A birthday bash, anyone?

It's my birthday today. Dev- elopment of some kind ( I hope), although what I write about today is hardly a subject for celebration. Perhaps, though, if those with the decision-making power paused for reflection, one of those famous decisions the media call a 'U-turn' could happen?

The Norwich Northern Distributor Road (NDR) has been a hot topic for over a decade now, and, after a lot of horse-trading and amendments, it is now listed by the Department of Transport on the official list of major new roads to be built. It may well be 5 years off yet, and has yet to get planning permission, but already a casual look around the areas to the north and north-east of the City will show a surprising number of houses for sale near to the proposed route.

Probably the most shocking aspects to the proposal is the cost. If you add all the pots of money together - government, County Council, and the GNDP ( Greater Norwich Development Partnership) you get about £112 million, and you can probably safely add another 40% or so to that in reality, which is the average 'overspend' on major road schemes over the last 20 years. The County Council right now are carefully putting money aside from it's revenue budget ( estimated at around £2.5M) into what can only be described as a slush fund to build up extra reserves for the road. All this at a time when frontline services are being systematically reduced to 'save money'.

In September 2005, early on in my role as a County Councillor, this topic was so hot and so big, a special dedicated Full Council meeting was arranged over and above the regular meetings, to hear all Councillors views on the subject, and crucially, to take a vote. Of the 69 Councillors present that day, only 2 voted against the proposal - myself and my colleague, Andrew Boswell. What was also remarkable was the lack of expression or understanding of the bigger picture. Faced with a large business lobby - for many of whom the word 'infrastructure' means 'roads' - and an assumed continued growth in road traffic, this development appeared to all those present an unquestionable step to make. For the full minutes to this meeting, and a brief summary of the speech I made, look here:

http://www.norfolk.gov.uk/Council_and_democracy/Committees/Committees_Archive/index.htm

So will the road ever be built? Privately, there are key planners and newer politicians around now who are saying that there are doubts. Let's hope so. There is still a long way to go, but maybe there will be true celebration - much as there has been in the past over the relinquishing of plans for new roads - when we see the area to the north-east of Norwich remain unblighted by this unnecessary road.

Bikes, trams and feet

I introduced you yesterday to the town of Freiburg, in Germany. Today I'd like to show you how their residents get around.

I have to be honest, I can't get hugely excited by trams. OK, they're an efficient public transport system and are quiet and don't spew emissions directly into the street, but, in the end, they're just a glorified bus. The thing which is important, though, is that people use it! These trams were full every time I saw them, which means that it is a social norm to use public transport there. I get rather upset when I find myself the only person on a double-decker bus in Norwich. "Why doesn't everyone use this bus?", I wonder.

But I mostly bike places, anyway, which is better.

If you can't see this image very well, the entire other side of this road is full bike racks... and yes, that it is the same person to the left, centre and right of this image (it was stitched together from three photos!).

There are very few streets that you could walk down in Freiburg without seeing a bike. They line the streets, there are people riding everywhere on them. It is just a normal part of life. There are good bike paths too. What I think is the test for whether a city is good for biking in is if, without planning beforehand, you can get from one randomly chosen location to another without having to use major trunk roads or get off your bike to walk along footpaths. Unfortunately, Norwich isn't at that point yet, but has made some great improvements over the past few years.

The entire centre of the town is pedestrianised. Not a car in sight. Bicycles, of course, and trams, yes, but no cars. OK, buses are allowed down some of the town centre streets too, but they do so quite discreetly. And I think cars can enter the town centre for access at certain times of day, but there was certainly never any real traffic.

The town centre feels like a pedestrian's world, and any vehicle is an invader. In most British cities, the opposite tends to be true. We are very lucky in Norwich to have quite an expansive pedestrian area, but I still feel it could be bigger. There's no real reason why Exchange Street couldn't be pedestrianised (with exceptions for access at certain times of day, of course), and this would also have the effect of cutting down traffic along St. Giles'.

However, as I said, we are already doing pretty well in the town centre from this point of view. Perhaps we should consider where more out-of-town areas that could be pedestrianised. I can't think of any out-of-centre community shopping precincts that are designed around the pedestrian in Greater Norwich, can you? Leave your answer in comments below! :)

Tomorrow I'll talk about public open spaces in Freiburg and Norwich.

All photos by the author in Freiburg (first three images) and Norwich (last).

Toads talk transport - 2012

During the last 8 weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time helping toads to dodge the traffic in order to get to their breeding ponds and I’m pleased to say that this year in Norfolk, more people helped more toads, in more places than ever before and over 17,000 toads were saved from a premature end, under a car tyre. Toad patrol involves a lot of time spent walking up and down roads in the dark and usually alone – though another patroller will be close at hand, if needed.

After a while in the dark by yourself, you become more in tune with the toads than you are with the humans whizzing past in their cars, like aliens in space craft, and your mind begins to contemplate strange things. One night out in the rain, I was pleased to find that my friend from last year had survived into her 21st year and once again we fell into conversation as I carried her to the pond in my bucket.“What do you think of this drought? Do you think humans are responsible for changing the climate?” I asked her. (We have had 3 years with very dry springs and this year, many of the breeding ponds were completely dry – something no humans could remember but my friend’s family has lived in the village since the last ice age and toads have a different perspective on things.) The toad snorted at this question and said that there was always some species getting above itself and messing with the climate – too much algae – too many flatulent dinosaurs – too many humans. The toads have seen it all before and she was confident that there will still be toads once the humans have burnt all the oil and gone back to their caves. She just hoped that no volcanoes are going to erupt this year because the dust makes slugs taste awful for years afterwards.

The toad reminded me that Chaucer had written ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote’ – so perhaps it is not so unusual to have a very dry March. The toad then remarked , with a cynical tone, that the recent fuel shortages had not persuaded many people to get on their bicycles and she asked whether I had made any progress with getting people to swap cars for bikes, so that they are better prepared for the real shortages that are coming.

As we paused to help a passing newt, I explained that the County Council has responded to suggestions and has pencilled in a path to connect the village to the Research Park. I am urging everyone to attend the exhibition of Research Park expansion plans, next week and demand that a cycle path connection to Hethersett is included (the first phase of the expansion includes parking for over 2000 cars, but no joined up cycle path plans!). As I helped the toad into the shallow puddle, where there should have been 2m of water, she thanked me politely but it was clear that she was deeply upset by the ever increasing car traffic that kills so many of her family and friends and pollutes the atmosphere for all species on the planet.

Car Clubs and Car Shares – Hints and Tips

Thinking of giving up your car? Tired of spending fortunes on repairs, insurance and tax? Living the low carbon life, but need a car for work? Wonder how you’ll get to your favourite spot on the coast without one? Gather courage and look at the alternatives... James Frost on life after car ownership.

