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)

Home Sweet Home

Housing is one of the topics that was discussed early on in the initiative, along with energy and co-housing. We live in a culture that is dominated by buildings and the ownership of property and when Nicole Foss (aka Stoneleigh) gave a talk about the financial crisis last year there was a palpable unease in the hall, as many of us began to imagine how it might affect the future of people's homes in Britain and elsewhere. As austerity cuts begin to displace people from their houses and neighbourhoods, Transition social reporter, Ann Owen looks at what this might mean for all of us.

This week's editor, Caroline, has asked us to look at those things that we feel would be hard to do without. In my mind I ran through the obvious list of bananas, chocolate, ice cream, washing machine, laptop etc, but ultimately, the absence of any of those would not make me terribly unhappy. I'd have to make a few changes, like get the teenagers to do their own laundry, but on the whole, it wouldn't have that much of an impact on my life.

When I look at those things that we now take for granted which might end up beyond our reach as a consequence of peak oil, climate change and financial crises, I can only think of one situation, the prospect of which truly frightens me and that one is homelessness.

About two years ago I was facilitating a Training for Transition course in London at the Hub in Islington. It was a wintermorning, freezing cold, a thin layer of snow on the ground as I came out of the Angel tube station. I turned the corner and there, huddled against the wall, just below some kind of vents that blew slightly warmish air were three people laying on some cardboard in sleepingbags. I'm not an urbanite and therefore not used to the desperate sight of the homeless in winter and what I saw shocked me profoundly. I remember thinking that no way could I just walk by and do nothing. I ran to the Hub, up four flights of stairs, found three large paper cups (the sort that posh coffee comes in) in the recycling, washed them and made some strong, milky tea with lots of sugar. As the first participants to the course started arriving, I apologised and put one in charge of letting the others in, raced back down and got the hot tea to the rough sleepers. One of them was now awake and he couldn't have been more than 17 or 18 years of age. He wrapped his hands gratefully around the paper cup and I hope my gesture made them feel like somebody cared. That Transition course ran deep and intense.

My home is my place of refuge, where I take shelter from the world. It's where my family comes together around the dinner table and we tell each other about our day. It's where we curl up on the settee with the kids and the cats and watch a movie. It's where we've celebrated many birthdays and Christmases, shared sadness over people that passed away and rejoiced at births. On the walls are the pictures of those that are dear to us and through the windows we look out over the productive garden that has taken a lot of hard work to establish. There is the fire pit around which we had many merry gatherings and out front is the slope the kids slide down when we have snow. We've had so many good times here, so many memories that make this place our home.

As this economic downturn worsens and the government cuts deeper into the welfare budget, there is more than a fair chance that in the years to come, we may not be able to remain in the small bungalow our family has called home for the last six years. I have to admit that our situation is not a resilient one as we are heavily dependent on housing benefit to cover the rent. It's not an ideal situation, but then being the proud owner of a mortgage doesn't give you that much more in the way of security in the current economic climate. Jobs are no longer secure or for life, but the mortgage needs its monthly fix, regardless the state of your bank account. I think it's probably the main reason why the talk by Stoneleigh at the Transition Conference two years ago made such an impact. Her advice was to get rid of debt, now, which is easier said than done with a mortgage and it's 20 to 25 years repayment term.

With more than 80% of benefit cuts still to come and unemployment rising, we can expect a sharp rise in both repossessions and homelessness. Thanks to the cap on housing benefits in cities like London, thousands of families will be forced to move away from their communities, schools, family and friends to rental properties in cheaper areas, if they can find them. Without a home it is extremely hard to hold down a job or have consistency in schooling for your children. You're out in the cold, on your own, as you no longer have a community to belong or turn to, as the latter is very much bound to place.

In Mid West Wales there is a shortage of affordable rental homes. When children come to the age where they move out and get their own home, it is often the case that they cannot stay in the same place where they grew up, but have to move away in order to find a a home they can afford. This means that it becomes difficult for grandparents to help with childcare and equally problematic to care for frail and elderly parents. It took us nearly two years before we found the house we now live in, even though we were desperate to move out of the damp, mouldy appartment we were living in. There simply weren't any rental properties that were close enough to my daughter's school and my son's nursery. Council housing is hugely oversubscribed and it takes many years of waiting on a list before you can move in. As a result of this shortage, private rents have gone up by half in the last 10 years, making renting almost more expensive than paying a mortgage.

