13 Mar 2014
I have been ‘living with climate change’ for the last few years, living on the Somerset Levels with the highest ever recorded rain fall events causing vast flooding to the area. For me this year it all started around Boxing Day when the road from the next village of Muchelney to Langport flooded and became un-passable. As I write in the first week of March, it is still underwater. It is not unusual for that road and surrounding fields to flood during the winter, but not in living memory has there been so much recorded rainfall over winter.
Nor has there been the widespread flooding across Somerset causing so many main roads to be underwater and impassable for many months, as well as many homes, communities and businesses affected by the flood waters. It is only in the last few days that I can no longer see the flood from my front door across the road filling half of Thorney (and sadly neighbours homes) making it look like I live in a West Country version of Venice.
Yes I live on the edge of a floodplain and so am aware that the area floods, but to have two successive winters with yet more water causing friends and neighbours to be flooded two years in a row where no recorded flooding had been before? Something is changing and it’s not just the fact that the waterways haven’t been dredged of silt as they were back before the early 90s.
Speaking to the elders they even recall widespread flooding of other homes locally not affected this time by the floods back when the dredging was a regular activity and there was less recorded rainfall. To me this demonstrates that these recent severe floods are not directly linked to the lack of dredging. Quite clearly the problem has come from the deluge of rain, the most ever recorded since records began around 250 years ago.
I felt that these floods were coming, I felt this after last winter’s excessive flooding here had gone that that was just a taster of things to come. I felt that since the focus on climate change by the Government and media had diminished that the planet would do something to show what the effects of increased CO2 levels created by humans since the industrial revolution to date would look like and here it showed a very very wet and very very windy retaliation.
It has, however, split opinions of people locally. Last time it was an “Act of God”, a one in one hundred year effect that people living on the levels have to cope with once in a while and maybe climate change was impacting but it was just life. This time though the majority of the loudest opinions are those blaming the Environment Agency for not dredging the silt from the rivers and spending too much of public money on saving birds not people. Though no person died on the levels during this flooding, many parts of the ecology and wildlife did. Humans want to blame someone for their pain. The psychology of change is interesting and in this instance shows that its easier to blame an Agency than look at the bigger picture where we are all part of the problem but equally part of the solution.
The positive aspect of all this is that it did bring the community closer together and tightened our bonds. It has enabled those with an understanding of climate change and it is effects to discuss and debate what caused the excessive weather effects creating these floods in the community.
The floods have reignited my desire to live an even more low impact lifestyle. I have felt so guilting driving long ways around the floods to “civilisation” so have been planting trees and am making plans to switch to an EV (I am fortunate that I work from home for an environmental charity so I have drastically reduced my daily transport CO2 emissions) and i’m looking to move to an off grid small holding up hill đ
The local community group Transition Langport formed in 2007 as a way to help people of the Langport area reduce our impact on the climate as well as supporting local renewable resources and supporting each other in working together to transition from a fossil fuel based society to one sustained by renewable non polluting solutions. The group have also been reinvigorated to make a difference within their own lives as well as with the community to reduce their use of fossil fuels and to inspire others to do the same.
We are also working on reinstating a train station in Langport to run on biomethane from food waste to enable the community to use sustainable transport as the nearest train station is 17 miles away and this would give transport resilience to the community as the train lines here were less effected by the flooding than the roads. Details of our group and how to get involved or seek advice can be found on www.transitionlangport.org
Most excitingly the Town Clerk is supporting our idea of a community renewable energy project as well as the planting of a wild flower meadow at the cemetery. We are empowered by the effects on our door step to do something about climate change and to improve the lives of the people as well as the ecology on the Levels which makes this part of the world such a wonderful place to live.
Cara Naden, member of Transition Langport, resident of Thorney/Muchelney Somerset Floods 2014
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11 Mar 2014
One of the things Transition can bring is the ability to turn ‘living with climate change’ into inspired and positive action. We asked Chris Rowland of Ouse Valley Energy Services Company (OVESCO) to tell us his story:
“The triggers which got me involved with Transition Town Lewes started with the 2000 flood in Lewes, a talk by James Lovelock about Gaia in Brighton and the TTL open space events, at which I met the future directors of OVESCO directors for the first time. Following those events I distinctly remember taking a call from Adrienne Campbell on the roof of a car park in central Birmingham, I was working as a design manager on several construction projects, including a shopping centre in Birmingham and at Terminal 5.
