when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing

Welcome to the third in our series based on The Transition Companion where the crew look at different Ingredients and Tools. This week we are considering Chapter 3: Connecting, which contains some of the themes we have focused on this year, including Working with the Council. Forming Local Networks has also inspired a regional series, which this autumn will see reports from working initiatives in London and Scotland. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I was planning to write about communication today, which forms the main strand of this chapter (hard to connect without communication!). But reading the entries for Oral Histories and The Role of Storytelling, I realise these are very precise exercises which I know little about. Both the initiatives I have been in have been more on the ground than teaching or workshop-based. I do know about writing stories that are embedded in the future, which was the basis for a real newspaper, the Transition Free Press. And I know about speaking with older people about the neighbourhood and getting a deeper sense in time, a sense of a culture and economy based on life without fossil fuels - though only in a non-structured context.

I could write about how hard it is to break the spell of the media, and how listening to people is key to breaking out of our chronic individualism, but to be fair to the book these ingredients are not ones that we have used in our Transition kitchens in Norwich and Bungay. The tool I know however like the back of my hand is Street-by-street behaviour change, which we called Transition Circles. I would say that this was perhaps the most influential and essential enterprise I have taken part in (apart from Working in Groups). Here's our precis in the Companion:

TRANSITION IN ACTION: TRANSITION NORWICH CIRCLES
There are other approaches similar to Transition Streets that have also proved to be very effective. Transition Norwich started a less formal approach called ‘Transition Circles’. In this model, small groups of people meet, usually over a meal, and start with looking at individual actions, creating a space in which people can talk in a real way about lifestyle changes, and are able to support and encourage each other to take the first steps.
The Circles came out of a second wave in the initiative, called Transition Norwich 2.0 (TN2) in 2009, in which a core group of Transitioners made a decision to cut their carbon emissions by half the national average in the key areas of home energy, transport, food and ‘stuff’. The second motivation for TN2 was to start up intentional communities in different neighbourhoods, to bring people together to create and celebrate a low-carbon culture.
The groups have been meeting regularly, and have since broadened their focus to look at larger practical initiatives, e.g. wholefood-buying co-ops. For Transition Norwich, personal carbon reduction is a defining element of what Transition looks like in an urban context. 

To bring personal carbon reduction changed the dance completely because it challenged us to be real about the changes required to downshift. It changed the conversations between us. Transition groups sometimes meet with the understanding that somewhere in the woolly future "the community" will engage in energy descent. However when you put your own highly consumptive lives under the microscope, the kind of double think and denial that allows Transitioners to talk passionately, for example, about peak oil but still take planes, could no longer happen.

In Norwich we ran a series of Carbon Conversations alongside the Transition Circles during 2009-11 and personal downshift became something most of the movers and shakers were engaged in. It formed the basis for our discussion, our measure and a way of life that we celebrated in all its rich detail. It inspired our Low-Carbon Life blog (now in its third year), and the Low Carbon Cookbook. We didn't see it as behaviour change, we saw it as culture change, something we were creating together. It was another story about the world we could tell. And we told everyone we met. Look here we are in old coats, on the bus, eating beetroot, chopping firewood!

I was in the Strangers' Circle for about six months and in that time radically reduced the energy I used, the waste I produced, relocalised my larder, joined a wholefood coop, learned to share a car, stopped buying stuff apart from essentials. Two years later those decisions carry on being made: reduce, reuse, recycle, repair. We have not put the heating back on. We eat almost entirely seasonally. This year I haven't bought any clothes. I'm not thinking about "carbon reduction" anymore, or even writing about it: it's become embedded in the everyday fabric of my life and continues to affect everything I do and every conversation I have.

The high aims that we had for the Circles to spread around the city did not happen, but as speakers for Transition we became real about what we were saying. That has its own homeopathic effect within the living breathing world. We live in a mind-based culture which is happy with the abstract, with words rather than actions. We can dismiss billions of strangers by talking blithely about "too many people on the planet" and yet be unable to face the real-life death of a close friend. We are happy with the theories of Transition but do not necessarily engage in what it takes.

One of the functions of communication is to allow people to speak from their true beings and from their experience and to find a common ground, and for that we have to listen. We spent those winter months 2009-10 when the four pioneer Circles were up and running, talking in a small group about our everyday struggles to live a more frugal and respectful life-style, one that was kinder to the planet and to the people we would never meet who made it possible. It was hard going because we had to face our own denial in each other's front rooms, or around the kitchen table. We had to listen to difficult things and not shut down. Allow our resistances and resentments to be there in the alchemical space of the room. We had to know that this was everyone's shared experience, one way or another. We didn't talk in the abstract: we looked at electricity bills, car logs and shopping lists. We confessed to supermarket habits, having hot baths, driving too much. And then we acted on our findings and feeling during the following months.


Maybe one of the stories we need to tell each other is that everything in Transition goes through a process. Stories allow you to look back and treasure everything with what Roberto Calasso calls the "douceur of time". Just because a project isn't still current, or established, or a social enterprise, or famous in some way, doesn't mean it was a failure. The Circles were a huge success in that they broke a pattern, taught us clarity and generosity and endurance, and opened a rich seam of stories that enabled, for example, the Social Reporting Project to come into being and gave Norwich FarmShare its cultural backing. For Transition to work there have to be stories - real stories, real experiences - heart-warming testimonies about the struggles and rewards of doing downshift, not scientific graphs and behaviour mananagment. For that as we need real storytellers, people who are prepared to stand by the words they speak and write, and tell it how it is right now - not how it should be or was once long ago.

We had a lot of fun too especially sharing the meals (we were all cooks) and there was this sense that we were not engaged in a programme or teaching, but pioneering something that people hadn't done before. No one was in charge. We were all of us in the dark. No one knew anymore than anyone else and that made our moves exciting and real. It connected us in a way that still, years later, makes sense of what we do, even though most of us no longer see each other and the initiative is no longer up and running as it once was. The Circles were a way-though. I don't think I would be where I am now without having take part in them. So this is a recognition of that and a thank you too, to all the people I sailed with on that powerdown journey.

Because those storytellers are not the oral historians in our community, or the journalists in the conventional media. They are us.

