Transition Culture

19 Dec 2014

Pandora Thomas on responding to the Prison Industrial Complex with permaculture and resilience

Pandora Thomas is a teacher, writer, speaker and designer. She currently lives in Berkeley, California and is a board member of Transition US, a founder of the Black Permaculture Network,  a co-founder of Earthseed Consulting, and co-creator of the Pathways to Resilience programme.  We’ve been trying to get an interview with her many months, so we’re delighted to share this with you as our last blog of 2014.  We started by asking her to tell us more about Pathways to Resilience.  

“For many of you that might not be in the United States or specifically in California, there’s an opportunity that exists that’s grown out of what we call the Prison Industrial Complex. I’m not going to get too deep into it but there’s a high rate of incarceration in the United States in general and about 60% of people incarcerated in the United States represent communities of African-American, Latino, Asian, Native, and it’s disproportionate to the amount of people actually doing crimes.

 

There’s pretty much no way, when you look at the numbers, that 60% of people of colour could be doing crimes! There are lots of challenges in our justice system that have resulted in this inequity of incarceration rates. Also there’s overcrowding in the prisons. California are releasing people early, there’s a lot of legislation being passed because lots of people are waking up and saying this is absurd, we’re paying money to house millions of people instead of supporting their transformation and their healing.

In California you have what’s called ‘re-entry’. Re-entry exists all over, but you have a very robust re-entry initiative that’s attempting to take people from prison, especially non-violent offenders, put them into jails and then release them. So the question is, why are they serving time? We need to really support them and really look at the economics of it. We’re spending about $47,000 to incarcerate them a year in the United States, and you could use that money in so many other ways.

My family, who are African-American and Native American, are also dealing with high incarceration rates, and so myself and another woman I work with are very passionate about re-entry and specifically looking at how the idea of sustainability or ecological design, how can we leverage this time where there are going to be all of these people coming back into our communities.

We’re also facing what’s happening, climate change, environmental justice, social justice, and to bring all of these together. When we work on the inside in San Quentin, this other woman, Angela, and myself ran a programme called ‘The Green Life’. The men inside were just as committed to sustainability as they were to their own personal growth, and they saw the link.

So we thought – wow, how about if we could make the argument that as people are coming out into our communities, into re-entry?  We can help lower the rate of people returning to prison and we can also educate them and support them in taking leadership around their own life paths and the way that we live on the Earth. That’s why we call it a Pathway to Resilience, because this idea of resilience being a path, the same path that you are taking as you’re re-entering the society and understanding the systems that are in place, some systems that are responsible for you being incarcerated, but also the natural systems and how can we align the lessons.

A lot of the men and women that we work with need everything when they come home. They might have been away for 20 years, so they’re just learning about technologies and communication, moving back into the flow and the world of work. So we thought this was a perfect opportunity to also highlight and teach them permaculture design, social entrepreneurism. Help them create a re-entry plan where they see themselves having people, the planet and making a profit in alignment as opposed to just coming out and having to piece together a life after coming out of an often very traumatic experience being incarcerated.

What are some of the different elements of the programme?

It’s 4 months training. It’s a pilot, and it’s for men and women coming back to Alameda County, which is the county where I live. They get their Permaculture Design Certification. They also get social entrepreneur training. More importantly, they get case management, wrap-around services so that each participant can figure out where they are at in this journey of re-entering their community. They also get linked to a network of leadership in non-profit and for-profit companies that are committed to their success.

They also do these healing circles where they come together and really talk about everything from trauma to relationships to what we’re dealing with right now in the United States about police brutality and keeping yourself safe. So we’re trying to do almost the eco-village model. I call it the ‘Mandela Welcome’ because when Mandela got out of prison everybody was excited and hoping he was going to be victorious and gave him all sorts of support and resources. So we’re trying to create a Mandela Welcome for all these men and women coming back.

After the 4 months of receiving all this training, what we’re attempting to do is not necessarily place them in full time jobs, but give them internships and apprenticeships at local either green business or social and environmental justice organisations so that they can then take the skills they’ve learnt and apply them to creating a career that’s really rooted in their ethics and their values.

You call it “a holistic pathway towards success”. How is it received by the people who do it? How is it working? Is it something that people choose to do or that people have to do?

Right now we’ve had one cohort. A cohort is just 15 participants. Everyone has to apply, so you apply, you’re vetted and you show the commitment to be able to show up over 4 to 5 months. You go to permaculture. You’re getting your PDC, the Permaculture Design Certification, you’re meeting with other people, and we start the whole experience by what we call rites of passage, so it’s a ceremony in the redwoods where we bring out supporters – like the family of incarcerated folks – who really want to see them succeed and it’s a rites of passage thing that they go through.  They write something down that they’ve done, then they burn it, do the ceremony, there’s drumming, and this is a re-entry. They loved that because it was a way to start anew.

A lot of them are especially excited about the Permaculture Design Certification because it’s a tangible skill that they can start to use right away. Several if not all of them have experience of some type of land-based practice, whether it’s just working in their grandmother’s back yard, being a landscaper, or having to do landscaping while incarcerated. What we’re trying to do is give it more relevance and help them understand where we’re at and what’s happening planetarily with sustainability, and also make it relevant to what’s happening in our own communities.

They love learning about patterns in nature, but also the patterns in their own lives that they can transform – seeing we’re having a drought in California right now and understanding that their bodies are made up of water. What is the relationship between their own health and the health of the planet? It’s been overwhelmingly successful in terms of the permaculture design education piece and helping them re-envision what they could be doing with their lives.

What changes do you see in the people who go through the programme?

