Transition Culture

16 Sep 2014

Responding to Ted Trainer: there’s a lot more to Transition than community gardens

Ted Trainer’s recent paper, Transition Townspeople, we need to think about Transition: just doing stuff is far from enough!, generated a certain amount of attention at the recent Degrowth conference in Leipzig.  Most of what I would say in response to it I have already said in previous exchanges with Trainer, and his arguments remain much the same.  But given that it’s always useful to reform and re-examine assumptions and beliefs, and that several people asked for my thoughts on it, here are some reflections. 

The core of Trainer’s argument in this paper is that:

“The path the Transition Towns and related movements are presently on will lead only to a grossly and increasingly unsustainable and unjust consumer society, containing lots of community gardens etc”. 

It’s a statement that offers a really useful opportunity to reflect on both Trainer’s arguments and how he presents them.  The crux of Trainer’s issue with Transition appears in the following paragraph, where he argues that greens and the left:

“…fail to recognise a) that rich countries have resource and ecological impact rates that are utterly unsustainable and cannot possibly be spread to all people b) if a sustainable and just world is to be achieved these rates must be cut by something like 90%, c) that cannot be done unless we scrap a growth economy, reduce GDP to a small fraction of present levels, stop market forces from determining our fate, radically restructure the geography of settlements, largely scrap the economy, switch almost entirely from representative democracy to participatory democracy, and, above all, abandon affluence”.

Many of us read so much writing like this, that it’s really worth pausing and looking at this more closely.  It falls into exactly the trap that some on the green Left have fallen into for 40 years, which for me is one of the factors, alongside capitalism’s growth imperative, the normalising of hierarchical habits and ways of thinking, the promotion of extrinsic values and other factors, which combined mean that we are so catastrophically losing the struggle to save the climate. 

It is a mindset that seeks differences rather than common ground.  Talking to each other is more important that talking to everyone else.  There is little mindfulness about how the way in which we communicate our message comes across to people beyond the bubble.  George Lakoff puts it beautifully in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, which looks at how to build and message an effective progressive movement:

“There are six basic types of progressives, each with a distinct mode of thought. They share all the progressive values, but are distinguished by some differences. 

1. Socioeconomic progressives think that everything is a matter of money and class and that all solutions are ultimately economic and social class solutions.
2. Identity politics progressives say it is time for their oppressed group to get its share now.
3. Environmentalists think in terms of sustainability of the earth, the sacredness of the earth, and the protection of native peoples.
4. Civil liberties progressives want to maintain freedoms against threats to freedom.
5. Spiritual progressives have a nurturant form of religion or spirituality, their spiritual experience has to do with their connection to other people and the world, and their spiritual practice has to do with service to other people and to their community.  Spiritual progressives span the full range from Catholics and Protestants to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Goddess worshippers, and pagan members of Wicca.
6. Antiauthoritarians say there are all sorts of illegitimate forms of authority out there and we have to fight them, whether they are big corporations or anyone else. 

… The problem is that many of the people who have one of these modes of thought do not recognize that theirs is just one special case of something more general, and do not see the unity in all the types of progressives. They often think that theirs is the only way to be a true progressive. That is sad”. 

Yet if we are to have any chance of achieving Trainer’s ambitions, we need to not only successfully bring together the different strands of the progressive movements as set out by Lakoff, we must also engage beyond that, creating common platforms and engagement across political spectrums.  Trainer’s article is written in such a way that his arguments, many of them entirely reasonable, can be guaranteed to be largely ignored by everyone other than a small handful of people.  The words we use really matter.  Trainer argues that we need to bring about:

“extreme, rapid and unprecedented structural change, away from some of the most fundamental ideas, practices and values in Western culture, especially away from the commitment to economic growth, freedom for market forces, corporate control, competitive individualism and, most problematic of all, affluent lifestyles.  It is a far bigger task than just getting rid of capitalism”. 

That’s quite an ask (even “just getting rid of capitalism” is somewhat ambitious!).  Unless he is proposing some sort of coup, an armed uprising of organic growers and solar panel installer militias, storming the barricades in their fetching home-knitted balaclavas, he needs to get a whole lot more skilful, and fast. His call that Transition focus more on “taking collective control of our town”, while communicating in language guaranteed to exclude most of the community, is whatever the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy is.

Let’s look again at the paragraph I quoted earlier, only this time I’ll highlight the words, the language I would suggest is guaranteed to turn off 98% of the population. 

“…fail to recognise a) that rich countries have resource and ecological impact rates that are utterly unsustainable and cannot possibly be spread to all people b) if a sustainable and just world is to be achieved these rates must be cut by something like 90%, c) that cannot be done unless we scrap a growth economy, reduce GDP to a small fraction of present levels, stop market forces from determining our fate, radically restructure the geography of settlements, largely scrap the economy, switch almost entirely from representative democracy to participatory democracy, and, above all, abandon affluence”

Lakoff refers to President Nixon, who in a national address during the Watergate affair, said:

“I am not a crook”. 

As Lakoff puts it, “And everybody thought about him as a crook”.  I’m also reminded of Gary Larson’s cartoon with the dog listening to his owner (see right)…

In the same way, trying to inspire and engage people to step across from feeling disempowered and that something needs to change to actually doing something about it requires a different language, certainly not the kind of disempowering language used here.  Compare Trainer’s writing with Transition Town Tooting’s invitation to take part in their Foodival this weekend:

“Now in its seventh year, we want you to help break the record set last year of feeding over 300 people in one day, using locally grown food, cooked by local people.  Foodival takes place 13th and 14th September. We’re aiming to explore and celebrate the range of food that can be grown in the city and the diverse cultures found in Tooting, giving local people a chance to meet, learn from each other and have some fun.

Last year’s Foodival was a huge success. We want to build on that, so we’re inviting everyone from Tooting and the surrounding area to get involved – be it growing, cooking or simply coming together on the day to celebrate tasty local dishes with very few food miles. We’re always amazed by the amount of produce that people are growing in even the smallest space. People have been adding some wonderful pictures to our map to show what’s growing in Tooting” says Dave Mauger, Foodival’s event director”.

