Ireland's First Ecovillage

I met Davie Philips (middle, above), Director of the Sustainable Ireland Project, during the “Positive Energy” conference on “Creative Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Change” held at the Findhorn Foundation Community in the end of March 2008. Davie introduced me to “The Village,” otherwise known as the “Sustainable Ireland Project,” Ireland’s first ecovillage located in Cloughjordan, Ireland. Davie invited me, along with several other international delegates, to attend an event being held during the second week of April 2008 at the Cultivate Center in the heart of Temple Bar, Dublin. The event, entitled “Convergence 13: Transition Strategies – Post Carbon Cities, Transition Towns and Ecovillages,” was a four day conference that would feature a couple of the speakers from the conference at Findhorn, including Jonathan Dawson and Megan Quinn (far right, above), and finish off with a tour of the ecovillage now under construction. The conference included an impressive list of key leaders in the sustainability movement throughout Ireland and the British Isles, including representatives from local government, the Transition movement in England, the Center for Appropriate Technology in Wales, and the Post Carbon Cities initiatives in the U.S.

Over eight years ago, Davie was a founding member of the Cultivate Center and The Village, as well as an economic think tank called FEASTA (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability). In the spirit of Permaculture, the three organizations have been “stacking functions” in symbiotic ways over the years, culminating in the realization of the ecovillage project this year, and the relocation of the Cultivate Center from the heart of the Temple Bar cultural center of Dublin to the Cloughjordan site. There, the founders believy, it can better establish itself as an holistic sustainability demonstration site, while continuing its role as an educational and cultural hotspot of Ireland. Cultivate, true to its name, has planted the seeds of sustainable culture and education with its program entitled “Skilling Up for Power Down,” which includes a 10 week course (that can be upscaled or downscaled according to need), an exhibit and a book, as well as a T.V. show. The conference and the course will appear on the T.V. show, which will then become part of the course and the book, then back on the T.V. show, and so on, enriching the fertile soils of sustainable culture.

The Village, where Cultivate will soon be housed, will be the first of its kind in Ireland, and has already become the recipient of sizeable governmental grants to model the potential for renewable energy and the revival of rural villages. Aside from breaking ground in Ireland, what makes The Village in Cloughjordan especially unique among other ecovillage projects worldwide is its hybridization of sustainable ecovillage development with the re-vitalization of declining rural villages, together with Transition Town strategies. The founding members of The Village, a group of only about ten people, pooled their modest resources back in 1999 to leverage the purchase of some land adjacent to a rural village that was declining in population. They chose the land carefully on the basis of which county council would show the greatest support for the project. Since the conception of the project, alliances have been forming between the village creators and the existing local residents and officials of Cloughjordan. The Mayor of North Tipperary and lifelong resident of Cloughjordan, Jim Casey, has welcomed the project with open arms and gave an opening talk at the Cloughjordan leg of April’s Convergence.

Ecovillage members have already begun to inhabit empty buildings and store fronts on the main drag of Cloughjordan, establishing community businesses, such as a transportation collective and a coffee shop, before the ecovillage is built. The Village is planned to include 132 households as well as small business spaces and community buildings. Two thirds of the sites have already been sold, and they expect to sell the other third within the year. They have a strong Eco-charter with stricter than strict sustainability standards. The charter adheres to the principles of permaculture by reserving a third of the land for food production and a third for wildlife preservation. There will be a creek running through the ecovillage and edible landscaping throughout. With a financial boost from the SERVE project (Sustainable Energy in Rural Environments), including grant projects partially funded by the EU, the community will build the largest solar array in Ireland, which combined with dual wood boilers and their own small forest, will make their energy sources 100% renewable.

Another progressive feature of the project is the fact that the current membership is not only focused on the so-called “hard” technologies of green building and land use, but the “soft” technologies of self-organization, participation, viable systems and various forms of therapy. Davie proudly shares that The Village’s members not only participate in designing their homes, but collectively participate in the designing of the ecovillage as a whole. Membership buy-in includes part ownership of the entire project.

At the close of the event, Jonathan Dawson enthusiastically welcomed The Village project to become a member of the Global Ecovillage Network, for which he is President, as the world waits and watches while Cloughjordan make its way onto the world stage.

Jonathan Dawson, President of the Global Ecovillage Network, on the role of Ecovillages

I had the opportunity to hear some of the latest thinking of Jonathan Dawson (far right, above), President of the Global Eco-Village Network (GEN) and Executive Secretary of GEN-Europe, at an historical event during the week of March 22-29 at the Findhorn Foundation Community in Northern Scotland. The event was a conference entitled “Positive Energy: Creative Community Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Change,” for which Jonathan was the “focalizer,” or coordinator and MC. Jonathan gave a presentation at the conference entitled: “Moving outside the Bubble: The Ecovillage Contribution to the Sustainability Movement.” The following week, Jonathan also spoke at a conference held at the Cultivate Center in Dublin entitled “Convergence 13: Transition Strategies – Post Carbon Cities, Transition Towns, and Ecovillages,” which continued on in Cloughjordan, Ireland, where there is an exciting new ecovillage project currently under way.

