Transition Culture - Rob Hopkins

[Here's a great story from Portugal. My thanks to Isabel and Luis for sending it in]. Hello everyone.We are Isabel and Luis, from Cascais, in Portugal. We have lived here (in Cascais) for the last 15 years, with the blue sea and fabulous sand beaches nearby, on one way and amazing mountain sides on the other, sensing the earth and the sea

watching beautiful sunrises and sunsets (more sunsets now than sunrises, since our recent embraced work tends to keep us awake till late hours)…

and live with the constant presence of our history,

feel the life in the community and taking part in it,

… and watching how climate change is taking its toll with some hot waves in the Summer (2003 was indeed the worst, but some others have already followed) and the sea leaving some of the beaches without much of the sand in the Winter (like in 2010).

Well, as we were saying,… we were thinking how sustainable our lives should be to keep being as good as they have been until then, and so that our two children (with six and three years old) could keep on growing with at least the same chances of having a good and safe future as we did back in the time when we were growing up.

By April of 2010 we knew that our municipality was starting a community garden program and we applied ourselves to it. On July 2011, we were called up to start the program formation on organic farming and we haven’t stopped gardening our vegetables since then.

In fact we have quite a group there, with some good friendships developing and lots of celebrations to bless our crops.

Meanwhile, about that same time, I (Isabel) came in contact with the Portuguese permaculture and transition groups over the Internet… and I found a new world that looked like it was just there waiting to be found!… For years I had been searching for such kind of knowledge and practical information and… there it was!…

On September 17th and 18th took place the Transition Initiative Course in Sintra, but although an attractive theme, it was still just an idea for me.

On November of 2011 I took notice of a meeting of the local (Cascais) Transition Initiative and I knew I had to come. Until then I had never left what I thought was my comfort zone. And then… I found Transition. After that meeting, Transition grew on me.

On early January of 2012, this time with Luis and the kids coming along, we went to another group meeting, where the core group assumed the disintegration of the existing Initiative.

Later on that month, after some thoughtful consideration, we (Luis and I) looked at each other and… as Rob says “if there is no Transition Initiative in your town, start your own” and so… We did!

From late January we started “Cascais em Transio” group on Facebook, we picked up the existing blog (from the previous group), and on early February we went to the Lisbon Initiatives Meeting and were invited to be on the National HUG (HUB) Meeting, the day after. It was so good meeting all of those whom became our Transition companions and they gave us such levels of inspiration and strength to go on with our new mission in Cascais!… We returned home with our hearts full of joy and motivation to carry on our work.

In the beginning of March we saw our Initiative group grow to six members and on March 23^th and 24^th we, Luis and I, did the Initiative Training Course in Linda-a-Velha.

In early April we, on behalf of the Cascais em Transio Initiative, presented a proposal to the Cascais Municipality Budget 2012, a program started in 2011 by the Local Government to motivate local residents to have a more active citizenship, to participate in the local decisions and have a saying on how the local funds are spent. This year we presented a proposal and it was approved after being initially voted in the first presenting session!

Here is Luis presenting the proposal (and you can see the satisfaction on his face, once we knew it had been approved).

What we are trying to do with this proposal is to pass a vote on a decision to convert a local urban park and to create renewable energy infrastructures on the existing buildings and others like community gardens and community composting area, community wood ovens, cycling school, and a place or building where we can start some sensibilization and capacitation activities.

Now the proposal will be technically evaluated by the municipality budget department and after that it will be voted through the internet by the resident constituents. We shall know the final results in October. By that time we also concluded we needed a Logo and we needed it fast if we wanted to have an image that presented ourselves to the outside as a Transition group. And this is what we came out with:

Still, on 17^th of March 2012 we were invited by the organization of ‘MUSA CASCAIS Festival to join them on a tree plantation campaign to neutralize the carbon footprint of the Festival. It was quite a group of people gathered in this cause.

Here is Miguel and Sofia planting their first cork oak trees with mum and dad.

And here is our Mayor, Carlos Carreiras, carrying the oak trees up the hill. He turned to be quite a dedicated man. On that day he said that he wanted to plant one tree for each newborn child in Cascais while he was in office. Since that number had already been exceeded (65.000), he set a new goal: to plant one tree for each resident. We are 268.000.

On the May 5^th we invited all of Transition Initiatives of the Lisbon Area to join us in celebration for the national (and simultaneous) exhibition of the In Transition 2.0 film. It took place in the Cascais Cultural Center and it was followed by a picnic in the park where we all gathered afterwards and talked about it, exchanging experiences, expectations and points of view about what we had seen. It had a good audience, with lots of friends from other Transition Initiatives, and not only from Lisbon, which left us grateful for their presence and for the outcome.

Now, about our most recent adventure on behalf of our Transition Initiative

After planting some trees to help to neutralize the carbon footprint of the MUSA Cascais Festival, and since MUSA Cascais is and has been from 2006 onwards strongly advocating in favor of sustainability, and of an active response to global warming and climate change its tag is Preocupas-te? or Do You Care? this year, we decided to propose to the organization of this Festival to land us a place or a stand in the grounds of the event, where we could promote Transition and demonstrate its practices.

When we met, instead of discussing the conditions or accepting our request, they proposed to us to go a little bit further in our ambitions and asked us to speak to our national HUG to know if, as a growing civic movement, we would be interested in turning MUSA Cascais into a wide and transversal Transition Festival.

In such short notice, this year, with the help of the other portuguese local Initiatives we will all be able to raise a stand representative of the Portuguese Transition, capable of a good deal of promotion and demonstration of our Transition standards in this Music Festival. Next year, with time, preparation and due efforts, we hope we will be able to share with the world our first Transition Festival. This is the current lineup of this year MUSA Cascais Festival and it is not closed yet.

What can we say That good chances only unveil to those who stand with open heart and mind to what life can accept of them.

A big HUG from Portugal

Isabel and Luis Gonalves

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Fri, 18 May 2012 11:59:16 | 2 Comments

I posted the video of this a couple of weeks ago, but I am deeply grateful to Vanessa Kroll who has transcribed it, in case such a thing would be of interest/use to anyone. Here it is:

“Hello. I want to tell you a story which pulls together a lot of what weve heard already and looks at what that might look like in the context of one place. And its a story which I think can change the world. Its a story which already is changing the world. Its the story of my town, Totnes, in Devon. A town of about 8,500 people, midway between Exeter and Plymouth. But before I can tell you the story what I really want to tell you about Totnes, I have to get another one out of the way first.

Totnes was once referred to as the Capital of New Age Chic, thats chic not sheep. The idea of a Capital of New Age Sheep is too horrible to imagine. The Western Morning News, the local paper, in an article which Ill be coming back to later, once referred to the average resident of Totnes as a sandal wearing, crystal gazing soap carver subsisting entirely on brown rice and organic parsnips. And Matt Harvey, our local poet, says that when youve lived there too long your body starts to secrete a hormone called ‘Totnesterone’, where your masculine and feminine come into perfect balance with each other.

But I think its really important that we move beyond the stereotypes of the town into another story that is happening there, which I think is really, really important. Totnes has a much higher than the national average number of families depending on part time work rather than full time work, has 50% more families living below 20,000 a year than the national average, very high house prices, and has seen most of its industry, most of its employment shut down over the last 15-20 years. The bacon factory, the milk factory, the art college, to a point where local businessman and historian Walter King talks about whether what were seeing is the long, slow death of Totnes as a living working town, gathering pace. And its that story, that context that I really want to talk about.

My role in this, I suppose started in 2005 when a friend and myself started showing some films about peak oil, about the idea that we are reaching the end of an age of cheap energy and all that that has made possible. Were entering a time of increasingly volatile energy prices and that what we need to do with focus, determination, optimism and a sense of possibility is design the way that were going to get away from that. Same in terms of addressing climate change. (Points to slide) Its the very first talk that I gave in the town and its a story that has really started to build from that point because ultimately there is no cavalry coming to the rescue of places like Totnes, of most places where you live.

The current economic situation, these kind of issues around peak oil and climate change, what we really need to do, I would argue, is to harness, engage the collective genius of the people around us and focus on these challenges, seeing them as an enormous opportunity to be more brilliant than weve ever been, to do something which is really, really historic. What I want to do is show you a very short little animation from the film that weve just released which is called In Transition 2.0 which hopefully captures rather creatively how transition approaches making change happen on the ground.

[Audio from video clip] You can think of the economy of the place that you live as being like a big bucket and into that bucket go pensions, wages, grants and so on, but at the moment things like supermarkets, paying our electricity bills, internet shopping are all drilling holes into that bucket that means that our accumulated wealth and its potential are just draining away. And everywhere that theres a leak in that bucket is a potential local livelihood, potential local business or a training opportunity for young people. So things like supporting community energy companies, supporting local food where its available and boosting that where it is and using local currency are all very skilful ways of plugging the leaks in that bucket.

So from quite early on of doing Transition Town Totnes as it started to be known, we had a big event called The Unleashing which was our launch event and from very early on, very quickly projects started going, people were excited, they were inspired, they wanted to see thing happen where they were. There were projects like the nut tree planting scheme where we wanted to plant productive trees throughout the town. There are now 250 planted, looked after by people who are close to them. A lot of local businesses paid to have them planted. And we had our first harvest of almonds from a park in town last autumn.

The Totnes Pound, the local currency scheme, specifically designed not to fit out through those holes in the bucket because if we take them anywhere else theyre not worth anything. You cant use local currency, you cant put it in offshore banking accounts, theyre not very useful in the Cayman Islands! A Local Food Directory so people can identify and support local food businesses. A co-housing group looking to build affordable co-housing for people as part of the local development. Awareness raising things like Open Eco-Homes, Open Edible Gardens where people can go and visit other peoples places where theyre already doing that stuff and learn from it. The Garden Share scheme where people who have a garden that theyre too elderly or too busy to use, are matched with people who want to grow food and dont have anywhere to grow it. And thats been going really really well.

