We have Bees!

Here at Norwich Community Bees, we'd been on high alert for a couple of weeks as we were waiting and hoping that we might get a swarm. After a few false starts (warm morning followed by wind and cloud in the afternoon) I finally got the call on Friday afternoon! Beekeeper-extraordinaire Colin had found a swarm for us!

One rapid round of mails, calls and texts later, and Tom stepped forward to meet Colin at Norwich Farmshare to install the bees in the hive.

Despite a slight technical hitch that meant there was only one suit available, Tom got some great shots of the bees heading into their new home!

The next afternoon, Dan, Bee, Suzanne and I headed over to the site to see how they were settling in and add some additional frames. It was the first time I'd suited up and got up close and personal with a hive, and I was quite nervous, but as soon as we opened the hive, you could just hear that the bees were getting on fine, and they were really calm while we checked them out and added the frames.

It was a fantastic experience, and I can't wait to go back and see how they're getting on. As Dan said, watching them flying in and out of the hive and listening to the buzzing is so peaceful, you could quite imagine bringing a deckchair and a nice bottle of wine and making an afternoon of it!

If you're interested in knowing more about Norwich Community Bees, visit our website or drop us a line at norwichcommunitybees@hotmail.co.uk. We'd love to hear from you!

Pics: Colin transferring the bees from skep to hive. Watching the bees marching into their new home. Jon (l) and Dan (r) adding frames to the hive.

Everything must change - Transition Themes Week#14

Welcome to our last Transition Themes Week #14. We've been running this blog daily for two and a half years now. We created it originally to reflect back to ourselves and the world what a low carbon life looks and feels like, to show the kind of people we were and explore Transition ideas, particularly the experiences we were then having in the Transition Circles.

The Transition Themes Weeks were begun to report on the work of TN's projects - energy, economics, food, bees, Low Carbon Cookbook, Magdalen Street Celebration. They were there to keep us all in touch and functioned like a network in a resilient eco-system, working to connect and feedback to the whole initiative and different affiliated groups in Norwich. They began on Mondays with an introduction to the week and a post about Transition communications, both in the city and within the Network.

Today some of the groups featured in these weeks have fallen away, people have come and gone from the blog. And though there is still a committed core of us, life is pulling us in other directions. Some people are too busy to write, others have stronger commitments, and this puts a strain on other bloggers to keep up the momentum. Weeks are becoming harder to fill, to get a full house of contributors. So after June 20, summer solstice and The Festival of Transition (and my birthday!) we will become a more occasional blog. We're each taking a day and posting when we can. Hope you will still continue to join us!

Some reflections on the editing business and Transition

So everything changes. That's something you learn for sure in Transition. You also learn to reflect and see how you might have done things differently - not had you known then, but if you were to start again now. Now I think I would think twice about creating editorial roles, and what this entails in grassroots communications. Communications have a low priority within Transition. It is something that is done by someone, and is useful insofar as it works as a marketing or recruiting tool. Even though in Anthony Sampson's analysis of power in Britain the media holds the second greatest ability to influence events (way beyond government), creating our own media and forging a new culture is not considered important.

So now I would get clear on how communications, specifically editorial, are regarded within the rest of the enterprise. Secondly, I would hesitate to take an editor's role, even though this has been crucial in setting up both our Norwich blogs (and also the Social Reporting Project and Transition Free Press).

In traditional journalism, nothing happens without the editor. They are the deciders, the ones who say yes, maybe, and no way Jose. Everyone has their role around this decision-making process. I've worked with some great editors. Some I got on with, and some I didn't. There's usually something you don't like about the editor. That's because a good editor cares about the edition, and not you. It's not personal, it's just how it goes. Everyone understands that. The editor's word is final.

In Transition no one understands that, because you are not working professionally, you are working out of conviction, or because it suits you. You are loyal to the main storyline only as far as it works for you personally. Most people join a Transition project, as a hobby or an adjunct to their normal lives. So as an editor you can't really operate very well. No one is getting paid, so you have to be nice to people or you get a blank page.

At first people in the initiative didn't want an editorial crew at all. We started the blog along trad lines with ex-professionals - with an editor (me), managing ed (Jon), sub-editor (Mark) and designer (Andy) - which proved really useful for setting things up. Then the bloggers who came on board wanted to be a "community" and have "ownership" and tell the people doing the editorial work what to do. Censorship came up, and control. Egos clashed. Tempers flew. It felt like the most wonderful thing I had ever done and possibly the most horrible. That was a rocky moment. The Sturm und Drang moment all creative enterprises undergo. Eventually the dust settled and everyone found their rhythm.