Adrienne asked when I could attend the next TTL meeting and something just switched in my brain saying the job I am doing is madness, its everything I donât need, it takes me away from my family, has no connection with the place I live in, its working for carbon intense companies and my wife Suzanne said the stress was going to kill me! So right then I made the decision to give up my job, a company car, pension and what seemed like security, to work part time for OVESCO in Lewes to help deliver a microgeneration grant scheme for Lewes District Council.
My first day at OVESCO was wonderful, we opened a small office in Lewes, I also had a part time job as a designer for a Lewes NGO exhibition company and I had just completed a short Permaculture course run by Pippa Johns at the weekend. I have to give credit to the other OVESCO directors and especially Howard Johns, because he gave us the confidence to believe OVESCO could work and make a difference. Over the years we have learnt that you have to focus on building up a viable company.
The microgeneration grant scheme was the first step and is was Lewes District Council’s trust in or ability to deliver the grant scheme that paid for the office and my part time employment. In the first year we delivered all the grant funding, so the council ran the scheme again and by 2011 we had helped 250 homes install solar thermal, wood stove, heat pumps and PV systems.
[Here is a video by Chris Bird, of a visit to Lewes where Chris Rowland showed him various OVESCO projects]
We also offered a free energy advice service taking about 1000 calls up to 2011. In 2011 we raised our first share issue and raised over ÂŁ400,000, which we invested in locally owned photovoltaic (PV) projects starting with 545 PV panels installed on the roof of the Haveys Brewery Dept in Lewes. Each step meant we were reducing carbon emissions, building local resilience and developing a decentralised energy supply.
There are dark moments when you see the potential effects of climate change such as flooding in the UK, forest fires in Australia or the spreading of malaria in Africa, it feels like you are just not doing enough to combat climate change, but itâs important to realise that as individuals we all have the ability to contribute to change by taking many steps. Itâs also not enough to work on your own, so recently with the help of our new director Ollie Pendered, we have formed an umbrella groups in the South East called Community Energy South (CES.)
Using the Community Energy Peer Mentoring Fund (CEPMPF), OVESCO is helping up to twelve groups set up local energy coops in Sussex learning from the work we have already done. CES is there to support new emerging energy groups in Sussex and we are working with SESP and West Sussex County Council to grow energy groups in Sussex. CES are holding their first public talk at the Brighthelm on 18th March called âPower to the Peopleâ and a second talk by Doug Parr from Greenpeace later in the year.
[Here is a short video introducing all the community groups who will be part of OVESCO’s peer mentoring scheme].
What next for me at OVESCO? I just want to see the growth of community energy and develop ways to supply direct the community. And OVESCO has been short listed for the 2014 Ashden Awards, which is fantastic, because Ashden supports grass roots initiatives from all around the world to help combat climate change and most of the projects are taking many small steps to make this happen.
When we started TTL in 2007 I thought we could do everything ourselves and it was that wonderful feeling of empowerment/excitement that got everyone together in Lewes. Over the years we have learnt that it is a combination of the community (TTL & OVESCO etc), working with their local authority (at Town, District and County levels) and guiding/lobbying Government for grant funding, but also the right incentives/support to scale up.
Finally I want to say thank you to Adrienne Campbell, because she helped me take my first steps. Ultimately you just have to âbe the change you want to see in the worldâ and thatâs my strategy for living with climate change.
[The attachment below is a wonderful ‘timeline’ of OVESCO since it began in 2007]
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7 Mar 2014
“I am not sure what it is you are doing but it seems like a lot of fun. Can I join in?” This was the message I send to the Edible Deventer group in the Netherlands after reading yet another article about their local initiatives: household garden courses, creation of an edible, decentralized carbon sink forest by the free distribution of hundreds of nut trees, picnics in the park and the creation of âfaçade mini gardensâ (even in the shopping centre!) were some of them. What appealed to me especially was the clever combination they made of doing practical stuff with in the back of their minds the need of mitigation for climate change.
