Most Of It We Don't See

What connects us and makes us resilient in the face of collapse, are the things you cannot ordinarily measure or see. Charlotte Du Cann

A year ago I felled a dead elm and sawed much of the first two trunks into logs by hand. These logs burned okay, but everyone said splitting the wood was better. Yesterday I split wood for the first time.

So here I am in heroic mode, spltting the wood. I did a pretty good job, was surprised it came so easily and felt very satisfied at the end.

But no one is a hero in isolation, not even a humble woodsplitting one. In fact, I think the whole hero thing reflects the hyper-individualism of our culture.

And there is always what you don’t see in the picture. And not just the photographer. In this picture you also don’t see Nick who lent me the maul you don’t see (very well) either. Nick helped me cut down the last of the dead elm trunks last year and sawed it into logs. Charlotte sawed another dead elm by hand on her own whilst I was out a couple of weeks ago, so even I didn’t see that.

Also remaining unseen are the people and the materials that made the maul, and all the actions and connections that led to our being here and to Nick coming over on Wednesday on his way to drop his daughter off at her boyfriend’s nearby.

All those transition meetings in Bungay and Norwich and skill shares and learning about global markets and industrialisation and wanting to be less dependent on them and get to know people and places closer to home. Wanting to chop firewood with my own hands, to work with the grain, the material.

And all the conversations over the years I was listening to without even knowing I was listening to them, about how to let the woodsplitting axe fall by its own weight and how to stand properly and not twist your back.

In fact a thousand words wouldn’t be enough for all the connections making up what lies behind and beneath this simple photo.

Or indeed this one. I don’t celebrate Christmas. This year, however, we found a broken bough of pine in the local wood and brought it home for the living room. On Christmas night something got into me and I cut into strips the gold paper Dano had given me at Sustainable Bungay’s Solstice/Christmas party and tied chillis to the bottom of them reusing ties from plants that had died down. The chillis were a gift from Malcolm and Eileen where we get our weekly veg box, a mix of the formidable Ring of Fire and the fragrant serrano.

We’re taking down the bough and chilli decorations tomorrow and so I wanted to share it here.

Though this piece is mostly about some of the things we don’t see.

Photographer unseen, Splitting wood for the first time 4 Jan 2013, by Charlotte Du Cann; Chilli, gold paper, use garden tie decoration on salvaged pine bough from nearby wood (MW)

This post originally appeared on the blog Mark in Flowers on 5th January 2013

The awesome power of water

It was a beautiful summer morning, Saturday 28th July. Soon after getting up, I left the house, walked to the canal and helped a struggling beginner narrow-boat user with a lock gate. He and his friend offered me a trip down the canal, so I joined them for a peaceful mile or so of the Rochdale canal.

Needless to say, I wasn't in Norwich!  I had stayed the night with friends in Hebden Bridge, a place reminded of the power of nature recently when it experienced flash floods just a couple of weeks earlier.  Reservoirs further up the rivers were reportedly still full from previous rainfall, and the quick inch and a half of rain that fell within a matter of hours could go nowhere but the streets, devastating businesses and homes.

Flood damage in
Hebden Bridge

Later in the day, I would see how the awesome power of nature can be harnessed for good, when I visited National Trust property Gibson Mill, which forms part of the Hardcastle Crags estate, not far North of Hebden Bridge - definitely worth a visit if you're in the area! Gibson Mill prides itself on being entirely off-grid, with 100% of its electricity, heating and water sourced on site. Electrical power is from water turbines and a 4kW solar photovoltaic array, water comes from a spring on the estate and heating is provided by a biomass (wood) boiler, using wood exclusively sourced on site.

The most fascinating part of this, to me, is the water turbines.  There are two, one that was originally installed in the 1920s but has since been refurbished and given a new generator.  When running, it can produce up to 9kW, but due to the flow-rate required, they only usually run it in the winter.  The other was installed during refurbishment works in 2005, and is rated at 1.5kW.  This turbine runs almost constantly, keeping the batteries topped up, which then provide the power to the mill.  Usage is also kept to a minimum, with energy efficient appliances in the café kitchen, and low energy lighting (which was consuming only 600W for the entire building whilst I was there!).  The only thing which struck me was that there is the potential to over-produce energy (since the batteries were full all the time I was there, but energy was still being produced), and therefore that energy was simply dumped as heat.  I wonder what possibility there is for something which only uses power when power is available, but that does something productive with that waste energy.  Anyone got any ideas? Bear in mind that exporting back to the grid is made impossible by the remoteness of the mill.

The awesome power of water - lock in Todmorden.

If you want to read more about the refurbishment of the mill (which was a lot more extensive than the installation of the electrical system), have a look at the article at http://www.buildingforafuture.co.uk/summer06/gibson_mill.pdf.

Images: Canal near Todmorden; water damage in Hebden Bridge; Lock near Todmorden. All photos by the author.

Peak Oil: Seven Years on the Plateau

Hard to believe that the transition movement is seven years old. I remember a peak oil meeting in 2005 where we arranged ourselves in a line according to when we thought the year of peak oil was. Not that I’ve ever seen the point of worrying about the actual year of peak - knowing that it’s coming is what matters. So there we stood in a line from ‘it’s already happened’ to a more optimistic 2015. That’s 3 years from now.

2005 was also the year of the Hirsch report, which was created by request for the US Department of Energy. Hirsch considered three scenarios for implementing the necessary actions to deal with peak oil and found that initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before world oil peaked offers the possibility of avoiding a global liquid fuel shortfall, while doing so 10 years before helps considerably but still leaves a liquid fuel shortfall roughly a decade after peak. Sadly, as this is the approach we seem to be taking, waiting until global oil production peaks before taking serious action leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades.