I was inspired to interview Jonathan by an article Jonathan wrote for Communities Magazine in Fall 2006 entitled “How Ecovillages Can Grow Sustainable Local Economies,” in which Jonathan articulated “the need for intentional communities to belong to something larger than themselves alone.” At that time, Jonathan put forth a strategy far more ambitious than the creation of local, collective cottage industries and services. To accomplish greater autonomy from the destructive elements of the global capitalist economy at large and to contribute to the emergence of sustainable economies, Jonathan suggested that intentional communities expand upon the already emerging trend to participate bioregionally, and create alliances with partners with whom they can develop economic mutuality, thereby amassing far greater muscle for serving the planet. Now that communities are facing the dual challenges of Climate Change and Peak Oil (or, rather, the multiple challenges of “Peak Everything,” as author Richard Heinberg calls it), this reader was curious about recent developments in Jonathan’s thinking about the progress that intentional communities have made in recent years and the task that lies ahead for them. Some of the content of these answers were gleaned from talks that Jonathan gave at both aforementioned conferences.

Jonathan, what progress do you think intentional communities have made over the last several years and what do you see as the role of ecovillages today?

Over the last 50 years or so there have been an astonishingly powerful series of initiatives that go under this cuddly label “ecovillage.” Traditionally the word “ecovillages,” at least in the European, North American context, has been synonymous with “intentional communities.” Unfortunately, the world has changed a lot in the last 20 years, making the ecovillage model more difficult to replicate: land prices have increased, planning regulations have tightened, there is a much more individualistic society. So, while the model itself is difficult, there are many lessons within the ecovillage that are of relevance to the sustainability movement more generally today. I wrote a little book a few years ago about ecovillages around the world (Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability, a Schumacher Briefing), and researching the book, I lost count of the number of times I wrote that a technology that has now become widely adopted in a country was first introduced into that country in an ecovillage. This is true of governance systems as well: non violent communication, conflict mediation techniques, both the software and hardware of community. It is no accident that this kept coming up again and again and again, that a technology that is now widely adopted as being just the sort of thing we need for a more civilized, sustainable society, was first introduced in an ecovillage. Ecovillages have been the early adopters and pioneers of initiatives that many people then simply adopt because it becomes the best way to do things. Ecovillages adopt new ways of doing things, not primarily for their own benefit, but as a way of demonstrating and modeling.

I notice that many ecovillages, including Findhorn, run ecovillage training programs. Ten or fifteen years ago, these programs were teaching people how to create ecovillages. Today they are not really doing that.They are providing immersion experiences in a new paradigm bubble that people can go back to the mainstream and take that inspiration with them, rather than trying to recreate communities like Findhorn. I think this is our gift. The ecovillage route is saying “we are going to achieve more if we gather together with people with very similar shared values and then really develop almost like an accelerated process.” For me, the real strength of the ecovillage movement is that it is made up of people who have taken themselves outside the system in order to give themselves license to make as few compromises as possible and create communities that are not just generating their own energy, not just treating their own sewage biologically, or living in ecological houses, but creating a distilled version, in terms of how the whole community works, of how a new society could be based along more sustainable, ecological lines.The smallness of scale of ecovillages is a also an important feature that goes back a long, long way; it goes back a millennia. Ecovillages are in keeping with the monastic tradition.

You have spoken about the need for ecovillages to step outside of their “bubble” and build alliances and partnerships with the greater community. What are some of these alliances you speak of?

Doors are open with organizations that ten years ago it would have been political suicide for them to have been identified with us. There is now an invitation to have a dialogue between various networks, including government. However, how we respond to oil depletion and climate change frequently involves what the government needs to do. For example, the government needs to set new standards for insulation or the government needs to address wasteful transport patterns; these are all essential things, but they often miss out how can we really dig into the well of human creativity. Together with the Transition movement, we are very much about how we can actually mobilize the greatest resource we have, which is the creativity of people, rather than become dependent on the government solving it for us. The Transition route and the Ecovillage route are not in competition; they are very much complementary.

As far as economic partnerships, I would say that it is important to partner with the sector that is seeking to recycle for the benefit of all rather than extracting profit for the benefit of a few investors, which is really what defines the not-for-profit sector. This includes credit unions, cooperatives, and social enterprise generally. An area really worthy of research is the cooperative movement. It is huge; it is one of the biggest international movements in the world. The number of people who are members of cooperatives is over a billion, I think. A substantial portion of the world’s population has a share in a cooperative, and they are designed to recycle the profits for the benefit of their members. The more I research in different lands, the more I come back to the origins of the cooperative movement in Rochdale, in Lancashire, in the 1840’s. They found answers to so many of the questions. They really got it right. I’d like to do more research to find out exactly how they have taken the correct principles and applied them in different areas.

Also, there is a growing awareness of the insecurity of current investments, which provides a wonderful opportunity, if we can get our act together, to provide safe, secure (or as secure as you can get) investments, and set up the mechanisms whereby people can invest with confidence in life-affirming activity rather than life-destroying activity. A lot of people for example, have their pensions or their savings invested in stocks and shares and this is profoundly unhealthy, and it is not safe. It’s just not safe. You never know when the coffers will pop.

You mentioned the importance of new investments. What are some of the best investments, and how would you persuade people with resources to redirect their investments?

