All the latest - Transition Themes Week #13 - Communications

Welcome to our Transition Themes Week #13, where we will be looking at all the latest news and developments in Transition Norwich.

We start, as usual, in the communications dept, where alongside this and other blogs, your busy ed has been starting up a national Transition newspaper. Several of us are designing a preview edition we hope to publish in May, both for everyone's feedback and to find some investment. Can print media be a social enterprise? Can we sustain ourselves in tricky times? The thinking behind this venture is that though on-line comms is brilliant, quick and relatively easy (and cheap) to do, print goes to places that no website can. You have to deliberately search for a blog, but a paper you can come across by surprise. And so its appeal will be broad enough to go beyond Transition circles.

Sustainable Bungay's newsletter, for example, which comes out every quarter, goes into the local cafes, library, theatre, shops and waiting rooms. Anyone can pick it up and see what kinds of projects we are engaged in, what Transition is about. Even if people don't come to events they know that in their town there are projects looking at grey water systems, sowing a wild meadow for bees, organising summer cycle rides, garden share, give and take days etc. There's a whole culture happening out there. Like a rhythm that's giving the beat for a new song.

It's harder to produce print for sure. Our Spring SB newsletter was edited by Mark, with skill-share behind-the-scenes from me. You would not have wanted to come round our house last week for all the swearing going on. Getting copy and pictures to fit and look good is the main technical hurdle you face. But the greatest challenge is commissioning copy that works objectively, from writers who can listen to others, ask questions, report back. Your story has to work "cold", out of the warm and friendly context of a blog. Anyone has to be able to pick it up and "get it". It also has to reflect back to other Transitioners the life and soul of the enterprise. On a blog like This Low Carbon Life I can write from the subjective "I" or inclusive "we" position. In a paper you have to write from a different perspective, more as a witness, observer and interviewer.

In the Transition Free Press we have an additional challenge in that everyone engaged in the paper so far is in a different initiative: Mike Grenville (production) and Tamzin Pinkerton (food) in Forest Row, Alexis Rowell (News) in Belsize Park, London, Trucie Henderson (designer) en route back to England from Australia and Jay Tompt (business advisor) in Totnes. Equally our Transition stringers are far and wide, from Erik Curren (Transition Voice) in Virginia, to Filipa Pimentel (International Hubs) at the moment in Brussels. But this is also the strength of Transition, being able to bring together a wide range of subjects and maintain coherence in a time when everything feels as if it is fragmenting and losing the plot.

This requires a whole different approach, what some people call Social Reporting, writing in the field, on-side. In the old-style journalism years you could get on a train (or a plane) to find the story. Part of its lure and edge came from the fact you were entering unknown territory. In the new media the dynamic is different, you are deliberately finding common ground. For our preview issue of TFP our main interview is with Shaun Chamberlin (see above) author of The Transition Timeline, which he and I conducted over Skype. We had only met briefly twice before, but we were able to talk at great length, because many of the subjects we discussed we had written about, talked about, thought about ourselves. So the conversation was a meeting point between two people, one talking the other listening, rather than a two-sided adversial encounter.

So this is the strength of the paper: the Press can provide a showcase to reflect that common ground between Transitioners and our fellows in other low-carbon, progressive, cultural movements and organisations. It is our hope that it will communicate the strength of diversity and co-operation in a time of increasingly unstable and unsustainable monoculture.

big story, small story

At our last bloggers meeting we watched In Transition 2.0. I'd been asked to write a review of the film for the new on-line magazine STIR and wanted to watch it in good company! One of the main things that struck me about the film was how many of the 17 initiatives filmed showed how they had responded to crisis. The nuclear disaster in Japan, the economic downturn in Pittsburgh and Portugal, the earthquakes in New Zealand. How, when push comes to shove, all the work Transition groups have been doing quietly over the years suddenly comes into its own.

In the paper we hope to bring this sense of urgency and our ability to look at reality into focus, and show what resilience looks like on the ground - people coming up with innovative projects, working together, creating something that wasn't there before. We'll be looking at the hard stuff (fracking) as well as the joyful (baking bread). We plan to feature all the big downshift news from alternative energy to the gift economy, as well as some of the smaller practical stories - medicine gardens and off-grid celebrations - plus comments, reports and reviews of the latest books and documentaries. Oh, and football. Watch out for that one on the back page!

