Positive Energy: Creative community responses to peak oil and climate change, Findhorn, Scotland, 2008

Positive Energy: Creative community responses to peak oil and climate change, Findhorn, Scotland, 2008

Conference Report
22 – 28 March, 2008.
Findhorn, Scotland

Davie Philip, Education Coordinator, Cultivate Centre

Thanks to Rob Hopkins and Mattie Porte for their fantastic accounts of this conference on their blogs. This report is a mix of my reflections and their notes.

Photographers: Sverre Koxvold and Peter Vallance
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Day 1 – Sunday Dorothy McLean and Joanna Macy

The first day of the conference began in the Universal Hall of the Findhorn Community with a introductory talk with Dorothy McLean, one of the founders of Findhorn. This was followed by a mindful walk with all 200 plus participants of the event outside in the dunes behind the main hall.

After the break was the first session with Joanna Macy. Joanna is a teacher, author and the creator of the ‘Work That Reconnects.’ Drawing from Buddhist practices, systems theory, and love for life, her workshops empower environmental and social activists worldwide. Her many books include Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World; World As Lover, World As Self; Widening Circles, A Memoir; and translations of Rilke’s poetry. http://www.joannamacy.net

Joanna began with a ritual to open the space and to help everyone to feel fully present. She used a protocol used by the Iroquois Indians in their meetings, which offered a very active way of starting the session.

Her workshop, which was held over the next two days, was based on her ‘Work That Reconnects’, which is essential in helping us to face the hardships that are looking, and it reconnects us with ourselves and our long story. It connects us with life on earth, with our future relatives and our ancestors, with those who are here and with those who we share this planet with.

“There are 2 ditches on our way to the future, they are paralysis and panic. It is easy in the current context for what is happening to be so frightful that it brings up such dismay that we easily shut off our hearts and minds. It is easy to panic. We are on the edge of social hysteria, surrounded by blaming and fear mongering. We can, in fear, turn on each other.”

“We find ourselves now with peak oil and climate change as monumental challenges, but they are only two of many. However, when we look at these challenges, what is important is not guilt, it is about being present. There are 4 parts to The Work That Reconnects that we will be exploring over the next day and a half. The first is Gratitude, which helps us to be present. The second is about Honouring our Pain for the World. The third is about Seeing with New Eyes, and the fourth is about Going Forth.”

The next session began with a slideshow of beautiful images from nature accompanied with music. After that Joanna began by explaining that the great reliable fact is that being thankful does not depend on external circumstances, on how our lives are going. Native Americans have survived holocausts with dignity and self respect. When we develop our capacities to meet the world with thanks and greetings we are developing psychological muscle that can help navigate all kinds of weather.

“We are so programmed by a society dependent on creating dissatisfaction; it is akin to a worm in an apple. We end up wanting, craving, nothing is enough. Millions of industries are designed to create within us the itch of dissatisfaction. We don’t feel right, look right, smell right. We feel a need to compare ourselves with others. In this context, to develop the habit and capacity for thanks and greeting is subversive. It is time to take it seriously.”
In the final session of the first day, Joanna gave a clear and passionate explanation of the Great Turning, and what she means by the term.

“Different people have given this revolution different names. Lester Brown calls it the Ecological Revolution. Donella Meadows calls it the Sustainability Revolution. I and others use the term the Great Turning. Whatever we call it, it is important that we name it and see it, otherwise we risk being like a fish in water, we take the water for granted but don’t name it. It takes an effort of the moral imagination to see the significance of our own time.

Things are becoming so dicey now and we can become mesmerised by technology and market forces. It is important to say though that this Transition is inevitable, but we don’t know yet if we will be able to pull it off or not. The Great Turning is, however, underway. The term is also heard a lot in the Deep Time work I do, where by our will, intention and imagination we borrow future people’s eyes and look back at this moment.

The future is with us and in the choices we make now. Our decisions will have a direct effect on human beings for at least the next 250,000 years (especially when we make decisions about the storage of nuclear waste). David Korten who uses the term the Great Turning, says we must choose between it and the Great Unravelling. I feel that both are happening at the same time. My friend Tom Atlee says “things are getting bigger and bigger, worse and worse, faster and faster”.

The Great Turning is inevitable because the industrial growth society is built on growth. It is a political economy that sets its goals and gauges its success on how fast it can grow. But what does it measure the growth of? Health? Longevity? No. It measures corporate profits. Market shares. It ignores the limits of the physical world, water, minerals etc. We are mining it, pulling out resources at an accelerating rate. In the 1980s reports said we are pulling out resources faster than they can renew.

Our souls have been registering this, and we know that things are running out of control. This gives us an edge of desperation, and symptoms emerge in various ways. Various systems are becoming runaway systems; our political economy, other linear systems. The system is, in fact, designed to destroy itself, we don’t need to plot to destroy it, it can do that itself.

The Great Turning isn’t being reported on the evening news, you find it in places like Positive News, in ‘The Transition Handbook’, and more and more people need to hear about it. As Gil Scot Heron sang, “the revolution will not be televised”.

There are three aspects to the Great Turning. The first is Holding Actions. These can be thought of as the Hands of the process. These are actions that stop the further desecration of our planet. These include direct actions, legal or political work, lobbying, stopping the war, civil disobedience. This is vital work, but it is exhausting, and you have far more defeats than victories.
The second is creating new structure. This takes ingenuity and is like the forehead. It is the design of new energy systems, housing, food systems, community currencies. It can appear fringe but it is key and it will be the new mainstream. Future generations will thanks us for this work, but it will not succeed unless it is accompanied by inner work.

We have been treating the Earth like a storage vessel and like a sewer. Now we are waking to realising that it is alive. This is so momentous. Don’t take it for granted. This is the biggest revolution in human thought in history. We can join in with the singing and the dancing, and in the naming of it. We are part of the living planet. New insights like chaos theory and systems thinking pull apart the idea of hierarchical reality. It is about the creation of a new story for our times.”