In 2009, when this had been going for about 3 years, we did a survey and we found that 75% of people in the town had heard of what we were doing, 62 % of people agreed with it, thought it was a good idea, and about 30-33% had had some kind of engagement with it at some point. But stories started to reach us of how it was being picked up in other places. And my favourite was the daughter of a woman who is very active in the local churches went on holiday to Canada, a canoeing holiday. She was out in the middle of one of the great lakes, canoeing along, middle of nowhere, sees another canoe thinks Ill be sociable, Id better go over and say hello, paddles over, gets chatting Where are you from? Totnes. Oh, Transition Town Totnes? And its amazing how that story has rippled out.

But very quickly we needed to put some foundations under this, this was something that was starting to grow very very quickly and it had a lot of interest, both within the place and from outside people coming along and saying What do you do?, How does that work?. So Transition Town Totnes was set up as an organisation to offer project support, its a do-ocracy. The people who make the decisions are the people who are doing stuff. It employs one and a half posts at the moment, and has brought in, I reckon, about one million pounds to the town over the last five years, and has rapidly become one of the pillars locally of local culture I think.

When we started doing Transition I was always imagined it was an environmental thing. More and more I see it as being a cultural thing, really more and more I see it as being a cultural thing. How do you change the story of the place where you are? And within that theres a whole process of we can start lots of different projects but what does it look like if we start to see them all together? If we can create a vision, if we can create a story that the people in the place can start to resonate with, it starts to make sense.

And weve done 2 things that have been really sort of strategic pieces around design. One of them was the Energy Descent Action Plan which you can find online, which involved many hundreds of people in trying to envision what the place could be like if we take peak oil, climate change, our economic situation as a huge opportunity to be brilliant. And the other one is called the Economic Blueprint that were doing at the moment which is actually now the local councils Economic Blueprint.

Whats exciting with that is that for the first time that Im aware of its starting to map the potential of the local economy. What passes through it and how could we start to cycle that more locally if we can start to plug some of the leaks? So what are the initial findings for example? Every year the area spends 30 million on food. 20 million of that goes out through just 2 supermarkets. If we could start to shift just 10% of that spent to local food, weve brought 2 million into our local economy. We havent had to get government grants in, we havent had to invite big companies in, weve got 2 million in our economy for creating skills, trainings, new livelihoods and new enterprises. That feels like, to me, like a really big, really important idea of our time.

And one of the projects we did a couple of years ago which I think is really really interesting, this is after starting an organisation focussed on community responses to peak oil and climate change, is this thing called Transition Streets. Transition Streets is based on the idea that maybe change sticks better if you get together with your neighbours and it works on a street by street level. So you get out on your street, you knock on the doors, you get between 6 and 10 people/households together and you agree to meet 7 times in each others houses.

You look at water one week, energy another week, food another week and you make pledges at the end of each session about what youre going to do. And on average each household that gets involved cuts their carbon by about 1.3 tonnes and saves themselves about 600. 500 households have done this now. That becomes a very significant reduction towards the towns emissions. But when I meet people in the street whove done it, they dont say: Oh, its great Rob, we did Transition Streets, we saved 1.3 tonnes of carbon, were feeling really pleased with ourselves. So great, we really feel were doing our bit. What they say is: its great, I now know Sandra over the road, Dave over the road, you know were doing this thing, I didnt know him, hes such an interesting guy, he does this and he knows all of this and hes shown me how to do that. And all that social side of it is what comes to the fore.

When we asked people in a report at the end that pulled together all the learnings from it why did you get involved in Transition Streets?, the key answer was because I wanted to know my neighbours better. And when we asked them What were the key benefits you feel that you got out of being involved in that? and we turned it into one of those clever Word Cloud things, Community, neighbours, getting to know. Climate change doesnt even register, peak, a tiny little word in the bottom corner, which for me is really really fascinating, that maybe in terms of making change happen, there is a different way of doing it which is about something which is kind of infectious and sort of viral and fun and contagious in that way. Im using lots of disease analogies and Im not trying to but they seem to be coming to my mind quickly!

And what were really focussing on now increasingly is about how do we make a new economy a reality in the town? If the cavalry arent coming, how do we do that? What does it look like if we start to put that in place? So things are now happening like the Totnes Renewable Energy Society, which now has 500 members and is about to put in for planning for 2 wind turbines on the edge of the town.

Transition Tours, which is about turning the many people who come to Totnes to find out about TTT, put on a really good experience for them in such a way that means we dont kind of drown in it. Transition Homes which is a development looking to build 20 affordable houses but using predominantly local materials, because in the same way when we talk about food, localising food brings more money cycling into our economy, exactly the same thing works for building materials.

Were seeing businesses starting to emerge through the kind of culture thats been created of saying we need new enterprises for this, whos up for that?. We recently held a thing called the Local Entrepreneur Forum, where we brought together people with business ideas in the town, about 40 people who had great ideas for different enterprises with local potential investors and mentors to really try and kick start what this new economy could look like. We have a micro brewery project which is in the offing, The Kitchen Table which is really about catering but trying to catalyze lots of other things around local food as well.

Its looking for businesses which have a number of criteria, that theyre about:

• promoting local resilience
• that theyre low carbon
• that they are not just purely for personal profit
• that they are working within natural limits
• promoting localisation, and
• that theyre about bringing assets into the local community.

Im really glad I remembered all 6 of those, because lots of people talked about their anxiety dreams in advance. My anxiety dream before TED was that DeLaSoul came round to my house to stay for the night, the 80s rap trio, and I couldnt find enough bedding for them. And so the fact that Ive remembered all those things is great, Ive broken through that barrier, thats fantastic!

And when I was preparing this talk I asked various people What were their highlights of being around this process for the last 5 or 6 years? One person said it was the event at the end of Transition Streets where we showed a film called Start something together which you can find on YouTube, which documents that process. All the people from all the different Transition Streets came together to the Civic Hall and had a big kind of celebration. She said that she was almost moved to tears by the energy that that had created. Another friend of mine who organised a hustings event in the run up to the election where we invited all the local candidates rather than just having them sit there answer questions, we talked about this, about the kind of economy we wanted to create for the place, and then asked them how are you going to support that, how are you going to help that into being?

My personal highlight was this headline from the Western Morning News, the lead editorial no less, which contained this sentence: In an interesting twist to the climate change debate, communities and individuals once seen as quaintly idiosyncratic for their way out views, have now become mainstream and may yet provide some of the answers to the biggest questions we all face.

One day a German guy came, about 2 years ago, into the office of TTT. He said: I have come all the way from Germany to see the famous Transition Town Totnes and you still have cars! Well, you might like to temper your expectations a little bit you know! But its really interesting reflect over the last 5 years about how this has spread. And the best kind of analogy that I can come up with is like mycorrhiza, an incredibly fine fungus, one of the main things which gives forests their resilience, it gives soil their resilience. If I had an inch cube of mycorrhiza-rich soil here it would contain 10 miles of mycorrhiza. And what it does, its like a neural network between all the different parts of it that enable it to spread excess nutrients around, communicate risk, communicate disease or threats to it and so on, its an extraordinary thing.

In a sense Transition is a bit like inoculating a community with something like that in that it runs and so our German friend who came he was looking for all the fruits, but a lot of what it does, it runs under the surface, it fruits where you expect, but it also fruits where you dont expect. Research that we did showed that for example when Transition Streets had only just started, it hadnt had any publicity or anything, we did a focus group completely on the other side of town and a woman talked about the first place where we had a pilot going on and said its great over there, its like the war, theyre like a village, they have street parties and everything. That sense had started to percolate through. One local councillor I talked to said: the best thing TTT has done is bring people together.

If it had just been something that happened in Totnes, that wouldnt really have been that much use, but actually what happened is something has germinated there, has spread and spread and spread. There are now Transition initiatives in 34 countries, thousands of initiatives places all of this in their own context, whether it be Brazil or Barcelona, Bologna or Brixton, and using it to create their own banks, their own energy companies, their own food systems and so on. Its an exhilarating thing to see and observe the spread of.

Its a story which is able to bring 300 people from the town out about 2 weeks ago down onto the former derelict industrial site in the town for a big photograph to launch a campaign about bringing this site, which used to employ 163 people back into community ownership. To develop it as a catalyst for a Transition economy for the town, what we call the Atmos project.

Its a story which is really about communities seeing community resilience as where their economic future lies. And Jay Tompt who works with us, wrote a beautiful blog about it which contained this sentence I wanted to read to you:

There is plenty to keep and our children busy for a long time to come, the important thing is that weve begun, we know that were the ones weve been waiting for, so were just doing it, we dont need the cavalry, were already here”.

So this has really been a process about ordinary people and a process that has dirt under its fingernails and has seen the opportunity this time around, its a really really exhilarating thing to be part of. I just want to finish with one of my favourite quotes which is from my childrens favourite story book which is Comet in Moominland, written in 1946 by Tove Jansson. I think captures what the essence of Transition more than any academic paper on the subject I ever heard or Ive ever written about it.

It was a funny little path winding here and there, dashing off in different directions, sometimes even tying a knot in itself from sheer joy. You dont get tired of a path like that and Im not sure that it doesnt get you home quicker in the end.

Thank you very much.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Thu, 17 May 2012 17:24:44 | 0 Comments

Here is some updated information on the Festival of Transition:

The nationwide Festival of Transition, coordinated by nef (the new economics foundation) and the Transition Network, has begun, running until 20thJune, the first day of the 20th UN Earth Summit in Rio. Instead of flying to Brazil, the Festival gives people the opportunity to do something positive about climate change and the economic crisis in their own communities.