What are the words that leap out at you here?  “Break the record; local people; explore and celebrate; diverse cultures; meet; learn from each other; have some fun; huge success; tasty”.  And so on. See where I’m going here?

As George Monbiot put it in Heat, “nobody ever rioted for austerity”.  However, if we can be sufficiently skilful and inclusive, they might “long for localisation” though, or “yearn for empathy”.  Trainer is right that the scale of what needs to change is huge, and his sense of frustration at the glacial rate of change is palpable and understandable.  But this is only going to work if we find the skilful means to take people along with us, indeed, the skilful means to enable people to long for the world we need to create, because the very possibilities it presents make their hearts sing. 

Transition has clearly not achieved all that it needs to, far from it.  But Trainer’s analysis of Transition in this piece is horribly out of date.  There’s much more to it than community gardens.  Much more. Where is the mention of the impact initiatives like the Bristol Pound are having in nudging their City Council and other organisations to reimagine their procurement policies in favour of more local procurement? The Transition groups who have shifted, as in Berlin, the city authorities to a policy of only planting edible and useful species in their landscaping? The role Transition has played in the explosion of community energy projects and the UK government now having, for the first time, a Community Energy Strategy?

What about successful crowdfunding campaigns that are seeing social enterprises such as Vin de Liege in Belgium raising nearly €2m in shares from local people? Initiatives like Atmos Totnes, modelling a new approach to community-led development which has the potential of undermining the current development model? Of the REconomy Project, working with communities in 10 countries to help them turn their ideas and projects into vibrant new social enterprises rooted in principles of resilience, low carbon, bringing assets into community ownership and rebuilding local economies? 

Yet, the uninitiated reading this piece would assume that all Transition is about is community gardens.  Trainer appears fixated on community gardens.  The photo that accompanies the piece is, we assume, of one.  He mentions them five times, usually in a disparaging “is that all you’ve got?” kind of a tone.  It is important, however, at this point to speak up for community gardens, as they, and ‘smaller’ projects like them, are far more important than Trainer gives them credit. 

You could think of them as a ‘gateway drug’, as a way in to help people think about what’s possible.  Not everyone has Trainer’s confidence, nor even a sense that change is even possible. For many people the idea that you can even influence the place you live feels remote and impossible.  The question I hear when I do work with communities isn’t “how do we “take collective control of our town?” (one of Trainer’s recommendations of what Transition initiatives need to be doing), but rather “where do we start, or how do I engage my neighbours in doing something?”

In The Power of Just Doing Stuff I tell the story of Portalegre em Transição in Portugal.  Sonia Tavares told me that when she first heard there was going to be a talk about Transition in her town she “went beserk”:

“I felt finally that in Portalegre, my town, the town where I was born and live, there were people that were in need of changing something, just like me. I thought that was amazing, and when I saw so many people going to this presentation, I thought “this is it, we can do something. We can actually change something”. 

The first thing the group did was to work with the community in Sonia’s apartment block to create a tiny community garden in front of the building.  Sonia told me: 

“I’ve been living in Portalegre for ever, 37 years, and I have felt my community and my city crumble, people turning backs to each other. This  community garden we created tells me it is possible to do things with other people. It is possible, we just need to wake up to each other again”. 

Community gardens can give people a sense of “can do” that no amount of reading articles advocating, as Trainer does, “radical politics, confronting capitalism, fundamental structural change and “revolution”” can.   We need a new language to communicate this stuff.  That’s what Transition does.  We need to speak to peoples’ values, of community, of family, of the things they love, of place, of possibility, of things their children love and value.  

Our values also play a key role in this.  Writing in the latest Transition Free Press, Tom Crompton of Common Cause distinguishes between intrinsic values (“values associated with greater concern about social and environmental problems. They include values of connection to family, friends and community; appreciation of beauty; broadmindedness; social justice; environmental protection; equality; helpfulness”) and extrinsic values (“money; social status; public image; authority”).  He writes: 

“If we are serious about building irresistible public demand for ambitious policy change, the implications seem clear: we should always prefer to communicate about issues in ways that communicate with intrinsic values; we should avoid communicating in ways that connect with extrinsic values”.  

Writing about Common Cause’s work, George Monbiot recently challenged the idea that the more information we give people, the better decisions they will make: 

“Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information which confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social identity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their resistance to change”. 

Unfortunately that’s just what Trainer’s article does.  His writing could really benefit from studying the work of Crompton and his Common Cause organisation.  His article cries out for deep and urgent change, but in such a way that very few, other than those already on his wavelength, are ever likely to follow him.  He writes: 

“In my experience, people who are attracted to these movements (i.e. Transition) tend to be very nice, polite, sensitive, respectable citizens who find words like “radical”, “capitalism” and socialism”, let alone “revolution” quite off-putting and distasteful”. 

From this he assumes that movements like Transition aren’t thinking in terms of deep systems change, that they don’t see the revolutionary potential in what they do. That “nice” people can’t affect deep change.  My sense, and it’s a point I made in my last Trainer response, is that Transition tries to take a different route, albeit what I think of as a more skilful one.  Banging on at people about the need to “revolution” and peppering sentences with “radical” and so on have clearly failed to bring about the change needed.  It doesn’t work. It’s a busted flush. It has failed in nearly everything it has tried to achieve.  What we’re trying to do with Transition is to model this stuff in action and to be more skilful about how we communicate.  

If Trainer is looking for a thorough and complete Theory of Change, we don’t have it yet, although at Transition Network we are working on it.  I was struck by the recent film Disruption, designed to inspire engagement in the Peoples’ Climate March next weekend (I’ll be going to the London march – see you there?). 

Its opening quotes Frederick Douglas: 

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will”.  

Well, yes … but.  The film uses “demand” in its banging-the-fist-on-the-table, “I’ve got half a million people outside who don’t agree with you” kind of a way, and of course, that is an important way in which change can be triggered.  But I would argue that we could reinterpret that quote using “demand” as in “supply and demand”.  Power never concedes anything unless we withdraw our support for it, and give our support to something that better meets our needs, better resonates with our values.  As Andy Lipkis put it in our interview with him last year: 

“The Bush administration was ready for all Americans to be protesting to try to stop the Iraq war. Why did they not care about that? How did they make it resilient? They expected that, they built that into their design. All they cared about was as long as people kept consuming, especially petroleum, their objective was being met. They were counting on no-one changing lifestyles. The most radical thing you can do is actually vote with your feet and vote with your dollars. They were counting on people complaining: protesting and not changing”.

