Transition Culture

27 May 2014

A Healthier Community: Margy Henderson on Transition Stourbridge’s Harvest Share

Three or four years ago, I discovered there was a group of us who felt it was time to do something about this waste of a wonderful local resource – so we set up the Harvest Share project. Every year, starting in late summer, we help local folks harvest, process if needed, and store / distribute any spare crops from gardens, allotments, and fields (and the odd skip behind food shops). We pick and gather; we make jams, jellys, chutneys, and cordials; we bottle and jar; and we hold juicing days.

For these, we borrow an apple mill and a press from a local market garden. People bring apples if they have some, or just come to join in the fun, and we wash, chop, mill and press apples (and some pears), all day long. Last autumn we held 6 of these days, with 20 – 30 people at each event. They were in our back gardens, in a local school, at a market garden, at a farm – wherever it was asked for. It is very popular as you no doubt know from similar events you have probably been at!

Harvest Share brings great benefits for the health of local folks – physical, emotional, spiritual – through working together, drinking fresh juice, eating more local produce, knowing we are reducing waste and making a positive difference. And it is helping us all get out and about more, and feel more connected to our neighbours and local environment.

People are happy to have help with making the most of their glut of fruit or vegetables – they are mostly unhappy to see it rot away! However, a lot of the oldendays skills are getting forgotten, so together, we are re-learning how to harvest, store, and process foods in different ways. This is immensely empowering! We are looking forward to many more wonderful Harvest Sharing experiences.

Margy Henderson on behalf of Transition Stourbridge

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23 May 2014

Four reasons why too much local democracy can be a bad thing

So the European and local elections are over, and once again it looks like a result underpinned by low turnout and a general lack of interest, especially from young people.  Parties seemed to be falling over themselves to say how much they love communities and want to give them more powers.  It’s the UKIP manifesto that takes it the furthest, raising the interesting question I want to explore here, namely “is it possible to give communities too much say in local affairs?”  Is giving communities a say always a good thing?  It’s not an assumption I saw challenged at all in debates around the elections, so it feels important to make a space to explore it here.

The UKIP Manifesto states:

“Real decision-making should be given to local communities”.  

Well hear hear, I’d be all for that.  Sounds very Transition.  Tell me more…  

Local referendums

It’s time to bring power back to the people. So major decisions should be subject to binding local referendums if the people demand it. On the petition of 5% of the population within 3 months, major planning and service provision decisions should be put to a local vote.

Skirting around the pedant’s point that it should surely be ‘referenda’, let’s look at what they add to this: 

Democracy: Introduce binding local planning referendums on major decisions, such as out-of-town or large-scale supermarket developments, wind turbines, incinerators, solar farms, major housing developments and transport schemes like HS2. 

One might imagine that from a Transition perspective, giving powers over local decision-making can only be a good thing.  But there are a few very real flaws in this proposal which I’d like to explore here.   

1. Rights without responsibilities. 

Giving people rights to decide local planning decisions is all very well.  I’d be for it, up to a point.  But it should be remembered where UKIP, and increasingly, the Conservatives, are coming from on this.  Later in the Manifesto UKIP pledge to:

“end wasteful EU and UK subsidies to ‘renewable energy scams’, such as wind turbines and solar farms”.

Such extreme devolution of decision-making is relatively do-able in a world where you don’t believe in climate change, a position UKIP held until about 4 weeks ago. Roger Helmer, UKIP’s Environment Spokesperson, who in 2009 accused the Church of England if having “abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate alarmism instead” and recently wrote “believe me, I should like nothing better than to re-open the mines, and to restore a once-great British industry”, as well as proposing banning the teaching of climate change in schools, now believes in the science at least, but not necessarily doing anything about it.  

But if you do take a view that climate change is a huge and pressing issue, and that cuts in emissions are now a matter of survival, then things look very different.  With the pressing need to reduce emissions, giving power to communities to decide everything without any corresponding responsibilities is insane.  

What we should be doing is to say that each planning region is given certain targets by central government.  For example, this town needs to build 400 new homes, but also to cut its emissions by 20% over the next 5 years, and we could even throw in a target that 70% of homes built need to be genuinely affordable and in community ownership.  

Then, for sure, give communities the power to decide key decisions, but if they fail to press developers to build genuinely low carbon homes with renewables installed, then they will need to make up the carbon cuts needed by either either allowing a wind project, or using Section 106 money to fund a major retrofitting scheme.  We can’t have it both ways.  

