Community Powerdown session 8

Tonight was an interesting session, mainly focussing on the Transitions Towns movement. We read an article by Rob Hopkins, Designing Energy Descent Pathways. Rob is a permaculture teacher who used to live in Cork and teach permaculture there. They had built a beautiful house there made out of cobb and sustainable materials, it was a big learning project that many people worked on and that took years to build. When it was almost finished, it was attacked and burned to the ground. When I read about this happening a few years ago, I felt extremely upset, even though I only had heard of his house The Hollies, I had never been there or met him. It seemed so visceral, so painful, so pointless, someone who had given so much, the fruit of so many people's labour trying to do something good, and it seemed that someone was so vicious that they angrily destroyed it. I don't know if that was ever confirmed, but it appeared not to be in question that it was arson and was being investigated as such, due to the nature of the fire and another building or store of theirs nearby that was also destroyed. At the time I don't know if Rob had yet started the Transition Towns with Kinsale, but he left quite soon after this and moved back to England, and I always wondered if that was because so much of what he'd worked for had been destroyed. I don't like to write about what must have been a very personal pain for someone else, but he did write about it publicly on his website, so perhaps it is a pain that he is willing to share. And ultimately it showed that out of pain can come renewal and new life.

The continuation of the story is that he started the Transition Town in Kinsale, and then went on to found Totnes in Devon as a Transition Town, and this has now become an incredible movement where in just a year or so over 100 towns and communities are using his system to plan their energy descent. It has become a big movement and is really powerful. That was what the class was focussed on - there are 12 steps by which local communities can plan for a life with less energy.

It starts with the principles that life with much less energy is inevitable and it's better to plan for it, that communities have lost their resilience to shocks and need to rebuild it, that we must act for ourselves and act now, and that we should 'unleash' the collective genius in our communities to design more enriching, sustainable, enjoyable ways of life. I liked the idea that you start with the present, where you now are, and then the vision, what it will be like when you are where you want to be. In the 12 steps were important things like start your steering group with a plan for its demise, bringing in groups, allies and networking with others, and developing visible, practical demonstrations of activities - like planting walnut trees around the town, or having schools grow their own food - which must be tangible, not just a talking shop, but also in line with the ultimate energy descent plan, not things that have no place in it. I liked that it talked about honouring elders and their ideas and experience of living with less energy, but it's not about 'going back' to an earlier time.

I like the transition town movement and I think it is very important to do something practical, and indeed do something at all, not just think all the time. You have to do something in your home, and something that sustains you personally, where you live. And we will need to live in a much more locally dependent way as peak oil and climate change take effect.

My main concern was that there is not a sufficient focus on the global. And the world can get neglected and indeed destroyed while we focus our energies on our neighbourhoods. We need to do both, and my focus would be more on the global. The facilitator pointed out that a lot of the people who were active in the global social justice movement a few years ago are now focussed on relocalisation and local projects, and working with mainstream community groups, which is a great move. However, my concern is that we still need that global justice, and that indeed major powers will destroy the local efforts, or indeed a single attacker can do a lot of damage, if we're not watching out for that too. Not living in fear and definitely not being controlled by suspicion and despair, but also not turning away from the global issues and the giant questions. Asking this to the course leader afterwards he suggested that in a transition town, which always has lots of sub-groups, I could start a sub-group that would focus on the global issues, how we ensure that's not forgotten. But I think my focus is the other way round - in a movement focussed on the globe, I'd like there to be a local sub-group. The world is our locality. And it's where I'd like to keep living.

Community Powerdown session 7

This session was on the home. Or housing, which is different. The homework reading, Energy in the Home by Patrick Waterfield, was ok but mainly filled with the usual turn off your appliances, insulate, showers instead of bath, don't buy too many gadgets. All individual. The only thing it made me think twice about was to block off gaps around skirting boards or pipes going into external walls. It had nothing on community, on sharing living space, or sharing walls in flats rather than homes, that living in denser housing is much more ecologically sound. That we need to think about living together, sharing resources, this makes much more sense.

