Mapping Grassroots Britain

Last night watching A Dance to the Music of Time it came to me that for decades now Britain has looked backwards into the past - its form and feel embedded in the hierarchical style of Empire. Whatever happened to creating the future most of us yearn for, a future which benefits everyone, including the environment we all live in? And how would we recognise it when we came across it?

To show that that future has already been seeded and taken root is the aim behind The Grassroots Directory. It was launched last week with this wonderful street map by Laura Barnard. The map is of an imaginary town, village or city neighbourhood made up of many of the innovative community-led, owned and run projects that are now happening all over Britain. In a Guardian piece today I catalogue some of these enterprises that appear like a net of bright sparks across an apparently hostile and corporate-dominated country. 

What distinguishes them is that they bring benefit to the places and people they share, whether orchard, cinema, farm or energy company. These projects are not driven by an individualist desire for power but by collective necessity and ‘cluster under the umbrella of a social and solidarity economy’ as John Thackara writes about so eloquently in his new book How to Thrive in the Next Economy.

They belong to a new mood that is now shifting the country politically and economically and most of all in the hearts of its people. If you know of a project near you do get in touch with us at info@grassroots.org. Details about this sourcebook and its aims can be found at www.grassrootsdirectory.org.uk. We would love to hear from you.

Free as a bird

This is a small story about money: I am in the woods outside Norwich on a January day with a gang of kids from Catton Grove, a huge primary school in a rough-and-tumble part of the city. I'm here as part of an arts and Transition teach-in, exploring peak oil and honey bees, reconnecting with nature and planting some of the apple varieties that used to grow in the Grove before it was tarmacked over.

Most of the children haven't been in woods before, and for sure have not been let loose in them. They are wild for it. We have split up into tribes, named after some the of rarer creatures that shelter here, raft spiders and dormice, and performed small plays in the woodland theatre. I am with the Nightingales. We wear crowns of hazel and pheasant feathers and squeeze into our host's tiny off-grid wood cabin when it starts to rain. Everyone is bursting with questions: How do you dry your clothes? How do you catch the fish? Yuck! say the girls, as they watch her gut a pheasant. Cathy, originally from Zambia, tells them everything about the animals, about the Paleolithic peoples who used to live on this land. They do not move away.

Afterwards I walk back down the track with Vernon. That's not his real name, because this is more than two years ago now. But I do remember two things about that day: the first is how the "deprived" and "difficult" children responded the best to this wild and creative environment and really came into their own. The second was the question Vernon asked me:

"I love this feather," he says. "Can I keep it?"

"Of course you can," I said.

"How much does it cost," he asks.

"It doesn't cost anything," I tell him. "It's free."

That's the rub about our culture. Everything comes at a price. In some ways the pheasant has a price on his head too of course. In East Anglia he is big business. People will pay up to a thousands pounds a day to shoot him and all of his tribe. One day Vernon will have a price on his head too. He will be £6.50 an hour if he's lucky, or he will get to be called worthless and a scrounger and be paid £50 a week. No one will value the way he was once a nightingale and sang from deep within a blackthorn bush.

When you are talking about living without money, what you are really talking about is living with the values of the free. Living without money is not poverty, which is a lack of money and resources, the fate of most people who live on the bottom rung of a civilisation or capitalist system. It is the deliberate way of life that Mark Boyle embodies and writes books about. Living in a world where people and land and birds are not market commodities, but integral to the living, moving, breathing fabric of the planet.

Some of our living without money is a consequence of the economic downturn, a Transition making do. But mostly it is about reestablishing a collective value system that is not based on scarcity and debt but on the abundance of the earth. If you live within that abundance, you are never poor. You live like the tribe, within the richness of life itself. Rain, laughter, imagination, the closeness of trees and your playmates. The delight of having a physical body, of being alive, of having a heart that can feel and connect with all lifeforms, that can trace in its mind's eye the sky path of a bird now flying across the ocean from Africa. That remembers that this small insignificant bird will return to these woods in April, as he does every April, to sing a song that makes all the world stop in its tracks.

No charge

I want to write an unshopping list. It's a list of all the gifts I have received since I joined Transition. I stand in the room and look around me and eveything in the room comes from people and their generosity. The green sofa and wooden chairs from our Give and Take Day. The seeds on the dresser from our Abundance tables and Give and Grow Days. The Transition books on the table from Mike and Josiah. The cupboard filled with freegan groceries from Juan, my tinctures and jams made from the hedgerows aound the house - wild cherries, damsons, sea buckthorn - the logs in the basket from the dead elms. The boots on my feet, my clothes.

Some of these things come from events we host as initiatives, and some come as a consequence of Transition. Living in a transition culture makes you bold and free in a way that living within the constricting old culture cannot, bound as it is by the shame of poverty and the desire to control everything. Blogging in all these years has enabled me to be shameless about my life: it's all on show. Here we are, no house, no holiday, no swanky car, and still thriving, enjoying ourselves, together.