UKIP proposes giving the power to communities to decide on housing developments, solar farms, wind turbines and HS2 precisely because they don’t like housing developments, solar farms, wind turbines and HS2 and feel they can rely on communities to turn them down for them.  It would be a scenario that gives communities all of the rights, but none of the responsibilities to be part of a collective response to the collective challenges we face.   

2. We can do better

In the current mad scramble to recreate the very housing bubble that caused the economic crash in the first place, it’s all about numbers of new houses built.  No consideration of who builds them.  Or how well they’re built.  Or what they’re built of.  Or how much energy they’ll use once built.  Ministers and, it is assumed, the rest of us, are supposed to feign wild delight and gratitude at any old shit housing thrown up anywhere.  “It’s good for the economy” apparently.  Public health professional Angela Raffle told us this week:

“Economic growth and jobs in the pharmaceutical industry are now more important to the government than human health”.  

You could say the same thing about building and housing. 

But we can do better than that.  The problem isn’t that communities need to be able to decide on every development proposed in their area.  The problem is that what is proposed, and what they feel is possible, suffers from a chronic lack of imagination, a paucity of possibilities, one of the reasons Transition can be such a powerful thing.  The spirit in which these powers are offered is not one of genuine empowerment, but rather in a miserly spirit of stopping development going forward.  With a dash of imagination and a few pinches of genuine empowerment and support, we can do a lot better than that. 

3. We also need stronger government alongside stronger communities

There is also a need for strong leadership here, rather than devolving everything (you’ll note that UKIP don’t devolve the powers of referendum for communities to vote on the degree of protection for workers, the levels of tax millionaire businessmen should be paying, and so on).  At the moment we have a government riven over the importance, or not, of climate change, which gives it secondary priority to economic growth, to saving money and the removing “red tape”.  They pass this schizophrenia down to local government along with the starting point of a presumption in favour of all development which is now reclassified as “sustainable development”.  So then the decisions taken at the local scale need to take place in this confused context.  

Imagine if we had a government clear on the need to rapidly cut emissions. A government that encouraged a national conversation about climate change and what actually needs to be done in order to reduce our emissions far quicker than is currently the case. A government that takes action nationally and internationally.

As part of that it could set binding targets for local government, and support them in achieving them.  It would be a government which sees economic activity as arising not from doing things exactly the same as before, but differently.  A government that sets a clear context for planning, setting out both rights and responsibilities.  It is their role also to create as many opportunities as possible for community involvement, for social enterprises and cooperatives.  If the community then wants to come up with other solutions, they are entirely empowered to, but in a context.  

4. Referenda are not neutral

There is a real question as to whether referenda for everything is actually a more democratic way to go.  I spoke to Peter MacFadyen, Independent Mayor for Frome (who we will be interviewing next month here), who told me: 

“People elect people like me as a councillor and then say “I trust you Peter.  I’ve elected you in order to make the decisions for me.  I did it so I don’t have to read all these papers and get involved”.  Giving that level of power to what would inevitably be, at least initially, a very few people who showed up, would be deeply dangerous”.  

Who tends to mobilise to vote in referenda?  Generally those with time, skills and money.  And often those who already own property. It leads to an intergenerational deficit, where people mobilise to vote against wind and solar projects because their house values and view are more important than the needs of future generations, vote against new housing developments for similar reasons, rather than because they don’t create sufficient opportunities for young people locally, whether in terms of work or affordable housing.  Bugger the climate, bugger creating a town with opportunities for young people.  As Helen Lewis put it in the Guardian recently: 

Because owning a house is like having an extra vote – a vote for house prices to keep rising, mortgage rates to stay low and for supply to be constricted to prop up the whole shebang. By owning your own property, you get a say in planning law too – your objection to that new tower block counts for far more than the indirect, dissipated unease of all the people hunting desperately for somewhere affordable in the vague vicinity of their work.

She then went on to argue, wrongly in my opinion, that the solution is to build on Green Belt land, but her opening analysis still stands.  

While the government’s Localism Bill gives communities many useful powers, such as the Right to Build and the Right to Bid, it doesn’t factor in the need to support, inspire and train them in how to make best use of them.  As a result, in spite of the bill being passed in 2011, there has still not been, to the best of my knowledge, a Community Right to Build Order applied for anywhere in England or Wales.  We need to invite communities to sit down to a feast of possibilities.  Instead what seems to be happening now is that communities are being given partial and selective rights but in the absence of a wider discussion about our responsibilities to future generations and for each other, with no care given to what support and empowerment communities need to actually be able to take wise decisions together.  They’re not the same thing at all. 

