Monthly archive for July 2014
Showing results 6 - 10 of 10 for the month of July, 2014.
8 Jul 2014
Given that our theme this month is ‘Celebration’, this feels like a good time to share the story of the oddest talk I ever gave, which took place at a celebration, and which left me with a question I have been unable to answer to this day, one that perhaps you might be able to help me out with. Sometime around 1998, I was invited to give a slide show at a wedding, thankfully not something I have been invited to do before or since.
I was living in South West Ireland, and a couple I knew were getting married at Cool Mountain, a kind of travellers community on the side of a hill near Dunmanway. Locally it was known as a mostly incomer/alternative/’hippy’/traveller community, who lived in an assortment of vans, caravans, temporary structures, but also some very interesting low impact buildings and some great people, on a hillside renowned for its high levels of rainfall.
My friends were getting married (well ‘handfasted’ actually, a kind of pagan wedding), and for some reason, I was invited to give a talk about straw bale building as part of the festivities. It’s certainly the first, and last, time I’ve been asked to give a talk about straw bale building at a wedding. I had recently been part of building the first straw bale house in Ireland, Marcus McCabe’s house in Monaghan (see photo above), and had a slide show showing most stages of the process which I have given a few times locally.
The actual ceremony had taken place in the early afternoon, to be followed by a big knees-up in the evening, and I was asked to come and speak at about 5pm. I turned up, with my slide projector, to an old farmhouse on the side of the mountain, got set up, and then people started turning up to listen.
It rapidly became clear that while about half the people had come expecting to hear me speak, the other half had arrived already expecting the party. Quite a few of them had, we might say, imbibed levels of alcohol more suitable for a party than a slide show about straw bale construction.
One guy in particular was already very drunk. He sprawled on the sofa, but still managed to fix his attention onto the talk, just about. I started by talking about the history of strawbale building before moving onto the story of the Monaghan house. We began with the foundations. I showed how they were built and the learnings from that. The guy on the sofa roused himself. “Foundations”, he just about managed to get out coherently, “foundations are what goes under the walls to carry the weight”, before slumping back again. “Thanks” I said, before moving onto walls.
It soon became clear that whatever stage of the building process I mentioned, our friend had to have an informed (ish) opinion on them. “Walls, yes, that’s what the roof sits on”, “Roof, that’s the bit that goes over the top and keeps the rain off” etc. Each time he spoke he was shooshed by everyone else, and after about 15 minutes, he proceeded to be sick all over himself and left the room.
During the talk more people arrived, the majority of whom were here clearly to party rather than listen to me. At the end of the talk, I came to the bit about how much this beautiful, circular, thatched house had cost to build. “So this family”, I told the crowded farmhouse sitting room, “built a three-bedroom house for just £30,000!”. I had given this talk many times before, and every time this fact generated an appreciative sense that that was quite something, that here, perhaps, was an affordable and technically feasible building solution at a time when conventional construction was out of the reach of many. For many people it was the high point. Not on Cool Mountain.
One guy, who had spent the talk either listening intently or was too drunk to move, it was hard to say, looked shocked at this statement, and his indignation moved him to sit upright. “Thirty grand?” he said with a tone of great disgust. “Thirty grand?? Baz built his house for a hundred quid”. History does not record what Baz lived (or perhaps even still lives) in. Quite what Baz managed to build for a hundred quid will forever be left to future generations to speculate upon. Me, I never found out. As soon as I finished, the partiers were able to finally begin partying properly, let off the leash at last. I headed home, celebrating Baz’s ingenuity, creativity, and, quite possibly, highly creative accounting.
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7 Jul 2014
It’s just as well I enjoy travelling on trains, as Germany is a long way from Totnes. That enjoyment however does not extend to the train I’m writing this post from. It’s the 40 minutes-delayed Koln to Brussels train, packed with people, and I’m in the carriage in which the air conditioning is broken, on a day when it is over 30 degrees outside. I’m surrounded by lots of sweaty faces. I’m on my way back from 2 packed and inspiring days in Germany, helping with the promotion of the German version of The Power of Just Doing Stuff (Einfach. Jetzt. Machen!).
You can’t get from Totnes to Berlin by train in a single day, so I had to break the journey with an overnight in Brussels. I arrived just in time for the start of the Belgium/USA game, one of the finest games of football I have ever had the pleasure to watch, and then took quite a while getting to sleep due to the people driving around the centre of the city beeping their horns to celebrate the Belgian victory.
The following day I reached Berlin by about 4pm, with Gerd Wessling of Transition Germany, who had joined me on the train as it passed through Bielefeld. We walked to the Heinrich Boll Foundation, who regular readers may remember hosted a talk I gave about 18 months ago. We were straight into an hour of interviews after which was a short period of downtime before the evening’s event.
