Transition Culture

31 Jul 2013

Sophy Banks on the Power of Not Doing Stuff

This month’s theme has been ‘The Power of Just Doing Stuff’.  It’s the first month we’ve had Transition Culture in its new home here at TransitionNetwork.org, and thanks for sticking with us while we figured out how to do that.  I think we’re getting there now.  It’s been a very full month, a month in which we really have done a lot of stuff.  But there’s more to Transition than just doing stuff.  So in this, our final post for July, we’ll be discussing with Sophy Banks, the Power of Just Not Doing Stuff, the power of being.  

The impetus often in Transition is to do stuff.  We’ve had a very productive month here on the website, exploring our theme from a number of different angles.  Anne Owen reflected on hearing people say “Somebody somewhere should do something about this sometime”, we heard from CSA market gardener Jenny Gellatly about the power of just growing stuff, I reflected on one of my life’s key ‘Doing Stuff Moments’, seeing a talk by Bill Mollison, Jay Tompt wrote about reading the new book sitting under a tree in the sun, we heard from Mike Small about the very real power of when lots of people do stuff together, I shared a talk I gave to promote The Power of Just Doing Stuff at the Ways with Words festival, Sarah Ayech reflected on the sense of possibility she found in a £300 house at Glastonbury Festival, we heard from Molly Fletcher about the power of creating an edible high road in Kilburn in London and Caroline Jackson asked an important question – “are we doing the right stuff?”

We heard about Transition Thursday events in Crystal Palace (and the audio from that talk), Sheffield and Downham Market/Swaffham, Worthing, Louth and Horncastle and Slaithwaite including videos of Transitioners reflecting on what Transition is and why they do it, talked to food writer Joanna Blythman about the power that lies within our creating a new parallel food system, we heard from Nick Sherwood about the Herefordshire Economic Evaluation, Kerry Lane reflected on why it’s so important to just do stuff, and then to share your stories, we heard about what it looks like when Transition Streets moves from rural Totnes to inner city Newcastle in Australia, about One Year in Transition, and we introduced our wonderful new Infographic for you to read over the summer holidays.  Phew.  That’s a lot of stuff.  We really hope you enjoyed it and found it useful and insightful.  

But in this, our final post for the month before we sign off for August (during which very little will happen on this site, as we put theory into practice), Sophy (busily doing nothing, above), one of the key developers of the Inner Transition approach and co-creator of the Transition Training, reflects on whether it’s just as important to not do stuff.  Here is the audio of my conversation with Sophy, you can also read the transcript below…

Sophy, I’m sure you get asked the question lots of times, but how would you describe Inner Transition ? What’s Inner Transition  for you?

I gave a talk about Inner Transition in Canada just recently, and someone said “what I want from the talk is, what’s the most succinct story? What’s the E=mc² of Inner Transition?”  The way that I’m talking about that at the moment is to say the absolute core of Inner Transition is that in our groups, within ourselves, in our relationships, in what we’re doing in our communities, how can we be creating a culture that supports us to be in a state of feeling resourced, feeling empowered, feeling seen and appreciated?  With the understanding that when we have those kind of external conditions, we find ourselves in a state where we’re the most open to new ideas, the most open to connection, the most able to build relationships with people who are different from us.

That’s the core of it, to understand that internally we can be in different inner states, we can be in a state where we feel stressed and closed and driven or whatever, or we can be in a state where we’re open and creative and learning and available. That’s one way of framing Inner Transition, how do we keep recreating that? 

Part of it, I think, is when we’re all in that state of being open and creative and connected with each other and with ourselves, we make the best decisions. We’re able to take the longest and the widest view, we’re able to see the consequences of what we do, so there’s also something which has really been resonating for me. That’s not only the process we need for Transition, that’s the end-state we want to get to. Part of what’s not working in our culture is that lots of the people with a lot of power who are making really key decisions are in a state of constant stress and pressure and having to make very narrow decisions, decisions based on very narrow viewpoints.

Quite early on in the discussions about the whole process around Inner Transition  emerging was a sense that looking at other change movements before then, particularly in the environmental movement, that there was a real absence of any of that stuff. It was very much must do must do, must keep going for the sake of the planet, dragging the green crucifix up the hill. What’s your sense of what transition does differently from activist campaigning things in the past? What lessons did you feel we’ve learnt from some of those approaches?

In its best form, Transition integrates lots that those social change and environmental change movements have learnt about how to do the doing of change, alongside the huge amount of insight and understanding about how humans work. That’s come from all the inner work traditions. There’s such a raft of them, we have such a wealth of teachings now, from the immensely detailed long practised spiritual traditions such as Buddhism or even Christianity that teach us about relationships and good relationships and healthy community.  Quakerism is another fantastic example, and psychology that teaches about the unconscious and how the unconscious works through us to create patterns that we don’t really intend, unintended consequences, to all the newer science that I think is really fascinating. 

Year by year, even since we started Transition, it’s showing us how we have mirror neurons that mean what you feel and express is what I feel and express: how much we’re wired up to be interconnected with each other. How stress works in our bodies, how stress that we’re not dealing with both paralyses and over-activates us. We’ve got such a wealth of those things. For me it’s very exciting in Transition, and Inner Transition feels like it sits right on that edge, putting together what are essentially two huge movements for change, one focusing on inner and one focusing on outer.

I remember in the really early days I talked to Hilary who was the originator of the idea, who came and talked to you [Rob] about the Psychology of Change group. We had this dream for a workshop where we’d get all the activists that are full on working out in the world, to come and look at their own personal stuff and what’s going on for them and what might be not always conscious about the drivers for their work and tendency to over-work and burn out.