Referenda offer a huge opportunity to educate, engage and inspire communities with new ideas.  As the Atmos Totnes initiative nears the end of its negotiations over the future of a derelict industrial site and starts to gear up for what we think is the first Community Right to Build Order in the country, we are seeing the referendum that it results in as a huge opportunity for public engagement, building of the community’s self-confidence and sense of what’s possible.  If done properly, referenda can be extraordinary.  If done in the way the UKIP manifesto promotes, it could all too easily be a tool of the curmudgeonly, the selfish, the short-termist.  As a new report states that the collapse of the West Antartica ice sheet is now inevitable, and the White House warn that “the old normal is broken”, that’s the last thing we need.  

Note: Transition Network is avowedly non party political. In previous blogs we have taken both this and the previous administration to task over policies.  Next month our theme is ‘Transition and Politics’, and we are aiming to speak to representatives of all the main political parties.  

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21 May 2014

The May 2014 Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition

Crystal Palace Transition Town’s market is celebrating its first birthday.  The market has been a huge success since its inception, with local paper the Croydon Advertiser reporting “Extremely strong winds caused havoc among stallholders at Crystal Palace food market on Saturday.  But despite forcing three traders to pack up and go home, the bad weather failed to mar the market’s first birthday celebrations”.  Congratulations from us too.  The market also appeared in the Guardian in a piece about the resurgence of markets.  Here are some of the CPTT organisers celebrating with a sing-song appropriate to the circumstances: 

And here are a few of the traders on what the market means to them: 

The group will also be celebrating their third birthday with an event on June 11th.  And they’ve been busy in the St John’s Community Garden too:

Crystal Palace Transition Town have been one of the groups behind the creation of the area’s Edible Bus Stop, which we’ve reported on previously here.  With the Spring and everything, it is now a riot of plants. “Is this London’s best bus stop?” they tweeted.  Here is a photo.  You wouldn’t mind a bus being a bit late if you got to spend time here would you? 

Transition Town Horncastle recently hosted an energy festival for people to learn more about the benefits of renewable energy.  Members of Transition Town Dorchester left inspired and ready to seek a suitable site for a forest garden after a visit to Martin Crawford’s site in Devon. In the rain (see right).  

Also in Dorset, members of Transition Town Bridport have helped prepare a new polytunnel garden at a local school as part of their HOME in Bridport initiative.  

Salisbury in Wiltshire is ready to launch Transition and have invited Rob Hopkins along to a public meeting at the local Guildhall to help catalyse and inspire people to get involved. 

Transition Langport recently tweeted that they are “very excited & proud to have been shortlisted for the #Westbourne100 for our #Plastic Bag free #Langport campaign”.  

Transition Town Worthing are busy too.  Two of their recent tweets give a sense of how things are going for them: 

We’re heading to @TTWorthing‘s pre-launch event for the #Worthing #farmdrop‘s producers. Such exciting times for @farmdrop! #foodpioneers  

We doubled our membership on facebook in just over two months – #transitiontowns #worthing is on the up!

They also partnered up with Brighton Permaculture Trust, Low Carbon Trust and Open Eco Homes for a weekend showcasing local eco homes in Worthing. A video and more info on the event in the Worthing Herald.  Transition Bristol are holding their ‘Small Green Sunday’ this Sunday (May 25th).  Here’s the flyer: 

 

We are all in deep admiration of the story this month of how the West Solent Solar Co-operative, formed by members of New Forest Transition, raised £2.46 million in local investment for a community solar farm.  The full story is here.   

Bucks Free Press reported how Transition Town Marlow had been given “Go-ahead to plant Marlow town orchard for community scrumping”.  It quoted Helen Dann from the group as saying: 

“When we plant orchards we can teach children where food comes from, and the importance of nature. Orchards help a town to maintain its local distinctiveness and identity as we group together to save vulnerable local varieties of apple, pear, cherry, plum and damson.

“In a similar way to community gardens, community orchards are a great opportunity for everyone to learn new skills, such as fencing, wildlife watching, horticultural skills gained from pruning and maintenance of the fruit trees, and jam, cider and fruit juice making skills, once the fruit is picked.”

