The Firm

Last week on the Social Reporting Project we looked at the role of the Transition Network within the wider network of people involved with the movement. We  looked at several of its aspects from the movers and shakers to its communications system. Here is mine focussed on the Board:

My name is Charlotte and I am in Transition. Maybe I should rephrase that and say I’m in the Transition movement, or the Transition network (small n). One thing is for sure: I’m in a Transition initiative that is five years old this November.

Originally we were turned down by the Network (cap N) as an official Transition town. We then became one of the few initiatives in the UK to be unleashed, though our projects are small and unfunded and ignored by the local council. We have never been mentioned in the Network’s monthly dispatches. From the outside we would be dismissed as white and middle class by one set of people, and a bunch of hippies by another. Not “fit for purpose” either way.

The truth of the matter is however we are a group of people who would have never met and worked together otherwise. We do ordinary things in extraordinary times. The effects of what we do are subtle and unquantifiable. We sit each month in a circle and discuss our events - bees, recycling, food, films, pig club, green drinks. We are from all classes and ages, upper to lower, 20s to 70s. At our community table the proud and the meek sit down together, pensioned, low-paid, unemployed, house owner, renter, Tory and Marxist, hunter and vegan. We make ourselves at home in each other's compnay. If you asked the group: are you in transition, a movement, or a network? most would smile and shake their heads: we’re in Sustainable Bungay, they would reply.

into the fire

My name is Charlotte and I am in Sustainable Bungay. I start here because in order to write about the Network as a social reporter, I have to begin in my initiative (or one of them). Few in my group know about the Network, use the website, read the books, go to the Conference, or engage in any of the Ingredients or Tools. When I asked if anyone would like to come and hear Rob Hopkins speak about The Transition Companion last November my neighbour turned to me and said:

Who is Rob Hopkins?

When I told Rob Hopkins that he laughed. That's perfect, he said. We were giving him a lift to Norwich station the next day and he was telling us how his house burned down in Ireland and how he had become wary of entangling his family too much in Transition as a result.

I am in Transition the network (small n) because, like Mark and Josiah in my group, I have made it my business to be. I have immersed myself in Transition culture for five years. I have made contact with the people who work for Transition at three Conferences, and know them as comrades, “engaged in actions on the edge of consciousness” as the chair of the Network, Peter Lipman described it. I don’t know Peter, and yet somewhere I do. His commanding attention and presence hover over the movement, like an eagle, that some might mistake for a CEO. But that's not what I recognise in him, or any of the people who have put themselves on the line for the movement.

We know, as many of us in Transition do, but rarely say, what it is like to live in a burned house and have people be wary around what you do. The toughness and beauty and the opportunity it brings. Thanks to this awarenThe Transition Companion and Peak Money. The Network has given the Transition Free Press crew £1000 to help fund the preview issue of the newspaper, I have worked with Ed Mitchell for six months to set up this blog and received expenses to meet all the reporters and to go on line at my house. I am not in the Network but I am in the network. When I imagine the map of Transition I see dots of light in towns and cities around the country, and a circle in the West that is Totnes. I want to open the circle and join those dots up.  My business within the network is as a connector. No one gave me the job, it’s just what I do wherever I go. Just like Josiah and Mark.
ess I have taken part in discussions about

From the air

One of the most damaging effects of specialist culture is that we do not see what goes on behind the scenes. Goods and services are available on-lline. Events and entertainment appear like clockwork. Food arrives at the supermarket, petrol in our tanks. We judge everything by its show, as consumers. We are critical without appreciating the work that goes into creating all these things. Sometimes we don't care to. Once you know the workings of something, you have to take responsbility for your role within it.

This week we are looking at the Network in order that we understand its function better, and to define on our part. We have already focused several of our weeks on its different strands: Transition Training (Naresh Giangrande) Inner Transition (Sophy Banks), REconomy (Fiona Ward), as well as the role of the TN website (Ed Mitchell). Most of the staff and board members have written blogs for us from Steph Bradley on Rank and Privilege to Ruth Ben-Tovim on the role of the arts in Transition. For today’s post, I spoke with three trustees on the Board: Peter Lipman and William Lana, who have been on the board since 2006, originally with Rob and Ben Brangwyn (who have since stepped down) and Sarah Nicholl who joined in 2010 when the Board were looking for people who were deeply immersed in their local initiatives. We had three long intense discussions and though I cannot fit our dialogues within this post, this is a fusion of those conversations.

We wanted as a crew to explore the nature of the organisation in the collaborative spirit of social reporting. Eco-systems and human cultures work when all parts are in touch with each other and in communication. As a communicator I wanted to find the connections between the official Network and the unofficial network, in which it is embedded. Because no matter how you swing it: you don’t get one without the other.

at sea

To look at an organisation you need to look at its structure, and the people who take up the roles within that structure. The Transition Network is a registered charity. It has (paid) staff members and a board, as well as affiliated individuals, such as Filipa Pimentel (national hubs) and Isabel Carlisle (education) and Nick Osborne (group facilitaiton) and the Conference organisers, who work on a freelance basis (both paid and unpaid). The board has eight members all of whom have been selected on the grounds of their skills and experience in areas of economics, diversity, community, systems knowledge, the arts, inner work and employment, among others.