In the USA ordinary people have started to take action against foreclosures and the evictions that follow. But here in the UK, I haven't heard or seen anything along those lines. I'd be interested to know if any transition initiatives have started to make provision or plans for when the housing chicken comes home to roost. In all my transition activist time, I have never come across an initiative that had a Housing Group. Which doesn't mean that there aren't any, but if there are, they are very few. Maybe most people in the UK feel that “things surely won't get that bad here” or maybe homelessness is such a scary topic that we'd rather not dwell on it. I would love to find out about any transition projects that look at affordable housing. Housing co-ops are an obvious route and I wonder if any arose as a result of the actions of a transition initiative?

I'll await your answers while I treasure my home, feeling grateful for the roof over my head, at least for now.

This post was originally posted on the Social Reporting Project

Everything must change - Transition Themes Week#14

Welcome to our last Transition Themes Week #14. We've been running this blog daily for two and a half years now. We created it originally to reflect back to ourselves and the world what a low carbon life looks and feels like, to show the kind of people we were and explore Transition ideas, particularly the experiences we were then having in the Transition Circles.

The Transition Themes Weeks were begun to report on the work of TN's projects - energy, economics, food, bees, Low Carbon Cookbook, Magdalen Street Celebration. They were there to keep us all in touch and functioned like a network in a resilient eco-system, working to connect and feedback to the whole initiative and different affiliated groups in Norwich. They began on Mondays with an introduction to the week and a post about Transition communications, both in the city and within the Network.

Today some of the groups featured in these weeks have fallen away, people have come and gone from the blog. And though there is still a committed core of us, life is pulling us in other directions. Some people are too busy to write, others have stronger commitments, and this puts a strain on other bloggers to keep up the momentum. Weeks are becoming harder to fill, to get a full house of contributors. So after June 20, summer solstice and The Festival of Transition (and my birthday!) we will become a more occasional blog. We're each taking a day and posting when we can. Hope you will still continue to join us!

Some reflections on the editing business and Transition

So everything changes. That's something you learn for sure in Transition. You also learn to reflect and see how you might have done things differently - not had you known then, but if you were to start again now. Now I think I would think twice about creating editorial roles, and what this entails in grassroots communications. Communications have a low priority within Transition. It is something that is done by someone, and is useful insofar as it works as a marketing or recruiting tool. Even though in Anthony Sampson's analysis of power in Britain the media holds the second greatest ability to influence events (way beyond government), creating our own media and forging a new culture is not considered important.

So now I would get clear on how communications, specifically editorial, are regarded within the rest of the enterprise. Secondly, I would hesitate to take an editor's role, even though this has been crucial in setting up both our Norwich blogs (and also the Social Reporting Project and Transition Free Press).

In traditional journalism, nothing happens without the editor. They are the deciders, the ones who say yes, maybe, and no way Jose. Everyone has their role around this decision-making process. I've worked with some great editors. Some I got on with, and some I didn't. There's usually something you don't like about the editor. That's because a good editor cares about the edition, and not you. It's not personal, it's just how it goes. Everyone understands that. The editor's word is final.

In Transition no one understands that, because you are not working professionally, you are working out of conviction, or because it suits you. You are loyal to the main storyline only as far as it works for you personally. Most people join a Transition project, as a hobby or an adjunct to their normal lives. So as an editor you can't really operate very well. No one is getting paid, so you have to be nice to people or you get a blank page.

At first people in the initiative didn't want an editorial crew at all. We started the blog along trad lines with ex-professionals - with an editor (me), managing ed (Jon), sub-editor (Mark) and designer (Andy) - which proved really useful for setting things up. Then the bloggers who came on board wanted to be a "community" and have "ownership" and tell the people doing the editorial work what to do. Censorship came up, and control. Egos clashed. Tempers flew. It felt like the most wonderful thing I had ever done and possibly the most horrible. That was a rocky moment. The Sturm und Drang moment all creative enterprises undergo. Eventually the dust settled and everyone found their rhythm.

The blog got published through thick and thin. We didn't miss a beat. I kept going because everything, I saw, was grist for the mill. There were endless opportunities for getting over oneself on a daily basis and exploring new territories. Sometimes we liked each others posts and sometimes we didn't. We learned a new tolerance, I think. I did certainly. I realised this was an alchemical space, where things got aired and changed, and we learned how to work in diversity. How we allowed each other to speak after millennia of silence.

