Permaculture

Last weekend I was at Embercombe, about 20 minutes drive from Totnes, for the West Country Storytelling Festival.  Embercombe is a fascinating evolving project, describing itself as “a charity and social enterprise established to champion a way of living that celebrates the opportunities inherent in this challenging time and that inspires people to energetically contribute towards the emergence of a socially just, environmentally sustainable and spiritually fulfilling human presence on earth”.  It is also a stunning place, a mix of woodlands and fields.  Food production is becoming a key part of its work, and it now has a wonderful vegetable garden, orchards, field scale veg and, of particular interest to me, some small scale cereals production.  The day I was there, they were threshing (or attempting to thresh) some of what they had grown, and I thought I would share some of the conversations that took place by the threshing machine.  So, this year, the land team at Embercombe experimented with growing cereals, planting blocks of oats, rye, wheat and spelt.  The previous year they had grown a traditional variety of wheat, which was a long-strawed type, but in the wet and windy summer we had much of it fell over (‘lodged’).  This year’s wheat variety was a shorter stemmed one, and, like all the other grains grown, grew well.  The field was rotavated with a tractor, and then the seeds were hand-broadcast.  A few months later, they were harvested by hand, using scythes, and stacked up, waiting for the thresher.

The threshing machine that came is one of only a handful of such machines left in operation.  Powered from a tractor, it is a beautiful piece of equipment, lovingly maintained by enthusiasts, and fascinating to observe in operation.  The harvested crop is fed into the top of the machine, which separates the grain from the chaff, and both of those from the straw.  Only the wheat and the spelt were going through the thresher, the oats and the rye were going to be dealt with differently.

Oats are tricky old things.  When we buy porridge oats we think of them as an unprocessed, natural product, but actually to get from what you harvest in the field to something you can make porridge from takes a few different processes, dehusking, steaming, rolling… as friends in West Cork found out when they had harvested the West Cork CSA oats they had organised.  Without access to machines that can get the husk off them, oats are really only usable as animal feed.  At Embercombe, however, they are planning to try an imaginative alternative, rather than feeding their prcious crop to the chickens, they are going to experiment with making oat milk from them (currently bought from wholefood shops in tetrapacks…).  I’ll be fascinated to hear how that goes….

I don’t remember the plans for the rye, but what was focusing minds when I was there was the difference between wheat and spelt.  The wheat was going through the machine fine, coming out as clean grains, but the thresher was unable to take the husks off the spelt (see left for the picture, the top hand is the wheat, the bottom hand is the spelt).  The guys working the machine adjusted the settings, tried various things, but every time the spelt emerged with its husks on.

Spelt is a fascinating crop.  In this part of the UK, and as we head on down into Cornwall, less wheat is grown, as the soils become less and less suitable for the high gluten varieties that large bakeries favour.  Spelt, however, grows well down here, and is a grain that can be eaten by people with an intolerance for gluten.  Not much use though if no-one can get the husks off!

There is something fascinating to me about experiments such as those being conducted at Embercombe.  The now seminal Hirsch Report argued that it would take at least 10 years, ideally 20, ahead of peak oil in order to be ready for it, to have successfully managed a ‘crash course’ of breaking our oil addiction.  In terms of local food, it seems to me that the process of dismantling the infrastructure that local food production needs has been underway for some time.  As I often say in talks, it was easy to turn Totnes’s last working flour mill (see right) into a Tourist Information Office, much harder to turn a Tourist Information Office back into a working mill again.

The conversations taking place as different grains spilled from the thresher were about rediscovering something just about still within reach, but only just.  Even if you get the husks off, how do you store grain so it doesn’t go musty, how do you keep the rats away from it, how do you mill it… a whole chain of knowledge, sophisticated knowledge acquired over thousands of years, rendered obsolete by cheap energy and the “biggering and biggering” of agriculture.  One of the nuggets I gleaned was that if you harvest wheat and just pile the crop in a heap, and it gets rained on, it is ruined.  If you ’stook’ it, make it into bundles which stand up, you can leave them out in the rain and they are fine.  At Embercombe they couldn’t find anyone who knew how to do that…

We often use the term ‘The Great Reskilling’.  As I stood by the thresher at Embercombe, I realised that as well as the passing on of skills, we also need “The Great Practicing”, trying things out.  We can learn a certain amount from books and from courses, but the best way to learn, the way that has you thinking around problems and solving them on the hoof, is by having a go.  Even the small patches of grain that had been grown had been hugely instructive.  It also gives you a sense of the infrastructure you need to create, the infrastructure that a local food economy needs.  As Aldo Leopold put it, “who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts?  To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering”.  I found it very inspiring, in the sunshine, listening to whirring and clacking of the thresher, to watch some dedicated people who have picked up some of those seemingly useless parts and are trying to work out how to make them work again.

It’s competition time here again at Transition Culture!  You can win a copy of Chris Bird’s just-about-to-be-published book ‘Local Sustainable Homes’  (I have 5 copies to give away) by telling me the answer to the following before midday this Thursday (9th September).  Please email your answer to rob (at) transitionculture.org (do not post as a comment).  Which two of the following ten local natural building materials or related terms is merely a product of my fevered imagination?

1. “Clunch”: a soft limestone favoured in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire

2.  “Wychert”: a kind of cob using chalk, favoured in Buckinghamshire

3. “Clay lump”: blocks made of straw and clay, using boulder clay from unstratified glacial deposits

4. “Rumpletumping”: a West Midlands term for picking through a pile of rounded stone to find the ideal stone for a drystone wall

5. “Clom”:  the Cornish term for cob building

6.  “Thackstones”: a term used in the Pennines to describe thick flagstones

7. “Cobble ducks”: term used in Cumbria to describe a wall made from cobbles

8. “Stob”: the term for a handful of straw with a knot in one end used as part of rethatching an old straw roof

9. “Grot-stock”.  A Kentish material, mostly made from cow’s mucus, often used as an alternative to wallpaper paste, used in traditional building as a glaze over fine limework.

10. “Grumping”: a stone rubble base used under wychert walls

(I am indebted to my well-thumbed copy of the sadly now out-of-print ‘Craft Techniques for Traditional Buildings’ by Adela Wright for some of the above terms).

You may well have already seen this, indeed 2.5 million people did before it was removed from YouTube due to copyright infringement, but I hadn’t seen it until this weekend, and it is fantastic and, I found, actually strangely moving.  Now back on YouTube, “Newport (Ymerodraeth State of Mind)” is a parody of the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song, a celebration of the Welsh town. Although it has been criticised for the fact that its producers don’t actually come from Newport, I thought it was hilarious, as a lover of warts’n'all musical celebrations of place, such as that for Branksome in Dorset (very silly).

Here’s a short treat for a Friday afternoon, a good way to sign off for the week, a trailer for a film being made by Milpa Films called ‘Voices of the Transition’.  Looks like it is going to be rather good….

Here’s what Nils Aguilar of Milpa Films told us about the production: “it is totally independent, non commercial, passion driven and collective (as far as it is possible to involve different actors in the production process). We managed to get grants from different foundations (EU, France, Switzerland), which permits us to operate very freely, neither bound to structures, nor to political or economical doctrines… Also, our goal is to use very diverse channels to promote the permacultural, agroecological and TT propositions showcased in the movie: we would like to organize debates in schools (very important), as well as public open air projections, presentations on documentary festivals, and partly a free internet diffusion. A DVD is also going to be edited in 4 different languages (german, english, spanish, french), which will permit to show it in different other european countries”.  They are now looking for some additional funding in order to finish the film off … perhaps you might be able to help?

Two months’ worth of round up in quick succession… normal service will be resumed next month.  So, let’s start this roundup in Europe,  with an interview with Ellen Bermann of Transition Italia, sat on a terrazza somewhere with a rather nice view (understanding Italian an advantage…).

Transition in Germany is going on well, with another successful training and a further one coming up on 9 October in Bielefeld, so if you’re interested do get in touch with them. There are also lots of new registered users for their German-speaking Transition Network, as well as meetings with key players in German peak oil organisations, and increasing interest from the media as more articles appear in German publications. And congratulations to TT Bielefeld as they celebrate their first year! Thanks to Gerd for this update.  Here is a film of him giving a presentation about Transition (understanding German will help considerably.)….

Down to New Zealand and Australia, TT Invercargill will be holding a Spring Festival in September, which will bring people, organisations and businesses together that are working on sustainability and environmental issues so they can be show-cased and celebrated, so get involved if you’re down that way. TTs in Northland, where unemployment rates are higher than elsewhere in New Zealand, will be holding two community-led job summits to discuss ways of creating new jobs and rebuilding local economies. This is a wonderful idea and hope it will be very successful… There are celebrations as Australia gains new TTs in Transition Yarra and TT Wallan! So if you live locally, try to get along and join. TT Cambridge is planning a World Café workshop where they’ll be developing a shared vision for their community, and also form working groups for further action. They’ll also be seeking commitment to become an official group in the coming months.

In the UK there’s an offer to learn new skills in eco-building in return for your labour… sounds like a great opportunity to learn new useful skills. And more skills sharing as Transition Worcester organises a series of 2 hour bicycle maintenance courses throughout August and September. Portabello’s TT, PEDAL, will be participating in a Community Energy Conference to speak about Community Energy Possibilities. They’re well placed to talk on this subject as they’ve just been awarded a large grant for their community energy project. It should be a very worthwhile day. PEDAL is also celebrating Portobello’s very first organic market! TT Alness is helping its local community save energy, reduce its carbon footprint and save money by offering free home energy checks. Here’s a call to get Transition Shetland started, so if you’re up that way then please get involved! And if you can, go to visit TT Linlithgow and join their mini Transition gathering and harvest celebration. They’re very keen to meet other TTs around Scotland and share ideas and activities.

The soon-to-be-official Transition Saltash, together with Saltash Environmental Action Group, will be holding a Transition Fortnight of festivalling, freebooting (not the piracy kind) and doubtless some feasting. They were awarded a grant of £3250 by the town council for their green festival, so congratulations T Saltash! And then they’ll also hold their Unleashing – very exciting – so try to get along and celebrate with them. More festivities as T Finsbury Park organises its ‘Well Oiled Festival’ focusing on communicating the Peak Oil message, as well as celebrating their existing relocalisation activities. TT Bellinge and Orrell have a wonderful download called ’12 things you can do to move towards a lower energy lifestyle’. It’s great…have a look! TT Kingston has launched its own food co-op called ‘From the Ground Up’, which delivers organic fruit and vegetables each week together with a selection of other goodies…right to your door. If you live close-by, then make the most of it!

TT Louth is busily creating community food gardens (see left) and is asking anyone living locally to volunteer their time, and there are some lovely pics of a garden that’s already producing food. TT Wandsworth also has a community garden, designed and created in partnership with Wandsworth Council and has just been launched. Congratulations!

Maps are wonderful things! So here is an explanation of how to make a fruit map of your town on googlemaps…fantastic! And here’s one that was made earlier…Thank you TT Brixton for getting this started. And now for a little video of T Bro Gwaun’s float at the recent local carnival….

Making pedal-powered smoothies in Halesworth...

TT Halesworth got people exercising on their pedal-for-your-smoothie day to help raise awareness of energy use (see right), and there’s also news of their Bike Aid Scheme which distributes emergency repair kits around the town. TT Horncastle have lots of exciting events going on including a nature trail for kids and, together with Horncastle Now, a chill-out day to help raise funds for solar panels in Mali. TT Stoke Newington is also being very busy with events from bike maintenance workshops to harvesting Hackney… and here’s a lovely report of an urban fruit harvesting day around London…

Transition Homes's community consultation event.

TT Totnes held an exhibition and consultation day on the low cost low impact Transition Homes project to explain to people all about it, answer questions, and ask for feedback on possible locations. TT Tooting together with the Energy Saving Trust is organising a free training day so you can learn how to carryout basic energy audits on home and community building. And have a look at Steph’s blog to see where our flip-flop-footed wanderer has got to now and whether she could be heading your way!  She was recently spotted back in Devon, co-presenting a workshop with Rob H. at the West Country Storytelling Festival…

Across in the US, Dallas is celebrating as it becomes TT Dallas…welcome and congratulations! And here’s Nils to chat to you about Transitioning Lake County in a little video he’s called ‘An Invitation to Imagine: part 1’…

The New Eden Collaborative and Transition Newburyport together held a Local Flavour Community Potluck Picnic, and here’s a nice commentary and some lovely pics. Transition in Colarado has been the focus of an hour-long TV show on PBS in Denver for a programme entitled Transition Cities, fascinating viewing, which you can see below…

Transition Cheltenham will be hosting a local food banquet, and has also produced an on-line local food directory.  In Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, at the Victoria Region Transition initiative picnic, they built a model ecohome out of cardboard (complete with wind turbine), filmed it, and put it on YouTube….

… you can also see a great selection of photos of the picnic here.  And now to South America for a report on a well-attended weekend workshop in Chile. This is great news!  Finally, here is a repeat performance by our young American friend who closed last month’s roundup with his Spongebob piece.. here is again with some ‘Transition Town Floetry’ filmed in a back garden somewhere….

We have a guest post today, from Jules Peck (see left), originally posted at Citizen Renaissance.com.  We have had some initial explorations of this here at Transition Culture already, but Jules offers some useful additional insights into what the Big Society agenda might mean for Transition, and vice versa.  Our thanks for allowing us to publish his piece here.

Big Society – Small State.

“Countering Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration, David Cameron has asserted that “there is such a thing as society”. His vision for this society is based on his Big Society programme of “social action, public service reform and community empowerment… a shift from state action to social action”.  His concept of the Big Society makes a distinct break, at least rhetorically, with the individualist neo-liberal model of the Thatcher era. And its success rests, to a large degree, on the abilities and energy of citizens, communities and the third sector. Citizen Renaissance Movements like Transition Towns (of which I am a great fan) would argue that they have been active in building a Big Society for years.

In giving her support to the Transition Towns community initiative, Theresa May MP reinforced the party’s’ appeal to citizen and community-centric values saying “This is an interesting initiative aimed at getting communities to come together to think seriously about how they can at grass roots level plan for the future and start to make the changes that will be needed.” And a good friend of mine, Transition Towns Chairman Peter Lipman, has also met Big Society Network Chairman Lord Wei at his request to discuss how the Government’s policies and rhetoric can support Transition Towns. This is all very positive and I know that many of us involved in Transition are interested to see in what way the new Government are willing to support their work.

However, it is important to ask what role Conservatives see for the state in supporting and empowering this? We know that Cameron and most Tories are ideologically anti-state. Cameron has gone on from the above to say “it’s just not the same thing as the state”. Their view is that the state needs to roll back and allow society to roll forwards. But this raises a number of questions. Firstly, what support will the state be willing to give citizens, communities and the third sector in their work on community? And secondly, what roles will the state play in removing neoliberal market barriers to community flourishing?