The term ‘peak oil’, as I’m sure most Transitioners know, refers to the year in which the global production rate of conventional oil reaches a peak. ‘Peaking’ occurs for all non-renewable resources (as well as for renewable ones which are being extracted faster than they can be replenished) and means that the rate of production cannot increase; it does not mean that production will suddenly stop, because there will still be large reserves remaining. It’s easy to dismiss ‘peak oil’ as a distraction because we have billions of barrels left in these reserves, but it doesn’t matter how much oil is in the ground, it’s getting it to market that counts.
No one actually wants oil, or any other form of energy. It’s the services provided by that energy that matter: the miles travelled, the crops harvested or the synthetic materials manufactured. So flow rate is key because oil is energy and energy is the ability to do work. Imagine you won a competition and were given a bank account with £1million in it. But now imagine that there’s a catch: you can only withdraw £10/day from that reserve. It’s not the size of the reserve that matter - it’s your access to it.

Goldilocks oil

Oil is classified as ‘conventional’ and ‘non-conventional.’ Conventional oil, also known as crude oil, is typically the highest quality oil, which flows with comparative ease, and is the least expensive to produce. However, of all the world’s oil, conventional only makes up about one-third (see Fig. 1:). Non-conventional oils are not as readily processed as conventional oil partly because our infrastructure is not geared up for them, hence production often requires a great deal of capital investment. And they require way more energy input to process, meaning you’ve already spent a larger proportion of the energy you produce and have less to do other work with.


Fig. 1: Non conventional resources are twice as large as conventional ones

Yet despite the fact that non-conventional oils have much lower energy yields and are more polluting than conventional oil, we’re turning to them as an energy source because, as far as infrastructure goes, they are largely like conventional oil. Now without boring your socks off, it’s important to know that conventional oil is the stuff we’ve been exploiting for the last 150 years. It provided the vast majority of the energy used to create Western civilisation and was a wonderful alternative to coal, especially for transport. You might like to think of it as Goldilocks oil - it’s not too dense, not too light, it’s just right. It’s ‘just right’ because we built the appropriate infrastructure to deal with it. We live in a liquid fuel world but those with little understanding of energy returns can’t grasp that it’s not how many barrels produced, but the ‘net energy return’ that counts.

“But surely peak oil isn’t being ignored?” the doubters will ask. Well, if it isn’t, someone’s doing a hell of a good job in hiding the evidence from us! According to such august bodies as the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Energy Information Administration (EIA), global output of conventional oil has been stagnant since 2005 (Fig. 2). More worrying than that, if all liquid fuels are considered, which includes heavy oils, tar sands and biofuels, the plateau remains (Fig 3).

Fig. 2: IEA data shows conventional oil output to have reached a plateau


Fig. 3: IEA and EIA data shows all liquid fuel output to have reached a plateau

Seven years on the plateau

While there’s no doubt that the term ‘peak oil’ is more widely understood today, the meaning to society is not. Not only have atmospheric CO2 levels continued to rise, despite way more concern over climate change, we have now turned to tar sands and fracking for shale gas, and there are continuing disagreements over who has mineral rights over the Arctic shelf, so that once that pesky ice goes we can get drilling.

Seven years on and this is ‘our’ answer to peak oil and Hirsch’s warnings go unheeded. Just last week (26 Jan 2012), James Murray and David King had an article published in Nature arguing that the impact of dwindling oil supplies on the economy is a potentially more persuasive argument for lowering global emissions than climate change. But if oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either. This is such a frightening prospect that many still refuse to consider it.

It’s easy to become depressed, demoralised, demotivated as one realises that we won’t choose to change. But change we will as change will be imposed by nature. It’s not information we are short of - it’s understanding. I’m not sure why we continue to destroy the environment on which we all depend but it’s not because we (as a species) don’t know any better. I think it’s that we don’t want to know. It’s ironic that the optimism of the Transition movement, which is seen widely among humans, is the same optimism which seems to enable us to blinker out unpleasantries, like the impossibility of endless economic growth or the need to radically change the way we do things.

I have noticed in recent years that many transition initiatives seem to be more focused on ‘cutting carbon’ but we must not forget the driving purpose of the Transition Movement - to withstand and overcome the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil. The plateau won’t go on forever - life with less energy is inevitable. It is better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise. Mandy Meikle

Mandy Meikle lives near Edinburgh and has been speaking on peak oil issues since 2004. She believes that humanity’s future lies not in technology but psychology. Mandy writes an occasional blog as The Cheery Pessimist and gives talks on energy issues. A "Transitioner-without-initiative", she is working to set up a Community Development Trust in her locality.

Photo of oil rigs from article on North Sea Oil, DECC, Climate Change by Chris Verno (Genghiskhanviet /Creative Commons)

energy shifts involve mind shifts

There are always surprises in store when we talk about saving energy, or open up that conversation. Whether that be of the physical kind - through electricity or gas use - or the personal kind - 'let's not waste energy thinking about this'.

I was a child in the 50s and 60s when we really didn't have a clue about energy consumption. Filling up that car, leaving the lights on, and burning coal until the atmosphere around us began to choke ( London smog, et al). There was no house insulation, double glazing hadn't been invented, and the England football team actually won things ( maybe because the penalty shoot-out also hadn't been invented).

So we have come a long way. All that has changed. Why? Partly because we have become more aware of the climate change implications, but probably more specifically because energy is no longer cheap. And of course we haven't seen anything yet, in terms of energy prices - they are destined to increase year on year at double or triple the rate of inflation, as energy scarcity increases alongside demand, and the related political unrest in countries of 'strategic significance' ( read: with a lot of oil) increases.

However there are still surprises. Both individual households, and businesses big and small, often do not see energy-saving as a cost saver. This is all the more surprising in the current climate for small businesses who feel the squeeze from several different directions.
Research shows that this is often because the degrees of savings to be achieved through energy saving measures are hugely under-estimated.