We had one woman who joined the programme and she was like “I’m into fashion, I’m just trying to go to school and work”, and wasn’t into “the environment”. It wasn’t relevant for her. After the first day of the permaculture course, and we had our other events too, she was like “I had no idea how what’s happening around the environment impacts me and my community and my life, and how urgent it is, and how I can actually take leadership around it”. So there are stark changes, that lens shift that I think everybody gets when you start to learn about permaculture design or Transition or any way of starting to see our relationship to what’s happening with the rest of the systems on the Earth.

We also have other participants who understand – wow, whatever job I get, I can bring this ethic of people care, earth care, resource share to that work. A lot of participants also say “now I feel like I’m serving my community. I don’t just feel like someone’s looking at me like he just got out and I’m afraid of him”. Now people are looking at these men and women and saying “I can look to them as leaders and as a resource for improving our community”. That’s been really powerful to hear from them. They also give us feedback on how to improve the programme. That’s been really good too, how do we make it more relevant or more empowering for future participants.

Social entrepreneur training is one of the key parts of it. Why did you feel that you had to include that?

I consider myself a social entrepreneur. It’s kind of a buzzword that’s going around right now.  Someone asked me the other day “what’s a social entrepreneur?” I think it’s this opportunity we call the triple bottom line: people, planet, profit – just understanding that you can have a mission-driven life, that your work can be mission-driven. We wanted to offer that lens to these men and women coming back into our communities so again, they don’t just say – I’m going to go and work for whatever, but what’s their mission in life and how can they create that.

How can they not just see themselves as whatever one thing they are doing, but what are they passionate about. Is there an issue in their community that they can become innovative and creative about and design a solution that’s needed? So we worked with the Sustainable Economies Law Centre which is a local co-operative of lawyers in the area. They do a lot of training around starting co-operatives.

They also get to meet social entrepreneurs, specifically social entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds like Back to the Roots. They have used coffee grounds to grow mushrooms. They have mini aquaponic systems now and these are located in stores all over the United States. This was two college students who saw a need and that there is no waste actually and wanted to grow something out of it. For our participants to learn about their story and see how they designed a business and that it’s possible to design something, that you can be an entrepreneur and make a true impact in your community.

Last year Back to the Roots made $11 million growth. They’re hiring people locally, they’re committed to social and environmental justice. So for us, including the social entrepreneur lens makes it more holistic, so that the next step they take is what role do I play in creating a mission driven business, or bringing that ethic to whatever work I might do.

How would you rate the level of awareness around issues around race and culture within the permaculture and Transition movements? Is it improving? Is it worsening? What’s your sense?

I should say I have done a lot of work around bridge-building and creating relevancy and engaging diverse communities around sustainability. This is an area that I’m very passionate about and I’ve been working for the last 20 years around it. Firstly I think that Transition and permaculture, there are so many facets to them. In my mind, there’s no one permaculture movement. Permaculture is a discipline that shows up in many different ways. There are patterns that you see in California, how it show up in the Mid-West, in the South. The principles are based on the place where it’s rooted.

If you went to a Permaculture Design Certification in Northern California and you went to one in Malawi, the participants will look very different. Just as if you went to a Permaculture Design Certification where people had made an effort to actually bring people together and create access, like what we’re trying to do. In Oakland it’s going to look different to the Permaculture Design Certification just over the bridge in San Francisco. What I see now is that permaculture, Transition is a microcosm of a macrocosm.

We are still experiencing the legacy of racial injustice in a system that was designed to create racial disparity and foster racial disparity. So these movements reflect that, unless you’re actually using the principles to transform that. A lot of people talk about “diversity as a principle in nature”, and “more resilient systems are diverse”. OK, but we actually destroyed a lot of diverse systems, started monocropping and designing water systems that are not appreciative of how water actually needs to flow. It’s the same with people systems.

We put people in silos and now have communities where certain races and cultures live, people identified as poor or rich. If we’re not designing opportunities to bring people together, heal and transform relationships then oftentimes it doesn’t happen. I feel like that occurs a lot.

How are we dealing with racial inequity in our society, the fact that race doesn’t actually exist, but yet these systems exist that reinforce disparities? If that’s not included at the forefront, you can’t take a Permaculture Design Certification and not talk about the people piece, or social dynamics and expect people to leave and apply the principles anywhere else but land-based projects. You guys in Totnes learned that, where you learned that Transition is more about the relationships of people and how you’re using and understanding resources.

It’s still very fragmented but people want to know what to do. We started the Black Permaculture Network and in the last 2 months we’ve given out 12 scholarships working in partnership with local organisations and trainings to get more people of colour trained and at workshops. I’m just writing letters to people saying “hi, would you sponsor 3 diversity scholarships?” People pay a range, and folks are like “yes, that’s a great idea”. There is a lot of work to do, but it’s also relationship building and acknowledging the past and moving forward, and designing better ways of interacting across different cultures and different groups.

I mentioned at the beginning that our theme this month is around ‘less is more’. The impression one gets from the media is that within certain aspects of black American culture is that aspiration through music and culture is often a very material motivation. Particularly one would imagine guys coming out of prison would be wanting to take that path. How do you bring those permaculture principles around Fair Shares, around living with less, around simplicity and looking at abundance in different ways and introduce those ideas and make them resonate with guys who might be in prison because they were motivated by acquisition and wealth and those kinds of things?

First thing thing I want to say is that’s no means just a part of the black American experience. It’s part of the global design here, to accumulate more stuff. So again, black America is a microcosm of patterns that exist in larger society – partially.  I talk a lot to students in the South in historically black colleges and universities about our African-American legacies of conservation.

There is a huge history of conserving, making do, saving, sharing. There’s a huge legacy of the sharing economy in our communities. They still exist in the desires of all ages. It’s not just the old people. People who care about our communities and understand what it’s going to take to really distribute resources once they understand what to do, they’re like “yeah, how do we figure out how to do that?”  I just wanted to point that out, that we are dealing with a system that everyone’s dealing with.