The blog got published through thick and thin. We didn't miss a beat. I kept going because everything, I saw, was grist for the mill. There were endless opportunities for getting over oneself on a daily basis and exploring new territories. Sometimes we liked each others posts and sometimes we didn't. We learned a new tolerance, I think. I did certainly. I realised this was an alchemical space, where things got aired and changed, and we learned how to work in diversity. How we allowed each other to speak after millennia of silence.

For a while, maybe a year, things went really well. We had a full quota of bloggers and invited guest contributors on board. We had a new readership and were cross-posted in several places. We met each quarter to decide the rota and took turns to lead weeks. Then the initiative around which our blog is based started to lose momentum. Some of the projects faded. Some people shifted camp to Norwich FarmShare. Some of us started to be two-timers on the Social Reporting Project. I started to feel I was carrying the load and filling up gaps.

So here we are in May 2012 at a moment of shift . . . The editorial crew is a beautiful structure but it only works when a certain number of people are writing stuff together for real. In a grassroots blog where people are in it for the feeling it gives them, or as promotion, the editor becomes simply a useful coordinator who can be depended on to hold the fort, carry the rap, pick up the ball etc. You end up being a kind of nanny, or secretary. You feel that you are putting yourself on the line, doing all the hard Transition work, while other people stay within their comfort zones, in their conventional lives.

So I think to run a good community blog I would get clear on who exactly is doing the change, who is loyal to the cause, and make sure the load is fairly shared. I'd rotate the editor role, right from the start. If you don't have an editor at all there is an emptiness to everything. A bit like a ship without a captain, or a kitchen without a cook. There's no one at the helm, no presence there. No fire. No food. No home station.

I'm not sure how it would work. Or if it would work. Maybe that's the place we are right now in Transition. The kitchen only works with a cook, and the cook is tired of being treated as a servant. She is wondering what she is doing amongst the pots and pans, and telling everyone: serve yourself. The cook is not just me, she is all the real-time Transitioners who feel this way, she is everyone on the planet serving the Empire, those who dine upstairs at our expense. She is the earth too and all creatures and plants who sail with her. Taking off her apron, kicking off her shoes.

Transition training; with fellow Transition comms people taking part in a Project Sharing Engine day, London, 2011; Transition bloggers in Chapelfield Gardens: Ann Owen's market garden, visiting the social reporters

Community resilience requires a look at economics

Transition has always been, to me, about community economic resilience. Even the types of things that don't appear to have anything to do with economic resilience at first sight, do. Growing your own food, for example, is a great way of making yourself resilient to dramatic changes in global food supply or prices. Reducing your energy demand increases your resilience to fluctuating energy prices.

But looking at this beyond a personal perspective, and as a community, what can we do together to make ourselves more resilient?

Many Transitioners have thought about this question ever since the movement began, and lots of great community projects have come out of it, but many of the root causes are still there. Consumerism (or producerism, as I think it should be called), greed and globalisation still seem to be going strong with little sign of abating.

In light of Occupy Norwich decamping from Hay Hill last week, but with the continued prevalence of their concerns within society, I have written this survey to see what concerns we in Norwich have, and what effects Norwich is feeling as a result of our global economic problems.

The idea is not just to gather data on what people think, but what social enterprises, campaigns or government policy (both local and national) may grow out of these concerns. We have the power to make the world what we want it to be, if we come together as communities to make it happen.

I hope that you will find the survey interesting, and be interested to know about the various campaigns that already exist to tackle the issues highlighted. One that I'm particularly interested in is the Mary Portas review for high street regeneration, which I'll talk about in a later post, but I hope that I will be able to find ways to progress professionally!

Please feel free to fill in the survey which is at http://www.simeonjackson.co.uk/2012/02/23/local-economics-survey/.

Images: Transition high street; Occupy Norwich's rebranding, using Norwich's motto "do different".

Transition Themes Week #12 The Bigger Picture

Welcome to our Transition Themes Week #12. During this week we'll be looking at some of the practical projects Transition Norwich are engaged in from Energy Lookouts! to Norwich FarmShare. We'll also be hearing about the new Abundance project and its mapping of fruit and nut trees, as well as a great car-sharing offer in the city. We start however with communications and the key look at the frame in which Transition sits.

It's easy once you get involved with the detailed focus needed in maintaining projects to lose sight of the bigger picture. So this week, as well giving value to all our micro works-in-progress, we are also keeping an eye open for the macro - those big planetary drivers, from climate change to resource scarcity, that inform our on-the-ground narrative for change. Simeon Jackson will give an update from the Economics and Livelihoods group and our guest blogger, Mandy Meikle, will be reporting on Peak Oil. As the Transition 2.0 film has its preview this month, here's a reflection on one of the key communication tools in keeping this bigger picture in our sights - the grassroots cinema. Vision on!

