I got the power!

This post originally appeared on the Transition Social Reporters project on 9th February 2012 as part of the Energy week.

OK it's the eighties. I'm storming into my flat after a bad day. Someone spiked my article, my lover walked out, they ran out of ciabatta at the deli, it's been raining too many days in a row, whatever. I throw my bags on the floor, grab a vodka from the freezer and hit the music. I play it loud.The song everyone is playing on the city dancefloors this season. I'm dancing alone in my flat, like millions of other people. Frustrated, talented, energetic, stuck like a bird in a cage. The music and the alchohol fuel my veins and make me feel, for a moment, alive. I got the power!

It's thirty years later. I'm not storming any longer, or drinking vodka, or writing lifestyle pieces on beige swing macs. I'm looking at a week where the giant energy corporations have increased their mauling of the earth for oil and gas and electriity, in order that the vast global metropolis most of us live in can keep going. A week where the news is all about superfracking, nuclear power, hydro-dams, coal-fired plants. A week in which UK carbon emissions rose 3.1%, Josh Fox, the director of Gasland was arrested, and fossil fuel poverty and profits soared.

I could pick any of these monsters against which brave activists pit themselves to prevent their disastrous impact on climate and the environment. I could list the campaigns in countries throughout the world, some of which succeed and many of which do not. I could look at the projects that are setting up alternative sources of power throughout the country, the fate and fortunes of the solar industry, investigate the wind turbines that soar above the fields at Kessingland, or the community wind turbine owned by the rural villages of Cookley and Walpole.

I could sing praises, and I could weep.

But this is not the subject of my post today. Because no matter how we change the sources of energy that run our homes, transport systems and keep the military-industrial complex fuelled to the max, we make these moves within an old paradigm. We want the same world we have been brought up in, just run on clean, natural stuff. A world where we can put on the kettle in the morning and feel like the good guys in Avatar. So my Transition energy story is not about any of these things. It's something that starts in that London flat with the person I once was.

Powerdown story

The reason Derrick Jensen once wrote that the personal does not equal the political when it comes to carbon reduction, is that big social changes necessarily come in big social forms. Small consumer acts like turning off the shower or changing the lightbulb do not challenge a system which allows private companies to suck the oil from the tar sands of Alberta and then sell it to people as “ethical oil”.

Unless, that is, you do them within another paradigm.

Personal powerdown within Transition brings a subtle force into everything you do that is hard to quantify. It means that when you talk of energy descent action plans for your community, you know what it takes on the physical and emotional levels, because you have done that descent yourself. You did not “change your behaviour” because you wanted to salve your conscience, or increase your well-being. You made those radical moves because one day you woke up and realised the storm was coming. In a culture wrapped up in a carbon bubble, in the illusion that our energy supplies will last forever, you have become a dissenter. And, as every dissenter finds within history, your push against the river bears consequences you do not always see.

Turn Out the Lights

When Tully Wakeman returned from the 2008 Transition Conference in London he was fired up. He was, he said, a peak oil man up until that point, but now, looking at the three years we had to avert catastrophic climate change, he realised that other strategies needed to come into play. Upstairs at the Baptist Church fifty of us gathered and discussed what moves we could make that might inspire the city to massively reduce its carbon emissions. We started up several neighbourhood “Transition Circles” that looked at individual energy use. Although most of these circles ended after we had explored the main drivers of home energy, transport, stuff and food, they radically altered the dynamic and the direction of the initiative.

As we discussed our gas bills, car logs and shopping lists over kitchen tables, monitored meters, started up buying co-ops, we uncovered a rich seam of stories among ourselves. A narrative we were not aware of before. These tales and testaments gave our descent meaning and value and became the driving force of an innovative community blog, This Low Carbon Life. As we pledged to reduce our carbon emissions to 4 tonnes we reflected back our experiences to one another, laughed about wearing thermals and living without central heating, wrote about (not) flying, the industrial food system, waste and all the Resistances we had to change. We were invited to join Norfolk County Council’s Cimate Change Partnership. We ran Carbon Conversations at the University and the City Council, formed new incentives, like the recent Energy Lookouts! scheme. We kept our pledge.

It was personal, but it was also social. Something we broadcast to the world.

Going Down the Mountain

In a field in Norfolk, sitting around a campfire discussing the Circles, I embark on a Transition tussle with a new age astrologer.