Images: all banners from reports on Transition Circles and Carbon Conversations 200-2011 in Transition Norwich News; Hold the Front Page, Transition Culture; colleciting apple grafts and fingerless gloves and the Stranger's Circles discussion on Resilience in This Low Carbon Life.

Hethersett and Little Melton Circle

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!

Entering Transition Circle Hethersett

This is our first contribution to This Low Carbon Life and happily it feels particularly relevant to be writing about our experiences with Transition at this point in time. Steve and I attended the ‘Great Unleashing’ three years ago and were very excited by the event but the actual reality of engaging with Transition has only recently begun to emerge and develop in our consciousness and behaviour. It feels as though we have very much been on a slow burn with this movement; aware of its significance and importance but hesitant to do more than show a concerned interest in it.

The Hethersett Transition group, although it has sometimes lacked cohesion and momentum, has been a supportive nudge in helping us to actually start engaging with Transition. Seeing how others are committed to the movement has led us to reflect on our own lifestyle and expectations and to do more than just contemplate making changes towards a more sustainable lifestyle. However, we are still very much beginners in this field and it feels as though there are many daily obstacles to overcome before we could begin to call ourselves Transitioners. We, like, I imagine, many of the ‘concerned interested,’ are wary of some of the real, hard choices to be made. It feels like there’s a jarring between how we have been living and how we’d like to and ought to, live. We’re at a bit of an uncomfortable stage and it’s easy to feel inadequate when the ‘old’ unconscious way of living comes up against an increased awareness of the issues.

I don’t want this blog to be a whinge about how difficult it is to engage with sustainability nor a guilty confession about our ‘bad’ consumption habits. Rather I’d like it to be an opportunity to explore honestly the difficulties of engaging with such changes when other structural aspects of our lives seem to require a different pace or way of being that seems to be at odds with living sustainably. I also want it to be about how a community group like the Transition Circle can support and encourage people to make the changes needed.

In February 2009, with the first wave of the property crash resounding in our ears, Steve and I moved from our small terraced house in north Norwich to rent a large, old farmhouse cottage in Hethersett. We fell in love with the place at first viewing and immediately envisioned chickens, vegetables and freedom loving children all flourishing in the very large garden that surrounds the property on two sides. However, the reality of living in a draughty old house with costly oil fired heating has at times been more like a nightmare and the garden has seemed like an enormous burden rather than the gift it could be.

Steve works four long days a week as a counsellor and CBT therapist and I am currently on maternity leave with our second child, although I normally work three days a week also as a counsellor. We have three children between us and weekends are very child focussed. We both have professional commitments that require us to ‘work’ in addition to our paid hours (supervision, CPD, book editing etc) and Steve is currently doing a PhD. We are active members of a church in Norwich and so the list goes on! Our greatest poverty is time and increasingly our depleting reserves of personal energy and tightening finances are posing even more obstacles (excuses?) in the way of introducing new ways of living. Nevertheless, we do want to live slower, lighter lives while also providing a good quality of life for ourselves and our children.

I don’t know why it should seem that the prospect of living more sustainably might impact on the quality of our life, but it does. If it were a seamless transition then everyone would have engaged in the process already and looking at the queues for parking in Norwich on weekends, I know this is not the case. The shift to living more sustainably does not so much feel like a purely practical one but a cultural one too and it is really quite daunting. And this is where I think the local groups can really come to the fore: by connecting people at all stages of their journey and by engaging those who would like to be involved but don’t know how or feel too intimidated to ask.

It seems crucial to me that established group members have to be non-judgemental and welcoming. It’s a bit like welcoming people to a church without making any assumptions about where they are in their spiritual journey. We are lucky in the Hethersett group to have some very experienced members who can share their knowledge and skills in this way and who put a lot of effort into making things happen.

Last week, they came and had a look at our unloved garden to offer some ideas and advice for growing veg. It is really encouraging to find people who are willing to offer their time in this way and the result is that we really do want to find ways of engaging with the process. Like any process of change, it might just take a bit of time and we might not take all the advice offered.

So how far have we come in reducing our carbon footprint? Well, Steve cycles to work every day and I have become much more conscious of how we waste energy at home. When the baby is old enough to go on the back of the bike, I will also cycle to work. Although with two children in tow, I reserve the right to use the car when the weather is terrible. The old house is no longer quite so cold; our landlord installed a new boiler and radiators when we pointed out that we were using oil at double the rate of our neighbours and we have put thermal blinds on the windows where possible.

Three of our main challenges as a family are to reduce waste, especially plastic packaging; to be more organised with our shopping so we can reduce our dependence on supermarkets and subsequently the car; and finally, to find more ecological ways of managing the huge amount of laundry we produce every week.

We’ll being doing a bulk food order with the Hethersett group once again soon and I promised some time ago to look into bulk ordering for detergents. With so much laundry to do it’s now definitely in my interest to get this done. Food and drink packaging is a real annoyance for me as our kitchen recycling and rubbish seem to take on gargantuan proportions every week. This is going to be my personal project as I do most of the shopping and if anyone I know is reading this; I’d really like a Soda Stream for Christmas so we can eliminate plastic bottles for ever. As for the veg growing, I’m pretty sure we’re not the Tom and Barbara we envisioned when we first moved house. Rather, we might have to revise our own vision of what it means to live more sustainably and opt for a more modern, energy efficient house that’s easy to clean and maintain. If this means eventually giving up the garden and leafy outlook in return for a sense of manageability in our lives then this seems sensible to me. In the current absence of another housing option however, Steve is going to try some of the advice from our fellow Transitioners and tackle the beast once again. Ruth Roberts

Going Green in Glasgow

The trials and tribulations of taking your green ethos to a new location

Every time I put my veg peelings into the landfill bin a little bit of my spirit dies, its a fight against my better instinct, but what can I do? When I first moved in I collected up a massive container full of compost, until I finally accepted the fact that I had nowhere to put it or take it to.

I moved up to Glasgow in mid May and I have been in my new flat for almost a month now. I do have a shared garden, but it doesn't have a compost bin and my logic makes me reluctant to make the effort to make a compost heap when no-one is going to make use of the resulting compost (I'm probably here for less than a year). I have tried to go and find local allotments where I could 'donate' my peelings, but to my dismay they are locked up behind big wire fences and although there are quite a few community gardens in Glasgow the nearest one is a good 15minutes cycle ride away. I do live right next to a wonderful country park and I have considered taking up guerilla composting, but that feels a bit more like being a civil nuisance than a responsible citizen. So the compost conundrum remains unsolved. I think it may end in a small compost bin in the garden, but I still have to organise it and reassure the rest of the tenants that it isn't going to smell/ attract rats.

