Give and Grow, Walk and Be Well

Sustainable Bungay's 4th annual Give and Grow event last Sunday (20th May) at the Bungay Community Library garden held a particular significance this year in the light of the recently passed EU "Plant Reproductive Material Law" aiming to regulate and restrict the sale, exchange or growth of all plants unless officially registered.

This would have impacted severely upon our freedom to (legally) "Give and Grow" in the manner of even our humble SB events, had the law not been mitigated in the final hour due to pressure from growers, gardeners and lovers of plants and freedom from all over Europe. See The Real Seed Catalogue's page for more information and why we need to keep an eye on this law (and take a look at their great vegetable seed list, too).

Our 2nd Well-Being walk took place after the Give and Grow with a group of six adults and three children setting off through town and the annual Bungay Garden Street Market, where we were joined by Sofia, recently moved to Norwich where she is studying midwifery. So here is a story in mostly pictures and some words of both the Give and Grow and the Well-being walk:

Lesley Hartley, who is curating this year's Edible Bed in the centre of the library garden. Note the crimson flowered broad bean to Lesley's left. After a slow post-cold-winter start, the garden is beginning to respond to Lesley's hard work.

Plant Medicine 2012 meets Edible Bed 2013. Mark and Lesley trying not to hide behind flowering brussels. What was that about Brussels, seeds and plants..? Keep giving and growing!

Brussels, A-Board and the big old red Post Office van, which Eloise has picked up all the large Give and Take day furniture and garden donations in over the last three years and used to deliver items to people after the events. As well as couriering display boards for Bee group events and other talks and workshops.

 Nick shows Mark how to construct a make-shift seed envelope. This turned out to be a double (flowered?) version.

Richard demonstrates how to divide primrose roots and replant them. Primroses respond well to root division and the best time to start is just as the flowers are going over. Here Richard explains that even a small section of root like the one in his hands will resprout, though a misting table is best for roots this size.

 A new tray of primroses.

Double-flowered feverfew growing out of the cracks and just about to come into flower. Feverfew leaves are a well-known herbal remedy for migraine. I'd never heard of anyone who'd actually used it till last year. A lady from Beccles came to a Plants for Life session and told us she swore by feverfew and used it any time she felt the beginnings of a migraine lurking. "Do you put it in bread," I asked. I'd read countless times that bread helped it to be easier on the stomach. "Oh no, I just eat a couple of leaves raw. Always works!"

You can't go to a Give and Grow event anywhere these days without coming across someone reading the Transition Free Press! Tony in  deep concentration.

And isn't that the TFP's editor sitting there with Tony? What a coincidence!

Goodness me! Is that ANOTHER copy of Transition Free Press sticking out of Paul's pocket?

Straw bale culture. Cucumber. nasturtiums and giant pumpkin planted by Lesley for EastFeast at the Street Garden Market.

We've now left the library and the Give and Grow and started our well-being walk. No one was in any rush to leave the courtyard garden though, it was so relaxing.

We mapped out the route between us deciding to go via the market to the bridge at the bottom of Earsham Street and then down Castle Lane which skirts round the castle ruins. A favourite walk for several people, some found the castle ruins romantic, some liked visiting the wildflowers and others found it an  enjoyable route for walking the children to school.

A brief stop at the East Feast stall (love that hat, Dano!), to play a board game with the children, and then on to  Orchard End Herbs: "I know you," I said to a young woman there. "You came to my Trade School class on rosemary and circulation at the Common Room in Norwich a few months back. Would you like to join us on our well-being walk?" "That'd be great," said Sofia. "And I'd like to bring some friends to Happy Mondays tomorrow. How do I book?" "You need to talk to Josiah," I said. "And he's coming on the walk, too."

Leaving the market (and the Punch and Judy show) and heading down to Earsham Street bridge and the River Waveney. This is one of Sally's favourite places to visit.

Waterweeds in the Waveney.

Reuben leads us purposefully to Castle Lane.

Take Me To The River, but don't drop me in the water... at least not until August when we combine our annual picnic with a swim.