I’ve never been incarcerated, so it’s just want I’ve seen and heard, but when you are you are confined to small quarters. You do not have a lot of stuff. If anything, they’re probably living with the least, by force. You get very creative and you also become very observant. From what I’ve seen, you’re really understanding how to stretch the resources you have. The food they buy is sometimes not very healthy for them, so they have to be shown how to get enough fruit or just enough healthy things in their bodies.

So when I went inside, when I was working in San Quentin, a lot of the men I was working with were in all these classes and workshops in trying to improve their life. Also, in order to have volunteers come in, you have to be at a certain level, and you have to have proven that you’re not in solitary confinement. I was working with people who were on their P’s and Q’s, but they knew what they did was wrong and they were all trying to improve their life.

So the ‘less is more’ argument, they got it! They were all saying “I want a thriving life, but when I get out I don’t necessarily want the lifestyle I had before”. You pointed out that some of them might have done things and had a lot more resources that when they got out and had this new environmental lens they were like “yeah, I want good things that are quality and support the health of the planet and the health of our community”.

So the same way that you would think about this, or I would think about this, being incarcerated doesn’t make you not think about these things. You have to go through making it relevant. The men and women that are now out in our programme, once they’re understanding what’s going on, that’s why they’re like “wow, so you can use corn to make cups?” Or you can not use plastic cups. Or you can trace the fibre journey of your clothing, fibres that are made in these more sustainable ways. They still want nice things and nice clothes, but like we all do in this movement, rooted in a more sustainable process.

So it hasn’t been difficult at all when we talk about it in relevant ways and also when we build on their experiences of being incarcerated, and on their experiences of their cultures. Most of these people are anything from Filipino to Native to African-American. We talk about “remember that Grandmother you had”, or your legacy. And they understand, this is where we come from and how do we reclaim that.

There’s always the question of “is Transition political?”. How political is Transition, is it political enough? Is it more successful because it’s not explicitly political? In the current situation with the Michael Brown shooting and Eric Garner and the different things that are going on, permaculture, Transition in the context of all the protests and all the demonstrations that are happening all over the US, do you see that as something parallel? Does it have a role in that? For you, how do those things come together?

For me, the most sustainable thing a person can go is continue to live! To stay alive and thrive and create and support systems that help affirm their own life. The practices that resulted in Michael and Eric’s deaths were not life-affirming. So that is about permaculture design and Transition. We are the environment. Black men, and not just black men, anyone.

People are also the environment, we are our own ecological system integrated into the larger systems. It’s a no-brainer for me that we had to discuss this also again because it’s been designed as such. We live in a society that policing and the idea of valuing property or other things over a certain life, it’s been designed that way. There are many people who aren’t surprised. They’re saddened, highly saddened and disgusted, but when you look historically at how the system of policing has been designed and who it has benefited, and how black people are seen, dark skin, black men are seen globally and feared. All of these things.

For me it’s how are we designing. If anything, it’s so relevant for Transition because of this idea that we need to transition to communities where people can walk down the street, stand on the street without a question. The police will actually look to them, look to an Eric Garner and say “I know you are a part of this community, what have you observed?” Permaculture’s all about flow of energy, what if those police officers said to Eric Garner “oh hi, you’ve been standing out here watching” – instead of seeing and immediately fearing that he did something – “What are you observing? You’re helping us do our job, who are you?”

If we can design our communities in ways that take into account the injustice that happens, that lives are being taken early, that has to be part of Transition, that has to be part of permaculture design.  There’s enough people to be thinking of all these different parts. I speak a lot to permaculture designers and they’re like “we don’t know anything about racism or police brutality”. But that doesn’t mean you need to be ignorant about it, or that it doesn’t exist! Once you start understanding that it is a part and has been designed in the society that you live in, and that you benefit and you have privileges, just like I do, as a black woman I have some privileges.

Moving forward the conversation, you won’t be surprised that I am frustrated because you can’t even have the conversation and you just want to talk about the diversity of your crops. I’ve had people say to me “let’s talk about the diversity of plants. I don’t see colour or race”. And I’m like “but you have to! You see diversity in plants! What’s the problem with saying you also see diversity in race, diversity in people, and the beneficial opportunities that exist when you bring them together?” I said race doesn’t exist, but cultural diversity does exist.

Here is the podcast of our interview:  

Read more»

15 Dec 2014

If I Ruled The World

A couple of weeks ago the Western Morning News asked me to write something for a new feature they were starting called ‘If I Ruled the World’.  “Feel free”, they wrote, “not to take it too seriously – after all (unless you know something we don’t) no one is really about to make you ruler of the world”.  So here is my (admittedly south west England-oriented) piece:

“In the highly unlikely event that I ruled the world (well, the UK anyway), the first law I would pass would be to nationalise the railways and make all short to medium distance public transport free of charge, so as to give people a real alternative to cars. I would legislate to ensure that it is powered by renewable energy or biogas.  

I would move the capital city to Bristol, bringing more influence to the southwest, allowing London to declare independence as its own nation state and allowing the rest of us to get on with it.  Bristol is next year’s European Green Capital and looks as if it might be about to leap ahead in modelling what a sustainable city might look like.  Its Mayor takes his full salary in the city’s own currency, the Bristol Pound! 

In my Cabinet would be Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden in Yorkshire as my Food Minister.  I would create a special post for Simon Cowell just so I could have the pleasure of sacking him again.  I would put Peter Capener of Bath & West Community Energy, who recently won the Community Energy Organisation of the Year, in charge of energy policy.  I would create a cabinet of vibrant, solutions-focused people, with lots of younger people in there too.  Saying “that’s impossible” would be outlawed around the cabinet table.  