On the bill was myself, Gerd, and Dieter Janacek, an MP and the Green Party’s economics spokesperson. The evening was moderated by Dorothee Landgrebe. I spoke for about 30 minutes and then Gerd talked about what is happening with Transition in Germany. We then had debate and discussion with Dieter about the meeting of bottom up activism and top down policymaking, and just how far a bottom up approach like Transition can go. It was billed as a debate, but we pretty much agreed that of course Transition can’t do everything, but it can help politicians who want to make the necessary changes by just getting on with it and changing the culture.
Then there were lots of good questions and dialogue from the packed room. When it was all over there was lots of book signing, chatting, questions, and meeting great people from all over the country (and a guy from Chile who was all excited and wanting to take Transition home with him). After a trip to a bar for pizza and a beer to round the day off, it was off to bed.
The next morning started with Gerd and I travelling by tram across Berlin to visit Leila, a free shop set up by Transition Pankow, who are very active in their neighbourhood of the city. The shop, in the basement of a community centre, has three parts, a free shop, where people can bring stuff and take stuff away for free, a borrowing shop, where … I think you’re getting the point by now .. you can borrow stuff (lots of board games for example). And lastly a Tool Library, with a wide range of tools.
After a tour of the shop, and meeting the dedicated people who run it, a big group of us had breakfast on the street in front of the shop, including some of the most delicious strawberries I have ever eaten. Then about 8 of us got onto bicycles and set off across the city to our next stop. My bike was an old GDR bike, one of the ones you pedal backwards as a brake. Never ridden one of those before. Not sure I have any immediate plans to do so again. But it got me around.
Our next stop was Goerlitzer Park in the Kreuzberg part of the city. We met members of Kiezwandler, the local Transition group, among the 26 heritage variety fruit trees they planted in the park. Goerlitzer Park is, as our hosts put it, loved by many and hated by many. It suffers from overuse, from rubbish and littering, and from open drug dealing in the park, as well as from parties and loud music. For some the park is a nice clean green oasis, for others it is an anarchist free zone that operates without state interference. It proves to be a tricky balance.
Kreuzberg had, until a couple of days before I arrived, been under something resembling a siege. Between 500 and 1000 police from across Germany had closed off part of the area due to a large group of mainly African refugees occupying a school building. It had been squatted for around 18 months, and over time the situation had deteriorated within the squat, with drug and alcohol problems, fights, inadequate sanitation and even one murder.
The district government offered to resettle people to other districts, and around 200 people left voluntarily, but about 40 remained, some threatening to leap from the roof if the police entered. The night before I arrived, an agreement was reached to allow the occupants to stay in part of the building while work begins to transform it into a centre for refugee organisations. It is in this context of a part of the city where social and political problems and disputes are very visible that our friends have been working since 2009 to try and make Transition happen.
In this context, the group proposed, at a series of meetings with neighbours, local politicians and park authorities, planting an orchard of heritage varieties in the park. A rota of people now look after the trees and water them regularly due to the poor, free-draining soil in which they stand. The plantings have suffered minimal vandalism, and have had good feedback, and are seen as being one of the key contributors to the recent decision by the district to redefine Kreuzberg as an “edible neighbourhood”, meaning that any plantings, where possible, will be edible species. That’s quite an achievement.
Although the group has done lots of things, they have also struggled with engaging a critical mass of people in a neighbourhood defined by high levels of left wing dissident activism, high levels of diversity, low incomes, and many groups already existing before Transition. The group is currently, apart from maintaining the orchard, on a hiatus, due to burnout and over-reach. There were very interesting discussions about how an approach more rooted in REconomy might have been a better way to do things, as the group definitely felt it has reached the extent of what was possible as a group of volunteers.
Then it was back on the bikes and off to ThinkFarm, a social enterprise incubator on one floor of a great old 1930s factory complex. ThinkFarm is a community of entrepreneurs, and was founded inspired by Transition values. They are home to a number of innovative enterprises, and one of the founders, Boris, showed us round and introduced us to many of the businesses there.
There was Milpa Films, who made the very influential Voices of Transition film (now out on DVD!). There was a media company specialising in ecological/social businesses. There were some designers. There was TransitionLab, a research organisation doing research into Transition. There was Quartermeister, who brand beer brewed in a local brewery and sell it in bottles with all profits going towards local charities They operate as a not for profit, as a transparent business, with a social purpose, and with a membership who choose the local charities the profits are distributed between.
There was Fairbindung, an organisation doing education work with schools and also selling Fairtrade coffee from Nicaragua. They all share the space, have a kitchen area in which they try to eat shared meals on a regular basis, and which feels like a really creative community. At the end of the tour, they asked me to wax lyrical to their camera about ThinkFarm, not easy with 1 minute’s preparation! Very inspiring, something that could be replicated in many Transition communities.
Then back onto the bikes and off to Prinzessinnengarten, in the centre of the city, one of the best known urban agriculture projects in the world. Given that the site has no soil, the garden is raised in boxes of compost, often stacked two or three deep. Runner beans scramble up very sturdy supports. All manner of produce flourishes in boxes. The place is fascinating from a financial model perspective.