From Transition Town Totnes, the April Skillshare newsletter, details of the CARD project (Community Action for Retrofit Delivery), funded by a grant from the Energy Saving Trust and starting with the nearby village of Harbertonford, the latest community consultation on the Transition Homes project which covered natural building materials, design constraints and project overview and finally, some inner nourishment in the form of a (weekly) Time to Breathe session, this one in honour of Earth Day. 

Now on to some local currency stories.  While we’re still in Totnes, Tuesday May 20th saw the relaunch of the Totnes Pound, with a great event to launch it into the world. There was a very good piece in the Guardian before hand which gave a good sense of the different schemes underway across the UK, and how they are boosting local economies.  Here is the poster for the Totnes launch event: 

New social enterprise Totnes-based brewery New Lion Brewery also brewed a special bottled beer available on the night called ‘The Totnes Pound’.  Here’s the label:

According to South West Business, the city of Bath is considering a local currency, the ‘Bath Pound’.  Jay Risbridger, one of its founders, was quoted as saying: 

“They have seen the benefits to Bristol – it’s really a no brainer. It makes absolutely no difference to the local council if they get their business rates in local pounds or pound sterling. It will be a really crucial part of it and will make the businesses feel secure.” 

Meanwhile, the neighbouring Bristol Pound is going from strength to strength, now launching Real Economy Pop-Up Markets across the city, making local food available affordably to people in different communities.  They write: 

Real Economy pop-up markets will have a range of fresh produce stalls, cooking demos, music, makers and bakers. With a focus on home-grown Bristolian enterprise, each market is unique and will showcase the delights that the local community has to offer.

And the Bristol Pound will be, one assumes, most welcome at all of them. 

Peterborough in Transition have got together with the folks at the Green Backyard to open a new shop!  Here’s a short video about the Green Backyard: 

So the shop is called Backyard Food, and sells local food, and some other stuff too.  Here’s a couple of photos: 

We wish them all the very best.  Abbots Langley Transition held their Community Market again recently and Transition Town Kinsale recently held their Springamagig, their annual benefit fundraiser in the amphitheatre at Kinsale Further Education College.  Here’s the poster: 

Transition Loughborough tweeted: 

Wednesday evening work parties start again at the community allotment from 5pm tonight. Sowing, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting!

As part of the St Albans Film Festival, Transition St. Albans ran a screening of the film Trashed.  They are also doing a survey, so if you live locally and have the time to answer 10 quick questions, click here. 

There has been the usual outpouring of Transition initiative newsletters too recently.  Here’s a selection: Transition Linlithgow, Transition Letchworth, Transition Stroud, Transition Cambridge, Transition KW, Crystal Palace Transition Town, Transition Town Totnes and Transition Town West Kirby.

Transition Stourbridge have been out cleaning up along the banks of the River Stour.  Here’s a photo (left).    

In Bedfordshire, the different groups from across the county got together for a day to share experiences and to enthuse and inspire each other.  It was an event that John Bell very kindly wrote up for us here.  

Transition Town Tooting have already started thinking about their Foodival event for this year.  Here’s a link, and they posted the following photo too: 

 

Ealing Transition announced recently:

“Just up the Uxbridge Road, our new neighbours in Transition, Southall Transition, are holding their first public event on Friday this week.  Formed by a diverse group from the Southall community, they are certainly off to a flying start!”

You can read more about what they are up to in Southall here.  Transition Dorchester tweeted:  

Come to our AGM Saturday 3rd May 4.00pm. Bonfire and barbie to celebrate the spring. Wood to burn, convivial chat, bring something to cook. 

Transition Town Wivenhoe have started a Bike Kitchen, helping people fix their bikes every Monday and some Sundays.  Here are a couple of photos:

Transition Usk are now up and running, and held their launch event on May 14th, with members of Abergaveny Transition coming along to share their experiences.  Transition West Bridgford just held their Open EcoHomes weekend.  Transition Kentish Town in London held a public meeting to discuss the idea of setting up a community energy company.  They wrote the following which I thought was rather beautiful: 

We set up Transition Kentish Town four years ago. We’ve done all kinds of things together – film showings, marmalade making, nettle and elderflower workshops, gardening adventures, apple pressing, draught busting, seed swaps, talks and films.

One of our bigger projects was setting up our community-led veg box scheme in 2012. The idea was to start something that went beyond volunteering, something that could generate income and jobs, build an alternative food supply chain outside the supermarket economy, and lock in social change.

