Strategic Thinking or The Library at the End of the World

I knew, as soon as the Man in Seat 61 (c) got on at Colchester, that it was a Sign.

I have been away for a week, he told his fellow commuter, and no more was said between them. It's the influenza season, where public places are a maelstrom of invisible bugs and viruses, waiting to wreak their pesky havoc on the lumbering forms who haven't stepped up their immune systems with echinacea and oranges.

Three days later I found myself in bed unable to get back on the train to London, or even to go outside, and now, dear reader, still horizontal and faced with the awesome prospect of having to write about Strategic Thinking, I fear I am not up to the task. So please bear with me. I will write this introduction to the Building section  (on the Social Reporting Project series about The Transition Companion) as soon as I can.

You may be wondering why I have a photograph of Mark Bee, leader of Suffolk County Council (with various members of Sustainable Bungay peering quizzically at him) here and why I am including a trailer for the new documentary, Chasing Ice (see end of post). But it will make sense. I promise you, by Thursday at the latest.

Some people say the world is coming to an end on Friday. Well maybe not literally, but some tear in the fabric that brings about a collapse in our civilisation. However it plays out it is the end of a long, long cycle of time, mapped out by a people whose own high city culture tumbled into ruin in the forests of the Yucatan.

Sometimes I feel ancient, as though I have seen it all before, and sometimes I feel like a being from the future, starting again with an entirely new bluepint. Sometimes, when I listen to people talk, I think we have learned nothing, in spite of all the books and buildings and all our thinking. But that, as they say, is another story . . .

Part Two: Perseverance Furthers

Transition groups aim ultimately to catalyse the localisation of their local economy. They strive to move from running small community projects to thinking and acting much bigger. New skills and ways of thinking will lead Transition initiatives to become social enterprises, such as becoming developers, banks, energy companies and so on. (Intro to the Building Section of The Transition Companion)

 The main purpose of this Ingredient is to glean knowledge about a local region and what it would take to relocalise the supply systems - the food economy, for example, or energy or transport. It requires undertaking research and amass data that most initiatives would not know how to access, or why. One of the example Rob Hopkins uses to illustrate what is meant by Strategic Thinking is the Norwich Resilient Food Plan.

Which is why here I am almost at the end of 2012, looking back at a cold day in January in the Baptist church on Boltolph Steet, four years ago where 17 of us - a farmer, a miller, several bakers, wholefood shopkeepers, the TN Oats, Beans and Bread group, Professor Martin Wolfe of the Organic Research Institute (researching wheat that can thrive in eco-systems undergoing climate change) and Andrew Whitley of The Village Bakery and author of Bread Matters - are meeting to discuss Resilient Bread. It’s a project aiming to create a sustainable supply of bread for Norwich, using locally milled flour from English wheat, grown on Norfolk farms. One of the components of the Plan that also includes a CSA and a market garden in a local school.
 
The ingredients for real bread are simple - flour, water, salt, yeast. Bringing a resilient local loaf into Norwich is more complex. The mega-distribution system of the big three industrial bakeries have trucks perpetually on the road travelling 200 miles transporting ready-sliced to the city’s 122,000 inhabitants daily. They are roaring across East Anglia from Stevenage, London and Enfield. To feed Norwich sustainably would require 30 tonnes of wheat and several local mills. On the agenda that day in January were questions about the supply chain: quantity of flour, storage and transportation of grain, the price of a loaf, the feasibility of setting up and maintaining an electric mill in the city, the packaging and marketing of the loaves.

East Anglia has arable land for growing the wheat but few working mills. The first challenge for the project is to find a mill in the city to grind the corn. The nearest wind or water mills are 25-30 miles away. The other is the quality of the wheat. The gluten content of bread is a key consideration in baking. Wheat has a very high gluten content (between 12-15 per cent) which gives the dough its extraordinary elasticity and ability to be moulded into the hundreds of shapes in which we have historically consumed it. Artisan bakers in England have been using commercial Canadian flour for decades because its exceptionally high gluten levels makes the light and fluffy white loaf we have got used to. The lower gluten content of our native wheat is compensated for by the industrialised "Chorleywood process".