The board meet six times a year. Four regular meetings in three locations (Totnes, Bristol, London) and two “awaydays” in Totnes where they meet with staff over a weekend, generally hosted by Sophy Banks and Naresh Giangrande. These are opportunities to deal with specific issues and to “get their hands dirty”, as Peter described it. The subjects range from diversity to strategy to inner work, and include workshops, constellations and celebrations.

The Network is grant-funded, though a small amount of money comes from the sale of books and films and the trainings. As a consequence a good part of the agenda is around financing and fulfilling their obligations to the funders. Like a ship that has to change course according to the prevailing winds, the Board is also engaged in a continual process of self-examination. Is the Network doing the right thing? It uses the annual conference as a weathervane to find its direction in the rough ocean of the world. In 2009 this was diversity, in 2010 financial collapse, in 2011 social enterprise, in 2012 international expansion.
At present the Board are looking at the structure of the Network and themselves (there is no official term of office or a rotating chair). After two years of negotiation they are bringing a director on board who will keep the ship on course and the crew more coherent. They will also shortly be publishing a long-awaited communications strategy. It is recognised that the exciting cutting edge phase of Transition needs to cede to establishing resilient and flexiible procedures that can withstand the rocky road ahead. More hardy perennials putting down roots, than annual plants throwing out seeds and breaking ground.

On the ground

Many people who criticise the Network see it as an entity like the Government, an abstract "Them" whom we are powerless to communicate with or influence. But of course it’s not: it’s a small group of people configured in a certain way in order to hold a large organisation together and make it work more effectively. The charity structure of board, staff and volunteers could be seen as a bit clunky and stiff and behind-closed-doors for a grassroots movement that is in a constant state of metamorphosis. Most Transitioners would not describe themselves as “volunteers” and unlike most charities which are tapped into the status quo and business-as-usual, none of us really know where we are headed, or whether this "social experiment" will work. What we have in common is a knowledge that this is the best opportunity we have right now of working something out together on a local and national level. Everyone I spoke with shares a sense of urgency and a need to support initiatives more clearly. The Network however is a  small organisation with few resources, and so its scope is limited.

On the ground there is little recognition of this: sometimes there a resentment that some people are getting paid to do things that others have to do for free, that there is a Totnes mafia, a tyranny of structurelessness, that it is too academic, too corporate, not corporate enough, that decisions are being made without consultation, that the "leadership" is enjoying life at the top while the rest of us struggle unrecognised, that the model doesn't work, that no-one gets back to inquiries, that “They” should do this and that for us, should come and sort out this mess my initiative is in! And how come you never told us it would be so hard?
The truth of the matter is that Transition not been done before. This is a creative act and like most creations, has emerged assymetrically and organically from its material – a civilisation in a state of entrophy. It doesn’t fit the known industrial world: it is quirky, intelligent, frustrating, good-hearted, prolific, and not always that efficient. In short, awkwardly human.

At the 2011 conference workshop on Financial Collpase, led by Peter and  Naresh, there was a fevered demand for a workbook about the financial system. How can we talk to people in our communities about money? everyone asked. It was responded to, but with a marked reluctance to behave in a proscribed, top-down manner:

We are not policemen. This is a bottom-up movement we can’t tell people what to do. (PL)

The strong language used at the conference wasn't backed by a willingness in people to do it themselves (WL)

This is a key question: What do we want the Network to do for us that it is not doing? More than books and films, conferences, courses and resources posted on a website? Mostly we want, if we are honest, someone to take the pain away about the houses we see burning all around us and the people we love who look at us askance. We want someone to take the rap and all the responsibility. We like talking, but not necessarily acting. We are consumers and specialists, and Transition forces us to be activitsts and generalists and, more obliquely, to suffer as we shift towards a partnership culture. We have, brothers and sisters all, to do it for ourselves. And once we have figured that out and accepted that it’s just us in the room and the cavalry are not coming, what then? Is this really a client-server relationship we are engaged in, or do we have the beginnings of a different kind of organisation? There is talk of a federation of national hubs, but what about a national hub here as Jay suggested? Who is talking for the initiatives within the network to the Network?

My name is Charlotte and I wouldn’t be telling you my name if I wasn’t in Transition. I am tapped into a network of people that is Sustainable Bungay, and also Transition Norwich, that is the social reporters and their initiatives, that is hundreds of readers and conference-goers and thousands of people I don’t know and yet I know are there. It is a network of small lights that stretches across these islands, and is sparking alight elsewhere across the globe. We hold these pilot lights inside ourselves and in our groups, in our towns and cities, and when we meet up we make a fire. Every month I sit down alongside my fellows, come rain or shine. We share a language, the shape of our meetings, of core group and sub-group, the concepts of gift economy and co-operation. These came from the Network and from its creators. This network turned my life around. It’s turned thousands of people’s lives around. We walk out alone from our meetings, and yet we are connected. These connections are everything. Because a network is the dots and the connections and the people who make them.

This is not a feel-good moment in a workshop. This is for real. Let’s not blow it.