For a while, maybe a year, things went really well. We had a full quota of bloggers and invited guest contributors on board. We had a new readership and were cross-posted in several places. We met each quarter to decide the rota and took turns to lead weeks. Then the initiative around which our blog is based started to lose momentum. Some of the projects faded. Some people shifted camp to Norwich FarmShare. Some of us started to be two-timers on the Social Reporting Project. I started to feel I was carrying the load and filling up gaps.

So here we are in May 2012 at a moment of shift . . . The editorial crew is a beautiful structure but it only works when a certain number of people are writing stuff together for real. In a grassroots blog where people are in it for the feeling it gives them, or as promotion, the editor becomes simply a useful coordinator who can be depended on to hold the fort, carry the rap, pick up the ball etc. You end up being a kind of nanny, or secretary. You feel that you are putting yourself on the line, doing all the hard Transition work, while other people stay within their comfort zones, in their conventional lives.

So I think to run a good community blog I would get clear on who exactly is doing the change, who is loyal to the cause, and make sure the load is fairly shared. I'd rotate the editor role, right from the start. If you don't have an editor at all there is an emptiness to everything. A bit like a ship without a captain, or a kitchen without a cook. There's no one at the helm, no presence there. No fire. No food. No home station.

I'm not sure how it would work. Or if it would work. Maybe that's the place we are right now in Transition. The kitchen only works with a cook, and the cook is tired of being treated as a servant. She is wondering what she is doing amongst the pots and pans, and telling everyone: serve yourself. The cook is not just me, she is all the real-time Transitioners who feel this way, she is everyone on the planet serving the Empire, those who dine upstairs at our expense. She is the earth too and all creatures and plants who sail with her. Taking off her apron, kicking off her shoes.

Transition training; with fellow Transition comms people taking part in a Project Sharing Engine day, London, 2011; Transition bloggers in Chapelfield Gardens: Ann Owen's market garden, visiting the social reporters

powaqqatsi or breaking the spell

(Capitalism) has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells (Karl Marx)

It's a new house by the river. It's not the Antilla mansion that Arundhati Roy writes about (where I found this quote) in her searing portrait of industrialisation and land grabbing in India. but it's big. A gleaming white monstrosity, overlooking the silvery River Blyth, its dun-coloured marshes and water meadows, all the way down to the sea. A big house with a view, the kind of mausoleum that Sebald might have written about in his melancholic walk, contemplating the rise and fall of Empire along this coast.

Something about this house strikes me: the way it is so out of synch with its surroundings, exuding its "mystery and a quiet menace". It would be more at home in Malibu or on the Riviera. And yet being at home is not the point of such places.

One of the meadows it overlooks was once known as Bloody Marsh. It was named after a battle in 1624 when the landowner, Sir Robert Brooke, set up a boarding house for men and dogs in the village of Walberswick and four men were killed trying to maintain their commoners' rights. The enclosure of common land in England began with the Norman conquest, with the foreign kings who claimed the wild forests for their hunting grounds. It was completed by Parliament who claimed the rest of the wild land for agriculture.

Reading Roy's account of the relocation of people in the forests of India, of millions of villagers displaced by the building of giant dams, hounded by armies hired by corporations, of all the present land grabs that are resisted in Guatemala, Africa and China, is to see a certain pattern prevailing in the world. We forget we were once those indigenous people; that the Sandlings of Suffolk suffered the worst pauperism in the country. We are unaware that we have inherited a story that justifies such monstrous deeds. But most of all, that we have been led believe that to live in this big house is to find our rightful place in the world. Our own fairy palace.

Dispelling the Sorcerer

"They are so powerful," I am sitting next to Anthony Smith who once came to our Transition Stranger's circle and introduced the documentary, The Age of Stupid (which he helped fund) at Cinema City just before Copenhagen. Things are depressing at 10:10. There is not enough money and the political and corporate climate deniers are vociferous.

"They are so powerful," I am sitting opposite Ross Jackson, writer and businessman from Copenhagen, whose book Occupy World Street is just about to published. We have all just been to a talk at the Assembly House called Guardians of the Future where he explained his road map for a new economic future. I am talking about shifts that happen on ground level. I have worked with grassroots organisations for years, he says, what we need is a new political structure.