I struggle when I read sentences like this from Trainer’s piece: 

“The key to cutting present rates (of consumption) is not primarily to reduce personal consumption.  It lies in designing local settlements to provide for us without needing much non-renewable resource consumption”.  

“Designing local settlements” will only happen if it is a part of a democratic process that provides livelihoods, which feels like progress and which better meets our needs than the current approach and which speaks to a majority of people.  Of course community groups can tinker at the edges and do something things, but at the moment our settlements are mostly designed by big developers and powerful organisations.  

If we want to “design local settlements”, we need to mobilise people and demand change, yes, but also create demand for a better approach by getting real and scaling up our ambition and becoming developers ourselves, but a different kind of developer, as we’re soon to start modelling with the Atmos Totnes initiative here in Totnes. 

Trainer states “of course the economy has to be scrapped eventually” adding that to do so “will require a huge amount of effort consciously and deliberately devoted to the task”.  But there is no way that will happen unless we have the different models in place which are able to provide the things we need: schools, jobs, homes and so on.  The ambition of Transition, in stark contradiction to the impression Trainer paints of it, goes far beyond community gardens, into reimagining local economies, shifting their focus, modelling how it can meet public health ambitions better than the current approach, how it can create better and more meaningful livelihoods, create healthier communities, create safer investments offering a social return. We’re not there yet, but it’s where we’re headed. 

It may be that the future will reveal Transition to have been “a reformist project posing no threat to consumer-capitalist society”.  We’ll see.  Whether it ends up being called ‘Transition’ is of little matter.  But what I do know is that whatever gets us to where we need to go will need to think bigger, reimagine the language it uses, and seek to build common ground rather than talking itself into a corner while everyone else is looking in a different direction. 

Trainer’s is a bewildering perspective. On the one hand he argues that “sudden or noisy calls for more radical goals would harm these movements” and on the other he argues that the path Transition is on “will lead only to a grossly and increasingly unsustainable and unjust consumer society, containing a lot of community gardens etc”.  

I would suggest that the goals of Transition Network’s REconomy Project, to create an economy based on the principles of appropriate localisation; resilience; being low carbon; recognising that we live in a world of limits; not purely being for profit but serving a wider social purpose and, where possible, bringing assets into community ownership, are already deeply ambitious.  And Transition is just one “app” in the change activist’s toolkit, designed to enable the push towards more resilient communities.  It’s not intended to do everything.  But it is capable of doing a whole lot more than Trainer’s rather out-of-touch critique gives it credit for.  It’s evolving.  It remains open to new ideas and to processes that work with people to ask questions and shape then where the process goes, what was termed “let it go where it wants to go” in The Transition Handbook. 

Time will tell, but of course time is one of our most limited resources.  Which makes it even more imperative that we learn the art of communicating this stuff in a way that actually has any chance of leading to the change we all want to see. 

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16 Sep 2014

Mary-Jayne Rust on "reconnecting to the rest of nature"

Mary-Jayne Rust is an art therapist, a Jungian analyst, a feminist psychotherapist and an ecopsychologist. She runs a small private practice seeing individuals in North London, and also gives talks, workshops and courses and seminars in the field of ecopsychology.  She is the editor, with Nick Totton, of the recently published Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis.  We spoke recently by Skype, and I started by asking her “what exactly is ecopsychology?”

“The first thing to say is that it’s one of those funny questions because you can’t ever give a proper definition because it’s an incredibly diverse and wide field. But this is where I always start because obviously I often get asked that question so I start with.  It faces in two directions and the first direction is facing outwards. How can we bring a psychological lens to the collective shift that we’re trying to make towards sustainability?

It seems that we have many of the practical solutions to be able to make that shift, and it would also seem, if we listen to the media, that really that arena of politicians and environmentalists, I know that’s got nothing to do with us but actually when you look at the situation it would appear as if we’re really very stuck and it’s very difficult still for people to really face into this very urgent situation and think about it.

So I would say we have a psychological problem. I know that’s not the only reason why we’re stuck, but it’s psychological in part and we need some psychological help in many different ways. So an example of that would be: an organisation called Carbon Conversations set up by a psychotherapist called Rosemary Randal, who has gone into lots of different organisations, NGOs, working in the area of sustainability, helping them to think about how we might communicate climate change. It’s not just about ramming dry facts down people’s throats, it’s actually how do you engage people in this very difficult subject.

There are many other examples I could give, but I said two directions, so the other direction would be facing inwards. How does the bigger picture affect us personally. This is the first hurdle in a way where people get stuck, because it’s so overwhelming when we face into it. We feel a lot of grief, rage, despair and impotence. Particularly impotence I think, because when people look out there, they just don’t know when to start. Many, many people want to make a difference but they go to where they feel they can make a difference.

How can we help people begin to unpack that first of all? Joanna Macy and John Seed were two environmental activists in the 1980s who realised that if you didn’t take account of your feelings in the process of being an activist, you would very likely burn out, because most activists want to stay positive and they are afraid of admitting their sense of, at times “oh my God I’m not making a difference, this is all hopeless”, and so they would keep it to themselves and that would begin to eat away at them; whereas if collectively we can have safe containers to admit how we’re feeling at times, it’s like a natural cycle. We admit it, we go through a process. We come out the other side feeling empowered.

Ecopsychology is also about just generally not to do with the crisis but our human relationship with the non-human world. Psychotherapists concentrate on human to human relationships and our relationship to self. We tend to think if we go to see a therapist we’re going to talk about our personal problems and that’s usually to do with the marriage that’s not working, problems at work etc. Ecopsychology would say that actually we’re all born into a place and into a piece of land. We have very important relationships when we grow up with pets, with trees, with the sea, with the elements. With all manner of things to do with non-human relationships. And this is absolutely essential in terms of making us human.