When you are open and free, that's when the gifts come. People are happy to give or lend you things. My neighbours are happy to lend us ladders and their lawnmower. Philip is happy to give me his boots. I am happy to receive them (even though they are two sizes too big). I have been longing for boots all winter and now here they are! There is a lot of happiness in these exchanges. Because somewhere deep inside everyone is that song, that desire to give to life. We like to be generous. We are taught to be mean and possessive, but we long to give, to have those small conversations over the fence. Transition allows us to give in a way that is not compromised by good works or charity, by patronisation or demand for gratitude. They are small insignificant acts, like those cups of tea Caroline was writing about on Thursday. But all of them break us out of a mindset that keeps us locked away from life and from each other.

Somehow we have to learn not to be fearful and get to a state of free exchange, in line with all the wild things and eco-systems of the planet. When you start to pick herbs or forage in the hedgerows you have to break the taboo of property. Automatically we assume everything we see belongs to someone, or there is a law against it. Or that if it has not been processed and bought in a shop that it has no value. But nature doesn't think that way. It just is. I used to buy wood until a painter who was working on our house asked me why I didn't just collect it myself, and taught me to use an axe. Now my wood is free. I find it everywhere I look.

Time is Money

Some of these gifts of course are invisible. We live in a world of stuff and we measure our success and our easy passage through life in terms of stuff, the owning of properties and technology, cars and smart new clothes. We are the inheritors of a consumer culture, built on the bourgeios values of possession and conspicuous extravagance. But most gifts you can't measure or own. Not really. For example, when our spade broke, I sent out an email to Sustainable Bungay asking if anyone had got an old one knocking around they didn't use. David wrote back and said he would mend it for us.

So instead of buying a whole new spade, I bought a new handle and took our old spade to his smithy and he showed us how to knock out a rivet, how to drill, how to grind and fashion the metal. We spent an hour immersed in his workshop, picking up hammers, banging on anvils. I learned about life in Africa (where he taught villlage smiths), about steel and iron and smelting. Most of all I learned that if you allow and ask, you learn stuff you never learned at school and maybe should have - all the arts of living on the earth most native and indigenous tribes have down by the time they are twelve.

You might ask: what did you give in return? As a fellow craftsman, I could say giving someone an opportunity to pass on their skill is a reward in itself, especially when it is joyfully received. Or that we pay forward. Or I could reflect, as I did last week in a post on the Gift Economy:

When push comes to shove, everyone gives their gift. What they have in their hands at the end of the day. I write. I write in praise of everything I see. All the small and bold moves a people are making to downshift. All the beautiful and difficult things we experience. I write in praise of the people who are learning to love their neighbour and not worship Mammon. I write for the new paradigm. I am writing our story. I write for free.

I worked out that since I joined Transition I have written about 250,000 words which at the lowest rate for journalism (now much lower than it used to be) works out about £50,000. This doesn't include editing newsletters, news blogs, social reporting, tweeting, taking photographs, organising press releases, teaching people about Becoming the Media, or any of the meetings or communications that bring people together and keep connected. I am not alone of course. Everyone immersed in Transition will tell you the same story.

It's hard work and rarely acknow-ledged. And you might say, So why do you do it? As you might ask the bird now flying thousands of miles towards the small island and the small wood, Why do you come so far? And the bird will tell you, It is what I am. The world will not be the world without my flight. Spring will not be Spring without my song.

And as lovers of nightingales will tell you: because this is your heart as it sings in the dark, this is what freedom on earth sounds like. Listen!

Photos: Schoolchildren and daisies from We'll Be coming Down the Mountain Singing; foraged spring greens from the River Blyth; outside the Give and Take Day van; Mark and Nick sawing the elm; David mending spade; blackthorn road

A Time of Gifts

We are a market people. In a world where all things are a commodity - air, water, food, animals, the seeds we plant in the ground, the minerals under the ground, the genetic make up of our bodies - money is our god. Everything we do we do in the name of profit. We emulate the rich, we despise the poor. All things on earth are property. This bird, this child, this lake, this mountain has value only insofar it can bring us financial reward. Every day we bow down to Mammon.

We forget absolutely what all scriptures and native prophesies say about a people who are entranced and enslaved to a material world. I am not a bible person, or anyways spiritual, but I know when a house is built on sand and a storm is coming.

Some of us in 2012 are remembering and waking up to reality. The fact is since the banking crisis and the emergence of movements like UK Uncut, Occupy and Move Your Money, a lot of us are becoming atheist and getting much smarter about the spell-making behind money. How it is conjured out of thin air, how the financial high priests shape the physical world to their benefit, how mainstream media and governments serve their interests, and pillory anyone who dares challenge their absolute rule.

Engaging in alternative currencies is one of the ways to break up the global cult of money, as well as providing a transaction that brings benefit to businesses and communites on a local level. There are several organised by Transition initiatives: the Lewes Pound (as Chris has already mentioned), the Totnes, Stroud and Brixton - which pioneered the first e-currency - and most recently the Bristol Pound which will be launched in May (which Ciaran Mundy will be describing on Saturday). But there are other ways in which Transition assists in changing our dangerous allegiance to the money-making Machine and that is in bringing about a culture of free exchange.

Money enables you to control your world, and, as Charles Eisenstein says, in a hostile environment, where you are not connected to the planet or other people, money enables you to buy you some kind of protection. Money enables us to fly round the world and treat life as something we put in a shopping basket. But it doesn't bring companionship or connection. With the trees, with the people, with each other. For that you have to drop your belief in the power of money. And most of all you have to drop your fear.