Richard sweeping up after a Sustainable Bungay Give and Take Day observed by Monty; The Happy Mondays kitchen crew at the Mexican Fiesta, September 2012; Josiah and Mark on the bus to the 2012 Transition Conference; Peter Lipman chairs the Peak Money Day; Sarah Nicholl with Transition Belsize in the Transition Companion; William Lana on the Atmos Project; Transition Conference (Mike Grenville)

Finding Mr Green

In case you don't know me I will just start with explaining that transition pretty much summarises who I am. It shares most of my values and beliefs, it defines how I try to live my life, I even work for a Transition Initiative albeit an unusual one, it is also what I want to do with my future. For more info on the depths of my Transitioness check out my How Transition Changed my Life post.

So with that clear, my answer to one of the question Helen asked us 'How much do you let the Transition lifestyle interfere with your relationships?' is that it's kind of hard not too when that's essentially who I am. It does, however, create additional hurdles in what is not the easiest quest in the first place.

The first fairly obvious side effect is that the number of people who can comprehend and accept (even if they don't follow) what I believe in and how I live is relatively small, making the chance of finding them much smaller. For example I went on a date with a lovely guy who turned out to be a carnivore capitalist (his definition not mine!) which was going to make things a bit tricky.

And how do you find these people? Those who agree with the transition ethos are so diverse that it's not like knowing you like heavy metal and so going to lots of heavy metal concerts. Transitioners don't follow stereotypes or labels (apart from that they are all lovely!)

This is not made easier by the fact that our society doesn't really offer many easy opportunities for talking to people and getting to know them. We seem to be expected to make all decisions on face value. Hopefully transition's community building is changing this, so maybe in 20 years time...

And if you do meet lovely people on the same path as you then another hurdle rears its head. Transatlantic relationships aren't really viable if you have vowed never to fly again. So a further limit - keep it local!

It's not all barriers and problems though (just like its not all hair shirts and lentils!). So much of Transition is about building positive, nourishing relationships that this can only be good in the long term. And we are constantly encouraging community and connections. So maybe it takes a wee bit longer to get started (no quick convenience culture here), but it's built to last and it's a lot more fun if your partner likes climbing trees and gets as excited about home grown jerusalem artichokes as you do!

Photos: maybe we need a transition uniform so that we are easier to identify - I'm voting for this stylish look, muddy matches online dating: lovely transitioners or feudalist recreational hunters?

A love affair with place

When we talk about relationships, we are normally talking about relations between people. Equally love. And when we talk about falling in love, a few characteristics typically come to mind: a sense of longing, a sense of 'nothing else matters', inner joy or peace, aliveness, and so on. Well I have to admit it - I've been there - been to that place - and that place is/was actually a geographical place. I fell in love with a City - or part of it - located 3000 miles from home, and I became addicted. Each time I left my other place, I had longings to go back. I felt an immediate sense of aliveness and vibrancy on arriving, and each time I returned home to Norwich I felt empty again. Something was missing.

Over a period of years this resonance with my other home, as it became, was so strong that I began to wonder whether I really belonged there, and not in Norwich. The thought of upping sticks certainly passed through me more than once, but against it, tugging the other way, were all my family and friend and campaigning connections in Norwich. After quite a process of examining exactly what it was which attracted me - what characteristics of Chris-ness were getting amplified and expressed when I was in this place - I began to realise what was going on.

Not long after this, timewise, in 2005 I was unexpectedly elected as a Green Party County Councillor, and with it a whole set of new responsibilities and transparency of values kicked in. By this time the awareness of flying in aeroplanes as a destructive pastime had really taken hold - and so now, I was faced with another dilemma to add to my list. Having let go of the idea of moving home and country, and promised myself I could survive and keep my attachment going by annual visits, I was now faced with the shame of knowing how destructive such visits would be, given the necessity of travel by air.

Here I need to digress a little. Volumes have been written on the ifs and buts of flying, some of it sound, and some of it highly misleading. The essence of air travel is speed and distance - that's the whole point - and of it's nature, anything travelling at high speed and over a long distance will use extremely large amounts of energy.

Try pushing a car. Then try pushing a jumbo jet. Then imagine this jet being propelled at 500 m.p.h. for hundreds or thousands of miles. Actually in my case, traveling to my special place involves, per person, about 3.5 tons of emitted CO2. So getting on this aeroplane and traveling for about 6 hours each way, I, personally would be responsible for emitting the same amount of CO2 as my house now emits in 7 years. To make matters even worse ( for my conscience), there is something called the 'forcing factor' when emissions are made at high altitude - which roughly translated means that carbon emitted at altitude, has 2.7 times the effect as that same emission would have on the ground. Put another way, this one trip would involve more carbon emissions than an average Tanzanian in their entire lifetime. And when it is widely regarded that a truly sustainable, long term, per person per year emission rating is 1.1 tons, there really was no way I was going to continue my addiction.

So then began the painful process of letting go of my attachment to this place, and of the dear friends I had made there. Actually, I still feel in some way connected with my friends, thanks to the wonders of e-mail and skype. The whole process has helped me realise just how difficult it is for us as individuals to kick the carbon habit, and how, over time, our lives have become dependant to such a degree on using energy and carbon. It wasn't exactly like coming off an addiction to ice-cream - although my special place had plenty of that in quantity and quality - more like coming out of a relationship. Sometimes I still feel that pang...to impulsively arrange a trip....but then I really do get that image of struggling sub-Saharan people in drought areas, whose circumstances are undoubtedly in my mind partially brought about by our addiction to carbon and guzzling energy. [ It's no co-incidence that all the major NGOs doing work in areas like that campaign vigorously on climate change issues].

