Post Carbon Institute

By Bill McKibben, posted Feb 22, 2012:

The fight over the Keystone Pipeline began in earnest last spring, when James Hansen at NASA pointed out that heavily tapping the Canadian tarsands would mean it was “essentially game over” for the climate. Since planetary destruction is what even the dimmest analyst might describe as a less than optimal policy outcome, the oil industry and its allies in Congress have since done everything they can think of to change the subject.

First the pipeline became a jobs project - until the one study not funded by Transcanada showed it might kill as many jobs as it would create. Now even the pipeline company says permanent employees will number “in the hundreds.”

Next it became an energy security issue - until a look at refinery contracts made clear the oil was to be refined and shipped overseas.

Let me predict the next talking point right now: with gas prices rising, the pipeline will let Americans fill up for less.

This is nonsense on many fronts, most of all because the price is oil is fundamentally set on global markets. As the Congressional Research Service pointed out in late January, when there’s trouble in places like the Straits of Hormuz, the price of oil goes up for everyone and Keystone will make no difference, since the oil market is “globally integrated’; it’s not like Exxon offers a home-country discount to American motorists.   But in the case of the Keystone pipeline, it turns out there’s a special twist. At the moment, there’s an oversupply of tarsands crude in the Midwest, which has depressed gas prices there. If the pipeline gets built so that crude can easily be sent overseas, that excess will immediately disappear and gas prices for 15 states across the middle of the country will suddenly rise. Says who? Says the companies trying to build the thing. Transcanada Pipeline’s rationale for investors, and their testimony to Canadian officials, included precisely this point: removing the “oversupply’ and the resulting “price discount” would raise their returns by $2 to $4 billion a year.
   

According to the National Wildlife Federation, that would translate to about $3 for an average 15-gallon fill-up - as independent energy economist Philip Verleger put it, with Keystone the industry “will be able to use its market power to raise the heavy crude price to Midwest refiners above the level that would prevail in a competitive market.” Certainly that’s been the case in the past: Stephen Kretzmann of Oil Change International recently calculated that "over the last two decades the U.S. has almost tripled the amount of Canadian oil we've imported into the US, and during that time average gasoline price has more than tripled.” The Midwest states most at risk of higher prices if Keystone is built include some of the hardest hit economically in the country: Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin.

In other words, the Keystone Pipeline is among other things an attempt to manipulate prices - which may not come as too great a shock to an American public used to watching the fossil fuel industry manipulate prices.

If we actually wanted to insulate our economy from the effects of oil price increases, we’d need to do a couple of things. One is slow speculation by hedge funds and their ilk in oil markets. Business Week reported this week that $11 billion in betting money has entered oil markets “on the long side” in recent weeks - i.e., people trying to cash in by squeezing the price higher. The last time gas went above $4 a gallon, in the summer of 2008, oil executives later admitted that about a quarter of the price hike was the direct result of this speculating frenzy.

But the longer-term fix is the obvious one: get our economy off fossil fuel. Every hybrid car we build, every solar panel we erect, every windmill that arises - each takes us closer to the day when we can tell Iran, Exxon, Venezuela, Shell, Transcanada and the rest exactly what they can do with their oil. The less we use oil, the less they can use us.

That reduction, of course, is the real nightmare scenario for those companies and countries. It’s why, in Washington and around the world, they’ve blocked every attempt to really deal with climate change and the other troubles fossil fuel produces. They figure - so far rightly - that they can buy enough politicians to keep their record profits flowing. But 800,000 Americans sent the Senate messages opposing Keystone in a single day last week; it’s a sign that people are starting to wake up, which is what you’d expect after the year with the most weather disasters in our history.

Maybe manipulated rises in the price of gas will have the same effect. It’s time to get angry, and for once to get angry at the right people: the fossil fuel industry has already damaged enough lives.

