Dark Kitchen: Uncivilising the Table

This week I introduced a new Dark  Mountain series that explores food and eating in times of collapse. Follow us during this Lenten month as we travel through different kingdoms and terrains, sharpening our appetites and cooking knives, in the company of artists, filmmakers, writers and activists.

We are looking at a plate. Tiny translucent slices of fish are artfully arranged around its rim. It is 1990 and we are in a Japanese restaurant in downtown Manhattan. 'Who is going first?' we wonder and laugh nervously. I am with Hamilton and Steve. We'll all go at once we decide and put the poisonous raw fugu in our mouths, declaring that a tingling was definitely happening. The dish costs $50.

We are looking at a plate. On it piled in chunky layers are home-baked sourdough bread, crispy seaweed and a poached egg. It is 2017 and we are outside in the lee of the Dorset cliffs, cooking on a camping stove. Everyone wants to go first. I am with Caroline, Jack and Mark and yesterday we cut the bright green fronds from the rocks, as the aquamarine sea swirled about our feet. We declare this is possibly the best breakfast we have ever had and laugh.

This is a story about food and powerdown. It could seem like a personal story except that it is not: it is a social story about how everything changes when you break the illusions your civilisation is wrapped in. In 1990 I am staying in the Algonquin Hotel, covering the US fashion collections, and I know nothing about the industrial food system; in 2017 I am staying in a hut on a beach, talking about Dark Mountain, and I know all its dark secrets. Decades later the Spring collections will still send beige raincoats down the catwalk and the forests of kelp will continue to wave their ancestral arms in the currents of the English channel - but the world I am documenting, like the food I now cook, is radically different.

This is a series called Dark Kitchen: a set of pieces that will look at and question the culture of food in times of fall. It's not a subject Dark Mountain has focused on before, even though writing and cooking share a creative terroir, not least in their ability to bring things to the table, to alchemise raw material into food for the mind, heart and body. Up to now any focus on food has been practical: the Uncivilisation festivals hosted foraging walks, we've published pieces on mead making, bread baking in Australia and a recipe for a very rooty, roadkill pheasant stew; this series aims to bring a writer's and artist's particular attention to food from a Dark Mountain perspective.

Our focus will not be on the labyrinth, the whirlygig of distribution centres and trucks that thunder along our roads, all the data and polemic, but on finding the dancing floor beneath it. Around all our sentences lie the deforested lands, the denuded and poisoned oceans, the lost soil, the vast herds of creatures living and dying invisibly in dark sheds. We know what is going down. Our core question is, once you have railed at the machine that holds us in its palm-oiled maw, what do you do as an artist, as a storytelling human being, knowing that every time you venture out with a shopping basket, you return with blood on your hands?

Dark Kitchen aims to gather some of the stories about food that go untold at the edge of our civilisation. All civilisations flourish and flounder according to their ability to feed themselves. All of us, as human animals, no matter where we exist, on what social and political map, need to eat to live. Like death, this is a fact of our existence here. How we can we do that sustainably, with kindness, with fairness, is a question many grassroots organisations and activists ask themselves.

One they do not necessarily ask however is: how do we change the story of our lives, built as it is on millions of years of living in hunter/gatherer bodies, thousands of years living in wheat and barley-fed civilisations, in nomadic milk-herding geographies? Food is not a matter of intellectual debate: it is physical and feeling memory, deep time memory, cultural and personal history. It is people and relationships with domestic and wild creatures, conviviality, tradition, hunger, belonging, snobbery. Roast dinners, fish and chips by the sea. It is hunting deer and keeping chickens, curry on a Friday night when you were a student. It is visiting the markets of Morocco, or France, or your gran who cooked the best lemon meringue pie ever.

How do you come up with a new way of interacting with the world that means all that culture stored inside of you and everyone you know, constantly reflected from shiny magazine pages, on TV screens, on your best friend's Instagram, has to go?

Roland Barthes observed in his seminal work Mythologies how the modern left faltered before the sheer power and sexiness of the capitalist advertising industry. How can you match the pull it has on your most basic desire: to eat delicious food, tasting of fat and salt and sweet, ready made without effort, without thinking of where it has come from, a food without consequence, untainted by guilt. Every day feast food, seeped in the lure of luxury, convenience, pleasure, control - the defining signature of a corporate lifestyle.

A humble recipe for vegan nut roast is not going to cut the mustard, any more than modern socialism has been able to counter market fundamentalism. The glamour and snobbery of high culture, and the physical desires and  habits of most people, are too strong. Something else has to pull you more powerfully in another direction: something that has its roots in the land, in a deeper culture that also looks prophetically to the future,  that has intelligence, meaning and ethics and still tastes good.

One thing corporate dining, for all its cheffy fancies and huge glasses of wine, does not have and never will: the relationship with the non-human, with the earth, with the plants and creatures who stand to go down with us if we don't dismantle the labyrinth. This relationship is above all things a matter of the heart. Dark Kitchen is about remembering one of the oldest and simplest stories ever told: a love affair with the fabric of life.

Powerdown

Where did the shift away from that plate of fugu begin? I read a cookbook by Colin Spencer with a no-holds-barred description of slaughterhouses. I gave up eating meat. I read End of the Line by Charles Clover. I gave up eating fish. I read Eat Your Heart Out, Felicity Lawrence's document about corporate control and the fate of African workers in the glasshouses of Spain and Italy. I gave up buying out-of-season tomatoes. I stopped going to supermarkets. Then I went to a documentary hosted by a local Transition initiative where Derrick Jensen spoke about the agricultural revolution and how it had decimated the wild world. Somewhere a restaurant door slammed shut and an allotment gate clicked open.