My Community Empowerment Bill would give communities the right to compulsorily purchase assets they felt  key to their future development.  I’d bring in the supermarket tax being considered by Derby City Council to give local economies more protection.  For me, local economies, which we do so brilliantly here in the South West, are the foundation of the economy of the future, not just expendable in the face of the onward march of identikit High Streets.    

Among my advisers would be the brilliant Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company, George Monbiot, one of the sharpest thinkers I know, and Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre.  I’d put solar panels on all government buildings.  I would outlaw the influence of fossil fuel companies, defence companies and mining companies within government. I would declare Goldman Sachs a rogue organisation and not award them any government contracts or employ any of its former staff. 

MPs would earn the average national salary (currently £26,500).  I would stop blaming our problems on migration and on the EU and instead focus attention on the real crises we are facing, climate change (recently described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “severe, widespread and irreversible”) and the widening gap between the richest and poorest in this country.  

I would outlaw zero hours contracts.  I’d set real and ambitious climate targets and argue passionately that our economic future lies in addressing climate change, not putting it off until we see economic growth again. Any brownfield sites unused for more than 2 years would have to be gifted to a Community Development Trust. 

I’d roll back much of the legislation that enables surveillance of our phone calls, emails and so on, reintroducing genuine privacy in our online lives.  I’d lower the voting age to 16.  I would make it illegal for Oasis to reform, given how unforgivably dreadful their last 3 albums were. 

I would ensure that each NHS Trust, rather than tendering its services to companies like Serco, would set up co-operatives to do those things: laundry; catering; cleaning and so on.  This would keep money local and bring more empowerment to local communities.  Zero carbon homes would be the norm, where possible using local materials so that any new housing built would have the maximum beneficial impact on local communities. I would ban new out-of-town retail.  I would ensure that every child leaving school is not only able to read and write but also grow at least 10 different vegetables to a basic level of proficiency.  I would ban advertising in public places and any advertising aimed at under 16s.

How would I pay for all this?  I’d introduce a National Maximum Wage (set at 10:1 in relation to a raised Living Wage).  I would outlaw tax havens and introduce a Land Value Tax.  I would scrap Trident, and use the money instead to roll out a programme to insulate every home in the UK by 2025.  

It would be a government of the long term, not the short term.  It would be straight with people. It would usher in a new culture of co-operation, inclusion and entrepreneurialism.  It would be a lot of fun too.  

Read more»

11 Dec 2014

Knowing what ‘just enough’ is: Azby Brown on Japan’s Edo period – Part Two

So how did you set about researching the book?

I was really fortunate because there are quite a few excellent researchers in Japan who have done a lot of the groundwork, and researchers overseas as well. Of course a lot of it was academic research. And again, the specialisation was interesting, because I met people who knew everything there is to know about forestry and timber transport for instance, but who didn’t necessarily know about other issues, agriculture, water, etc. I found people who knew everything there is to know about public baths but who didn’t necessarily think about the use of metal or charcoal etc. So none of them were linking up their knowledge with other specialists. I approached it specifically looking at the connections.

I have been in Japan for quite a long time and particularly as a traditional architecture specialist I already was very familiar with how buildings were built, how the materials were used, and how cities were built. So from one standpoint it involved following the traces. I knew how timbers were shaped and used in a building but I said – but where did they get the timber from, and how did that whole system work? And then looked on the downstream side – what did they do when the building was being demolished? Where did all that wood and tile and other materials go?

It was really interesting simply expanding this network of the stream of materials and energy through the system in order to illustrate the overall connections.

How has the book been received in Japan?

It’s very interesting because the Japanese edition was published just a couple of weeks before the disaster of March 2011. It was very well received. I was asked to write articles in some very high profile Japanese magazines about these ideas. There was an incredible new receptivity towards this kind of thinking, a very common perception that the way that Japanese society had been doing things, certainly since the Modern period, that there was something fundamentally wrong.

We read stories of people in the Tohoku area that was affected by the tsunami that there had been stone markers set there centuries ago saying that tsunami came this far. Don’t build below this point. And they were warned. Their forebears warned them not to build on these low lying vulnerable areas, but that was ignored. So there’s a sense that there was an incredible amount of knowledge and information that was bequeathed to current generations by their ancestors that had been ignored. And why have we ignored all this stuff – is it a crisis of thinking?

I really felt that that society was ready to turn a corner on things like energy policy, environmental policy. And I think it sparked quite a lot of discussions and quite a lot of networking. But I hate to say it, we are 3½ years past this disaster and I feel that I was naïve in expecting changes to happen as quickly as I did.

So I’m very happy that the ideas that I talk about in the book have gained much more currency. There’s much more of a grassroots understanding, lots of people in the rural regions of Japan are trying to integrate a lot of this kind of thinking into their own lifestyles. But overall, the direction that economic and industrial policy and energy policy has not changed, and I don’t know what it will take to change it.

At the moment the economy has gone into downturn again in Japan after a period of quantitative easing that seems to have made the rich richer and not really helped anybody else very much. Do you see any conscious degrowth movement emerging in Japan that is inspired by these kind of ideas?

There are people, colleagues of mine who talk about this a lot. Interestingly, another researcher called Yuko Tanaka, who has approached the Edo period through literature and writing; she and another colleague called Kebo Oiwa have discussed the implications of the conscious economic degrowth policy and the successes of that during the Edo period.

In terms of what we can learn from it now and how it might have important lessons for us, there are people, very good scholars, writers, thinkers, activists who are talking about this. It is a very alien idea to people, however. A very foreign idea. Our assumptions are that constant growth is necessary. The idea that we can have an economic cycle that is very vital and positive, that does not require the kinds of interpretations of growth, of constantly utilising more resources, new markets, this is something that is so alien to people’s way of thinking that it’s hard to really talk to people about it.

