It was my turn to show a video and lead a discussion afterwards in September and I chose Urban Orchard, a production of colleagues in Adelaide about the community food swap of the same name and other food swaps in their city. This was followed by a structured conversation about food swaps and was preceded by the shared meal which is cooked in the kitchen of the Chapel by the Sea, the premises in a commercial building made available to Transition Bondi but with which the organisation has no religious affiliation.

I came close to my culinary limits by chopping vegetables for the meal under the supervision of competent cooks Beatrice and Kim, both on the Transition Bondi team. The food itself comes from the Sydney Food Connect weekly collection that precedes the shared meal and video. Transition Bondi operates the weekly http://pacific-edge.info/urban_orchard/ City Cousin at the Chapel by the Sea, the distribution of the weekly boxes of Sydney region organic food to members. Attendees make a small contribution to cover the cost of the food.

A structured discussion

I had earlier worked out a number of key messages about food swaps that I wanted to get across during the event:

• food swaps are a proven and viable structure to swap your excess food with others to contribute to a nutritionally diverse diet (I provided evidence by naming examples and by referring to the video)
• food swaps are relatively easy to set up and run
• food swaps are community self-help initiatives
• food swaps are part of a wider system of community-based trading and exchange that goes under the name of the ‘collaborative economy’
• food swaps, because of the social interaction they involve, are convivial events that contribute to a sense of belonging in an area.

The option with these key messages is to start the conversation by writing them on the whiteboard, then going through them with examples and ideas,. Alternative, leave them unstated and addressing them within the structure of the guided conversation.

At 35 minutes, Urban Orchard is a good length to follow with a structured conversation about food share initiatives. Some feature length videos doing the rounds of the sustainability video circuit are too long for a follow-up conversation with the audience.

How to stimulate imaginations?

The question for me was how to use the ideas in the video to stimulate imaginations in the discussion.

I decided to make use of the structured conversation format known as Public Narrative. There are a number of ways to conduct conversations that lead somewhere, such as ORID, which leads participants through a sequence of objective, reflective, interpretive and decisional questions. There’s also Fran Peavey’s Strategic Questioning, Appreciative Enquiry and more.

The Public Narrative process begins with the ‘story of me’, leads into the ‘story of you’ and links to the theme of the conversation. It starts, for example, with an anecdotal structure about how the presenter got into whatever it is they do that is related to the theme of the conversation.

Following this structure, I told a brief story of how my interest in food and the issues around it started when I did Robyn Francis’ first ever Permaculture Design Course in the mid-1980s. Then, permaculture was largely  focused on food production in the home garden but I was inspired by the statement of one of permaculture’s founders, Bill Mollison, that you didn’t have to garden and grow your own food to practice permaculture. What you should do is buy your food from someone who has produced it ethically, in the environmental and social justice sense of the word.

My interest in food issues, I explained, grew with my association with the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network from the time it started in the late 1990s and while working in project management and development education with an international development NGO, APACE, that was engaged in food security, small scale farming training and rural livelihood development in the Solomon Islands.

I went on to describe how circumstance and accident led to my becoming a consultant on local government policy development for community gardens and associated ventures.

The story of us

That was the ‘story of me’ component in the Public Narrative framework. Next came the ‘story of us’ in which the story of me segues into the story of the audience.

This is done by eliciting their reasons for attendance and, from that, their interest in food issues. You can use questions and answers and mini-conversations based on some of the responses. These are necessarily brief. It’s a process of following-up responses that address the theme of the video and the discussion as entry points into the community initiatives in food theme.

Strategic questions

By briefly exploring how the audience understands food issues through their responses to questions about what brought them to a video and discussion about food, by having a few respondents to the questions tell their own mini-story, the issue or theme—in this case about community intervention in their own food supply through food swaps and other mean is explored.

One of my questions was whether anyone knew of food swaps other than those in the video—the Urban Orchard swaps in Adelaide and Melbourne. Fortunately, there was someone in a leadership position with a community garden in south west Sydney who works mainly with social housing tenants and who has established a food swap. Having him tell the story of the swap reinforced some of my own key messages. I explained that there are food swaps at the North Wollongong Community Garden, in the Blue Mountains and that one was being planned for Collaroy on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Some of the strategic questions I asked were:

• what in the video stood out as a good idea… what did you find interesting?
• have you heard about or been to food swaps like Adelaide’s Urban Orchard or the others in the video?
• do you think food swaps are useful initiatives in the city?
• how would you summarise the main messages in the video?
• what would it take to set up an Urban Orchard food swap in this part of Sydney?

The purpose of this last question was to stimulate any interest there might have been in setting up a food swap and to provide the opportunity for anyone who specifically came to the evening with the intention of starting a swap to put forward their ideas.

To explore this question I used the whiteboard and led brainstorming around a series of linked questions based on a simple systems thinking approach:

• what would be the needs or inputs to set up a food swap?
• what would be the functions or processes needed to run a swap, including those regular tasks that would be needed to make it happen?
• what would the yield or outputs of the food swap be and how would we use them?

I used two sets of terms in these questions—those familiar in systems thinking—inputs, processes, outputs—and those that might have been familiar to people who had a backgroubd in the permaculture design system which I knew some of those present had—needs, functions, yields. These are different terms for the same things and, as you usually do, you would choose those most understandable to your audience.

Here’s some of the responses to those questions that the audience brainstormed and that I wrote on the whiteboard as they were offered:

• inputs/needs—food to swap; a venue; organisers; publicity to attract swappers; tables to display food for swapping; a structure and process to facilitate the swap
• processes/functions—set-up and take-down; cleaning up after the swap; doing something with leftovers; communication to attract participants to the swaps
• outputs/yields—access to a diversity of swapped food; a sense of belonging to an interest group; social interaction.

The collaborative economy

Food swaps, like the clothing swaps happening nationwide, the second hand Saturdays and the other initiatives that make up community-based goods redistribution initiatives, are part of what is becoming more widely known as the ‘collaborative economy’. It’s all about peer-to-peer exchange.

As it turned out, no proposal emerged to set up a food swap in Bondi. The reason that came out of the evening’s proceedings was that there would be too few growers of food in the area, a reflection of the medium density nature of this part of the Eastern Suburbs which has a high proportion of its population living in apartments. There are a couple community food gardens in the area including that which was wrapped around a Bondi Road apartment block by Transition Bondi and which is open to public.

The evidence from the Sydney Food Connect weekly food box collection earlier in the evening is that community-based food distribution stytems, like Sydney Food Connect CSA (community supported agriculture), may be a more viable means of participating in community food systems. For permaculture design practitioners, this gets back to Bill Mollison’s statement about it not being necessary to grow your own food to participate in permaculture, but to buy it from someone who has produced it ethically.

By bringing people together in an informal setting around food for a focused conversation or video, Transition Bondi’s Wednesday events are one of those initiatives that have an important place in making our cities stimulating and good places to live.

In late 2009,  Dr Ted Trainer published a critique of the Transition and permaculture movements. This is reproduced here.

Ted works in the School of Social Work at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of a number of visionary books on sustainability such as The Conserver Society and The Simpler Way and has a small property at Pigface Point in suburban Sydney where he has built a number of intermediate technologies.

Dr Ted Trainer

THE TRANSITION TOWNS MOVEMENT; ITS HUGE SIGNIFICANCE AND A FRIENDLY CRITICISM

Ted Trainer   26.11.09

The only way the global sustainability and justice predicament can be solved is via something like the inspiring Transition Towns movement.  However unless the movement radically alters its vision and goals I do not think it will make a significant contribution to solving our problems.

The Transition Towns movement began only about 2006 and is growing rapidly.  It emerged in the UK mainly in response to the realisation that the coming of “peak oil” is likely to leave towns in a desperate situation, and therefore that it is very important that they strive to develop local economic self sufficiency.

What many within the movement probably don’t know is that for decades some of us in the “deep green” camp have been arguing that the key element in a sustainable and just world has to be small, highly self sufficient, localised economies under local cooperative control.  (See my Abandon Affluence, published in1985, and The Conserver Society, 1995.) It is therefore immensely encouraging to find that this kind of initiative is not only underway but booming.  I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that if this planet makes it through the next 50 years to sustainable and just ways it will be via some kind of Transition Towns process.  However I also want to argue that if the movement is to have this outcome there are some very important issues it must think carefully about or it could actually come to little or nothing of any social significance.  Indeed in my view if it remains on its present path it will not make a significant contribution to the achievement of a sustainable and just world.  This will probably strike transitioners as a surprising and offensive comment, but please consider the following case.

Everything depends on how one sees the state of the planet, and the solution.  In my view most people do not understand the nature and magnitude of the situation, including most green people.  Consequently they are working for goals which cannot solve the problems.  It is of the utmost importance that good green people and transitioners think carefully about the perspective summarised below.

Where we are, and the way out

For decades some of us have been arguing that the many alarming global problems now crowding in and threatening to destroy us are so big and serious that they cannot be solved within or by consumer-capitalist society.  The way of life we have in rich countries is grossly unsustainable and unjust. There is no possibility of all people on earth ever rising to rich world per capita levels of consumption of energy, minerals, timber, water, food, phosphorous etc.  These rates of consumption are generating the numerous alarming global problems now threatening our survival.  They are already 5-10 times the rates which would be necessary to provide present rich-world living standards to the 9 billion people expected by 2050.  Most people have no idea of the magnitude of the overshoot, of how far we are beyond a sustainable levels of resource use and environmental impact.

Although present rich world rates of resource use are grossly unsustainable, the supreme goal in consumer-capitalist society is to raise them as fast as possible and without limit.  If all expected 9 billion rose to the “living standards” we in Australia would have by 2080 at present growth rates, then total world economic output would be 60 times as great as it is now!  These sorts of multiples totally rule out any hope that technical advance could sustain growth and affluence society.

ln addition there is the huge problem of global economic injustice.  Our way of life would not be possible if rich countries were not taking far more than their fair share of world resources, via an extremely unjust global economy, and thereby condemning most of the world’s people to deprivation.

Given this analysis of our situation it is not possible to solve the problems without transition to a very different kind of society, one not based on globalisation, market forces, the profit motive, centralisation, representative democracy, or competitive, individualistic acquisitiveness.  Above all it must be a zero-growth economy, with a far lower GDP than at present, and most difficult of all, it cannot be an affluent society.

I refer to this alternative as The Simpler Way.  Its core principles must be:

• Far simpler material living standards
• High levels of self-sufficiency within households, national and especially neighbourhoods and towns, with relatively little travel, transport or trade.  There must be mostly small, local economies in which most of the things we need are produced by local labour from local resources.
• Basically cooperative and participatory local systems,
• A quite different economic system, one not driven by market forces and profit, and in which there is far less work, production and consumption than at present, and a large cashless sector, including many free goods from local commons.  There must be no economic growth at all.  There must be mostly small local economies, under our control via participatory systems, and run to meet needs not to make profits (although I think we could have markets and many private firms.)
• Most problematic, a radically different culture, in which competitive and acquisitive individualism is replaced by frugal, self-sufficient collectivism.

Some of the elements within The Simpler Way are:– participatory democracy via town assemblies –  neighbourhood workshops – many suburban  roads dug up an planted with “edible landscapes” providing free fruit, nuts etc – being able to get to decentralised workplaces by bicycle or on foot — voluntary community working bees – committees – many productive commons in the town (fruit, timber, bamboo, herbs…) – having to work for money only one or two days a week – no  unemployment – living among many artists and crafts people – strong community – citizen assemblies making many of the important development and administration decisions – much production via hobbies and crafts, small farms and family enterprises.