In Transition I bumped into everything that the advertising and supermarkets keep in the dark: land grabs, slavery, GM, pesticides decimating insect and bird populations, slurry from pig farms killing the rivers and oceans. I started to look at the barley and beet fields outside my window in a new light and shudder.

In those grassroots community activism years, food growing connected us all: we knew that growing radishes would not change the world but it would radically change our relationships with the earth and with each other. I became a serial food blogger charting the downshifting moves within food production: growing co-ops, box schemes, gleaning networks, apple-pressing weekends, potato days, community bakers, seed swaps, the plight of the honey bees, and the ex-Agriculture minister John Gummer telling us at a farmers' conference on Climate Change and Food Security:

This is the biggest issue agriculture has faced, and unlike the Depression in the 1930s and the Black Death we are not facing this in ignorance. And because we know we are responsible. People don't want to know of course, because once you know it changes you and you are ashamed.

It was a time where people on panels said these kinds of things and prophesied that bio-tech loaves and fishes would feed the 9 billion. It was a time of bringing potatoes to Occupy camps and wild weed salads to low-carbon meetings, of rescuing a whole side of salmon and punnets of strawberries from the Latitude festival recycling bins, cooking Mexican and raw food feasts for community diners. It was a time where The Monitor in the kitchen told me exactly how much power was eking out of the fridge and the kettle. When some women wept and struggled with their Tesco habit, and others implored me not to tell them exactly what their shrimp habit was doing to the seabed or the coastal mangroves of South East Asia.

But something was missing. Everything I wrote had this evangelical tone. We need to reduce our energy use! Get in season! Make your store cupboard resilient! Wake up to the real price of consumerism! I realised neither knowledge nor social justice gives enough heft for people to change tracks. To be in synch with the living systems, to restore the land, to eat beautifully with conscience, to find meaning in an everyday humble meal, an imaginative relationship with the physical world had to be created. Our hearts had to be rekindled by something stronger, more alluring, than any feel-bad information. Something you never thought of before – like seaweed for breakfast on a limestone beach in September.

A short story about beans

I am standing on Dark Mountain's Base Camp stage, holding a handful of field beans. These beans are what this weekend is all about, I am telling the gathering. Field beans have been grown here in Britain since the Iron Age and embody one of the uncivilised principles of the manifesto – being rooted in time and place.

The beans are produced by my friend Josiah, who started a small business in a nearby Suffolk market town with Nick and William five years ago. The beans were all about shortening the supply chain, encouraging farmers to grow a crop that was either given to cattle or sold to the Middle East, and that was nutritious not only for an eat-less-meat-and-dairy-cook-from-scratch culture, but also for the soil that is being rapidly depleted by fossil-fuelled farming.

But most of all the beans were about telling a different story. A Jack in the Beanstalk story about a boy who sells his mother's cow for a handful of beans that totally changes their luck. The beans were followed by peas of many colours, and then quinoa (grown not in Bolivia but in Essex), and now lentils, naked barley and oats, and a host of other grains and pulses, grown with the same kind of attention to place and provenance that has made local craft beers rocket in popularity in the face of corporate brewing. In short, a whole shelf of basic goods that would normally be imported, in fields that would normally host monocultural commodity crops grown for the global market. Last year Hodmedods won BBC Producer of the Year and had to move warehouses, as everyone else began to agree those beans just took you to places that Mr Heinz never could.

One of the successes of the fava bean is that it is a beloved ingredient in the fragrant and spicy cuisines of  the Middle East and other countries. To end each of our Dark Kitchen posts we'll be cooking up a recipe that will capture the flavour of some of the story we're telling, that shows though we may live in more austere restricted times, there need be no limit to our imaginations and flair and generosity. This is a classic North African dish made with fava beans instead of chickpeas and served with quinoa instead of couscous. It can serve two to four people – just add less or more veg.

Seven vegetable tagine

Soak a big handful of fava beans overnight and then cook until soft (approx 40 minutes). Keep to one side. Whole beans keep their shape but split fava is OK too if you don't mind a bit of collapse in your cooking (no need to soak).

Chop one onion and fry gently in olive oil in a largish saucepan. When softened add 2 cloves of garlic, a teaspoon of ras el hanout spice (or a mix of cumin, coriander, mixed spice and chilli pepper) and fresh green chilli if you like it hot. Stir and then add your roughly chopped seven veg which will depend on season: swede, leeks and parsnips in winter for example, courgettes, green pepper and turnips in the summer. You're looking for a strong taste and a chunky texture, so celery and carrots are good. Cabbage however is key and can be added half way through the main cooking so it keeps its form.

Stir in the spicy oil for a minute or two then add 2 tomatoes and a squeeze of tomato puree, or the equivalent in tinned tomatoes, and water to just below the level of the veg. Throw in a handful of sultanas and half a preserved lemon (or a couple of slices and the juice of half a fresh squeezed lemon). Stir, pop on the lid and cook until the veg starts to soften (about 15 minutes). Add the beans for a further five.

