Follow the van

I was recently privileged to cater for the Food for a Greener Future conference, and got to hear some great talks in the afternoon after lunch. The most interesting part for me was the workshop right at the end, where Jacky Sutton-Adam and Duncan Catchpole discussed the Transition Food Hub and invited everyone in the audience to say something about what the concept meant to them.

This was a chance to get a consensus about what Cambridge needs, how to address perceived issues with food and community, and potentially begin a new profit-making spinoff from the Transition community. The appetite in the room was clearly for a space where sustainable food could be sold - and where people could come together. There was some murmurs about including educational activities, selling CamBake bread, and a definite preference for a venue somewhere central with a shopfront that could provide a visible site.

Potential visibility is a massive benefit that I would love to see the Hub project explore, and I'm going to restate my suggestion for a mobile hub after a little bit of research.

The challenge of a static site is that property rental costs are so high in Cambridge, that it seems hard to imagine even a temporary makeshift site being affordable. And as with the Cafe Project and Cambridge Carbon Footprint, being evicted by the landlord would be quite a setback after working really hard to get people turning up. Perhaps there is a way to find a permanent home for a sustainable local food enterprise, I would love to see this, but I am afraid that it might be too well-hidden to get the custom it deserves.

I'd like to seriously think about having a Transition food truck, fitted out to run off solar energy and cooking oil, and weaving a route through business parks, community kitchens and schools. The benefit of this approach would be that the vehicle acts as both marketing and point-of-sale, popping up in the city and the villages making people think "What's that beautiful, positive, hopeful thing doing here?".

Transition doesn't have the resources to advertise heavily in the press or the busy places, but the word of mouth and social networks have a limited extent. In fact there were some legitimate concerns at the conference that the attendees were white, middle-class, middle-aged and upwards, and the message wasn't getting out beyond that very small group. A hub bus would be able to both sell to and engage with diverse groups, and learn a great deal about what is really in demand in the wider populace. Organic food is seen as expensive, vegetarian food is seen as bland, these ideas can be challenged more effectively by lunches than by lectures.

A bus or a van would also be flexible enough to respond to opportunities - travelling to festivals and invitations, while learning which areas generate enough revenue to maintain running costs. It would be able to resell on behalf of community bakeries, chefs and farms if the terms were good, perhaps even working with Outspoken couriers to fulfil deliveries for each other.

Spare room could either be used for storing additional food, seats for outdoor occasions, or projector equipment for showing Transition related films. The van might even be kitted out as a mobile library for some situations.

Financially, most of the cost would come in terms of set-up, rather than in terms of monthly expenditure. This seems more suited to the type of money that could be raised from a council or developer grant, or from investment - a predictable cost that can be budgeted, and a liquid asset.

Perhaps the team who take this on could focus on generating turnover to begin with, turning up at large office buildings with delicious food to buy, and proving the concept of the hub bus so that the outreach and education activities can be gradually brought online while keeping the balance sheet healthy. Opportunities to reduce food waste and to create community will reveal themselves every day, and a digital presence can also take shape.

The next step would be to contact green businesses who have tried similar things, The Big Lemon and Buddhafields Cafe for two examples, to seek out more advice about costs and processes. I will offer to do that myself if there is a enough interest in the idea.

The Big Lemon is a public transport company in Brighton which uses cooking oil for fuel
http://www.thebiglemon.com/aboutUs/FAQs/default.asp

A detailed breakdown of setup costs for a Food Truck in New York, in dollars.
http://upended.net/post/25574021175/foodtruckstartupcosts

Community Energy Trumps Gales and Romance

Valentines Day this year brought no let-up in the storms so I was really pleased to see about 40 people come to the Transition Cambridge Energy Group forum on Community Energy – many of them even came by bicycle.  The program featured three local schemes in various stages of completion: Mike Brettle talked about the Gamlingay Wind Turbine project, installed in May last year, Andy Rankin described the Reach Solar Farm project, now waiting for planning permission, and Stuart Dyer gave us an update on the Cambridge Community Energy company, which hasn’t definitely got a site yet but we are sure enough to go ahead and register the co-op. Also Paul Rewrie of PR Accountants described some tax breaks available to renewable energy investors. Cambridge is rather a slow starter compared to Oxford, with several installations already completed, but people commented to me how exciting it is that things are happening here too at last.

