It’s Over. Let’s Move On.

I’m just getting around to reading Richard Heinberg’s new book, The End of Growth. This video has been on You Tube for a few months, but I’ve only just seen it (probably something to do with having a nine month-old baby).

Anyway, it makes rather interesting reading as it outlines what many of us have been thinking for a while. Endless growth on a finite planet just ain’t gonna happen. Sooner or later (possibly sooner) we hit a brick wall.  The End of Growth is a big, uncomfortable dose of reality (not good for business or re-elections). The book is a real eye-opener.

What is the connection between the banking crisis/credit crunch/oil hitting $148 per barrel in 2008/probable Greek Euro exit/continuing recession/double dip recession? What comes after economic growth?

This five minute video sums it all up neatly. So many ideas that are completely ingrained into our society and culture, and just accepted as ‘normal’. The book is a crash course in economics and energy descent.

In terms of energy descent – a future scenario in which declining energy availability is the defining characteristic – the end of economic growth is a pretty devastating aspect. The inter-relationship of energy and the economy is usually overlooked or at best, taken for granted. Massive and unprecedented use of a one-off bonanza of fossil fuels helped create growth (as well as the annoying side effect of destabilising global climate). The crucial point is we can’t rely on this any longer. The sooner we get our little oil-consuming, growth-obsessed heads around this fact the better!

Politicians are keen to stimulate growth and get back to normal. The end of growth suggests that we have gone beyond that point and need to find a new normal. The important question is, can you visualise a future beyond economic growth? Read it now. Start transitioning!

What is Community?

A few years ago, my Canadian relatives gave me a poster on ‘How to build community’, which has been placed on my vision board at home.

It is always a source of inspiration and I always think the community-building aspect is a fundamental part of how a Transition town works and what energy descent will mean in practice. What is community? Well, we could talk about online communities, which are part of the mix, but largely a reflection of the multi-tasking, time-poor, physically disconnected age we live in. We could define community by asking how we can build it. Read on . . .

How to build Community:

1. Turn off your television.
2. Leave your house.
3. Know your neighbors.
4. Look up when you are walking.
5. Greet people.
6. Sit on your stoop.
7. Plant flowers.
8. Use your library.
9. Play together.
10. Buy from local merchants.
11. Share what you have.
12. Help a lost dog.
13. Take children to the park.
14. Garden together.
15. Support neighborhood schools.
16. Fix it even if you didn’t break it.
17. Have pot lucks.
18. Honor elders.
19. Pick up litter.
20. Read stories aloud.
21. Dance in the street.
22. Talk to the mail carrier.
23. Listen to the birds.
24. Put up a swing.
25. Help carry something heavy.
26. Barter for your goods.
27. Start a tradition.
28. Ask a question.
29. Hire young people for odd jobs.
30. Organize a block party.
31. Bake extra and share.
32. Ask for help when you need it.,
33. Open your shades.
34. Sing together.
35. Share your skills.
36. Take back the night.
37. Turn up the music.
38. Turn down the music.
39. Listen before you react to anger.
40. Mediate a conflict.
41. Seek to understand.
42. Learn from new and uncomfortable angles.
43. Know that no one is silent though many are not heard – work to change this.

For me, the most important point here was ‘Learn from new and uncomfortable angles’. This is because energy descent is unprecedented and even those highly-educated and professional amongst us will need to do this. My experience in a Transition initiative showed me that sometimes individuals with significant academic qualifications were often quite inflexible in doing things differently. I remember conversations along the lines of ‘well, all this transition stuff is no different from sustainable development’. The idea of doing anything from a new or uncomfortable angle would be unacceptable. The thought of being a energy descent  ’beginner’ would not be entertained.

Being out of your comfort zone is often where we are with all of this. It is enriching and humbling at the same time as being educating.