You can see it all over the place, can’t you, that people long for this relationship, because at the moment we’re pretty cut off from it, I would say. It’s not just about our relationship with the non-human world out there, because that teaches us about ourselves as animals. It’s about our animal self. How I relate to my intuition or my instinct. How do I smell my way through life, rather than just relying on my head and trying to make decisions. This is what happens in this culture, isn’t it?

We’re taught to use our mind and our thinking and our rationality, but there’s all kinds of other parts of ourselves that are very important in terms of making decisions. Actually, we’re very good at knowing things. We have a great deal of knowledge. But I would say that our culture at the moment is lacking in wisdom. Wisdom comes through head, heart and hand, which you know a great deal about, but through being embodied, through using all aspects of ourselves. It’s when we go out and spend time outdoors that we begin to feel more embodied.

In terms of one more piece really about ecopsychology, many people think that it’s really just about reconnecting to nature, and there’s a very important piece about language there because of course we are part of nature. So it’s about reconnecting to the rest of nature. But I’ve begun to talk about how our culture affects us. A crucial part of ecopsychology is how our culture shapes our perception of the world that we live in, and that we can’t possibly think about our relationship with the rest of nature without thinking about that. How our culture organises things and what it teaches us is that apparently we’re on top of a hierarchy of beings.

That human hierarchy puts western values at the top. Race, class, gender is somewhere swimming about in the middle and indigenous peoples are right at the bottom, because they’re seen as closest to the other-than-human world. Sometimes they’re seen as animals in a very derogatory way. And then there’s a thick black line underneath which all of the rest of nature sits. Actually you could see this as capitalism, really. What’s happening at the moment, even though we appal slavery in the human world, actually we are treating the Earth, the whole of the web of life, as our slaves. So there’s a power relationship going on.

So I would say, at the core of ecopsychology is a radical shift in world view. [Here is a recent talk of Mary-Jayne’s]

 

When we lose a connection with nature, what do we lose?

Many, many things. One is that the motto of our culture is onwards and upwards, as if all we can think of doing is going from down there in those dark caves, making progress up into the light and into reason. This is how progress is somehow visualised.  What we’ve lost in there is that life actually moves in cycles. When we lived outdoors a bit more, like our ancestors did, we would be taught by the seasons and by death as part of life. How much contact do we have with death? I have very rarely seen a dead body, actually. Many children learn about death through their pets, that’s their first experience of death.

It’s really important, also knowing that we are very small in relation to the greater whole, and there is no greater teacher than, say, going out there and spending five days in the wilderness – which we don’t really do any more – as a kind of rite of passage. You come away from that knowing jolly well that you are smaller than this mysterious greater whole. It teaches you a lesson and it puts humans into their place. I think we’ve really lost that sense of place, and actually we’re longing for it. We invent all kinds of fake adventures through movies and scary adventures like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. We watch it all from our comfortable armchairs on telly, but we long for that adventure.

How do you think that manifests in our culture? What do we see in our culture that is a manifestation of that separation?

From small things like never eating food according to the season. We want the things now. We imagine that we can just have anything now. It makes our culture not just into adolescents, but almost into toddlers. We see these people having tantrums when they can’t get what they want. So we’ve lost a sense of patience.

Mobile phones are the icing on the cake, because every last moment where we could possibly be, like standing at the bus stop or sitting on a train, we’re playing with mobile phones. There’s no sense of being able to tolerate frustration. It’s that frustration actually that leads to creativity and leads to the invention of new ways of being.

There’s a huge longing for something. That longing gets manifested in binge drinking, binge eating, all kinds of addictions. Work addictions. Ultimately, it’s a very destructive force. When we can’t actually get met by something out there, when that longing isn’t met, when that longing for something mysterious isn’t met, then you get self-destructiveness, destructiveness towards each other and destructiveness towards the world, and we are seeing a great destructiveness towards the non-human world.

On your website you write ‘this website is dedicated to NATURE’. Do you think there’s a danger that we over-romanticise nature? Is it only a luxury of a privileged western lifestyle that we can talk about nature in this way? Surely polio, tapeworms and tornados are nature? Isn’t there a danger that we argue that everything natural is better than it isn’t?

Yes, I think we very much do. And this is a result, especially, and I’m sure in other places too, but in the UK we live in a glorified theme park really. It’s very easy, isn’t it, to have a very comfortable view of nature when you go walking in the park? There’s no wilderness left for us to get a sense of the danger. The danger actually comes to us, say recently in the flooding. The danger comes to us in illness, in viruses. There’s all kinds of dangers, aren’t there, in our encounters with the other-than-human world. But western culture would have us believe that we can conquer all of those problems. That western medicine can conquer them. So we’re still living with this illusion that somehow we’re on top of it all, that we’re omnipotent.

And I guess when you’re an indigenous person living in it, you very quickly realise that nature is not a romantic place to live in, that wilderness is dangerous as well as awesome. It’s like any relationship: if you’re in a marriage, the love is amazing, but the difficulties are also there. The same is true of our relationship with the non-human world. There is great love and it’s very important to nurture those attachments to the rest of nature, but we have to pay respect to it as a dangerous and fearful place. Some aspects of it we really don’t like at all.

What would a re-imagined relationship with nature look like?

Arguably, the western world view, the world view of industrial growth culture, if you like, is at the root of our environmental crisis. So if we carry on seeing the Earth as a bunch of dead objects that we can just take as we wish, with no respect for life at all, with no thought of reciprocity, with no thought that this is a relationship, then we will carry on until we have destroyed ourselves and most of the rest of life.

So how do we re-imagine that? It comes back to relationship. But in an indigenous world-view for example, they would say that humans are one of the last species to arrive. So we need to ask permission to take what we need and we need to live with respect for all others. If that’s too extreme for some people, to think about indigeny, then it’s really just quite straightforward. We need to see ourselves as part of the web of life, and not on top of it. It’s a very big project to start to live with respect for other beings. To live in partnership with the rest of nature. Otherwise we’re not going to survive.