We’re coming together today with our neighbouring Transition Initiatives in Dartmouth Park and Tufnell Park to see if we can create another ambitious social enterprise: a community-owned energy company.

Good luck folks. The meeting was described later on Twitter by one person who attended as “awesome”. Back in Totnes, one of the recent highlights was the Totnes Entrepreneurs Forum.  It had a plug in the local paper, and in the Totnes REconomy newsletter, and the actual day was amazing.  

The day featured a setting out of the Circular Economy at the local scale, getting people to interact as much as possible, and ended with the ‘Community of Dragons’ event which was quite extraordinary.  Five businesses pitched and received all kinds of support from people across the community.  Here’s a photo of the pitching event: 

 

Transition Homes, the project in Totnes seeking to build 25 affordable homes on the edge of the town, just held their public consultation event.  Here’s a short film about it: 

Rob will go to Germany in the summer and speak at 19h on July 2 in Berlin and on July 3 in Bielefeld to present the German version Einfach.Jetzt.Machen! of his latest book (together with the co-translator and contributor Gerd Wessling and fellow Transition activists from all over Germany).  There will also be networking and sharing possibilities for all German & Transition Initiativen in Bielefeld that day; starting from 16h on July 3rd in the University of Bielefeld.

Also from Germany, this is quite fun.  Rob Hopkins’ recent article ‘Why I closed my Amazon account’ has been translated into German and then read out on YouTube with accompanying images by a woman there who is campaigning against the expansion of Amazon in her community:

 

Also in Germany, Transition Bielefeld recently appeared on local radio to discuss their Repair Cafe:

 

In France 14  journalists and writers of the association JNE ( les Journalistes-écrivains pour la nature et l’écologie, the jounalists-writers for nature and ecology) decided to visit Totnes, the heart of the Transition movement. To pay their travel they decided to get money from crowdfunding via kisskissbank.com. Before the end deadline they raised 113 % of the required money to cover their travel costs.

The people who decided to fund them had in return the choice of different packages of their stories, including some issues of publications in other related magazines. They made a first report of their journey at the end of may. You can read their story with a lot of nice pictures of Totnes, Ben Brangwyn, the local market and other locations ; just take a look in this article (in French)

On the Transition Network site we heard from Aveiro em Transição in Portugal, when various members of their Core Group were asked to share their thoughts on the impact the group has been having.  It makes for fascinating reading.  In Australia, Mundaring in Transition recently had their launch event, which was captured in this article.  Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins also made a short video for the event.  Here it is… 

From Brazil we heard recently from Monica Picavea about Transition Brasilandia’s Sustainable Health Fair, a fascinating look at what Transition looks like in that setting, and when Transition meets public health.   

In the US, Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition were the subject of a great article on the REconomy blog.  Here is a map of the food forest they are planning to plant soon, but the whole piece is very inspiring.  

Also in the US, Transition Town Media (PA) celebrates International Happiness Week and here Dr. Joni Carley, who initiated and helped orchestrate the event, reports on the successful outcomes of Happiness Week which involved collaborating with over 30 local organisations.  Finally, Transition Town Manchester (VT) are busy getting new recruits to their Community & Educational Garden and also held a Wild Edible Walk and Talk.

Then there’s this, which is just frankly the kind of random thing one comes across sometimes when you type ‘Transition Town’ into YouTube as a search.  I can offer little explanation other than it appears to be Transition Missoula.  And a kazoo. 

Lastly, but by no means leastly, Transition Network’s Sophy Banks recently gave a webinar for Transition US which explored the ideas around Inner Transition.  It’s an inspiring immersion in the subject, which will give you plenty to reflect upon before we meet again next month. 

That’s it for this month!  Do send us your stories, and see you in a few weeks…

 

 

 

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20 May 2014

Angela Raffle of Transition Bristol: "Health and sustainability are like twins"

Angela Raffle is a founder member of Transition Bristol and a public health worker in the city.  She was one of the people that produced the Bristol Peak Oil Report. But her experience was that because the government says that fossil fuel depletion isn’t a concern, the NHS finds it very hard to act on the issue.  Since 2010 her focus has been on finding ways to bring the public health message and Transition together in issues as diverse as transport and food, with varying results.  As part of our month on ‘Transition and Health’, we wanted to hear her thoughts on the challenges, and the opportunities, of seeing Transition as public health.  

Where are the largest areas where energy consumption can be reduced within the NHS do you think? Where are the places where it could make the biggest impact quickest?