It has become a key tourist attraction, and its cafe, which appears in many tourist guides as a “must visit”, serves delicious meals under the trees, in a unique setting. 60% of its income comes from the cafe, and the rest from consultancy. The group who run the garden also have installed and manage a number of rooftop gardens across the city and act as contractors on others. They receive no funding from anywhere and the site is thriving.
I met a woman who is the site’s beekeeper. She’s clearly a woman who loves bees, to the extent of having a beautiful bee tattoo on her arm. She showed me the site’s hives. I was fascinated by how close to people they are. Just feet away from people sitting having lunch, the bees are minding their own business. Apparently they travel up to 5 kilometres from the garden in pursuit of pollen, and the beekeepers have mapped where they get their pollen from within that radius.
After lunch under the trees and a couple more interviews, Gerd and I set off for Bielefeld. Bielefeld is a city of around 300,000 people, and is a University city with the largest single-block university building in Germany. It was to the University that we headed for the evening event.
When we arrived, a Transition ‘market place’ had been set up, with stalls from many of the Transition initiatives in that region of Germany. The way to it was marked by boxes full of plants. It was great to see the different groups and what they’ve been up to. Always a fascinating and inspiring experience. Here’s a short video someone made of impressions from the event:
Then a couple more interviews, a sandwich, meeting more great people, and then at 7.15pm, it was time for the talk. A great crowd piled into the huge lecture theatre, hardly an intimate space, and for the next 45 minutes or so I talked about Transition and the steps people are already taking around the world to bring a new culture into being. We then had good questions and answers and discussion, and I signed lots of books for people. We also asked people doing Transition in Bielefeld what, for them, Transition is:
… as well as asking why they do it:
In my talk I had discussed how important it is to start things, to get projects underway, to take the step across into action. I met a woman from Transition Town Witzenhausen who said “starting projects isn’t our problem. We’ve started loads. We now own and manage a building, we’ve started gardens” and a huge range of other projects I can’t remember now. “Our problem is maintaining them all!” she told me. She showed me one of two folders packed with all the press coverage they’ve had over the last couple of years. Impressive.
Then I went for supper and a drink with a lot of the Transition Town Bielefeld crew which was very enjoyable, before heading back to Gerd’s for the night. Then up early the next day and onto the sequence of trains that led me home again, including this extremely hot carriage. A great trip, full of inspiration, and delightful as ever to see Transition popping up in different places, and to hear people’s experience of it. My thanks to Gerd and everyone at Transition Germany as well as my German publisher OEKOM for organising it and to everyone who hosted me and came up to say hello.
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7 Jul 2014
Naomi Oreskes is a historian at science who teaches and does research at Harvard University. She is the author, with Erik Conway, of the excellent The Merchants of Doubt: how a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming. We caught up by Skype to talk climate scepticism, science and the relationship between the two. I started by asking who the ‘Merchants of Doubt’ are, and why she felt compelled to research and write about them.
“The Merchants of Doubt were a small group of people, mostly scientists, mostly older physicists, who had created common cause with think tanks and the fossil fuel industry to challenge the scientific evidence of climate change. We wrote the book because we stumbled across the story, we didn’t set out to write a story about climate change denial.
Eric and I are both historians who were working on other problems in the history of science. I was working on the history of oceanography, he was working on the history of atmospheric science. We stumbled across the story of these prominent physicists who had become climate change deniers. But Eric had also found materials related to the denial of the scientific evidence of the ozone hole and it was the same people.
We thought that was a little peculiar, so we started digging and discovered that not only had those people challenged scientific evidence of ozone depletion but also acid rain. Also in the big 5 was that they had denied evidence on the harmfulness of tobacco. When we found that link to the tobacco industry, which as most people know was convicted of criminal conspiracy to commit fraud against the American people, we thought that was an important story so we started digging and that’s what led to the book. [Here is a video of a talk Naomi gave around the time of the book’s publication]
The book’s subtitle is ‘How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming’ but to what extent can those people truly be called scientists? Where does the distinction lie between a scientist and a pseudo-scientist?
This was one of the really difficult things about this book, and about how to tell the story. It’s the same thing that makes it difficult to deal with. These people were scientists in a sense that they had PhDs in science, they had published scientific research, they had prominent positions of power and influence in the American scientific community. But they were not experts about climate change.
One of the things we say in the book is that this is part of the reason they were able to fool so many people. They drew on their scientific credibility to make claims that the people and the press found credible. This is the part of the book where we really do fault the press. In most cases, the press never pointed out that these people were actually all-purpose contrarians, that they really didn’t have expertise on climate change or tobacco and that they were really exploiting their scientific credentials in a way that was quite misleading, in a way that was merchandising doubt.
It helps to explain why it worked because it’s a subtle point. If it were really coarse and really crude, if these guys were just shills for the coal industry and were on the payroll of the coal industry, you could have pointed that out and everyone would have said “oh well, obviously”. But this is much more subtle and therefore a much more pernicious thing.