Oh yes, and I've grown to really appreciate Norwich too!

My special place, if your really interested, is Boston - that's Massachussetts, not Lincolnshire.

Sustainable Relationships #2

I have been asked by Helenofnorwich to write a blog as part of the sustainable relationships week.

She was impressed by my ability to balance my environmental beliefs and my three children's needs.

So lets start with white goods. One of the things that has really changed women's lives is the invention of white goods. My washing machine is very dear to my heart, it works away every day doing a chore that would otherwise literally take me hours and hours a week. My dishwasher is my second most-loved machine. There's a huge amount of debate out there about whether washing up by hand or using a dishwasher is the more environmental option. Only this morning this was being hotly discussed by my fellow Quakers when considering refurbishing our (currently dishwasherless) kitchen. The jury still seems to be out on this one, but The Guardian tells us that dishwashers are the greener option, and I for one believe them on this one. Also, as a woman and single mum of 3 I firmly believe that when calculating the eco-friendliness of any appliance, you should factor in the effect is has on women's lives.

It's funny (to me at least) that although no one would consider turning back the clock and doing the washing by hand (or do you? let us know, and why!) there is still resistance to the idea of using machines to do some chores for us and this seems to particularly apply to washing up. One friend said to me that he enjoyed the peace and repetition of doing the dishes, but I had to point out to him that in fact his wife did the washing up most of time.

Having children, particularly more than one, is sometimes condemned as a move which increases the pressures on the world. As parents, we are very aware of this, as we struggle with washable nappies and throw out double the amount of rubbish that we used to in the pre-parent days. When our lovely babies grow into interesting but somewhat selfish teenagers, they relentlessly ask you to give them lifts here and there, provide them with new stuff ALL THE TIME and generally seem to retreat into a world where consideration for others and the planet ceases to exist for a while. This makes it hard to explain that no, we won't be buying a massive TV screen just because they are all at the rage at the moment.

One of the things I hadn't really expected is that my children, deprived of computer consoles, laptops etc at home would end up going round to their friends' or their Dad's house to get their fix of computer-based fun. We have one TV and one computer, both in the living area. Living in a little house can drive teenagers mad, but I prefer to see it in more positive terms - we are all a bundled together in one living room sharing our lives and keeping each other warm. Those long winter evenings just fly by!

When they were little, I effectively ran a huge children's clothes swap system with my friends and a lot of clothes got passed round and round. I had hoped that when they were old enough to choose their own style, they might adopt charity shop chic, just as we trendy souls did in our young days. But alas no, my kids wish to be clothed by expensively-labelled stores which seem to tap into teenagers' needs to fit in and wear exactly the same T shirt as everyone else. Will they grow out of it? Or will they rebel against their Mum's greenish and slightly hippy ways and all become 4X4 driving gas guzzlers? Joanna Smith

Skill Sharing as a Way of Life in Norwich and Bungay

I didn't really notice it at first. There I was in the early days (2008-9) at Sustainable Bungay meetings saying 'Oh a local food conference, how brilliant, I'll help out with that, I can do front-of-house, dish out some soup, help wash dishes, learn something about food systems'.

Or spending the day learning to graft and plant fruit trees and use a sledgehammer for the first time (to secure the stakes) at growers' co-operative Greengrow down the road.

Or speaking about Deep Ecology with Transition Norwich, though I hadn't spoken in public for years.
And that was just in the first six months of being in Transition. I was responding at a deep level to what Ann Owen described last Monday as

being open to learning anything from anybody, anywhere. No need for teachers or schools, just the willingness to share what you know and can do, with others, who will likewise share their skills with you.

Coming away from that grafting and planting session on Valentine's Day 2009, I was in love with digging and sledgehammering and delighted to have learned the names of three varieties of apple I'd never heard of: Ashmeads, Kernel and Suntan.


And so when, over two and a half years later, Gemma (co-chairman of Sustainable Bungay) rang up to say someone she knew had moved and left a young orchard behind which the new owners were planning to JUST DIG UP and THROW AWAY!!! (excuse CAPS of frustration here - that kind of thing really gets on my nerves!) would anyone like some apple trees, I (along with almost everyone in SB) said YES PLEASE!

And even though it was August and hot and dry and traditionally a dreadful time to uproot and replant the trees, I took a Katy and a James Grieve, dug two large holes, made sure there was no strong grass there and planted them. But not before speaking to three fruit tree growers I've got to know since being in Transition. They varied in their optimism as to the trees' survival prospects but they were all unanimous on one issue: WATER, WATER, WATER. Soak those trees! At least once a day, twice even.

And even though I'm not religious, I watered them religiously. I spoke to them, 'that's right fellows, you can do it!' Right now they have healthy looking buds all over them. So we have lovely replacements for the trees we've lost over the years.

Engaging in the reskilling/skillsharing aspect of transition has revolutionised my whole attitude towards life. As I say, I didn't really notice it at first. It's been cumulative and all-pervasive. Paying attention to my own skills and those of fellows-in-transition, which are dismissed or ignored in the mainstream discourse: the ability to hold a meeting where everyone's included; communicating the experience of downshifting; learning to cook, eat and shop for food differently as part of the Low Carbon Cookbook crew; making space so solutions can emerge in the face of energy and financial constraints, using a chainsaw, making a rocket stove at the Transition Camp!