Dropping belief

So this is a small personal story. In 2007 I went into a jewellery store in my local town with a necklace that once belonged to my mother. I was running out of money. That necklace, like other small gifts, was some kind of insurance against the bad times. It's African amber, my mother had announced when she bought it.

"I'm sorry to tell you this but this is plastic," said the girl in the Amber Shop in Southwold. "You could sell it as costume jewellery."

I laughed. Half in embarrassment and half in disbelief. Plastic! And then I asked myself, why did I go along with that African story, when I knew perfectly well that amber comes from Poland or Mexico, or is washed up on the East Anglian shore.

That's the day I felt hunger for the first time. I realised I would have to face the music and go on the dole. I was no better and no worse than anyone else. I would have to endure what millions of people without voices endure daily, in a process designed to humiliate and grind down those who are not slaves to the Money Machine. It will make me angry and make me fight for self-respect. It will show me a world I have never seen before and discover fellow-feeling in the strangest of places. Most of it will wake me up and realise I am not on my own. That standing up for myself is not just for myself. A year later I will join Transition.

Not having money breaks your isolation and opens you, and when you open up that's when the gifts come. It was shocking, I told the Norwich Heart and Soul group when I related this story, but it was also liberating. My mother spent her highly-bourgeois life saying she wanted to live in a community, that she wanted to be an artist and that things didn't mean anything. They weighed you down. She didn't make it. I was about to.

The gifts of Transition

So the first thing is not to be ashamed about not having money, or the wherewithal to make any. In Transition that's not hard as most of us are broke. We get by. Most of us are on low-incomes and tax benefits. We don't talk about it much, but we know it's there. I don't know whether it's because we have experienced what it is like to live on £50 a week with the world's hostility on our heads, but we do not look at each other in terms of property or income or status. We see the deeper values of people, the work we do for Transition, our skills and generosity and intelligence, we way we make each other laugh. the vibration we bring into a room. The fact is living a low carbon life is also living a low-income life and engaging in Transition culture makes having less easier, kinder, to bear, not just for ourselves, but for everyone on the planet.

This is not just about using Freegle or volun-teering at FoodCycle. You can do those things and still worship Mammon - out of meanness or as "charity", a way to salve your conscience. It's about a whole shift in cultural values. In Transition you're not putting all your attention into living in an exclusive fossil-fuelled property with a swanky car and putting Them down, you are making connections with your neighbour and the neighbourhood. You love street trees and hedgerows that bear fruit and nuts for everyone to pick. You love allotments and community kitchens and swapping second hand clothes and admire one another for living without heating, or cycling long distances to work. Or in the case of Mark Boyle, living without any money at all. This is a culture about We, because it depends on Us to work, a sense of being in the world together. Not Me against you.

In Transition we share stuff as a way of life. We lend each other tools and pass on our skills. In the Low Carbon Cookbook we forage, glean, skip dive, and tell each other about our freegan adventures. In Sustainable Bungay we put on Give and Take Days twice a year for the community to exchange goods without any money. We run Give and Grow days where we exchange seeds and plants, flowers and bushes and knowledge. All our events have an Abundance table with produce freely given from our gardens. I have only just finished the apples I gathered and stored last autumn from the table at the Library Community Garden.

Thanks to Transition I am bold and truly thankful: I can go to my neighbours to borrow a stepladder, a mower, big things I can no longer afford. People give me furniture and clothes, compost from the horses down the lane. Our local grocer lets us have food he cannot sell. Sometimes a pheasant that has been run over finds it way into our pot. It's a different attitude to life, that brings everything you touch to life. It's not glamorous, it's not powerful, but it has heart. A heart that is not for sale.

What do I give in return? When push comes to shove, everyone gives their gift. What they have in their hands at the end of the day. I write. I write in praise of everything I see. All the small and bold moves a people are making to downshift. All the beautiful and difficult things we experience. I write in praise of the people who are learning to love their neighbour and not worship Mammon. I write for the new paradigm. I am writing our story. I write for free.

Video for Sacred Economics; queue outside Brixton Credit Union on Move Your Money Day; Mark, Nick and Eloise on Give and Take Day; Mark Boyle, The Moneyless Man, outside his caravan; with Daphne and Lesley at the Produce Swap in the Library Community Garden

A Loyal Customer

We're here, we're queer and we don't shop at Sainsbury's (Graffitti in Oxford City Centre)

This is a post about shopping and a conversation we've been having for three years now in my Transition initiatives about relocalising food culture in East Anglia. Because when you're discussing supermarkets you are really discussing the industrialised food system and the producerist society we live in. It's a massive topic and one we will return to in our Diet and Environment Week in April, when I'm hoping to write about disentangling ourselves from Big Ag on the micro-level. Right now I'm looking at the macro-level and how there is life after supermarkets. Really.

Facing reality

So why haven't I shopped at supermarkets for four years? Because when you see and feel the system that supplies the store you don't want anything to do with them. Mostly we don't consider the food we buy or put in our bodies, or follow its track back to the field and the workers the way Mandy looked at bananas yesterday. We look at the show on the shelves, think in terms of convenience and price. However, if you look behind the scenes, at the machine that provides this endless array of convenient, cheap, stylised, fossil-fuelled food you come to different conclusions.

