NR3 is the place to be

Anyone who has been to the Magdalen Street celebration would know that NR3 is a most exciting and vibrant place to live. Of course it always has been and all the celebration did was to give people permission to show that side of themselves.

Amongst the many artists, performers, craftspeople there were local groups, a vintage fashion show, churches open for the day, traders with special offers and local historians giving talks. When I walked down the street two days later I could still feel the buzz and walked along with a new view of the street, a more connected view. Like I had lived there since I was a child and everyone knew me.

A few months ago I wrote a blog called sun, sea, sand and sustainability which was about finding someone with the same values as you locally. A chap then got in touch with me to tell me about a website he is developing aimed at helping people find ethical connections in Norwich called Heddcraft.

If all else fails you could do worse than find yourself a Morris dancer.

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

The Visitors - A Transition Journey

I'm setting off today, catching an early train. I'm leaving Bristol Temple Meads, London Liverpool Steet, Machynlleth. I'm leaving Darsham by the marshes of my own home territory, crossing the city, negotiating bridges, underground tunnels, standing on a platform with schoolchildren, city commuters and old ladies going to the sea for a holiday. I'm on my way to visit the social reporters who live in different corners of the country, to meet the people I'm working with to create this new Transition communications hub. To find out how the places we live in influence our everyday lives and our initiatives, and how we all connect on a national scale.

Outside the window the flowers of the autumn flash past, skeins of travellers joy, stands of Michaelmas daisies, a resurgence of great mullein. The apples fall from the railway trees and form small pools of gold along the track. The jackdaws of Britain gather in the grey skies over a canopy of beech and oak. Outside the window the soils of the island shift colour from the red outside Totnes to almost black outside Cambridge, the arable prairies of the East become the green misty hills of the West. Rivers, valleys, house backs, allotments, distribution centres, sugar beet plants, ancient steeples, sprinkled cow and sheep, barn and spinney, the pattern language of Britain speaks its eloquent lexicon of brick and stone, tree and estuary.

One thing you do not expect: how beautiful it still is and how gentle. How, even with the knowledge you carry inside your mind about melting glaciers, population expansion, planning laws, species extinction, fracking, a morning in England can be so lovely. That the shape of the Chiltern Hills or the Sussex downs or the first glimpse of the Devon coast can still take your breath away.

I wanted to visit everyone on the project as much as was possible, the reporters who write during the week and the guest editors who write each Sunday. So today I'm meeting Jo in Finsbury Park, having a coffee with Rachel and her son and cats in her kitchen in Dursley, sleeping in a tipi in Ann's garden in Artist's Valley outside Macynlleth. I'm meeting Chris Wells (Communications) at the Transition Conference in Liverpool, Peter Lipman (The Big Picture) at Ed's house in Bristol, Tamzin Pinkerton (Food and Health) at Transition Camp in Sussex, Shaun Chamberlin (Economics) at the Uncivilisation festival in Hampshire.

Will you write a piece for us? I say and smile.

One key thing I remember from travelling for all those years. Visiting makes a difference to people and places. If you are visited your house is refreshed by someone noticing the small things you take for granted - the colour of your walls, how you plant your garden - enjoying your children, you. When you visit you see other vistas, other houses, other initiatives, something moves inside. You are surprised by the generosity of strangers who respond so positively to your presence. No longer good old (or not so good but certainly old) Charlotte. Visiting is how we engage in diversity and feedback, how we value, how we make connections.

Visiting is how I find out that Jay (Totnes) shares a love of Gary Synder's work, how Rachel (Dursley) works for ecotricity, how Martin (Cambridge) could talk about business with Jay, how Adrienne (Lewes) could talk forest gardens with Jo, how we could all visit Joe at Transition Heathrow and experience how TH run their meetings by consensus. How we could all visit Adrienne and see how TT Lewes have renovated the weekly market with small producers and social enterprises and via direct action helped a derelict school become a community space. How we could all benefit.