The Festival is a unique mixture of walks, talks and a DIY day of action on 20th June. It combines a series of organised events at festivals, museums and institutions around the country with an open invitation to schools, workplaces and community groups to stage their own real-life experiments in living differently on 20th June. Full details of Festival events can be found athttp://www.festivaloftransition.net.

The What if? events include:

• 19^th/20^thMay (this weekend!) at the Bristol Festival of Ideas: What if we left the oil in the ground? with author James Marriot and What if we could create money as well as the banks? with nef and the newly launched Bristol Pound
• 30^thMay at the Hay Festival: What if we turned back the climate clock? with poet Lemn Sissay and Greenpeace chief executive John Sauven and What if cities produced our food? in association with the Soil Association

• 6^thJune at the Royal College of Art: What if creatives redesigned economics? with nef and Occupy Design
• 13^thJune at the Museum of East Anglian Life: What if.. the sea keeps rising?
• 14^thJune at Manchester Museum: What if Manchester was as sustainable as Havana?

The Transition Walks include:

• 22^ndMay: In the shadow of the City: A walk through the history of the Corporation, with author Nick Robins
• 23^rdMay: On London’s Oil Road: A journey to the heart of the energy economy, in association with Platform London

Community groups and Transition initiatives have already started pledging to stage 24-hour experiments in living differently on 20th June via the Festival website. Does your Transition initiative have any plans to do anything?

Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation said:

This summer thousands of people will fly to Brazil to wait and watch as politicians struggle to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, hoping for action to meet the scale of the climate crisis. International political action is vital, but weve moved beyond leaving it all to big, global conferences. People are impatient and want to take action themselves. The Festival of Transition is an opportunity to question, taste, and experiment with living better within life-preserving environmental limits. We believe that once people take a first step, theyll want to keep on walking.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Thu, 17 May 2012 08:40:50 | 0 Comments

What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century? While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site. However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it). The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself. As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “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”.

I often use the analogy, in terms of food, of a cake. Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it. What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing. In the same way that for food we need to urgently reverse this, for many reasons that will be only too familiar to regular readers of this blog, the same can be argued for building materials.

In the case of these alms houses in Sherborne, it literally wasthe building’s ‘icing’ that caused the difficulties. With about 30% of UK road freight now due to the movement of construction materials, many of which already have a high level of embodied energy, I’d like to argue here that we need to think about construction in the same way we are starting to think about food, specifically in the context of the Atmos Project, a community initiative I am involved in in Totnes.

Historically, as well as being the only option people had, the use of local materials also led to the evolution of vernacular styles of building, so that each region had its own distinct styles of building, rooted in materials, culture and tradition. As John and Jane Penoyre note in ‘Houses in the Landscape’ “in these simple buildings the available materials are the principal dictators of style”. Mark Gorgolewski writes in The Green Building Bible:

“… as materials closer to their natural state will tend to have had less processing, which often means less energy use, less waste and less pollution. Local materials can reduce the need for transport and benefits the local economy and community”.

Christopher Day writes that “local materials minimise transport energy, suit local climate, support local employment and society and reinforce locality identity, anchoring buildings into local culture … so roundwood instead of sawn, adobe or brick instead of concrete”. As well as having far less embodied energy due to requiring so little transportation, they also often have far less embodied energy in their manufacturre, as the graph below showing overall CO2 emissions by weight [kg] released by production of 1 kg of twenty-four common building materialsdemonstrates (source). Note that those materials on the right hand side actually lock up more carbon than they emit (depending on how far they are transported of course, a strawbale house in the UK built with Turkish bales would clearly not qualify):

Then there’s also the aesthetics. The other day I was in Marlborough in Wiltshire, and took a walk around the town. It is easy to be nostalgic about old buildings, and to assume that they are so characterful and attractive simply because they are old. I would argue that the ambience that comes through in some of the photos below has more to do with the materials than with the age of the building.

The combination of brick, timber and cobbles is far more attractive than just one single material.

Clay wall tiles that were fired in kilns with variable temperatures produced tiles of a range of colours, from black to orange, which gives the tiled surface much more richness.

This timber frame house is a beautiful example of how the materials available locally dictated the design of the building and its character.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the use of natural and local building materials in recent years. Cob building, strawbale, lime plasters, roundwood timber, hemp, clay plasters, have all experienced a renewal of energy, but are still almost only ever used in self build projects, and have yet to cross over into mainstream construction. Yet, as Gill Seyfang points out, they are still very much in a niche and what is needed isscaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production. She argues for the natural/local building niche adapting itself to resemble the regime. Key to that will be scale.

Of course, running alongside the discussions about materials is the need to create truly low carbon buildings, in their construction, their inhabitation and eventual demolition/recycling. The Larch and Lime houses built recently in Ebbw Vale are passivhauses (Larch House right), that is they are built in such a way as to require no space heating. When I talked to the architect behind them, Justin Bere, he told me that most of the materials were local (stone, slate, locally made Rockwool etc) but hadn’t veered too far into the world of very local and natural materials. Part of the reason for that is that for the kind of accurate modelling needed for passivhaus certification, data for many of these materials doesn’t yet exist. I would argue that this is a pressingly urgent area for new research.

Enter the Atmos Project. For the past couple of months, as well as my Transition Network stuff, I have been working a day a week on the Atmos Totnes campaign. Atmos has been running for the past 5 years, since Dairy Crest closed their 8 acre site next to Totnes station, and since when it has sat and become more and more of an eyesore (you can read the story so far here). The Atmos Project, as it became known, due to it being home to a building built to house Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s experimental ‘atmospheric railway’, has sought to bring the site into community ownership to develop it as a catalyst for new businesses in the town and as a demonstration of Transition in action.

The initiative did a lot of work, raised bits of funding to do design work, business planning and so on, but seemed to be getting nowhere due to the site’s owners’ unwillingness to engage seriously with the community. So a couple of months ago we started a campaign, aimed to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the site’s owners. We gathered voices from around the community, got a lot of media exposure, got people in the town out for a big photo opportunity and for a public meeting, and a couple of weeks ago, had a very positive meeting with Dairy Crest, and all of a sudden the project is moving forward with an energy that is a delight to see.

The tagline for the campaign has been ‘the heart of a new economy’, and it is seen as a development that in all that it does is focused on skills, training, the creation of new businesses and the boosting of the local economy. It is of a scale where it can do some very exciting things in terms of construction. One of the founding ideas is that the place that the development starts its very first question, is what are the local materials that we have to hand? In the same way that I always used to teach on permaculture courses that the question should be “I’m going to cook a meal, what’s in the garden”, rather than “what’s in the fridge?”, that same principle could and should apply to building materials.

So, as the first part of the design process, and as part of what will form a key part of the brief for whoever ends up being the project’s architect, will be a list of the local materials available to such a project in Totnes. We have commissioned a specialist in this to draw this up, including the places locally where they would be sourced. My initial list off the top of my head is:

Timber: for construction grade timber, internal studwork, window and door frames, roofing shingles, laths, panelling, flooring, wattles, wood fibre insulation.

Clay: for rammed earth construction, cob walling, daubs, clay plasters, cob bricks, clay paints

Hemp: for use in hemp/lime construction, to make insulation, for hemp/lime or hemp/clay plasters and bricks

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

Reed: for thatching roofs, and also to make reedboards, an alternative to plasterboard

Lime: for plasters, mortars, renders, as well as in construction systems such as hemp/lime

Straw: baled, and used in straw bale building, chopped as an ingredient in plasters

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

Recycled Materials: newspaper processed as an insulation product, car tyres, recycled bricks

It used to be that when a cathedral was built, a temporary village was built around it, with a stone masons’ quarter, a timber framers’ quarter and so on. On the scale of something like the Atmos project, it may well be possible to do something very similar, processing the timber needed on site, making cob blocks, even hand-making tiles for external cladding. If done skilfully enough, integrating training and apprenticeships, it could be a vitally needed new approach to development, especially when combined with the potential for the community to invest into the development.

Panels at Charing Cross tube station in London showing the various trades associated with the construction of Charing Cross in the late 1200s.

A development that from the outset seeks to source it’s metaphorical cake locally. As the Euro crisis continues to unravel at a pace, as the academics are telling us that the only thing that will halt climate change is a massive economic downturn, or at least a huge rethink about how we make economic activity happen, we need a new approach to development.

Work in progress: Cob walls, hemp plaster on the walls, clay plaster onto lath on the ceiling, local timber window frames...

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion? I think so. I think the time is right for that, and that’s what we want to do with Atmos. Watch this space.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Wed, 16 May 2012 08:37:56 | 1 Comments

One of the key outputs from the creation of ‘The Transition Companion’ was the ingredients card gamewhich was launched last October. Each card represents a different ingredient, a different aspect of the process of creating Transition in your community. We have had good feedback from different events where people have used them, and so I was very interested to see this short film of their being used at Transition Town Cheltenham‘s recent AGM:

What they do is to allow a group to celebrate the things it has already done, and to reflect on possible parts of the process that it hasn’t got round to. They can be used to lay them out to tell the story of the initiative so far, with reflection on the cards left unused. They also get away from the idea that Transition is a linear, prescribed process, rather an organic, place-specific assembling of ingredients. What has been your experience with the cards? The activities we have come up with so far can be downloaded here … have you developed any other ones? My thanks to Transition Town Cheltenham for sharing their reflections.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Tue, 15 May 2012 10:21:50 | 1 Comments

I recently read Nick Shaxson’s excellent book which explores the extent of off-shore banking in the world, shocking stuff. I was honoured to be able to interview Nick recently, you can either listen to our conversation below, or read the transcript. You can find out more about the book here.

Nick, thanks very much for joining us. For people who haven’t read Treasure Islands, can you describe for us its key findings?

