Monthly archive for May 2014
Showing results 11 - 15 of 18 for the month of May, 2014.
12 May 2014
When people talk about ‘green jobs’ the health and care sector is not often on the list. We often think first about green technologies, renewable energy production, retrofitting and food and it was no different when we first sat down to plan the Economic Blueprint work in Totnes. When we agreed the key sectors that play a fundamental role in our community’s sustainability and resilience, and could create new livelihoods, the opportunities to grow the local food, retrofitting and renewables economy were obvious choices.
But adding in Health and Care? This seemed much less so, at first glance. Its inclusion was even questioned by some people in TTT who couldn’t see the how this should be a prime focus for Transition work. However to me, the person who initially suggested its inclusion, this seemed like a contradiction. I felt that to provide for our local resilience it is essential that the local community is as healthy as possible, both physically and mentally and many others agreed.
Our position was that caring for those that need extra help in our community could bring some new livelihoods and approaches to providing care and highlight the opportunity to find new ways to use other means of exchange to look after each other better, and in a way that went beyond the current ‘one size fits all’, siloed way of delivering services.
Besides the on going public spending cuts, which are leading to increased crisis (or worse, no) intervention due to lack of spending on prevention services, a number of issues threaten to complicate and challenge our future health and wellbeing. These include a growing population that is living longer, but without sufficient pension provision, and with expectations that medicine and care will be provided as needed.
Additionally the dire state of our economy is resulting in growing numbers of unemployed and insecurely employed people, particularly amongst the young, and the resulting stress and poverty is impacting on wellbeing, with serious effects on our mental health, further exacerbated by a lack of good affordable housing and climate change is projected to bring health and social impacts as a result of more floods, heat waves and other extreme weather events, as well as new water or food-borne viruses and diseases. Clearly the current system cannot continue to meet all of our needs, and is already under extreme pressure.
But there is much we can do in our own communities, using the assets we have and a focus on prevention and early intervention. Coupled with the provision of healthy food and comfortable homes this has the potential to meet our needs in a far better way – using a holistic, place-based approach and this is what we have been pursuing over the year in Totnes. Our starting point was a conversation with several council officers about their concerns regarding the axing of the Social Fund in its current (then) form.
Compounded by the myriad of other cuts and benefit ‘changes’ that were on their way they were all deeply worried about how this would impact on the most vulnerable members of the community and wanted to be able to raise awareness amongst residents and existing health and care agencies. Working together with the three tiers of local government and Totnes Caring, the primary source of support for the care of the vulnerable in Totnes, we started to think about how we could bring people together to discuss the threats we face in a positive, Transition type way which would enable us to commiserate, rage, cry and feel the frustration of being utterly powerless but then take all that energy and focus on how we could turn this on its head, take advantage of our shared knowledge, skills and the compassion we had in bucket loads and do something which would take back the power and create something truly special which met real, not perceived, needs.
Our first action was to organise a ‘Totnes Welfare Conference’ in October last year which invited statutory and voluntary organisations who support the vulnerable in Totnes to came together to talk about how we might work better, together and how Totnes could build on the strength of its community with many successful voluntary and charitable organisations, and for generally being “a town that cares” to face the major challenges ahead. Most crucially we asked people to step out of their professional roles and the potential for siloed thinking that this could engender and approach the day as an individual who could (and would) become vulnerable at some stage in their life.
On the day we started with an inspiring presentation from the great Hazel Stuteley then had two breakout sessions, the first on ‘imagining what a truly caring town would look like’ with everyone in groups answering the question: “If, in the two hours you have been in here Totnes had been transformed into the most caring town it could possibly be, how would that look, feel, smell like?” The second session focused on celebrating our already caring town and asked, “What we are proud of that happens here already?”
A full write up of the day can be found here but the two sessions created an overwhelming sense of opportunity, solidarity and impetus to act which was palpable. There was also an fantastic sense of liberation on the part of the people who were representing statutory services who had been truly inspired by being given the opportunity, in a safe, supportive environment, to talk about how they would ideally provide their service if they weren’t hindered by the increasingly institutionalised nature of public service delivery.
Everyone (over 50 participants!) left the day signed up to be involved in the next steps and a follow up meeting resulted in the inaugural Totnes Health and Welfare Day. We also agreed that the project needed a name and ‘Caring Town Totnes’ was born!
The main aim of this day was to enable organisations to meet each other and explore the potential for greater links and for people in the town to “drop in” and see some of the services on offer and share ideas for how to enhance provision in the area. The film below captures the results of the day beautifully, and the response of everyone involved was, again, overwhelmingly positive and engendered further enthusiasm for the next steps.
Since then we have been busy considering all the feedback and later this month will be setting up a steering group for the project and establishing working groups to look at setting up a community hub, further participatory and networking events, needs analysis and further engagement/consultation with the community and the pilot of a commissioning hub.
The commissioning hub is an exciting aspect of the work that has emerged through conversations with the Clinical Commissioning Group for the area and Devon County Council. DCC have identified a pot of money for a Community Impact Fund, principally to fund social care social enterprises and are in the process of asset transferring a large community building to us so we can create the community hub and have a base for the commissioning service.
We have been successful in being accepted as an ‘Our Place’ community which will fund some of the co-ordination of this work and we are truly excited about how this will not only create networks of support but also new livelihoods by creating and growing social enterprises and further developing models of social investment through the local credit union, community shares, peer to peer lending, skill sharing and the gift economy, linking in with the wider Reconomy work here in Totnes.
