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Spain in Transition?: Answers from the grassroots facing a collapsing country
Spain in Transition?: Answers from the grassroots facing a collapsing country
Introduction
Spain against the wall: between economic cracking and social looting
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The inspiring tale of the re imagining of Preston’s economy.
The inspiring tale of the re imagining of Preston’s economy.
We are often asked “what would a Transition local government look like?” It’s a complex question, but one Council taking a pioneering approach to its local economy is Preston in Lancashire. Preston City Council, working with Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) recently published ‘Creating a Good Local Economy: the role of anchor institutions‘, a remarkable document. To find out more, I spoke to Matthew Jackson, deputy chief executive at CLES and Cllr Matthew Brown, Executive Member for Social Justice, Inclusion and Policy at Preston CC. “The game’s up for the old system”, he told me, “if you want to do something really transformative and really radical, it means doing something really new and really creative”. So they did. It’s a deeply fascinating, and inspirational story.
Cllr. Matthew Brown (MB): Traditionally it seems to me we just tried to act as a magnet for outside institutional investments to come in, but with this economic crisis we’re seeing that that’s not working any more. A lot of the investment we had in the last 10-15 years is just not happening. So it’s more of a systemic issue in the economy that needs to be tackled. One way of doing that is to make sure that the wealth of the locality is maintained by the people that live here.
Matthew Jackson (MJ): Local government doesn’t necessarily understand its local market and the types of organisations that are available to deliver the goods and services it requires. So there’s a need for a more intelligent relationship between the public, the commercial and the social sector put in place to enable organisations to be delivering more services.
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Climate change will push Canadian business onside
Companies seem conservative today, but just watch when they reach the profitable tipping point
Until he lost his shirt in the Dirty Thirties, a relative of mine was an influential businessman in southern Saskatchewan. Among his interests was a livery stable, with a blacksmith, harnesses, buggy whips and everything you needed to keep horses on the road and in the field.
Horses are still with us, of course, but today it is hard to realize what an enormous industry they supported only a hundred years ago.
As skeptics scoff about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s grudging concession on the G7 agreement to end the use of fossil fuels, I think it is useful to remember how quickly businesses can completely transform an economy once they get the bit between their teeth.
“If we can get companies putting their innovative genius to work on solving environmental problems, we’re going to find solutions that we can’t even imagine today,” says Stewart Elgie, a professor of law and economics at the University of Ottawa.
He is confident that when it comes to fighting climate change, business will pull its share of the load. But we have to get over a hump.
Horse sense
A hundred years ago, the saddlery and harness business had its own industrial journals, well worth perusing. United States Leather, making a product essential to harnesses, was one of the 12 founding companies in the Dow Jones Index.
An inspection of one of world’s biggest monthly harness trade magazines, produced in Walsall, England — a world hub of harness and saddle making — shows that to a large extent, the industry did not see the end coming.
“Whilst some commentators (quite correctly) predicted disaster for the saddlery and harness trade,” says a commentary published by Walsall Council, “others were more complacent, dismissing the motor car as an unreliable and expensive plaything which would never catch on.”
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The 8 Paradigm Shifts at the Heart of REconomy
The 8 Paradigm Shifts at the Heart of REconomy
For the next two months here we will be talkingREconomy, looking in depth at this aspect of Transition which is about creating new enterprises, new economies, new livelihoods. We’ll talk to entrepreneurs, to people in local authorities embracing this approach, to people about to launch local currencies, to people around the world working to make this happen. Something remarkable and vital is happening, and we want you to be blown away by it.
When I visit Transition groups around the world, I hear many of the same questions over and over. “How do we engage a wider cross-section of our community?”/”how do we make a living out of this stuff?”/”how do we build stronger bridges to the local council and local businesses?”
REconomy is one of the best responses to all these questions, offering a series of activities, and a fresh way of thinking that meets more widely perceived needs, while also building a real relevance to far more people than just talking abstractly about “building local resilience”. It’s the invitation to shift our thinking, shift what we do, and step up in truly exhilarating ways.