Originally published February 21, 2012 at The Hill

By Rob Hopkins, posted Feb 21, 2012:

Sometimes the simplest ideas carry with them, when thought through, such a powerful taste of how the future could be that they are quite irresistible. One such idea has led me to spend the last couple of days immersed in trying to find out as much as I could about it, and it has been time well spent, which I want to share with you here. The idea came in a post on the City Farmers website, entitled ‘Brixton Beer’. The idea is a simple one: rather than breweries in London buying their hops from wherever they can source them (sometimes as far afield as New Zealand), people across London grow hops in their back gardens, on their patios and balconies, allotments and community gardens, which are then used by local brewers. As they put it, “we want to grow hops across a network of individual and community gardens, get local breweries to make beer out of them and drink the result. Simple!” As someone involved in efforts to create a Totnes Community Brewery, the idea held huge promise and intrigue and warranted further exploration.

Brixton Beer

I started my investigations by catching up with Helen Steer from City Farmers. She told me that the idea had first emerged at the AGM of Incredible Edible Lambeth in October 2011, inspired by the ‘Brockwell Bake’ where people grow urban wheat on allotments which is then milled to make local bread. She met with the Independent Brewers Association in London who were very enthusiastic, in fact as she put it “they bit our hands off!” when the idea of their buying and using these locally grown hops was raised.

One of the unexpected side effects they have found is that the idea acts as a great way to get men involved in gardening, a nice antidote to the fact that the majority of people involved in community gardens apparently tend to be women. The plan is to pilot the idea over the 2012 growing season in a number of gardens across London, and to produce a starter pack of rootstock and tools, as well as instructional videos for backyard hop growing. The idea then is to gather the harvest together in September and to brew a beer from the hops, which would then be shared at a harvest party. Longer term plans include the possible launch of a Brixton Brewery. Here is the longer interview I did with Helen (I am trying an approach in this post of mixing audio with writing, and making my research available for you to go into more depth if you’re interested: I hope it works for you):

The idea in practice

This is a wonderful and very attractive idea, especially as a way of making a community brewery truly feel like a community brewery. But is it practical? What are the obstacles such a project might encounter? Well it turns out it’s already being tried in at least one brewery. I spoke to Greg Pilley of the Stroud Brewery, and it turns out he’s been growing hops in his garden (40 plants), as have a number of other people close to the brewery. On one day in September, the hops are harvested, brought to the brewery, and a pale ale called ‘Brewers Garden’ is created which everyone involved then gets 9 pints of when it is ready.

Stroud Brewery describes it thus:

“These hops have been grown by members of our ‘Hop Club’ in their gardens and allotments. The hop bines were harvested on Sunday 5th September 2010, and members congregated at the brewery to hand pick the hop cones, and enjoy a few ales. Hops are dried in our home made ‘oast’ and go into this years brew of ‘Brewers Garden’”.

 

Starting with the basics: a crash course in hops

Let’s go back to the beginning and have a quick crash course in hops. One great place to start is with an episode of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Food Programme’ that looked at the revival of the UK hop industry. It would appear that the first hops to arrive in the UK turned up in 1524 when Flemish planters arrived and started growing them here. Initially they were grown for their medicinal and herbal properties. They were introduced into brewing as a preservative and also to introduce a bitterness to the beers, replacing the use of herbs and other bittering agents, such as bog myrtle, that was used up to that point.

The role of hops in brewing is two-fold. According to Ray Daniels in ‘Designing Great Beers’:

Hops provide bitterness to counteract the sweetness of malt, this making the beverage more palatable. They also provide some antibacterial properties that at one time increased the safety and potability of beer. Today this quality still aids the preservation of beer. Hops also contribute more than just bitterness. Although it seems incredible that a single element of one plant could do so much, hops also contribute appealing flavours and aromas to been when handled in the proper way by the brewer … hops are indeed a source of tremendous richness and variety in beer flavour”.