The role of the state in supporting community flourishing

On this first point, we have seen that the Big Society programme includes things like; reforming planning to give neighbourhoods more ability to determine the shape of their communities, powers to help communities save local facilities and services, training a new generation of community organisers and supporting the creation of neighbourhood groups, supporting the creation and expansion of mutuals, co-operatives, charities and social enterprises, and using funds from dormant bank accounts to establish a Big Society Bank, which will provide new finance for neighbourhood groups, charities, social enterprises and other nongovernmental bodies.

This all sounds positive and maps well against many of the things Transition and other citizen and community groups are doing around the country already. Indeed extra powers and funds for Transition and other community groups will be welcomed. But will this come with strings attached and a demand that the Government has a say in what is specifically intended to be a grassroots deliberative and democratic movement co-created by citizens themselves?

The role of the state in removing barriers to community flourishing

As Green Alliance CEO Stephen Hale has said “The neo-liberal version of Conservatism that has had such a strong influence on American and British Conservative thinking over the past thirty years has proven very environmentally destructive. It has promoted ‘market forces’ to the detriment of communities and family life. It has tended to foster economic growth without a proper regard for the environment, and to be reluctant to intervene in imperfect markets. There are notable exceptions of course, but the dominant underlying ideology has led to irreversible environmental damage.”

Amongst a host of other issues for which there is no space here, such neoliberalism includes a dogmatic fear of an appropriate, facilitating role for the state. So what of the role of the state in supporting the strengthening of community?

Let’s take Conservatives at their word and see what they have said on this. Andrew Tyrie MP writes this “Our success will partly be measured by the extent to which we can convince the public that reining back the intrusiveness of the state under a conservative government will not lead to the atrophy of community. The state will nonetheless discharge important obligations in supporting communities, institutions and individuals, but not always from the centre.”

Cameron has also been clear that there is a role for the state in supporting community “we achieve progressive aims through decentralising responsibility and power to individuals, communities and civic institutions. The task of Government is to create the environment in which the social norms and institutions which enable reciprocity can flourish.”

Oliver Letwin agrees with this “[Personal freedoms] can indeed only be achieved through ‘collective action’. They all need action from government… But much of that action has to work through family and community and social enterprise – essential ingredients of safer streets and of the escape from poverty… Thatcher wanted to roll back the frontiers of the state. Brown wants to roll forward the frontiers of the state. Cameron wants to roll forward the frontiers of society.”

And so does David Willetts “[F]ree market economics, like patriotism, is not enough… the conservative tradition placed as much importance on our shared values and our sense of community as it did on the role of private property and free markets.  The task of Government is to create the environment in which the social norms and institutions which enable reciprocity can flourish.” Finally, ResPublica’s Philip Blond is quite clear that Compassionate Conservatism needs to repudiate neoliberalism and shift to Conservative values which are “socially conservative but sceptical of neo-liberal economics”.

All well and good, some of the leading players in the Government seem to be saying that there is a role for the state in empowering community flourishing. This rhetoric is all very well. But often what has come hand in hand with a neoliberal free market approach has been a strong belief in low taxation, especially for the wealthy, and in cuts in the size, nature and extent of the welfare state.

Heading in the wrong direction?

No one will have missed a parallel agenda of another leading player in the Government and his massive spending cuts. Economist David Blanchflower has said that Osbornes pre-election commitments to massive spending cuts, now being delivered in power “amounts to a declaration of class war”.

The Big Society programme has a series of policies which invoke and encourage the strengthening of community. However, it is not yet clear whether these efforts will be undermined by the spending cuts agenda which could threaten to do great damage to communities and Britain’s poorest citizens.

Some of the cuts threatened will have significant impacts on social justice and communities. One example includes more than 400,000 vulnerable citizens, including pensioners and victims of domestic violence, possibly being in line to lose their homes and see care entitlement scrapped if the Treasury carries out its threat to cut 40% from the £1.6bn ‘Supporting People’ Programme. Other likely cuts include things like Sure Start, the Future Jobs Fund, the scrapping of free school meals for 500,000 low-income families, the free swimming scheme for children and pensioners, the Future Jobs Fund, the Child Trust Fund, the freezing of child benefit, the cut in housing benefit and the VAT rise. All of these may well act to hollow society out from the centre and mean it is far less able to focus time and energy on grassroots change.

A recent report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (interestingly the previous employer of Osborne’s main advisor Rupert Harrison) shows clearly that the spending cuts agenda will hit the poorest in society hardest. The report concluded “Once all of the benefit cuts are considered, the tax and benefit changes announced in the emergency Budget are clearly regressive as, on average, they hit the poorest households more than those in the upper middle of the income distribution in cash, let alone percentage, terms.”

There are also real concerns also that a reliance on the third sector and on private companies is both lacking in accountability and likely to fall short of the gap created by cut backs in state support for communities, their infrastructures and their services. Many third sector organisations get significant proportions of their funds from local councils.

As these councils are now being forced to cut up to 30% of their expenditures, this will hit the third sector’s ability to deliver on Cameron’s Big Society vision. Services such as after-school clubs, play schemes, domestic violence charities, rape crisis centres, parenting programmes, projects to tackle youth crime, and support schemes for isolated older people are all threatened by these cuts. With other donations falling as a result of the recession and this to continue to worsen with the VAT rise in January; many third sector organisations are very worried.

Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, has said “Small scale community activity is fundamentally important to civil society. It depends on small grants, and if these are wiped out this will remove the very support structures that community groups depend on and undermine the big society.” Likewise Stephen Bubb, CEO of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, said the cuts meant the government would struggle to “close the gap between its heady rhetoric and current reality. It’s just like the 1980s. Charities are seen as the easy target.”

Stephen Cook, Editor Third Sector has echoed this saying “The mantra of ‘doing more with less’ will be carved on the doorway of more and more voluntary groups. In these circumstances it is increasingly important that we hear more about the big society from the government than pious rhetoric and the gnomic utterances of Lord Wei.” And Toby Blume, CEO of UrbanForum has said “The credibility of the Big Society is significantly undermined by the impact of economic policy on charities and voluntary groups, as announcements of cuts to funding emerge on an almost daily basis.”

Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd MP has responded to these challenges saying “There is clearly a significant risk to the Big Society agenda,” and that he will be telling other ministers to “think about the impact on the local and voluntary sector” and “make sure the state minimises the damage.”

Conclusion and questions for the Big Society

So this raises a few questions which the Big Society really must answer. Will support for citizen/community initiatives come with Government strings attached? Or will Government recognise that a key element in the success of grassroots initiatives like Transition is that they are ‘of the people and for the people’. And that they are based on participative democracy and emergent properties of citizens flourishing within their own communities. In short not things which Government should seek to influence.

And most importantly of all, how will the Government ensure that the current spending cuts regime does not completely undermine all their fine talk of rolling forwards a Big Society?

About the author

Jules was for two years Director of David Cameron’s Quality of Life Policy Group, advising the Conservative Party on wellbeing and environment issues. A committed Citizen, he has spent the past 20 years advising business, NGOs and government institutions on sustainability issues and Wellbeing. In a varied career Jules has worked in on environmental issues in Brussels at the EC, in the US and EU in marketing and public affairs roles with a number of companies and internationally for WWF as a Global Policy Adviser.

Jules’s recent publications include: Blueprint for a Green Economy (2007), Let Them Eat Cake (2006), Hope and Glory (2008).

In advance of the publication next week of Chris Bird’s Transition Book ‘Local Sustainable Homes’, I spoke to Chris about the book, and about what he set out to achieve in writing it.  The book will be available to order here at Transition Culture from next Thursday (the 9th).

So Chris, how does ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ differ from all the other green building books out there?

You could fill a bookshop with volumes on green building. There are so many works on sustainable design and construction and green materials that choosing what to read has become almost as difficult as deciding which spectacle frames to wear! But this book is different because it concentrates on how individuals, groups and communities are making it happen. Okay, I admit that in places the book does drift into looking at materials and construction methods but the bread and butter of the text deals with examples from around the country of how people are making sustainable homes a concrete reality – but without the concrete!

What do you think is unique about the Transition take on housing?

In a word? People and communities. Oh, that’s three! The transition movement is making resilient communities the central plank for building a sustainable future. Perfect eco-homes, whatever they might be, won’t solve the problem of climate change or prepare us for a future without cheap fossil fuels. We have to see sustainable housing in the context of sustainable communities. Imagine a house built with local timber, insulated with strawbales from a nearby farm and roofed with slates from a local quarry.

The window frames and doors are supplied by a local carpenter and the energy comes from a district heating system and a community owned wind turbine. The occupants get much of their food from a community supported agriculture scheme and also work locally. Not only does their home have a much lower carbon footprint and less embedded energy but it’s also stimulating a virtuous circle of local enterprise. When homes like this, whether they are newly built or refurbished, become the norm, then our communities will be more cohesive and better equipped to tackle climate change and cope with the problems that peak oil will bring.

What surprised you most while researching this book?

Almost as soon as I started gathering information two things became clear. First, there were lots more interesting projects going on than I had thought       possible. I could have filled the book just with stories about low impact developments or what housing associations are doing. Second, the pace of change means that new projects are being launched all the time so I was constantly rewriting to keep up to date. Fortunately the whole project, from start of researching to publication, was only just over a year so the book is pretty up to date. So I suppose the big surprise was just how much is happening out there. But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent. At a rough guess I’d say we need to increase the scale of our activity around sustainable homes a thousand-fold to really deal with the problem!

What does ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ teach us about the current state of the Transition movement?

It would have been much more difficult to write this book as an individual rather than as a transition activist. Access to transition initiatives around the country and overseas through the Transition Network was immensely valuable so, even at this early stage of development, the movement is a valuable tool for learning from and disseminating local experience.

But we need to recognise that, despite our successes, the Transition movement is still just a small part of the picture. Most of the people and projects described in ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ have either no links or a very tenous connection to Transition and very few sustainable housing projects are formal Transition initiatives. Is this a problem? Not really. The fact that so many projects are happening already is really encouraging. The fact that they don’t have a Transition label is not an issue.

Cloughjordan, which is now linked to the Transition movement, and Totnes sustainable housing projects like Transition Together and Transition Homes, are valuable examples that I’m sure will be surpassed by communities all over the UK and elsewhere. The Totnes Pound has been eclipsed by the success of local currencies in Lewes and Stroud and the same process of leapfrogging will happen with sustainable housing.

What do you feel are the key ingredients in a community housing project?

Community. By that I mean the things that bind people together for the common purpose of making their homes and neighbourhoods more sustainable. There are many examples in the book of people coming together to face a threat to their communities such as an unwelcome housing or office development or unnecessary demolition, then using this new cohesiveness to launch something positive. But community cohesion can develop in other ways. Building links between people in existing communities through programmes such as Transition Together or  people with a shared vision such as low impact development or cohousing develop shared goals that see them through the difficulties they encounter.

Of course there are ways of building and laying out homes that foster productive interactions. George Monbiot dealt with this in a recent article but most of the estates we want to turn into communities have already been built so our starting point must be the people themselves.

Transition promotes the use of local building materials.  How big a part do you think they will play in the future, or can industrial materials do things that more local, natural materials simply cannot do?  How purist should we be?

One of the points I make in the book is that we need to reduce the embodied energy in new homes and refurbishments as well as everyday energy consumption. An ‘eco-home’ built with high energy fossil fuel based materials may consume very little energy in the long term but it will take decades to pay back the carbon debt created by building the house in the first place – and climate change is a problem NOW! Even if the problem of carbon emissions was not so urgent why develop a dependency on construction methods and materials that will be unsustainable with the end of cheap oil?

Local materials are vital to sustainable construction because you immediately reduce the transport emissions associated with materials carried from across the country or half-way round the world. What’s the true cost of slates from China or paving slabs from India when we include the environmental damage their production and transport cause?

Using local timber, straw, hemp, earth, stone, wool and a host of other materials also boosts local economies, helps create resilient communities and brings back a regional identity to our buildings. And many of these materials lock up carbon so new buildings and refurbishments can actually be carbon negative

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting a return to the cold and drafty buildings of the 18th or 19th century. We need a new synthesis of modern construction methods and traditional materials to create homes that are a pleasure to live in but don’t cost us the earth.

Some specialist materials and products – glass, photovoltaics, heat pumps – may best be sourced from outside the local area. We shouldn’t lay down rigid rules but use common sense. So no, we shouldn’t be purists, but neither should we give up too easily in the search for local and sustainable low energy alternatives.

In the book you tell the story of the TTT Building and Housing group and what it has achieved thus far.  You have been involved since early in its evolution, what lessons do you feel you have learnt about what is possible for such groups to achieve?

Wow! The sky’s the limit. Set realistic goals but never imagine that there are limits to what can be achieved. Build on what’s already happening in your area but don’t be constrained by it. Aim for a mix of education, practical action and inspiring projects. Remember that the dividing lines between different transition theme groups are arbitrary so don’t be afraid to work with other groups on joint projects. Be organised with regular business meetings, mailing lists, events and discussions and try to involve as many people in conducting the business as possible. This creates a sense of ownership and involvement and prevents a few people getting burnt out because they are doing everything – but that applies to almost any campaigning organisation.

I think the key factor in the success of the Building & Housing Group in Totnes is that we have a solid core of people who have been involved for the past few years and just keep coming to meetings and getting involved in projects. How to build and maintain such a group will vary in each area and we don’t have any magic formula. Just use whatever mix of education, agitation, organisation and inspiration that works.

Any final thoughts you would like to share?

I’ve really enjoyed researching and writing this book and I hope people learn as much from reading it as I have from creating it. When we first discussed the idea of a book on sustainable housing for the Transition series I envisaged a very different end result from the book that will be published in a few days. So the book really is the product of what I came across while traveling around the country, trawling through the internet and talking to hundreds of people rather than just flesh on the bones of an original concept. I hope people beg, borrow or hopefully buy a copy and I really hope they’ll be kind enough to tell me what’s wrong with it!

Open Eco-Home days are a great way of promoting the idea of green building in all its many manifestations.  I have no idea whether the two events were planned to coincide, but two Transition initiatives, Totnes and Stroud, are holding Open Eco-Homes weekends at the same time, the weekend of the 11th-12th September.  The Totnes weekend (see poster left) provides access to 13 houses which have taken steps to reduce their energy use, ranging from a new cob house with a thatched roof (absolutely gorgeous) to some of the houses that have participated in Transition Streets and have made a range of energy efficiency improvements.  You can download the flyer for the weekend in 2 parts, here and here. The Stroud event visits over 20 homes, and has become an established part of the local calendar.  They also produce an excellent leaflet for the event, which you can download here.  You can find out more about the Stroud events here.   Transition Town Lewes also did one last year, but I haven’t been able to find any links to their doing it this year.  Perhaps they, or any other Transition initiative doing one, might let us know in the comments thread below?  Do try and get along to support one of these excellent events…

Next week sees the publication of the next book in the Transition Books series, ‘Local Sustainable Homes: how to make them happen in your community’ by Chris Bird.  More details to follow (including how to order your copy), but as a taster, here is my foreword to the book:

In The Pattern of English Building, his seminal review of vernacular English construction techniques and the wide range of building materials that have defined English architecture – from flint and chalk to clay, oak and straw – Alec Clifton-Taylor wrote:

“all these different materials imposed architectural forms appropriate to their character and, despite the many visual improprieties of the last century and a quarter, the pattern is still remarkably complete. It was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable.”

