Love in the Network

I am unashamedly, devotedly, a blogger. Never happier than facing that blank page at dawn, thinking as I do now: what on earth shall I write about today? A unsung painter once told me: artists always go back to their first love. And so, unequivocally, I returned in 2009 to putting words into empty spaces. For years I lived without true love, without a deadline. I had other affairs. I roamed the realms of plant medicine and dreams, traversed great geographies and met extraordinary people and I loved them all passionately. But something was missing. When I climbed trees and looked across the land I had no one to tell about my experiences.

Because as every writer knows words only come alive when they are read. You can't tell a story if no one is listening. You can keep notebooks and write manuscripts that gather dust under your bed but all these are a substitute for the real thing. In blogging I discovered, as thousands of other bloggers have, that you didn't need a publishing house or a newspaper to exist. As soon as you blog you become a part of a vibrant web of communication. Now alone in this birch tree on an ancient tumulus, thinking about the planet in a state of extreme shift, I find myself working alongside thousands of others in the cities, mountains and forests of the world.

So this is about the people who make that happen: my blogging colleagues. Because blogging not only liberated me from silence and solitude, it allowed me to work joyfully and productively with my fellow Transitioners, with Jon and Mark and Simeon and all the Norwich bloggers, with Mike at the Transition Newsletter and Ed at the Transition Network, all the regular writers and guest editors on the Social Reporting Project and people that I met as I set it up - from those who came to the talks on communications at the Sunrise Festival to the media team at the Transition Conference. With Adrienne Campbell (TT Lewes) of 100 Monkeys, with Shaun Chamberlin (TT Kingston) of Dark Optimism, with fellow writers at the Dark Mountain Project and the crew at the One World Column. Becoming a Transition blogger gave me licence to investigate, reflect, be creative, give back and make friends in a way I could never had imagined two years ago when Jon and I sat down before the empty screen just before the Transition Norwich First Birthday Party at Unit 5 (our first post).

Sometimes love redeems you from obscurity in a way you can never imagine, it comes out of the blue and rescues us from living a meaningless life, without relationship. It gives us all a second chance.

Scanning the news
Each morning I scan the tweetdeck for three or four retweets (for those who don't know this ace tool, it's a way of looking at four or more columns of tweet lists at a time). I look across those columns and the stories jump out. Each one of those links leads me to a blog and this now is how I see the world beyond my personal experience. This is how I know there are some bold and articulate writers and thinkers out there. Most of us writing for free and against the odds, looking at the big picture, facing reality, coming up with new moves, not losing heart. Providing coherence in a time of dissonance. As Mike Grenville described in his post on Navigating Change and Community Chaos, we are the imaginal cells of a butterfly meeting and joining up, while a rapacious caterpillar world violently resists our emergence.

We're creating a new kind of communications network that is not dominated by highly selective (and often manipulated) mainstream media, intent on fostering antagonism, 1% obeisance and consumer desire. We're writing because the world-in-Transition is created by forging new kinds of links and connections. We re-imagine this future through reading about what is happening, by tuning into the zeitgeist, by getting smart, and becoming empathic with our fellows. And most of all because we desire to wake up and live in a collective truth that has been kept from us. As Laurie Penny (Penny Red) wrote this week in the New Statesman reporting from Zuccotti Park on police brutality and citizen journalism:

Many of them are not even journalists in the traditional sense. Increasing numbers are bystanders, interested amateurs, or members of the occupations themselves, shooting footage on phones and pocket cameras, writing up eyewitness reports on Twitter and Facebook.

There's another problem for the authorities: not only do more of the journalists look like protesters, more of the protesters behave like journalists.

You can bar every reporter from the scene of a camp eviction, you can pen them way away from the action and rip off their credentials when they complain, you can arrest every single person with a press pass, and there will still be recording, publishing and broadcast technology beyond any 1990s news editor's most nicotine-addled fantasies right there in the sterile zone.

Energy Bulletin

My blog of choice for this week is the Energy Bulletin which is a nexus for many finger-on-the-pulse, thought-provoking posts, particularly at this point about the Occupy movement, which has appeared in the "blogosphere", like a flash fire, igniting the indignant hearts and minds of people everywhere. Uprisings in Tahrir Square and the plazas of Madrid and Athens provoked twitterstorms and blog commentary, but the Occupy movement that began in New York has opened the floodgates of the English speaking world.

Social justice, the environment, food systems, peak oil and Transition are some of the key subjects of this fast-moving productive blog, edited on both sides of the Atlantic by Transitioners, Bart Anderson (Palo Alto) and Kristin Sponsler and Simone Osborne (Bristol). It was adopted by the Post Carbon Institute in 2009 where (where peak everything, Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow-in-Residence) and is a vital "clearinghouse for information regarding the peak in global energy supply":

We publish news, research and analysis concerning: energy production statistics, models, projections and analysis articles which provide insight into the implications of peak oil across broad areas including geopolitics, climate change, ecology, population, finance, urban design, health and a range of information to help people prepare for peak energy, such as renewable energy information, alternative financial systems. low energy agriculture, relocalization... [and] any other subjects that could lead to better understanding the implications of an energy production peak.

We welcome original content, and we especially invite industry insiders, independent researchers, journalists, specialists and activists to submit their insights relevant to these issues.