And to get all the people who are deeply engaged in personal work with that cliche, can we get them off their cushions and looking at their personal development stuff and how that connects to what’s going on with the planet and how might their personal behaviour be contributing to problems at that level of scale. So to kind of put those two groups together and that feels like exactly what Inner Transition tries to do, to take the best of all of that and make something with greater wisdom.

What for you does it look like when a Transition Initiative is doing Inner Transition  well? Is it like the thing when people come to Totnes to see Transition and say – well I can’t see anything, what’s going on? What would you see in a Transition group that was actually working with this stuff in a successful way, do you think?

I think you’d see it in the quality of people’s meetings, that you would see meetings where people would feel relaxed, where even if some meetings feel pushed for time the tendency is for meetings to feel spacious enough that people enjoy them and people feel connected to each other. That within how the group spends time together there’s some time for relaxation and being sociable together and there’s time also for developing how the group is working so there’s time to reflect on the group’s structures and process: how do we hold meetings, how do we deal with differences.

I think you would see events that are celebratory and not about building and doing things. They’re about celebrating either what you’ve done and built or just celebrating the beauty and the wonder of this amazing planet that we live on. Or the wonder and beauty of the incredible things that go on in our communities. There’d be a kind of culture of celebration and appreciation of each other and our world.

I think there would be places where people are still and reflective long enough to deepen into their own experience. What’s it like to be alive in these times? What are the feelings that come up for me, how’s that in my body? So we’re using all of our senses to be alive and aware of the times that we’re living through. That might be workshops and it might be events. It might be speaker events, it might be films. It might be facilitated discussions after powerful films with images of things that are happening in our world.

There’s a sense of roundedness that all of us as humans are needed in this process of Transition and we don’t have to leave our feelings out or leave our friendliness out because we’re too busy and feeling that something’s more important than being whole and all of who we are. And again it feels like that’s the model of the future. That’s what I think we want to live as human beings, and what in a lot of places we don’t really get the opportunity to, especially in organisations.

Somebody once told me that the tie is an image for cutting off everything below our heads and leaving that at home, so all that you bring into work is your head and your thinking capacity. For some people it will be their physical strength. But that’s a good question for me, how do we make workplaces and organisations where we bring all of our wisdom. There’s some really interesting work going on around that.

You’ve been involved with Inner Transition  stuff for Transition Town Totnes from the start. Are there a couple of events or moments that stand out as real peaks or moments of insight for you during that time?

There are so many things that we’ve done. One of the things that really stood out for me was having Marianne Williamson come and talk very early on. We’ve had lots of powerful speakers, but she raised some really profound questions about how change happens and the nature of a movement. I remember one of the things she said is that one model for understanding how movements spread is is that they push at the edges, so they broaden outwards. I’ve had lots of conversations and I’ve been in them myself, about how we do awareness raising and engagement, how do we involve more people by getting our message out.

She said there’s another dimension to spreading a movement which is about the people at the centre deepening into the profound truth of the change that their movement seeks to bring about. If you have a really profound truth, like the Buddha did, you’ll have a movement that draws many many people and is enduring because it speaks to something really profoundly true in people’s souls or hearts or experiences. That’s really stayed with me as a question about somebody in the centre of this movement. How do I keep deepening my enquiry into what Transition is and find it in different parts of my experience and life. 

The other thing I think that has been really interesting that we’ve done well in Totnes, is we’re very lucky here to have so many interested people with therapy and supervision skills and mentoring skills. It’s very difficult to measure and again, like you said, it’s hard to see but I think it’s been really helpful for people involved at the centre of Transition Town Totnes and also Transition Network …

… the mentoring …

Yes, the mentoring, to have free ongoing one-to-one support of a professional quality. Other places have done it through peer-to-peer support and that’s also fantastic, but I’ve seen people really transform their practice and really feel supported in some of the edges of their activism through that scheme. I’m curious, we’ve had quite a low rate of burnout in Totnes, how much that scheme has helped. I know it’s helped me! 

One of the expressions you’ve been using increasingly over the last couple of years is “healthy human culture” and this idea that that’s ultimately the aim of Transition, to enable that and to create that. What does that mean? Can you define “healthy human culture”?

This is where my enquiry took me. I got really interested in seeing polarities and dualities – people have been doing that for centuries – about our culture and calling it dualistic. I came across Riane Eisler’s work. She talks about basically two kinds of human culture. One is based on partnership and one is based on domination. I got really interested in that and the question what if that’s true? It’s a big proposition.

If that’s true, what’s underneath that and what is it about what goes on inside us that we’re constructed, the way we’ve evolved, that causes that to be so, that there are these two stable states?  I feel like I’ve been looking at lots of different territories, I’m really interested in trauma and how that affects us in the creation of the unconscious that comes through trauma.

This whole thing about how we create unintended consequences. The idea that anybody could have sat down and designed the consequences that we’re living with is inconceivable. However dysfunctional people were and however much they’re interested in wealth or power or anything, I just don’t believe that anybody intended it to be like this. How do we get this as a by-product of something that’s natural and…just who we are, who we’ve evolved to be. 

So for me, the question around “healthy human culture” is one of the inner. What’s the inner state of a culture that creates partnership, learns to live within its resources, that’s oriented towards joyful, pleasurable existence, that has a belief about ourselves as humans that we’re trustworthy and generous and want good things for the future, good things for our children. What I see very very strongly: in a lot of the depth work that I’ve done, what I see is when you peel away a lot of the damage, what you find is a profound and I could say universal.  In my experience (I haven’t worked with the psychopaths and the most damaged people) but that sense that if we’re healed and whole what we want is to love each other and do good in the world. 

Then there’s another state we could be in, which comes back to your first question, where we feel under-resourced, disempowered, under attack. There’s not enough and I’m taught that other people are selfish, violent and greedy so I need to fight for what I can get. In order to have status I’ve got to have stuff, I’ve got to prove myself. With that goes a whole lot of very difficult feelings.