Here are some more skill share examples from Sustainable Bungay and Transition Norwich: In the picture on the left Josiah shows me how to navigate the new Sustainable Bungay (Wordpress) website in May 2010, (along with his daughter Iris) in the kitchen. This picture was included in the Transition Companion for the ingredient: Transition Towers - having an office or not.

I learned to bake sourdough bread from Jane in Transition Norwich, who always arrived at meetings with a delicious freshly-baked loaf. She visited us one November day in 2009 to pass on her skill and the gift of a leaven she'd originally been given by Andrew Whitley at a breadbaking course.

And what of some of the skills I'm sharing? Having worked in what I call the Transition Engine Room in the Norwich and Bungay initiatives over these years, guiding Gemma to set up her own twitter account over the phone last month was peanuts (or maybe cobnuts!). Never mind that I didn't even know what Twitter was until a year ago - and I was quite snooty about it at first!

And in December I spent one Sunday afternoon in Elinor's kitchen teaching fellow Bungay Community Bees to make a Yarrow salve with our very own beeswax.

Of course it's not just about me. Eloise has led a series of sewing groups in Bungay library on winter Sundays, where anyone could turn up (sic) from complete beginners to experienced sewers and make curtains, learn how to hem or use a sewing machine. Rose is organising a Skill Share, Knowledge and Resources Directory (also the subject of our next Green Drinks).

Kerry and Helenofnorwich have been reskilling in Transition Norwich in all the colours of the rainbow since the beginning. Talking of rainbows, click here and then again on the video in the post (I'm unable to embed it directly)... And there are all kinds of practical tips and hints in the posts on This Low Carbon Life on everything from insulating priest holes to accepting feedback and the basics of permaculture to communicating and forging alliances with other groups.

As Kerry said in I love Reskilling last week, every time you learn something new (or teach something you know), you get more confident, you feel life is much more in your own hands. And it's enjoyable to share knowledge with other people.

It's as if skill sharing works its way into the fabric of who we are. And becomes a way of life.

Photos: Preparing the Ground at Greengrow Feb 2009; Growing Local Conference poster, Sustainable Bungay November 2008 (Josiah Meldrum); Website skill sharing Transition in the Kitchen Office, May 2010 (Charlotte Du Cann); Sourdough breadbaking November 2009 (MW); Twitter pic, January 2012; The Colours of the Rainbow knitting with pride, 2010 (helenofnorwich)
This post (amended slightly) was originally published as part of the Social Reporters' Skill Sharing topic week on the Transition Network site.

A world with hope

Transition made me the person I am. It has guided the path I walk, the people I know and the way I think. It gave me hope. I cannot imagine a life where I was not involved with Transition.

I first discovered Transition during my third year of university, when I heard about the 'Great Unleashing' of Transition Norwich and thought it sounded exciting and something I would be interested in. I had been bought up with a love of nature and being outside and I was studying all of the ways we were destroying our world at university. I was getting tired of just studying what was going wrong and I really wanted to start doing something about it. I had got involved with a lot of the environmental groups at the university, but I had never really felt comfortable with Protest and Direct Action. I recognise their value, but the anger and negative angle never resonated with me. I was drawn to the positive projects, such as setting up a veg box scheme on campus, but I hadn't really found my niche. It all felt too small, not quite right, too isolated.

I had also been living in Norwich for 2 years and I still hardly knew people outside of the university. And then Transition started and WHAM!

It all started with lots of meetings, lots of discussions. I learnt a lot and met lots of diverse, but all lovely people from across Norwich and East Anglia. It was a gradual process, but we started to build a community, I felt I was part of something, I had found lots of other lovely people who were also trying to do something to make the world better.

I had already learnt about Climate Change and Peak Oil in my degree, but for Climate Change the solutions all seemed very big and imposing and the advice we were given on Peak Oil was stockpile food and buy a gun......so Transition's positive vision for the future and can do optimism were the balm I needed. They gave me hope that another world was possible, that enough people cared. And I came to realise that solving all of these problems could actually lead us to a better world as well.

So I jumped in with two feet and pretty soon I was attending 3 or 4 Transition meetings or events a week and my life was revolving round Transition. When conflict reared its head I was shaken and disheartened, but Transition had given me an enduring belief in what is possible. So I developed an ongoing interest in non-violent communication and healthy group dynamics ('Groups' are something we are missing in our current society and we need to relearn how they work.) And we got through and were stronger for it and we moved into the action phase and there were lots of wonderful events and activities and projects that emerged.

I have learnt so much from other inspiring ordinary people and through my experiences about how we can live a happy low carbon life. So when it came to finding a job I wanted something that could help create this world, hence the fact that I have been working for a Transition Project since May. My contract finishes in March but one of the criteria for my next job/location is that it needs a Transition community...

I do not know where I would be now if it wasn't for Transition, but I am sure that the last 4 years wouldn't have been anywhere near as exciting, eventful and happy. And I wouldn't have such hope for the future.