As part of this month, we interviewed George Monbiot about his book Feral and the concept of rewilding. If we were to pursue that, and to extend the large areas of wilderness populated with top predators and all manner of wildlife we currently lack, what would we discover about ourselves? What would happen to our personal and cultural level if we really let wilderness back into our landscape and our world?

This is quite a difficult question to answer. I’m familiar with what George Monbiot is proposing. My first response to your question is that it’s a great unknown really. In the unlikely event, it seems to me, that we would populate our world with top predators, I can’t imagine the powers that be really agreeing to that. But let’s just imagine for a moment that they did agree to it and the world radically changed, wouldn’t that be wonderful.

First, we’d be on the menu. That would be the first reason, wouldn’t it, that people wouldn’t allow it to happen. It’s been a very long time since we’ve been on the dinner menu. Not just us, of course, but all the other animals that we use in our farming would also be on the menu. That’s also why, for example, you don’t want to reintroduce wolves to Scotland.

But what we would find is what you get when you listen to George Monbiot speak about this: you get a sense of coming back to life. There’s a sense of deadness in how comfortable we’ve made our world. Of course I understand why we’ve done that, but we’ve lost all sense of adventure. We’ve lost a sense of living on the edge in ourselves. We’ve lost a sense of our wild selves. As I said earlier, we see many humans going in search of that because it’s a huge piece that’s missing.

We create the adventure that we’ve lost. We go into wilderness for adventure holidays and sometimes people die and then health and safety gets very agitated, but introducing top predators would be a very big issue for health and safety people, wouldn’t it?  I suppose we would bring back a sense of that wild part of ourselves which would be a very core part of the meaning of being alive.

How important is connection with nature as a tool for addressing burnout in activists for positive change?

In terms of burnout there’s connection on many levels. There’s a connection with self, for a start, and I’m going to go back to what I said earlier about when we spend time outdoors, we’re reconnected to life as a cycle. Many activists, understandably because of the urgency of the situation, go onwards and upwards as our culture has taught us to do. We don’t allow for fallow periods. When was the last time you heard of an activist going on a pilgrimage for eight months? They don’t take time out. Somehow it just seems as though we’ve got to get on with the cause. So that would be the first thing, to learn how to live in a cycle with oneself, and that would mean on a daily level, on a yearly level, but also that we might do seven years on and take one year off.

But also it would look a bit different if we were living a bit more outdoors and getting that incredible sense of nourishment. That’s another question for activists. Where do you get nourishment? You can’t go on giving out. You have to have some input. Where does that come from? I suppose for everyone there’s going to be a different answer to that question. For me personally, I make a pilgrimage to Hampstead Heath every single day.

I swim in the Women’s Pond and that takes me about an hour and a half if I’m quick and that’s an absolutely essential part of my day. I couldn’t see endless clients without that and I couldn’t do the ecopsychology work that I do without that. Everyone has to have some form of daily practice in my opinion, in order not to get burnt out.  That’s just a few little examples.

My last question was the thing that came out of talking to Caspar Walsh recently that was really interesting. He does work with young men from the cities who’ve been in prison or whatever, and brings them out to a wild place in Devon and they spend time in the woods and all that kind of stuff. He said when you’re in the bus with them, and they come out of London and they drive down the M5, down the A38, down the little lanes and the lanes get smaller and mossier and then you pull into this place in the middle of nowhere, actually their experience is by the time they arrive there they’re terrified because the only time that their key experience of nature is in horror films. People go into the woods and terrible things happen to them. He said the film, the Blair Witch Project, probably did more damage to a whole generation and its interaction with nature than anything else. I thought that was a really fascinating insight and just wondered what your thoughts were on that?

That’s an interesting view and it’s not an insight that I’ve had, so it’s quite new to me making that link with nature and horror films. I would also say that it’s terrifying because it’s so unfamiliar. I heard on the radio the other day about some kids who saw potatoes in the ground for the first time, and said ‘eurgh, I’m not eating that, it’s come out of dirt’. They’re just not familiar with it. Or milk out of cows’ udders. They would probably think it was disgusting. It’s a lot to do with familiarity, I think, as much as associations that our culture has laid onto it.

One of the most important things about trying to make this shift, it’s coming to me more and more strongly about how important it is to understand the resistance in our culture at quite a deep level to making the change. It manifests in all kinds of different ways but let me give you a couple of examples.

One is a ‘green prison’ that I was reading about in Norway, where the prison is on an island and the men grow their own food and they spend a great deal of time outdoors, and lo and behold the violence towards themselves and towards the prison officers and towards each other is drastically reduced, something like 80%. Their reoffending rate is brought down massively after they’re let out of prison. So wouldn’t you think that as soon as all governments in the world would hear about such a project that they would want to convert all prisons to looking like that, because it would save them enormous amounts of time and money?

But couldn’t you imagine what would happen in this country if such a prison were opened? The tabloids would tear it apart immediately, because prisoners must be punished. So there’s a real tension there between what we know would be a very good idea, ultimately and would save us all time and trouble and would protect people, protect the general public, and somehow an idea that people have got about what should happen.

Another example, the Natural Change Project which colleagues of mine, Dave Key and Margaret Kerr have been doing up in Scotland. They were funded by a large green NGO to set up this project where they picked key people, key leaders of the community, to take them through a six month programme which included spending large amounts of time in the wilds as well as really thinking about sustainability at a deeper level. Their own relationship to the non-human world and their own relationship to themselves.

They go through a long process and come out the other end, and it’s had a huge impact on all of those people. And by the way, those people at the start were no greenies. One quote from one of them was that she’d never been off a pavement in her life. So this is quite an amazing feat that they have made such an impact, not only on these individuals, but then these individuals have taken these ideas back into their organisations and made a huge impact. It’s had huge ripples right across the board in terms of policy making, education, all sorts of things.

Now, wouldn’t you think that would be a really great project to be funded across the country and across the world? Here we have a new exciting way by which to enable people to live more sustainably and to communicate that to other people so effectively? But no, their funding has been cut. Why? I’m only left to imagine why, but I imagine because it’s too touchy-feely for quite a traditional green NGO. They didn’t like what was going on, they didn’t like the emotional process that these people were being taken through. It clashed with the image of their organisation.