I am not a politician, an economist or a business man. But I am a writer, who knows human history depends on the decision of a people to follow a storyline, or change it mid-sentence. All narrators, by dint of their craft, are prodigious rememberers. It is their job to remind the people of the right way to walk the earth. Trackers of the collective imagination, they learn to recognise an illusion when they come across it: they hold it up to the light and test it against the physical reality of space and time.

Storytellers know, for example. that is no sorcerer is powerful for ever, that all trances can be broken. At some point the small child, the youngest daughter, the third brother, the fool, comes and challenges the magician, cuts through briars and restores beauty to the kingdom. One day the sister runs widdershins and finds her brother trapped in the lake of reason. He or she doesn't believe in the stories, and so asks the emperor, the fisher king, the boy with the frozen heart the question that breaks the spell. How come you have no clothes on? What is wrong with you, man? Shall we go home?

As folk tales and history tell us: you never know when those people arise. The Arab Spring showed us tyrants can be toppled. Whole autocratic regimes can collapse overnight. The Berlin Wall can come down. Aung San Suu Kyi can be released from house arrest. The big houses along the East Anglian seaboard can fall into ruins. These are not big moves organised by PR agencies or oil barons. These are moves of small and ordinary people, holding out for something else. They are the spirit of the times.

Maybe it's because I spent a decade looking at the frills and furbelows of the ancien regime, documented its predilection for glamour and grand views. Maybe when you are brought up in the ambitious atmosphere of politicians and public schoolboys you can see and feel so clearly how everything is done at the expense of the human heart. Like dragons, the 1% amass great hoards and compete with each other, in a world constructed entirely of will and ego and its unbearable self-pity and self-importance. How everything depends on the 99% believing in the ultimate superiority of a fairy-tale elite - presidents and queens, stars and celebrities.

The story we are taught to believe in is the story of power. Power sends everyone in the room and in the world into a trance. What breaks its spell is not to desire that power, nor any of the material things it brings, the big house, the sweetness of revenge. It is to know deep in your inner core that those who live out their dragonish nature at the expense of their hearts, never inherit the kingdom. And nor do the servants who worship, or despise them.

What has this to do with Transition? We are the small people in the villages and neighbourhoods, eating in our community kitchens, sharing our tools and produce from our gardens. We are the people walking by the mansion on the way to the river, who know the territory inch by inch. We are the people who tell each other a new and ancestral story, who live within the generous aesthetic of the heart, and not in the rulership of the will. We are commoners and we are not alone. We walk alongside millions of people everywhere, taking matters into our own hands. We are the people who know the way home.

*Powaqqatsi is the second film in a trilogy by the director Godfrey Reggio. The word comes from the Hopi language which means "parasitic life" or"world made by a sorcerer at the expense of others".

Avenue to the Big House from Patience (After Sebald); Huichol people defend their ancestral land; poster for Powaqqatsi; the river Blyth

Risk, or Why competition is bad for us

On Wednesday of last week I had my good friend James over for the last time before he moves away from Norwich. Having noticed it in the loft a few days before, I proposed we played Risk, the classic "World Strategy" board game, where you have to conquer the world by battling and out-witting your opponent. It was a tense game... well, it was for the first two or three rounds, but after a few lucky dice rolls from James, it became quite obvious that I would never be able to claw back enough territories to get back into the game.

And this got me asking myself "is Risk unrealistic in giving such an unfair advantage to the person who is already winning?" and when I thought about it, the answer is no. It happens all around us. Wherever there is competition - that is to say, a truly competitive environment - anyone who is already ahead has advantage over people who are lagging behind. A trailing runner always has to run not just as fast as but faster than their competition even just to tie with them.

So it is with races, so it is with Risk, and so it is with business. The latter is the one that most concerns me, because favouring business that is already ahead favours the large, long-established businesses of yesterday, rather than new, socially and environmentally responsible businesses of today. To be financially viable and provide a competitive return to its investors, a new business would have to be a lot more economically efficient than its competitors.