Greening the city, making it edible at the same time and getting people from several neigbourhoods directly involved, was a golden formula, it seemed to me. It had taken me at least a year to write this email to the Edible Deventer group. My project as an international consultant just finished and I wanted to get more involved with my local community. The answer to my e-mail, almost two years ago now, was more than welcoming. Apparently someone put me on a mailing list and in no time my in-box was flooded with messages. It was slightly overwhelming but one of the âEdible girlsâ assured me to just pick-out âwhatever makes you happyâ and ignore the rest.
The first activity I attended was a gathering about Urban Farming where the Edible Deventer group would make an appearance. A bit anxious, as it would be the first time to meet my counterparts, I entered the meeting room. Wow. The room was packed with local farmers, shopkeepers, politicians, consumers, activists, policy makers and …the Edible Deventer group.
Apparently the local political party, who had organized the meeting, had looked all over the place for people involved in urban farming, before they realized that Transition Town was already âdoing itâ right around the corner. For me, I was amazed that there where all these people thinking about the same things as I did. And I didnât have a clue! So this was what my towns(wo)men were up to when I was away!
The next âstepâ was the Transition training that I attended soon after. I started to read The Transition Handbook and found out what the Transition movement was all about. Oh dear, this wasnât just about fun and inspiring activities, this was heavy stuff! I did try to get away from it, “do we really have to talk about climate change and peak oil? Canât we just stick to the fun stuff?” But really there is no turning back once you get into it.
I did like the way the training was set up though and how the trainers (Tara and Paul) guided us through the process and I did meet a lot of new and inspiring people. The Transition process can be frightening and lonely, sometimes. I was so lucky to have found a group that already existed, with like minded people to share thoughts, ideas, initiatives and yes to also have a lot of fun. I was also so lucky to be able to take on the next step last year: with a group of people from TT Deventer to create and form the âGroene Golfâ (Green Wave), a centre for practical sustainability and local resilience.
A place to meet people, inspire, create, dream and experience. A place where only recently we hosted this yearâs national Transition conference and the LAUNCH training. If we let climate change go out of hand, Deventer will be on the new shore line of the Dutch lowlands. In my experience, working for a truly sustainable future can be fun and very rewarding when taking it on together. Weâve only just begun.
Find out more about Transition Deventer here.
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6 Mar 2014
Paul Kingsnorth wrote recently of the floods that have hit the UK, arguing that they represent the beginning of “a gradual, messy, winding-down of everything we once believed we were entitled to”. It’s 2 years since he announced “I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching. I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity, and all the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. Iâm leaving, Iâm going out walking”. What has he been doing since then, and what does “living with climate change” mean to him?
To start with, here’s the podcast in case you want to listen to our conversation while shampooing the dog or pruning your gooseberries.
The first book of yours that I ever read was Real England which I really enjoyed and had the subtitle âThe Battle Against the Blandâ. Does the fact that youâre about to move to Ireland mean you think thatâs a battle that weâve lost?
Iâm moving to Ireland for a number of reasons, not least because for a long time I have wanted to have a little bit of land that I can work on and live mortgage-free and educate my kids at home, and itâs just not something that I can afford to do in England any more. Interestingly, in Britain these days, if you want to live simply, youâve mostly got to be rich.
In terms of losing that battle, what weâre looking at all over the western world is this continual advance of the corporate economy and itâs wiping out a huge amount of colour and character all over the place. In terms of whatâs happened in England since I wrote that book, itâs a mixed bag actually. If you go back and read Real England now and start to look at a lot of the campaigns that I wrote about, youâll find that some of those campaigns were actually won by the people who are fighting them, and a lot of the things they were talking about saving have been saved. Youâll also find that others have been lost.
But the general picture, certainly, is that this march of the monoculture is going on. How long it will go on for, in the face of climate change and peak oil and all the other things that we all talk about is a moot point, but certainly we can see what direction weâre moving in at the moment.
The piece you wrote a couple of years ago, the Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist which generated a lot of debate and discussion, you wrote “itâs all fine, I withdraw, I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching. I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity, and all the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. Iâm leaving, Iâm going out walking”. Where have you been since then? Can you give us an update on your walking?
That was a piece that I wrote at a point where I felt that environmentalist had hit a wall. I still feel that, actually, and I stand by what I wrote in that essay, What it also is, is a very personal essay. Itâs not necessarily a piece of advocacy. Iâm not suggesting anyone else should be doing the same thing. But I think the green movement has hit a wall and I think there are certain things that canât be achieved and thatâs not being talked about, which was why I wanted to withdraw from my involvement in it.