Before serving add salt and black pepper to taste, plus a big handful of chopped coriander and/or parsley. Served with quinoa, flavoured with orange zest, cinnamon and toasted sunflower seeds, a bowl of slaw or salad, and some feisty harissa.

Next course:

The Dark Kitchen series will run throughout February, but will continue as an occasional series when the new-look Dark Mountain website is launched in April. If you would like to contribute in the future, do get in touch with a short description of your piece to charlotte@dark-mountain.net. Thanks all and bon appetit!

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Images: Medlars in a Sieve by Food/ Still life photography: Sue Atkinson www.sueatkinson.co.uk; loaves from a co-operative oven, Can Piella, Catalonia by Phillip Evans ; a handful of (field) beans by Mark Watson

Paris Plan B - the untold story

At the end of November I went to France and Sweden. It was my first trip to Europe for 15 years. The first week I spent in Paris during the opening of the COP21 negotiations and then travelled overland to Stockholm to give a series of workshops and talks based on the work of Dark Mountain. More on that next year. Meanwhile here is a short blog I originally wrote for Bella Caledonia about those heady first days. 
 

The last time I filed from Paris I was covering the Spring Collections. It is a long way from where I am now perched on a high stool in the lounge of a reconfigured hostel by the Gare du Nord discussing Why the Message Doesn’t Get Across with a sociologist called Jean-Baptiste.

However this is a report about COP21 that did not make the headlines, nor even the small print, when, for two weeks in December, 1000s of activists, campaigners and grassroots communicators converged on the capital to disseminate their messages of defiance, hope and renewal, in spite of a heavily-policed clampdown on gatherings and demonstrations.

 ‘Refresh the climate, rewrite the story’ 

I have never seen so many people online in one room before – blogging, tweeting, texting, emailing, Skyping, videoing  –  and it is only 7am. 600 of us are having breakfast in the co-working space of the alternative media hub of Place to B. We know we can’t just fix the climate by twiddling with the temperature dial as 195 world leaders are now doing at Le Bourget. We know we need to address its deeper causes; a debt-bound economic system, the myth of progress and our millennia-long separation from wild nature on which we depend for everything.

The millions of grassroots responses around the planet are too small and undramatic to fit into the dominant mainstream narrative. Nevertheless we are busy sharing them across tables – stories about restoring soil, challenging fracking, bearing witness from communities under fire and under water. None of us are here just for ourselves. We are speaking on behalf of organisations and networks which have brought us together in a way that no conventional social meeting or workplace could ever do.
 

The first thing you notice is that everything connects. The second that there is no hostility. 

'What I am waiting for is sincerity’, says Jeremy from the BBC, as we discuss how the story we are here to rewrite looks more like a global communications system, firing on all cylinders. What I am waiting for is a way to frame my convincing argument, my pitch. But I can’t. Because when push comes to shove what really matters is something that bears no relation to a newspaper opinion, and it’s a hard to describe how it feels when suddenly you don’t have to fight the person you are talking with anymore.

When you realise you are not on your own. 

Boulevard Voltaire

10,000 people are holding hands along Boulevard Voltaire. Angels flex their wings, a stream of bicycles flies past, a brass band plays; a newt-headed man from the occupation at La Zad gives an interview to a citoyenne with a video camera. Vans of riot police wait in side streets for the clashes that will come later in a flower-strewn Place de la Republique. I join the human chain between a row of Tibetan men, one of whom hands me a badge saying ‘The Third Pole’, and feel strangely at home.

Afterwards I step back into the calm cobbled back streets of a Sunday Paris. You could think nothing had changed if you look at the cafes and shops and knobbly plane trees. You could think that nothing had changed when the gods at Le Bourget congratulate themselves on coming to a historic agreement.

It may appear to be the same but it isn’t the same behind the facade. The Tibetan plateau, the biggest reservoir of fresh water outside the Arctic and Antarctica, is warming at twice the global rate. We have been living as if our fossi-fuelled lifestyles have no consequences, but the consequences are now blowing back towards us. Some of us are no longer looking at hemlines.

Rue de Dunkerque

I could report on the Climate Games, the People’s Assembly, the Global Village of Alternatives, the documentary Demain, or any number of the workshops, talks or actions that are taking place on the edge of the official negotiations, but I have decided to stay here in the Place to B’s Creative Factory, where I work with an opera singer, two dancers, a novelist, an anthropologist and a cartoonist amongst others to create projects that explore ways to Dismantle the Buying Imperative. 

There is a challenge we all face with this rewrite. We are embedded in a culture of market fundamentalism, just as we are in the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change. A capitalist economy is our default common ground, no matter how connected we are to ‘nature’. It is hard to communicate without feeling the pressure to convince and propagandise in a way that goes against our craft. It is hard not to sound like an ad.

Scientists plea for their terrifying data to be rendered into an acceptable narrative for people to ‘get’. We know we need a story that holds a ‘radical dreaming’ and touches the hearts of people, and that climate change is a symptom of a cause that corporate media cannot admit. Industrial civilisation has brought the living systems on which we depend to a breaking point - systems that do not operate according to our 21st technology, 18^th century reason, nor our 4000 BC sense of godlike control.

In the COP21 deal there are blue sky pledges but no mention of how carbon reduction might be achieved on the ground in a world where everything we consume  is made possible by oil. The obvious ‘solution’ to powerdown our whole way of life was never on the table. At the COP21 ‘fringe’ however it is clear we need to do exactly that and undergo what some call decroissance (degrowth). To walk in the opposite direction of Empire.

