselves and our social groups, to forge alliances without allowing our own allegiance to the ancien regime to destroy us from within.

One Saturday last month the Bloggers met, as they do each quarter, to discuss the upcoming rota for Winter and Spring, We sat round a table at The Greenhouse and jammed about themes and topics and how to reduce the enormously long list of subjects we have been covering for the last two years (see right hand column!).

But before the meeting began three of us attended a lobbying session upstairs, organised by StopClimateChaos Coalition, to present 8 different questions to Simon Wright MP, ranging from FITs for community solar panels (Norwich City Council) to biofuel power plants (Greenpeace/Norwich Carbon Reduction Trust). The meeting was chaired by Michael Uwins (Friend of the Earth) and networked by Trevor Phillips (Norfolk Coalition Against the Cuts) to mark the start of the present talks in Durban. After our meeting I went to the General Assembly at Occupy Norwich and heard about the upcoming Kett's Rebellion march this Wednesday and feedback

from the Climate Change working group and the recent Occupy UK conference at St Paul's. If you could step out and see from a bird's perspective you would see amongst the thronging restless shoppers on an ordinary Saturday in Norwich, these small still circles of people, discussing the future against all odds. What characterises all them is their intensity of focus and their coherence.

These alliances are happening all over the world. The old consumer caterpillar culture carries on voraciously eating all the resources at its disposal and resisting that dissolve. It is lashing back violently against the butterfly protest and peaceful assembly, breaking its agreements, infringing civil rights and environment protection. At the same time grassroots and environmental groups are holding together and responding in a way not seen for decades. Last week in response to George Osborne's autumn statement and the Government's deregulation planning laws that will put vast areas of our countryside into developers hands, an extraordinary alliance of countryside campaigners, wildlife groups and green activists delivered a powerful push back.

So one of the function of “comms” within Transition is to cohere and to bring to light some of our own local, national and international alliances. Because Transition cannot be all things to all people. It can’t do the specific work that single issues campaign groups such as BiofuelWatch do, it doesn’t have the edge of activism, or a connection with the bigger frame of the natural wild world, as Jeppe Graugaard pointed out in his post on Re-imagining the Future. It doesn’t have the intellectual or creative edge of the Dark Mountain Project, or the full-on engagement of

Occupy. And conversely these groups do not provide the drivers for community resilience, the building of an alternative low-carbon infrastructure, or individual ways people can reconfigure themselves. Our strength lies in our working together as a composite and the harmonious exchange between our networks. To engage in meetings and actions in full awareness of their significance, as if life really mattered.

If we are serious about social justice, about creating a fair and equitable world, about the consequences of peak oil and climate change, we would be wise not to separate and attack, to criticise ourselves or each other, not to call ourselves usual suspects or hippies or middle class or a bunch of amateurs. We would be wise to see ourselves as an emergent new collective form, to celebrate our own integrity and intelligence, to do everything we do as if our lives depended on it. Because our lives do depend on it. And our hardest task is to keep communicating with one another in a hostile world that encourages everyone to remain separated and silent and superficial, whose media keeps informing us that if we just keep shopping everything will be all right.

So here is our week from Transitioners who know that that is not the truth of the matter, who all work intensely in their singular areas and write in alliance on this blog: Chris on a new carbon-cutting incentive, Norwich Energy Lookouts group, Simeon Jackson on Occupy Norwich and Monetary Reform, Elena on local food production at Norwich FarmShare, Mark on working together on a Permaculture Norfolk Workday, John on "sustainable" housing development and Transition Circle Hethersett. Keep that conversation going!

Photos: Nov 26 meetings - stopclimate chaoas, Norwich bloggers, Occupy Norwich GA; poster for Occupy Everything; recent Heathrow map for expansion plus graffiti; video of Nov 30 fair pensions public workers's strike march.

Being Part of it All

2011-12-03T08:25:00.014Z

Everyone reading this post will know our modern world is made of oil, from this computer to my toothbrush to the global food and transport systems. We are utterly dependent on it.

Responding to Peak Oil on a community level is one of the original drivers of Transition together with climate change. These drivers are what made a group of us in the pioneering Transition Circles spend 2009-2010 explore ways of cutting our personal carbon use to half the national average. And write about our experiences.

But what about the kind of people we are now after 150 years of cheap fossil fuel energy and all the perks that have gone with it - aeroplanes to cars to i-pods? I'd just assumed before my Peak Oil moment(s) that the "stuff" around us would be around forever. And that I would carry on not having much to do with anybody beyond my immediate circle. I had my own life, my own interests, my own world. I didn't really have to deal with other people. But this was an illusion.

Seeing through this illusion of being isolated, individual units in control of our own world as if we had no connection with or impact on anything or anybody beyond it is one of the biggest human challenges right now. We’ve had the energy and wealth (at least in the West) to keep ourselves apart from our fellow humans, ignore the planet that sustains us, whilst using up its physical (and human) 'resources' (hate that term) and cocoon ourselves in a web of consumerist products made of those resources.

This illusion of independence from the physical world casts a powerful spell. I meet a friend occasionally for a drink. We get on well and enjoy each others’ company. But I also have a strange and mysterious Power: the ability to bring the conversation and the evening to an abrupt end at any given moment. And not because I am endowed with any magical secrets. All I need do is mention the FINITE NATURE of the PLANET’S PHYSICAL ‘RESOURCES’, quite gently, throwaway even, and a restlessness ensues and suddenly it's time to go home.

I don’t do that on purpose. I just don't seem to be able to keep it out of the conversation.

My own separatist defence systems (which are not really my own, more conditioned social responses) have been breaking down slowly and surely over these past years in transition. I wouldn’t even be sitting with that friend four years ago. I probably would have been sitting at home on my own.

I would also not be visiting the Occupiers in Norwich or going to the workers’ rally in Lowestoft, or speaking with the local MP about climate change, or taking people on bee and wildflower walks around Bungay, writing these blogposts, working with a group of people on the Low Carbon Cookbook, or be part of the Transition Network Social Reporters’ project. I wouldn't be talking to Frank and Jeremy about chia, or keep forgetting to send helenofnorwich the photos I took of us picking sloes when she came down to visit with her girlfriend.

Or going over today to Kris and Eloise’s with Sustainable Bungay and the Norfolk Permaculture Group to help out on their work day chopping wood, moving compost and making soup...

Pics: Sunrise Autumn 2011 (MW); Me, Helen, Jo at Walberswick by helenofnorwich