Now I have to say that Dave and Margaret have taken that organisation on and they’ve developed it in other ways, and they’re about to start a three year training. But it’s been a real struggle without organisational funding. There’s loads of examples like that. I just think it’s really interesting psychologically to think about what stops us doing what makes most sense. 

Images from a walk taken on Dartmoor by the Editor and his son. 

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8 Sep 2014

Caspar Walsh on nature, writing and community

Caspar Walsh‘s childhood combined “experience of nature, of writing, rehabilitation from crime, drugs and alcohol, and generally a pretty dysfunctional upbringing”.  “I had these three things which were nature, writing and community” he told me.  After years as a professional writer, he had what he calls his “aha moment” and thought “maybe I can bring these things together to create something really unique to me in terms of my own life journey and could possibly offer something to help other people”.  And so the award-winning charity Write to Freedom was born. Our conversation took place in a wood on the Dartington estate (if you listen to the podcast you’ll hear a steam train in the distance). 

Your book ‘Criminal’ tells the story of your very dysfunctional childhood.  Did it include access to nature? What role did nature play in your childhood and how did you experience the absence of it, I suppose?

I grew up in London but I also went to schools in the countryside, a very fractured financial upbringing in terms of money for boarding school, then no money. I went to a boarding school called Summerhill which was very much in the countryside, so I had a very strong connection to nature there, and then I would come back to the city in the holidays and London is full of parks, so I was sniffing out trees at any opportunity. I’d be straight up a tree and I’d often sit in it, and I found that was a place where I didn’t have to deal with any adults or any of the stuff that was going on around me.

It wasn’t a conscious thought, it’s only on reflection that I realised what I was doing. It wasn’t “I’m going up a tree because I’m feeling stressed”. I’d just go up a tree like a monkey and sit up there and feel peaceful. I have lots of memories of being in the boughs of trees and looking at people who didn’t know I was looking at them.

There was a real mix of what I call concrete and chlorophyll. I had my green fix in the country and then would be in London, and when I was in London and it all got too much I would scoot off to a park or a garden where I could get some solace.

A lot of the work that you do now is working particularly with young men. What do you observe in a lot of particularly urban young men and the culture that they grow up in now, and what the relationship with nature is to that culture?

We go into prisons or probation or the youth offending teams and as part of our assessment process we have an interview and a written assessment. One of the questions on that is “what’s your experience of nature?”  Some of them will say nothing, but then you realise that they used to hang out in parks. There’s some kind of a connection. They may not necessarily have been drawn to it or felt that it was a real need, but they knew they had that thing and there was usually a camping trip story when they went off with school.

In terms of them coming on the courses we run up on Dartmoor and on the coast in South Devon, it’s really interesting. A lot of them come from a prison, they get released on license, so they leave this very municipal environment, a very concrete-driven environment and they get on the motorway, the M5, then the A38 then they get off at Maniton and are on this little country road.

It’s a progression of dropping into the countryside and you end up with these big walls covered in moss and trees overhanging and into the site we use, Heathercombe. Generally what they say is they feel like they’re in a horror movie. Their experience of that kind of nature, the non-urban-park type nature, is this is what you’ve seen in movies, that there’s a werewolf somewhere and you’re going to get eaten.

In terms of the impact on them, it’s profound. They come into that space a bit shaken up and a bit wide eyed. Half of what I do with them, or should say don’t do, is just let nature run its course. She, it, whatever it is, works on them and softens them up so I don’t have to do all the work.

So Blair Witch Project had probably a worse impact on a generation’s understanding of immersion in nature than anything else?

Yeah, I think Blair Witch Project had an impact on me for a while, I was worried about going into the woods and seeing things hanging from trees. I think the Blair Witch Project is the Jaws of the noughties, the land-based Jaws in terms of the impact it had on us.

One of the other things we work with them on is around tracking and connecting with nature and opening the senses to nature. We work with them and allow them to use their experience what it is to be on alert and intuition in an urban environment in terms of being hunted, there’s this big thing about hunting. They are generally predated upon either by pimps or bigger dealers or rival gangs. They’re literally being hunted on the streets. So we allow them to engage in that energy – you’re in an environment so connect to those senses and you’ll be able to tune into this environment and it works every time.

If you’re experience of nature that it is scary and dangerous and you’re actually safer among bricks and concrete and X-boxes and streets, what does that do to people?

In nature?

How does it change how they develop? What does it do to young men who have grown up with this being their view of the world?

It’s based on the world being a threatening place to live. We’re putting them in a natural environment that they feel threatened by, and the process that we are inviting them to step into is seeing that nature is a resource and an ally to them, and that’s not something that just happens by us sitting down and saying “it’s an ally to you, it’s great, everything’s fine”. They generally have to have at least a weekend with us to get to the end of it and think “you know what, I feel quite good in this space, it’s alright”.

We don’t have any apex predators particularly in this country. We’ve got things that can kill us but … interestingly their relationship to insects and bugs and stuff, these big heavy-duty gangsters that wield blades, they’re literally jumping into people’s laps when they see a wasp or a spider.

So it has an impact on them because it’s like growing up in a war zone. That was my experience, it was like growing up in a war zone .. that I’m under threat constantly so I have to check and see what’s going on. I’m sitting opposite you – you seem like a nice guy but you could turn at any minute so I’m constantly tuning in thinking is this going to kick off. So it is very much about changing that relationship so that nature becomes an ally and a friend and something they can go to and trust.

What kind of impact do you see that that has on them, that nature immersion? Do you have any stories of people who’ve been through that experience and the kind of impact it’s had?

It’s that thing of the difference between empirical and anecdotal evidence. It’s all anecdotal as far as I’m concerned, we’re working on building an evidence base that this really works. The first impact that I see is a real softening. At the end of the weekend you can see that there’s been a holding or a tightening or aggression, fear basically on their face and that really softens and eases up.

I’m still in touch with two of the lads from the first weekend in 2008 that we ran on Dartmoor. We’re in sporadic contact but they’re there. The fact that they’re still in touch and that they communicate with me through Facebook or text messages says that there was an impact for them. There was a guy who lives in Portsmouth who said that it was a life-changing experience for him. I’m very wary about how much somebody might big up their experience because it’s a very heightened experience for them.