“No one is going to buy a bad bloomer”, said one of the bakers rather gloomily; “You could call it ciabatta,” another quipped, and there was a long discussion as to how we were going to get over the fact that life was unpredictable and that white and fluffy was not the future. It felt it was going to take some time for all of us to get used to the idea.

Tully Wakeman (the architect of that plan and then a director of East Anglian Food Link) asked me to write up that meeting and it was the first record I made within the initiative. It kickstarted the kind of reporting I have been doing in in Transition ever since. This tiny pic of me going to a neighbourhood bread baking workshop in Yoxford a month later - by a fellow participant on her phone - was the moment where I realised the potential for writing "citizen journalism", small on the ground stories that could grab people's attention about change.

What happened to the plan? you might ask. Well, Tully left Transition Norwich before the CSA (Norwich FarmShare) reaped its first harvest. A small and handsome electric mill did get bought, but the resilient loaf of Norwich did not get baked (well not commercially anyhow). Great British Beans however, which came out of the same staples project, are launching themselves on to the market in January. The bread we buy at Southwold Market is made with flour grown by the farmer at the original meeting. I look at the fields outside my door and recognise peas, oats, barley, potatoes, where once they meant nothing.

The Building section is about stepping up the enterprise. As a comms person this has meant moving from being a personal blogger in my local initiative, to running a national newspaper (Transition Free Press) as a social enterprise. That's a big undertaking that involves thinking about a crew, discussing pieces with people all around the UK and the world, advertising, social media, crowd-funding. It involves risk and 12 hour shifts. Sometimes I look back fondly at the days when I could just write about what was happening in my neighbourhood, stepping out into the frosty lane with my camera, learning how to bake bread. There was a beauty and a lightness to do with those days. But Building is a bigger move. You can't do Transition for real, and stay where you feel small and cosy.

In fact you can't do anything and stay small. If we had stayed small in Bungay there would be no library. The reason we are looking quizzically at Mr Bee, is because we know that in spite of all his words about Bungay Community Library celebrating its 20th Birthday, Suffolk Country Council were famous for zealously wanting to close libraries down. Only some people from the communities in North Suffolk got together and forced them back. What you don't know about this picture at the top is that Sylvia (just out of shot) and James Hargrave (who took the picture) and several others put hundreds of hours of unpaid work into keeping it open. And still do.

So I'm guessing you are wondering what on earth any of this has got to do with a documentary about glaciers. There is one word: perseverance. None of these enterprises work without a big desire or sense of destiny.

You can't photograph the movement of glaciers, without going to extreme places and suffering. You can't save a library, start a collective blog, or run a community bakery, without the kinds of people who are prepared to put themselves on the line against all odds. Norwich FarmShare would not have happened without Tully who pursued a funding application over two years. It wouldn't have worked either, if it had just stayed as a Plan and other Transitioners hadn’t stepped on board to manifest it. So no matter how brilliantly you understand the ingredient of Strategic Thinking, with its data and analysis, maps and bigger picture thinking. it's the people who will make the blueprints work, who translate them into physical reality.

We live in a culture where we think to have an idea is enough and that anyone can do it. If you can bake bread you can start a bakery, right? This section is where those ideas fall down hard. To relocalise a food supply doesn’t happen by growing vegetables in an allotment, you have to look at the staples and where they grow. Transition teaches us that to really succeed we have to know a lot, put in a lot of unpaid hours, and keep going, for reasons only we know. And most of all have the kind of people on board who know what they are doing. That's not strategy. That's something more like luck.

Thank your lucky stars when you find them. . . .



Post originally posted on Social Reporting Project
 
Images: Mark Bee and Sustainable Bungay by James Hargrave (the only geek in the village) Local bread in Breakfast with Friends by Mark Watson; Steve Winter of Dozen Bakery, Norwich by Jane Chittenden (Transition Norwich blog)

Reaching out around the world - the DOHA summit

More collective action for international climate justice!

The 18th Conference of Parties (COP 18) met this month in Qatar to negotiate ways to mitigate and adapt to climate change amidst increasing global warming impacts worldwide. However, the agreement reached in Doha does not reflect the urgent action needed to combat last year’s record high CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and damage caused by natural disasters. I wonder if this would have been the case, had there been proper media coverage and civil society representation in these negotiations.  