The facts are easy to find. Starting up the Low Carbon Cookbook in 2010 we draw up a list of books and documentaries, and all the issues appear on the table, from supply chains (Caroline Steel's Hungry City) and the cruelty and madness behind commerical meat production (Food Inc) to depletion of the world's fisheries (Charles Clovers' The End of Line). We discuss everything from waste to water to land rights. How come the world isn't having a rethink about everything? we wonder.

Because we are persuaded on all sides by marketing, and by our erroneous belief that we can change a system from within. We are grateful for justifications. I could say that the local Rainbow Supermarket has helped us raise funds for Bungay Community Bees, and provided a bus to The Wave in 2008, but this won't alter the fact it is still a supermarket, using the same buy-and-sell tactics as everyone else, that the "ethical" Co-op hastily backed down from the now notorious Workfare scheme and has contracts with equally notorious Texaco. All supermarkets are dependant on global supply chains, distribution hubs, tankers, mass abbatoirs, factories and refineries, chemical laboratories, tactics that grind down small farmers everywhere, in favour of corporate control. Invisibly, this machine grinds everyone and everything down in its relentless pursuit of profit. We have all the evidence we need to change our allegiance. How come most of us don't?

Compartmentalisation

One thing I've learned: inner transition does not mean bringing to share our wibbly-wobbly "What About Me" emotions and pretending this is the earth speaking through us. The real inner challenge is to shift our inner governance towards our hearts, to break down the barriers in our minds that deftly separate one action from another. Our minds persuade us that having an idea is the same as making a move, allow us feel right on buying veg in the local organic market, and be in denial when we walk into Waitrose. Some of this shift work we can do on our own, but to be effective we have to hold our own in groups.

In the Strangers's Circle we are looking at our shopping lists and Naomi is wringing her hands. If her son doesn't have his frozen ready-made pizza with shrimp and pineapple he will be ostrasized by his peers and life won't be worth living.

Get a grip girl!

No one dies if you don't eat pizza! I like Naomi, I like sitting in her kitchen and the discussion we have around the table. I am not singling her out. She could be any number of women (and men) who have come towards me, holding their children before them, wailing and gnashing their teeth, as they assert their Right to Buy Turkey Twizzlers, or white sliced bread, or whatever goes into the trolley. It's Cheaper in Supermarkets, they chant like a mantra. There is no alternative. We are powerless to change. You vegan, you elitist, you communist!

Lucky for me we are not living in times when heretics come to a bad end.

The Circles are an alchemical space. All things are allowed here in the spirit of carbon reduction. We don't judge each other, but we don't pussyfoot either. Some things get realised in that space and acted on later. Tully will write about the disconnect in a blog a few days later and drop his "Tesco habit". Elena will write about palm oil and I will give up margarine. Norwich FarmShare will happen thanks to both of them and now dozens of people can connect with the land that grows their vegetables on the outskirts of the city. It's a process. Transition is a process. It demands that we face reality and make decisions. Those are not mind decisions though, they are heart decisions.

On the mind/body axis these kinds of move are almost impossible. Your body is addicted to that supermarket food, your mind can runs loops around your good intentions, you have been brainwashed by the Empire all your life. You engage in bouts of self-calming and duplicity, worthy of the Coalition. Your heart however can weigh up many factors at once, connect you with the feeling and spirit of things, break those separating walls down. It doesn't excuse itself and argue. It sees and it acts. One day the affair is over. I have been sleeping with Sainbury's and Waitrose, and Tesco's and Safeway. I realise I don't love them, or my time spent between their cold and heartless aisles.
That's the real subject of my blog today. What shopping with heart means, what can happen in a post-supermarket world.

Finding the pattern

Viens, ma petite, says a quavery voice and puts a sweet roll in my hands. I am four years old, shopping with my mother. Bayswater, London. 1960. M Pechon founded this bakery/patisserie in Queensway. Now blind and old, he spends most of his day by the door and when small children come through he gives them a roll. My early life is spent among shopkeepers, being given small gifts, feeling the physical world that nourishes me from the land outside the city, the sawdust of the butchers, the ice of the fishmongers, all manner of temperature and smell. When my friend Christine's father, Oscar Montanari, brings us a tray of peaches he imports from his native Italy I think I am in heaven. One day Stephanie Morgan gives me something green and crunchy to taste. Wow! I say what's that? It's a green pepper, she says. From Sainbury's. It's 1967. My mother is about to change her allegiance and get in the car to go shopping. I do not go with her.

Somewhere a pattern remains in our memory that makes sense of the world. In a time of unravelling that's a pattern that comes to me about local food and shops: home grown veg, home-made marmelade, conversations with shopkeepers, picnics, orchards, foraging for blackberries. It's not a nostalgia thing, or a question of privilege. Like everyone else, I have eaten a mountain of salt and vinegar crisps and can remember the jingles for breakast cereal, better than most of my lessons. When Mark and I compare our childhoods of bourgeios house and council estate, we share Twiglets and Custard Creams and Bird's Eye Fish Fngers, every variety of industrialied food, drenched in pesticides (from oil) and fertilizers (from natural gas). I wish I had like my friend Polly been brought up on hippy, socailist food. But I wasn't.