Day 2 – Monday – Honouring Our Pain for the World

On the morning of the second day Joanna Macy facilitated a session called’ Honouring our Pain for the World’, which concluded with a ritual to help us feel the grief and despair our work exposes us to.
“The Great Turning takes great courage, and we have great courage. There will be no flourishing unless we open our eyes to our world. We need to acknowledge what is coursing through our bodies and minds so that we can address our own grief. Only than can we go together to apply the hands of our attention to our world.
That’s the core of the Great Turning. You know its not going to be pain free, you know that. You also know you won’t have to do it alone. We need each other. We need to listen together, to take each others hands, to stand together.”

In this session four people read out a list of endangered or extinct species while Joanna played a drum slowly. On the large screen a slide show on the destruction of our planet played. This then led into an extraordinarily powerful exercise called The Bowl of Tears. Three large bowls of water were placed in the middle of the floor, representing the tears of Gaia, and a musical lament was played to accompany a slide show of images of social and ecological breakdown, deforestation, pollution and so on.

We were invited to go to a bowl, and to voice what our tears are for, for what it is that we weep, and then to dip our hands into the water and place it on our face. This went on for a while until everyone had done it, and it was a deeply moving experience.
Once everyone had done it, everyone made an avenue of people and the three bowls were passed gently along, and then we all gathered, in the driving snow, where with some words from Joanna, it was returned to a pond. It was a deeply touching exercise, really touching the depth of feeling we so often keep hidden or suppressed. One of the great powers of Joanna’s work is her ability to allow expression for that, and to see that within it are the tools for our true effectiveness.

The afternoon session focused on Seeing with New Eyes. For this session, Joanna gave an overview of systems thinking, arguing that the time of the Great Turning will be a time of a return to a deep understanding, to what Tich Naht Hanh calls ‘Interbeing’. When we go out into the world to take our part in the Great Turning, we need more than just our feelings, they come and go, we also need a grounding in the new comprehension of the world that is emerging in systems thinking.

In the next session with Joanna Macy she stressed the importance of seeing with new eyes.

“We need to broaden our context of time, the context in which we see this work. We call this Deep Time work. If we could experience ourselves as part of the journey,we would perhaps deal with things like radioactive waste in very different ways. Our human chapter is so recent, yet we are doing things with such long implications. Depleted uranium shells, used routinely in Iraq, creates a radioactive waste that is so fine, so light, that the slightest wind picks it up and wafts it around. We can see our relation to time in this material, with its half life of four and a half billion years.

So we discount the future and those that follow us, and in the main we have become compliant in this. The way our culture experiences time is unprecedented, fragmented, it is making us suffer. We all feel increasing time pressure, less time to think, to be, to vision, to spend with family, to be in our gardens.

Market forces, the industrial growth society can’t just continue but must accelerate. It drives itself in a positive feedback loop. The pressure is always to speed up, speed up. For the first time in history time is measured in such small bits of time that we can no longer actually experience them, nanoseconds. Deep Time work is an antidote to that, the realisation that we belong to so much more than just this moment. The future ones are within us, within our ovaries, our gonads and our DNA, and we can become aware of their thanks and gratitude.”

We then did the exercise of meeting the Seventh Generation, where the group formed into two rings, both facing each other. One took the role of someone now, here, today, in the Great Turning, and the other took the role of someone from the 7th generation hence, in 2208, in a time where humanity had made it, had arrived. We then asked each other questions about how that time had been and what inner resources had sustained us though that time. It was a very moving practice.

Joanna’s final session brought us round to the y to care, and the wellspring of the intention can guide your every step. It is important to know that uncertainty and risk taking will take you forth, but there is only one thing you can count on in this. Your intention. Put it behind your ear, in your heart, anywhere, but cherish it. There are huge evolutionary forces at work because this is the time of the Great Turning. It can of course break our hearts, but it breaks them open so they can fit the entire universe in.

The last activity was one in groups of four, a new practice she calls “Corbett”, after the town in Columbia where the practice evolved. We took it in turns to think of one project we want to do when we get home from this event. We had 2 minutes to talk about that and to introduce it. Then the first person had 2 minutes to be the voice of doubt, to pick apart our proposal and question it. The second person was the voice of the Ancestors, giving their views on our proposal, and the final one gave the view of the future beings. Then we gave a second response having heard all that.

Day 3 – The Journey of Renewal in Shakespeare’s As You Like It

Richard Olivier, a leading theatre director for over 10 years, held a full day session using theatre as a tool for our work, which he calls Mythodrama. For Richard the play has many parallels with Great Turning and the times in which we live.

The session began with his taking us through the play, telling the story and introducing its main characters. It is so easy to kill Shakespeare and make it dry and uninteresting, but as an extremely gifted actor he was able to bring it to life. He pulled out some amazing quotes from the play. One was from the Old Duke, who had been in a position of high authority but was then banished to the woods where he lived simply and had developed a deep connection to Nature.

He says “these rough elements are counsellors that feelingly persuade me what I am”. When the hero, Orlando, arrives in the woods, he is armed and expecting trouble. When he meets the Old Duke, it becomes clear that there is no threat, no danger, and he says “I blush, and hide my sword”.

Later Richard talked about two things that we need in order to be successful in the Great Turning, alignment and atonement. Alignment is about the parts of a system being in line with each other, being connected and in sympathy. At its best this means efficiency, at it’s worst it means rigid systems that prioritise profits above people. Often highly aligned systems don’t listen and can prevent change.

Atunement Richard defined as a resonance or harmony between the parts of a system and between the parts and the whole. Highly attuned systems can also be very ineffective as they aren’t able to actually make things happen. We need both. The problem is how to move from highly aligned to highly attuned systems. When you remove a dictator for example, a highly aligned system, what happens? Chaos and breakdown. At least aligned systems maintain order, without a gentle transition we end up with chaos and rampant individualism.