Modern/high technologies and mass production can be used extensively where appropriate, including IT.  The Simpler Way will free many more resources for purposes such as medical research than are devoted to these at present, because most of the present vast quantity of unnecessary production will be phased out.

Because we will be highly dependent on our local ecosystems and on our social cohesion, e.g., for most water and food, and for effective committees and working bees, all will have a strong incentive to focus on what is best for the town, rather than on what is best for themselves as competing individuals. Cooperation and conscientiousness will therefore tend to be automatically rewarded, whereas in consumer society competitive individualism is required and rewarded.

What we will have done is build a new economy, Economy B, under the old one.  Economy B will give us the power to produce the basic goods and services we need not just to survive as the old economy increasingly fails to provide, but to give all a  high quality of life.  The old economy could collapse and we would still be able to provide for ourselves.

Advocates of the Simpler Way believe that its many benefits and sources of satisfaction would provide a much higher quality of life than most people experience in consumer society.

It must be emphasised that The Simpler Way is not optional.  If our global situation is as outlined above then a sustainable and just society in the coming era of scarcity has to be some kind of Simpler Way.

Reform vs radical system replacement

In my view few green people or transitioners recognise the huge distinction here between trying to reform consumer-capitalist society and trying to replace its major structures and systems.  The Simpler Way contradicts the core systems of the present society and cannot be built unless we replace them.  Consumer-capitalist society cannot be fixed; it cannot be reformed to not create the alarming global problems we face while still being about the pursuit of affluence and growth etc.

Consider,

• Sustainability requires shifting to very low levels of per capita consumption in an economy that has no growth, and this is impossible in the present economic system.
• Therefore a good society cannot be an affluent society, and this contradicts a consumer society.
• An economy that focuses on need, rights, justice, especially with respect to the Third World, and ecological sustainability cannot possibly be driven by market forces.  Market forces totally ignore needs, rights, justice etc., because they only allocate scarce things to those who can pay most for them.
• The conditions of severe scarcity we are entering leave no choice but to shift to mostly small, highly self-sufficient local economies run by participatory procedures, which contradicts present political and economic paradigms.
• The more the market is allowed to determine what happens the more cohesion, community, collectivism and solidarity will be driven out.
• The basic values driving a good society cannot be individualistic, competitive acquisitiveness.

What do we have to do in order to eventually achieve such huge and radical changes?   The answer goes far beyond the things that green/transition people are doing now, such as setting up community gardens, food co-ops, recycling centres, Permaculture groups, skill banks, home-craft courses, commons, volunteering, downshifting, etc.  Yes all these are the kinds of institutions and practices we will have in the new sustainable and just world so it is understandable that many people within the Eco-village, Transition Towns and green movements assume that if we just work at establishing more and more of these things then in time this will have created the new society.  I think this is a serious mistake.

Firstly these things are easily accommodated within consumer-capitalist society without threatening it, as the lifestyle choices and hobby interests of a relatively few people.  They will appeal to only that minority potentially interested in composting or organic food or Permaculture etc.  Larger numbers will not come to them unless they understand why they should, that is unless they accept the world view summarised above, and therefore see that it is necessary to do these things if we are to save the planet.  Just establishing more community gardens and recycling centres does little or nothing to increase that understanding.

Secondly, the most crucial institutions for transition are not in the list above, are not being set up, and will not be set up by the thinking motivating the many good green people now establishing the gardens and recycling centres.  If the global vision sketched above is valid then we ordinary people in our towns and suburbs eventually have to establish our own local Economy B, take control of it and relegate the market to a very minor role, identify local needs and work out how to meet them, get rid of unemployment, work out how to cut town imports, etc. …and grope towards the practices which enable us to collectively self-govern the town.  In other words we have to deliberately come together to replace core consumer-capitalist ways in our town.  This requires thinking about goals that are at an utterly different level to just initiating some good green practices within present society.  It requires coming together to organise collective economic systems and political action.  The town must ask itself what are we going to get together to do to solve our problems; what arrangements and institutions do we need to set up to make sure everyone around here is provided for?  Such big picture thinking is rarely encountered in current green or transition movements.

Hence, “Just do something – anything”

Not surprisingly, at present the Transition Towns movement is reformist.  It is not in general motivated  by the clear and explicit goal of replacing the core institutions of consumer-capitalist society.  Its implicit rationale is that it is sufficient to create more community gardens, recycling centres, skill banks, cycle paths, seed sharing, poultry coops, etc.   It is not in general motivated by the clear and explicit goal of replacing the core institutions of consumer-capitalist society.  (Some people within the movement say or think they are working for change from consumer-capitalist society but my point is that in fact the things they are doing will not have that effect, and will only bring about changes within it.)

Thus this rational assumes that it is in order to do anything green.  Just go ahead and set up a community garden here, a nut tree plantation there, and in time it will all add towards the eventual achievement of a satisfactory society. As Steffan has said  “…just go ahead and do something, anything… All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of apocalypse… and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing swap.”  (www.worldchanigng.org.)

However if your goal was to build the kind of society that I’ve argued we must have if we are to solve global problems of sustainability and justice you would very definitely not think it was sufficient or appropriate just to encourage a thousand flowers to bloom.  You would think very carefully about what projects were most important to achieve that goal, you would realise that this must involve taking collective control over the local economy, and you would recognise that developing this vision among people in the region is the supremely important task to work on.

Thus the insufficiency of resilience.

From the perspective I’ve outlined, making your town more resilient is far from a sufficient goal.  That could be little more than building a haven of safety in a world of oil scarcity…a haven within a wider society that remains obsessed with growth, markets, exploiting the Third World, and using mobile phones made with Tantalum from the Congo.

If you want to protest that you are not just building a haven, that you see yourself as working for the kind of society that would defuse world problems, then again my point is that you won’t achieve that unless your vision and goals shift to way beyond building compost heaps and recycling groups.

The lack of guidance

A major deficiency in the current Transition Towns movement literature is the lack of information on what to do.  The website, the Handbook and especially the 12 Steps document are valuable, but they are predominantly about the procedure for organising the movement and it is remarkably difficult to find clear guidance as to what the sub-goals of the movement are, the actual structures and systems and projects that we should be trying to undertake if our town is to achieve transition or resilience.  What we desperately need to know is what things should we start trying to set up, what should we avoid, what should come first.  Especially important is that we need to be able to see the causal links, to understand why setting up this venture will have the effect of creating greater town resilience.  But unfortunately people coming to the movement eager to get started will find almost no guidance in the current literature as to what to actually try to do, let alone anything like a suggested plan of action with steps and do’s and don’ts and clear explanation of why specific projects will have desirable effects.

The advice and suggestions you do find in the literature are almost entirely about how to establish the movement (e.g., “Awareness raising”, “Form subgroups”, “Build a bridge to local government”), as distinct from how to establish things that will actually, obviously make the town more resilient.  There is some reference to possibilities, such as set up community supported agriculture schemes, but we are told little more than that we should establish committees to look into what might be done in areas such as energy, food, education and health.

The lack is most evident in The Kinsale Energy Descent Plan, which does little more than repeat the process ideas in the 12 steps documents and contains virtually no information or projects to do with energy technology or strategies.  It lists some possibilities, such as exploring insulation and the possibility of local energy generation, and reducing the need for transport, but again there is no advice as to what precisely can or might be set up.  We need more than this; we need to know how and why a particular project will make the town more resilient, and we need to know what projects we should start with, what the difficulties and costs might be, etc.  Just being told “Create an energy descent plan” (Step 12) doesn’t help much when what we need to know how might we do that.

The authors of these documents seem to be anxious to avoid prescription and dogma, and it is likely that no one can give confident guidance at this early stage, but that does not mean that ideas regarding probably valuable projects should not be offered.  Some groups have accumulated experience that now surely indicates more effective directions to take.

I worry that the many now rushing into Transition Towns initiatives all around the world will do all sorts of good things, which will not turn out to have made much difference to the crucial issues.  At least one group has folded apparently because of confusion over what to do.  If people become disenchanted the movement could fizzle and be set back seriously.  As I see our situation this movement is our only hope so it is extremely important that it is not allowed to falter.

This lack of guidance reflects the reformist nature of the movement, the (implicit) acceptance of the assumption that just adding this and that better practice to this society will eventually fix it sufficiently.

What, then, should the goals be?

My hope of course is to persuade transitioners to adopt a radical global vision which sees the attempt to reform of consumer-capitalist society as a fundamental mistake, and sees the Transition Towns movement as the way to build the kinds of societies that would eliminate the main global problems. Following are the implications I want to suggest for sub-goals.

The supreme goal should be building a new local economy, and running it.

I don’t think the focal concern of the movement should be energy and its coming scarcity.  Yes all that sets the scene and the imperative, but the solution is not primarily to do with energy.  It is to do with developing town economic self-sufficiency.  The supreme need is for us to build a radically new economy within our town, and then for us to run it to meet our needs.   It is not oil that sets your greatest insecurity; it is the global economy.  lt doesn’t need your town.  It will relocate your jobs where profits are greatest.  It can flip into recession overnight and dump you and billions of others into unemployment and poverty.  It will only deliver to you whatever benefits trickle down from the ventures which maximise corporate profits.  It loots the Third World to stock your supermarket shelves.  It has condemned much of your town to idleness, in the form of unemployment and wasted time and resources that could be being devoted to meeting urgent needs there.  ln the coming time of scarcity it will not look after you. You will only escape that fate if you build a radically new economy in your region, and run it to provide for the people who live there.

All this flatly contradicts the conventional economy. We have to build a local economy, not a national or globalised economy, an economy designed to meet needs not to maximise profits, an economy under participatory social control and not driven by corporate profit, and one guided by rational planning as distinct from leaving everything to the market.  This is the antithesis of capitalism, markets, profit motivation and corporate control.  Nothing could be more revolutionary.  If we don’t plunge into building such an economy we will probably not survive in the coming age of scarcity.  The Transition Towns movement will come to nothing of great significance if it does not set itself to build such economies.  Either your town will get control of its own affairs and organise local productive capacity to provide for you, or it will remain within and dependent on the mainstream economy.

In other words, the goal here is to build that Economy B, a new local economy enabling the people who live in the town to guarantee the provision of basic necessities by applying their labour, land and skills to local resources…all under our control.  The old economy A can then drop dead and we will still be able to provide for ourselves.  This kind of vision and goal is not evident in the TT literature and reports I have read.  There is no concept of setting out to eventually run the town economy for the benefit of the people via participatory means.

The need for coordination, priorities and planning – by a Community Development Co-op.

We must somehow set up mechanisms which enable us to work out and operate an overall/integrated plan.  It will not be ideal if we proclaim the importance of town self-sufficiency and then all run off as individuals to set up a bakery here and a garden there.  It is important that there should be continual discussion about what the town needs to set up to achieve its goals, what should be done first, what is feasible, how we might proceed to get the first and the main things done, what are the most important ventures to set up, how our scarce resources should best be deployed (e.g., what are the top priorities for the working bees to do, for our banks to fund…)?  Of course individual initiatives are to be encouraged but much more important are likely to be bigger projects requiring whole-town effort.  This does not imply a vast and detailed plan, nor indeed a confident one, but it is a plea for an attempt to think out goals, priorities and integration.

This means that from the early stages we should set up some kind of Community Development Cooperative, a process whereby we can come together often to discuss and think about the town plan and our progress, towards having a coordinated and unified approach that will then help us decide on sub-goals and priorities, and especially on the purposes to which the early working bees will be put.  Obviously this would not need to be elaborate or prescriptive and would not mean people would be discouraged from pursuing ventures other than those endorsed by the CDC.