As well as worrying about what you are going to do with your veg peelings, moving to a new city poses the challenge of where you are going to get you veg from in the first place. It didn't take me long to track down the wholefood shops in Glasgow and to go and check out what delights they had on offer. The discovery that one of them has an entire wall of herbal teas to choose from made me a very happy hippy indeed, especially the discovery of tulsi (holy basil) tea that I had discovered in Inverness on my Otesha tour last year and then never seen since.

Unfortunately though the fresh fruit and veg selection was not as exciting, although one of the shops has an entire greengrocers, so a good array to choose from, but it was not necessarily organic and very little of it was local.

Get a veg box I hear you say. Well I did! I found three different possibilities, but I decided which one to try out first (as they had the option of a UK box) and after sorting out all of the logistics I got my first box on Thursday! Its wonderful to have local, organic veg again, but its quite a bit more expensive up here than it is in Norwich. Its easy to forget how easy we get it in Norwich, being in the middle of a massive arable area. Scotland is rather more livestock orientated, which is not quite so good for a vegetarian...

Trains, planes and pedal power
Generally travel is further and longer in Glasgow than in Norwich. Glasgow is considerably bigger and quite a bit further way from, well, most places. I didn't have my bikes with me when I first arrived so the first aspect I explored was public transport and Glasgow does have a fairly awesome public transport system. It has one underground line that goes in a big circle around the city centre, which is pretty useful as it takes a good 30mins, if not longer, to walk across the city centre. And at only £1.40 a journey its pretty good value. But the subway is only useful if you are in the city centre and I live further out than that.

But here Glasgow gets one up on Norwich, it has the most amazing network of urban railways. Within 15mins walk of my flat there are no less than 5 train stations, on two different train lines with regular services into the city centre taking only 10minutes and costing only £1.25 off-peak single.

This makes me very happy as I have always preferred trains to buses and although there is a good network of regular buses around Glasgow that are pretty good value, they take a lot longer and you have to pay the exact fare. They will not give you change. So if you don't have the correct money with you then you just have to pay more. I think that this is a shocking, profit making tactic. Bus drivers are bad enough in Norwich, being unwilling to accept notes, even though ATMs only give £10 as the smallest denomination and therefore there is no easy way of getting smaller change. But to give no change at all? So I am kind of boycotting the buses out of annoyance at having already paid at least £1.50 more than the actual fares since I have been in Glasgow, as I didn't have the correct change at the time.

On a positive note, when I looked into going to visit my parents I was astounded to discover that it only takes 4 hours on the train, which is incredible as it is the same time as it took me to visit them from Norwich on public transport, despite it taking 2.5hrs to drive from Norwich and something like 6.5hrs from Glasgow! It is of course quite a bit more expensive if you buy your ticket on the day, but if you plan in advance a £13 advanced single is pretty good going for travelling almost 400miles. Unfortunately though longer distances mean more carbon emissions, so my transport carbon footprint is going to suffer :(

But I do finally have my low carbon vehicle with me, my wonderful bicycle. When I first came up I couldn't bring my bike, so I tried to get a cheap secondhand one to see me through until I could bring my others up. However, secondhand bikes are soo expensive up here. Where as you can get a bike in Norwich for a tenner (probably not a good one, but anyway) on Glasgow gumtree the cheapest bikes were £30 and they really didn't look that good. So I never did get round to buying a bike, instead I bought my town bike up on the train when I went down to move all of my stuff out of my Norwich house. Unfortunately the excitement was short lived as my poor little bike, who was brilliant for pootling around Norwich, wasn't up to the longer distances, hills and potholes of Glasgow. I need to replace the front wheel and get the gears working at the very least! So the bike saga continued.

Finally, success! I now have my more robust touring bike up with me as well and it is doing me proud. This week, Kristina and I took the plunge and decided to cycle from work back home, a distance of 6 miles. And it's amazing! A beautiful cycle along the national cycle network, following the river through parks and quiet residential streets and it only takes us 45mins! Thats faster than the train and so much more enjoyable. We were so impressed and enthusiastic that we cycled to work and back on both thursday and friday. This was however a fairly ambitious start and I am rather tired today from so much exercise all of a sudden!! But it is definitely worth it.

Transition times
Lastly, but definitely not least, I haven't found a lovely group of Transitioners in Glasgow yet who I can share my low carbon living attempts with. I think we are very lucky in Norwich to have our transition circles and such a supportive community of people trying to live differently rather then just focussing on projects. So I miss you all, but I am very happy to hear all of the wonderful things you are still getting up to.

I am having a marvellous time up here in Glasgow, but it is definitely a challenge to my low carbon lifestyle. I am finding some things are easier and some things are harder, but hopefully I can take inspiration from all we have achieved in Norwich and make some suggestions for enabling low carbon living up here.

Photos: The shared garden of my flat, a grow wild veg box and the view from my local train station.

Election Special

Some people in the Transition movement don’t wish to get involved with the established political process and prefer to focus their energies on personal action to reduce their carbon footprint – others wish to influence the polices for transport, housing and waste that will affect us all and will determine how easy it is for us to live a low carbon life.

We have often discussed this dilemma at our TN Hethersett Circle meetings –local people are very concerned about the planned 50% increase in the size of the village – or should that be ‘town’? Eileen decided that getting involved was the right way forward and I’m pleased to report that voters of Hethersett liked her ideas and elected her to the Parish Council on Thursday. Also new to the PC is Simon, who has been involved in Transition in London and hopes to come along to the TN Hethersett Circle. Eileen and Simon will join Anne and Garry on the council – both of whom have been promoting environmental actions for many years as members of the Hethersett Environment Action Team.

I’ve been Chair of neighbouring Little Melton PC for the last 3 years and I’m pleased that this year I’ll be joined on the PC by several friends who also have a long history of environmental action. I’m well aware that PCs have limited powers but we do get to talk to planners, District and County councillors and I have found that people in these roles do take notice when enough people start plugging the same message. I very much believe in change being led from the grass roots and I’m really pleased to see more like minded people prepared to get involved in the process of local government.