The Last Picture Show

It's no go the merry-go-round, it's no go the rickshaw
All we want is a limousine, and a ticket to the peepshow
(Louis MacNeice)

The first thing you do is show a film. It starts with Power of Community. It starts at the 11th hour at the End of Suburbia. You go against your wishes, lured by a love of documentary, and find yourself talking animatedly amongst strangers about Life at the End of Empire, asking whether you can come to the next core group meeting. In these films there is a moment when you realise that life is not the fairy tale you have been taught to believe. It's the moment you join Transition.
The second thing you do is take the camera into your own hands. Or rather, you have it thrust into them and find yourself instructed by The Producer to interview people as they gather for the 2011 Transition Conference in the bar.

"What right now, here, Ed? I've only just arrived!"
"You're part of the media team. No time like the present."
That's another moment. The moment you realise you are in it for the long haul.

Grassroots cinema

Today we are taking a look at Transition and Film Media and reflecting on how films influence the way we think, feel and move in changing times. The documentaries we go to see and the videos we make ourselves. Films powerfully affect the way we perceive the world. They can maintain the illusion that everything is fine by providing us with entertainment and feel-good escapes, or they can confront us with reality. We can be mesmerised by the shiny surfaces of our fossil-fuelled civilisation, lulled by official everything-is-under-control voiceovers, or we can look behind the scenes at its unglamourous workings for ourselves.

To find the Inconvenient Truth means you walk down another path, enter unfamiliar venues and make connections you might not have thought of before. You walk past the neon signs for the latest thrillers and romantic comedies at the city multiplex. You notice the small poster at the local newsagents or on the Parish notice board. You stumble under the stars across the common to the barn where Sustainable Bungay and Waveney Greenpeace are watching Robert Newman's The History of Oil, or down a side alley to sit on the studio floor of Unit 6 to watch Transition 1.0 at Transition Norwich's First Birthday celebration. You come across these films by surprise: in temporary cinemas in festival tents, in village halls, in converted Volkswagens, powered by bicycle dynamos, or any number of inventive community spaces where the new In Transition 2.0 is being previewed this month:

It was shown in Lewes Town Hall, The Dukes in Lancaster, at the Watershed in Slaithwaite, the town building in Wayland, US, in the office of Project Lyttelton in New Zealand, in the fire station in Moss Side, a front room in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, US, a Hindu temple in Tooting, a school in Finsbury Park, a hall in Tokyo, Japan, in ‘Cinema Paradiso’ in Auroville, India and in a village in Portugal. (Rob Hopkins)

In these places you find yourself in an audience that is as much at home watching films about community growing projects as it is watching those about Collapse. Committed organisers run these film nights regularly alongside the initative's food and energy projects to give the necessary frame in which Transition sits. They show the bigger social and environmental picture that we do not see in our small everyday world and, perhaps more crucially, provide a meeting place where we can pay attention to the issues which are rarely discussed by conventional media, or at the supper table amongst friends and family.

Joining the dots

Although often considered to be just an early part of forming initiatives, these impromptu grassroots cinemas are a key part of the culture of Transition. They not only enable people to celebrate the movement through showing the In Transition movies, but also maintain awareness about fracking and peak oil and economic collapse and the facts about our industrialised civilisation that are normally kept hidden from view. To join up the dots in our own fragmented minds and come to different conclusions.
What are these dots? It's the panel discussion about climate change at the premiere of The Age of Stupid in Cinema City , it's the on-line debate about Transition and activism sparked by the documentary Just Do It! It's an empathic response to Josh Fox's Gasland, to the industrial food system in Food Inc, to the consequences of the oil we consume every day in Joe Berlinger's Crude.
It's any number of YouTubes we watch daily, recorded by citizen journalists around the world: from Happy Birthday Grow Heathrow! shot by Felix from Transition Brixton, to The Revolution is Love with Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Ecnomics) at Zuccotti Park. It's the animated Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds narrated by Richard Heinberg. It's the new Crisis of Civlisation film where you can makes your own remix. It's Transition Norwich watching itself Unleash and celebrate its third year. Standing with Nick, being filmed by Tom at Occupy Norwich. It's the effort we make to join these moments up and make a coherent picture.

There are many that argue that communities don't want to look at shocking films and they are not an inviting way to market Transition. That they are not well-made enough, too disempowering and depressing, too American. It's true: a lot of people are stll enamoured by the matrix of conventional media, caught up in the star system, who prefer BBC spin and Hollywood fantasy to reality, but that does not mean that those who want to keep our eyes open should not show them to the world. Even if only a small group gathers to take part, that collective focus and discussion are taking place where none happened before. It takes practice to engage in a complex multi-faceted way of seeing the world, instead of following the familiar storyline of baddies and goodies, the happy ending, and the OK Corral. Reality has its own powerful allure. And a shared reality even more.