 

I spoke to Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust (who has produced an essential fact sheet about hops), who told me that traditional varieties grow up to 6 metres tall, but that there are dwarf varieties which grow to 2 metres which are better suited to back gardens. According to Martin, there is only one dwarf hop that is commercially available, called ‘First Gold’. Here’s my full interview with him:

Dr Peter Darby: outstanding in his field (sorry)

At the moment, almost all the hops grown in the UK are either grown in Kent (as was documented in George Orwell’s fantastic “Keep the Aspidistras Flying”) or in Herefordshire. I spoke to Dr Peter Darby, who is in charge of the National Hop Association for Wye Hops, and is one of the UK’s leading experts on hop breeding, and asked him why that was. Does it indicate that those are the places with the best soils and the best microclimates for hop growing? Apparently not. It turns out that with the industrialisation of brewing, and the demand for large amounts of beer that was generated by the British Empire, that large workforces of pickers were required, so the large urban centres of London and the West Midlands provided that, and it fitted in nicely with the picking of other crops, most notably apples. Prior to the British Empire hugely increasing demand for beer, hops were grown in most parts of the country.

He told me that the UK hop industry is now relatively stable after years of decline, due mainly to a shift from growing hops to add bitterness to growing hops to add flavour. This has been helped by the emergence of a strong microbrewing culture and more craft brewers. About a quarter of hops grown in the UK are exported, and the UK imports about a third of what is used here. Current production, were it all to be retained for UK brewing, would only be enough to meet two-thirds of demand. Most brewers like to use a mixture of UK hops and imported hops, because, he told me, imported hops grown in sunnier climes, can give beers a ‘high impact flavour’. Traditionally though, they were grown in every county in the UK, and could be again. Here is the interview I did with Dr. Darby:

The advantages and disadvantages of growing urban hops

In some ways, growing hops in ‘patchwork farms’, that is, a number of gardens across a city, is ideal. According to Martin Crawford, the two main challenges that affect hop growing, aphids and mildrew, will sweep through hops on a field scale, but in a more dispersed context, in a more biodiverse setting, should be less of an issue. They can be grown in containers, although they would need to be pretty deep containers as hops need a deep soil. Again though, growing them in containers could actually be a benefit, as it prevents them from suckering, something they are prone to.

Also, given their inclination to climb and to clamber, being able to grow up buildings and other structures, so long as they are accessible for harvesting, can be an advantage. Dr. Darby added that hops are well suited to urban growing because they are classed as horticulture, rather than agriculture. He also stated that hops are a plant that needs quite a lot of attention, something that is easier to provide on a small scale. He added another dwarfing variety that would be suited to urban growing, called Golden Tassels, or ‘Diva’. There are others too, but they are fiercely protected, and can only be grown under licence from the National Hop Association.

Dr Darby cautioned, however, against the idea that growing hops is an easy thing for the amateur to pick up. The pests and diseases to which hops are vulnerable can be dealt with, but knowing what you are looking for and how to deal with it takes some training. City Farmers are already assembling their team of volunteer hop growers, and have been surprised by the levels of interest, and the quarters from which it is coming. One of their local councillors has asked be become one of the growers. It will be interesting to see the degree to which the skills required to to prevent pests and diseases trashing their first harvest can be communicated through videos and leaflets.

Another key challenge revolves around drying herbs on a community scale. On the large scale, hops are dried in huge warehouses where warm air is blown through them. According to Dr Darby, hops must either be used straight off the plant (what is known as “green hopping”) or dried within about 4 hours of being picked. This is to avoid them becoming musty or losing a lot of their volatile oils. To dry them they need to be warmed at 30-60°C, in a long steady dry (10-12 hours), with a high air throughflow in a darkened space in order to bring their moisture down from 80% to 10%.

On the home/community scale this is tricky. It is too low a temperature for the domestic oven, and more like a greenhouse on a hot day (hardly reliable when you have only 4 hours to get the drying underway! Martin Crawford suggests a blacked-out polytunnel or the use of an attic (this is September we’re talking about remember, attics should be pretty hot then). He also states that building a thermostatically controlled medium-sized drier shouldn’t be too complicated. Greg Pilley at Stroud Brewery dries some, but only on the domestic scale. Here is my interview with Greg:

Another challenge for brewers using green hops is that as brewers they are, in effect, flying blind, in that hops usually arrive having been tested for bitterness and so it is not clear what they are introducing into their brew. For this reason, when Greg Pilley brews his ‘Brewer’s Garden’, he still has to use some bought-in hops for the bitterness, and the garden-grown green ones for flavour.