“We have eternal power within us,” she insists.
“We live on a planet of limit,” I tell her, “And we need to go down.”
“We are going up in another way, she adds.
“No, we are not,” I reply. "We are going down."

The powerdown story is not a popular one. Not within the consumer culture, not within governmental or spiritual circles, all of which promise us a Shanghri-La at 21 degrees and boundless power at our fingertips.

We live with a wildly inflated sense of ourselves, in a world powered by the strength of a thousand horses. What can possibly replace that?

The Power of the Small

It’s thirty years later. I am walking along a cliff edge on the bitterest day of the year, The sea is roaring below me and there is no one on the beach that stretches all the way down to Sizewell Nuclear Power Station. Holding onto the hawthorns up here you can feel the wind shudder through their branches and into your body. It is an exhilarating feeling. The power of nature running through you.

One thing that I learned about powerdown. You can’t do it without the earth. It is a social move, a community move, and Transition can teach us to make those moves wherever we live. But it’s also an earth move, a reconnection that all urbanised human beings long for, even though we do not know we long for it. To live in a new paradigm we have to find a way to disentangle ourselves from the military-industrial complex within our bodies and imaginations. We have to forgo those supercharged egotistical flirtings wtih artificial power and tap into the forces of nature inside and outside ourselves.

What are we powering down for after all? Is it just to keep our lifestyles going at all costs? Or are we reconstructing a different relationship with the planet and its people?

The main reason we don’t want to know about peak oil, or the geo-political reality that fuels our radiators and petrol tanks, is that we cannot imagine a future without perpetual energy and the small pleasures it brings. A future where we are no longer in control of the switch.

I can’t imagine it either on a big scale, but I can know it in a small way and imagine what it could be like if everyone was doing these moves together, the way we once did in our Norwich circles. How it brought us close to each other. How it still does through our communications. How your body becomes strong in a winter without heating, walking the neighbourhood, eating food that is grown without the toxins of agri-business, how your emotions no longer swing violently, your mind feels clear. When you face these realities, something breaks inside. You feel liberated, because you are not longer caught up in the illusions of power. Bird out of the cage.

You are still dancing though, thirty years on, feet on the ground, still point inside. Tapped into another kind of energy inside. Some things stay with you forever. Those moves you make on the dancing floor called earth.

Photos: in London flat, 1989; Stop Kosovo campaign the 350.0rg; Amazon river planned to be used for the Belo Monte dam; Plundering Appalacia; boarding a flight from Cartegena to Mompos, Columbia,1992; branches protecting coppiced hornbean, Suffolk; up a birch tree on local tumulus, 2011.

Waking up in Forest Row

I am in Forest Row, East Sussex. It's six in the morning and outside high in the trees a thrush is singing in the dark. I have just made coffee, switched on the computer and the lights. I don't think about it (the power that is). Like millions of people each morning I click the switch, press the button and expect light, heat, instant connection. I'm staying with Mike Grenville (thanks to a fossil fuelled train) and we're putting together an idea for a Transition newspaper. Yesterday we went to the local coffee shop where the talk was all about fracking as the village is close to the site at Balcombe where Cuadrilla plan to test for oil. We were going to go to have a sauna (wood-fired) by bicycle (human powered) but the project took up all our attention.

The fact is everything we do is shaped by energy - by electricity, by oil, by gas- and there is not one of these sources of power that doesn't somehow leave blood on our hands and present some kind of dilemma.

To look at where the coffee, the kettle and all those invisible wires go, what grids they are connected to, what industries, means we're looking at big picture: fracking, mountain top removal, coal-fired power stations, all the issues around nuclear power, the burning of rainforest wood and palm oil for biofuels, oil extraction in the wildernesses of the Artic, deep sea drilling. We're looking at dams and tar sands and pollution and climate change and land grabs. We're looking at companies that make billions of pounds profit, at ourselves struggling to pay bills as those prices keep rising and being totally dependent on that power to live our lives and all I want to do this morning is make my cup of coffee and write this blog before I catch the train home. All I want to do is make my breakfast and step outside into the garden and listen to that bird.

But I can't do that because I'm in Transition and this is the energy week and I know that even if we did make it to the woods to have that sauna last night the bender and the stove exist because of the same energy and somehow we're not going to escape that dilemma no matter how right-on and low-carbon I am about not using central heating. Even if the local people in Sussex, Lancashire and Kent and Wales resist the highly controversial, expensive and resource hungry drilling that will damage the water tables of Britain as it has in the United States, the question we need to ask is where do we get the power from?