Anyone who says “this thing has changed my life”, it’s like, well, ok that’s great, but I think there are other things at play. What we do is not to say this to bodies and funders and organisations is we’re not the Holy Grail and never will be, and even if an individual says this is the thing that turned their life around, this makes us really happy, but you’ve got to have all these other things as well supporting you in your community.

As education becomes more and more focused on results and all of that kind of stuff, and particularly the young men, who aren’t academically gifted just seem to be failed horribly by that, what would be your sense of how we could bring some of the learnings from that, from more exposure to nature and bringing that more into our education system? What would that look like?

This image of not academically bright or not seen as intelligent is based on the framework of the teaching system that we have in this country at the moment, which is primarily whiteboard learning. It’s downloading information. There are a lot of people who are predisposed to that. I don’t know what the learning style is for that. But the learning styles that I work with is kinaesthetic learning so primarily hands-based learning. You have those individuals who really respond to the whiteboard downloading process and they’ll end up in university and they love a lecture and all this information. I never had a thing for that. I always struggled with it because my body needed to move.

In terms of what would we do is that we could either look at a binary split in the education system between the kinaesthetic learning and the non-kinaesthetic learning, assess and identify those individuals and then stream them to those two individual places; or we have a way to bring them both in where you say there are times when you do need to be sitting in the classroom. With the teaching that we do at the weekends, we try to keep the classroom-based teaching to an absolute minimum. There is a whiteboard but I try and stay away from it, or I’ll just literally put some bullet points on the board and talk to that so that they can see what I’m talking about.

I’m amazed, it’s almost medieval. The lack of common sense, intelligence, understanding, empathy from the systems that deliver education. So many people didn’t know that dyslexia is a major way to disengage from the education system. They’re then seen as troubled kids. They get excluded. They get into trouble. That causes more trouble and they end up in prison.

I’ve worked with loads of young men and you can just track that process from being dyslexic and not really being into school to ending up in prison under a major sentence for a really heavy duty crime. For me that was a real revelation because understanding that I’m dyslexic … I grew up with this thing of not being academically bright. I got to the age of 29, 30 before I fully acknowledged that I was intelligent.

The truth is that the guys that I work with, the young men, they’re all very very bright. They’re just not bright necessarily by other people’s standards. It’s our job to find out where that is. One of the things we do is we say “what’s your genius?” Everybody has a genius. It’s not exclusive to Einstein or Stanley Kubrick or whoever, it’s our job to help discover that, identify it and tell them that, and let them grow into a belief of that.

When young men grow up isolated from nature, what does it do to them? What does it do to us when all we ever see is screens and buses and streets and never experience the wild? When we grow up and have no experience of that, what does it do to us? What bits of our psyche or the way we work in the world are damaged or influenced by that?

It does a lot of things to us. The first response is that it makes me ill. When I lived in Bristol, I’d come back after a weekend in the country and people would say “you’ve got colour in your cheeks”. You see guys coming out of prison and they’re looking quite pale and freaked out, understandably because they’re in a prison environment and have been locked away.

I think it creates a disconnect and there can be a predisposition to panic at that disconnect, to say that there’s something that’s broken in that individual. Our thing as well is that there’s nothing actually wrong with any of them. What’s wrong is what’s going on within the system, and the opportunities that they’ve had. The speed with which they reconnect, not necessarily at a conscious level but an unconscious level, actually physically the blood starts to rise into their cheeks.

We had a guy recently, we were running a project with the Torbay Youth Offending team. They were in group situations, which I don’t really favour any more. I just want to get them outside as quickly as possible because that’s where they want to be. This kid was really disengages in the sessions, irritating and I found him really difficult to work with. We got him out into a wood and another guy, another friend of his for the day and he just became like an animal. I don’t mean tearing around ripping things apart, but he was immediately in tune with the environment. He had had some connection to nature.

So in terms of what it does to them, I think it creates a disconnect, but for us not to be afraid or think that we’ve got some massive onerous task in order to help them reconnect. As human beings, our neural pathways and our senses and our sensory awareness crackles to life like static electricity when we’re put into a natural environment very very quickly. You can’t really destroy the soul of a man or a woman. I don’t think you can really take that away.

But in response to your thing about the games, I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I spent a lot of time in front of computers as a kid and a lot of time in front of the television. I also spent a lot of time outdoors and I wonder whether there’s a bit of moral panic around that. It’s what teenagers do.

I think there is a bit of a problem, I think it’s more intense than it was when I was younger but it’s a process that encourages them to get out. There was a Facebook photo that I saw, which was a picture of a forest, which said “the original Playstation” I think it’s great to be in the forest and there are advantages.  There’s a really good TED Talk about this, the advantages of console game playing. But everything needs a balance.

You mentioned prison before. Prison is by definition the ultimate nature deficit experience. You’re indoors 23 hours a day or whatever it is. Could you imagine a prison system that brings nature more into what it is and how it works?

I could and I see it. The young offender institution that I work with was starting it. One of the things with Write to Freedom was looking at creating a programme where we could bring the wilderness experience into the prison. Obviously there are restrictions on what you can do, but we were looking at creating a fire where they could sit around a camp fire, have tents and things. It was a nice idea but it didn’t actually work. They often have gardens in prisons, they’re quite municipal-looking gardens with nice arrangements of chrysanthemums and begonias and things.

But there is a connection for them. Park Prison that I work with, which is a young offender and an adult prison have increasingly extensive flower garden and I think they grow vegetables as well. There’s a project in America which has a major food growing project in the prison which ended up supplying food to the local community. It provided a lifeline and massive levels of rehabilitation for the offenders, and reconnection to the community. Originally, they would say – we don’t want vegetables grown in prisons, as though they’re going to be infected in some way. But they were eating them and thinking, actually this is really good.

My take on the prison system is that it’s a necessary place for some people. The majority of people don’t need to be in prison but some do for their own safety and the safety of the public. So to some extent, there needs to be, not a total removal but “this is a stark environment and I don’t want to be in here”. I don’t mean turn prisons into Medieval dungeons where people are dying and are terrified. They have to have humanity within them.