Central to it is the idea that WE can do this, that creating the new economy that better meets our needs starts with us, here, now. In terms of what REconomy is, I will assume by this stage you are familiar with the general idea, and if not here is Fiona Ward to give you an introduction:
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Have you done the Transition Health Check yet?
Have you done the Transition Health Check yet?
Believe or not the Transition Health Check is not about measuring everyone’s blood pressure in your Transition group or seeing how fit you all are. It’s actually a great tool for you to use to see how your group is doing, one that many Transition groups have already found to be really useful. It is very important to state upfront that the Health Check is there to help your group, it is not a test that you pass or fail. Over the next few weeks we hope to hear from some groups who have already done the Health Check for their reflections.
A healthy group
Interestingly the similarities between a healthy human body and a healthy Transition group are both about taking an holistic view of what is happening in order to prevent problems by checking that all the different parts are working well. The Health Check is based around the following elements of the Transition support offer. It has been shown through research, actual experience and feedback that if a group covers these they are more likely to be successful, sustainable and healthy:
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The Newly Launched Commons Transition Plan
The Newly Launched Commons Transition Plan
The P2P Foundation recently launched a new website, the Commons Transition Platform, as a central repository for policy ideas that help promote a wide variety of commons and peer-to-peer dynamics. The site represents a new, more coordinated stage of activism in this area – collecting practical policy proposals for legally authorizing and encouraging the creation of new commons.
The website is a database of “practical experiences and policy proposals aimed toward achieving a more humane and environmentally grounded mode of societal organization.” The idea is to begin to outline how policies could bring about and support a commons-based civil society, with a special focus on how collaborative stewardship of shared resources can be achieved.
The P2P Foundation has stated its aspirations for the new initiative this way:
With the Commons Transition Plan as a comparative document, we intend to organize workshops and dialogues to see how other commons locales, countries, language-communities but also cities and regions, can translate their experiences, needs and demands into policy proposals. The Plan is not an imposition nor is it a prescription, but something that is intended as a stimulus for discussion and independent crafting of more specific commons-oriented policy proposals that respond to the realities and exigencies of different contexts and locales. This project therefore, is itself a commons, open to all contributions, and intended for the benefit of all who need it.
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How ‘The Power to Convene’ can transform Transition
How ‘The Power to Convene’ can transform Transition
I had seen it in lots of different places. I’d seen it in the 30 people who turned out to plant nut trees on a grey Sunday morning in Totnes. I’d seen it in Liege in Belgium, where representatives of many local organisations had come to an event to discuss creating a ‘Food Belt’ around the city. I’d seen it at the launch of the Brixton Pound, in a hall packed with local traders. What I didn’t have was a name for it.
It was in a small sideroom at the Resilience Hub in Portland, Maine, that I first heard the term ‘The Power to Convene’. It fascinated me, and finally gave me a name for this thing I’d been seeing for years. I was doing an interview with Chuck Collins of the fantastic Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition (JPNET) group. “One thing we have”, he told me, “is the ‘Power to Convene’”. He continued:
“Somebody comes and has a great idea, such as “I really want to start a bicycle taxi business”, and young people who are graduates of a local bike mechanic programme say “we know how to take care of bikes, we’d like to start a business.
So we pulled together a community event, and got 70 people there who were interested, and we got a whole bunch of new stakeholders and allies, and now they have a working group and are working on setting up that business. I think we just keep doing that in every area where there is both a problem and people who want to do something about it. We can get a crowd together, help identify resources and spark them”.
‘The Power to Convene’ put a beautiful, succinct term to something you will no doubt recognise. We’ve noticed more and more groups working in this way and exploring the potential of their own, place-based, ‘Power to Convene’. We see it in different forms:
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Permaculture, a Vision of the Post-Oil World
Permaculture, a Vision of the Post-Oil World.