But the overwhelming positive thing about this work has been the sense of solidarity, goodwill and energy that has emerged. Whenever I talk to people about the project, they are truly delighted by the liberation of the approach and the opportunities it provides, using words like thrilled, brilliant and in the case of the lady who runs the Memory Café just welling up and giving me a huge hug.
Of course I have sleepless nights about ‘enabling’ the austerity agenda but this stuff has a potential that is just too good to pass up on principle, and I hope will join up with other amazing work happening across the country to show that the appropriate response to limited resources is not rhetoric about fecklessness but an acknowledgment that we’re all vulnerable and that together we’re stronger and happier.
Frances Northrop is Transition in Action Manager with Transition Town Totnes.
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12 May 2014
We are grateful to Rivka Kushner, Chris Buse, Blake Poland and Rebecca Hasdell for the following, which came in just slightly too late for our month on impact but which we’re posting anyway. The Transition Emerging Study: Examining the Trajectory of the Transition Movement in Canada looks at the work underway to understand Transition in that context.
“How has the Transition movement unfolded and taken root in Canada, what seems to be working, and how do we know? These are core questions guiding the Transition Emerging Study (TES), which seeks to understand how initiatives are seeking to build community resilience in the Canadian context.
The Transition Emerging Study starts from the premise that Transition Towns are an intriguing example of how social movements are responding to emerging global and local challenges. We are interested in Transition initiatives as places where cultural change occurs through creating new spaces for social learning about how to ‘live well in place’ in preparation for an energy-constrained, economically uncertain, and relocalized future.
The purpose of the study is to generate information about ‘lessons learned’ and ‘promising practices’ of Transition initiatives that can be useful to Transition movement leaders, participants, and for people engaged in environmental and community development work. Below, we briefly describe the TES research team, the study’s methods, and what we have learned so far about the emergence and impact of the Transition movement in Canada.
The Research and Advisory Team
TES is a three year research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada . Our team includes social science researchers from 7 universities across Canada, and students in several of these institutions. A Movement Advisory Group, comprised of Transition leaders across Canada, meets several times a year and advises the team on methdodology and study implementation including issues of relevance, fit, utility, and knowledge translation.
Research Methods
TES utilizes a range of methods to help answer our research questions. It can be thought of as a collection of smaller studies, where each study informs the next. Table 1 outlines each phase of our study and the associated timelines:
We are currently in Year 2 of the study. The Web Scan consisted of an exploratory analysis of TIs in Canada through online searches. This provided the foundation for our study because it generated a database of TIs in Canada, preliminary information about where TIs are located and how long they have been active/inactive, and the range of activities taking place. The Founder Survey was an electronic survey that was completed by TI (co-)founders and steering committee members identified through the Web Scan.
The survey included questions about organizational and logistic matters, events and meetings, perceived strengths and impact of TIs, and challenges facing the movement. Our next data collection method was 20 in-depth interviews of TI (co-)founders and steering committee members, sampled from the Founder Survey to give us a range of initiatives based on location (e.g. urban/rural/suburban, north/south), size, length of time in operation, and ‘vitality’ (level of activity).
These interviews provided a personal narrative of how the initiative emerged, how it operates, who is involved, and key challenges and successes. A second TES survey was directed at TI participants, regardless of level of involvement. The survey asked participants about their perceptions of the TI, involvement in activities, individual environmental practices, and the diversity of participants in the TI.
Transition in Canada
From the Web Scan, we know that as of 2012, there were 88 TIs at various stages of development in Canada (this includes several that have gone ‘dormant’). TIs are spread throughout the country, with the greatest number initiatives in the province of Ontario (43). As illustrated in Figure 1, there was a steady increase in the number of new initiatives from 2008 to 2011, with a peak in 2011 and a decrease in the number of new initiatives in 2012.
Among the 47 TIs across Canada that participated in the Founder Survey, the average age of TIs was between 2.5-3 years. Most TIs had 6 or more organizers (67%), though one third of TIs had 5 or fewer organizers (33%). About half of initiatives met once a month (50%). TIs are responsible for organizing numerous events in their communities. Of all TIs surveyed, 19% held multiple events in a single month, 38% held events roughly once a month, and 21% held an event every 2-4 months.
Over a two year period, most TIs engaged in the following: meetings, booth or display at community events, speakers, skill development workshops, education or awareness building events, an email listserv, and celebrations. Many TIs also had newsletters and work bees. Other events included film screenings, training programs, and events and programs around food.
Perceived Impact of Transition
A question in the Founder Survey asked participants to describe the perceived impact of the TI on their community as either strong, moderate, weak, or no impact. One third of (co-)founders and steering committee members across Canada reported the perceived impact to be moderate (32%). More than half of TIs reported having a weak impact (53%), while a small number of TIs reported having no impact (8%). No TIs reported a strong impact. Regional variations are observed: for example, in Ontario most TIs reported having a moderate impact on the community (62% vs 32% for Canada as a whole) and one third of TIs reported a weak impact (31% vs 53% for the country).
An open-ended question in the Founder Survey asked participants what event organized by their TI had the greatest impact in the community and why. These included film screenings, public forums or conferences, and potlucks or local food events. Indications of impact most frequently mentioned were attendance (including the addition of new people), new connections with other organizations or key contacts, the creation of new projects or working groups, learning a new skill, having fun, and feeling ‘moved’. A few participants attributed the high impact to successful awareness and promotion of the event.