I gave up my car in 2008 and haven’t looked back. This decision was hurried along by my rusty Peugeot’s £500 MOT bill, but I was still nervous at the time – could I really live without my own car? Even though I love cycling and walking everywhere in Norwich, would public transport really cut the mustard for those trips into the Norfolk countryside? And my work contract stated that I needed access to a car, so how was I going to get round that?

As it turned out, I couldn’t live without a car. But that’s OK – I now use the Norfolk Car Club and operate my own car share scheme. It feels a bit greener and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper. Let’s take those one at a time.

Norfolk Car Club

These are the swanky Polos and Golfs (image 1 or 2?) you see parked in special parking bays around Norwich. You join the scheme as a member (at the moment it’s free to join at www.commonwheels.org.uk, if you use the promo code ‘Norwich10’) and you book the cars online whenever you want to use them. Then, you go up to the car in the street confidently brandishing your swipe card, hold it over the reader (image 3?) and watch as the car magically opens up. Then you drive away, feeling smugly 21st century. If you are anything like me, at that point you are also driving the nicest car you’re ever likely to set foot in ... the kind of car that switches itself off while waiting at traffic lights...

Anyway, you pay about £5 per hour and return the car to the bay when you are done. So to go to the coast for a few hours you might pay £20+. At first, this did seem expensive but I found I had to take a mental leap and think of the bigger picture – remembering that I wasn’t paying for MOT, tax, insurance, breakdown cover, repairs or servicing, or dealing with the hassle of any of these things, quickly put it in perspective. Some nice man even comes and cleans the cars when you aren’t using them. It’s like car hire but the cars are available 24/7, in streets all over Norwich and you can book them for as little as half an hour if you like.

Car Share

Together with a group of 3 friends, I’ve also now set up a car share scheme. We all put in £100 and brought a car together – a secondhand Fiat. We set up insurance with The Green Insurance Company, with one of us as the policyholder and the other three as named drivers. We set up a Community Bank Account with Barclays Bank (this involved us saying we were a not-for-profit organisation and coming up with a simple logo on headed paper), with all payments going in and out of this account by Direct Debit. We book the car on a shared Google Calendar and with no-one having a daily need for the car, it all seems to work out so that the car is available when we need it.

We each pay £50 a quarter and then 15p per mile that we drive (with any petrol we put in taken off the mileage sum). So essentially, my fixed motoring costs are at £200 per year. With each of us paying the same, this more than covers the car’s annual payments, with a surplus accruing for any repairs. If any extra costs come up, we just split them in four, which is a lot less painful than swallowing the whole bill, as you can imagine.

It’s worth noting that if you want to share your car, but don’t have any friends/neighbours that are keen, you could offer it to the Norfolk Car Club above. They will then pay all your fixed costs, you will continue to use the car for free, but others will also be able to book the car online and open it with a swipe card. Now that is thinking out of the box!

The Future

So should we be advocating ways of continuing to drive in a post-peak-oil society? Is it climate irresponsible to be driving at all? Well, perhaps, but I’m no saint and where the fine lines of idealism and realism meet, I’d rather find solutions. I still want access to a car but I am mindful of my footprint. And hell, it’s expensive owning a car – I’d rather do it with others for that reason alone.

I am convinced that petrol prices and the rising cost of motoring are going to see more and more people sharing cars. Neighbours, friends, family members – people will be forced into thinking outside of their comfort zone and the costs will really focus people’s minds on what is a priority journey. Whilst I can see more people cycling and using public transport, car usage is not going to stop overnight. Belonging to car clubs and car share schemes, will provide a more localised, community-focused approach. Perhaps the streets will become empty of cars, apart from the few cars in community ownership, being booked online for only the very essential journeys.
James Frost

Graffiti on car advertisment in Norwich; Norwich city car club car and poster

Off the wagon

There is an expression about addiction that I always get the wrong way round. So I am either 'off the wagon' or 'on the wagon'. I don't know which one means you are doing the thing that you are trying to stop doing. But which ever one that is, then I am doing it. My addiction is to oil and all that that entails and I have been trying to give it up since I joined transition and gradually I have changed my life but it only takes a few things for me to be indulging again.

So for example I had gradually changed my life so that I was much less dependant on the car. I had done this by never agreeing to be involved in anything that meant I had to drive, so if someone invited me to join a book group in Wymondham then I would just say no.

I had started visiting my parents in Peterborough by train. This turned out to be cheaper than driving and much easier to knit on the journey.

I started to walk to work and sat smugly by as people ran round my office looking for the person who had blocked them in in the car park.

I moved to the city centre and started dating someone also in the city centre so that I was never more than walking distance from where I wanted to be.

I nearly, I repeat, nearly got rid of my car and then disaster struck....

My mum went into a home and my dad got really ill. Then my work got moved to 3 miles outside the city centre. I had to travel to Peterborough at a moments notice. When I walked around the office asking if anyone was driving into the city and could give me a lift I was looked at like I had asked for spare change for a cup of tea outside Macdonalds.

So I started driving around everywhere like an ex-vegetarian who has started eating meat and can't get enough of it!

Then my car broke and the garage asked me to pay £2000 to get it fixed and so I have parked it in my ex's driveway while I have a think. You could say that the car and me are officially 'on a break'.

So there you have it. My story of how you an end up off or on the wagon and then back on or off it in just a few months.

My name is Helenofnorwich and I haven't driven for 6 days and 3 hours...

modal shifts of the third kind

Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed that an ultimate freedom was that no citizen should ever need to travel on a bus.

In cities like Norwich, buses - after walking and cycling - are what keeps it from entering total gridlock. Even with only handfuls of people on them, buses are big carbon-savers compared to private cars, and they save oodles of road space. The bus shown here - the No.25 which serves UEA and the train station - is the most frequent service in Norwich, and by a strange quirk of history, travels along what used to be Colonel Unthank's bridleway - now known as the Unthank Road.

Over long distances buses, and their cousins the coaches, are even better than the train for carbon emissions per person. According to the Department of Transport, the CO2 emissions per person for a journey from London to Manchester are as follows:

car : 36.6 kg
train: 5.2 kg
coach:4.3 kg

If you traveled by plane, that figure would be a massive 62kg per passenger. Figures assume the average car carrying 1.6 people, and the average coachload of 40 people.

So why aren't more people using the humble bus? In 2005 the then government introduced free bus travel for those of pensionable age and some other concessionary groups. It immediately increased bus patronage around the country, and was later extended to include cross-country travel. However, it became apparent quite quickly that the formula for calculating how the government reimbursed local authorities for running these schemes meant that most authorities had significant shortfalls. In Norfolk this shortfall is about £4.5 million (per year), with 180,000 people (passholders) eligible to use the scheme. It is critical in rural areas where the scheme has given new freedoms for non-car owners to travel around.