So - practical as ever - Transition Norwich invented it's Energy Look Outs group. We realised there was - in the jargon - a suppressed demand from individuals as ordinary citizens who are seeing everyday, examples of waste around the business sector in Norwich, particularly in the retail sector. Some go to the trouble of reporting it , but find they get faced with a mass of bureaucracy, or puzzled looks, or both.

So, we are busy collating information reported to us, and as part of that, we are carrying out a little audit of shops in Norwich regarding their door policy. See here to read about the national 'Close the Door Campaign' .

U.S. citizens now living here are amazed that in the middle of our winter, shops leave doors wedged open. In the Northern States, this would be economic suicide for retailers to do this, as well as rather uncomfortable for their customers coming into the shop. If the centre of world capitalism is behaving in this way, why are we not?

So - we are meeting in The Forum 2.00 p.m. 23rd and 28th March, just outside 'Tourist Information', to start our little tour. This will be observation only, so no engagement with retailers just yet! No experience necessary, and cafe-lovers note: we'll be winding up in one at the end of the day, around 4.00 p.m.!

Local Energy, for the World

When I was about ten, we lived in Saudi Arabia for a year, where my parents taught in a school in the capital, Riyadh.  One day we took a trip out into the desert; and there in the middle of the stark white and yellow sand dunes that marched in all directions to the horizon, stood an oasis, exactly like those you see in comic books and old films about the French Foreign Legion.  An oasis of cool green water, surrounded by scrubby grass and great palms, groaning under the weight of dates.  Nearby stood a village, and it was this village that really caught my attention; every available space was covered in solar panels.  I was really impressed, even as a child, by the thought that this village could be entirely self-sufficient in its electricity needs; that a country unbelievably rich in oil, was, in this village at least, fore-sighted enough not to use oil-powered generators, but to invest in technology that could harvest the sunlight that is freely available in large quantities, and effectively forever.

I listened to a debate on the radio recently where one of the speakers said that in order to feed the world, we must go down the route of genetically modified crops; he was a passionate advocate and cited the moral argument that, given the numbers of starving people and the technology at our disposal, the choice was obvious.  The counter-argument, shorter, more succinct, was that the world already produces as much food as we need,  but not as much as we want.  Feeding the world with a western-style, meat-and-dairy-rich, daily 3000 calorie plus, diet would require radical change in our agricultural methods.  Feeding the world more equitably could already happen; the change would have to be in our minds and habits rather than in the job of our farmers.

It's a concept that's echoed in George Monbiot's book Heat - How Can We Stop The Planet Burning.  We could, with available technology, and enough will, provide all the power that we currently need, but pretty much not all that we want.  Given the amount of energy we waste every day in the UK, and across the world, arguably we wouldn't even have to increase production that significantly to achieve energy equity across the globe.

And this is where I started thinking about the problem.  As part of our New Year Aspirations theme week, I talked about local energy generation, using solar or wind power to support a community-led energy collective.  I think this could be a real opportunity to both generate power sustainably and from renewable sources, but also to wrest some control back from the utility companies that control how much we spend on our gas and electricity.

But I also started to think about the problem from a more global perspective.  Given that climate change knows no political and national boundaries, what could be a global solution?  If we as a global community are sufficiently concerned about climate change, would it make sense to invest heavily in, for example, solar technology, right across the Middle East, across North Africa to the west, and across the central Asian countries to the east?  They get the most sunshine, so that would make sense, wouldn't it?  I'm not talking about the complex carbon trading initiatives that offset holiday flights against energy efficient cooking stoves in sub-saharan Africa.  I'm talking about genuine, cooperatively owned, community-owned solutions, harvesting the plentiful sunshine and wind resources for the benefit of the communities that live in those regions.  It could provide energy, but also training, jobs, prosperity, autonomy.

Am I just being simplistic, or is the only real challenge to that concept in our own minds?

Even on a (grey and wet) day like today, installing panels in Norfolk is still an effective option.  And what else do we have?  We have a lot of wind (I'm told that the winds from Siberia heading west cover flat country all the way across Europe until they hit the first high ground here in Norwich - sometimes I can really believe that!).  We have the turbines at Scroby Sands, and scattered across the county, plus the beautiful old windmills dotted around the place, some of them still working, many, I'm sure, just ready to be refitted to modern-day usage.  In the same way that Iceland uses its locally available geothermal energy, maybe we should be pushing for a new localism in energy production - local, but cooperative, while supporting other countries, so called developing countries, in building their own local energy, based on what is most suitable for their own locality.

I'm not saying that this will solve all our problems - solutions often come with their own complexities, their own new problems.  But as part of a mix - localised, community-based energy production, side by side with radical and focussed energy waste reduction and elimination - this could be a real opportunity to create energy sustainability and equity.  It just needs to will to make it happen.

Pic: http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2008/09/04/solar-project-brings-water-and-crops-to-desert/

Look after the pennies...

I'm going to assume that you know the other half of this little proverb.

I don't want to quote it in full because this is one proverb that I truly can't stand.  It makes no sense! It's just not true! If anything, it's the other way round: If you make big investments in things that work well and last a long time, you'll never have to worry about the minute details ever again!

And so it is with energy.  When people talk about home energy-efficiency, the first thing that pops into your head is... let me guess... low-energy light-bulbs. Great! But as far as I'm concerned, low-energy light-bulbs are the "pennies" of energy-efficiency. Yes, by all means install them in your homes, but don't expect them to take care of the bulk of your home energy-efficiency.

To demonstrate this point, let's compare boiling a kettle unnecessarily to leaving a light on unnecessarily. Have a look at these calculations:

Boiling a kettle: 3kW for 3 minutes (1/20th of an hour)

3 kW x 1/20 h = 0.15 kWh 

Time for a 60W lightbulb to use the same energy:

0.15 kWh / 0.06 kW = 2.5 hrs

Time for a 11W lightbulb to use the same energy:

0.15 kWh / 0.011 kW = 13.6 hrs

What that's basically saying is that to waste the same amount of energy as boiling a kettle, you would have to leave a 60W incandescent light-bulb on for 2.5 hours.  Or if it was an energy-efficient light-bulb (11W), a whopping 13.6 hours!