Back lanes full of wildflowers and garden escapes, from cow parsley and Babington's poppy to shining cranesbill and grape hyacinth. One of Bungay's delights.

Sitting (and climbing) on the bench, before heading back to Sally's for a cup of tea. The whole walk was very relaxed and took about an hour and a quarter. To find out when our next Wellbeing walk is, check out the Sustainable Bungay Calendar - all welcome!

Images (all by Mark Watson): Beans, peas and seeds; Lesley and the Edible Bed; Mark and Lesley behind the flowering broccoli - medicine plant bed 2012 meets edible plant bed 2013; brussels, board and red van; making seed envelopes; Richard demonstrates primrose division 1 & 2; double-flowered feverfew growing through the concrete; Tony gets the lowdown with Transition Free Press; And again with TFP's editor Charlotte; Give and Grow and sit down for a chat; straw bale culture; garden street market with Dano; Earsham Street Bridge; waterweeds; follow the leader;  down by the Waveney; plants along the wayside; on the bench

First published 27th May 2013 on Sustainable Bungay's website

Integrating our cities' functions

I've always been a fan of things with multiple functions.  I take great pleasure in the fact that the tree which I've been building a treehouse in with and for my niece and nephew is not just a place of recreation for them, but is also contributing to the air we breathe, supporting various forms of wildlife, and providing a visual and physical barrier at the edge of a field.

But this is a trivial example in comparison to many others.  Cities, one could argue, are the ultimate in providing multiple functions in one space. Within one city block, there will be housing, entertainment venues, cafés, shops, public buildings, transportation hubs.

Within each of those, many human needs may be served at once. The best cafés, in my opinion, are ones which provide good food, a calm environment and wifi access so that I can work on my own, as well as a nice space to meet with friends or colleagues. Even better if the café has a community noticeboard, outdoor seating, enriching art on the walls and a few plants around.

It troubles me that some areas of cities have lost touch with what makes them great - this multiplicity of functions - and have been compartmentalising themselves.  In Norwich, the city centre is a place to shop, but with relatively so little residential property, it becomes dead at night, and seems cold and unfriendly. The suburban housing estates, meanwhile, lay empty in the middle of the day whilst everyone is at work in the city centre, but become active once again in the evenings when residents get back from work.

Flats in the city centre of Freiburg, Germany

OK, some would argue that that's just how cities work. But you only have to cross the channel to see that that isn't entirely true. Cities such as Amsterdam, Netherlands or Frieburg, Germany (above) enrich their city centres with multiple functions, with housing right in the centre, greenery on the rooftops, and plenty of multiple function public spaces and shops, serving shoppers during the day, and residents in the evenings.

Food From The Sky on the roof of Budgens, Crouch End, London

Transition, I feel, is all about this integration of functions in local communities, serving local needs locally.  Why ship food from across the world, when it could be grown on our rooftops? Why get contractors in from London when we could be giving Norwich people jobs, keeping money in the local economy?  Why separate work and living zones when integrating them together will reduce need for transportation and make places more vibrant places to live?

Whilst we operate as individuals, or as single organisations serving their own needs, it is easy to lose sight of how what we're doing might be affecting the things that are going on within our communities and cities.  That's why this Friday's meeting, "What's Happening in Transition Norwich", was organised. It's a chance for us to learn about what is going on in Norwich, and how collaboration can lead to the enriching of community, each action serving multiple human needs at once.

Images: all by Simeon Jackson

Treehouse Festival: A demonstration of alternative lifestyle

It's the third day of The Treehouse Festival, during which we've been experiencing communal living and pondering and discussing everything from religion to ant farms.

Each morning we have a fun activity (like yesterday's trip to the beach) and each afternoon we have a seminar/talk. Monday's was from professor Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre at the UEA. It was on the (broad!) subject of climate change. She reminded us of the overwhelming evidence of global warming, it's causes (including anthropogenic greenhouse gases), and the effect that that it is having on extreme weather events and changing ecosystems.