The issue of sustainable leadership is about how to bridge between the two, but getting the two into an appropriate relationship is very difficult. He then identified some of the key characters and some of the key parts of the story, and invited us to chose those that spoke to us. We then, in our groups, though about our part and what it meant. Then we all came back together after lunch and fed that back. For each of the stages he had exercises that we all worked on together.

Mythodrama is an amazing tool, and using Shakespeare as the basis for it is very dynamic, given the degree and depth of the symbolism that Shakespeare worked into his plays, which offer a rich seam to be mined. It was a workshop that leant itself to being experienced rather than being written about, all I can say here to do it justice is that it is a very deep and powerful approach that may well have a very powerful place to play in Transition work and in the building of new leadership.

Richard Olivier is Artistic Director of Olivier Mythodrama, a unique leadership development consultancy. He was a leading theatre director for 10 years. His work is at the leading edge of bringing theatre into the development of authentic leadership. Richard is the founder of Mythodrama – a new form of experiential learning which combines great stories with psychological insights, creative exercises and organisational development techniques. http://www.oliviermythodrama.com

Day 4. Megan Quinn & Jonathan Dawson

Megan Quinn works for Community Solution in the US, and was involved in the making of the Power of Community film. She is also wonderful in that she represents the next generation of speakers on this topic, well informed, passionate about the subject and a gifted speaker. Her talk looked at the strategy that Community Solution are developing, which they call Curtailment and Community.

Curtailment is the dramatic reduction in consumption, and is a more realistic term than the rather fuzzy ‘sustainability’. The time has come to ask what we actually want to use fossil fuels for? Does it make sense to use them to sustain something inherently unsustainable? Even if we could sustain all this, say if a new energy source were found, should we?

She went on to explore the difference between change by choice and change imposed from outside, talking about Cuba, and how those changes were imposed by necessity, and although some of them, such as urban food production, have stayed, the move to bicycles was shortlived once the petrol started to flow again.
She mused on why change has been so slow, attributing it to the degree of denial out there and to what she called the Saviour Mentality, the belief that someone will come riding to our rescue. Future generations will come to rely, she argued, not on national security, rather on community security.

We need to be realistic about where we can affect the most change, she argued. Green new build will only be a fraction of the housing stock, retrofitting is much more important, it needs to be low tech and low cost. In terms of transport, hybrids won’t make a great difference, sharing your car with 3 other people is far more efficient than any hybrid on the road!

In terms of food, the farmers of the future will be respected above all other careers. Indeed, it is the whole system that needs overhauling, we need to replace the industrial model with the local. What, she asked, is community? Community is the benefit, it is what we get, when we consume less and are happier.

We are still separated from neighbours and life has become such an abstraction, if we could walk through the clearcut forests or the sweatshops of China, we would change our practices, yet it is all still very abstract. Yet as people lose confidence they still perceive that they have no alternative, yet community will become their only source of security. When our focus shifts to the local, it becomes about sharing and conserving scarce resources rather than having a perception of seemingly abundant global resources.

There is a perception that in Cuba the changes were all state driven, yet 80% of agriculture is now organic, they are decentralising energy production to the community, and the reality is that Cubans didn’t wait for their Government, they just got on with it, and the State had to help. This change will not come from Governments, it will start with those who are inspiring others.

Jonathan Dawson has been a long term resident of Findhorn and is the President of the Global Ecovillage Network. His talk was called “Moving Outside the Bubble: the Ecovillage Contribution to the Sustainability Movement”. Ecovillages, he argued, are places of vision, and are generally the product of pretty stubborn people. They exist in service of something different from themselves.

Findhorn recently had its ecological footprint assessed and it was a fraction of the national average, in part due to the fact that people don’t need to commute (because, he said, they are paid so little they can’t afford to!). Perhaps a better way to think of eco-villages, he mused, was like the Irish monasteries of Glendalough and Skellig Michael. They are places where people can take time out to breathe and to find inspiration.

Many of the ecovillages that now exist began in the 70s and early 80s, when planning was more relaxed and land much cheaper. The paradox now is that they have never been more influential, yet never harder to do. Findhorn which 10 years ago was off the map as far as local Government was concerned, is now much more accepted.

So, as monasteries, ecovillages are places of deep refuge where you can stop, which are beautiful, safe and holding. They are a place where one can step aside from the concerns of daily life, and reimagine what we are for. They are also research, demonstration and training centres, and as such are more like monasteries than villages.

He closed with the quote that opens the Kinsale Energy Descent Plan, “if you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work; but, rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”. In terms of looking at the difference between Findhorn and BedZed in this context, we could see BedZed as a boat yard, and Findhorn as a dream factory.

The conference was joined by videoconference by students in Sweden, who were able to ask questions. The idea had been to have Sao Paolo too, and a couple of other places, but they didn’t work. A great way of bringing people in from elsewhere.

Day 5. Alan Hobbett, Rob Hopkins, Richard Heinberg and Workshops

The first speaker of the day was Alan Hobbett, whose talk was called “Community Power, the imminent revolution. Alan Hobbett is Senior Manager – Social Housing for Dunfermline Building Society. Before joining Dunfermline Building Society, he worked with the islanders of Gigha in the regeneration of their community-owned island, which included the creation of the UK’s first grid-connected, community-owned windfarm. Alan remains a voluntary Director of Gigha Renewable Energy Limited, the subsidiary company established by the Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust to develop and manage the island’s windfarm. He is a voluntary Director of Highlands and Islands Community Energy Company Limited and las year became a founder Director of Ecology Centre Enterprises Ltd, a community-based social enterprise in Fife. Alan is currently involved in the establishment of a Community Energy Company for Edinburgh and acts as an editorial board advisor to Good Company magazine.