Photos: One of the first Transition Norwich Open Spaces, the Transition Norwich contingent in the Lord Mayors procession with Celeste the dragon, A rag bag that I made in a reskilling workshop and the flier of Transition University of West Scotland who I work for at the moment.

the terror of the situation

There's a scene that I remember from The Heart of Darkness. It comes back to me sometimes in Transition meetings. The hero returns from Africa and tries to tell Kurtz's fiancee about the iniquities of Empire. But she is not listening. He can't bear to tell her the truth of what he has witnessed. The Congo is far away from the polite drawing room in which they now sit and the illusion that everything is nice and safe is too strong for him to bring the cruel realities of the forests and its people to light.

You might be forgiven for thinking that all the bad things that are happening "out there" to our fellow human beings and to the earth, are due to politicians and bankers and the military-industrial complex. And this is true they are. But they are also happening because we shut our ears in our modern version of Joseph Conrad's drawing room, believing that everything is OK really. And I often wonder how in Transition we can bring those kind of shocking, end of suburbia moments to bear, so that we can realise that the times are really not OK, and actually have never been OK and take steps to shake ourselves and everyone else awake?

This week at Sustainable Bungay's AGM something outrageous got into me. We were upstairs in the Library and Sylvia, who is on the pilot for the new version Bungay Community Library, was giving us the low-down on the county council's shifting of funds and personnel in respect to the cuts. Everyone was listening intently.

"What a bunch of crooks!" I exclaimed, breaking the uncharacteristic formal atmosphere, created by the appointment of our new chair (Mark) and confirming our treasurer, secretary etc.

"Sounds like Stalinist Russia!" roared Rob from St. James Village Orchard. We all laughed and Sylvia told us that it might look like everything we had done together was in vain, but it wasn't.

"If none of us had acted, they would have taken everything," I said.

Then a local charity, the World Land Trust came up in passing. "Oh, that dreadful organisation!" I burst out, because I had just read a blog about some of their activities. And when someone added that David Attenborough was the president, added "He is the worst."

People were shocked. I had broken a taboo. These things are complex, we said to one another afterwards, but we need to know all the facts, not just the ones we like. We need to question everything, and our belief-systems about "population" most of all. Just because a person or an organisation appears to be acting in favour of the planet, doesn't mean there are no consequences to their actions or they that they do not support an unpalatable agenda. We can't take everything as read.

The fact is we do take everything as read. Because we would rather believe that someone we have seen all our lives being kind to animals on television is a good person. We would rather believe that the party we vote for acts in our own interests, that our parents love us, that the energy we use is limitless and that at some point the cavalry will come round the corner. We would rather believe Sustainable Bungay - and indeed all of Transition - was just about friendly community events, but the reality is it is set within a frame of massive degradation of the earth, the power-play of corporations and the global banking system, resource wars and media manipulation and although, as yesterday's post explored, we have to have a positive vision to work towards, we can't do that unless we allow those realities to frame everything we do.

And this isn't just an individual decision this is a social decision. Because a conversation between people who know the facts and one where people are upholding the illusions of the status quo, is a different conversation. You discuss the same things and design the same events, but they contain the ability to change the way everyone sees and thinks about the world, in the same way the Occupy movement has changed the conversation about our financial system.

It will be an Abundance project, where we are really finding out what it means to live on local apples through the winter, a skills, knowledge and resources directory where we are really learning to share everything we have. It will be events like tonight's showing of The History of Oil at Tom Abbott's barn in the Saints, because though we like to be entertained like everyone else, we have a serious reason to meet up. Because the real struggle we face as Transitioners is not so much to design and implement a localised infrastructure, but to change the fixed perceptions about our civilisation. To shift out of a complacent narrow world-view we have been taught to uphold, to one in which the consequences of our collective history can be clearly seen.

What has this got to do with this photograph of an emerging Monkshood shoot? Well this is one of the 52 Flowers That Shook My World. The shoot is emerging after a long winter as a seed, kept in the dark, and this image (by the German architectural design lecturer, Karl Blossfeldt) shows the kind of energy and determination that emergence takes. Monkshood possesses one of the most poisonous roots in the world, but its poison has the power to cure many maladies and was one of the two founding plants of the homeopathic system, a system that recognises a small inperceptable action can change the health and destiny of an entire organism.

In the book I stand beside the 1648 border of the Oxford Botanical Gardens and contemplate the turning point of the English Revolution. In 2012 in the Bungay Library I take part in Mark's Plant for Life series, with a talk called Connecting With Our Roots.

In tomorrow's post I will explore those radical "disruptive" energies in the light of this talk, what they have to do with our own roots, what they have to do with Transition.

Monkshood shoot by Karl Blossfeldt; Bungay Library Read-In, February 2011; poster for the History of Oil by Robert Newman

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

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)

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.

When the Chips are Down

It’s noon on Saturday and a small and buoyant crowd of people are gathering for The Spuds Don't Work rally outside the Forum. Activists from France, farmers from Norfolk, campaigners on bicycles with placards saying Stop Gambling with our Chips!, children riding small red tractors piled with red and white tubers from Wales. A waitress from The Greenhouse is handing around (delicious) organic chips to passers-by. I’m taking pix and speaking with Brenna and Tierney and Christine from Transition Norwich, Becky and Hayley from GreenGrow outside Bungay and the people from Growing Communities in Hackney. We’re all here to champion the potato, that key staple veg of all our allotments, gardens and fields and protect the land from the invasion of GMOs.

