We don't need no education

"But Mr Biddlecombe what is god?" It's 1972, Felixstowe, Suffolk. I'm wearing a gym slip several inches too short according to the music mistress (Du Cann there are male members of the orchestra!) and I've just discovered existentialism. Julia Weatherly and I are the only atheists in a religious school and we have found our intellectual edge. Rev Biddlecombe runs the chapel where I sing in the choir and is attempting to teach us theology. I am giving him a hard time because that's what you do when you are fifteen and running up against authority and the big questions in life.

I know he won't be able to answer, and that no teacher can. The question is not there in search of an anwer, it is there to challenge the boundaries of a prescribed world.We live in a world governed by education - a small mean god we worship, even without realising our faith. It schools us in the rational mind and teaches us to look at the earth through the heartless and acquisitive eyes of Empire. Depending on what kind of house we are born into we go to school to be shaped by the requirements of our hierarchical culture: to be turned into obedient factory or cannon fodder, to fill in forms, or to arrogantly rule the world.

But no matter what school we attend, all of us are programmed to see life in geometric squares, truth as scientific facts, the earth as property, our nation's history as the rightful conquest of Western civilisation. We are taught that control of the mind is always more important thanl real-life experience. Some of us are broken by our establishments - bullied, humiliated and made miserable, labelled as difficult or deficient in some way. Some of us become haughty and power-hungry. Some of us find ways to thwart the hold this god has on our imagination and our liberty. When I am fifteen I devour philosophy and literature in the bathrooms at night and start to keep a journal. I have decided to become a writer, which means I will be the one in the room asking awkward questions, bringing the mythos into play, challenging conformity at every turn. I am learning no one will ever love me for it - but I'm going to do it anyway. If only to hold open a door.

WHAT IF . . . WE NEVER WENT BACK TO SCHOOL?

"But the sea is also beautiful!" It's 2012, Stowmarket, Suffolk. I am sitting at question time at the What if . . . the sea keeps rising? event, chaired by Andrew Simms. Everyone on the panel has given a slick and scientific low-down on climate change and the way it will alter our coastlines as the Arctic melts and the waters cover the earth. The sentence floats uneasily among the rigid facts and figures, among the agricultural tools of the c14th barn, signalling another route we could take - except that The Problem about Transition has just risen among the sea of heads. The Problem at question time is usually three-fold: 1) Transition is too middle class 2) what are you going to do about population? and 3) where are all the young people and We Have to Take Transition into the Schools!

I am no longer fifeen. I have learned to bite my tongue and not take the bait. I've been in Transition for four years and know all these "questions" are memes, manifestations of the annoying defense system of the left-brain, and none of the people who utter them intend to act on their words, or indeed join Transition.

Transition is big on education. Its tools and ingredients favour an academic approach: measurement, graphs, stats, mindmaps, flipcharts, trainings. In 2009 the UEA published a survey about Transition Norwich (from its mailing list) that received more attention than anything the actual Tranistioners were doing on the ground. Students and researchers have often observed our grassroots activity, as if they were in charge or separated from the meetings and projects, like anthropologists making notes on an interesting rainforest tribe. In spite of our emphasis on reskilling, learning practical stuff and giving it value, the abstract theories of the mind world are considered superior to physical experience, and for sure anything that smacks of creativity or the unquantifiable stuff of the right hemisphere.

This is not to knock learning here. But to bring attention to the limits of this approach, to our logos-biased world, and to question how we go about Transition. Our ability to look at reality is severly hampered by our education. Our instituationalisation makes us obedient and perverse in ways that hamper our ability to act decisively. Trained to be commanded, we are waiiting to be told what to do (mostly by people we are taught to think of as our responsible "superiors"). We think that if children understand climate change, everything will be sorted and we won't have to change ourselves. We don't see that the mindset that enables governments and corporations to engineer reality, the systems that makes people disassociated, hostile to one another, controlling, scornful of life, have its roots in the classroom and playground.