The Energy Bulletin also publishes some of the blogs from This Low Carbon Life and the Social Reporters (Yay, many thanks!), where they enjoy a different and wider readership. Cross-posting and retweeting is part of this new butterfly effect. Check them out!


Up a birch tree; photo from Shaun Chamberlin's post on Economy for the Social Reporters Project; Buy Nothing Day poster from post by Lindsay Curren of Transition Voice; from TN's First Birthday poster, designed by Andy Croft, first post on This Low Carbon Life.

We Are Here

Today I'm writing a post in solidarity with my fellow Transitioners at GrowHeathrow, who are going to court tomorrow to defend their home. For people who don't know about this key Transition initiative, do visit their website and look at everything they have been engaged in in the last two years. I visited everyone there last month (Joe Rake in their communications crew is one of our Social Reporters) and it is really a dynamic and friendly place. The group have cleared 30 tonnes of rubble and made a lush and vibrant garden. It is totally off-grid and the first Tarsands-free community in the UK. They have installed a wind turbine and solar panels and cook with wood donated by a local tree surgeon. It's a true community space where they hold frequent workshops and decide everything by consensus. If you wanted a vision of how the future could be, the kind of future Transitioners frequently talk about or imagine might be possible, you need to look no further. Everyone is welcome.

GrowHeathrow is also on squatted land. Their kitchen, living space and workrooms have been converted from two ruined greenhouses, their garden from derelict and poisoned earth, and tomorrow the owners are taking the group to court to try and evict them (in spite of the fact that the local community and residents' associations support the initiative and attend many of their events).

So today I'm writing about ownership and property, alongside our Social Reporting week on Economics, and to question the violence which those who own and possess use against the people who wish only to live on the earth as real human beings together (the brutality of the US police against the Occupy protestes, for example or the UK police evicting the travellers at Dale Farm). And how, as the banking system puts a stranglehold around the resources of every country, we are being challenged to come together and defend our right to live peaceably.

And also to rethink our attitude.

Everywhere, from corporate land grabs in Africa to the IMF seizure of assets in countries such as Greece, the rights to common ownership are being eroded. Indigenous people are being evicted from their ancestral lands, small farmers from land they have cultivated for centuries. In Britain new laws around squatting are now going through Parliament just at the point that many are losing their homes. To stand up against these measures we need to overcome any fear and hostility we might hold towards the dispossessed. We need to see our heartless attitude as a result of centuries of indoctrination by the Empire, as the 1% have systematically and violently seized common lands and native territories everywhere and asserted their rights to domination.

How does this fit with Transition? Why am I writing about the activist initiative GrowHeathrow when I live in East Anglia? Because the resilience of communities everywhere in the future will be measured insofar as they can embrace a culture of shared space and fellow feeling.

As Rob Hopkins said last night, summing up his talk at Transition Norwich's Third Birthday Celebration, most of the projects within the Transition movement are based on co-operatives and community-held assets. A brief look at The Transition Companion will immediately show you a wealth of social enterprises, community gardens, farms, energy companies, bakeries, breweries. Shared knowledge, shared meals. At the heart of the movement is our radical breakout from individualism, a relinquishing of a culture that champions private and exclusive property, to embracing one that celebrates shared neighbourhoods and shared lives. Habitats made for the benefit of all beings, not just for 1% of the human population. Our challenge is to let go of our addiction to possessing things and instead hold those same things in common - tools, cars, food, land, space.

You might not want to sleep in a tent at Occupy Norwich, nor live in a converted greenhouse in Sipson, but the spirit that Occupy and GrowHeathrow embody is core to Transition initiatives everywhere. Ours not yours.

Watch this video. Be with them tomorrow.

Defend Grow Heathrow! from Joshua Bregman on Vimeo

GrowHeathrow; Poster for The Garden, a documentary about the 14-acre community farm, South Central, in Los Angeles. the largest of its kind in the United States. In 2006 the owners sent in bulldozers and razed it to the ground; well wishing photo sent to the GrowHeathrow photo campaign; OccupyBeloMonte (Dam), Brazil.

We Are The Many

Protest song sung by Makana in front of world leaders at APEC summit in Hawaii (45 mins wearing Occupy with Aloha T-shirt)

Since September 17 there has been a new mood in the Western world as the OccupyWallStreet protest ignited a fire that has been roaring in the cities ever since.Tonight before hearing Rob Hopkins talk about his just-published, The Transition Companion, I'll be heading down to OccupyNorwich for their evening assembly.

Occupy is the story on everyone's lips and fingertips. It's the subject of this week's social reporting blog as Shaun Chamberlin introduces our week discussing economy and Transition as well as the key topic of many brilliant reflections within the social media. Transitioners everywhere have been taking part in the tent universities that have sprung up on the pavements around the globe, hosting talks and films and finding practical ways to contribute to this burgeoning movement.

But to really understand what thousands of people have been doing with their bodies every night, risking being brutally attacked by police, you have to experience what it is like to sleep on the cold hard ground in the middle of a city centre. That's the business of social reporters, of those who are Becoming the Media and creating a new communications infrastructure, you have to write from within the field as one of the many, rather than observing from the comfort and safety of a house or office. You have to put yourself on the line.