A lot of the journey thatâs been happening since then has taken me up and down the dark mountain, if you like. Itâs taken me to a point where Iâm a lot more comfortable with not being in control, and Iâm a lot more comfortable with not knowing. And I feel that broadly speaking as a society, as a civilisation, we tend to think weâre in control of what the futureâs going to look like, or that we ought to be or that we can be, and I think that applies to a lot of environmentalism as well. Weâre just not. Weâre living in a country which is currently flooding in many parts of the landscape, and we have absolutely no control over that. We have no control over the direction our climateâs now going in. We canât even reduce the emissions that we continue to pump up into the atmosphere at an increasing rate.
Yet we labour under this illusion that if we can come up with the right plan we can sort things out, and we canât. Once you accept that, you walk off into this strange wilderness in which youâre not in control of things. Iâm exploring this territory in which weâre faced with an enormous change in the way that we live and an enormous change in all the assumptions that we base our lives on, and we canât really get a grip on where things are going. Itâs an unsure place to be. I think we need to have a lot more honesty about exploring those unsure places that weâre finding ourselves in. Weâre moving into this age of really radical change and collapse and weâve no idea where weâre going to be going or how we can keep a grip on the way that we live.
Over the years, I know with the Dark Mountain camps and some of the writing, thereâs been overlaps and links between the Dark Mountain movement and Transition or people involved in Transition. How have you observed or thought about the relationship there? Whatâs in common and whatâs distinct between them, do you think?
Iâve noticed a lot of Transition people involved in Dark Mountain, a lot of them kind of at the heart of the project actually. I think what the projects have in common is that they are both open to the reality that Iâve just been talking about, of this future in which things are going to change whether we like it or not. This path that our culture is on at the moment isnât going to continue, and a different future needs to be prepared for in different ways.
There are obviously differences as well. Transition seems to be a much more practical engagement with the on-the-ground stuff. Dark Mountain is really an artistic project, itâs a writersâ and a creatorsâ project I suppose in the broader sense of the word. We produce books and we produce art and we hold events which feature music and all sorts of creative responses, and weâre talking about trying to reimagine the stories that weâve told ourselves on a creative level. So thereâs an obvious difference there.
The similarity between them is that theyâre both responses that seek to, I think, have a realistic assessment of whatâs possible and what isnât, and often in the mainstream green movement I donât see enough honest assessment of what isnât possible. People donât like to talk about that. I think at this stage, we need to be able to put our hands up and say well here are the things we canât do, how do we live with that. I think as a culture, weâre very bad at doing that.
Within the more mainstream environmental movement, where does that inability come from, do you think? They keep telling this story that we can turn it all around, particularly the ones who say and we can still have growth tooâŚ
Itâs so common. Itâs politics I think. What youâre really looking at here is a movement, if you look at the big green NGOs, they need public support. Thatâs where they get their funds from and thatâs where they get their petitions signed and how they get people to go on their marches. If you look at political parties like the Green Party, they need to get the votes in, which means to some degree theyâre going to have to tell people what they want to hear.
What people want to hear in a society in which weâre all soaked in material wealth is âItâs all going to be fine for you, you wonât have to give up your nice cars or your houses or your holidays in the sun. We can somehow make those things âsustainableââ. Iâve lost count of the number of âmainstreamâ greens Iâve met or know who donât really believe that for a minute, but they have to say it because otherwise nobody listens.
We have this cult of optimism in this culture where people donât want to hear bad news. They just want to turn off. The Greens have discovered this to their cost over the last 50 years. Every time you tell people about climate change or any other horrible thing thatâs happened already or is coming along, people just donât want to hear it. Weâve got this whole global movement of climate change denial now which is an incredible thing really, psychologically. Millions of people out there, busily working away pretending itâs not even happening.
If youâre a mainstream green organisation and you need a lot of people to buy into your message itâs very difficult to give them bad news. Itâs very difficult to question all of the stories and all of the assumptions that the whole culture you work in is based on. I donât really blame anyone for that, youâve got to work within the barriers that are set for you. But the limitations there I think are very clear and it just seems very obvious to me that you canât give out any kind of honest green message on a wide scale in a society in which people are as addicted to material prosperity as we are here. Itâs just not possible. And that leaves Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and the Green Party and all the rest of them in a very difficult position, an impossible one really.
