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/

Money, money, money

To cap off our week on local currencies, we have reproduced part of a blog Ciaran Mundy wrote recently about the Bristol Pound. The Bristol Pound is due to be launched next month....so we'll all be watching that space when the time comes. Good luck Bristol!!

I have been helping to create a local/regional currency scheme the Bristol Pound. It is, in part, motivated by several key issues to do with the economy plus a few more, but also because I love Bristol, the city I live in, and I find my energies are more suited to creating things than fighting to stop bad things happening (we urgently need more of both). I love the spirit of the people in Bristol and crucially, the independent traders, retailers, artists, street traders, crafts people, restaurants etc. Bristol is often called counter cultural, and for me it's that which makes it feel so exciting a place to live and work. It's that counter cultural attitude that might just save our collective arse when the chips are down. I want my home city to not just remain that way, but to see a lot more of that creative enterprise and try and build some alternative means to function as the system we currently depend on demands an ever higher toll from us all. It may soon fail to provide for many people and then we will need to be skilled in organising a functional local economy if we are to avoid the most serious social fallout in recent history.

So, a couple of years back I decided to hold a seminar called "Money and Economics" (without any real expertise or connections). I posed a few basic questions to try and find out what to do about the endless push for economic growth vs the need to create closed loop, ecologically sound economies. A guy called Chris Sunderland turned up saying he wanted to create a Bristol Pound. The more I thought about it the more obvious an idea it seemed. Everyone who knows anything about the private banking system knows it is structurally designed to impoverish the 99%, so why not create our own system. But doing this at scale across a city was pretty daunting. We knew this would only work if we took the time to hold open the space for other people to come forward and offer some serious skills, ideas and lots of time. We ended up with a great team.

We have spent a lot of time building a strategy in Bristol and working with other transition initiatives, the new economics foundation, Qoin and others to develop an electronic 'banking' system that we think is a genuine alternative. It's called Monea and it already sits behind the Brixton Pound and soon, I hope, behind many other initiatives. I'm hoping this system we have developed can be a solid building block that allows new democratic money systems to spread across the UK and further, to other cities and places that can run a diversity of local to regional currencies at a scale not seen before. I dare not say too much of how far we might go for fear of jinxing it, but simple paper currencies are working well elsewhere: in Germany the Chiemgauer and in the US Berkshares where regional banks support them. We now have the technology to go much further.

In Bristol we have gone for a sterling backed model, something we felt was a necessary compromise in building the network of users to critical mass. We are a CIC and will run it as a 'Multi Stake holder Cooperative'. But there are many alternatives and it's worth really doing the some thinking about what it is you want to achieve in setting up a currency scheme (as well as all the other Transition style currencies check out Bernard Lietaer's The Future of Money, Peter North's book, Local Money, the Spice Project and Community Forge).

In Bristol we have worked hard to persuade our local authority to support the Bristol Pound, but the key elements we want in place first are having the critical mass of diverse independent businesses signed up to the scheme, and support from our Bristol Credit Union to handle the accounts. We have held many talks and meetings with local businesses and trader associations, in the council, community groups and activist organisations and of course the local press. But it's not just telling people what we want to do but asking for real input about what would work for them. It has been a long road to collaborate with so many people and there is no guarantee of success, but the prize is great - a currency can be a systemic driver of equity and sustainability. If it does not work at the scale we hope for? Already the connections and growing understanding that has been fostered along the way make it worth it for me.

We have learned a huge amount that we want to share with others in terms of FSA regulations, the compromise between open source development and security, the technologies behind mobile phone payments and where we can take currencies in the future. But most important we are learning how to organise and that as we get better at organising we can genuinely start to create and collectively run the economies that deliver for people Ciaran Mundy

Original post is here

Nice Work If You Can Get It

"Soon there'll be no jobs working for the Boss," Mark said to me at a One World Column meeting.

What I've realised this week as I engage in the topic of sustainable livelihoods is that it's not a simple matter. Jobs, for example, are not the same as livelihoods (see Rethink the idea of Jobs by Joanne Poyourow of Transition LA.)

I’ve spoken with fellow transitioners on the phone and at Green Drinks, followed the blog and paid attention to the unfolding Occupy movement. I even bumped into Richard who was installing solar pv's in a neighbouring village and read an interview saying 40% of bankers will lose their jobs.

"We used to install solar panels for people with an interest in environmental sustainability. Now the motivation is purely financial," Richard told me. I heard similar words from the vicar at Bungay's solar-powered Emmanuel church. People are doing it for money. Just business. As usual.

Context and Sustainability of Physical Matter
One thing came up repeatedly in the conversations: as individuals we can be dedicated to living an environmentally-friendly life, even run a local or home business with minimum carbon emissions and energy use on a day to day basis and provide work for people locally, like John. Yet every one of us in the UK and the West, works (or not) within the context of an oil-dependent, energy-intensive globalised system - however our money comes in, whether through a paid job, self-employment or benefits.

How long that system can be kept going (one meaning of sustainable) is debatable. But the physical fossil fuels it (and therefore we) have been depending on are finite and the main one, oil, which is embedded in all our goods and services, is peaking or has peaked. It’s downhill from now.