I’m very interested in that idea, that in unhealthy culture we have a whole lot of unmanageable feelings centred around shame and not being good enough that we then disown – I can’t deal with that in myself, I’ll put it on to you, I’ll find somebody else to have that experience and then I’ll watch it in them and feel OK about myself. It’s really interesting to look at cultures of domination and colonialism and capitalism and power-over as being driven by the need to not feel stuff myself, but grab enough power so that I can do it to somebody else.

The whole driver for those things is a psychological state of splitting and projection. When I bring that back to me and what culture I create in my relationships and my groups, you see it out in those big systems in the world but it’s also a very precise way of understanding and discerning what culture do I make in this room with these people, around splitting and projection or unity. 

That’s quite a big answer! The short answer is “healthy human culture” is that one where we reel resourced, empowered, connected, appreciated and safe. Those seem to be the 5 things. If we have those, we are in that state of openness and availability and connection and learning and receptivity and then taking good action instead of action that creates a problem somewhere else in the system.

A space we can flourish in …

Yeah, flourish is a great word. I’m aware of my engineering training. If you look at all of that with an engineering hat on, what are the characteristics, what are the key things, that order the system towards health? I’ve got my theories now about what some of them are. One of them is if you have power, how do you use it? The abuse of power is very very quickly a characteristic that will lead to bad reality, deteriorating human culture.

One of the governing principles of human culture is that with power goes responsibility and accountability, and the more power and wealth you have, the more you are responsible for other people’s health and wellbeing. We can see in our culture how much we’ve lost that sense, that people have wealth with no sense of responsibility and how incredibly damaging that is. People internalise that experience of power without responsibility and you either become a victim of power or you try to grab as much of it to wield it yourself and it’s very difficult to come out of that once that’s the pattern.

In our culture, in western culture, I think we have a real mix of those two systems. It’s really difficult to put us in one or the other camp. It’s not that as human beings these are fixed states and we inhabit one or the other, and this idea that it’s not about fixed states and end states and wherever we’re trying to get to, it’s about process and what we create in each moment. Most of us have the capacity for both of those within us and in each meeting, each conversation, each action, and in what we do to ourselves, so it’s a continual recreation, healthy human culture is a continuing recreation of the conditions for health.

It’s not – we’re going to get there one day and then it will be done. We just have that choice all the time. What do we see out there; again, we can choose what we see. Do we see goodness, generosity?  Is that what we see reflected back to us? Or do we see the violence, selfishness and greed? What the news tells us is disastrous in terms of supporting the goodness in our society?

The Power of Just Doing Stuff has been the theme of the posts this month. What’s the balance between doing stuff and not doing stuff? Is the idea that the power of not doing stuff is as important as the power of just doing stuff?  What’s your take on that? 

One of the phrases that’s really ringing round my head at the moment is “burnout is not a side issue”. It is not a side issue for something like Transition. I guess one of the features of Inner Transition, the characteristic of it, is seeing how dynamics are parallel across different levels of scale and inner and outer parts of the system.

As always this is quite a big answer, but if we look at burnout, its is all about giving more than we recharge within ourselves. I’m constantly putting out and giving energy and supporting things and doing things and not resting enough, not replenishing myself, and that’s exactly what we’re doing to the planet.

That sense that if we’re addressing a global system that is depleting the planet, that is taking more than it puts back, that isn’t allowing time for natural systems to replenish and revitalise themselves, if that’s what we’re doing in our movement to ourselves that’s not a coincidence. We can see the parallel dynamic. So for me the issue of burnout is absolutely central to any movement that seeks to create positive change and whether we are working sustainably and creating a culture of sustainability within our groups is not a side issue, it’s central to what we’re doing. 

I think all the wisdom traditions, all the places that have created healthy culture, see and reinforce and teach model and come back to the sense that healthy human life is action, outward, doing, movement, completion, celebration, slow down, harvesting, stillness, moving inwards, reflection, learning, deepening, questioning, stop. Nothing. Now I’m orienting towards outer again, dreaming, beginning to sow seeds, enquiring together, sharing, shaping, gathering resources, momentum building. Then outward, there we go again. We can see those cycles so clearly in nature, summer and winter and the seasons or day and night.

I think one of the symptoms of unhealthy human culture and dominating culture is that the two parts of that cycle get split and we get either very identified with doing or very identified with being passive and stuck. I think it’s interesting that those are two neurological responses to trauma and stress. It’s fight or flight. Freeze is another one. It’s almost as if you can see that we’re patterned into getting stuck into fight/flight or stuck into frozen.

The pattern of going … we’ve worked really really hard and then we burn out, we can’t do anything for months or possibly years, is a very extreme version of that. I think rest is important and all of those qualities of rest. How do I nourish myself, how do we nourish ourselves? How do we reflect, how do we celebrate? How do we get to emptiness? How do we start dreaming? What’s our next vision?  To allow time for all of that is really challenging.

It’s part of why it’s really easy to get to burnout. The issues are so huge, so many people aren’t doing anything. It’s really really urgent. I think we do need to be easy on ourselves. I do it. I find that balance incredibly challenging within myself, to stay not caught in too much doing and then exhaustion. It’s really important to see how easy that is and how natural a response that is. 

If people are reading this and about to take some of the summer off, what would your suggestion be if they’re wanting to come back in September and be of best service to Transition in the place where they live, other than just not do anything to do with Transition? Any reflection or anything they could do to serve that or best to just turn off altogether?