Because visiting is key to the art of communication. If we just stay in our own localised communities we forget the bigger picture. When we surf the net and peek into stranger's lives across the globe we forget about our own land, the value of the face-to-face encounter, what it feels like to wake up in another bedroom, to break up our own rigid routines and mindsets and not have everything under control.

When I stayed with Adrienne before and after the Transition camp she was on a "locovore" Sussex diet, which like the Fife and Cornwall diets means eating only food and drink that grows within your vicinity. Sussex is abundant in vegetables and fruit and beer, but crucial items from the larder were missing, including salt. So she had gone down to the coast to collect sea water and boiled it down until it crystallised.

But we have traded salt for hundreds of years, I said (there are salt routes all over Suffolk), as we discussed the challenges of eating strictly locally and seasonally. And no matter how peak oil and economic recession will affect our ability to travel as freely as we once did, we will still move because it is our nature to move and exchange, as much as it is to make roots and be stable. And travelling to meet people in this last month has shown me how vital that linking up is.

I have loved all my trips. I loved staying with Ed and jamming with him over breakfast, cherry tree in the garden, cat on my lap. I loved helping Ann and John in their market garden and going to dip my feet in a wild waterfall. I loved meeting Sarah in Belsize Park (People and Connections) and having a glass of Pinot Grigio in a London bar. I loved walking with Martin through the Cambridge streets and meeting Steve (Transition Ipswich) by serendipity on platform number 2. I loved travelling back to Paddington Station with the oldest member of the GrowHeathrow crew, as he told me how he became an activist and fitted all the glass panes for their greenhouses, so they could all live there. I loved talking with Adrienne, sitting beside her beehive in the corner of her forest garden at dusk as the moon rose over the hill. I loved hearing everyone's stories and telling them mine, about the things we do. The feeling that life is OK and there are people everywhere working towards the future in all the corners of this land.

But the best thing about visiting is coming home. When you come back you realise why you chose to be here in the first place. Thanks to fossil fuel and the industrial complex many of us are well-travelled people: we love the sea in Turkey, the countryside in France, Italian food, North African markets. We think nothing of going to Thailand or Australia, and take the places we live in for granted. But in Transition our world shrinks and we have to work harder to love our neighbourhoods and ourselves.

I have yearned for the physical experience of being in the desert or swimming in the Aegean, I have longed to live again in the Welsh hills, and be able to walk into a city cafe. To be up mountains, on the road, staying in a hotel in an unknown town. But as soon as we start approaching Manningtree and the train swings across the broad reach of the Orwell, something opens up. The light expands, the horizon goes on forever. I'm in big sky country again. Soon I'll be changing trains onto the Lowestoft line and the land will become familiar: shorn barley fields, craggy oaks, golden marshes, water meadows, fluffy-headed hemp agrimony gone to seed, the boats laid up at Woodbridge, painted chicken houses as I approach Darsham and Mark waiting at the station to greet me.

How did you get on he will ask, picking up the suitcase, a turmeric plant I was given and my rocket stove. Let's go home and have a cup of tea I will say, and I will tell you everything . . .

Photos: walking towards the sunrise, Southwold: Jo in front of her teaching nursery garden in Finsbury Park; Joe and Transition Heathrow at Grow Heathrow; Chris Wells and communication strategy at the Transition conference; Jay at Totnes station; field kitchen at the Transition Camp

The Yurt and the Labyrinth - Transition Camp 2011

It has been a year of gatherings, each one different from the last. Although many have taken place in the countryside, this was the first one I had gone to that paid full attention to nature. The 2011 Transition Camp was not defined by its music or intellectual debate, but by our presence on the land, the chalk and clay pastures and woodlands of Sussex.