What I found fascinating, however, was where this all points; what does the future hold? Yes, her predictions suggest increases in consumption (and therefore carbon emissions) in the short term, but the further future is a lot less predictable than anyone can really reasonable assume, and depends so much on how we choose to live our lives over the next few decades. She showed a graph of world population over the past 3000 years, and although exact population was not know for much of that, one thing is clear, and that is that we have very suddenly had an increase in population. We are in a transition already, between a sparsely populated world to a denser one. Many things will have to change for us to support our population, whether we do it consciously or not!

Although Corinne was talking in terms of technological fixes, I was painting my own idea of corrective measures. They were mostly tackling behavioural change: a renewed respect for nature, lifestyle changes that are more about local cooperative community than keeping up with the Jones's, and ceasing the distribution of absurd subsidies for our highest polluting industries.

I'm glad that The Treehouse Festival can give such an idea of the lifestyle possibilities that will lead to a more sustainable future, whilst continuing to be an open and fun environment for those who attend!

Bread and Circuses

As the Festival season gets into full swing, this is a post about events. How they shape Transition, how they work (or don't), what questions they bring up about our culture. Most of our initiatives are built around events, as we raise awareness in our communities, involve people and keep connected with one another - stalls, seedy saturdays, produce swaps, open spaces, world cafes, film nights, community parades, discussions in cafes, talks in church halls, unleashings. The Network is structured around "away days" in which the team meet and discuss key topics. We converge at the annual Transition conference in a three-day marathon of meetings and networking.
Do we ever kick back and ask ourselves if these are worthwhile? Do we assess their success or significance? Or are we, as the event's organisers, just rushing around making bookings, sorting chairs and flip charts, putting up posters, too busy in a busy-busy world to stop and consider the wheel as it turns. Gotta get it done, get it sorted and on to the next!
I used to work as an event manager, mostly for a local theatre and poetry festival. It sounds sort of grand, organising artists and musicians, welcoming crowds of people, being in charge of the lights, but as Bryony, my fellow EM once said, it's mostly checking whether there's enough toilet paper in the men's. However it does mean you see behind the scenes of the cultural music-hall that shapes most of our lives. You get to see how people come and go, the buzz of gatherings, that empty feeling after the show is over, how the song and dance never quite deliver you to the paradise they promise. You see backstage and front of house - the exhausted young dancer, the bitter old singers, the critical, heartless audience, how far people will go to find a bit of glamour, how much this all costs in terms of money and human energy. The whole ras lila of it all. You get to observe it and ask yourself: is this what life is really about?

"What I remember most is the repetition, the kind of repeat cycles Sebald writes about in his melancholic work, The Rings of Saturn: the actors repeating the same lines, the musicians playing the same phrases, and how it felt as if I were in charge of some kind of machine that only cared that this show was repeated over and over again. And how our ancient folk wisdom warns us about not listening to the fairy music and getting lost for centuries. The Event

But not all events are escapes and entertainments, some of them bring people together in surprising ways, provide information, inspiration and connections you would never come across if you stayed at home. In events you can come together in different and dynamic configurations, take part in activities that make you a participant and co-creator of a new culture, rather than a mere spectator of pageants that boast the power and priviledge of the ancien regime. My own life took a radical change of direction thanks to two events I decided to go to at the last minute: a talk in Santa Barbara called Aboriginal Dreamtime, which started a ten-year investigation into earth dreaming; a series of Peak Oil films organised by Sustainable Bungay, that led to these last four years in Transition.
So I am ambivalent about them, both as an organiser and as a punter. Gatherings are essential, but they do not always work in the way we would like them to. Sometimes they work only because we value them afterwards in hindsight. So perhaps this week as we give time to reflect on our experiences we will find some answers as we look at different Transition happenings. Here to kick off are short responses to two I feel have been pivotal:

Launch of Transition Norwich 2.0

2009. The room is packed. It's a sweltering June evening. I am standing in front of 50 people, rapping about Transition and we are all rapt in the retelling of a children's story:

Uh-oh climate change. You can't go over, it you can't go under it, you've gotta go through it!