Weâre in a situation where lots of Somerset is under water, Cornwall coastlines are crumbling into the sea, the river Thames is swelling … itâs been extraordinary in the coverage over the last week or two how rarely anybodyâs mentioned climate change. Really, really extraordinary. If youâre in a situation where the impacts are so clear and nobody puts two and two together, is there still a role for you in terms of raising awareness and talking about it? Is the idea that we can get people to care about this a lost cause?
I think one of the reasons I moved on from green campaigning to the Dark Mountain kind of writing I do now, is I kind of gave up on raising awareness as a useful response. I think that thereâs a false assumption within the green movement and within all political movements actually, that if you give people enough information, and you raise their awareness, that that will lead to action. I believed that for a long time, and I can remember in the early 1990s writing about climate change and campaigning on it, no-one else in the mainstream was talking about it, it was just a few greenies.
We all believed that if people knew about this on a big scale then obviously they would act, itâs just so obvious that they would act, isnât it? Now they know about it on a wide scale. Itâs been on the front pages of newspapers for the last 10 years. Everybody knows about climate change, all the information is out there, and nothing is happening.
And as you say, you can get into this astonishing situation where half the countryâs flooding and hardly anyone talks about it. They donât even ask the questions. No-one in the media even asks the questions. What does it take? I think thereâs been a bit of a misunderstanding. We assume people are being rational all the time and that if you give them facts theyâll act on the facts. Thatâs not really what happens. We all make assumptions based on our prejudices and intuitions and then we use the facts to back them up. Call me cynical but I think thatâs the way that humans work. I think thatâs the way that we all work.
If you start off on the assumption that if you raise enough awareness things will change, I think youâre in the wrong place. My conclusion personally is that the useful thing you can do is keep telling the truth, to keep being honest about whatâs actually happening to provide information for people who want to act on it, but also just to hunker down really and get on with doing what useful work you can do at your local level without imagining that you can change the way that society is going, because I donât think at the moment that you can.
Is there anything that you would march for now?
I think this stuff is really about distinguishing between what you can do and what you canât do. Itâs very simple. Iâve been involved in a campaign to stop a supermarket being built in my town for the last three years. Iâve been involved in that quite heavily because it feels like a winnable battle. Itâs not going to stop the march of supermarkets more generally but it might save this small town centre and that seems to be worth doing.
If thereâs something specific to be marching against then itâs a good thing. Marching against the Keystone XL pipeline seems like a good thing. That might be a winnable battle as well. But thereâs a difference between trying to prevent a particular pipeline or a particular fracking rig or a particular supermarket and trying to change the whole of human behaviour and stop climate change. Theyâre not the same thing. I think you can win small battles and local battles and I think you can protect what you can protect, and I think you can continue to tell the truth. But if you set yourself up to try and change the behaviour of industrial society, or stop the climate changing or change the direction of material progress then youâre going to be very disappointed as a lot of people have been.
When one takes that step across, when one goes up the Dark Mountain as it were, and accepts that thereâs not a great deal that you can do and that the climate is going in a particular direction and thatâs just how it is … what gets you out of bed in the morning?
The funny thing is, this was a surprise to me really. People sometimes look at Dark Mountain from the outside and assume itâs very depressing and doom laden. They say âWhereâs the hope? Whereâs the hope? We want hope!â People have this addiction to hope. They want to be able to hope for things even if there isnât a basis for it. But Iâm finding that since I gave up on false hope and since I gave up having to pretend that we can save things we couldnât save or stop things we couldnât stop, I feel a lot better I have to say, because I felt for a long time and I know other people have felt this too, that I was like a priest who didnât actually believe in the religion I was telling everyone about but felt I had to keep telling them because that was my job.
I get this sense from a lot of green leaders and spokespeople and all the rest of it, they donât really believe in what theyâre saying in a lot of ways. They donât really believe that the world can be turned around and we can stop climate change and have a peaceful, sustainable development for 10 billion people. But they kind of have to say it because they donât know what else to say.
But once you stop saying it, and once you stop saying things that you actually believe to be untrue, the alternative is not to collapse in despair. Itâs to think â OK, well what can I actually usefully do then? Here I am, at this moment in time. These changes are happening and Iâm living through them. What can I usefully do?