The Camp is held each October on a farm that once grew strawberries. When the English soft fruit growers co-operative was broken up by the supermarkets Waspbourne Manor Farm became the Wowo camping site and a centre for bio-diversity. For the last three years it has also hosted the South East Transition gathering in one of its main fields, organised by Mike Grenville of TT Forest Row.

The yurt was in a hornbeam grove by a stream edged by Himalayan balsam that at night was full of owls. Inside it was felted and had a skylight so you could see the trees moving. We slept on futons and a wood burning stove kept us warm. It was the kind of space you could live in for ever and happily forgo electricity and running water. It was also one of the spaces where the weekend talks were held.

The talks ranged from Sacred Baking to Fracking in the UK. Mike talked on Navigating Community Chaos. Adrienne talked about Natural Beekeeping. I talked about Big Picture Thinking and Medicine Plants. Summing up a discussion on Inner Transition, druid Philip Carr-Gomm warned us about the demons that can lurk in people's dreams for the future and cited the back-to-nature movements in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries that become the dark history of Europe. Though the local Sussex downland TT initiatives seem gentler and more spiritually-based than our rough and ready big sky East Anglian ones, I didn’t encounter idealism. Something else far more earthy was going on.

In 2011 most of us are not thinking about a well-ordered 20 year Transition Timeline, but what will happen now when our industrialised system begins to crack economically and environmentally. Maybe three years ago we experienced a youthful burst of enthusiasm, but for most of us those demons appeared pretty quickly in the form of difficult meetings with our fellow Transitioners. Co-organiser Martin from Brighton (an initiative that had its fair share of demon struggles) did hold a fireside circle on How Is Your Transition Journey? but the main engagements of the weekend did not centre around our initiatives or communities, but on rediscovering an archaic and resilient way of being together.

Was this an escape from reality, or was it the reality? Giving the talk on plants I realised that finding a real connection with the planet, the lightness and intelligence it brings, is as important right now as keying into the #occupy movement or Keystone Pipeline protest, knowing about melting ice caps or organising community projects.

Civilisation with its problems is set within the bigger reality of the planet and so long as we do not indulge in fancies or the kind of individualism that Mark was talking about yesterday, we can connect with this reality with our physical bodies and our imaginations as well as with everyone in the world who is doing the same work. We just have to make the time.

Big Picture Thinking, Small Action Living - Facing Reality in Times of Radical Downshift

I read The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney. The hawthorn berry is the lantern carried by Diogenes, the cynic philosopher who walked around at the beginning of Athenian civilisation, peering into people’s faces looking for an authentic human being. To find the the real person in ourselves and to meet as The People requires a kind of scrutiny, an inner work that many of us have been conducting through the years. It also requires gathering in certain configurations in order that we recognise one another, to know we are not alone, that we hold the ancestral flame for the future inside ourselves as a group.

The weekend was opened and closed by gatherings organised by Rebecca from Transition Crouch End. We hung wooden discs on the tree of the weekend, the elder, made clay figures, held hands and walked in spirals as we sang songs. The children ran round the hay labyrinth and at night it was lit by candles. The communal camp was held in a circle of wooden stakes around a field kitchen, meeting tents and several fires. And there was something about these shapes, these circles of people, these felted enclosures, the tin washing and eating bowls, the soup on the fire, the clay oven that cohered us in a way that our separating straight-lined, square-boxed, pixel-formed modern world does not.

One of the main principles of the camp is about sharing knowledge. Not in an entertainment or arts-and-craftsy way, but because we will need these skills for the future - skills that range from making bread and felt to singing together and teaching bush craft to children. I found out how to make acorn flour by storing the nuts for two months, shelling and crushing them and leaching the tannin with several soaks of cold water. I made a rocket stove from two large and three small tins. I learned that you need at least 20 cross-pollinated plants for their seeds in any variety to maintain populations. And when we looked through the telescopes at the night sky and saw stripey Jupiter’s bright moons and the craters of our moon I felt the earth was not alone and nor were we in our struggles to keep life going here in a way that we in all in our hearts wish for.