How can people spot this? What are the fingerprints? When you open the newspaper and read a story questioning some aspect of climate change what are the fingerprints to look for?
There are a few things to look for. One of the things I’ve noticed is very often journalists will write a story in which they’ll say “the majority of scientists say the globe is warming up” or “the IPCC says…” or the National Research Council or the Royal Society, they’ll identify who it is who holds this dominant position. But then they’ll say “however, some experts”, and very often those “some experts” are not actually identified. We’re not told who they are so that should be a red flag from the start.
“However some experts” should also be a red flag, because then the question should be raised, “well how many experts exactly?” Are we talking 49% of the scientific community, is there a really big split among scientists, or are we talking about a handful of doubters? Very often they are talking about the handful of doubters. If you see an article in which it’s not made clear who these people are or how many of them there are, that should be grounds for suspicion.
From the point of view of the journalist, journalists have asked me so many times – what should we do? That’s always a tricky question for me because I feel like saying “you guys need to figure this out, you guys need to ask yourselves that question”. One thing that all journalists could and should do is just to ask some really basic questions up front from anyone who’s presenting themselves as an expert.
That is to say “what’s your PHD in?” “What have you published on this particular topic under discussion right now?” “Are you receiving funds from a third party with a vested interest?” Because if you were to ask those basic questions of the scientists, it turns out that Fred Seitz was receiving a lot of money from the tobacco industry. I don’t think he was doing it for the money. I think ideological and egotistical reasons played a bigger role in his own personal motivation. But the fact that he was being paid by the tobacco industry was a relevant piece of information.
The fact that his PhD was in solid states physics was a relevant piece of information. The fact that he’d never published a peer-reviewed scientific article on climate change, to me that’s the most relevant of all. If journalists would just ask those three basic questions, they would realise very quickly who are the real experts and who are the doubt-mongers.
In an interview online that you have with sceptic Nick Minchin, you suggest he untangles the discussions about his responses on how to run an economy etc. from arguing about the science. While historically the sceptics you write about have had an impact, so have a number of independent bloggers, tweeters and so on. Where are they coming from?
It’s becoming a complicated social phenomenon. It isn’t just one thing. The story we were telling in ‘Merchants of Doubt’ was essentially an origins story. We wanted to know where all this had come from in the first place and we were able to track it back. Every story has a beginning, and we were able to show that this story begins with the George C Marshall Institute in 1989, where they first shift their attention away from Cold War issues, having to do with national security, and onto environmental issues. That’s the origins part of the story.
Since then of course it’s spread like a kind of disease. Nick is an interesting case in point because to me he was a kind of ‘Exhibit A’ of exactly the type of thing we talk about at the end of the book, namely that The Merchants of Doubt conflated two very different problems. First is the factual scientific problem of whether climate change is happening and caused by human activities, and the second is the problem of what to do about it. These are two very different things.
Nick Minchin is just like the Merchants of Doubt we studied, because the reason he rejects the science is because he doesn’t want to do what he thinks will be required to do if climate change is true. Let me say that again: If climate change is true then there are certain things we may have to do. Nick doesn’t like those things.
He doesn’t want the government to intervene in the marketplace through a carbon tax or an emissions trading system, or whatever else it might do. And because he doesn’t like the implications of the truth, he denies and rejects the truth and finds reasons to question it. We call that ‘implicatory denial’. We’re in denial because we don’t like the implications of the truth.
Nick is a perfect example of this because he’s a nice guy, he was fun to talk to, and when you really press him on it he actually admits that this is the case. I was upset with that ABC programme because we had this great exchange in which I said to Nick “you’re confusing two related but different things” and he actually said that that was true, he said that yes, he didn’t want the government to get involved in a big intervention in the marketplace.
So I said “well that’s fine, and that’s what we should be talking about, about how to solve this problem without taking away everyone’s personal freedoms”. It was a really great truthful, honest moment and of course the ABC didn’t use that in the film. That tells you something about what the press’s orientation on this issue is, at least in some cases.
There are some who argue, like Stuart Brand and Mark Lynas, that if the science on climate change is right then we should also therefore accept genetically modified food, nuclear power, geoengineering. What’s your sense of other lenses that we can look through such issues with beyond just the fact of scientifically establishing whether they work or not?
There are two question there. The first is – should we look at this problem through other lenses? The answer to that is of course absolutely yes, and this is the most important thing of all, we need to stop arguing about whether climate change is happening. That shift is underway, but the problem is it’s been underway for 20 years and we keep slipping back.
But we need to shift the focus from the problem to the solution. There’s no question in my mind that that’s true. The extent to which people like the ones you mentioned, Stuart Brand and Mark Lynas are provoking us to discuss the solutions, that’s a very good thing and they’ve made a positive contribution.