Climate change is not my area of expertise, but it is something I am increasingly addressing in my international development work. I believe that equitable access to sustainable development is a concept that should be more central in climate change policy, funding and programmes. I wish to reach out to the TT network – to let folks know a bit about the summit, share some recent resources, and ask that we explore what could be done to influence these climate negotiations – including COP 19 next year in Poland.  

This month, nearly 200 nations agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol to the year 2020, at which point a new global UN pact (to be signed in 2015) will enter into force. A recent statement by Greenpeace International calls the agreement “so full of loopholes as to have little or no effect on carbon emissions”.  

In an interview with Samantha Smith, leader of WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative, she explains that civil society is very disappointed because the COP 18 agreement “will do nothing to bring finance over the long term to poor countries that are suffering from climate change. And it will do nothing to pave the way for the global deal that we have all been promised in 2015”. 

This week, Professor Michael Jacobs wrote an article calling for sustained global pressure to be put on governments to reach a deal in 2015. Also writing on the COP 18 agreement, CARE International Director of Climate Change and Environment, Kit Vaughan concludes that, “we need to focus our attention on those countries that continually fail to take action and live up to their historical and current responsibilities. Developed countries must now step up their game to kick-start the urgent transition to a low carbon and climate resilient world. It is their duty to invest in creating a safer and more stable world for all.” 

A report published last month by the World Bank warns that under current United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change emission pledges and commitments, average global temperature could rise 3.5-4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century; and the longer pledges remain unmet, the more likely a 4°C world becomes. It argues that a 4°C world can, and must, be avoided. If it is not, “the projected impacts on water availability, ecosystems, agriculture, and human health could lead to large-scale displacement of populations and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems.” It also emphasises that the distribution of climate change impacts is likely to be “inherently unequal and tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions, which have the least economic, institutional, scientific, and technical capacity to cope and adapt.” 

The COP 18 deal did establish for the first time in an international legal document that rich nations should move towards compensating poor nations for loss and damage due to climate change, though it merely "encourages" rich nations to mobilise at least $10bn (£6bn) a year up to 2020.  

While wealthy nations continue to argue that they cannot make greater contributions to climate financing, a new study by Oil Change International has found that they spend five times more money on fossil fuel subsidies than on supporting developing countries to address climate change and its impacts.  

Greenpeace's Energy Revolution contests that economic crisis and climate change are two problems with one solution, showing that “with only 1% of global GDP invested in renewable energy by 2050, 12 million jobs would be created in the renewable sector alone; and the fuel costs savings would cover the additional investment two times over."  

As Transitioners, we have an amazing network in place to affect local and national policies. Can we make it a New Year’s Resolution to use our network to impact international climate negotiations – in addition to the good work we are already doing? Developed nations and corporate interests have a disproportionate influence on the outcomes. Isn’t it our responsibility to ensure that they are sending the right message and taking appropriate measures? Or at least, shouldn’t we say that they are not doing it in our name?  

I suggest discussing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in your circle meetings – perhaps invite experts to give talks. Let’s discuss questions like, ‘Why wasn’t this year’s COP the climate coming-out-party for the Obama administration that many had hoped for after his re-election acceptance speech?’ and, ‘Why did Europe refuse to go beyond a 20% emissions target, which would barely decrease emissions from today’s levels, and side with Poland, which demanded the right to keep 'hot air' Kyoto credits awarded to them in the 1990s?’ Then I hope we could explore how best to communicate our thoughts to our communities and the world.  

I do not intend to emphasis the importance of making better international agreements over, say, improving international development policies or national level energy policies. As University of East Anglia doctoral student Martin Mahony wrote in a recent blog, “the UN process is not the be-all and end-all of climate change policy”.  Whilst true, I believe there is a need for more links between local, national and international ideas and actions for climate change adaptation and mitigation. 

This holiday season, I implore us all to remember our sisters and brothers who are victims of natural disasters, including the recent typhoon in the Philippines, and consider supporting recovery efforts. Oxfam Unwrapped gifts are a great low-carbon way to share the love this season.

Angela de Prairie (Transition Circle Earlham)

Picture: communications by Miljømagasinet Putsj.