In a world that lacked the hydrocarbon punch that today bestows the ability, which we take for granted, to move mountains, people in a wide diversity of locations developed forms of construction that reflected local materials, the local climate and other cultural influences particular to that place. From Devon’s curvaceous cob cottages to the limestone roofs of Dorset; from the intricate timber framing of Suffolk to the granite-walled homes of Leicestershire, it was the materials that defined the forms of building – leading also to a wide range of artisans and craftspeople: masons, ironmongers, lime kiln-keepers, thatchers and so on.

Over the past hundred years, during what one might call ‘The Age of Cheap Oil’, the process of building shelter has, like most other aspects of our lives, become increasingly industrialised. A recent study by British Gas found that houses built during the 1960s were built to such shockingly poor standards of energy efficiency that they performed worse than the Tudor homes of the 1500s. In an oral history interview I did in Totnes, Devon, a man who grew up in the town in the 1960s recalled his grandmother, with whom he and his mother lived, keenly moving out of an old house that was a converted cider press.

“She just wanted modern. She wanted electric fires, electric cookers, electric everything. She wanted automatic this, that and everything. So we moved, at my grandmother’s insistence, from this wonderful rambling old building to a brand-new house, typical of its time. Wooden-framed, single-glazed windows, open fire for a chimney which she quickly replaced with an electric fire (“I’m not having any more of that dirty coal business”). The winters were actually colder than in the previous house. You’d wake up in the morning, and your breath would have condensed on the window, frozen on the inside. Inside it was cold, outside it was cold. Eventually my mother paid for an electric fire to be put in so you could reach out of the bed and turn it on. Electricity was cheap in those days.”

These days our challenges in terms of shelter are different from those of the 1960s. We no longer live in a world of cheap and abundant energy. Promises of ‘electricity too cheap to meter’ have been and gone, and the climate change caused by our burning of fossil fuels is an increasingly urgent issue. It is clear that the target of avoiding a 2°C rise in greenhouse gas emissions is being overtaken by reality: feedbacks not expected for 50-100 years are already under way – the melting of Arctic ice, the release of methane from the seabed, the melting of permafrost, the disappearance of glaciers; the list goes on . . . This is all happening just because of a 0.8°C rise in the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere since fossil-fuel burning began in earnest. The urgent need is not only to reduce emissions, but to seek to phase them out altogether by 2030.

Over the past four years, the rapidly growing Transition movement has argued that climate change cannot be looked at in isolation from the imminent peaking in world oil production, with the resultant price volatility and interruptions to supply. This realisation has mobilised thousands of communities around the world to start planning for life beyond cheap energy – to see the end of the age of cheap energy and the need for urgent decarbonisation not as a disaster but as an opportunity; a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink basic assumptions. Transition Initiatives can now be found in villages, islands, cities, districts, boroughs, universities and schools around the world. They focus on the practicalities of relocalisation, offering a creative process of engagement and awareness-raising that seeks to involve the community in designing a new, and more appropriate, way forward. The impact of Transition thinking is starting to emerge in the most unexpected places. A report in 2010 from Lloyds Insurance and Chatham House argued, as Transition has for the past four years, that peak oil needs to be looked at alongside climate change, and the following quote from that report could have been taken straight from a Transition publication such as this book:

“Energy security is now inseparable from the transition to a low-carbon economy, and businesses plans should prepare for this new reality. Security of supply and emissions-reduction objectives should be addressed equally, as prioritising one over the other will increase the risk of stranded investments or requirements for expensive retrofitting.”

Just as they have in all other aspects of our lives, cheap fossil fuels have come to underpin the way in which we build our homes. In the same way that it has been argued that our current food system means that we are, in effect, as Dale Allen Pfeiffer put it, ‘eating oil’, such is the embodied energy in new buildings that it could be argued that we now live in buildings made from oil too.

In the same way that, across the world, the Transition movement is arguing for seeing peak oil and climate change as two sides of one coin, Chris Bird’s book represents an important shift in the debates around what the housing of the future will be like. Much of the literature on green building focuses on new build using local and/or natural materials – what is often termed ‘natural building’ – as self-builders discover the possibilities presented by materials such as cob, straw bales, hemp and so on. I have been involved in a number of natural building projects, and have taught straw-bale, cob, cordwood and hemp/lime construction courses. These are all wonderfully democratic materials; anyone can get the hang of them and use them to create individual spaces that feel so different from our everyday idea of what a house should feel like.

The point Chris makes in this book, however, is that the decisions about housing we need to make will bring together the challenges we face today (peak oil, climate change, the need vastly to reduce our energy consumption) with the challenges faced in the past (the need to rediscover local building materials). Much of what is known as ‘green building’ sources its materials from far and wide – sheep’s-wool insulation from Germany; lime from France; shingles from Canada. Like a delicious but distantly sourced organic meal, this represents an approach that is highly vulnerable to volatile energy prices.

The core argument of Local Sustainable Homes is that housing ourselves can be, and needs to be, about far more than simply having a roof over our heads. The model today is one of homes designed for us, built from high-embodied-energy materials, with a high carbon footprint; materials sourced wherever in the world they can be found cheapest; and the property purchased in a way that saddles us with a debt we then spend many years struggling to pay off. How would it be if, instead, we were more involved with our homes’ design, if our choice of materials meant that it became possible for local businesses to emerge to provide them, if the construction process worked in such a way that people could be trained to engage with construction for the first time, and if the homes were built in such a way as to require no space heating at all? We could, by building ’sustainable homes’, produce buildings that lock up more carbon than they produce, that have a local distinctiveness, and that stimulate the local economy rather than leaching from it.

Of course, it is not all just about new buildings. Of Britain’s approximately 24 million homes, at least 87 per cent are projected to still be in use by 2050. Retrofitting existing homes saves 15 times more CO2 than demolishing and rebuilding them. Over the past 30 years we have also used our housing stock to introduce the ruinous idea that our houses will increase in value for ever, and that we can use them as a cash-dispensing machine. In the UK, and especially in Ireland, this has led to a huge problem of overpriced, energy-inefficient housing that nobody can afford, and historically unprecedented indebtedness. Alongside energy efficiency and local materials, it is clear that we also need to find new models for how we ‘do’ housing – such as cohousing, housing cooperatives and so on. Many such models are explored within these pages. As the implications of the bursting of the debt ‘bubble’ continue to unravel, the owner–occupier model will become increasingly difficult to sustain, and we will need to look at a variety of ways in which we may house ourselves.

Possibly the greatest challenge, however, is tackling the low energy efficiency of our housing. The UK has some of the worst housing stock in Europe in terms of energy efficiency. How to retrofit buildings of such wildly different types? Many innovative schemes are under way, and Chris explores some of these here.

The question this book addresses, ultimately, is: What is a ‘local house’? In ten years’ time, might it be possible that the building standards require that new buildings be constructed using almost entirely local materials, but built to very high energy-efficiency standards, and that the existing housing stock be made vastly more energy-efficient, again using mostly local materials? While little is yet happening in terms of the use of local materials for retrofits, one very exciting development, under construction as I write, is the building of two ‘local Passivhauses’ in Wales. These use largely local materials (over 90 per cent local for one of them), and are built to the Passivhaus standard, requiring no space heating at all. Their construction involves the seeking of local materials, the training of local builders, the recycling of local newspaper (for insulation) and the engagement of local window-makers to manufacture high-performance windows from local timber. It is a project that is beginning to model the future of construction in such a way that the future comes into distinct focus.

The challenge, though, as Gill Seyfang of UAE puts it, is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass-production”. Housing ourselves, and reducing the energy consumption of our existing homes, if done well, could become one of the key drivers of the regeneration of our local economies. These challenging times demand that we think smart, and that is just what Chris Bird does within these pages.

Rob Hopkins, September 2010

The rather cheeky new logo for newly formed Transition Derwent Valley (Australia)

Here is July’s round up, August’s will be along shortly, we are still catching up after the break.  We’ll start this with a plea to all you Transition initiatives who have wonderful projects that you’re not telling us about! The plea is to add them to the Transition Network Projects Directory here so everyone else can see them too, and get new ideas for what they can do…   So, for July we start in New Zealand, where TT Kapiti is putting on a series of skills workshops to see you through the dark winter months and prepare you for the summer, so if you’re around that way, why not join in and learn a new skill. Here’s New Zealand’s James Samuel commenting on Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), with a couple of little movies to help explain why carbon trading isn’t an answer for reducing carbon emissions… if you’re interested in knowing more about TEQs, then have a look at Shaun Chamberlin’s talk and slides on the subject to help you make sense of it all.

Transition in Australia continues to spread, with a new TT in Maitland and another in Derwent Valley, while T Kenmore District is holding its two-year anniversary celebration…congratulations to you all!  TT Maroondah’s Food Group is being very busy… look here to see what they’re up to and maybe get some new ideas. TT Sherbrooke is holding a monthly food swap, while TT Blackwood is preparing for a winter warmer cook up and sharing recipes so all the participants can prepare the lovely foods at home.  In Ireland, there’s some great news from TT Kinsale as its Food Club is now working with two local farmers to develop a Community Supported Agriculture scheme for potatoes and oats. They need more people to sign up, so if you live locally, why now join them and enjoy a share of the harvest?

TT Den Helder in the Netherlands has shared the short film below to show us what they’re up to, while the new group at Ibiza Transition Island has news of all its activities here.

Here is a talk from Poland (in Polish) by Kamil Pachalko from Southend in Transition at an event in Poland… beyond it being about Transition, your guess is as good as mine as to what is being discussed….

In the UK, congratulations go to TT High Wycombe for the imminent launch of its Energy Saving Kits-for-Loan project, funded by the Wycombe Strategic Partnership, and it has also donated Transition books to the library to promote this project.  Other TTs have received some funds too:  the Co-operative supermarket chain has been giving out grants of £100-£150 to help communities reduce their carbon footprints, and TT Nailsea will use their grant to fund its monthly market stall. Congratulations also to PEDAL Portobello TT for its award of £72,000 from the Scottish Government’s Communities and Renewable Energy Scotland to help cover the legal and planning costs of establishing a community owned wind turbine on the seafront.  Also on energy, T Shipston held a ‘Community Ownership of Renewable Energy’ conference where they decided to set up a community energy company, and one of their first ideas is to install solar panels on the roofs of Stratford and Warwick Hospitals.

TT Exmouth has a great newsletter here (where you can meet the Strandbeest, which you’ve just gotta see) and is celebrating its two-year anniversary, so congratulations to them too! TT Louth has some lovely pictures and happy memories of their food and musical gathering in their community garden. Wivenhoe TT has served up a lovely vegetable garden curry at none other than from the very fine tabletop eatery on Wivenhoe Railway station… wonderful and highly appreciated it was too.  Here’s an update on TT Tooting’s upcoming Harvest Foodival, and if you want to know more about the wider TT Tooting action, you can listen to a podcast interview with City Bumpkin talking on exactly that subject.  Heading out into the suburbs, here’s a short film about the Electric Vehicle exhibition that Transition Town Kingston just held…

There are a couple more new groups to congratulate on their emergence:  T Greenwich and T Belfast, so do get in contact with them if you live locally and want to join in the fun.  TT Sturminster Newton enjoyed a lovely farm walk and saw a huge diversity of crops being grown, and some nice pictures to prove it. TT Newcastle is holding monthly open space meetings for anyone interested in helping to make Newcastle more resilient and sustainable, so why not join them if you live nearby. TT New Cross has been contributing to a collaborative community arts project, in the form of a participatory opera called ‘Carbon Chronicles’ that aims to inspire and provoke discussion through music and humour. Have a look at some great pictures that Naoki Tomasini, an Italian freelance photographer, took during his visits to TTs around the UK.

Workshop participants at Transition Powell River's solar food dryer workshops showing off the fruit of their labours at the end of a hard day's sticking and glueing....

In the US and Canada, TT Powell River held a ‘Build Your Own Solar Food Dryer’ workshop, and got some nice pics too. There are several new groups to congratulate: Bowen in Transition (and this page has some great diagrams and a sketched personal actions chart), TT Hadley, Transition (Upper) York Region, TT Venice, T Lake County, Clear Lake Transition Initiative, and then there’s a request for people to help start Sussex County TT, so if you’re local to any of these towns, islands, lakes or regions, go along and join the fun!

T Los Angeles is holding a mini-conference in September to share information about the Transition movement, so if you live close by, go and check it out. TT Ann Arbor and a local school are hosting the second annual Ann Arbor Reskilling Festival where you can learn skills from permaculture to knot tying to cooking with sun ovens to making toys from old clothes. There’s also a little film to watch. A very worthwhile event to attend! TT Ashland is preparing for a Local Food Treasure Hunt in September that begins with map-reading your way to find your food, and then… And for those interested in how Transition might work in cities, have a look at Transition in the Big City part I and part II, which tell of how Transition ideas are being applied in Los Angeles.  Heading south again, here is a short slideshow of pictures from the second Transition Training to be run in Chile…

And finally…. (as they say)…. he’s something rather odd which offers a fascinating take, from a young person’s pespective, on the Transition movement… (advance knowledge of who Spongebob Squarepants is would help greatly…) … .  See you next month!

With thanks as ever to Helen and to the wonder that is the worldwide web….

Transition Culture is back!  After a month of Cornish beaches, hemp lime plastering, wood store-building, cinema visits, catching up with friends, storytelling festivals, campfires and wrestling with cabbage white caterpillars, normal service is resumed.  Nice to see you again, you’re looking well.  I’m kicking off again with some reflections on John Michael Greer’s ‘green wizardry’ concept, which he calls “the current Archdruid Report project”, which will no doubt generate some interesting debate.  Greer, for those who don’t know, is a blogger and author whose work I usually admire greatly, whose excellent blog can be found here. 

Green Wizards….

So, first question, what is a ‘green wizard’?  Greer defines green wizards thus, “individuals who are willing to take on the responsibility to learn, practice and thoroughly master a set of unpopular but valuable skills – the skills of the old appropriate technology movement – and share them with their neighbours when the day comes that neighbours are willing to learn”.  The idea, as I read it, is that any notion of a co-ordinated response,  a la Heinberg’s ‘Powerdown’, a scenario where communities self-organise and work with, or without, their local authorities, to start the rebuilding of that settlement’s resilience, reduce its oil dependency and carbon footprint, is now for the bin, condemned as impractical and unrealistic.  Greer appears to have given up any notion that such a thing might be possible, stating “a movement is a great thing if you want to hang out with congenial people and do interesting things together.  It’s just not usually a good way to make change happen”.

What Transition and Green Wizardry have in common….

Both Transition and green wizardry are based on the ideas that peak oil, and peak various other things too, will lead to a future of economic contraction and declining net energy availability, where the communities that are most successful are those that have most successfully strengthened and refocused their local economies in advance.  Both (as I understand it) believe in the need for stronger local food networks, more back garden production, more local ownership of key utilities such as energy generation, and for a rediscovery of local building materials, seasonal foods and so on.  Greer’s latest post, The Care and Feeding of Time Machines, is a fascinating distillation of useful tips and ideas around season extending, which will be of great interest and use to many involved in Transition.  Much of the information being unearthed and rediscovered by the green wizards will be very useful for those involved practically in building resilience at a local level, and it is a very valuable and fascinating project.  I do, however, have a few concerns about green wizardry, which I would like to reflect on in this post.  