On the other hand, I think to jump to the conclusion that the solution is nuclear power or genetically modified crops is, let’s just say, not supported by the evidence. One of the things about climate change and fossil fuels is that energy derived from fossil fuels was a super great technology and nobody expected it to do the damage that it’s ended up doing. One of the things we know about technology is that it’s almost always a two-edged sword. It does some things for us very well but it often creates other different problems.
I feel like if there’s any lesson from the history of technology it’s that. So anyone who thinks that nuclear power or genetically modified crops will solve this problem, it seems to me has only got one eye open. That’s what we talk about at the end of The Merchants of Doubt. We talk about this phenomenon which we call ‘techno-fideism’, faith in technology.
The Merchants of Doubt had that too. Their whole argument was the government didn’t need to do anything about climate change because markets would provide the technologies we needed. Bill Nierenberg made that argument explicitly in 1983, so that’s 31 years ago! Well here we are 30 years later, climate change is underway, we’re seeing the impact all around us and yet we still haven’t seen a strong market response and we’re still seeing the use and production of fossil fuels increasing rather than decreasing. So we know that the marketplace, left to its own devices, isn’t solving this problem for us spontaneously.
But now the question comes – should the government support nuclear power? Well, there’s a lot of problems with nuclear power. There have been a lot of extreme difficulties, including the very high cost of it. To say that this is going to solve our problems without engaging in a serious discussion about why nuclear power has not succeeded so far, that’s, as I said, discussing the issue with one eye closed.
What does this conversation really look like when you open your eyes wide open, both eyes, and you don’t succumb to techno-fideism but ask yourself a serious, honest question: “what do we know from history about the successes and failures of large-scale technological systems, and can we learn any lessons from that?”
The answer is yes, and it strongly suggests we will not solve this problem with some kind of massive reliance on nuclear power. Possibly modest reliance in certain cases, almost certainly not with large-scale reliance without serious costs.
One more thing about genetically modified crops. Again there’s no question in my mind that genetically modified crops could be useful for certain kinds of things. But the idea that they will solve this problem is naïve and ignorant in the extreme. Because look at the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was supposed to be the fantastic application of technology to solving a major human problem. And what happened?
Well it definitely helped. There was definitely very significant progress and we don’t want to downplay the progress that was made. But where are we today? Well 2 billion people on this planet are still hungry and they’re not hungry because we don’t have enough food. They’re hungry because we don’t know how to distribute and store and get food to the people who need it. That’s not a problem of technology. That’s a problem of human institutions.
The techno-fideists focus far too much on the hardware and not nearly enough on what we could call the software technology. I don’t mean this in a literal sense, but software in the sense of support systems, distribution systems, the forms of governance that are needed to get food to people where they are without it being diverted. Even Norman Borlaug who was considered the father of the Green Revolution, said at the end of his life that he had overestimated the role of technology and underestimated the role of all these other social, institutional and cultural factors.
So is there a place for genetically modified crops? Probably. Is it going to be a magic bullet , a solution to this problem? I don’t think so.
You paint a picture of very influential people, very highly connected, very well resourced with credible scientific qualifications, with the ear of many powerful people. How on earth can we combat that?
One thing we can do is expose it, because when people see it for what it is they get it. People aren’t idiots, but we get confused and we get misled, especially when people are trying to confuse and mislead us. So number one is exposing it and that was of course what Eric and I were trying to do in the book, and we’re very gratified it’s received the reception it has.
I think the second thing is what you just suggested. To shift the conversation to the solutions and say “this is a very difficult, very challenging problem, but it’s not insoluble”. There are people who want you to think it’s insoluble for reasons of their own. There are also people who want you to think there’s an easy solution for reasons of their own. I think we want to resist both these impulses and say “it’s not easy but it’s not impossible”.
What does that look like? Conversation has not really begun in a serious way. There are places happening here and there, but a serious sustained discussion about solutions, we really need to have that conversation.
There are the people you talk about in the book and the Heartland Institute and these very well-backed, very vocal and influential climate sceptics. But I’m sure that you probably, like me, on Twitter and so on, get people who are armchair climate sceptics who do much the same job but presumably in an un-funded amateur capacity and they can be quite poisonous as Michael Mann and others experiences on a daily basis and quite possibly you do too. Where are those people coming from?
Quite right. What has happened is this has spread like a kind of disease, and like any disease that’s now spread, it’s much harder to contain. This is one reason why deep in my heart I feel anger towards people like Bill Nierenberg and Fred Seitz because they started a kind of epidemic and now it’s out of control.
You’re absolutely right, all over the internet, Twitter, in the blogosphere there are all kinds of people, many of them are amateurs, self-motivated armchair climate change deniers. But one thing they all have in common is that in a sense they’re all like Nick Minchin. They don’t want climate change to be real because they don’t want to be told that they have to change the way they live. So there’s no accident that climate change denial is much more rampant in the United States than anywhere else in the world.