None of this would have happened without this small home-grown blog. Because the seeds of creating a new alternative Transition media started here in October 2009. Many of the people who helped shape it are still on it and after two and a half years we still publish every day (except most Sundays). The key to media - like all projects - is consistency. Keeping to that all-important deadline! Ideas and visions are easy, manifestation and maintaining mometum are work. You can write a star blog in a moment of inspiration, but can you write one every week, on a Monday morning at 6am before you go to work? That's hard going for most of our bloggers, who are writing in their spare time. But not, as it turns out, if the rewards we get for doing it are strong enough. If you feel you are part of something that matters.

So introducing the week here is John, Chris, Elena, Jon, Mark, Lucy and Jo, reporting and reflecting on what is happening outside in the fields (Norwich FarmShare/Community Bees), in our kitchens (Low Carbon Cookbook), in the city centre (Energy Lookouts!), in the workshop (Bicycle Links), in the allotment and unseen on the roads (ToadWatch).

Watch this space!

Photos: Shaun Chamberlin reading the news; Dan McTiernan at the HandMade Bakery; Transition Amoreiras workshop on working with horses, Portugal; fracking tail pond, USA; Tierney of Norwich FarmShare (copyright Tony Buckingham, all rights reserved)

on being an eco traveller - part two, going on holiday

I am starting to think about my holidays this year although I realise that according to telly adverts I am way too late. I should have done it in January just after I bought a sofa for Christmas.

I do not holiday by plane so that restricts me to Britain or Europe. In the past I have had amazing holidays in Scotland and Wales. In my mind a holiday should have a number of elements:

1.You need to be far enough away to not nip back home to check you have not been burgled and that the guinea pigs are OK.

2.You have to be either more luxurious (posh hotel) or slumming it (camping) so that it feels different.

3. You have to be convincingly out of range of mobile contact. This is not the same as actually being out of range but allows you to not be in touch with various people.

These elements in place I can relax and enjoy myself. As a child I loved going to our caravan at Kelling Heath in North Norfolk. We still have it and holiday in it as well as renting it out ( contact me for details!). It is set in a woodland with a village centre. In practice this means a pub, outdoor pool and shop that sells as interesting selection of tent pegs, bread rolls and t-shirts made from bamboo. Oh yes you heard right. In amongst the camping equipment are an assortment of clothes by Braintree.

You can also travel there by train from Norwich although it can take a while and is partly by steam train.

One of my best days ever came about not through any environmental concerns but just because we ran out of money and could not travel far. We spend the morning catching crabs at Stiffkey which being vegetarian at the time we did with feta cheese. The crabs had soon had enough and started just grabbing the cheese off the hook and then scarpering. So we just laid in the grass and watched clouds drift by and tried to imagine what they looked like. It was one of the best days out I ever had.

On being an eco traveller- part one, family relationships

So its Easter and I am at my dads for the weekend. I am wanting to be as green as possible but how do you do this and keep family relationships together? I remember announcing my vegetarianism years ago and my mum going into a panic and forever cooking me salmon whenever I visited. In some ways being environmentally friendly can be a similar challenge. Vegetarianism has become part of peoples' understanding of someones dietary needs in the same way you wouldn't serve nuts to someone who is allergic. So how much might someone accommodate your needs as an environmentalist if you went to stay and how much might you inflict your ideas on them?

I normally travel by train to my Dad's and then we drive around in his car. He lives in a small suburb of Peterborough that has its own pub, church and corner shop so it is possible to go several days without a car trip. I arrived with a free range chicken from Manor Farm Shop in Little Fransham. My brother arrived the next day and cooked an amazing Coq Au Vin with it. We made the rest into a chicken soup the next evening. We walked to see my mother in her care home nearby which is an easy distance. Afterwards my brother spent a happy hour in the loft re-discovering things I had forgotten about and I came away with a Ukranian lamp for my house shaped like a globe and a tin to put brownies in.