Just before Guy Fawkes night I went with fellow Transitioner Nick from Sustainable Bungay and stayed amongst the tents. Here's a report that was first published on the OneWorldColumn.

On a Friday night in Norwich, November 2011

It's nine o'clock and eleven of us are discussing climate change. So far we have agreed that in order to mitigate the effects of modern civilisation on the planet's atmosphere we have to powerdown to a low-carbon economy, de-industrialise our agricultural system and bring equality to bear in all aspects of the human world. You might think this is taking place in a warm lecture hall or meeting room on this November evening, but we are far from such venues. We're meditating on the vicissitudes of financial power under the statue of Sir Thomas Browne at the Haymarket. We're sitting on a quincunx of (very hard and cold) granite shapes, inscribed with the names of his philsophical examinations upon life and death. Occupy Norwich is holding one of its evening talks and I've come to spend the night here amongst the tents. Like thousands of others I've been following the activities in Zuccotti Park and Finsbury Square on-line and I want to find out what it's like to occupy a space in physical reality.

Earlier in the week I took part in the general assembly at the Occupy London site at St Paul's where a sea change had just occured. The Church, having originally joined forces with the City of London Corporation to evict the protesters, decided not to go ahead. Clerics resigned from high places as the dilemma presented by the presence of 200 tents in the financial district forced the church to have a change of heart and threw light on the customary obscure power play of the Corporation.

As you weave between the tents you are first amazed by the camp's organisation- the field kitchens, information booths, rota of night watchmen, co-ordinators and working parties - and then by the intensity of the dialogues. In sharp contrast to the shoppers and office workers wrapped up in themselves on their journeys home everyone is talking and listening - a media team sitting in a circle outside the coffee shop, workshops on inner change and the NHS in the meeting tent, a soapbox exchange on industrialisation and slavery by the church railings. It feels modern and yet historic, significant in all ways. St Paul was famously a tent maker, this site was once a place for radical and popular debate known as the folk moot. It's as if all the spiritual and political contradictions about Western culture have been thrown up into the air, in these squares, on the these steps, for a radical re-examination. Not by the 1% who rule but by the 99% - the people who serve its complex machinery. Ourselves.

Philosophers, since the first Athenian city-state was created, have provided politicians with rational justification for all their red in tooth and claw deeds. Political ideas, sanctioned at universities, have justified all the empire's violent acts from the shock doctrine meted out in South America to the rationale behind the atrocities of the Khymer Rouge. In spite of the call from the "thinking classes" for a full-scale manifesto of economic demands, the Occupy movement is taking time to self-organise and find its own directives. Directives that are not just dictated by "left hemisphere" reason and force.

New kinds of street university are springing up around the world. These exist so people can get together and decide on the intellectual and ethical base behind their actions. Most of us have not met before and certainly not in these configurations. We are strangers bound together by a common cause, by our sudden realisation about the global banking system. We are used to living and thinking individualistically, within a hierarchical structure, sanctioned by the official bastions of education. Now we are coming together and learning to think and come to conclusions as a group, creating a new narrative. In common with other occupations, we use the tools of consensus decision making, skill-share, assembly and co-operative agreement.

"What we need is a maxium wage," declares one of the climate change debaters.
"What we need is a fair society," added another,
"What we need is a society," says a third and everyone laughs. A student called Sam writes everything down. All our names. All our conclusions.

It's a Friday night in Norwich. At the FoodCycle Cafe at the Friends Meeting House the long queue for the free weekly meal has now dwindled. At the Forum a Cafe Conversation on Philosophy and Depression organised by the UEA is winding up. We're just getting going. It's a debate that will go on until eleven and then continue around the camp kitchen until 1.30am.

* * * *
In 1992 a German professor from the University of East Anglia walked from Norwich down the coast of Suffolk. His meditation on life and death begins with Sir Thomas Browne and ends in the streets of London, following a train of black funeral silk woven in this city of silk-weavers. The Rings of Saturn charts the intricate wheel of history as it holds us ransom in its grip. In their seats of power, the 1% preside, like dragons with their hoards, coveting form, bringing death and ruin on the world. As I lie on the cold hard ground, next to Sam and Victor and Nick, I'm wondering what it would take to break that pattern, bring warmth and life back to the people, to get us off the wheel.

* * * *
There is the most terrific din outside as the street sweepers and dustbin collectors storm down Gentlemen's Walk. Someone is speaking loudly to an itinerant man with a flying helmet. It's six o'clock. I climb out of the sleeping quarters I've been sharing with the others curled up in sleeping bags in one of the communal tents. I greet the dawn watchman of the camp and walk out towards the loud speakers sitting under the plane trees.

One of the most challenging things about the camps is confronting the hard edge of our city culture, for this is no summer festival in a green and pleasant English field. In common with other protest camps Occupy Norwich has a no alcohol, no drugs policy, but that doesn't apply to everyone else out on a Friday night. As well as keeping yourself together physically, you have at all times be ready to converse with everyone that swings by and cope with both the positive and negative responses to the occupation - not just the ordinary shoppers and workers, but the police, the Street Pastors, the homeless, the bitter and confused and angry, the mentally challenged, curious and cynical teenagers, merry pranksters celebrating the end of another hard week.