"It's about narrative," said Mike. What is the energy story are we telling ourselves?

Off Grid This summer we sat the two of us, as the wind and rain shook the tents at the Sunrise Festival and drank our coffee (rocket-stove) as two men chopped wood for the pizza oven. Grateful for heat and shelter, it is experiences like these that bring home exactly the kind of attitude and engagement you need to live without modern power systems. Tin Village had a solar panel and a small wind turbine that kept the computer going for on-line communications and a small cinema. Everything else was run on wood. However this was the summer and a weekend. Most people, including myself, would soon be heading home. We love all that Kelly kettle camping business but we're on holiday. This is not our everyday world.

To live off-grid all year round in 2012 requires either money for alternative power systems (e.g wood chip boilers, ground-source heat pumps) or high principles. As anyone who has slept in a tent at Occupy Norwich can tell you, off grid is cold, damp (and frequently muddy) in a wintry Britain. Some fellow Transitioners have organised their houses to run almost entirely on wood burners for heat and water and cooking, some like the activist initiative Transition Heathrow have a strong supply of wood from a local tree surgeon for their rocket stove kitchen, a bike generator and four solar panels and a very committed crew.

Other Transition initatives have made that strategic step and started to create their own community energy source, most notably the solar power station in Lewes and the community wind turbine set up by PEDAL - Portobello Transition Town. To create the kind of enterprise requires huge commitment and funding and is no small undertaking. It's a big topic. as Forest Row discovered, when Mike set up a debate between Charles Hendry and Jeremy Leggett at the recent Transition Energy Fair.

But however you organise your house and your transport and your neighbourhood, all of them are underpinned by different stories. The first is that you can continue living the same individualist lifestyle, only using alternative sources of energy, and the other two involve an individual and collective powerdown. Which is not, as energy campaigner Mandy Miekle pointed out recently, so much about creating a low-carbon community, but a low energy society:

The more I have looked into the energy crisis, the more I feel that the next big leap forward will not be technological, but psychological. We must reexamine our relationship with nature, for all resources come from nature. We need to stop talking about outcomes like saving ecosystems without also asking why we are destroying ecosystems in the first place. As Paul Kingsnorth points out, this squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all – it is about narratives. We have many cultural narratives to address, but our relationship with energy has to come first.

However there are a few barriers in the way, not least our ability to look reality in the eye.

Techno-fix. In Forest Row the talk is also about free energy and not the kind that comes from the sun or the winds and waves of the earth. The anti-documentary of the moment is Thrive where dodgy looking geezers fly over the ancient sacred sites and crop circles on a disc, discussing how the big oil corporations (controlled by the banks) are squashing all research into this everlasting power source, encapsulated in the symbol of the torus (see left). This key invention, transmitted by extra-terrestrial intelligence, will transform the planet and solve all the problems of the world (cue starving Africans) which according to the film are entirely due to the lack of energy.

This is another narrative entirely. It suggests that we will be saved by outside agencies who somehow will work in our best interests and all former ideas of collective equity are null and void. And instead of looking at the hard facts we just have to fall down a virtual rabbit hole into a wonderland mix of half-truths about the global banking system and conspiracy theory.

This is a bad fairy tale to be believing right now, because it suggests we don't need to do anything about our energy dilemma, that we don't live in a place of limit and or have to face the consequences of our actions. All real stories look at these realities, and the characters in them who are plucky and ask questions, who don't go along with the magic spells, are the ones who live to see a happy ending.

Time to check out those narratives.

DISCLAIMER: Just in case you thought Mike was responsible for showing me Thrive, I twisted his arm, curious to the max. What we were really watching in Forest Row was a film of Alan Watts speaking from a different paradigm altogether in California. . .get wiggly!



Photos: solar panels on Mike's roof in Forest Row: Keystone XL pipeline protest; chai-making at Tin Village, Sunrise Festival; making a wind-turbine at Transition Heathrow; Scene from Thrive.

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

This is the House Transition Built

What is the house? Is it a dream we hold, a fairy palace, a shelter from the storm, perched on a hill, overlooking the sea, somewhere down a farm track or a long drive edged with lime trees? Or is it a nightmare, the haunted house, the house of childhood secrets we fear to reenter, the slum and the council estate we long to escape from, the little boxes on the hillside we are loathe to see?