There was a point later in the class about living and working in your home, I'm not sure I'd like that, there is a book called Living above the Shop by James Pike, produced by Comhar. Important to help non-eco houses refit to be better insulated. The Village in Cloughjordan will work with 500 local houses nearby that are not part of the project to reduce their energy consumption. Learnt that it's good to have something with thermal mass such as bricks, mud or a watertank beside windows that are in the sun, to absorb the solar energy and give it off later. Windows dont' have much thermal mass. Apparently Coillte may have FSC approval now which a lot of people are very unhappy about and that would seem to make a mockery of that certification. A group possibly called Energy Action go out and help insulate the homes of the old, and disabled, which is pretty good. Old style masonry stoves called 'pishka' in Russian would heat the bench, bed, different areas, with its heat. I do think ovens waste a lot. And hot water, there must be something to do with the hot water we throw away, the heat of it, from boiling vegetables, showers, baths, washing up, washing machines. Something to do with all that hot water. Ideas welcome.

A new IPCC report may indicate we have only 7 years now to change everything. We changed the group exercise to think about how would we convince others about making changes in their homes. I think it has to be tangible and relevant to them, and for a lot of people that means money. Get people to look at their bills, actually read them, and then say ok I'm going to help you save 10% on that bill in 3 months, that becomes real. The article had the old chestnut that reducing your thermostat by 1 degree can save you 10% on your heating costs - I hate hearing this, it is so obviously incorrect, has to depend on so many factors like how high your heating is anyway, how it's provided, your insulation, etc etc. A green party person said logic was key, just showing what's being wasted. This is often my main focus - there's just so much waste. We are literally flushing away and burning energy, and money. Creating things just to throw them away. Building in waste. And that has to change. There's the need for education, and real skills. Creative sharing, like communal power tools and parties to teach how to use them. Clothes exchange parties. Shame or pride lists for good performances. The Green Party You Tube on the world you're leaving your kids. Communal washing machines. Greenpeace tickets on SUVs. I suggested lots of parties, have a dinner party, save energy, create your own heat, and have some fun. It has to be fun or what's the point?

Community Powerdown session 6

This session was on food systems. The article The Case for Local Food was by Helena Norberg Hodge, which was interesting as I'd visited her ecological centre in Ladakh in northern India in 1998. Ladakh is an incredible place, the systems that have been used by local people to thrive at 3500m above sea level, where they have created amazing irrigation systems for example, where people dam off the communal channel using stones to that it runs into their plot for their designated few hours a day, before the next farmer gets a turn at the water, with miles of stone channels bringing the precious water to the gloriously green fields. I managed to find a photo of the centre and brought it with me to the class but was slightly too embarrassed to show it to more than a couple of people.

An acronym CSAs in the articles was referred to be someone in the class as standing for Community Share Agriculture, where people pay a certain amount towards a local farm, and get a share in its produce, popular in the US apparently.

The icebreaker was ways to reduce our food carbon footprint, and the group session at the end was similar, so we chose to focus the group work on community solutions. The main ways people were suggesting were:
Buy seasonal food. Buy local. Support farmers' markets. Grow your own food. Check labels and become more educated about where food comes from and what's in it. Increase social education about these issues. Ask the shops and supermarkets about where their food comes from. Go to local and smaller shops. Eat at restaurants that source local food - that last something I think of but it doesn't get emphasized enough.

Only half way round the group did someone say, eat less meat, or no meat - which is a colossal way to reduce carbon production from food. You need so much more energy, most of which comes in the form of oil, to produce meat than to produce grain - up to 10 times more in intensive cattle farming, according to the course facilitator. Eating less meat is necessary, and essential if we're to tackle climate change - I do hear people making this ecological argument occasionally, but it could be front and centre.