The other thing about kettle-boiling is that it is a huge demand for a short period of time, which, if large numbers of people turn them on at once, as Chris mentioned on monday, causes a peak in electricity demand that can be in excess of the entire electricity production capacity of the country.  Electric lights, however, are a more constant demand and can be allowed for much more easily - 273 low-energy bulbs would have to be turned on at exactly the same time to create the same effect as a single kettle switch being flipped!

So which should we pay more attention to? The "penny" light-bulbs or "pound" unnecessary kettle-boiling?

It's still very hard to keep you eye on where you're using your electricity though, because it's so invisible and so available! You can just flick a switch and it's there, but this hides the amount of energy you're really using.  Say you've got an electric heater in your living room (as indeed I have, although I rarely use it), it would be quite easy to turn it on and leave it on without a care in the world, and to be barely aware of the energy that is going into it.  With a woodburner, however, if you were spending 10 minutes every couple of hours going out to the shed to bring in some more wood and stack it up in the burner to get the same effect as a 2kW electric heater, you'd start to think to yourself "What the hell am I doing? Look at all this wood I'm wasting!"

Perhaps you'd see your electricity bill differently if it was itemised, like a telephone bill:

This week's electricity usage:      Cost per Use      Total
Dishwasher Use x 8 .................................. £0.15 ......... £1.20
Washing Machine Use x 2 ........................ £0.20 ......... £0.40
Lights in living room x 28 hrs .................. £0.003 ........ £0.10
Cooking x 10 ............................................ £0.15 .......... £1.50
Microwave x 6 ......................................... £0.15 .......... £0.90
Washing hands with hot water x 20 .......... £0.02 ......... £0.44
Power shower using electric immersion heater x 7
................................................................. £1.01 .......... £7.07

Which would you look at first?  The lights? Or the power showers?

Whether the shower or the tumble-dryer takes the most amount of energy in your house will depend very much on your set-up, appliance energy-efficiency and heating energy-source, but you can depend on one thing: you're not going to have a big impact on your bill without looking at the pounds, not just the pennies!

Images: Three pounds and one pence by Simeon Jackson (who noticed that there are three pound coins in the bin in the corner of the picture?  Who's looking after them now, huh?), Kettle switch found on the internet, annotated by me.

Waking up in Forest Row

I am in Forest Row, East Sussex. It's six in the morning and outside high in the trees a thrush is singing in the dark. I have just made coffee, switched on the computer and the lights. I don't think about it (the power that is). Like millions of people each morning I click the switch, press the button and expect light, heat, instant connection. I'm staying with Mike Grenville (thanks to a fossil fuelled train) and we're putting together an idea for a Transition newspaper. Yesterday we went to the local coffee shop where the talk was all about fracking as the village is close to the site at Balcombe where Cuadrilla plan to test for oil. We were going to go to have a sauna (wood-fired) by bicycle (human powered) but the project took up all our attention.

The fact is everything we do is shaped by energy - by electricity, by oil, by gas- and there is not one of these sources of power that doesn't somehow leave blood on our hands and present some kind of dilemma.

To look at where the coffee, the kettle and all those invisible wires go, what grids they are connected to, what industries, means we're looking at big picture: fracking, mountain top removal, coal-fired power stations, all the issues around nuclear power, the burning of rainforest wood and palm oil for biofuels, oil extraction in the wildernesses of the Artic, deep sea drilling. We're looking at dams and tar sands and pollution and climate change and land grabs. We're looking at companies that make billions of pounds profit, at ourselves struggling to pay bills as those prices keep rising and being totally dependent on that power to live our lives and all I want to do this morning is make my cup of coffee and write this blog before I catch the train home. All I want to do is make my breakfast and step outside into the garden and listen to that bird.

But I can't do that because I'm in Transition and this is the energy week and I know that even if we did make it to the woods to have that sauna last night the bender and the stove exist because of the same energy and somehow we're not going to escape that dilemma no matter how right-on and low-carbon I am about not using central heating. Even if the local people in Sussex, Lancashire and Kent and Wales resist the highly controversial, expensive and resource hungry drilling that will damage the water tables of Britain as it has in the United States, the question we need to ask is where do we get the power from?

"It's about narrative," said Mike. What is the energy story are we telling ourselves?

Off Grid This summer we sat the two of us, as the wind and rain shook the tents at the Sunrise Festival and drank our coffee (rocket-stove) as two men chopped wood for the pizza oven. Grateful for heat and shelter, it is experiences like these that bring home exactly the kind of attitude and engagement you need to live without modern power systems. Tin Village had a solar panel and a small wind turbine that kept the computer going for on-line communications and a small cinema. Everything else was run on wood. However this was the summer and a weekend. Most people, including myself, would soon be heading home. We love all that Kelly kettle camping business but we're on holiday. This is not our everyday world.

To live off-grid all year round in 2012 requires either money for alternative power systems (e.g wood chip boilers, ground-source heat pumps) or high principles. As anyone who has slept in a tent at Occupy Norwich can tell you, off grid is cold, damp (and frequently muddy) in a wintry Britain. Some fellow Transitioners have organised their houses to run almost entirely on wood burners for heat and water and cooking, some like the activist initiative Transition Heathrow have a strong supply of wood from a local tree surgeon for their rocket stove kitchen, a bike generator and four solar panels and a very committed crew.

Other Transition initatives have made that strategic step and started to create their own community energy source, most notably the solar power station in Lewes and the community wind turbine set up by PEDAL - Portobello Transition Town. To create the kind of enterprise requires huge commitment and funding and is no small undertaking. It's a big topic. as Forest Row discovered, when Mike set up a debate between Charles Hendry and Jeremy Leggett at the recent Transition Energy Fair.