People and Social Sustainability
The theme on the Transition Network’s Social Reporting project this week is Diversity and Social Justice. In a comment on Kerry Lane’s excellent Helping Your Community Out First, fellow social reporter and smallholder Ann of Transition Bro Dyfi writes:

(It is) so easy to exclude all those who are working really long hours on tiny incomes, those who rather than jobs, have livelihoods, where a patchwork of jobs, skills and goods are traded to make a living, leaving little time or energy for community organisation…

…When a tenner a week makes a difference, that's what I call money poverty. It creates a level of ongoing insecurity which is exhausting, physically as well as emotionally. There are lots of us in this kind of situation, but mostly we go unnoticed until we become homeless, a situation we're only ever one rent raise away from.

This shows that when we’re looking at “sustainable livelihoods”, we’re also looking at social justice. And we’re back to context. There are lots of us in this situation. Most of the people I speak to in transition in fact.

Considering Ann’s words I see a direct link between the exhausting ongoing insecurity, and the tactics of ‘shock doctrine’ Chicago School-style economics, which underlie the present ideological ‘austerity measures’ and keep the illusion of economic growth going so an uberwealthy 1% can carry on landgrabbing and lording it over the rest of us.

Transition and me

So what about me? I'm looking for work. Work that, as the old economic system crumbles is the only kind of work that makes sense to me - helping to build a parallel infrastructure for the future with the underlying permaculture ethics of earth care, people care and fair shares. Some do this by growing food, setting up energy co-operatives or working with alternative currencies.

My skills work best in becoming our own media, which I spoke about in News From The Engine Room last week. I've worked with people all my life, helping them to make shifts in their personal and planetary lives. The challenge now is to do it within a new paradigm.

And to get paid for it.

Pics: Great Depression, taken from Rethink the idea of jobs by Joanne Poyourow; Earth Care, People Care, Fair Shares at Bungay Co-op Family Fun Day, August 2011

Thanks to Charlotte, Nick and Josiah, fellow transitioners with low incomes for vital in person and telephone conversations

A Different Kind of Tea Party

Summer came to an end yesterday with a surprise... a visit from fellow TN blogger John (Heaser) and his wife Rebecca. They turned up on our doorstep after a sea walk in Southwold, armed with a huge bag of homegrown carrots, beetroot, romanesco courgette and cucumber.

I picked fresh peppermint and spearmint from the garden for tea and we sat in the tent porch talking about plants and vegetables – everything from runner beans through to sunflowers, the ten types of potatoes John is growing this year and the ‘ricola’ peppermint I gave to Rebecca for her herb patch. This type is grown for Swiss chocolate and smells like After Eights.

This year we have grown more vegetables than normal - runner beans and tomatoes in amongst the herbs and flowers, potatoes at the edge of the compost heap (currently home to a large family of grass snakes), cucumbers, courgettes and aubergines. But the garden is still mostly unmown and left to its own wild devices for the benefit of birds, lizards, bumblebees and the friendly snakes.

John gave me a vital piece of advice for potato growing. And though it will be obvious to people who have been growing them for years, it may not be to novices (like myself). So I’d like to share it:

Potato leaves love sunlight BUT the tubers need to be protected from direct sun and so need at least an inch and a half of soil over them. This keeps them under the ground and stops them from going green (green on potatoes indicates a high level of solanine, which is poisonous to humans). Yesterday I had found a few good-sized potatoes exposed to the surface. But there wasn’t a lot left of them after I’d cut the green away.

Then the conversation turned to another kind of blight - imminent economic collapse, which had been a key subject of discussion both at the Uncivilisation Festival Charlotte had gone to, and the recent off-grid Sunrise festival. John said he’s glad to have 30 years’ experience of growing food at home to provide at least some basic necessities in the face of future adversity.

But what of the general awareness of anything being other than ‘business as usual’? Last week I had gone to Southwold for tea with a friend from London. She was glad to be on holiday she told me because her next door neighbours have spent the past nine months having building work done on their house and the noise is unbearable. And EVERY one of the houses around her has had major building work in the past few years. And the conversation among the other Londoners present was the same conversation I would have heard before I left two decades ago. Money, house values, children’s education. Nowhere in this seemingly financially secure company was there talk of collapse or the sense that life was going to be any different than it had always been.

As I walked home in the pouring rain I wondered: Is this because most of us are not aware of the storm brewing, or don’t want to look out of the window, or that it’s a taboo subject? Not the kind of surprising talk you have over tea?

There is an excellent interview on Transition Voice by Lindsay Curren with Dmitry Orlov, peak oil commentator and author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. The interview is long but well worth the effort to read. In it he talks about collapse American style, where for most people in the ‘polite society’ of ‘how are you?’ ‘Fine’, collapse is ‘not even on the radar’. I don’t think that’s just America.

What kind of teatime conversations are you having?