We don't see that this system will resist the kinds of changes we really need to make, because it is designed to uphold the industrialised world (as Charles Eisenstein points out). I have taken Transition into school (to give classes on Reconnection with Nature and Peak Oil in Norwich and honeybees in Bungay) and was shocked by its soul-destroying architecture and atmosphere of repression. The children were raucous, lively, friendly and also disturbing. They got Peak Oil and creation myths and pollination in a trice, and listened more-or-less quietly to the tales about the future Transition Cambridge brought with them, and happily tuned in to the spirit of the beehive. Then the bell went, and so probably did everything we said. Theatre and stories are for fun. Back to the curriculum tomorrow!

POSTCARD FROM THE SUNRISE COAST

The sea is also beautiful, and I am still a non-believer. It's the end of the summer and the newspapers are full of smug-looking schoolboys jumping into the air with their triple A results. I am not going back to school, but I can feel the season turning. Geese are coming in from Siberia in the mornings, and the evening light is turning tawny. Everywhere the fields lie bare and gold after the harvests. Floating in the deep swell, I can feel the temperature of the water dip. After six weeks the Social Reporters are returning from their summer break to a full-on autumn term. We're genning up for the Conference, looking ahead, filling in the rota. This is my last postcard from the Sunrise Coast.

No one taught me to love this old North Sea. It was there all the time when I was reading Sartre in the small hours at my boarding school, and now it is here: still mysterious, moving, unquantifiable. No one taught me to love the moon that shone through the bathroom window as I turned the pages, or my friends sleeping in the dormitory, or the feeling of being able to write about my own life, to make meaning of everything, to be autonomous and not bow down to authority.

I don't remember those lessons I learned during the day - cosines, dates, or Latin declensions. But I do remember this sea. How it changes every day, the light, its mood, the shape of the waves. How it feels when you are there, immersed in the elements, alone with the wind and sky, or alongside your fellows, as the cormorant or the seal pass by. And it feels to me that the greatest lesson we ever learn comes directly from the planet we are now trying to "save", and that if we held our love of this place and all its creatures as the basis for all our knowledge, how differently the world would look. How differently we would speak with one other, with our initiatives, with all our relations.

Images: still from The Belles of St Trinians; harvest fields outside Bungay; Plants for Bees class at Bungay Primary School, 2011; Peak Oil class at Catton Grove, 2010; still from Kes; on Aldeburgh beach, 2011

Hard rain on the parade

The flags hang limply in the rain down the High Street. No one has removed them after the Jubilee, as this summer it appears the populace are in a continual celebration of the Kingdom. Last week the Olympic Games and its £27 million opening gambit were heralded by torch-bearers running through the town. As I write the sound system at Latitude booms in the air from several miles away, and everyone has been locked into the site due to the weather.

But my attention is not in these places. I'm watching the rain. The shop keepers are watching the rain, as the holiday makers stay away from the beach and their tills. The farmers are watching the rain as it soaks the corn and the potatoes. The trees are empty of fruit down the lane, the grasses high as houses. There are slugs everywhere, devouring produce in the fields and gardens (£8 million's worth) like an apocalyptic curse.
We don't have sun, but we do have water. In other places it is the opposite.



At what point do we wake up and put our attention to where it really matters? At what point do we look at the corporate shaping of the Games, its private armies, its eviction of peoples, the lockdown of the city, and come to our own conclusions? At what point do we stop worshipping the rulers and behaving like grateful servants, and start to recognise our own beauty and significance? At what point do we stop distrusting and being hostile to our neighbours and our countrymen, and stand by each other, side by side? At what point do we stop believing in the magic spell of money and privilege and realise that the plants we depend on need both light and water? At what point do we realise that everything in our "civilised " world - our energy, our food, our life - comes directly from the planet? And when we do, when we connect the dots, what are we going to do about it?

Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, who is speaking next week in London, says we have a task ahead of us: to transform the damage that has been done by industrialisation and reclaim the land, as well as our true sovereignty, the commonwealth of the people. From an old paradigm, standing in the High Street, disconnected, it seems impossible, but from another perspective, standing on the earth, looking at the future, it looks like the possibility of starting again.

History depends on our attention. Where we place our attention confers value and significance. That's quantum physics and human nature. Attention can keep the flags flying and the illusion of supremacy going, it can hold people on pedestals up as small gods. Or it can focus on the real facts of the matter and see climate change happening in the backyard. Distracted by entertainments, you can't see what is happening in front of your eyes. You don't notice the weather. You don't see the London allotments torn down to make a hockey stadium, the people displaced in Guatemala for EU biofuels, you don't see the treatment of the cows, or the dairy farmers, when you buy your cheap milk, you don't see the scam of the banks who have created 97% of our money supply out of thin air.