Vandana Shiva says we're eating oil. The importance of looking at the global implications of going local I think can't be forgotten - what about fair trade, what about poor farmers in the global South earning a living from selling to the global North. And it's those farmers that will be squeezed out first, and suffer most if pressure appears not to trade internationally. I get constantly worried that the rhetoric of climate change will be used to move us towards some dangerous and destructive ends - such as nuclear power or killing the poor or leaving them to die - this is already happening but its implications are hidden, the 'consumption choices' of the North contribute to and in some cases cause death and destruction in the South. These two issues, the implications of eating meat, and the global-local relationships, are close to my heart, but I'm not expressing them well here. As I said to someone in the class who asked what are the solutions, what systems thinking teaches us is that we have to look at the whole picture, it's not enough to address climate change at the expense of people's lives, we have to find a system that works for everything we value, and I think human life, has to be high on that list. It's a person or speciesist perspective, but it can't be forgotten.

Community Powerdown session 5

Cycled to the class tonight which was lucky as it was on transport. It's been good to get back on my bike after hardly being able to cycle the last couple of years. If you know how much I like cycling you know how tough that's been. So the reading was Community Transport and Mobility by Graham Lightfoot. Ok but felt that it didn't address international transport much at all, perhaps on the assumption that with the end of oil there won't be any, but there can still be sailing ships and long-distance travel, and I for one definitely don't want to live in a world where we're unconnected to other parts of the globe. That would also be totally at odds with thousands of year s of human history - people seem to forget that traders and pilgrims in particular travelled thousands of miles at all times in the last few millennia - we found plenty of ways, albeit slower, before the advent of oil. It will be different not gone. There was some discussion in the article about Ireland's car usage - very car dependent but not that many cars apparently, and long journeys taken more often - is this a good thing or not? Would think that taking longer journeys and using the car often is perhaps better than just having a car that isn't used. Obviously the emissions are more but the wastage is less? The best discussion so far during the course - everyone joined in and had plenty to say. Lots came up: changing attitudes when people want things like out of town supermarkets and shopping centres that suck life from the town or village centre, comparing this to the media that claims to give people what they want but actually shapes it. Nitrous oxide is apparently 310 times worse than C02 carbon dioxide. Having the correct pressure in your car tyres which most people do not have at least in the UK saves a colossal amount of CO2 a year. Are people going to give up their cars for a seat on public transport that is like something from the Inquisition, or to stand on a crowded bus that may not show up for ages and could take anything from 20 minutes to 1 and a half hours for a commute, as one participant experienced daily. Have to look at how full public transport eg trains are in order to reduce their fuel per passenger mile, which of course planes are worst at. Servicing your car is another way to increase its energy efficiency. Flexi time at work reducing congestion at peak times. The astonishing film of Bogota, Colombia and how it had introduced an enormous amount of cycling, protected lanes, no cars on certain days. The Mayor being interviewed, and how difficult it would be to turn this back after only a few years. The walking bus where kids walk together to school, supervised by a parent, picking up more kids on the way. A recent Garda report that showed a 12% increase in pedestrian deaths - I think 60 so far this year compared to 57 last year. THat 98.3% of Irish freight is moved by HGVs - no other European country has anything like this amount (according to another participant). Do we want an underground Metro, with the tunneling and energy that would require, instead of electrified buses or other methods? How to move people away from the comfort and quality of their cars. What about businesses moving goods, it's not all about passengers, which again the article focussed on. 'Induced traffic' is the technical term for the phenomenon that when you build roads more cars come to fill them - I still don't understand this as surely there is a limit to the number of cars in an area. Although I think the US has more cars than people. And that includes children. Friction between steel rails and wheels on trains less than rubber tyres on tarmac - thought of magnetic highspeed trains in Japan that don't touch the rails at all. What about university residences - some people at the course travelled for college whereas if everyone lived closer or on campus that would change things. Do we want that cultural shift? Meanwhlie we need more info on actual usage of transport eg buses etc. Check out the film The High Cost of Low Price about Walmart, and Who Killed the Electric Car. The clip about Bogota was on Contested Streets. I suggested people look at the simulation of a pedestrianised Dublin city centre from a recent conference, Making Dublin the capital of Ireland, about transport in the city, and some of the presentations about public health effects of driving, increasing cycling in Dublin and what other similar cities like Copenhagen have done.