Former Deputy First Minister of Scotland, Nicol Stephen has said, ‘Scotland has the potential to become the renewable powerhouse of Europe. Development and application of renewable energy in Scotland could be more important to this country than the discovery of North Sea oil.’ Harnessing the power of the sea is not new to us; we’ve also been using wood for millennia, and we made good use of wind in developing trade links all across the world. We have a long, long use of renewable energy in our history. It was renewable energy that delivered the modern age – the coming of the Industrial Revolution came on the back of renewable energy. The River Clyde powered the wheels of the textile industry which was the first industry that heralded the modern industrial age in Scotland and the UK.

So perhaps we should not be surprised when a deputy first minister says that the development and application of renewable energy in Scotland could be more important to this country than the discovery of North Sea oil.

What then is this tremendous resource we have in Scotland? The country in Europe which has more than 25% of the enlarged European wind power is Scotland. This is a phenomenal, unmatched resource. It doesn’t just stop there. The Pentland Firth has tremendous power. If we thought we had alot of wind, we have even an greater source of tidal movement; something like 27% of tidal current resource for Europe resides around our shores. Professor Ian Bryden of Gordon University refers to Pentland Firth as an international standard of green energy resource capable of supplying all of Scotland’s electricity needs. The professor was quoted by current First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond when he referred to Scotland’s potential to become the Saudi Arabia of the renewables world. Of course, when the professor said that he was just talking about the tidal resource.

Off the west coast of Scotland and Ireland we have the tremendous wave resource to go with our tidal and wind resources. And there are others: solar and hydro. We’ve also got alot of trees with good potential for biomass generation – a resource very available for our use. The first wave of renewable use in the Highlands was with the hydro industry. Having said that, and with this phenomenal resource, there is no doubt we’ll get more large wind projects and tidal projects; large wave projects and large biomass projects. This will undoubtedly happen, but is bigger always better?
Most of our energy in Scotland actually comes from power stations which is very typical of the way we produce energy in Scotland and the UK. Very big units of production generating vast amounts of energy which are then transmitted across the country on a high voltage transmission system to the points of consumption where the transmission system interfaces with the local distribution network. That’s how we generally do it in Scotland.

Now Gigha and Findhorn are slightly different because we’re not generating to the transmission system. We’re generating within the distribution system, the effect of which is offsetting power that would normally come in through the transmission system. Engineers call this embedded or decentralised generation. The benefits of this are:

* cheaper capital and revenue costs?* lower carbon emissions?* greater efficiencies?* lesser visual impact?* greater power equality?* improves operation of the grid?* reduces air pollution?* reduces dependence on imported fuels?* most importantly, it’s accessible to communities and within there is tremendous opportunity

In the 1970′s, British socialist politician, Tony Benn referred to Scotland as ‘an island of coal in the sea of oil.’ At the moment we’re importing more coal than we ever have done and we’re a net importer of oil and gas. So, decentralised generation of renewables reduces dependence on imported fuels.

Just how centralised are we in our production of electricity? About 8% is generated in a decentralised fashion. In the US it’s 5% and an average of 11% around the world. Denmark is the most decentralised of any at 55%.

If it’s possible, and it is because other countries have done it, and if it presents all these benefits that I’ve talked about, then why do we still have large centralised production? As is the answer to most things, it lies in our history. The history of electricity generation is about 100 years – not that old. As the industry developed in Scotland and the UK, it was in the context of fast, abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuels. As we moved through the century, it increasingly became more centralised until it became a state monopoly. In a state monopoly situation with abundant resources, efficiencies are not the primary driver. This has happened in many European nations.

The situation has changed. Alan’s view is that we have a once in a life-time opportunity over the next couple of decades. We’re going to be decommissioning huge parts of generation infrastructure – nuclear power stations, old coal powered generation, so what do we do and how do we do it? We need to look at the lessons of our neighbours who’ve decentralised. We’d create high levels of community ownership of production – very exciting.

So why hasn’t it happened?
* Is there a market? Yes! Ernst and Young regularly compares the best places to invest and the UK always comes near the top of the list.
* Is it because we have grid restrictions? Yes, but the point is that if communities are going to make significant sums, then you need grid connection. The embedded challenges are less.
* Is it because renewable energy is not popular? No, it’s very popular in Scotland and windmills are the least controversial things we do. There is a landscape issue, but the vast majority of people favour extension of renewable regeneration in Scotland. The nearer you live to a windfarm, the greater the level of public support.
* Is it because it’s not commercially viable. No, as a banker Alan thinks it’s very viable, but subsidies are limited.

Even in a situation where there are compelling arguments, could it happen? If our current leaders were to say, ‘There will be community power,’ Alan feels there would be.

Alan closed with a story about the resilience of the Isle of Gigha. Willie Bowles McSporran has lived all his life on the Isle, is chairman of the Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust and one of the directors of Gigha Renewable Energy Ltd. Willie had no doubt about the potential of the community ownership to transform the island upon which he lived and that he’d seen gradually dying over a number of decades. The population had halved in 30 years. In the 10 years before community ownership, 1 in 4 people had left. Where there used to be 30 children in the school, there were only 6. This was a community that was dying.

Willie, his colleagues and the islanders recognised that through community ownership they would be able to turn that island around and they have done. The population has increased in 6 years by 70%. There are now 26 children in the school. The islanders have repaid 1 million of public money, they’ve opened the first community-owned windfarm in the UK, they’ve opened a quarry, 27 houses have been built in that period when only 1 had been built in the last 30 years. Their windmills, fondly named the dancing ladies of Gigha, are a very important part of that. For without them the Isle of Gigha was not financially sustainable. They’ve pushed the island into financial sustainability and with that have transformed the experience of their community. So an island that had one of the greatest rates of population decline of any Scottish island now has the greatest rate of growth of any Scottish island. When Alan first went to live there and realised the enormity of the task this community has taken on for themselves, Willie said, ‘Don’t worry, Alan, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but then I wasn’t the chairman.’