In all, TIs in Canada are still relatively young and (co-)founders and steering committee members have varied perspectives on the impact of Transition and Transition events on the community. Our data suggests that many TIs are using size (attendance) and growth (number of new participants, new connections, new projects) to assess the impact of Transition-related activities.
It is notable that visible, action-oriented measurements of impact such as size and growth are likely important metrics for initiatives trying to get established in a community. However, it appears that ‘soft’ measures related to the psychology of transition and ‘inner transition’—while perhaps more difficult to measure— (e.g. having fun, and inspiring others), also merits consideration in terms of assessing the ‘success’ or ‘impact’ of TI events and activities.
Our analysis is preliminary at this point, and many questions remain unanswered. In the coming months we will be deepening our analysis of the data we have collected, and reaching out to the movement to share what we are learning and generate new insights through a collaborative learning process of regional dialogical workshops using a “Structured Story-Dialogue” method.
Upcoming Results
Join the TES Facebook page and check out our website for study updates, research results summary flyers, and more. Get in touch with us by leaving a comment on our website, Facebook page, or by emailing us at contact@transitionemergingstudy.ca.
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8 May 2014
Clive Hamilton is an Australian academic and author. His last two books were Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change and more recently a book published last year on geoengineering called Earthmasters: the dawn of the age of climate engineering. It is both a chilling and a fascinating read, an insight into something I didn’t know that much about, engineering the climate in response to climate change. We caught up with him by Skype, and began by asking him, “what’s geoengineering?”
“It’s a range of technologies aimed at offsetting the effects of climate change. They fall into two broad classes: the so-called carbon dioxide removal methods and the solar radiation management methods. There are a couple of dozen in each of those classes. The carbon dioxide removal methods aim to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere one way or another, fix it in some safer form and perhaps bury it underground or under the oceans, in perpetuity it’s hoped.
Solar radiation management involves a number of schemes whose object is to reduce the amount of solar radiation or sunlight reaching the earth’s surface and thereby to cool the planet. Solar radiation management methods of course are not tackling climate change at source, but attempting to deal with one of the symptoms – the major symptom – of human-induced climate change and that is the warming of the globe. But it doesn’t deal with the other symptoms of excessive greenhouse gas emissions, notably the acidification of the oceans.
The thing that alarmed me reading ‘Earthmasters’ is how far progressed the science and the politics around geoengineering are. Can you give us a sense of where it’s at now?
Climate scientists and others have dabbled in geoengineering schemes for 20 or so years. It was only in 2006 when the famous scientist Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, published an article saying the situation is so dire that we need a plan B and therefore we need to start a major research programme on solar radiation management, on a method known as sulphate aerosol spraying. With that article, Crutzen broke the taboo amongst climate scientists on talking about and researching geoengineering and there has been a huge growth in publications in scientific journals on a range of geoengineering schemes.
There’s now a significant community of climate scientists studying geoengineering schemes and publishing their results in professional journals but also in the grey literature. There are a range of conferences and in fact it’s gained so much momentum that the IPCC in its recent 5th assessment report has for the first time included an evaluation of geoengineering as a response to climate change.
On the political front, I think it’s true to say that the taboo on talking about geoengineering remains. We can imagine, for example, if President Obama said that America’s response to climate change will be to research a programme of coating the earth with a layer of sulphate aerosols to reduce the levels of sunlight reaching the surface. There’d be uproar and mayhem and the United States would be accused, legitimately, of shirking its responsibilities, of refusing to tackle this threat except through Dr Strangelove kinds of technologies.
There’s a big taboo, politically, on talking about geoengineering in public, although we know that in private on Capitol Hill in the United States for example, and indeed here in the parliament in Canberra, there are politicians, principally Conservative ones, who are in their offices speculating on the desirability of geoengineering as a substitute or a complement to emission reduction methods which they concede are manifestly inadequate.
Perhaps a more interesting development on the politics of it, whilst it’s not part of the mainstream political debate; there are a number of right-wing think tanks in the United States who are taking seriously the geoengineering response to climate change.
To the best of your knowledge, has it actually happened on any meaningful scale anywhere in the world yet?
No, it hasn’t. There have been a few experiments carried out, particularly with the geoengineering scheme known as ocean iron fertilisation. In the atmosphere there have been no serious experiments carried out on any geoengineering scheme. I must stress that this is despite the claims of the so-called chemtrails activists who have been claiming for many years that the government – and they often don’t specify which government, it’s a sort of generalised oppressive force, perhaps the UN – engage in the spraying of chemicals out of the backs of commercial and military aircraft over wide areas.
They never really say what kind of chemicals, but these chemicals are sprayed by ‘the government’ in order to destroy crops or control our minds one way or another. The chemtrails conspiracy theories should be dismissed out of hand. We are, after all, serious about science and there are no serious scientists, no cloud physicists or other kinds of atmospheric scientists, who can find any evidence whatsoever for these chemtrails claims. So we should not be misled by chemtrails activists who have leapt on geoengineering as some kind of vindication of their crazy claims.
What do the solutions that geoengineering offers tell us about the mindset that got us into this climate mess in the first place?