The thing I find most helpful is to have somebody ask me the question “what’s restful for you?”, when I’ve been doing a lot of work. That may change from day to day. Sometimes it’s to sit in nature, sometimes it’s to be active, sometimes it’s to read a good book about Transition, sometimes it’s to just go and watch football or do something completely different. Just to be enquiring “what do I need right now, what’s out of balance, what’s restorative, what’s my way of nourishing myself?”. And to be alive to whatever that is in that moment. 

When we come back again, everything starts again in September, what does the new season, from a football perspective, hold for you or for Inner Transition ?

There’s going to be another Inner Transition  workshop in London in September, and that’s been a really interesting journey to put that together.  If anyone’s interested into deepening into questions and sitting with other people who are interested in what Inner Transition is, that’s a really good space to do that. We’ve had really great international groups meeting in London exploring questions together. 

Because we have some funding for Inner Transition through Transition Network, we’re looking at either offering support sessions for initiatives that want to explore Inner Transition a bit more or get together with other local initiatives, other neighbours and say how can we support this part of our work a bit more. I have availability to do that so I’d love to hear from groups that are interested in that. 

And we’re dreaming, is there something that we could do that would be something a bit more deliberately international, particularly in Europe? Either to run the two-day workshop or something else. We’re looking at running it in the north of England. I’ve started blogging on Transition network.org so I’m in the blogosphere now finally. I’ll be writing about things like some of these questions and burnout. 

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30 Jul 2013

It’s your summer reading! The Transition Infographic

Every summer holiday break needs some stimulating reading that isn’t too taxing on the brain.  So rather than the latest Dan Brown book, may we offer you our wonderful shiny new Transition infographic?  It is the work of Bristol-based designer Trucie Mitchell, who also happens to be the designer of Transition Free Press.  It can be printed in a variety of ways, and will hopefully be a really useful tool for communicating Transition (perhaps we should have had it printed on beach towels?).

• See and download the infographic in the resources section here

  Already a number of groups are using it, such as the photo below, taken at the recent Transition Thursday in Swaffham: 

I caught up with Trucie and asked her a few questions about it:

What were you trying to achieve with the info graphic?

Most people find graphic representations of complex ideas easier to understand than bare stats and factual text, so I wanted to create a visual explanation of Transition – why its important, what it is and how to do it. And I wanted it to be without racial, gender or age bias and for it to appeal across geographical and political boundaries – with easily translatable text – as well as be simple to update and change. And I wanted it to look good!

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26 Jul 2013

Joanna Blythman on the Power of "lots and lots of little projects"

Joanna Blythman is a journalist and author who writes about food and food issues.  Her book The Food We Eat had a huge impact on me when I read it nearly 20 years ago.  She remains one of the most incisive and insightful writers on food issues.  I had wanted to interview her for some time now, and am very grateful that she made some time available to talk to me.  

Joanna, one of the things that prompted me to get in touch with you was reading the piece that Jay Rayner wrote in The Observer several weeks ago about food, where he announced that a study he’d just come across, although it was actually 7 years old, was “the final nail in the coffin for localism”. It argued that food produced in New Zealand and exported to the UK could have a lower carbon footprint than food produced here because “New Zealand simply has a better landscape and climate for lamb and apples”. I wondered what your thoughts were on that piece? 

It might come as no surprise to know that I don’t agree with Jay Rayner on that point. I’ve always adopted the following strategy and this is what I’ve made explicit in my most recent book which is called What To Eat. Just to recap a bit I’ve written several books: The Food We Eat, Bad Food Britain, The Food Our Children Eat, How to Avoid GM Food, and Shopped which is about supermarkets. 

At the front of that book there are 20 principles of how to eat well, thoughtfully and healthily and sustainably. One of the key strategies for me is always local first. So it’s local first, then regional or national. The third option is Europe or further afield if you can’t satisfy the first two. I would never say to anyone “you must never eat a lemon, you must never ever eat an allspice berry because it can’t be grown in the UK” for example. What I would say is it just makes total sense to eat what’s on your doorstep and to make that the thing that you try to satisfy the majority of your food needs.  

There are lots and lots of surveys, little bits of research and academic studies about food miles. We hear things like, for example, a tomato grown in Sicily can be greener than a tomato grown in Britain. I think these are false arguments. It’s best not to say “I’m going to eat local and if I can’t get it locally then I just won’t get it”. What you can say is “right, let’s start on our doorstep with what grows in this country and then look beyond that if we can’t satisfy that”.  

In another role I have sat on the board of the Fife Diet which is Europe’s biggest local eating project. It started off with half a dozen people sitting in a tent in a soggy field at an ecology festival, and turned into 1500 households all participating. It’s all based on eating local food. They came to the conclusion that what’s realistic for most people is what we call the ‘80/20 split’. In other words 80% of the food we eat from where we live and 20% from elsewhere. That seems to be quite feasible for people in Fife and probably that sort of proportion is going to be relevant to most communities in Britain. That’s how I see it. 

I’m not going to get into an artificial discussion about food miles because food miles is not the only reason for eating local food. There are many others: 

• I’d rather give money to the local community because of this multiplier effect
• More of the benefit from that will feed back to the community
• I want there to be local shops, markets
• I want to keep local growers going. 

There are many socio-economic reasons for supporting local food.  Cutting food miles is not the only criterion whereby local food makes sense. This is why I part company with Jay Rayner on this point. 

It seems an extraordinary argument that he says New Zealand simply has a better landscape for growing apples when we live in a country that has historically produced 3 – 4000 varieties of apples, apples that will store for a year, apples that can be used for all kinds of different things ...

I do think it’s silly. I’m sure Jay would accept that he likes to be an iconoclast and the peril of being an iconoclast is that sometimes you say things that aren’t perhaps as well thought-out as they might be. If we think about New Zealand lamb for example, it’s absolute nonsense for us to be shipping lamb all the way from New Zealand when we have kilometre after kilometre, mile after mile of land that is really good for rearing sheep. There’s something perverse about having something that you can easily produce on your doorstep that you decide to source from the other end of the world.  