What is striking is the camp's general friendliness and openenss towards the people who turn up. The way strangers respond to one another generously, bringing not only free food, but their knowledge and time in order to articulate the complex web we are all caught in. We are the 99% means difficulties have to be dealt with rather than pushed away or dismissed in the heartless manner of all Empires.

The itinerant man starts to reel down the steps, singing a military song in German. "People are sleeping!" I tell him, but he is oblivious. Heil Hitler! he shouts as we stand under an umbrella in the softly falling rain.

"I don't think we want any of that around here," I say and laugh, and direct him back to the street where he disappears into the day. That's when I remember it's the 5 November, why everyone has been wearing those Guy Fawkes V masks and transfering their money out of the Big Six banks. It's a quiet revolution that's taking place in the cities, that burns within the right governance of all our hearts.

If we can hold out against the repeating hostilities of history, we might just make it to a future.

Makana singing We are the Many; wish list at Finsbury Square via Flickr; Young protester at OccupyNorwich, 15 October; writing on the steps at St Paul's, OccupyLSX; ON group in discussion on those seats (blipphoto.com); the camp (South Norwich News); OccupyEarth at the (successful) Keystone Pipeline protest outside the White House.

We’re Not Moving

I’m writing this in response to a blog written by Ann Owen of Transition Bro Ddyfi Trawsnewid on the Social Reporters project last week. Our subject was Inner Transition which had been introduced by Sophy Banks in a post about peacemaking and working with groups, Culture for a Healthy World. Ann writes about how a native antipathy to the historical (and continuing) occupation of the English in Wales makes it almost impossible for Transition initiatives to attract local people.

Ten years ago I spent a winter in Wales. I had arrived back to my native land and was looking for somewhere to live. I couldn’t afford to live in my last "hometown" Oxford anymore and although I loved these mountains and everyone I met was very welcoming (much more than in most places in England), I wasn't Welsh. I had just been thrown out of America as an "alien" ("go back to your country, buy a house, get a job, be normal") and had spent years on the road as a gringo, a pom, a Brit, a rosbif and suddenly I wanted to live somewhere where it was OK to be English and most of all, myself.

I soon discovered that, even in England, being English wasn't enough. In Suffolk I wasn't native enough, I was an “incomer” and would always be an incomer (even though I had spent years of my early life here). For other incomers in my lane, I was a "renter" and was frequently asked how long I intended to stay. When I visited London (my birthplace where I had lived and worked for 35 years) I was treated by visiting workers with the scorn reserved for outsiders. When I asked a fellow Londoner why this should be she said: "Well, this is a multi-cultural city now. You don’t live here anymore".

Returning to the Mountain

Francisco Ozuna stood on the mountain as we stood in a protest circle to pray for the Dragoon Hills. The peak was about to be blasted by a German mining company to provide the European art market with marble dust. The Dragoons are sacred to the Apache and were once the stronghold for Cochise and his warrior band during the last Native American resistance against the white invaders. Francisco, brought up in Mexico, was coming back to the land his people had been hounded from a hundred and fifty years ago:

"The mountain doesn’t belong to the Apache," he said. "We belong to the mountain".

At what point do we belong to the earth and to the people? And who is it who is telling us we do or don't belong?

In 2001 when I considered my position on the planet I realised I would never belong to any "community" if I was waiting to be invited and welcomed. I would always be too posh or not posh enough, too white, too poor, and never possess the correct genealogy. I would never own a house, or get the right job or be part of a local institution – church or club or school. I would never be "normal", or desire to be. I had to make myself at home.

Because one thing I had learned travelling all those years: you can be at home and belong to the human spirit anywhere you go, so long as your heart is fired up. When a volunteer from my old workplace came up to me and asked when we would be leaving Suffolk, something rebelled inside. Something wild and indigenous:

“Right, that’s it!” I said to Mark. “I am not moving”.

And so we have stayed in our cottage, down the lane, in Reydon, in Sustainable Bungay, in Transition Norwich, in England. We're not going anywhere.

What has this to do with Transition?

Most Transitioners are incomers. At least most of the ones I have met. We desire to belong to places and communities we find ourselves in and being part of an initiative allows us to have meaning and give back to a collective without having to be in a place for generations. We have the enterprise and ease of passage afforded to those who look towards the future. We can welcome people and be welcomed in ways that break convention and social isolation. Most true natives however are heavily constrained by their collective past, by family ties, by local traditions and vendettas that go back centuries. To do something different and new puts everyone at risk of being criticised and ostracised, which as social beings, as tribes, we are conditioned to fear more than anything else.

Transition gives us an opportunity to start again and thus the world. But to avoid the sense of futility (not reaching the community) or internal group conflict, we need to recognise we’re not starting with a blank slate. No matter how good our intention, how many ingredients and tools we have up our sleeves, we come into the room with history. Not just our own personal history but that of our society, being the change in places full of ghosts and bitterness. We carry the scars of a hostile and hierarchical culture within us. If we identify with it, repeat the patterns of acting the oppressed or being the oppressor, keep shunting other people out of our elite circles, out of the initiative, out of town, we are not truly in Transition. We are in the same system that is crippling the planet.

You’re welcome

Why the Occupy Movement has captured the world’s imagination is because we are the 99% includes everyone. We are not moving means we are occupying the space that the 1% says belongs to them. Suddenly in cites everywhere it doesn’t matter where you are from or who you are. We are all locked into the financial system and somehow we have to configure a way out of the labyrinth together.