Rob Hopkins, Designing Pathways from Oil Dependency to Local Resilience

Rob Hopkins is founder of Transition Town Totnes, the first transition town project in the UK. Transition Towns (now referred to as Transition Villages) are an emerging approach to enabling towns/villages to prepare for peak oil and climate change and act as catalysts for the community to explore how the end of the age of cheap oil will affect them. They are based on the simple assertion that life beyond cheap oil and gas could be preferable to the present, but only if we engage in designing this transition with sufficient creativity and imagination.

Rob’s presentation began with a skit featuring two seasoned ladies trying to come to grips with the idea of the transition town concept coming to their community. Very refreshing!
Rob then shared his incredible story with us and gave us lots of practical tools and creative ideas, along with the 6 principles of the transition movement which are:

1. Visioning?2. Resilience?3. Inclusivity?4. Psychological Insights?5. Appropriate and Credible Solutions?6. Awareness-Raising

Rob began by sharing a little about his background. When he was 21 years of age, he visited India and Pakistan and at that time knew nothing about sustainability. Something resonated with him in India about how they’d developed and incredible system of agriculture high up in the mountains, where people ate fresh, unprocessed foods and they were healthy and happy. It was for him an extraordinary place, the happiest place he’d ever been.
On his return home, he stumbled onto permaculture and became involved in what Joanna Macy calls holding actions, activist/ protest work. In 1996, he moved to Ireland. What fired him was Bill Mollison’s permaculture movement which advocated that the most sustainable and responsible thing you can do is build your own house and grow your own food. So he did just that. He went, as he puts it, from being useless to moderately useless. He and his colleagues started a centre called the Hollies and set up the first two-year permaculture course in the world which still runs today. Everything was going well, then there were two big shocks that rocked him:

1. Peak oil – he didn’t see it coming.?2. The house which he’d lovingly built burnt down.

These two things combined took the ground out from under his feet.
First, Rob addressed the question of peak oil. Oil allows us to do 100 times more work. We have no idea of the value and energy of oil. The peak is when the supply can no longer meet the demand. Rob then demonstrated what’s happening in the North Sea. We start using the biggest oil fields first because they’re the cheapest to exploit first, so you get your money back quicker. When the bigger oil fields start to deplete, we use the smaller and smaller ones. We peaked a couple of years ago in the North Sea. All the new technology that’s been brought in – pumping carbon in, pumping water in, sideways drilling – has made no difference and we see the same pattern in country after country. Over 60 of the 98 oil-producing nations in the world now are on the downward part of the slide.

Rob said that when he first watched the film, End of Suburbia, he thought, ‘who would design suburbia anyway,’ and then realised he lives in suburbia, it just doesn’t look like suburbia, but he has to drive his children to school, drive to the shops, drive to visit his friends…. Even if he didn’t drive a car, he thought, ‘Is this small, conservative area that I live in what I would want to be my main source of cultural stimulus? And if I’m sitting here with my fuel forests and my garden and my zero carbon house, while in the village up the road they’re all freezing and starving, what are my options? Am I going to sit at my gate with a gun to protect my interests? Is that an attractive option?’ His initial response was of me, mine, then he realised it’s about coming together not running away.

Rob then sat down with his second year students in Kinsale who’d also gone through this cathartic experience and explored what it would mean for Kinsale if they were to make the transition from being dependent on oil to being independent of oil. So they started researching and holding open spaces, talking to people in the community, running various events, visiting different farmers and growers, and so on, and started the process going. There were no models at that stage. Rob read Richard Heinberg’s book, Power Down and David Holmgren’s book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability.

When his house burnt everything was thrown in the air. Peak oil felt like positive disintegration. He could see the world much clearer and what came out of the process in Kinsale was the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan – an action plan for food, medicine, transport, education, etc. They imagined what it would look like in 2021 if they pulled this off and backcast from there. They really didn’t know what they were doing, Rob admits, but they produced a report, held a conference called Fuelling the Future, put the report online and it started to go all over the place. People started to get in touch as if it were something they were really waiting for. At that point, Rob was considering moving back to the UK, the idea being to take the process further and deeper.

Next, Rob began to address the principles of the transition model. The first principle – visioning is the power of creating visions for the future and painting them in such a way as to entice and draw people. Renowned scientist?and visionary, Peter Russell, talks about visions as being like a whirlpool in front of you that draws you to it. Rob thinks this is something in the environment that we fail to harness, particularly when we talk about climate change. We paint a picture of something ghastly and then try to persuade people that they really don’t want to go there, rather than painting a picture of a low carbon world in such a way that you can almost smell it and taste it, and the idea of not dedicating your life to moving towards it seems fairly hollow. Part of what Rob’s team has been doing is playing around with this vision. For instance, they’ve been playing around with creating newspaper articles from the future as part of their Transition Tales work.

For example:
Example 1: From the Sun 2014 – The top TV show at the time is called Celebrity Love Allotment where they take 10 celebrities and lock them on an allotment until they’ve mastered growing 10 vegetables to a sufficient level of proficiency.
Example 2: Hello Magazine 2029 – piece about David and Victoria Beckham retiring early to pursue their lifelong passion which is growing heirloom vegetable varieties. At that stage the trend among celebrities is to build smaller houses than one another. So the couple built a cob house. Chart-topping singer, Letitia Lloyd is experimenting with the earthship in Essex and Charlotte Church’s roundhouse in Wales is a highly individual celebration of hemp construction. At the end of the article it says, David and Victoria are as ever fashion trailblazers, darlings of the post petroleum age, snuggled up together on their heated cob bench with a bowl of fresh mixed salad from their garden and David muses, ‘When I look back at photos of us 20 years ago, given all that’s happened since, I have to wonder as I sit here on my warm cob bench, ‘what were we thinking?’