Labour Efficiency

Since the existing company already (probably) has the advantage of the economy of scale and materials, the new company will probably need to make itself efficient through labour efficiency - i.e. fewer or lower-paid workers for the same economic output. If they're a social enterprise, perhaps they might even use volunteer labour where the large business has to pay its staff, in order to be able to compete. My point is that by being new, and being required to be that much more efficient than its competitors to be able to compete in the marketplace, jobs will be lost, margins will be squeezed and the company will have to choose between its ethics or its bottom-line. If it is successful, then its competitors will have to become more competitive too, and job losses will take place there instead (or as well!).

You may be asking "what's wrong with that? Efficiency is good, isn't it?". Well, material efficiency is good (although there is a problem associated with material efficiency which I'll get onto in a minute). However, labour efficiency is not good, because it is essentially what puts people out of work. OK, it's good for the particular company that is racing ahead and making profits, and that company's investors, but on average over society as a whole, labour efficiency means putting people out of work, paying them benefits out of taxes, which in turn puts more pressure on small businesses to maximise their labour efficiency because the small businesses are inevitably less able to avoid taxes through the use of tax havens and other tax-dodging schemes.

Material Efficiency

As I mentioned above, material efficiency is a good thing. Doing the same thing with fewer physical resources is always good news for the environment: less energy wasted in the extraction of materials, less energy wasted in processing and less energy wasted in transportation. However, going back to the competition model, if a socially responsible company uses less material to make a product, the competitive industrialist sees this as an opportunity to take up the resources saved and put them to another profit-making venture. Thus, material efficiency only serves to free up physical resources for those who are competitive, rather than serve any societal or environmental good.

This dynamic mechanism both relies on and feeds consumerism to take up the slack caused by more efficient production, and is the reason why competitive businesses feel such need to advertise to ensure we keep on spending and consuming, to make up for any decreases in economic throughput caused by material efficiency.

When does this all stop?

Imagine if, like in Risk, the entire point of the game of political life was to conquer the world. A scary thought, I know, but I think the result would turn out much like is does in Risk. There would be one nation, that by directing all its resources to the conquering of other nations would end up taking over the world. Thankfully, this hasn't happened, with the recognition at the end of the cold war that nations do much better for both themselves and others if they cooperate with other nations rather than consider them their enemies.

I'm not saying that there is no place for competitive systems in society - there are times when a free market is the only way of reaching an equilibrium of resource distribution within a particular closed system, but at the same time, shouldn't society recognise the flaw in competitive systems as a means of distributing resources fairly, and instead look at ways in which benefit is felt by all, whether or not they have a competitive advantage?

Image: Risk, the boardgame, photo by the author

Who wants to talk about economics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Occupying the Conversation

Wednesday 30th November, Lowestoft I've just got back from the High Noon Rally and public sector workers' strike march up Lowestoft High Street and the meeting afterwards where I sat with Kate and Rita and Charlotte in the packed United Reform Church, listening to people speak about the effects of the government’s austerity measures on their lives, pensions, families and future prospects.

Teachers, therapists, cooks, retired gardeners and trade unions representatives all spoke about how the government (and the system) was ennabling more than ever the richest to rob the poorest, pushing mercilessly for privatisation, for fewer and fewer workers’ rights or job security and longer hours for less pay. For YEARS to come. How it considers ordinary people as being of no value whatsoever. Like the starlings Jon wrote about on Monday.

A woman who had worked as a public gardener for thirty years told how her annual pension of £2,500 was officially considered ‘gold-plated’. Another who had been a teacher for twenty years said she loved her work, it was all she had ever wanted to do, but the prospect of having to wait until she was 68 to retire made her feel like she was being squeezed of all her life force and there would be nothing left by then. And how that marred the love she felt for her job.

“It’s as if [the people running the system] want you to die so they don’t have to pay you any pension,” said someone from the floor. Everyone cheered.

One primary schoolteacher had left a well-paid media job in London to come and teach in Suffolk after he discovered that all the money he was paying into his private pension would bring him almost nothing when he retired.

“I keep hearing this one word,” he said. “It just keeps speaking to me - solidarity. Now more than ever we need to stick together. We can’t afford not to. Solidarity.”

The atmosphere of the march and the meeting in the church was alive, attentive and engaged. People were listening to each other. I wondered whether I should “stand up to speak” something about Transition or Occupy, mention fossil fuel depletion and energy constraints and the preparations we are making in our local initiatives in the face of these along with climate change and economic instability. After all, Transition is where most of my attention has been focussed for the past four years.