Bring on that Cycle Path!

Pic from http://www.brh.org.uk/election2010/index.html

Breaking the Habit

In The Transition Handbook Rob Hopkins describes our fossil-fuelled industrialised lifestyle as an addiction. We’re addicted to oil. And that presents humanity with a major dilemma: we find ourselves stuck inside a destructive self-replicating system with very few ideas of how to get out of it. We can either get together and find ways to liberate ourselves, or face the consequences of a planetary meltdown. Tough call either way.

With classic dependencies like alcohol and heroin it’s clear what you do when you face the music, when you wake up to your life falling apart. You stop. You can do this with sheer determination, you can get professional advice. You can go to any number of self-help groups and sit in a room with fellow addicts. You can treat it as a personal problem or a social problem - the historical fate of certain people at the hands of Empire, indigenous tribes dispossessed of their land, the factory workers in the slums of 19th century Manchester. You can look at it as a spiritual problem, the fate of the most of us, escaping from reality in one way or another, because of the emotional harshness of our lives, because of the lack of connection with the earth and with the spirit of life. It’s not our fault and yet it is our problem.

Most addicts, when they decide to quit can ask someone who has quit before them: How did you go through this process? And can expect to receive an answer. Normal is not-addicted (or at least not to the degree that it rules your life). But how do you do this with energy? When normal is addicted and our lives are built around a constant need for electricity and gas? When oil interplays in almost all our activities? When no-one before us has given it up?

Instead of looking at the big picture of peak oil and climate change and feeling unable to act, the Transition Circles in Norwich decided to tackle the problem from ground up and go the way of self-help groups. We kept the big picture in mind and concentrated on the four drivers of energy, transport, food, stuff (and waste) in regard to our daily lives.

We confessed our profligate use of heating oil and gas, brought our log books, crunched numbers. We came out as bicycle riders, as users of rainwater, organic food producers, second hand clothes wearers, non-consumers, admitted a secret horror of plastic. But hey! We were in a Safe Space. It was OK to care about the planet. No one was going to accuse us of being tree huggers or climate agree-ers. We had a lot of fun (and good food). And in a few months, most of us had shifted to a low(er)-carbon way of living. We reduced our emissions to four tons (half the national average). We’re still working on it and communicating our findings to everyone we come across, 100 monkeys-style. This blog was created from those original meetings in 2009/10.

Still, as we found out, you have to go cold turkey and that’s a personal thing between you and the Power that rules your life. And then you have to hold those decisions in the outside world, often against stern opposition. How do you do that?

I’ve given up a lot of stuff in my life. I gave up sugar in tea for Lent as an experiment when I was 12 and, heathen child though I was, discovered the joy of renunciation. I never went back to it. After living a high life during my 20s and 30s I gave up a colourful list of recreational drugs, vodka and champagne drinking when I went on the road. I gave up newspapers and television and designer clothes and buying interesting stuff in markets. I gave up smoking cigarettes (oh, tobacco!), meat and fish and cheese, restaurants and elaborate cooking. In Transition I gave up daily hot baths, owning a car, supermarkets, flying, central heating. The pre-Transition decisions got me a lot of flak, the in-Transition ones curiosity and questions.

The trick is the decision. You’ve got to see it matters within the big picture. You have to see that it gives you freedom. And that you prefer that freedom, all that space and time, to being caught in a repeat cycle, even at the risk of "losing" people. It isn’t really renunciation as I found out, it’s breaking a hold something has over you. When I gave up drinking wine it didn’t mean I would never drink wine again. It meant that I broke the habit of having to have wine every day in order to feel OK. I still have hot baths, but only when I need one. It’s not driven from a puritanical urge. It’s come because I want to be fluid and autonomous. And on a social level I want to find out how we can extricate ourselves from the oil age and what that demands from individuals and communities, humanity as a whole. So there’s adventure in there, intellectual and physical curiousity, pioneer spirit, desire for experience (and copy!). What would it be like to live in rural England without a car?

Right now I’m breaking a terrible habit I picked up this winter when I had the flu. DVDs from the library! I had given up going to the cinema in 2005. I love films, especially real life stories with redemption in them. The DVDs from the library are mostly Hollywood movies so I can’t even claim I’m engaging in high culture. I’m just distracting myself. After a while you feel enclosed in these worlds of American gloss, the girls with their perfect hair, those mawkish plot lines. The globalised culture depends on these movies and their star system to disengage people’s attention , to give everyone a taste for the artificial and the emotional tone it brings. Its violence and false desires. Its hidden heraldic structures that imprint themselves on our imaginations. Giving up has got to have meaning in there. And noble purpose.

If you lay out every thing you have given up, the habits you have broken, you’ll find yourself with a map of powerdown. That’s when you notice it looks a lot like gaolbreak. A lot like breaking a spell.

Photos: Smoking in the Yucatan 1991; opium poppy; Strangers' Circle. 2010 - All by Mark Watson. Black Swan poster, 2011

Hethersett Circle: A Dilemma - Transition Themes #3

At the February meeting of the Hethersett Circle we had a proper discussion about a subject that kept forcing its way to the surface in previous meetings, when we were supposed to be talking about topics such as food, transport and waste. The rogue topic is the ‘threat of massive housing development’ that has been hanging over Hethersett for the last few years – ever since the Greater Norwich Development Project pencilled in Hethersett to receive a significant share of the 30,000 ish houses planned for the Norwich area. Development on this scale can seriously impact on peoples’ lives – fields turn into housing estates, quiet lanes become major roads – so it is not surprising that people are concerned. But why did the topic keep intruding into other discussions? Well, because the ability to grow food locally is dependent on the supply of allotments, people will only cycle if there are safe routes to cycle on and people can can only buy local sourced produce if there are local shops selling it. And then there is the whole subject of energy efficient homes and local energy production.

So the way that new housing is developed has a massive impact on the lifestyle that will be adopted by the eventual occupants. It seems to me that nearby housing developments have not done nearly enough to make it easy to cycle – paths stop in the middle of nowhere. There is no provision of sheltered housing for the elderly that would enable them to vacate large family homes but still live in the community. People drive short distances to the shops rather than walk or cycle. I could go on – and on …

As a parish councillor I believe it is my role to try to influence the planning of local developments to support the lifestyles that I believe we should be aiming for. My own experience is that developers are open to persuasion – they want to build houses that people wish to live in (and make a profit of course). Within Transition there are people who are not enthusiastic about getting involved in the planning process and prefer to concentrate on personal action to reduce their own carbon footprint. Of course getting involved in the planning process takes time and energy that at a personal level I’d much rather spend on my own veg patch – much more pleasurable and I get nice things to eat!