Now here follows a completely upfront and brazen replication of a County Council petition! The County Council is gathering names on a petition to present to the government in it's effort to rectify this big anomaly in funding - i.e. please Mr. Cameron, cough up the money you should be paying to enable us to continue running this bus subsidy. You can sign the petition here .

This is somewhat unusual I know, for the blog to be supporting the County Council, but in this case we are totally aligned in what we would like to see happen.

Done. So now I am off on my bike to catch the train!

how to get where you want to go - part 2

This is an update on my efforts to travel in a low carbon manner.

As some of you may know I nearly got rid of my car earlier this year. But now I am glad I didn't. Why? Because sometimes I am so tired I can't be bothered to cycle, walk, catch the bus, cadge a lift or sit on a train.

The other day I got talking and missed my stop and ended up in Grantham because I forgot to get off at Peterborough and then spent an hour making bunting in the waiting room until I caught the next train back. Also my boss has just told me I am being given a different job that will involve me driving around North Norfolk and visiting people which would be impossible to do by public transport.

I am determined still to use environmentally friendly methods as much as possible. So I have taken my bike to the menders and for £40 I got a new gear something-or-other and a new tyre. I was a bit worried when I went to pick it up because he said there was some extra stuff that he had had to do. I braced myself for the bill which turned out to only be another £9.

The other day I borrowed a friend's electric bike. It was amazing. Kind of how I imagine it would feel if you rode a bike and were really fit. I am going to borrow it a bit more and then maybe buy one.

I also saw an electric scooter on Norwich market. It looked like a childs scooter but had a lead and a plug which was for recharging. It looked like a cheap way to get about but it is probably only legally allowed to be used in your dads driveway between school and bath-time.

Tomorrow - the advantages of going out with someone in NR3

Northern Distributor Road - It's the Ecos, Stupid

Welcome to the Outreach section of our Transition Themes Week where writers and community activists relate what is happening around the city within a Transition context. The proposed Northern Distributor Road was the key subject in one of TN's early theme groups that met to discuss Transport. Here Andrew Boswell puts this controversial scheme into a clear (and global) perspective and challenges "the shadowy world of economic hallucinations".

All last week, there was a debate in the Eastern Daily Press over whether the Government should fund the Norwich Northern Distributor Road – a £112.5m scheme on which the Council has already spent at least £15m of local people’s Council Tax. The arguments can get very technical – too complicated for many people to bother with. It’s my job to engage at that level day-to-day, and I have spent literally months poring over calculations of projected congestion levels, consultation responses, planning policy statements etc but I often feel we all just need to stand back and look at it all much more simply.

The issues really come down to what sort of future do we want – how do we want to live, work, play, eat? And crucially, what will future people feel about these fundamentals of human existence. That sounds a bit like Ecos – the root of the words economy and ecology.

What is on offer with the road proposal and the associated plans for Greater Norwich is massive housing growth in North East Norwich that is pure and simple ‘business as usual’. This was clear when the County Council’s PR offensive hit the EDP front page on 9th September with the headline “NEW BID FOR ‘£1.3bn’ ROAD”. No, I hadn’t got all my decimal points wrong on the cost of the road above – it turns out that this bigger number represents the benefits: the County are hanging their bid to Government on the road “adding £1.3bn” to the Norfolk economy. That’s £1,300,000,000 if you like lots of noughts. But has anybody at Norfolk County Council tried really defined what “economy” means?

I never tire of Satish Kumar’s wisdom having first come across him and Resurgence at the first Schumacher Lectures in Bristol in, I think, 1977 – an event that started to change my view on the world. Satish has written widely on what real economy means, here he is recently in Brazil:

The word ‘economy’ is made from two Greek words ‘ecos’ and ‘nomos’. ‘Ecos’ means the earth household and ‘nomos’ means the management of it, so I want to ask the world leaders, are you managing the earth household or are you managing only the financial capital? True wealth is not money, money is only a measure of wealth, true wealth is land, animals, forests, clean water, human communities and human intelligence. If we have lots of money but the natural capital is diminished then what good is that economy so please understand the true meaning of economy and manage it properly for all people now and future generations and create a system which is harmonious for all living beings.

However, I don’t think that is quite what the Norfolk officialdom folk mean with the £1.3bn claim. Even from the mainstream, rationale point of view, I am very sceptical, in the best sense of the word, about this claim and what it means. If you build 37,000 houses and then create lots of jobs of business parks and out-of-town retail centres for the inhabitants … and, if, the economy suddenly goes back to what it was in the last decade before 2008, and that is a big IF, then, sure, you must add something measureable to the ‘size’ of the economy. But that’s not adding something to the current economy – its actually saying if you replace Norwich over twenty years with a city like Nottingham, you have something bigger and, yes, it generates more business.

The £1.3bn claim keeps making me think of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where a computer is invented to discover the answer to the “Question of Life, The Universe and Everything” – the good old computer comes up with 42. Somehow, those folk at County Hall seem to have come up with a computer into which you pour lots of concrete, carbon emissions, lost landscapes, congestion, future human stress and found it comes up with the answer £1.3bn.

We all know too that some of this calculation involves adding up the fractions of time that a new road might shave of journeys and places a value on time - see references 8 and 9 in this article by George Monbiot for a good expose of this. Of course, this is not real money – not many people will be able to say “well, I saved 5 minutes each way of my commute since that brilliant road opened, and that’s enabled me to grow my business 50% this year”.

What is really disturbing is that the Council are still trying to tell people that all this growth, and the huge number attached to its value, will bring us a veritable land of milk and honey. In fact, they have been telling Norfolk people for years, that it is the ONLY way to the Promised Land.

Lots of big questions come to mind. The most obvious one that I don’t need to spell out for Transition and One World Column readers is ‘is it at all likely that this sort of economic growth vision will actually happen?’. Well, as I write, the latest ‘Markets plunge’ story is on all the newsfeeds, the Greeks are striking against extreme austerity measures, and all commentators are talking about a double-dip UK recession, and possible “contagion” spreading around Western European economies. And, yet, people are still thinking that this sort of business as usual model is going to continue and that it is the only vision for the future.

There is a much deeper question. Even if, our economies recover from the current situation, is this what people want? Everywhere that this sort of urban sprawl has been built, it hasn’t benefitted the local people. The main beneficiaries are the retail park owners, the likes of Tescos and B&Q, and the businesses like Aviva. For the ordinary person, high carbon transport brings lack of choice, greater conformity and greater dependence on the car leading to isolation for some people. Money is sucked out of the local economy to London, Chicago, Beijing as fast as you can say ‘N D R’.