Energy companies are the real deal; they are a potential major income earner for a community. And also, in many parts of the world, there are generous subsidies available to help pay for the capital costs. It is important to educate people that the only true wealth is natural resource in community and that, actually, their money would be more useful and more secure there. They might not get this big return on their buck, but were they to invest in, for example, wind turbines, and were the system to collapse, they would still be holding a share in real assets. So I think there has got to be potential for encouraging people, not just because it is the right thing to do, but out of self interest to them, to invest in real assets: forests, wind turbines, community centers. The other idea I had was for people to invest in high quality housing. To invest in really energy efficient co-housing, or other ecological housing developments, will again deliver a strong environmental benefit and will have the potential to deliver an income stream for years to come; it is a real tangible asset. The books Going Local, by Michael Schuman (an American) and Short Circuit, by Richard Douthwaite (an Englishman living in Ireland, using international examples with a European slant) are both peppered with examples of community owned enterprises.

As far as how to persuade people to redirect their investments, this is not a strategy that I often would prioritize, but I think in this case a dose of fear is not a bad thing; the fear would be about the security of their conventional investments, a realization of just how vulnerable they are. We are so used to defining wealth in terms of economy, or money, that actually we are overlooking the fact that so much of what really adds to the quality of life has nothing to do with money at all. It lies particularly in the strength of community, human relationships, social services that are often on a voluntary basis. With current investment strategies and under the current rules of the game, you really get the biggest buck, the biggest return, on the most profitable activities, of course, which are the very ones that undermine social capital and natural capital: mineral exploitation, war, pharmaceuticals, industrial agriculture. These are going to deliver a higher economic return for the individual but the social and ecological costs are huge. So actually, whether for their own retirement, or their grandkids, if they really want to increase wealth, it will be by directing their investment towards true wealth that is both secure and will increase the wealth of communities.

What do you think about the strategy of intentional communities linking their economies? For example, the Emmissaries of Divine Light, a spiritual community with more that half a dozen member communities in the U.S., Canada, and around the world, have a farm in Colorado and Indiana, and a publisher in Los Angeles, and they share their resources and products across the states.

I think that is a bad idea. Pretty much every time we have a gathering of eco-villagers, the idea is proposed of creating a currency to enable eco-villagers to network among themselves. I have no interest in it at all. The reason is because we are moving into an increasingly bioregional world. I see our alliance internationally with other communities in the eco-village network as being really important and valuable, but I see our key partners as being in the North of Scotland. I am much more interested in finding a way of building a network that links the North of Scotland than those which hold us in the bubble of intentionality. So, for example, with the Peak Oil/Climate Change scenarios rolling forward, there may well be scenarios where it is a bit dangerous out there. The food supply chains may well come under threat; they are already coming under threat in economically poorer parts of the world, but they could come under serious threat here. If that is the case, if we are growing food and our neighbors aren’t, and they see us as being linked primarily to a group somewhere else, there is no mutuality and ownership. Whereas if the work we are doing is consciously building partnerships so that they come to see that what we are doing is building exactly the skill base that they will need in a post Peak Oil world, it is the best chance we will have to protect ourselves.

Jonathan Dawson on Findhorn's community currency

I had the opportunity to hear some of the latest thinking of Jonathan Dawson, President of the Global Eco-Village Network (GEN) and Executive Secretary of GEN-Europe, at an historical event during the week of March 22-29 at the Findhorn Foundation Community in Northern Scotland. The event was a conference entitled “Positive Energy: Creative Community Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Change,” for which Jonathan was the “focalizer,” or coordinator and MC. During the conference, Jonathan hosted an Open Space discussion on community currencies. In the following question and answer, Jonathan, a resident of Findhorn, explains his interest in community currencies and the Findhorn community currency called the “EKO.”

Jonathan, are there investigations that you are prioritizing right now?

There are, and one is community currencies. I am persuaded that community currencies are one of the most important areas that we can focus on right now; I am certainly prioritizing it. I have been involved in our own community currency project here and it could work a lot better. A commitment I made about a year ago, and I am still on track, is to deeply research community currencies so that we can maximize their use, to really get to the bottom of them and discover what the factors are that we can tweak to make them run better. So far, scale is the most important factor and I think we are too small. Here at Findhorn, we have a relatively small population of 450-500, but with 3000 visitors every year coming to the training programs, it works. It could work even better.

Briefly, how does Findhorn’s community currency work?

We have our own currency called the EKO. One EKO equals one pound. Effectively, we use them exactly as we use regular money. The way that EKO’s come into existence is that we sell them. It works like a bank. Ecopia, our “bank,” has taken responsibility for printing 15 K EKOs, which means we have 15 K pounds in the bank, and we use this to make low interest loans, to the wind park, for example. The EKO’s are continually circulating. People are encouraged to take a proportion of their salaries in EKOs. These go to the Phoenix (the local store), the Phoenix pays for its electricity from the wind park, and its water services from the Findhorn Foundation, the Findhorn Foundation buys printing services from a community service, and so on.

Why did you decide to use this system rather than donate the currency into existence, as was done in Ithaca, or use a LETS system (Local Exchange Trading System)?

In Ithaca, they simply gave the Ithaca hours away to local charities, and then people spent them and they came into circulation. They got 20% of the local businesses to participate. That is one system and I think it is the ideal system. We chose our system for a couple of reasons. First, it is expedient and short-term. The second reason is that we formerly had a LETS scheme and the problem was that there wasn’t a wide enough range of skills and services in the community, so it meant that some of the businesses had so many credits that they couldn’t spend them; there are only so many aromatherapy sessions, massages and astrology sessions one needs. People really wanted carpenters and plumbers and blue collar people who worked in the bigger system. So, in order to persuade people to participate, we needed to assure them that if it didn’t work and they were left with EKO’s, we could refund them. So this is the other big reason we decided to do it this way. LET’s systems work well in communities where there is a high level of enlightenment as to the value purpose of doing it, and where people are time rich and money poor. With a note, one needs only the conviction that once could spend it on a wide enough range of services.

