Keep Circulating in the Common Room or What Rosemary Did

I had planned on giving a pre-spring tonic Herbs for Resilience class at the second Common Room prototype day at St. Laurence's church in Norwich on Saturday. I was going to focus on plants like dandelion, cleavers and nettles to wake up our systems after winter.

Only it really wasn't 'after winter' on Saturday. It was after a week where the temperature never rose much above freezing and I'd had too many conversations with people who said they'd been feeling gloomy and low (including, unusually, myself) or who had had flus and colds that were taking an age to clear up - or both!

So on Friday I decided that the spring tonic was just going to have to wait. What we needed right now was something cheerful and warming for the End of Winter. Something that would clear our heads, lift our spirits and also keep us warm in the nippy air of St. Laurence's church!

Welcome to Rosemary! Known since forever as a herb that warms, stimulates circulation, helps clear the head and improve memory AND cheers the heart, it had to be you, bold, resinous Rosemary!

I picked some sprigs from the garden, packed up my teapot, and took some dried thyme and lavender to add to the mix along with some Norfolk honey. The class would be based around a cup of tea. 

Then on Saturday morning I sat down at home with a hot water bottle to tune in to the day and the class. The temperature was almost as low inside the house as out and I suddenly noticed my kidneys and hands were really cold. I placed the hot water bottle on my back to warm up my kidneys and carried on considering the class. Five minutes later I noticed not only was my back now warm, but so were my hands! Warming up my back and kidneys had warmed up my hands too. As my system was not just focused on keeping my organs warm, the blood was circulating further out to the extremities. 

"THIS," I thought, "is what I want to pass on to everyone at the Trade School today." Keep your internal organs warm with a hot water bottle. And make a pot of rosemary, thyme and lavender tea with a small amount of honey to help clear those old colds and cheer the spirits!

Ten people turned up for a lively class and in the way of skill and knowledge share and Common Room and Trade School, I was rewarded with friendly people and some lovely gift exchanges: a pair of hand-knitted fingerless gloves, a diary, organic fruit and veg and a jar of homemade Seville orange marmalade, all of which are already being loved, worn (fingerless gloves on as I type!), written in, cooked and eaten!

So thanks to everyone for those and for joining in so heartily. And also for sharing your own knowledge about the virtues of Rosemary, which is also an antiseptic:

"When my brother was a teenager, he had terribly smelly feet," said Sarah. "Our grandmother told him to bathe them every day in cooled rosemary tea. And that soon sorted it out!"

Notes:
(i) For more on The Common Room in Norwich check out the website. There were all sorts of interesting and co-operative/collaborative classes, talks and demonstrations going on on Saturday, besides mine: from creative action for trees and grassroots media to origami and creating complementary currencies. The whole day had a great atmosphere with many people joining in in spite of the cold. And you can see some photos from the day, too!

(ii) I teach people in groups and communities to reconnect with the living world by taking notice of the plants growing right where we are and how that helps increase well-being. Here is some of what I've been doing recently:

Common Plants, Common Room
The Plants for Life 2012 Archive (a monthly series of talks, walks and workshops I organised last year with Sustainable Bungay)
Mark in Flowers

I look forward to doing more Trade School barter sessions at the Common Room! And if you'd like me to come and give a  plant talk (always interactive and practical), or lead a walk or workshop with your group, do let me know: markintransition@hotmail.co.uk

STOP PRESS: Common Room meeting tonight Monday 25 Feb 7-9pm at the Norwich Playhouse (42-58 St Georges St, NR3 1AB) to discuss next steps and how to move forward. This is your chance to join in with setting up a new and exciting community space in Norwich! The meeting is in the Playroom (the room to the right when you come in).

Pics: Preparing the blackboard and the tea at St. Laurence's Church (in an attic-like side room); Passing the rosemary tea at the herbs for Resilience class; Lovely things people brought in exchange for the class

Some People More than Others

This is my introductory post for this week's theme of Class, Hierarchy and Transition on the Transition Network Social Reporting Project. Mark Watson

(i)
We live in a society and culture that is shot through with class and hierarchy. We are brought up living and breathing it whether we like it or not, with our monarchies and corporate pyramids, line managers, owners, renters, professionals, masters, servants, wage-slaves, the woman who has and the woman who does.