The nationalistic parades and the media that trumpet them are the circus that keeps an old story in place. The Athenian civilisation that bequeathed us the idealistic sporting arena, also gave us a skewed "left hemisphere" way of seeing and a "democracy" that works for the rulers, rather than for the ruled. It has made the culture of the City superior to all lifeforms on earth, a legacy we have inherited and still uphold to this day. But this cultural story, with its fairytale shows and bloody arenas, is not the only narrative that is going on right now. It has never been the only narrative going on. People have been holding a torch inside them for hundreds of years in the mountains and the fields, as civilisations have risen and fallen, as they have sent their armies to conquer the world for resources and slave labour. At some point the people start watching the rain and realise there is another task at hand. For the planet and for ourselves.

When you do, you discover you are not alone. There are millions of us out there. Some of us saying one thing, but thinking and feeling another. Some of us are finding our voices and speaking out. Some of us are listening, turning out attention away from the parade. We're not just in the town, or the city, we are in all lands. The empire dominates, as it has done though history: it crushes protests, wins arguments, forces people off the land, ignores the heart. But one thing it has no power over: it cannot force our attention. It can't buy love.

And it can't stop the rain from falling.

From One World Column

Images: cover of Sacred Economics; protest in the Amazon against the Belo Monte dam.

Everything must change - Transition Themes Week#14

Welcome to our last Transition Themes Week #14. We've been running this blog daily for two and a half years now. We created it originally to reflect back to ourselves and the world what a low carbon life looks and feels like, to show the kind of people we were and explore Transition ideas, particularly the experiences we were then having in the Transition Circles.

The Transition Themes Weeks were begun to report on the work of TN's projects - energy, economics, food, bees, Low Carbon Cookbook, Magdalen Street Celebration. They were there to keep us all in touch and functioned like a network in a resilient eco-system, working to connect and feedback to the whole initiative and different affiliated groups in Norwich. They began on Mondays with an introduction to the week and a post about Transition communications, both in the city and within the Network.

Today some of the groups featured in these weeks have fallen away, people have come and gone from the blog. And though there is still a committed core of us, life is pulling us in other directions. Some people are too busy to write, others have stronger commitments, and this puts a strain on other bloggers to keep up the momentum. Weeks are becoming harder to fill, to get a full house of contributors. So after June 20, summer solstice and The Festival of Transition (and my birthday!) we will become a more occasional blog. We're each taking a day and posting when we can. Hope you will still continue to join us!

Some reflections on the editing business and Transition

So everything changes. That's something you learn for sure in Transition. You also learn to reflect and see how you might have done things differently - not had you known then, but if you were to start again now. Now I think I would think twice about creating editorial roles, and what this entails in grassroots communications. Communications have a low priority within Transition. It is something that is done by someone, and is useful insofar as it works as a marketing or recruiting tool. Even though in Anthony Sampson's analysis of power in Britain the media holds the second greatest ability to influence events (way beyond government), creating our own media and forging a new culture is not considered important.

So now I would get clear on how communications, specifically editorial, are regarded within the rest of the enterprise. Secondly, I would hesitate to take an editor's role, even though this has been crucial in setting up both our Norwich blogs (and also the Social Reporting Project and Transition Free Press).

In traditional journalism, nothing happens without the editor. They are the deciders, the ones who say yes, maybe, and no way Jose. Everyone has their role around this decision-making process. I've worked with some great editors. Some I got on with, and some I didn't. There's usually something you don't like about the editor. That's because a good editor cares about the edition, and not you. It's not personal, it's just how it goes. Everyone understands that. The editor's word is famously final.

In Transition no one understands that, because you are not working professionally, you are working out of conviction, or because it suits you. You are loyal to the main storyline only as far as it works for you personally. Most people join a Transition project, as a hobby or an adjunct to their normal lives. So as an editor you can't really operate very well. No one is getting paid, so you have to be nice to people or you get a blank page.