The 1% of society want us to be in the down-there, outside place for ever and it keeps us in this position by encouraging everyone to hate each other and push each other out of the way, so that we live in a terror of not-belonging, with the wrath of a five thousand year-old alien empire on our heads. You, earthling, do not step out of line!

The fact is that by pitting themselves against the earth and against the people, the 1% are the real outsiders, even amongst themselves. Like mythical all-powerful dragons, they have no brothers and sisters, no compadres, no companions. They are alone in their lairs with their hoards of treasure. The most strategic act we can do right now is not to act like them - within ourselves, in our neighbourhoods, in our initiatives. Because the only place worth belonging to is the earth and to the human spirit.

If we can hold that fire and hold together we can all come home, wherever we live, in the cities, in the mountains, by the sea.

Photos: speaker at OccupyNorwich, Oct 15; rocks at Dragoon Hills, 1997; with Helen, Magdalen Street Celebration, Oct 1; with Nick and Margaret at the Transition Tea Tent, Greenpeace Fair, Suffolk, Sept 4; ocean at Cancun, Mexico, 1991.

Bringing to Share - Communications and the Low Carbon Cookbook

Welcome to our Transition Themes Week #9, our regular round up of Transition Norwich groups and projects. It's been a full-on month for Transition communications. As well as coordinating this blog and putting out our monthly bulletin the comms crew have also been working on a deadline for the Transition Network's Social Reporting Project where Mark, Kerry and I are writers and editors.

Last week I went up to the Festival Hall to take part in the Network's Project Sharing Engine and become one of the "alpha" testing team. Several webmasters from different initiatives are helping roadtest this innovative on-line sharing platform that will allow initiatives to disseminate their myriad projects across the globe. At the moment anyone can log their project by going directly onto the main site, where it is kept much like a library. The Sharing Engine will enable people to not only file copy via a widget on their own website but also to connect and cross-reference with others. It will become a vast interconnecting web and storehouse that will enable Transitioners to see the full range of activities and glean information and inspiration. So the meeting was as much about creating a dynamic social infrastructure as it was a technical exercise.

Not that computing skills were absent. At the start we had to say how tecchy we were in terms of numbers on the scale of one to ten. I have to say I did not feel very alpha at this point as several wizard 10s are on the team (including the Networks own technical co-op - Jim, Chris and Paul) as well as the project's mastermind, Ed Mitchell (8), the Network's new webmaster, Laura (9), and the Newsletter's editor, Mike (7). Where your zeta (2 1/2) reporter did have something to offer was editorially. Unlike the other initiatives most of TNs active members are also bloggers, either for our news blog or on This Low Carbon Life. Most of us regularly file copy, take pictures and create the necessary feedback loops for a resilient and connected collective.

One of the challenges in Transition is for people to actively report back on what is happening on a daily basis within the initiative. There are usually one or two people that are key communicators, but lacking other contributors the momentum for regular collective communication does not happen. One of the reasons we have the very non-tecchy Blogger system is so everyone can upload copy easily (the Network uses the far cooler Drupal). By running community blogs and contributing daily posts the rhythm of the enterprise carries people forward. This was one of the main topics we discussed in our break-out groups. When many people focus and participate within a shared enterprise everything becomes much easier and more fluid. These are how grassroots and diverse systems self-organise and create strong networks.

This has certainly been the case with the recent Occupy Movement which we'll be reporting on this week, along with other on-the-street reports: Simeon on the St Augustine's visioning (Economics and Livelihoods), Helen on the Magdalen Street Celebration, Elena on FarmShare's potato day, Ruth or Steve on Transition Hethersett and Kerry on Social Justice.

And in the spirit of the Sharing Engine here is a precis of the Low Carbon Cookbook project I wrote about last week as a social reporter in our Food and Health week. It is excerpted from the main piece what is going down in my kitchen is going down in the world which you can read here:

Low Carbon Cookbook

I am standing with a giant tea pot in my hands on a cold November day, listening to Tully Wakeman from East Anglia Food Link at Sustainable Bungay’s Growing Local! conference. He's telling a packed hall how 70% of grains grown in East Anglia are for animal feed, how “local” pigs are fed on rainforest  soya. He’s talking about peak oil and modern agriculture, how in the future we will have to learn to eat less meat and less dairy, a far simpler fare. This is it, I am thinking. This is The Project.

The Low Carbon Cookbook did not start straight-away. It began after a meeting between bakers, farmers, researchers and Transitioners to discuss how to create the Norwich loaf. It began after working with my friend in Transition, Josiah Meldrum, on three issues of Food Inspiring Change about local food projects and then on a treatment for a book called One Planet Community Kitchen (now roots shoots & seeds). It began after Tully inaugurated Transition Norwich’s second phase – the start up of the innovative Transition Circles, neighbourhood groups which looked at personal carbon reduction in all aspects of our lives - home energy, transport, food, “stuff” and waste.

It began after many of us had catalogued and recorded our downshift experiences in the TN blog, This Low Carbon Life, from baking bread to the Norwich livestock market, from eating roadkill to the health hazards of the global food business. It began in September 2010 after a fortnight on Transition Food Patterns that catalogued many of the local outlets, market traders and community gardens that make up a Transition food infrastructure, including the CSA that has now become Norwich FarmShare.

