Video - Tim Jackson - Economic Collapse or Prosperity Without Growth

Tim Jackson recently spoke at TED , here he is speaking in Totnes. Thanks to Rob Hopkins over at Transition Culture for the heads up on this.
"An unparalleled opportunity to come to grips with what the current financial crisis means for you.

Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity Without Growth and Ed Mayo Secretary General of Cooperatives UK will be joined by Naresh Giangrande of Transition Town Totnes in a 'trialogue'."

From Transition Culture - Why GM Has No Place in a World in Transition

There is clear scientific evidence that the current epidemic of diabetes and obesity is related to consumption of high fructose corn syrup, a genetically modified frankenfood, that suppresses leptin levels which control satiety. This is millions of people. This is evidence that demands further independent research but for me it is a smoking gun.

Please see Rob Hopkins post over at Transition Culture;

Why GM Has No Place in a World in Transition

Are you a citizen or a consumer?

This interview done by Rob Hopkins with Tim Kasser over at Transition Culture is well worth a read.

Part One
Part Two

Here is an Excerpt from part one;

"What’s consumerism done to us? How have we been changed by fifty or sixty years of that?

I think what consumerism has done to us is turned us into consumers. Which sounds like a silly answer but we all have roles in our lives, and we have multiple roles: I’m a father, and I’m a professor, a teacher, I’m an activist and I’m a consumer too, and our roles like our values end up influencing what we think is important in life, they influence our behaviour and how we treat other people. I think what’s happened over the last fifty/sixty years is that in order for our economic system to maintain itself, it requires people to enhance the consumer role – to think of themselves more as consumers and I don’t know how it is here in the UK, but when you’re reading the newspaper in the US you’re much more likely to see people referred to as consumers instead of citizens.

To be a consumer has a very different set of implications than to be a citizen. To be a consumer is to think about “what is it I want to buy?” So first off there’s a selfishness already involved in the role and there’s a set of behaviours implied by the role. There’s this sense that as that role comes to dominate more and more of how we think about ourselves and how our policy makers think of us, it leads potential solutions to problems or potential decisions to be “well what’s good for consumption, or what’s good to make a citizen?”, as opposed to what’s good for people. If you think about what a citizen’s role is, it’s to think about the whole of the community and “what’s my role in the community?”

You’re obviously still thinking about yourself, but you’re not thinking about yourself and what you’re going to buy, you’re thinking about yourself and who you’re going to be in relationship to others. There’s sort of a transcendent characteristic or aspect to that role. That I think leads us to behave in very different ways. I behave very differently when I’m being a consumer to when I’m being a citizen. The way that our economic and thus our political system is oriented now, is very much attuned to people as consumers and less to people as citizens and therefore it develops all kinds of policies that end up maximising the consumer role and not too much for the citizen role.

I think that’s part of why it makes it easy for people to think about “Do I want this?” instead of “well, how is it made, and how does my buying this impact people?”, and to think, “well it’s Friday and I’m going to stay home and watch TV”, rather than “I’m going to go out enjoying my fellow citizens cleaning up the river bank”, or having a meeting to help determine town policy about zoning and whether Tesco’s is coming in.

Consumer society tells us what the optimal ways are to live our lives. That’s what any social system does, there’s nothing special about consumerism with regard to that. Christianity tells us how to live our lives, fascism told us how to live our lives… the particular way consumer capitalism tells us to live our lives is this way and through consumption and the maximisation of economic growth. Through working hard so you can have a lot of money and then you can spend it on stuff that you want to buy. Whenever you believe something’s important something else has to become less important and the value of consumerism and materialism crowd out other important things.

Has consumerism left us more or less able to respond rapidly to change? Are we less resilient? How can we know that?

I think to the particular kinds of changes which we’re likely to face here in the near future if climate science is right and if everything we read about what’s happening socially is right, I really think it’s left us less able to respond to those challenges and I think there’s a couple of different things that goes back to: one of them is that consumerism leads us (this is true of any social system) when we have a difficulty to think about certain ways to solve that difficulty and to not think about other ways.

If you take a look at people who accept that there is climate change or climate disruption and then they try to figure out how to solve that problem, consumerism says: “well, consume in a green way”, because that’s a very reasonable solution to the problem from a consumers’ perspective – we just need to consume different things and we need to decarbonise and we need to keep economic growth, but just have carbon clean economic growth. So we get locked into that set of solutions when we think about the problem of climate disruption from a consumerstic view point.