We visited a local Medieval Tower and picked up some tips on living without fossil fuels but when we got home we discovered we had no servants to make a fire and resorted to the electric cooker to boil a ham for tea. My girlfriend and I then travelled to London and stayed with her sister. I had cooked some brownies as a thank you for the accommodation and we handed over some handmade birthday cards made by her children.

So are you impressed? Pretty transitional eh? Well yes as I didn't mention the two trips to Sainsburys, the car drive to London, forgetting to take the brownies and mum being asleep so we had a wasted journey. But then that is why it is called Transition. We are not there yet and neither is anyone else. So be gentle on yourself and enjoy your relatives and friends. Next week I will be back to trying to find a way to work without a car so I arrive on time, looking professional and not too sweaty.

Norwich is Pants!

No I am not joining in Harry Hill and any other comedian's cheap jibes at our marvelous city but trying to come up with a witty title to my blog. For a number of years I have been interested in the manufacture of clothing in Britain. So how happy was I to see both a programme about making pants and also a workshop to make them in Magdalen Street both in the same month?

Mary Portas has a new programme called Bottom Line in which she attempts to re-energize the British manufacturing industry by creating her own line of British Knickers. I have not seen all the episodes but I followed a link to the House of Fraser where they appeared to be sold out of said garments, although Liberty London still have some. So things must be going well. I am assuming this is because of peoples desire to buy British rather than their advertising slogan which implies you might buy your pants for the milkman (I wonder if milkandmore who we get our milk delivered from had the same idea, I always thought that 'more' meant a couple of strawberry yoghurts but now I am starting to wonder)

Back to the workshop. My excitement mounted as I entered Makeplace and saw the women gathered at the tables. We were then shown to our sewing machines that had been loaded ready with the correct colour cotton. We opened up our pants kits with ready cut material and soon we were making our own pants. The teacher explained how she had become disillusioned with the manufacture of clothing in China, mainly with the working conditions and now she runs courses to upcyle t-shirts into pants. 'What is upcycling?' one young sewer asks? In my head my hand has shot up to answer: Oh God, I know this, pick me! Pick me!'

I remain calm while the instructor describes how it differs from re-cyling and how it sounds better to say upcyling pants than recycling pants.

After a couple of hours we each have a pair of pants and pose for a group photograph.

You may notice that I got the best deal in that we all paid the same price and I got the most material!

I think I will ask her to do a workshop at the Magdalen Street Celebration......

Solving Problems

I’m tremendously excited!

It was one of those weeks when problem seemed to be heaped on challenge, heaped on difficultly. One of these was simply how we were going to manage without access to a second car. We seem to live a fairly typical 21st Century family life, by which I mean having to juggle demanding jobs, (wonderful) children, the school run, after-school clubs, childcare, study, hobbies, not to mention quality family time. The sheer logistics required to make it all work are amazing. It never stops, and suddenly it was about to become a lot harder when one of those demanding jobs stopped being accessible by public transport. I walk the girls to school, but twice a week, I need the car, and I really need it.

All the environmental reasons for not having a second car aside, we simply couldn’t afford to buy one, let alone run it. Then, a happy coincidence of problem and solution presented itself, all in that same week.

Every day since September, during term time, I’ve walked down Stafford Street, past the Car Club parking space, and idly wondered what it was all about. Then James Frost wrote about the Norfolk Car Club on the Transition Norwich blog and this appeared to be the answer we were looking for.

So, I followed the link on the blog, along with the much appreciated promotion code (waiving membership and registration fees) and signed up. It couldn’t have been a more simple sign up process, and within a couple of minutes my application was in. The next day I received a mail to say that everything was in order, and then a call with the DVLA to confirm my license details. It was all incredibly slick and professional – if anyone thinks that social enterprises are somehow inherently more amateurish than more mainstream organisations, this will certainly change your mind.

I’m particularly impressed by the way that really clever technology has been used to solve a very real problem of cars in our city centres. Smart cards, slick on-line booking, the in-car systems that ensure that you get billed for the right amount, all these are great examples of what the well-applied use of technology and imaginative thinking can do for some of the challenges that our society faces.