Creating the new narrative

In Liverpool I am looking for "the story". I have been giving workshops on Social Reporting (that will form the basis for the national Transtion blog), holding a shaky camera for an interview with Ben Brangwyn, interviewing Rob Hopkins about the forthcoming Transition Companion, but I haven't found that aha! moment that makes sense of everything. I am about to stumble upon it. While the open mic is in full swing in the bar, two Transitioners from Barcelona are holding an impromptu screening of two short films and a follow-up discussion. Many of us in the audience have no idea what has been happening in the squares of Spain this summer. Many of us also have not heard each other speak about about the economic issues raised by the indignats of Europe. It is two months before the word occupy will run like wildfire through the grassroots media.

As the YouTube flickers against the wall, I can see the story. I don't care about the production, or the fact there are no actors I recognise. I am not here to escape, or dream the American dream, I am here to create a new narrative. I can hear it in the voices of the people, taking the microphone in the squares, I can hear it in the voices of the Transitioners standing up to speak in the room. It's a world where we are the director, the cameraman and the crew. We are the actors and we are the audience. It's a world we are creating together as we take the production back into our own hands.


Sustainable Bungay/Waveney Greenpeace in the barn watching The History of Oil; Collapse with Michael Ruppert; videoing at the Transtiion Conference wtih Ed, Mike, David and Adrienne; still from Transition 1.0; Poster for Gasland; cardboard notice in Barcelona, May 2011

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.

Economics and Livelihoods - Transition's response to Occupy's concerns?

Over my Christmas/New Year holiday, whilst I was without internet in the depths of Normandy, I finally managed to finish reading Prosperity Without Growth, the seminal book by Tim Jackson subtitled "Economics for a Finite Planet". His analysis of our current economic problem is in-depth but still logical and understandable to the reader. Every single chapter adds new understanding to the issues, meaning that my copy has practically every other line highlighted and notes scribbled in the margins every few pages.

It was with little surprise that I found that the themes discussed at Occupy Norwich's "What's Occupy About?" meeting last Saturday (which will be continued next Saturday at the same time of 12 o'clock at the Occupy camp, Hay Hill) chimed with so many points I had read only a few days before. The fact that a book which is essentially about economics also covered issues of environmental degradation, fractured society and political dysfunction (which are also the broad theme areas of Occupy Norwich's meeting) just goes to show how inextricably these issues are interlinked.

Even many of those with no involvement or even a hostile attitude to the Occupy movement still have the same societal concerns, if the first few responses to Occupy Norwich's survey (which I urge you and all your friends to partake in) is anything to go by.

Where there is disagreement (which in some cases is really quite extreme) it is within the appropriate responses and solutions to such problems. Even within Occupy Norwich's monetary reform working group, there are highly differing attitudes to a graduated move to full-reserve banking, gold as a medium of exchange, local currencies and the elimination of money altogether.

Notes from the What's Occupy About session. The four central coloured squares are the theme areas, specifics surrounding them, colour-coded.

At the "What's Occupy About" meeting, this presence of disagreement led to discussion on what the movement's role is within this complex and ever-changing discourse. The conclusion, at least as far as I am concerned, was that Occupy is there to initiate discussion, inspire idea generation, inform and educate, but not to be a solution in and of itself, a role carried instead by individuals, organisations and campaigns that may arise out of, but not directly be a part of, Occupy.

Transition Norwich, I feel, is one such "solution organisation". Ok, Transition's actions are always in flux and depend largely on who has time and energy to push forward any particular project, but nonetheless, Transition is about actions. Transition Norwich has already implemented positive responses in all the projects that have been set up in the last three years, but there is still lots more we could do!

Images: Prosperity Without Growth, my copy; Occupy A Few Minutes; notes from What's Occupy About typed up by Robert Vincent.

All the latest! Transition Themes Week #11 - Communications

Welcome to our Transition Themes#11, 2012. Uncharacteristically this will be a short informative intro to the week, as your correspondent has a massive deadline ahead of her (normal service will be resumed after Friday!). As well as this comms update, we will be hearing all the news and reflections from different TN groups and affiliates: Simeon will report from Economics and Livelihoods, Chris will discuss the new Energy Lookouts! project in the city, Elena all the latest from the field at Norwich FarmShare. We're also welcoming Helen from Transition Circle West and Vanessa from Occupy Norwich who will write about their plans for this crucial year.