There didn’t seem to be much controversy about whether or not community energy generating schemes are a good idea. There were questions about the financial side: Can I use my pension fund to invest? (Answer yes but you won’t get all the tax breaks you do normally) and: Will you only allow local investors? (For Reach it seems that local will definitely include Cambridge).

Also there were concerns about the equipment: Which bit of a wind turbine usually fails after 20-25 years? (answer none, they may last much longer, but they are often upgraded before then anyway).

Mike made some very interesting recommendations about how to get support from local residents – their planning application got twice as many positive comments as negative ones which is amazing for a wind turbine project. The CCE scheme probably won’t need planning permission but Reach is in planning now and we are keeping our fingers crossed.

You can download some of the slides from the presentations on the CCE website here and on the Reach website here. Also both websites let you signup for a newsletter and if you are interested in helping to get CCE going let me know or use the email address on the website contact page.

The Work that Reconnects

It was a happy day for me when a mentor of mine recommended the book Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (see link below). Subtitled 'How to face the mess we're in without going crazy', the book is a practical guide to what is variously known as 'despair and empowerment work', and 'the work that reconnects'. The Work that Reconnects is trailblazing in its emphasis on personal transformation in this time of crisis.

In particular, the Work that Reconnects is the antidote to the frozen, numb sort of feeling that can arise when one is aware of the huge crises facing our planet, and suppresses the rage and grief that this knowledge can bring up. This suppression is quite understandable - these emotions are can be inconvenient to manage while one is attempting the stressful juggling act of 21st-century living. The rage and grief can be awkward in social settings, and one can feel the threat of being swallowed up by emotions and responsibilities unmanageable by a single, concerned individual.

It is this numbness that Joanna Macy argues is the dam in the river of interconnectedness that weaves each individual into the web of life (to mix my metaphors). It is our interconnectedness that causes us pain when rainforests are slashed and burned, when reefs are bleached, when broken Syrian families flee to refugee camps.

To quote Macy, interconnectedness is no picnic. But it is a life saver.

On February 2nd, Transition Cambridge hosted a Work that Reconnects workshop in Newnham Croft Primary School, near Paradise Nature Reserve. It was a very special and enlivening day with an eclectic range of participants (would estimate 12-15 of us; I wasn't counting). The workshop had five facilitators, from the veteran to the first-timer: Anna McIvor, Bev Sedley, Liz Serocold, Nicholas Wilkinson and Kate Honey. 

The day was modelled around the spiral of the Work that Reconnects: Gratitude, Honouring Our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes and Going Forth. One exercise we participated in was completing open sentences in pairs (one scribe and one mindful listener). The sentences included 'If you knew you could not fail, what would you do for the healing of the world?' Another exercise was the Mirror Walk: one partner leads the other, who has their eyes closed, through a garden. They guide their partner to a beautiful object, which the parter explores by touch before opening their eyes. My favourite exercise was when we were all asked to mentally voice our most burning question. As we internalized this question, we wandered through Paradise Nature Reserve, and let the sights, sounds and smells of nature offer us their timeless wisdom.

May all beings be well!

Joanna Macy: 'The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world - we've already been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millenia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other...'

http://www.activehope.info

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Active-Hope-without-Going-Crazy/dp/1577319729

Climate Change and the Arts - Gary Snyder

For me this poem encapsulates the ambiguity of the times we live in. No one alive today can predict what the world will be like in the 22nd century (imagine someone from the 19th century trying to predict the events of the 20th!) This is an area where intuition and emotional response can tell us as much as the intellect.
May we all learn to... well, I won't spoil the last three lines of the poem.

FOR THE CHILDREN

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

--Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder (b. May 1930) was an American Beat poet,  Zen practitioner, environmentalist and
general free spirit. Google him. 

Climate Change and the Arts

I’m writing this series of posts about climate change and the arts because I believe that the current ecological, social and economic crises facing us (of which climate change is arguably the greatest) require radical internal transformation – transformation in the heart, mind and perception, as well as in our civilization.

Climate change is a big, scary issue. It is particularly scary because so much of its implications are unknown. The more we find out about it, the worse its implications seem to be. Whether it’s methane bubbling up through the permafrost; the jewel of biodiversity – the Amazon rainforest – shriveling to savannah; the boreal forests of North America being eaten alive by beetles; it would seem that our natural life support systems are falling apart quickly and brutally. 