All the climate scientists I talk to and everything I read suggests that that’s important, but it won’t get us anywhere near the way to solve those kinds of problems. Plus, it’s not going to help habitat loss or the other environmental problems we have to do those things. That’s one issue – it tells us solutions which are far too partial.

Another issue is that because we know that materialism and consumerism and materialism in research is associated with behaving in less cooperative and more competitive ways and less empathic and more manipulative ways and less pro social and anti social ways. What all that suggests is that when push comes to shove, and there are significant problems that we face, we will have lost some of the interpersonal, social skills and community skills that are really needed in order to come together as a group and solve the problems and instead I think we’ll be more likely to continue our competitive mindset in ways that end up damaging us at the very time we need to work together to solve the problems. Because we don’t think about consensus and we don’t think about building a group and listening to everybody and treating other people like people instead of other objects to be manipulated when we take on that materialist mindset.

So that scares me. If things get really bad here we may have lost some of the important skills that we need to manage that and the aftermath. We have milk goats and my wife wanted someone to teach her how and there wasn’t anyone. A hundred years ago there’d have been all kinds of people to teach her. But we’ve lost a lot of the self sufficiency skills that we need. Instead we go to work to earn money so we can hire somebody else to do it because that’s good for the economy.

We’ve lost a lot of the skills that ultimately we’re going to need if we live in a more localised way and we live not in a self sufficient way, but in a group sufficient way."

Transition Bermuda update

Our efforts to get a Transition Initiative started in Bermuda are bearing fruit. Our steering committee has grown by 1/3, from 2 to 3! We have expressions of interest from more and more folks and requests to present our short talk are starting to come in.

For those of you who don't know. Transition is about planning a path to resilience in the face of the challenges presented by the hydrocarbon twins, peak oil and climate change. We try to avoid debating the truth of both, rather to focus on practical actions that can lead to an energy descent action plan. One example is the nut tree project in Totnes, the first transition town.

When Totnes was looking for a project that embodies resilience and local economy they decided to become the Nut Tree Capital of Britain. Some of the trees are now bearing fruit. Here is an excerpt from Rob Hopkins blog, Transition Culture, on the topic;

"Over 100 trees have now been planted, most of them having a ‘guardian’, whose job it is to keep an eye on them. In one park, a line of 3 almond trees, it turned out, have begun to bear fruit!...Of course Totnes is not going to ever provide the bulk of its carbohydrates from nuts, but it could be a significant contribution. My mission for the next couple of weeks is to work out how much of a contribution the trees already planted will make when fully grown. It’ll be interesting to see how many more trees we need to plant! For now though I can relax safe in the knowledge that even if TTT ceases to exist in the morning, future generations will be able to feast on almond, walnuts and chestnuts planted during the early years of the great Transition."

In searching for an initial project for Transition Bermuda we seem to be in agreement that it should be focused on local food. I've suggested a linkup with the National Trust to establish historically authentic kitchen gardens on several of their properties. I'm sure whatever we decide upon will involve growing food as the majority of our personnel are involved in growing food at some level.

At our next meeting we intend to show the video "The Power of Community- How Cuba Survived Peak Oil". We'll probably also do our short talk on PO, CC and Transition if there are new folks present.

Transition in the US media

As Transition gains momentum in various communities across the US it is appearing in the media more and more. Here are some excerpts, posted by key concepts, from a paper in northern California. Read the whole article at Bohemian.com. Thanks to Rob Hopkins over at Transition Culture for the heads up on this.

The Basics

"Three years ago, David Fridley purchased two and a half acres of land in rural Sonoma County. He planted drought-resistant blue Zuni corn, fruit trees and basic vegetables while leaving a full acre of extant forest for firewood collection. Today, Fridley and several friends and family subsist almost entirely off this small plot of land, with the surplus going to public charity.

But Fridley is hardly a homegrown hippie who spends his leisure time gardening. He spent 12 years consulting for the oil industry in Asia. He is now a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute in Sebastopol, where members discuss the problems inherent to fossil-fuel dependency.