What are the advantages of having a community currency system at Findhorn?

Community currencies build community allegiance and turn a slow vicious circle into a slow virtuous circle. There are at least four big tangible advantages to community currency at Findhorn. The biggest one is that they are “un-traveler’s checks.” You can only spend them locally. So rather than leaving the local pocket they stay in local circulation continually. If you go to a supermarket, typically 90% of the money you spend immediately leaves the local economy. There may be a few local purchases which they give a song and dance about to give people the idea that it is localization, but it is a fraction of the amount spent. If you can keep the currency in the community circulating, purchasing power stays local. So that is the primary reason people create them. Secondly, we save an estimated thousand pounds annually on bank charges. Instead of paying checks, businesses and people in the community pay each other. Thirdly, the 15 K pounds that we have from them we use for safe, secure loans for small community businesses at low interest rates. So, effectively we are making the money work twice. By giving these low interest rates to community businesses, the businesses also make a substantial savings on what they would have to pay on the loans to the bank. Another benefit is that most community currencies are really beautiful, partly because we are artistic folk and we want to make the world a more beautiful place, and partly because people buy them as souvenirs, Christmas presents, or gift certificates. They are also an excellent educational tool.

Are there any obstacles or pitfalls, such as counterfeiting, runs on the bank, or problems paying taxes?

The first step, of course, is to build community and the second is to get enough businesses to be willing to take the notes. Other than the challenge I mentioned previously of scale, and the difficulty of persuading people to use them, I cannot see a downside. We have a very clever anti-counterfeiting technology which is a serial number, except that it is the same serial number on all of the notes (that’s a joke). The reality is that the local economy is so small that it would not be worth someone counterfeiting. As far as a run on the bank, as long as our loans come back, at any stage we can reproduce the money, and they are very safe loans. The whole current money system is based on the assumption that not everyone will come to the banks at the same time.

We did accrue a lot of lawyer’s fees at the start to find some breaks in the legislation to make the system legal, but Findhorn has already done a lot of the research, so there is no need for other communities to incur large lawyer’s bills. This differs from country to country. In our system, the notes are considered “vouchers,” and paying taxes is not a problem, because there is a one-to-one correspondence between dollars and EKO’s; and we simply declare our income as if it were pounds. The LETS system can be more ambiguous. The interesting thing in terms of the history of community currencies is that as long as they remain among the economically poor, governments have turned a blind eye, but at those moments where it is threatened, where it has become important, governments tend to intervene.

Is there any danger to the community currency movement getting too large and becoming a threat to the government?

I would say there is a real possibility that we would have a rather sudden collapse in the economy. Community currency systems tend to proliferate in periods of crisis in the formal economy. So at the moment, certainly in Latin America for example, there is lots of experimentation because of the economic crises there. There has been over the last couple of decades. Now, if there is a long slow descent in the formal system and a long slow ascent in the informal system, there is plenty of potential for conflict. However, it seems to me more likely that whole formal system is such a huge bubble that I see a real possibility that there will be collapse. And if that is the case, the bubble is expanding at such a rate that the little currencies at the bottom are of no significance at all, but they will become highly significant after the crash, if there is one. So, I think that we shouldn’t necessarily worry too much about community currency movements protecting themselves against the formal system. The other thing is that, increasingly with the contradictions in capitalism, there is growing proportions of the global, and even of national populations falling into poverty where really they are just not being reached, where they are becoming a real problem. And my feeling is that in that context, official authorities may be more open to encouraging them, or certainly at least not persecuting them, because they are serving a useful function, keeping the lid on the revolution.

Caroline Lucas, Member of European Parliament, opens for Transition Towns

Caroline Lucas, a Green Party Member of the European Parliament representing the South East of England region, opened the second Transition Network Conference during the weekend of April 11th-13th 2008 at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, England, with her words of support for the Transition Town movement, which has “gone viral” throughout the U.K. and beyond:

“The Transition Town movement is the most exciting, most hopeful, most inspirational movement happening in Britain today. It is a fast growing, grassroots, direct response to a crisis, which doesn’t wait for government, which doesn’t wait for politicians, which doesn’t wait for corporations. It just gets on and does it, communities taking action for themselves. It is exciting because it is facing the two greatest challenges we face today, Climate Change and Peak Oil, and it is exciting because it does it in such a hopeful way.