There is a simplistic argument emerging that very much comes under the ‘reduce meat’ banner that all meat eating is bad and Britain would be better if we relied on non-meat, vegetarian-type food. The problem with this is that meat and dairy could be said to be the strongest products we have.  We’re good at producing dairy and we’re good at producing meat. We’re not good at producing things like lentils, it’s not the best climate for aubergine. 

I think we need to be pragmatic here and say yes, there are things that at certain times of the year it makes sense to import, but to take basic things that we can produce here: lamb, apples, beef, milk, all these things that are imported, is of course very bad for our food security. We rely on faceless people in faraway places who owe us absolutely nothing, to provide us with a large proportion of our food. That’s clearly a very perilous situation.  

The recent Economic Evaluation for Herefordshire found that between 70 and 83% of all food and drink sold in Herefordshire was sold through 5 supermarkets in the county, and 16% of the food was sold through local independent businesses.  It seems to be at the moment that national government’s relentless push for growth and for increased GDP focuses entirely on growing the 83% rather than growing that 16% and sees the future of economic growth in removing all obstacles to that 83% becoming 90-95%. I wondered if you had any thoughts as to how our food culture and need to preserve resilience sits alongside that push for growth? 

The first point I’d like to make is about supermarkets. I think it’s abundantly clear that ever since supermarkets made their push to take over the lion’s share of the UK shop grocery spend, and that started in the late 80s-early 90s, public health has declined seriously. We used to mostly cook food that we bought locally in small shops and markets, and we tended to be quite healthy and obesity was a rarity. I think what supermarkets have done is ushered in a whole new era of processed food where we’re all encouraged to eat this globalised, industrial food.

In your ready meal lasagna, the onions might come from Poland, the tomatoes might come from Italy, the beef might come from Ireland, the garlic might come from China. We’re sourcing globally to create this processed food diet. Before we even get to the economic argument, there’s a huge cost to public health and to the NHS from people deserting what was a fairly sound way of eating for the industrialised, globalised food that supermarkets provide.  

There’s a kind of false populism around supermarkets. This is where most people shop. This is where the big business is done. The government has always been very good at listening to the supermarkets and trying to accommodate them because they’re seen as great contributors to the British economy. I think this is a very dangerous situation to be in. 

Firstly because of the health scenario that I’ve outlined and secondly I think we’ve concentrated on big retailers and they want a supply base of big suppliers. As a consequence we’ve lost a lot of small and medium-sized businesses in this country, and they were the people who were sustainable and not running vast supply chains from the south of Spain to a superstore in this country. They were probably running them within a radius of 30 or 40 miles. Governments seem to be in love with the supermarkets and don’t seem to understand that for resilience we need to localise our food supply again and base it around smaller units.  

For me the best scenario would be to deliver healthy, wholesome food, sustainable food, food which strengthens its local community in terms of creating jobs, sustaining our high streets….There has to be a plurality of suppliers – lots of small suppliers not a few very big ones like we have at the moment. We complain to kingdom come about the government being in the pockets of the supermarkets, which it undoubtedly is.  But I don’t expect the leopard to change its spots, that’s not going to change. It’s more about what people choose to do in their own lives and what I think is really exciting is when I see what you have been achieving in Totnes, in places like Herefordshire, and in Fife … 

People are saying, if we sit and wait for our government to sort this out, they won’t, we have to create our own solution. We should never underestimate that, I think that’s very important. What’s really interesting at the moment is that cabinet ministers are sitting there thinking “these people haven’t a clue, they’re just a bunch of hippies, they’re dreamers, that’s not real business”. But if you look at where we are now, with environmental problems, peak oil looming, one thing after another, one of these days they might think – “now what were those people saying, maybe they had a point!”  

You have the model there for a sustainable future. The current industrialised global food system as we know it is bust and it’s increasingly defective. It’s falling apart at the seams. There’ll be more and more manifestations of the defective nature of the current food system. The whole scandal over horse meat is just the latest example of how dysfunctional our industrial, globalised food system really is.    

Retailers should be delivering good wholesome food to everyone.  It’s our democractic entitlement.  I think that realisation will dawn eventually but in the mean time, people have to press ahead and do their own things locally. Those will be very powerful, inspiring models to other communities when things do get extremely serious and we start wondering whether we’re going to run out of food, and also how much can obesity really grow in this country. When we start really tackling these issues then all these local efforts will be very relevant. 

I love the quote that you had in Shopped from Sir Terry Leahy (CEO of Tesco) about “queuing in one store then trudging down Watford high street in the rain – is this what people actually want to go back to?” It feels like one of the things that you really pulled out there is that the projects that you mentioned, what they’re doing is really telling a new story about food and giving a new vision of what the food system could be. You’ve touched on it in parts but could you give us a sense of what your vision of what might successfully replace or out-muscle supermarkets might look like? 

The first thing is that there are two big problems with supermarkets, and they’re meant to be their selling points. The selling points for supermarkets are they’re meant to give you cheap food and they’re meant to be convenient. Now everyone loves the idea of cheap food if it’s cheap good food. If it’s cheap bad food it’s not such a bargain obviously. 

I think we know that when it comes to the raw, unprocessed whole foods that I would like to see most people basing their diet on – fruit and vegetables, meat, fish – supermarkets are actually really expensive places to shop. Secondly it’s actually not that convenient to have to get in a car every time you want some milk or a loaf of bread. 

I think that a lot of the local food models, and there’s so many of them now, things like community shops, organic box schemes, bread clubs, all kinds of cooperatives and initiatives now and local markets, in many places it’s actually becoming much more convenient to use them than trail all the way to a supermarket.    