Following is an indication of the kind of projects that I think a CDC would try to take up (although not all at a once.)

• Identify the unmet needs of the town, and the unused productive capacities of the town, and bring them together.  Set up the many simple cooperatives enabling all the unemployed, homeless, bored, retired, people to get into the community gardens etc. that would enable them to start producing many of the basic things they need.  Can we set up co-ops to run a bakery, bike repair shop, home help service, insulating operation, clothes making and repairing operation….  Especially important are the cooperatives to organise leisure resources, the concerts, picnics, dances, festivals?  Can we organise a market day?

One of the worst contradictions in the present economy is that it dumps many people into unemployment, boredom, homelessness, “retirement”, mental illness and depression – and in the US, watching 4+ hours of TV every day.  These are huge productive capacities left idle and wasted.  The CDC can pounce on these resources and harness them and enable dumped people to start producing to meet some of their on needs.  To do this is to have begun to set up Economy B.  We simply record contributions and these entitle people to proportionate shares of the output.  (This is to have initiated our own new currency; see below.)

This mechanism puts us in a position to eventually get rid of unemployment – to make sure all who want work and “incomes” and livelihoods can have them (not necessarily in normal, waged jobs.).  It is absurd and annoying that governments, (and the people in your neighbourhood) tolerate people suffering depression and boredom when we could so easily set up the cooperatives that would enable them to produce things they need and enjoy purpose and solidarity.

• Help existing small firms to move to activities the town needs, setting up little firms and farms and markets.  Establish a town bank to finance these ventures, making sure no one goes bankrupt and no one is left without a livelihood.
• Organise Business Incubators; the voluntary panels of experts and advisers on gardening, small business, arts etc., so that we can get new ventures up and running well.
• Organise the working bees to plant and maintain the community orchards and other commons, build the premises for the bee keeper…and organise the committees to run the concerts and look after old people…
• Research what the town is importing, and the scope for local firms or new co-ops to start substituting local products.
• Decide what things will emphatically not be left for market forces to determine – such as unemployment, what firms we will have, whether fast food outlets will be patronised if they set up.  We will not let market forces deprive anyone of a livelihood; if we have too many bakeries we will work out how to redirect one of them.  The town gets together to decide what it needs, and to establish these things regardless of what market forces and the profit motive would have done.
• Stress the importance of reducing consumption, living more simply, making, growing, repairing, old things… The less we consume in the town the less we must produce or import.  Remember, the world can’t consume at anything like the rate rich countries average.  As well as explaining the importance of reducing consumption the CDC must stress alternative satisfactions and develop these (e.g., the concerts, festivals, crafts…)  It can also develop recipes for cheap but nutritious meals, teaching craft and gardening skills, preserving etc.  The household economy should be upheld as the centre of our lives and the main source of life satisfaction, more important than career.
• Work towards the procedures for making good town decisions about these developments, the referenda, consensus processes, town meetings.
• Throughout all these activities recognise that our primary concern is to raise consciousness regarding the nature, functioning and unacceptability of consumer-capitalist society and the existence of better ways.

Conclusion

The Transition Towns movement is characterised by a remarkable level of enthusiasm and energy.  This seems to reflect a long pent up disenchantment with consumer-capitalist society and a desire for something better.  There is a powerful case that the only way out of the alarming global predicament we are in has to be via a Transition Towns movement of some kind.  To our great good fortune one has burst on the scene.   But I worry that it could very easily fail to make a significant difference.  My argument has been that it will fail if it turns out to have been merely a  reformist project, because reforms can’t solve the problems.  It is very important that people working for the movement should think carefully about what the global situation is and how it can be solved.  I have sketched a perspective on these questions which indicates that the movement is not going to make a significant contribution to the transition to a sustainable and just world unless the underlying vision and goals alter significantly.

Appendix:

The introduction of local currencies

Although the introduction of our own local currency is very important there is much confusion about them and often proposed schemes would not have desirable effects.  There is a tendency to proceed as if just creating a local currency would do wonders, without any thinking through of how it is supposed to work.  lt will not have desirable effects unless it is carefully designed to do so.  I have serious concerns about the currency schemes being adopted by the Transition Towns movement and I do not think the initiatives I am aware of are going to make significant contributions to the achievement of town resilience.  It is not evident that they are based on a rationale that makes sense and enables one to see why they will have desirable effects.

It is most important that we are able to see precisely what general effect the form of currency we have opted for is going to have; we must be able to explain why we are implementing it in view of the beneficial effects it designed to have.  As I see it, the main purpose in introducing a currency is to contribute to getting the unused productive capacity of the town into action, i.e., stimulating/enabling increase in output to meet needs.  (Another purpose is to avoid the interest charges when normal money is borrowed, but this can’t be done unless the new money is to be used to pay for inputs available in the town; it can’t pay for imported cement for instance.)

Following is the strategy that I think is most valuable.  Consider again what happens in the above scenario, when our CDC sets up a community garden and invites people to come and work in it.  When time contributions are recorded with the intention of sharing produce later in proportion to contributions, these slips of paper  function like an IOU or “promissory note” (although that’s not what they are.). They can be used to “buy” garden produce when it becomes available. They are a form of money which enables everyone to keep track of how much work, producing and providing they have done and how great a claim they have on what’s been produced.  The extremely important point about the design and use of this currency is that it helps in getting those idle people into producing to meet some of their own needs.  Obviously the introduction of the currency was not the most important element in the process; organising the “firm” was the key factor.  Also obvious is the way the currency works; you can see what its desirable effects are.   So just introducing a currency of some kind does not necessarily have any desirable effect and it is crucial to do it in a way that you know will have definite and valuable effects.

At a later stage we can use our currency to start trading with firms in the old economy.  We can find restaurants for instance willing to sell us meals which we can pay for with our money.  They will accept payment in our money if they can then spend that money buying vegetables and labour from us in Economy B.  But note that the normal shops in the town cannot accept our money and we in Economy B cannot buy from them, unless there is something we can sell to them.  They can’t sell things to us, accepting our money, unless they can use that money.  Nothing significant can be achieved unless people acquire the capacity to produce and sell things that others want.  So the crucial task here for the Community Development co-op is to look for things we in Economy B might sell to the normal firms in the town.

Councils can facilitate this process, for example by accepting our new money in part payment of their rates—but again only if there is something they can spend the money on, that is, goods and services they need that we in Economy B can provide.  Therefore the CDC must look for these possibilities.

Sometimes it makes sense for a council to issue a currency to enable use of local resources, especially labour, to build an infrastructure without having to borrow and pay interest to external banks.  This can only be done for those inputs that are available locally.  If for instance the cement for the swimming pool has to be imported then it will have to be paid for in national currency, but it would be a mistake to borrow normal money to pay the workers if they are available in the town.  They can be paid in specially printed new money with which they are able to pay (part of) their rates.  Note however that the council then has the problem of what to do with these payments.  If it burns them the council has actually paid for the pool via reduced normal money rate income, and will have to reduce services to the town accordingly. Better to keep the money perpetually in use within a new Economy B, so those workers and the council can go on providing things to each other.

Now consider some ways of introducing a new currency that will not have desirable effects.

What would happen if the council or a charity just gave a lot of new money to poor people, and got some shops to agree to accept it as payment for goods they sell?  The recipients would soon spend it…and be without jobs and poor again.  The shops would hold lots of new money…but not be able to spend it buying anything they need.  (They could use it to buy from each other, but would have no need to do this, because they were already able to buy the few things they needed from each other using normal money.)  Again if things are not to gum up it must be possible for the shopkeepers in the old economy to use their new money purchasing something from those poor people, and that’s not possible unless they can produce things within a new Economy B.

Sometimes the arrangement is for people to buy new notes using normal money.  This is just substituting, and achieves nothing for the town economy.  What’s the point of people who would have used dollars now buying using “eco”s they have bought?  Again there is no effect of bringing unused productive capacity into action.

What about the argument that local currencies encourage local purchasing because they can’t be spent outside the town?  This reveals confusion.  Anyone who understands the importance of buying local will do so as much as they can, regardless of what currency they have.  Anyone who doesn’t will buy what’s cheapest, which is typically an imported item.  Obviously what matters here is getting people to understand why it’s important to buy local; just issuing a local currency will make no significant difference.

Similarly, currencies which depreciate with time miss the point and are unnecessary.  Anyone who understands the situation does not need to be penalised for holding new money and not spending it.  In any case it’s wrong-headed to set out to encourage spending; people should buy as little as they can, and any economy in which you feel an obligation to spend to make work for someone else is not an acceptable economy. In a sensible economy there is only enough work, producing and spending and use of money as is necessary to ensure all have sufficient for a good quality of life.

The ongoing conversation:

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-1/ (this page)

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-2/

http://pacific-edge.info/trainerpapers-3/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-4/

Thanks to the organised Greg Olsen from Transition Sydney for having the foresight to file the thing.

Ted’s paragraphs quote straight from his work and are followed by my responses denoted by RG:.

Dr Ted Trainer

TED:

The way of life we have in rich countries is grossly unsustainable and unjust. There is no possibility of all people…

RG:

The world is changing and what constitutes a rich country is changing rapidly, too. When Ted started to use the term a few decades ago, things were more clear cut — the rich world was the industrialised world, predominately but not completely the West (Japan and Korea were not the West but were industrialised).

Now, China is rising to affluence and India is next and could even outdo China in this regard.

Ted writes that “Our way of life would not be possible if rich countries were not taking far more than their fair share of world resources… “. China, of course, is sourcing much of its industrial raw materials, including energy, from all over the world, providing further evidence that we should include the newly-industrialising states as part of the “rich world”.

TED:

“… it is not possible to solve the problems without transition to a very different kind of society, one not based on globalisation… “.

RG:

Ted apparently means economic globalisation, something that has been with us, off and on, since the days of mercantile capitalism and the China tea trade. If we go further back, economic globalisation of the known world can be seen in the form of its primary trade root — the Silk Road — that carried goods back and forth from Asia to Europe via the Islamic world.

I don’t think we should discard all globalisation. The Internet has allowed the emergence of a globalised civil society, much to its collective benefit.

TED:

“… A quite different economic system, one not driven by market forces and profit, and in which there is far less work, production and consumption than at present, and a large cashless sector, including many free goods from local commons.”

RG:

Ted mentions this in his explanation of his concept of The Simpler Way and it is clear that his “different economic system” is not the corporate growth economy.

Local economies, especially when it comes to the exchange of basic goods and services, might be based on an understanding of the ‘natural market’. This is not the trade in eucalyptus leaves and koala skins, rather the local exchange in kind or for cash that emerges from human needs and their satisfaction by local growers, processors, manufacturers and service providers. It is the basic economy that can be seen in village markets and, perhaps, an upscale version of it could be developed for modern societies in transition into new forms.

Ted:

“… a radically different culture, in which competitive and acquisitive individualism is replaced by frugal, self-sufficient collectivism.”

RG:

Cultural change is slow and a big job. Culture cannot be imposed as it grows organically as the combination of tradition, geography and social structure.

A word about terms. Words carry implied meaning. Thus, “frugal” while having some appeal to those cogniscent of global trends, is easily interpreted as ‘poverty’ and ‘doing without essentials’ by others. Likewise, “collectivism”, while Ted uses it to describe shared culture, also brings to mind the disaster of forced collectivisation of farms in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.

It’s ok to use them for Ted’s preferred audience, but we should choose words carefully when addressing the general public.

Another example comes further into Ted’s critique of transitions: “An economy that focuses on need, rights, justice, especially with respect to the Third World”.