A #shamelessplug for the Transition Free Press, Great British Beans, and some words on Livelihoods

For many of us, at least in the modern UK, the very concept of livelihood is in transition. In a recent week of posts dedicated to the theme on the Transition Network Social Reporting project, a recurrent theme emerged: as the one secure job/career/pension for life becomes less common, some people are developing ‘multiple pathways for meeting their needs’.

Over the past three years I have written consistently on This Low Carbon Life, on Sustainable Bungay's website and as a social reporter about my experience of being an active part of the Transition ‘movement’ and network, and the benefits it has brought. From skill-sharing to learning how to work in groups, from personal carbon reduction to maintaining blogs, bulletins and websites, from helping set up social events to organising a year of talks, walks and workshops on plants as medicine. These are just a few of the pathways meeting some essential needs.

It just hasn’t been very financial yet! I think I have earned £150 so far from my all transition-related activities (and that thanks to Sarah and Alexis from Transition Belsize, and the Plant Medicine workshop they organised for me to teach at the Royal Free Permaculture Garden). But, like Kerry, I’m in transition for the long haul (just not the flight kind!). It takes up much of my time.

So I haven't managed to earn anything near my keep in transition yet, though things may be changing slowly. For this post I spoke to Josiah Meldrum and Charlotte Du Cann who both lead low carbon lives on low incomes, each with several income streams. "The work is consistent but the pay isn't," said Charlotte. "Living freelance in this way would be impossible unless I'd seriously downshifted."

#ShamelessPlug 1 - Beans

Now about that #shamelessplug. This twitter hashtag (and we’re ALL using twitter now despite our derogatory dismissals when it first came out) was first used by Josiah to bring attention to the Great British Beans project. Josiah is a founding partner of Provenance, which “provides supply chain management, marketing, research and consultancy services to food businesses, with an emphasis on supportng, promoting and developing more sustainable and local supply chains.” He is also director of Hodmedod's, which means hedgehog in East Anglian parlance, the company that deals with the equally East Anglian Great British Victor Beans (and now Great British Peas).

I asked Josiah yesterday about his experience over the years with multiple income pathways. First he told me the latest about the beans. “It’s been full-on over the past month,” he said, “We’ve just received the latest order in the new boxes, the design looks great, it’s very exciting.” I asked him whether the beans would make money. “A little,” he said. “Though we’ll never be bean millionaires.” You can tell he’s not in it for the money. He really loves the whole bean thing!

Josiah told me his job is well done if he is able to effect at least some positive change within local food supply systems. To that end his work can vary from 6 month contracts involving half-day to 2 day weeks with local Community Supported Agriculture projects like Norwich FarmShare, more regular work with established farms or occasional consultancy work with organisations like the World Wildlife Fund. And of course those beans. Which by the way make great falafels and houmous and find their way into many delicious dishes on Sustainable Bungay’s Happy Monday’s community kitchen menu.

#ShamelessPlug 2 - SUBSCRIBE to the Transition Free Press

Now to that other #shamelessplug. I have just taken on the task of distribution manager for the new Transition Free Press quarterly printed newspaper (see Preview issue here), first 'proper' edition due out on 1^st February 2013. It's a very exciting thing. And if it all works out there'll be some money in it. Not a lot, but something.

From the outset, Transition Free Press has been about doing a proper job: getting the Transition message in physical form around the country and into as many people’s hands as possible. Providing a newpaper with excellent reports and interviews on all the transition news from local food projects to discussions on the latest climate science that you just won’t read in print elsewhere.

TFP is also about contributing to the livelihoods of the people producing it. The newspaper team is made up of professional writers, editors, designers and business people with years of experience in their fields and several years' hands-on experience in Transition.

The Financial structure of TFP is made up of four parts as follows:

1. Distribution - transition (and other) groups and initiatives subscribe to the newspaper

2. Crowd-sourced funding

3. Grants

4. Advertising

This pays for the all the costs of producing a high quality Transition Free Press from the printing to the paying of ‘staff’ and contributors on a sliding scale. The idea is that everyone who contributes gets something.

The aim is also to benefit Transition initiatives financially. A bundle costs £75 per 250 (30p a copy) and with a suggested sale price of £1 you can more than treble your outgoings. If 250 copies are too many try sharing bundles with other groups in your area or county.