Procurement is the big one, and a big chunk of that is pharmaceuticals. That’s the entire pharmaceutical industry, in terms of the drugs, the packaging, the whole advertising schamoozle that goes behind it, flying people all over the world to conferences. It’s a very difficult one. Some of the pharmaceutical companies are taking it seriously, but we’re in this situation with the NHS that it’s a very politicised institution, it’s bound by government policy, and economic growth and jobs in the pharmaceutical industry are more important to the government than human health in a way.

Per capita the carbon footprint of the NHS is probably about half a tonne per head per year. If you gave people the choice “would you like to fly less or give up your entire entitlement to the NHS?” they’d say actually “I’ll fly less”. The NHS can reduce its carbon footprint a lot.

How do you characterise the pressures that the NHS finds itself under at the moment?

I see health as wider than the NHS. Health is an outcome really, and everything that the Transition movement is doing is good for health because it’s about clean water, clean air, good food, safety, security, connection with nature and towns that are liveable.

The NHS is a delivery mechanism for a huge and complex range of different forms of care. At the moment it’s a very difficult environment to work in because it’s going through enormous structural changes and the 2011 Health and Social Care Act which led to the 2012 Health and Social Care Bill has really fragmented the NHS a lot. It’s become a really heartbreaking field to work in, to try and get unified change.

In theory we’re looking at discussions around public health which seem to open up the potential for local food, the idea that hospitals could become more like market gardens or looking at things like where food comes from. Local food as strategies for public health seems to open up some interesting avenues that weren’t there before, do they?

Yes, it’s a really fruitful area of work. The big North Bristol NHS Trust which is Southmead Hospital is the first hospital in England to get Silver in the Soil Association’s Food for Life catering award. That flowed really from quite some years back when Prince Charles ran some May Day events. The Chief Executive of that large organisation was at one of his events and came back saying to her catering managers “how do we do this?”

They’ve worked really hard at it. They’ve built a new hospital and put kitchens in. Nottingham Trust is also similarly done really well, though I think that there’s been recent changes to their catering contract so some of that work has taken a step backwards. It’s about having enough people in the right places within the NHS organisation who see that even though it might cost a few pence more per head per meal, that price is worth it because it’s better for health, it’s better for the environment and better for local businesses.

Public health was recently moved out of the NHS and into councils. Why was that and what difference does that make to what you’re doing?

In some ways it made no difference to what I’m doing because I was already working with local government on transport, food, planning, built environment, that kind of thing. It hasn’t only moved public health into local government. It’s also created new organisations, NHS England and Public Health England, so at the moment public health people are saying, where is everybody? Half our colleagues are in organisations and we don’t quite know where they are, everybody’s in new jobs.

It’s my 13^th restructure in my career in public health. It’s immensely diverting because of the amount of paperwork. It’s like getting a divorce, knocking your house down and rebuilding it all in the same go. The links in local government are good but the funding cuts in local government create challenges.

Clinical Commissioning Groups, on paper at least, could potentially have a role if you had the right people in those, of really driving the process of local procurement and investing in on-site renewables and so on and so on. Can they do that, or is it a rather naïve interpretation of them?

They are very stretched, short of skills, criticised daily by politicians, and under threat of judicial review for any decision from people who quite understandably want to throw a spanner in the works with the current reorganisation which they see as simply selling the NHS to the private sector. The Health and Social Care Act had clauses and phrases within it which changed what’s at the heart of the NHS. When the NHS was established, its system aim was to deliver care fairly, free at the point of delivery universally to everyone no matter who they were.

The 2012 Act changes the duty of the Secretary of State to make sure that happens, so that healthcare becomes a commodity now. It won’t happen overnight but I’m just trying to be really honest with you because it’s only a matter of time before the NHS is just a brand and behind it are a lot of large multi-national organisations. So clinical commissioning groups, many of them are doing wonderful things, and people within the NHS have a strong culture of caring about not just personal health but community, the health of the whole community, the health of the whole ecosystem.

They are doing what they can and the NHS Sustainable Development Unit headed up by David Penchon [who we will be interviewing here next week] is helping them as much as they can, but there are also these other forces. It’s familiar territory to you – to us – in the Transition movement because in a way what the Transition movement is doing is setting up new prototypes that work at a local level irrespective of what’s going on in the big multinational corporations. In a way health will start doing that. We’ll start seeing community-owned companies saying “this is really fragmented, we’re going to set up to take over community care for old folk” or whatever.