But most of all I found out that when push comes to shove extraordinary things come out of people. I know that because when I gave my talks I didn’t have any time to prepare. Or rather most of the stuff I was thinking about on the train became irrelevant when I arrived on site and began to talk with everyone. I collected some plants and remembered some ways of paying attention I had found in an earth dreaming practice I explored with Mark years ago. Then when the time came I looked at everyone in the dark warm interior of the yurt, opened my mouth and told my story.

Herbs for Resilience: 10 Key Medicine Plants

I read Old Man by Edward Thomas. It’s a visionary poem about the southernwood bush. Thomas wrote it as he observed his 4 year old daughter in the garden just before he went back to the trenches for the last time. I passed round a sprig of the feathery bush and its relative, common wormwood, and asked everyone to guess what strong fragrant plants they held in their hands. Like most sunflowers wormwoods are a bitter medicine and they famously token the end of civilisation (their Latin name absinthium meaning against sweetness). The bitterness of reality that counteracts the decadence of the pleasure-dome.

Mike who also co-ordinated the camp as well as the programme (brilliantly) told me that holding it on the edge of autumn brought home the realities of living without fossil fuel. And it’s true, immediately you arrive your focus turns to shelter, warmth, food and making contact with your fellows. It’s small too (100 people) which gives you enough time to talk with just about everyone without suffering festival stress-syndrome, the anxious feeling that the great workshop/party/talk/encounter is happening in the next field and you will never have the Right Experience or make the Perfect Contact.

“It would be great if the Transition Conference could be held in a camp,” I said to Mike as we looked at the double rainbow appearing above our heads.
“Most people don’t want to camp,” said Mike.
“Maybe we all need to learn how to,” I replied.

I can say this because I was 55 before I went to a festival. Thanks to Transition I learned the beauty of sleeping in a tent outdoors, working in a field kitchen, meeting strangers round a fire. I learned that you can hold a dandelion plant in your hand and speak about its extraordinary bitter-leaved equalising medicine that frees up all the cramped and crystallised spaces inside. How it liberates knowledge and happiness from places you never imagined were there. How it can make everyone laugh and dance and feel the irrepressible sense of being alive, that force that pushes wild nature through the pavements of cities and well-behaved gardens everywhere.

And so Transitioners everywhere if you want to share the experience, you know where to come and where you are welcome. See you in 2012!

Photos by Mike Grenville and CDC: Labyrinth; the yurt and talk on Herbs for Resilience; Milly Hawkins talking about foraging for acorns; tools for making rocket stoves with Louise Smith; Martin Grinch biodynamic seed collector talking about gathering veg seeds: Mike in yurt doorway sweeping up at the end of the weekend; children queuing up to try the apple press with Fran the cook.

Individualism and the Bigger Picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physically, Actually, Really – Transition Topic Weeks

Our topic weeks began in March 2010 with an elephant in the room, Flying. Several of us were engaged in the Transition Circles at the time and the effect of personal carbon reduction within the initiative challenged many of us to (literally) walk the talk. It’s easy, for example to hold forth academically about peak oil, to feel instinctively that climate change is Important, but on the blog we wanted to ask the difficult low carbon questions of ourselves: were we still taking the plane? Did we shop at supermarkets and eat junk food? What were we doing about waste in our households and neighbourhoods, physically, actually, really? And was “community” just a word we used to cover up our splendid isolation, or were we in fact creating the kind of downshift culture we dreamed of by writing its new narrative, every day, on time?

The intent behind the topic weeks was to connect those dis-connects and brings those very real personal and political interests together. Resilience within eco-systems is due to its biodiversity. Many solutions to different challenges that come about due to the whole system being in communication with itself. Transition is a deliberately diverse practice and its media needs equally to allow as many different voices to be heard.