Creating visions is so important. And it’s where we really need to start with this work, Rob urges. This leads into the second principle – resilience which Megan Quinn touched on in her presentation. What Rob was seeing in India, all those years ago, was resilience. This is the ability of an ecosytem, individual, or community to withstand shock from the outside. So that when you encounter shock, the whole thing doesn’t just crumble to dust. We saw in the year 2009 when the lorry drivers went on strike that we don’t have any resilience. It’s been dismantled in the last 40 or 50 years. Wildlife conservationist, Aldo Leopold, said, ‘The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.’

We look at peak oil and climate change as separate issues. Peak oil is a challenge of liquid fuels, how we’re going to get them from other places. The Hirsch Report in 2005 said we’ll just get them out of coal to liquids, gas to liquids – biofuels – we can get them anywhere, but from a climate perspective Rob thinks we’re toast if we go down that road.

The Stern Report which came out the year after talked about the economics of climate change and said that we can keep economic growth going and we can deal with climate change, but on page 185 it said there are enough fossil fuels in the ground to meet world consumption demand at a reasonable cost until at least 2050. In a couple of years we’re going to see Stern 2 which puts those two things together financially because when you overlap those two things there’s a middle bit which is about cutting carbon with an unprecedented degree of urgency, while at the same time building resilience. If there’s one thing you take from this talk today it’s that you have to do those two things at the same time.

When we talk about climate change and say that we have a 2 degree limit that we must stay under, we don’t have that luxury. What happened in the Arctic last summer was of scale in terms of melting. We saw stuff that was not supposed to happen according to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for another 80 years! It’s happening now and we haven’t even got to 1 degree. So we don’t have room to play around. What would it look like at the end of the day if you went to bed sequestering more carbon than you produced that day? We have to ask the questions. Our actions are underpinned by our questions.

Thomas Homer-Dixon in his book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, says that in a resilient system, individual nodes (like people, companies, communities, countries) are able to draw on support and resources from elsewhere and they’re also self-sufficient enough to provide for their own essential needs in an emergency. In our drive to hyperconnect and globalise all the world’s economic and technological networks, we’ve forgotten the last half of this injunction. We’re going into a time where we need resilience.

To illustrate the principle of resilience, Rob told us the story of a man named George Heath, a gardner living in Totnes, who up until 1981 worked on a piece of land that had been used for food production back as far as there are maps. He grew fruit and vegetables and flowers and sold them to a shop on the High Street that you could see from the garden. This is a system of food feet not food miles. George was a source of education and wisdom for other people who grew. The garden provided seeds for people who wanted to garden. It provided the freshest, lowest carbon food you could get. If you go to Totnes now, chances are you go to Heath’s nursery carpark underneath which lies what used to be Heath’s garden.

We see the same thing up and down the country – that resilience that was in place covered with tarmac or even worse, built on.
Part of the process Rob finds fascinating is ‘what we’ve had and what we’ve lost.’ He grew up with the idea that life without oil was about rolling around in the mud and sticking little boys up chimneys. There’s alot we can reclaim from the skill that people had, the thrift, how things were made to last. He thinks we have to honour people like George Heath because although he was seen as behind the times, he was really ahead of them. Anything we do as a response to peak oil and climate change has to be about cutting carbon and building resilience and those two things have to go hand-in hand in what we decide to do.

The third principle – inclusivity. Rob realised the importance of this after reading David Holmgren’s book and seeing him put permaculture back in the frame, saying, ‘permaculture is the design science for a post oil world.’ It’s applied common sense, it’s a good design and David argues it so convincingly and passionately. This made Rob look around and say, ‘well where is the permaculture movement at this juncture, given the scale as we stand on the threshhold of The Great Turning? Where are we?’ Rob felt that this was a call to the people up the misty lanes and up in the hills, and everywhere, a call of ‘We need you – come back here now. What you have learned, pioneered and developed is what is needed back here now. ‘

It felt the same to him as it did after the fire had taken his house and he and his family had to rethink their lives and what they were going to do. It was actually a push – what he’d been doing was the right thing, wrong place. It needed to step up a gear.

Rob also felt that permaculture was notoriously difficult to explain and that we needed to bring all these skills and tools under the radar so that they are accessible. The transition movement is a kind of Trojan horse. It’s a way of making these things implicit but not explicit. People who have a permaculture background get the transition movement because it’s based on permaculture principles.

The idea of inclusivity is not enough though – it’s not enough for the green movement to talk to itself. It requires something like the 1939 wartime mobilisation, bringing in all these groups we would not normally work with – churches, schools, political groups, etc. The transition movement is a vehicle for pulling us all together to face this. In Totnes Rob’s worked with businesses, landowners, schools, and the transition movement is successful there because everyone feels like they’re a part of it, so inclusivity is a key ingredient.

The fourth principle – psychological insights is really underpinned by Joanna Macy’s work. In fact, Rob’s own background is based in a Buddhist perspective. He thinks that when we give someone a copy of The End of Suburbia or video to watch at home, alone, in the dark we are being irresponsible. This is really distressing stuff – we need to acknowledge that and design in ways that provide some level of holding. The fact that we are able to read miserable books about climate change and then go out and grow carrots was the exception rather than the norm.

Rob then drew on a Buddhist analogy from 8th-century Indian Buddhist scholar, Shantideva’s, book, A Guide to the Bodhisatva’s Way of Life, where he talks about these trees that drop poison berries in the forest, but there are peacocks who live in that grove. The peacocks can eat those berries and transform them into beautiful plumage. So part of what the transition movement does is it takes these twin potentially ghastly issues of peak oil and climate change and transforms them into something enticing and positive. We try to develop this idea that you go to hear a talk on peak oil and climate change and you come away feeling fantastic or exhilarated. It’s why the transition movement is growing so quickly because people can explore these issues in such a way that feels held and they feel part of something really amazing.