When I grow up however I find myself loyal to markets and delicatessens. I spend fifteen years working as a lifestyle journalist, documenting the skills of the shopkeepers, cooks, artisans, hatmakers and chair makers of London. I could tell you stories about the grocers from Samarkand, Bangladesh, Cyprus, Portugal, shops that specialise in wine or cheese or herbs from my city years, I could sing the praises of the Arizona co-op and the markets of Guatemala and Mexico from my travelling years. What I couldn't tell you is the name or remember the faces of anyone at the checkout in the numerous supermarkets I also went to. I can't remember any good times I had in these places. All I recall is how chilly and brightly lit and alien they were, the way the food was covered in plastic, how everything looked dead.

In another life, in Suffolk, in Transition. I find myself in market towns, battling against the encroachment of supermarkets, bullying corporations that are co-ercing local planners to change roads and housing estates to serve their interest, where small businesses are dropping like flies. I find myself reading Felicity Lawrence's account of the immigrant workers among the greenhouses of Spain and the packing houses in Thetford and can't buy that stuff anymore. I go to parties where prepackaged, factory food is laid out, and see how humble home-made dishes are left uneaten (except by myself). I start researching a book with my fellow Transitioner Josiah called Roots, Shoots and Seeds, about the arable fields that surround us and yet no-one sees, even though, like all civilisations, we depend on them in every aspect of our lives: sugar beet, rape, potatoes, flax and barley. Asking questions about pesticides, about soil, the effects of peak oil and climate change on agriculture. Looking at the future and making small moves.

What is life without a supermarket? It means a weekly trip to Juan's organic grocers, Jack's farm shop and Malcolm's smallholding where we have had a veg box for nine years. It means roadside stalls, produce swaps, freegan gifts, a montlhy shared Suma order and occasional visits to Norwich market, cycling down to our local ex-post office which sells organic milk and produce from Norman's market garden down the end of my lane. It would be harder to do some of this without a car, especially now so many rural buses have been cut. When we didn't have a car for months, I hitched and cycled. An inconvenient truth for sure.

As Shane Hughes wrote last week, once you engage in something with your heart and soul, other opportunities and riches come your way. Supermarkets cater for our engineered individualistic, bargain-basement emotions, but they don't bring happiness or fellowship, the kinds of relationships I have with Malcolm or Juan or Vanessa, or the joy I feel at noticing the fresh eggs and daffodils on Sarah's stall, as I go by.

The range of food we eat is much smaller for sure. Seasonal veg, pulses and grains mostly. I don't buy bananas, shrimps, tuna, greenhouse tomatoes, ice cream, or anything with palm oil, a diet that most people from all income streams consider ordinary. Most of my money is happily spent on food and distributed in the neighbourhood. If I buy a jar of honey it comes from the beehives in the local churchyard. It's twice as expensive as supermarket honey from overseas, and so I eat a lot less of it as a result. I eat a lot less of everything as a result. But I then don't miss or long for anything either.
Supermarkets are our materialistic churches of desire, catering to our addictions for sugar, fat and salt, to our weakness for novelty. To get out of them you need to drop the desire. It's not a decision you make rationally. No one persuades you to "change your behaviour". One day you see the pattern and are shocked to find blood on your hands.

You walk out the door because you no longer want to keep destroying the ocean bed and the forest, the eco-systems of the earth, exploiting your fellow human beings, throwing them off their land, condemning your fellow creatures, chickens, pigs and dairy cows to a life of hell. This is not a Me-Only decision. It's one we are having together. No hard feelings. No blame. We have all been asleep and now some of us are waking up and finding out what to do. Growing oats and beans, storing apples. Moving as David Korten would call it, from Empire to Earth Community.

Transition provides the platform on which these conversations can take place. We have this conversation at the Transition Norwich Low Carbon Cookbook meetings, at Carbon Conversations, at Sustainable Bungay's Happy Mondays at the Community Kitchen, at our Abundance produce swaps. If we don't have the conversation we don't learn anything, explore new ways of sharing and nourishing ourselves. We will just keep wandering the supermarket aisles, alone, disconnected, confused by false choices, lost in a bad dream, far from each other, far from home.

Time to link up.

With a sack of Suma millet; Felicity Lawrence' Eat Your Heart Out; with Malcolm at Swallow Organics, Darsham; with Naomi outside Focus Organic, Halesworth; with Mark at Middleton Farm Shop; wholefood co-op circle; Occupy the Oil Aisle protest poster; Occupy the Food Supply!

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.

A Lifeboat moment

Last night 25 people gathered in a downtown pub in a market town in the East Anglian borderlands. It was Tuesday night and raining cats and dogs and the pub was almost empty. The backroom however was full: heads were craning forwards to tune into the mood of the moment. The big cuts were about to be announced (at 12.30pm today) and the Sustainable Bungay sub-group on Economics and Livelihoods was about to be launched.

"We need to learn skills with working together, said Gary Alexander who had been invited to share insights about visioning a sustainable community outlined in his booklet, Sustainable Diss. Here is the Good News, he said and outlined what the town c.2030 had achieved and how people only got into exchange and relocalisation when they had no other choice.