There’s a range of views in what might be called the geoengineering community. If you look at somebody like Paul Crutzen, who has been called the caretaker of life on the planet, he’s a man who is deeply anxious about the implications of climate change but believes the major nations of the earth are so incapable of responding adequately that we’re going to end up with some kind of climate emergency that if not stopped would lead to catastrophe and therefore we must have this Plan B.
But what we see in fact is climate engineering heavily influenced by a particular kind of American technocratic thinking. The view is that humankind has intervened, largely successfully in natural systems for a very long time, so why should we not attempt to regulate the earth’s climate system as a whole? Humans can generate technological means to exercise control over the climate system. Given the links of the climate system to other parts of the earth’s system, this means exercising control over the earth in its entirety.
In writing my book ‘Earthmasters’, I traced some very interesting and multifarious links between many prominent scientists, particularly in the United States, working on geoengineering and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which was, along with Los Alamos, one of the two principal nuclear weapons research facilities in the Cold War. There are a lot of links of personnel and research associations.
In fact, one of the first papers to advocate sulphate aerosol spraying was written by Edward Teller, the godfather of the United States nuclear weapons programme in the Cold War and a virulent anti-communist who believed that the power of the United States lies above all in its control over massive natural forces. In his case, control took the the form of the hydrogen bomb, and various nuclear weapons. There’s a similar kind of mindset–that humankind is the species on earth that has the capacity and possibly the right to develop these extraordinarily powerful forms of technological invention, this control of massive powers.
This kind of thinking naturally links weapons research in the Cold War to some kinds, and I stress only some kinds, of geoengineering, notably sulphate aerosol spraying. The idea is that we can coat the earth in the upper atmosphere with a permanently supplemented layer of tiny particles that would turn down by 1 or 2 or 3% the amount of sunlight that reached the earth’s surface and thereby control the temperature of the earth and the climate system as a whole.
What ethical issues does geoengineering raise? What are the key ethical concerns for you?
First of all it should be said that for someone like Paul Crutzen, one of the most profound ethical problems is the impact of global warming itself and the unequal effect that it will have. The poor and vulnerable of the world will be harmed most by human induced global warming and therefore we have a duty to stop that if we can through technological means.
I must stress that some schemes are more benign but we’re focusing on the grander ones that aim to regulate the climate of the earth as a whole. These schemes have some profound ethical dilemmas. If humankind has the capacity to intervene in the earth’s climate systems so as to regulate the temperature of the planet, then we have to ask who are these human beings who are going to do this? It is unlikely to be a democratic decision, perhaps through the UN.
It’s much more likely to be a technological system of control in the hands of one or a small number of powerful nations such as China, Russia or the United States. If one government has the power to instruct a group of scientists or engineers to turn the earth’s thermostat down a bit, down a bit more, no up a bit more, whose interests are they going to be thinking of when they adjust the temperature? Not the interests of the Bangladeshi peasants facing rising sea levels. Not the Indian or Pakistani rice farmers who may soon be severely affected by some shift in the monsoon, which is one of the possible impacts of sulphate aerosol spraying.
We also must remember that generals have always dreamed of controlling the weather. Here we’re going from weather, which is a local phenomenon, to the climate of the earth as a whole. So we can expect the whole process to be militarised or at a minimum have profound geo-strategic implications.
One further ethical dilemma within a terrible tangle of ethical dilemmas is the role of expert scientists, those who possess a highly specialised knowledge at the disposal of their political masters. Those masters will use it to make decisions about where to set the earth’s thermostat. So we have a situation in which the wellbeing of everyone on the planet would potentially lie in the hands of a group of technocrats based in the Arizona desert or in some nondescript facility on the outskirts of Shanghai.
You can see that this generates severe ethical dilemmas and explains why a grouping of nations of the South have started to move at international fora, notably the Convention on Biodiversity, to develop methods of regulating research into geoengineering technologies.
You write in the book of the connections between geoengineers, oil companies, neo-liberal economists and politicians. This turning of the biggest challenge we’ve faced, in terms of climate change, into an opportunity for new technologies, felt to me like the last stand of business as usual. Does it actively undermine the pursuit for international agreement on climate change?
Firstly it’s important to stress that there are some people engaged in geoengineering research who find abhorrent the idea that geoengineering should be used as a substitute for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. They have been driven into research on geoengineering because they believe that Plan A, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, will not work and therefore we need a Plan B.
But there are others with less noble motivations, who see geoengineering, particularly sulphate aerosol spraying, as a substitute for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, as a way of protecting the political-economic system from change, from the kind of power shift that a new energy economy based on zero or very low emissions energy technology would entail.
Of course, measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions are not going to be especially difficult economically around the world, but they are going to challenge, they are challenging the market and political power of perhaps the most powerful corperations on earth, the oil and coal companies and those heavily dependent on fossil fuel energy.
We are seeing some of those fossil fuel companies dip their toes into the emerging area of geoengineering research. It’s important to stress that it’s not the case that the whole thing is being run by the oil companies, that they are somehow pulling the strings from behind a curtain of invisibility. They’re not. This whole push towards geoengineering has come quite independently, but having seen it emerge, the oil companies are starting to undertake small engagements, Shell for example and BP and ConocoPhilips have made small investments in certain kinds of geoengineering research.
A bit more insidiously, Murray Edwards, a tar sands billionaire in Canada, has invested in a company founded by David Keith, perhaps the principal scientific advocate of geoengineering research, a company called Carbon Engineering Limited which is developing air capture technologies. Murray Edwards can see that it may well be the case if his tar sands investments succeed and lock in massive amounts of carbon dioxide emissions in decades to come, then the world community in desperation may well turn to these geoengineering companies. So he wants a little slice of that action too. He’s in a way hedging his bets.