At the end of our discussion most of us decided that we should get involved in some aspects of the planning process and we will open communications with the Hethersett Parish Council to seek their views. But this is not the first time I have come across this dilemma in Transition. Should Transition purely focus on enabling people to take personal action or should we also spend some time on trying to influence what is being done by our elected representatives? I, for one, would be interested to read your comments.

The pictures are from the leaflet created by a developer after a consultation exercise where local people were invited to make suggestions.

Share a bit more

This evening I am hosting a Transition Circle meeting on trying to set up a 'resource sharing' scheme. The idea is that there are many things which we do not need one of each, but the 'individuals' focus of our society has meant that we often do. So we are going to try out sharing instead to save money, the environment and to strengthen our little Earlham-based community.

There are so many possible things that I don't know quite where to start. Maybe the kitchen is a good place and I'm sure our sizeable collections of cake tins can be put to better use than they currently are. And as my bike tools are currently stranded in Edinburgh, borrowing a few basic tools to fix my brakes would be amazing!

I am interested to see how broad we set our sharing. There are the obvious things such as lawn mowers and cake tins, recipe books and hammers, but whether we get into skill/service sharing as well is an interesting question. For example someone could offer a bit of bike repair and someone else could offer some darning, anything's possible!

The logistics may take a little bit of organising, especially for more sizeable items, but at least we all live in the same part of the city so won't have to go too far to collect things. And another activity we were talking about is making a few bike trailers to share so maybe that will help solve those problems.

Whatever we come up with a little more sharing rather than personal hoarding in the world can only be a good thing.

Photos: art work at Glastonbury

An Ode to Dirty Hippies

There are certain difficulties you encounter in your quest to be a low carbon eco warrior, especially tricky are those subjects that are taboo in society, such as personal hygiene. It is not something we really like to discuss, we are much happier just accepting the advertisers spiel on it.

We must eliminate all bodily odours.

We must use all these luxurious hair care products or our hair will look horrendous.

White equals clean.

However, after reading a very interesting book on this topic – ‘More work for mother’ by Ruth Schwartz Cowen – and getting involved with Transition Norwich, I started to question some of these ideas. This is what I have found so far...

We all know that short showers are better than baths, but what’s wrong with a sink wash? It's definitely more pleasant in a cool bathroom as you only have to be half undressed at any one time and you don’t get as wet. And also the amazing invention of microfiber cloths renders soap fairly obsolete when you use them as flannels.

Another fallacy is all of the copious hair and beauty products that tend to stop your skin/hair looking after itself rather than helping it along the way. So I think many people would be surprised by how much healthier they looked without them. I was a bit sceptical of not using any hair care products until I discovered that my friend who always has incredibly stylish looking hair does nothing but wash her hair with water. So I decided my cycle touring this summer was a perfect opportunity to experiment. So off came all the hair in June and I haven’t used anything but water on it since. And it’s amazing, it looks if anything less greasy than it did before. Most people just think I have some kind of styling product in it to make it stick up! I have yet to try it out with longer hair though.

So generally I have been trying not to use products at all if possible, but deodorant is something that it is still culturally unacceptable not to use! However, it is challenging to find one that doesn’t increase the risk of breast cancer, through containing aluminium or blocking pores, and does actually work. I have concluded that using two ‘eco’ ones is the best answer, but it still doesn’t have quite the same complete odour blocking effect of some of the leading brands. However, I don’t think that this is actually the end of the world. After all we evolved to smell to attract a partner, therefore it can’t be all that bad? I have sometimes contemplated making my own deoderant, but I have the feeling that they would be even less effective!

An important point in this discussion though is that although all of these measures are great for the environment and/or your health, it is also important for your happiness to still be accepted into society. I don’t want to become a dirty, smelly hippy as my friend bluntly puts it. And getting that balance right is the challenge.

This is further complicated by using eco-balls in my laundry which aren’t quite so effective at removing odour… Line drying outside tends to compensate this, but as winter draws in this becomes harder and I may need to purchase some laundry liquid to compliment the eco balls. There is also an interesting conundrum of waiting to have a full load of washing meaning that you need to have more clothes! It’s ever so complex sometimes having to think for yourself rather than just blindly trusting the adverts.

Well I hope that whistle-stop tour of low carbon personal hygiene has got some of you thinking. Our next transition circle is on this topic so I am looking forward to a lively discussion!

Photos: applying deoderant (http://www.bellasugar.com.au/Use-Natural-Deodorants-8041996) and eco balls (http://www.ethicalsuperstore.com/products/ecozone/eco-balls/)

Transition Circles - A Personal Carbon Reduction Review

Welcome to the Transition Circles and Carbon Conversations theme slot. We're starting off with a personal carbon reduction review based on the results of real experiences in TN’s Strangers’ Circle. Mark Watson reports:

Strangers' Beginnings

In June 2009 TN2 was formed as a response to climate change, with the aim of reducing our personal carbon use and emissions to half the national average over the coming year. The Strangers’ Circle emerged as one of TN2’s Transition Circles, made up of those of us living outside of Norwich. We began to meet every month bringing food to each others’ houses, where we would discuss the principle drivers of carbon use (transport, food, home energy, ‘stuff’) and ways we could reduce it.

The meetings were informal, exploratory and intimate. We looked at the real evidence of our energy use, our individual log books and shopping lists. We brought our energy bills to the table to share along with the food for the meeting on home energy. We led quite different lives. Some of us owned our homes, some rented. Some of us had children, others not. We had different financial circumstances. So our responses and actions were also different depending on those circumstances.

Winter 2009/10

When winter arrived last year Charlotte and I decided to forgo the central heating. We heated the water for one hour a day. We used the radiators for drying clothes when they really wouldn’t dry outside. We dressed up warm. We lit fires, but not every day. It was cold. We rent our house. The windows are double-glazed and there is minimal insulation. Our next door neighbours are not there all the time so their house is cold, too, with no heat coming through the walls. We live in a semi-detached rural cottage built in 1884. This is interesting to visitors who walk past in the summer, look up at the numbers built into the brick on the front and say “Eighteen eighty four!” and walk on. But it means that we can’t have cavity wall insulation.