But however you organise your house and your transport and your neighbourhood, all of them are underpinned by different stories. The first is that you can continue living the same individualist lifestyle, only using alternative sources of energy, and the other two involve an individual and collective powerdown. Which is not, as energy campaigner Mandy Miekle pointed out recently, so much about creating a low-carbon community, but a low energy society:

The more I have looked into the energy crisis, the more I feel that the next big leap forward will not be technological, but psychological. We must reexamine our relationship with nature, for all resources come from nature. We need to stop talking about outcomes like saving ecosystems without also asking why we are destroying ecosystems in the first place. As Paul Kingsnorth points out, this squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all – it is about narratives. We have many cultural narratives to address, but our relationship with energy has to come first.

However there are a few barriers in the way, not least our ability to look reality in the eye.

Techno-fix. In Forest Row the talk is also about free energy and not the kind that comes from the sun or the winds and waves of the earth. The anti-documentary of the moment is Thrive where dodgy looking geezers fly over the ancient sacred sites and crop circles on a disc, discussing how the big oil corporations (controlled by the banks) are squashing all research into this everlasting power source, encapsulated in the symbol of the torus (see left). This key invention, transmitted by extra-terrestrial intelligence, will transform the planet and solve all the problems of the world (cue starving Africans) which according to the film are entirely due to the lack of energy.

This is another narrative entirely. It suggests that we will be saved by outside agencies who somehow will work in our best interests and all former ideas of collective equity are null and void. And instead of looking at the hard facts we just have to fall down a virtual rabbit hole into a wonderland mix of half-truths about the global banking system and conspiracy theory.

This is a bad fairy tale to be believing right now, because it suggests we don't need to do anything about our energy dilemma, that we don't live in a place of limit and or have to face the consequences of our actions. All real stories look at these realities, and the characters in them who are plucky and ask questions, who don't go along with the magic spells, are the ones who live to see a happy ending.

Time to check out those narratives.

DISCLAIMER: Just in case you thought Mike was responsible for showing me Thrive, I twisted his arm, curious to the max. What we were really watching in Forest Row was a film of Alan Watts speaking from a different paradigm altogether in California. . .get wiggly!



Photos: solar panels on Mike's roof in Forest Row: Keystone XL pipeline protest; chai-making at Tin Village, Sunrise Festival; making a wind-turbine at Transition Heathrow; Scene from Thrive.

Creature Comforts

I’m currently reading ‘At Home’ by Bill Bryson and enjoying learning all sorts of quirky details about how most of us came to live in relative comfort. Apparently crude oil was first extracted from the ground, in the 1850’s, in order to produce paraffin for lighting and the petroleum fraction was considered worthless and discarded. How times have changed!

A lot of the book is about how the exploitation of energy sources have made our lives comfortable – a concept that we now take for granted but the word ‘comfort’ only assumed its current meaning in 1770 (when it was used in a letter by Horace Walpole). Until then most people had no expectation of being comfortable and in medieval houses people literally huddled together around a single open hearth with no chimney. The exploitation of coal led to heat, steam for engines to power the industrial revolution, gas for lighting and ultimately to electricity and all the labour saving devices that we now depend on.

A biomass boiler

Apparently, if you ask people what they want from life, a common reply is ‘to be comfortable’. So given how recently it is that the working family has achieved a comfortable life, you would think that we would all be motivated to preserve the resources that sustain our comfortable lives. We are now planning to build many thousands of new houses around Norwich and I would hope that planning for a world no longer supplied with cheap oil, would be a priority – but I don’t see it happening. Many of the technologies that could keep us warm in the future (such as anaerobic digesters and biomass fuelled heat and power plants) need to be designed into new communities when they are built – it is much harder to retrofit. And don’t get me started on the need for cycle paths and transport!

I really don’t understand why people who are now in their teens and twenties are not demanding new homes to be designed for the energy deficient future that we all know is coming. Councils are largely run by the middle aged or older – who put in a huge amount of voluntary effort but subconsciously don't expect to be around when energy has become painfully expensive. Young people need to take action now if they want to enjoy the same levels of comfort in their older years. Some of us can keep warm cheaply today by scavenging wood but you can’t keep a whole city warm that way.

An unplanned consequence of the discovery of oil, was that cheap paraffin destroyed the market for whale oil and saved sperm whales from extinction. Predicting the future supply and demand for energy is never straightforward but we have to try harder to be less dependent on finite resources!

We need to get out more!

I've just been sawing down a dead elm at the bottom of the garden. There were three trunks originally and I've managed the first two alone with a handsaw.

I began felling last week and published a short account with accompanying precautions:

*CHEERFUL DISCLAIMER: The following pictures are NOT intended for educational purposes. I do NOT recommend this way of cutting trees down to anyone and if you are mad enough to follow the manner presented here you do so at your own risk.

Having said that I had great fun, one or two scary moments, got several week’s worth of firewood and ended up soaked in sweat – terribly masculine!

It was speaking with Rose on the phone on Saturday and her stories of the wild men and women in the New Zealand outback that got me off my backside and up the dead elm. What I’m doing here is tame in comparison. But I felt very proud (in a good way!) when the first trunk fell in exactly the right place, i.e. not on me!

Maybe I should open another blog/twitter account: markintrees?

from Sawing Elm - The Low Carbon Way

Where I live in the Suffolk countryside there are elm ghosts in every hedgerow. Elm burns well and thanks to this dead tree we'll keep warm with the woodburner for the rest of the winter. And talk about renewables. Underground the tree itself is actually still alive and growing again from suckers.

Since our engagement with TN2's Stranger's Circle two years ago we have hardly used our central heating (oil-fired). The first winter of 2009-2010 was cold and it was tough. Sleeping with more clothes on, hot water bottles in the coldest moments and endurance were the order of the day. We used the woodburner once or twice a week.