Meanwhile the trusty This Low Carbon Life crew recently met at the Greenhouse to discuss the programme for the year ahead. We decided to continue the editorial style of this blog with its sure-fire mix of individual posts, Transition Theme Weeks and Topic Weeks (Sustainable Relationships to Alternative Currencies). One thing we recognise from working together for over two years is that communications, both real and virtual, play a key role within the initiative, not only as a means of keeping us all in touch, but also as a way of exploring how to work effectively as a group and make strategic links with other local progressive movements for fair and sustainable change.

However to be truly effective, we need to be linked in on a national and international level. Transition Norwich is one of the hundreds of initiatives around Britain and the world, and as a short reminder, here are all the communication links that keeps us connected and inspired by each's others' work.

Transition on film: the movement will be in full multi-media swing in 2012, as the film Transition 2.0 launches this March. This is a following up from the first film Transition 1.0 which we showed at our first birthday celebration. We're hoping to set up a screening in Norwich soon. On the home front there are also plans to expand the 15 minute Norwich in Transition film. directed by Tom Harper (now available on our news blog), to a full-length documentary.

Transition Network News: you can find a monthly Transition Round Up, produced by Rob Hopkins and published on his blog, Transition Culture, followed by a monthly podcast that explores three of the featured stories at greater depth (have a listen to last month's featuring Norwich FarmShare).

Every month Mike Grenville (Transition Forest Row) produces an essential monthly newsletter, which you can also find on the Network news site and sign up to receive as an email (highly recommended).

Transition publications: And if you didn't catch Rob Hopkins talk in Norwich about the new The Transition Companion book, there are still cut-price copies available (see below). This is an invaluable full-colour explanation of the drivers behind the movement and the essential ingredients and tools that make up initiatives (now numbering over 800 in 34 countries). Featuring the Norwich bloggers (Becoming the Media) and Norwich FarmShare. You can find the Ingredients and Tools on line and in card form on the Network site.

Social Reporters: the innovative Social Reporting project came to the end of its three month pilot in December. The project began again last week with a month of Looking Back, Looking Forward. Don't miss the daily blogs by ten writers from initiatives around the UK, including three of the TN bloggers, Charlotte, Mark and Kerry (now at Transition University West of Scotland), reporting and reflecting on all subjects under the sun. You can keep updated with our twitter news at tnnorwich, ttreporters and transitiontowns.

STOP PRESS! Article on Transition Norwich now out in Norwich Magazine - reprinted on Transition Culture. Text by Sabine Virani. Photos by Tony Buckingham. See here.

Copies of the new Transition book, The Transition Companion, by Rob Hopkins (Green Books) still available for £14. To order your copy email: info@sustainablebungay.com

Pix: trailer for the new Transition 2.0 film; the TN bloggers ; Norwich FarmShare picture from Norwich Magazine: poster from Portalegre em Transição (Portugal jam-making day; cover of The Transition Companion.

Bringing to Share - Communications and the Low Carbon Cookbook

Welcome to our Transition Themes Week #9, our regular round up of Transition Norwich groups and projects. It's been a full-on month for Transition communications. As well as coordinating this blog and putting out our monthly bulletin the comms crew have also been working on a deadline for the Transition Network's Social Reporting Project where Mark, Kerry and I are writers and editors.

Last week I went up to the Festival Hall to take part in the Network's Project Sharing Engine and become one of the "alpha" testing team. Several webmasters from different initiatives are helping roadtest this innovative on-line sharing platform that will allow initiatives to disseminate their myriad projects across the globe. At the moment anyone can log their project by going directly onto the main site, where it is kept much like a library. The Sharing Engine will enable people to not only file copy via a widget on their own website but also to connect and cross-reference with others. It will become a vast interconnecting web and storehouse that will enable Transitioners to see the full range of activities and glean information and inspiration. So the meeting was as much about creating a dynamic social infrastructure as it was a technical exercise.

Not that computing skills were absent. At the start we had to say how tecchy we were in terms of numbers on the scale of one to ten. I have to say I did not feel very alpha at this point as several wizard 10s are on the team (including the Networks own technical co-op - Jim, Chris and Paul) as well as the project's mastermind, Ed Mitchell (8), the Network's new webmaster, Laura (9), and the Newsletter's editor, Mike (7). Where your zeta (2 1/2) reporter did have something to offer was editorially. Unlike the other initiatives most of TNs active members are also bloggers, either for our news blog or on This Low Carbon Life. Most of us regularly file copy, take pictures and create the necessary feedback loops for a resilient and connected collective.