American author, Richard Bach, used say, to bring anything into life, imagine that it’s already there. You just start doing it – live as if The Great Turning is already underway. Part of the transition process that’s really vital is having a heart and soul group. What they do is offer pre-transition counselling (similar to post-traumatic counselling). For a community that is about to go through a transition on this scale, what would it look like to get the counselling first?

The fifth principle – appropriate and credible solutions. The film, An Inconvenient Truth, paints this picture of climate change and at the end shows what you can do – change your bulbs, drive an economy car, etc. Come on! Rob exclaimed. There’s a whole range of what you can do at home and all else we have to lobby the government to do. There’s also a whole range in between which is what you can do if you get together with people on your street, in your community. There’s a huge amount of latent power there that we can tap into. There’s a project happening now in Totnes in response to last year’s shut down of Dairy Crest, their big milk manufacturer and main employer in the town. The property is an 8 acre site in the middle of Totnes right next to the railway station, which runs down to the river. Transition Town Totnes, along with other organisations, is creating this idea of a sustainable business park. We need to be thinking some big solutions here. We need to think like developers to make things happen on a large scale.

The final and sixth principle – awareness-raising. What we’re seeing in communities up and down the country is this amazing creativity, this playfulness that’s coming out to support this work. In Totnes we unleashed the transition model with an historic evening designed in such a way that everyone will look back on it as the moment it all started. This process has to have a feel of history to it – we’re making history here – this is The Great Turning! The official unleashing is the thing people will put plaques up to in 20 years as the time when it all began.

Community projects may include, for example, taking unloved areas of your tows and making them useful by planting trees and then offering tree guardian training so the people who live nearby can look after them. Other things Totnes did included fundraising for relevant books for the library to be used as resources, running courses, holding events, teaching people how to make their own films to document their transition process and putting them on Youtube, teaching courses on the ‘great reskilling’ as Rob calls it. Rob often argues that we’re the most useless generation that ever walked this planet, in terms of making things last, repairing things, growing things.

Totnes has also brought together local councillors to explore various issues and, as a way of working with local businesses, has created a vulnerability audit which is a risk assessment tool, showing where they use oil and where they are vulnerable. According to Rob, it’s a really fascinating process. They’ve even trained people in the community to be able to do the audits. They also run swap shops where they get together and swap their waste with each other. They run a ‘states in transition day’ and Rob teaches a 10-week evening class called Skimming Up for Power Down, giving people thinking and practical tools. They’ve also set up home groups who support each other through making these changes in their lives. They’ve launched a local currency scheme, the Totnes pound, which is honoured in over 70 shops in the town. It’s an amazing awareness-raising tool. They’ve launched a local food directory, weaving people back with their local food producers. They’ve brought the Transition Tales work to local schools. This work is about transitioning forward – they ask the students, what would it be like in, say, 2030 if you woke up and this had happened? What would it feel like, sound like, smell like, what would you have for breakfast? They the invite the students to produce news broadcasts from the future. The work is really important in allowing them to think forward while holding them in doing that.

So, what’s next for Totnes? They’re setting up a transition Town Totnes construction company that can take on some of the projects and act as a training centre in these new ways of building. They’re establishing a Totnes currency company to deal with finances. They’re founding the Totnes Renewal Society which is a model for investment in local renewable infrastructure.

On a national scale, there are now 45 formal transition projects in cities and islands. They’re working now on incredible range of scales – 42 in the UK; 1 in New Zealand; 1 in Australia and there’s a second lot they call mullers (those trying to decide whether or not to become a transition town) – there’s over 700 of those.
All of this has happened by word of mouth and through the internet, Rob says. We nudge it and it unfolds so different parts of the country become hubs, like Sussex and Lewis. They’re also seeing the emergence of a national hub; a self-selecting and evolving system.

We’re designing for viral growth. Marketing guru, Seth Gooding, talks about unleashing the ideas virus. Why has the movement grown so fast? Rob believes it’s because it’s grown into a vacuum. There’s clearly something you can do about peak oil and climate change that feels great and you don’t beat yourself up about it. You come together with other people and it’s exhilarating.

Rob says they are developing Energy Descent Action Plans – making that a much more thorough process. He feels they shouldn’t read like your normal dull plan. Your action plan should read like a holiday brochure for a low-energy future. It should have transition tales like he showed us woven through it. After you’ve finished reading it you should feel that you can’t imagine dedicating your time to any other future. At the moment, they’re trying to figure out how to do this and how to develop scenarios with the community that really engage them.

When we assess how we’re doing carbon footprinting, Rob says, it is what we need to look at but it’s not enough on it’s own. We need to also assess resilience. They’re developing resilience indicators and weaving them into their Energy Descent Plans. What do transition businesses look like? Governments? Hospitals? Schools? Universities? At the core of all of it, it’s cutting carbon and building resilience.

Transition is about asking some of the uncomfortable questions:
* What does our work and life look like at a one ton level??* What does our spiritual practice look like at a one ton level??* What do our relationships and family life look like at a one ton level?

It’s about seeing within that process the opportunity to do something magical and wonderful. Richard Heinberg often says the sooner we start living in that way, the gentler the transition is going to be. What is it that we cling onto anyway? 1961 was the year consumerism made us happiest and ever since then, the amount of stuff we consume hasn’t had that much effect on our happiness. We just become more and more in debt to something that makes us less and less happy.