Pics: John, Rebecca, Charlotte and me at the tent with mint tea; John's homegrown vegetables; ricola peppermint - all by Mark Watson

Communicating the financial crisis in 7 easy steps

Young people in Greece and Spain are worried, angry, and question- ing the financial power structure that is causing economic hardship in their countries. The financial system has shown over the last few years that it has the potential to wreak havoc in all of our lives.

How do we make sure that we find good ways to talk about this topic, especially as it is so timely and important, so that it becomes part of the Transition message? So much of what we are already doing is helping get us off the ‘money grid’ just as much as it is achieving energy interdependence or loosening ‘supermarket strangleholds’? Money and the economy are dominating the news - shouldn't we be as confident to talk about it as we do about climate change and peak oil? This enquiry will be about finding good ways of engaging people in this topic without losing sight of underlying resource issues that still lie at the heart of the Transition message.

At this year's Transition Conference Naresh Giangrande and Peter Lipman gave a workshop on Financial Instability. At the beginning Naresh outlined 7 Steps to assist our communicating the key issues behind the present economic downturn, as well as the resources we might use:

I really hesitate to put the financial system front and centre.

The environmental movement has argued long and hard for us to make this shift:

However what we would like to explore with you is how to include financial crisis along side the environmental issues in a way that makes sense, appeals to us a Transition folks, and speaks to people in our communities who maybe are not yet fully with us.

Step 1 Ecological limits are, real, pressing, and creating constraints in the economic sphere that have not been there before.

As evidenced by:
o The high price of oil creating a drag anchor on the economy
o The high price of other commodities constraining ‘normal’ economic activity
o Climate change pressing particularly on global food supplies, and altering hydrological patterns that in addition to constraining food production is creating water stress in many parts of the world.

Step 2 The ecological constraints in step 1 mean we won’t be able to carry on as we have even if we want to.

As evidenced by:
The limits to growth scenarios, world watch foundation reports, and IPCC 2007.

Step 3 We have built a financial system is based on growth, without growth it doesn’t work

Evidence - Crash Course, Money as Debt

Step 4 A growth based economic system, turbo charged by debt, has the capacity to crash our civilisation of its own accord even without us hitting ecological limits due to the unconstrained creation of debt.

As evidenced by:The blue curve is exponential, and shows that the creation of debt, that has enabled our expectations of unabated, rising living standards over the last 40 years to continue up to now.
The next doubling is highly unlikely, and therefore we are either living on borrowed time, or have to change to a non growth based economic system.

And :*260% was the record for total indebtedness by a nation state ever repaid. It was by Britain in the 19th century and it took many decades, an industrial revolution, and an empire of resources to do it.

Source: Chrismartenson.com

Step 5
It appears that our uncontrolled debt creation is the factor most likely to create a ‘tipping point’ into system collapse. However, we feel that the complexity of the interplay between resource constraints and the economic system make some kind of transition likely but impossible to predict the nature, speed, or duration. It is what we do now that will determine the nature of any transition as well as what emerges from that transition.

As evidenced by:
Michael Hudson http:/.michael-hudson.com
The Crash Course www.chrismartenson.com
Automatic Earth theautomaticearth.blogspot.com

Step 6
The financial crisis of 2007 has not been solved. Big banks and other financial institutions have used their political power to ensure the socialisation of debts, while retaining profits. There has also been an assault on weaker economies by stronger one in the by the latter’s financial institutions, which has led to national ‘bailouts’ used as cover for dismantling of welfare states and selling off of public assets. While this process is nothing new, 3rd world countries have suffered this treatment at the hands of the IMF for years, what is new is that this is now being done to first world countries.

• We have ‘kicked the can down the road’ nothing more, and in fact made the problem worse by creating more debt. We prevented the immediate crash but made the inevitable worse.
• Efforts to solve the debt problem with more debt will probably ultimately fail, and make the problem worse.
• We are not so much facing a liquidity crisis- i.e. “the banks aren’t lending”, but rather an insolvency crisis because banks and other financial institutions have large, and ultimately worthless debts that will never be repaid on their books.
• The adverse effects of debt socialisation are falling disproportionately on the poor and middle class, through slashing of public services, decreased spending power of national currencies, and increased taxation to service those debts.
• Financial war is also being waged between nations via a sovereign debt crisis in Europe, played out between the creditor nations of Germany, UK, Holland, and France (and the USA) and the so called PIGS.
• There is a crisis in the USA with national, state, and municipal debt reaching unsustainable levels.

Step 7
Part of a solution to all this, as far as we can see, are Transition towns. Including financial crisis does not alter one jot the core transition approach; re-localising all we can and making ourselves less dependent on the global economic (as well as food/energy/consumer goods) system. By radically lowering our economic expectations, living standards, and resource use we will be well placed to weather whatever comes.

We are highlighting the financial piece of what is after all a whole system because we feel it is important to take the financial system, in particular the debt issue, into how we talk about and frame Transition alongside climate change and peak oil (and other resource issues).

Naresh Giangrande

Photo: the Financial INstability workshop, Liverpool, July 2011

Who Wants to be a Billionaire?

(i)
Yesterday afternoon at four o’ clock I went to the beach and sat on the warm shingle. I’d just been in the library reading Lindsay Curren’s article Debt downer: Thank you, sir, may I have another? in Transition Voice, about the consequences for ordinary citizens of the US government avoiding default (which has now happened).