But scarier even than that is the ‘business as usual’ mentality that those in power have succumbed to – whether it’s the European Commission setting a pathetic, industry-appeasing target to cut emissions, or countries sabotaging international agreements to please business lobbyists.  Where is the transformation, and the change of direction?

I would argue that the greater the crisis seems to be, the more potential there is for truly great, transformative art. Art that knows the foibles of human nature – how hard we try, how we cock up, how violent and selfish and how deeply enlightened and compassionate humans can be. There is plenty of debate going on about art and morality – for example, how a great composer like Wagner can be anti-Semitic. But great art can escape its maker. When a crisis and huge suffering seems inescapable, when there’s nowhere to hide but a dying planet, when all you can do is question ‘can we come through this? Are we capable?’ there is a space for the arts, and for spirituality. We can become a force for love and beauty, greater than ourselves. The planet speaks (or sings?) through us.

I will focus on composers, bands and poets, and discuss a work of poetry/music/film/art that I’ve found has helped me. I hope it helps you too. Watch this space for further updates!

Energy course

I've just signed up for this online course about energy and climate change - I think Coursera is a really good platform as it allows people to study and discuss lessons as long as they have access to the Internet, quite a low barrier to entry. I'll blog as I go through the course, it will give me some extra inspiration to call upon!

https://www.coursera.org/course/energy

On values and frameworks

I went to a Cambridge Hub talk last week by Ralph from the PIRC (http://publicinterest.org.uk/about/) which was about research around values and frameworks. It seemed like really rich material which would be useful to relate to Transition, and I wanted to record some of the content and my reflections on it.

It is all available here, at http://valuesandframes.org and I thoroughly recommend looking at it. This quote sums it up very well though:

Fostering “intrinsic” values—among them self-acceptance, care for others, and concern for the natural world—has real and lasting benefits. By acknowledging the importance of these values, and the “frames” that embody and express them; by examining how our actions help to strengthen or weaken them; and by working together to cultivate them, we can create a more compassionate society, and a better world.

This is based on the work of Shalom H. Schwartz, a social psychologist who found that there were a limited number of values that were found in people from all cultures, and they fitted into a map that contained an additional significant property. The values in the graph below have a kind of "bleed" between each other, so that an increase or decrease of any one of the values has a small parallel effect on the neighbouring values. Fostering the value "responsible" will normally foster "meaning in life", "loyal" and "self-discipline" to a smaller extent. Fostering the value "privacy" will lead to an increased appreciation of "self-respect" and "choosing own goals".

For Ralph, the speaker, the importance of this was largely about appealing to the values which are "intrinsic", the ones which are in the top-right corner. In persuading people to do so, it is important to cherish the values of "inner harmony", "social justice", and "a world at peace". This makes it easier to work with other charitable groups, and recognise our common cause, instead of splitting hairs about where to put our focus. Some extra reading to understand this better is in their handout, which you can download here.

http://valuesandframes.org/initiative/nature/

Where I think this is important for Transition is in trying to persuade other people of the importance of what we're doing, without either compromising ourselves or trying to appeal through extrinsic values. What I mean by that, is that we can use empathy and common values to build a connection, but at the same time try to foster values in ourselves and others which will help to build a stronger community and better protection for the planet. If the "frame" for Transition conversations starts to go into "wealth", or "status", or "authority", it starts to foster values which will certainly not help.

In the book "Transition Timeline" there is a passage near the start where the author talks about four possible outcomes for the world, which depend on how we act now, and which values we hold dear. If we acknowledge the challenges, and make a cultural shift, we have the greatest chance of reaching the transition vision. If we maintain business as usual, or ignore the evidence, we really hamper our chances and realistically we won't get there.

The interesting thing here is the number of values from across the board that come into play in that - we certainly need creativity and intelligence, which are not quite what we think of as intrinsic values - the same goes for self-discipline and respect for tradition. The conclusion I draw is that all these values in the area of discipline, tradition, self-direction and stimulation aren't as useful for building a better world when we treat them as valuable in their own right, we have to cultivate the values of universalism and benevolence and allow the great influence of those values to inspire and guide the way that the other values live within us.