At first people in the initiative didn't want an editorial crew at all. We started the blog along trad lines with ex-professionals - with an editor, managing editor, sub-editor and designer - which proved really useful for setting things up. Then the bloggers who came on board wanted to be a "community" and have "ownership" and tell the people doing the editorial work what to do. Censorship came up, and control. Egos clashed. Tempers flew. It felt like the most wonderful thing I had ever done and possibly the most horrible. That was a rocky moment. The Sturm und Drang moment all creative enterprises undergo. Eventually the dust settled and everyone found their rhythm.

The blog got published through thick and thin. We didn't miss a beat. I kept going because everything, I saw everything was grist for the mill. There were great opportunities for getting over oneself on a daily basis and exploring new territories. Sometimes we liked each others posts and sometimes we didn't. We learned a new tolerance, I think. I did certainly. I realised this was an alchemical space, where things got aired and changed, and we learned how to work in diversity. How we allowed each other to speak after millennia of silence.

For a while, maybe a year, things went really well. We had a full quota of bloggers and invited guest contributors on board. We had a new readership and were cross-posted in several places. We met each quarter to decide the rota and took turns to lead weeks. Then the initiative around which our blog is based started to lose momentum. Some of the projects faded. Some people shifted camp to Norwich FarmShare. Some of us started to be two-timers on the Social Reporting Project. I started to feel I was carrying the load and filling up gaps.

So here we are in May 2012 at a moment of shift . . . The editorial crew is a beautiful structure but it only works when a certain number of people are writing stuff together for real. In a grassroots blog where people are in it for the feeling it gives them, or as promotion, the editor becomes simply a useful coordinator who can be depended on to hold the fort, carry the rap, pick up the ball etc. You end up being a kind of nanny, or secretary. You feel that you are putting yourself on the line, doing all the hard Transition work, while other people stay within their comfort zones, in their conventional lives.

So I think to run a good community blog I would get clear on who exactly is doing the change, who is loyal to the cause, and make sure the load is fairly shared. I'd rotate the editor role, right from the start. If you don't have an editor at all there is an emptiness to everything. A bit like a ship without a captain, or a kitchen without a cook. There's no one at the helm, no presence there. No fire. No food. No home station.

I'm not sure how it would work. Or if it would work. Maybe that's the place we are right now in Transition. The kitchen only works with a cook, and the cook is tired of being treated as a servant. She is wondering what she is doing amongst the pots and pans, and telling everyone: serve yourself. The cook is not just me, she is all the real-time Transitioners who feel this way, she is everyone on the planet serving the Empire, those who dine upstairs at our expense. She is the earth too and all creatures and plants who sail with her. Taking off her apron, kicking off her shoes.

Transition training; with fellow Transition comms people taking part in a Project Sharing Engine day, London, 2011; Transition bloggers in Chapelfield Gardens: Ann Owen's market garden, visiting the social reporters

powaqqatsi or breaking the spell

(Capitalism) has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells (Karl Marx)

It's a new house by the river. It's not the Antilla mansion that Arundhati Roy writes about (where I found this quote) in her searing portrait of industrialisation and land grabbing in India. but it's big. A gleaming white monstrosity, overlooking the silvery River Blyth, its dun-coloured marshes and water meadows, all the way down to the sea. A big house with a view, the kind of mausoleum that Sebald might have written about in his melancholic walk, contemplating the rise and fall of Empire along this coast.

Something about this house strikes me: the way it is so out of synch with its surroundings, exuding its "mystery and a quiet menace". It would be more at home in Malibu or on the Riviera. And yet being at home is not the point of such places.

One of the meadows it overlooks was once known as Bloody Marsh. It was named after a battle in 1624 when the landowner, Sir Robert Brooke, set up a boarding house for men and dogs in the village of Walberswick and four men were killed trying to maintain their commoners' rights. The enclosure of common land in England began with the Norman conquest, with the foreign kings who claimed the wild forests for their hunting grounds. It was completed by Parliament who claimed the rest of the wild land for agriculture.