The Low Carbon Cookbook group have been meeting for over a year now, paying attention to dishes and produce in the way Mark was describing in respect to land and medicine plants on Monday. Most of us on the project have been part of the Transition Circles and trained as Carbon Conversation facilitators. We're cooks and growers, writers and academics, vegans and meat eaters, some of us constrained by chronic illness and allergies. All of us are highly aware of the ethical and political choices we are faced with everyday and vote with our forks, as Michael Pollan famously advised in the documentary, Vanishing of the Bees.

Josiah introduced our first Low Carbon Cookbook meeting at The Greenhouse with a talk on the history of co-operatives. We began the project by conducting a mapping exercise known as Deconstructing the Dish, speaking about its provenance, energy use and our memories around the different ingredients. My own was the humble dish of fava, first eaten on a Cycladic island in Greece, aged 19.

We have held kitchen conversations over a seasonal, local, organic, freegan, fair-traded, foraged meal each month since then. We have met in each other’s houses, in Jo's raw food neighbourhood café, The Nectar, at Norwich’s weekly FoodCycle, looked at key ingredients and tools, recorded and photographed all our sessions. We have considered all aspects of the industrial food system and how we can break out of it, how we can restructure, relocalise and most of all radically change our relationship with food.

The aim of the project is to compile (and publish) an A-Z on all subjects you need to know to eat as sustainably as possible within our present distribution systems. Here is a small taster:

Allotments, Beehives, CSAs, Dairy, Eggs, Foraging, Germination, Hungry gap, Industrial food systems, Jam, Kitchen Conversations, Land Grabs, Milling, Nourishment, Organic, Palm oil, Quinces, Rocket stoves, Storage, Tortilla, Umi plums, Veg boxes, Water, Xylitol, Yellow peas, Zero Waste.

It is built around a collection of Bring-to-Share recipes we have been cooking up for the last year and also a growing list of vegetables, wild and foraged plants. It contains resources: documentaries such as Food Inc and The End of the Line, books like Felicity Lawrence's Eat Your Heart Out! and Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution, as well as local food sources. In short it helps create the atmosphere, conviviality, intelligence and connection that is intregral to a low-carbon culture. It is our hope that by providing this kind of practical and philosophic blueprint, other Transition initiatives might compile their own regional cookbooks with local resources and dissmeninate them eventually via the new Project Sharing Engine on the Network.

Looking forward to linking up!

Photos: Alpha group at the Festival Hall (Mike Grenville); engagement group break out; occupy group en route to St Paul's (Ed Mitchell); Indian spices in a Mexican molcajete; deconstructed dishes by Elena of Norwich FarmShare and Gemma of Ripple Food Co-op and Transition Ipswich; dandelion tea and toss it in 24 leaves salad; anti-GM potato demonstration in Norwich; roadside stall; Food Inc poster and still; remembering sunflower and marigold seeds (CDC and MW)

On a friday night in Norwich, November 2011

By Charlotte Du Cann

It's nine o'clock and eleven of us are discussing climate change. So far we have agreed that in order to mitigate the effects of modern civilisation on the planet's atmosphere we have to powerdown to a low-carbon economy, de-industrialise our agricultural system and bring equality to bear in all aspects of the human world. You might think this is taking place in a warm lecture hall or meeting room on this November evening, but we are far from such venues. We're meditating on the vicissitudes of financial power under the statue of Sir Thomas Browne at the Haymarket. We're sitting on a quincunx of (very hard and cold) granite shapes, inscribed with the names of his philsophical examinations upon life and death. Occupy Norwich is holding one of its evening talks and I've come to spend the night here amongst the tents. Like thousands of others I've been following the activities in Zuccotti Park and Finsbury Square on-line and I want to find out what it's like to occupy a space in physical reality.

Earlier in the week I took part in the general assembly at the Occupy London site at St Paul's where a sea change had just occured. The Church, having originally joined forces with the City of London Corporation to evict the protesters, decided not to go ahead. Clerics resigned from high places as the dilemma presented by the presence of 200 tents in the financial district forced the church to have a change of heart and threw light on the customary obscure power play of the Corporation.

As you weave between the tents you are first amazed by the camp's organisation- the field kitchens, information booths, rota of night watchmen, co-ordinators and working parties - and then by the intensity of the dialogues. In sharp contrast to the shoppers and office workers wrapped up in themselves on their journeys home everyone is talking and listening - a media team sitting in a circle outside the coffee shop, workshops on inner change and the NHS in the meeting tent, a soapbox exchange on industrialisation and slavery by the church railings. It feels modern and yet historic, significant in all ways. St Paul was famously a tent maker, this site was once a place for radical and popular debate known as the folk moot. It's as if all the spiritual and political contradictions about Western culture have been thrown up into the air, in these squares, on the these steps, for a radical re-examination. Not by the 1% who rule but by the 99% - the people who serve its complex machinery. Ourselves.

Philosophers, since the first Athenian city-state was created, have provided politicians with rational justification for all their red in tooth and claw deeds. Political ideas, sanctioned at universities, have justified all the empire's violent acts from the shock doctrine meted out in South America to the rationale behind the atrocities of the Khymer Rouge. In spite of the call from the "thinking classes" for a full-scale manifesto of economic demands, the Occupy movement is taking time to self-organise and find its own directives. Directives that are not just dictated by "left hemisphere" reason and force.