There are a couple of main conclusions. One is that the offshore system of tax havens is much much bigger and much more central to the global economy than almost anybody had thought. It’s seen in the popular imagination as an exotic sideshow to the global economy. But really since the era of globalisation began in the 1970s the offshore system of tax havens has been growing much much faster than the supposedly onshore economy. It has been steadily pushing its way onshore so that a lot of big countries are increasingly resembling tax havens as they try and compete with each other to attract the hot money. So they increasingly offer stronger forms of secrecy and new forms of trust and corporations and so on to try and attract the hot money, and new tax loopholes.

Another big finding is that tax havens are not where most people think they are. Of course places like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Monaco are tax havens, big and important tax havens. But the really big ones are places like the United States and the United Kingdom which runs a huge network of satellite tax havens around it, feeding the City of London. The UK and its overseas territories, which it partly controls, include the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, British Virgin Islands. Massive tax havens. And also the crown dependencies which are Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. And these are all like, in Treasure Island I describe it as a bit like a spider’s web with the City of London at the middle. So these places are capturing money from around the world, and the business of handling the money from around the world and funneling this money up to London.

They are deliberately lowering the standards on secrecy and various other things to entice this money. And so the City of London itself is only indirectly implicated in this stuff. It is at one step remove and there’s plausible deniability. We’re not offering these specific facilities. But this network is. It’s very much a British network and it is, in a sense, a financial empire. It grew up from the 1950s onwards with the City of London, the growth of the oil markets. That was when the formal British empire was ended but the UK has managed to retain a significant degree of influence over the flows of money around the world after the collapse Empire and it now has this new kind of financial empire. So these were my two big conclusions.

Are there any countries that don’t allow the offshoring of capital? And if so, how do they do it? And also, are there any countries that have reintroduced those mechanisms.

The trouble with this is that there are all shades of grey. Some countries deliberately set out to be tax havens. So Switzerland is a classic example. It has for decades set out to provide banking secrecy and to attract dirty money, criminal money and other sorts of money from around the world. But every country, in a sense, is a tax haven in its own right because there isn’t an international network of transparency, of sharing information between countries that makes any country in the world completely transparent.

If you take your money to Germany, or somewhere like that, it’s going to be difficult if you’re an African government or something like that it’s going to be quite difficult to get hold of information about that money, there’s no automatic sharing mechanisms. There are some sharing mechanisms in their fledgling state. The European Union has one called the Savings Tax Directive and the United States is starting to get more active in this area. So there are some international information sharing transparency mechanisms, but it’s still very much a patchwork, an insufficient patchwork. So when money moves across borders very often is able to find secrecy.

But I think when you’re looking at tax havens what you’re really looking at are places that are deliberately setting out on a strategy to do this. Some countries are tax havens kind of by accident but they tend not to the big players. The big players are the ones that deliberately set out to create this stuff.

What’s your view on the supposed benefits of extra liquidity that our internationalised banking and money system provides versus the loss of money in the real economy that Treasure Islands describes so well?

If you take the UK for example, on the one hand you have the UK losing tax revenue to tax havens. So British tax evaders or tax avoiders, that is, for example, corporations that are not technically breaking the law but are still cutting their tax bills substantially. These are costing the treasury billions of dollars, billions of pounds. But at the same time the money that is coming into the United Kingdom from tax havens, there’s this huge kind of feeder mechanism into the UK, is benefiting the City of London.

I’d be very careful about how to phrase this because what the City does is it says, this is good for Britain, this is money that is coming into Britain. But I argue very strongly that it isn’t. This is money that is good for the City but what it does is it creates this international financial centre, this offshore financial centre in the heart of the United Kingdom. Makes it almost unreformable. People are worried about the power of the City of London, the fact that it’s able to suck up the best talent and all the best capital and influence all the policy makers.

This power and this strength comes in very large measure from its international network and the offshore network. So just to say, oh, money coming into Britain must be good for Britain, it’s just not true. These hundreds of billions of dollars that have been flooding into the UK. Is Britain any better off than say, Germany or France or Sweden or Canada which have not been playing nearly such a financial game? I would say no. Britain is on many measures much more unequal, worse health outcomes, worse social outcomes than these other countries and I think there’s quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the financial centre has been a very powerful driver rather a contributor, rather than anything that benefits Britain.

Is it possible to reform the financial institutions that we have that are responsible for so much of the world’s current crisis or is building a new financial institution based on co-operative banks, credit unions, regional currencies and so on the only way? How might we start that shift and where might the political support come from?

The lobbyist of the City of London, and the financial industry more generally, always say, they always wheel out this argument, don’t regulate us too much, don’t tax us too much because then we’ll pull on our horns and we won’t lend anything and the economy will collapse”. But the fact is that there has been almost a fraud perpetrated by the financial sector on the UK. It’s well known now that has been that when times are good all the benefits go to to the bankers and the banks, and when times are bad all those risks and costs gets shifted onto the burden of ordinary tax payers.

This narrative that comes out of the city and is widely repeated, is demonstrably untrue. It is a much more complicated and nuanced picture than that. I would argue that if you have a system that remains unregulated and uncontrolled, you’re going to store up even bigger problems in the future. I think if you did start to regulate banks and banking properly, not just in an offshore sense but in terms of, you know, capital requirements and all sorts of other things, you would end up having a much stronger, much healthier economy. In fact, there is historical evidence to suggest that this is the case.

Back in the period after the Second World War when the Bretton Woods institutions were set up, that was an era when people had really learned the lessons of the Great Depression. There were huge policy mistakes. The Great Depression itself followed a period of extreme financial freedoms and afterwards the international policy makers in the UK and United States and elsewhere decided that the way forward was to powerfully restrain the banks and to prevent them from speculating large amounts across borders and to really curtail them.

In Treasure Islands I describe how the banks were really champing at the bit. In the 25 or so years following the Second World War the banks were really tightly constrained. That was a period of extremely high and broad-based economic growth internationally. It’s now known as the golden age of capitalism and it kind of came to the end in the 1970s. Since then we’ve seen ordinary people’s wages stagnate, lots of financial crises and all sorts of other problems. That has coincided with a period of financial liberalisation and financial freedoms which has been very substantially accelerated by the offshore system.

So financial liberalisation kind of opens up the international markets for the flow of capital but tax havens take that one step further by artificially creating things that will attract cross border money flows, will accelerate those flows, so if you offer secrecy then lots of money will flow in pursuit of that. So the tax havens have been a sort of accelerator of financial globalisation and I would argue, with very harmful effect.

The UK economy is inextricably linked to offshore banking, a relationship you brilliant outline in your book. Assuming that it were possible to regulate that and to curtail its activities, would the impacts of doing that only be beneficial or for the 99%, as it were, might there be a downside?

That’s a very good question. I think there’s a difference between now and the Great Depression. When the Great Depression happened, things were so bad that you did see a major political realignment, particularly in the United States, and you had the New Deal coming in with very progressive legislation and high tax breaks and, as I said, very tight constrains on banks and the financial sector and on capital flows. So you know this political realignment really set the stage for a period of wonderful prosperity for quite some time. Unfortunately this crisis does not seem to have produced that realignment yet.

We have seen tinkering at the edges and at the end of the day it’s all about political realignments, it’s all about citizens collectively forcing the politicians to really change. We are seeing a little bit of a swing now, there does seem to be a swing in Europe against austerity and perhaps that’s the start of something bigger. But I think until we see a much more fundamental political and social change in response to the crisis and maybe the Occupy movement times 10, I think that’s when we’re going to start seeing the possibility of change. I think until then, we do have in Britain particularly and very substantially in the United States, you have the banks calling the shots and telling the politicians what to do. Not much has changed there. I think that is the essential first step.

So the audience for this interview is the Transition movement; people out in their communities trying to build community resilience, local food systems, local energy systems and that kind of thing, which brings up a couple of questions. And the first one is do you think that something like Transition can succeed despite the enormous power and influence which will be fundamentally threatened by a real relocalisation a real programme of community resilience building?

For me, what’s important when one uses the word ‘local’, I think what I’m particularly interested in is the sort of fragmentation of the international financial architecture and the fragments are nation states. That for me is the key fault line that is the problem for me. Because within a nation state you have democratically created tax systems and sometimes inside nation states, you know in Switzerland for example they have the cantons where you have a lot of local tax raising. But essentially it needs the nation state, that is the most important local level.

I think it’s very interesting and useful to have local community organisation. I think that’s a very powerful thing and very important. It’s not something I have particularly paid attention to just because I’m much more focussed on the international level. But I do think, from the point of view of tax havens, it’s the jurisdictional unit of the nation state that is the fundamental building block of the whole process with regard to tax havens. I do think community organising can be fantastic at creating networks and creating awareness. In terms of the actual mechanics of off shoring it doesn’t mesh immediately with that problem, if you see what I mean.

And how do you think people who are involved in Transition and similar things should split their time and energy between trying to stop the corporate looting that you write of and building resilience at the local level?

There is no magic bullet. If there is a magic bullet it is political and local and social organisation. And awareness, the building of awareness. That is the stage we’re at now. I think it is significant. We’ve had groups such as UK Uncut which have protested against corporate tax avoidance and Occupy which has been very important, which many have derided as not having achieving many particular aims, but in fact, what we have seen. We have seen the remarkable spectacle of conservative chancellor, George Osborne, calling aggressive tax avoidance “morally repugnant”.

Also a lot of statements from business leaders such Andrew Whitty of GlaxoSmithKline making some very powerful statements about corporate responsibility and the responsibility of corporations not to just to their shareholders but to wider sets of stakeholders and particularly with tax in mind. I think tax, for me, is a real touchstone of corporate responsibility. If a corporation is prepared to engage in a tax debate, then, it’s so easy for corporations to do window dressing and things that don’t matter to them, but I think when you touch on tax, that’s when you really start to see whether they’re just window dressing or if they’re really interested in engaging.