One other thing that’s important to mention here is that there’s been a flurry of patents taken out by private corporations and individuals over a range of geoengineering technologies–by the scientists themselves, entrepreneurs and companies who just see a commercial opportunity if the world shifts towards geoengineering. There’s one important company called Intellectual Ventures run by a man named Nathan Myhrvold who was chief technology officer at Microsoft. There are a number of heavy hitters in the geoengineering community who have a financial or other stake in Intellectual Ventures.
That company has taken out patents on more than one technology for regulating the global climate. This of course raises some very serious ethical concerns, that private corporations should own the intellectual property for regulating the climate of the earth as a whole.
The theme of the Transition Network website this month, this interview sits as part of this, is around health and Transition in relation to promoting health locally. What are the public health implications of geoengineering?
The health implications of geoengineering depend heavily on which kind of technology we’re talking about. If we’re talking about biologically-based air capture, or carbon dioxide capture from the ambient air–so technologies like growing trees or algae, capturing the carbon dioxide that way and burying it somewhere underground for a very long time–then the health implications are probably minimal. Of course they have to be weighed against the massive health implications of climate change which are already very apparent and are becoming more severe.
When we’re talking about other grander technologies, again I’m thinking of sulphate aerosol spraying which is kind of a landmark technology here, it’s a complex question. On the one hand, by reducing the amount of global warming, which it could do, it would have health benefits.
On the other hand, it’s going to have side effects that could be very damaging to the health of people around the world. For instance, as I mentioned, it’s thought it may shift the Indian monsoon which is vital to the food supply for a billion people living in Pakistan and India. It’s thought that sulphate aerosol spraying will cause severe damage to the ozone layer with serious impacts.
So there’s no general answer to that question. Each technology needs to be investigated to evaluate the kinds of effects on human health and indeed animal and plant health.
One of the people who’s an advocate for geoengineering is Stuart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Discipline, who is part of a group of people who called themselves ‘eco-pragmatists’, who argue that GM and nuclear and geoengineering are good because science shows that they work, and who would brand yourself and myself no doubt as luddites or anti-science for even having qualms about geoengineering. What additional filters do you believe that we should put new technologies through before suggesting their widespread use?
Stuart Brand is part of an interesting, and in my view quite worrying, new grouping of ‘eco-pragmatists’ who essentially say that humankind is the technological animal. Our technology has produced very great benefits and advantages in the past, why should we not go for broke, develop the technologies and use them to take control of the earth as a whole? I don’t know what’s happened to Stuart Brand, I don’t know whether he’s stopped smoking something, but he’s really undergone quite a dramatic transformation. Stuart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalogue all those years ago had a different kind of social analysis, a different kind of social vision to the capitalist greed-oriented and consumerist society that we had when he first wrote it, and that we have on steroids now.
Because the kind of vision that he now puts forward, along with the eco-pragmatists in the United States, is essentially a powerful defence of the status quo. These people argue that the bearers, the implementers of technology are private corporations and so environmentalists should get on board with capitalism, even capitalism reddest in tooth and claw, and help provide the financial incentives for corporations to pursue the cheapest and perhaps the most technologically advanced option, which may be using sulphate aerosols.
I see the ecopragmatists as essentially a new group of apologists for the prevailing economic and political order, people who claim to be environmentalists but in fact have a vision of environmentalism which is not much more than painting a pale green tinge over the prevailing economic and political system, the same system that has given us the problem..
To see the eco-pragmatists become the handmaidens of those who have caused the problem, and have acted so vigorously to stop the world responding to the problem in the most appropriate and effective way, really leaves me breathless.
You’ve written four books now about climate change. Next December in Paris is COP 21, the latest round of the COP negotiations. We interviewed Sir David King here recently who was the Chief Scientific Advisor here in the UK who was very positive, feeling that this was the time that something would come out of this process. Is your sense that anything useful may come out of it, and what for you feels like what needs to come out of that process in order to be meaningful?
It’s easy to be pessimistic about international political processes, and who isn’t? We certainly have a plethora of evidence of failure, notably Copenhagen which left everyone feeling so depressed Environmental activists could barely get themselves off the ground for a year or two. But I think we have to remember that history is often extremely unpredictable and there can be a gathering of forces for action that aren’t necessarily apparent.
We can point to potentially helpful trends; of course we can point to more depressing trends. One of the more hopeful trends is that there’s certainly progress in some crucial nations, particularly China. I think that China may be one that takes climate change very seriously. If an entente can be reached with the United States then I think some major steps could be made.
It’s also true that there have been some quite marked technological breakthroughs in the last two or three years that certainly make the task of technological transition easier once the world does really get serious about it. I’m not ruling it out. I guess if we put our realist hats on, particularly if we were betting a large amount of money on it, we’d bet against any substantial breakthrough happening in Paris. But who knows – I’m Mr Pessimism, having written ‘Requiem for a Species’, a book that most people, when they read it, sends them in to a deep depressive funk for three to six months, because it speaks the truth.
I’m not naturally a pessimistic person but there’s a point where healthy illusions become dangerous delusions, and some maintain their illusions for far too long in the face of all the evidence. My friends who are environmentalists are naturally optimistic people, but they were not listening to what the scientists were really saying. But I think the mood of the environmental movement has shifted quite markedly towards a more realistic conception of where we’re at, and it’s ugly.