I was asking myself what makes it possible for a billionaire minority to keep their grip on the planet’s physical resources. And to increase their plutocracy at the expense of the majority who become ever more financially squeezed, unfree and in debt... to them.

Part of the answer had come out of my own mouth the day before on the same beach as I considered my own financial resources.

“What I need is to for someone to give me a couple of million,” I mused to Charlotte.
“It’s not going to happen”, she said.

And there it was. In that simple, throwaway statement was one clue as to why this situation exists. And a perfect example of magical thinking.

Because most of us, like me (still? and being such a committed downshifting transitioner over these past years?!?), harbour secret dreams (read fantasies) of having a ‘couple of million’, or winning the lottery, or meeting a rich man or woman, or living the high life, going to all the right restaurants, being a hollywood star - or any star, wearing the latest fashions, having a big house, having a second, holiday house, having power over other people... GOING UP IN THE WORLD.

That fantasy has us in its thrall. And it's being upheld aggressively by groups like the Tea Party and their Defending the Dream agenda - see George Monbiot's recent post.

But in a DOWNSHIFT time, in a world with less available fossil fuel energy to physically drive that dream lifestyle (and what energy there is concentrated in those few hands), for most of us GOING UP IN THE WORLD is not going to happen. So we need a shift of focus. To put our energies into a different kind of dream.

(ii)
Last Sunday at Bungay Beehive Day I led a Bee and Flower walk through town and gave a talk on the Healing Power of Honey in the marquee. My intent behind both walk and talk was to bring attention to the living, physical world that all of us form part of and depend on, and provide conditions for this to be experienced, even within an urbanised setting in the short time frame of 45 mins.

I asked everyone to consider the shift from having control over and needing to possess everything, including the natural world (and each other), to being in relationship and reciprocity with the living systems of the planet – our fellow plants, creatures and humans.

The walk was simple: Let’s go out and pay attention to the flowers on the way and the bees and other insects visiting them. Wildflowers, garden flowers, 'weeds', bumblebees, honeybees, hoverflies, whatever we find, wherever we find them. Don’t be concerned about names (certainly not the Latin ones!). We’re just visiting the neighbourhood to tune in and see what’s happening.

So over thirty people moved through alleyways, wildflower meadows, gardens and ‘wastegrounds’ and the library community garden, encountering everything from common mallow, ivy, echinacea, meadow cranesbill, corn marigold, virginia creeper and the indomitable anise hyssop – along with their various insect visitors.

The atmosphere was open and harmonious as we walked along. Even a discussion about the much-maligned ragwort was good-natured (see here for solid facts on this important invertebrate food plant).

Recently what well-being depends upon has been the subject of several studies. The general consensus is that once we have enough money to eat decently, keep warm, have a place to live and clean water, our well-being then depends on non-monetary things, such as good social relationships with each other, a healthy environment and engagement in life. Things that money (and the obsession with it) will never bring us.

This year the theme of Bungay Library Community Garden has been Plants for Bees and Buttterflies. Next year I’m going to be establishing a Medicine Garden, based on those very principles of well-being and how they relate to Transition. Stay tuned.

Pics: Southwold beach on the day before the US didn't default (by me); Bungay Beehive Bee and Flower Walk: Down the alleys and Dragonfly on Anise Hyssop (by Muhammad Amin)

Shifting Worlds, Uncertain Times

I was planning today to write about my attempts to come to grips with fractional reserve banking, the imminently expected US default and a book called The End of Money, all of which have been on the periphery of my consciousness over the past couple of weeks.

My time this weekend though was occupied with other things: collating a write-up for Bungay Beehive Day, helping to prepare the Transition Norwich August bulletin (out now), responding to a hundred emails and planting out various potbound plants.

But I did read Mark Crutchley’s article ‘The World Shifts’ on the One World Column which considers the potential consequences of an imminent US default. Mark writes of the complexity and instability of the modern financial world and its (astounding) relevance NOW to every person in the street in clear, understandable prose. For a lay reader like me this is manna.

We live in uncertain times. Uncertainty is a natural phenomenon. But when that natural uncertainty is exploited by engineered financial and other crises designed to keep most of us enslaved and in debt with all the resulting stress, worry, isolation from each other and disconnection from the planet, then it can no longer be called natural.

But we are social animals at heart. And that’s what being in transition has made me increasingly aware of over the past three years. That it's not just me.

“Shall we work together on these things?” Nick asked me last week. We were at a Sustainable Bungay planning meeting discussing a future leaflet for raising awareness of the transition ethos behind the library community garden and organising the front of house for our next Give and Take Day on 24th September. A burden lifted. Suddenly neither of us were on our own. “Yes, of course”, I said.

Sometimes the only thing to do in tough times is to join up with other people, communicate what’s going on and see what you can do together. The key I realise more and more is in recognising the urgency of the situation and the times and then responding as if it really matters.