Drying hops at home. Photo courtesy of GreenWellies/flickr

Another practicality is how much could actually be grown in urban gardens. Greg grows 40 plants in his garden, which he reckons yield him 5kg of green hops, which would dry to 3kg. Each year his brewery requires 600kg of hops for its brewing, by which calculation he would need 200 other gardeners doing the same if he were to be drying and using Stroud-grown hops. Do-able but ambitious. The beauty of hops is that, as a climber, you can still grow other things underneath them, and allow them to clamber up buildings or ramble through trees. You can also, as Martin pointed out, eat the young shoots, lightly steamed, they are sometimes referred to as “the poor man’s asparagus”.

So, should the hop fields come to town?

Looked at in isolation, encouraging lots of untrained amateurs to take on planting potentially demanding crop in a dispersed way across a city doesn’t perhaps seem like the brightest idea. However, placed in the context of creating a community growers, sharing their experiences, focused around a community brewery initiative in which they have an interest, it starts to make a lot more sense. As a way of land use and gardening helping to build social capital, it is very valuable. As a story to unpin and help promote a social enterprise it is fantastic. Me, I’m intrigued, and think that certainly for our initiative, this will be a central part of what we are planning to do.

Originally published February 20, 2012 at Transition Culture.

By Sandra Postel, posted Feb 20, 2012:

As the human population has climbed past seven billion, and the consumption per person of everything from burgers to blue jeans has risen inexorably, the finiteness of Earth’s freshwater is becoming ever more apparent.

It takes water to make everything, and the explosion of demand for all manner of products is draining rivers, shrinking lakes, and depleting aquifers.   Consider this: on average it takes 2,700 liters (713 gallons) to make a cotton shirt and 9,800 liters (2600 gallons) to make a pair of blue jeans.  The cotton crops growing in farmers’ fields consume most of that water; a smaller share is used in the factories that churn out the clothes.   On any given day we’re likely wearing more than 15,000 liters (~4,000 gallons) worth of water.  And if we slip on a pair of leather loafers, well, add another 8,000 liters (~2,100 gallons).  It takes a lot of water to grow the grain to feed the cow whose skin is turned into shoes.   Such figures might not matter if there was abundant water whenever and wherever we needed it – or if water had a substitute.  But water is limited, and there’s no substitute for it.  We need water to quench our thirst, to grow our food, to cool electric power plants, and to make cars, computers and all those cotton shirts. And that’s why the size of humanity’s water footprint – and of yours and mine – matters.   In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers Arjen Hoekstra and Mesfin Mekonnen of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, have made the most detailed estimate to date of the scale and patterns of humanity’s water consumption.   This is a tricky and complicated task.  Using a high level of spatial resolution, the researchers tabulated all the water from both rainfall and irrigation that’s consumed in making goods and services for the global population. To complete the picture, they added in the volume of water needed to assimilate the pollution generated along the way.  They calculated the annual average global footprint for 1996-2005, the most recent ten-year period for which the necessary data were available.   The result is a large number – 9,087 billion cubic meters (2,400 trillion gallons) per year.   That’s a volume equivalent to the annual flow of five hundred Colorado Rivers. Agriculture accounts for a whopping 92 percent of that global water footprint.  Not only are crops naturally thirsty, we’re feeding more than a third of the global grain harvest to livestock to satisfy our desires for meat and other animal products. Added up, the average beef burger takes 2,400 liters (634 gallons) of water to make. In fact diets heavy in meat largely explain why the average water footprint for the United States is twice the global average.  U. S. consumers eat 4.5 times more meat than the global average.   One of the most interesting findings of Hoekstra and Mekonnen is that one-fifth of humanity’s water footprint travels across national borders in the form of “virtual water” – the water embedded in products that are traded between countries. For Egypt, Israel, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other water-scarce nations, the ability to externalize their water consumption by importing wheat and other thirsty grains allows them to save their scarce water for industrial production and other higher-value uses.   Virtual water trade over the period 1996-2005. Only the biggest flows are shown. Source: Hoekstra and Mekonnen, PNAS early edition, 2012.   Yet some water-stressed countries export a great deal of virtual water to other countries. For example, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, the Central Asian nations of the Aral Sea basin export 96 percent of the cotton they produce. Large-scale cotton production in this region over the last half century has caused the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake, to lose 80 percent of its water.  Much of the lake bed is now a salty wasteland.   The United States, blessed with a vast area of highly productive rain-fed cropland, is the world’s biggest exporter of virtual water, sending millions of tons of grain to countries around the world.  Its biggest virtual water imports come from China’s Yangtze basin, which produces a wide variety of goods for the U.S. market. So what is a growing population to do to live within water’s limits and keep rivers flowing?   The short answer: consumers can alter their diets and buying habits to shrink their water footprints, and producers can use water more efficiently in making their products.   As corporations grow concerned about the risks water scarcity poses to their bottom lines, many are taking a careful look at their supply chains with an eye toward conserving water. Unilever, for instance, has helped Tanzanian tea farmers shift to drip irrigation so its Lipton tea bags have a lower water footprint. Patagonia, retailer of outdoor apparel, has gone a step further. Its eye-opening “Don’t Buy this Jacket” advertisement and its Common Threads Initiative to motivate companies and consumers to reduce, repair, reuse, recycle and re-imagine our world are helping to motivate water stewardship.   There are dozens more examples of organizations offering practical ways to shrink the size of our water footprints – from Meatless Mondays to the Alliance for Water Efficiency.   The movement to live prosperously while reducing our impact on the planet’s precious waters is beginning.  The pace at which it unfolds is up to us.   Sandra Postel is director of the Global Water Policy Project and lead water expert for National Geographic’s Freshwater Initiative.  She is the author of several acclaimed books, including the award-winning Last Oasis, a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment, and one of the “Scientific American 50.”