But I felt a bit tongue-tied (even though I hadn’t said anything), and there didn’t seem to be an opening. I thought, well I’ll write about the rally tomorrow and bring in the links with Transition and Occupy then. Better go and get on with that Transition Norwich bulletin. So I tapped fellow Sustainable Bungay transitioner Kate on the shoulder and mouthed “Got to go, see you soon…”

At that moment a woman stood up and brought Occupy into the meeting. I sat back down. She’d been to OccupyLSX and Occupy Norwich. It was really important to consider this movement, she said, because its presence in all these cities of the world brings constant attention to the vast economic and social inequality which exists and is exacerbated by the present gormengahst of the global financial system. Because of Occupy more and more people are seeing what they didn’t see before. And as Arundhati Roy once said talking about the social and environmental ravages of dambuilding in India, once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

And take care not to just side with the mainstream media when they talk about finding drug needles and the presence of alcohol at the London Occupy site, the speaker reminded us. This is the middle of London. Every day food is provided free and there are tents to sleep in. Of course you’re going to get homeless people, maybe even people on drugs. That’s what’s going on in our society. “I’ve been there a couple of times and I’ve noticed that the homeless are included. Maybe included for the first time in a long time. Not everybody here may agree with the protesters but it is a non-violent movement, with a lot of young people concerned about a future with few prospects. Just like we are here."

The people in the room cheered again and the retired gardener with the ‘gold-plated’ pension stood up and exhorted everyone to make sure their trades union leaders supported Occupy.

This was the cue for Kate and me. We put our hands up. Kate went first, introducing both of us and Sustainable Bungay and a few core Transition concepts around building community resilience. This is the woman who a few years ago at one of our core group meetings stood up and delivered a two minute talk on Peak Oil and Climate Change with no props and you just got it. It was also Kate who stood up at a climate conference in Bungay in 2007 and exhorted the people in the room to get together to come up with some solutions. That was the beginning of Sustainable Bungay. So she had to speak first! And it made me feel far less nervous about standing up to speak.

I said one of the most important things about Occupy was how it opened up and held a space for conversations to happen which aren’t normally granted any space at all, certainly not in the mainstream public discourse.

And what could be more mainstream than the vast and growing social inequality wrought by a small elite via an oppressive machine-like system that ultimately has no one’s best interests at heart? This is a time when our very humanity is at stake. We need to be talking with each other.

Pete then said how at OccupyLSX he had witnessed an intense conversation start up amongst a group of besuited city workers visiting the site. They were talking about it, too.

I‘ve visited OccupyNorwich a few times now and experienced this openness, both in listening to what other people have to say about our human situation and in being listened to myself. And I've encountered warmth and intelligence each time.

As I left the rally for the library yesterday a young woman at the door offered me a ticket for the Murphy's Lore gig later in the evening. I'd have loved to, I said, I really like Murphys Lore. But I have to write an article and help prepare a bulletin. Help keep the spaces open for those conversations...

Pics: High Noon Rally in Lowestoft yesterday; Marching up the High Street; Occupy Norwich general assembly; It's the private sector too; You don't have to be a Socialist Worker to read the Socialist Worker, Kate and I at the public sector strike meeting

I'm not a blogger...!

... I just happen to blog!

That is, in my opinion, one of the wonderful things about This Low Carbon Life and blogs in general. These aren't corrupted journalists seeking whatever bit of news will bring in the most cash. These are ordinary people, and what those ordinary people want to talk about. Naturally, at the moment, Transition issues and the economics behind them are on everyone's minds, so many blogs reflect this.

But before I introduce my chosen blog, I'm going to give you a brief insight into how I normally get my news.

I don't usually get any newspapers, nor do I watch much TV. However, I spend large portions of my time on the internet, and specifically on Facebook, for better or for worse, but the better, I think, being the fact that hundreds of people recommend articles and videos. Discussion about politics, current affairs and even religion is not the taboo on Facebook that you might find it in your local pub, and, amongst my Facebook friends at least, these deep philosophical questions are often welcomed.

So, on Facebook I recommend you join groups that share your values, and therefore get the news that you want when its members post links, and then discuss through comments. Don't forget to post links for other people too! Transition Norwich has its own group on there, so does FarmShare, and I also follow the Occupy Norwich group, which provides me with much reading on wealth inequality.