Everyone will have different answers to those questions. My answer is I can continue to write in a way which I know inspires and informs some people. I can continue to make my life as low impact as possible. I can have some land and work on it, I can bring my kids up in a way that I consider to be good, and thatâs what I do. That seems to be a useful response with the kind of powers that Iâve got, and that will be different for everybody. But once you stop having to pretend that you can do everything, the alternative is to say, well I can do something, what is it? I suppose thatâs a great weight off my shoulders.
I suppose for lots of people the idea of giving up on the idea of being able to hold things back feels like an acceptance of something that just feels completely unacceptable really.
I think so, and I think thatâs because of our illusion of control. This whole culture of ours, this whole civilisation is built on this illusion of control. It goes right back to the Enlightenment and beyond the idea that weâre going to control nature, weâre going to control the future, weâre going to have a great plan that weâre going to roll out for how civilisationâs going to look. Itâs not going to happen. We need to learn to accept, as most traditional cultures have accepted, that weâre not in control of the wider world beyond our culture, and we should learn to let go of some of it.
Weâre going through a climate change event now. Itâs not the first this planet has experienced by any means. Itâs the first one on this scale that humans have experienced. We created it. Itâs happening now. The levels of carbon dioxide are higher than they have been for thousands of years. Theyâre going up at a record rate. Thatâs not going to turn around and even if it did at this point, the change is coming. Thereâs no point in pretending that itâs not happening. It doesnât help anybody. Itâs better to be flexible and say well, here we are. Here we are. That doesnât mean you canât do anything to prevent things from getting worse. It doesnât mean give up. It just means that you adjust your expectations, I suppose.
But looking back through history, there have been times when people have mobilised, have made big changes happen. Even the changes of attitude towards smoking in public over the last 10 or 15 years â one can point to examples where people have led, within a relatively short period of time to quite major changes in how we do things.
Thatâs possible. Iâm sure that will continue. You can see that our changes to the environment have been quite rapid over the last 20 years or so. Peopleâs ideas about things as basic as recycling. Even things like flying and driving are starting to change a little bit in countries like this. But itâs not relevant to the scale of the problem. Itâs not that itâs not happening, it is happening and will probably happen a lot faster when people make the final connection between climate change and the weather events that weâre having, which I think they will because as this goes on and on and gets worse and worse, people are not going to be able to pretend itâs not happening any more.
I think that will happen, itâs inevitable that peopleâs attitudes will change and people will do things. People will keep doing things like campaign against fracking, which hopefully will prevent it from happening and thatâs all good. I donâtâ want to be critical of it or say that people shouldnât do it. In the grand scale of things, we are now committed to a big climate change. In the grand scale of things, thereâs now a rolling extinction going on which hopefully we can hold back as much as possible, but isnât going to stop. Weâre not getting back to the point we were at 50 years ago. Itâs not going to happen.
But that doesnât mean youâve lost, you give up, you go home and cry, it just means you adjust to the rolling reality of it. Weâre going to have to go with it now. The floods arenât going to stop coming at this point.
Did you see any of the stuff recently that David Holmgrenâs paper Crash on Demand generated?
I havenât read the post but Iâve seen lots of people writing about it.
His basic argument was that economic growth and the growth-based economy is the thing which is frying the biosphere and pushing us over the edge, and the only way to have any hope of saving that is to deliberately engineer economic collapse because thatâs the only way it stops growing, and that actually we would be well advised to put some or all of our energy into actually withdrawing our support from the economic growth model in such a way that we deliberately bring about its collapse. I wondered what your thoughts were on his approach?
Itâs interesting because I think thereâs going to be a lot more of this in coming years. Youâve probably seen the rise of Deep Green Resistance as well, thatâs another slightly more radical, angry response to this idea that the thing thatâs destroying the world is the capitalist machine and therefore you must destroy the capitalist machine.
Itâs quite right really. Obviously the thing thatâs destroying the world is economic growth. More broadly, the thing thatâs destroying the world is advanced capitalism. What you do about that, on the other hand, is another matter. I havenât read Holmgrenâs paper so I canât really comment on it.