The dangers of setting up a straw man

In recent weeks, Greer has been taking swipes at the Transition approach, both in his posts and also in the comments threads.  A while ago I responded to a piece Greer wrote which accused Transition of ‘premature triumphalism’: I’m all for people picking at Transition, questioning, debating and challenging it, but it does get frustrating, as we saw recently with Alex Steffen, when Transition becomes a straw man, when it is presented as something it isn’t in order to enable to writer to prove his or her point, or, more commonly, to propose something else they see as being a superior and more appropriate idea.  The Transition I read about in Greer’s posts often isn’t the Transition I recognise from the work I do.  Some examples:

• He has referred to a “number of Transition Town activists who have found their way onto municipal payrolls has excited grumbling from members of less successful pressure groups”… which when I objected on his comments thread saying I don’t know of any such person, said that he had got that from the ‘Rocky Road to Transition’, itself a very badly researched document…
• He dismisses Transition by saying that “many people in the peak oil scene have chosen to downplay the difficulties and insist that we can have a bright, happy, abundant future if we just pursue whatever baby steps to sustainability we all find congenial” … does that ring bells for any Transitioners out there?  Thought not…
• Transition’s “fixation on optimism makes it raise expectations it can’t possibly fulfil: the question that hasn’t been settled yet is what happens to it once it becomes obvious”, again rather missing the point…
• Transition is often dismissed by Greer as being a ‘revitalisation movement’, which I interpret as meaning that it is content to tinker around inconsequentially at the edges without doing anything meaningful, revitalising the existing model rather than suggesting anything else meaningful. Again, not the Transition I recognise….

He takes particular exception to the notion of Energy Descent Planning, of the idea of intentional planning for energy descent, arguing:

….the core argument of last week’s post centered on the possibility of building a better future by deliberate planning, and many of the comments and critiques took issue with my suggestion that this is not only impossible but counterproductive. While most of these latter noted that they were participants in the Transition Town movement, the ideas they expressed in that context are anything but unique to that movement; rather, it expresses a consensus that extends through most of the peak oil scene, and indeed, most of contemporary society. Despite its popularity, though, this confidence in our ability to plan the future seems woefully misplaced to me, and the reasons that have forced me to dissent from the consensus may be worth discussing here.

Let’s return here to the Cheerful Disclaimer, not I, nor anyone else involved in Transition would argue that it is a strategy that will definitely work, that Energy Descent Plans, community visioning, or any other ‘deliberate planning’ approaches are guaranteed to work.   Transition is a collective experiment, an invitation to be part of a huge research project, learning through doing.  It is not so much the ‘mass movement’ that Greer rails against, rather it is people around the world working at a community level to see what works, and what is appropriate in a range of contexts (urban, rural, developing world etc).  My point is that it is easy to present a picture of what Transition is that suits the argument you want to make.  What feels unhelpful though is to use green wizardry as a way of dismissing or brushing aside Transition, when both do different things, appeal to different people, and are needed simultaneously.  So what could be the limitations of the green wizardry concept?

The Limits of Gathering an Appropriate Technology Library

Another of Greer’s recent posts, by way of an example of how green wizardry seems to be working in practice, discusses a key issue that a society engaged in adapting to energy descent will need to address, namely peak phosphorous, and then gives Greer’s reflections on the matter, followed by a list of suggested resources.  Greer is particularly keen on books from the ‘appropriate technology’ movement of the 1970s, suggesting that ‘how-to’ books have never been bettered since those times of counter culture, energy crises and xerox machines.

I have lots of books from that time on my shelves.  Indeed, in my early 20s I hoovered them up at car boot sales, second hand bookshops, wherever I could find them.  I still have most of them, John Seymour’s books, a great little book on urban gardening called “Your Home Grown Food”, gems such as “Common-sense Compost Making”, “The Self-Sufficient House”, and little booklets on making your own windmills and solar panels.  When I moved to Ireland I picked up many more at house sales when people who were the ‘back to the land’ generation of the 1970s had house clearances, and threw out loads of great little books on beekeeping, making your own yeasts and coracle building (in most cases I was pretty convinced they had done none of those things…).  I remain a kleptomaniac for such books, and covet my collection.

I also collect books, when I can find them, from the 1940s/1950s, Dig for Victory books and gardening books written by old fellas who grew up on allotments and grew leeks up to their waists.  There is much that can be learnt from those books, but also a great deal best left behind.  I have a lovely old book called ‘Fruit Culture for the Amateur’ by W.F. McKenzie, published in 1947, which recommends DDT as a new insecticide, offering the key piece of Health and Safety advice: “DDT is non-poisonous to human beings and animals”.  Whether from the 1940s, or the 1970s, thinking and solutions have evolved.  While still often insightful and valuable, much of the literature from the 1970s was based on the idea that you needed to drop out of society, get some land, buy a farm, become as near self-sufficient as possible.

Energy books assumed you wanted to be ‘off-grid’, rather than the perhaps less anti-social approach favoured today of generating energy to feed into the grid.  Food production books often assumed you had acres to play with, and books on energy in buildings assumed you were starting from scratch.  Greer may argue that there were also some excellent urban appropriate technology books, and groups such as the New York Energy Task Force who promoted urban wind power, but there is a danger, I think, in assuming that we can just go back to those books 40 years later and pick up from there.

Geodesic domes, for example, big in the 1970s, are largely accepted now as actually being quite rubbish.  Windmill designs from then have been hugely improved on since.  Our understanding of energy performance in buildings has come on hugely, the materials available are much better, our knowledge of how to use local and natural materials in buildings has evolved greatly, our understanding of soils, gardening systems and so on, have come on since then too (I would rather, for example, rely on Adam Weissman and Katy Bryce’s ‘Using Natural Finishes’ book (published 2 years ago) as a ‘how-to’ for making clay plasters than ‘Shelter’ or any of the other far more speculative books from the 70s).  I can’t help thinking that  the idea that we will see the rapid onset of peak oil and economic collapse, at which point society starts to unravel, and desperately and reverently turns to a few enlightened souls who are fortunately bravely clutching a load of tatty books from the 1970s, and who are then able, from those curled and well thumbed xeroxed pages, to rebuild the world anew, is somewhat naive.

Also, much of that literature is rich on ideas, but very short on measuring, on assessing whether they work or not.  Was Ruth Stout, referred to in Greer’s phosphorous post (I too have some of her books), a great visionary, whose straw-based mulch gardening system was a radical gardening breakthrough, or was she a fruitcake, the neighbour from hell, whose system gave initial promising results but which robbed soils of nitrogen and bred slug populations that pulsed across the garden in a frothing gelatinous tide?  Do we actually know?  Did anyone actually test, measure or evaluate what she did (I get the impression from her fascinating and highly entertaining books that she certainly wouldn’t have done so)?  Where are the companion volumes that went back and tested the results of the experiments of the 1970s?  How are the first Earthships bearing up?  The first underground houses?  I suspect that rather like permaculture’s fabled chicken greenhouses, basing our green wizardry on the literature of the 1970s could lead to much that we rely on turning out to be myth, unsubstantiated fables.

Some of the publishers who were producing books in the 1970s, some of the books that are on the wizards’ reading lists, are still publishing.  The Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, for example, are still publishing ‘how to’ books, and very good ones too.  Books on how to clean dirty water, build your own solar systems, grow your own food.  But they are not still just publishing facsimiles of their 1970s output, their current books are much more up-to-date, much better publications.  Also, today’s challenges are different.  As previously mentioned, many of the books produced in the 1970s assumed the reader was building from scratch, had land, no debts and so on.  For most people today, the challenge is very different.  How to retrofit a poorly-built house?  How to reinhabit a house that is too big for your family?  How to get out of debt?  How to garden on concrete?  Can I make a garden that I can take with me when I move between rented accommodation?  I find little of use in addressing those challenges from my 1970s book collection.

Do ‘Green Wizards’ build community resilience?

This is the ultimate question for me.  Would having green wizards in my community make it more resilient?  I don’t think so. When talking about resilience, I mean the ability of my community to withstand shock from the outside, to not unravel at the first sign of difficulty, and to be able to reinvent itself, using the shock as an opportunity to reimagine and remake itself in a way more appropriate to a world of energy descent.  For me, resilience refers to more than the ability to not fall apart when catastrophe strikes, rather resilience is a desirable state in itself, something to strive for because, if done properly, it stands a higher chance of meeting our needs in uncertain times than business-as-usual does.

My first point here is that there are already plenty of green wizards in my community, people with a range of skills.  Transition’s working assumption has always been that we need a ‘Great Reskilling’, that we have become collectively vastly useless.  However, the research I just completed that looked at Totnes found that actually people are far more skilled than we might give them credit for.  The survey I conducted showed that 66% of people stated that they were ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ at food growing, and other methods such as focus groups confirmed this, that a lot more people are gardening than one might imagine.  They learn not from government programmes, but largely from friends and neighbours, from people, like green wizards, who are just living it and doing it.  The idea that we can build resilience by brushing up on canning techniques and swapping knitting techniques, while not wishing to dismiss the importance of those skills, is rather missing the point.

My initial thinking  (around the time I wrote The Transition Handbook) was that, as shown in the graph to the left, that levels of core resilience skills (growing food, basic house repairs etc) were high in the 1950s, and have fallen steadily ever since, as those skills have become less and less useful.  As one oral history interviewee who was a teenager in the early 1960s told me,  gardening was, by then, perceived by that generation as “something you did if your Dad caught you”.  It is easy to percieve that from that point forward, practical skills have fallen by the wayside, as we have moved from a producer society to a consumer society.

In reality, that wouldn’t appear to be the case.  Each decade brings a new ‘pulse’ of people learning these skills (see left) , in the 1970s inspired by the appropriate technologists, John Seymour and the whole ’self sufficiency’ movement, in the 1980s the early permaculture movement, and so on, until today, where there is a huge interest in learning how to grow food, and indeed to relearn a wide range of practical skills.  I would increasingly argue that the challenge that we need to address in order to move forward in the best way to build resilience is not through ‘building community’ (a subject I have addressed previously), or through a crash course of community reskilling, but rather through issues of governance and social entrepreneurship, areas where the green movement has fallen short for many years, and which aren’t addressed in green wizardry at all.

Where ‘Green Wizards’ Fall short.

The ‘Green Wizard’ concept is principally, as I understand it, conceptualised as a response to peak oil.  It is based on the assumption that everything is going to unravel very fast and that this is the best way to respond.  Fair enough, there will be many different ways people will respond, there is no one-size-fits-all response that will grab everyone, and ‘Green Wizardry’ is, in that context, just as valid a response as Transition, as engaging in political campaigning, protest, standing for office, or whatever.

What green wizardry is definitely not, though, by any stretch of the imagination, is a response to climate change.  Becoming a walking appropriate technology library is not going to do anything to reduce your community’s carbon emissions.  Climate change doesn’t work like peak oil.  It isn’t something that builds to one moment of collapse, a point where circumstances determine that suddenly people see that you were right all along.  The need presented by climate change is to reduce emissions today, and to cut them as hard and as deep as possible.  Our 1970s ‘how-to’ library has nothing to say in terms of measuring carbon, nor how to most effectively reduce it, producing nothing like Chris Goodall’s ‘How to Live a Low Carbon Life’.

Green wizardry also falls short because it fails to acknowledge that a transition on the scale it is presumably designed as a reponse to will be anything more than purely a challenge of an absence of practical know-how.  Communities faced with the realities of energy descent, whether rapid onset, stepped descent or rapid unravelling will be faced with much more than simply a need for windmill designs and guides to making good compost.  It is not purely an outer process, indeed the practical solutions side of it is the easier side.  Ensuring clear communication, dealing with conflict, supporting people through the grief of the future not turning out in the way they had spent their lives so far imagining it would, is equally important.  Are the green wizards also dusting off 1970’s self help manuals?

I also can’t help thinking that there isn’t actually anything very new about the idea.  There are already lots of places where people are finding and exchanging this stuff.  A good permaculture design course is, in effect, an immersion in much of it, but with an angle of how to practically apply it all.  There are web fora where this stuff is discussed, such as the excellent permies.com, as well as organisations like Garden Organic and others, who facilitate the sharing of tips, ideas and insights.  In that sense, I see little new in the green wizard concept.

‘Told You So’

The part that grates most with me is the element of green wizardry that resonates with the things that always hacked me off most about certain elements of the green movement.  This is captured in Greer’s statement “… share them with their neighbours when the day comes that neighbours are willing to learn…”.  The Green Wizard, with his or her new and indispensible knowledge about appropriate technology, can now sit at the local bar, smug in the knowledge that when everyone else ‘gets it’, he/she will finally be valued, finally gain the appreciation they have for so long been denied.

Perhaps a less condascending position might be to assume that within the community a wide range of skills already exist, and we might bring people together physically, rather than virtually, such as at this event, coming soon, to share them.  A huge range of knowledge exists in any community, and often community organises in a wide range of ways, many of which we may not even be aware of.  Which would do more to make our communities more resilient, green wizardry, or volunteering for a local charity, helping out on the organising committee of a local carnival, volunteering for a local school?  It is a serious question.  One appears to take a somewhat aloof stance of knowing what a community needs, of knowing the skills people don’t have but need to acquire, the other a more open view which is there to support, observe, interact, learn and offer.  It is an important distinction.

Final Thoughts

Unlike green wizardry, the Transition approach requires that we move out of our comfort zones, that we engage with people we otherwise wouldn’t engage with, that yes, we learn skills we otherwise wouldn’t, but we also organise meetings, events, learn how to run businesses, start to take up the responsibility for creating the new low carbon economy, engage, on our own terms, creatively with local governance.  The idea that a sustainable, resilient future will emerge only when those around us ‘get it’ and seek us, and our knowledge, out, as argued by Greer, as and when things get dire enough, is a dangerous one, and one, I am concerned, that will get us nowhere.

Richard Heinberg, in the foreword to the paperback edition of ‘Peak Everything’, writes “the genius of the [Transition] movement lies in its engagement of the citizenry first”.  Nothing new there really, but for me, green wizardry falls down in that rather than engage the citizenry, it falls back on the aloof superiority of the environmental movement, stockpiling knowledge for “when the day comes that neighbours are willing to learn”. If we are to come anywhere near to doing what needs to happen in order to have settlements sufficiently resilient to weather the shocks of the next few years, whether they be related to climate change, resource depletion or economic shocks, we need to scale up our thinking, think bigger, reweave connections and relationships, and start building a new infrastructure where we can.