Last winter was also cold for months on end. We still felt it, but it was less gruelling now as our bodies had acclimatised. I started to feel uncomfortable in centrally heated buildings and got used to wearing thick (and thanks to the Give and Take Days in Bungay, free) jumpers.

This winter has been mild so far. But when it is cold I only feel it when I'm sitting still for long periods (writing blogs for example). When I'm sawing the elm it takes about five minutes before I'm completely warm, sweating even. As Adrienne of Transition Lewes reminded me the other day: "You know the old saying: you warm yourself three times, once cutting the wood, once carting it and once burning it..."

As peaking fossil fuels get more expensive, both for companies to extract and get onstream and for consumers to buy, either directly for household or transport, or indirectly as goods, our whole sedentary lifestyle and desire for comfort will be challenged. Our physical bodies are archaic, they are made for balance between movement and stasis and to respond to weather. We need to get out more!

I used to order my wood in, put the heating on whenever it felt the slightest bit chilly and would never have dreamed of cutting down a dead elm, let alone by myself. Now the combination of environmental awareness, low income, high prices for all fuels including firewood and being in Transition make me approach energy in a very different way. And I feel better for it.

These may seem like small steps. Insignificant. But at this point we need to engage with the source of our energy, both as individuals and communities, with an eye to our common future in any way we can. Whether we are on Energy Lookouts, attending meetings to oppose gas fracking, carsharing or sawing our own firewood, each is a move towards resilience in the coming energy-lean times.

The Energy we need

This week's theme is the hot topic of energy - where we get it, what we use it for, how much of it we are using, and what the future holds for energy security.....oh yes, and what this all might be doing to our environment!

Sample any of the daily press and you'd be forgiven for thinking there is an underlying sense of panic around about how we are going to feed the ever increasing demand for energy. And on the flip-side, concern about what this panic seems to be creating in the energy industry in terms of the risks being taken in extracting energy from the earth in ever-more ingenious, and some might say, dubious, ways.

Where we get our electricity from in the U.K. and the balance between sources is interesting from an environmental point of view. At the moment the proportions go roughly like this:

gas 41%
coal 33%
nuclear 19%
renewables 3%
oil 1%

Electricity on it's own has a sense of magic about it. Faraday was indeed a genius, but he could not have possibly foreseen how much of our current everyday infrastructure now depends on it - from heating and lighting homes and businesses, driving trains, to powering the computer I am writing this on. Unlike other commodities we buy, it cannot be stored and then picked off a shelf or ordered over the internet - it has to be produced at the moment it is needed. Apart from its invisibility, this is also part of its magic - or rather the amazing power-generating infrastructure that is needed to ensure we get it when we need it.

In the U.K. that demand can vary enormously with time of year and time of day, and what's on the TV. On a U.K. summer evening, typically the power demand - always measured in multiples of Watts - is around 15 - 20 gigawatts. A gigawatt is a billion watts. In the winter, around 6.00 p.m., the demand can be in excess of 60 gigawatts. So demand has obvious peaks - although the cause of them has some interesting features. The most important feature in any large power station, or more accurately power distribution centre, amongst all the banks of computer monitors, is the humble TV. Why? Because what is being shown on it has a large bearing on what the power demand is going to be, minute by minute. The largest peaks in demand happen toward the time when the credits for 'East Enders' appear, or at the end of a penalty shoot-out in the World Cup. Immediately afterward is when households go straight to the kettle, and nationwide demand for electricity can go so high as actually to exceed the total capacity of generation in the country - at such times the distribution centres usually make a discreet telephone call to France and say, "more power please".


But what of the consequences of using all this power? Our current burning of coal in particular, and its planned increase by our government, is a big cause for concern. Burning anything that releases carbon into the atmosphere is bad news, but coal releases about 40% more CO2 than gas, when it is burnt. Even worse, a coal-fired power station runs at about 40% efficiency, compared to a gas-fired one on 52%. The coal advocates of course point to carbon capture and storage (CCS) as the way forward here, but even such conservative institutions as the International Energy Agency have said that ..." large scale (CCS) is probably 10 years off (development), and is a real potential emission mitigation tool from 2030..." Apart from the UK, the US and China both have enormous coal reserves they are only too keen to exploit.

So later in the week we will be hearing more about CCS and so-called 'gas-fracking', the humble elm tree, how local development plans affect our demand for energy.... and more.

I'll now think about lighting the woodburner. Anybody got any spare wood?

Keeping the home fires burning

At a lecture I attended many years ago presented by Matthew Fox, I was struck by his observation that as a member of homo urbanus, I was cut off from the elements.

So much so, that in our homes we no longer really feel them - the earth is covered over and built on, fire is boxed up in boilers, water travels through pipes, and the air is often messed about with by conditioners, humidifiers, and any number of interventions. In many modern offices you can't actually open the windows.

This sense of disconnection is also true of our energy usage. Anyone living little more than 100 years ago would be astonished at our steady supply of energy in the form of electricity and gas, and the assumption that we can have it exactly when needed, instantaneously, on demand, invisibly driving everything that heats, powers, and makes our home work. Faraday was indeed a genius.

Before the oil and coal revolution, fetching fuel (usually wood), and water, was an integral and time consuming part of survival. And, of course, two-thirds of the current world's population are in this position. It has been calculated that on average, today, an African living in a rural location spends 2 hours per day simply fetching water. So.... glad to be out of that, we think. Fine, as long as we continue to be aware of and value where our resources come from now, and how much we consume. But most of the time we are oblivious of this, because the process is invisible.

If this is true of the home, it is even more true of our workplaces, given that we are not usually responsible for the bills. 3 years ago, Mark Crutchley and Maria Price of the then TN Energy Group, invited the BBC locally to record on camera apparent energy wasteage late at night in Norwich - this ranged from office block lights left on, to car sales showrooms and shops with very large outputs of lighting on at 11.00 p.m. It featured as an item on BBC Look East and clearly the media team thought this was a striking and newsworthy piece.