This story is made up of humble things: of cargo bikes and community orchards, of handmade bread and local assemblies, big picture vision, small everyday actions, a tale of sharing and restoration and sincerity and many other things besides. It doesn’t fit into a hash tag. It takes time to listen to. It challenges all the assumptions we were taught by our parents and teachers, and most avowedly, by our governments. There is no happy ending.

But there is a door to the future we can open that doesn’t depend on a mythical technology, that recognises, unlike the agreement, the rights of indigenous peoples, the forests, the oceans, all creatures: a culture that not only engages in letting go of its addiction to energy, but also in dismantling its powerbase from within, divesting its sense of entitlement, of superiority over all species, its extractive ego, its will to conquer, its baseline hostility.

On the walls of the bar there are small messages written by 1000s of individuals to everyone in Paris. They are written on bunting (from Scotland) and coloured ribbons (from USA). The people were asked: 

'What do you love and never hope to lose to climate change?'

The Great Barrier reef
My country, Syria
Kindness between strangers.

Here’s mine:

The sound of a robin singing in midwinter.

Images: Fossil free action at the Louvre (Andrea Hejlskov) Kristian Buus) for Climate Games; one of 600 Brandalism posters posted on bus stops around Paris.

ARCHIVE: On an ordinary summer's evening in an ordinary town

This week one of my fellow activists from Sustainable Bungay Nick Watts, left the flatlands of Suffolk for the mountains of Wales. In celebration I helped produce a 'souvenir' issue of our regular newsletter for his farewell party, and it was only when we sat down to chart everything he had done during the last six years that we realised how intrinsic some people are within a Transition Initiative. Here is a blog from our heydays in 2011 that starts and ends with Nick - about downshifting, being ordinary, and the dynamics of working in a group:

"It’s definitely the stick," said Mark as he stood with a piece of wood in his hands. It had been inadvertently donated at Sustainable Bungay's Give and Take Day and suddenly reappeared in our hallway. From the outside it looked like a shiny broom handle but it wasn't: it was a fighting stick belonging to a young man mortified by its disappearance. 

But I guess you’d have to be a warrior to know that.

It’s an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town. We’re on our way to our monthly core group meeting. First we have to drop off the stick at Kate’s and have some supper with Nick.

“You share your lives in the blogosphere and I’d like to share some of what I do," Nick said as he began to fill a box full of July veg - onions and garlic, fennel, beetroot, fresh eggs and blackcurrant jam. We sat down at the kitchen table and drank some squash wine, ate a delicious bean salad and talked about the financial crisis.

You have to be in Transition to truly appreciate Nick's house – kale and courgettes in the front garden, sorrel around the door, a garage with dried herbs hanging from the ceiling and shelves full of preserves, giant tanks of rainwater, chickens, cupboards and windowsills with kegs of homemade wine, a stack of books on economics. It’s not what it looks like, but what is behind everything you see. What it took to get there. The bare aesthetic of downshift.

Years ago I interviewed a man called Tommy Roberts. I was working for a glossy magazine at the time and the subject of the article was Taste, that indefinable quality that distinguished one person or house from the next.What is Taste? I asked various arbiters of style, fashion designers and editors, owners of grand and important properties. Tommy was once a designer of natty suits in the 60’s when he was known as Mr Freedom but at that time had a shop under Centrepoint full of zany, brightly coloured modern furniture: Taste is the Japanese room with one beautiful vase in the corner, he told me. A lifetime of taking away makes that room. It’s what you don’t have that defines taste.

We live in a have and have-not culture and our value systems are entirely based around possessions. Not just the things those designers were talking about back in the 1980s when materialism and property began its great boom – wallpaper and watches and John Fowler’s "pleasing decay" - but a personal warehouse of business connections, children, communities, garden flowers, Hollywood stars, holiday countries. My special world.

"Well, you’re rich in other ways," said the man at the Financial Instability workshop at the Transition Conference after I had detailed my downshift from The World of Interiors to Sustainable Bungay.
"I really am not rich", I replied.
"You are rich in social relationships", he insisted, frustrated with my density. "In quality time. You are abundant in other ways."
"I have very little", I replied. (which is not strictly true because like most people in this country I have chairs and tables, pots and pans and all manner of basic essentials). 
"What is wrong with nothing? Why do we have to be wealthy at all?"

What I wanted to say was I had spent a lot of time clearing out that room. And I didn’t replace the things I used to own with different things - with people or experiences, or a low-carbon lifestyle - but had learned to love space and time and the freedom that lack of ownership brought.

In downshift less is not more in the way we once understood Japanese style. Less means you take everything you don’t need away, so that what really matters is left. It means you don’t have because having is no longer important. What becomes important is that freedom of movement and living a deliberate life.

It’s an ordinary evening in a Transition town and we’re on our way to our meeting at the Library. But first we have to meet at the pub with the Community Bee Group to celebrate the success of our Beehive Day, and then unload Eloise’s van full of information boards and select some just-picked fruit from the back of Cathy’s car. Cathy runs the Abundance project and swapping our produce and plants - at our meetings, in the Library community garden- has become a way of life. So here we are in the car park with a stack of boards and punnets of cherry-plums and blackberries meeting in a damp summer in a difficult time, swifts whizzing round the roofs, echinacea flowers full of bees.