But there are lots of grassroots movements. There are even alternate currency movements in Japan. There are lots of places, and again these tend to be rural areas, where people have gone back to small towns, to be farmers, to be more self-sufficient, to live closer with the natural environment. This is a network but really it is a small minority within this society, as these things often are.

One of the questions I often get asked about Transition and the idea of intentional localisation is “surely we need everybody to be trading with each other?” and I  say – well, up to a degree, but when different communities are more able to meet their own needs, and have an economy when they’re more self-reliant, not self-sufficient, but there is that cultural sense that people are able to turn their hands to address issues that arise rather than each community, each settlement being completely unskilled and dependant on imports for absolutely everything. Then the quality of the relationship between those two settlements is very different. When two people meet each other and they’re both very skilled, adaptable, resilient, can turn their hands to anything, it’s a very different relationship to two people meeting each other who don’t have those skills. I wonder what your sense is from your study of the Edo period in terms of how that was. What was the quality of the relationships between neighbouring settlements and how they maybe differ from today?

They were overall very self-sufficient to begin with. Of course, there’s variations in the natural topography and what resources their particular local environment may have provided. There were not many things that villagers needed to buy from the outside. One, interestingly, was salt. Another was metal ore for making iron implements etc. Other than that, there was the conscious desire to make do with what was naturally provided and to set limits on the consumption of these resources. Among other things that this led to was an incredible recycling, reuse and the design of things for recycling and reuse.

Politically, it’s difficult to talk about the political and economic situation because on the one hand, it was a very advanced system in terms of information. This was largely based on the literacy that I mentioned. You had peasants who were very well educated and certainly the leadership of the villages were well educated. They had economic systems with their neighbouring villages that were actually very lively, trading goods, trading farm goods etc. with each other. Not that it was necessary, so much.

And then a large part of the farm economy was based on providing things for the cities. So the urban-rural interchange was really the engine for a lot of the economic activity and particular regions. For instance, if your area was very well suited for growing peaches then you would have a concerted effort by local leadership to maximise that and to find the markets and the shipping etc. to provide these to the cities.

The cities were very, very large. The city of Edo had 1.3-1.4 million people. This made it one of the largest cities in the world, if not the largest, until it was probably overtaken by London at some point. They needed everything, particularly food. This was an interesting relationship. The peasants knew they were needed. They were heavily taxed by the feudal lords, and yet the feudal lords did everything they could do to keep them content, happy and to provide them with an improving quality of life. Again, this is one of the remarkable aspects of this.

Despite this conscious, constant effort not to over consume, quality of life did improve steadily. This seems to be an oxymoron to us – how is it possible to have a better quality of life without consuming more? It was a question of consuming more intelligently based on a good understanding of the environment, of what was available, of what was changing and of how to utilise it as optimally as possible.

Are you able to in any way infer or suggest that people were happier than they are in Japan today?

This is one of those great questions and again this is where we might run the risk of over-romanticising. If there was a happiness index then I think that Japanese peasants would probably have ranked fairly high. There were occasional famines. We mentioned that there was no real mobility. The feudal government allowed a certain amount of expression of discontent, of petitioning for reform and for redress, but they drew a firm line when it came to armed uprising and were very harsh on this.

So it’s as if you’d say – well as long as they didn’t overstep their boundaries, they were allowed to do pretty much anything they wanted. This seems very, very clear. In terms of free time, in terms of things that we tend to evaluate for our own happiness, they had that in abundance. The merchant class in the cities, again if their life was about business and business opportunity then it was a very business-oriented society as well.

The cities were fantastically dynamic, lots of entertainment, lots of food. Pretty much everyone had what they needed in terms of food and a place to live. Some people were able to have a lot of luxuries and there was a lot of social mobility, economic mobility for the merchant class and the craftsman classes who lived primarily in the cities.

The people who suffered the most, ironically, were the Samurai. The Samurai were technically at the top of the pyramid. But the system was rigid. Their incomes were set on stipends based on the situation generations previously. They were not able to get more income except by somehow advancing in rank and there were limited opportunities for that. So ultimately you had, in effect, a horrific inflation that affected the Samurai classes, who were unable to make ends meet with their government stipends.

They were trained as warriors, but with centuries of no war they ultimately became salaried workers. They would go to an office somewhere and do some paperwork a few times a week, but they really could not better their lot and they were prohibited from doing business or from selling things. One of the fascinating results of this was that gradually they converted their ornamental gardens. Every Samurai really needed to have a garden for formal reasons when they were receiving people ranking above them, they needed to be able to receive them in an appropriate way. They gradually converted their ornamental gardens to vegetable plots.

We saw during this period a tremendous amount of urban farming, primarily for the Samurai to feed themselves. This led to an exchange economy. Again, because they were prohibited from participating in the cash economy, if you grew a lot of apples or aubergines, you were welcome to share those or trade them with your family, with your neighbours, and this was a very lively sharing economy that was happening at the same time. So you had the cash economy and within this was the sharing economy and it continued for well over a century and eventually fell apart when the nation opened itself to the global economy.

You mentioned that your background is in architecture, and in building. There’s a quote from the book I was really taken by, where you say “we’ve become accustomed to living in spaces that are bound by characterless materials with neither sensual richness nor history.” Given the quality of most modern industrialised buildings, what do you think we’ve lost by moving away from the kind of construction rooted in local materials, local culture that you set out so beautifully in the book, and can we get it back?

This is an area that I am conflicted about for a lot of reasons, because I am interested in wooden building, I do love wooden building. I think in many places in the world it has an unparalleled sensual quality, physical quality, environmental qualities. And yet sometimes I feel that because of our deforestation, our poor management of our forests, maybe we should decrease the use of wood in construction. So I’m really torn about this.