Requiem for a Species suggested that runaway climate change is all but inevitable. Is there a point in that process where you would consider geoengineering an option, and if so, which technology would you favour? How bad does it have to get before Clive Hamilton thinks, “oh, sod it, go on then?”
People ask me whether I’m for or against it, and having written ‘Earthmasters’ clearly I’m a sceptic. That is, I’m not convinced that the technology, thinking particularly of sulphate aerosols, could be implemented in the foreseeable future in a way that wouldn’t carry massive problems that would outweigh the benefits. But, as the earth heats, the attraction of radical technological intervention will grow because the need to make some kind of Plan B response could become desperate.
It’s impossible to say when that point will come. Nevertheless I recognise there are circumstances in which the situation may be so dire that the world – and of course there is the question is what is meant by ‘the world’ – decides that these risky technologies really have to be used. I may be in a position where I have to, with heavy heart and deep anxiety, say on balance it has to be done. But the situation would have to be truly dire.
What can people do about it?
The first thing is to become informed. That’s why I wrote the book. Before I wrote it there were a few reports being written by scientific or quasi-scientific organisations all of which said we must have a massive research programme. It would be a program controlled by elite scientists without any oversight essentially. And then there were a whole bunch of scientific papers which were beyond the reach of most lay people. There were a couple of popular books which were really a bit of gee-whizzery.
So concerned citizens need to get a better idea of what geoengineering is scientifically, what the politics of it are, what the forces gathering behind it are. So once they have become informed, and of course that’s a continuing process, they have to think what to do about it organisationally. There are a couple of groups starting to work on it, in particular the ETC group, is based in Canada. It’s been campaigning for a while and for a small organisation has had a big impact.
But I think it’s also important for people who are members of environment groups, like Greenpeace, RSPB, and Friends of the Earth, to start getting their organisations involved. Most environment organisations large and small in the United States and in Australia, really don’t want to talk about geoengineering. The reasons are usually complex. One is that they feel as though if they start talking about it they will validate the discussion of geoengineering, which they don’t want to do.
Others feel that there’s so much on their plate that they don’t have the resources or the capacity to get across geoengineering. Others believe that as long as it’s not on the political agenda there’s no point in diverting people and resources to it because there’s no one to lobby yet. And others in the United States are often dependent on funding sources that they acquire for particular projects; they have enough trouble getting money for the things they want to do, so they don’t think they could raise funds for things they don’t particularly want to do.
So the reasons are complex, but I think sooner or later the environment groups are going to have to come to grips with geoengineering and they should do so sooner rather than later because the whole thing is gathering so much momentum that every environmentalist is going to have to take a well-informed stance on the issue.
So that’s what I would urge people to do.
Lastly, what does geoengineering potentially mean for democracy? What are the implications for democracy both within nation states and also globally?
Well certainly it’s a technology that has the capacity to regulate the climate system of the earth as a whole – well I only have to say it don’t I? The mind runs off – who’s going to control it, who are they going to consult, will it be run by the military, what happens when it goes wrong? What role will the UN have in it? Will there be some kind of international oversight? It’s one thing to turn the thermostat down but what if it all goes pear-shaped and the system has to be stopped? Who’s going to make those decisions?
But the more immediate problem is not the question of who will control the technologies when they’re deployed, but who is controlling the research? I don’t think it’s wise to oppose all research into geoengineering technologies as a matter of principle. The more important question is who has oversight in the research programme? Which bodies have a role to play in regulating it and setting the direction?
At the moment, it’s essentially private organisations, scientists, government researchers in China and Russia for example. The people who would perhaps be affected most by geoengineering, should it ever eventuate, are people in countries of the South. So I think the urgent issue is to bring some democratic control over the research programme that is happening now around the world.
As things stand, a number of those countries of the South are using international fora like the London Convention on ocean dumping and the Convention on Biological Diversity to put a damper on research in to geoengineering. But what I think it needs is some kind of international regulatory process that would allow the nations of the world to have oversight, perhaps just beginning with a research registry and transparency in research efforts, but leading to an international accord for regulatory control.
At the moment there is no international law governing the research or the deployment of sulphate aerosol spraying. Any country could do it now and there is no international law to stop them. In fact, a billionaire with a Messiah Complex like Richard Branson could start doing it next week.
So what I think we need is some international instrument to govern this technology. For my money, the best avenue would be to develop a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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6 May 2014
Health care is a very important issue to Transition Brasilandia, especially because in a low income community such as ours, many diseases appear frequently. To help with the prevention and awareness raising about taking care of your health, the event is promoted by 5 Basic Health Units of the Territory and now 30 partners from Transition movement. The Sustainable Health Fair (Feira da Saúde Sustentável) takes place in the Linear Park of Damaceno neighborhood.
It brings together many activities that help people to learn how to live better, to better manage day to day stress and connect them with the health agencies. Last year was the third time we ran it, and it brought together more than 3000 people.
It features many activities which interpret health in an wider way, in ways that try to make people feel better about life, and happier. Activities include: breathing and stretching classes, walking and meditation, a trade fair, the passing on and preservation of traditional childrens games; AIDS awareness, oral hygeine, an mobile display about energy awareness from an energy company, a walk in Canivete Park, education on toxic plants and how to identify them, and campaigns about diseases such as dengue fever and rabies.