At the 2011 Transition Network Conference we took part an exercise. We had to imagine a group we longed to be with in the future. I am no good at visioning and all I could think about was the fact I would be 65 in ten years time and how weird that was. And then I realised I don’t long for a group of people because I am already with those people and I had met them three years ago in the theatre down the street from here. And what was difficult to feedback to my fellow Transitioners in the canteen in Liverpool was the fact that it wasn’t the individuals in the initiative that made us matter to one another, the way we are used to people mattering in our lives, as special friends, or heroes, support systems, as possessions and dependencies. My important relationships.

It was the fact that when we met up as a group in these public spaces something happened between us. Something we held in common. We understood implicitly what we were doing and why – sharing stuff, organising events, going through the agenda. When I looked at this working-together in the visioning it looked like an energy field, the kind of energy field you sense when you stand by a hive humming with bees. A hum of warmth and intelligence that allows people to naturally collaborate and make that low-energy downshift happen. When that’s going on you don’t need possessions to compensate for your isolation, to anchor your introverted fantasy world. You don’t need data or climate science to persuade your tricky mind. You just need to tune in and act.

If you passed by Bungay Library tonight you’d notice the lights were on and if you peered in you might see a group of people around a table, eating plums and laughing, one person intently writing notes, one speaking, another occasionally calling order and everyone else paying attention. None of us look as if we are arbiters of taste, or abundant, or full of well-being or anything else the modern world puts a price on or gives value to. We’re obviously not important members of the community with homes-to-die-for, or great jobs or cars. We appear utterly ordinary and so we are. Ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing.

You can’t see the field from the outside, you have to feel it from the inside. You recognise it when you are in it because you are doing it along with everyone else. In fact you can’t be in it unless you are doing it.

That’s the real shift. The move from individualism to group collaboration for the good of the whole is primarily a personal shift, away from ownership and control, into a field of exchange and communication and reciprocity, into give and take. And that’s a whole new lexicon of being. It’s not a replacement of things, it’s a move. A let go and a join in.

Because Transition is not a noun, it’s a verb.

Photos: Sustainable Nick - souvenir issue; with squash wine in Nick's kitchen; rainwater storage; Cathy's Abundance fruit; Nick with harvested herbs.

ARCHIVE: Breaking the Habit

Happy New Year everyone! This post was originally published on the Transition Norwich community blog, This Low Carbon Life which ran stories every day for over three years. It was part of a three-day slot between posts about group communication Having the Conversation and reading Roger Deakin Notes from the Sunrise Coast. 

Looking back I can hardly believe I wrote so much about Transition. I didn't realise then that blogging is as addictive as everything else. I'm pretty cured of the habit these days, working as an editor, writing news copy and the occasional column. Recently however I've been having some keyboard yearnings . . .  watch this space in 2014!
 
In The Transition Handbook Rob Hopkins describes our fossil-fuelled industrialised lifestyle as an addiction. We’re addicted to oil. And that presents humanity with a major dilemma: we find ourselves stuck inside a destructive self-replicating system with very few ideas of how to get out of it. We can either get together and find ways to liberate ourselves, or face the consequences of a planetary meltdown.

Tough call either way.

With classic dependencies like alcohol and heroin it’s clear what you do when you face the music, when you wake up to your life falling apart. You stop. You can do this with sheer determination, you can get professional advice. You can go to any number of self-help groups and sit in a room with fellow addicts. You can treat it as a personal problem or a social problem - the historical fate of certain people at the hands of Empire, indigenous tribes dispossessed of their land, the factory workers in the slums of 19th century Manchester. You can look at it as a spiritual problem, the fate of the most of us, escaping from reality in one way or another, because of the emotional harshness of our lives, because of the lack of connection with the earth and with the spirit of life. It’s not our fault and yet it is our problem.

Most addicts, when they decide to quit can ask someone who has quit before them: How did you go through this process? And can expect to receive an answer. Normal is not-addicted (or at least not to the degree that it rules your life). But how do you do this with Energy? When normal is totally addicted and our lives are built around a constant need for electricity and gas? When oil interplays in almost all our activities? When no-one before us has given it up?

Instead of looking at the big picture of peak oil and climate change and feeling unable to act, the Transition Circles in Norwich decided to tackle the problem from ground up and go the way of self-help groups. We kept the big picture in mind and concentrated on the four drivers of energy, transport, food, stuff (and waste) in regard to our daily lives.

We confessed our profligate use of heating oil and gas, brought our log books, crunched numbers. We came out as bicycle riders, as users of rainwater, organic food producers, second hand clothes wearers, non-consumers, admitted a secret horror of plastic. But hey! We were in a Safe Space. It was OK to care about the planet. No one was going to accuse us of being tree huggers or climate agree-ers. We had a lot of fun (and good food). And in a few months, most of us had shifted to a low(er)-carbon way of living. We reduced our emissions to four tons (half the national average). We’re still working on it and communicating our findings to everyone we come across, 100 monkeys-style. This blog was created from those original meetings in 2009/10.

Still, as we found out, you have to go cold turkey and that’s a personal thing between you and the Power that rules your life. And then you have to hold those decisions in the outside world, often against stern opposition. How do you do that?