And then there is personal happiness and fulfilment. One has to be careful with this nowadays because despite all the years of good work by the people of Bhutan and the New Economics Foundation, the Government and David Cameron have suddenly latched on this. Wellbeing and happiness are the latest words due to have their meaning corrupted like sustainability and, yes, economy.

When you look at real wellbeing and real economy in the way Satish Kumar suggests, then it is hard to see how the road and its associated way of living will bring us any closer. It might be convenient for a few often, and convenient for others occasionally, but that’s not wellbeing. And the costs of that are landscape destruction, congestion and high carbon emissions. It’s clear that carrying on trying to pursue the business as usual, growth at 3% a year, is not just going to not give us happiness and wellbeing, but its actually going cause more harm and damage.

Transition and One World readers, and many others, are already working day to day for another vision. One based upon the true meaning of economy and ecos: an ecological society based in social justice. The challenges for this century to tackle climate change and resource depletion make concrete trophies like the NDR an irrelevance to real progress as they steal vital resources from social and environmental welfare. The economy needs stability and diversity not endless growth – a steady state economy is quite possible. Many of us are already downsizing to help economic and climate stability.

By the way, if you need any convincing that a shadowy “Yes, Minister” world occupies the corridors of powers at County, check out these two links: Link 1 and Link 2.

It is important for us to challenge the shadowy world of economic hallucinations that try to take us further down a destructive path – the growth-at-all-costs machine and its cogwheels like the NDR. Over the next few weeks, it is vital that many people write to the Department of Transport and ask them not to fund this road.

The public has an opportunity to comment on the bid until October 14. Comments can be made to the DfT by emailing development.pool@dft.gsi.gov.uk

If you wish to send a letter please email the campaign against the road on i_oppose_the_ndr@fastmail.co.uk and we will send you some guidance notes on the key issues that we hope people will tell the DfT. The postcard image above gives some headline points too. Many thanks. Andrew

This piece was also published this week in the OneWorldColumn.

Going Green in Glasgow

The trials and tribulations of taking your green ethos to a new location

Every time I put my veg peelings into the landfill bin a little bit of my spirit dies, its a fight against my better instinct, but what can I do? When I first moved in I collected up a massive container full of compost, until I finally accepted the fact that I had nowhere to put it or take it to.

I moved up to Glasgow in mid May and I have been in my new flat for almost a month now. I do have a shared garden, but it doesn't have a compost bin and my logic makes me reluctant to make the effort to make a compost heap when no-one is going to make use of the resulting compost (I'm probably here for less than a year). I have tried to go and find local allotments where I could 'donate' my peelings, but to my dismay they are locked up behind big wire fences and although there are quite a few community gardens in Glasgow the nearest one is a good 15minutes cycle ride away. I do live right next to a wonderful country park and I have considered taking up guerilla composting, but that feels a bit more like being a civil nuisance than a responsible citizen. So the compost conundrum remains unsolved. I think it may end in a small compost bin in the garden, but I still have to organise it and reassure the rest of the tenants that it isn't going to smell/ attract rats.

As well as worrying about what you are going to do with your veg peelings, moving to a new city poses the challenge of where you are going to get you veg from in the first place. It didn't take me long to track down the wholefood shops in Glasgow and to go and check out what delights they had on offer. The discovery that one of them has an entire wall of herbal teas to choose from made me a very happy hippy indeed, especially the discovery of tulsi (holy basil) tea that I had discovered in Inverness on my Otesha tour last year and then never seen since.

Unfortunately though the fresh fruit and veg selection was not as exciting, although one of the shops has an entire greengrocers, so a good array to choose from, but it was not necessarily organic and very little of it was local.

Get a veg box I hear you say. Well I did! I found three different possibilities, but I decided which one to try out first (as they had the option of a UK box) and after sorting out all of the logistics I got my first box on Thursday! Its wonderful to have local, organic veg again, but its quite a bit more expensive up here than it is in Norwich. Its easy to forget how easy we get it in Norwich, being in the middle of a massive arable area. Scotland is rather more livestock orientated, which is not quite so good for a vegetarian...

Trains, planes and pedal power
Generally travel is further and longer in Glasgow than in Norwich. Glasgow is considerably bigger and quite a bit further way from, well, most places. I didn't have my bikes with me when I first arrived so the first aspect I explored was public transport and Glasgow does have a fairly awesome public transport system. It has one underground line that goes in a big circle around the city centre, which is pretty useful as it takes a good 30mins, if not longer, to walk across the city centre. And at only £1.40 a journey its pretty good value. But the subway is only useful if you are in the city centre and I live further out than that.

But here Glasgow gets one up on Norwich, it has the most amazing network of urban railways. Within 15mins walk of my flat there are no less than 5 train stations, on two different train lines with regular services into the city centre taking only 10minutes and costing only £1.25 off-peak single.

This makes me very happy as I have always preferred trains to buses and although there is a good network of regular buses around Glasgow that are pretty good value, they take a lot longer and you have to pay the exact fare. They will not give you change. So if you don't have the correct money with you then you just have to pay more. I think that this is a shocking, profit making tactic. Bus drivers are bad enough in Norwich, being unwilling to accept notes, even though ATMs only give £10 as the smallest denomination and therefore there is no easy way of getting smaller change. But to give no change at all? So I am kind of boycotting the buses out of annoyance at having already paid at least £1.50 more than the actual fares since I have been in Glasgow, as I didn't have the correct change at the time.

On a positive note, when I looked into going to visit my parents I was astounded to discover that it only takes 4 hours on the train, which is incredible as it is the same time as it took me to visit them from Norwich on public transport, despite it taking 2.5hrs to drive from Norwich and something like 6.5hrs from Glasgow! It is of course quite a bit more expensive if you buy your ticket on the day, but if you plan in advance a £13 advanced single is pretty good going for travelling almost 400miles. Unfortunately though longer distances mean more carbon emissions, so my transport carbon footprint is going to suffer :(

But I do finally have my low carbon vehicle with me, my wonderful bicycle. When I first came up I couldn't bring my bike, so I tried to get a cheap secondhand one to see me through until I could bring my others up. However, secondhand bikes are soo expensive up here. Where as you can get a bike in Norwich for a tenner (probably not a good one, but anyway) on Glasgow gumtree the cheapest bikes were £30 and they really didn't look that good. So I never did get round to buying a bike, instead I bought my town bike up on the train when I went down to move all of my stuff out of my Norwich house. Unfortunately the excitement was short lived as my poor little bike, who was brilliant for pootling around Norwich, wasn't up to the longer distances, hills and potholes of Glasgow. I need to replace the front wheel and get the gears working at the very least! So the bike saga continued.