For the last ten years the Sainsbury laboratory at the John Innes Centre has spent £1.7 m of public money researching (so far unsuccessfully) a potato that is resistant to blight. During this time the UK has successfully resisted the introduction of GM food into its stores and supermarkets. But the laws in Europe are now changing, making it easier for GM crops to be grown and the debate is back on the table for both growers and consumers. Already the seed merchants and pharmaceutical companies are pressurizing farmers in East Anglia to adopt them and this event is bringing this into public awareness. At 1pm a red tractor will drive through the streets of Norwich to the John Innes Centre and deliver a load of conventionally bred blight-free potatoes in protest at the research and trials taking place there.

“It’s becoming impossible for farmers in Canada to be organic," reported one of the speakers (this week a farmer in Australia is suing a bio-tech company as their seeds have entered his crops and he has lost his organic status) as we listened to speeches from the Soil Association, local farmers and national campaigners outlining the main reasons why public money should be spent elsewhere.

“It’s complex,” said Josiah before he went on BBC Look East to discuss the GM potato trials at the Centre. Scientific research and the debate around it is complicated, but the decision to allow GM trials is simple. You either believe that it’s OK to radically interfere and manipulate the structure of plants and sow the land with these invasive artificially-bred organisms.

Or you know it isn’t.

The real complexity here however is not this decision, but in arguing from different paradigms. One where corporations seek to control and exploit the natural world for profit and to drive the industrial food machine to every corner of the globe, and the other (of which Transition is part) where individuals and groups seek to establish a small-scale agriculture that works with the natural world, to prevent waste and relocalise the food chain. Josiah who has worked with local growers for years (including FarmShare) and knows his potatoes (as well as the research behind them), faces the same difficulty all of us do in facing that argument.

The people who push for GM are smart and aggressive and have little conscience about these matters. Their decisions are based on conquest and profit. They also fund the academics who can argue cleverly on their behalf. Those who oppose GM have gut instincts, a knowing in the core of themselves that bio-tech crosses a certain line and a feeling they do not want to eat food grown in this way, anymore than they want to eat cloned animals.

The majority of people in the UK have those same unacademic feelings and instincts and do not want to put “Frankenfoods” in their shopping baskets. Corporations seek to persuade everyone to buy bio-tech by claiming it will banish the spectre of future World Hunger, mostly in Africa. The reality is that there is already famine in Africa, as there are massive land grabs by UK bio-fuel companies (a main cause of rising food prices). There are also studies that prove growing organic crops is a far better solution to food security than global industrialised farming which dispossesses and exploits people, drains water tables and destroys local eco-systems. The “opposers” are in fact not so much against GM and its consequences but for everything it takes away, including social equity.

The difficulty is that it is not really an argument we need to be having. Arguments reduce issues into black and white boxes and exclude the ur-complexity, which is not the Byzantine line of scientific reasoning, but the richly-woven web of life, the way everything on the planet is connected and in relationship. The dominating “left-brain” mindset of Empire goes way too fast for this complexity to be seen or heard. It deliberately compartmentalises each issue, so that its contradictions never confront each other. It reduces communication into superficial feel-good spin whilst keeping the depth discussion of real-world ethics and social responsibility at bay. It reduces the globe to a soundbite. A few short moments on a television broadcast.

GMs have been in use in North America for years now. The crops don’t give the great yields that are promised (and sometimes fail), use more pesticides, and the seeds (which farmers can no longer keep themselves) have increased dramatically in price. Economically many farms are struggling. In spite of all the scientific research there has been no study on its effects on people’s standard of health (the US has one of the worst in the Western World). There are plenty of good reasons why we are outside the Forum today in defence of the real potato. But the underlying force that brings us all together has been the subject I’ve wanted to pay attention to this week on This Low Carbon Life.

Because ultimately there is a decision that we all have to take at some point down the line, as the Artic melts, as the environmental storm brews all about us: whether we follow the reason of the mind or the logic of the heart. This ultimately is a question of allegiance. Not just to the beating engine of our bodies, to the profound feeling intelligence of our beings that informs every great thing that we do, but the heart that is the natural order and organisation of all life.

The earth is not made of the human mind. Cities and civilisation are constructed of the human mind, but the natural world and everything we depend on for life is not. Air, water, plants, pollinators. Our minds tell us we can control what gives us life, in spite of increasing evidence to the contrary, and forget one essential fact. The earth is a creation of heart.

We just have to reassemble the letters.

The gathering outside the Forum; chips from the Greenhouse; Brenna on her bike; Jack from GreenGrow with the red tractors (small version); already blight-free potatoes from Wales.

On an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town . . .

"It’s definitely the stick," said Mark as he stood with a piece of wood in his hands. It had been inadver- tently donated at Sustainable Bungay's Give and Take Day and suddenly reappeared in our hallway. From the outside it looked like a shiny broom handle but it wasn't: it was a fighting stick belonging to a young man mortified by its disappearance. But you’d have to be a warrior to know that.

It’s an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town. We’re on our way to our monthly core group meeting. First we have to drop off the stick at Kate’s and have some supper with Nick.