Fridley has his doubts about renewable energies, and he has grave doubts about the future of crude oil. In fact, he believes to a certainty that society is literally running out of gas and that, perhaps within years, the trucks will stop rolling into Safeway and the only reliable food available will be that grown in our backyards.... "If you are a typical American and have expectations of increasing income, cheap food, nondiscretionary spending, leisure time and vacations in Hawaii, then the change we expect soon could be what you would consider 'doom,'" he says soberly, "because your life is going to fall apart."

Reskilling

"But is it the end of the world?

Fridley and other supporters of the Transition movement don't believe it is. First sparked in 2007 in Totnes, England, Transition was launched when one Rob Hopkins recognized that modern Western society cannot continue at its current pace of life as fast access to oil begins to dwindle. Global warming and economic meltdown are the two other principle drivers of the Transition movement, but in an ideal "Transition Town," society would be ready for such changes.

With limited gas-powered transport or oil-based products, a Transition community's citizens would live within cycling distance of one another in a township built upon complete self-sufficiency, with extremely localized infrastructure for agriculture, clothes making, metal working and the other basics of life which the Western world largely abandoned to factories in the late 1800s, when oil power turned life into a relatively leisurely vacation from reality.

Now, Transitionists say, it's time to get back to work—and quick. Localized efforts have sprouted from the ground up in Santa Cruz, Cotati, Sebastopol, San Francisco and many other towns worldwide, where residents and neighbors are putting their heads together and collaborating on ways to relocalize themselves, bolster self-sufficiency and build the resilience that communities will need to absorb the shock of peak oil.....

Transition Sebastopol was born in 2008 as the ninth Transition Town in the United States. Boulder was the first; Sandpoint, Idaho, the second. Today, 27 Transition Towns, also called Initiatives, have assumed life across the nation, and what began as an idea has become a concrete reality in which people are taking action. In particular, McKeown has seen tremendous community interest in the growing of food. Currently, the average parcel of food comes from untold distances away. The common estimate is 1,500 miles, though some experts assure that most food travels much farther.

Such external dependence will no longer be feasible after peak oil, and communities must be capable of producing all their own goods in fields, orchards and gardens within miles. In and around Totnes, for example, community nut trees have been planted as a sure source of protein and calories in an uncertain future.

In outlying regions of the Bay Area, backyard food production is already an after-work hobby for thousands, and interest in edible gardens appears to be growing fast. At Harmony Farm Supply in Sebastopol, demand for edible plant seeds, starters and saplings has never been greater, according to nursery manager Kirsten Tripplett. She estimates that sales of lettuce, kale and tomato seedlings has jumped by 25 percent this year, with a particularly large portion of sales going to customers who have never before gardened. Fruit and nut saplings, too, sold out weeks ahead of schedule this winter.

"My reading is that this is the silver lining to the economy going south," she says.

McKeown, though, calls food production "the entry-level thing to do" among Transitionists; other essential actions must be taken for a Transition Town to cushion itself against the drastic changes predicted in post-oil society. A viable Transition Town must be capable of producing its own materials, tools and other products that society now imports from half the globe away. With machines and factories no longer readily available, almost every citizen would need to participate at some level in production of food, energy and goods."

Oil

"Yet it was only a little over a century ago that society first got swept up on the thrilling wave of oil-age progress. In the 1850s, societies functioned largely as local entities, without deep reliance on global economies or crude oil. Many, if not most, Americans lived on or near farms. We knew how to labor with our hands and feed ourselves. In short, people worked—and our elders can just about remember that era. In fact, The Transition Handbook includes a chapter titled "Honoring the Elders," urging Transitionists to dredge from old-timers information and anecdotes from the days before cheap oil. McKeown is currently at work on such a project for Transition Sebastopol, seeking out locals in their 80s and 90s who were young adults during or before the Great Depression.

"It would do us good to talk with these people who remember what it was like to live in a pre-hyperconsumption era," he says.

Michael Levy, a private music teacher who helped found Transition Santa Cruz last summer, agrees that scaling back on individual consumption is among the most fundamental of actions in the Transition movement.

"Most of us don't know how to grow food or preserve food so that we can have things in the winter that grow in the summer. We also don't know how to make basic things, like structures and buildings. Even simple tasks like repairing clothes, we just don't even bother anymore. We've become a throwaway society."