Home Thoughts from Abroad

Just got home from a family wedding in Ireland and am still slightly battered by the drive back; if I'm honest, my resolve not to use Ryanair ever again took a bit of a battering yesterday while stuck for an hour on the M6 somewhere east of Chester!  However, it gave me the chance to watch a hawk hovering over a field, and watch the swifts chasing butterflies in and out between the lorries standing still on the tarmac.  It's amazing how quickly nature reasserts itself when the human world come to a standstill!

Ireland has had a tough year, as any search of the news shows, and there were a lot more boarded up shops and houses than I noticed last year.  However, one thing really struck me about the Irish response - virtually every foodstuff in the shop is plastered with "made in Ireland" stickers - even the chocolate had a "made in Ireland" logo next to the fairtrade one.  It's a fiercely proud response to the crisis and one that mocks the UK's feeble and frankly spineless attempts to support its own farmers and food producers.  It seems to me like our supermarkets in particular go out of their way to hide the fact that the food is made elsewhere while fooling us into thinking it's home-grown, yet the Irish are doing it loud and proud.  There were signs everywhere, promoting jobs, promoting Irish food, supporting tourism and the community.

I was pretty impressed; we could learn a lot from their example.

Pic from http://vinteeage.com/made-in-ireland-t-shirt-vintage-t-shirt-review-rad-rowdies-rad-rowdies/

Who Cares?

Second in our series of occasional cross-posts, Mark Crutchley of the OneWorldColumn and Norwich Greenpeace addresses the escalating crises of economics and the environment and why the oceans come first.

Why does our media focus so much attention on the economic problems of people who are “like us” and yet it has so little time for much bigger and more important issues? The news has been dominated recently by the economic crisis in Greece and the cuts the state may have to make to services to meet the criteria being demanded for the release of new loans. Of course there are echoes of the cuts being made here in the UK in the cause of cutting the budget deficit, and perhaps an unspoken question of whether we are likely to see similar protests.

But the economic prescription we are seeing for Greece is only the same as the IMF has been handing out to poor countries around the world for the last three decades with far worse consequences than those which the Greek people are likely to face. Rarely though does this register on the news front. Telling richer nations to cut their spending can cost people their jobs, see them suffer reduced services and perhaps have to pay higher taxes. Forcing poor nations to cut spending, kills. But that is what we as key players in the IMF have been doing for years. Paying back debts, even if run up by corrupt governments, is deemed more important than providing basic healthcare or education services to your poor.

The repeated failure of the IMF prescription to do any good for economies where it has been applied has in no way dimmed the enthusiasm with which it is recommended for every economy which gets into trouble. It learnt the old Thatcherite slogan “there is no alternative” at the start of the 80’s and it has stuck to it ever since.

Important though this is, it isn’t the real point I want to make. Because there was another story this week which was largely passed over by the media, yet its significance makes the crisis in Greece seem even less important than does the economic effect of cuts in poor nations. At a conference on the state of the world’s oceans which brought together experts in many different aspects of the field there were a series of shocking conclusions drawn, including that:

- The magnitude of our impact on the oceans is greater than previously realised
- There is a high risk of a marine extinction phase unprecedented in human history and
- Ecosystem collapse is occurring which damages or eliminates the ability of ecosystems to support human beings

We are destroying the most important ecosystem on the planet and the one which makes it habitable for us and yet with a few honourable exceptions much of our media didn’t apparently consider this to be important enough to report in any real detail. So we pore over the details of the Greek debt crisis but move quickly past the much greater environmental crisis of our own creation. Are we so disinterested in the environment that even a threat to our continued existence as a species isn’t considered especially newsworthy?

Perhaps the underlying issue here is that the environment represents a threat to the economic status quo. As the oceans report makes clear, we and our economic development are the problem. Climate change, pollution, over-fishing, resource extraction, habitat destruction and alien species introduction are the major problems identified and all are bound closely into our economic system. Tackling these would require a wholescale change in our relationship with the natural world. One which it isn’t in the short term interests of any business or government to promote because of the inevitable economic implications.

So here is the root problem. For too many years our world view has been dominated by economics and the belief that everything is subservient to its demands. The environment has been considered very much a secondary issue, nice to look after so long as the economy is going well. We have to turn our thinking on its head and realise that we must focus on preserving our environment and then run our economies as best we can in that context. That way we might have a future worth looking forward to. If we continue to put the needs of the economy at the top of our priorities then we may have no longer term future at all. Governments don't care; business doesn't care, do you? Mark Crutchley

This article was originally posted on the regional blog, the OneWorldColumn. Photo of shark reef from the article Massive Coral Die-off in Indonesia (from the wildlife blog, Bush Warriors).

Do we control money, or does money control us?

Like many of Transition Norwich’s theme groups, the Economy and Business (now Economy and Livelihoods) group was set up in October 2008. It attracted a lot of attention throughout 2009, but dwindled somewhat at the end of 2009 into 2010. With Nicole Foss’s recent presentation, and the follow-up discussion, it is time to revive it! So what is the group all about?