This week the house is a practical place, a building in Transition, in cities and villages where property is valued more than people and everyone is assessed by their address and the colour of paint on their front door. As the Government is poised to relax planning laws that will make it easier for developers to tarmac the green fields of England, while the Green Deal gets pushed back and low-income city dwellers pushed out of the smarter neighbourhoods, our relationship with the House is changing.

No longer a place of exclusivity and security, it has become a liability. The economic downturn and soaring energy prices have made our homes the highest financial burden most of us carry. And, as we come awake to peak oil and climate change, also a burden on our conscience. To change our relationship with the environment we need not only to consume less we need a different attitude to the shelters we build and inhabit. Including those in our imaginations.

How can we create an aesthetic of downshift in a culture of aspiration?

I once spent my working days visiting people’s swanky apartments and villas for magazines like World of Interiors. I styled photographic shoots of heritage chintz curtains and designer chairs and unwittingly upheld the aesthetics of Empire. I had grown up in London’s Bayswater district in a Victorian white-fronted house, serviced by a crew of professional builders, carpenters, interior decorators, window cleaners and dailies. And yet I always longed to live in simple vernacular spaces - artist’s studios, rough Greek interiors, thatched cottages. When I sold my city flat and went travelling I got to live in a series of palm-leaf cabanas, wood cabins, yurts and adobe roundhouses and eventually settled in a cottage that resembled the one in the Kent marshes I had loved as a child. It doesn’t belong to me and yet it feels like home.

So when it came to my turn on the blog this week I wanted to look at two Transitioners’ houses that reflected this personal and contemporary downshift: a retrofitted house in Norwich owned by Stefi, one of the movers and shakers behind the Magdalen Street Celebration and the innovative Café Conversations, and a straw bale house, designed and built by John Preston and Carol Hunter from Transition Downham Market and Villages.

Transition has its foundation in permaculture and natural building. The upcoming The Transition Companion was inspired by the seminal text on environmental architecture, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Many Transitioners dream of cobhouses and passive houses set amongst forest gardens and friendly communities. And yet we live within old walls, constricted by planning laws, by expensive green technology and by a lack of skills in the basic arts of living. How do people work with those constrictions and yet make steps to live within their principles? I stepped out of my door to find out:

House on the edge of Mousehold Heath

Brought up in an airy 1930s suburban house in Los Angeles and having just returned from India Stefi stepped into her 1900 NR3 terrace two-up two-downer and wanted immediately to bring space and light into its narrow and dark British dimensions (it is 9 foot wide). She was influenced by two streams, she said. One was an aesthetic made of the space and light she inherited from her native California and the simplicity she found living in an Indian one-room dwelling open to the elements. The second stream to do with ecological living and energy reduction.

Inside the rooms have wooden floorboards and bare plastered walls and simple furniture ("primarily sourced from the rich pickings of Magdalen Street's dozen or more charity and antique shops! So the embodied carbon is very low"). Light has been introduced by opening up a skylight in the kitchen, making a glass front door and a device known as a solar tunnel which amplifies and bounces light into the recesses of the dark back bedroom.

“The sun tunnel costs £200 to buy, £150 to have fitted. but could be done DIY - it's an easier fit than a roof window. Even situated on a north facing roof, there is no longer any need to put on the lights in the room during the day. You need to figure out a way to shade it on summer evenings or you'll have daylight coming in until 11 pm and again at 4 am!"

Meanwhile the double-glazed K glass fronted door (£150) and large window bring both light and solar passive heat to the front room, along with its underfloor insulation (£600). The woodburner in the “winter” back room uses wood from her pollarded sycamore tree:

“While warming the rooms, I also warm water and put it in a thermos for the next morning's tea (just needs a few degrees heat up in the kettle). I can also pre-cook pulses and rice for a super-fast finish off in the pressure cooker.”

Her energy bills have fallen dramatically as a result of these steps. Inspired by Chris Hull’s model she has also installed a rainwater loo outside and is presently constructing a Japanese-style handbasin where the grey water feeds into the cistern, meaning there will be enough water in the drought times without having to use mains water. Further into the narrow, immensely long garden rainwater feeds the pond and this summer at her birthday party people brought succulents for a new sedum roof.

“This helps insulate the outhouse, improves the view over the garden, preserves the tar roof which would otherwise slowly breakdown under UV exposure. It also adds to the biodiversity of the long terraced garden, which borders on Mousehold heath and hosts many of its flora and fauna.”