In terms of withdrawing your support from the machine as it were, it seems like a great idea to me. Thatâs what Iâm trying to do myself. I donât think youâd ever get enough people to withdraw your support from it to crash it, but to be honest I think itâs starting to crash itself anyway. It seems to be completely unsustainable. Again, this is a question of everybodyâs individual response to the crisis weâre going through now.
I think everybodyâs individual response will be different, and his seems to be, as far as I can tell, quite sensible. Whether it will have the effect that it wants to have, I donât know but whatâs clear from an ethical point of view to me is that this industrial machine is destroying the world. We know that. It seems to be an obvious ethical obligation really to withdraw your support from it and your engagement with it as much as possible.
But of course, the reality is that weâre all stuck in it. Just by being born into our generation in this country itâs almost impossible to completely withdraw yourself. But you can still do what you can do. You canât predict the future. How many people are going to do that kind of thing? We donât know. Anything could happen over the next 10 or 20 years. It could be another economic crash, it could be a rapid climate change event and everything could change and everybodyâs attitudes could go out the window.
One thing that is exciting I suppose is that we shouldnât underestimate how quickly peopleâs attitudes can change when circumstances change. If we had a giant economic collapse, if we had rolling climate change, if we had all this stuff coming at once and making it very very obvious that we werenât going to keep on going in the same direction then anything could happen. That doesnât mean we could reverse everything and get back to how it was, but we could have a very very different attitude. At some stage, our intellectual assumption that capitalist growth and progress are the only game in town is going to collapse. How soon that will be, I donât know, but it will happen because it so obviously is undermining even its own assumptions, and when that happens then things start to get really interesting, but in what direction we have no idea at all.
Is there not a case that actually whatâs needed now more than anything is people who have a real understanding of the situation and the context and where we find ourselves actually putting themselves forward for positions of leadership, whether at the local or the national scale, and actually stepping up rather than retreating? Is this not a time for the people who have spent so many years working on this stuff to actually try and step across and take some kind of leadership at this point?
My feeling on that is that weâre living in a decaying system and trying to take leadership roles within a decaying system is not going to lead to anything. You canât offer solutions with the same mindset that created the problems and look whatâs happened to the Green Party.
You can spend 50 years trying to get seats in parliament. If you try and stand for leadership roles or step up to leadership roles in the society weâre in at the moment, you will automatically get sucked in to that societyâs assumptions about growth and progress and all the rest of it.
I think itâs more interesting. I think weâre in whatâs called a “pregnant widow moment” at the moment, where the old king is dead and the kingâs wife is pregnant and we donât have a new king yet and weâve no idea what the new regimeâs going to be. Weâre strangely in transition actually between the old world of growth and progress and material assumptions of wealth and a new world which is going to see much more environmental chaos and much more poverty and instability but also probably completely new forms of politics and philosophy and all the rest of it, that are going to come from the changes that weâve already initiated. We donât know what shape theyâre going to take.
I think the most useful role for people who you might call leaders, anyone whoâs been working on the stuff weâre talking about is to actually keep doing what theyâre doing to stand apart from things. Not to necessarily become leaders in whatâs going on at the moment. But to stand apart from things, to keep cranking out the radical ideas, to keep thinking about how things are changing and to stay nimble and to improvise, not to get bogged down by ideologies or get stuck in party systems or any of that stuff. But just say “things are changing radically. The useful stuff to do at the moment is to protect what we can protect and keep developing our ideas as things happen”.
I think there will be more and more appetite for people who have radical views or what we see now as radical views over the next decades because so clearly the thing is coming apart and the answers are not going to come from within, so actually standing outside and maintaining a clear focus and continuing to expose whatâs wrong and trying to come up with alternatives, I think is the most useful thing to do at the moment.
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Yes I live on the edge of a floodplain and so am aware that the area floods, but to have two successive winters with yet more water causing friends and neighbours to be flooded two years in a row where no recorded flooding had been before? Something is changing and it’s not just the fact that the waterways haven’t been dredged of silt as they were back before the early 90s.
Current levels of water use in California burn up a sizzling 19% of electricity use, just to pump water around! Importing water from the State Water Project (SWP) can only be considered a temporary measure. Source of SWP is 500 miles (almost 1000km) away in the Sacramento Delta! Joshua Basin Water District recently installed a pipeline at great cost; the pipeline was completed just in time for the SWP to cut off all allocations due to drought. Governor Brown 