This will not be able to be brought into being purely by communities of course, it will also need local government, national government, and international action.  But a retreat to the belief that those of us who have stockpiled practical knowledge now comprise some kind of enlightened brotherhood (or sisterhood), whose role is to wait for the rest of the world to come to its senses and come seeking out our great wisdom, is somewhat dangerous.  Rather, I would argue, we need to step out of our comfort zones and think bigger, see that we have a huge amount to learn, not just from dusty appropriate technology books, but also from those around us.  I’ll close these reflections with a quote from David Orr’s book ‘Down to the Wire’, which captures the scale of what we need to be doing, whether we call it Transition, green wizardry, or whatever….

“Every increase in local capacity to grow food, generate energy, repair, build and finance will strengthen the capacity to withstand disturbances of all kinds.  Distributed energy in the form of widely disbursed solar and wind technology, for example, buffers communities from supply interruptions, failure of the electrical grid, and price shocks.  Similarly, a regionally based, solar-powered food system would restore small farms, preserve soil, create local employment, rebuilt stable economies, and provide better food while reducing carbon emissions and dependence on long-distance transport from distant suppliers.  The primary goal in rethinking development and economic growth is to create resilience – capacity to withstand the disturbances that will become more frequent and severe in the decades ahead”.

Update Aug 25th: Brilliant talk by Hans Rosling, in which he explains “Child survival is the new Green”. Book review PeopleQuake by Fred Pearce Eden Project Books 2010 Pbck; 342pp There is a scary book I have a half-share in with a neo-Malthusian friend which contains graphs of the exponential growth curves in population for [...]

I love stoves, and we recently made a simple rocket stove on the Introduction to Permaculture course at Carraig Dulra in Wicklow. Above: rocket stove (foreground) and Storm Kettle behind This was made out of a Feta cheese tin from the local wholefoods shop and a piece of single-wall stainless steel flu pipe attached to [...]

Transition Culture will be closing down for most of August as I stop work and take time out with my family, sit on a beach in Cornwall for a while, visit family, leave my laptop at home, and try not to think about Transition very much (well I can try).  The last few days has been a wrapping up of various things, including the thesis I have been doing for the last 3 years (alongside everything else…) which (pause for fireworks, dancing elephants and great plumes of multi-coloured bunting) I handed in today (see left).  Don’t have to even think about it once for the next 2 months.  Thanks everyone  for all your comments and support over the year so far, much appreciated.  Have a good few weeks, normal service will be resumed here first week of September, when we’ll be into full-on Pattern Language writing mode, and other exciting new developments to be revealed when activities resume!

As a follow-up to the previous post, here is a short film that was made for the event that announced the 20 winners of the Low Carbon Communities Challenge, which features Transition Streets among the winners.

‘Transition Together’, the street-by-street behaviour change programme developed by Transition Town Totnes and now being piloted in 10 other communities, has just completed analysing the data that has come back from the first 4 groups, comprising 32 households in Totnes.  They have completed all 7 of the sessions set out in the workbook, and the data offers a fascinating first look at whether the process works or not.  The results from the other 31 groups currently underway are expected this Autumn.  Here, Fiona Ward of Transition Together shares the results that have emerged. 

Carbon and financial savings so far

Total carbon savings pa: 38.9 tonnes

Total financial savings pa: £19,236

Average carbon savings per household pa: 1.2 tonnes

Average financial savings per household pa: £601

Projection – by the time all 35 groups or 278 households have completed the programme by end of Round 2 in March 2011:

Estimated total carbon savings pa: 338 tonnes

Estimated total financial savings pa: £167,109

One of the Bridge Road Transition Together group's meetings.

The carbon conversion ratings used have all been approved by CRED at the University of East Anglia (the guys behind the gov’s Act on Co2 carbon measures) and are conservative. We have not been able to apply credible carbon and financial savings to all actions therefore the actual results will likely be higher than reported here, and account mostly for home energy and water use savings.

This also doesn’t take into account that the household will likely take on  more of the carbon saving actions  in the workbook once the ‘official’ T-Tog programme has ended – e.g. some of the groups are going round a 2nd time off their own initiative, and we are not tracking these additional savings. However, some of the actions are of course highly variable in savings, and we are more confident in some measures than others.

Numbers and types of actions

On average each households has undertaken 8 actions from the workbook (these are the only actions that we count in the figures above). They state they had already done, before starting T-Tog, 17 of the workbook actions and that they plan to do 2 more actions.

Top 5 most popular ‘new’ actions:

• Know how much energy you are using (monitor your usage in your home)
• Be a real turn off (always turn things off at the wall when not in use)
• Control your heat (know how to use your heating system and thermostat)
• Know how much you are using (monitor your water use at home)
• Buy local & seasonal foods

Bottom 3 least popular ‘new’ actions:

• Use car clubs
• Get on your bike – cycle don’t drive (tho this is highest ‘plan to do this’ item)
• Loft  insulation (most have already done it)

Top 3 ‘already done’ actions:

• Recycle (food, glass, plastics, tins…everything!)
• Washing clothes (full loads, low temps, wear clothes longer)
• Minimise food waste

Top 3 ’I plan to do this’ actions:

• Get on your bike – cycle don’t drive
• Draught proofing
• Grow your own

Qualitative feedback The 5 (of 10) measures on which we show most impact are:

• I feel well informed about peak oil and climate change.
• I understand how these 2 issues affect me, my family, my local community, and the planet.
• I know what practical, effective actions I can take to reduce the potential impacts on me/others.
• I’m aware there are simple, easy things I can do to reduce household costs – and I know how to do them.
• I feel positive about the future.

It is fascinating to note that from just the first 4 groups that have been assessed, total savings have been £19,236, pretty much what it took to develop and pilot Transition Together.  Given that it is estimated that by the time the 35 initial groups have completed the programme, total savings are projected to be £167,109, it is an impressive return on investment.  The Transition Streets project, which builds off the Transition Together project is now at the stage of installing PV arrays across Totnes, and during August the town’s Civic Hall will have its roof clad in PV, with a launch event in September.

For more information on Transition Together, or running the programme in your community, contact the T-Tog team….

There is often confusion within the peak oil/Transition movement about the distinction between the terms ‘localism‘ and ‘localisation‘.  On Energy Bulletin yesterday, Richard Moore’s piece, ‘The Emergence of Localism” was actually referring, I would argue, to localisation, not localism.  In the UK, in the context of the government’s Big Society agenda, the two definitely mean very different things.  Here is section from my forthcoming thesis which explores this distinction.  ‘Localism’ or ‘localisation’?  The national context.

Often, the terms ‘localism’ and ‘localisation’ are used relatively interchangeably, but it is important at this stage to note that they refer to different things.   Stoker (2007) defined ‘New Localism’ as “a strategy aimed at devolving power and resources away from central control and towards front line managers, local democratic structures and local consumers and communities, within an agreed framework of national minimum standards and policy priorities”.  For Morphet (2004:292) it is “a means of improving democratic accountability, providing a local mandate, and producing inter-agency approaches to localities”.  Localism can therefore be seen as being primarily concerned with governance, while localisation, on the other hand, is a wider, more far-reaching adjustment of economic focus from the global to the local.  Hines (2000a:27) defines localisation as “a process which reverses the trend of globalisation by discriminating in favour of the local”.  Shuman (2000:6) adds that:

“…it means nurturing locally owned businesses which use local resources sustainably, employ local workers at decent wages and serve primarily local consumers.  It means becoming more self sufficient, and less dependent on imports.  Control moves from the boardrooms of distant corporations and back to the community where it belongs”.

One might tentatively argue that localism therefore focuses on political structures, the devolution of governance, the application of subsidiarity to democracy, while localisation focuses instead on the practicalities of building more localised economies, in terms of food, energy, manufacturing and so on, which may necessarily include governance (a distinction explored in Table 6.1).

Assumptions shared by Localism and Localisation

• Local people should have more control over local services and decision-making
• Stronger local government and increased accountability is a good thing
• Community ownership and the Right to Buy are important

Assumptions Not Shared by Localism and Localisation

• Localisation is underpinned by an ethic of sustainability: this does not necessarily enter into localism
• Localisation embodies the Proximity Principle, arguing that where money flows from and to are important, and that what can be produced locally should be consumed locally where possible: localism sees itself within the context of business-as-usual economic globalisation
• Localism seeks to reduce the role of the state and of ‘big government’, localisation can happen within the context of stronger government, indeed it argues that addressing global issues such as climate change or resource scarcity will require strong government alongside community engagement
• Localism seeks to transfer state assets (schools, hospitals etc.) into community ownership: localisation focuses more on control rather than ownership of those assets, and seeks to bring key local functions (food production, building development, energy generation) currently in the private sector into community ownership
• Localisation argues for a different relationship between consumers and producers, localism has no such critique
• Localisation seeks to increase tightness of feedbacks, so that consequences of resource use are felt closer to home (i.e. local food production): localism operates in the context of economic globalisation, with no concept of feedbacks.

Table 6.1. The assumptions shared and not shared by localism and localisation (Source: the author).

For Daly and Cobb (1994), the term subsidiarity means that “power should be located as close to people as possible in the smallest units that are feasible” (ibid:174).  For Ziman (2003:63) it means “decisions should be taken at the lowest competent level in an organisational hierarchy”.  Table 5.1 gave an indication of what subsidiarity could look like in terms of local economics, but in terms of political organisation it is a greyer area.  The term does have its doubters; as Robinson (1996:unpaginated) put it “the chief advantage of subsidiarity seems to be its capacity to mean all things to all interested parties – simultaneously”.

Others add that there is little to be gained by academic debates around subsidiarity, as it is entirely place-specific and the conclusions reached will always be contextual and dynamic (McKean 2002).  For Blond of Respublica (2010a: pers.int.), the role of national government is to enable “the highest level of subsidiarity possible”.  In the context of Totnes, subsidiarity could be interpreted as referring to decision-making being brought as close as possible to the community level, the community response to the Totnes DPD discussed above offers a glimpse of what subsidiarity, in terms of planning, might look like in practice.

Localisation applies the concept of subsidiarity to economic life, as well as to the political.  While localism can perfectly well take place within a globalised growth-focused economy, a ‘business as usual’ scenario (see 2.4.3.) (hence its appeal to mainstream political parties), whereas localisation carries within it an inherent social justice and resource-focused critique of globalisation (Bailey et al. 2010, North 2010), emerging from concepts such as Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 2004), Steady State economics (Daly 1977) and Schumacher’s (1974) concept of ‘Buddhist economics’.  Localisation is a social movement and a principle for social and economic reorganisation, whereas localism is a principle for political organisation.

Although the question of what local government focused on resilience-building and Transition might look like will be explored below, a useful place to start is in considering how the national political context might best enable relocalisation.  Porritt (2008:47) argues that “the tension between centralisation and decentralisation is ever-present in terms of alternatives to the current world”.  In national politics, the concept of localism is very much in vogue at the moment (Parvin 2009).  David Cameron, as part of his ‘Big Society’ concept, has spoken of “pushing power down as far as possible” and of “a massive, radical redistribution of power” (Cameron 2009:unpaginated).

Former Labour leader Gordon Brown called for “a vibrant, reformed local democracy [rooted in] a renewed focus on the devolution of powers and responsibilities to local government” (Blears 2008:51), and the 2006 Power Inquiry called for “the introduction of institutional and cultural changes which place a new emphasis on the requirement that policy and decision-making includes rigorous and meaningful input from ordinary citizens”.

The 2008 White Paper “Communities in Control: real people, real power”, proposed the shifting of “power, influence and responsibility away from existing centres of power into the hands of local communities and individual citizens” and suggested that Participatory Budgeting (see 6.3.3) be undertaken in all local authorities by 2012.  It is worthwhile noting that the concept of localisation, with its more radical ambitions and greater perceived challenge to current-day economics, is never used at this level, rather ‘localism’, focused largely on political governance, is the term of choice.

The previous Labour government made ‘modernisation’, referring to constitutional and democratic modernisation, part of its agenda since its election in 1997.  Most obviously, it introduced Scottish and Welsh devolution, regional elected assemblies in England, a London Mayor and Assembly, but perhaps less obviously, Pratchett (2004:11) points out, it has introduced “modernisation of internal political management structure, experimentation with new electoral processes and technologies, through to exhortation for greater citizen involvement and engagement in local affairs”.  In spite of this, it has been criticised for achieving the opposite, for continuing centralisation strategies and ‘control freakery’ (Wilson 2003).  Stoker (2001:3) argues that New Labour’s approach to central-local relations can be seen as “a classic example of a hierarchist approach”.

Wilson (2003:26) is careful to distinguish between approaches and language used by New Labour, and actual results; noting “an involvement in and commitment to ‘dialogue’ and ‘partnership’, but dialogue does not necessarily convert to influence, and multi-level participation is different from multi-level governance”.  The UK, after 13 years of Labour government, is still one of the most centralised states in the Western world (Hambleton & Sweeting 2004).  Lancaster City Councillor John Whitelegg (2010 pers.int.) is suspicious of politicians who use the term localism.  “Britain is grossly over-centralised and I think that whenever a national politician starts talking about ‘localism’ their nose starts going into Pinnochio mode”.   For Blond (2010a:pers.int), genuine localisation “requires a political economy if it’s going to work”.  Part of this, he argues, is “local councils and local authorities having genuinely independent revenue-raising capacity, the ability to vary, for instance, the national non-domestic business rate, the ability to generate new forms of revenue and share in those new forms of revenue” (ibid), a power that can only be bestowed by national government.

References

Bailey, I, Hopkins, R, Wilson, G. (2010) Some things old, some things new: The spatial representations and politics of change of the peak oil relocalisation movement. Geoforum 41(4) 595-605.

Blears, H. (2008) The Decentralised State. In: Milburn et al (eds). Beyond Whitehall: a new vision for a progressive state. Progressonline.co.uk.

Blond, P. (2010a) Personal interview

Cameron, D. (2009) A New Politics. The Guardian.  Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/25/david-cameron-a-new-politics on 20 March 2010.

Daly, H.E, Cobb, J.B. (1994) For the Common Good: redirecting the economy toward community, the environment and a sustainable future. Boston, Beacon Press.

Daly, H.E. (1977). Steady-state Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company

Hambleton, R, Sweeting, D. (2004) US-style leadership for English Local Government. Public Administration Review. 64 (:4. July/August 2004

Hines, C. (2000a) Localisation: A Global Manifesto. London, Earthscan Publishing Ltd.

McKean, M.A. (2002) Nesting institutions for complex common-pool resource systems.  In: Graham, J, Reeves, I.R, Brunkhorst, D.J. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Landscape Futures. Institute for Rural Futures: University of New England.

Meadows, D.H, Randers, J, Meadows, D.L. (2004) Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update . London, Earthscan Publishing Limited.

Morphet, J. (2004) The New Localism. Town and Country Planning.  73 (10). 291-3.

North, P. (2010a) Eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change – a sympathetic critique. Geoforum 41 (4) 585-594.

North, P. (2010a) Eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change – a sympathetic critique. Geoforum 41 (4) 585-594.

North, P. (2010b) Local Money: how to make it happen in your community. Transition Books/Green Books.

Porritt, J.  (2005) Capitalism – as if the world matters. London, Earthscan Publishing Ltd.