This great idea is now being re-shaped and formed as our very own Energy Look Out initiative. So now, everyone has a chance to report us examples of energy waste - or indeed any kind of resource waste ( what about those constantly running taps in some of the cafe chains?) - and members of the Look Out team will contact the retailer or company concerned. See this month's bulletin.

However, unlike the mainstream media approach, we are not out to 'name and shame', but to firstly alert the company, and suggest ways they could save energy - and money. We will then publish the companies where positive change has been evidenced.

Research shows that in comparing companies that have adopted carbon and energy-saving measures, with those that have not, the latter group, when asked 'why not?', simply did not believe any significant savings could be made. Given some of the first group managed savings of 20% and more, this was yet another example of the need to change behaviours, assumptions and attitudes. So right on the transition agenda then!

Keep those reportings and sightings coming, and thanks to those who have already written to us.

Report your concern by e-mailing here . We will also be meeting informally at Take 5, Tombland, Norwich on December 12th 6.30 p.m. to further develop this initiative

Individualism and the Bigger Picture

I'm writing this in Lewes in Sussex having spent the last two days at the South East Transition Camp which I'll be reporting on tomorrow. I've been off-line and off-grid and sleeping in a yurt (bliss!) and Mark has been holding the fort so it seemed only fair (and in the spirit of our last retroblog week) that he has today's spot. Here is his piece from our first week's editorial on the Social Reporting project on The Big Picture, introduced by Peter Lipman. Meanwhile I'm off to catch several trains back to East Anglia. See you soon!

The bigger picture underpins the whole of the Transition movement for me. It’s the reason why I engaged in the first place and the context for my participation.

Transition meetings can often run the risk of revolving around the ‘business of the day’, particularly where events and projects are concerned, and the bigger picture starts to look like an elephant in the room no one pays any attention to. We need to make space for those conversations.

Early this year for one of Sustainable Bungay’s monthly Green Drinks at the Green Dragon, we chose the theme of shifting cultural values, after several of us read the recent Common Cause report by Tom Crompton.

Despite concerns that the subject was too intellectual or “airy-fairy” (our usual themes and activities tend to be more obviously practical: waste, local food, energy, keeping bees), and that No One Would Come (we’re not Totnes, after all), the bar was packed with the biggest turnout of any of our Green Drinks and the conversation was long and lively. You can read more about it here.

In the context of cultural values I'd like to look at individualism; one because it is endemic to our modern culture and two because I think it is one of the greatest obstacles to making a smooth transition to a liveable future. That along with social inequality and injustice. And blindness to the fact that the artificial systems which hold our current civilisation and its institutions in place are totally dependent on the earth’s living systems and not the other way round.

I see a direct link between the availability of fossil fuel energy in rich Western countries such as the UK and the individualism which is so prevalent. Most of us here have been able to afford a kind of splendid isolation from each other and the rest of the world, particularly in the last 30 years. My personal computer, stereo, i-pod, car. My house, my garden. My personal relationships, my space. My comfort zones (which you'd better not go too near). The high energy return on energy invested (EROEI) fossil fuels have given us has gone hand in hand with an exaggerated (illusory?) sense of our own self-importance, whilst disconnecting us from our fellow humans, creatures and plants.

Popular psychology and psychotherapy have reflected and reinforced this bubble with their focus on the personal, the domestic, finding myself (with other people part of my personal movie), I’m OK You’re OK (just as long as you fit my picture of you!) – and the consumerist - I Can Be Rich, Thin, Successful, go shopping endlessly, be a supermodel, have a supermodel, treat myself and have Time for Me!

That’s a big picture thing. Because individ-ualism and the lifestyle that goes with it is not just personal. It uses up vast planetary resources. It literally 'costs the earth', as fellow transitioner and musician John Preston sings in his song of the same name. Maintaining this lifestyle is a huge part of what’s driving the Alberta tar sands extraction in Canada and the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline that Bill McKibben and others have been protesting (and being arrested) about in Washington and which Jay wrote about in yesterday's excellent post.

And of what's driving the proposed gas fracking operations closer to home in the UK.

We need to keep these things in the conversation so they inform our decisions. Because everything comes down to home in the end. Mark Watson

Pics: Before Transition - One man, one car, mountains, sky, Arizona 2001; Shifting Cultural Values in Bungay, January 2011; Still of Josh Fox in Gasland - from On Gasland and Feeling (Transition Norwich blog)

This is the House Transition Built

What is the house? Is it a dream we hold, a fairy palace, a shelter from the storm, perched on a hill, overlooking the sea, somewhere down a farm track or a long drive edged with lime trees? Or is it a nightmare, the haunted house, the house of childhood secrets we fear to reenter, the slum and the council estate we long to escape from, the little boxes on the hillside we are loathe to see?

This week the house is a practical place, a building in Transition, in cities and villages where property is valued more than people and everyone is assessed by their address and the colour of paint on their front door. As the Government is poised to relax planning laws that will make it easier for developers to tarmac the green fields of England, while the Green Deal gets pushed back and low-income city dwellers pushed out of the smarter neighbourhoods, our relationship with the House is changing.

No longer a place of exclusivity and security, it has become a liability. The economic downturn and soaring energy prices have made our homes the highest financial burden most of us carry. And, as we come awake to peak oil and climate change, also a burden on our conscience. To change our relationship with the environment we need not only to consume less we need a different attitude to the shelters we build and inhabit. Including those in our imaginations.

How can we create an aesthetic of downshift in a culture of aspiration?

I once spent my working days visiting people’s swanky apartments and villas for magazines like World of Interiors. I styled photographic shoots of heritage chintz curtains and designer chairs and unwittingly upheld the aesthetics of Empire. I had grown up in London’s Bayswater district in a Victorian white-fronted house, serviced by a crew of professional builders, carpenters, interior decorators, window cleaners and dailies. And yet I always longed to live in simple vernacular spaces - artist’s studios, rough Greek interiors, thatched cottages. When I sold my city flat and went travelling I got to live in a series of palm-leaf cabanas, wood cabins, yurts and adobe roundhouses and eventually settled in a cottage that resembled the one in the Kent marshes I had loved as a child. It doesn’t belong to me and yet it feels like home.