I think touching on tax from a corporate responsibility perspective is very important. The fact that there have been these protest movements is much more significant and have had much more significant impacts than I think many people think because really now the politicians do know that they can’t get away with saying, ah let’s just get on with this stuff. They have to at least be seen to be doing the right thing. Whether they do the right thing is another matter, but I think all of this is just an important first step. But I think much more awareness raising is needed.

I also would suggest that the economics profession in particular has had this massive blind spot when it comes to tax havens and offshore and secrecy and tax evasion and things like that. They have just chosen, because it’s so difficult to measure and so difficult to understand, they have basically treated it like a somebody else’s problem, and let somebody else deal with that. As a result it’s been left to fester and grow rapidly without anyone challenging it. I think if we can get economists to start taking this stuff seriously, because economists are so influential, I think that will also be an important step. But at the bottom of it all is awareness raising of political consciousness and that’s what needs to happen now.

Do you think there is a way out of our current financial crisis and the steady worsening of it that we’ve seen in countries such as Greece and Portugal, without tackling tax havens?

I think it would be very difficult without tackling offshore banking. A lot of these problems have a whole array of causes. Offshore is one of these underlying causes that is very diffuse and very hard to put your finger on, that’s one of the great problems with it and many of these other causes that the size and the power of the financial sector, are very strongly influenced by the fact that financial actors are able to use the offshore escape route to escape financial regulations. Offshore is a kind of thing that’s in the background of so much that’s been going on.

Because it’s hard to point to as a specific, you know, here’s a trigger from offshore, that’s making it much harder for people to see this. I think if you did tackle offshore, and you did also find mechanisms to curb the huge tides of hot money that flow through the global economy, I think you would have a serious chance of getting the financial system on a much better long term footing. But I think that’s a long way in the future.

Lastly Nick, I’m really interested to know, having written the book, how it’s changed your own relationship to how you bank and how you live your life.

One thing I’ve realised is that if you want to avoid tax havens, the best way to do it is to go and live in a cave somewhere, because they’re everywhere.

A cave with broadband by the sound of it!

No you couldn’t have broadband! You basically can’t avoid it. All the multinationals on the high street that you see will be using tax havens in one way or another for various different reasons. The banks, of course, all of them are massively steeped in tax havens. If you’re an overseas resident, as I am, they will try and encourage you to use offshore accounts. You will get a lower interest rate if you use an onshore account. They’re always trying to get you to use offshore accounts.

That’s something actually I didn’t really touch on in Treasure Islands and I do want to research it when I get some time as to just why this is. I have banked with a bank in the UK for many years because I set it up when I was in the UK and that is still my bank, but I actually recently tried to change my account to the Co-operative Bank and I wasn’t allowed to because I was overseas. I would have been allowed to set up an offshore account but not an onshore account, so that wasn’t possible. It’s very difficult. I think if you’re looking to confront this monster and to tackle it, voting with your wallet is important, but I think it’s very hard to do. I think political action is really the way to go and raising awareness is what matters here.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Mon, 14 May 2012 10:24:19 | 5 Comments

A while ago here we posted the video to Rebecca Mayes’ song ‘The Lights’, her beautiful song written for the closing credits of ‘In Transition 2.0′ (the one everyone goes out after the film singing). I am delighted to announce that the song is today released as a single, and is now available via. iTunes. Here is what Rebecca says about it: “I’ve registered it with the UK charts so if enough of us buy it this week we’ll get into the top 40! If you’re outside the UK try and buy it through a UK distributor so it will count towards the charts. All proceeds go to theTransition Network. Tell your friends, family and local radio stations! Thanks so much for watching the video which has had over 3,000 hits – if you missed it first time you can check it out below.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Wed, 09 May 2012 08:52:18 | 2 Comments

I wrote a while ago about Transition Network’s recent one day conversation on ‘Peak Money and Economic Resilience’, and how it had included a session where people from Portugal, Ireland and Greece gave a sense of what is happening in each place. Filipa Pimentel, who is co-ordinating the networking of the national Transition hubs, spoke about Portugal, and about how the economic crisis is shaping how Transition is emerging there. Filipa was in Totnes recently, and I caught up with her for a quick interview at the station as she waited for her train home. Here it is:

Shortly before we started recording, she realised that she had left her suitcase in the cafe where we had met and had had to go off and get it, hence the laughter about half way through. She said that the crisis in Portugal is now one that you can really feel. The average salary is 840, the minimum wage is 480, and some OAPs are on a pension of just 150. This in a country where supermarket food prices are the same as in the UK. People are already starting to hungry.

Filipa speaking at the recent Spanish Transition gathering.

Transition is starting to spread in Portugal, but it has made a deliberate decision from the outset to base itself on the concept of the gift economy. In areas which are in financial distress you cannot, for example, charge for film screenings. The aim is to decouple money from the message of Transition, to, as Filipa puts it, “try to reduce money exchange in everything we do”.

There are, she said, two reactions to a crisis. If you really believe that the crisis will go away, you hold on and you hold your activities and you wait. If you believe that it is here to stay, you start to adapt. What Transition initiatives have done in Portugal is to accept that it is here to stay. Initiatives in Portugal have been developing ways to organise low cost events, and to develop relationships with Councils not based on asking them for money, but asking them to share resources. I hope you enjoy this interview, in which she also tells a few of the most fascinating stories from the emergence of Transition in Portugal.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Tue, 08 May 2012 06:34:34 | 3 Comments

Thanks to everyone who entered the competition to win a copy of Martin Crawford’s fabulous new book. The correct answers were that there are no such things as ‘Moncktons sausage chives’ or ‘Abyssinian exploding carrots’, although frankly I have to say that that is an enormous shame. So the winners, who clearly already know far too much about perennial vegetables for their own good, areCarol Brandon, Paul Martin, Judith Cunnison, Louise Reynolds Doughty and Maxine Grant. Congratulations all. I’ll be in touch for your postal addresses. Have a great weekend.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Thu, 03 May 2012 18:00:23 | 0 Comments

Let’s start with something I came across on YouTube, the caption just says “We are students from 4th of ESO and we are in a project about Transition Towns. Hope you like it:) !” Turns out it is the students from the High School Joan Segura i Valls, in Santa Coloma de Queralt (Catalonia)(see right) who did a project on Transition (they talked to Rob Hopkins by Skype), set up Transition Santa Colomba, and are going great guns. After they finished their school project, they were given a video camera. What did they come up with?

The first Spanish Transition Conference took place this month. Many thanks to Antonio Scotti, Filipa Pimental and Emilio Mula for their accounts of the event which Rob has just posted toTransition Culture. You can view all the photos from the event here onFlickr. Here is the group photo of dynamic Spanish Transition activists:

Transition has been getting into the Spanish media a fair bit too. El Mundo, one of Spain’s biggest national papers, recently ran stories about Transition, onea more general introduction, aboutTransition Belsizeand about theBrixton Pound(with some great photos, such as the great photo below).

Here is a great story from Brazil, from Guarulhos (Sao Paulo). We’re grateful to May East for sending it in.

Guarulhos is the Brazilian Heathrow; known as the gateway to the country, it is home to the largest airport in South America. It is also the second largest city of Sao Paulo state, with a population of 1.2 million people and 33% preserved area. Last month the first Transition Training took place in the city, hosted by the Secretary of Environment and involving 70 participants from a wide range of backgrounds. The impact of the training was lightening quick and at the end of the 2 days there were 3 working groups and the declaration of intent to re-dedicate a public park to be the first Transition Park of the city. Three weeks later a retrofitted abandoned building painted in earth colours, a medicine herb garden, the childrens play ground cheered-up, a crafts fair, the presence of the authorities, blessings by the regional indigenous people made the opening day of the park front-page news in the local press.

Guarulhos is the latest city to join the ever-growing Brazilian Transition network – has its headquarters in the Julio Fracalanza Park and intends to increase the cycle paths connecting all the citys parks threefold in one year.

The Mayor of the City being blessed by indigenous people on the opening morning.

To Canada now, and inBritish Colombia (BC), on April Fools Day (April 1^st), Transiton Sooke on Vancouver Island discussed how money in our society is a kind of Fools Gold. Sunshine Coast in Transition (see right) on Vancouver Island is one of the latest groups to join the Transition Network and is well on their way to becoming official. Read more about their journey so far.

The Northern View wrote an article about the founding of Transition Town Prince Rupert. If you missed Robs interview with founding member of TT-Prince Rupert, Lee Brain, here it is:

In an effort to help keep their communities clean, T-Huronia (ON) held a Pitch In Day in Penetanguishene. They also screened The Greenest Building as part of their environmental film series. Above is a photo of some members of T-Huronia enjoying Earth Day! From Manitoba, here is anUptown Magarticle on the fledgling Transition Winnipeg initiative.

Let’s start our travels around the UK in Derbyshire. Here is a film of Transition Buxton’s recent planting of a community orchard:

… and they have also been clearing a new allotment:

Transition Town Totnes has been co-ordinating an innovative campaign to pressure milk processors Dairy Crest to enable the community to take over its abandoned site in Totnes, a campaign which is gaining momentum (see below photo from a recent public meeting).The project, known asAtmos Totnes, has made thefront page of the local paper, appeared on theBBC Newswebsite, generatedconsiderable media attention, gathered50 ‘Atmos Voices’of people from across the community speaking up for the campaign, and recently spoke to former agriculture minister John Gummer who gave the schemea glowing endorsement.

TTT has also justlaunched a new website. Rob Hopkins recently gave a talk about Transition in Totnes at TEDxExeter. Here it is:

TT Exmouth planted nearly 50 trees at the former Dennesdene Farm site in East Devon. Read morehere. Bridport Newsreports how Transition Town Bridport is training unemployed 18 to 26-year-olds in the use of hand tools and called for people to volunteer as course mentors. TT-Cheltenham held a ‘Low Energy Show’ which you can read about in more detailhere, and you can see the poster (right).