One of the challenges in Transition is for people to actively report back on what is happening on a daily basis within the initiative. There are usually one or two people that are key communicators, but lacking other contributors the momentum for regular collective communication does not happen. One of the reasons we have the very non-tecchy Blogger system is so everyone can upload copy easily (the Network uses the far cooler Drupal). By running community blogs and contributing daily posts the rhythm of the enterprise carries people forward. This was one of the main topics we discussed in our break-out groups. When many people focus and participate within a shared enterprise everything becomes much easier and more fluid. These are how grassroots and diverse systems self-organise and create strong networks.

This has certainly been the case with the recent Occupy Movement which we'll be reporting on this week, along with other on-the-street reports: Simeon on the St Augustine's visioning (Economics and Livelihoods), Helen on the Magdalen Street Celebration, Elena on FarmShare's potato day, Ruth or Steve on Transition Hethersett and Kerry on Social Justice.

And in the spirit of the Sharing Engine here is a precis of the Low Carbon Cookbook project I wrote about last week as a social reporter in our Food and Health week. It is excerpted from the main piece what is going down in my kitchen is going down in the world which you can read here:

Low Carbon Cookbook

I am standing with a giant tea pot in my hands on a cold November day, listening to Tully Wakeman from East Anglia Food Link at Sustainable Bungay’s Growing Local! conference. He's telling a packed hall how 70% of grains grown in East Anglia are for animal feed, how “local” pigs are fed on rainforest soya. He’s talking about peak oil and modern agriculture, how in the future we will have to learn to eat less meat and less dairy, a far simpler fare. This is it, I am thinking. This is The Project.

The Low Carbon Cookbook did not start straight-away. It began after a meeting between bakers, farmers, researchers and Transitioners to discuss how to create the Norwich loaf. It began after working with my friend in Transition, Josiah Meldrum, on three issues of Food Inspiring Change about local food projects and then on a treatment for a book called One Planet Community Kitchen (now roots shoots & seeds). It began after Tully inaugurated Transition Norwich’s second phase – the start up of the innovative Transition Circles, neighbourhood groups which looked at personal carbon reduction in all aspects of our lives - home energy, transport, food, “stuff” and waste.

It began after many of us had catalogued and recorded our downshift experiences in the TN blog, This Low Carbon Life, from baking bread to the Norwich livestock market, from eating roadkill to the health hazards of the global food business. It began in September 2010 after a fortnight on Transition Food Patterns that catalogued many of the local outlets, market traders and community gardens that make up a Transition food infrastructure, including the CSA that has now become Norwich FarmShare.

The Low Carbon Cookbook group have been meeting for over a year now, paying attention to dishes and produce in the way Mark was describing in respect to land and medicine plants on Monday. Most of us on the project have been part of the Transition Circles and trained as Carbon Conversation facilitators. We're cooks and growers, writers and academics, vegans and meat eaters, some of us constrained by chronic illness and allergies. All of us are highly aware of the ethical and political choices we are faced with everyday and vote with our forks, as Michael Pollan famously advised in the documentary, Vanishing of the Bees.

Josiah introduced our first Low Carbon Cookbook meeting at The Greenhouse with a talk on the history of co-operatives. We began the project by conducting a mapping exercise known as Deconstructing the Dish, speaking about its provenance, energy use and our memories around the different ingredients. My own was the humble dish of fava, first eaten on a Cycladic island in Greece, aged 19.

We have held kitchen conversations over a seasonal, local, organic, freegan, fair-traded, foraged meal each month since then. We have met in each other’s houses, in Jo's raw food neighbourhood café, The Nectar, at Norwich’s weekly FoodCycle, looked at key ingredients and tools, recorded and photographed all our sessions. We have considered all aspects of the industrial food system and how we can break out of it, how we can restructure, relocalise and most of all radically change our relationship with food.

The aim of the project is to compile (and publish) an A-Z on all subjects you need to know to eat as sustainably as possible within our present distribution systems. Here is a small taster:

Allotments, Beehives, CSAs, Dairy, Eggs, Foraging, Germination, Hungry gap, Industrial food systems, Jam, Kitchen Conversations, Land Grabs, Milling, Nourishment, Organic, Palm oil, Quinces, Rocket stoves, Storage, Tortilla, Umi plums, Veg boxes, Water, Xylitol, Yellow peas, Zero Waste.

It is built around a collection of Bring-to-Share recipes we have been cooking up for the last year and also a growing list of vegetables, wild and foraged plants. It contains resources: documentaries such as Food Inc and The End of the Line, books like Felicity Lawrence's Eat Your Heart Out! and Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution, as well as local food sources. In short it helps create the atmosphere, conviviality, intelligence and connection that is intregral to a low-carbon culture. It is our hope that by providing this kind of practical and philosophic blueprint, other Transition initiatives might compile their own regional cookbooks with local resources and dissmeninate them eventually via the new Project Sharing Engine on the Network.