Americans use more energy and are more consumptive of material resources than anyone else in the world and by a lot. The average American uses 4 times as much energy as the average French person. It’s not just that we use more than impoverished Bangladeshis, it’s that we use more even than our fellow citizens in the advanced, industrialised wealthy nations of the world.
Climate change is a problem that seems to suggest that there’s something wrong with the American way of life. People don’t like that suggestion, especially Americans! Americans live by the belief in American exceptionism, that this is in a way an ideal and wonderful country. I travel a lot and America is a great country. There are many things about this country that are great. I’ve lived in other places and I came back because at the end of the day, life in America is really good.
But there’s this sort of soft underbody of American life and it’s the consumption problem. A lot of people don’t want to admit that. They don’t want to talk about it. So when they hear or read the allegation that climate change is some kind of left-wing hoax, some kind of liberal or even socialist or communist hoax, that appeals to them and so they go looking for arguments that support their inclination to disbelieve in any way, so there’s a lot of confirmation bias. There’s confirmation bias on both sides of course, but one side has the scientific facts and the other side doesn’t.
The above was edited from the full interview, which can be heard below:
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1 Jul 2014
Here’s a lovely piece by Ian Wild, a celebration of a project very close to my heart…
Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?
Or may we cram within this wooden O
the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?
Around the turn of the millennium, my wife Belinda was invited to run a theatre course for adults at Kinsale College. John Thuillier, the then Principal, was an educational visionary who had already set up the best Outdoor Education Course in the country and an arts faculty that was refreshing and different. We were allowed to design a fun, exciting and practical training where students could experiment with acting in a free and uninhibited way. It was quite unlike any other professional drama training in Ireland or any of the headbound University courses.
One early difficulty for the course though, was a theatre. We didn’t have one. Though, back then, we had three light and airy rooms for rehearsals, when it came to performing our productions, we had to move house – pack everything into a lorry and tumble into the Town Hall, or a venue in Cork. Building our own theatre, never seemed an option. Who thinks like that? Well, Rob Hopkins did, fortunately for us.
Once a drama training had been established, a permaculture course was next to take root in Kinsale college. As it was the only such course on the planet, people came from all over the wide world to join it. The numbers overwhelmed. Permaculture aims to create a more sustainable way of living with the earth. It emphasises the provision of local needs with the least destruction to the world and its resources possible.
Rob Hopkins, (leader of the course) was interested in his students serving the college community and asked Belinda what the drama course needed. Only a theatre, she said. And so the idea of a mini-Shakespeare’s Globe, made from natural building materials and sitting in the grounds of Kinsale College, was born. Rob and Belinda were, of course, both quite mad.
Why the Globe? Partly because the sort of natural building techniques that the Permaculture students were using were common in Shakespeare’s day, and also because Belinda has this slight infatuation with a man from Stratford – though not the Shakespeare of set texts in the junior and leaving certs. There is a very different Shakespeare to that ghastly fellow, and people mostly love him when they meet him. Although Belinda was interested in all aspects of theatre, mime, clowning, tragedy, masks – she had just been to see the Globe in London and was fired up about creating a smaller version on the college grounds with Rob and the permaculture hordes.
And so, with plans drawn (literally) on the back of an envelope, Rob set to work with a team of Permies (as they were affectionately known) and in a matter of months raised an odd-looking, but strangely attractive stage (a theatre that Bilbo Baggins might act on and not seem out of place). It was made out of cob (straw and mud) with wood frames.
Colossal cedar beams held up the turf roof. With a view to practicality, I was at first perturbed at my wife’s eagerness to stage a large end-of-term play in a theatre so completely open to the elements. Any actor, stepping onto the apron of the stage in a downpour would have been immediately drenched. And as for the audience … well, there were no walls and no roof for the groundlings, or any spectator. There were benches in a semi-circle that formed, with the rest of the theatre, a large ‘O’.
But protection from the ravages of nature? There was none. And in Ireland, if I might import a quote, ‘the rain it raineth every day’. Or at least, sometimes it seems so. For some reason, this didn’t seem to overly concern Rob or Belinda. Faith, I dare say, wears no mackintosh.
It was however, a tremendous achievement to get a performance space ready for the end of term play, the Merry Wives of Windsor. We rehearsed in this open air arena, like ancient Greeks but without their blue skies and dusty olive groves. It wasn’t until the show went on that I realised that the amphitheatre was something out of the ordinary. The play electrified the audience. Of course, it is a great play, and the actors excelled. But there was more to it than that.
The space had a magic that modern theatres entirely lack. The Globe and all early Elizabethan theatres, were designed to maximize contact with the audience: to connect with playgoers in as direct a way as possible. A modern theatre seeks to distance the audience from the actors. In Kinsale amphitheatre, the audience are in the play. Not in a way that will discomfort or embarrass them. In a way that will enchant and enthral.