Some people are upstairs, some people are downstairs, the ones downstairs are dreaming of what it’s like to be upstairs. And whilst most people do not find themselves literally living in Upstairs, Downstairs today, one look at our lives, our day-to-day exchanges, the way we speak and act with each other, the language we use, not to mention the huge (and growing) disparity in wealth distribution and access to resources, is enough to see how heir (and heiress) we are to millenia of inequality in civilisation. Our own government (if we can call it ours) here in the UK is testament to this, packed as it always is with privileged public schoolboys.

Some people, as Irish poet Rita Ann Higgins says*

know what it is like,
to be called a cunt in front of their children
to be short for the rent
to be short for the light... 

and other people don't.
 
(ii)
But what has this got to do with climate change, peak fossil fuels and economic crisis? The things that individuals and communities in transition are responding to?

In a recent interview with Rob Hopkins, Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the UK Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, says that an adequate response to climate change and continued economic growth are mutually exclusive. Levels of energy and resource consumption need to be drastically reduced, and it's the people who earn more and therefore consume more, where these reductions need to happen most. He says that already people on lower incomes are consuming less because they have less money:

given that we face a lot of issues now with unemployment, welfare reductions etc., issues that disproportionately affect people in the middle-lower income band; it is these people that could actually benefit from a transition to a much more efficient and lower carbon economy. Andersen goes on to say that Transition’s bottom-up, community approach is pivotal in providing examples of how individuals and groups can prepare for a future with less fossil fuel energy and less consumption. They are, in effect, the pioneers.

Most people who have done "very well out of our western system, and live very carbon profligate lifestyles are going to face difficult challenges, and we should not pretend otherwise."

At present though, many of these people, including old friends of Andersen’s in the oil industry and even fellow climate change scientists "think climate change is a serious issue but are not prepared to make any changes to their lifestyles. It has raised some serious challenges for me in maintaining personal relationships..."

Until we actually embrace alternative means of finding value in our lives, I think that transition from where we are today, high-carbon, high-energy lifestyles, to ultimately lower-carbon lifestyles is going to be both difficult and unpopular. But ultimately, I do not see an alternative.

Some of those alternative means are going to have to come from letting go of the idea that some people are ‘better’ than others because of their position of birth, class, profession, what school or university they went to or because of how much money and property they own. This includes the have-nots. We have to stop aspiring to resource-hungry lifestyles. Another dream needs to happen.

(iii)

I am the current chairman of Sustainable Bungay, a grass-roots community initiative in north-east Suffolk, 15 miles from Norwich. The group started up in November 2007 (it’s our 5^th birthday this month) after a Climate Change conference in the local Emmanuel church (which included speakers from the Tyndall Centre in Norwich). 

We became an ‘official’ Transition initiative in the summer of 2008, ‘unleashed’ in 2009 and we’ve been unleashed ever since. We have had minimal funding since we began. We host several events each month, and you can read more about us on our community website – in fact, I've just noticed the about us section is due for an update.

I’m not saying that no hierarchy or class exists in Sustainable Bungay. There is scarcely a place in our culture and in ourselves where these have not been ingrained, and they are sometimes expressed unconsciously.

But I’d like to talk a bit about the core group, which has been meeting together for five years now. Every month since then, bar December when we have a party, we meet at the library or the oak room at the Three Tuns pub and organise and feedback on our various events and projects.

We have a chairman, a secretary, a treasurer, a bank account and a basic constitution. 

The core group meetings are open to anybody who wants to come as are all our events. This ‘open plan’ structure has kept the group coherent, dynamic and relatively fluid. The meetings provide a space where people can report back on how the projects they’re involved with are going, ask for help or sound out ideas for new ones. 

This commitment to turning up each month over the years has been a key part of building community. The open nature of the group means that people of all different types get to meet each other, work together, even take the lead on projects: employed, unemployed, self-employed, old, young, middle-aged, with money or without, working class, upper class, middle class. What we're getting is a great deal of excellent practice in working together, one of the major skills we'll need in a downshifted future.