FromLancashire,Transition Town Clitheroe reported that planning permission has been given for constructing a hydro scheme at Whalley weir for generating electricity from the River Calder. Find out morehere. We are grateful to Pete Goffin in Leicestershire for sending us this:

Hello, we are a partnership of two, active in the Transition Towns movement in Leicester. We have worked in peoples houses, are very conscious of carbon footprint issues, have a cycle for work policy, moreover we have helped develop the shared apple pressing project which is proving to be so successful in Leicestershire. Rupert has developed an apple press package which is highly efficient, locally produced and competitively priced. We are also sourcing our timber from as close to home as possible, hence the tree sawing machine. It started with one press for Transition Leicester shared among 20-30 people. They now have two, Market Harborough, Loughborough and NorthWest Leicestershire also have one each. I think Wigston are wanting one now too. It would be great if we could let your network know what a good community development the project has turned out to be.

You can read more about this apple press projecthereon T-Leicesters website. Here (left) is a photo of the new press in action.

To London now. At St Marks Church, Transition Town Wimbledon, Wimbledon Civic Forum and Transition Town Tooting jointly hosted a Local Husting for London Assembly elections. You can read more about thathereand see the photo below, right.

Transition Town Hackney held a screening of In Transition 2.0 (you can too! Seeherefor more details about organising a screening!). Loads of great ideas for possible Transition Hackney projects were generated in thediscussion. TT Stoke Newington held anOpen Spaceto ask A greener more resilient Stoke Newington, how can we make it happen?

Transition Town Tooting in London are edging towards the launch of a Tooting Pound. Two workshops provided lots of lovely ideas for the design of the the notes. Some great drawings were created by budding designers and these will all inform the final designs. Here’s one design. Bank of England eat your heart out:

Read more about the Tooting Poundhere. Transition Town Tootings ‘Monthly Do’ at Wandsworth Borough Councils Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park saw several members join with gallery staff to offer a drop-in afternoon about on Growing Successfully in the City (see right).

Transition Town Shrewsbury held an exhibition over Easter to show what a locally-owned hydro scheme in Shrewsbury might look like. You’ll find more informationhere. TT Taunton has been exploring the creative potential of using thermal images to tell stories. To find out more, clickherebelow, and look for the title Thermalogues. There are six films in all, here are two of them …

TT-Taunton Guerrilla Gardeners have also been busy planting up derelict areas of the town with edible herbs! Read more inThis is Somerset.

TT Worthing have been promoting a garden share scheme in the Adur and Worthing area. To find out more visittransitiontownworthing. Former TT-Worthing steering group member Steve Last decided to start up a Transition group closer to home in the village of Findon. Read how a change in circumstances made him revaluate his involvement with Worthing and look no further thanhis own back yard.

Transition Town Marlborough in Wiltshire submitted a report to town councillors calling for better public transport for the towns commuters. Read the original article onThis is Wiltshire. The Bromsgrove Standardpublicized the ‘Buy from Bromsgrove’ event, which took place at the monthly farmers’ market and was organized by TT Bromsgrove. In the last round-up we heard about how Marsden and Slaithwaite Transition Towns in Yorkshire had used their LEAF fund grant to do work around energy efficiency and hard-to-treat homes. As part of that, they made some videos, most notably this great animation:

Doing the work they did led to them reflecting on the imminent ‘Green New Deal’, and here is a short film they made about that:

From France, we are grateful toKitty de Bruin for sending us this: “In Ungersheim, France, the town decided to use the bottom-up process to start Transition with the citizens. They did not fly in expensive experts but involved the citizens to create awareness and involve them in the Transition process(see photo above). Read this LAlcase report (in French) about Transition in Ungersheim”.

DACH (Germany, Austria & Switzerland) have been busy preparing for their nation(s) wide”In Transition 2.0 Film & Information Day” on May 13th. More than 10-15 (and growing!) Transition initiatives across DACH are planning to show In Transition 2.0 in this fantastic unified event! If you are in Germany, for more info about how to participate etc. (in German) click here.

In Ireland,Kinsale Transition Town held a Spring Fair. Here is a film about it:

In New Zealand,Transition Oamaru and Waitaki District held their third Sustainable Skills School which had on offer over 30 courses including identifying edible seaweed, wood turning, preparing a hangi, making sauerkraut, making mud bricks and recycling car tyres! Read more about this fantastic event in the Otago Daily Times.

Now toSweden. The spread of Transition Towns in Sweden got a big push forward recently from the Swedish Minister for the Environment, Lena Ek, who expressed her support for the work of Transitioninitiatives in the County of stergtland. She was quoted as saying, “it was so great to get back to Stockholm after the UN climate negotiations to discover all these Transition initiatives. This is exactly what I hoped would start in Sweden, as transition must begin locally”. For more information read Stephen Hintons full report here. And for information in Swedish, see the (PDF) newsletter from Hela Sverige Skall Leva.

Lastly, let’s see what’s happening in the US. For starters, you can findthe Transition US April newsletter here. In California, an article onNewsReview.comhas members of Transition Chico talking about bringing neighbourhoods together to create a self-sustainable community. Transition San Luis Obispo co-sponsored a free lecture titled The deadly connection: Endless war and economic crisis in the city-county library.

Colorado Springs Independent wrote about TT Manitou Springs Seed Bank. Find out more about the seed bank here. In Newtown (CT), local resident Barbara Toomey attended a Transition training session and is now well on her way to forming an initiating group. There is already a Sustainable Film Series up and running which started this month with Carbon Nation. Transition Newtown would make the third Transition group in CT joining the communities of Greater New Haven and Litchfield. Go Newtown!

Dr. Steven Chase of Antioch University New England, presented a free lecture “The Global Transition Movement: Innovative Local Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Disruption at Saint Joseph College, Connecticut. FromFlorida, here are a couple of photos from Code Green Community in Tampa Bay taking part in Earth Day.

Framington Patch reports that Transition Framington (MA) took part in the States Green Fest. Keene (NH) Transition Movement Community blog published a timetable for Monadnock Localvore Reskillling Workshops in 2012. See the dates of the workshops and find out more here. Transition Town State College (PA) held a successful local Foods Forum whilst Transition Town Media held a community pot luck meal and garbage art contest!

Here is anarticle titled ‘Is the Time Now for R.I. to Make Transition?’which discusses the potential for Transition towns in the state. The Citizen reported how Transition Town Charlotte (VT) co-sponsored community viewing and discussion of five films related to Vermonts Comprehensive Energy Plan. Read the article here.

Transition Viroqua (WI) got busy making a broadcast for local community radio station WDRT which includes interviews with local car share pioneers, a hybrid car guru, information on area bus options, an interview with a local bike shop owner and a discussion about pedal assist bicycles. You can listen to the audio below:

To close, on a more general note, don’t forget to keep an eye on Transition Network’snewsandprojectsfor inspiring Transition-related stories from across the globe. STIR online magazine features aninterview with Rob Hopkinsby Jonny Gordon-Farleigh and areview of In Transition 2.0by Charlotte du Cann, and at Permaculture Magazine,Phillip Moore reviews In Transition 2.0. AlsoTransition is cited as a grassroots movement that isshaping the futureand is mentioned in a summary of the key points from the built environment discussion group also onGuardian.co.uk.The Christian Science Monitor writes this article titledTransition Towns moves communities beyond sustainability to resiliency.

With many thanks to Lia who helped pull together this months roundup!

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Tue, 01 May 2012 17:38:43 | 4 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at TedxExeter, a fantastic occasion with many great speakers (have a look at their website as more and more of the films from the day go online). I spoke for the first time in detail about Totnes as a case study, and what, after 6 years, we can draw from the experience of Transition Town Totnes. I hope you enjoy it.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Tue, 01 May 2012 11:20:44 | 8 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, 150 people from across Spain gathered inZarzalejo for the country’s first Transition gathering. By all accounts it was an extraordinary event. This post draws together various accounts of the event, and photos from it (a film is soon to follow), but we start with a short interview with Emilio Mula who attended the event. How was it? Who came? How is the emergence of Transition in Spain looking? How did he leave the event feeling?

You can see a great selection of photos from the event here, and here is how Filipa Pimentel described it:

“More than 150 people from all over Spain, including the Islands, travelled to Zarzalejo, Madrid, and got together to debate ideas in an incredibly positive way, full of hope. I had the sense I was in a celebration I really could feel that people were ready to start working together I had the clear feeling that it was time for Spain! There were around 20 formed Transition Initiatives but not only I met people that have been working in isolation in incredible projects, other people came to discover what Transition is

A lot of constructive ideas came out of the various discussions and activities but the main idea that I got was the deep respect for the planet and the will to work together. Under the theme Building the future we want, the group proposed local and positive solutions to achieve a more sustainable life and more resilient communities.

Emilio Mula's name badge

Susana, Antonio, Javier, Juan and Emilio, proposed a program that would create the conditions toget people to meet, to show their work as initiatives, to create the feeling of belonging to a group and to feel empowered to continue to make the difference; to discuss and collect ideas, examples of inspiration given by Transition initiatives and to create a national network of transition initiatives in case the group would feel that would be helpful for the work done by the initiatives; to give visibility to the Transition Movement as an example of positivity and so on

ThisConferencewas a true success, in my opinion. It was a very participative and creative meeting, with loads of proposed creative activities and with a lot of fun! The film In Transition 2.0 was launched by the hand of Emilio Mula! Participants showed a lot interest and posed loads of questions. There was a concert by a local chorus, and many other activities.

The organizers open the program completely for proposals for workshops by the participants. The human resources in theSpanish network are remarkable: there was a talk about , a talk about auto-construction and auto-consuming by a manager in the National of Civil Protection (Firefighter Training department manager). There was a workshop on Transition and education by the TI University of Santiago de Compostela in Transition and, among others, a workshop about the collaborative edition of the Transition Companion inSpanish(we might here more about this because they are working already in it and proposing strategies of lowering the costs, etc etc)!