The undercover materials include a recycled woollen blanket and a quality pond liner. Some things you just can't skimp on.

House in the Quarry

I met John and Carol at the Greenpeace Fair where they had just finished a set on the cycle-powered stage. John and Carol sing a sharp-witted contemporary slack rock as The John Preston Tribute Band. They are also about to finish building a straw bale house after five years hard labour. The last layers of the cob floor are being laid this week and with luck (and warm weather) they are finally moving out of their caravan and into the studio with its wood-fired stove, living roof and hand-made, hand-plastered walls, surrounded by a permaculture garden.

The derelict land John bought was in an old chalk quarry that housed a neglected but mature walnut orchard. Originally they designed and planned to build a house and a studio but soon learned that more space means more time and more money.

"Where this fits with Transition is that all these are learnable skills," John told me as we riff about busting through the mystique of the professional builder and not living in house “where the woman is trapped in a kitchen and a stupid room dominated by a TV set.”

“Oh, I thought you were a builder,” I say, dead impressed, it has to be said, by anything to do with DIY.

“I have an O level in Woodwork and Technical drawing, “ he corrects me, “And a degree in Music. I’m a music therapist. I didn't even have any interest in DIY before this misadventure.. Building is all about confidence and getting intimate with the materials. You can learn to lay bricks in a straight line, but you just won’t do it as fast as a bricklayer."

The skills to do with constructing your own house are many, not least dealing with planning permission and building regulations, along with learning about U-values and how to make your own paint (lime, borax, casein, natural pigments). What has stood them in good stead is instinct and persistence. For example where other houses built on this historical backfill of chalk have brought in massive machinery to build expensive high-impact concrete piles as foundation, John and Carol put in a simple low-impact trench (for £1500). They took a risk it would pass the geological tests.

“It’s scary building because you have to spend money. And you have to undo things if you want lovely results.”

"And you don't have the same level of energy when you are in your early 50s," added Carol ruefully and laughed.

John and Carol have deliberately worked alongside people who were prepared to teach them – from green build designers to plumbers. (“The work will show you the way” as one Polish builder told them). Everything in the house has been installed with peak oil and carbon emissions in mind, which is how we ended up sitting in the rain discussing oil-based insulation materials and sourcing ecologically-sound door frames from Estonia, while everyone else was in the tea tent eating cake. Ah, Transition!

Straw bale under construction at Stokes Ferry; hand-made paints on plaster; Stefi's house; rainwater system; skylit kitchen; sedum roof; the Studio almost complete; building the walls; laying the cob floor; talking green build at the Greenpeace Fair.

Fracking Hell and Other Apocalypses - The Energy Story

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
(from Burnt Norton, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot)

In Kensington Gardens there stands a statue: it’s called Physical Energy and throughout my childhood it acted as a marker for all journeys in the park. We’ll go to Physical Energy and back. The granite statue depicted a man on a horse looking toward an imaginary future. He seemed, from my small perspective, vast and strangely remote. Did he, I wonder, foresee what we now see, as he gazed implacably across the Serpentine?

Our culture is entirely underpinned by physical energy. Each one of us has the power of a hundred horses underneath us, at our fingertips, as we race through the land, across the world wide web. We think nothing of it as we click and switch and yet there it is invisibly pumping through the pipes in our houses and public buildings, heating and cooling, crackling through the lines: electricity, oil and gas. On and off, 24/7. Where does that power come from? The banking system invisibly debits our accounts and we don’t think about it much. Sometimes we might see a news flash about an oil spill, or a nuclear explosion, or campaigners talking about coal-fired power stations, but to connect those dramatic images with what is going on in our ordinary domestic lives seems not only hard, but undesirable. We don’t want to. There are better and more fun images to look at, and a story we love to hear again and again. We Can Have What We Want Anytime.

And yet if we are to avoid the kind of disaster scenarios predicted by climate change scientists, environmentalists and First Nations we are really going to have to make those connections and fast. As Rob Hopkins pointed out in his recent review of the documentary Gasland, we are entering the second part of the oil age - the societal scraping of the barrel. This will entail the kinds of violent resource drillings and mining thousands of us are protesting against: gas fracking, coal-fired power stations, nuclear power-stations, mountain-top removal, tar sands, Arctic oil-drilling, bio-fuels, the decimation of thousands of eco-systems, the homelands of indigenous peoples, pristine wilderness, wild creatures, birds, ancient forest. All of them decimated in the hands of a vast and remote culture that is violent in its refusal to change its ways.