The mood is high. I am the second in line of four speakers. Tully opened the evening with some hard data about feeback loops to galvanise a big plan he has to help the city to radically reduce its carbon emissions. This is my call to arms. Afterwards we're going to do some mapping and visioning exercises and then feed back to the room. People are well fired up and standing up and saying what needs to be done.
Inspired, as we all were at the beginning of Transition, at the beginning of the initiative, on a performance high, this feels like a great evening. But it's a false buzz in many ways. You can ignite a fire, but if there's no fuel, the fire will die out. The fuel in Transition comes from our own lives, as we commit them to the flames, take up another way of being on the planet. We don't always want to do that. We want to be playing with the ideas at the top, as Jo pointed out so directly on Saturday. We want to be in charge and feel good. We don't want to be bean counters. We love the wedding but we are not so sure about the marriage when it hits the rocks, as of course it will.

You can't go over it, you can't go under it . . .

At the second meeting there will be 15 of us. Ten of us will commit to reducing our carbon emissions to 4 tonnes in the following year. The big plan will not play out in reality. This is however a pivotal event in Transition Norwich, as it introduces personal carbon reduction into the mix of theme groups and projects. In many ways it will define the initiative. It will create four Transition Circles, This Low Carbon Life and the Low Carbon Cookbook. I will learn not to trust the buzz. I will learn to respect the fire.

Transition Network -Peak Money Day

2012. The rain is pouring down in Hoxton Square. The great London planes shake their new leaves and people stand drenched in doorways. It is an unseasonable and strange Spring. Inside the room, fifty of us are sitting listening to Phoebe Bright from Ireland telling us how the financial crisis is driving the country into despair: we have lost the run of ourselves, she says.
We are at a Peak Money day organised by Eva Schonveld and Transition Network – discussing alternative currencies, REconomy projects, timebanking, credit unions, a mix of initiatives to reclaim the economic commons, away from the private banking sector that controls 97% of our finances.
I am keeping an eye on the door to let people in. Most of whom I don't know and some I do. Some I've had email conversations with like Mark Boyle and Filipa Pimentel about the Transition Free Press. The day is structured around several presentations and after lunch we will split up into groups and hold several world cafe sessions, and finally a plenary. It's a full on agenda and afterwards we will cross the square to talk in the Red Lion and I will catch the train home with Gary and Josiah.
The day has been written up already both by Rob Hopkins and Shaun Chamberlin, so this is not another report. It's a famous pause for reflection about how these kinds of events stick. The fact is, like most people in Britian, even though I have been using money all my life, I have no idea how the financial system works. Now I am getting some understanding. First through the attention of the Occupy movement on the fianancial institutions, now by this attention on Transition economy. By listening to Tony Greenham from nef, talking with Ciaran Mundy about the Bristol pound, listening to Filipa talk about what is going on in Portugal, the picture is coming into focus. I am not an economics thinker, I am a bean-counting writer, who used to be a fashion editor and event manager. Glamour and illusion and distraction I know all about.

We have to break the spell of money, I said.
By putting our focus together in the room, by gazing on what appears to be all-powerful and invisible, is how we dispel the trance that has the whole world in its grip.
You don't see the result straight away. You're not sure the event was a success, or that you enjoyed yourself; the world cafes felt unsatisfactory somehow. But none of these things are important. The fact is events like these kick-start unexpected moves, act like strange attractors in non-linear systems, and bring about change. Most of all, you know now you are not alone in thinking that the show is not what it seems. Because there were fifty of you in that room in the heart of London, in the Baptist Church of Norwich, and in a thousand locations in Britain, in the world, each day, each night. Valuing bread, forgoing the circus.
Poster for Magdalen Street Celebration 2012; Sustainble Bungay Green Drinks poster

First published 6 June 2012 on Transition Network Social Reporting project

A Walk Along the Thames in Deep Time

Today's Festival of Transition post is from the new economics foundation blog and is by Dr Stephan Harding, the resident ecologist and MSc co-ordinator at Schumacher College and the author of Animate Earth and Ruth Potts, co-founder of Bread, Print and Roses.