“You share your lives in the blogosphere and I’d like to share some of what I do," Nick said as he began to fill a box full of July veg - onions and garlic, fennel, beetroot, fresh eggs and blackcurrant jam. We sat down at the kitchen table and drank some squash wine, ate a delicious bean salad and talked about the financial crisis.

You have to be in Transition to truly appreciate Nick's house – kale and courgettes in the front garden, sorrel around the door, a garage with dried herbs hanging from the ceiling and shelves full of preserves, giant tanks of rainwater, chickens, cupboards and windowsills with kegs of homemade wine, a stack of books on economics. It’s not what it looks like, but what is behind everything you see. What it took to get there. The bare aesthetic of downshift.

Years ago I interviewed a man called Tommy Roberts. I was working for a glossy magazine at the time and the subject of the article was Taste, that indefinable quality that distinguished one person or house from the next. What is Taste? I asked various arbiters of style, fashion designers and editors, owners of grand and important properties. Tommy was once a designer of natty suits in the 60’s when he was known as Mr Freedom but at that time had a shop under Centrepoint full of zany, brightly coloured modern furniture: Taste is the Japanese room with one beautiful vase in the corner, he told me. A lifetime of taking away makes that room. It’s what you don’t have that defines taste.

We live in a have and have-not culture and our value systems are entirely based around possessions. Not just the things those designers were talking about back in the 1980s when materialism and property began its great boom – wallpaper and watches and John Fowler’s "pleasing decay" - but a personal warehouse of business connections, children, communities, garden flowers, Hollywood stars, holiday countries. My special world.

"Well, you’re rich in other ways," said the man at the Financial Instability workshop at the Transition Conference after I had detailed my downshift from The World of Interiors to Sustainable Bungay.
"I really am not rich", I replied.
"You are rich in social relationships", he insisted, frustrated with my density. "In quality time. You are abundant in other ways."
"I have very little", I replied. (which is not strictly true because like most people in this country I have chairs and tables, pots and pans and all manner of basic essentials). "What is wrong with nothing? Why do we have to be wealthy at all?"

What I wanted to say was I had spent a lot of time clearing out that room. And I didn’t replace the things I used to own with different things - with people or experiences, or a low-carbon lifestyle - but had learned to love space and time and the freedom that lack of ownership brought.

In downshift less is not more in the way we once understood Japanese style. Less means you take everything you don’t need away, so that what really matters is left. It means you don’t have because having is no longer important. What becomes important is that freedom of movement and living a deliberate life.

It’s an ordinary evening in a Transition town and we’re on our way to our meeting at the Library. But first we have to meet at the pub with the Community Bee Group to celebrate the success of our Beehive Day (which I’ll write about tomorrow) and then unload Eloise’s van full of information boards and select some just picked fruit from the back of Cathy’s car. Cathy runs the Abundance project and swapping our produce and plants- at our meetings, in the Library community garden- has become a way of life. So here we are in the car park with a stack of boards and punnets of cherry-plums and blackberries meeting in a damp summer in a difficult time, swifts whizzing round the roofs, echinacea flowers full of bees.

At the Transition Conference we all did an exercise. We had to imagine a group we longed to be with in the future. I am no good at visioning and all I could think about was the fact I would be 65 in ten years time and how weird that was. And then I realised I don’t long for a group of people because I am already with those people and I had met them three years ago in the theatre down the street from here. And what was difficult to feedback to my fellow Transitioners in the canteen in Liverpool was the fact that it wasn’t the individuals in the initiative that made us matter to one another, the way we are used to people mattering in our lives, as special friends, or heroes, support systems, as possessions and dependencies. My important relationships.

It was the fact that when we met up as a group in these public spaces something happened between us. Something we held in common. We understood implicitly what we were doing and why – sharing stuff, organising events, going through the agenda. When I looked at this working-together in the visioning it looked like an energy field, the kind of energy field you sense when you stand by a hive humming with bees. A hum of warmth and intelligence that allows people to naturally collaborate and make that low-energy downshift happen. When that’s going on you don’t need possessions to compensate for your isolation, to anchor your introverted fantasy world. You don’t need data or climate science to persuade your tricky mind. You just need to tune in and act.

If you passed by Bungay Library tonight you’d notice the lights were on and if you peered in you might see a group of people around a table, eating plums and laughing, one person intently writing notes, one speaking, another occasionally calling order and everyone else paying attention. None of us look as if we are arbiters of taste, or abundant, or full of well-being or anything else the modern world puts a price on or gives value to. We’re obviously not important members of the community with homes-to-die-for, or great jobs or cars. We appear utterly ordinary and so we are. Ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing.

You can’t see the field from the outside, you have to feel it from the inside. You recognise it when you are in it because you are doing it along with everyone else. In fact you can’t be in it unless you are doing it.That’s the real shift. The move from individualism to group collaboration for the good of the whole is primarily a personal shift, away from ownership and control, into a field of exchange and communication and reciprocity, into give and take. And that’s a whole new lexicon of being. It’s not a replacement of things, it’s a move. A let go and a join in.

Because Transition is not a noun, it’s a verb.

Photos: echinacea by the carpark; with squash wine in Nick's kitchen; rainwater storage; Cathy's Abundance fruit; Nick with harvested herbs.