So the topic weeks always aim to include several positions on certain key subjects and not limit the discussion to one Transitionally-correct opinion. On This Low Carbon Life we have bloggers who are involved in this cultural sea-change at all levels of engagement, from toe-dipping to whole body immersion. All of us have different perspectives, different commitments.

But all of us are on the beach.

This year we have looked at thirteen different subjects, led by one of the bloggers who organises the rota, introduces the week and acts as a temporary editor. This year has included Elena (Autumn, Books and Waste) , Charlotte (Gatherings, Spring, Fashion) Mark, (Deep Nature, High Summer), Chris (Climate Change, Buildings in Transition), Kerry (Happiness, Christmas and Midwinter, Transition Basics), Jon (New Year, Transition Postcards, Health in Transition). Keep an eye out for Best Blogs led by Jon and Sustainable Livelihoods led by Simeon this autumn, Meanwhile here is Kerry just before she left for Glasgow summing up the Happiness Week.

Photos: Mark in Madre Tierra, Southern Ecuador (Transition Postcards); poster for Gasland from Fracking Hell and Other Apocalypses by Charlotte Du Cann (Transition Basics); dress from recycled plastic bags by helenofnorwich (New Year).

In Praise of Saying Thank you
by Kerry Lane
26 March 2011

Transition Norwich Blog


My blog today was inspired by the TED talk by Laura Trice that I have included above. She encourages us all to genuinely thank each other more and to be honest about the praise we need.

The value of praise
We are bought up thinking that saying thank you is just good manners, part of social convention, as arbitrary and subject to change as the custom of shaking hands and one of those things that 'young people these days, have no(ne of)'. But as we grow up we realise the underlying value of saying thank you, the value of praise. We realise our need as a species to have our efforts recognised and appreciated, as a way of feeling a valued part of our communities.

Having worked in several different organisations I have experienced first hand how much difference it makes to feel that your work and efforts are being recognised and valued. For a start it motivates you to keep going and to try harder for the organisation, it also makes you feel happier and more content with your job.

However, saying thank you is not just important in a work setting. Thanking people is such a small effort from you, but can make such a huge difference to how the other person is feeling, especially if they are very busy and/or stressed. I think if we all took the time to properly thank the people around us for what they do, rather than just assuming that they know we are grateful, then it could have amazing effects on our society. People would feel happier, communities would be stronger, people would feel less isolated, less trapped in a faceless world. One small gesture of human compassion could make a much bigger difference than you realise.

I find it all too easy to just not get round to thanking people for things, as Laura mentions in the video I some how feel a bit embarrassed by it sometimes. It is also so easy to assume that people know you are thankful, but even if they are, they are still going to appreciate a thank you! In our time poor world it often seems to be one of the things that doesn't quite happen, but I know what its like at the other side too, the slight disappointment and uncertainty of not receiving a thank you.

In a voluntary organisation, such as Transition Norwich, it is very difficult to ensure that everyone gets recognition for the effort they put in. Especially when there is not one person in control who sees everyone's contributions. However, it is so important as everyone is giving their time for free and wants to feel an important part of the community.

Thank you
So I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of the people that have put tremendous amounts of time and effort into making Transition Norwich the success that it is. Tully Wakeman, Christine Way and Chris Hull, who were all members of the original core group, put in lots of effort to get the whole thing started and have stayed very involved doing an awful lot of work behind the scenes without enough thanks. So I would like to say a massive thank you to them for all of their hard work. I would also like to thank Charlotte DuCann, Mark Watson and Andy Croft for being the biggest movers and shakers of the communications team to date, they are responsible for the website, the monthly bulletin and this blog and they have put massive amounts of time and effort in to making them so brilliant.

To all of you - we massively appreciate all that you have done and still do.

There are of course many other people who have made Transition Norwich the success that it is and I am very thankful for everything everyone has done, you are all amazing.

And thank you very much for taking the time to read my post and for being caring and conscientious enough to want to make this world a better place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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