Finally, success! I now have my more robust touring bike up with me as well and it is doing me proud. This week, Kristina and I took the plunge and decided to cycle from work back home, a distance of 6 miles. And it's amazing! A beautiful cycle along the national cycle network, following the river through parks and quiet residential streets and it only takes us 45mins! Thats faster than the train and so much more enjoyable. We were so impressed and enthusiastic that we cycled to work and back on both thursday and friday. This was however a fairly ambitious start and I am rather tired today from so much exercise all of a sudden!! But it is definitely worth it.

Transition times
Lastly, but definitely not least, I haven't found a lovely group of Transitioners in Glasgow yet who I can share my low carbon living attempts with. I think we are very lucky in Norwich to have our transition circles and such a supportive community of people trying to live differently rather then just focussing on projects. So I miss you all, but I am very happy to hear all of the wonderful things you are still getting up to.

I am having a marvellous time up here in Glasgow, but it is definitely a challenge to my low carbon lifestyle. I am finding some things are easier and some things are harder, but hopefully I can take inspiration from all we have achieved in Norwich and make some suggestions for enabling low carbon living up here.

Photos: The shared garden of my flat, a grow wild veg box and the view from my local train station.

Achtung! Peak Oil Reports and Community Transport

What have a leaked German military think tank report on Peak Oil, a Guardian article stating that for two years the British government (i.e. the Department of Energy and Climate Change - DECC) has consistently played down and dismissed as ‘alarmist’ warnings from its own civil servants about the threat of civil unrest in the face of ‘peak oil’ energy shortages, and Sustainable Bungay’s midsummer bike ride and Green Drinks on Community Transport got in common?

The German report is clear, sobering and well worth reading. It outlines the systemic risks involved in an “unavoidable peak in oil production, which go beyond gradual shifts in energy systems and economies,” and discusses those risks from the standpoint of globalised, industrialised economies – oil being the base for 95% of all industrial output. The paper also addresses energy security and changing international and geopolitical relations – who has the remaining oil reserves and what that means in terms of potential political power shifts.

The Guardian article looks at the DECC report on the risks and impacts of a potential future decline in oil production within the present global context of historic oil price highs ($115 or £71 a barrel). The report had been unavailable to the public until a student gained access to it through a Freedom of Information demand.

Community Transport was the theme for Sustainable Bungay's solstice Green Drinks yesterday as a group of cyclists set off from the Buttercross in the centre of town to St. Peter's Brewery a few miles outside. Margaret Sheppard, SB's own full-on cycling campaigner, organised the ride both as part of National Bike Week and as one of a series of summer rides to raise awareness, show how enjoyable cycling can be and "get bums on bikes."

Some of us chose to go with Richard in the Beccles and Bungay Area Community Cars' wheelchair-assisted van - also to raise awareness of its existence as an alternative to private cars for groups of up to six people for anything from day trips to evenings out. The BBACC also have a network of drivers using their own cars to take people on shopping or hospital trips (this costs 43p per mile). In an area with a large rural hinterland, diminished bus services and many (especially older) people without private transport, this is proving to be an increasingly popular and valuable service.

Whatever the future holds in terms of energy provision, the current trend of rising oil and food prices seems set to last. We need to get more and more into the spirit of sharing our resources - and making it as enjoyable as possible - like cycling (or community bussing) out together at summer solstice for a drink to discuss the practical ways we can go about it.

Pics: Richard, Charlotte and the Community WAV; Bungay bikers at the Buttercross and entering St. Peter's Brewery, Summer Solstice 2011

Toads talk Transport

Each spring I help organize the Toadwatch Patrols that this year saved over 15,000 Norfolk toads from being run over whilst on the way to their historic breeding ponds - we carry the toads across the roads in buckets. Toads often move on wet and windy nights so patrollers find themselves out on the roads with just a torch whilst everyone else is indoors watching the TV or driving around in their heated, air conditioned metal boxes. It is interesting how quickly being out in the dark with just toads to talk to makes you see the world through different eyes. The humans rushing past in their cars and hidden behind their curtains become an alien species whilst you identify with the toads, and the foxes and owls that are out hunting them.

One wet night in February I picked up a large, old female toad on her way to the pond and she asked me why there were so many more cars going through the village now, compared to twenty years ago when she was just a tadpole. I explained that the pub in the village offers cheap meals so many people drive here from miles away. The toad asked why the people didn’t use pubs near where they live – I replied that lots of pubs have shut because of lack of custom. The toad asked whether people in the village walked to their local pub. ‘No they mainly drive to pubs in other villages’ I said. ‘So they can squash other toads?’ - asked my friend. I didn’t like the way this conversation was heading and at this point I spotted two toads in the road and a vehicle approaching. I always wear a hi viz jacket and it is a 30mph limit (in theory) so I shone my torch on the toads and stepped out to rescue the toads – the car was still some distance away. I picked up one toad but the driver of the large 4wd drove on till there was an audible plop as his massive tyre stopped directly on the other toad. Our eyes met across the bonnet – clearly he was furious at having been made to stop but I could not tell if he had seen the Toad Crossing signs or had any idea of what I was doing in the road. I moved and he screeched off in a cloud of diesel smoke.

I took my bucket of toads to the pond and watched as they swam of to join in the mating frenzy that has occurred each spring for more than 300 million years- since amphibians were the first vertebrates to colonize the land.

Being out with the toads makes you realize just how pointless are a lot of the journeys on which we squander our precious oil. You see the same cars going back and forth. Parents spend hours transporting children miles to clubs in other parts of the county yet getting people to help with facilities in the village is difficult. People drive to supermarkets yet village shops and post offices are closing. The toads can’t tell us what we should be doing but they have seen off big footed dinosaurs and are confident they will still be here when the only oil fuelled cars are in museums.

Footnote - Toads secrete a poisonous protective substance called bufagin which is made up of a hallucinogen, bufotenine, and several glycosides similar to the heart stimulant digitalin from Foxgloves. Some people have been known to lick them to get high – NOT recommended but I do pick up a lot of toads and may have absorbed some bufagin! I should also point out that many drivers are considerate and once they are aware of the toads they do their best to avoid them.

Transport - Where Are We Going?

What immediately comes to mind when I think of “Transport” are cars. And buses. Mostly because at the moment I don’t own one of the former and so rely on the latter. And in rural Suffolk where I live, the number of the latter seems to be shrinking by the month.

Then I think lorries, trains, boats and planes. Bicycles. Horses. But the theme of transport goes beyond just the forms. It’s about more than whether I personally own a car or have access to a decent public transport system.