At present, our monetary system dictates much of our activity. It is through our wages that we are directed to work in the interest of our employer. And once we have earned that money, it is through advertising, legal obligations (such as mortgages) and other forms of persuasion that we are convinced to spend our money in the interests of others. These “others” are often corporations, governments or other institutions that in themselves have obligations to their stakeholders and are willing and able to direct the activity of even more people to ensure that they meet those obligations. What makes this worse is that the obligation for corporations is no more complex than “to make profit”, and that therefore a large portion of our human effort goes towards the continual and unsustainable expansion of an ultimately doomed consumer society.

There are numerous books, videos and websites which explain these concepts much better than me, but what is clear is that this structure is wrong. It is fundamentally opposed to our individual freedom to do what we want with our lives, and makes money a master, rather than a facilitator in exercising our liberty as it should be.

The primary function, therefore, of an Economy and Livelihoods group is to establish what our requirements are for a monetary (or other exchange) system, and to try to shift from the current paradigm towards something which more satisfactorily meets those requirements.

Although there will be differing opinions on what those requirements actually are, the following actions would undoubtedly move towards it:

- Sharing knowledge about what the current financial system looks like, so that we can make informed decisions about government economic policies, as well as personal decisions, such as where our own money is invested and what we expect to be the benefits and risks. This may be through discussion sessions, talks and blog posts.
- Investigating, establishing and promoting alternative exchange systems that more closely meet the needs of people, including the promotion of existing local trading schemes, where appropriate.
-Stimulating a resilient green local economy, by encouraging development in renewable energy generation, energy conservation, local production of goods, sharing schemes and other enterprises that enable a low-carbon lifestyle.

The above is provisional, and may be added to and changed depending upon the discussions that we have as a group together. I therefore invite you to join us for the first meeting of the revived Economy and Livelihoods group upstairs at the Bicycle Shop Cafe, 17 St Benedict's Street on Tuesday 24th May at 6pm. Simeon Jackson

Picture from http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/, which tells the story of the man who, starting with a paperclip, traded his way to obtaining a house; cover of Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson

Avoiding Palm Oil

Palm oil is the 'cheapest' vegetable oil available to food manufacturers. Clearly, it costs us all a great deal, but not in the monetary terms understood by world trade. The World Health Organisation has reservations about palm oil's safety- and has advised that it should not be considered a healthy alternative to trans fats. Research appears to show that palm oil consumption is linked to higher rates of heart disease. That gives us a monetary cost in providing health care for those people, but also a human cost in terms of loved and valuable people dying before their time. Add in the environmental cost of deforesting huge areas of rainforest and the environmental, human and monetary costs of worsening climate change (through burning peat bogs and rainforest to grow the stuff) and its starting to look pretty expensive to me.

I decided I'd like to find out how much palm oil I am consuming. I really believe that Michael Pollen is right in what he says about 'voting with your fork':

“How you and your family choose to spend your food money represents one of the most powerful votes you have... and you get three of them every day.”

Last week I recorded everything I ate. I didn't change the things I ate, I just wanted to record an average week. At the end of the week I checked the ingredients list of everything I could and worked out if it was likely to contain palm oil or not. I know that there is palm oil in lots of non-food items, like soap and shampoo, but I didn't record them during the week. My soap from Lush is fine, as Lush spent lots of time and money working out how to make soap without palm oil- and then made their successful method available to any other company who wanted it.

I learnt a lot about where palm oil lurks and what I can do to avoid buying the stuff. None of it is rocket science, I admit, but I'm pleased to have learnt it.

None of the 'raw ingredients' I cook with have palm oil in them. I can't say for sure it wasn't used somehow in their growing and processing- that kind of thing is hidden away and hard to find out about. But I am confident that none of the vegetables, spices, fruit, pulses and flours I use have palm oil in them.

By contrast, all of the processed foods I indulge in are suspect. The odd frozen pizza that makes it into my trolley is very likely to have palm oil in. The crisps and chocolate that make my workday a bit more luxurious are interestingly split: in this instance, crisps are fine but the brand of chocolate I love the most is neither fair-trade nor palm-oil free. Whenever I don't have time to make my own bread, the supermarket bread I fall back on almost certainly contains palm oil. The 'big three' bread bakers use it, as the independent discovered:

“It's in the top three loaves – Warburtons, Hovis, and Kingsmill – and the bestselling margarines Flora and Clover. It's in Special K, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, Mr Kipling Cakes, McVitie's Digestives and Goodfella's pizza. It's in KitKat, Galaxy, Dairy Milk and Wrigley's chewing gum. It's in Persil washing powder, Comfort fabric softener and Dove soap. It's also in plenty of famous brands that aren't in the top 100, such as Milkybar, Jordan's Country Crisp and Utterly Butterly. And it's almost certainly in thousands of supermarket own brands.”

But the ingredient which is most worrying me is margarine. I cook and bake with it too, which means my home-made bread could be just as compromised as the supermarket stuff. If there was a legal obligation to label palm oil, I could be sure to buy a palm-oil free margarine.

It was frustrating looking at all those labels that said 'vegetable oil' and having no idea if it was palm oil or not. Then I turned over a box of chocs from the Co-op that a friend had bought me. There on the label it said 'palm oil'. Looking into it, I found that the Co-op voluntarily label all their own-brand products which contain palm oil. No other supermarket does this.