The message of Transition Town work isn’t a doom and gloom message. It is a hugely positive message about the power of people acting together, the power of an alternative vision of how society can be. I think the brilliance of the Transition Town movement is that it demonstrates so effectively that the changes that we need to make in order to address Peak Oil and Climate Change are changes that are, in any case, good in themselves. They are positive changes, and by making those changes we can not only tackle the very real environmental crisis, but we can also get to a situation whereby we actually also lead more fulfilling lives, through stronger local communities, through better insulated homes, through more vital local economies, and through more local production and consumption. To me that is such an essential message of hope in what in so many other respects can sometimes be a rather bleak looking picture. I think it is essential that we get that message out to as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

Climate Change and Peak Oil are in many ways two sides of the same coin; they lead us to the conclusion that we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels very, very quickly. Many people have been saying this for many years without much success. But now as the price of oil is $100 a barrel or more, there is a new and growing awareness of the utter dependence of our lives at the moment on oil and the very dramatic consequences, ever more costly, of that dependence. There have been some voices from quite unexpected places who have been saying this for some time. A report from the U.S. government, tagged by the U.S. Office of the Treasury Reserves on the internet, has this to say: “The world’s oil reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being discovered. Oil is being produced from past discoveries, but they are not being replaced. The disparity between increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached, and future supply to meet conventional oil demand will not be available.” As the report succinctly concludes, a series of supply and demand “discontinuities” will trigger world wide economic chaos.

There are people looking at this issue, but if the EU is anything to go by, there really is an extraordinary failure to be addressing this issue. There was a commission back in 2006, asking them how they were planning to take Peak Oil into account in their policy making. They replied that Peak Oil was “only a theory” and that therefore it wasn’t something that was on their agendas. So, I arranged for Richard Heinberg, one of the foremost authorities on Peak Oil, to meet with commission representatives to brief them on the scale and the urgency of the situation. It was absolutely horrifying to witness the expression on their faces when they openly admitted that the supply side of oil resources is not something they had really thought about. Yet, one of the things we can be sure about when it comes to Peak Oil is that it certainly isn’t theoretical. The timing of it might be theoretical. It might be two years ago, it might be in another two years; it might be in ten years or twenty years, but the geological non-negotiability of the fact that fossil fuel resources are finite, I think we can all agree, is on the political horizon. I find it extraordinary that in the E.U., it is almost as if it isn’t.

As you all know, the implications of Peak Oil for virtually every aspect of our lives is absolutely overwhelming. We have allowed oil to become vital in almost everything we do. 90% of all our transportation, whether by air or land or sea, is fueled by oil. 95% of all the goods in the shops involve the use of oil. I have been looking at this through the lens of food security, since currently around 95% of all food products currently require oil in some way or another. Unless we take urgent action, as oil security deteriorates, so food security will also deteriorate. The fact is that British farming and, indeed, Western industrialized farming as a whole, has evolved into systems of turning oil into food, relying for years on energy intensive manufacture of synthetic fertilizers, oil-based plastics, and centralized, oil dependent just-in-time distribution centers. We have gotten a glimpse of just how dependent even our most basic necessities have become on petrol. During the blockades of the oil refinery distribution centers in September of 2000, you’ll remember, there were protests by farmers against higher fuel taxes, and within days the supermarkets began to ration sales of bread and milk and sugar. The chief executive of (a large food chain) was beginning to warn of the crisis expected in Britain’s food stocks and that stores were likely to run out of food in what he said was days rather than weeks. This startling vulnerability, activated by our dubious dependence on oil, exposed the fact that we currently rely on imports for about a third of the food that we consume in this country.

I have done some research on some of the issues around imports and exports of food because the figures that a third of our food relies upon imports seems quite extraordinary when you consider how well endowed we are with land and climate for growing our own food. I looked at the bizarre example of food swaps, where countries are swapping the same food between the same countries at the same time. Britain imported 60 K tons of poultry meat from the Netherlands in the same year that it exported 30 K tons of poultry meat to the Netherlands. We imported 24 K tons of pork and 125 K tons of lamb and exported 95 K tons of pork and 102 K tons of lamb. You get the picture. This phenomenon came to life in an even more dramatic way during the recent avian flu outbreak. I don’t know if you noticed it, but in some of the media coverage of what was happening at the poultry plant, it was apparent that poultry eggs were taken from the U.K. to Hungary to be hatched because it is cheaper there. Then they come back to the U.K. We like the breasts, so we keep the breasts and then we send the legs back to Hungary. It is extraordinary to think that at any particular moment there are all these animal parts flying across the planet. It reminds me of a little quote from Herman Daly, the World Bank economist, turned ecologist, who was looking at all this food going backwards and forwards from the different countries, between the United States and the Netherlands, and the Netherlands and back again, and he said, “You know, it would just be a whole lot simpler to exchange recipes.”

It is clear that we need a plan that promotes low energy, low imput, increasingly organic food. It is also true that there is much that we as individuals and communities can do ourselves. We can look at how our villages and our towns and our cities can begin to “power down,” to become less dependent on fossil fuels and more dependent on each other, on human capital, on the relationships between us, which is the glue to our society. And that, of course, is where the Transition Town movements come in, rebuilding the social infrastructures we might need. The revitalization of local food economies is one of its other aspects. For example, Totnes is pioneering the introduction of a local currency to insure that money stays within the local economy. It is one of the aspects of Transition Towns that I find most exciting. We know that supporting local shops is one of the most direct ways to do this. There is research that calculates that 80% of the money spent at the local supermarket leaves the local economy with only 20% left as wages and services. Whereas in a local shop with local produce, 80% stays in the local economy and only 20% leaves.

The local currency not only encourages the purchase of locally produced and locally available goods and services, it also helps to protect communities from economic turmoil that takes place nationally or internationally, and right now it feels a timely moment to be working on that. Clearly the world is facing uncertain times. When Climate Change meets Peak Oil the future already looks grim and when you throw in a local recession, then, frankly, it looks pretty worrying indeed. $100 a barrel is just a start. Oil prices could spiral out of the stratosphere, spinning the world into an era of enormous economic insecurity. We urgently need a response that is commensurate with the scale of the problem.