A manager group for the national network was created then and met to start working on how the network of initiatives will work, tasks and roles, forming working groups and thinking about the national Hub structure. The organizers planned to document this event using a film, pictures and completed reports. Meanwhile, you have some pictures here“.

And here is what AntonioScotti had to say about the weekend:

“On the weekend of April 20th-22nd, a meeting was held in the town of Zarzalejo, in the proximity of Madrid, where many of the existing Spanish Transition initiatives got together for the forst time, with the intention to explore ways of co-creating a spanish-wide network that can support existing initiatives and catalize the emergence on new ones. The first time when people interested in the Transition Towns movement from many corners of Spainwas in Barcelona, in june 2009 when the first Transition training inSpainwas held.

There the seed of Transition was sown, and during all this time many transition initiaves have been incubating up to spring of 2011 when many of themfirst exposed themselves on the internet through their web pages. This inspired the event organizers, themselves belonging to some of the existing SpanishTransition groups (Zarzalejo en Transin, Barcelona en Transici), and a couple of Spanish members and collaborators of the Transition Town Totnes Initiative,to consider the possibility to organize an event, where all these emerging initiatives con meet each other, share their experiences andenvision a future where they could all support each other in an organized way. And this is what happened.

During the 2 and a half days that the meetinglasted, people from the transition initiatives of Coin, Fuegirola-Mijas, Jerez (Andalucia), Barcelona, Argelaguer (Catalonia), Zarzalejo, Mostoles, Aranjuez, (Madrid), Valladolid, Valencia, Bilbao, ….. got together and exchanged experiences. The event included many interesting workshops on transition related matters, celebration, lots of good food and vibes as well as more formal moments of work about the creation of the Spanish network.

Eventually the event concluded with an agreement of organizing a second meeting in two months time,to continue working on the organizational aspects of the Spanish network, but some work on the more technological aspects of the network like creating a website (both about the event itself and about the Spanish network) have been undertaken. Information about the next meeting and the new website will be communicated in due time.”

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Tue, 01 May 2012 09:50:24 | 7 Comments

Many people involved in Transition have been inspired by the work of Joanna Macy, and also of Chris Johnstone. The two recently collaborated on a new book called Active Hope: how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy”. In a couple of weeks I will be doing an interview with the two of them, and I want to offer you the opportunity to ask the questions you have always wanted to ask the two of them. Please send any questions you might have to me at rob (at) transitionculture.org. Get your thinking caps on! Thanks.

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:15:48 | 4 Comments

A while ago, Transition Network held a ‘Thinky Day’ around the Big Society and how Transition might best respond to that. These bringings together of people to explore the ‘edge’ of Transition are very useful, and yesterday saw the next one, entitled ‘Peak Money and Economic Resilience: a Transition Network one-day conversation’, held at the offices of Calouste Gulbenkian in London. About 50 people came together to explore the scale of the economic challenges we are facing, what Transition is already doing to respond to that, and what else it might do, or how it might adapt what it does to be more appropriate to these fast-changing times. I will attempt here to provide a record of the day and of the key discussion points that emerged. Any misrepresentations due to my note-taking are entirely my own doing…

Peter Lipman (right), the Chair of Transition Network, introduced the day, stating that the initial idea and framing for the day came from Eva Schonveld who had asked what can we do in Transition to best prepare for times of rapid economic change, should we do things differently, or more of the same? He also referred to the debate I had had a couple of years ago with Richard Heinberg about the extent to which we should be preparing for collapse or for a more gentle descent. He mentioned how in ‘In Transition 2.0′ the stories from New Zealand and Japan showed how when things became very difficult, Transition was one of the pieces of the solution that they turned to. Might this offer us a clue to Transition’s future role, he asked?

He compared climate change and economic volatility, saying that ultimately, economic crisis is nowhere near as dangerous, in the long term, as climate change, but when there’s no money, if cashpoints no longer work for example, then the impacts of that could be catastrophic in the short term. How, he asked, do we bring the implications of financial volatility into our lives, and how to we feel about them? (The complete framing statement for the day can be found at the end of this post).

The first speaker was Tony Greenham of new economics foundation(hereare Tony’s slides). Initially, he said, money was just a way of people recording debts. Money is a social relationship, a recording of relationships of credit and debit. 1 in 3 people believe that when you deposit your money in a bank it is locked in a safe below the bank, and this money is then lent out to other people, but this is not what happens. Banks create new money into existence when they lend it out. There are 2 kinds of money, he said. Central bank reserves, and commercial money made by banks, which is the one that accounts for 97% of money. Central bank money is what banks lend between each other, and commercial money is now shrinking as the amount of money in circulation shrinks.

Who, Tony asked, has benefitted from the growth in the amount of commercial money in circulation? The top 1%. The lower earners haven’t had much gain at all. This very small group holds all the money, the rest of us hold the debt. Although the UK has a sense that it is somehow immune to what is happening elsewhere, he showed a graph from Morgan Stanley which showed the UK having the most debt in the world, the majority generated by the financial sector (see below). The government, he said, are not on top of this, debt is a blind spot.

There are 4 ways to tackle the debt crisis. The first he outlined is to pay it back, the current strategy of ‘austerity’ However this requires increases in real income, economic growth or a redistribution of wealth which isn’t going to happen. The second is to default, which is one approach but the implications of it would be horrible. The third would be a slow default, with inflation and financial repression, or lastly a debt jubilee combined with debt-free money produced by the state, or by the people themselves.

The second speaker was Molly Scott Cato of the Gaian Economics blog, who is the Green Party’s spokesperson on economics (hereare her slides). She stated that although Transition has been great at creating the pieces of the puzzle that people can pick up when things get difficult, it is not yet part of the wider mainstream debates. What we are seeing, she said, is that the economic crisis is causing a decline in concern about the environment. 37% of people in a recent poll believe that environmental concerns are exaggerated. It has also been shown that the richer you become, the more your carbon footprint grows. She said that she wasn’t a fan of the term ‘peak money’, because ‘ peak oil’ refers to a fixed resource, and it isn’t helpful to see money like that. We need, she said, to determine between real commodities and fictional ones.

What we need, she said, is a ‘resilience hierarchy’, which moves from abstract resources to real one, from money to fossil fuels to land. When the national debt is looked at more closely, she said, 20% of it is money that we have lent to ourselves, so we could just wipe that off to everyone’s benefit. In terms of how to bring about change, she dismissed lobbying as a waste of time. The financiers have taken over the government, she said. Community action is very important. ’Move your money’ campaigns are very important. So is reframing the debate to be around turning austerity into resilience. This is a situation that the Transition movement predicted and has been preparing for, and has much to offer.

Gary Alexander gave a talk called “A Transition Economy: looking after people and planet” (you can download Gary’s slideshere). From this point forward, he said, we need to create a vision that evokes a “yes”. We have to start to see that the real cost is not the same as the financial cost, that we need to also be taking environmental and social costs into consideration.

Before people used money, it was generalised exchange or mutual support and not barter that was used in human societies, and this needs to be brought back into a Transition economy. We need not just projects, but the infrastructure that supports them. They should have distinct niches to provide stability and avoid competition. All of this built towards a proposal that we create a toolkit for a community exchange, with a local currency at its heart.

Then there were three short talks, under the heading ‘Commentaries from Europe’ which gave a sense of how the economic situation is playing out on the most affected countries in Europe. First Filipa Pimentel talked about Portugal. Portugal, she said, is a country of 10.5 million people, with around 13% unemployment officially, but the true figure is far higher. The average salary is 800 per month, and the minimum wage is 450. At the same time, supermarket prices are the same as in the UK. There has been an 89% rise in unemployment in the last 3 years. In Filipa’s region, 25% of families are now below the poverty line. It isn’t about whether collapse is going to happen or not, people are already adapting to it.

There is good news though, she said. Transition is spreading fast in Portugal, partly due to being based, from the outset, on the idea of the ‘gift economy’. All films and events are offered free. It is felt to be vital to decouple Transition from money. It raises the question of what are people willing to give, and is resulting in lots of exchange. It is creating ways to feed people, with Transition working like a charity, any money being used to create structure. They work with local government, but they never ask for money, just for sharing of resources. She has found that the economic situation has meant that people are more open to new ideas, and that at the local level, people are very concerned about the environment, and about ‘peak land’.

Phoebe Bright works with FEASTA in Ireland, and lives in the south west. Ireland, she said,is a very conservative nation, used to being the underdogs. There is almost a sense that we’re back where we deserve to be, she said, that during the Celtic Tiger years “we lost the run of ourselves”. The thing that no-one really wants to consider is that we might not actually get back to ‘normal’. Events keep knocking their confidence. ”Who can we trust?” she said. There is a feeling that the politicians have let people down. The recent Tribunal on political corruption showed far-reaching levels of corruption. People knew there was some, but not to the extent revealed.

Listening to Phoebe Bright skyping in from Ireland.

Irish banks have been given 63bn. Allied Irish Bank, for example, was given 23bn, 99% of which was loaned by the State, but it is still not lending to businesses. Small businesses are finding it hard to find work, and if they do then they struggle to get paid for it. Tescos supermarkets have spread all over the country, and Ireland, Phoebe said, is their most profitable country. The suicide rate has doubled since 2007. Where she lives in West Cork the farmers are doing OK (especially those that didn’t borrow too much during the Celtic Tiger years), there is some money there, her local town is still active, but that’s not the case everywhere. Food growing and new food businesses are a big thing, and the IT sector isn’t doing too badly, but there is little money for new goods. So while there are a few positives, the overall picture is grim.