Looking forward to linking up!

Photos: Alpha group at the Festival Hall (Mike Grenville); engagement group break out; occupy group en route to St Paul's (Ed Mitchell); Indian spices in a Mexican molcajete; deconstructed dishes by Elena of Norwich FarmShare and Gemma of Ripple Food Co-op and Transition Ipswich; dandelion tea and toss it in 24 leaves salad; anti-GM potato demonstration in Norwich; roadside stall; Food Inc poster and still; remembering sunflower and marigold seeds (CDC and MW)

More News From The Engine Room - Transition Network Social Reporters

I first published the post below, News from the Engine Room, on the Transition Network Social Reporting blog.

This nationwide blog, created by Ed Mitchell and Charlotte Du Cann during the summer and launched in September is based on our own This Low Carbon Life. Like the Norwich blog, there is a daily post - today will be the 49th - and like ours too it's full of great writing, variety, poignancy and humour. It's the place to read firsthand experiences of transitioners from all over the UK.

From Omagh (Northern Ireland) to Heathrow, Artist's Valley (Wales) to Glasgow and the Black Isle, Lewes to Bungay and Norwich, Totnes to Lancaster to Dursley near Bristol to Finsbury Park, we're talking from behind the transition scenes about what it's like to be in the thick of it, full-on, night and day. We're talking about:

bad hair on vital communications days (Marella)

the ethics of squatting and revitalising vacant land (Joe)

permaculture on a (very low) budget (Ann)

the practical struggle between the values of transition and the norms of society (Kerry)

control of the land and the islanders of Eigg (Catriona)

going locavore - finding and eating food from where you live (Adrienne)

a low carbon cookbook for transition times (Charlotte)

transition as social permaculture (Jay)

the joys and sorrows of putting on the 'big picture' (Caroline)

feeling the fear and growing things anyway (Rachel) and

community building in an urban edible landscape (Jo)

So here's mine from the Communicating Transition theme week:

NEWS FROM THE ENGINE ROOM (Mark)

When I signed up to contribute to the Communicating Transition theme this week, I thought writing it would be a cinch. I should know by now after years of 5am starts (with prep beforehand) and hours wondering whether I'll be able to string more than one intelligible sentence next to another, that cinch doesn't come into it.

But hey Transition is just about getting together with others within the context of global peaking fossil fuels, climate change and economic downturn/ instability/crisis/chaos and systems meltdown and building community resilience, isn’t it? About responding to these things as individuals and as social and planetary beings. About working together on parallel infrastructures whilst the present dominant global industrial one breaks up. About finding alternative ways of inhabiting the planet to the business-as-usual one. And having some fun (hopefully) at the same time. What's so hard to communicate about that? We all GET IT, don't we?

The problem comes when you start trying to define communications or transition as one thing (or when I do). They are such multi-dimensional affairs. They are ten thousand things.

Today I'm going focus on practical communications and talk about the blogs and websites we've developed in Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay as part of creating the alternative media Joe was writing about on Monday.

Communications are the flyers Marella wrote about yesterday, the visits Charlotte spoke about the day before, the phone conversation I had with a farmer’s wife recently who told me top-down agricultural bureaucracy ignores the actual lived experience of people, like herself, who have lived on the land all their lives and know it intimately.

Providing an outlet to give voice to our experiences of being in (and going through!) transition as it happened was what originally inspired This Low Carbon Life. This was a Transition first.

Charlotte, together with Andy, a graphic designer and Jon, also an ex-journalist, pooled their editorial experience and created this community blog (on Blogger) in October 2009. Since then about twenty bloggers, of all different backgrounds and ages, have written between us more than 650 posts on everything from the low carbon growing, cooking and sharing of food to downshifting in style to reducing fossil fuel usage to half the national average. Many posts take a good, considered look at the bigger picture: reconnection with nature, politics, the industrial food system and inner resilience, whilst others explore the kinds of people we are becoming/need to become as we navigate the times. We also take our own photographs.

As well as the regular writers we feature crossposts from fellow transitioners in other initiatives and guest slots on transition-related themes. We meet every three months, sort out the rota and decide the topic and theme weeks for the coming quarter. We keep in touch with each other via a googlegroup in case someone wants to swap days or forgets to post. Charlotte and I both look at the blog daily to check photo and text alignment and I proof the copy. But we don't edit the content, it's a no censorship blog. Everyone’s voice remains free to be what it is. It’s a bit like a feral choir.

The structure of This Low Carbon Life is also what Ed and Charlotte have used to develop this very social reporting project we're all now engaged in.