Image credit: Dry river bed in Adelaide, South Australia by Michael Coghlan/flickr

Originally posted at National Geographic

By Rob Hopkins, posted Feb 17, 2012: ‘Breathing new life into the concept of resilience’: the notes from my ‘Four Thought’ talk

Here are the notes of the talk I gave that went out just now on Radio 4′s ‘Four Thought’ programme. You can download the podcast of the programme here (which also includes the Q&A that followed as a bonus feature). I hope you enjoy(ed) it.

“It’s generally considered unwise to use props when speaking on radio, especially on your first appearance on Radio 4. However, this talk will contain two props, and here’s the first. It’s a £10 note from Brixton in London, but it’s a Brixton Pound. Rather than the Queen’s head, it features David Bowie’s. I’ll tell you more about it later, but it matters because it leads us into what I want to discuss this evening, the question of resilience.

The former Crystal Palace manager Iain Dowie once described resilience as ‘bouncebackability’. In our own lives, and in the lives of those around us, when we encounter difficulties, we either respond with resilience, or we don’t. Sometimes we are able to adapt to enforced changes, to ‘go with the flow’ as it were, and at other times everything falls apart. This applies to us as individuals, as communities, and as entire economies. The degree to which we are resilient matters very much.

But one key question is “resilient to what?” There’s a conventional view of resilience, but I take a very different view. The UK Cabinet Office argues that it is up to each community to determine what they build resilience to, but then sets out what it sees as being the key areas of risk the nation faces: floods, pandemics, terrorist attacks. In this context, resilience is a very practical matter of ensuring we have enough medicines, emergency responders and sandbags in the event of a disaster. In this context, resilience is about the ability to adapt. It’s about having the flexibility to get back on our feet.

I take a different perspective though, and what I am presenting in this talk is a kind of ‘Resilience 2.0’ (to use computer language). The World Economic Forum, whose job it is to advise governments on risk, are clear about what they see as being the key ones: climate change, volatility of energy prices and the economic crisis. These require very different, and more far-reaching responses, responses that go far beyond sandbags.