I'll be voting with my fork and shopping at the Co-op more. And I'll be a very happy bunny if they sell margarine without palm oil in it.

My Struggle to Make Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil

Peak Oil, I get. I’ve been in Transition for three years and had my end of suburbia moment(s). I understand that fossil fuels are limited and non-renewable. That as the world’s oil fields diminish, demand exceeds production, and the remaining crude oil is harder and more expensive to extract, the enery return on energy invested (EROEI) drops to a fraction of what it was when oil was plentiful. No more cheap petrol. Oil prices soar. And along with them the price of everything else in our industrialised, oil-dependent global economy – including food.

The same with Climate Change, the anthropogenic variety. Creating a vast artificial industrial complex all over the planet which demands huge amounts of energy, destroys most of the rainforests and other complex eco-systems and burns billions of tons of fossil fuels every year with its attendant carbon emissions and expecting it not to affect the climate just makes no sense.

These two ‘drivers’ informed the beginnings of the Transition movement six years ago – a challenge to people and communities to respond to Peak Oil and Climate Change and start preparing for a (liveable, maybe even preferable) energy-leaner future without the whole world falling apart. When the financial crisis hit with the credit crunch in 2008 the economic downturn became the third driver.

Then last year Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth) presented her talk Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil at the Transition Conference. It changed the whole course of the event. Suddenly Transition was seriously looking at economics and finance – money.

Money is where a vast amount of our attention and energy is invested (sic) and informs most of our decisions and choices, whether we have it or not. For the majority of us on a very basic level it’s the means by which we have a roof over our heads and put food on the table in the current economic system.

But it’s also where a lot of our aspirations, fears, fantasies and desires get caught up, “When I’m rich and famous, I’ll have a big house (and servants!!!…)” Yes, I wanted it too! This has been the case since money was invented but it’s been exacerbated by the creation of trillions of dollars of virtual wealth over the past thirty years. In addition, enough people have become more wealthy or comfortable in that time for others to feel they have the chance to follow.

But all this virtual wealth has been fuelled by cheap plentiful energy. This is where the connection with peak oil comes in. There will not be enough available energy for the modern Western resource-intensive lifestyle to continue. There won’t be enough real wealth to support it. The gap between rich and poor is already widening, bringing into sharp focus questions about social equality and the sharing of available resources.

So any conversation about the future has to include a discussion about money. Stoneleigh alluded to this on Friday night in Norwich. “It’s important to understand the way the global economy works,” she said several times. How markets work. How we are entering a time of deflation after a 30 year financial bubble. How housing (in the UK) has now become worth 8 times our incomes and yet the price of real things that matter like tools and bread are cheap and almost without value. How this will change as houses lose their value and the prices of real necessities like bread and milk go up. How when people can no longer afford the repayments on their mortgages, if one person sells their house in a neighbourhood cheaply, the prices of all the houses in that neighbourhood are affected. Meanwhile personal and global debt is enormous (the UK has the second highest debt-GDP ratio in the world after Japan).

This suggests the need for a good, hard look at what our values are. These are the conversations that need to take place. In the Stranger’s Circle meeting last year when we talked about "Stuff", each of us produced an item of value to us - all of them tools to do with either communication or making or mending things.

Social and communications skills were high on Stoneleigh’s list for what we’ll need in the times ahead, along with food growing and the ability to make things. We’ll also need to find inexpensive ways of entertaining ourselves.

I’ve been grappling with all these things since the talk, alone and in conversations with Charlotte and Nick. They’re hard to understand and hard to talk about, almost like breaking a taboo or a spell. It's like trying to catch a magician out in a sleight of hand. Or chasing shadows. Money is so entrenched in our perception of value.

But when relationships between people are given value, then you can start to share things. Some of those things cost little or no money.

Like joining in a Give and Take day, or listening to a storyteller in Bungay Library or going on a bee and flower mapping walk with Netta through Beccles and listening to the bees roar in the goat willow.

A follow-up discussion of Nicole Foss's talk will take place at Aladdin's Cafe on Magdalen Street, 12th April at 6.00pm. Everyone welcome.

Pics: Not Chasing Shadows with Netta and Charlotte in Beccles; Goat Willow with Bumblebee

Doing Things Differently, Together

"What we found doing this, among people in many countries, in city, suburb and countryside is this - that as long as it is part of a story, changing your life radically is wholly possible. You can endure anything - as long as it is part of a story of heroism and transformation."*

“So did you ask your question?” I said to Nick over a mug of tea and a shared plate of chips in the Buttercross Tearooms in Bungay on Saturday.

I’d had to leave the Nicole Foss talk Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil before question time the previous night to catch the train home.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I asked about who all the debt is owed to (the banks) and how is it ever going to be paid off if people have no money. Will governments do anything?”

Stoneleigh’s advice was not to wait around for top-down government because they will do little or nothing. Grass roots, bottom up was the way to go.