The author and activist Rebecca Solnit describes walking as “how the body measures itself against the Earth”. It’s a poetic description that resonates with our experience of walking, and a sensation that we deliberately set out to evoke with our walk through 4.6 billion years of the Earth’s history on Saturday 12 May as part of the Festival of Transition.

It’s hard, often, to think beyond the scale of our own lifetimes. Even measured in thousands of years, the passing of time is elusive, inconceivable, almost magical. And that’s before we get to the billions. Until the bank bailouts of 2008 and 2009 we were unused to such orders of magnitude. Now, billions are bandied about like loose change (at least where the banks are concerned.) But it’s still hard to get a sense of scale. A billion is one thousand million. What might a billion years feel like?

To connect students at Schumacher College with the vast expanse of geological time, Stephan Harding and his MSc student Sergio Maraschin developed a walk that recreates Earth’s history along 4.6 kilometers of Devonshire coastline. Here, we follow the coastal path where the passing of geological time is evident in the cliff face, the contour of the shore and the shards of rock that crunch under foot through to the point where we finally meet the sea. On the scale of the Deep Time walk, one millimeter equals one thousand years.

Re-creating that walk along the Thames, our group of 30 set off from Festival Pier, one of the few visible reminders of the Southbank Centre’s origins and the spirited optimism of the Festival of Britain when anything seemed possible. We begin to imagine ourselves at the very beginning of geological time. For each step of the walk we pass through about half a million years of Earth’s history, aware in that timescale, of the transitory nature of the apparently immutable infrastructure that surrounds us.

Original post can be found here

24 Hours of Possibility

Here comes the sun! Welcome to our photoblog for the Festival of Transition and the 24 Hours of Possibility that began at dawn today. Here I am greeting the summer solstice sun as it rises from the sea at Southwold, Suffolk (4.36am). It's a glorious day out there, at the sun's zenith in the sky, at this moment of maximum light on earth. Have a wonderful time, whatever you decide to do (or not-do) today. I'm travelling Westwards across the land and looking forward to meeting up fellow Transitioners at the Transition Tin Viillage and the Sunrise Festival. Oh, and having a dance! Wishing everyone the midsummer best. Keep an eye out for the photos as they appear here during the next 23 hours. (Charlotte)

Connecting with the Earth For 24 hours from between the 20th and 21st June, I'm going offline and concentrating on connecting with the earth's living systems. This will involve being at the seashore for sunrise and later on visiting some of the neighbourhood trees. Here I am curating the medicine bed at Bungay Library Community Garden. (Mark)

08.20 - Sunrise shining through the leaves of the sage flowers - at this hour the day is still fresh and alive with possibility. (Jon Curran)

10:00 am - My task for the day is to mend the damage to my improvised fruit cage, caused by the unseasonable strong winds last week. However, the wind brings rain and the rain brings flowers. Bottom right are potato flowers which are unusually abundant this year (John Heaser)

Festival of Transition: What if . . . the People had a change of heart?

Today we are running our blog week in tandem with the Social Reporters Project. We start out with an introduction to the week (and follow on from my last week's post on Development).

I am in the Museum of East Anglian life at the Festival of Transition event, What if . . . the sea keeps rising? and I want to put my hand up and ask about the rivers. Why did the government withdraw its funds for the river defences of the Ore, the Deben, the Alde, the Blyth? But the question does not happen. The woman from the Environment Agency in London is staring into her computer and talking about plans and scenarios and how some moves are less controversial than others, as we all gaze at the aerial shot of the lovely sinuous and green waterlands of coastal Suffolk.

Maybe it's because I know the answer: because when the seas did rise up in a storm surge in 2007, and there was a massive flooding of the Blyth, the environment officer told us the land was not worth much anyway. Only marsh and watermeadows for a few cows. And that the small-scale local fishing was "not economic", so it made no odds that the harbour collapsed. The money for flood protection would be secured for the big inland towns and commercial sea ports, such as Great Yarmouth and Felixstowe.