There’s something incredibly alienating about supermarket shopping.  I know that when I walk in the doors of a big supermarket I actually – I was going to say lose the will to live but that’s an exaggeration – I certainly lose the will to cook, and I think this is a very depressing experience. You end up doing  what most people in Britain do, going around, paying more than we thought we’d pay, going back home and finding the fridge is still full of all the same things we bought the week before which we throw away to make room for the new ones. There’s something very soul-destroying about it.  

I try to avoid going to supermarkets, that’s one of my key goals in life.  I’ve managed to do that with really quite a large degree of success. What I do is use quite a lot of local shops, and I’m lucky to still have a fishmonger, a butcher, a good grocer. I go to the farmers’ market on a Saturday.  There’s another indoor market project where I live which is really good, really well stocked. 

I have a choice of organic vegetable boxes. It’s just much nicer to have a proper baker who makes traditional sourdough bread, to be able to see him working away in the background and know that you’re getting the real thing. It’s not the same when you go into a supermarket.  I think in terms of quality of life and quality of food that small food outlets are life-enhancing, and vastly superior to supermarkets.  

I should say the reason I’m interested in local food is that ultimately I’m a very food-centric person. This is what’s taken me into the environmental arena but fundamentally I’m not interested in food being right-on if it doesn’t taste good. What I find quite interesting is the quality of the food we’re seeing now in the independent sector is much, much higher. When you go for the good quality food in Britain that’s where you go for the best-tasting food.  Of course seasonality is a very big factor in creating taste.  

The alternative to me seems like a lot of small local businesses on your doorstep and being liberated from this dreadful get-into-the-car-and-drive to the out of town supermarket – I’m sure a lot of people will agree with that.  

The Totnes Blueprint had that figure about if we could shift 10% as a community what we spend on food to local food, then that’s £2 million coming into the local economy’s pocket rather than the supermarket’s pockets. But given that our finding here was that about two-thirds of what’s spent on food here goes into just two supermarkets in the town, is there a case for working with supermarkets to get them to stock local produce and support local producers, or is it just a case of building a completely parallel system that doesn’t have anything to do with that? In Shopped you say ‘We can’t have both’. Is there a case for working with supermarkets or are we best just to turn our backs on them completely? 

The number two option: we have to build a parallel system. What you have to understand is that supermarkets are structurally incapable of embracing the concept of local food. It goes against their business model, which is so centralised: head office; central distribution; relatively few people in local stores and certainly in those stores no manager who has the power to buy locally because everything is just sent to them. They can’t change, they’re dinosaurs. They’re really not capable of it. They operate on hundreds of thousands of product lines every day and they want them in massive quantities. 

I remember once interviewing a supermarket person for Shopped and he said “it’s not worth our while switching the computer on for this sort of thing” so I said “Well why don’t you buy local cauliflowers?”  I think this might have been in Lincolnshire where there are fields of cauliflowers outside. Not worthwhile switching the computer on…  

Supermarkets need these big suppliers who give us the same thing every day of the year 365 days a year. It’s not about understanding how supermarkets operate to think that you’ll ever get them to take local food seriously, because they’re just not able to do it, and they don’t want to do it , because what they have done is got supply down to what suits them very well, what’s called category captains, which is big companies who give them everything that they want in a category at the lowest price with the suppliers carrying all the risk and the supermarkets carrying none of the financial risks. That’s enormously profitable for supermarkets to do that and provides absolutely no incentive to change. 

When you go into your local supermarket and they say things like “We support local growers” …  but when you look at what’s there it’s something like a few pots of jam, that’s the extent of their interest in local produce. When I looked at the proportion of local food ‘lines’ in the supermarket, it was less than 1% and I don’t have any reason to think that’s changed hugely.  There’s no point in expecting them to do that. 

I think  people have got to develop more of a European mentality about supermarkets. At one point in my life I lived in France for 4 years so I’m quite familiar with the French pattern of shopping. I arrived as someone who was thoroughly imbued with the British way of thinking about food shopping i.e. a once-a-week shop in a supermarket. 

The French have these massive out-of-town, really really big hypermarkets like Carrefour, Auchan etc, but French people would never dream of getting everything they eat there every week. They never go there every week, they go there maybe once every six weeks. They see them as places to buy cheap dull things like toilet roll or tins of tomatoes or something like that, something that isn’t particularly fresh. They use things like the market, the local shops, and these are very valued. I think that’s very strong also in Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe as well.  

In Britain we’ve gone down an Anglo-American path where it’s all about big supermarkets and the independent sector is almost irrelevant. I think that’s not particularly European and we need to get back into that European way of thinking.  

You’ve written about the GM issue. What’s your sense of where we’re at in that debate at the moment, what’s the current state of play do you think?  

On GM it’s absolutely obvious, because of study after study and piece after piece of market research,  that most British people are either opposed to or extremely suspicious of GM. I think the latest figures were something like 80% of people are anti-GM, I think that was a survey for The Grocer magazine. We know that and we know that in Europe there are the same sentiments. 

GM is very unpopular in Europe. It was quite interesting to see that last week or perhaps even earlier this week, one large GM company announced that it wasn’t going to actively try and get its crops grown in Europe or to get crop trials in Europe because the European market doesn’t seem to want it and they’re going to concentrate on countries that appear to be more amenable.    

We have to realise that although government ministers, such as Owen Patterson, are telling us that GM food is the way for the future and it’s the only way for food security and more food on our plates, the public isn’t buying that. We’re being sold a fairy tale, that it was going to stop animals suffering and make food more nutritious and use less pesticides and one thing after another. 

What do we really know about GM crops? We know that they increase the use of pesticides. We know that the yields are not higher. Even the US Department of Agriculture has admitted that. We know that it produced super-weeds, super-pests, and now increasingly as we suspected for a long time, health consequences of the great GM experiment are becoming identified much more. 