(iv) “Producing a newspaper is skilled work,” says Charlotte Du Cann, TFP’s editor. “And it can be hard going. You need a solid, dedicated team, which we’re fortunate to have.” 

I asked Charlotte some more about working with multiple income pathways. 

“I love writing. I’m not talking about writing as personal therapy or marketing but writing for life, for the world. For three years I was blogging away about transition, no money in sight. In general, people don’t want to pay for communications. Writing is seen as a hobby, not taken seriously. Something that should be done for free.”

But the hard work is starting to pay off. As part of the research for this Social Reporting project, Charlotte went to Dark Mountain’s Uncivilisation 2011 festival, wrote a blog about it and got an article published in the Independent, the first since giving up journalism in the 90s. This led to press and publicity work with Dark Mountain.

After publishing What Do You Do? Writing on the Edge on This Low Carbon Life during the Transition and Livelihoods week last October, Charlotte received an offer from Two Ravens Press to publish her book 52 Flowers that Shook my World and subsequently to become a columnist in their magazine Earthlines.

This all came about by getting totally involved with Transition communications through several years dedicated and unpaid work, setting up websites, this SR project with Ed Mitchell last year, editing newsletters and bulletins.

“You hold out for making things pay. I didn’t want to earn my money from the old world, but from a world in transition,” she says.

An awayday to Totnes to discuss The Transition Companion led to meeting Lucy Neal and getting involved in (and paid for) the “Playing for Time” arts in transition project and book, which is now underway.

“Ideally I’d like to earn my money just by writing,” says Charlotte. “But that’s not how it goes. So I do some editing and admin work, and that’s fine so long as the project is both relevant and something where my real skills and talents are being valued, for example helping to update the Network’s Project Sharing Engine with Ed (Mitchell).”

Charlotte also acts as distributor for the Dark Mountain books and will be co-curating the literary stage at next year’s Uncivilisation festival. “The skill is in the balance. You make sure all the projects, even when they are for different people, are all connecting in really interesting and vibrant ways.

“Most jobs are carried out in isolation from the whole and we're living in a time where we need to join the dots. It’s not straightforward. It’s not 9 to 5 and then the working day is over. In any given day or night I’m on a train to a meeting for Playing for Time, emailing America, packing boxes of books, writing a blog or discussing the TFP front page with Alexis (news ed) on google hangout.”

These are difficult times and we face an uncertain future. Resilience depends on having a good communications network. We need to be network beings, working as a collective. Not just discrete cogs in a machine that’s destructive to the planet.

“As a communicator the network is everything!”

(v) Finally for me, in addition to really getting into the TFP distribuition task, with all the emails, spreadsheets and the huge map of the UK on my bedroom wall (the same one Mike Grenville is pointing to in the photo), I’d like to add that I am totally up for visiting Transition Initiatives and other groups for workshops on plants as medicine, particularly (but not only) connecting with our wild, native plant communities. I charge for my travel expenses plus a negotiable fee on a sliding scale, including payment in kind.

I might even let you into some of my secrets about how to make a medicine jelly or an awesome herbal refresher for any occasion!

The Transition Free Press crowdfunding is now underway, support us here. Thank you! Find out how to subscribe as one or several initiatives here.

TFP 'staff':
Charlotte Du Cann - Editor-in-chief
Alexis Rowell - News Editor
Trucie Mitchell/Mihna Damien - Design
Jay Tompt - Business and crowd-funding manager
Tamzin Pinkerton - Food and Well-being editor
Mark Watson - Distribution manager
with the participation of co-founder Mike Grenville.

This slightly amended version of What has this #SHAMELESSPLUG for the TRANSITION FREE PRESS got to do with LIVELIHOODS?, was originally published on 23rd November as part of the Livelihoods week on the Transition Network Social Reporting project. (MW)

Images: Transition Free Press Open Space session at the annual Transition Conference, September 2012; the original Great British Beans postcard; Mika from Japan reading TFP preview issue on a train in Suffolk; Mike Grenville points the way, Transition Conference 2012; 52Flowers the Shook My World book cover; teaching herbs for resilience at the Common Room, Norwich, November 2012; TFP's Buzzbnk page with Mika on the train

ARCHIVE: energy shifts involve mind shifts

Last year saw an innovative Transition project taking place in the streets of Norwich. This was Energy Lookout, a group that set out to chart (and curtail) the energy wastage of shops and public spaces in the city centre. Here Chris Hull talks about the principles behind the scheme.

from 2nd March 2012

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

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

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

However there are still surprises. Both individual households, and businesses big and small, often do not see energy-saving as a cost saver. This is all the more surprising in the current climate for small businesses who feel the squeeze from several different directions.