I grew up in a working class family of Irish immigrant and English background on a council estate in High Wycombe, in an atmosphere with Bohemian overtones and musical and artistic ability. My dad was a car mechanic and my mum cleaned offices and houses. I passed the twelve-plus and went to grammar school where I was thrown suddenly among middle-class people with much more money and status (and posher cars) than my parents had. I have known what it is like to be short of school books* and money and to be looked down on*. To wear a cheaper school uniform than others and be aware of it. And to dream of being upstairs when I was downstairs. As an adult living in various places I have also felt the exclusion of being a renter when most other people were buying their houses.

I am no longer personally so much at the behest of these things. Partly due to age, partly to having spent a great deal of time examining them and lately to involving myself in Transition with all the friendly collaborations and difficult encounters, carbon cutting and community building. I'm tougher now. Though social inequality is as rife, as iniquitous and as inexcusable as ever.

I am at present the non-hierarchical chairman of Sustainable Bungay (happily holding the position until it's time to let go for someone else's turn), and a writer on this Social Reporting project. I have been downshifting for years on very little income (could do with a bit more, actually), exploring with others ways to (re)connect with the planet, keeping our carbon down and our spirits up.

My dreams though are neither up nor down these days, more steady-state.

Photos: Temple of the Magician (all civilisations need a magician or two), Uxmal, Mexico, 1991; We Told Them the Wealth Would Trickle Down**; Downsizing at the first Sustainable Bungay Give & Take, March 2009***; Plants for Life (for everyone) poster, April 2012. Images/artwork by Mark Watson except **from the  Mendo Island Journal and *** from Sustainable Bungay

*from the poem Some People by Rita Ann Higgins (1988) in An Awful Racket (Bloodaxe Books, 2001)

A Transition Camp Journey

I am a reluctant traveller these days, rarely venturing beyond Bungay or Norwich, let alone East Anglia. And it’s strange. Having lived in the Americas in the 80s and 90s and experienced incredible landscapes, people and ways of life, now, after ten travel (and money)-lean years, I’ve learnt to totally appreciate the odd train trip, whether it's going to London for the Transition Conference in September or travelling up to Norwich in the carbon conversation days through the Norfolk broads as the sun goes down.

Last weekend I went by foot, bus and train to the 5th Transition Camp in the Sussex Downs at the Wo-Wo campsite. And I loved it. From the moment I walked in when Mike greeted me and Alice handed me the key to the Little Owl yurt where I’d be sleeping, I felt welcomed and relaxed. It was a weekend where you could kick back, lead or participate in workshops and talks, sing around the fire at night and have transition conversations that the normal rush of life just doesn’t leave time for.

"These seeds," said Rebecca from Transition Crouch End, who opened the camp in a circle around the fire on Friday afternoon, “represent what we would like to plant here this weekend, so take one as they go round and consider for a few moments what you’d like to give and receive from the Camp. We’ll put them all in a saucepan and on Sunday, they’ll be cooked up and we’ll share in the stew.”

“They are called Victor beans,” she said, holding up a postcard that was now very familiar to me. I withheld my desire to whoop out loud. But I got my opportunity to speak when we went round the circle saying what we’d like to experience.

“Well, I’ve already experienced something amazing,” I said. “Those are native East Anglian beans, grown very near where I live and Josiah, who runs the Great British Beans business that promotes them is a friend and fellow transtioner in Sustainable Bungay. They make great hummus and falafels too by the way and feature regularly in our monthly Happy Monday meals. Talk about making connections. If the rest of the weekend is as enjoyable as that then I’ll be a very happy camper!”

It was. From working up some great harmonies round the fire on Friday as we sang into the night, to being lent a soup bowl by Claire and dry wellies by Nigel (mine were leaking and that first night was very wet); from learning the Basque word sapori (which means 'taste') from Urtzi, who also taught us how to start campfires, to learning the basic steps of the Charleston with Jo in a very dark tent as we sang along to the Muppets theme song. When I just couldn’t keep step, Christy took me gently by the elbow and guided me through. The Camp was like that; friendly, fun and people giving each other a hand when they needed it.