There are already big links.  There are GP practices in Bristol which allow people to grow fruit and vegetables in the land around the practice. There are all sorts of visionaries. All I’m cautious about is any massive top-down led approach saying resource depletion and the environment mean we should all do this.

What would be the best way for community groups, Transition groups listening to this, to support their local health institutions in this kind of shift? What would this kind of shift look like if it was working in the kind of way that you’d like to see it working?

One of the strongest things is people who work in the health sector participating actively in Transition and those who don’t work in the health sector and who are aware of some of the issues we face extend a hand of friendship to people in the health sector and recognise the constraints that health sector workers are under.

This is the same across so many spheres. Every time I hear someone criticise the NHS my heart sinks because I take it personally, and I have to tell myself “no I mustn’t take it personally”. The NHS is very large and everything you say about it is probably true somewhere. So just forming those connections at a local level and seeing where it leads.

If you were to be able to wave a magic wand, if you became a Health Secretary of State tomorrow, what would be the three key things that would need to be changed in order to make the NHS more resilient, playing its part in terms of climate change and peak oil and so on?

I would want to see an honest appraisal of resource depletion and its impact on the health sector. I would commission that straight away. Because without that, it doesn’t matter how many people in the health sector are saying “the way we’re evolving our new models of care are less and less resilient and more and more resource intensive”.  It doesn’t matter how many people say that at a local level. The driver from the top becomes you can’t talk about that, there is no problem with energy and resources. So number one I’d commission a review from people who are independent of government and could look at the evidence and say what they felt they needed to say.

Number two, I’d reverse the key clauses in the 2012 Health and Social Care Act so we would still have a nationwide system committed to delivering care fairly and according to need.

Number three, I would put into the requirement for every health sector organisation clear measures that are about their transport footprint, their food procurement. Probably those two. The NHS has been good on energy use in buildings, but they haven’t really had any legitimate emphasis on their impact on transport and their impact on food.

I’d also want to invent what India are doing which would probably be quite hard legally, which is to have our own pharmaceutical industry that looks at using the simplest medicines and the most important medicines instead of this endless pursuit of more and more drugs that do less and less good.

So would I be correct to summarise that if the inspiration was to spark within the NHS there is quite a lot the NHS can do but the difficulties come with the procurement rules and the restrictions from the top down as to the degree of freedom that individual hospitals have?

I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head there. Once a year everyone in the South West gets together and we have a really brilliant residential school at Dartington, and we ran a session on contentious issues and used the example of fracking. Everybody at the workshop tables were asked to say if they were producing a health report on the impacts of extreme energy extraction what it would look like, and if they woke up in the future and the public health movement had done everything they could wish for what would it be like. Everybody came to the conclusion that big picture wise, from the public health perspective we shouldn’t even be thinking of extreme energy extraction for very many sound reasons.

In contrast, Public Health England were given a brief to say, in effect, we are going to do extreme energy extraction, please see if there is any evidence that this will cause direct damage to human health. Of course the answer to that is there isn’t much direct evidence yet. But that’s not the question we want to ask, so when you say the freedoms people have within the system, to take those big picture questions the freedoms aren’t really there. It doesn’t mean people can’t do a lot, we can do a lot but we have to be a bit creative about how we do it. And as you say, you have to join health and sustainability. They’re like twins and you do it on that double argument. 

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12 May 2014

Sarah Timmins: the Low Carbon Nurse

Sarah Timmins is a qualified adult nurse who is now doing a postgraduate qualification to become a health visitor.  She recently started the blog ‘UK Nurse Against Climate Change‘ which she describes as “my own private journey into a year, and hopefully much longer, of trying to raise awareness of climate change and its devastating effects on human health”.  “I’m passionate about what I do, I love nursing and I want to do something which will make a difference”, she writes.  So how’s it going, and what’s it like being a nurse within the NHS trying to raise awareness about climate change. 

On your blog you wrote about how ‘The Lancet’ and the UCL Institute for Global Health Commission called climate change “the biggest global health of the 21^st century”. You wrote “that’s a big statement, why should we get involved as nurses?” That’s my first question: why should nurses get involved with climate change?

We’re here to protect the public’s health. Especially nurses who are more involved in the public health field, but all nurses as well even if you’re working in a care home or in a paediatric unit, you are still there to protect health rather than just treat illness. The government’s got a big drive on preventing ill health as well as treating the symptoms of all the illnesses and actually if there’s something so big as they’re suggesting it’s going to affect every person on the planet, it really should be a health issue we take on board and try to do something about.