With peak oil and economic ruin looming over us like teetering skyscrapers, Transitionists argue that we can no longer afford such wastefulness. For a while, perhaps even a few more years, this matter may remain one of individual choice and lifestyle, but eventually prices will rise, imported products will begin dwindling from shelves, and we will have no choice but to move into a new era. Fridley says too many Americans believe in solutions to all problems, but peak oil is a terrible anomaly among crises, he explains, because there is no solution. Fridley doesn't even see any hope in solar, wind, water and other renewable energy sources. Even nuclear power creates only electricity, while crude oil is the basis for thousands of synthetic products.

"There is nothing that can replace oil and allow us to maintain life at the pace we've been living," he says. "Crude oil is hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight, and we're using it all up in a few generations. It's like living off of a savings account, whereas solar energy is like working and living off your daily wages."....

Historically, too, oil has been very easy to get since the world's first well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859; for each barrel's worth of energy invested in the process of accessing crude oil, 30 barrels are produced, says Fridley. By contrast, ethanol is a paltry substitute; each barrel's worth of ethanol invested in ethanol production produces a mere 1.2 barrels of raw product. Other renewables offer similarly poor returns. "The thermodynamics just don't add up," Fridley says.

Put another way, societies of the pre–oil age worked their butts off. They had to. Roughly 90 percent of the population toiled in jobs that produced our energy, food and water, while just 10 percent reaped the rewards, holding soft-palmed positions in politics, the arts, begging and prostitution, to name several fields. Today, by contrast, merely 5 percent of Americans work jobs that relate to producing food and energy, while 95 percent reap the rewards, many working at abstract tasks in offices. In a world suddenly without machine labor, this top-heavy imbalance is poised to capsize."

Life Post Peak

"Fridley does not see peak oil as doomsday, though he predicts that there might be "die-off," just as marine algae bloom and crash periodically. In fact, Fridley views Transition as a process of world improvement. The environment around us has been falling apart for decades due to our excessive lifestyles, he notes. In our oceans and wildlands, doomsday has already arrived with deforestation, water pollution, fisheries collapse, extinction and other plagues. Peak oil presents an urgent cause to rethink and reshape our lives and the world for the better, he says.

Jennifer Gray, who founded Transition United States in Sebastopol two years ago, also believes peak oil could open doors to happiness that most Americans never knew were there. A native of the United Kingdom, Gray moved to Mill Valley in 2007 after helping to get Transition rolling in Totnes. She believes that redefinition of wealth is one of the essentials to the Transition movement.

"We need to make that paradigm shift that having less may actually mean that you have much more, and in this country it's hard to convince people of that."....

While Transitionists see the coming change as one of potential enrichment—community gardens, cycling, skilled artisans at every corner—Savinar's outlook is a bleak and shadowy contrast. He warns that in the foreseeable future the world will experience "staggering horror." While life in remembered times has been about "the pursuit of victory and money," life in the near future, he predicts, "will be about tragedy. We've been able to externalize this reality to the future and to other places only because we had access to this incredibly dense source of energy," he says.

No longer. Savinar can't say when, but he believes that a time will come well within just one generation when even supermarkets must close their doors. Then, unless the goal of Transition—to build resilience into communities—takes effect soon, chaos could only ensue in a culture so spoiled by excess and mass consumption as ours. In the North Bay, says the Post Carbon Institute's Miller, residents have the open space, the soil, the sun, the water and the resources to hit the ground running when peak oil arrives. What the community doesn't have, he says, is a full collective understanding of how much people need to cut back on individual consumption and how quickly they need to do it.

Savinar says too many people's happiness depends dearly on external items and flimsy concepts of wealth. These people must reprioritize their value systems now and quit "waddling through Wal-Mart." They must wean themselves from the comforts of supermarkets, leisure time and television. They—we—must forfeit luxuries; instead of feasting on steak, one may have to give thanks to a plate of beans and rice. Instead of vacations to Europe, we might have to settle for camping weekends at Salt Point State Park.

Because, if the predictions are true, we will not always have Paris.

Growth ad infinitum?

"Fridley also believes assistance will not come from the world's leaders. Transition can only be a grass-roots revolution. He points out that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was previously the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Fridley has done much of his thinking about peak oil and Transition.

"[Chu] was my boss," Fridley says. "He knows all about peak oil, but he can't talk about it. If the government announced that peak oil was threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just can't say anything about it."