Part of this process is to take people’s hands and lead them through The Great Turning. It’s an inevitable transition and what we can do at the local scale is read the terrain in great detail. Jonathan Dawson talked about the ‘frenzy of playful wantonness.’ That’s what we need in this process, to make it playful, fun. It can put on different hats and talk to different people. French painter, Jean Dubuffet, said, ‘Art does not lie down in the bed that is made for it. It’s best moments are when it forgets what it’s called.’ Rob thinks our activism around the time of The Great Turning needs to do the same thing.

Transition is a catalyst. It doesn’t come in with the answers. It puts the power in the hands of the people. It’s a simple set of tools and principles and people experiment with them. As Joanna Macy said, would you want it any other way? Would you want someone to come in with the answer and work it all out for you? It’s such an adventure working all these things out.

Rob closed with the following quote from French novelist, essayist, and dramatist Albert Camus:

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.

Day 6. Heinberg, Lochhead, and Closing

The final day began with Richard Heinberg’s talk, ‘Resilient Communities. Paths for Powering down; an exercise in strategic thinking’.

His talk was underpinned by 8 assumptions. The first was that global oil production are nearing an all time maximum and will begin to decline within the next 18-24 months, with gas and coal peaks not far behind. The second was that the consequences, as identified in the Hirsch Report, will be severe.
Assumption 3 is that there will be no technofix, no silver bullet that will mean that business as usual can continue. Therefore, Assumption 4 continues, we will have to power down. Assumption 5 was that in the meantime, climate change poses thorny policy challenges where everyone wants to be seen to be doing the right thing, but enormous economic interests stand in the way of enforcing effective global agreements, which without China and the US will be ineffective.

His sixth assumption is that Climate Change makes global Powerdown necessary, whereas Peak Oil means it is not only possible but unavoidable. The seventh is that the powering-down process will be complex, lengthy, and perilous, and his final assumption was that these are not the only looming crises -nor even necessarily the most imminent. It may well be that a financial crash, already beginning, will affect us first.

He gave an overview of the emerging responses, the bottom up approaches such as Transition Initiatives, Relocalisation Outposts, and so on, and of the top down responses, such as Post Carbon cities and local government plans such as the Oakland Peak Oil Task force, of which he is a member.

Richard then unveiled a concept which he has been evolving and of which this was the first public airing. He calls it the Resilient Communities Action Plan . The idea is that it is something that is a companion to the Energy Descent Action Plan, but it is different, it is, in effect, an emergency response plan, a Plan C to the EDAP’s Plan B. It would be created by a working group within a Transition Initiative or a Post Carbon group, and would sit alongside the main plan as an emergency response that could be taken off the shelf when required.

While crisis can equal opportunity, he argued, it may not necessarily yield the kind of opportunity we are talking about here. In the past, crises have produced Hitler, and the kind of insidious undermining of economies that Naomi Klein set out in her (enormous) book Shock Doctrine.

This plan would involve many of those who have relevant knowledge and would be made very visible to the community at large. He unveiled, with a tip of the hat to the 12 Steps of Transition, his 10 Steps to a Resilient Community. They were;

1. Form a working group
2. Identify people and organizations with something important to offer post-peak
3. Ask their help and participation
4. Work with them to develop a contingency plan in their field: how to scale-up quickly?
5. Seek input from disaster management officials
6. Contact mainstream organizations responsible for water, food, power, fuel, health care, etc.
7. Assemble a coherent Resilience Plan
8. Present the plan
9. Implement the plan
10. Work with other communities to create a national plan

Repeat steps 1-10 at higher levels

Most response groups, he argued, cultivate an upbeat, hopeful tone, which is essential. In contrast, creating this kind of disaster management is a sobering activity-but it is strategically and practically necessary. Somebody’s got to do it!

As with many things that arise from hearing Richard speak, one often needs time to go off and digest these ideas for a while. My initial thought is that this could be possible as a subset of the EDP process, and could be something that could emerge from the material gathered. However, it felt to me, from what Richard said, that it involved the creation of a panel of experts, and that the danger with that approach is that the community feels no sense of involvement in the plan itself.

I can see his argument that, in effect, our Energy Descent Plans need to maximize their resilience as it were, as in they can be as robust in the face of a rapidly on-setting breakdown as in a more gentle transition. My initial sense is that rather than having a separate process, that the creation of an EDP should involve the continual assessment as to how its recommendations would hold up in the face of a sudden shock. Richard was, as ever, authoritative and passionate, clear and forward thinking.

The next speaker was Richard Lochhead, the local MSP. He was introduced as a politician who finally was starting to talk the right talk. He announced that ‘sustainable economic growth’ (which by this point in the conference most delegates recognized as an oxymoron) was at the heart of their policy making. They are committing to an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 (a 20% improvement on Westminster), and he announced a Climate Change Fund for communities which will give out £17 million over the next 3 years.

He said he was delighted recently to have spoken at the launch of Transition Town Bigga, and is very supportive of Transition Initiatives in Scotland. His dedication to community empowerment, he said, is not just jargon, it is the real thing.

He is aiming for 50% of energy to be coming from renewable, and that a Scottish renewable energy revolution has more chance of success if it comes from the bottom up rather than top down. His department would be offering £13.5 million for the support of microgeneration, and would make the installation of renewables in schools a priority.

His talk was a mixture of vision and pragmatism. As so often at amazing conferences such as Positive Energy, it is a shame when politicians are just dropped into the event, not having shared the experiences and the learning process that those at the conference have undergone. In questions, he was asked for his view on aviation, which he replied by saying that he was supportive of expansion of air travel, as Scotland was starting from a low base and needed to catch the rest of the UK up a bit.

He was questioned on the term ‘sustainable economic growth’, and replied that if a renewable revolution is to take place, and if that manufacturing is to take place in Scotland, that needs an economy that is growing. Asked how deeply peak oil is reflected in his thinking and policies, he replied that he was aware they still had a lot further to go.

After lunch was a very touching closing ceremony to end a wonderful week at Findhorn.