There are local talent shows for artists and performers in the community, which helps make them feel more confident, and builds self esteem. Many people go to this fair to share their knowledge, so a fascinating range of workshops are also offered, such as how to make a rainwater collection system.
The Health Fair is just one of the health projects of TT Brasilandia. Another great initiative is the Food Security Project, which connects the knowledge of how to cook with a wide range of vegetables (seeds, flowers, roots and fruit) to the community food gardens. We have already enabled 160 health agents with the social technology of Dra Clara Brandão, about how to make meals more nutritional, and how to grow and eat more unusual plants. This agents use to visit all the community and share their knowledge.
Today we have 3 food gardens in these three neighborhoods that we are more directly working with, Jardim Guarani, Jardim Damaceno e Jardim Paulistano, and we are trying to expand this project. Brasilandia is a community with 246, 000 people, and formed by some neighborhoods and many slums, located in North Zone of São Paulo, Brazil. Transition Brasilandia was the first projects of Transition in a slum in the world.
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6 May 2014
Our theme for May is ‘Transition and Health’. This month we’ll be looking at how public health professionals are already responding to challenges of climate change and resource depletion and at how a more Transition-inspired approach might help to deepen that. We’ll be talking to nurses and doctors, to those responsible for sustainability within the National Health Service and to one of the authors behind The Lancet’s extraordinary recent ‘Manifesto for Planetary Health’. We’ll hear from people involved in Transition who are doing great work in their communities to make them healthier places, from the author of the first Health Impact Assessment of a Transition town, and from the people working to make whole cities healthier places. We’ll start by hearing from Clive Hamilton, author of ‘Earthmasters’, about the public health impacts of that most extreme response to climate change, geoengineering.
For my opening piece this month, I want to ask the question “what would a Transition hospital look like?” In many communities, the hospital is one of the largest employers, the largest procurer of food and energy, and a key focal point for many people in the community. A good place to start is with a report from the World Health Organisation called Healthy Hospitals, Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Addressing climate change in health care settings. It sets out ‘7 Elements of a Climate-Friendly Hospital’:
- Energy efficiency: reduce hospital energy consumption and costs through efficiency and conservation measures.
- Green building design: build hospitals that are responsive to local climate conditions and optimized for reduced energy and resource demands.
- Alternative energy generation: produce and/or consume clean, renewable energy onsite to ensure reliable and resilient operation.
- Transportation: use alternative fuels for hospital vehicle fleets; encourage walking and cycling to the facility; promote staff, patient and community use of public transport; site health-care buildings to minimize the need for staff and patient transportation.
- Food: provide sustainably grown local food for staff and patients.
- Waste: reduce, re-use, recycle, compost; employ alternatives to waste incineration.
- Water: conserve water; avoid bottled water when safe alternatives exist.
As I argued in my recent piece in the Coop News, institutions can gain a great deal by collaborating and working with local community organisations, and seeing that as being central to their health and wellbeing agenda. Let’s see what we might be able to add to the WHO’s list.
Design for beauty: most hospitals, let’s face it, are pretty soulless and uninspired buildings. As Christopher Alexander puts it in The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth (2012):
“If we examine … newly built environments during the period from 1900 to 2010, and judge their human quality from the point of view of our psychology, our emotional states, our social and mental well-being, our happiness, our joy in life, then we shall reluctantly be forced to acknowledge that the contemporary efforts we (as a people) are making to build living environments, are becoming less and less successful with each decade that goes by”.
While introducing the work of local artists to hospitals can help a bit, it really is no replacement for creating new buildings which embody healthy design, in terms of materials used, access to daylight, busy areas and quiet corners. It need not cost more, when rebuilding is to take place, to create a hospital which is beautiful, life-affirming and nourishing, but the benefits would be huge.
Create a new economy: A recent report by the Landscape Institute on the role landscapes can play in promoting public health began:
“We are under no illusion that spending cuts in the UK are constraining public health budgets, as well as putting pressure on the NHS. But, if responded to imaginatively, this pressure has the potential to generate both positive results for the health and wellbeing of communities across all the UK’s administrations and, as a result, reduce NHS spending”.
There is huge scope, as the Evergreen Cooperatives in the US demonstrate, to reimagine how the economy of a hospital work. It need not follow the neo-liberal model of out-sourcing everything which is being so pushed by the current UK government. Subcontract the cleaning to Serco, the catering to Serco, the cafe franchise to Costa, the security to G4S etc. While many in the current government look to the US for inspiration in terms of how to design and run a healthcare system, they are looking at the wrong models there. Have a look at this:
Here’s an approach which offers a way of procuring services which keeps money local, builds jobs, ownership, training and so on. Given the choice between promoting that, and the current approach which results in minimum wages and zero hour contracts, a strong argument can be made that the public health, financial health and mental health of the local community are far better served by taking a different approach.
Kick out the Costas, and get in a locally owned cafe, serving local produce, indeed produce grown in the hospital grounds (see below). Kick out Serco, and let a thousand co-ops bloom. Place the hospital at the centre of the web of the new local economy. Procure locally like they do in Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust.
In an inspiring story that could be replicated anywhere, catering manager John Hughes shifted their procurement so they now source 90% of their fresh red meat and all of their vegetables, salad and fruit in season from within a 30-mile radius. Now they have created a ‘super kitchen’ and have taken on to provide all the meals that Nottingham City Council provide to people who use the Meals at Homes service. As Hughes said in a recent interview “we can continually change with the seasons”. Anywhere else interested in such an approach can get great support from the Soil Association, who have been doing amazing work on this.