A transition town/village is probably the best response we have right now to energy descent. The people involved in a transition town are a community in their own right, and a microcosm of the wider community. Looking at the list above, it seems to me that most points are experiences for those actively involved in a transition group. Working together is the essence of it really. Whenever anyone used to ask me ‘what is this transition town thing all about?’ I would always blurt out something about peak oil and climate change, and get some fairly blank looks. Once I started mentioning the word ‘community’, people’s reactions were much more upbeat. They got it.

As I’m reading Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything at the moment, community is one of the aspects that gets a mention as something we should be growing and developing in the future. Whilst we may be peaking in oil, gas and coal production, as well as other essentials (water, soil), it is suggested that we are nowhere near a full potentail in terms of community.

Living in a village (which is taking its first tentative steps towards transition), I find that many of these community-building steps are already happening. After being a local for the past five years, it is very natural to greet people in the street, even ones I don’t know. Saying ‘Good Morning’ to a random person in the street will mostly get a smile and a positive response. The few people it is tricky with are those who don’t look up when you pass them, even if there is no-one else around. My theory is that these people are ones who don’t live locally and aren’t use to greeting strangers when they are out. I always think it’s a shame: the chance to connect with someone wasted.

Something as simple as ‘look up when you walk’ sounds obvious, but seems to be a quality that is increasingly missing through mobile phones, ipods, and just an embarassment over having to acknowledge/speak to someone whilst you are moving from A to B. Saying ‘hello’ to someone who isn’t looking up when they are walking is a barrier, but one that can be overcome. I know people who will say it anyway, often taking the other person by surprise. We could call this ‘guerrilla greetings’ and I would wholeheartedly recommend them. Until there is a point of people being able to communicate with each other in their locality, any discussion of community seems quite abstract. Looking up is also a good community-builder as it enables you to be aware of both the place you are in and the here and now.

So simple, but so elusive.

The ‘How to Build Community’ list is always a source of inspiration, and a manifesto for living. I was going to add ‘in an post-oil future’ at the end of the previous sentence but it’s now that this stuff is important. It’s always easy to stick up a poster and think how nice it would be if . . .  but doing most of these things isn’t difficult. I mean I’m not sure about dancing in the streets, but everything else sounds great: the community I want to live in. These are the things that makes life worth living. Being a strong community is a clear advantage to all who live there, particularly in uncertain times.

The future ain’t what it used to be!

Many of us grew up in thinking that we knew what ‘the future’ was going to be like.

If you were a child of the 60s or 70s your vision of the future was probably one of flying cars, endless leisure time and food tablets that could provide all of your nutrition in an instant. The future was always the year 2000 and everything that came after that. Most of our images of the future were either of this luxurious, leisured lifestyle, or one shaped by films and comics. In the late 70s, one comic book, 2000AD, brought an alternative future of atomic war wastelands and robotic warriors.

My favourite book as a kid back in 1979 was the Usbourne Book of the Future.

The page that really got me was of a projection of the year 2000. It had two different scenarios, one positive, and one negative.

The negative picture portrayed a decaying world filled with pollution (this is pre-global warming), dead trees, overpopulation and an environment which had reached its limits. On the other hand, the positive picture showed a world with bright blue skies, abundant green vegetation, clean electric transport systems, smart urban design and happy, healthy people. Not surprisingly, the second image was the one that I hoped the year 2000 would be like, but the first image was the one that scared me.

Now in 2012, the future might look a bit like the past. Less energy, yes, but what else? Energy descent as a concept is very simple on the surface, but when you start painting a scenario, all sorts of questions get flung about. In Peak Everything, Richard Heinberg suggests we could be looking at a messy collapse at the most pessimistic level or an ‘intelligent’ descent on the more optimistic. Many of us can visualise the collapse scenario because we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood through countless films of a future dystopia: 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Mad Max, Terminator, Planet of the Apes, Idiocracy, WALL – E . . . the list goes on.