This so-called benign GM technology can pose health problems and bring about changes in animals and in humans  which are not good for public health.  I think the case against GM food strengthens rather than weakens.  There is a very well-oiled marketing campaigning message trying to force GM down our throats but I actually don’t think it’s going to work because I think the benefits are just not there and the risks are becoming more apparent.  

It’s always going to be a big battle with those GM interests, they’re very powerful. I think in Britain it’s alarming to see how pro-biotech interests have hidden behind the veneer of so-called evidence-based science and being objective to push GM, when in fact they have a very clear agenda, which is to do with certain companies and institutes gaining funding. I think that’s disappointing but predictable and the main thing is that consumers are still very anti-GM food and I don’t see that changing in the near future.  

You’ve talked about the need to build this parallel economy, this parallel food culture and about how you can start to see that in things like the Fife diet, what Transition groups are doing and Incredible Edible and the whole local food explosion that’s going on. How do we scale it up? If we’re looking at it being still a very small slice of the cake now as opposed to what it would have been in the 50s and 60s, do you have any thoughts on how we might join it up more strategically and start to make this something that can really effectively start to claw its way back? 

In a way I wouldn’t want them to be scaled up, but to multiply outwards.  What we need is not lots of bigger projects, but lots and lots of little projects. It would be to do with the sort of activity amongst the groups. There already are speaking and I know that the Council for the Protection of Rural England did an interesting thing looking at local food clusters. I think the more we work together and show that all over the country in completely different environments: industrial, some urban, some rural, some very remote, that alternative models work and are sustainable.  

I think we just have to go ahead and do, it and try and communicate more between these groups. Perhaps a network would be a good idea because it certainly seems to me – almost every day, every time I switch on my computer there’s a whole lot of new people saying to me – did you know about this, did you know about that. Very interesting, for example there’s a Crop for the Shop scheme, a local shop saying to people “if you’ve grown pproduce in your garden and you have a surplus, bring it to us.  We’ll sell it for you”.  

It’s an organised thing which is looking at a whole community like Totnes or the Fife diet, I think we should link those up because what always comes out when I talk to people is how enormously positive people who are involved it feel.  It’s such an antidote to the doom and gloom that comes with the industrialised model which is just so defective. People are very suspicious of it and not necessarily happy with it, and I think that is something that is a great selling point for the alternatives. Getting connected means we’d be in a position to show that here are people who are really doing something and it is really working in a whole lot of different places. 

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25 Jul 2013

One Year in Transition and the Power of Alternatives to University

Today’s post is by Transition Network’s Isabel Carlisle, and focuses on ‘One Year in Transition’ (1YT), a course she has developed and piloted this year.  The post below contains 3 audio clips, with Richard, Lisa and Hannah, this year’s participants, reflecting on their experience as part of the successful pilot. Registration for 1YT 2013-14 is now open. The cost will be £1500 for the year.  Over to Isabel: 

There is a conversation going on at the margins of higher education that is just beginning to be heard in the market place. It goes something like this: If the future that we are educating young people for is not the future that is approaching, how can we adjust the course of our monolithic education system? What are the skills and aptitudes needed for a world of economic contraction, rising energy costs, environmental degradation and climate change? Have we been charting our course by the wrong North Star?

For many young people the rising tuition costs of higher education are not the only reason that they are questioning the desirability of getting a University degree or college certificate. The conveyor belt of performance learning from SATs to GCSEs and A-Levels and upwards no longer guarantees a job at the end. Nor do they see much work that accords with their values and their desire to bring a different future into being, one that supports their lives, the lives of their communities and the lives of future generations. 

In spring of 2011 I began to reflect on these issues as I looked at ways in which Transition could make an offering to young people looking for right livelihood in community. If they were to step forward into community, either their own or a Transition community that offered them a place, what skills and knowledge would they need? How would they map that community and make their pitch, knowing that they were creating value and finding their niche? How would an understanding of new economic models such as Gift Culture serve them, and how would we weave a learning process that combined the inner and outer aspects of Transition?

Around these questions a group of eight young people aged 17 to 27, in different parts of the UK, gathered for regular Skype chats. This design team agreed the learning should be through mentoring. They liked the idea of practical skills and they asked for the freedom to learn through being given responsibility and being allowed to fail. They didn’t want an over-designed course, they thought the students should design much of it themselves, and they said it should not cost more than £1500 for a year. One Year in Transition was born and then launched at the September Transition conference.

Despite the fact that we didn’t have time for marketing 1YT, we have three intrepid “Transitioners” who have so far had one week-long meet-up in Totnes in which we explored the nature of change. Each has a personal mentor who is a trained psycho-therapist or coach. We use Action Learning to plan, take action and reflect on our projects and own our learning journeys. Skills mentors are being recruited to offer voluntary placements in the skills that the Transitioners choose to learn. We collectively plan future meet-ups and the “tutors” who we invite to teach us. The January focus is on REconomy and Gift Culture.    

The projects that the Transitioners are embarking on include setting up the new network for youth in Transition, starting up a new Time Bank in Oxford (Cowley) and starting a new green skilling programme for young people at risk of exclusion in Bristol. 1YT validates the way in which young people want to learn.  Here are some closing thoughts from the participants of the pilot year:

“This week has shown me many possible ways to tackle difficulties with a healthy attitude, but also how to avoid situations becoming difficult in the first place. It has encompassed personal, group and social psychology, and the technicalities of developing initiatives. It has given me permission to get wrapped up in nature and the metaphors of myth and has caused us, as a group of students to become close and to be truly honest and appreciative of one another” (Richard in South Brent). 