Reading Roy's account of the relocation of people in the forests of India, of millions of villagers displaced by the building of giant dams, hounded by armies hired by corporations, of all the present land grabs that are resisted in Guatemala, Africa and China, is to see a certain pattern prevailing in the world. We forget we were once those indigenous people; that the Sandlings of Suffolk suffered the worst pauperism in the country. We are unaware that we have inherited a story that justifies such monstrous deeds. But most of all, that we have been led believe that to live in this big house is to find our rightful place in the world. Our own fairy palace.

Dispelling the Sorcerer

"They are so powerful," I am sitting next to Anthony Smith who once came to our Transition Stranger's circle and introduced the documentary, The Age of Stupid (which he helped fund) at Cinema City just before Copenhagen. Things are depressing at 10:10. There is not enough money and the political and corporate climate deniers are vociferous.

"They are so powerful," I am sitting opposite Ross Jackson, writer and businessman from Copenhagen, whose book Occupy World Street is just about to published. We have all just been to a talk at the Assembly House called Guardians of the Future where he explained his road map for a new economic future. I am talking about shifts that happen on ground level. I have worked with grassroots organisations for years, he says, what we need is a new political structure.

I am not a politician, an economist or a business man. But I am a writer, who knows human history depends on the decision of a people to follow a storyline, or change it mid-sentence. All narrators, by dint of their craft, are prodigious rememberers. It is their job to remind the people of the right way to walk the earth. Trackers of the collective imagination, they learn to recognise an illusion when they come across it: they hold it up to the light and test it against the physical reality of space and time.

Storytellers know, for example. that is no sorcerer is powerful for ever, that all trances can be broken. At some point the small child, the youngest daughter, the third brother, the fool, comes and challenges the magician, cuts through briars and restores beauty to the kingdom. One day the sister runs widdershins and finds her brother trapped in the lake of reason. He or she doesn't believe in the stories, and so asks the emperor, the fisher king, the boy with the frozen heart the question that breaks the spell. How come you have no clothes on? What is wrong with you, man? Shall we go home?

As folk tales and history tell us: you never know when those people arise. The Arab Spring showed us tyrants can be toppled. Whole autocratic regimes can collapse overnight. The Berlin Wall can come down. Aung San Suu Kyi can be released from house arrest. The big houses along the East Anglian seaboard can fall into ruins. These are not big moves organised by PR agencies or oil barons. These are moves of small and ordinary people, holding out for something else. They are the spirit of the times.

Maybe it's because I spent a decade looking at the frills and furbelows of the ancien regime, documented its predilection for glamour and grand views. Maybe when you are brought up in the ambitious atmosphere of politicians and public schoolboys you can see and feel so clearly how everything is done at the expense of the human heart. Like dragons, the 1% amass great hoards and compete with each other, in a world constructed entirely of will and ego and its unbearable self-pity and self-importance. How everything depends on the 99% believing in the ultimate superiority of a fairy-tale elite - presidents and queens, stars and celebrities.

The story we are taught to believe in is the story of power. Power sends everyone in the room and in the world into a trance. What breaks its spell is not to desire that power, nor any of the material things it brings, the big house, the sweetness of revenge. It is to know deep in your inner core that those who live out their dragonish nature at the expense of their hearts, never inherit the kingdom. And nor do the servants who worship, or despise them.

What has this to do with Transition? We are the small people in the villages and neighbourhoods, eating in our community kitchens, sharing our tools and produce from our gardens. We are the people walking by the mansion on the way to the river, who know the territory inch by inch. We are the people who tell each other a new and ancestral story, who live within the generous aesthetic of the heart, and not in the rulership of the will. We are commoners and we are not alone. We walk alongside millions of people everywhere, taking matters into our own hands. We are the people who know the way home.

*Powaqqatsi is the second film in a trilogy by the director Godfrey Reggio. The word comes from the Hopi language which means "parasitic life" or"world made by a sorcerer at the expense of others".

Avenue to the Big House from Patience (After Sebald); Huichol people defend their ancestral land; poster for Powaqqatsi; the river Blyth

We Are Here

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

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

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

And also to rethink our attitude.

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

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

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

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

Watch this video. Be with them tomorrow.

Defend Grow Heathrow! from Joshua Bregman on Vimeo

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

Bringing to Share - Communications and the Low Carbon Cookbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low Carbon Cookbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward to linking up!

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

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