Hospital as Market Garden: Why not take a look at the grounds of the hospital and reimagine them in a different way? Gardens have been shown to have great benefits to peoples’ health. A 2003 study from the Netherlands, based on interviews with 10,000 people, showed that the greener peoples’ environments, the better their general health and the less symptoms they report, and the better their mental health too.
An evidence review for Community Food and Health (Scotland) showed how involvement in food growing is linked to improved mental health and wellbeing in a variety of ways, such as enabling people to learn new skills, have more physical exercise and relaxation. So why not bring the two things together, and put food growing on hospital grounds as being central to their public health work?
Instead of seeing hospital grounds as large areas of ornamental grass which no-one ever walks on, outsourced to a contractor who cuts the grass and plants annual bedding plants, rethink them instead as intensive market gardens, as food forests, as orchards undergrazed by chickens. Such spaces also serve a powerful role in creating stress-free environments for staff and patients, reducing sickness time in staff and hastening recovery for patients. As Christina Fox put it in her dissertation for her Landscape Architecture degree at Leeds Metropolitan University:
“In the current economic crisis, budgets should be re-addressed with the emphasis on volunteering, fundraising, shared services and changes of use of external landscapes and gardens. With a focus on educating staff and managers on health benefits of natural environments and links with external expertise such as universities and colleges should maximise the potential of hospitals landscapes and gardens”.
Create a co-operative to manage them and to train local people to become growers. Create walkways through them for patients and their families. Focus on leafy greens, salads, and other high value crops which also introduce a healthy seasonal boost to the hospital meals.
Be ambitious in terms of scale. Work the ground like you would work a market garden. Redesign the menus around the seasonal produce. Grow produce that patients at the hospital who originate from oversees connect with home, and invite them out to see it, smell it, taste it. Design into the business plan a percentage of food distributed free to local families struggling to provide good food. Harness the healing power of food memories around food. Use the waste heat from the hospital air conditioning or from the incinerator to heat glasshouses to extend the season and the varieties that can be grown (NHS bananas anyone?).
Such an approach also tackles a range of other problems hospitals face. It can reduce crime (a study from Chicago showed that that the presence of vegetation can significantly reduce both property crime and violent crime). It can improve air quality and the problems associated with that. It can be a sink for water, stopping surges associated with heavy rainfall. It can reduce the heat island effect and therefore lead to reduced need for air conditioning. It can provide enjoyable occupational therapy for patients. Looked at in this way, although the ‘contract-it-out-to-the-guys-with-the-sit-on-mowers’ approach may be cheaper, in the longer run, the approach outlined above would make far more sense.
Hospital as community power station: Let’s take the WTO’s suggestion to “produce and/or consume clean, renewable energy onsite to ensure reliable and resilient operation”. How about the hospital reimagines itself as a community energy power station, and invite the local community to invest in and benefit from the energy? Hospitals often have some of the largest roofs in an area and the highest potential for installing renewables. For example, Totnes Renewable Energy Society (TRESOC) recently invested £39,000 of members’ money in installing solar onto the local doctors’ surgery.
This is an approach that could scale up. Hospitals could see the community investment that such an approach would enable as a public health strategy in itself.
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Those are just a few thoughts. What’s exciting is how the debate around public health and prevention opens up these conversations. What is a healthy community? Is it one surrounded by lawns and asphalt, or by food gardens, ponds and orchards? Is it one for whom services are contracted in at the lowest cost, or one able to provide them themselves, thereby creating sustainable employment? Is it one whose energy is generated miles away, or one that can see, and invest in, local energy generation?
Is it one where breastfeeding is encouraged or stigmatised? Where counselling and mentoring is available to young people in school? Where good local food is available on prescription for those who so clearly need it? Where the hospital hosts a Food Hub? Where the hospital is twinned with a farm, and patients for whom it would be beneficial are taken for trips to the countryside, while the farm’s produce supplies the hospital?
As Michael Lewis & Pat Conaty put it in The Resilience Imperative:
The physical and emotional health of citizens and communities is reinforced by active physical and cultural engagement. Programming and support that makes such involvement possible can be an important platform from which to extend the opportunities for participation in other aspects of community life”.
This should be a really fascinating month, and as it goes by we’ll be adding new ideas to those above, hearing from people working within the NHS about what is already happening. The NHS is at the moment under the greatest risk it has yet faced from those who seek to privatise as much of it as can be privatised. The pressure is away from what we have described above, yet at the same time, the public health agenda opens the possibilities of much of what Transition seeks to do coming under that banner.
It’s not an either/or choice. There is a different route forward for healthcare in the UK, one framed around an understanding that public health and increased community resilience can be seen as very much the same thing. A healthcare system recalibrated to that end could become a powerful and dynamic force, and, as we shall see, many of the building blocks for that, and examples to show that it is possible, are already in place. As we will hear though, it needs support from higher up, it needs government that has some degree of vision, that cares about more than the shareholders of private service companies. Perhaps the scale of change needed will come from us, as communities, supporting and working with our local health providers, and talking more explicitly about what we do in the context of public health (as, for example, Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition did recently)? It’s going to be a fascinating month, we hope you enjoy the journey.
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