A truly comprehensive program for a transition to a zero carbon economy could provide a massive economic opportunity as well as offering an antidote to rising unemployment and giving a safe haven for pensions. When the world faced a depression back in the 1930’s, it was President Roosevelt’s New Deal that contributed to people getting back to work again through building the infrastructure that the U.S. needed. A number of groups are trying right now to look at a new idea of New Green Deal, which will provide a safe haven for savings and banks and pension funds, which in turn can be used to kickstart a massive public and private works program to cut energy use and the call would be a program to make the nation’s building truly energy efficient. Local authority bonds, for example, could be used to raise the necessary funds for major investments in things like insulation and efficiency, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process.

I began by saying that one of the most exciting things about the Transition Towns movement was that it was so hopeful and so positive. I have to say that I think the green movement as a whole could learn a lot from the example that it has set. I think the green movement as a whole needs to get very much better at painting a compelling picture of a zero carbon world that is hopeful and attractive and smart. If this kind of debate continues to be framed in terms of giving things up, in terms of shivering around a candle in a cave, then it is not an appealing message and it is not going to work. It is very hard to feel motivated by a threat, or get excited about something when you are forced to do it. But we can get excited about a zero carbon lifestyle if we recognize that it leads the way for the world to be better for everyone, that Climate Change and Peak Oil could be a catalyst for a positive transformation in our society that might otherwise never have happened.

I used to call this a low carbon lifestyle, but I realized that it doesn’t excite anybody to talk about “low” anything. Low things don’t sound very inspiring. I am beginning to think we need to be more careful about the terms that we use if we genuinely want to inspire people. The green writing activist that inspires me very much is George Marshall and he talks of it as “living lightly,” giving up carbon and weight. Each person in Britain is responsible for digging up and burning three and a half tons of carbon each year, and when that combines with oxygen, it makes twelve and a half tons of carbon dioxide. Think of that as a huge load on your shoulders, which doesn’t just threaten your future, but it weighs you down and chains you to the ground. So then, instead of thinking about giving it up, you can think of dropping that load. You can think of “living lightly,” a lifestyle that doesn’t have that heavy load of carbon. “Light” in the sense of treading lightly upon the Earth, “light” in the sense of dancing, not stumbling; it is about living differently, smartly, with all the benefits of a richer quality of life. It is about social equity, enabling everybody to be able to do the same. Imagine that your home is comfortable all year round, warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer. It generates its own power and you don’t have to pay crippling bills. You can imagine streets belonging to people again, not to cars, and there are children playing in the streets, and there is good, affordable public transport and better town planning so that your homes and your shops and the things you need to get to are all close together. Can you imagine there is enough work for everyone near where they live so they don’t have to sit for hours in traffic jams to get there?

Although some jobs will certainly be lost in a transition to a zero carbon economy, they will be more than made up for by the new economy based on retrofitting and recycling and reuse. Can you imagine the things that you buy are the things that you really love and value? You don’t have to spend months every year working to get the things that you don’t even need. Imagine that this gives you the freedom to work less and spend more time with friends and family. When most people are lying on their death bed, they don’t think: “I should have spent more time in the office.” They are more likely to think, “I wish I had spent more time with friends and family.” Imagine a world where our foreign policy is not based largely on trying to get access to someone else’s fossil fuel resources. Finally, imagine that this is a quality of life not just for the wealthy countries like Britain, but a standard to which all the people of the world are entitled to aspire and are hoped to achieve. That vision in a zero carbon world isn’t just an idle fantasy. It is a real and compelling picture of how the U.K. will look and be, and you are some of the people actively engaged in turning that vision into reality.

Some people say that thinking about the environment is a luxury that governments can only indulge in during times of economic prosperity. We can’t afford to let that be the case, because although economic collapse might be painful, environmental collapse is unbearable. One of the benefits of living in a democracy is that people always hope for something different; they can hope for something better, they can vote for something. Transition Towns is very much about the journey to overcome powerlessness and I wish you every success in your days that are going to unfold here in Cirencester as you meet and as you apply the Transition model to your own community. And I just wanted to end with the fitting words of Anne Frank who said: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

Dynamic Transition Network Forges Ahead: Interview with Rob Hopkins

Caroline Lucas, a Green Party Member of the European Parliament representing the South East of England region, opened the second Transition Network Conference during the weekend of April 11th-13th 2008 at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, England, with her words of support for the Transition Town movement, which has “gone viral” throughout the U.K. and beyond: “The Transition Town movement is the most exciting, most hopeful, most inspirational movement happening in Britain today. It is a fast growing, grassroots, direct response to a crisis, which doesn’t wait for government, which doesn’t wait for politicians, which doesn’t wait for corporations. It just gets on and does it: communities taking action for themselves. It is exciting because it is facing the two greatest challenges we face today, Climate Change and Peak Oil and it is exciting because it does it in such a hopeful way.”