Most people at the camp lived in East Sussex, and were involved in local transition initiatives or wanting to start them up. But there were also transitioners from London, Buckingham, even Aberdeen. Peter, who was visiting from near Aylesbury gave such a great rendition of Singing In The Rain that we all asked for an encore the next night, even though it was dry by then and the stars were out.

Everybody was asked to do a stint in the kitchen, chopping veg or keeping the water fresh in the washing up bowls. Every morning there was hot porridge, fresh fruit and bread, yoghurt and raw milk from the biodynamic Plaw Hatch Farm nearby. Lunch and dinner were equally abundant (and very tasty) and made from scratch by the good-humoured kitchen volunteers.

Martin from Brighton led an introductory session the first night where we said our name out loud each time we spoke. Although the repetition felt awkward at first, I soon got used to it and remembered people’s names for the whole weekend. Not that I would forget Martin’s name. We shared the Little Owl yurt, talking and laughing late into the night and taking it in turns to keep the fire alight. Even though we’d only met briefly once before I felt like I was staying overnight with a friend from school again. It was great fun and really liberating. I reckon we could run a pretty good ‘inner adolescent’ workshop for jaded over thirty-fives! I even managed to turn three X-Ray Spex songs into lullabies and impose them on Martin before he went to sleep! (He did actually fall asleep in the middle of Oh Bondage Up Yours!).

If you ever need anyone to break the ice for a meeting so people can get to know each other, Martin’s your man. On Saturday morning he did another introductory session where each person told two truths and one lie about themselves. Where else would you find out that Lynne sang in a punk group called the Decaying Bogeys in the 70s (or was that the lie?), that Rebecca crossed the Sahara Desert, that I will be 52 next year, that Mike lived in a hippie commune on Ibiza or that Martin was a famous child star? True or False? Answers on a postcard.

On Saturday I held a Plants for Life workshop and spoke about my work in Sustainable Bungay this year organising the Plant Medicine bed and monthly events. St. John’s Wort was the plant of the workshop, and I passed round Rose’s bright red oil for people to smell and rub on and guess what it was. Then I read out the St. John’s Wort chapter from Charlotte’s book 52 Flowers That Shook My World, which was published this year. I passed around the hawthorn leather I made for people to share at the camp and we took a look at ragwort, a plant that brings up strong reactions on any wild plant walk. See here for a balanced, sober look at this plant. The hour and a half sped by and I finished by showing people how to roll plantain balls for bites, stings and incipient cold sores.

Don arrived on Saturday afternoon with the sauna - a bright pink converted caravan with a wood burning stove. Over the next 24 hours, the brave and hardy would cool down by jumping into the nearby river. Some just sprayed water on themselves from a container outside the caravan. I, of course, jumped into the river at every opportunity! Truth or lie?

There was a fascinating workshop making Sterling engines run by Louise from Buckingham in Transition with her partner.

“Buckingham. That sounds familiar. Did you start up the herb garden there?” I asked her. ”I saw a post about it some months ago and I’ve been meaning to get in touch.”

“Yes, that’s me,” she said.

It also turned out that the rocket stove Charlotte made at last year’s camp and that now sits in our conservatory, was the product of one of Louise’s workshops. There are a hundred and one instances of connections like these, but it’ll make this post far too dense to give all the details.

The weekend was filled with workshops on rhythm and resilience, permaculture and fairy tales for children. A foraging walk on Sunday led by Tanya Lodge, focused on the medicine chest in a stretch of hedge no more than thirty feet long at the edge of the campsite field. Dock, nettles, elder, rosehips and cleavers were all discussed along with how to make tinctures and dry herbs. And the redoubtable plantain made a robust appearance at the end. Did you know that plantain helps draw out toxins and heal wounds. Chewed and kept in  the mouth it can also helps with teeth abscesses. The plantain book grows by the moment!

At a talk on fracking and extreme energy, Olly introduced the latest data on Peak Oil, spoke about the work of Frack Off and showed us a short Australian film about a rural community who have united to keep coal seam gas (CSG) out of their area.