Mass transportation of goods (and people) is key to the present globalised industrial economy. Those goods whether they be food, clothes, computers, white goods or cars, already have embedded within their manufacture the use of vast amounts of oil. And that’s before you get to the fuel in the tank (see Rob Hopkins’ recent post on the energy in a litre of petrol).

If we look at the predominant aspirations and narratives of our present culture, they are still predicated on the cheap abundant oil supply we’ve enjoyed for the past fifty years. We can all have a car, own a house, fly anywhere in the world for holidays or special occasions… or dream of it for the future. In theory we can have it all. The recent economic difficulties have yet made hardly a dent in this narrative.

We know all this, you might think. We’re transitioners. But just because we are aware of something doesn't mean everyone is, even other transitioners. I still have conversations where people say that Peak Oil is a hype and that we’re not running out of oil, there’s plenty left. That’s where I need to be on the ball about, yes, there might be half of what we’ve used so far left but where is it? What Peruvian rainforest, Arctic tundra or Canadian boreal forest does it lie under? How easy is it to extract? What’s the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI)? What are the environmental and political considerations? Who is being dispossessed of their ancestral lands? What about Deep Sea Drilling? Take a look at Naomi Klein’s extraordinary and lucid TEDS talk on oil and risk.

The fact is that once you start looking at Transport you’re soon looking at the culture as a whole. One car, one person and an i-pod. “We’ve had so much, we’ve become selfish. We don’t really want to share any more. And we’re not really looking at what’s coming.” And that’s from the woman who runs the (very successful) Voluntary Help Centre in Southwold.

One of the best things about being in Transition is the context it provides in which the bigger picture of diminishing fossil fuel reserves, carbon emissions, climate instability and the global economy can be brought to the table and discussed. We can begin in these conversations to forge a different and perhaps more satisfying future. And sometimes we admit, as happened in our latest Low Carbon Cookbook meeting, that we don’t really know what the future will hold.

Back to Transport. Transition Norwich has hosted many conversations about transport in the past few years, here on This Low Carbon Life, in the Transition Circles and as part of Carbon Conversations. A Transport group did form after the Unleashing in 2008 and although currently dormant, acted for a time as an umbrella for campaigners wanting to improve public transport in Norwich city centre and prevent the Northern Distributor Road from going ahead. There are several expert cyclists on the blog team some of whom have led weeks on Cycling, reported on Otesha and been active cycle path campaigners. There are posts about inconvenient carless living, giving up the sexy sports car and its identifications, the trials of rural public transport (as well as its delights) and getting from A to B in Norwich traffic. And our week on Flying last March emerged from a fiery group email debate… whew hot topic!!!

And what about in the broader Transition movement? Have a look at this superb article by Mike Freedman, published yesterday on Transition Voice, Inconvenient Truths about the Coming Transition (see part 3 on Transportation).

Some initiatives have transport-related activities up and running. Transition Town Brixton just received funding for their local cycle delivery service. And Transition Ilkley are part of a chip fat biodiesel project that has been going three years.

I'll sign off today with a mention of Sustainable Bungay's Biodiesel project, which has been taking shape over recent months. No one has gone anywhere yet with the diesel we've made, but it's early days and we're refining (sic) our methods!

And before I forget, Happy Earth Day!

Pics: One Man (with partner) and a Car, Arizona 2001; Making Biodiesel, Suffolk February 2011

My Inconvenient Life (without a Car)

First the exhaust fell off and Mark tried to tape it back Mexican-style. Then we took the car down to the garage. Carl welded it and Chris gave us one of his laconic predictions: OK for short journeys. But we knew - as you always Just Know- that it was a Sign. We drove gingerly down the bumpy icy lanes and started to do complicated arithmetic with bus timetables. In a full-on blizzard we skated off the road at night into a ditch. That was another one.

Then, out of the blue Daphne, a fellow Transtioner said: you can have my old car. A reprieve! Another Vauxhall, and a diesel, so we could try out the fuel from our Sustainable Bungay bio-diesel project in the Spring! We were exultant. Two weeks later it refused to start. The alternator had gone. And Chris gave us another of those looks and a list of other unforeseen horrors to do with camshafts and brake pipes. Oh God, here it is: The Total No-Car Situation.

If you’re reading this in the city you’re probably thinking, what’s the big deal? But in rural England, right now, not having a car has consequences. We can walk to the local town (35 minutes) but that ancien regime, non-organic seatown is not where our social life is, or Transition, or most of our food. And since the cuts the buses have rocketed in price (£3.20 for the same journey) and the services drastically reduced. I cycle to collect our veg box (20 miles), Mark walks out and meets everyone in the lane. We are getting fit and back in touch with the neighbourhood, with the elements, after a long secluded winter . .

But how are we going to get to Bungay? Our 30 minute car journey suddenly turns into a two-bus, two and a half hour one. £5 becomes £12. And there are no buses back. Our Norwich journey at least has one night bus (at 11.15pm) from Lowestoft train station. You see, life shrinks. You don’t have that freedom anymore to go where you want. And that’s why, though the petrol prices have reached a record high, people hold on desperately to cars.

But something else happens. It really does. I found that out in the first post I wrote about Car-Free Day and found myself canoing down the River Waveney under the stars at Autumn Equinox. You can stay the night with us, said Nick and Josiah and Elinor and Gemma and Daphne. After Green Drinks, Margaret drove us home, Rita and Kate picked us up to go the Lowestoft Anti-Cuts meeting, and Lesley gave us a lift to the Core group meeting. Come in for a cup of tea, a glass of wine, supper, we said. We found ourselves talking and laughing, getting to know each other in a way that isn’t always possible in our Transition events or meetings in the library or the pub.

Do you want control or do you want relationship?

That's a question I used to ask people when they wanted to connect with flowers or with their dreams, in the days when I taught such things. There was this big struggle inside as the desire to have it My Way ceded to the kind of openness required to tap into the multi-dimensional nature of the earth and ourselves. You can’t see the earth as it really is with your dualistic rational mind. You can only see it with your heart, when you are immersed in the fabric of life and allow self-organisation to happen. When you risk and let go. You think generosity comes from the giver, but actually it comes from the receiver. It comes when you work within an open system, rather than a closed system over which you have Total Control, steering wheel and gear stick in your hands.

We’re not taught relationship. We’re taught to live in isolated bubbles and to escape into our minds. We sit in circles and share ideas about community and support, but we’re mostly talking to ourselves, in separation, as cycles of inconsolable grief and terror go into replay in our emotional bodies. I found out in our old flower and dream work that people like to be in control of the earth they are saving, in the same way lovers like to be in control of who they are loving. To manage and design every situation. Not because we’re dictators but because we have been bullied and shamed by our upbringings to live in shut-down. Seize power or be humiliated! Take the wheel or take the bus! However you can’t control and communicate at the same time, neither with people, plants nor the planet. It’s either a one-way domination or a two-way free-will exchange. And the world we get to inhabit depends entirely on that choice.