That first spring – in early May, the weather held all week. The air was a little refrigerated. I was playing mandolin in musical accompaniment to the play and my fingers once went a funny blue colour. It was something though, to watch Falstaff’s antics with an awareness of a starry infinity overhead. We all realised, the permaculture students had raised something rare and unique. [Here‘s a piece from RTE Television at the time]
Alas, Rob Hopkins left for England before the amphitheatre went much further. But not before starting the Transition Town movement (now an international phenomenon) in Kinsale, from the college. The baton was taken up by lecturer Graham Strouts, with assistance from Paul O’Flynn, and gradually, year on year, the amphitheatre has been improved and enlarged by diligent permaculture students. Walls grew and backs appeared for the benches. But most difficult of all, was the provision of a roof for the audience. We knew our meteorological luck couldn’t hold out forever; but how could we prop up canopy across the wide auditorium?
Nobody wanted great pillars obscuring the spectacle of a play. Eventually, Christie Collard from Future Forests arrived and designed a reciprocal roof: impossible Escher-like cross struts which suspended a roof above the audience like a conjuring trick. Christie’s experience with natural building, meant that he shaped structures entirely in keeping with the beautiful and idiosyncratic appearance of the theatre. Travel where you will, there is nothing like it. It is pretty and unusual as Elizabethan architecture was, because, as with buildings constructed back then, the amphitheatre has grown organically.
Instead of the prefabricated square and rectangular monstrosities that modern architects inflict upon the landscape, this wooden O is human. The grass roof is a little prairie on the house. Throughout, the theatre is an arcadia of trunks and beams. The place seems to have a sense of humour and is full of inbuilt jokes, the windows being made from recycled portholes of washing machines. In a world that is becoming increasingly regulated and conformist, it is part throwback, partly a dream of the future. One could almost say, the amphitheatre is a physical embodiment of the spirit of the drama course it serves. Always growing, always different, always human, busily creative and comedic.
For many years, hardened amphitheatre devotees sat on hard seats and braved the chill of evenings in early May by arriving with cushions and even sleeping bags. Those days, for good and bad, are pretty much gone. The Auditorium is soon to get a thorough draughtproofing and stuffed seats. It’s not centrally heated, but on a May evening, there is no longer any danger of blue fingers or toes. I like to think that it’s the sort of place Shakespeare’s ghost visits now and then. Arriving unseen through the thick walls, seating himself at the back and enjoying plays – all manner of plays – even his own, in one of the most intimate and thrilling auditoriums a person could ever visit.
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1 Jul 2014
As someone who visits quite a lot of Transition groups, I see the same thing over and over. People say “we don’t feel like we are making much of a difference, we’ve not done much”. I then ask them to tell me the story of what they’ve done so far, and 20 minutes later people tend to be feeling rather pleased with themselves. We need to celebrate more! Take a breath and pat ourselves on the back! It’s not hard, in fact it’s wonderful. The key thing is remembering to do it.
This month our theme is Celebration and Transition. It’s no accident that it comes immediately before August, which is traditionally our month on ‘The Power of Not Doing Stuff’, where this site puts its feet up and tries to model the importance, on occasion, of taking time out and being rather than doing. I was in Lewes a couple of weeks ago for Transition Town Lewes‘ Seven Year Itch celebration. It’s seven years since their Unleashing, and so to celebrate it, they threw a big party. It was fantastic.
I get the impression Transition Town Lewes are quite good at celebrating. It comes quite easily to them. It’s not always like that. I also get the impression that Transition initiatives often don’t do celebration for a few different reasons:
- That it feels rather trivial compared to the work of actually getting on and making stuff happen
- We don’t have very much time even for doing all the things on our ‘To Do’ lists, so finding time to celebrate? Forget it!
- Our attention is always on the future and the sheer bloody enormity of what we’re trying to do here
- The culture around us isn’t good at celebrating everyday achievements, and often pausing to reflect on things leads to the opportunity to criticise and blame, so it’s easier just to keep going
- “It’s just another thing to organise”
I’m sure there are others too. You might like to share yours below. However, it’s a sure recipe for burnout and exhaustion. So, back to Lewes. Their Seven Year Itch was a great event. It was hosted in a rather funky arts centre in an old industrial unit called Zu, and it made me think of the following 10 key ingredients for a good celebration:
1. The invitation
The invitation needs to be clear and celebratory. People need to know it will a fun occasion, what will be happening, and what’s being celebrated. The Lewes event made it pretty clear, as did the tagline on the great poster (see right), “Come and celebrate seven years of making global issues local”.
Given that you are celebrating what has been created by so many people, do as much as you can to invite them personally. Be colourful, bold and inviting. This is your party after all.
2. Food and drink
It’s a celebration, and celebrations need refreshment. The Lewes event featured food and drink that celebrated Lewes: beer from the local celebrated Harveys Brewery, local wines, elderflower champagne, food made by a local cafe, and pizzas made out the back from a wood fired pizza oven. Not a sausage on a stick in sight. Feast well.