The term in question here is “Third World” because it has been disappearing now for some time. Why? Third World was an economistic term formulated to describe the so-called ‘developing’ countries so as to distinguish them from the First World — the affluent, industrialised states — and the Second World: the states that made up the Soviet bloc of the 1960s to the 1990s.

That international structure started to change with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the opening of borders in Europe between the then-collapsing Soviet satellite states and the West. The world that has evolved is so different that that old description has lost its relevance. Additionally, many of the problems of what was the Third World are now found throughout the First World. Like economies, social dysfunction has been globalised, rendering these now-old terms of little practical value.

TED:

” …living among many artists and crafts people … “.

RG:

I’ve known Ted for some time and I know that Ted is a man of the manual world. He’s an artisan at heart (and in practice at his home at Pigface Point), however we do not live in an artisan world anymore. I’m not saying we discard artisanship; it remains a valuable and valid approach to production; however we should not forget that contemporary people, especially younger demographics, are technical in lifestyle. That is, technologies are an everyday part of their being. The technophobes among us might not like this, however I think we should recognise and make use of it. Technologies have been an integral part of human evolution and today’s tech is just a continuity of that historic association.

It’s not only younger people who adopt digital and other modern techs, of course. This I learned when attending a workshop to learn about my new mobile phone, the one I had to buy after my Palm crashed completely (and sorry, Microsoft, your Windows Mobile 6.5 was a dog’s dinner of a mobile phone operating system). Who attended? They were all people my age. That says something about the adoption of technology by people outside the younger demographic.

What I suggest is that we transitioners learn to use and be at home with modern digital communications and production technologies because it enables us to reach a wider audience and, anyway, we can’t leave all the fun to young people.

Technophobia is today a barrier to the penetration of new ideas and it finds a home all too often among the environmentally minded. I believe that digital culture can happily coexist and collaborate with the artisan approach as a productive, enjoyable and workable hybrid culture.

Ted:

“Modern/high technologies and mass production can be used extensively where appropriate, including IT.  The Simpler Way will free many more resources for purposes such as medical research than are devoted to these at present, because most of the present vast quantity of unnecessary production will be phased out.”.

It would be difficult to envision a world free of IT now, if that is part of Ted’s “unnecessary production”. As for freeing resources for Ted’s example of medical research and the like, I have a question that maybe others out there can answer for me. It is this:

1. In the sort of zero economic growth society that Ted advocates, with its lower GDP, would there be sufficient governmental and corporate revenue to devote to medical research and associated hi-tech pursuits?
2. While lifestyle disorders might be reduced in incidence in Ted’s society, would we see the return of the old devastating diseases that plagued past centuries?

TED:

“What we will have done is build a new economy, Economy B, under the old one.  Economy B will give us the power to produce the basic goods and services we need not just to survive as the old economy increasingly fails to provide, but to give all a high quality of life. The old economy could collapse and we would still be able to provide for ourselves.”

RG:

Ted seems to be advocating the approach taken by permaculture and the ‘alternative’ social culture of the 1970s of creating the new within the body of an increasingly dysfunctional old society. This is a social evolutionary approach and it is how much social change occurs (as different to social revolutionary and other abrupt disjunctions that flip societies into a new state as the old suddenly falls apart).

To play a role in this, however, transition organisations will have to become somewhat more sophisticated in their approach and move beyond the permaculture model as it is presently and popularly practiced.

Transition could be described as ‘permaculture plus’ and it will have to become this because, through its 35 years of evolution, permaculture has become a better-known grassroots technology for sustainable living but has achieved little by way of influencing social decision makers and institutions. Permaculture, in rightly focusing on acting at the local level, has not been an achiever in acting at the state or national level to any appreciable degree.

Here’s an aspect of permaculture for transitioners to avoid: Sometimes in permaculture organisations you see a kind of self-induced euphoria, something like the groupthink and self-generated enthusiasm of an Amway convention, in which people imagine that their permaculture association or permaculture in its entirety is so well known and so influential and commonsensical that it is about to create imminent change in society. Take a step outside the permaculture milieu, however, and you find that the design system is known (most popularly as a type of organic gardening that doesn’t dig the soil but spreads dry grasses on top of it) but is less influential than imagined. The analogy is the anti-war movement of the late 1960s; it was both populous and prominent but it mistook form for substance and thought (as did some of its opponents) that the revolution was imminent.

This is to mistake quantity for quality. You can have a horde of members in a permaculture organisation but if most are not active in any significant way, then the mass of quantity is countered by the mass of inertia. Better to go for a small number of key, innovative people who will act in some way to jointly create an impact larger than their numbers should suggest (ref: the well known Margaret Mead quotation and truism about small groups of people leading change).

TED:

“The Simpler Way contradicts the core systems of the present society and cannot be built unless we replace them.  Consumer-capitalist society cannot be fixed;… “.

RG:

This is where Ted could be seen to depart from the permaculture approach.

Permaculture contains a Mollisonian principle that proposes the greatest change for the smallest investment in making that change happen. The implication here is the reform of existing social institutions rather than their complete destruction and replacement. Permaculture would seek to change “consumer-capitalist” society by changing its direction from within. This is different to Ted’s approach which seems to have more in common to that of social revolutionaries.

TED:

“What do we have to do in order to eventually achieve such huge and radical changes?

“The answer goes far beyond the things that green/transition people are doing now, such as setting up community gardens, food co-ops, recycling centres, Permaculture groups, skill banks, home-craft courses, commons, volunteering, downshifting, etc.  Yes, all these are the kinds of institutions and practices we will have in the new sustainable and just world so it is understandable that many people within the Eco-village, Transition Towns and green movements assume that if we just work at establishing more and more of these things then in time this will have created the new society. I think this is a serious mistake.”

RG:

All of these things that Ted mentions are components of a sustainable society, as he says. Now, a few points:

There is no plan to establish more of the same as some kind of goal, as Ted seems to imply. These things have caught the popular imagination and are replicating because they are good ideas whose time has come or because they meet some social/personal needs. This happens in an organic way, not through some central plan. Together, perhaps these initiatives will generate some emergent properties within conventional society so, as suggested earlier, a new model of society emerges from the body of the old.

The things Ted lists are a great deal more than what he describes as “…the lifestyle choices and hobby interests of a relatively few people”. Numbers participating are growing and I have already broached the idea that numbers do not count, quality does. In idea-diffusion terms, many of these things are the property of the innovative fringe, the early adopters. As we can see with ecovillages, community gardens and permaculture, ideas flow from early adopters to early mass adopters. This is how ideas become part of the social mainstream, exactly where we want them.

Moreover, for Ted to categories them as “hobby interests” is to denigrate the social innovators adopting them. For many, things like community gardening have become a part of everyday life… they have been integrated into life… normalised… and are a part of lived experience. This implies that they are far from “hobbies”.

Ted:

“If the global vision sketched above is valid then we ordinary people in our towns and suburbs eventually have to establish our own local Economy B, take control of it and relegate the market to a very minor role, identify local needs and work out how to meet them, get rid of unemployment, work out how to cut town imports, etc. Šandgrope towards the practices which enable us to collectively self-govern the town.”

RG:

A few comments on this statement which, surprisingly for Ted, fails to consider the history of the permaculture and allied movements:

• Economy B: people like Robert Rosen and Damien Lynch (August Investments) were early developers of what became the ethical or social investment movement, and they came from the early permaculture milieu.
• The market: see my notes earlier on the ‘natural market’; Ted’s comment about “relegating the market to a very minor role” will not build the vital and viable local economies that we need to sustain a sustainable culture. Sure, it’s a different market that Ted is talking about, however markets at the local and regional scale are important to sustainable civilisations and there would probably be the need for a national market in some goods and services.
• I wonder if Ted still labours under the old notion that markets are somehow evil? It was a notion that permeated the environment movement, as some of the alternative economic innovators found out when environmentalists preferred not to support them and kept their money with conventional banking and investment institutions.
• Ted’s …”get rid of unemployment, work out how to cut town imports, etc” all depend on the development of viable local and regional economies.

TED:

“However if your goal was to build the kind of society that I’ve argued we must have if we are to solve global problems of sustainability and justice you would very definitely not think it was sufficient or appropriate just to encourage a thousand flowers to bloom. You would think very carefully about what projects were most important to achieve that goal, you would realise that this must involve taking collective control over the local economy, and you would recognise that developing this vision among people in the region is the supremely important task to work on.”

RG:

Ted’s “community gardens, food co-ops, recycling centres, Permaculture groups, skill banks, home-craft courses, commons, volunteering… ” and so on mentioned earlier seem to me to be the means of, to quote what he writes, “… taking collective control over the local economy and… developing this vision among people in the region”.

They are practical, on-the-ground initiatives of ordinary people and are just the opposite to what you find to be the products of universities, where people spend a great deal of time and effort in criticising and analysing but seem to have some kind of paralysis when it comes to creating something tangible (there are exceptions, I know).

TED:

“From the perspective I’ve outlined, making your town more resilient is far from a sufficient goal. That could be little more than building a haven of safety in a world of oil scarcity; a haven within a wider society that remains obsessed with growth, markets, exploiting the Third World, and using mobile phones made with tantalum from the Congo.”

RG:

Well, what’s the big deal with “… using mobile phones made with Tantalum from the Congo” that makes it so worthy of being singled out? Can’t corporations pay the Congolese fairly for the mineral and ensure good working conditions?

Does what Ted says indicate some hidden tendency towards technophobia and dislike of mobile communications, when the reason that people use such technologies is usually because they enable them to do new things that are of value to them or to do existing things better?

And Ted shouldn’t be too hard on the mobile phone industry or its customers; mobile phones are now used for poverty eradication in some developing countries and prepaid, transferrable mobile phone credits are now an informal currency within the non-monetary exchange systems that Ted supports.

The point of making resilient towns, cities and suburbs is not to form some kind of enclave amid chaos. Their real value at present is as proof-of-concept examples and as prototypes that, like any good idea, can be replicated and adapted. So, they are a worthy goal and, having been debugged, should be replicated across the nation.

TED:

“A major deficiency in the current Transition Towns movement literature is the lack of information on what to do. The website, the Handbook and especially the 12 Steps document are valuable, but they are predominantly about the procedure for organising the movement and it is remarkably difficult to find clear guidance as to what the sub-goals of the movement are, the actual structures and systems and projects that we should be trying to undertake if our town is to achieve transition or resilience. What we desperately need to know is what things should we start trying to set up, what should we avoid, what should come first.”

RG:

Lack of information on what to do? I thought that was fairly explicit. Sure, the 12 Steps is about organising a movement but they are also about what that movement can do and why. Does anyone find this information missing?

You really can’t tell people all over the world what structures and systems and “things” they need… they have to work that out for themselves. There are no formulas you can universally apply. Most people have the capacity for intelligent observation, conversation and thinking and can sooner or later work these things out for themselves.

I do, however, have concerns that transitions could apply ‘template thinking’, rather than design thinking, through the use of techniques and ideas adopted from other transition initiatives, much as has happened in permaculture with the template thinking that comes with garden design. You have to adapt as well as adopt and not uncritically take on structures that someone else finds has worked for them.

Ted’s goals are fine, however I see transitioners trying to implement them, such as in the form of: “… Identify the unmet needs of the town, and the unused productive capacities of the town, and bring them together” and the others.

Ted’s is a worthwhile analysis of the transition movement and is the sort of constructive criticism that can make the movement self-reflective and help it grow. I find much of what he says should be done to be being done in some form or another.