New kinds of street university are springing up around the world. These exist so people can get together and decide on the intellectual and ethical base behind their actions. Most of us have not met before and certainly not in these configurations. We are strangers bound together by a common cause, by our sudden realisation about the global banking system. We are used to living and thinking individualistically, within a hierarchical structure, sanctioned by the official bastions of education. Now we are coming together and learning to think and come to conclusions as a group, creating a new narrative. In common with other occupations, we use the tools of consensus decision making, skill-share, assembly and co-operative agreement.

"What we need is a maxium wage," declares one of the climate change debaters.
"What we need is a fair society," added another,
"What we need is a society," says a third and everyone laughs. A student called Sam writes everything down. All our names. All our conclusions.

It's a Friday night in Norwich. At the FoodCycle Cafe at the Friends Meeting House the long queue for the free weekly meal has now dwindled. At the Forum a Cafe Conversation on Philosophy and Depression organised by the UEA is winding up. We're just getting going. It's a debate that will go on until eleven and then continue around the camp kitchen until 1.30am.

* * * *
In 1992 a German professor from the University of East Anglia walked from Norwich down the coast of Suffolk. His meditation on life and death begins with Sir Thomas Browne and ends in the streets of London, following a train of black funeral silk woven in this city of silk-weavers. The Rings of Saturn charts the intricate wheel of history as it holds us ransom in its grip. In their seats of power, the 1% preside, like dragons with their hoards, coveting form, bringing death and ruin on the world. As I lie on the cold hard ground, next to Sam and Victor and Nick, I'm wondering what it would take to break that pattern, bring warmth and life back to the people, to get us off the wheel.

* * * *

There is the most terrific din outside as the street sweepers and dustbin collectors storm down Gentlemen's Walk. Someone is speaking loudly to an itinerant man with a flying helmet. It's six o'clock. I climb out of the sleeping quarters I've been sharing with the others curled up in sleeping bags in one of the communal tents. I greet the dawn watchman of the camp and walk out towards the loud speakers sitting under the plane trees.

One of the most challenging things about the camps is confronting the hard edge of our city culture, for this is no summer festival in a green and pleasant English field. In common with other protest camps Occupy Norwich has a no alcohol, no drugs policy, but that doesn't apply to everyone else out on a Friday night. As well as keeping yourself together physically, you have at all times be ready to converse with everyone that swings by and cope with both the positive and negative responses to the occupation - not just the ordinary shoppers and workers, but the police, the Street Pastors, the homeless, the bitter and confused and angry, the mentally challenged, curious and cynical teenagers, merry pranksters celebrating the end of another hard week. What is striking is the camp's general friendliness and openenss towards the people who turn up. The way strangers respond to one another generously, bringing not only free food, but their knowledge and time in order to articulate the complex web we are all caught in. We are the 99% means difficulties have to be dealt with rather than pushed away or dismissed in the heartless manner of all Empires.

The itinerant man starts to reel down the steps, singing a military song in German. "People are sleeping!" I tell him, but he is oblivious. Heil Hitler! he shouts as we stand under an umbrella in the softly falling rain.

"I don't think we want any of that around here," I say and laugh, and direct him back to the street where he disappears into the day. That's when I remember it's the 5 November, why everyone has been wearing those masks and transfering their money out of the Big Six banks. It's a quiet revolution that's taking place in the cities, that burns within the right governance of all our hearts.

If we can hold out against the repeating hostilities of history, we might just make it to a future.

Sir Thomas Browne and young protester at Occupy Norwich, October 15 by Ruski Fari; group in discussion on those seats (blipphoto.com); the camp (South Norwich News); Guy Fawkes masks.

what is going down in my kitchen is going down in the world

When I am born my first act of civil disobedience is to reject my mother’s milk. I am the child of a bourgeois household, who brings the dreaming of a wild kitchen with her, and my body, I discover, is a tool to overthrow the patriarchial and matriarchal tyranny of the dining room. While my mother orchestrates polite and delightful parties and my father pours claret, I seek out apples in a marshland garden in Kent and my friend Polly’s hippy breakfast oats. My education years are spent eating at boarding school tables and slumland curryhouses. Everywhere I am hemmed in by anorexic girls and women on diets.

By a strange quirk of destiny I later earn my living in London partly by working as a waitress, styling food photographs, interviewing chefs and writing articles about food fashion and society. My first book is called Offal and the New Brutalism. Everyone I know is obsessed by restaurants, by their collections of global groceries, by the small snobberies of knife and fork, season and brand. I document our every move.

But the hands that write also stir, chop, mix and fold. They have learned in these cooking and eating out years to touch and feel and memorise the living fabric of the earth, the vibrancy of fish and fowl, the rough coats of seeds and bark, the soft down of peaches. These hands know what to do with sea urchins and dead hares. They have shopped in the markets of the world - Greek islands, South American cities, desert and mountain towns. They are smart, gentle, ruthless. Like everyone’s hands.