Pratchett, L. (2004) Local Autonomy, Local Democracy and the ‘New Localism’. Political Studies. 52 (2) 358–375

Robinson, M. (1990) Constitutional shifts in Europe and the US: learning from each other. Stanford Journal of International Law 32. 1-12.

Schumacher, E.F. (1974) Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered. London, Sphere Books.

Shuman, M.  (2000)  Going Local: creating self-reliant communities in a global age. New York, Routledge.

Stoker, G. (2001) Governance by lottery? New Labour’s strategy for reforming local and devolved institutions in Britain. Paper presented to the PSA Annual Conference April 2001.

Stoker, G. (2007) New Localism, Participation and Networked Community Governance. University of Manchester, UK / Institute for Political and Economic Governance.

Whitelegg, J.  (2010) Personal Interview.

Wilson, D. (2003) Unravelling control freakery: redefining central-local government relations. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 5:3.  August 2003. 317-346.

Ziman, J. (2003) Subsidiarity: The science of the local. In: Simms et al. Return To Scale: Alternatives to Globalisation. London, New Economics Foundation.

Fred Pearce (2010) The Climate Files: the battle for the truth about global warming. Guardian Books.

The saga of the hacked, or leaked, emails from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) has gone on to become known, predictably, as ‘Climategate’.  This release of thousands of emails and documents, sceptics argued, proved that climate science was fabricated and fraudulent, and showed scientists deliberately falsifying data. The release of the emails just days before the Copenhagen climate talks couldn’t have been worse timed, and they were dissected endlessly online, often by people with little understanding of the science, selected quotes being used to dismiss climate science in its entirety as a wicked scam (here’s one more lurid example of this). In this, the first book to look in depth at Climategate, Pearce offers a remarkably well balanced and up-to-date account of what really happened, what it all means and where climate science finds itself in the wake of the whole sorry saga.

The implications of Climategate are only just starting to really sink in.  What the emails revealed was that climate scientists can be as territorial, unpleasant, defensive and bitchy as the rest of us.  For anyone who thinks that teachers, for example, in the privacy of the staff room don’t discuss some of their students in rather derogatory terms, or lawyers, or nurses or whoever… this may come as a bit of a shock.  Climate scientists are shown in the emails as having, on occasion, refused to comply with Freedom of Information requests for them to share their data sets, misused their position to try and keep papers they diasgreed with out of journals, and generally tried to shut up shop in the face of a barrage of demands from climate sceptics.  Pearce, in spite of being a leading writer on climate change himself, is frank in his assessment that some of the behaviour within UEA was not up to the standards expected, and has put the process of peer review in a very bad light.

It is clear that several years before the release of the emails, relationships between the scientists and the sceptics had already broken down, and levels of animosity had reached such levels that it gets rather hard to start telling right from wrong.  Like a ‘family at war’ on the Jeremy Kyle Show (such as this one), relationships had soured, and people were happy to block other people’s work on principle, and had started acting so unreasonably that nobody emerges from this story with very much credit.

Pearce does a great job of explaining just what it was that everybody was arguing about.  Much of it relates to what is called ‘paleo-climatology’.  While we have climate data, temperatures and so on for the past 160-odd years (“since records began”), it is the detective work required to build up a picture of temperature changes further back in history that is the source of much rancour.  Debates revolve around which data is used to build up that picture, tree rings data being a bone of particular contention.  Sceptics and critics point to Mike Mann’s famous ‘hockey stick’ graph and argue that he cherry picked the data in order to show flat temperatures followed by the more recent spike, an accusation which Mann himself has argued against for years.  Pearce explains patiently and clearly what all this means, and the different sides of the debates.

The key question of course is whether any of this proves that climate science is wrong, or is part of some vast shadowy conspiracy to usher in a One World Government, or some such nonsense.  Pearce is clear:

“none of the 1,073 emails, or the 3,587 files containing documents, raw data and computer code upsets the 200-year-old science behind the “greenhouse effect”. We might wish it weren’t so, but the world still has a problem.  A big problem”.

This is a point also made by George Monbiot in this recent interview:

The world continues to warm, the first half of 2010 having been the hottest ever recorded.  Evidence of other feedbacks and indicators of rapid warming continue to accumulate – Climategate has done nothing to undermine the science.  Indeed if anything, as this recent report from WWF shows, the science published since IPCC’s fourth assessment in 2007 suggests a far graver picture than that set out in that report.

‘The Climate Files’ does occasionally feel like it was written in a hurry, rather like books about celebrities lives that emerge weeks after their demise, with no index and the odd typo, but the advantage of that is that it is right up-to-date with developments.  Pearce’s style is clear and patient, and although I picked up the book in order to gain a clear overview of the story and implications of Climategate, I found I also picked up a great deal about climate change and the debates within the science.  Clearly, he argues, something went horribly wrong here.  The levels of openness, the practice of good science and, as he explicitly states, the levels of basic human courtesy, were not what one would expect from scientists of such repute.

Pearce argues that in moving forward from the mess of the past 9 months, given the damage and disrepute it has caused not just for climate science, but for science in general, a new principle of openness is required, in effect, the ‘Open Sourcing’ of climate data, the opening up of datasets and information, a new spirit of collaborative learning.  This, Pearce argues, is actually one of the key objectives of the new generation of climate sceptics, who are not like the older generation of sceptics, often funded by petrochemical interests to ‘manufacture doubt’ (watch Naomi Oreskes’s excellent presentation on ‘manufactured doubt’ here), but who rather see themselves as ‘liberators of data’, arguing for the open sourcing of all climate-related data.

‘The Climate Files’ is a highly readable, fascinating account of an event which has been spun by so many different people as meaning so many different things, depending on their views about climate change.  Is it the ’smoking gun’ that proves climate change is all a conspiracy?  Does it prove scientific fraud on an unprecedented scale?  Or does it show that climate scientists are, in fact, human, and that when put under pressure, sometimes people don’t behave to the standards they would otherwise observe?  Pearce’s book is clear, fair and balanced, and a fascinating account of this whole sorry saga.  Essential reading for anyone with an interest in climate change, and a reminder of why alongside good scientific practice we also need to value civility and courtesy.

You can also hear Fred Pearce, along with some of the other key players in ‘Climategate’ in the podcast of the excellent debate hosted recently by the Guardian in London, which explored many of the issues raised in the book, here.

I am hopefully now only days from handing in the PhD I have been doing, the closing stages of a gruelling marathon.  I posted a couple of weeks ago the contents and the layout of the thesis, which is called ‘Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level:  the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)’.  I thought you might like to see a section of it, to give you a flavour.  Apologies to regular readers that this is written in a far more academic style than you might be used to here, but hopefully you will find it useful and relevant.  It comes from a section looking at the relocalisation of food, and draws from the different research I did.  I am importing this from Word, so some of the formatting might go a little wierd….

5.4. Food:  Can Totnes Feed Itself?

“… to draw in our economic boundaries and shorten our supply lines so as to permit us literally to know where we are economically.  The closer we live to the ground that we live from, the more we will know about our economic life; the more we know about our economic life; the more able we will be to take responsibility for it”  (Berry 2010:35)

5.4.1. Introduction

Sections 5.4-5.7 now explore the practical application of the concept of intentional localisation, starting with food, then moving to building materials, and then energy and transportation.  What degree of localisation is possible, and what degree is, in fact desirable.  5.4 starts by looking at food, the most fundamental of the four.  Of the four, food is the one people are most familiar discussing in the context of localisation.  5.4 therefore explores the question of the practicalities of relocalisation in the greatest depth, in order to draw comparisons across to the other areas of study.

5.4.2. Conceptualising Local Food Systems

Few areas of modern life are debated as vigorously as the food system.  There are those who argue that the globalisation of the food system stimulates competition and results in cheaper food and wider choice.  This view was summed up by former DEFRA minister Margaret Beckett (2006:unpaginated), who told a 2006 conference;

“…it is freer trade in agriculture which is key to ensuring security of supply in an integrating world. It allows producers to respond to global supply and demand signals, and enables countries to source food from the global market in the event of climatic disaster or animal disease in a particular part of the world. …it is trade liberalisation which will bring the prosperity and economic interdependency that underpins genuine long term global security”.

Conversely, there are also those (Schlosser 2002, Heinberg & Bomford 2009) who argue that our food system is becoming steadily less resilient.  The UK government’s take on food security is moving more in the direction of taking national food security seriously as an issue.  In 2003, DEFRA argued that “national food security is neither necessary, nor is it desirable” (DEFRA 2003:unpaginated).  This perspective had begun to change by 2008, when a  Cabinet Office Strategy Unit (Cabinet Office 2008) analysis of food issues argued that “existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more resource-constrained future”.  DEFRA’s ‘Food 2030’ report (DEFRA 2010b:7) set out its vision for the future of the nation’s food and farming in 2030 thus

• Consumers are informed, can choose and afford healthy, sustainable food. This demand is met by profitable, competitive, highly skilled and resilient farming, fishing and food businesses, supported by first class research and development.
  • Food is produced, processed, and distributed, to feed a growing global population in ways which:
    • use global natural resources sustainably
    • enable the continuing provision of the benefits and services a healthy natural environment provides
    • promote high standards of animal health and welfare
    • protect food safety
    • make a significant contribution to rural communities, and
    • allow us to show global leadership on food sustainability
  • Our food security is ensured through strong UK agriculture and food sectors and international trade links with EU and global partners, which support developing economies.

However, the gulf between the more localised food system of the 1950s, still with its roots in the ‘Dig for Victory’ culture of World War Two (Viljoen 2005, Kynaston 2007), (more intimately revealed in the oral histories featured in the following quotes, the first offering a sense of what a small proportion of food consumed was imported), and just-in-time, carbon intensive, long supply chain supermarkets (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002) remains profound.

“Looking back, practically all our food came from this area.  We had a couple of house pigs that ate the rubbish.  A local chap would come by, cut their throats and cut them up, and make bacon and hams.  We used to preserve it in saltpetre, the wives would make a salt solution and baste it every 2 days, then it was put up on hooks in the dairy to dry.  I still have the hooks out there now.  I suppose we might have had an orange on very special occasions.  Our main meal was lunch, not supper, if the husband worked at home.  Evening meals were a professionals’ thing.  Lunch was normally roast beef, mutton, hot or cold.  Hot or cold chicken, stews, potatoes and veg, peas and beans, potatoes baked or boiled.  We ate meat every day, hot or cold, depending on how the husband and wife were getting on! For tea we had bread and butter, jam and cream.  For breakfast it was bacon and eggs.  Supper was just a snack meal, bits and pieces of what you liked.  For fruit we had apples, pears and plums.  Apples could be kept all year round.  They were kept in a cellar under the house.  Certain kinds of pears could be kept.  We had greengages and plums; we usually made those into jams”.

Oral History Quote 5.1. A Local Diet in Staverton in the 1940s.  (Source: author’s oral history interview with Douglas Matthews).

The major trends in food of the past few decades include the intensification of agriculture, accompanied by a concentration in the control of agricultural inputs, and a trend to larger farm sizes with hired labour globally, accompanied by increasing fragmentation among marginalised smallholders (Wilson 2007, Eriksen 2008), and globally agriculture is coming up against the pressures arising from increasing demand as well as the stresses caused by soil degradation, over-fishing, water constraints and the increasing impacts of climate change (Godfray et al. 2010).  These have been accompanied by increasing concerns over the economic dominance of large corporate interests (Shiva 1998, Pollan 2007, Lawrence 2008) and increased energy use in agricultural systems and food processing (Matson et al. 1997, Pfeiffer 2006).

One study at Cornell University showed that in the mid-1990s the US used over 100 billion barrels of oil per year to manufacture food (Morgan 2008), and in the UK, the average distance travelled by food items is 5000 miles from field to plate (Pretty et al. 2005).  A study by Simil (1999) estimated that in the absence of nitrogen fertiliser, currently produced from natural gas and itself a resource with a depletion profile similar to that of oil (Darley 2004), no more than 48% of today’s population could be fed at the inadequate per capita level of 1900.  In the context of peak oil and climate change, the oil dependency of intensive agriculture is not sustainable, plus as Hirsch (2005) argued, the move from oil dependent systems to oil independent ones requires time, intentional design and focused effort.

In recent years farming has decreased in its perceived significance, and is no longer the dominant economic activity in the overall food system (Eriksen 2008).  The disconnect between communities and the source of their food has grown markedly.  As Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002:349) put it, “as people foster relationships with those who are no longer in their locale, distant others can structure the shape and use of the locale, a problem that is being explicitly rejected by those involved in local food system movements across the globe”.  As Morgan & Sonnino (2008:7) identified, “scientists and policymakers alike are beginning to realise that food systems hold the potential to deliver the wider objectives of sustainable development – economic development, democracy and environmental integration”.

For some, the concept of food relocalisation is central to notions of food security (Pothukuchi 2004), and also to the very notion of sustainability in relation to food. Terms such as ‘local food’, ‘food localisation’ and ‘relocalisation’ are used in the literature almost interchangeably.  For Peters et al. (2008:2) they all share the concept of “increasing reliance on foods produced near their point of consumption relative to the modern food system”.   For Seyfang (2008:5) defining local food is a straightforward matter: “localisation of food supply chains means simply that food should be consumed as close to the point of origin as possible”.  Kloppenburg (2000:18) argued that a sustainable food system embodies a deeper and more far-reaching transformation: “locally grown food, regional trading associations, locally owned processing, local currency, and local control over politics and regulation”, some of the themes explored later in this study.    The idea that food relocalisation will by necessity lead to more sustainable farming practices is also put forward by Renting et al. (2003:398) who believe that “a ‘shortening’ of relations between food production and locality, potentially [configures] a reembedding of farming towards more environmentally sustainable modes of production”.  For Feenstra (1997:28) “the development of a local sustainable food system not only provides economic gains for a community, but also fosters civic involvement, cooperation and healthy social relations”.  However, DuPuis and Goodman (2005:369) warned against what they called the “reification” of the local, arguing for the need to make localism “an open, process-based vision, rather than a fixed set of standards”.  The danger of local food becoming an exclusive, middle-class niche is, they argue, very real, a charge already levelled by some at organic food.  Former Minister David Miliband dismissed the health benefits of organic food and described it as a “lifestyle choice” (Jowitt 2010:unpaginated).

But what geographical and spatial form might a relocalised food system take?  Kloppenburg, drawing from the earlier concepts of the bioregional movement (i.e. Sale 1993) and Getz (1991) conceptualised the notion of a ‘foodshed’, defined by Peters et.al (2008:2) as “the geographic area from which a population derives its food supply”, and perceived these as hybrid social and natural constructs (Feagan 2007:26).  The foodshed is linked conceptually to the watershed.  Kloppenburg et al. (1996:34) stated “how better to grasp the shape and the unity of something as complex as a food system than to graphically imagine the flow of food into a particular place?”