Suddenly it was 3 o’ clock on Sunday afternoon. Mark Boyle, The Moneyless Man, gave a sober and unapologetic talk about our relationship with money and how it affects our relationship with the world. Speaking about money exchange as a way of saying "I want no more to do with you", and examining the hidden pain and exploitation behind the consumer products we take for granted in our society, Mark exhorted all of us present to open and FEEL the damage that maintaining a consumer lifestyle is wreaking on our fellows both human and not, and the planet that gives us life. And to keep open and keep feeling...

Photos: Mike doing the morning shout-out of all the day's activities*; Great British Beans in the community pot; Woodland and Kitchen yurt with Saturday's talks and workshops*; Reading aloud from 52Flowers That Shook My world in the kitchen yurt**; the pink sauna caravan; Mark Boyle burns money By Mark Watson, *Mike Grenville and **Matt O'dell

This post first appeared on the Transition Network Social Reporting project on Saturday 13th October 2012

ARCHIVE: On an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town . . .

We're just on our way to Cathy's orchard and meadow for the Sustainable Bungay annual picnic and games (this year it's boules, instead of our usual rumbustious rounders on the Old Grammar School Field). So here is a summer celebration (from July 2011) of some of the people I've met in Transition and the friendliness and fellow feeling you can find in downshifting times. The above pic was taken after our July 2012 core group meeting, as we feel the heat of the Hot Wall and slip into a moody album mode.

"It’s definitely the stick," said Mark as he stood with a piece of wood in his hands. It had been inadvertently donated at Sustainable Bungay's Give and Take Day and suddenly reappeared in our hallway. From the outside it looked like a shiny broom handle but it wasn't: it was a fighting stick belonging to a young man mortified by its disappearance. But you’d have to be a warrior to know that.

It’s an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town. We’re on our way to our monthly core group meeting. First we have to drop off the stick at Kate’s and have some supper with Nick.

“You share your lives in the blogosphere and I’d like to share some of what I do," Nick said as he began to fill a box full of July veg - onions and garlic, fennel, beetroot, fresh eggs and blackcurrant jam. We sat down at the kitchen table and drank some squash wine, ate a delicious bean salad and talked about the financial crisis.

You have to be in Transition to truly appreciate Nick's house – kale and courgettes in the front garden, sorrel around the door, a garage with dried herbs hanging from the ceiling and shelves full of preserves, giant tanks of rainwater, chickens, cupboards and windowsills with kegs of homemade wine, a stack of books on economics. It’s not what it looks like, but what is behind everything you see. What it took to get there. The bare aesthetic of downshift.

Years ago I interviewed a man called Tommy Roberts. I was working for a glossy magazine at the time and the subject of the article was Taste, that indefinable quality that distinguished one person or house from the next. What is Taste? I asked various arbiters of style, fashion designers and editors, owners of grand and important properties. Tommy was once a designer of natty suits in the 60’s when he was known as Mr Freedom but at that time had a shop under Centrepoint full of zany, brightly coloured modern furniture: Taste is the Japanese room with one beautiful vase in the corner, he told me. A lifetime of taking away makes that room. It’s what you don’t have that defines taste.

We live in a have and have-not culture and our value systems are entirely based around possessions. Not just the things those designers were talking about back in the 1980s when materialism and property began its great boom – wallpaper and watches and John Fowler’s "pleasing decay" - but a personal warehouse of business connections, children, communities, garden flowers, Hollywood stars, holiday countries. My special world.

"Well, you’re rich in other ways," said the man at the Financial Instability workshop at the Transition Conference after I had detailed my downshift from The World of Interiors to Sustainable Bungay.
"I really am not rich", I replied.
"You are rich in social relationships", he insisted, frustrated with my density. "In quality time. You are abundant in other ways."
"I have very little", I replied. (which is not strictly true because like most people in this country I have chairs and tables, pots and pans and all manner of basic essentials). "What is wrong with nothing? Why do we have to be wealthy at all?"