I’ve given up a lot of stuff in my life. I gave up sugar in tea for Lent as an experiment when I was 12 and, heathen child though I was, discovered the joy of renunciation. I never went back to it. After living a high life during my 20s and 30s I gave up a colourful list of recreational drugs, vodka and champagne drinking when I went on the road. I gave up newspapers and television and designer clothes and buying interesting stuff in markets. I gave up smoking cigarettes (oh, tobacco!), meat and fish and cheese, restaurants and elaborate cooking. In Transition I gave up daily hot baths, owning a car, supermarkets, flying, central heating. The pre-Transition decisions got me a lot of flak, the in-Transition ones curiosity and questions.

The trick is the decision. You’ve got to see it matters within the big picture. You have to see that it gives you freedom. And that you prefer that freedom, all that space and time, to being caught in a repeat cycle, even at the risk of "losing" people. It isn’t really renunciation as I found out, it’s breaking a hold something has over you. When I gave up drinking wine it didn’t mean I would never drink wine again. It meant that I broke the habit of having to have wine every day in order to feel OK. I still have hot baths, but only when I need one. It’s not driven from a puritanical urge. It’s come because I want to be fluid and autonomous. And on a social level I want to find out how we can extricate ourselves from the oil age and what that demands from individuals and communities, humanity as a whole. So there’s adventure in there, intellectual and physical curiousity, pioneer spirit, desire for experience (and copy!). What would it be like to live in rural England without a car?

Right now I’m breaking a terrible habit I picked up this winter when I had the flu. DVDs from the library! I had given up going to the cinema in 2005. I love films, especially real life stories with redemption in them. The DVDs from the library are mostly Hollywood movies so I can’t even claim I’m engaging in high culture. I’m just distracting myself. After a while you feel enclosed in these worlds of American gloss, the girls with their perfect hair, those mawkish plot lines. The globalised culture depends on these movies and their star system to disengage people’s attention, to give everyone a taste for the artificial and the emotional tone it brings. Its violence and false desires. Its hidden heraldic structures that imprint themselves on our imaginations. Giving up has got to have meaning in there. And noble purpose.

If you lay out every thing you have given up, the habits you have broken, you’ll find yourself with a map of powerdown. That’s when you notice it looks a lot like gaolbreak. A lot like breaking a spell.

Photos: Smoking in the Yucatan 1991; opium poppy; Strangers' Circle. 2010 - All by Mark Watson. Black Swan poster, 2011

ARCHIVE - Confessions of a Class Traitor

In November 2009 I joined a collective column on the Eastern Daily Press called the One World Column, alongside a crew of progressive thinkers and writers from Norwich. Our main topics were centered on social justice, globalisation, peacemaking, human rights and the environment. I was asked to cover the Transition movement and sustainable food systems. The column was axed when a new editor took charge, but continued as a blog. This was a post written as the nation took to the streets to protest against the cuts to public services in 2011.

Where you are going is overwhelmingly dependant on where you are from. Just before the last election OWC columnist Lee Marsden wrote a perspicacious analysis of public school education and the class system. If the Labour government had hidden their Etonian and Oxbridge advantages, it was clear the next millionaire cabinet were going to flaunt them. We were entering a very different political period. A moment of turbulence in which we were all about to be thrown out of our comfortable seats.

During the last 30 years as the global finanical credit bubble swelled, many people in Britain improved their material lives. Everyone it appeared was able to buy houses and go on holiday. Shopping became a national pastime. In 1998, in a shocking report on poverty and prostitution, Dark Heart, the Guardian journalist Nick Davies looked at the hidden cost of that improvement, the demolition of the working class and the creation of an invisible underclass, a quarter of the population who served as scapegoats for the rest, and most particularly the governing elite.

We imagine that class has disappeared from modern consumer society, but of course it hasn’t. It operates insidiously as a signalling sysem, through language and behaviours, to establish who we are and where we figure in the pecking order: the people who take charge or who obey, those who bask in the limelight, or act out the collective shadow. In spite of what we do in our adult lives we are strictly labelled according to our childhood circumstances and education.

“Daddy, what class are we?” “We’re professional class,” replied my father, once a lawyer. “If anyone asks you tell them you are a professional.” I’m standing outside his old chambers on the Victoria Embankment and a group of socialist lawyers are gathering under a banner in wigs and gowns to protest against the cutting of the court services. It’s March 26 and thousands of workers, students, unemployed and sympathetic protesters are massing beside the Thames. I’m talking with Gurkas, London fireman, librarians from Manchester, engineers from Birmingham, student nurses, actors and coastguards. There’s a strong feeling of solidarity in the crowd I haven’t experienced for a very long time.

My father was born (illegally) in the Inns of Court and spent his whole life behind these gates, defending the innocent and the guilty, pornographers, murderers and fraudsters. During the day he battled against censorship, at night he told me stories about the woods and birds from his rural childhood on the Sussex Downs and about the protagonists of the French revolution. The liberation of Paris obsessed him. Allons citroyens!

We are made of the stories we are told. Sometimes we are told them in order to live them out. And sometimes we are born to end them - not just our personal narratives but the ones we tell ourselves as a culture, as a people. The most enduring story we are taught is that some people are better than others. Better fit to rule, better fit to live in splendour, more intelligent, more evolved. I was raised to believe that “lower” class people were poor because they were stupid and when workers went on strike they were holding the country to ransom. But this wasn’t the story my life followed.

