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.”
“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.”
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