It was an interesting six months (and last winter did go on for six months!) and those monthly Strangers’ Circle meetings were key to maintaining my enthusiasm and momentum. Shared human warmth was both metaphorical and literal.

Where We Are Now

This week we had our first delivery of oil in 19 months. Oil is what fuels our central heating and hot water. We also have a woodburner in the living room. Here are some figures to put things in context:

In October 2008 we ordered 500 litres of oil (at 48p per litre), and in April 2009 another 500 (42p per litre). That was our last order before this week of 500 litres (at 58p per litre, up 16p a litre since last April). The woman on the phone at Total Butler said it was wise to order now as prices looked set to increase further. When we first moved here in January 2003 oil cost around 18p per litre, and we’d order a whole tank (1200 litres) twice a year.

I worked out that we’d reduced our oil use by two-thirds since joining the Strangers' group. What's more, when the cold began this year we noticed it hasn’t bothered us as much.

In large part for me it worked because of the sustained attention over many months on personally reducing carbon emissions within the structure of a group engaged in doing just that.

And for this winter? I’ve been sawing up dead elms from the trees in and around our garden for the woodburner. We’ve arranged with the landlord to get the radiators fixed so we can turn eight out of the ten of them off without their leaking. We’ll live mostly in one of the rooms and have some heating on the coldest days. And hopefully not have to order any more oil at least until April 2012.

Transition Circle Earlham North are meeting on Monday 30 November, Circle Hethersett on Tuesday 1 December and Circle Earlham South on Monday 7 December (see Calendar for details)

Pics: Carbon Conversations and Strangers' Circle; Piping Oil

Revisiting my 'front line'

My choice of a favourite blog entry is Tully's post of 25th January, titled "Reports from the Front Line", because it reminds me of my own struggles.

Like Tully, I have had my good intentions strengthened by joining a Transition Circle (Strangers) and by taking part in a Carbon Conversations course. I have found it very helpful to be part of a group that is trying to lower its carbon footprint. It makes me feel a little less eccentric, and helps me realise that we are all different, and that I can only do what is right for me and my family.

Last year I installed a second wood stove and began keeping my house a lot cooler. I discovered that Madeline, my wife, and I have quite different preferences for room temperature. I've grown to like being in a cool room with heavy clothes on much more than she has. We are learning ways of respecting and living with our differences.

I'm proud of how I've learned how to make a great woodpile around my wood stove (see photo). Notice how at the ends of the pile the direction of the wood alternates to keep it stable. (And those bits of wood need to be carefully chosen.) The wood gets really dry there. I'm looking forward to my first full winter of mostly wood heat, and to seeing if I can get my gas bills down even lower.

Tully's entry shows how much careful thought he has been putting into his own carbon footprint, and is honest about his difficulties and mistakes. That's what I like about it, but you can read it again and see what you think.

Reports from the Front Line by Tully Wakeman - 25 January

As I've recently joined a Carbon Conversations group as well as a Transition Circle, I've decided to use this week writing about my family's efforts to reduce our carbon footprint. Following the pattern of those groups I'm going to write about the energy we use at home today, and later about travel and food.

Carbon Conversations suggests that an initial target for many of us might be to get down to one tonne of carbon dioxide, person per year, in each of four areas - home energy, travel, food, and stuff. That's a similar target to the one many of us in the Transition Circles have set, which is to get below half the national average emissions. So as I go along I'll report on how we're doing against those targets. In the case of home energy we're currently keeping our emissions down to about 0.7 tonnes per person per year - so we've achieved that particular target, although of course we'll continue to see how much further we can go.

For most of us the two largest items in home energy use are space heating and water heating. I live with Angie and our three children in an old cottage (possibly 300 years old) in the countryside near Shotesham. When we first got here the heating was all by electric night storage heaters. A few years ago we replaced those with a big woodburner that heats radiators and also the hot water; and we also put in a solar panel to heat the hot water. The woodburner succeeds in keeping most of the house at about 14 degrees, and the living room at maybe 18 degrees. But that requires a lot of wood - we get a two-and-a-half cubic meter load every fortnight or so in the winter, except when I can scavenge wood locally. Stacking, moving and sometimes chopping the wood takes at least half an hour a day. But it's a pleasure to have a fire burning in the living room.

The solar panel has been a bit of a nightmare. The person who installed it, despite having many years' experience, made a complete hash of it, and proved unable to fix it. More recently Lee from Norfolk Solar has been doing his best to recover the situation, and we're waiting to see later this year how that's working out. I wish I'd got Lee to install it in the first place.

I've also done a great deal of work over the years to try to insulate the house while also making it drier. We put in double-glazed windows, which conserved heat but accentuated the damp problems - these old houses were built to inhale and exhale moisture. I've replaced old solid floors with new suspended ones, stripped paint off a damp wall and returned it to limewash, and added ventilation. I've had to learn a lot about damp and old buildings, and spent a lot of time just observing how the house behaves over the seasons. Finally it feels like the house is reasonably dry - which of course makes it more comfortable and reduces its need for heat.

Burning wood results in almost zero emissions - though it's a bit of a cheat in the sense that there's only enough wood around for a few of us to do it. So the emissions we do need to count are from the electricity we use. We've reduced this by about 25% over the last year or so, but we're still getting through a hefty 16kWh a day between the five of us. Since I joined the Transition Circle I've been working to find out where all that electricity is going - using an Owl-type monitor as well as a plug-in appliance monitor.

It turns out that the biggest energy user in the house is one I hadn't even thought about - a 100w electric towel rail in the bathroom. When we installed it years ago I thought 100w is nothing - just like a lightbulb. But now 100w is approximately the sum of all the lightbulbs in the house, and the thing is on 24 hours a day, using 2.4kWh a day. We've tried just turning it off, but in the winter at least that's a bit miserable. My next plan is to put it on a timeswitch.