There needs to be a balance, and giving them a taste of nature, giving them a connection with it is important and it happens. I haven’t been to all the prisons in the UK. There’s a prison in Suffolk which has a bird of prey centre in the prison. They have buzzards, hawks, eagles, and the young prisoners work with these animals in the prison environment.

Fantastic, thank you. Any last thoughts on why it’s important to make space for nature in what we do?

There’s a phrase which I’ve started using. It’s not a new one, but that nature is a life support system. Obviously it provides us with the oxygen that we breathe. But I do think there is a disconnect. The growing cities – my sister for instance doesn’t spend much time in nature at all. The more you’re away from it, the easier it might seem, that sense of not really understanding that something’s missing, not fully being yourself, not in great health. Because it happens over time, it can be like looking in the mirror and not really noticing you’re aging. There can be an incremental detriment.

But as I said before, get them out. There are lots of parks and there’s a real passion for parks and when the sun comes out people want to get to the water, to the sea. So it’s absolutely central to what we do. When I tell people what Write to Freedom does, that we offer wilderness and writing activities, the wilderness comes first. The writing is a way to express those experiences that come up within that, how we feel about that.

The last thing I’ll say is that yes I believe we’re damaging the planet and we’re losing species and animals and plants. But I have no doubt that when nature really has had enough of this part of her, which is us and what we’re doing, we’ll go and it will regenerate in a couple of hundred thousand years. I don’t think we’re so powerful that we could wipe out nature, but I think we’re powerful enough to wipe ourselves out. 

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5 Sep 2014

How to make Transition plum & almond cake

Last night I attended the book launch, at Schumacher College, of Julian Ponsonby’s new book Gaia’s Feasts.  It contains many of the recipes used in the College’s kitchen, which, as anyone who has ever eaten there will know, produces incredible meals on a daily basis, strongly rooted in local, seasonal and organic food.  One of the recipes is called ‘Transition Plum and Almond Cake’, and I thought, as you might be about to spend the weekend harvesting plums, that you might enjoy it. Gives “Making Space for Nature” a new twist. Here is the recipe from the book.  Over to Julia …

“In 2007, Transition Town Totnes (TTT) – mother of the Transition movement – celebrated its first anniversary. Tamzin Pinkerton, author of the Transition book Local Food, asked me to make a cake for the birthday party. Clearly a cake for a movement that aims at promoting local resilience to external change – through seed-swaps, farmers’ markets, food hubs and by planting nut trees, etc., etc., would have to have a locally inspired cake . . . 

Well, the plums were dripping off the plum tree in the Old Postern garden, and Riverford Dairy’s delicious double cream was calling fatteningly from the fridge. The chickens were laying in the long grass at School Farm. And nuts – the recipe had to include nuts, even if the newly planted Totnes nut trees were still too young to produce any . . . 

1 medium round sandwich cake (serves 10)

(2 x 23cm / 9″ shallow cake tins)

175g (6oz / 1½ sticks) butter, softened

175g (6oz / 1 cup) golden granulated sugar

+ 1 tbsp extra for topping

110g (4oz / 1 scant cup) white flour

2 tbsp polenta + 1 tbsp extra for topping

85g (3oz / ¾ cup) ground almonds

3 eggs

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 good pinch salt

approx. 2 tbsp milk

approx. 3 tbsp flaked almonds

250g (9oz) fresh plums

100g (4oz / ½ cup) plum jam

250ml (9fl oz / 1 cup) whipping or double cream

(The book also includes the measurements for making this cake to feed 30 people)          

1.   Pre-heat the oven to 180°C (350°F / Gas Mark 4). Grease and line the tins with baking parchment.

2.   Cream together the softened butter and sugar, then stir in the eggs, one or two at a time.

3.   Mix together the flour, polenta, ground almonds, cinnamon, baking powder and salt. Fold this into the creamed mixture with a little milk to get a soft dropping consistency.

4.   Spread half the mixture into one tin. Then spread half the remaining mixture into the other tin – leaving a quarter of the total mixture still in the bowl for later: this means that the batter in one of the tins will be half the thickness of the other. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes.

5.   While the cake is cooking, halve the plums lengthways and remove the stones. Cutting along the dimple of the plum allows you to find the stone lying flat and easier to remove, especially if using ‘free stone’ plums.

6.   Remove the thinner cake from the oven when it is just set but scarcely browned at all (about 15-20 minutes, depending on the size). Spread the remaining cake mixture on top of this, then scatter with the flaked almonds and a little polenta before laying the halved plums on top, cut-side down. (The flaked almonds help to take the weight of the plums while the polenta absorbs juices.) Scatter meagrely with granulated sugar and return to the oven to finish baking. Your other cake may be done by now!

7.   When the cakes are ready, they should be well risen and golden-brown – a knife or skewer should come out moist but clear of any cake mix.

8.   Allow the cake with the plums on to cool in the tin. The other cake may be cooled on a wire cooling rack. Once the plummy cake is completely cool, loosen it around the edge, cover with either a clean cloth or bubble wrap (to cushion the plums) and invert it carefully on to a tray, rip off the baking parchment and then quickly turn the cake back again on to another board or cooling rack.

9.   When the cakes are completely cool, place the plain one on a plate or chopping board. Spread liberally with plum jam, followed by a generous layer of whipped cream. Carefully lift the cake with the baked-in plums, and plant it gently on top of the cream. If making the larger version, ask someone to help you lift it using spatulas inserted under each end.

10.   The plum and almond cake is now ready – though you may wish to streak a few iconoclastic jet-trails of melted chocolate over the top, as I often do – not local, but rather delicious and really puts into perspective where our cultural food journey has got to… !

You can order your copy of Gaia’s Kitchen here. 

 

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4 Sep 2014

Can supermarkets ever be sustainable?

Here is another piece I wrote recently for the Guardian Live Better Challenge:

Can supermarkets ever be sustainable?  Walmart’s new boss is on a mission. Will his drive for renewable energy and waste reduction transform the supermarket model?

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