What I wanted to say was I had spent a lot of time clearing out that room. And I didn’t replace the things I used to own with different things - with people or experiences, or a low-carbon lifestyle - but had learned to love space and time and the freedom that lack of ownership brought.

In downshift less is not more in the way we once understood Japanese style. Less means you take everything you don’t need away, so that what really matters is left. It means you don’t have because having is no longer important. What becomes important is that freedom of movement and living a deliberate life.

It’s an ordinary evening in a Transition town and we’re on our way to our meeting at the Library. But first we have to meet at the pub with the Community Bee Group to celebrate the success of our Beehive Day (which I’ll write about tomorrow) and then unload Eloise’s van full of information boards and select some just picked fruit from the back of Cathy’s car. Cathy runs the Abundance project and swapping our produce and plants- at our meetings, in the Library community garden- has become a way of life. So here we are in the car park with a stack of boards and punnets of cherry-plums and blackberries meeting in a damp summer in a difficult time, swifts whizzing round the roofs, echinacea flowers full of bees.

At the Transition Conference we all did an exercise. We had to imagine a group we longed to be with in the future. I am no good at visioning and all I could think about was the fact I would be 65 in ten years time and how weird that was. And then I realised I don’t long for a group of people because I am already with those people and I had met them three years ago in the theatre down the street from here. And what was difficult to feedback to my fellow Transitioners in the canteen in Liverpool was the fact that it wasn’t the individuals in the initiative that made us matter to one another, the way we are used to people mattering in our lives, as special friends, or heroes, support systems, as possessions and dependencies. My important relationships.

It was the fact that when we met up as a group in these public spaces something happened between us. Something we held in common. We understood implicitly what we were doing and why – sharing stuff, organising events, going through the agenda. When I looked at this working-together in the visioning it looked like an energy field, the kind of energy field you sense when you stand by a hive humming with bees. A hum of warmth and intelligence that allows people to naturally collaborate and make that low-energy downshift happen. When that’s going on you don’t need possessions to compensate for your isolation, to anchor your introverted fantasy world. You don’t need data or climate science to persuade your tricky mind. You just need to tune in and act.

If you passed by Bungay Library tonight you’d notice the lights were on and if you peered in you might see a group of people around a table, eating plums and laughing, one person intently writing notes, one speaking, another occasionally calling order and everyone else paying attention. None of us look as if we are arbiters of taste, or abundant, or full of well-being or anything else the modern world puts a price on or gives value to. We’re obviously not important members of the community with homes-to-die-for, or great jobs or cars. We appear utterly ordinary and so we are. Ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing.

You can’t see the field from the outside, you have to feel it from the inside. You recognise it when you are in it because you are doing it along with everyone else. In fact you can’t be in it unless you are doing it.That’s the real shift. The move from individualism to group collaboration for the good of the whole is primarily a personal shift, away from ownership and control, into a field of exchange and communication and reciprocity, into give and take. And that’s a whole new lexicon of being. It’s not a replacement of things, it’s a move. A let go and a join in.

Because Transition is not a noun, it’s a verb.

Photos: standing against Bungay Library wall with Daphne, Lesley and Josiah; echinacea by the carpark; with squash wine in Nick's kitchen; rainwater storage; Cathy's Abundance fruit; Nick with harvested herbs.

Seeing Things Differently #1

The #1 in the title of this post is there because being in Transition has made me see differently in so many ways. This post is about one of them.

I could tell you transition has made me more tolerant and that would be true. But it wouldn't convey the sense of what this actually means. Just being tolerant is okay, probably better than being intolerant in general, but it's a bit passive. "I accept people for who they are" seems like a nice-person type of thing to say, but the world is full of nice-person-type cliches. Cliches don't change the world.

There may be a better word than tolerance for what I'm about to describe, but it'll do for now.

If you look straight-on at what Transition is responding to as movement, it's nothing less than the collapse of our present industrial civilisation, built on peaking oil and other finite and diminishing fossil fuels, coupled with increasing climate insecurity, severely strained planetary life systems, and economic and social chaos.

In short, the collapse of the world as we've known it.