What I do see that the Japanese building of this period had and gave to its society was a sense of time, primarily. A sense of connection, a sense of ageing, a sense of continuity. The buildings lent themselves, particularly the way they were designed in Japan, to being modified, to growth, to adapting, being adapted as needs changed without changing the fundamental character or quality of the buildings or the towns. This is a property that towns or buildings and cities have always had, we could even say they still do even if they’re built with industrial materials to some degree. But it’s not really recognised as a fundamental need for buildings.

We basically assume that buildings will be used for a certain number of decades. In Japan, it’s currently assumed that a building will be used for 20 or 30 years and then will be demolished, scrapped and something else built. So we have lost buildings that speak to our society, that speak to ourselves about who we are, where we came from, what we have valued, what we care about.

I grew up in New Orleans, in the United States, which is one of the oldest cities in North America, where this was valued. No matter what neighbourhood you would walk through, you could see how people lived 100 years ago and how we still appreciate some of the same things they appreciated, and how, if we value that and take care of it, it really beautifies and enhances our lives and enhances our identity.

And I realise in the United States there’s not a lot of places where you can say that. In Japan, I think people understood that. There’s still some kernel of understanding about it. But they feel that newer is better, that the older buildings were somehow inadequate. They were dark, they were gloomy. They don’t understand how in the West, certainly the United States and I believe in the UK, when people wanted to reuse old buildings, when they started to want to go back to the city centres in the 1960s and 70s, people said “hey, we need to find ways to bring electricity into this old building, we need to improve the plumbing, we need to find ways to improve the insulation”. The market demanded it, and industry responded. And this has not yet happened in Japan. People just assume older houses will be cold and draughty. It’s really a lack of imagination and I think they’ve been sold a false set of ideas by industry and advertising.

The Japanese love their old buildings, they just don’t think that they are appropriate for their life today. They have not seen what I have seen, which are examples all over the country of people taking old buildings, renovating them, upgrading them, retrofitting them to be more comfortable, to be safer, more structurally secure for earthquakes etc. This is a fantastic movement and it’s been happening for decades here in Japan. It’s just not widely recognised by people throughout most of society.

The last question I wanted to ask you was this.  Our theme this month is ‘Less is More’ This was a culture, a time that clearly lived with much less than today in terms of energy demand and resources and so on. In what sense could it be argued that they had more than we have today?

Often the kind of things that people possess, the kind of things that we enjoy, that we benefit from, that enhance our life, are the ones that go unremarked because they are so common and so pervasive and form the connective tissue of our daily lives. The Japanese people of this period possessed a remarkably sophisticated knowledge and understanding of their environment, of how to use things, of how to get things done in a very efficient and beautiful way – which if they would stop and look and compare, if they had been able to compare to European cities at the time, they might have realised how special what they had was.

But in fact, they were living it from day to day, it was emerging from internal needs, from what they wanted to do and how they liked doing it. I think they didn’t notice what they had. This made them very vulnerable to images of Western superiority in the mid-19^th century when the American warships showed up with steam engines and they saw images and models of the railroads and fantastic large buildings. They were vulnerable to regarding Western culture, particularly material culture, as somehow superior and more desirable. This is when they started to throw these things away and discard them in an attempt to match the West.

If I had been a leader in Japan at the time, I don’t know that I would have done it differently. They managed to avoid being colonised, they managed to integrate and adapt the best of Western technology, and for a long time managed to preserve a lot of the traditional ways as well. But ultimately the shift in value, the shift in energy sources particularly, the shift towards using coal, fossil fuels as prime energy sources instead of these carefully husbanded forest supplies was one of the main drivers of the shift away from traditional practices.

But their lives probably were quite poetic. Constantly reminded of what they considered beautiful, what they considered desirable. A lot of their knowledge was quantified literally in poetry and in song. If you went into a Japanese person’s house, if they were above the poverty line, of course there were some poor people as well, there was a visual harmony to everything they had in terms of colour and texture and material. Their life was filled with gardens, not just in terms of the Samurai and their vegetable gardens but the cities were full of very extensive tree canopies throughout the entire city. They benefited from a very comfortable and environmentally harmonious and visually harmonious lifestyle which they probably were not aware of, except maybe artists who would highlight these things for them.

At the same time, daily life depended upon a lot of physical effort. They walked everywhere. They did not use draught animals very much at all. They did not have lots of carriages and things. People walked, they pushed handcarts, they used boats in the cities a lot. But it was assumed that there was a lot of physical effort that would go into your life. They were not seeking leisure. Leisure seeking in itself was considered morally and ethically suspect. It’s a fascinating set of values. If you have two ways to do things, one is to invent a machine to do it and one is simply to employ people who will do the work. They would just employ the people to do the hand labour.

If we think of comfortable life as meaning a life of leisure, well, they might not have had it so much in the sense of free time. But if you think of a comfortable life as meaning one when you’re well embedded in your very communicative and supportive community of likeminded people, of people who celebrate who they are, where they came from, people who celebrate the gifts of their environment through their festivals and their shrines, then it was an incredibly rich society by any means. 

If you would like to hear the interview in full, the podcast is below: 

Read more»

9 Dec 2014

Appearing on Desert Island Discs, Totnes-style

On Friday, at St John’s Church in Bridgetown, Totnes, I was the subject of a rather unusual version of Desert Island Discs.  The Winter Concert, organised by 2 local choirs, Glorious Chorus and Viva, and by The Bogg Boys, invites a local person to choose 8 tracks which are then performed interspersed with stories from that person’s life.  It was a real honour to be chosen for this year’s, and to have my somewhat eclectic choices reinterpreted by choirs and a band.  Sadly though, ‘Shut’em Down’ by Public Enemy wasn’t chosen from my original longer list of choices: the choral reworking of that will have to wait for another occasion.  