The ongoing conversation:

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-1/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-2/ (this page)

http://pacific-edge.info/trainerpapers-3/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-4/

Dr Ted Trainer

Some thoughts on Russ Grayson’s comments on my friendly critique of the Transition Towns movement

Russ discusses what I think is the crucial issue of what changes we are or ought to be working for in society, and how to try to achieve them.  Russ thinks my approach to these issues is different from the Permaculture way.  Like some of the people in the UK Transition movement who are uncomfortable with my readiness to make statements about what the movement should be for, Russ says, “…you really can’t tell people all over the world what structures and systems …they need…they have to work that out for themselves.”  Brian Davey recently expressed his unease at me “…prescriptively trying to design a simple society in advance.   Hob Hopkins feels the same way, and I would think most Transitioners would share that view.

Brian said that we should let the movement go where it wants to go and it will eventually achieve what I want anyway.  I think this is quite mistaken and it is very important for us to think very carefully about the issue.  It is my very firm view that the general Transition/Permaculture/Eco-village or indeed wider Green movement is currently not about the crucial goals and practices necessary to get us to a sustainable and just society.  They are about many very relevant and necessary and valuable goals, but not the crucial ones.  This will surely strike most good green people as offensive so please let me elaborate by quoting from my recent reply to Brian Davey.

One’s position on all this depends on one’s answers to two crucial issues.  The first is what form would/must a sustainable and just society take?  The second is will the present green/transition movement automatically result in such a society?  I have very strong views on both issues. I might be completely wrong and I am happy to reconsider, but you should be willing to think about my cases.

My view on the first question is that consumer-capitalist society is so intrinsically grossly unsustainable and unjust that its fundamental structures and systems cannot be made sustainable and just.  You can’t reform it so that the big global problems are not created yet we still have the same basic systems.  The most obvious example is that sustainability requires a steady state economy, so you cannot reform a growth economy to meet this requirement while you retain a growth economy – you have to scrap and replace a growth economy.  Similarly you cannot have a society which focuses on meeting needs, and prioritises justice, rights, the interests of future generations and those of all other species — if you let market forces determine what happens in society…because by definition a market attends only to the demand of those with most money to pay and totally ignores need etc. and totally ignores need, justice, rights etc

In other words it seems to me that when you analyse the state of the planet you can see very clearly a number of procedures and systems that have to be scrapped and replaced or we have no chance of voiding catastrophic breakdown, and that means you see inescapable implications for the basic nature that a satisfactory society must have.  It seems to me for instance that there can be no argument that a sustainable world must have zero-growth economies…nor can it be determined by market forces and nor can it  be driven by a culture of competitive acquisitiveness.  You might not be sure about such conclusions, but I am prepared to assert them pretty confidently/dogmatically. If you think I am mistaken about these (dogmatic) claims then let’s discuss.

Given my views on these issues it is understandable that I would want to persuade people within the Transition Towns movement to hold them too.

The question this sets us all is, what should our goals and sub-goals be?  If you see the world the way I do then certain general but very firm answers are obvious and I don’t think these are the goals most people within the Transition Towns movement hold at present.  (Of course most people in the movement would surely say they are for sustainability and justice, but my argument is that they can’t achieve these goals unless they adopt as sub-goals things like scrapping growth and affluence, taking control of local economies, and not letting market forces determine our fate.)  I’m claiming that most people in the movement are (understandably) not clear enough about the fact that we cannot get to a satisfactory world through reforms that leave those basic structures in place, and without at some stage focusing on these fundamental/radical system change goals.

On the second issue, Russ and Brian expressed the very common assumption that we needn’t fret about all this because if we just help the movement go where it is going then it will in time end up where I want it to be.  This view is in effect that if we just facilitate ventures which are in line with the Permaculture ethic of care of earth and people and distribution of surplus, then the movement “…should evolve in the direction you want anyway.”  Again I think this is profoundly mistaken.

In my view almost the entire green movement is a) full of good concerned people working hard for good causes, b) making little or no contribution to saving the planet…because it is predominantly only about bandaiding particular problems  and it is not about getting rid of the structures and systems that are causing the problems.  Bandaids are very important.  The green movement is patching up lots of damage, but it is not about moving to the kind of society that would not destroy the environment.  For instance the Australian Conservation Foundation does heroic work trying to save forests and whales etc., but not only has no interest in challenging the growth economy but actually argues that it is a good thing. (Its CEO has lectured me on this!)  The world is full of good people in aid, justice, environmental etc. groups whose efforts are only to achieve reforms to consumer-capitalist society, not to replace it.

These good green efforts and campaigns are not going to get us to a society that doesn’t cause the problems, because these efforts have nothing to do with the changes that requires;  saving the whale is a good thing, but it can make no difference whatsoever to the commitment to a growth economy.  Similarly developing more community gardens in Totnes is a good thing, but you tell me how that is contributing to the day when the people of Totness have taken control over the local economy and run it without economic growth.  Those are goals that we do not move closer to by planting more nut trees, and there is no reason to think that if we just go on planting more nut trees etc. we will eventually end up with a zero-growth economy we control.  These are two utterly separate sets of goals and we cannot expect to achieve the second set unless at some stage we start explicitly asserting and endorsing them and working out how we are going to achieve them. At present these crucial higher-order goals are rarely if ever evident in green movements, especially in the Permaculture and Transition Towns literature.

The goals presently stated within these movements, planting of the commons, setting up the farmers markets etc., can all be achieved without any significant effect at all on consumer-capitalist society.  They are all quite compatible with a growth economy, affluent lifestyles and market forces.   Consumer society can accommodate them comfortably, and they are no threat to such a society.  If you want us to get rid of a growth economy etc. then you have to make that an explicit aim, and to achieve it you will have to do things quite different to stetting up more farmers’ markets and planting nut trees.  I don’t think any of the projects I am presently aware of within the TT movement are going to make any contribution whatsoever to getting rid of a growth economy, (even though all of them seem to me to be valuable.)

If you see things the way I do then it is not sufficient if people just set up whatever good green thing takes their fancy, which is what Russ, Brian and Rob  Hopkins seem to be happy with.  If you think vast and radical structural change is necessary then you want to see these as strongly held explicit goals within the movement, and my pretty strong impression is that at present they aren’t.  That’s not really a criticism of the movement, it’s more appropriately seen as a comment about the present early state of the movement, and the state that I hope it gets to before long.  I think it is quite understandable that at this point in time it is mainly about reforms and good works within existing society.

So my concern is to badger people within the movement to think carefully about what their ultimate goals are, and what it will take to achieve them.  Few would reject the general Permaculture ethic of care for people and environment and sharing the surplus, but these principles are so vague and motherhood that they aren’t much use in helping us work out what sub-goals to adopt.  My plea to you is to ask yourself can the ultimate sustainability and justice goals be achieved if we do not endorse sub-goals such as getting rid of a growth economy, and if you agree with me on that, is it not appropriate that you and I should try to persuade people in the movement to adopt such sub-goals?

Russ suggests that my approach is about “complete destruction and replacement” and is …”more like that of the social revolutionaries.”  If you see the world the way I do then what we have to work for is the most enormous revolution in history (…so big indeed that I do not think it will be achieved).  For decades my writings have attempted to show in detail that sustainability and justice cannot possibly be achieved without very radical change in our economic, social, geographical, agricultural, political, and most difficult of all, cultural systems.  If you think I’m wrong about this, if you think we can solve the big problems while we retain a growth economy driven by market forces and limitless acquisitiveness, then please let me know how. But none of this implies any need for destruction, violence or force.  Actions of those kinds cannot help achieve this revolution.  The task is to get enough people to see the desirability of moving to the alternative ways so that they willingly dump consumer-capitalism as its difficulties accelerate and happily take uyp the better option.  If we fail at that then the revolution is lost.  (The way I see the transition process is spelled out in Thoughts on The Transition, at http://ssis2.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/ThoughtsOnTrans.html

Best wishes,

Ted

The ongoing conversation:

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-1/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-2/

http://pacific-edge.info/trainerpapers-3/ (this page)

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-4/

A continuing conversation — a friendly critique of Ted Trainers’ response.

Preface

This is a continuing conversation that started with Dr Ted Trainer’s allegation (The Trainer Papers… 1) that the Transition and permaculture movements are not addressing the critical need to change the economic system and to restructure society to take it towards a socially fairer, zero-economic growth economy.

I have no argument with Ted’s ideas about a zero-grwoth economy, however I differ with him on a number of points:

1. The Transition and permaculture movements are not structured and never were structured to address what he sees as the main challenges.
2. The movements take a less-direct approach to changing society by seeking to make changes from within and that these changes, taken cumulatively, could bring about significant change over time.
3. There is no valid reason for the movements to change their focus to comply with Ted’s priorities.
4. Ted offers little by way of a practical program to create the massive change he discusses. By criticising the Transition and permaculture movements — and recognising that constructive criticism is beneficial — Ted criticises what may be the most effective grassroots initiatives to hands-on change-making.

In commenting on Ted’s paper, I do so as someone with great respect for Ted and his ideas. My comments are offered in the spirit of constructive, critical dialog as a means of exploring questions that are quite relevant to the social movements of our time, particularly the Transition and permaculture movements.

Sometimes in the text I refer to ‘environmentalists’ in a general and somewhat critical way. This I do to emphasise that some who so describe themselves continue to operate in the ways I describe. Being a generalisation, however, there are numerous exceptions and I recognise that many who call themselves environmentalists today take more of a sustainability point of view.

Readers should understand that my response is very much stream of consciousness, with all the omissions and clumsiness that implies.

Readers wishing to comment constructively on the conversation are welcome to respond via the ‘comments’ box at the end of the pieces.

First, a general response…

Social change

Ted suggests that society must change to a zero-growth economy so as to achieve sustainability and social justice.

I don’t dispute this as a proposition. What I find is that Ted offers no route from where we are to where he wants us to be. He  describes a future in very general terms. As it does not exist, this is acceptable, however if people are to be attracted to his model of a desirable society then it will be necessary to paint an attractive vision of what life in it might be like. Ted’s paper is strong on general, broad vision but short on ideas for the route we would take to attain it.

In contrast, the Transition movement has a methodology to take us to a largely undefined future through its Skill-up for Powerdown and Energy Descent Action Plan processes. These might not be the whole story, however they are clear and distinct steps into an unknown future. That it remains poorly described in Transition literature is ok because the future is essentially unknowable and many of us are quite at home living in a present that is heading for an uncertain future.

Terminology

Ted seems to lapse almost into cliche in the terminology he sometimes uses, such as portraying those interested in sustainability in terms of ‘saving the whales’ or ‘saving the planet’.

Saving the whales is now an institutional initiative led by very determined action and lobbying groups and involving government at the international level. It is the focus of those with a specific interest in it. Generalising as if it were one of the main and immediate foci of the sustainability movement might have been true… in 1985.

I venture to say that for those interested in the transition to a sustainable society, saving the whales would be a proposition that they support but that does not occupy a dominant part of their time.

Also, ‘saving the planet’ is now a tired, worn-out cliche because a realisation has emerged that resilient nature will adapt to climate change in its usual creative way but human cultures might not. Now, people are about saving those cultures, including ours.

Behavioural change

Sustainability education today focuses on changing the behaviour of people, organisations and institutions. It does not lecture, hector, make people feel guilty or suggest that they follow the ideas of some environmental elitist group.

Doing that is a dated concept — it was part of the way the environment movement operated a few years ago (and, unfortunately, how some of it still operates) but has been shown to be outdated by the research of sustainability educators such as Bob Doppelt (2008; The Power of Sustainability Thinking; Earthscan).

Unlike the Transition movement Ted criticises and finds substantial fault with — even suggesting those in it are wasting their time in regard to social change though what they do might by itself be worthwhile in itself — in formulating his ideas Ted has not engaged in a participatory ideas-creation process. They remain his ideas alone, untested in their acceptance, practicality and desirability. Those of the Transition and permaculture movements, in contrast, are collective works.