Research shows that this is often because the degrees of savings to be achieved through energy saving measures are hugely under-estimated.

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

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

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

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

coming down the dark mountain

Transition is not a stand-alone movement. In a recent interview for the Transition Free Press Shaun Chamberlin commented that one of its unsung capacities is to connect and cohere other progressive initiatives. This week is a exploration of how some of us do that

Most campaign groups have a single focus, but Transition has many (87 Ingredients and tools for starters) - food and economics, inner work and group dynamics. Instead of putting energy into confronting the business-as-usual mindset of the industrialised world, it puts it into building social and practical infrastructures for a future when that mindset begins to lose its grip on reality. Backed by a network of similar initiatives in cities and towns in the UK and elsewhere it can provide a secure base from which to proceed.

But Transition can sometimes be stodgy and small town in its approach, and lack the radical and activist dynamic to challenge the status quo and the corporate grip on our neighbourhoods. At the Transition Conference three Transition groups discussed their response to threats in their communities by taking a strategic part in local campaigns (NO to Costa, anti-fracking in Wales and Plane Stupid). When I wrote a post in 2011 called lock on it was widely held that Transition should not take part in any activism. But when the local library in Bungay (Suffolk) was threatened with closure we did not hesitate to back the campaign to make sure it stayed open. How could we not: many of our meetings and events were held there and we built the community garden in its courtyard? It was, in many ways, our home.

Sometimes you have stand by the places you love.

Occupying the town square

In Transition Norwich we have stood alongside many like-minded initiatives, from the Campaign for Climate Change to FoodCycle to Zero Carbon Britain. We've taken part in protests from Anti-GM to Norfolk Against the Cuts and published posts by campaigners across the city on our blogs. When the Occupy movement took off last year we took part in the general assemblies held at Hay Hill, where Occupy Norwich was camped for four months.

One of the highlights was a three hour discussion about climate change. Even though this is a principle driver in Transition, most of us have never made time to actually sat down and talk about it. So much of our energy goes into building the infrastructure of an initiative and maintaining it there is rarely any time to discuss these subjects at depth. Sometimes you feel constrained by politeness, by its civic and psychological language. Occupy provided that edge and that conversation : you could go to the camp at any time of day or night and go straight to the deep and urgent stuff and be surprised by the kindness of strangers.

However, I might never have slept on that pavement or gone with my hand-made rocket stove to give a talk about breaking out of the industrial food sysem, had I not been in Transition. Searching for a new narrative makes you bold and able to talk with progressive groups and food initiatives wherever you go. Often people diss Transition for not being strong enough on the environment, for not going into the poorer districts of town, as if the movement has promised to solve the crisis of capitalism with a fairy wand. Mostly however, this is a symptom of a competitive monoculture. We are programmed to reject any new ideas, the way pesticides work on crops (all visiting aliens will be eradicated!) and to allow a new "partnership" narrative to emerge, you have to let your defensiveness slide.

We’re bridge makers that's our job. We join dots and don't get derailed if people tell us the trouble with Transiton is . . . or call us hippy or usual suspects. It’s our business to find the connections between the myriad groups and projects out there and pull us into the same conversation. To really forge the future we need to work as an interconnected system: that means many different groups working in different areas, connected by a communications network. The Project and the Press are part of that network. And so is the group I want to talk about:

"If Transition is the Village then Dark Mountain is the Shaman"

Dark Mountain Project is neither a political campaign, nor a community group. In some ways it is as hard to define as Transition. Stemming out of a manifesto written by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine in 2009, it soon developed into a book, then a festival, then a movement. It is both a cultural response to a collapsing world, and a network of people who gather to make sense of that collapse.