At the age of 19 I found myself living in the slumlands of Birmingham with working class students from the North, who unlike me, had struggled hard to get here. It was the mid-1970s and all our world-views were being challenged. In the red-light district of Balsall Heath amongst the immigrant sweat-shops, I learned about Diggers and Levellers, studied Chomsky and socio-linguistics, stood by ASLEF workers and against the National Front, and when I faced a police charge realised I was in a country that bore no relation to the one I had been brought up in.

Those years changed everything. At the age of 35 I sold everything I owned and went on the road, compelled, like many of my contempories in the 90s, to reconnect with the earth and with people in a way that broke with our conventional upbringings. Today I’m about to march past the offices where I once had a successful career as magazine journalist. Fortnum and Masons, where I used to meet my grandfather for tea, is about to be filled with the tax-dodger protesters from UKUncut. It’s another England. I’m no longer inside those gates.

Like many people I'm struggling to co-create a new narrative, one of equality and fairness - not just for myself among the crowd in Hyde Park and the millions dependant on the welfare state, but also for the invisible people of the global South, on whose natural resources and slave labour the global North depend. In order to write a new story I need to deconstruct a very old one.

The coalition government are made up of the kind of people I was brought up amongst: proud, ritualistic, acquisitive, obsessed by form, terrified of losing face, with a horror of the masses, all fellow feeling having been ruthlessly bullied out of them. In order to hold its superior position, the ancien regime needs to continually push others down. The more equality and fairness exerts its pressure within the collective, the harder they push. They are, as George Orwell points out in his peerless study of class, Road to Wigan Pier, terrified of losing control and falling. In this they are as much at the mercy of this heartless system as anyone else.

In order to deconstruct a story you have to know what it’s made of. The institution of class is ancient, stemming from the Aryan caste system, established in India thousands of years ago and upheld by the powerful few within all Empires from Assyrian overlords to corporate CEOs. It works its restrictions through all our lives, born high or low. The barriers between us are kept in place by hatreds, by humiliation, by blame, by revenge, terror, hostility and mostly by ignorance. In 1975 in Birmingham Mel Foster railed at me. An ex-miner, he had gone through Trades Union college to study for a degree and was cracking under the strain. Like many of his working class peers he was loathe to betray his origins by becoming educated and thus middle class. "You have destroyed the Hull fishing fleet and all our livlihoods!" he yelled.

He knew nothing about London. I knew nothing about Hull, but I did know I had a legacy, A crooked inheritance I had to put straight. We all have that legacy. And in this the working class is no more exempt than any other section of society, for it too has its whipping boys - the unemployed, the migrant, the homeless Orwell once walked amongst. Everything in our consumer society is a product of the exploitation of our fellow human beings, from the child slaves of the African cocoa plantations to the Chinese IT factory worker. None of us has impunity.

To break out of our historical mould we can’t identify with the class we were brought up in, hold on to our positions as victims or conquerors, as righteous Conservatives, as ideologially pure Socialists, we have to let go of them and come together in a new and fluid way. We have to see the world from a common perspective. Because, if we don’t, the corporate elite will push us all down as far as we can go. We will lose everything our ancestors fought for so hard - all our freedoms, all our public services. If we separate and attack each other, we play into their hands. United, we can exert a force that could change how we live on this planet as a people forever.

Part of that unifying future story, that radical shift, is that we have to listen to each other’s stories. We have to know what it’s like to be in other people shoes whoever they are, and when we understand begin to act from within a deep frame of change. And this is why I am telling you mine. I fell and failed. I quit my position, my house, my job. Contrary to the cautionary tales was told I did not die in destitution as my great-grandmother did in a workhouse on the Isle of Wight. I found that people are kind and fair and intelligent everywhere you go, so long as you don’t give way to your hatred or rage or self-pity, or close down from fear. What matters is that you give that natural empathy and desire for liberation a chance. History does not need to repeat itself. The French revolution, like all revolutions that followed in its wake, ended in the Terror and the brutal reinstatement of another kind of hierarchy. We don’t need another revolution. We don’t need class war. We need to evolve.

Complete list of OneWorldColumn posts (18) from Avatar to bio-tech

Photos: March for the Alternative, Victoria Embankment, March 2011; looking outside the door, Kent, 1958; Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth behind Hidden Britain by Nick Davies; coming together to discuss civil liberties and economic system, Transition Norwich, Aladdin's Cafe, Magdalen Street, Norwich, April, 2011.

ARCHIVE: On an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town . . .

We're just on our way to Cathy's orchard and meadow for the Sustainable Bungay annual picnic and games (this year it's boules, instead of our usual rumbustious rounders on the Old Grammar School Field). So here is a summer celebration (from July 2011) of some of the people I've met in Transition and the friendliness and fellow feeling you can find in downshifting times. The above pic was taken after our July 2012 core group meeting, as we feel the heat of the Hot Wall and slip into a moody album mode.

"It’s definitely the stick," said Mark as he stood with a piece of wood in his hands. It had been inadvertently donated at Sustainable Bungay's Give and Take Day and suddenly reappeared in our hallway. From the outside it looked like a shiny broom handle but it wasn't: it was a fighting stick belonging to a young man mortified by its disappearance. But you’d have to be a warrior to know that.

It’s an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town. We’re on our way to our monthly core group meeting. First we have to drop off the stick at Kate’s and have some supper with Nick.