Thus, world leaders would like to have the populace believe that this oil-age feeding frenzy will continue forever, that the economy will continue to expand and grow. At the 2008 G-8 Summit on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, for example, our leaders declared a resolution to resume economic growth. Fridley says such a goal is impossible, yet no one wants to face the fact.

"Ask scientists if something can grow forever exponentially, and they'll say, 'No.' Then ask how our economy can keep on growing, and they'll say, 'Well, it has to.'"- Alastair Bland

A Farm for the Future

If you are at all interested in growing or eating food, and who isn't, you really should watch this film from the The Natural World series on BBC, "A Farm for the Future" over on Google video. Here's the blurb for the film from United Diversity;

"Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key.

With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is.

Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future. (from BBC)"

Thanks to Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture for the heads up on this. My wife and I eagerly awaited every new episode of The Natural World while we were in England. I can't get them here on Bermuda TV which is mostly US sitcoms and drama. This episode is required viewing in my opinion as we chart our course through the world of peak oil and climate change.

Thanks to Hermitage TV for the image.

The Transition Handbook

I've been trying to develop interest in starting a transition movement here in Bermuda. My primary resource and recommendation is "The Transition Handbook" by Rob Hopkins. I've been thinking of writing a review for this blog but now one of my favorite bloggers over on Celsias, Jeremy Williams has done it before me.

This book really is a wonderful resource, full of pithy quotes, rationale for starting a transition movement, and practical guidance in getting the job done. I also recommend Rob Hopkins blog Transition Culture. Here's an excerpt from Jeremy's review;

"‘The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience ‘ is the guidebook to the Transition Towns movement. It explains the problems of peak oil and climate change, re-localization and resilience as responses that will transition us to a post-carbon future, and how you can set up your own transition initiative.

All of this is divided into three broad sections, ‘the head’, ‘the heart’, and ‘the hands’. First, the problem, and Hopkins explains peak oil and climate change in simple and straightforward terms. He avoids the controversies, and focuses on the local - these are things that will affect each of us, in our every day lives. The two must be addressed together, as there are many solutions that will tackle both, and other solutions to one that will make the other worse. The US government’s Hirsch report for example, recommends coal to liquids for keeping cars on the road - a neat solution to peak oil, but devastating to climate change. Instead, a focus on efficiency and public transport would deal with both. ...

‘The Hands’ gets down to the practical details, from the principles of Permaculture, how to write a press release, working with a local council, films to show, the experiences of Totnes and Lewes, the first projects. There are sections on running productive meetings or discussions with large numbers of people. It’s practical and realistic, and really does feel like a handbook or a manual. I should also mention that from a design point of view, The Transition Handbook is a nice piece of work. It’s big and square and has wide margins that invite you to scribble notes. In its message and design, it’s a book that wants you to be involved, to add your story to the transition tales.

Transition Towns is the rarest of things, being a response to climate change and peak oil that is positive and proactive. “Too often environmentalists try to engage people in action by painting apocalyptic visions of the future as a way of scaring them into action” says Hopkins. “What would happen if we came at this the other way round, painting a picture of the future so enticing that people instinctively feel".

Foodzoning the foodshed on Transition Culture

Check out this fascinating discussion of food zoning and foodsheds over on Transition Culture
Here's an excerpt,

"Here are two very interesting concepts I’ve come across recently that feel worth sharing. One is Julie Brown of Growing Communities’ ‘Food Zones’ idea, and the other is that of the ‘Foodshed’ or ‘Foodshed Analysis’. Both hold key pieces of the Energy Descent Pathways jigsaw, and we are actively looking at how to make best use of them in the Totnes EDAP process. Clearly the Transition movement has developed a strong ethic that increasing the resilience of a settlement necessitates, among other things, a food system that grows as much food as close to home as possible. But what might that actually look like?

Growing Communities is a fantastic initiative I was lucky enough to visit last year, based in Hackney in London, which sources produce for 450 vegetable boxes a week as well as supplying a farmers market, based on the principle of sourcing as much food as close to home as possible. Three market gardens within Hackney itself provide some of the salads and other produce, and they have a close relationship with several farms on the edge of the city (you can hear Julie’s talk at last year’s Soil Association conference here)." - Rob Hopkins