So when I say what goes down in my kitchen goes down in the world what I mean is that when you stand beside the chopping board with a knife the fate of a thousand things are in your hands – energy, water, people, soil, oil, all living systems. How you approach your meal is a microcosm of how the world is treated. Do you hold this creature with contempt or with love? Are you connected to the invisible people who work the land when you chop vegetables, slice bread, dream of chocolate? How many journeys did everything take to get here? Do I really care? About the trees, these facts, about my own creaturehood?

When you come into Transition you bring your intelligent hands with you, your small seemingly insignificant biography. By 2008 when I stood at the back of the Emmanuel Church Hall in Bungay, I had already gone through a radical downshift, foregone my swanky city ways and reconnected with the planet. I had become vegetarian, given up supermarkets and learned to live on rice and beans, I knew what kind of process your body needs to undergo to adjust to eating local food, to go cold turkey on all the addictive high-protein substances a lifetime of pleasure and convenience affords most people in the Western world. What you sacrifice in terms of nostalgia – all those picnics, feasts and treats, those holiday destinations.

What I hadn’t learned was how to make myself at home in my native land, with my neighbours, how that early rebellion was not just a personal act but something that connects us all.

Entering the collective

I am standing with a giant tea pot in my hands on a cold November day, listening to Tully Wakeman from East Anglia Food Link at Sustainable Bungay’s Growing Local! conference. He's telling a packed hall how 70% of grains grown in East Anglia are for animal feed, how “local” pigs are fed on rainforest soya. He’s talking about peak oil and modern agriculture, how in the future we will have to learn to eat less meat and less dairy, a far simpler fare. This is it, I am thinking. This is The Project.

The Low Carbon Cookbook did not start straightaway. It began after a meeting between bakers, farmers, researchers and Transitioners to discuss how to create the Norwich loaf. It began after working with my friend in Transition, Josiah Meldrum, on three issues of Food Inspiring Changeabout local food projects and then on a treatment for a book called One Planet Community Kitchen (now roots shoots & seeds). It began after Tully inaugurated Transition Norwich’s second phase – the start up of the innovative Transition Circles, neighbourhood groups which looked at personal carbon reduction in all aspects of our lives - home energy, transport, food, “stuff” and waste.

It began after many of us had catalogued and recorded our downshift experiences in the TN blog, This Low Carbon Life, from baking bread to the Norwich livestock market, from eating roadkill to the health hazards of the global food business. It began in September 2010 after a fortnight on Transition Food Patterns that catalogued many of the local outlets, market traders andcommunity gardens that make up a Transition food infrastructure, including the CSA that has now become Norwich FarmShare.

The Low Carbon Cookbook group have been meeting for over a year now, paying attention to dishes and produce in the way Mark was describing in respect to land and medicine plants on Monday. Most of us on the project have been part of the Transition Circles and trained as Carbon Conversation facilitators. We're cooks and growers, writers and academics, vegans and meat eaters, some of us constrained by chronic illness and allergies. All of us are highly aware of the ethical and political choices we are faced with everyday and vote with our forks, as Michael Pollan famously advised in the documentary, Vanishing of the Bees.

Josiah introduced our first Low Carbon Cookbook meeting at The Greenhouse with a talk on the history of co-operatives. We began the project by conducting a mapping exercise known as Deconstructing the Dish, speaking about its provenance, energy use and our memories around the different ingredients. My own was the humble dish of fava, first eaten on a Cycladic island in Greece, aged 19.

We have held kitchen conversations over a seasonal, local, organic, freegan, fair-traded, foraged meal each month since then. We have met in each other’s houses, in Jo's raw food neighbourhood café,The Nectar, at Norwich’s weekly FoodCycle, looked at key ingredients and tools, recorded and photographed all our sessions. We have considered all aspects of the industrial food system and how we can break out of it, how we can restructure, relocalise and most of all radically change our relationship with food.

The aim of the project is to compile (and publish) an A-Z on all subjects you need to know to eat as sustainably as possible within our present distribution systems. Here is a small taster:

Allotments, Beehives, CSAs, Dairy, Eggs, Foraging, Germination, Hungry gap, Industrial food systems, Jam, Kitchen Conversations, Land Grabs, Milling, Nourishment, Organic, Palm oil, Quinces, Rocket stoves, Storage, Tortilla, Umi plums, Veg boxes, Water, Xylitol, Yellow peas, Zero Waste.

It is built around a collection of Bring-to-Share recipes we have been cooking up for the last year and also a growing list of vegetables, wild and foraged plants. It contains resources: documentaries such as Food Inc andThe End of the Line, books like Felicity Lawrence's Eat Your Heart Out! and Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution, as well as local food sources. In short it helps create the atmosphere, conviviality, intelligence and connection that is intregral to a low-carbon culture. It is our hope that by providing this kind of practical and philosophic blueprint, other Transition initiatives might compile their own regional cookbooks with local resources and dissmeninate them eventually via the new Project Sharing Engine on the Network.

 

Looking forward to linking up!

Photos from This Low Carbon Life: Indian spices in a Mexican molcajete; deconstructed dishes by Elena of Norwich FarmShare and Gemma of Ripple Food Co-op and Transition Ipswich; dandelion tea and toss it in 24 leaves salad; anti-GM potato demonstration in Norwich; roadside stall; Food Inc poster and still; remembering sunflower and marigold seeds (CDC and MW)

Video link

Suddenly my body by Eve Ensler