Building community resilience requires us to take the reality of these events seriously. This is more likely after an end-of-suburbia-moment when you've seen the 'terror of the situation'. The split-second when you realise you're living in life at the end of empire and that the world is not what your parents, friends, teachers, business-as-usual governments, global corporations or the BBC are saying it is - nor what you have been agreeing it is:

A civilisation relies upon a set of unconscious agreements as to what constitutes meaning and can be allowed into discourse. When faced with information that falls outside these parameters, cultures and individuals alike forget or neglect, or actively suppress, the ill-fitting data. Yet the repressed elements return to haunt us eventually...*

Maybe instead of tolerance, I really mean patience, or allowing enough time and space to see myself and others in a different light. So we can come to different agreements together, as valuable co-participants in life with work to get on with at a critical time.

We can't do this if we're going around seeing each other just as same old, same old nice person/nasty person, winners/losers who happen to agree or disagree with ME or be an ally or enemy to MY particular worldview or lifestyle. Particularly when that lifestyle has reached its best-before date.

Seeing ourselves and others differently is a task that takes persistent effort. All of us have been raised in and conditioned by the same system with its competitiveness, jealous rivalries and power struggles in a culture that says some people are better than others because of class, looks, education or financial status.

That's why tolerance or patience, or allowing time and space so the more co-operative aspects of ourselves and each other can emerge and our skills be recognised and valued is a practice really, an active rather than a passive thing.

And where better to practice it than with those fellows in transition who already acknowledge the situation?

Then we can really be the change we wish to see in the world.

For it is important that awake people be awake...
the darkness around us is deep.**

Later: As synchronicity would have it, the themes here find echoes in a great piece about Occupy Norwich on the One World Column today by Vanessa Buth.

* from 2012 by Daniel Pinchbeck, p.41 (2007, Piatkus Books)
** from A Ritual to Read to Each Other in Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems by William Stafford, p.52 (1977, New York: Harper and Row)

Pics: Woodbridge station arches looking through the window; Honesty, Darkness and Sunlight (both MW, January 2012)

Breaking Isolation - How Transition Changed My Life #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I laughed. I'd never even considered it.

"Go on," said Richard.

"Well, I'm not..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transition Dad and Other Unofficial Initiatives

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

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

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

2010/2011

Hi Mark,

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

Water and Heating

Hi Mark,

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

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

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

Love, Dad XXX

Garden

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

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

Waste

Hi Mark,

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

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

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

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

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

Shed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, Dad XXX

Chip Off The Old Oak

Nov 2011

Hi Mark,

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

Dec 2011

Hi Dad,

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

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

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

Keep well and warm,

Mark x

Hi Mark,

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

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

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

Lots of love, Dad. XXX

Welcome to book week!

This week we'll be talking about books. We then also decided to hold a book swap on Saturday 24 September 3pm at Nectar cafe, 16 Onley Street, NR2 2EB. We'll also start an Official Bookcrossing Zone, so from then on you can come and take and bring books there. For free, there aren't even penalties for returning your books late.

To provide the context for what I'm reading at the moment (4.), let me go back a few years, when I found a feminist book in a second hand bookshop: Gyn/Ecology (no, it doesn't actually talk about ecology, which somewhat blunts the pun, but it's a powerful book anyway). In it, Mary Daly laments the lack of historical sense amongst feminist students of literature, and recommends some classics that span 3 centuries.

1. Some reflections upon marriage, Mary Astell (1700)
2. A vindication of the rights of woman, Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
3. A room of one's own, Virginia Woolf (1929)
4. The second sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
5. The feminine mystique, Betty Friedan (1963)
I thought the sixth book that she recommends isn't as good as the others, which I mostly blame on the fact that not enough time had passed to distinguish what was presumably at the cutting edge at the time, but that has now lost much of its expressive power. (Sisterhood is powerful, various (1970)) I would therefore recommend:
6. Gyn/Ecology: metaethics of radical feminism, Mary Daly (1975)

In 1995 the women's conference in Beijing calculated that it would take until the year 2745 for women's emancipation to be completed. Reading these books that span 275 years, and that must have been part of the basis for this calculation, really brought home to me what we've let ourselves in for, in transition as well, as I've argued when talking of rebalancing the carbon cycle, and also what I was thinking of when I proposed a new pattern: the Moral yardstick.