Here’s what I think we need to be building resilience to. Oil prices have quadrupled since 2003, and prices are becoming increasingly volatile. At the same time, North Sea oil production fell 22.5% last year, a record fall. The cost of importing oil into the EU has risen from $280bn in 2010 to over $400bn in 2011, and it is clear that the price of oil will strangle any possibility of a revival of economic growth. Cheap energy underpins most of the goods and services that we depend on in our everyday lives. You can’t do economic growth without cheap energy, however many bailouts we throw at it. The two go hand in hand.

Without cheap energy, globalisation goes into reverse. If petrol and diesel becoming more expensive teaches us anything, it is that far away really is quite far away. 5 years ago, I found myself deeply worried about these issues, and about the kind of world I was leaving for my children. I wondered whether in seeing resilience just as something we do in order to be prepared for a crisis, we were missing a trick: that we might instead see it as an opportunity. How might our settlements look if we began to think in terms of resilient food, resilient energy, resilient economies? Might this shift in thinking actually contain the potential for an economic and cultural renaissance for the places we live? It felt to me to be a powerful question.

So, I looked around for people to work with to kick off an experiment. It is clear, when the government argues that the supply of cheap oil to the UK isn’t even an issue for another 20 years, that they are not going to take the lead here. So, myself and a few others set out a simple template, a simple set of principles and tools, and more importantly, an invitation; an invitation to be part of an historic experiment. You may have heard of the result, Transition initiatives, or, as they are more popularly known ‘Transition Towns’. The ‘towns’ bit is a bit of a misnomer: there are now Transition villages, cities, islands, hamlets, streets, schools. It has spread like wildfire. There are now many hundreds in the UK, and thousands around the world, in 34 countries. The idea at its heart is that of ‘resilience-building as economic development’, that by keeping things local we can build richer, stronger and more resilient communities. It is inspired in part by my friend, the economist David Fleming who died last year, who said:

“localisation stands at best at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative”.

Many people have ideas, theories, models. Those who have helped to shape this approach have been fortunate enough to have see it gain some traction, indeed to go viral around the world. It has been a self-organised process, and like Open Source software, has been shaped, refined, deepened and evolved by those who pick it up and try it out. It’s not our idea any more, and that’s how it should be. It’s an exploration of what ‘engaged optimism’ looks like as the driver for change.

The idea that making our communities more resilient is the opportunity to also make them more skilled, more diverse, more grounded, better connected, more entrepreneurial, is an idea whose time has come. Indeed, when I look around myself today, as the economic unravelling gathers increasing pace, it often looks to me like the only viable idea on the table. I want to tell you some stories of initiatives you may not have heard of but which have arisen from Transition groups around the country and which I think hold the seed of our economic future, one which still trades, but mostly in things that can’t be produced closer to home.

A few months ago I stood in a field on the edge of Norwich as the sun went down, visiting Farmshare, a Community Supported Agriculture project started by Transition Norwich, from an idea that emerged at their launch three years earlier. The farm has 70 members, and it produces local, seasonal produce for them. They are recreating the model that supported us until relatively recently, farms on the edges of our towns and cities, sited close to where people live. It has been a steep learning curve, but here they are, modelling in practice a key part of a resilient food system, learning a huge amount by doing so, and building a strong sense of community at the same time.

And now to our Brixton Pound. 3 years ago, I stood in Lambeth Town Hall, watching the launch of the Brixton Pound, (“money that sticks to Brixton”). It is a local currency that operates only in that part of South London. The idea is that it is a tool that helps to plug the leaks in the local economy, supporting local businesses and traders. Brixton Pounds cannot be taken out of Brixton as they instantly lose their value, they can only recirculate. They cannot be traded internationally, nor banked offshore in tax havens. During that event, the then leader of the local council told the packed hall “I want the Brixton Pound to become the currency of choice for Brixton”. More recently they launched a new set of notes and also an innovative system where you can, believe it or not, pay for your shopping by text. The next development is that later this year, the Bristol Pound will be launched, a combination of pay-by-text and printed notes for the whole city of Bristol, keenly supported by the City Council. It is an experiment in what a resilient economy looks like in practice that could have huge repercussions elsewhere.