What we seem to have more trouble with is the intelligent, planned transition vision. When I have run workshops to visualise this type of future, a lot of people have tended to be unable to really tune into a positive vision (maybe it was me!) or struggled with it. But, what an energy descent future could look like is tricky. Nine million farmers? Community supported agriculture? Millions working from home? Massive levels of microgeneration for wind and solar energy? Do we keep the internet? Ipods? An economy based on salvaging the scraps of the present? The end of globalisation? Arts & crafts? Horse-drawn transport? Weaving? What do roads look like in 2040?

There is almost an infinite number of questions that could be asked about a post-oil future, and as we know, predicting the future is fraught with problems. The other thing is that for a child of the 60s, reared on 70s sci-fi about the ‘YEAR 2000′ (and beyond), the future is already here. Not quite as set out in old comics and books, but look at where we are: climate change, peak oil, globalisation, the internet, biofuels, economic meltdown. None of that was in 2000AD comic in 1978!

On another level, of course, the future is an illusion. It never comes, because when you get there it’s now/today . . . So, where are we going with this? Well, I’ve got a wish list of things I’d like to see happen:

1. Develop a vision of what positive transition to a post-peak world/West Sussex (where I live) could be like. Even down to the little details.
2. Realise that today/now is the only opportunity we ever have to do anything in, and we can’t just live in hope that the future will magically solve all these issues. The future doesn’t exist!
3. Encourage cartoonists and writers of sci-fi to come up with a new comic which deals with an energy descent future, warts and all!
4. Sign out and cook some dinner. I am planning ahead.

Loss and Gain

When you’re a member of a transition initiative, it’s very easy to lose sight of what is important in amongst all the organising of things.

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It made me think that we all need to constantly remember the reasons we became interested and involved in the beginning. It also sometimes means questioning how doing what we’re doing makes us feel. If it makes us feel good, alive, excited, then that is a reason for carrying on. If on the other hand, it makes us feel overwhelmed, negative, jaded, then that should be enough to stop doing it.

Recently, I’ve spoken to several people who have felt that they have become mired in detail and managing, losing some/all of the vitality they felt when they first started. This is a pity, but only a decision that can be made by those individuals. What are the options if you find yourself in a negative spiral? Remove yourself from the situation, change the situation, or accept the situation. That is all (thanks Eckhart Tolle!)

Working towards energy descent is very challenging. It demands much and is unprecedented. There is also a tedency to feel we need to use today in order to create a better future. Well, that might be one way to think about it. What is just as important though, is what you do today. Transition implies a gradual change or shift; it is about a journey rather than a destination. Always thinking of the destination is overwhelming, and might mean you miss the journey itself.

Feeling that ‘if we don’t do it, no-one else will’ is also something I’ve heard recently. Transition Towns are often caught up in this thinking: too few people trying to do too many things. This often then becomes the main reason for taking on too much, or feeling anxious that the whole organisation is going to fall apart if you stop doing this or that. Well, there are times when you need to just say ‘no’. Not all grand schemes happen, and recognising when it’s time to let go of something that isn’t working is not just important, it’s often a way to regain your focus and feel happy again. Anything really important won’t fall apart and anything that goes is not important. This is personal resilience.

I feel like I’ve had to learn most of this the hard way, and have gained much in the process.

Transition Findon . . . it has to start somewhere!

Well, here’s what I decided. After helping set up TTW back in 2009, by the time 2012 began, I came to a point where a lot of things had changed.  For those of you who don’t know Renee and me, we had a baby daughter last summer. That meant that pretty much everything we did took a seismic shift. Attending TTW evening events and meetings immediately became a thing of the past, and all the time I’d spent previously on TTW matters suddenly disappeared.

For a while I’d been questioning the logic of constantly having to travel into Worthing (for me that’s a ten mile round trip to the centre of town) to do transition-related things. Neighbours in Findon were asking why we were doing Transition Town Worthing instead of something more local, and friends in TTW floated the concept of a Transition Findon on more than one occasion.

Six months after our baby was born, I decided to take a big step back and formally leave the TTW steering group. I couldn’t attend meetings and my work on Worthing’s Energy Descent Action Plan seemed to have reached something of a dead end. My priorities had shifted and I had to focus on what was really important to me and my family.