The event raised £1,800 for the Atmos Totnes project.  Local poet and performer Matt Harvey chaired the event, and the whole thing was a magical evening, very moving.  I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to it, especially the choristers who got their heads round my trickier choices, it was very special.  Thanks.  

Here is my recording of the evening.  My stand-out track was Song to the Siren, which you’ll find at 35:50, but the whole thing is fantastic.  

Read more»

8 Dec 2014

Knowing what ‘just enough’ is: Azby Brown on Japan’s Edo period – Part One

One of the most extraordinary books I have read in recent years is Just Enough: lessons in living green from traditional Japan by Azby Brown. Brown is director of the Konazawa Institute of Technologies Future Design Institute and has lived in Japan for the last 30 years.  It is a beautiful analysis of the integrated, mindful and design-driven way in which one traditional society worked and embodied the principles of sustainability.  Here is a TEDxTokyo talk he gave about this:

 

His analysis of the Edo period is the perfect example of the ‘Less is More’ that is our theme for this month.  I talked to Azby by Skype from his home in Tokyo. I began by asking him when the Edo period was, and what it is that he finds so fascinating about it:

“The Edo period began in the first decade of the 17^th century and lasted until the country opened to the West in the 1860s. That was a period of a little over 250 years. It was remarkable in many respects culturally, technically and economically because it was preceded by centuries of civil war and also of economic and military expansion overseas. The country basically had exhausted itself, had exhausted its resources. It had deforested most of the country, it had damaged its capability for agricultural production, the population had increased and the country was on the verge of environmental collapse, mainly caused by the deforestation.

But over the course of the first few generations of that period, through very wise policy making and the ability to use people’s traditional knowledge, their understanding of their local environments to apply these new policies, this was reversed. The environmental degradation was largely reversed, regenerative forestry practices were introduced and means were found to introduce agricultural production to support a growing population which was then kept stable. The rest of the period had a steadily increasing quality of life by all our current measures in terms of lifespan, health issues, education, housing and so on.

It was a period when the country was isolated. The regime, the Shoguns, had a strict policy of isolation, of not having much economic or political interchange with the outside world at all. It was a conscious turning inward and a conscious degrowth period in terms of the economy, and had very many positive benefits for the society. It was considered to be the period where most of what we consider to be traditional Japan, the great arts, the great woodblock prints and architecture, this is considered to be the period where that was born and when that became very common.

At the root of this was a great store of traditional environmental practices which were very well utilised at this time. This was something that I spent a lot of time learning about and trying to communicate in my book Just Enough.

You argue that that period gives insight into what it’s like to live in a sustainable society. In what way?

This is really one of the big problems that I saw. That we don’t have many models for what a successfully run sustainable society might look like and how it might work. The Edo period of Japan was one and it’s certainly not the only. I’m sure in other Asian countries there are very many similar practices, but because of its peculiar lack of resources for instance, the specifics of the situation in Japan, an island nation with not a lot of arable land for agriculture. There were quite a lot of pressures that they went through that have great parallels with our own period.

So, diminishing energy sources, in their case it was primarily wood for burning and charcoal. A growing population, difficulty having enough agricultural land, the pressure between how much land you allow for agriculture and how much for cities. Lots of the issues that we’re facing now were things that they faced.

They did not have climate change/global warming – fortunately. They had very abundant and good fresh water, which we are now facing a very great difficulty with globally. So there are some cases where the parallels don’t fit, but otherwise it was a very good match. When I set about to write the book I thought one of the best ways to do it would be as a travelogue, as if we were visiting people in rural villages for instance, in cities, a visit to a workman or a samurai in the city, and see how they worked and how they lived and how the interconnected systems that they had developed for maximising the use of their environmental resources without degrading them.

You mentioned that the Edo period came about as a response to the near collapse of society due to degradation and the environmental crisis. How did they turn that around? And perhaps most relevant to our current predicament in terms of climate change, how did they mobilise people to do that?

It’s really interesting. We can divide it into the technical steps that were taken, the social steps that were taken, the political steps that were taken. They’re all connected. The first thing was to reverse deforestation and this was done by some very strict forest protection laws. There were laws on the books that stipulated the death penalty for anyone entering a protected forest with an axe or a cutting tool. We don’t really know how often this penalty was enacted but the fact is that was how carefully they wanted to protect these forests.

The populace was involved in monitoring their environment and had always been actually, through something called the satoyama which is a set of practices of utilising and monitoring the surrounding environment. Japan is very mountainous. Most villages are in the valleys, and they were using the surrounding forests in the mountains for their fuel, for supplementing their diet with mountain vegetables and mushrooms and fruits and things like that. They were constantly monitoring and taking care of this environment. For instance, in the case of fuel, this was an ethical issue that’s always been part of the society, the strong ethics of not wasting things and being careful to leave enough for the future.

In the case of fuel, people were not allowed to cut down trees to burn for fuel. They were only allowed to use what had fallen naturally, the fallen branches and so on. And if a community was living in the same place for centuries, for generations, they knew what the normal carrying capacity of that environment was in terms of things like fuel. They would limit their fuel consumption to their known supply and this preserved the forest from being unnecessarily cut and basically this was not necessarily such a legal restriction as it was an ethical and social one.

So these kinds of tie ups between the overall necessities that were recognised and somehow documented and quantified by the government, and the traditional ethical, moral and knowledge based practices of the communities themselves were very well unified and served on the whole to preserve the environmental resources.

Reading ‘Just Enough’ with a background in permaculture and having been a permaculture teacher for a long time, I look at a lot of what you have in there and think – it’s design. That everyday life was underpinned by an incredible amount of sensible, common sense design, it was a design project. That everyday common sense design that underpinned so much of what you document in the book, did people learn that consciously? Did they absorb it mostly by osmosis? How was that culture infused with good design?