Johan van As gave a perspective from Greece. Things have moved there very quickly he said. Greece has been in recession since 2008. There is now 50% unemployment among the under 30s. For those people who do have jobs, many have experience cuts in their salaries of 30-40%. This has led to a huge liquidity squeeze, with demand for goods and services imploding. The country is in a state of shock. Johan was there recently, and said that it felt like the calm before the storm. On the buses in the cities, the drivers don’t bother to check anyone’s tickets as an act of passive resistance.

There are elections coming up, and it is the first time since 1974 that the centre right and centre left won’t be dominating. Usually they look to share 70-80% of the vote, this time it looks more like 35%, with splinter parties and far-right and far-left parties who are usually anti-European, anti-Troika, and some are even anti-democratic. There is also a rise in conspiracy theories and a search for scapegoats. While people looked shocked to hear the news about the resurgence of far-right groups, Johan asked “well if in the UK there were wage cuts of 40% do you think things would really be that different here?”

All the positive reports we hear about Greece, he said, should be read with the view that it is not talking about the mainstream. It looks in the upcoming elections that the Green Party will get one seat, great news until you also see that the fascist party look set to get about 10. There has been an explosion in buyer co-ops, there is at least one new local currency, there are new allotment schemes and an explosion of interest in food growing, but driven more by necessity than green concerns. Economic hardship is catalysing innovative thinking, but theprevailingschool of thought seems to be to throw the police and the bankers in jail and leave Europe, not that practical as a solution to the complexity of the issues.

This was followed by a Q&A session, and then a tea break. I introduced the next session, called ‘So where it Transition at?’ I talked about how I get sent a lot of books that are about peak oil, economic collapse and so on, that at the end say “but there’s this great thing called Transition that might sort it out”… this puts a lot of pressure on Transition, and it feels like we have achieved a huge amount in 5 years, but the aim of the day is to look at how we might reframe things in this context. There is some amazing work emerging in Transition now around the creation of new economies, and it feels like where all this is going.

Fiona Ward(you can download her slideshere) gave an overview of REconomy, Transition Network’s initiative to help Transitioninitiatives their capacity for creating a new economy.

The idea is to encourage an economy with the following characteristics:

• Resilience outcomes
• Being about more than just personal profit
• Respecting resource limits
• Appropriate localisation
• Serving the community
• Big enough to provide the jobs and goods that we need

At the moment REconomy is working with 10 Transition initiatives around the UK. There are 4 parts to it, Leadership, Vision, Transforming businesses and starting enterprises. As a microcosm, she talked about what is emerging in Totnes. REconomy is seen as the ‘Engine Room’ for a new economy for the town. The process is seen as cyclical, going from ‘Get inspired’ to ‘Get help’ to ‘Get money’ to ‘Give back’, and then round again.

She talked about the work underway to create a model whereby people can invest into the Transition economy, a fascinating and vitally important piece of work. She finished by saying that the day before the 2012 Transition Network conference, September 13th, will be a day dedicated to REconomy.

She was followed by Ciaran Mundy of the Bristol Pound(you can see Ciaran’s slideshere). He talked about how most local currencies so far have been printed notes only, and that a few of those, most notably the Chiemgauer and Berkshares, have been very successful, but it has been a significant limitation for others. What has been developed recently by Transition Network, nef, QOIN and others has been an electronic currency, and the software has now been made available to anyone. Bristol is a good scale for a complementary currency, it has a strong identity and good social capital. Their initial target is 300 businesses accepting it and 1000 account holders in time for the launch.

They ran an art competition to design the notes which reached over 1 million people. The slogan is “your city, your money, your future”. The council was nudged into accepting the currency in business rates by the ‘buzz’ that was created by the art competition. The plan is to go live by the end of June. The artwork for the 1 note was unveiled, but I am not allowed to show it to you. You’ll just have to wait! So instead here is the template people were asked to design into…

People then divided into groups. Here are a few of the findings from that. One group looked at stories, and felt that we need to get new stories about Transition as an alternative out there, and to show that there are other options. We need to be telling stories of positive alternatives. They also stressed the importance of stories from our past. The second group looked at the gaps in what Transition Network is doing to respond to the economic crisis. Thoughts included that one key gap is the degree of confidence people feel in understanding economics as it is presented in the media. As an organisation it is also limited in its capacity and needs to think about how to resource telling its story better. One thought was to work to include the local economy more in resilience planning, asking what thinking has been done in terms of cash resilience, i.e. what happens if one morning the cash machines don’t work?

Another group looked at what we have learnt from 5 years of Transition. One point was that still most people aren’t aware of it, and we need to work hard at making it more attractive. It may be a good blueprint but we are working from low levels of awareness. Although the label can often be very useful, and can bring a holistic take on things that are often not viewed in that way, it can sometimes be problematic. The last group looked at the need for a common strategy, and suggested that people already have values, it is just a case of bringing them out. We should also, it was stressed, really acknowledge and celebrate all that has been achieved over the past 5 years.

After lunch, there was a World Cafe session looking at 4 key questions:

1. What does a Transition response to these times look like?
2. What might government do in response?
3. How can the business sector respond, and what would it look like if it gave its support and shared its skills and expertise with Transition groups?
4. Who else do we need to connect with and how to we reach them?

I don’t have all the notes from all those discussions, but at the end, Alexis Rowell pulled together 9 things that had emerged from those, and earlier, conversations, in terms of concrete things Transition Network might now do. They were:

• Create a ‘local currencies kit’ that simplifies the process of getting started with a local currency scheme
• Work more with councils, offering support and training around economic resilience
• Keep pushing REconomy, a toolkit, how to do Blueprints etc
• Look at lenders beyond credit unions such as CDFIs
• Develop responses to cash resilience, perhaps with your local emergency planning group. If there is no cash, then what?
• Need to up Transition Network’s communications work to get our story out there
• Repackage the resources list from this event (which I have attached to the end of this piece)
• Put out something to local groups about how they can best communicate economic issues
• Collaborate more with others like Timebank UK to tell positive stories about economic resilience.

And that was that. Most people went to the pub to continue conversations, some people ran through the April showers to get trains home, and people felt stimulated and full. There was a call that we should do this more often, perhaps 6 monthly ‘Thinky Days’. Sounds good to me.

Thanks to everyone who made it happen, most notably Peter, Eva, Justin, Gary, Ciaran and Jules, and with deep gratitude to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation andMarmot Charitable Trust who sponsored the event. If you tweet, the hashtag #peakmoney will guide you to the tweets from the day. By way of a couple of appendices, here is firstly, the day’s framing statement, and secondly the recommended reading (and viewing) list that was circulated in advance of the meeting.

The day’s Framing Statement

The sudden disruption of the financial system, which became apparent in 2008, is affecting many people already. However the greatest impacts of peak money may yet unfold. Peak money could change many aspects of normal life, from the personal to the governmental level, much as peak oil and climate change do, but in a much more abrupt way. The Transition movement needs to think through consequences and responses. What are we doing in our communities to create economic resilience and where are the gaps? What might our response be when governments make sweeping changes in services or propose draconian measures?

The purpose of the day will be to begin to develop a toolkit of ideas and information for others in the Transition movement and kindred spirits to use and add to. It could also be a starting point for similar meetings in other places, networks and groups around the world.

We will gather information from a range of sources inside and beyond the Transition movement, consider and evaluate these and create proposals for the wider movement, then disseminate this as the start of a larger and wider discussion around the movement.

The emphasis will be on the positive and constructive: What can we do in our communities? However, we will also include background information on what has happened in the past in response to financial crises (e.g. Argentina, Iceland) and some basic background on the nature of the economy to help us evaluate constructive ways forward.

A reading (and viewing) list on the basics of money, debt, economy

Short articles and videos

• The End of Growth (5 min. video) Richard Heinberg
• Debt: The first five thousand years David Graeber interview
• Debt: The first five thousand years (15 min video) David Graeber
• Imagining the Post-Industrial Economy Sharon Astyk
• To build community, an economy of gifts Charles Eisenstein
• The History of Money – Part1
• The History of Money – Part2
• Punk economics (9 min video)
• Understanding Economics
• Suggested features of a new economy
• Automatic Earth Blog

Books

• Managing without Growth, (final Chapter) Peter Victor
• Debt: The first five thousand years David Graeber
• The End of Growth Richard Heinberg. New Society Publishing
• Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson

Lessons from elsewhere

• Argentina in the Red: What can the UKs Regional Economies Learn from the Argentinian Banking Crisis? Molly Scott Cato
• Remembering the Social Movements that Reimagined Argentina: 2002 – 2012 Francesca Fiorentini
• Lessons From Iceland: The People Can Have The Power Birgitta Jnsdttir
• Greece on the Breadline (Guardian series of articles) Jon Henley

Local/alternative/complementary currencies

• Liquidity Networks: local trading systems using a debt-free electronic currency Graham Barnes
• Local Money (interview about book) Peter North
• Local Money Creates Wealth Outside the Bubble Mira Luna
• Brixton and Bristol Pound websites

REconomy

• REconomy and Me Fiona Ward

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:45:58 | 39 Comments

Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust has just published a wonderful new book, How to grow perennial vegetables. It covers why and how to grow them, how to look after them, and then goes through over 100 edible perennials in detail. Itll have you drawing up I must try growing that lists and looking at your garden in a whole new way. We have 5 copies to give away to whoever can come up with the correct answers to our brain-stimulating competition.

All you have to do is to let me know (by email to rob (at) transitionculture.org before midday on Friday 4^th May) which two of the following is NOT an edible perennial (just email me the numbers of the made-up ones):

1. Wolfberry
2. Babbingtons leek
3. Partridge berry
4. Monks rhubarb
5. Bowles mint
6. Moncktons sausage chive
7. Air potatoes
8. Duke of Argylls tea tree
9. Duck potato
10. Abyssinian exploding carrots

Good luck!

Posted by Rob Hopkins on Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:08:41 | 1 Comments