P.S. Bonus track for anyone who reads Dutch: Er is een land waar vrouwen willen wonen, Joke Smit (1984)

On Gasland and Feeling

As I write just after sunrise this morning, I can hear birdsong of all kinds and a woodpecker drilling on a pole. A large wasp came in, carefully investigated the frame of the open window, flew slowly out again. The day is bright and the sky is mostly clear. The rain I wrote about on Monday returned with a few drops on the next night but that’s been it for now. The farmers have been watering the fields with those huge versions of sprinklers for several weeks.

Yesterday I got a message from 38 Degrees about the government’s proposals to remove the ‘red tape’ around environmental protection laws (read dismantle the laws protecting the environment) and reduce the UK’s carbon emissions targets. I read the piece by George Monbiot. I will write a letter to my local MP, as I did to protest the recent national forest sell-off plans.

And now I do want to mention what I did on my birthday, even though it was last week. I went to see Gasland with Charlotte at Cinema City. The event was organised by a young post-graduate from UEA and the auditorium was full of students, although from Transition Norwich I only recognised ourselves and Christine. We sat together for the film and the discussion afterwards with a panel of hydro-geologists and environmental experts.

Gasland documents the practice (and effects) of ‘hydraulic fracturing’ for ‘natural’ gas, or gas fracking, which in less than a decade has put thousands of wells all over the United States. Josh Fox decided to make the film after a company wrote asking him for fracking rights on his land in the Catskills. He got into his car and travelled the country to find out what was happening to the people who had sold rights on their land or lived near others who had.

It shows how gas and chemicals from the fracking process pollute the groundwater and poison the land. And how people (and animals) living in the area suffer or die as a result. There were shots of people setting light to the water coming out of their taps. One man said his water turned black overnight. Other people reported frequent severe headaches and worse - cancer and brain lesions.

Up until now in the UK, according to one of the panelists, gas fracking has happened out at sea but not inland. But it's due to start near Blackpool this summer. And what if those environmental laws get dismantled? Just as the US Clean Water Act was?

I think Gasland should be seen by everyone, certainly by anyone in a Transition initiative (see Rob Hopkins' review). Not just because it is interestingly shot, utterly engaging and completely topical. But because it has feeling. The filmmaker has real feeling for his home in the Catskills, the trees, the streams, the birds, the natural world, his fellow banjo players, the people he interviews. For what’s at stake. The kind of feeling we’re all going to need to have any real hope of restoring some kind of balance to our world, already fracked in so many ways.

This feeling was absent from the perfectly rational and well-presented panel discussion after the film. We heard about geological facts, profits and how in the UK our environmental regulations were tougher than in the US (although that was last week!). We were relieved that Norfolk (and I imagine Suffolk too?) was not earmarked for fracking.

I remarked on the curious flatness of the post-film discussion to Charlotte and Christine, who’d both felt it too. It reminded me of Ian McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary*, which talks about how the left (smaller) hemisphere of our brains, the part that deals with facts, figures and stats, has put itself in charge of life, and usurped the right hemisphere’s rightful place, which is in contact with all life and the realm of feeling, and is really the ‘master’. And how this situation has become endemic to and expressed throughout the whole of Western culture with our obsession with numbers and quantification at the expense of the living planet and our own hearts.

One of the best things about being in Transition is the context it provides in which the bigger picture of diminishing fossil fuel reserves, carbon emissions, climate instability and the global economy can be brought to the table and given proper attention. With all our feelings on board. We can admit, as happened in our Low Carbon Cookbook meeting last month, that we don’t really know what the future will hold. Space and time for these discussions are invaluable in a left-hemisphere ruled world where 'getting it all done' and 'busy busy busy' are the norm. Where feeling is left out of the picture in favour of stats and ticking boxes.

And this is why I will go to a film like Gasland on my birthday. Because of the things it includes that are usually left out.

Pics: Josh Fox in the stream outside his house, among Wyoming wells, both from Gasland

*Click here for the PDF of the Introduction