The thing was, I couldn’t detach myself completely from transition. As transition is about building resilience in your local community I thought why not just put a few feelers out exactly there. Findon is different enough from Worthing to give it a go (a village of 2000 people as opposed to a large dispersed town of over 100,000), and the essence of transition is that if you have an idea and some enthusiasm, GO FOR IT!

Where we are now is a Twitter account (@tr_findon), a blog: http://energydescentforbeginners.wordpress.com/and registering as a ‘muller’ with the Transition Network. Email: transitionfindon@gmail.com

Who knows what might come of it. I’m not planning anything at present, and it all depends who comes out of the Findonian woodwork. I still don’t have any time to set up events and run meetings, but there had to be a beginning to it. Bear in mind that TTW took almost a year from the initial discussions to the first event in September 2009, and that was with 6 or 7 very enthusiastic people involved, giving up substantial time to make it happen. So, this one is going to be a relaxed, slow growth (which is perfect for me at present . . . less is more and all that).

What we’d like to focus on eventually (2013 onwards) are things along the lines of community allotment or orchard, street-scale solar energy project, and heart & soul type activities. What we’d like to link in with that’s already going are the fantastic Angmering Community Supported Agriculture, and the Highdown Permaculture Garden. What we don’t want to do is commit to too much, get stressed about meetings, and over-complicate things. Keep it simple. Whoever turns up will be the right people.

So, there it is. A transition village on Worthing’s doorstep.

If not now, then when?

Energy Descent Conundrums Part One

Energy descent is not an easy concept for most people to grasp. As we have all grown up in an era of unprecedented energy ascent, the idea of a future with less available energy is an uncomfortable one, even for those of us within the Transition movement.

I was thinking about what the best ways of getting energy descent across to people who haven’t come across the concept before. Then I thought about an idea raised a while ago by a friend in TTW about the role of an agony aunt in a post-peak-oil world. What sort of issues and problems would they be dealing with? Secret addiction to the smell of unleaded? Nipping out into the garden at midnight with a pick axe hoping to find a new reserve?

So what are the small things in life that energy descent will mean to people? Not just the obvious ones like getting to work or heating the house, but the more mundane things that don’t even register when discussing big scary stuff like peak oil. These are more random, trivial questions for an energy descent future . . .

New Tricks?

Last month I made a decision. In many ways, it was a tough one, although actually it was a ‘no-brainer’. I decided to quit the Transition Town Worthing steering group.

It was a tough decision because I was a co-founder of TTW in early 2009. Ever since the set up, I’d been deeply involved with most TTW things: writing the constitution, setting up the website, giving talks, showing films, supporting projects, running the monthly newsletter. Since 2010, my main focus was creating an Energy Descent Action Plan for Worthing, and the TTW steering group seemed like the natural route to make this happen. How could I let that go? TTW had been in my soul for three years, head, heart and hands.

It was a ‘no-brainer’ because in August 2011, I became a parent for the first time and all the time I’d previously dedicated to TTW vanished overnight. I suddenly had a whole new set of priorities to contend with and even if I’d had the time, I just didn’t have the ‘headspace’ to be part of the steering group.

Being a good dad to my little girl became my new direction. Sitting in meetings just didn’t work for me anymore.

I had various conversations with others in the steering group and had a vague idea of getting back into it after a ‘few months’ or maybe in the spring when the evenings would be lighter, but it didn’t happen. I set up an EDAP group within TTW back in the Autumn and made a little progress developing a second draft of the EDAP. What was clear to me were two things: one, I just didn’t have much available time to work on the EDAP; two, there was little interest within the steering group to make the EDAP happen. There was a real struggle to try and put the EDAP centre-stage rather than allowing it to become ‘just another TTW project’ in amongst the knitting workshops and social events.