So, I’m just waiting for my electronic keycard to arrive in the post, and I’ve already booked my first car for next week. I’ll let you know how I get on!

Pic: www.norfolkcarclub.com/

What a Waste

So there I was, continuing my assault on all the junk we seem to have accumulated since having children, when I had one of those moments.  By which I mean, one of those moments when you realise, all of a sudden, in a moment of clarity, that something is mightily wrong with this picture.

Children, as all parents know, seem to accumulate stuff like iron filings to a magnet, and they also seem to trash a lot of it.  OK, kids can be quite rough with their toys, no matter how much effort you put into trying to keep them calm.  And, certainly, toys are not build to last.  It seems no matter what you do, no sooner have they got their grubby mitts on their latest acquisition, than it's broken.

So, having made my peace with the need to throw some of this stuff away, I headed off to the tip.  As I said yesterday, we actually ditch very little stuff.  Apart from the usual recycling, we make a real effort to send old and unwanted clothes, toys and books to charity shops.  Given that we buy the bulk of said clothes, toys and books from charity shops in the first place, it feels like we're almost borrowing stuff rather than owning it, a grand circle of use and reuse, with various charities making money along the way.  How virtuous it all sounds.

But, amazingly at the tip, there were incredible things being thrown away, some of which looked to me like they were perfectly salvageable.  If I knew what to do with them.  Which, of course, I don't, possessing virtually no practical skills whatsoever in the mysterious domain of make do and mend...  And then I thought (here's that "moment" I mentioned at the beginning) well, if I don't have a clue what to do with all this stuff, and it looks so usable, probably everyone else here is looking at me, and thinking exactly the same - "why is that man throwing away that perfectly usable x, y and z?"

Then I started thinking, should I have tried putting it on freecycle, even though it was broken and / or mouldy?  Is there some magical place, like Bagpuss' shop window, where broken and discarded things can be brought back to life and reused?  I thought, the UK must surely have enough washing machines, cookers, bicycles, whatever to last the next hundred years, but half of them are probably broken for the want of someone who knows what they're doing to fix them.  Even if we could only fix some of them, surely (same line of thinking) we have enough washing machine parts, if they were all stripped down, to make up enough washing machines (or cookers, or bicycles) to last us the next hundred years?  What about cars?  We should almost never have to import any consumer white goods ever again, if we knew, properly, how to make things, mend things and reuse them.  And do this as a matter of course.

Pic: www.greenpeace.org

Taking out the Trash

I had one of those strange bouts of spring-cleaning madness recently, where I started opening random cupboards and seeking out things that hadn't been used, moved, or even looked at for a year. The kitchen cupboard I was particularly keen on getting to grips with, the cupboard that you can't even open without bracing back the stuff inside from exploding outwards onto the floor.

I was astonished! What hoarders we are! The evidence is in the picture - I two-thirds filled a wheelie bin just with plastic shopping bags. I'm slightly ashamed to even write about it - part of me wanted to bury the dark secret along with all the rest of the landfill.
We pick up very few plastic shopping bags - we've really got into the habit now of taking those sturdy reusable ones along with us when we go shopping, but occasionally we forget, and quite often people will give us things wrapped in a Tesco or Sainsbury's bag. And, I think to myself, oh well, at least we'll reuse them as bin-liners, save us buying them new. What I hadn't realised that we'd already accumulated about three years' worth of plastic bags, there in that cupboard, some of them even older, from the years before I ever thought about such things.

There may have been a time when we used plenty of shopping bags as bin-liners, but nowadays, we carefully separate the paper, tins and plastic bottles, put all our peelings and plate-scrapings into the compost caddy, and actually, very little of our household rubbish now goes into the traditional bin. Those sorry bags of bags, now destined for the Monday rubbish collection, are a throwback to an earlier age.

So, though I felt bad throwing away so many bags, I really couldn't think of anything else to do with them (any ideas, anyone?) And now that they're gone, the kitchen cupboard is pretty much clean and empty. More functional. And I'm determined not to let it fill up again - with anything! Especially not with plastic shopping bags.