My comments are identified in the following text as ‘RG:’.

The dialogue…

TED:

Some thoughts on Russ Grayson’s comments on my friendly critique of the Transition Towns movement.

Russ discusses what I think is the crucial issue of what changes we are or ought to be working for in society, and how to try to achieve them.  Russ thinks my approach to these issues is different from the Permaculture way.

Like some of the people in the UK Transition movement who are uncomfortable with my readiness to make statements about what the movement should be for, Russ says, “…you really can’t tell people all over the world what structures and systems …they need…they have to work that out for themselves.”

Brian Davey recently expressed his unease at me “…prescriptively trying to design a simple society in advance. Rob Hopkins feels the same way, and I would think most Transitioners would share that view.

RG:

I find trying to design societies to be something of a fun activity, certainly an interesting one, but ultimately a futile one. Why? Because there are far too many variables that are operating now and that would substantially influence the zero-growth economy society that Ted postulates.

Societies are complex adaptive systems, and it is inherent within the dynamics of systems that they give rise to properties that are not perceptible at the present time — ie. societies change in unanticipated ways and new things and characteristics continually emerge. It is a property of complex adaptive system that they are inherently unpredictable. If we fail to acknowledge this and fail to expect the unexpected, then we risk getting stuck in our favourite ideological models which bear the same relationship to our 4D reality as does the world of Avatar.

For those wishing to change society to comply with their own pet ideas, I believe there are interesting video games such as Civilisation and interactive online worlds such as Second Life. Apologies, games mavens, if I have this wrong.

As for the imagined world of the Transition movement, we simply don’t know that the model of a low-energy, peak oil world will be. Why? Because we don’t know the future or what it will bring. The Transition model is predicated upon present trends extrapolated and makes use of scenario planning and other techniques, yet doing this in the past has come unstuck and I believe that most of those in the Transition movement are aware that their prognostications might be quite wrong. Sure, there are those that parrot the ideas of others dogmatically, mistaking what are ideas for the future reality.

The best we can say at present is that the consensus energing in the Transition movement, that we face a world in transition under the influences of climate change, peak oil and fresh water shortfall, to be a possible future based on what we know now. But, again, expect the unexpected. Maybe that should be promoted to a law like that of physics, or perhaps as a new permaculture principle.

TED:

Brian said that we should let the movement go where it wants to go and it will eventually achieve what I want anyway.

I think this is quite mistaken and it is very important for us to think very carefully about the issue.  It is my very firm view that the general Transition/Permaculture/Eco-village or indeed wider Green movement is currently not about the crucial goals and practices necessary to get us to a sustainable and just society.

RG:

First, I don’t think you can all-that-closely control the trajectory of social movements over time. Take one that you know, Ted — the permaculture movement. I’m sure you will recall that, in the movements earlier days there was a broader interest in social issues but that this has devolved into a focus on gardening in the popular interpretation of permaculture. This was not Bill Mollison’s dream, but the design system changed due to new people coming in and due to the influence of media coverage, something that played a big role, I conjecture, in shaping the popular conception of permaculture.

When Ted says that he finds Brian’s statement to be “quite mistaken”, I’m not sure if he is suggesting that, somehow and by persons unknown, the movement be deliberately forced to take some course preferred by him. How do you do this? How do you tell all those people out there who populate the Transitions milieu that they should suddenly bow to the direction that Ted suggests and set out to follow it? The Transition movement is like permaculture in that it consists of an amorphous conglomeration of ideas, priorities, politics and beliefs. The chance of succeeding in redirecting it to the direction Ted wants? Zero.

Ted — I wonder about including ecovillages in your conceptualisation of a “Transition/permaculture/Eco-village” movement. Looking back on permaculture’s history I see ecovillages as a rural expression of permaculture with the initial one, the prototype, being the creation of Max Lindegger and his crew at Crystal Waters in SE Queensland. It’s still there, more than 20 years later.

Ecovillages constitute something of a movement themselves, however they are not a major component of the broad sustainability movement because of limitations that come with moving into a rural ecovillage development — livelihood, finding employment, access to services for an aging population and so on. Cohousing is perhaps a better urban model that incorporates some of the features of ecovillages, however I don’t think that either of these are worthy of listing as the equivalent of permaculture and Transition initiatives rather than as subset initiatives initially of permaculture but now of others including property developers.

Also, I am a bit uneasy with the lumping of Transitions and permaculture as some seemingly unitary movement. While Transitions has attracted many from within the permaculture milieu, there are others with little or no connection to permaculture who are active in Transitions. To claim Transition for permaculture could be to risk alienating these people as their outlook can be at times quite different than that which prevails in permaculture.

TED:

My view on the first question is that consumer-capitalist society is so intrinsically, grossly unsustainable and unjust that its fundamental structures and systems cannot be made sustainable and just.

You can’t reform it so that the big global problems are not created yet we still have the same basic systems.  The most obvious example is that sustainability requires a steady state economy, so you cannot reform a growth economy to meet this requirement while you retain a growth economy — you have to scrap and replace a growth economy.

RG:

Question: what economic structure would a steady-state society adopt? Would it include capitalism in some form, perhaps that of what I call the ‘natural market system’ consisting of small scale enterprises and sole traders buying and selling needed goods and services? We see this in microcosm at markets. I have seen it operating in a non-monetary way at Takwa village market on Malaita island in the Solomons when I was doing some work there.

Presumably, and I leave this for those with the depth of knowledge to answer, the natural market would be what we would anticipate in a society organised along anarchist lines, especially that of libertarian anarchism. Or, what we would find in a localised village economy.

What other economic forms would be possible? Fascism gave us, during its trial period in the 1930s, nothing more than state influenced corporatism. Communism, despite its rhetoric, gave us state control of the economy such that any innovative entrepreneurial spirit amongst the people was thwarted. Some called it ‘state capitalism’.

The dot.com model of the late 1990s promised an economy based upon innovation, imagination and business daring, originally in opposition to the old big corporations. It was a form of techno-libertarianism.

So, what model for a no-growth economy do we have?

TED:

…because by definition a market attends only to the demand of those with most money to pay and totally ignores need etc. and totally ignores need, justice, rights etc.

RG:

Well, I was watching an ABC video podcast featuring Cherryl Kurnow who now goes around promoting social enterprise.

She was saying, as do other social entrepreneurs, that not-for-profit and for-profit businesses with social goals can primarily serve society. That’s within a capitalist society and by using a business model.

What she was talking about some of us would be familiar with — our food co-ops operate this way, as social enterprises… they are essentially small businesses in which profits are reframed as ‘operating surplus’ and are fed back into the business rather than to shareholders or owners. On a larger scale, there are the cooperatives of Mondragon in the Basque country of Spain and the co-ops of Maleny.

TED:

On the second issue, Russ and Brian expressed the very common assumption that we needn’t fret about all this because if we just help the movement go where it is going then it will in time end up where I want it to be.  This view is in effect that if we just facilitate ventures which are in line with the Permaculture ethic of care of earth and people and distribution of surplus, then the movement “…should evolve in the direction you want anyway.”  Again I think this is profoundly mistaken.

RG:

Ted, with all respect I don’t see why society should change towards your model only, no matter that I have substantial areas of agreement with it. What about public participation in deciding our collective future? We all have to live there, after all. It’s one thing to theorise about these things in a university but it’s somewhat more complicated when you get out into the world and deal with the opportunities and barriers that people face for real.

What you are saying, as I understand it, is that only a complete social, cultural and economic transformation will bring about a sustainable and socially just society. I grant that this is theoretically possible but to do it I think you might have to join the revolutionary socialist party or somesuch. To expect a community-based formation such as Transition Towns or permaculture to  achieve this is unrealistic.

Actually, if you look at permaculture’s ethics, then they are pretty revolutionary and they certainly throw out a challenge to societal models capitalist and socialist. Of course, permaculture has no means of carrying off something on the scale you envisionage.

Permaculture, we know, includes people with a diversity of political attitudes ranging from capitalist to socialist, even some with anarchist tendencies. Bit like a microcosm of society in this regard. We see this in the championing of the Cuban experience of recent years in the form of that country’s commendable self-rescue from its own peak oil future through the application of organic and quasi-organic food production approaches to agriculture both urban and rural, and to its accomplishments in the medical services field. Yet we hear little from permaculturists about human rights in Cuba and about state oversight of life. In this regard it is like some of the more authoritarian capitalist states and this can be a disappointment for people seeking a real alternative.

Permaculture’s approach is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary… it proposes developing a model of the preferred new within the body of the old. Permaculture’s approach — and I think few within that milieu have much of an inkling of this — is akin to Buckminster Fuller’s notion that if you want to change something then you develop a new model that is so compellingly attractive that it makes the old obsolete. Change by choice based on the evidence that the change being proposed is highly desirable.

Transition initatives do not have a revolutionary or society-changing agenda, rather, they seek social adaptations to the potential challenges of peak oil and climate change. Whatever type of economy you prefer, these are likely to be factors it will have to deal with. The present thrust of Transition initiatives is production of an Energy Descent Adaption Plan and handing that on to local government. Doing that is only the start of the process as after planning comes implementation, and that is a much more difficult proposition. There is also a community education component of skills development called Skill-up for Powerdown, however this is certainly no agenda for social change as it lacks any political content to bind its disperate components together. But doing that is not its mission.

Transitions is still a new phenomenon, only being unleashed in 2006 or thereabouts. That it has gone global in the short period since is remarkable and is testament both the stickiness of the idea itself and to the  power of online communications. It remains uncertain how effective it will be in Australia or how durable it will be. At present, there is a trend to express it as an outgrowth of permaculture. This will attract some but not others, and it may have been more effective and potentially more inclusive to position it as an independent initiative with links to permaculture. It is primarily a community-based movement and, unless it attracts the right people with the right background, it might have difficulty bridging the civil society-government gap.

TED:

In my view almost the entire green movement is:

1. Full of good concerned people working hard for good causes
2. Making little or no contribution to saving the planet…because it is predominantly only about bandaiding particular problems and it is not about getting rid of the structures and systems that are causing the problems. Bandaids are very important. The green movement is patching up lots of damage, but it is not about moving to the kind of society that would not destroy the environment. For instance, the Australian Conservation Foundation does heroic work trying to save forests and whales etc but not only has no interest in challenging the growth economy but actually argues that it is a good thing.

RG:

I have a little difficulty with this concept of ‘saving the planet’ for two reasons:

1. The planet doesn’t need saving but human civilisations might. Nature is resilient, tough… not fragile. It copes well and has done so with ice ages, global warming and all of the changes through the aeons. The planet will probably adapt to higher temperatures or whatever with new suites of plants and animals.
2. The term is now hackneyed and has lost whatever impact it might once have had. It’s one of those now-largely-meaningless terms emanating from the environment movement that I suspect just flow straight past people.

Don’t know about ACF being so strong on the whales issue, that would be Greenpeace, itself now at risk of being eclipsed by the Sea Shepherd Society.

So, how do you “get rid of the structures and systems that are causing the problems”? What is the ideology, the agenda, the methodology? If the goal is the type of society you describe Ted, what are the steps from here to there? Simply describing such a society has value as envisioning a desirable future, but doing only that does little to move towards that society.

You also offer a situation analysis of sorts with your critique of present day society. That’s good too — any movement for change needs both an understanding of the present and a vision of its preferred future.

But having both of these does nothing to move us towards that future. That requires stages of achievement and a program of action. We go nowhere without this.

