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Hubs of Resilience
In December of last year, thanks to funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, the Transition: Bounce Forward project distributed £140,000 to 112 Transition projects across England. One of those projects was hubRen, a Hub of Resilience imagined by Amy Scaife of Transition Leytonstone who asked herself:
What if the plans for the thriving future became widely available? With accessible language, beautiful art and friendly faces to discuss and plot new plans with?
What if these hubs of information, inclusivity and imagination popped up in a park, or a high street corner, or place of worship?
Inspired by reimagined cargo trikes she set out to create a mobile hub of art, imagination and connection, seeding community decarbonisation and resilience in a climate changing world.
In this piece Amy shares with us her experiences and learning from beta testing the idea at a local arts trail.
That was the E17 Art Trail, 2021
When I saw that the theme of this year’s Art Trail was Possible Futures, I knew that the hub had to participate in some way, despite not being in its perfect bike trailer form yet.
It was… interesting. Not gonna lie, how I imagined it and how it turned out were two quite different things (are they ever the same?). It took me a few days to pick myself up from the ground when it finished, but I am glad we went through with it. I learned a huge amount and had a great many illuminating conversations, forcing me to clarify my own understanding of certain subjects (population and China being the most commonly brought up ‘deflectors’) along with the way that I communicate about them, and re-affirming that I really do love chatting to people about climate, solutions, responses and emotions.
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Bee Roadzz
Bee Roadzz
Transition Marlborough wanted to help save the bees so they started joining up landscapes to connect pollinators and people.
This is the story of a small, local project to help bees. They are in trouble, along with all flying insects, and we can all do something to help.
There are 25 native species of bumblebee, over 250 species of solitary bee and one species of honeybee in the UK. Many are in decline, but even DEFRA’s 2014 10 year National Pollinator Strategyhighlights that we know very little about many of them, so measuring baselines and progress is a real challenge. Last year German research hit the headlines showing a 75% drop in flying insect biomass over just 27 years across 63 nature protection areas. What a wake-up call.
Sweet William – Sara Wilman, British flower grower, took this on her ‘My Flower Patch’ field Photo © Sara Wilman
Our four key project aims:
1. Raising awareness of bees and their predicament
2. Encouraging everyone to contribute, however they can, to join up the landscape by creating more pollinator-friendly forage and nesting habitat
3. Actively contributing to national insect monitoring schemes
4. Creating a replicable model of effective community-based response to the National Pollinator Strategy.
The reasons for decline are complex, multiple and their impact is cumulative. They include loss of diversity and quantity in year-round pollen and nectar-rich flowers, loss of nesting and hibernation habitat, pesticides, habitat fragmentation, climate change, disease and parasites.
Just here in the UK, in the last 60-70 years we have lost 97% of wildflower meadows, 300,000km of established hedgerows and 80% of flower-rich chalk downland. Two species of bumblebee were lost in the mid-late 20th century, eight are currently conservation priorities and two more survive in rare and limited areas.
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My IPCC take-away: Imagine. Take Action. Repeat.
For those who care about the world and the people and creatures we share it with, the last 6 weeks has offered a barrage of dire news. The new IPCC report called for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. We learnt that since the time the Beatles broke up and I was born (I claim no scandalous link between those two events), human activity has caused a 60% decline in mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians.
We’ve seen the German government, whose ‘Energiewende’ we were all celebrating a few years ago, dragging away protesters trying to prevent the clearing of an ancient woodland in order to create an open cast coal mine. Oh, and Brazil just elected a fascist who has vowed to turn much of the Amazon, that vital global carbon store, into farmland, merging the departments of environment and agriculture so as to ensure maximum cheap beef burger output. My own personal WTF moment was the US Department of Justice arguing last week, in their attempt to overturn a court case brought by 21 young people, that “there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’”. Er, excuse me? Is anyone actually taking this stuff seriously? Grief and rage feel an entirely appropriate response. As Bill McKibben put it, “we’re running out of options and we’re running out of decades”.
Image: James McKay.
As I work on the book I’m writing about imagination, I find myself intrigued with a thought that doesn’t seem to want to leave my head, namely that the deeper we get into climate change, the harder we seem to be finding it to imagine a way out. It’s an idea that, for me anyway, gets under the skin.
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Falcon in the storm #04 – Critical Mass Heaters
In our 4th guest post from Gergő Benedek, we look at rural energy issues across Hungary.
While Hungary is preparing to invest into the most ambitious energy project of its entire history – building a new nuclear power plant – the rural areas of the country are facing dire energy problems that very well could be solved with less effort and maybe even more benefit.
Apro’ Tech is an ingenious word game with Appropriate Technology, the movement of achieveing the best possible result with the resources at hand, and the word for ‘tiny’ in Hungarian, which happens to be ‘apró’. It represents the small scale of the energy solutions this team is aiming for, while hinting subtly at the scientific philosophical background of their operations.
‘I studied product design on the University of Sussex. I’ve been working at a local supermarket to cover my costs of living. I think that’s where my green thinking sprouted from, seeing all the wastefulness.’
‘Later I went to the Netherlands to study Industrial Ecology: a systems approach where the aim is to mimic natural cooperation to maximize efficiency. One thing I learned there is that I don’t want to work for big corporations and optimize their environmental impact. I wanted to utilize my skills elsewhere.’