At some point in Transition you have to become the passenger. And accept the invitation.

Photos: Dashboard with devil's claw seed pods, Arizona, 2001; Sustainable Bungay Library Community Garden and the new hazel screen.

Midwinter Weather Report

(i)
Yesterday afternoon at the library I checked the Met Office weather reports for Lowestoft, Southwold and Norwich. Heavy snowfall was due in Norwich in the mid-afternoon, but in Suffolk the temperatures would be 2 or 3 degrees above freezing and the prediction was for rain.

Do we go to the TN Christmas party? We decided to play it by ear. We’d have to leave around five. At half past three it SNOWED. It was NOT supposed to SNOW at all anywhere near Southwold.

I just missed the four o’ clock local weather report on the radio. I phoned National Express to find out about the state of the trains. There was an automated message that stated the trains were running on time AND a warning about poor weather affecting services in East Anglia.

Should we make the journey? Last week, coming home from the London Bee Summit along the icy back roads we found ourselves at ten o’ clock at night in a snowstorm. I didn't see the corner and we careened into a ditch on a deserted country lane seven miles from home. And whilst I’d since recovered my nerve (with the help of a fellow Transitioner from Sustainable Bungay who not only pulled the car out the next day but gave me an excellent lesson on driving on icy roads and chaperoned me home, thank you David), I still felt cautious.

It was dark by now. Then suddenly we found ourselves in the kitchen preparing coleslaw and fava bean salads and packing up plates and cutlery and apple juice. And putting on even more layers of clothes. I kept muttering about the weather and maybe we should just stay home, but physically I was doing something else.

I looked outside. It was raining and there was no snow on the lane. It didn’t feel too cold. It looked like we were on our way.

(ii)
“ICE INSIDE THE WINDOWS!” Didy shuddered. It was an early Sustainable Bungay meeting in 2008, we were talking about carbon reduction and central heating and Didy was suddenly remembering the bleak midwinters of her childhood. She wasn't the only one. No one wanted to go back there!

Last winter as part of Transition Circles' aim of reducing our personal carbon emissions, we decided to forego the central heating for anything but drying clothes, or when people came to visit. It was cold. We wore more clothes. We lit the woodburner once a week. We really enjoyed it when people came!

So though this is "the worst winter in 100 years", my body remembers last year's experience. I've toughened up.

(iii)
What was striking yesterday was the amount of time I spent worrying in my mind about taking the car out, taking the train, snow, black ice, WEATHER! But my body was in the experience. With its creaturehood, its earth intelligence.

On the night the car went into the ditch, neither Charlotte nor I were actually afraid. We locked the car and walked onto the lane. As we got to the corner we saw headlights approaching (very slowly!). We waved, the man stopped to give us a hand. The car was stuck. Peter insisted on taking us home in that blizzard in totally the opposite direction to where he was going with his daughter after a party.

The mind needs to have everything under control AT ALL TIMES. I Will Be Safe In My Little World. But then there's no opening for anything else to happen. It's when we lose control that something surprising appears round the corner...


Pics: Ice Inside The Windows, Snow Car Ditch, We Got To The Party (and Back) - Lights in the Tree and Elena's Paper Snowflakes

Public Transport – A Private View

I went up to the Anti-Cuts demonstration in Norwich on Saturday by public transport. When I got on the Anglian bus to Lowestoft, I discovered the return fare had suddenly gone up from £3.80 to £5.20. That’s roughly 40% in one go. The driver gave me the new day ticket for a mere £5. I could now travel all day anywhere within Zone C. But all I actually wanted was a return ticket to Lowestoft. And it was still a costly increase at over 30%.

The drivers on this route are normally cheerful and friendly. It makes a real difference to the journey. Today, this man looked tired. “It can’t be making your life easy at the moment,” I said. “Being the first port of call for the bad news.” He rolled his eyes up and I had a vision of all the drivers in the front line facing the passengers’ annoyance whilst the people making the decisions sat in offices - and not just the Anglian ones - shielded from it.

So I called head office this morning and spoke to Anglian's accountant. He told me some fares in the region had actually gone down (Harleston to Norwich for instance), whilst those from Halesworth to Norwich (bus 588) and Southwold to Great Yarmouth (bus 601, the one I was on) had gone up. The 601 is an unsubsidised commercial route. It does have to do with the cuts and loss of grants and council subsidies.

"I agree yours was a particularly sharp increase," he said. "We've introduced the day tickets. But that's still a £1.20 rise."

He then said that Anglian had increased their fares early in order to shield from further sharp rises in the future, although that wasn't guaranteed entirely. And that rural communities would be particularly hard hit.

"I am surprised by the lack of feedback from the public so far about the changes," he said.

The man at Head Office said he was also perplexed why there were oil price increases now the economy is said to be 'in recovery'. I mentioned Peak Oil and resource depletion (after all it is a bus company I'm talking to), and he told me about the dual fuel buses they are planning to use with methane generated from landfill. These are not in place yet.

There was also no increase in pay for the bus drivers beyond the 2% they received in October.

"Are the drivers unionised," I asked.
"I don't really understand why they would want to be."

So then what about the fact they were in the firing line of passengers annoyed by the fare rises?
"Yes, that's not great, they're a really good bunch of guys."

I looked at Anglian's website afterwards and found only the most oblique reference to the fare changes. About the day passes for Lowestoft, Yarmouth and Norwich: "In some instances a ticket may be cheaper than buying a return ticket !!"

At this transition time of peak resources and climate change we need to be using public instead of private transport, and making sure there is reasonably-priced access to it for people in rural areas on low income. And there are many of us. These fare rises, like the cuts themselves, hit hardest where there is the least leverage.

It takes effort to be bothered about these things. To give feedback. Even when they affect us directly. This does affect me directly and I really didn't want to pick up that phone this morning and call Anglian. I forced myself to. And that's because I really don't want to return to some Victorian world of vast inequality, with a ruling elite who despise the working class and the unemployed underclass are sent to the equivalent of workhouses, providing labour in return for the bare essentials of existence.

And who can't afford to get on the bus to Lowestoft.

Pics: Merry Christmas from Your Local Bus Company Day Ticket; Me on the bus holding The Long Emergency - Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century by James Howard Kunstler and The Rough Guide To Climate Change by Robert Henson. I had intended to review these books this week but I was overtaken by the bus.

Inspector Runs Rule on High Carbon Plans

As a Green Party councillor on Norfolk County Council, I am in a constant dilemma of how to spend my time. Do I focus on building a better future or opposing what’s preventing it? Joanna Macy has written that both are part of a whole: we need both the transition type work of creating a life-sustaining civilization and the resistance actions that slow down the high carbon “industrial growth” society.