When we discussed our imminent future we were sharing the Bad News. Wheat will go from £150 to £700 a tonnne in 10 years, said Glenn, a farm manager, and filled us in on how tractors now use more fuel, so that carbon emissions can be reduced. David told us from his experience in Africa how it takes two years to reskill a community to do small-scale farming. Cathy "in the spirit of the gift economy" brought some chard from her garden to share.

"Are you coming to our Apple lunch?" asked Netta from Sustainable Beccles.

"If the exhaust hasn't fallen off the car!" I laughed, and thought about the cost of petrol and how hard it's getting to travel from place to place.

It's difficult to see how we can effect change in our economic structure, not just because we lack financial or political power, but because we have been distracted for aeons from looking at the truth of the matter. We prefer ideas to reality. We like to handle facts as if they are our property and preside over them like CEOs. The fact is we are small and the iceberg that looms before us is large and invisible and the best response I can think of right now is what I was doing one hour earlier in Josiah and Elinor's kitchen, mapping out our Transition workshop alongside Iris (almost one) eating a biscuit, playing swords with Reuben and Tristram, and chopping up some (local organic) veg for dinner.

It's cold outside, but in the kitchen it felt good. We were all in Transition together, and that counts in ways you can't evaluate on any form. The pub was warm too, but disquieted.

"490,000 public sector jobs are going to be axed," said Josiah by the bar as he invited us to debate the issues around small wooden tables. What were we going to do as a community to build an infrastructure, to give each other a hand, to start up small enterprises within a hostile atmosphere?

He brought a paper by Tom Crompton (WWF) to our attention. It was written for Common Cause and argues that what is really required at this point is a change of values:

"The values that must be strengthened – values that are commonly held and which can be brought to the fore – include: empathy towards those who are facing the effects of humanitarian and environmental crises, concern for future generations, and recognition that human prosperity resides in relationships – both with one another and with the natural world. Undoubtedly these are values that have been weakened – and often even derided – in modern culture. They are not, for example, values that are fostered by treating people as if they are, above all else, consumers. But they are values that have an ancient and noble history within Western thinking, and they still fundamentally inform much public debate. They are there to be activated and strengthened. We believe that everyone – individual citizens, civil society organisations, government and business – can play an active role in strengthening them. Indeed, they are values that must be championed if we are to uncover the collective will to deal with today’s profound global challenges. "

The problem with this is not its premise, but it's position. We are used to seeing the bigger picture from the outside with our minds rather than from within the situation with our actions. You stupid human what a mess you have made! You wrong people need to do this and that. Change your behaviour! Shift that consciousness!

No matter how intelligent or visionary or noble our words, we remain above the situation. We're not in the thick of it, saying how it feels, speaking as one of those stupid humans who have been trained to think that how we live is normal and OK and "civilised". We're not seeing that when our assumptions are challenged we either start commanding the idea of reality ("Pepsi and ASDA now say our agriculture is unsustainable") or start inventing happy endings for ourselves.

Somewhere in our scaredy-cat minds, we're thinking . . . any minute now the cavalry will come and I'll be rescued. I'll win the lottery. Someone I don't know will sponsor me, pay for me, let me off the hook. I'm thinking one day I'll be able to go back to America, to Mexico, my books will sell, I'll wake up one morning and my bones won't creak anymore. One day everything will be all right. And even though the world is crashing around our ears and I know my agent won't call and I'll never be able to fly or put my legs over my head again like Iris, I'm holding out somewhere. We all are. And that somewhere isn't here in the room.

This is it. We are the people we are waiting for.

When I woke up with this morning I realised. Those Titanic thoughts have to go, or we won't make the lifeboat. Gotta get real.

Poster for Green Drinks: half a cider at the Green Dragon; Cathy's abundance of chard and damsons at the Library Community garden; discussing the future

Stoneleigh Revisited

Last night we listened to the second half of the Stoneleigh talk at the 2010 Transition Conference, where Transitioners asked questions about the coming bursting of the finanical bubble.

At about midnight the cat jumped up to be let out of the window. And I looked outside into the warm starry night, into the garden and across the fields and marsh to the sea beyond. What has any of that got to do with this? The moon was a bright sickle over the trees and Jupiter shone brilliantly. On the horizon the oil tanker lights flickered.

The recording was of Nicole Foss responding to questions put to her after what was for many a wake-up call to global financial instability. This thing is going to blow! We knew in our minds that unregulated markets had created virtual wealth, but we hadn’t faced the reality of its consequences.

What should any of us do? Well, some of those answers were practical: putting cash aside and waiting until the price of land came down, investing in tools. Making sure you were in a place where your face fitted. Some of them were ways of seeing the decade that lies ahead, opening ourselves to the reality of a financial deflation. The way Greece is being pushed to the periphery of the eurozone, the way feed-in tariff guarrantees are unlikely to be upheld, that Governments do not play fair and fascism is likely.

But the ones that struck me were those to do with the people in Transition. Those of us who were mentally prepared for such times, showing communities there are other ways of doing things and recognising individuals who may have no money or seeming skills, but are incredible social beings. Who can hold a centre, when everything else falls apart.