And on the subject of wealth inequality, I come to my recommended blog, "Make Wealth History", which has the tagline "Because the earth can't afford our lifestyle".

This blog is the work of Jeremy Williams, who I very briefly met at "Small Is... Festival" last year. It includes articles on overfishing, monetary policy, resource depletion, climate change as well as book reviews and his weekly feature "What We Learned This Week", which gives links to other interesting resources.

He's got Transition Towns as one of the "Solutions" listed at the top of the site, and writes articles about us from time to time, which is nice!

The latest "What we learned this week" feature:

What we learned this week

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Jeremy

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• What it looks like if you print out every photo uploaded to Flickr over one 24hour day.

• When the BBC’s critically acclaimed series Frozen Planet is shown in the US, it will not include the episode that focuses on climate change.

• I saw a map of all the Occupy protests the other day, and my favourite has to be the bold one-man effort of Occupy Paisley.

• Fans of visualisations, knock yourselves out with the Atlas of Economic Complexity.

We Are Here

Today I'm writing a post in solidarity with my fellow Transitioners at GrowHeathrow, who are going to court tomorrow to defend their home. For people who don't know about this key Transition initiative, do visit their website and look at everything they have been engaged in in the last two years. I visited everyone there last month (Joe Rake in their communications crew is one of our Social Reporters) and it is really a dynamic and friendly place. The group have cleared 30 tonnes of rubble and made a lush and vibrant garden. It is totally off-grid and the first Tarsands-free community in the UK. They have installed a wind turbine and solar panels and cook with wood donated by a local tree surgeon. It's a true community space where they hold frequent workshops and decide everything by consensus. If you wanted a vision of how the future could be, the kind of future Transitioners frequently talk about or imagine might be possible, you need to look no further. Everyone is welcome.

GrowHeathrow is also on squatted land. Their kitchen, living space and workrooms have been converted from two ruined greenhouses, their garden from derelict and poisoned earth, and tomorrow the owners are taking the group to court to try and evict them (in spite of the fact that the local community and residents' associations support the initiative and attend many of their events).

So today I'm writing about ownership and property, alongside our Social Reporting week on Economics, and to question the violence which those who own and possess use against the people who wish only to live on the earth as real human beings together (the brutality of the US police against the Occupy protestes, for example or the UK police evicting the travellers at Dale Farm). And how, as the banking system puts a stranglehold around the resources of every country, we are being challenged to come together and defend our right to live peaceably.

And also to rethink our attitude.

Everywhere, from corporate land grabs in Africa to the IMF seizure of assets in countries such as Greece, the rights to common ownership are being eroded. Indigenous people are being evicted from their ancestral lands, small farmers from land they have cultivated for centuries. In Britain new laws around squatting are now going through Parliament just at the point that many are losing their homes. To stand up against these measures we need to overcome any fear and hostility we might hold towards the dispossessed. We need to see our heartless attitude as a result of centuries of indoctrination by the Empire, as the 1% have systematically and violently seized common lands and native territories everywhere and asserted their rights to domination.

How does this fit with Transition? Why am I writing about the activist initiative GrowHeathrow when I live in East Anglia? Because the resilience of communities everywhere in the future will be measured insofar as they can embrace a culture of shared space and fellow feeling.

As Rob Hopkins said last night, summing up his talk at Transition Norwich's Third Birthday Celebration, most of the projects within the Transition movement are based on co-operatives and community-held assets. A brief look at The Transition Companion will immediately show you a wealth of social enterprises, community gardens, farms, energy companies, bakeries, breweries. Shared knowledge, shared meals. At the heart of the movement is our radical breakout from individualism, a relinquishing of a culture that champions private and exclusive property, to embracing one that celebrates shared neighbourhoods and shared lives. Habitats made for the benefit of all beings, not just for 1% of the human population. Our challenge is to let go of our addiction to possessing things and instead hold those same things in common - tools, cars, food, land, space.

You might not want to sleep in a tent at Occupy Norwich, nor live in a converted greenhouse in Sipson, but the spirit that Occupy and GrowHeathrow embody is core to Transition initiatives everywhere. Ours not yours.

Watch this video. Be with them tomorrow.