193 people attended the conference, with participants from as far away as Australia, the U.S. and Japan. In just over eighteen months, on the very evening of the opening of the conference, the Transition Network reached 50 official member communities – towns, cities, villages and even islands that have met a list of criteria set by the Network for being a “Transition Town,” a community that is transitioning from extreme oil dependency to a vibrant post-carbon existence through a process of simultaneously curtailing carbon use and massively increasing community resilience. In addition, another 650 communities are “mulling” over the possibility of becoming members of the Network. The Transition movement is now an international phenomenon, with Transition initiatives springing up all over the world, including Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, France, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the USA, all of this before the guidebook to the model, entitled The Transition Handbook, written by movement founder Rob Hopkins, came off the presses just last month. The “Transition Town” movement may soon need to change its name, with just the sort of flexibility it embraces, to encompass its ambitious scope, aiming to include local governments and businesses in the “Transition” model. “Transition Islands” have joined the Network, a “Transition University” is in the works, and there is even talk of “Transition hospitals.” There is also a pervasive recognition that the “Transition” movement calls for a deep personal Transition for each individual.

The following is an interview that took place during the weekend of the conference in the pub, with the notably light hearted and accessible Rob Hopkins, after his game of football (soccer) among the conference participants.

I understand that the Transition model arose out of a Permaculture course you co-led in Kinsale, Ireland, in 2005, where the students developed the first Energy Descent Plan for Kinsale. Upon returning to Totnes in England, what were your initial thoughts from which the Transition idea really gelled?

They arose from finding out about Peak Oil, which, despite myself having been a Permaculture enthusiast for years, was a bolt from the blue. It was a kind of Eureka! moment, really. And then a personal time spent in a Peak Oil pit. I think those of us who do this work should never forget what a huge shock it is for people. So, the tools that I had then for what to do about it were Permaculture design principles. They are the principles that have underpinned everything I have done. It made sense, really, to put those two things together. I suppose it is like with music when there are really great musical breakthroughs. What happens if you mix heavy metal and hip hop? You get a whole new interesting sort of music. You get hybrids which are more interesting than the sum of the two things they came from. So, I think putting Permaculture and Peak Oil together, it just seemed to gel really well.

Do you have any follow up on Kinsale?

In terms of what we now understand to be the Transition model or Transition approach, Kinsale is a funny example because what we now think of as a Transition process, there are 12 elements to that process. In effect, Kinsale went straight to number12 and did their Energy Descent Plan without having done all of the underlying community building, awareness raising work underneath. So, in terms of Transition Kinsale, as a group, they have largely gone back to stage one and started the awareness raising, but they have done it with the Energy Descent Plan in hand and they found it a really useful document. So, while they haven’t taken the document and implemented it year by year by year, a number of projects have emerged which are really exciting. They have been doing nut tree and fruit tree planting; they have a farmer’s market going again; they have started a community garden. There are quite a few initiatives having been started there and there are some very good, dynamic people there. It helps having the Permaculture course there at the college, which provides a lot of inspired training of young people. In the context of how the Transition movement has grown so quickly, the role of Kinsale has really been to introduce the idea of the Energy Descent Plan. The concept was really experimented with there, and they certainly have a very vibrant Transition project happening there now.

What do you see as the importance of the principle of self-organization and the tool of Open Space Technology to the Transition Town movement, particularly given how quickly and how large it is growing?

Open Space is just one of the different tools that we use, and I am sure there are lots of others that we haven’t heard about yet. We use this term in the Transition movement about “the collective genius of the community,” unleashing that genius to really focus on issues and to draw out solutions that are intimately linked to and emerge from the local terrain. These are the things that cannot come from top down. They have to have to come from the bottom up. So, you need tools that can offer that collective genius, and Open Space is a really useful one because it brings together people who don’t know much about each other, and it means that they create the agenda and they create the discussion. It starts to introduce people to the idea that Transition isn’t a process that is about imposing solutions. It is a catalyst. It is something that starts and then it triggers lots of projects and initiatives. People take ownership of the process with great energy and great passion and it is really exciting to see that.

There is a spectrum of opinion on how much to engage with government and on what level. Where would you say the Transition Town movement falls on that spectrum?

At the moment, Transition has developed a model which is about Transition communities. It is a grassroots model which local government can support, but which it does not drive. The local community self organizes and starts the process going. What we need to develop as well is the concept of Transition local government, Transition national government, and Transition business, so that all the different layers start working together. If the community pulls together and creates an Energy Descent Plan and it has good community support, a community of people saying “look, we realize the problems, we want to move in a different direction in terms of development, and we want to get to a place that’s a significant improvement on where we are right now.” It then needs the local government to play its core role, which is to enable that to happen. But, at the moment, local governments aren’t yet stepping up. So, we are trying to develop a process where we can work with different councils, Transition local government, and Transition business, putting resilience and carbon cutting together into it, which goes beyond just being a low carbon business. It is much deeper than that. So, at the moment, I think the model we developed works on all levels, but in order to be really successful, they all need to really be working together.

Humility really comes through in your presentations and how you seem to sit back a bit on the sidelines during the Transition Network conference. How does it feel to be at the center of a phenomenon that has so taken off?