Yesterday Helen rang me and said she couldn’t write the blog this week. She is inundated with Knit-In squares. A thousand of them in all the colours of the rainbow. Her original plan to have enough squares for a mammoth woolly to hang over the County Hall balcony for the Pride celebrations has come true. She has been sent squares from all over the world as well as all corners of Norwich. “It caught people’s imaginations,” she said.

In Bungay this week people are coming to the Library to see our Transition community garden being built. A plan was drawn up after the permaculture course in January but the working party had been waiting for funds. Out of the blue Sustainable Bungay was given £500 by the Bungay Society and so now we can forge ahead with the brickwork for the raised beds. Our fruit trees have just arrived in huge pots, between the rainbutts and the plantswap tables. Suddenly everything is ready to go!

In between the cracks of the system different things can happen. Seeds that were lying dormant, that you never thought were there, break through. You can’t expect them, but you can notice them. You can open your window at night and see Jupiter blazing in the heavens.

Because as well as the imminent financial meltdown there is also a new mood out there in the bigger picture. Of a possibility of something else happening. This is not a grandiose thing that has come out of board rooms, universities and temples. It comes from the bottom up, from the streets and shanty towns, from the people at the end of the line. People pulling together, reinventing their lives and their neighbourhooda. Something that’s happening everywhere - from small moves in East Anglia to the big movements in South America. From Mark on this blog to Oliver Stone’s new documentary, South of the Border.

To tap into that mood is important because if things really go to the wall the way Stoneleigh talks about and within a short timeframe, we’re going to need to hold together. And what holds us together are not the sentiments of Empire, nor the bullying tactics of corporations, nor the glitterati of society, but something far more ordinary. Something that catches the imagination, sparked by people you would never expect to matter. Who have been working in the community and on the land all along. The people in charge of the lifeboat.

The new push: photo op for the Bungay bike strategy outside the Library Courtyard; looking at the big picture in the Big Group process, Day 2, 2010 Transition Network conference; seakale flourishing outside tSizewell Power Station against all odds.

The Reality Crunch

Last week a shock wave rippled through 2010 Transition Network conference. A last minute change to the programme, an intense 90 minute lecture titled Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil brought an inconvenient truth to light: we are facing a reality crunch, in which a global financial collapse is the defining event.

The intellectual rationale behind economic expansion has shaped our society for decades. Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics underpinned the pattern of corporate rule throughout the world since the 70s. In the aggressive defence of free markets the rich have become immensely rich, the poor more numerous, and public services everywhere have been dismantled in favour of the private sector. It's a pattern this week's Budget is set to uphold.

But even though we are a civilisation obsessed by money, the financial system itself is rarely discussed. Though banker and credit crunch have became household terms, it's not until you look at the relation between credit and real wealth that you realise you are looking at a chimera and at some point it's going to disappear into desert sand.

With the exploitation of fossil fuels the financial bubble has expanded like never before in history. 1600 trillion dollars of virtual money in 30 years. For every slice of real wealth pie that exists there are one hundred claims. Because credit expansion is built on illusion the spell eventually breaks and deflation sets in. Credit disappears, house prices go down, prices for essentials go up. People start hoarding and without the lubricant of money trade halts. What do we need to do now? Nicole Foss (who writes as 'Stoneleigh' in the financial blog, The Automatic Earth) advised a packed lecture hall: look at your structural dependency, deal with debt, and make relationships you can trust.

In a workshop the next day 300 Transitioners looked at the future. We explored in images and words what would happen in one year's time, then five, then ten. What did it mean that we had so much debt? Everywhere you saw a split between breakdown and breakthrough, fall and transcendence; in amongst the dark scribblings emerged butterflies and the phoenix.

What we experienced after the shock was a different pattern emerging within ourselves. We were shifting from individualism towards community. We realised that if everything was falling apart we needed to be coherent. In a time of strife we needed to be harmonious. The culture of the credit bubble – with its exclusive dwellings and high-maintenance lifestyle, the Shangri-La of every shopping mall in the kingdom – was ceding to one where people had very little except the wealth they had inside - a wealth they were prepared to share.

It's a pattern that is emerging everywhere. Countries that have weathered the free market zeal that brings corporations and the IMF into play forces them to hand over real wealth – their natural resources – and reduce their vibrant people into a voiceless underclass, are turning their fortunes round. It's a pattern of neighbourhood engagement, workers' co-operatives and localised networks that foster the diversity and inventiveness that make all eco-systems resilient. Instead of being shut-off and in competition the people are getting together and working out how to rebuild their lives.

Meanwhile it becomes clear in Britain that we have a government that for all its talk of Big Society is not here for the majority, but to protect the priviledged. There will be no bail out for ordinary people, so we will have help ourselves. And the first step is to realise we are not on our own: there are billions of us in the same boat. This lifeboat called Earth.

This piece was originally published by the Eastern Daily Press as part of the collective weekly OneWorld Column,

The Stoneleigh Effect

On the red wall in the old students’ union there were sign-up lists for all the workshops – Zero Carbon Farm, Tales for Transition, Community Ownership of Assets, Wild Zones. DIY streets... One at the end was covered in signatures. The title was Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil.