The last three weeks I have spent considerable time, doing the latter, speaking out against the high carbon growth plans in the Local Development Framework (LDF) for the Norwich area. To get the acronyms over with, our local LDF is actually called a Joint Core Strategy (JCS) – “joint” because it’s been developed by four councils (Norfolk County Council, Norwich City Council, Broadland and South Norfolk) in partnership. The partnership organisation is the Greater Norwich Development Partnership (GNDP).

The forum for resistance was the Examination in Public (EiP) of the JCS a three week marathon during which a Planning Inspector looks at every aspect of the plans for their ‘soundness’.

Whilst governments grapple at Cancun to find an international agreement for decisive action on climate change, we know that we can make changes from the personal to the global. I went into local politics five years ago because I saw a need to promote low carbon development within local Government. I hoped that the processes such as writing LDFs would enable local government to take a serious, publically accountable, evidence based approach to climate, which takes me to the first theme … carbon doesn’t count and isn’t counted.

This is where I start: any plan now has to balance how more people can come into the Norwich area, live and work, whilst we overall cut emissions across the whole area year-on-year. Squeezing carbon out of the system is not easy and therefore carbon reduction must be the number 1 planning objective. More than that, the JCS needs to set out targets for carbon reduction across the plan area and then work out how new housing, people and jobs can be accommodated. To be ‘sound’, the JCS needs a carbon accounting mechanism so progress against targets could be checked.

The JCS does the opposite. It builds growth around a high carbon infrastructure, and does not attempt to even consider carbon targets or any carbon accounting. Yet in the bizarre ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world of modern planning, amazingly, Policy 1 of the JCS is ‘Addressing climate change and protecting environmental assets’.

Without apparent embarrassment, the GNDP proclaim this Policy 1, despite the fact that the ‘most critical’ piece of infrastructure for the JCS is the proposed Northern Distributor Road (NDR). This is modelled by the Council themselves to produce 25,000 tonnes of CO2 per year in addition to current levels – equivalent to 6% of Norwich’s current transport emissions. There couldn’t be a clearer carbon disbenefit working against Policy 1.

A key component for LDFs is the Sustainability Appraisal (SA), but the JCS SA does not mention carbon reduction targets or accounting, nor seek to use any quantifiable data on emissions within its appraisal methodology. Nor, at any point, does the SA mention the emissions associated with the NDR. As I said in my evidence:

“This is not only a major omission, but in this author’s view a profound methodological flaw, in appraising sustainability at this time, when this country has had a Climate Change Act already on the statute for 2 years, and Carbon Budgets established up to 2023.”

Through my evidence, I kept trying to make the point that unless there is a genuine carbon-centric strategy to start with, Policy 1 and other ‘climate aspirations’ are just bound to fail. It’s not rocket science, but if GNDP started to think carbon-centrically, the NDR would just drop out of the options. Other more interesting options would come in too like bringing back empty properties into use, creating communities where people can live and work locally, building more such communities in existing areas, ensuring good and supply for local food growing and initiatives such as community support agriculture (CSA).

You might ask how did all this happen? How did a plan so out of kilter on carbon change come in being? Theme two: secrecy and public exclusion …

During the first day of the EiP, on the overall theme of ‘legitimacy’ of the JCS, several representations were made by community stakeholders on the very major concerns about lack of public transparency, democratic process, political inclusion and fair political representation, in other words the secrecy that has dogged the development of the JCS. My own evidence to the EiP gives 4 pages of detailed representation on this alone.

The key point is that the GNDP has developed its plan behind closed doors, at meetings closed to the public and the majority of locally elected councillors. It has refused calls to open its meetings to the public and for agendas and minutes of its meetings to be placed in the public domain. All of this is in contravention to the UNECE Aarhus Convention that is based on the principle that sustainable development can be achieved only through the involvement of all stakeholders.

Theme three biodiversity ... A notion that was flying around the EiP was that biodiversity can be increased by building houses. I couldn’t help the word ‘greenwash’ reverberating around my head each time this was mentioned. Looking into it, it’s actually enshrined in the Planning Policy for Eco-towns which states that "Eco-towns should demonstrate a net gain in local biodiversity". The Biodiversity Design Guidance for the Ecotown proposed for NE Norwich demonstrates how this would be achieved through building in ‘green infrastructure’ – hedges, ponds, orchards, gardens etc.

Now, there are good things about this: it does increase some species, will tend create a nice liveable environment, and helps to protect areas that have special biodiversity features. At least, the GNDP are thinking about it and have worked with the likes of Natural England and Norfolk Wildlife Trust on a Biodiversity Working Group (unlike Climate Change where they do not appear to have even thought about it).

Question – which photo has more biodiversity? which photo has more nature?

Above: Current arable at Rackheath (from http://www.snubcampaign.org/)

Below: proposed Rackheath eco-town (from http://www.rackheatheco-community.com/)

However, I found the zeal for it worrying. Isn’t there a hidden level of suggested meaning, that one can replace nature and somehow land up with something more natural? This rankles. It’s a sort of charter to build on green belt despite common sense is that you can’t build an artificial environment, basically a small town even if an ‘eco’ one, and make it more natural than the natural landscape that was there before. It makes no consideration of the wider impacts of development: using a reductionist approach, it essentially says let’s add up the bits of biodiversity that we can measure and value in a certain way, and see if we can get a bigger number after than before. However, there’s no similar calculus given for natural value: space, sense of space, light, noise etc. It doesn’t look at wider impacts – for example, what will be the impact of thousands of new houses close to the Broads be on the Broads themselves?

I raise this as a flag. We need to be careful of terms like ‘green infrastructure’ and ‘net biodiversity gain’, and remember that more holistic experiences of landscape, nature and space are also crucial elements of our environment.

So after 3 weeks where did all this get to? During the last week, the Inspector ran the rule over the JCS and indicated that he wanted to explore a Plan B without an NDR. This is on the basis of the ‘planning technicality’ that the road may not get adequate funding from Government, not on whether it is a good idea or not. Even so, this is huge breakthrough against the fixed position of the GNDP of only Plan A being possible. He asked the GNDP to consider a Plan B and there will be a further day of Hearings on December 9^th around the NDR and Norwich North East.

Once again, the four council leaders of the GNDP will make their response behind closed doors. However, what ever happens we can continue to tell the GNDP that it is no longer acceptable for decisions on how the Norwich area grows over the next twenty five years to be made by a handful of people behind closed doors, and that we demand that all councillors and the public are involved in further developments. And, that carbon reduction must now be built in as a main plank of the plans. Andrew Boswell