The next biggest item is the fridge-freezer. Because we're in the middle of nowhere we probably need a freezer - the alternative might be more unplanned shopping trips. The next is probably cooking, and then (in the winter at least) the tumble drier. We try to dry things on the line when possible, but in wet and cold weather we've struggled to find an alternative to the drier that works for this family in this particular house. The fifth-biggest item is the electric shower - it uses about 1kWh for a short shower - so I've stopped showering and taken to washing (and washing my hair) at the sink instead. I've not had any complaints so far, but perhaps you're all just being polite.

How has all this been for us? Certainly it's taken a fair bit of effort, a willingness to do things like carrying in wood, or hanging out washing, rather than just accepting the convenience of central heating that just turns itself on and off effortlessly. Certainly there have been tensions, when family members have felt the house was too cold, or the water not hot when they wanted it. But for me it just feels like the natural and right way to go about it - I'd be uncomfortable if I wasn't making at least reasonable efforts to reduce unnecessary carbon emissions.

Green shoots in Hethersett

On Friday we had the first meeting of the Hethersett Circle. It was a beautiful evening and I biked first to Eileen and helped carry her amazing raspberry and chocolate fudge cake around the field to Erik’s house. We were joined by Gary and Rhoda who are both very aware of Peak Oil and Climate Change – in fact we all arrived by foot or bicycle. Gary has been active in the Hethersett Environmental Action Taskforce (HEAT) for some years and Rhoda is a keen cyclist and vegetable grower who has followed TN since the unleashing. Whilst it was good to have got a group of knowledgeable people together it was clear that our publicity had not attracted people who are new to Transition to come along and that we were not going to be following the original plan to have a series of meetings based on Carbon Conversations. So we talked about what our next move might be.

We all recognise that an import aspect of Transition is that it is a positive message – not all ‘Doom and Gloom’ as Eileen said. Eileen also compared the current economic system to the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and how we need to expose the truth. However, several people made a point that I have heard before at TN meetings - that Transition is a difficult concept to pin down and to communicate to others.

Our next step will be to have a Carbon Conversations Corner at an environmental awareness day that HEAT is organizing. HEAT has access to good publicity in the village and it seems sensible to work together. Today was an Open Gardens day in Hethersett which I went to (and which is why this post is so late) – people are given a map and walk from one garden to another. We talked about doing a similar event based on energy saving devices and methods as people are much more likely to engage with something that they can see already working in their own village. An example could be Rhoda’s battery assisted bicycle which makes it much easier for her to commute to work without having to completely change clothes on arrival. She still provides the energy but the battery evens out the effort – it levels the hills in effect! Erik hopes to soon be generating electricity from a Photo Voltaic roof.

I was encouraged to see these vegetable patches being exhibited as part of the Open Gardens day – one is at the Junior School where the teachers are keen that the children should learn that food does not appear on supermarket shelves by magic. So a lot is already happening in Hethersett, our task is to build on those foundations. Please feel free to comment !

Downshift

It happened last night. Just as we arrived back from our Strangers' Circle we came into the wet dark garden and the scent was everywhere. And so we opened the letter box to let the fragrance of the flowers permeate the house, come up the stairs and into our dreams.

It was the honeysuckle moment. Each flower has its moment: it spends weeks developing its individual show and then it bursts out into the world in a glorious mass of colour and beauty. When you learn to love flowers, you wait for those moments and treasure them when they arrive: the shocking moment when the bluebells shimmer in the woods like liquid fire, when the poppies ripple through the barley. Last week it was the hawthorn moment, this week we’ll head for the coast and find the sea kales flourishing in front of the nuclear power station at Sizewell. And for that moment we’ll immerse ourselves in the scent and presence of the great Krambe maritima growing in spite of all odds through the shingle. Holding a deep root in a hard time, for the flowers and for ourselves.

We had been talking about resilience, which is the subject of our new sequence of Transition Circle meetings. People talked practically and spiritually, about energy systems and political systems, about economic collapse and peak oil and how our complex global supply chains have become increasingly dependent on computerisation and special parts and therefore vulnerable. Some of us were pessimistic, not sure if we will be able to live without this stuff. Some optimistic and felt we had possibilities within us that had yet to be tapped. Resilience is the ability for eco-systems to weather shocks, to absorb their impact and regroup, adapt and hold together. We talk about community and getting into alignment with the earth, but we live with the spectre of History, where societies habitually fragment in the face of difficulties; where the rich triumph, the poor go to the wall, and those of us who speak out for love and freedom board the train for the gulag.

I have, like most people in this country, been able to avoid History and do not know how things would be in England if our social fabric breaks. I have however been through many individual shocks. A lot of them forced me to leave places and people, set-ups I had taken for granted, to look at the flimsy things I had depended on: spiritual fancies, culture, friendships, beliefs, reputation, innocence. Some of them made me abandon my biography entirely and start again. All of them broke me out of a small space. All of them made me more human. Only a heart that is broken and bitter knows how to feel beyond its personal circumstance and reach out for its fellows. When you have nothing to lose is when life opens up. When you are terrified of losing, you close down and don’t see the bigger picture, you only care for yourself, your space, your cherished beliefs about the world.

To be truly human, aligned with life, resilient, we need to hold on to what is dear and be prepared to let everything else go. To respond to that shocking moment we have to be flexible and open and to know how to work with people, so that History does not repeat itself and mash us in its maw. We have to practice thinking together, working together, exchanging things, sharing knowledge, knowing that the shocks will come and we can keep coherent and not fall apart. And like all resilient eco-systems, we need to be in communication and feedback what we experience and feel. Gathering up sweetness the way bees do from flowers. What we can’t afford to do is shut down.

So there was a different mood at Naomi and William’s last night. We discussed our wholefood co-op order and our new project, the Low Carbon Cookbook, but our usual exuberance about dishes we brought had shifted. We were no longer looking at carbon reduction in the light (sic) of reducing energy, as if our way of life was going to continue only more ecologically. We were looking at something else entirely around the kitchen table. A moment of radical change. A change which we can only look at for real when we are together, because each of us carries within us a vital component that makes that possible, both to see and to bear. Because that change is about coming together after decades of individualism. Because something about this moment is extraordinary, fragrant, unexpected yet known. Coming out of the dark, permeating the atmosphere, like honeysuckle after a storm.

Underneath the May; hawthorn flowers; honeysuckle and bumblebee door; Tully talking about resilience with the Strangers' Circle at Mangreen.