To reverse this scenario, we’re going to have to get our minds around powerdown really, really quickly.

The powerdown story however is hard to tell, partly because it has no precedent but also because the anti-story to We Can Have What We Want Anytime is The End of the World Is Nigh. If I can't be king of the castle I'll smash the castle. We are the inheritors of People of the Book. And whether we believe in Second Comings or not, apocalypse in embedded into our culture and into our imaginations. If we’re not creating, we're destroying. Oh, my great-grandchildren will have to deal with that! people remark blithely, the earth will get rid of us, or they get that scary Rapture look and rub their hands gleefully at the thought of a total systems collapse.

I am not, by nature, an Endtimer. I'm not into bring-it-all-down, come-the-revolution, oh, 2012 is next year, great! I don’t want to escape into the fourth dimension, or be lifted off planet. I’m not in a rush to die violently. I long passionately for radical change, but have read enough history to know that in revolutions writers are the first people to board the train to the gulag. And I have weathered enough small apocalypses in my own life to know I don’t want to live through any on a giant scale.

In my own experience people can swing two ways in extremity: wake up or cut out, become extraordinary or turn into monsters and zombies. In 2007 a policeman trained in disaster management swung by my house and spelled out exactly what the monster scenario might mean in the UK. Does anyone want to experience what the Japanese are going through? I don’t want to have to abandon my home, or my cat or any of my neighbours, or the old people in the retirement home at the end of the road to their fate. I don't want all the trees in my neighbourhood cut for fuel. I love this earthly life as it is. And I am happy to lose those mechanical horses the industrial revolution bequeathed me to keep it that way.

How else to describe this than as a form of mass insanity? Just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country — a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only stand to look at it for so long. As Jared Diamond and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes (from TEDwomen talk by Naomi Klein)

The correct response to a looming disaster is to try and prevent it happening. To be inventive and find ways to reconfigure how we do things. However most of us are not listening and responding. Part of the problem is that we escape into our minds to avoid facing reality. We’re not looking ahead and seeing the big picture, we’re carrying on as if everything is going to be the same. And in that desire, we’re wrecking the very lifeforms that keep us alive.

I’m not a builder or a craftsman or any kind of technician. I don’t wield any kind of political or scientific or community influence. So my only real response to these issues is be as a journeyman writer. When I joined Transition I didn’t join the Energy group, I joined the Communications group. There are many brilliant perspicacious and informative writers on blogs such as the Energy Bulletin and The Oil Drum who are far smarter on peak energy than me, who can tell you everything you need to know about nuclear waste, shale gas, oil drilling, carbon capture.

What I know is how to downshift. And I know about stories, how they affect us energetically: those spin stories that take hold of our self-deluding minds and the other kinds of narrative that speak directly to our heart’s intelligence, to our innate sense of fair play, that give us the courage to face the consequences of our actions. We are ruled in our granite minds - the unkind left-brain mind that can dismiss life in a sentence and welcome The End, that jumps to a scenario it thinks it can control. But it’s our warm-blooded hearts that connect with all our relations on earth, that feel for the Japanese people and the Canadian trees and the Siberian reindeer, even though they are thousands of miles away in places we will never visit now. It’s our hearts that can face reality and make the decision to live differently.

One person who perceives directly with an unwavering gaze. with a staunch heart, breaks a small spell in a small circle, a hundred looking at the big picture and acting in every which way they can widens that circle. Everyone paying attention means millions of people focusing on the same dilemma at the same time. Millions of solutions appearing, as opposed to millions burying their heads in tar sands.

It might be the end of a civilisation as we know it. But it won’t be the end of a people. And it won’t be the end of the earth.

Energy in Transition

There are myriad energy projects in Transition, ranging from the recent workshop on Tar Sands organised by Transition Heathrow, to draught-busting workshops by Transition Belsize. Some of the current Transition energy projects are listed in the Network website. Most focus on energy conservation but there are also community renewable energy initiatives. Perhaps the most exciting of these is the Solar Power Station, set up by Transition Lewes, which is being launched today (read Adrienne Campbell’s excellent defence of solar power, Solar So Good on her blog, 1oo Monkeys). Local East Anglian projects include Transition Ipswich's community wind turbine, Transition Cambridge’s wind-turbine construction workshops and bulk-buying loft insulation schemes (Framlingham and Otley).