The first point was an unavoidable result of becoming a new parent. The second point was unfortunate as we had agreed previously on several occasions that the EDAP was to be the priority for the steering group during 2011/12. What became increasingly clear was that creating an EDAP is a big task and one that needs input from a number of sources and co-writers. I had already had some excellent input from the local food group of TTW, some good ideas from our EDAP World Cafe event from June 2011, a few quality original cartoons, some great oral histories, and some degree of continuity with an introduction and resilience indicators.

With an EDAP (either working towards one or using one as a blueprint) a transition group has a coherence and direction about it; without an EDAP, there seems to be a real possibility of drifting towards being another vague ‘green’ organisation, well-meaning but ultimately without teeth or a USP. Transition’s USP for me is energy descent.

So, at present, the EDAP for Worthing is shelved until further notice. I’d still like to see it published, but only when we can find some real enthusiasm amongst TTW’s 300+ members. My feeling is that for a Transition initiative to produce an EDAP, several key factors need to be in place:

1. A fully committed steering group, willing to devote their limited and precious time to it
2. Three or four co-writers, alongside other contributors
3. A programme of co-ordinated EDAP-related events to bring energy descent into focus for those beyond the steering group
4. Good networking that allows EDAP to be presented and discussed with a wide range of key players in the the local community, as well as a willingness to incorporate EDAP into other local plans, and vice versa!

Now that I am a father, my interest in planning and/or addressing energy descent on a local community level has become heightened. I have a personal interest in a livable future beyond oil.  As a result, I will think differently about the future direction of this blog. We are still all beginners at this energy descent stuff and there is a lot to be thought about. Maybe some places and people are not quite ready for something as radical as energy descent (after all it is a concept totally at odds with ‘conventional’ thinking about the future), and as warm-hearted, inspirational, and positive as an EDAP.

I think this story is only just beginning . . .

Get Back . . . to Resilience!

 

 

 

Hats off to Geography Review.

 

 

As a Geography teacher and afficionado, I do occasionally take a peek at the A Level quarterly publication. Often filled with fascinating articles on coastal erosion and glaciation, it is always in tune with some big issues. My interest was exacerbated recently when I noticed that the November 2011 issue contained some brilliant sections on peak oil, the impacts of climate change, and an article entitled ‘Eat Local?’ What really caught my eye was a double page spread on the meaning of resilience.

 

To me, resilience is a great word. Just saying it feels uplifting, especially when you reach (and stress) the second syllable. It always feels full of untapped possibilities and optimism. It is a word that wants to hang on in there and not let go.

 

Students seem to get it, by and large, provided it is discussed in the context of a real thing rather than just a concept. So, it can often crop up when looking at the ability of an area of countryside to cope with large numbers of tourists trampling over it, or a rural community dealing with the reality of drought and coming up with responses to get through it.

 Anything that raises the profile of resilience has to be a good thing, so the fact that it was featured in the prestigious A level publication was very welcome. The article is called ‘Everybody’s talking about . . . Resilience’.

 

 

 Resilience is defined as ‘an ability to leap back or rebound following a disruption or a disaster’. So far, so good. It then adds how ‘academics, business leaders and politicians now embrace the word as a catch-all way of characterising the capacity of societies, economies and environments to cope with diverse pressures in a high risk world.’ Well, partly, but not in the same way that ‘sustainable’ has been bandied around for the past twenty years.

 

 

Here’s what it looks like on the graph:

 

 

 

However, what else do we learn about resilience? Well, we need to proceed with caution as the article is focused upon a return to ‘normal’ conditions following a stress event of some kind. As shown in the diagram above, any response that deviates away from the ‘growth path’ is deemed ‘non-resilient’. The goal of restoration of ‘business as usual’ is regarded as the defining outcome for resilience, and this goal has been echoed over recent years since the 2008 economic crisis began: how do we get back to where we were before?

 

 

Ugg. The more important question should be how do we break away from looking at resilience in ways that cannot see further than ‘business as usual’?