Nicole Foss writes under the name Stoneleigh on the influential blog, The Automatic Earth. Unlike most disciplines which only look at their subject on its own terms, Stoneleigh looks at the Big Picture, and the the Big Picture in 2010 from the financial and resource perspective is looking none too good. In fact it became obvious through this intense one and a half hour lecture that we are facing a meltdown, within which the financial collapse (already set in motion in 2008) is the defining event. This is because finanical markets move far more quickly than resource markets. They change in the speed of an email or a phone call. Fear spreads like contagion and positive feedback is the rule.

The graphs came and went. The patterns of deflation were spelled out. Bubbles burst through the centuries, pyramids collapsed. With fossil fuels the bubble has expanded like never before in history. 1600 trillion dollars of virtual money in 30 years. For every slice of financial cake that exists there are now one hundred claims. Because these expansions are built, as Stoneleigh pointed out, not on the reality of wealth, but on a perception of money. At some point the spell breaks. We are running off a cliff and our legs are still working, but very soon we’re going to look down and realise there is nothing to hold us up. We fall bigtime.

We looked at the screen: credit disppearing, affordability descreasing, house prices going down, prices for essentials going up. People hoarding and the lack of lubricant money halting the interactive flow of goods and services. What do we need to do now? Stoneleigh advises us: look at your structural dependency, deal with debt, and make relationships you can trust. In effect, be part of Transition.

The lecture hall was packed and everyone sat in a stunned kind of silence. Afterwards we reeled out to a second leg of Open Space and after lunch the next day entered a Big Group Process in the Great Hall. It was a new Transition experiment. We gathered into our “home groups” (groups of eight people formed at the Mapping of the initiatives at the start of the conference) and looked collectively into the future. We explored what we felt would happen in one year’s time, then five, then ten. We closed our eyes and put ourselves in a frame to see what would lie ahead, as Sophy asked questions. What does it mean we are so much in debt? What are our feelings about what is coming? Then we discussed the matter between ourselves and drew our thoughts in images and words. At the end we held up our sheets of paper in a living gallery. 2011, 2015, 2020. Everywhere there was a split between breakdown and breakthrough, fall and transcendence. In amongst the dark scribbling emerged butterflies and the phoenix. Through the dualities of hope and despair, the good ship Transition sailed on towards the future.

The Stoneleigh effect rippled through the weekend. It was the most talked about event. Not because most of us are unaware that things were going to change radically, but because the reality of the figures made the reality of what we might experience come home to everyone in the room.

Transition is well known for its positive outlook, for the fact it sees an opportunity for living very differently on the planet as fossil fuels become scarce and costly. It deliberately steers a different course of activism from environmental or social protest against the old powers; it does not encourage endtimes glee, the mind's arrogant dismissal of life. It works very hard to make new connections between human beings, to forge resilient communities, to enter the field of possibilities rather than follow a trajectory that we have been trained to see is the only way. But the fact is none of this can happen without the old structures that hold that trajectory in place breaking up.

You don’t get to the butterfly without the caterpillar dissolving. And that dissolve is what we were looking at in the Stoneleigh graphs as they dipped. It was the pattern of collapse of a civilisation.

Resilience, the key concept of Transition, is the ability to weather shock, to adapt and still thrive. This is the kind of unexpected shock we will have to weather, as Sophy explained later. The lecture was a last minute addition to the programme and interrupted the Open Space sessons; it sent people reeling and some to sit for hours in circles talking about their experiences. It influenced the way we thought, what was discussed around the tables, under trees, at the bar. But in many ways it was a relief, we didn’t have to be Pollyannas anymore. It was OK to talk about the difficulties we will face. Because it was clear we were all going to face them. That made a difference. Because instead of being alone, we will be together.

That evening I went swimming with Adrienne. There were five of us and we met up in the canteen in the self-organising style of the conference. The river Dart runs through a wooded valley, free flowing, tan-coloured with dark mossy rocks on either side. We went down a track through the trees and jumped naked into the cold wild water and swam together upsteam, and then floated back with the current. The sun spiralled through the green leaves and I remembered a long, long time ago a moment in Australia: a boy had fallen into the rainforest pool from the cliff and I was beside him waiting for the shock to subside and a turtle swam by and I heard the wind blow through the gum trees and looked up and saw a group of men, women and children standing naked in the water, in complete syncronicity with everything around them and there was a peace and a silence between us that seemed to stretch to infinity and I realised I was looking at the future.

Because who knows what happens when we take off our clothes, divest ourselves of our caterpillar lives, what butterflies we might become? Who could predict that I would have met Adrienne again after 25 years and that we had so many deep and shared experiences to talk about in a way that we could never have known in our careless city youth? What underlying pattern brought us together, connected the totem bird of the Conference, a fledging jackdaw with the fledging jackdaws I wrote about in the blog before I came? What patterns of strength do we find within us when the shock subsides, what depth of feeling, what intelligence and skill arises when other possibilites lie ahead?

What wings do we discover when we look down and see there is only space beneath us?

Photos: Sophy introducing the conference in the Great Hall (Ed Mitchell); Tully before the Stoneleigh lecture; mapping the future; Adrienne facilitating our Communication and Media session; bottom up initiative - swimming upriver (Mike Grenville).