Creating an Energy Descent Action Plan was the main goal of the original Transition 12 steps, and, like many initiatives, Transition Norwich's EDAP (renamed Resilience Plan) became the primary focus for most of the theme groups that formed after the Unleashing in 2008. Energy reduction has been a key driver both within the innovative Transition Circles and Carbon Conversations. TN also took part in a Solar Panel Scheme organised by SolarCentury.

At the end of 2009 the Energy and Buildings group ran an Energy Audit, principally lighting at night, of public buildings in Norwich, that was televised by BBC Look East. This year the project is about to be revived in a new form. Chris Hull reports:

"The Carbon Trust did a report into business energy waste and efficiency, December last year. Based on a survey over a 3 year period and analysing 1000 companies, they came up with a figure of U.K. firms wasting about £1.6 billion a year on energy.

The Carbon Trust also found that the Finance Directors of large companies underestimated the financial return of investing in energy efficiency by as much as 30%. Our idea for 'Citizens Energy Watch' is to invite people to note and record where they witness energy waste - for instance lights in office blocks, car forecourts, and shops being left on late at night, 'patio heaters' on the outside of cafes, etc. - and let us know via a specific webpage. We would then work with companies to encourage them to reduce their waste and their cost, and mention the companies by name who succeed."

For further info on Citizen Energy Watch contact Chris Hull 01603 664928 or chrishull@phonecoop.coop.

Poster for Gasland; Tar sands extraction in Alberta; A Japanese man looks down at two dead horses within the exclusion zone, 20 km from the Fukushima plant on April 7 in Minamisoma (Athit Perawongmetha); Solar Community Power team, Transition Lewes; A homeless dog wanders the streets of the exclusion zone in Futuba Town, approximately five km away from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

Entering the Conversation

Scientists talk about climate change with studies on pollution and toxins where the Inuit discuss the effects as they occur within our lives. Our whole world is changing. On the topic of environment southerners focus on borders which prevents them from getting connected. When Inuit talk about environment we are one. (from Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change)

From 1998-2003 I ran a project with Mark called the Earth Dreaming Bank. It was an investigation into the relationship between the earth and human consciousness, specifically dreaming. One of the tools we used was called Five Levels which I had borrowed from the eco-psychologist, Stephen Aizeinstat. Aizenstat had returned from the Rio Earth Summit where dreaming had been recognised as an intrinsic part of human knowledge, our world heritage. I had met him after a talk he gave in Santa Barbara on Aboriginal Dreamtime.

The Five Levels explore night dreams from five different perspectives, asking how they relate to your waking life in the last 48 hours, in terms of your biography, as a social being, in the realms of world mythology and finally as a creature of the earth. In the practice with others the hardest level to account for was the third. To break out of that individual mindset and shift into the collective level was a difficult step, often hedged by unnamed fears. Mostly people didn't like to think of themselves as a member of society within a historical or political framework – as a woman, for example or a member of the working class, even of the human race at this point in time. They felt they no longer had a handle on their destiny somehow, which was not true of the other levels.

None of us liked to think of ourselves as being subservient to the heartless and autocratic system we were all part of. A number or statistic. Somehow dispensable. And yet within the dreaming an awareness of our position was often the most powerful point, the point at which radical change could take place, a moment of liberation.

Perhaps the strongest opportunity Transition offers is for a redefinition of that social level. Partly because it values working with other people on an equal and fair footing. And because it recognises that a reconnection with people is a vital step towards co-creating the kind of low-energy future we want to live in. No matter how strong our connection with the natural world, no matter how determined we are to break out of illusion and live a deliberate life, if we don't also connect in a meaningful way with the people in our neighbourhood and in our society we will indeed become dispensable, cogs in a machine that is already running out of control across the planet.

These are not necessarily the conversations you have across the supper table or on the bus. You need another set and setting to engage in them fully. Transition can provide an informal platform for such discussions because everything we do is within the deep frame of change. Most of all we're not addressing the effects of the 3 E's (energy, environment, economics) as experts, outside the problem, we're discussing them as players, inside the problem, as a People.

