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Transition culture - from this kind of civilisation towards a sustainable one

  
 
Saturn's nod
09:59 / 04.02.07
Is anyone else interested in the 'transition towns' movement? It's a European thing, started with Rob Hopkins and other permaculturists in Kinsale, Republic of Ireland and since then the people of Totnes in England have also begun a collective "energy descent action planning" process. I've recently heard about Lewes and Bristol beginning 'transition town' movements as well. It's collective action by local people to secure infrastructure: energy, water, food supplies, health and social care, internet, and so on, into the future. I think the idea is that if we plan together we might be able to build a decent future for all of us. It's ground-up democracy

Rob Hopkins' blog has some hints about beginning your own transition town movement. The Soil Association (major organic certification body in the UK) has recently published a pamphlet 'One planet agriculture: the case for action' along with their annual conference on the same theme (includes recordings of lectures), which are relevant to the challenge of feeding people beyond dependence on fossil fuel. There's an essay by Rob Hopkins about energy descent on the Soil Association website, too.

I think a lot of city councils in the UK might still have full-time workers funded by the Agenda 21 movement from fifteen years ago, and I wonder how much those officers are aware and involved in this transition culture planning movement. They probably know a lot about where the resistances to change towards sustainable life have been identified. Here in the West Midlands UK I'm told it's been almost impossible to advance a collective green agenda because the industrial interests of car manufacturers are seen to exert control over the local political scene.

Are other posters involved in collective action planning towards a sustainable future? What are your reactions, if you're not involved? Is it the kind of thing you can see joining in with?

One of my own hesitations is that I'm on an academic career path at the moment and that means being willing to move at least until I've got a permanent job: hence it's difficult for me to get involved in the kind of sustained and committed local activism that I think is necessary to help cultural change happen. I don't really want to get stuck into local political stuff becaue I might be somewhere else in six months: I don't want it to be even more of a wrench for me to move and I don't want to harm the cause by deserting people.

What would help you get involved, if you aren't already? What would be the next step towards this kind of thing happening where you live?
 
 
Ticker
12:23 / 04.02.07
I'm going to follow the links you provided but my first question is can't you become involved with the main org rather than a local branch? If you were to help the larger body it (to my thinking) wouldn't matter if you moved.
 
 
Ticker
19:14 / 06.02.07
I adore permaculture (though my massive tome on the subject has not been completely digested). Do we have a thread on it?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
22:14 / 06.02.07
I've downloaded the PDF and I'll read it over the next day or so. I already suspect that the answer to your last question might be that I live in London.
 
 
sorenson
22:18 / 06.02.07
I try and grow as much of my own fruit and vegetables as I can in my own back yard (though it's getting harder with water restrictions, which annoys me no end given the relative water and energy efficiency of growing your own food), and we've recently joined an organic food collective which means we'll get a box of mostly locally grown, in season fruit and veg every week. We also attended a series of seminars run by the local council on sustainable homes, but it didn't translate into any larger scale planning for the municipality.

I would definitely be interested in this kind of collaborative planning, but it's always a matter of time and energy outside work and life. I am a bit annoyed by the way that the demands of the capitalist system (work all week so you can pay that mortgage so you can have the little bit of land to grow stuff on) take up so much energy that there is precious little left over for collective action, and I am always very impressed by people who manage to stay very active once they've left uni.

XK, there's a gardening thread in convo, but I haven't stumbled across a permaculture thread. I would participate if one was started!
 
 
Saturn's nod
10:40 / 07.02.07
Yay, a hat trick score from amongst my favourite posters.

Thanks for the suggestion, XK I'd not thought of that. I don't think we have a thread on Permaculture (what about Permaculture would make a thread?), though it's name-checked in various of my rants in other threads before 1, 2.

Nina, please will you say more about what you mean by 'I already suspect that the answer to your last question might be that I live in London.'? Is it that you think that has to change before you can get involved in this kind of thing?

Have you looked into Masanobu Fukuoka's work, sorenson? I think he's part genius, part elderly nutcase (you know the sort), and I guess one of the original sources of inspiration for permaculture's agroforesty tendencies. I've tried some gardening using his 'natural way of farming' stuff: it's really good for food growing where little water is available, and I got some really good plants a few summers ago when it was very hot and dry - they were sheltered and moisturized by deeper rooted stuff. Fukuoka's really keen on acacias because their taproots can drill to great depths - once they are pulling water to the surface and transpiring locally there's more moisture in the air for less deep-rooted stuff to thrive on.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:36 / 07.02.07
Is it that you think that has to change before you can get involved in this kind of thing?

Well I'm only on page 13 of the EDAP PDF but I think that I can already relate this to the document.

I don't have a garden so I can't grow my own food, maybe a few herbs or a couple of lettuces, possibly a tomato plant but nothing else. I also can't compost so if I want to enrich soil, even for a window box I need the equivalent of a bokashi bin. One of those would cost me between £40 and £50, maybe I can feed communal plants as well but basically that's the very basis of energy inefficiency in a huge number of ways.

I live in an area of London that's new to me and I'm not part of any kind of community yet so suggesting this kind of process (like the one at Kinsale) isn't something I can do right at this moment. The city is huge, it's extremely difficult to work out who the local authorities are and to stay within a council's boundaries for more than five years. London basically is about as adverse to securing a basic infrastructure and supply as anywhere could be.

Realistically the easiest way to engage with transition culture is to move somewhere much smaller, which will probably happen eventually because I actively want to engage with this type of community action.
 
 
sorenson
09:34 / 09.02.07
Yay, a hat trick score from amongst my favourite posters.

aw shucks.

I hadn't heard of Masanobu Fukuoka - he sounds very cool! Something to chase up next time I go to Japan.

My favourite gardening writer is Jackie French. I like her because she's Australian, which means she understands my local conditions, and because she is quite slapdash and laid back, which suits my gardening style. She often validates what I just feel to be right, ideas that go against the orthodoxy of gardening. She makes gardening seem easy, which I like too because I sometimes get overwhelmed by what I have taken on!

She talks about 'almost self-sufficiency', which I really like, because it takes the pressure off trying to reach some perfect ideal of self-sufficiency. Rather, the aim to is do what you can, with the understanding that every lettuce you grow in your back yard is a contribution in so many ways - to the environment by reducing water consumption and greenhouse emissions, to your own health, but perhaps most importantly to a deep sense of satisfaction at having nurtured something which then nurtures you. She has a dream that every suburban back yard has at least a little vegie patch and a bunch of fruit trees, that street trees are fruit and nut trees, that all the fantastic arable land that we waste in australia with lawns and 'entertaining areas' is put to use.

And she does all this in a chatty, fun, engaging style, unlike Bill Mollison who is brilliant but a bit ponderous and up himself. I just watched an interview with him tonight and I was disappointed by how much of an egotistical prick he is.

Sorry if this is all a bit off topic. I guess, to bring it more on topic, something that I would really like to see is local governments, or even the state government, being more proactive about encouraging people to grow even just a small part of their own food - maybe by giving small water restriction exemptions or rainwater tanks to those people who grow vegies. I would love to see more local planning around community gardens and food - I am hoping that the food collective we have joined will focus on locally grown food (I think that's the plan). I live in a pretty awful street, on a main road across from an industrial estate, so most of my local action energy is devoted to trying to reduce air pollution from the factories, but one day I would like to be more involved in other kinds of local sustainability initiatives (not sure why I am so obsessed with the food thing! I guess I just think it is a really neglected area of environmental activism).
 
  
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