The Kind of Party I Vote For

Last night the Strangers' Circle met up at Elena's and Alan's in Keswick for our May meeting. We were celebrating two birthdays (Elena's and mine) and a wedding anniversary (William's and Naomi's), and we were also divvying up our first food order as a co-op, which Tully had collected earlier in the day.

The food was awesome. Elena's Indian-style tomato and lentil soup with tamarind and cassia bark silenced us all, and we're not a quiet company! There was freshly baked bread, just-picked asparagus, Naomi and William's pasta bake, Tully and Angie's spinach roulade, fluffy baked potatoes and Alan's homemade cider (pure nectar). All delicious. There was more to come, but first to work.

With quick and nimble fingers, Charlotte, Elena, Tully and Naomi set about weighing rice, chick peas and lentils and packing them in old margarine tubs and used plastic bags. Dusk was falling and I darted about with the camera, trying to keep things focused and not use the flash, with varying degrees of success. I tripped up and splashed licorice tea over Elena's cushions and some of Naomi's order, which they were both extremely nonchalant about. William did the washing up, Alan checked the football results for Naomi on the internet, Tully checked the figures on the order, Charlotte and Elena poured and packed. And it was all done in about half an hour.

Back in the kitchen Charlotte raised a toast with the champagne Naomi had brought and we sang a version of Happy Birthday, which we altered on spec to include wedding anniversaries. And we ate the stunning chocolate birthday/anniversary cake Charlotte had baked all with organic ingredients, creme Chantilly and last year's blackcurrants, and decorated with local strawberries and the edible wild and garden flowers of the spring. On the top we put tiny beeswax candles with holders Angie had made on the spot out of tin foil. It was lovely. We decided to host a Transition Circles Midsummer picnic on 21st June at Mangreen in celebration of our low-carbon year in TN2. There'll be a carbon cutting quiz and Naomi will be Quizmaster! Everyone is welcome.

We also decided to look at Resilience in our next six meetings (beginning with a discussion about this key transition concept) and Tully spoke about the feasta report in respect to current non-resilient systems. Then Charlotte briefly mapped out a joint project for our low-carbon cookbook... because we couldn't stay off the topic of food for too long!


Pics: The Strangers' Circle celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and co-operative food buying; A Transition Wholefood Circle of organic rice, chick peas, lentils, peas, gluten free pasta, ring of fire chillies and a bay leaf, by Charlotte

In my final post I would like to take a wider view. I have recently been appointed to be a Trustee of the Transition Network and will be working with the Totnes (mainly) crowd on shaping the movement. I am extremely pleased with and grateful for this appointment.

I have become involved with Transition over the past couple of years because I see it as the most exciting movement I know that is working towards a sustainable future. The most important reason for this is that it is positive: it is about people in communities taking responsibility for their own lives and their own future.


That is very different from many other environmentally-oriented groups that put their efforts into lobbying governments or into protest. I think there is a place for that too, but the problem is that governments generally have no idea of what a sustainable future could or should be. They hold onto too many vested beliefs, particularly economic growth. I don’t think that growth in the well-being of people and planet and growth in the amount of money spent are at all the same, and very often are at odds with each other.

We in the Transition movement don’t have a fully worked out blueprint either, but we are engaged in learning the best ways of doing that, or at least the best starting points.

The Transition movement has been growing extremely rapidly, with more new towns in more countries all the time. I put that down to the appeal of Rob Hopkins (and others) vision in the Transition Handbook, which laid out a set of initial steps that people could look at and say “Yes, we can do that.” It was also the breadth of that initial vision, which went way beyond local food and energy, to include Heart and Soul and related issues.

A lot of our present activities are awareness raising events in our communities, and that is the bread and butter of Transition groups. The endpoint of the original Transition 12 steps was an Energy Descent Action Plan, which is aimed at helping their community create a vision of the future they want. All this is really valuable.


But there is an increasing emphasis on what Transitioners can do for themselves, to increase their own resilience and reduce their own carbon footprint. The two major areas for this are food and energy use. For reducing energy use, in this region, we have the Transition Circles and the Carbon Conversations. In both, groups of people get together to learn what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint. I think that being part of the group is as important as the reduced footprint, as the resilience comes out of being part of a supportive community. (See my anxious attempts to reduce my own fuel use in my Monday post.)

For food, there are so many projects: sharing vegetables from gardens and allotments, Seedy Sundays for seed sharing, community orchards and woodlands, community supported agriculture schemes, and probably most important of all, lots of shared meals.

My sense is that there is a great variation in the strength and stability of the various Transition Town groups, and even within the several parts of the larger groups, such as Norwich and Cambridge. To the extent that Transition starts to make a real difference in people’s own lives, as these energy and food projects are beginning to do, Transition will thrive and attract more people.

And where to next? I think that is to do with learning to support ourselves better organisationally. The challenge is that, on the one hand, we don’t want conventional hierarchical methods of organisation. We know that the kind of society we are trying to invent is not based upon power and coercion. On the other hand, we want efficient and effective ways of working, where people build upon each others strengths.

The starting point for this is effective communications, so that people know what others with similar interests and problems are doing. That is necessary for synergy to grow. Because of that I have been part of the Transition Network’s web project, and also have set up transitioneast.net as a regional web portal for East Anglia.

But that is only a first step. I think we need people who take responsibility for taking an overview of Transition at various levels. So we have the Core Group in Norwich, and the Transition East Regional Support Group.

We need to learn effective skills of communication and conflict resolution, using such techniques as Non-violent Communication. I hear too many stories of people falling out with each other, people who are seen as pushing their personal agendas at the expense of the group. That is a major reason for the patchiness of the success of Transition groups.

Finally, I think we need to be creating a coherent vision of the future we want for ourselves. The Energy Descent Action Plans are part of that, as are the Transition books: the Handbook, Timeline and Local Food book. My Sustainable Diss 2030 is part of that too.

I would like to see us move beyond publishing books and plans, to holding discussions and taking polls on these to make it clear where we agree and where we disagree. I would like to see summaries of these circulating around the various parts of the movement, so we begin to form an explicit shared vision, to attract more people, and to put before policymakers and businesses.

I see this combination of a clear shared vision, and making a substantial difference in people’s daily lives as the key to success for Transition in the next year or so.

That's all from me. Thanks for reading this week! Gary