Nóra took part in numerous local energy projects in extreme poverty areas of Hungary, before starting up Apro’ Tech. Her Industrial Ecology thesis work centered on a project in Told, one of the many forsaken little villages on the Eastern edges of the country. The population here is generally poor, with low education, possibilities for work are very limited.
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Talking climate, taking action – a quest for belonging
This is the final post in a series of blogs from our Guest Editor Kate Heath, an ex-humanitarian worker now based in Paris – exploring how to have constructive conversations about climate change.
In this, my final reflections on the value, science and art of talking climate change and energy issues, I lift this to you: do this together. Do this in community. Traverse the valleys, the slopes, the bogs and the boulderfields, the heights of this quest in company – and then share the stories that roll from it.
Those of you involved in Transition are in a particularly unique and rich position from which to start conversations, given your involvement already in an active community of belonging. Human connections rally people like no other factor. Tales of action, from a trusted space warm with relationships, where the whole emotional shebang can be explored – anxieties and doubts alongside hopes and plans – is one of the best starting points for talking about climate change. We as people love to tell and hear stories of how ‘we all came together…’ in the face of adversity; we make decisions based massively on whether enacting them will increase our sense of belonging; and regarding climate change issues specifically, people really like it when we talk in terms of ‘we’re all in this together, everyone doing their bit’. Before Christmas, I asked my Grandma what some of her favourite winter memories were. We reminisced about the depth that snowdrifts used to reach, and the story she chose to tell was my great-aunt Vera sledging off to ensure my grandfather’s produce got delivered to everyone when their village got cut off in the 50’s. Everyone doing their bit.
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Some Thoughts on Systems Change
There is an ongoing litany of alarming and depressing news regarding climate change and the growing gap between our aspirations for addressing it and reality (and climate change is only one of the nine planetary boundaries). There is similarly grim news about exponentially increasing levels of inequality, conflict — including in what Naomi Klein calls fossil fuel sacrifice zones — and the emergence of a nation of refugees.
Pondering appropriate responses to our increasingly chaotic and unstable global context has led me to identify a few central issues. First is the high degree of interconnection between the problems that we face. I would argue that proportionate reactions to climate change, for example, demand exploration of how energy is used — which in turn demands not just an understanding of the role of energy in our economies, but a preparedness to move away from relying on economic growth as the primary aim of economic policy. Generally we shy away from questioning the fundamentals of our economic system: if they come into conflict with the major issues we face, we somehow manage simply to ignore such conflict. See, by way of example, the EU’s (secret, internal) position during COP21 that nothing could be agreed which might jeopardise TTIP and similar agreements.
Continuing on the theme of connection, or the lack of it, I’m also struck by how little connection there is, generally, between top down responses to global issues and the bottom up movements also seeking to act on those issues. Again using climate change as example, the chair of IPCC working group 2, Debra Roberts, commented on the general lack of access to high level processes and agreements:
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Book Review: ‘Everything Gardens’ by Luigi Russi.
Book Review: ‘Everything Gardens’ by Luigi Russi.
Academic work on Transition can often be infuriating rather than illuminating. I was once asked to peer review a paper on Transition, a movement I was central in kickstarting and shaping, but I had to decline on the grounds that the paper was utterly incomprehensible. While some research is excellent, and offers useful insights and meaningful data, there is also much that leaves me cold, or bewildered. With this in mind, I picked up a copy of Luigi Russi’s ‘Everything Gardens and other stories: growing Transition Culture‘ with a certain trepidation.
Russi is a sociologist based at the University of Exeter, who set out to research Transition Town Totnes, not through a literature review or a few interviews, but by moving to the town, rolling his sleeves up, and getting involved. In spite of my initial reticence, I actually loved ‘Everything Gardens’, and had a few ‘aha” moments as I went through. Russi begins by questioning the usual approach that academic work on Transition tends to take, that of defining what it is (i.e. a response to peak oil and climate change etc), then to the model it proposes (still usually stuck on the 2008 model of ‘The 12 Steps’), which leads to an assessment of how well Transition is achieving its goals, how it is ‘performing’? It’s an approach that treats Transition as though it were some sort of set of policies that can be evaluated. As a result of this approach, much of the ensuing research bears little resemblance to what many Transitioners will be experiencing through their active participation in Transition.
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Shaun Chamberlin on the Ecological Land Coop.
Shaun Chamberlin on the Ecological Land Coop.
Food is an issue that galvanizes so many Transition communities, but many of the classic Transition activities around food, like Landshare and Abundance projects, are to some extent ways of making the best of the ever-shrinking space available for ecological growing. Nothing wrong with that, but it meant I was rather excited when – via a post on the Transition Network site in 2011 – I discovered the fledgling Ecological Land Co-operative working on a model for actually reclaimingland from industrialized agriculture and making it available to local, small-scale agroecology and permaculture projects. I quickly got involved, and was elected as a director in the summer of 2012.
Apple Nursery
Since then we’ve delivered three new ecological smallholdings into the hands of eager growers, and plan to reach twenty-five(!) new holdings in the next five years, and then spread from there, influencing planning policy as we go.
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