What form has that taken so far? What have you been doing so far?

The main thing I’ve been doing is trying to raise awareness really. It’s surprising how little it’s actually talked about. I think the more people talk about things, the more normalised it becomes then people start to take action, so raising awareness online or just through having conversations with people. Also, health visitors in particular have four principles that we work by. A few of them are searching for health needs and influencing policy that affects health. I’ve been trying to get involved with that through getting involved in the Divestment campaign which I feel personally would send out a very positive message.

What kind of reception have those conversations and you raising that issue had within the work context?

Some positive. A lot of people don’t know much about it, so when I bring up the impact it’s going to have on people’s health, not just 200 years into the future but what’s happening now and in the near future, people seem to be quite surprised, but they do get on board with it. People have responded to different degrees.

Some people have said they’d like to get more involved and others have just said “oh, I didn’t realise that”. It’s good that they’ve then gone home and they might then process that and when they watch the news start thinking about things in a different way. It’s good to get people a bit more positive about it.

In your daily experience as a nurse, where do you see the biggest carbon generating aspects of modern healthcare?

Pharmaceutical use and wastage in medicine in this country is a huge problem. If you’re using carbon to produce these drugs and then not using them that is a horrific problem that needs addressing. But also the main thing that I’ve come across is the use of cars. The transport, especially that community nurses use. It’s such a conundrum because we have to use our cars to drive around to people’s houses and there are times when I will see nurses who will drive two streets away and I think “you could walk!” It’s such a little thing but a policy addressing that issue I think will go a long way to making a difference.

What’s your vision of what a low carbon NHS would look like?

I’ve seen a lot of positive things. I’ve been looking at what a lot of different hospitals around the country are doing and I know that some of them have implemented policies with their building regulations which is really good, automatically shutting off their lights, responding to when people walk into the room, that sort of thing so they’re not left on all night.

Also they’ve introduced green spaces and allotments for healthcare workers within the hospital environment as well. More healthcare workers utilising cycling and walking, active transport would be really key I think. You can’t try and encourage people or patients to do things if you’re not willing to do them yourself.

I was really surprised to see The Lancet coming out so strongly about climate change and the need to really shift how we do stuff, and the role that healthcare has to play in that.

They have been really positive in making such a strong statement. I would be really keen to see the nursing community be as strong with their position on climate change and low carbon environments as well. The medical community seem to be all guns blazing at the moment with it, and it would be nice to get the nursing press on board as well.

Do you have any sense of how you might try and bring that about?

We’ve been talking to a couple of organisations about creating a global network of nurses on climate change, trying to get more nurses involved in it, not just in the UK but globally. There are a couple of organisations in the US and Australia who are a lot more involved with this, and I’m keen to get UK nurses mobilised.

A good place to start is always Universities. Students are ever so enthusiastic, so it would be really good to get it into the curriculum of public health nursing as a standard practice so that all nurses learn about sustainability and about the health effects of climate change, because it is such an important issue.

Actually something I’ve been thinking about would be putting in on Trust inductions, trying to get NHS Trusts to really put their position forward – this is the sort of thing that’s really important to us, and it’s as important as your fire training and your health and safety training. This is our sustainability policy and we think it’s important. Every healthcare worker should get training on it when they go into a job. It’s a pipe dream but I’ll certainly try.

You’ve just started doing a blog, how are you finding it and what are your hopes for that?

I’d like to keep going with it and explore different themes and get more deeply involved with it. I’m hoping to reach more people, more nurses, other healthcare workers and maybe get them involved too. It would be nice to reach more people really.

As a health visitor, how do you notice, if at all, in the UK setting the impact of climate change on the people who you visit and the people you’re looking after?

I work in quite an urban environment so the obvious thing is the air pollution. I seem to have a lot of young patients who have a lot of allergies, pollen allergies and asthma and I know that the pollen season’s getting longer and it’s been suggested that this is linked to climate change. There are lots of hospital admissions every year from asthma attacks and respiratory disease. It would be ignorant to bypass that and think there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s plenty we can do. There are cities around the world who implement low emissions zones to try and combat air pollution and it’s really important to notice that really.

I hope that more people realise a little bit more about the impacts it might have on people’s health, go away, read a bit more, have more conversations and let’s try and change something. 

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