“You share your lives in the blogosphere and I’d like to share some of what I do," Nick said as he began to fill a box full of July veg - onions and garlic, fennel, beetroot, fresh eggs and blackcurrant jam. We sat down at the kitchen table and drank some squash wine, ate a delicious bean salad and talked about the financial crisis.

You have to be in Transition to truly appreciate Nick's house – kale and courgettes in the front garden, sorrel around the door, a garage with dried herbs hanging from the ceiling and shelves full of preserves, giant tanks of rainwater, chickens, cupboards and windowsills with kegs of homemade wine, a stack of books on economics. It’s not what it looks like, but what is behind everything you see. What it took to get there. The bare aesthetic of downshift.

Years ago I interviewed a man called Tommy Roberts. I was working for a glossy magazine at the time and the subject of the article was Taste, that indefinable quality that distinguished one person or house from the next.What is Taste? I asked various arbiters of style, fashion designers and editors, owners of grand and important properties. Tommy was once a designer of natty suits in the 60’s when he was known as Mr Freedom but at that time had a shop under Centrepoint full of zany, brightly coloured modern furniture: Taste is the Japanese room with one beautiful vase in the corner, he told me. A lifetime of taking away makes that room. It’s what you don’t have that defines taste.

We live in a have and have-not culture and our value systems are entirely based around possessions. Not just the things those designers were talking about back in the 1980s when materialism and property began its great boom – wallpaper and watches and John Fowler’s "pleasing decay" - but a personal warehouse of business connections, children, communities, garden flowers, Hollywood stars, holiday countries. My special world.

"Well, you’re rich in other ways," said the man at the Financial Instability workshop at the Transition Conference after I had detailed my downshift from The World of Interiors to Sustainable Bungay.
"I really am not rich", I replied.
"You are rich in social relationships", he insisted, frustrated with my density. "In quality time. You are abundant in other ways."
"I have very little", I replied. (which is not strictly true because like most people in this country I have chairs and tables, pots and pans and all manner of basic essentials). "What is wrong with nothing? Why do we have to be wealthy at all?"

What I wanted to say was I had spent a lot of time clearing out that room. And I didn’t replace the things I used to own with different things - with people or experiences, or a low-carbon lifestyle - but had learned to love space and time and the freedom that lack of ownership brought.

In downshift less is not more in the way we once understood Japanese style. Less means you take everything you don’t need away, so that what really matters is left. It means you don’t have because having is no longer important. What becomes important is that freedom of movement and living a deliberate life.

It’s an ordinary evening in a Transition town and we’re on our way to our meeting at the Library. But first we have to meet at the pub with the Community Bee Group to celebrate the success of our Beehive Day (which I’ll write about tomorrow) and then unload Eloise’s van full of information boards and select some just picked fruit from the back of Cathy’s car. Cathy runs the Abundance project and swapping our produce and plants- at our meetings, in the Library community garden- has become a way of life. So here we are in the car park with a stack of boards and punnets of cherry-plums and blackberries meeting in a damp summer in a difficult time, swifts whizzing round the roofs, echinacea flowers full of bees.

At the Transition Conference we all did an exercise. We had to imagine a group we longed to be with in the future. I am no good at visioning and all I could think about was the fact I would be 65 in ten years time and how weird that was. And then I realised I don’t long for a group of people because I am already with those people and I had met them three years ago in the theatre down the street from here. And what was difficult to feedback to my fellow Transitioners in the canteen in Liverpool was the fact that it wasn’t the individuals in the initiative that made us matter to one another, the way we are used to people mattering in our lives, as special friends, or heroes, support systems, as possessions and dependencies. My important relationships.

It was the fact that when we met up as a group in these public spaces something happened between us. Something we held in common. We understood implicitly what we were doing and why – sharing stuff, organising events, going through the agenda. When I looked at this working-together in the visioning it looked like an energy field, the kind of energy field you sense when you stand by a hive humming with bees. A hum of warmth and intelligence that allows people to naturally collaborate and make that low-energy downshift happen. When that’s going on you don’t need possessions to compensate for your isolation, to anchor your introverted fantasy world. You don’t need data or climate science to persuade your tricky mind. You just need to tune in and act.

If you passed by Bungay Library tonight you’d notice the lights were on and if you peered in you might see a group of people around a table, eating plums and laughing, one person intently writing notes, one speaking, another occasionally calling order and everyone else paying attention. None of us look as if we are arbiters of taste, or abundant, or full of well-being or anything else the modern world puts a price on or gives value to. We’re obviously not important members of the community with homes-to-die-for, or great jobs or cars. We appear utterly ordinary and so we are. Ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing.

You can’t see the field from the outside, you have to feel it from the inside. You recognise it when you are in it because you are doing it along with everyone else. In fact you can’t be in it unlessyou are doing it.That’s the real shift. The move from individualism to group collaboration for the good of the whole is primarily a personal shift, away from ownership and control, into a field of exchange and communication and reciprocity, into give and take. And that’s a whole new lexicon of being. It’s not a replacement of things, it’s a move. A let go and a join in.

Because Transition is not a noun, it’s a verb.

Photos: standing against Bungay Library wall with Daphne, Lesley and Josiah; echinacea by the carpark; with squash wine in Nick's kitchen; rainwater storage; Cathy's Abundance fruit; Nick with harvested herbs.

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.