What Moulds, Breaking Down?

Last week I made this beetroot ink. I meant to take a picture of the actual beetroot which was becoming soft and beginning to decompose from the outside. But I didn't so this is the ink itself, which comes out a light purple-red on paper, as you can see on the label:



Now I know this week is a photoblog of winter and decay, but as I was "Cleaning the Downstairs Toilet Window Frame of Mould for the Landlords Inspection" yesterday, some thoughts I'd had for ages and been unable to express started to cohere. So I hope you don't mind John if this post is a decayed mix of photo and poem! The text above in bold is the working title.

I wipe black mold from the window frame
Oil-painted white,
I think of all the plastics.
How will it biodegrade?
Will it 'bio' degrade?
In the end.

We don't know what the planet has in store.
For us. For these things. For us.
How they will go
In the end.

What microbes, what subtle processes,
What break-ups-and-downs,
What surprise detoxifications,
What decompositions

I don't like to say these things
In our marketed world
In our money-mind-dominated world
In our arbitrary world of no consequence

I don't want to offer space for any more excuses
for the comments:
'that's all right then, the planet will come up with
something
to get rid of us, bye-bye humans
ha-ha
just pass me the deeds to those tar sands
as big as ten countries
and let the show go on, and the lights,
and let the land and the people and the plants
go detoxify themselves!'

we don't know what the planet has in store,
what unwritten and undreamt-of-yet procedures
what creativities,
what subtle and invisible armies,
what moulds, breaking down

even if we did
it would be no excuse.


Mark Watson Dec 20 2011



Pics: Beetroot Ink, December 2011, Mould on Window Frame by Mark Watson

So I'm a Transitioner, am I?

Thanks to Mark, who's allowed me one of his blog spots this week. I realised that since joining the bloggers in April, I have only really been posting during theme weeks, and consequently have been limited in what I could write about, so in this post, I hope to convey a bit more of a personal take on what transition means for me - a bit of heart & soul, if you like!

I'm 26, and a recent masters graduate. Like many recent graduates, I haven't got a full-time job, and the prospects of getting one, at least within my field of study (Architectural Engineering) remain dim, as even rapidly expanding companies seem to demand at least five years of relevant work experience. I'd be slightly more bothered about this fact, however, if a 9-5 graduate position in a consultant engineering firm was really going to fulfil my desires and ambitions for life. Whilst it would be great to have a regular income and the opportunity to develop my skills, I can't bring myself to pine about my lack of formal employment, not whilst the reward for such effort would be the opportunity to join the consumer society, ravishing the Earth with each new gadget, branded item of clothing or trip abroad that I liked the look of.

Being underemployed has given me the great opportunity, which I have embraced wholeheartedly, to think about the effect that I have on the environment, on society, and on our economy. When you have to consider what each pound that comes into your care is going to be spent on, lest you fall short at the end of the month, you get to appreciate its effect.

From August 2010, when I bought my car, to August 2011, when I sold it, I kept a record of all the journeys I had made, how much it was costing me, and what the journeys were for. This exercise alone taught me a lot, and gave me a new perspective on transportation, and on accommodation. Since I was living 16 miles out of Norwich, in a village with no public transport links whatsoever, the car was a necessity, but after thinking about it, was living 16 miles from Norwich a necessity? The answer - no. So now I live in Norwich, sans car, and paying approximately the same amount each month for the privilege, not to dirty oil companies, but to a dear friend and landlady, whose value, to me, is far greater than any international corporate conglomerate could ever be.

This move alone, though, does little to satisfy my thirst for peace of mind in terms of my impact on the world. I don't just want to have a not-negative effect on the world (and no doubt I'm still nowhere near that, at least ecologically), I want to have a truly positive one! I want to see more than our society just coping with the challenges imposed by the economic system and ecological limits of this world: I want to see a transformation! I want to be part of that transformation, and I want our society to thrive! This cannot be done just by ditching the car and using a bike. It's a much wider scope - a scope which Transition is the only movement/organisation that has the courage to look at in its entirety, and why I am proud to associate myself with it.