She emphasised that in a time of severe financial and energy contraction the last thing we need to do is close down and become engulfed in the (mass) psychology of contraction, thinking just about ourselves and our immediate circles, or panicking. We need to be able to rely on each other. This is a time to be building relationships of trust. ‘If you don’t have an extended family, make one,’ said Stoneleigh, echoing the closing words of the film that got me into Transition in the first place three years ago: “Find your people.”**

These years in Transition have really opened me up. I talk with many people I may not even have met otherwise. About things which don’t get expressed anywhere else with the same understanding or attention. I’m not alone in this.

In the early days it was common at Transition meetings to hear things like, “I can talk about climate change and peak oil here without feeling like the weirdo. I’m not the only one saying we need to do things differently.”

I hear that less now. More and more of us are starting to do things differently, together.

Quotes:
* Sharon Astyk on the Energy Bulletin
** What A Way To Go - Life At The End Of Empire

Pic: Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh) in Norwich last Friday

tipping point

There is a moment when you realise that it’s not really about you anymore. You could call it the Hal moment, when the vagabond prince in the play becomes a king and forgoes his pleasure-seeking companions, or the Pablo Neruda moment when the poet transforms from lover to Communist and begins to write for the people. You could call it the Shine moment, where the introverted pianist stands up to his oppressive father and starts to play for real. It’s not that you are discounting yourself - it’s that the personal you with all its small indulgences, its interiorities and subjective biographical events is turned inside out suddenly and asked to be someone else. Someone who acts within the bigger picture. Your own Spring uprising.

This week something happened in a shop, in the way that some things occur in a quiet lull and you realise you are at a tipping point. Last week was busy: I had gone to all kinds of political meetings from the Sustainable Bungay’s Library event to the Lowestoft Coalition Against the Cuts rally, I had taken part in a protest about the closing of the recycling centre and talked about Zero Waste with our local MEP. I had written a piece about climate change and food security and talked animatedly about world events at the Alex with my colleagues on the OneWorldColumn.

This week was quiet and that’s when I began to notice how the Hal moment is happening to the least of us. We’re not princes or poets or piano players, but we’re waking up to our destiny nevertheless. Even in the small conservative town of Southwold there are campaigns to save the library, the tip and to challenge the presence of oil tankers in the bay. The conversations across counters and in bus queues are all about the public service cuts. Where once we were talking about the weather we’re talking about forests or the NHS. In our local delicatessen we were talking about the millionaire cabinet and I found myself in an argument with une femme de l’ancienne regime who believed the cuts were necessary, especially benefits, and it was hard for the Government to make business people pay their taxes. In a different time I might have made light of things, or kept my counsel, or conceded one or two points. But this time I stood my ground because in that moment I realised it wasn’t just my ground. She backed away.

Transition is famously non-political but it’s hard not to be political right now. You can’t just stay secure in your allotment and reskilling class and ignore the storm that is brewing. Every time you take a bus you’re looking at cuts to transport services, every time you take out your rubbish you are looking at the closure of recycling centres and the opening of incinerators, every time you buy food you’re considering price rises and the situation in North Africa. You can’t really talk about community without realising what is happening to that community, the closure of youth centres and drop-in centres, its social infrastructure. Or facing the doublethink of the Big Society. Or how the once-positive word “volunteer” is shifting its meaning towards being a person who colludes with the prevailing order. Discussions about peak oil have become no longer academic. They are taking place within the forecourts of garages everywhere. And the deciding driver in all this is, as Stoneleigh predicted in last year’s Transition Conference, is economics. And a government that has decided to back the banks, rather than the people.

For years it has been about “me” and my consumer lifestyle, but now, in a hard time, it’s becoming clear me needs to be “we”. And as I stood by the counter with Mark and the shop assistants I realised there are a lot more of us who stand to suffer from “austerity” than those who are making the cuts and benefiting from them. We are experiencing an ideological breaking-up of the public sector, implemented by those intent on becoming privately richer and more powerful. And those of us who believe in equality need to stand our ground and not be bullied by those autocratic voices, by those who have been trained to oppress the “lower orders” and get their own way.

Transition has taught me to be bold, to find a language which makes it possible to speak with everyone I come across, to engage in activities and conversations that refocus our attention away from that fossil-fuelled lifestyle towards a low-carbon way of being. Now I’m finding as I move from meeting to meeting it also contains the possibility of a real political function. Because it is not bound by party, it can bring different progressive groups together. Because it is isn’t conflicted by history and past example, it is free to act for the future. Because it is doesn’t attack the enemy and get entangled in negative power struggles, it gives space to what is actually happening, the difficult ethical choices we face as a society. And in that space the old order cannot play the games that they have been taught so ruthlessly to win. Me up, you down. If we want a fair and sustainable world, we can’t shirk these confrontations with Empire. We have to play our part.

In 2011 open space is no longer just an exercise.

Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Age of Peak Oil - A presentation by Nicole Foss on 25 March at the URC, Princes Street Norwich. Find further details here.

Photos: snowdrop and recycling centre protest, Southwold by Mark Watson; St Valentine's Day Unneccessary Massacre, Norwich by Trevor Phillips, Save the Library by Sustainable Bungay.