Defend Grow Heathrow! from Joshua Bregman on Vimeo

GrowHeathrow; Poster for The Garden, a documentary about the 14-acre community farm, South Central, in Los Angeles. the largest of its kind in the United States. In 2006 the owners sent in bulldozers and razed it to the ground; well wishing photo sent to the GrowHeathrow photo campaign; OccupyBeloMonte (Dam), Brazil.

Helping Your Community Out First

Today's Outreach slot in our Transition Themes Week is cross-posted from the Transition Network's Social Reporting Project where TN blogger, Kerry Lane, reports from her new home initiative in Glasgow. This entry was originally part of our Diversity and Social Justice Week.

When you are struggling to engage people it is tempting to just label them as selfish and apathetic (NB. Slightly sore point as no-one turned up to my screening of Just Do It tonight). But Catrina's thought provoking blog and my experiences earlier this week have reminded me of why valuing diversity and not just writing off the 'unengaged' is so key to creating a better society.

A wee look from the other direction

This week I completed my first Home Energy Audits, an integral part of one of our projects where we go to peoples homes and do both a structural and behavioural survey to try and help them save energy at home. We also lend them an OWL energy monitor so that they can visualise their energy use.

It is lovely to be able to help people out and give them advice if they don't understand how their boiler works or which energy tariff they are on. But I was left wishing that there was more that I could do for this lassie living in a Housing Association flat with her wee boy. The building was as structurally heat retentive as a sieve and the heating system was highly inefficient and very expensive. As much as we tried to give advice on behaviour change and possible DIY options, all of us knew that really unless the housing association took moral responsibility for providing more energy efficient housing for its tenants, not much could change. Of course if any changes were to be made, these would inevitably be passed on to the tenants as an increase in rent anyway.

This experience made me understand, in a way I never truly had before, why a lot of people at the university do not feel like putting lots of time and effort into environmental projects. When plain survival and protecting your family are such priorities is it any wonder that there is little energy left for making awkward lifestyle changes with no obvious personal benefits? It is not that people are not sympathetic to environmental issues or that they are essentially selfish, they honestly do not have the luxury of being able to care.

Example two

My lack of audience tonight illustrates this beautifully. I could just throw my hands in the air, despair at a world full of people who do not care and cannot be bothered and give up.

Now as it is my job giving up isn't really an option, but besides this I am choosing to take a different view. Many students actually live a fair way from the university, they have children, jobs and other commitments. They come on to campus for their lectures and then go home. They don't even like to have gaps in between lectures where they have to hang around campus. Now most students would think of this as a great opportunity to go and work in the library and IT labs, but they would rather be at home with their wee ones or ready to go straight away if they get a call from work (perfectly reasonable). All of these pressures on time mean that even though they would love to be able to do extracurricular activities, they are bottom of a very big pile of priorities.

One of the politics lecturers had come to lead a discussion after the film, so we had a chat and we are going to try and put on another showing, but this time we are going to look at all of the politics timetables and find a likely gap, at least straight after the last lecture, but ideally in between them. This way students do not have to hang around on campus for 4 hours and it will be a more integral part of their course rather than something separate. As after all it should be a very useful case study.

I have found when talking to people that they do care, they just do not have the time or energy to make an effort. So it is about trying to help them out and make it as easy for them as possible.

Shrinking the gap

On the train home I was chatting with one of my colleagues about how so many of the measures put in place to alleviate poverty by government and other institutions, just end up benefiting those who are better off. Those who have to live in inefficient rented accommodation cannot take advantage of government insulation grants, they cannot afford to choose the cheapest deals, such as paying by direct debit. Instead they end up on pre-payment meters, paying the most for their electricity of all of us. A horrendous exploitation of those with no other choice.

Those who go back to education to try and get themselves a better job do not have the luxury of being able to study properly because they have so many other responsibilities and worries to juggle at the same time.

A society that allows this to happen, that lets so many people slip through the net can never be resilient. And while people are still trapped in these situations by society they are never going to embrace the transition message because they do not have the ability or the energy to change.

Although in some ways it is fairly obvious, it is important to reiterate that unless we address social injustice as part of Transition we have little hope of being sustainable in areas where it manifests itself. For this (and other) reasons I fully support the addition of equality into the Transition Initiatives statement.

Before we can expect low income communities to embrace Transition, we first have to help them into a situation where they can. Kerry Lane

Photos: A leaky house, Just Do It poster, Social justice