Originally published in French as the Preface to the French language edition of David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability. (Translated by Eugene Moreau and edited by David Holmgren)
More than an agricultural technology, permaculture is a vision of the societies of tomorrow, ours, which will be confronted with the evolution of energy and climate systems. Permaculture is not only another way to garden: it is another way of thinking about and acting on the world, a global philosophical and concrete change, at the same time as a drawing together of strategies of resilience in the face of radical transformations, if not collapses, which are presenting themselves.
The wealth and economic growth of the industrial world rest on unprecedented extraction of enormous quantities of fossil fuels, which have taken some hundreds of millions of years to develop in the depths of the Earth. We have used some of this precious energy source to increase even more the consumption of resources in unsustainable proportions. The consequences of this overexploitation are being revealed as access to cheap fossil fuels is in decline. David Holmgren underlines the fact that the squandering of so much capital would lead any enterprise into bankruptcy (collapse).
Permaculture offers a break with this waste of energywhich is based on an erroneous understanding of wealth. One of its fundamental principles affirms the need to capture and store energy out of concern for the long term. In particular, it is focused on how to maximise the capture of energy from photosynthesis. The laws of thermodynamics have not escaped permaculture. In the second principle, speaking of capturing and storing energy, David Holmgren comes back to the law of entropy: in the universe, energy is dispersed from centres of concentration and tends to dilution. High quality energy is degraded into lesser quality energy thus losing its usefulness. This tendency to dissipation and dispersion affects all systems, living or dead. Living systems are organised in such a way that they maximise their capacities for transforming and storing energy: only the most efficient emerge unscathed in the course of evolution.
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Energy Balance: Regenerative Agriculture: The Transition.
Energy Balance: Regenerative Agriculture: The Transition.
In the face of peak oil and in order to curb carbon emissions, methods of farming that depend less on oil and natural gas, respectively to run machinery and to make synthetic fertilizers, must be sought. Such options are to be found within the framework of regenerative agriculture, but the transition from current industrialised agriculture to these alternative strategies will prove testing.
It is an illusion to think we can continue to use as much energy as we do now. No one can entirely rule-out that some extravagant technology will be forthcoming, e.g. solar power or nuclear fusion on the full-scale of more than 500 EJ/year as we get through now http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-02-16/world-energy-consumption-beyond-500-exajoules, but the particular issue of matching liquid fuels derived currently almost entirely from petroleum appears insurmountable. The “solution” is probably the collective of individual solutions, and this means adopting a completely different paradigm of human philosophy and intention. The most pressing demand is how to feed the population of the world, and how to adapt industrialised conurbations, with cities provided for entirely from external regions for their food and electricity. If oil is the most vulnerable element in the energy-mix as the life-blood of transportation, then we must aim to live with less transportation, and this includes the means and distribution implicit to modern food production.
In methods of regenerative agriculture and permaculturehttp://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/stl/sciprg/2012/00000095/00000004/art00001?crawler=true, much of the energy involved is provided quite naturally by native soil flora and fauna fed ultimately by photosynthesis, since the fuel for good soil derives from plants as the factories that supply carbon-rich nutrients, and in a wonderful symbiosis, the living soil microbes, especially fungi can draw other nutrients and water from the soil to nourish the plants. The individual elements of life feed one another in a mutually dependent and beneficial manner.
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Inspiring New Film, “Voices of Transition,” on the Agriculture That We Need | David Bollier
Inspiring New Film, “Voices of Transition,” on the Agriculture That We Need | David Bollier.
How will agriculture have to change if we are going to successfully navigate past Peak Oil and address climate change? A new film documentary, Voices of Transition, provides plenty of answers from Transition-oriented farmers in France, Great Britain and Cuba.
Produced and directed by French/German filmmaker Nils Aguilar, the 65-minute film is “a completely independent, participative film project” that both critiques the problems of globalized industrial agriculture and showcases localized, eco-friendly alternatives. The film features actual farmers showing us their farms and describing the human-scale, eco-friendly, community-based alternatives that they are developing. 
You can watch a trailer of the movie in English, German and French here and read a synopsis here. Go to the film’s website to check out the public screenings and DVD versions that you can buy. Here is a link to the campaign around the international launch of the film.