That was the moment, just before I stumbled upon Transition, that my small world cracked upon and I found myself among the people, defending the place we all loved in our separate, and now connected ways. We spoke out in village halls and protested on the beaches, and then some of us picked up our spades and began to remake the river walls ourselves. Before the advent of diggers, all the river walls were mended each winter by a few men.

Tony Butler, the musuem's curator, showed us a ditch spade from among the extraordinary set of traditional tools on the 14th century barn in which our meeting is taking place. That's when you see the past and the future in your own hands. How everything hinges ultimately on our own efforts: Who will dig the land, who will shape the land, what is it worth, and in what spirit will this work be done? Up until the 1950s half the population in Suffolk worked on the land; now it's 0.5 percent. The country has become something we understand at arm's length, a Suffolk of industrial agriculture, fringed with nature tourism and leisure. And yet in our hearts, somewhere, we know there is a deeper relationship we have with our homeland, and if we were wise, we would be seeking it out.

Festival of Transition

The Festival of Transition has been running now since May in a series of events across the country: walks in London, talks at the Bristol Green Fair, at the Hay Festival and in Manchester. They have been organised by the Transition Network and new economics foundation, as well other organisations. On Wednesday this Festival culminates in a 24 hours of possibility in which everyone has been asked to imagine what life will be like in the future and live it for that one day. Everything from small individual acts - not using a car, making something by hand - to holding a street carnival. This week on the blog we're going to share some of those actions and reflections as Transitioners across the UK.

June 20 is a big day. It's the start of the Rio+20 summit in which the future of the earth will be discussed by world leaders; it is the summer solstice, the longest day, the day of maximum light, when the sun reaches its zenith in the sky; and it's also my birthday. So in the way days are markers for time, historically, planetary, personally, this midsummer brings a shift of attention. Everything enacted, felt and imagined that day will alter the course of events thereafter.

Traditionally midsummer is a door in time, in which other dimensions, possibilities you have never thought of, slip through our imaginations into this physical world. And maybe this is why I don't ask the government officer why they are abandoning the farmland and the bird reserves, and why instead I find myself looking at Laurence Edward's The Creek Men as they float down the River Alde on the way to Snape.

We think the government will turn the planet around. But they won't. It will be the people who will turn it around. The people who love the land, who know that there is more to life than economic necessity. They will not be the people you expect.

24 hours of possibility

What am I going to do on J20? I will get up at dawn and see the sun rise in the East out of the sea at Southwold and, if it's not too windy and rough, I will jump into the waves and have my first swim of the year. I will sit in the garden and have breakfast amongst the rock roses and ceanothus thrumming with bees. Then I will travel with three students from Norwich across the country to the Sunrise Festival and watch the sun set in the West amongst the hills in Somerset. I'm on the crew for the Transition Tin Village and giving workshops on grassroots communications and medicine plants, so the day will start quietly and end in a great crescendo of dance and song and people.

But that's the outside event. What am I really doing on J20? In a recent post during our week on Development, I asked what if beauty were the driving force behind all our actions, rather than economics? What if the basis of our lives was not how the fittest survived, but the how the most lovely and loving thrived, the people and the flowers?

Looking for the bee and pyramid orchids on a roadside verge on the way home from a Bungay Community Bees farm visit, a man stopped and complained to us how the flowers were getting in the way of his vision of the road. There wasn't much there anyway, he said, and kicked the grass as if to prove the point. Richard, who knows every inch of this land, explained why this was a roadside nature reserve, while Lesley, Mark and I kept looking, eyes down. The defender of cars disappeared into his house. We found orchids everywhere.

"When they moved the green-winged orchids from the Tesco roundabout in Lowestoft they disappeared," Lesley said.

"They didn't like being moved," Richard said. "Nature has its own way."

"Maybe they didn't like Tescos, I said. And we all laughed.

The fact is life is surprising and comes up with extraordinary solutions, so long as you allow it to, so long as you don't get intimidated. If you focus on the things you love and know that nature has its own way, including your own. That's something that creators know, and all people who work with wild flowers. What if . . . the unexpected happens? That the drivers of cars don't always have the right of way, that the politicians don't always have the voice? That what you do on a summer's day alters the destiny of the planet?