For some, the foodshed concept has much to recommend it.  Starr et al. (2003:303) believed that “foodsheds embed the system in a moral economy attached to a particular community and place, just as watersheds reattach water systems to a natural ecology”.  At the time of writing, much of the literature about foodsheds is conceptual, little has been written that explores the actual practicalities and potential obstacles of such a degree of intentional relocalisation.  A report associated with the preparation of this study has been published (Hopkins et al. 2009), entitled “Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ which set out to explore the potential of the local landbase to support the local population.   This built on Mellanby’s (1975) initial study which asked the same question on a national scale, and Fairlie’s (2008) subsequent update.  It also takes, by way of answering the question of what form of agriculture would be most appropriate within these foodsheds, Tudge’s (2003:357) model for a localised, what he called ‘Enlightened’, agriculture:

“The general answer (by and large) is to give the best, most suitable land to pulses, cereals and tubers (that is, to arable farming); to fit horticulture in every spare pocket – and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort on it, and to invest capital for example in greenhouses; to allow the livestock to slot in as best it can …. in short, farms in general should be mixed: even the most committedly arable areas would in general benefit from at least some livestock, as all traditional farmers knew … the areas that are truly marginal – too high, too steep, too rocky, too dry, too wet – can be ideal for ruminants, notably sheep and cattle … some cereal and pulse can be grown expressly for livestock – but in general, only enough to keep them going through the winter, so they can make better use of the grazing in the summer”.

Tudge’s exhortation to “fit horticulture in every spare pocket – and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort on it, and to invest capital for example in greenhouses” was a fact of daily life in Totnes until 1980, with the presence of three working market gardens within the town, as described in Oral History Quote 5.2.

Gills Nursery was one of three market gardens in the town (Heath’s and Phillips being the others).  The nursery was run by Jack Gill until 1973, when his son Ken took over, who managed it until the nursery closed in 1981.  Running a series of glasshouses which were kept warm all year round required a lot of energy.  Initially they were heated using coke, which required 10 tons a year, but they later moved to the less labour intensive oil, necessitating the burning of 2000 gallons of oil a year in order to generate sufficient warmth.  The site behind the shop was not the only site Gills managed.  They also had a site on Harpers’ Hill, where they grew potatoes and sprouts, and one on North Street, where, Ken recalls, “we grew raspberries, in spite of it being north-facing, somehow it was warm enough for raspberries”.  Later they also acquired a 3½ acre site beside the bypass, which was used for field scale vegetable production.  The main nursery was kept fertilised with manure from their own pigs topped up with manure from a local farmer.   “We had no complaints with our fertility”, he told me, “one year we grew 20,000 lettuces”, an extraordinary output from a small piece of ground.  Running a market garden and a shop was hard work.  Ken Gill recalls working 12-14 hour days, seven days a week during the summer months, and David Heath describes his father’s choice of career as ‘bloody hard work’.  Unlike Heath’s, the closure of which was forced by retirement, Gill’s was driven to close by a less predictable challenge.  “A Highways engineer from Devon County Council came into one of the greenhouses one day, and told me and my father “you won’t be picking many more tomatoes here, we’re going to build a road through the place”.  Although the proposed road linking South Street and the newly built Heath’s Way was never built (part of the road building phase which saw Heath’s Nursery opened up), it created enough uncertainty, hanging in the air as a possibility for at least 10 years, that when Jack Gill died, it fell to his son, Ken, to decide whether or not to invest in modernising and expanding the Nursery.  Given the degree of uncertainty, he decided it would be unwise, and the nursery was slowly wound down.

Oral History Quote 5.2. Gills Nursery, an urban market garden in the centre of Totnes: (Source: author’s oral history interview with Ken Gill).

5.4.3. Empirical Modelling of Local Food Systems

Within the Transition movement, a few initiatives other than Totnes have made attempts at answering this question using a variety of approaches, such as Norwich (Transition Norwich 2009), Frome (Sustainable Frome 2009) and Stroud (Transition Stroud 2008), which in turn pick up on earlier work which explored the ability of different regions of the world to feed themselves under various future scenarios (Penning de Vries et al. 1995, WRR 1995).  What such studies have in common, argued Cowell & Parkinson (2003:223), is that they are “based on a belief that regional self-sufficiency of food production and consumption is more likely to increase the food security of individuals than a globalised food system”.  Food security, it is increasingly argued is decreased as the cheap oil that enables our current concept of food security becomes increasingly scarce or subject to volatile prices (Hopkins 2008, Heinberg & Bomford 2009).  The hypothesis explored here, and in the Totnes paper, was that, provided diets were changed to feature predominantly seasonal local produce, less meat, and more grains and pulses (as set out in Fairlie 2008), Totnes and district would be able to produce the bulk of its food requirements, while still being able to export some produce.  It is important here to make the point, as did Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002:361) that localisation does not refer to self sufficiency:  “These alternatives”, they wrote, “require a notion of community self-reliance, rather than either dependency or self-sufficiency”, which echoes the concept from resilience science of modularity (Walker and Salt 2006).  Tudge (2003:378) reinforced this point, arguing that self reliance ought to become a general principle for global agriculture:

“… it makes sense on all levels – ecological, nutritional, gastronomic, financial, social and strategic – for almost all countries in the world to become self-reliant in food.  Most are perfectly well able to do so.  ‘Self-reliance’ simply means that each country should strive to produce all the basic foods that it needs, so that it could feed its own people in a crisis, notably in times of political or economic blockade.  It stops short of total self-sufficiency, which implies that a country produces absolutely all of its own food, including the kinds that it cannot easily grow at home in open fields”.

Using GIS mapping technology developed by Geofutures in Bath, ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ defined its area of study as being the Totnes and District boundary as defined by the Market and Coastal Towns Initiative.  This boundary choice combines some useful and some arbitrary elements (see Figure 4.1.).  Aside from its northern boundary, it reflects the town’s original market town catchment, the boundary within which growers would choose Totnes as the market town of choice and convenience, reflecting Kloppenberg et al.’s (1996:34) earlier description of a foodshed as allowing one to “graphically imagine the flow of food into a particular place”.  In this regard, as a ‘foodshed’ it encapsulates the catchment from which the bulk of the town’s diet would have ‘flowed’ into Totnes town.

The northern boundary is that of SHDC so is an artificial political boundary.  The area was also the area boundary when Totnes was a Borough, which as Chapter 6 will explore, may yet prove to be a more suitable political model for relocalisation.  Although the Totnes and District boundary is not perfect as a foodshed, or as a bioregion, the fact that, in the main, it reflects the historical boundaries of a more localised market town catchment, makes it useful for this analysis.  The question of what is ‘local’ in a geographic sense, has been the subject of much debate.  Hinrichs (2003:6) observed that the ‘local’ is not neat or easy to define: “specific social or environmental relations do not always map predictably and consistently onto the spatial relation”.  For Feagan (2007:34), local food systems “must bear in mind with respect to spatially bound concepts like foodsheds, that the types of food grown, how it is grown, where it is grown, by whom and according to what sorts of cultural, social and economic needs are tied, in complex and somewhat indiscernible ways, to sociocultural factors at the macro economic and political levels”, which in turn links back to DuPuis & Goodman’s (2005) notion of ‘reflexive’ localism.  In the Totnes and district context, the study focused purely on the physical ability of the area to meet its food needs, without also looking at the other elements necessary to a reflexive localism, although this is not to dismiss their importance.

Figure 5.1. Food footprints of settlements in the South West of England with a population of over 800, note location of Totnes and district (Source: Hopkins et al. 2009)

The study analysed land use types, and current levels of productivity, from the most recent data available from DEFRA in 2004.  Initially it looked at Totnes in relation to other settlements with populations of over 800 in the South West, mapping their ‘food footprints’ and how these overlap (Figure 5.1.).  This process confirmed McCullum et al.’s (2005:278) observation that “food systems operate and interact at multiple levels, including community, municipal, regional, national and global”.  The overlaps in the case of Totnes were with the food footprint of Torbay from the east, and Plymouth from the west, highlighting how locations cannot conceptualise food security in isolation from their relationships with neighbouring settlements.

Figure 5.2. The Growing Communities Food Zone Diagram. (Brown 2009)

The paper then looked at the ‘food zones’ model developed by Julie Brown (Pinkerton & Hopkins 2009) at the Growing Communities project in London (Figure 5.3.), which attempted to define the percentages of food that a low carbon London might be able to produce for itself, how much it would need to import, and from what distances.  This ‘dartboard’ approach is stylised, but still gives some insights into what proportion of food production could be more locally produced. It raises the question of what percentage of imports might be feasible in a more localised model.  The Fife Diet initiative in Scotland[1] aims to support people eating a more local diet.  It promotes an 80% local diet, the remainder imported.  When asked where this ratio had come from, Fife Diet founder Mike Small replied:

“It was about saying we didn’t want the eat local movement to be a parochial retreat inwards because we believe that eating locally is an act of solidarity with the developing world in terms of climate change and climate justice. We wanted to show solidarity by buying stuff that we just couldn’t get here. We also wanted tactically to say to people “look this isn’t too scary – you can do this!” Of course people say they couldn’t give up things like bananas or chocolate or red wine. 80-20 make it seem less scary, that’s the thinking behind it” (Small 2009:pers.int).

Julie Brown of Growing Communities, who created Figure 5.2, also advocates an 80/20% ration (but as a UK produced/imported ratio), but is less clear about why that figure was chosen, emphasising the work-in-progress nature of this debate:

“Its a hypothesis, and it needs proving.  It’s an aspiration.  It feels right.  Broadly speaking, in terms of what we’re sourcing for our box schemes, which is all fruit and veg, that’s what we manage to do, but we’re playing around with that.  I am struggling with how we measure this” (Brown 2010:pers.int).

Figure 5.3. Composite Foodsheds for the four largest settlements in Totnes and District, showing how they do not accord with the ‘foodzones’ model (Source: Hopkins et al. 2009)

In the Totnes study, the findings of overlaying food demand on top of the available soil types are shown in Figures 5.3. and 5.4.  The conclusion drawn was that the area could feed itself in most of its key food needs, although not all on land immediately adjoining the town.  Some staples, such as lamb, would need to come from further afield, as appropriate soil types do not exist close to the town.  Questions were also raised about the need to also address changes in climate, the kind of diet that could be supported, and so on.  What was clear was that much of what is currently considered to be available ‘local food’ tends to be seasonal vegetables and high value speciality foods, while bulk carbohydrates, in particular wheat and other grains, are grown at a considerable distance from the area.

Figure 5.4. Foodsheds for the four largest settlements in Totnes and District, broken down into agricultural production types (Hopkins et al. 2009)

At this point the question arises as to how local is ‘local’ food?  Peters et al. (2008:2) argued that, in relation to food, ‘local’ refers to “the concept of increasing reliance on foods produced near their point of consumption relative to the modern food system”.  For Hinrichs (2003:34) it is “a banner under which people attempt to counteract trends of economic concentration, social disempowerment, and environmental degradation in the food and agricultural landscape”.  The question of what is ‘local’ in relation to the Totnes and district food system is clearly important to this discussion.  To what extent does peoples’ sense of ‘local’ overlap with the tentative ‘foodshed’ identified above?  The survey found that 40% felt that for food to be considered local it would need to have been produced within 10 miles of Totnes (see Table 5.2. below).

Oral history interviews conducted for this thesis showed that historically, the bulk of food consumed within the area would have been sourced from within the Totnes and district boundary, which is around 10 miles at its farthest from Totnes.  Val Price, one of the interviewees, recalled the first time she became aware of the idea that food was something that could actually come from further than the local area, when in the early 1950s she was asked to do a school project which involved collecting the paper sheets that oranges came wrapped in at that time and compile a list of where they had come from.  Until that point the idea had never occurred to her that food came from anywhere outside the local area.  Andy Langford relates (see Oral History Quote 5.3.) how much more the casual work then available on farms was a part of young peoples’ lives, especially during the summer.

Andy Langford recalled picking up lots of casual work on local farms from the age of 13 onwards.  In the late 1960s there were “lots of small family farms all over the place.  The average farm size would have been 30-40 acres, 120 acres would have been considered quite upper class sort of farming”.  Many of the farms were short of labour during the summer, especially during hay making and straw baling times.  His favourite was one at East Allington.  “We were out there a lot.  We used to go out there and the farm was pretty much run by the young people.  Andy Strutt was a classmate of mine.  He had 6 sisters, which was part of the attraction. Suddenly I found myself in charge of a little tractor moving around the farm picking up haybales with all these young women about and these big lunches and suppers where you could eat as many roast potatoes as you could get in yourself, that was very lovely.  We basically ran the place.  The children from Andy, 16, down to the rest of us, would man the potato harvester.  That’s what we did.  We’d go out there for the weekend and harvest however many tons of potatoes needed picking, take them, riddle them, sort them into this size and that size, then get in the Landrover and deliver them to the chip shop in Kingsbridge.  It was great”.

Oral History Quote 5.3. How local farms were a source of casual labour for the people of Totnes.  (Source: author’s oral history interview with Andy Langford).

So, what did the word ‘local’ mean for Totnes and district residents?  The findings in Table 5.2. would seem to support the usefulness of the Totnes and District boundary, in relation to the traditional food economy of the town.  60% of respondents felt that ‘local’ meant between 10 and 30 miles from the town, more embedded in the wider South Hams.

Number (%) Immediately adjoining the town 9 (4) As far as 10 miles 83 (40) As far as 30 miles 42 (20) As far as Plymouth 17 (8) Within the South West 45 (22) British produce 7 (3) Don’t know 5 (2) Total 208 (100) No answer given: 11

Table 5.2. “Within what distance of Totnes would meat or vegetables need to have been grown/produced for you to consider them “local”? (Source: author’s questionnaire 2009).

Figure 5.5. The Index of Food Relocalisation. (Source: Ricketts Hein 2006).

This echoes Padbury’s (2006) and IGD’s (2003) observation that UK consumers generally understand ‘local’ to be either within 30 miles, or within the same county.  The Totnes data could be interpreted as inferring that within the culture of the town, the fact that it still holds regular markets, and still has a strong commercial presence from local growers, means that people feel, on some level, situated within the kind of ‘foodshed’ that Kloppenburg et.al (1996) refer to (see above). The role of markets historically in Totnes was also explored in the oral history interviews (see Oral History Quote 5.4).  The continuing presence of a strong culture of the importance of local food is supported by the ‘Index of Food Relocalisation’ produced by Ricketts Hein et al. (2006) which found that Devon was the county in England and Wales with the most local food activity, and that the bulk of the activity was focused in the South West of England (see Figure 5.6.)

Ken Gill recalls how the Cattle Market was what brought farmers and their wives into the town, while the husbands traded, haggled and drank, the wives would go shopping, providing a vital boost for the town’s economy.  Although it created a certain degree of nuisance and put a huge strain on the town’s traffic infrastructure, the Cattle Market’s passing was, for some, a loss.  Ken Gill told me “once you took away the Market it wasn’t the same”.

Oral History Quote 5.4 Totnes Cattle Market: From the oral history interviews.

5.4.4. The Food Culture of Totnes

The concept of the intentional relocalisation of food in the way explored in ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ sits within a wider food culture which is arguably in crisis (i.e. Lawrence 2009).  Fewer people cook with fresh produce or have the time or income to source local produce.  So what is the current Totnes food culture?  In the survey, 97% of respondents stated that they ‘always’ or ‘often’ cooked the meals they ate at home using fresh produce”, but the question was unfortunately sufficiently vague as to not yield much of value.  43% of respondents stated that someone in their household grows some of the food that is consumed there, and 8% have an allotment, above the national average: a study by the University of Derby in 2006 showed a national average provision of 7 allotments per 1,000 population (Crouch & Rivers 2006).