It’s a really interesting question, because design ultimately means making decisions about how to make, build, shape, use, transform things. I would like to argue that for the most part these were very consciously and continuously evaluated decisions. How do we bring the water to our fields without disrupting the natural ecological functioning of the places we’re bringing this through? Let’s use gravity, let’s use the natural watershed as much as possible. Ok, we get to a certain point and we need to dig channels for the irrigation water. How do we do that in the best way?

They are conscious decisions, and yet they are also techniques that are tested over time and handed down through generations. It helped that Japan was a very literate society at that point. A higher literacy rate than any European country, certainly higher than North America even though it was socially stratified. It was a caste-based society and some of the lower ranks may not have had a high literacy rate.

There were lots of things that were written and analysed and put into books, and the books were fabulously well illustrated so that even people who couldn’t read could look at the illustrations like a comic and say – oh, this is how we dig an irrigation ditch or build a trellis for these fruit trees. It was a wonderful combination of educated analysis and handing things down through the oral traditions.

Design was everything. And it was reflected, I think, in both the overall large-scale infrastructural urban planning, town planning, architectural planning aspects as well as the design of small things used in everyday life, the cups, bowls, boxes, furnishings etc.

Was it a more equal society than today? It looks like it was very caste-based and stratified, but was there much potential for social mobility? How does it compare to today, do you think?

This is probably the one area where we would find it the most wanting. It was clearly a caste based-society. Several classes of people, the military class, the Samurai, were at the top maybe 10% of the population, but they dominated most of the wealth and property as in any feudal society. Interestingly, the second ranking class were the farmers. Farmers were considered to be more of an elite and important part of the society than merchants were. Merchants were on the lowest rung of society.

Economically, they ended up making a lot of money and becoming very powerful instead of that, so the social structure placed value on the role of peasants, of farmers, of the people who actually provide the food and who form the bulk of society. There was very little mobility. It was purely hereditary, and as in many societies like this, this ultimately became one of the reasons why it was unsustainable and led to this catastrophic and dramatic collapse in the 19^th century. We would say definitely it was not an egalitarian society, and yet the fact that farmers were considered to be ethically, morally, socially superior to businessmen is really an inversion of our current value system.

Margaret Thatcher had a press secretary called Sir Bernard Ingham who once famously said “I have one word for environmentalists who would take us back to the 18^th century – dentistry”. I wonder whether you’ve been accused of over-romanticising a time that we’ve progressed from and is best consigned to history?

Of course, as anyone who’s promoting these ideas probably has, and yet I try to be careful to point out that I am not advocating returning to the specific practices, to these specific ways of farming or of building or of doing anything. But for understanding how they perceived their environment, how they addressed problems, and I use the expression ‘a multiform solution’ because in any situation during that period it seems if they were thinking about how to address something like let’s say the water problem, they would look at the connections – at how the issue of water is integrated with others.

One example would be – if  they want to provide hot water, for instance for bathing, then they could do this in a way that did not damage the water supply itself and that also made optimum use of the fuel available, then they were effectively addressing what we would perceive as two different spheres of interest with one solution. They did this constantly. Another prime example involves the use of human waste for agriculture. Again, we can find lots of reasons to oppose this these days, in hygienic terms, which in fact is probably not necessarily the case. Whereas in the West, in European cities and North American cities, human waste was eventually collected in these horrible cess pools which as we know led to cholera and other diseases. In the 19^th century when we developed indoor plumbing and flush toilets, it helped with the hygiene but then this stuff is being dumped into our rivers where it’s polluting them. It was really not a very good solution.

The Japanese solution during the Edo period was that farmers would use human waste for fertiliser for their agricultural fields. Before this they were only using what’s called green fertiliser, organic matter, leaves etc, the nitrogen-rich things that they would put on the fields as fertiliser. There were also other fertilisers available like the remains of sardines that had been pressed for oil or rapeseed that had been pressed for oil. These things were good fertilisers. But using human waste increased agricultural productivity many fold.

Having farmers go into the cities and empty out the latrines increased the hygiene levels of the cities themselves. There were no reported outbreaks of cholera in Japan until the Modern period in fact. This also became a market where if you were a landowner in the city and you had lots of rental properties and those renters used a set of latrines on your property, initially you would have to pay someone to clean it out but as time progressed they were paying you to cart the stuff off, it was so valuable.

This was providing several benefits. One specific technique provides benefits in terms of agriculture, in terms of health, in terms of economy, and also others. These are the kinds of solutions that Japan of the Edo period found everywhere. How to reuse things, how to recycle things. How to transform what they have into everything they need. They always looked at it as the big picture of how these things could provide many benefits at once. It’s the opposite of our specialised viewpoint, I think, where one person knows how to do one thing and that’s it.

I loved the bit about how people were paid for their sewage. It’s just so beautifully counter-intuitive to how we do things today.

It really is – you’ve looked at composting toilets, bio-toilets and these have been developed for decades. If you look at our situation, because we do pollute our fresh water system with our waste then we need to purify the water. And we need to use the energy and have infrastructure for this and use chemicals etc. It’s crazy.

During the Edo period, the main river of Edo, which was the town that was eventually renamed Tokyo, they said the water was clean enough, if not to drink, to make tea from. As if you were in the Thames in the 18^th century and dipped a teapot into that muck and make tea from it! It was clean enough to do that.

In terms of this idea of being paid for your compost, so to speak, you had a composting toilet in your house and once a month someone came to clean it out and gave you $5 or $10 for it. It’s crazy to think of this now.

Part Two will be published on Wednesday.  If you would like to hear the interview in full, the podcast is below:

Read more»