It was so inspiring, for me, to attend the discussion meeting after Nicole Foss's talk on the financial crisis, where the challenges of our modern world were being faced from so many different angles. Our civil liberties being undermined in the name of international security, producerism being the driving force behind consumerism, government cuts skirting round the only sector which deems them necessary. And at the core of it all, being our own media with our own vision (rather than that given to us by "The Media") as the only solution which can carry us through the challenges ahead.

So, when I cut up my Natwest credit card, and transfer any remaining funds which I still hold with them away, I'm not just taking action because it's what I want to do — in fact, by doing so, I lose out on £1000 worth of interest-free overdraft amongst other graduate "benefits" — I'm also making a statement to anyone who cares to listen - that investment in tar sands, arms trade and other destructive projects is wrong; that massive bailouts should not be coupled with increasing executive pay; that I want any savings I hold to be available as loans to small local businesses, rather than only to national or international chains with no interest beyond this quarter's profits; that I stand in solidarity with the millions of people who agree that the 99% of the people of this world pay the price for the extravagance of the 1%, and are protesting all over the world (including in Norwich) to bring about the changes required to correct this.

But in the end, I'm not the type of person who will just stand here shouting about what I want until someone else comes along and sorts it out for me. I'm a doer, and may every action I take transition to a world that is better - ecologically, socially and economically.

Images: my graduation; cycling in Norwich; Natwest credit card - cancelled.

Cold nights

Over the last week or so, it's been really noticeable that the year is turning. Nights are colder, the wind has a bite to it. The full moon has been hanging low and golden in the sky or swathed in an almost autumnal mist.

The birds that populate my own personal calendar are telling me this too. Swallows are just starting to line up on wires and today I saw my first jay on it's low swooping acorn flight.

Jays are amazing birds. They are bright beautiful crows, with that corvid cleverness. They're here all year round, but in the Autumn they are suddenly everywhere. Flying from oak to oak, they collect as many acorns as they can and cache them.

This, together with their big brassy voice, inspired their scientific name Garrulus glandarius: Chattering, producing acorns.

Each jay can hide between 3000 and 5000 acorns in a year. They play a big part in regenerating oak woodland: each time they forget exactly where they hid the acorn it gets a chance to germinate.

Now I've mentioned them, you'll see they're everywhere. Enjoy them.

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

On Gasland and Feeling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Click here for the PDF of the Introduction

Palm Oil

That's the mistake I want to talk about this week. I think palm oil has the potential to be one of the bigger environmental mistakes we make as a species. It's an oil derived from the fruit of the palm. So far, not much to separate it from rape or olive oil. But the problem is where its planted. The biggest plantations are in Indonesia and Malaysia, with others in Africa. It grows in tropical climates. Essentially it grows where there was rainforest. The equivalent of thirty square miles a day of rainforest are being felled to plant more palm oil plantations.

That rainforest is one of the most biodiverse habitats on earth. In Sumatra there are 465 species of birds and in Borneo 420. Sumatra is the only place in the world that the Sumatran tiger lives. Between 2004 and 2008, according to the US Great Ape Trust, the orangutan population fell by 10 per cent on Borneo and by 14 per cent on Sumatra. The decline of the orangutan in the face of deforestation motivated by palm oil has been described as genocide.

Ok, so we get the picture, palm oil is really bad. That's ok, because as we saw yesterday, humans are pretty clever, and as soon as we work out that something is really bad, we stop doing it.

No-one's going to accept palm oil. It's clearly a dreadful thing. Nobody's going to eat anything that says 'palm oil' on the label. Certainly nobody in their right mind is going to put it in their petrol tank and burn it. Right?

Wrong. Palm oil is being sold as biofuel. International agreements to increase the use of biofuel are directly contributing to the increased destruction of rainforests to grow palm-oil plantations. These international agreements seek to decrease the impact of climate change by reducing the emissions from burning fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the land that the plantations are being grown on is not only ex-rainforest, it's also ex-rainforest that grew on ex-peatbogs. The emissions from cutting down the rainforest and burning the peat are greater than from the fossil fuels they seek to replace.

And as to not eating anything that says palm oil on the label? There's no obligation to declare palm oil on ingredients lists. Any food that lists 'vegetable oil' as an ingredient may or may not contain palm oil.