It feels a mixture of bewildering, terrifying, and exhilarating. What is really exciting about it is that I don’t drive this process and I am not in the center of it. It is a process that has really developed its own momentum, its own dynamic. That is how it was always supposed to be, really. When we come together at something like this, and there are people from all over the world, who have taken this really simple idea and tried it out in their own communities, that is really fantastic. I think the thing that may come through about me is that people have really taken to heart that we don’t do this work for ourselves. This isn’t work where one’s ego is really appropriate. Transition work is for future generations. That is who we do it for. It helps, for me, because I have children, so the future generation is highly tangible. I get the sense that the people who are here doing this work aren’t doing it for themselves, or to get rich or to be famous. What they share, what drives them, is a sense that we are extraordinarily fortunate to be alive at this time of the Great Transition, the Great Turning.

The Transition movement is renowned for its hopeful, upbeat attitude. As new information about Climate Change and various post-Peak Oil scenarios come to you, where do you currently find yourself on the meter of hope?

I never think it is a very useful way of thinking about it because how hopeful or hopeless you feel can vary within seconds. Thinking about whether you feel optimistic or pessimistic is such a trap to get lost in. It really doesn’t help very much. A man named Tom Atlee in North America talks about the need to shift from probabilities to possibilities. So, rather than sitting down and looking at all the figures and figuring out what the probabilities are that we are going to get runaway Climate Change by 2018, it is more about looking at possibilities: what can we create from this? There are times when, particularly with the latest data coming in on Climate Change, it is easy to have some sleepless nights. But, then, again, when you shift from probabilities to possibilities, you can’t get to sleep at night because your head is racing with all of the possibilities of what you can do about it, and how inherent in Peak Oil and Climate Change there is the potential for the greatest economic, social, cultural, spiritual renaissance in history. That is what I hold on to. We can DO this! Are we really the first generation that just collectively chose to commit suicide? I don’t believe so. If you take a human being and throw them in the sea, they try and swim as long as they can. Our instinct is for survival and Vandana Shiva says the uncertainty of our times is no reason to be certain about hopelessness. The beautiful thing about Transition is that is keeps you going; it is so tremendously fantastic to see what we can do.

I understand that it was not the intention of the Transition movement, which is primarily a British phenomenon, to be a global initiative, and yet it has already crossed seas to the U.S. and elsewhere. Is there any message for those of us living in the U.S, anything you would like us to know?

I would want you to know that it is enormously good fun. Also, that if any nation in the world needs to step up and do something extraordinary, it is the U.S. Seeing as most of the developing world aspires to be like the U.S., the U.S. has a tremendous responsibility to shift that expectation. My sense, from here, is that there is a really growing awareness there that this way of doing things isn’t making us happy anymore. I think more and more people really feel that on a really deep level. I don’t know about in the U.S., but in the U.K., the figures show that increasing income stopped making us any happier in 1961. We have more and more stuff, and we know each other less and less, and we are less and less satisfied, we stay in relationships less and less long. What is it that we are so terrified to let go of? What is it? What we are seeing now is that we are moving into a recession, and this is going to be a biggie. This isn’t going to be any temporary or ordinary recession. It is the first recession that is underpinned by an oil peak, the first recession underpinned by a water peak, and business-as-usual isn’t an option anymore. Given that business-as-usual isn’t an option anymore, everything is up for grabs, and nobody has come up with any model, any solution, as far as I am aware of, that is more practical than a Transition model. The government here says that the solution to Peak Oil, to energy security is more nuclear power, taking the tops off the mountains in Wales, and building a new runway. This is a non-response. It doesn’t even begin to address the challenge. I like to think of the Transition movement as gentle hands, taking people’s hands and hand-holding people through Transition. The thing that I always really admire about the States is the attitude that you can make things happen. We don’t have that so much here; people are nervous and stand-offish. But, in North America, if you want to do something, you go, you do it, and it happens. If that could be applied to this, then what would be produced would be fantastic.

Trip to the British Isles and Ireland Spring 2008

I set out on my journey this Spring from California to the British Isles with the intention of accomplishing several aims simultaneously and maximizing the precious resource I would be spending to travel across the world. It would be my first and long fantasized trip to Europe, during which I hoped to find a connection to my very English ancestry (my mother’s family has traced its roots back twelve generations to the Mayflower and my father’s side of the family came to North America from England three generations ago). Feeling sheepish about England's history of colonialism, and the fact that people of English heritage historically have been granted more visibility than many others in this country, I wanted to find something in England that I felt authentically proud of, while maintaining a healthy sense of humility about it.

I also wanted to be highly purposeful during my much anticipated vacation time, and to write about it. As an exercise, I asked myself the hypothetical question: Where in the world I would want to go if this were my last plane trip? And then: Where would the planet most want me to go? For me, the answer was easy; I would visit the Findhorn community in Scotland. I discovered that a phenomenal event would be happening at the very time I had hoped to go: “The Positive Energy Conference: Creative Responses to Climate Change and Peak Oil.” Thus began my marvelous journey from Scotland to Ireland (which was a surprise), and then to England, following conferences addressing Peak Oil, Climate Change, Ecovillages, and Transition Towns. The Transition movement in England, especially, gave me the sense of simple pride I was looking for.

Upon arrival in London, I was questioned in detail by a customs agent about my plans during my stay in the U.K. I mentioned the Positive Energy conference and he asked “And, what will you be bringing back with you?” I asked for clarification and he said “Well, with such a conference, one would hope that something would come out of it.” Eyes to the ceiling, my jaw suspended, I processed his question while he waited, sincerely interested in my answer. I told him I would be publishing articles. My intention was set. He then quipped as he filled in the box, “so you will be bicycling back then?”

Read on...