April 8 7.30pm Tom Abbot's Barn. The Saints. Suffolk. Our second Sustainable Bungay and Greenpeace film night. There are 20 people in the barn and we're watching the Economics of Happiness. It's a documentary about the effects of globalisation, principally on the people of Ladakh who once all lived in autonomous, self-sufficient and locally-orientated communities. The director Helena Norbert-Hodge poses ways we can combat the eight spokes of the global economic wheel that run from competition and conflict to false accounting, how we can engage in localisation and revitalising our own local communities. We're discussing what we can do here in East Anglia and the freestyle conversation is running from sharing stuff to permaculture. We need to shift our values, we agree, how do we begin? Richard riffs on farmers committing suicide and dogs undergoing hip surgery. "It's great we can count on you for keeping our spirits up", says Marion, champion of organic potato growing in the region, and we laugh.

Outside across the dark common the stars are burning and the new moon hangs in the sky. The blackthorn is shining. I'm collecting my Suma order from Kris's car and going to stay overnight with Netta in Beccles. The parlous rural transport situation means I can't get buses after teatime. "How are you going to get those sacks back?" she says, as I heave 30 kilos of millet and rice into the back. "Trolley them!" I laugh. En route she turns to me and says: why don't I just drive you home?

April 12, 6pm Aladdins cafe, Magdalen Street, Norwich. The cafe is unexpectedly full. 35 people are listening to Deepak giving a recap of Nicole Foss' presentation last month. As well as the main theme of runaway deflation, he mentions other subjects Foss touched upon after the event at Christine's, notably the restriction of our civil liberties. We've organised ourselves into five tables each with a question arising from the talk: Are we heading for inflation or deflation? What political actions can we take in order to save our society? How did we get into this situation, historically, philosophically? What actions can we take locally, as individuals and in community?

I've asked the question: How can we preserve our liberties and what are they? "We don't even know what our rights are," remarked a young midwife as she described how her time-honoured profession was being squeezed out. There is a large piece of paper in front of us and I'm writing a litany of our disappearing freedoms: EU directives on herbal products, the liberty of living in a mobile dwelling on your own land, habeus corpus, the rise of demi-gods, press freedom, press monopoly, collection of data. We're talking about breaking our own self-censorship, standing behind others as they act on our behalf, protesting. What feels important is that we are talking these things out loud. Because silence is consent. Afterwards we give a plenary of everything we discussed. Financial actions that we can take from starting our own currency in Norwich to shifting cash into ethical funds.

Unlike our laid-back country conversation, this city one is intense. While others continue in the pub afterwards, I head back to the station down the back lanes where the stone walls are green with shepherds purse and ivy-leaved toadflax and ancient cherry trees lean out of hidden gardens. I'm staying with Lesley tonight in Oulton Broad. En route to her house we walk through Bonds Meadow Wood and feel the presence of the huge willow trees shifting in the warm spring night. In her kitchen there's a meal waiting for me and a glass of wine. Red cabbage sprouts for the salad from a seed tray outside her door.

You don't expect to find flowers in a city street, and yet they are there. You don't expect to find kindness and generosity in people, yet it is there. I don't think we talked about those qualities in either of our discussions and yet it was everywhere, unsaid in the room. Hussein and Tariq who run the cafe kept it open for us past hours, so we could have this conversation. Tom opened his barn. When I can't get a bus, people open their houses, drive me home, offer me lifts. Last week I hitched to our local market town and 4 strangers picked me up. What do you do they ask, the builder, scrap metal dealer, visitor (from North Wales), artist (from East London). I'm in Transition I say and start telling them what that means.

The fact is we have to have the conversation. Whether that conversation is haphazard or highly structured, whether it's awkward or fluent, speaking to our neighbour or speaking to the room, we can't feel on our own. As the world darkens and tightens its grip we need to feel light and in charge of our destiny. "The big thing is control," said Deepak. "And what mitigates control is communication," I replied. We have to talk about how we feel and what we can do, how we can manifest a vision for the future that includes the earth, our skills, our intelligence, our common cause, our common freedoms. The institutions that hold us in their grip count on our being separated and afraid. In the dreams Mark and I once paid attention to so intently, the point of liberation came when we said how it felt to be trapped. When we spoke from our hearts the dream broke open. The autocratic world none of us wish for and all of us resist, counts on not saying what we really feel out loud.

Time to speak.


Photos: Mark and Tully discussing resilience and infrastructure at Strangers' Circle meeting, 2010; Economics of Happiness poster; Deepak outlining the three E's at Aladdin's Cafe; the plenary; action sheet.