Who would have imagined for one minute, for example, that the Southwold Journal one of the most traditional local papers, in one of the most conversative towns in Britain had Transition on its front page this week? People in the town have decided to resist the advance of the Costa Coffee chain in our high street and have been set back by the county council planners' recommendation. So the postmaster and chair of the local chamber of commerce, Guy Mitchell, told the reporter about the recent Totnes campaign, quoting Andrew Simms from nef (and chair of the What if . . . the Sea Keeps Rising) and Frances Northrop from TT Totnes: "Ultimately it’s the community that knows its own needs and that voice is getting louder".

So that's what I am going to do on Wednesday, I'm going to tune into the sun as it rises and listen out for that other voice as it comes through. I'm going to keep an eye out for the beautiful and the free. I'm going to hold out, for what I always hold out for, a change of heart amongst the people.

I'm going to hold open the door.

Images: Laurence Edwards The Creek Men; community toolkit from Festival of Transition; with Tristram and Reuben in the hollow oak at High Ash Farm; bee orchid on the verge outside Bungay; Mark in the Library reading the Southwold Journal.

Announcing the Festival of Transition - 20 June 2012

The nationwide ‘Festival of Transition’, coordinated by nef (the new economics foundation) and the Transition Network, has begun, running until 20th June, the first day of the 20th UN Earth Summit in Rio.

Instead of flying to Brazil, the Festival gives people the opportunity to do something positive about climate change and the economic crisis in their own communities.

The Festival is a unique mixture of walks, talks and a DIY day of action on 20th June. It combines a series of organised events at festivals, museums and institutions around the country with an open invitation to schools, workplaces and community groups to stage their own ‘real-life experiments’ in living differently on 20th June.

The ‘What if?’ events include:

• 19^th/20^th May (this weekend!) at the Bristol Festival of Ideas: ‘What if… we left the oil in the ground?’ with author James Marriot and ‘What if… we could create money as well as the banks?’ with nef and the newly launched Bristol Pound
• 30^th May at the Hay Festival: ‘What if… we turned back the climate clock?’ with poet Lemn Sissay and Greenpeace chief executive John Sauven and ‘What if… cities produced our food?’ in association with the Soil Association

• 6^th June at the Royal College of Art: ‘What if… creatives redesigned economics?’ with nef and Occupy Design
• 13^th June at the Museum of East Anglian Life: ‘What if.. the sea keeps rising?’
• 14^th June at Manchester Museum: ‘What if… Manchester was as sustainable as Havana?’

The ‘Transition Walks’ include:

• 22^nd May: ‘In the shadow of the City: A walk through the history of the Corporation’, with author Nick Robins
• 23^rd May: ‘On London’s Oil Road: A journey to the heart of the energy economy’, in association with Platform London

Community groups and Transition initiatives have already started pledging to stage 24-hour experiments in living differently on 20th June via the Festival website. So do fill in your details here.

Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation said:

“This summer thousands of people will fly to Brazil to wait and watch as politicians struggle to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, hoping for action to meet the scale of the climate crisis. International political action is vital, but we’ve moved beyond leaving it all to big, global conferences. People are impatient and want to take action themselves. The Festival of Transition is an opportunity to question, taste, and experiment with living better within life-preserving environmental limits.

We believe that once people take a first step, they’ll want to keep on walking.”

Full details of the Festival events can be found at www.festivaloftransition.net

Cinema Paradiso

Welcome to our Transition documentary week on the blog! This week we are choosing one amongst the many documentaries that have shaped our thinking and ways of seeing the world. Films that have made us wake up, open our eyes, changed our point of reference. Our experience of life depends on our perception of the world, and media of all kinds influence this, overtly or subtly. A film can restrict or corral our worldview, or expand it and show us new territory.

Most films offer escape and glamour, and dwell in realms that have little to do with our ordinary lives. But some bring reality home. Make us look at things we would rather not look at, the places we don't normally see. The oil fields in the Ecuadorian rainforest in Joe Berlingers' Crude. Food factories, bullied farmers, tar sands, strip mining, melting glaciers. The consequences of our industrialised culture.