Edward de Bono has written that criticism is a good thing, but criticism that simply aims to demolish some idea (and I think much of academic criticism is of this type) is unhelpful. What is needed is the constructive criticism that makes suggestions for improvement.

As for people making no contribution to saving the planet, what is it that they are expected to do? Should they stop doing the small actions that are within their capacity in their homes, workplaces and community organisations? And do what instead? Those small actions sure do not change the trajectory of the planet but they do engage people in action. It is up to sustainability educators to build on this. You have to start where people are at.

The big changes that you propose, Ted, are simply too big for people to comprehend or take action on. They need breaking down into achievable steps over time.

TED:

These good green efforts and campaigns are not going to get us to a society that doesn’t cause the problems, because these efforts have nothing to do with the changes that requires;  saving the whale is a good thing, but it can make no difference whatsoever to the commitment to a growth economy.

RG:

Those whales again! So who goes around saving whales and why do you give it so much prominence in the conversation Ted? The mention of these marine mega-mammals seems to come around so often in this discussion that they have become cliche. It’s not 1985 anymore, it is 2010… a new century with new priorities, new trends, new challenges and new ways of being. Most of us have long ago passed the Great Age of Whale-Saving and moved on to contemporary reality.

Forget whales and think climate change, oil shortfall, fresh water shortfall, how to double food production on the same area of land within the next 40 years… for these are the things that are going to be the real limits. Thee are the crucial things we face. Time to reboot your thinking, Ted.

TED:

Similarly developing more community gardens in Totnes is a good thing, but you tell me how that is contributing to the day when the people of Totness have taken control over the local economy and run it without economic growth.

RG:

There’s a simple answer to that, Ted, and it is this: community gardens are not set up to change entire economic systems. That’s not their role, not their focus, not their mission. To expect that they could achieve this is to live in profound misunderstanding of the purpose of community food production. To place such an expectation on them is to completely miscomprehend their reason for existence.

But again… how would what you suggest come about? Do people in Totnes actually want to take over their local economy? Who says they should? Maybe, with the Totnes Pound, they are having a little experiment in local economics and this is the first step to that end. At least they have an idea to move from vision to actuality and they might just be doing it.

As for community gardens, they are a means for people to reclaim public land and to put it to productive use. Not a bad idea, really… just the sort of thing that might happen in a zero-growth economy to supply people with food from the region. Bit revolutionary in its own way, too, sort of a social revolution of the radish, the lettuce leaf and the seed (non-hybrid variety, preferably). Maybe we can eat our way to social change… hmmm… that idea has some appeal, come to think of it… done in the good company of friends, aquaintenances and colleagues, it seems a little more convivial than the glumness of environmental guilt-merchants and political revolutionaries.

TED:

Those are goals that we do not move closer to by planting more nut trees, and there is no reason to think that if we just go on planting more nut trees etc. we will eventually end up with a zero-growth economy we control.  These are two utterly separate sets of goals and we cannot expect to achieve the second set unless at some stage we start explicitly asserting and endorsing them and working out how we are going to achieve them. At present these crucial higher-order goals are rarely if ever evident in green movements, especially in the Permaculture and Transition Towns literature.

RG:

Yes… the nut-led path to a zero-growth economy… so we don’t need economics professors anymore, just horticulturists. I like that. But, again, nut tree cultivators probably don’t practice their craft to create economic revolution… you’re pushing your ideas on what you think they should be onto others, Ted, which suggests, well… just a little disregard for personal autonomy and freedom of choice.

But your last sentence above, Ted, is so true. Yet, I wonder if we should force these movements along a path they have not freely chosen? One of the good things about even imperfect democracies is that we give people and their organisations some degree of freedom to set a course of their own and to put up what it is that they try to do for consideration in the public marketplace for ideas.

TED:

The goals presently stated within these movements, planting of the commons, setting up the farmers markets etc., can all be achieved without any significant effect at all on consumer-capitalist society.  They are all quite compatible with a growth economy, affluent lifestyles and market forces.   Consumer society can accommodate them comfortably, and they are no threat to such a society.  If you want us to get rid of a growth economy etc. then you have to make that an explicit aim,

RG:

True Ted. All of these initiatives can exist within more or less any type of society (though possibly not the old Soviet model). Why? Because farmers’ markets, community plantings and the like are all part of what I referred to before as the ‘natural economy’, that in which an exchange of goods and services is made so that people can obtain what it is that they need to live and improve their lives.

Do you suggest the Transiton and permaculture movements are delelict in not being a threat to society even though that has never been their goal?

TED:

I don’t think any of the projects I am presently aware of within the TT (Transition Towns) movement are going to make any contribution whatsoever to getting rid of a growth economy, (even though all of them seem to me to be valuable.)

RG:

Again, this is not their objective Ted.

Maybe you need to set up your own movement to do this as none of those existing meet your demands on them.

TED:

So my concern is to badger people within the movement to think…

RG:

Ok. So you’re going to lose any support you have here Ted. Badgering people is a tired old strategy from way back then in the 1980s that went obsolete in the late 1990s, just like making people feel guilty and continually blaming them for not doing whatever it is that environmentalists thought they should be doing. Badgering… yes, it’s a great technique… for driving people away and innoculating them against your message.

This is the research of sustainability educators. Things are a little more sophisticated today… it’s about behavioural change… a more scientific approach, more psychologically savvy… less arrogance and more intelligence.

TED:

Few would reject the general Permaculture ethic of care for people and environment and sharing the surplus, but these principles are so vague and motherhood that they aren’t much use in helping us work out what sub-goals to adopt.

RG:

Sure, these are motherhood statements in today’s understanding, however we must remember that they are the product of  late-1970s thinking, the time when permaculture emerged. They remain, however, good ethics and I have to disagree with you about their not being of much use for developing sub-gaols. I think there are numerous projects, programs and initiatives you could hang from them.

I guess it’s true you couldn’t rally a social movement around them today. I guess they’re motherhood statements in much the same way as ‘save the whales’ and ‘save the planet’… hard to disagree with but of less value in bringing people together given the sophistication of today’s society and in light of the challenges we face. That’s why permaculture and Transition types develop more tangible goals that still fall within the ambit of these permaculture ethics.

As you say, they have no sub-goals, if they really need that, but what they do have are principles of implementation that are for the most part achievable within the opportunities and constraints of our daily lives. These are a set of principles designed to guide actions. Bill Mollison has a set of these. David Holmgren has a revised set he published in 2002, I think it was. You select those permaculture principles relevant to the task in hand, design your approach then assess that approach in terms of the principles and in light of the overall context of the ethics.

The thing with Bill Mollison is that he was a visionary whose visions are based on a varied life history and experience. This fed his ideas and, when he and David got together in those fateful closing years of the 1970s in that house on the hill in distant Hobart, they realised that at some stage visions have to be made reality or they would have to go. Making them reality is what they tried to do and are still trying to do. There is no single route to this.

Nobody, neither Bill or David, has all the answers. Moving towards a resilient future is a collective work, an amalgam of ideas, of trial and error, your ideas and mine, the ideas of all of those others out there in the permaculture and Transition worlds and all of their allies and fellow travelers marching that same road. Together, we create a future none of us yet see the distant outline of… but it is a future that we collectively create and that our children and grandchildren inherit. Let us go forward in the knowing that whatever it is that we do, however small the contribution we can make, that we walk a common direction of diverse tracks toward a future that unfolds as we move. The future is not a distant destination. It is what unfolds minute to minute as we create it.

TED:

My plea to you is to ask yourself can the ultimate sustainability and justice goals be achieved if we do not endorse sub-goals such as getting rid of a growth economy, and if you agree with me on that, is it not appropriate that you and I should try to persuade people in the movement to adopt such sub-goals?

RG:

I feel a little uneasy trying to persuade people of anything these days. Also, I sort of like the idea of being part of an open-ended social movement like permaculture or Transitions… one without a fixed, unchanging destination that refuses to evolve in the face of changing reality. Better, I think, to accept that within these movements we operate in a context of uncertainty about the future or about what these movements might evolve into. There is, I think, something liberating in this, something that offers a sense of possibility… exhilaration and adventure even… now I think I know what bill meant when he used to speak of “… adventures in good design”.

People are free to choose to adopt the sub-goals you suggest as are their organisations. I have no problem with that.

You mention persuading people to adopt the goals you have chosen… as for me and my role in persuading people, I’m just a humble conjurer of words and images, a mere dealer in ideas and information, a speaker of sentences that people might listen to or dismiss, a dabbler in projects and technologies. I don’t know of I can instigate change of any sort… heavens, I can’t even cook a chook.

TED:

For decades my writings have attempted to show in detail that sustainability and justice cannot possibly be achieved without very radical change in our economic, social, geographical, agricultural, political, and most difficult of all, cultural systems.

RG:

Ted, I love your books and your ideas, your patience and foresight, your persistence in continuing with the Limits to Growth idea over the decades. I have been fortunate to visit your Pigface Point property many times… I even worked for you and your classes at UNSW way back in the 90s
But that’s beside the point. The thing is this:  there is no single route, no single objective we can adopt to take us to a future that we can only imagine. Our existence is mired in a world of complex adaptive systems that are essentially unpredicatable, whether they are those of our body and mind, our economy or cultures, our planet or its home in the solar system and universe (or, perhaps, multiverse?). The only future we experience is the one we continually move into, minute by minute, and in doing that there lay opportunities or doing whatever it is that we do just a little bit better, a little more cooperatively, a little more effectively and little more sustainably.

People have only so much time and energy to devote to pursuing the goal of sustainability, so it is the responsibility of people like you and me, people who have chosen to make more time available to explore this sustainability stuff, to accept whatever it is that people in their busy lives can offer.

To expect people to give their time completely to doing this is the road to activist burnout, a phenomenon that has plagued social change movements since the 60s. People have their livelihoods, their home life, social life and families to attend to. All of these things are important elements of a sustainable society and to neglect them is to step off the track to sustainability. Let’s help people to attend to those things a little more sustainably and let’s congratulate them even is all they do is establish a nut plantation, cultivate a community garden or one in a pot on their windowsill, reduce their energy use or participate in developing an Energy Descent Action Plan.

That track to sustainability is no narrow, single route through the wilderness of ideas and chaos. It is a route made up of many twisting, twining paths. Permaculture, one of those paths, is a many-worlds phenomena — it is many different things to many different people. All of those paths must be trod according to people’s interests and skills. But — and this is the important part — those paths move in the same general direction no matter how different they look, and somewhere where those paths go over the curve of the horizon, in our lifetimes or beyond, they at some point have the potential to converge in the future we seek. Make it so.

The ongoing conversation:

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-1/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-2/

http://pacific-edge.info/trainerpapers-3/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-4/ (this page)

Most of us have at least a working familarity with climate change and its likely consequences, however the peaking of global oil extraction and the impacts that it is likely to bring are less known. Peak oil, as it has become known, is the time at which extraction from economically accessible oil wells reaches its peak. After that, extraction plateaus awhile, then starts to fall below demand. The effect of this will be to boost oil prices and the cost of anything that uses oil in its extraction, manufacture, processing, transportation or consumption. New oil field discoveries, such as those likely to be accessed by deep sea drilling made possible by the retreat of the northern ice cap, will bring temporary relief but are unlikely to affect the downward tend in global production.

Peak oil is not a theory. The US peaked in 1970, Australia in 2000, and the North Sea wells peaked in 1999 — there, production had dropped by 43 percent by 2007. David Holmgren made this point — that peak oil is reality, not theory — while speaking at the Conversations With Authors at the Randwick Ecoliving Fair this year. There is plenty of empirical evidence for the peak. As for the projected price rises as supply falls below global demand for oil, that relationship is basic market economics.