As I write this I feel like a Transition Communications maintenance engineer: I spend a lot of time caretaking! As well as This Low Carbon Life, I co-produce the monthly Transition Norwich News bulletin and the quarterly Sustainable Bungay newsletter. I use the word co-produce because none of us do any of these things on our own (even though it sometimes feels like that at 5 in the morning, or when someone who's NOT DOING THE WORK dismissively remarks "you missed a comma there" or "you need to get your marketing sorted. I've never heard of...")

Transition Norwich News is also a community Blogger-based website. A crew of 15 people from the various groups and projects in the initiative upload their copy each month and we organise it and make sure the calendar is up-to-date. The bulletin is edited and sent out to all TN subscribers (yes, I know Network, we call it that too) with links to the news items and latest This Low Carbon Life posts.

Sustainable Bungay's newsletter is likewise a collaborative publication with people from the theme groups sending in copy to Charlotte (editor), Kris (designer) and myself (sub) which we then collate, typeset and publish both online and in a printed version. The latter we distribute to Bungay library and local shops and services. This works well for people who do not have internet access and adds a physical dimension to SB’s presence in the town.

In early 2010 Josiah set up Sustainable Bungay's website using Wordpress and showed us how to publish posts about SB’s activities - both announcements and write-ups of our events. It's a shared thing. We each have a password and we write when there’s news to report, whether it’s about Give and Take Day, Happy Mondays, Bungay Community Bees, Film Nights, the Library Courtyard Garden or the Give and Grow and Abundance events. The great thing about it is you can see the thumbnails for the recent posts on the home page so all the projects and events are displayed.

For intergroup communication we have a googlegroup and speak to each other on the phone when the emails just get too much. Never underestimate the power of giving good phone!

I realise there is so much more to say about how we communicate transition: by word of mouth, by tweeting, by meeting, by Green Drinks, at community events (our own and others)... Here's a picture of Lesley and Kris arranging the new SB display boards at the All Under One Roof event this July.

Down in the engine room it's sometimes hard to see where all this is going. Is anybody out there reading me? Is the message getting through? I can't tell. But I think it's key in transition that we're as consistent as the mainstream. That we keep the rhythm going. That we keep writing, reporting and photographing. Every quarter, every month, every day.

Pics: Preparing the Transition Norwich monthly bulletin down at the community centre; Transition Norwich Bloggers on the Bench August 2011; Transition Norwich 2nd birthday poster October 2010 by Andy Croft; Notebook from The Sea Kale Project by Charlotte Du Cann; Josiah holds his daughter Iris AND shows me how to upload posts on SB's website; Lesley and Kris arrange the new SB display boards, July 2011

Keeping a Track Record - Transition Themes Weeks #1-8

We began our Transition Themes Weeks in December 2010. During the last three years Transition Norwich has shifted its focus and energy - from an early burst of enthusiastic gatherings, world cafes and open spaces into creating and delivering several (hard) working projects. Many of these have sprung out of the 13 original theme groups where people met and discussed what we can do in the "real world". Norwich Farm Share came out of the Food and Farming group, Magdalen Street Celebration out of the neighbourhood NR3 group,The Low Carbon Cookbook out of the Stranger’s Circle, Carbon Conversations and TN2.

As a result of this shift many of us find ourselves working in different areas and our paths do not always cross. So the intent behind the Transition Themes Weeks was to bring these strands together, so everyone could see the whole pattern of the initiative. To cohere news from these groups that wasn’t covered in the monthly TN bulletin and relay what was happening at a more detailed in-depth level. Published every five or six weeks these reports are filed by regular contributors and also by people commissioned within TN and other outreach groups (last week's TT featured pieces for example by a Green county councillor and a local vicar). The week is introduced with all the latest from the Communications crew, including outside comms work that happens within the Transition Network.

These reports are not indiviudalisitisc “Me” pieces, they are told from within the social groups and in many ways have served as the framework for the new Social Reporting project. We have run eight weeks now and have covered everything from Bees to Zero Waste. Some of the year’s highlights include Mark giving a round-up of the Transition Circles, Tierney on Permaculture, Kerry on Café Conversations, Helen on starting up the Magdalen Street Celebration, Olivia Heal on Lacto-Fermentation (Low Carbon Cookbook), John on Toads Talk Transport.

The one we’re publishing today is by Simeon whose intelligence and concise style epitomises the editorial slant of these weeks. Here he is talking about the group he started after the meeting to discuss the Nicole Foss talk in April.

Photos: Notebook from The Sea Kale Project by Charlotte Du Cann; oil tanker from Transition Circles review by Mark Watson

Do We Control Money or Does Money Control Us?
Simeon Jackson
18 May 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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