Transition often starts off in small grassroots cinemas, in halls and studios, with films that look at peak oil and climate change, ranging from the confrontative (Gasland, The Age of Stupid) to the upbeat (Power of Community). On Thursday Mike Grenville, who runs a Transition film programme in Forest Row, Sussex, will be sharing his tips about showing films, as well as his fave docs. Because this is not just about the documentaries, it's also about the set and setting in which you see them. Watching Life at the End of Empire would have really been no fun without the feeling I was surrounded by people who were ready to discuss its issues afterwards. Or watching the first Transition movie outside the celebratory context of the TN Birthday Party. They would have made little sense.

So the kind of films we will be looking are not entertainments: they are tools for discussion, sparks that light the fire.

Where do we go to find these films? In Norwich, there are regular documentary screenings at Cinema City, ranging this month from Patience (after Sebald), a photo essay on walking, memory and history, to a World Without Water (with panel discussion afterwards). There is also the monthly film night at the Quaker Meeting House every third Friday. Run as a "busy activist's alternative to a book club" alongside FoodCycle, the nights began in 2011 with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and will soon be showing, The Crisis of Civilisation, our Saturday story.

What About Me?
But the film I am choosing today swerves away from these attentions. I saw it at our Sustainable Bungay/Waveney Greenpeace film night last week in Tom Abbott's barn in the Saints. It's not about peak oil, or climate change, or digging potatoes. It does not examine the external factors that shape us – the industrial military complex, the domination of the consumer culture – and discuss ways we can mitigate them. It looks at the internal drivers, at our natures that strive for freedom, our bodies and imaginations that reflect the awesome forces of nature and the cosmos. What it means to be human here and now and connected.

Maybe it’s because I don’t travel anymore, or own a television, an I-pod or a radio, that the film, unscripted, shot on video, full of music and dance, made such a bright impression. Maybe it’s because I am surrounded by the tweedy countryside of England, its dun fields, and sober raincoats, all its quiet rhythms, that the colours of Africa and the sharp wit of city rappers and foxy old gurus startled me. I live on plain fare, and so the film appeared in the barn like a gorgeous feast. Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!

However it brought something else home. We live in a civilisation that runs along a vertical axis between mind and body – our world is masterminded by the Empire that fixes its attention on the control and possession of the earth’s physical assets. But this is not the whole story of life. This film was unequivocally framed along the horizontal axis, the dynamic between heart and spirit. The struggles for life (in spite of Empire and its false desires and self-absorbtion) are also a collective, multi-layered shout for freedom, for creative expression, for the mysterious and alchemical forces that run through us, the meaning of our being here together, billions of us at this point in time.

Shot on eight sequences in over 50 locations (which can be viewed seperately) by Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman, the film looks at different aspects of human life from the trauma of childhood to the acquiescence of old age. It is a vibrant, noisy, sassy, colourful mix, interweaving American philosophers, Bedouin musicians, Chinese rappers, Gabonese Pygmies and Tuvan Throat singers, shot on rooftops, balconies, in streets and villages. It's a long way from the monoculture of the Mall.

In Transition we are as much subject to living in a trapping world of things, of sterile planning, funding, separation and control as anyone else in this culture. To bring the horizontal axis into all we do, to liberate music and creativity from its role as entertainment and escape, and instead see it as central to our lives, is the key to real change. The fact is as people, whatever land or nation we come from, we meet in the moving rhythms and harmonies of the heart. We are on earth together, creating a new narrative. In our minds we are alone and stuck in perpetual war and slavery.

Normally after the films we discuss how the subjects bear on our lives in Transition – The History of Oil, Inuit Wisdom and Climate Change – this time we laughed, got up and shimmied.

Gotta loosen up, gotta dance, gotta get free.

Stills: Singer in What About Me?; growers from Power of Community; East Anglian seaboard from Patience; women in What About Me?; dancing at film night, The Saints.

Sun, sun, sun here it comes!

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.