“I signed up to 1YT because I felt I needed a container and support for the things I’m planning to do this year. I need to reframe success, and I want my ethics to be central to my working life, not something I do in my spare time. The first week’s training was just phenomenal. I learnt so much from the Transition model, which is going to be so helpful in my own project. Especially the way people deal with the realisation that we are living in an unsustainable world, and how to support them and ourselves as we come to terms with the kind of appropriate actions we need to take” (Hannah in Oxford)

“As I stepped out of the door [at the end of the week] I realised how incredibly grateful I am to be a part of 1YT and how healing it is to be carrying out this work” (Lisa in Bristol). 

 Isabel Carlisle, Co-ordinator, Transition Education.  isabelcarlisle@transitionnetwork.org 

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23 Jul 2013

Bill Mollison and one of my key ‘Doing Stuff’ moments

On June 4^th 1976, the Sex Pistols played a gig at Manchester Free Trade Hall that has gone down in history as one of the most famous gigs ever, credited as having inspired a huge number of influential bands, record labels, designers, even, according to the late Tony Wilson in the film ‘Joy Division’, with the regeneration and resurgence of the city of Manchester.  According to David Nolan, author of I Swear, I Was There: the gig that changed the world, only 35-40 people actually went, but “by my reckoning seven and a half thousand were there” given the number of people who have claimed to squeezed in. 

The gig had a huge impact on those attending, even if only, as Nolan puts it, “the audience who were there … looked at the band … and turned to each other and said, in that Mancunian way, “That’s rubbish!  We could do so much better than that”.  And that’s exactly what they did”. Here’s a documentary about it:

I won’t even claim to have been there.  8 year-old children weren’t allowed into gigs in 1976.  But I did grow up inspired by many of the people who had been there and by what they did subsequently.  If there was an event in my life that was the equivalent of that night, the incendiary event that lit my life’s blue touchpaper, it would be the evening, in 1992, when I headed to Stroud to hear a talk by permaculture co-originator, Bill Mollison. 

Last summer I gave a talk at the West Country Storytelling Festival about Transition, and at the end someone asked “how do you get the confidence to do that stuff?”  We all have moments that define our belief, or lack of belief, that we can make change in the world.  With this month’s theme being The Power of Just Doing Stuff, I thought I would share that experience with you. 

I was a real permaculture newbie at that stage.  I had yet to do my Design Course.  I had recently been given a copy of Mollison’s classic Permaculture, a Designers’ Manual.  I had the bug, so when a friend told me Bill was speaking in Stroud, and that that was the only public talk of his visit, a few of us hopped in a car and high-tailed it from Bristol to Stroud in time for the talk. 

A talk by Bill Mollison is an unforgettable experience, not always in a good way.  He had a remarkable ability to offend, outrage and upset roughly half of the audience, while changing the life and profoundly inspiring the other half.  It’s quite an art (although not something I try to emulate).  In Peter Harper’s recent critique of permaculture (which contains much I agree with and much that I don’t – I might respond to at some point when I get a moment), he writes (of a different talk on the same trip):

“The audience could not have been more keen to hear what he had to say.  But somehow he managed to turn everybody off by dogmatic statements and an arrogant manner … undoubtedly Mollison is a brilliant man, fizzing with ideas, many of them excellent, but unfortunately, many of them duds.  And it is rather hard to tell which are which …” 

I asked Matt Dunwell of Ragman’s Lane Farm for his recollection of the evening.  His main memory was Bill being “pretty hostile” and “tearing into someone who was questioning how housing coops worked, and he retorted that ‘you are the sort of person that steals chocolate from other peoples’ fridges’” (a phrase that has stuck with Matt ever since). 

My main memories were firstly him talking about how he had just come from Africa where one of the things he had done was to show people that you didn’t need tin foil for cooking (since when I have rarely used tin foil ever again), and secondly when a woman in the audience asked him a question about some land she had recently bought. 

“My husband and I”, she said, “recently bought 100 acres of land in Devon to run along permaculture lines.  But most of our money has been ploughed into buying the land, meaning that we have a very small budget for developing it.  What do you suggest?”  Quick as a flash Bill came back.  “Sell 90 acres” he declared, much to her disappointment (rather good advice I thought). 

What stuck with me though was a message of “just do it, just stop talking about stuff, hoping someone will sort it out, roll your sleeves up and do stuff”.  It resonated with the Do It Yourself culture I had grown up with, through the still rippling distant aftershocks from the night in Manchester: if you don’t like things as they are, get up and do something about it.  His talk, told like a storyteller, with no slides or overheads, was one man prowling that stage, talking from the heart about the projects he had initiated, inspired and seen around the world.

Whether it was people planting thousands of trees, creating new gardens in cities or in the desert, it was (for me at least) a riveting and passionate setting out of the case that change starts with us.  That no-one else is going to do it (Bill once famously said “I can’t change the world on my own.  It’ll take at least three of us” – inspiring but a recipe for burnout if I ever heard one).  That it’s down to us. 

What I took back with me on the drive back to Bristol was a kick up the arse that is still propelling me forward today. What Bill did was not just set out lots of inspiring possibilities, but challenged you to leave the hall unaffected, challenged you to see if you could actually live with yourself if you didn’t do anything.  While it may not have been everyone’s cup of tea (I think some people did get up and walk out), I was transfixed, and left that night, determined, on some level, that this was the work of my life.  The concept that the Earth could be repaired, that there was a way to do it, and that it would only happen if people decided to make it the reason they got out of bed in the morning, hit me hard. 

Like that first Sex Pistols gig in Manchester, I had no option than to be one of those people who (metaphorically) started a band, a record label, a magazine.  It was a life-changing experience.  You can trace this blog, this idea, my sense of the Power of Just Doing Stuff, back to that warm evening in Stroud.  

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