So when it came to my turn on the blog this week I wanted to look at two Transitioners’ houses that reflected this personal and contemporary downshift: a retrofitted house in Norwich owned by Stefi, one of the movers and shakers behind the Magdalen Street Celebration and the innovative Café Conversations, and a straw bale house, designed and built by John Preston and Carol Hunter from Transition Downham Market and Villages.

Transition has its foundation in permaculture and natural building. The upcoming The Transition Companion was inspired by the seminal text on environmental architecture, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Many Transitioners dream of cobhouses and passive houses set amongst forest gardens and friendly communities. And yet we live within old walls, constricted by planning laws, by expensive green technology and by a lack of skills in the basic arts of living. How do people work with those constrictions and yet make steps to live within their principles? I stepped out of my door to find out:

House on the edge of Mousehold Heath

Brought up in an airy 1930s suburban house in Los Angeles and having just returned from India Stefi stepped into her 1900 NR3 terrace two-up two-downer and wanted immediately to bring space and light into its narrow and dark British dimensions (it is 9 foot wide). She was influenced by two streams, she said. One was an aesthetic made of the space and light she inherited from her native California and the simplicity she found living in an Indian one-room dwelling open to the elements. The second stream to do with ecological living and energy reduction.

Inside the rooms have wooden floorboards and bare plastered walls and simple furniture ("primarily sourced from the rich pickings of Magdalen Street's dozen or more charity and antique shops! So the embodied carbon is very low"). Light has been introduced by opening up a skylight in the kitchen, making a glass front door and a device known as a solar tunnel which amplifies and bounces light into the recesses of the dark back bedroom.

“The sun tunnel costs £200 to buy, £150 to have fitted. but could be done DIY - it's an easier fit than a roof window. Even situated on a north facing roof, there is no longer any need to put on the lights in the room during the day. You need to figure out a way to shade it on summer evenings or you'll have daylight coming in until 11 pm and again at 4 am!"

Meanwhile the double-glazed K glass fronted door (£150) and large window bring both light and solar passive heat to the front room, along with its underfloor insulation (£600). The woodburner in the “winter” back room uses wood from her pollarded sycamore tree:

“While warming the rooms, I also warm water and put it in a thermos for the next morning's tea (just needs a few degrees heat up in the kettle). I can also pre-cook pulses and rice for a super-fast finish off in the pressure cooker.”

Her energy bills have fallen dramatically as a result of these steps. Inspired by Chris Hull’s model she has also installed a rainwater loo outside and is presently constructing a Japanese-style handbasin where the grey water feeds into the cistern, meaning there will be enough water in the drought times without having to use mains water. Further into the narrow, immensely long garden rainwater feeds the pond and this summer at her birthday party people brought succulents for a new sedum roof.

“This helps insulate the outhouse, improves the view over the garden, preserves the tar roof which would otherwise slowly breakdown under UV exposure. It also adds to the biodiversity of the long terraced garden, which borders on Mousehold heath and hosts many of its flora and fauna.”

The undercover materials include a recycled woollen blanket and a quality pond liner. Some things you just can't skimp on.

House in the Quarry

I met John and Carol at the Greenpeace Fair where they had just finished a set on the cycle-powered stage. John and Carol sing a sharp-witted contemporary slack rock as The John Preston Tribute Band. They are also about to finish building a straw bale house after five years hard labour. The last layers of the cob floor are being laid this week and with luck (and warm weather) they are finally moving out of their caravan and into the studio with its wood-fired stove, living roof and hand-made, hand-plastered walls, surrounded by a permaculture garden.

The derelict land John bought was in an old chalk quarry that housed a neglected but mature walnut orchard. Originally they designed and planned to build a house and a studio but soon learned that more space means more time and more money.

"Where this fits with Transition is that all these are learnable skills," John told me as we riff about busting through the mystique of the professional builder and not living in house “where the woman is trapped in a kitchen and a stupid room dominated by a TV set.”

“Oh, I thought you were a builder,” I say, dead impressed, it has to be said, by anything to do with DIY.

“I have an O level in Woodwork and Technical drawing, “ he corrects me, “And a degree in Music. I’m a music therapist. I didn't even have any interest in DIY before this misadventure.. Building is all about confidence and getting intimate with the materials. You can learn to lay bricks in a straight line, but you just won’t do it as fast as a bricklayer."

The skills to do with constructing your own house are many, not least dealing with planning permission and building regulations, along with learning about U-values and how to make your own paint (lime, borax, casein, natural pigments). What has stood them in good stead is instinct and persistence. For example where other houses built on this historical backfill of chalk have brought in massive machinery to build expensive high-impact concrete piles as foundation, John and Carol put in a simple low-impact trench (for £1500). They took a risk it would pass the geological tests.

“It’s scary building because you have to spend money. And you have to undo things if you want lovely results.”

"And you don't have the same level of energy when you are in your early 50s," added Carol ruefully and laughed.

John and Carol have deliberately worked alongside people who were prepared to teach them – from green build designers to plumbers. (“The work will show you the way” as one Polish builder told them). Everything in the house has been installed with peak oil and carbon emissions in mind, which is how we ended up sitting in the rain discussing oil-based insulation materials and sourcing ecologically-sound door frames from Estonia, while everyone else was in the tea tent eating cake. Ah, Transition!

Straw bale under construction at Stokes Ferry; hand-made paints on plaster; Stefi's house; rainwater system; skylit kitchen; sedum roof; the Studio almost complete; building the walls; laying the cob floor; talking green build at the Greenpeace Fair.