I came to the Mountain last year as part of the Social Reporting Project and wrote a blog based on a conversation around the fire at the Uncivilisation Festival with several Transitioners:

There’s all the intensity of a Transition debate here but without the concerns of the Village, worrying about whether “the community” is going to come to your event, or understand you, or fund you. No battle with the Council, no struggle to get Other People to do stuff. No psychology or sitting around in a circle talking about your feelings. Everyone understands you.

The festival struck a chord deep within me that Transition, for all its complexity, does not reach. It speaks of rain and birds and ancestors and everything I am putting myself on the line for. Organised by writers and thinkers, unswervingly generous about each others' work, the Project forges creative relationships that are hard to find in Transition. When I was offered some press and publicity work this spring it was the first time in years anyone had given me work on the strength of my writing. I’m not an expert, I warned them. That’s OK none of us are, was the reply.

What the two networks have in common is providing a meeting place and platform for people who know that the story our parents told us about our world is not holding; that the socio-economic model we have taken for granted most of our lives is not only precarious, but is socially unjust and environmentally destructive. As a people, hemmed in by denial and illusion on all sides, that meeting place is crucial. As the manifesto states Dark Mountain does not seek solutions, it holds a space so that a different narrative can be created. Not another monoculture but an “uncivilised” culture that is diverse in its expression as an eco-system. To be part of that creative edge is what pulled me: to listen to the stories that people are telling around the fire, on the edge of the forest, in tune with each other, intellectually sharp as a scythe.

This week Dark Mountain Norwich is meeting up for our monthly discussion. We'll take food and our Transition friends from Bristol, Kristin and Sim. We'll sit down and discuss deep time and paradigm shifting around the table, and design an event we hope to hold next year. We are from many places: students from the UEA. from Austria, Denmark and Germany, Ava from Devon, who is researching Dark Mountain and Kev from Norfolk, who took the first video of Transition Norwich way back when the whole thing began in 2008.

The world comes in full circle, that's what you learn, when you connect the dots, when you come down the dark mountain. It's the circle that will make sense of everything, when the old world finds itself at the end of the line.

Captions: holding the biofuels banner with Transition Norwich at The Wave, Speakers Corner, 2009; Deepak Rughani of Biofuel Watch discussing financial systems at Norwich discuss the aftermath of Nicole Foss’s talk; The Tellling, performance inspired by Dark Moountain, Doncaster; Rise and Root frontispiece to Dark Mountain 3 by Rima Staines;


This post first appeared on the Social Reporting project as the introduction to the week on Associated Movements.

Travel in the 5th dimension

Me waving a pump

 I’ve always tried to make my local journeys by bicycle where possible – partly for the exercise, partly to save on fuel but mainly because I hate sitting in traffic jams and wasting time looking for parking. Going by bike on journeys up to 6 miles is often quicker because I can go door to door without stopping. Over the last month I’ve been lucky that the weather has been good at the right times and I’ve been able to go most places by bike – though I did decide that it was better to arrive still alive and walked up the last part of Gas Hill when on a seed swopping trip to see my friend Jane.

Speedy Chris

So it came as a bit of a shock when we travelled to Southwold by car, for a walk on the beach and I was reminded just how many other people there are in this world. I was puzzled by this as some of my bike journeys have been right through the centre of Norwich and there are plenty of people there. I think that there are two reasons for the altered perception of the world that travel by bicycle brings about.

The first is simply that I try and use quiet roads with little traffic – even going through the city there are roads that are quicker to cycle than drive down. The main factor though, is that on a bike you are neither a driver nor a pedestrian and you follow a different set of rules. Unfortunately there are relatively few other cyclists sharing this dimension so you travel along in your own little world. Having cycled a lot recently I find that the wheels turn without much effort and I’m free to think about other things – unless the head wind is really strong! The whole effect is heightened because my journey into Norwich starts by crossing the A47 dual carriageway on foot and then using a disused section of road that is only accessible to a handful of cyclists and lots of rabbits.

Kerry as Superwoman

At a recent council meeting, that discussed funding for schemes to promote cycling, I was the only person to arrive by cycle and I was pleased when the local parish clerk remarked, when she saw me chaining my bike to the drainpipe, that they really ought to have a have a bicycle shed. I enjoy travelling in the 5th dimension but it can be lonely – I look forward to meeting you there.

The pics are some that have appeared in previous blogs about cycling