The experience of shopping for food has clearly changed greatly over the past 60 years, as revealed in Oral History quote 5.5.  Respondents were also asked to rank their choices when they went food shopping.  The list of priorities was, in order of priority; good quality, local, low price, organic, fair trade and brand.  This emphasis on ‘local’ is borne out in Totnes High Street, where food retail shops are highly visible, often stressing the local provenance of some of their produce.  The third placing of ‘low price’ is reflected in the focus group on food, and the decisions families make on a daily basis. In Hinrichs’s (2002) study of the Kansas City Food Circle, the “unacknowledged privileged position of the group” (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002:365) was acknowledged, a charge, they state “that can be levelled at many alternative food movements” (ibid). So to what extent did participants find the local food available in Totnes accessible?

“I used to go to the grocers and I could sit down, lovely.  They’d go through your list and say, “yes, yes, we’ve some new whatever it is, would you like to taste some?”  You’d have a little snippet of cheese or something, “great, yes, we’ll have that”.  “Now we’ve got a tin of broken biscuits, but they’re not too bad (half price you see), would you like them?”  As soon as you put a biscuit in your mouth it’s broken isn’t it!  Then they’d say “now Mrs. Langford, you’re going to the butchers, yes, yes, and going to get some fish?  Yes, yes, and paraffin?  Yes, yes… and they used to say to me now bring any parcels in, we’ll put it in the box with your groceries and bring the lot up for you.  And they did.  They’d come and deliver and you’d go through it and say that’s fine and would you like a cup of tea….”

Oral History Quote 5.5. A trip to the shops in the 1950s. (Source: author’s oral history interview with Muriel Langford).

The focus group on food supported many of the survey findings, as well as uncovering many of the choices that people make in relation to food.  One participant, MW, a family counsellor, opted for supermarkets for most of her food shopping “for easiness and cheapness”, but claimed that “if I had more time, and even more money, then I would make the effort to buy local food.  I do believe it’s important, but I don’t think I can afford to do it to be honest, because I think money comes first”.  These findings are also supported by a study of Totnes food culture conducted in parallel to this research (Pir 2010) which found that “while Totnesians have a high level of awareness of environmental and food-related issues, this is not matched by their patterns of behaviour.  First, producers and consumers seem largely motivated or constrained by the costs involving the production or consumption of foods.  Secondly, the convenience of food, i.e. shopping, cooking and consumption, seems to be a priority for most consumers” (Pir 2010:92).

Taken together, this appears to back up Hinrichs and Kremer’s (2003:37) findings from Iowa, US, which showed that local food movement members tended to be “white, middle-class consumers and that the movement threatens to be socially homogenised and exclusionary” (DuPuis & Goodman 2005:362).  Follett (2009:49) warns that “alternative [food] networks can lead to myopic and exclusive decision-making that only benefit the most educated and elite members of society”.   The question of not having enough time is also picked up by Hendrickson & Heffernan (2002), who identify the advantages and disadvantages of the time issue:

“Time may indeed be one of the biggest barriers for alternatives, yet one of the greatest strengths.  Many alternatives do take more time, and thus are less attractive to people squeezed by work and family responsibilities, which has important class-based implications.  However, that becomes a reason alternatives are difficult to replicate by the dominant firms”.  (Hendrickson & Heffernan 2002:361)

Kollmus and Agyeman (2002) however, refuse to take arguments of ‘not enough time’ at face value. “What”, they ask, “are the underlying factors of ‘not having enough time’”?  There would appear to be a direct link between the requirement to establish alternatives and people with time available, and the predominance of middle class participants.  As Kollmus and Agyeman (2002:244) add, “people who have satisfied their personal needs are more likely to act ecologically because they have more resources (time, money, energy) to care about bigger, less personal social and pro-environmental issues”.

Another participant, an 18 year old female student, had a high level of understanding about organic food and local food due to working part time at a local organic farm, but her mother shopped for the family.  “When we go in (to the supermarket) I know what’s local as its lots of the same products where I work, and I point it out to Mum, but she says “that’s so expensive!””  When asked about their attitudes towards growing their own food, their responses supported the surprisingly high figure from the survey of those who claimed to be good at gardening.  66% had claimed to be either ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ at food growing.  An initial perception might be that growing fresh fruit and vegetables is a dying art, in spite of the recent revival in interest (Birchley 2009), but the Focus Groups reveal more complexity than whether people are ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ at it.   For example, both DO and MW live on the Follaton Estate, and DO told me “Mum’s got a little vegetable patch in the garden, and she grows them all year round.  So we eat all our own vegetables”.

MW was a newer convert to food growing.  Both families were inspired by a young couple of the estate who garden very visibly in front of their house.  MW was clearly impressed; “they both work and yet they still manage to provide endless amounts of vegetables”.  MW enthused about how she had taken to gardening.  “I got really silly about it, and took people to look at my little plot.  “Look at what I grew!”  But I think my daughter was impressed with it for about two weeks!  “Do you have to keep talking about courgettes mum?” Part of her excitement stemmed from a glimpse at what being more self reliant could be like.  She continued, “one day I came back down the motorway.  I hadn’t been shopping, and it was Sunday so the shops were closed, but I managed to make soup from my garden. I was really excited that it hadn’t cost me a penny, but I’d managed to make really nice soup.  I think that’s really important, the fact that you can sustain yourself if you really need to”.  She also found that it brought other qualities to her life.  “It’s very therapeutic.  In the summer, it’s really nice to go down there and I like looking at it and seeing what’s growing”.

For most people, growing some of their own food was just a fact of life and the landscape of the town reflected this.  Ian Slatter recalled his father’s passion for food growing, a passion he never himself came to share.  At the bottom of his garden were allotments, of which his father had two, as well as a large garden, similarly dedicated to food production, but focused on fruit, whereas the allotments grew vegetables.  Val Price remembers every garden in the street being used to grow food, mostly done by the men of the households.  “Dad grew all our food in our garden”, she told me.  “Potatoes, runner beans, beetroot, carrots, onions, raspberries and strawberries”.  Gardening was, she recalls, the main topic of conversation for the men of the street who would “stand around, leaning on their forks, and telling each other they were doing it all wrong”.  In the late 1960s, the need for productive gardens began to diminish, and the new generation began to see it as boring and unnecessary.  Andy Langford, whose father was a keen gardener, and who initially kept an allotment at Copland Meadow (now housing), and subsequently a very productive third of an acre home garden at the top of Barracks Hill, told me “we used to consider gardening to be something you did because he’d caught you!  My generation was the one that broke the link with gardening.  It was much more fun to take your bicycle to bits, put it back together again and go off racing around the countryside”.  Similarly Val Price recalls never being taught to garden, as gardening was “something Dads did”, and that by the early 60s it had become something that young people only did if they had to.

Oral History Quote 5.6. The Rise and Fall of Back Garden Food Production (Source: the author’s oral history interviews).

In terms of where both households learned the skills needed, there were several sources.  The first was the gardening couple on their street, followed by other neighbours, elderly relatives and the internet.  They found that their enthusiasm for gardening was contagious.  MW told me “it’s (food growing) gone along the street and across.. the people behind me…”.  It was interesting to observe that although she could grow things, she felt underequipped in terms of basic gardening skills, so although she could grow, so was reluctant to describe her skills as ‘good’. It is useful to compare this present-day culture of back garden food growing, and the figure of 66% of respondents believing they are ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ at growing food, with that of the 1950s when food growing was much more commonplace, as revealed in the oral histories in Oral History Quote 5.6.

One older participant in the focus group on work and skills, however, countered the enthusiasm for back garden food growing expressed above.  She told another member of the group who had expressed an interest in gardening, “I had your experience of planting vegetables, and it put me off completely.  As a child I spent a lot of time on my Dad’s allotment, I was born and brought up in cities, trying to grow things, but it put me off completely”.  The root of her disillusionment was twofold, firstly her lack of skills (“I felt it was my ignorance”) and secondly…. slugs.  “I catch them, with a torch, and then take them up to the Arboretum, but what a waste of time and effort, to try and grow a lettuce which is dead by the morning because the buggers came along and got it”.

Many ideas have emerged about how to make this relocalised model a reality through World Cafe events and the process of creating the Totnes and District EDAP.  One key driver of this has been the TTT Food Group, which has been in existence for over 3 years and draws together food activists from across the community.  An MPhil dissertation by Pir (2010) offered a qualitative study of the TTT Food Group, based on surveys and interviews. It acknowledged the diversity of initiatives that have been initiated and maintained by the group, which include:

• Garden Share, matching the owners of unused back gardens with keen gardenless gardeners (over 40 families now have access to growing land through the scheme)
• ‘Totnes: the nut tree capital of Britain’, a volunteer-led programme which plants nut and fruit trees at locations through the town.  At the time of writing, over 180 trees have been planted
• a gardening training course
• links with Dartington and Sharpham Estates, both of which are on the edge of the town
• Healthy Futures: aiming to engage people with chronic health problems in learning how to grow and cook food
• A proposed ‘Food Hub’, a community-owned initiative to make local food available to people at supermarket prices.

However, Pir concluded that “contributions for resilience building at this stage have a symbolic meaning, largely manifesting themselves in considerations or mindsets and not in attitudes and patterns of behaviour… the overall perception of the TTT Food Group has shown that it was best known for raising awareness” (Pir 2010:93).  He also noted that “even though the scale of practical manifestations seemed symbolic, they have been described by some to have had an important psychological effect on the local people”.  From personal experience, many of the longer term, farther reaching initiatives like the Food Hub project, take longer to bring about, and that, as suggested by Pir, much of the initial work of Transition takes place at a deeper level, building networks and momentum.  Pir’s statement that thus far, the TTT Food Group “has not been able to enthuse the average person” is however not borne out in the survey data relating to the wider impact of TTT, explored in Chapter 7.

The dangers associated with ‘unreflexive’ localism for Totnes and district, and whether the ‘foodshed’ approach set out in the ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ research could actually lead to some of the dangers outlined above deserves reflection.  As the focus groups revealed, at present, local food consumers in Totnes tend to be wealthier, middle-class people, often with more free time.  Given that Totnes and its surroundings already have a strong local food culture with many producers, and is one of the leading centres in the country for this, there is no obvious sign of Winter’s (2003) ‘defensive localism’.  On the contrary, its local food culture emerged in interviews as something that contributes to the town’s perceived ‘uniqueness’.  DuPuis and Goodman (2005:360) suggested that “there may also be a cost to alliances with local elites that stand to benefit from localisation”, and certainly the realisation/implementation of the foodshed model would necessitate engaging with large landowners and some of the potential risks DuPuis and Goodman suggest.  However, the positive and constructive engagement of the Sharpham and Dartington estates, stemming from a TTT event ‘Estates in Transition’ held in June 2007, suggests that such a ‘cost’ would be minimal.

Following an event in Totnes in May 2009 which introduced the ‘Can Totnes and district feed itself?’ report referred to above, a World Cafe session was held (the full notes from the session are in Appendix 3).  It began by inviting participants to list the elements of a local food system that are already in place, and then to suggest ways of increasing demand for local food.  Suggestions included a Food Hub, a local food festival, local authority and school local food procurement, more education and the less constructive suggestion “burn supermarkets”!  Asked to list elements that could help, suggestions included training and support, enabling more people to have access to land, and “economic hardship”.   Finally, the groups were asked to think of some future events.  Suggestions included “2020 – slugs in Totnes become extinct”, “2014, allotments for all!”, “2020: local food production soars” and “2015: school certification for all in food growing and cooking”.  Some of the more useful information fed into the Totnes EDAP which was, at that point, being edited.

In terms of the views of SHDC with regard to its role in this area, interviewee Alan Robinson argued that they do not see themselves as being able to do much to support the relocalisation of food.  “Apart from an enabling role where we can, I’m not sure where we’d actually plug in.  We’d never be able to say we’ll only procure our sandwiches from somebody who’s actually growing stuff only a hundred yards away in Totnes.  I know that’s a silly example but I’m not sure we can ever define it quite that tightly”.

References:

Brown, J. (2009) The Growing Communities Food Zone Diagram.  Unpublished.

Brown, J. (2010) Personal interview.

Cowell, S.J, Parkinson, S. (2003) Localisation of UK Food Production and an Analysis Using Land Area and Energy as Indicators. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 94. 221-236.

Crouch, D, Rivers, P. (2006) Urban Research Summary No. 23.  Survey of Allotments, Community Gardens and City Farms. Department of Community and Local Government.

Fairlie, S. (2007) Can Britain feed itself? The Land 4 (Winter 2007-08)

Feagan, R. (2007) The place of food: mapping out the ‘local’ in local food systems. Progress in Human Geography 31 (1) 23-42

Hendrickson, M, Heffernan, W.D. (2002) Opening Spaces Through Relocalisation: locating potential resistance in the weaknesses of the global food system. Sociologica Ruralis 42.

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Hinrichs, C.C. (2003) The practice and politics of food system localisation. Journal of Rural Studies. 19:33-45

Hopkins, R, Thurstain Goodwin, M, Fairlie, S. (2009) Can Totnes and District Feed Itself? Exploring the practicalities of food relocalisation. Working Paper Version 1.0. Transition Town Totnes/Transition Network.

Hopkins, R. (2008) The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience. Green Books, Dartington.

IGD (2003) Local food comes from our country, say consumers. Press release 1 May 2003.  www.igd.com.

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McCullum, C, Desjardins, E, Kraak, V.I, Ladipo, P, Costello, H. (2005)  Evidence-based strategies to build community food security. Journal of American Dietetic Association 105 (2) 278-83.

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Penning de Vries, F.W.T, van Keulen, H, Rabbinge, R.  (1995) Natural Resources and Limits of Food Production in 2040.  In: Bouma, J, Kuyvenhoven, A, Bouman, B.A.M., Luyten, J.C, Zandstra, H.G. (eds) Eco-regional approaches for sustainable land use and food production. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Utrecht.

Pinkerton, T, Hopkins, R. (2009) Local Food: how to make it happen in your community. Transition Books/Green Books.

Pir, A. (2009) In Search of a Resilient Food System: A Qualitative Study of the Transition Town Totnes Food Group.  Dissertation for MPhil in Culture, Environment and Sustainability. Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo.

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Transition Stroud (2008) Food Availability in Stroud District: considered in the context of climate change and peak oil. For the Local Strategic Partnership Think Tank on Global Change.  16th December 2008.

Tudge, C. (2004) So Shall We Reap: What’s Gone Wrong with the World’s Food – and How to Fix it. Penguin.

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Winter, M. (2003) Embeddedness, the new food economy and defensive localism. Journal of Rural Studies.  19 (1) 23-32

WRR (1995)  Sustained Risks: a lasting phenomenon. Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR).  The Hague.

[1] www.fifediet.co.uk

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