Future Scanarios is more or less a paper version of David’s website of the same name. It’s not a large book in terms of number of pages, but it nonetheless serves as something of a wake-up call for those still in the slumber of an oil saturated present.

Exploring future scenarios

People familiar with David’s reasoning will find much that is familiar in the book. David takes the reader through his four scenarios that range from the consequences of business as usual to futures ranging through green technology, the survivalist ‘lifeboat’ scenario of social desperation that can end only in civilisational collapse, and his preferred scenario that he calls ‘earth stewardship’.

This latter invokes life as decentralised, self-governing towns and communities, with at least a partial abandonment of the cities which are mined for their materials. Life continues in the suburbs, however, though far from its present form. Although he does not go into detail in Future Scenarios, the multi-generational model of suburban conversion that David discussed during his 2006 national tour with US journalist and peak oil analyst, Richard Heinberg would likely be relevant here.

The model sees the development of multi-generational households and a substantial increase in food production, water harvesting and the use of renewable energies in the suburbs. In terms of urban infrastructure, it is a model I first encountered in the 1990s while working for Dr Ted Trainer at UNSW and that he called the ‘conserver society’, the title of a book be published on the topic. Through his books of the period, and in his courses at UNSW, Ted presaged many of David’s ideas on suburban conversion. This ‘ruralised city’ scanario is a model criticised by the authors of Resilient Cities, including the noted planner and educator, Peter Newman.

The book does not explore how this model would evolve in any detail — it is an investigation using the established scenario methodology that precludes detail, focusing instead on larger trends. The method has been used by government, corporations and civil society for some decades and takes existing demographic, resource, political, economic and other factors and projects how they could evolve within variables set for each scenario. Trends in oil production and other resources form the basis onto which David grafts projections about the possible impact of climate change to generate his four scenarios.

Return to appropriate technology

Earth stewardship is a model that is unlikely to be found universally appealing because it renders useless the skillsets of many. It is basically an agrarian future in which manual skills are those most valuable. It would be a profoundly different future, one less secure in many ways. Without hi-tech medicine, old diseases could return with little hope of cure. There is also the risk of a return to parochialism were global electronic communications to cease.

The scenario raises questions. How would human knowledge be preserved? Would we lose the extensive knowledge base drawn up over thousands of years of civilisation? Would there be any capacity to cooperate on projects of common endeavour over large regions ?

Writing this review, I recall ideas from the 1970s that were part of that exploration of what we then called ‘intermediate technology’, a term coined by British economist, Fritz Schumacher. Propelled by the 1973 oil crisis — the embargo of the West imposed by members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, in retaliation for Western support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war of the same year — intermediate technology (later to be renamed ‘appropriate technology’) sought simpler, cost-effective and more easily maintained tools and technologies to accomplish life needs. It was the dawn of renewable energy systems and paralleled the rise in popularity, although it remained organisationally separate to, organic gardening and farming.

Initially, intermediate technology found practical application in the intentional communities that developed during that period, however there was substantial interest among the more innovative of urban youth, especially those that considered themselves a part of the ‘alternative culture’ of the time, and by international development practitioners. Appropriate technology would certainly come of age in David’s earth stewardship society.

Imagining the scenarios

David outlines two ways of looking at his scenarios — as separate trends and in a nested structure. For me, it is the nested structure that is the most realistic as it recognises that different trends exist simultaneously, though at different scales and in different social milieus, in Western and, probably, other societies. Thus, the 1970s alternative culture existed within a growth economy then still expanding. Today, David’s earth stewardship model exists as loosely connected components in contemporary society focused around a number of movements such as permaculture, climate change and some elements of environmentalism.

Another way of looking at this is to see it as the new being born and prototyped in the bosom of the old. From that comes the resolution of what is a perceived contradiction among change agents making a living and pursuing their agendas within the infrastructure of a society they would severely modify or replace. Realistically, they have to live in both worlds at the same time, with a foot firmly planted in both. We all do.

Elements of the earth stewardship and the green technology scenarios are found within the permaculture milieu which David has some responsibility for co-creating. Here, there is a creative tension between the advocates of a basic and largely ruralised lifestyle and those who seek socially constructive solutions through green technology. Fortunately, David sees green technology a starting point for his journey to earth stewardship. The transition will come as energy supplies run down over time.

It is the force of David’s reputation, based on his role as co-originator of the permaculture design system and in recent years as its most prominent thinker, that leads to the ready adoption of his ideas by those within that milieu.

The influence of government

David writes that government has a substantial influence on these different nested scenarios, with local government holding most promise of influencing community-based initiatives that would form elements of the earth stewardship model. Through legislation, regulation and subsidies, local government has an influence on the structuring of households as, in effect, microcosms of the lifeboat scenario yet, at the same time, as components of the earth stewardship model.

What is implied here is David and his partner, Sue Dennet’s notion of the ‘household economy’. This views the household — whatever its makeup — as primarily a productive rather than consumptive entity. In reality, of course, households would be both consumers and producers, especially where they participate in a community-based, non-monetary system of exchange such as time dollars or LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System).

Seen as ‘prosumer’ (producer-consumer) entities and as micro-lifeboats, households would:

• produce in home or community gardens (and process as preserves) some of the food their inhabitants consume
• harvest and store for subsistence purposes rainfall and overland flow (the later where households have garden space)
• generate energy via photovoltaic or other system
• and form the basis, perhaps, for some home-based industry that produces goods or services for trade with others through LETS-like systems or as part of the informal or formal economies.

Local government, though in still-too-few cases, has made a start on educating people in these basic skills. Some offer workshops and courses in sustainable living where participants pick up largely forgotten skills in what Rob Hopkins, spokesman for the Transition movement, calls ‘skill-up for powerdown’ — growing food, storing water, producing home energy and other like things. Some councils facilitate the setting up of community food gardens and farmers’ markets. Others install photovoltaic systems on their buildings.

These things are not done as some deliberate policy of popular skilling-up but because they are components of the green technology model, the most popular model of sustainability, and because it is compatible with local government policy and practice for ameliorating and adapting to climate change. This motivation does not matter, of course, because such initiatives smooth the way to a earth stewardship society and have a firm place within it.

Both idea and template

Future Scenarios will no doubt be criticised because it will be seen to offer little option other than the evolution of earth stewardship societies.

Green technology advocates might feel a little chargrined that their preferred future might be only a transitional form between the present and the future. That is understandable, because much of the search for solutions to impending global trends focuses on technological fixes even though some proposing this foresee a less growth-oriented, perhaps even an economically steady state society emerging.

It is in discussing these different models that Future Scenarios provides a service. The book, and the workshops David offers as a means of exploring the topic more fully, introduce a sophistication to permaculture design that is not always present in its popular forms. In doing so, David once again offers permaculture a new lease on life as an applied technology for a community-based response to climate change and peak oil that complements that being developed by the transition initiative movement and that offers opportunities to the more innovative permaculture and sustainability, community-based organisations that are capable of addressing those parts of society outside their usual sphere of influence.

David Holmgren

IT WAS A BUSY FEW DAYS in Sydney for David Holmgren and his son, Oliver. First came David’s appearance at Randwick City Council’s annual Ecoliving Fair, followed next day with a full-day workshop and an appearance that evening at a TransitionSydney Cafe Conversation.

Many readers of this blog will know that David is a co-originator of the permaculture design system, which he and Bill Mollison unleashed on the world in 1978 through the pages of Permaculture One. David focused his efforts over successive years on the development of his Hepburn property, Melliodora, and marked his return to public prominence with the publication of Permaculture-Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability.

The writer of this report hosts Conversation With Authors, which is a regular event at the Ecoliving Fair, the intention of which is to introduce the authors and their ideas to the public and for the public to engage with the authors in conversation. It provided the opportunity for David to discuss his new book, Future Scenarios, however the discussion ranged far and wide around the general topic of sustainability.

Appearing with David was:

• Dr Mark Diesendorf from the Institute for Environmental Studies at UNSW; Mark has written the recently-released book, Climate Action
• Rosemary Morrow, the noted permaculture educator who lives in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, who recently produced A Good Home Forever and who  brought her unique variety of down-to-earth practical wisdom
• and Victorian permaculture designer and co-author of the Permaculture Diary and Permaculture Calendar, David Arnold.

Authors at the Ecoliving Fair, from left: David Holmgren; Rosemary Morrow; David Arnold; Russ Grayson (program host).

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Educating the educators

The one-day workshop attracted participants from councils, community organisations and others

Monday dawned much less windy than Sunday and, by 9am, a total of 35 people had gathered at Randwick Community Centre for a day-long workshop based on David’s Future Scenarios.

The day was organised by Randwick City Council’s Sustaining The City team through Council’s Sustainability Education Officer, Fiona Campbell. Attending were local government sustainability and environmental education staff, sustainability educators from community organisations, a leading, local climate change advocate associated with the local Green Church and a number of individuals engaged in sustainability education activities including consultants, two architects, two members of TransitionSydney, an engineer and small businesspeople.

The material was found challenging, but feedback on the day and over successive days indicates that it opened new avenues of thinking.

The day’s tasty food was supplied by no-waste caterers, O-Organics, with fruit from Sydney Food Connect.

Transition at the cafe

The day event complete, it was time to head over to Glebe for the TransitionSydney Cafe Conversation with David and Oliver.

Held at the Fair Trade Cafe, this was another of TransitionSydney’s successful Cafe Conversations which were set up so that local people involved in sustainability, permaculture and transition activities have the opportunity to meet innovators from out of town as well as those from the city. The Cafe Conversations are essentially networking events in which attendees have the opportunity to meet each other and to talk informally with innovators. Previous innovators appearing at TransitionSydney Cafe conversations include:

• Dick Copeman, education coordinator at Brisbane’s Northey Street City Farm
• Michael Shuman, US, economist and attorney, employee of the US Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, local economics advocate and author of the Smallmart Revolution
• Robert Pekin, coordinator of Brisbane’s Food Connect CSA (community supported agriculture).

Cafe Conversations are not presentations of the guest’s ideas, rather, they are informal events providing a chance to get to know the innovators. Consequently, David and Oliver spoke about how they became involved in permaculture and sustainability initiatives and, following this, attendees had the change to engage them in conversation.

It was good to get to know Oliver, who assisted David at the workshop with administrative matters. He is deliberately seeking the experiences that will inform his role in life and has a keen interest in photography, with which he and the writer of this report had more than a few conversations. No way will Oliver be overshadowed by his father’s reputation as the leading thinker in the permaculture design system.

New rational for permaculture design

David Arnold (left) discuuses his work with Conversations With Authors host, Russ Grayson, at the Randwick Ecoliving Fair.

David seems to be repositioning the permaculture design system as an applied response to the challenging global trends of peak oil and climate change, a response to be implemented at the community scale.

Into that mix, Rosemary Morrow threw the declining fresh water reserve on which food production and so much else depends. At the Conversation With Authors, Rosemary challenged David, saying that she thinks that water will be of equal importance to progressively declining and higher priced oil in the near future.

David’s approach to permaculture may represent a shift in the way it is focused because it takes the design system beyond many of its popular manifestations and applies it to developing local solutions to the major challenges. Were this to be further developed, it could provide a filter on relevant technologies, practices and ideas to emphasise those of greater social value while not ignoring individual and household initiatives in sustainable living.

His goal is what he describes as an ‘earth steward’ society, which may be eventually reached through the current trend towards a ‘green technology’ society. These concepts are explored in his book, Future Scenarios.

Tiring they might have been for those organising them, these two days with David and Oliver were inspiring for those in attendance.

Read a review of Future Scenarios.