3. A capturing of what’s being celebrated
It’s really important to name the things that are being celebrated. What has the group done? Not just the big things but also the smaller things too. Here’s the chart that Transition Town Lewes created for the event:
Then there was the great exercise that Transition Ferrara in Italy did for their third birthday event, where they had written a card for each event or project they had done, and these were clipped onto a washing line in chronological order which was then passed around the room, until everyone had tied themselves in knots, and remembered the huge diversity of stuff they had done.
Or you could, like we did at, I think, Transition Town Totnes’ 5th birthday celebration day, actually tell the story from scratch. Lay out a long piece of paper with dates on it, from the day you started until now, and invite people to fill in events they can remember (see pic below). It’s a process that can lead to a lot of laughter and remembering. In all these 3 different approaches, it’s also good to not gloss over the things that didn’t work so well, but to honour them as well.
4. A look forward
This celebration is not the end of the whole thing, merely a pausing point. Where might the group go next? While a celebration might not be the best time for an in-depth strategic look forward and planning of work and projects for the next 10 years, there are fun ways to do this. In Lewes, we played a Transition version of Pictionary (sort of). Three artistic members of the group stood on the stage next to a large wall of paper, while Duncan Law (of Transition Town Brixton) and I hosted. We had 8 or so large cards, on the back of each was a word like “energy”, “care and health”, “food” or “livelihoods”.
People were chosen randomly from the audience to pick a card, and then the audience were invited to shout out things they’d like to see in Lewes, while the artists drew them on the wall. After 10 minutes of laughter, shouting, silly and serious ideas, and lots of drawing, enough ideas were gathered to give a sense of where the future might take Transition Town Lewes. Great fun.
5. Keep it changing
At the Lewes event we had a choir, a couple of talks, some poetry, a raffle, more singing, bagpipes, dancing, the opportunity to interact with Transition Town Lewes projects, mention of the campaign for a community take-over of the site we were on, food, drink. The evening really benefitted from the “what happens next?” kind of spirit.
I remember the Unleashing of Transition Malvern Hills being similarly eclectic. First a bit of this, then a bit of that…
6. Dancing
A good celebration really benefits from the opportunity to have a good dance. In the Lewes event, Sacre Vert (see above), whose eclectic music and mad group dancing always leave everyone in a sweaty blather with big grins on their faces, having also briefly met and interacted with most of the people in the room. The perfect, and riotous, way to wrap up a good celebration.
The celebration that followed the talk I gave in Liege recently featured a rather different soundtrack, as captured in this short video of the event:
7. A sense of context
No Transition initiative works in isolation. During its lifetime it will almost certainly have worked with other local groups, organisations and projects. Invite them along! Invite them to have stalls, whatever they like. Celebrate the web of connections and relationships you’ve created and the sum total of what you have produced between yourselves.
To the right is a poster we created for an event to celebrate where we had got to with the Atmos Totnes project, which explicitly thanked all the people who had contributed to our getting to where we had got to.
8. Document it!
The only regret I have of my own wedding is that I didn’t really have anyone really documenting it, with photos or video or something. Such a rare occasion to have so many people you love in one place, and most likely will never happen again, so to have only a few photos of it feels a shame. Likewise with your celebration. Have someone there to take photos, or video, or to document it in some way or other. You’ll be glad subsequently that you did. The ever-wonderful Mike Grenville documented the Lewes event for them. And they wrote the whole evening up beautifully on their website.
9. No graphs!
By all means have someone along to give a talk, but keep it upbeat and positive. I spoke at the Lewes event, and tried hard to create something that would fit into a celebration. The first part of the talk drew on all the things that Lewes and Totnes have in common which went down very well. On their website, TTL noted one of the similarities:
…we got a whistle-stop tour around the greater and lesser-known similarities between Lewes and Totnes. Did you know both towns are exactly 6 miles from the sea? Thanks Rob, neither did we.)
Pleasure. Keep the energy up. It’s a celebration, remember?!
10. “Why are we doing this again?”
One of the hazards of doing doing doing without any reflecting is that we can sometimes lose sight of why we even started doing this stuff in the first place. It’s just what we do, but why? And do the reasons we started doing it still bear any relation to what motivates us now? When I was there, I asked people involved in TTL why it is that they do Transition. Here’s what they had to say. It’s good to hear each other say this stuff sometimes.
***
Of course there’s no reason why celebration should be confined to just one-off events like this. They can be part of your regular life as a group. Why not design in a standing item every time you meet to ask “does anyone have anything they feel we need to celebrate?” Why not, on a regular basis, have a time in your meetings for appreciations? Asking if there is anything anyone would like to appreciate that someone in the group has done, is doing, or brings to the process? In terms of the role food can have in celebrations, it could even be something as simple as, as we heard from Peter MacFadyen last month, the Chairperson of the meeting baking biscuits for the meeting.
We hope you enjoy the month, and we’d love to hear your stories of what celebration looks like in your initiative.
Thanks to Mike Grenville for most of the photos used above.
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