 

 

The one silver lining to this cloud was that one strand of the resilience definition in the article suggests ‘the capacity to respond to a crisis through innovation or evolution – the outcome of the recovery process will be a different state from what existed before the crisis’. Ahh, this is more like it. This is the Transition angle on resilience at last. It does highlight the importance of being clear about what we mean by resilience, especially given our current state of economic meltdown. But, this graph model is still obsessed with the ‘growth path’ and is showing innovation leading to even higher levels of growth than existed prior to the crash.

 

 

David Holmgren discusses a variety of potential future scenarios in his book, Future Scenarios (very apt title, no?) There are parallels here with his ideas, except there is no investigation of what this ‘innovation or evolution’ might look like. In Future Scenarios, this future scenario is the permaculture/transition to a low energy society.

 

 

Working on the second draft of Worthing’s EDAP has raised the question of what do we actually mean by resilience. Is it to ‘get back to where you once belonged’? And if so, where is that? What is ‘normal’? Is there a difference between what is desirable and what is possible? We need to be clear about resilience as being a defining characteristic of a community or society within an energy descent future. In other words, a future which has seen a real shift away from the business as usual model, or even business as usual with a few tweaks (aka ‘greenwash’).

 

 

The moral of the story? We need to be careful to explain what we mean by resilience to avoid it losing its importance in the area of energy descent. Making this really clear by bringing in some resilience indicators would help, and they will look very different to our business-as-usual ways of measuring where we are on this graph.

 

 

Finally then, anyone fancy having a go at re-wording the lyrics to Get Back to an energy descent theme? No? Oh well.

This is Worthing, 2012. What Next?

 Spending an hour or so in central Worthing  last weekend taking photos of the urban landscape for the EDAP resulted in a document of grey, cold concrete, a car-dominated space.

There’s a few here, and what we’re going to do is ‘doctor’ them using Photoshop to create some images of a ‘transitioned’ Worthing circa 2030. What’s changed? Oil is too expensive to use other than for exceptional circumstances. The climate has warmed. We’re doing more for ourselves as a local community. People travel less. We’re growing more food ourselves and learned new (old) skills.

The big question here is: what does Worthing look like after all this has happened? What does the urban fabric of the town look like in a post-peak oil world?

What will be our street furniture, or what logos will we see?

Will we want to retain some great examples of car culture’s great monuments and architecture?

Can we creatively re-think how we use space in a world where the parameters have been totally changed?

How will we make use of all the urban land that is no longer needed for cars?

Can we maintain it all? Does this landscape lose its meaning in 2030? Will people inhabit central town locations or is it still dominated by commerce? What sort of commerce will prosper and function in a post-oil future?

So many questions; so few answers.

What do you think?

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Mustn’t Grumble

Thinking about how best to present our Energy Descent Action Plan, and start building some solid connections with other groups and organisations in Worthing, the EDAP team is considering three threads.

These would be a printed version of the EDAP, setting out the vision of a transitioned Worthing along with an outline of the action plans for the key themes. The central focus of the printed EDAP is likely to be a map of the town showing numerous projects as they could be in 2030 (or thereabouts). The second version would be a short film. The reason for this is because we are trying to work out who the audience is for the EDAP, and ideally we want this to be as wide as possible rather than just a few hardcore transitioners. A short video (maybe around 20 minutes long – or less) might just engage those people who are never going to pick up a printed document. The final version is web-based and would contain much greater detail. This is to enable the action plan part of the EDAP to contain detailed backcasting and allow for a little reviewing and updating in the future.

I have recently been taking a tour through a few web-based tools to explain what an EDAP is (or might be). E-cards seem to be a possible for creating a jokey image with a message (I thought this one might appeal to a few in Worthing . . . ) especially since we no longer have a resident cartoonist to help us do this. Like Twitter, there’s a beauty in saying what you need to say in a soundbite.

We now have a committed team writing for the EDAP, but a real lack of creative/artistic types to create good visual images. But, I’m trying not to complain. Creating is actually more fun. Even with a e-card.