At an event in Bath a while ago, a member of Transition Bath excitedly told me of their very ambitious plans for starting a community energy company. Many months later, Bath and West Community Energy held its first share launch. They raised over £700,000 in shares and have plans for a range of renewables in the city and its surroundings, and have begun with installing solar photovoltaics on the roofs of local schools.

So, to my second prop. This is a bottle of beer, called ‘Sunshine Ale’, brewed by Harveys Brewery in Lewes in Sussex. It was brewed to celebrate the installation of 544 solar PV panels on their roof by the Ouse Valley Energy Services Company, one of the spin-offs from Transition Town Lewes. They raised over £300,000 in shares from local people. We are talking here about new renewable energy, but owned by, and for the benefit of, the communities affected by it.

In November 2009 I went to Slaithwaite in Yorkshire for a coming-together of Transition initiatives from across the north of England. On a noticeboard at the back of the hall was a poster that read “a fresh idea: a new community-owned fresh local food shop for Slaithwaite”. The local greengrocer was about to close, and members of Marsden & Slaithwaite Transition Town and others were considering taking it on as a community business. Shortly afterwards, they successfully raised £15,000 in shares from local people to do so, and The Green Valley Grocer was born. Business is thriving. The shop has acted as a catalyst, inspiring the creation of a local food-growing co-operative which now supplies the shop, and more recently they, along with other local food businesses, announced ‘A declaration of independence from the global food system’! Although perhaps a tad premature, it highlights the scale of their ambition.

What we are seeing happen in communities across the country is deeply exciting. It is enterprise, but it is enterprise in a context. They are implementing what Lloyds wrote in a report about why businesses need to take oil depletion into consideration. They wrote:

“Energy security is now inseparable from the transition to a low-carbon economy and businesses plans should prepare for this new reality”.

They are going beyond this though, and seeing this change of direction as a huge opportunity. They are not just creating standalone one-off businesses, rather businesses emerging to meet what they see as a very real need to build community resilience. They are not hoping that the challenges outlined by the World Economic Forum will simply go away, they are, without waiting for permission, rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it.

Another key function that many of these enterprises offer is the ability for people to invest inwards into their communities. I visit many of these communities, for their launch events, or other public events they have organised. These are ordinary people, coming together in extraordinary times, to do extraordinary things. To know and meet these people has been one of the greatest honours of my life.

The recent Review by Mary Portas which looked at the future of the UK’s High Streets stated:

“a pound spent in a retailer with a localised supply chain that employs local people has far greater domestic impact than a pound spent in a supermarket or national chain. What’s more, out-of-town developments are often presented as major new sources of employment, but we need to recognise that this ‘job creation’ is often just job displacement”.

Herein lies the tension. The current push for economic growth at all costs fails to determine between job creation and job displacement. It also fails to distinguish between strategies that build community resilience and strategies that undermine it. There is a Big Idea here I think, a vital one, and I hope I have managed to excite you with its possibilities this evening.

I often end talks I give with Arundhati Roy’s quote “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing”. I think we might adapt her quote, so that, in the context of this bottom-up drive for more resilient communities, communities better prepared for uncertain times, it is not only a case of hearing another world breathing, but being able to see her around us, already setting up local businesses, reviving her local economy, setting up bakeries, breweries, food hubs, mentoring scores of young people with business ideas, attracting inward social investment finance, creating the models whereby people can invest in their communities and see them being strengthened and supported.

That’s why I get out of bed in the morning, because I feel that the potential in our getting this right is so exquisite that it’s all I can do, and because the grim predictability of what will happen if we do nothing is just unthinkable, especially in relation to the challenge of climate change. If we are able to turn things around on the scale we need to turn them around on, to replace vulnerability, carbon intensity and fragility with resilience, it will be an achievement our children will tell tales about, sing songs about. I hope I am there to hear them. Thank you.

Many of these stories are told in more detail in The Transition Companion and in the forthcoming film ‘In Transition 2.0′.

Originally published February 16, 2012 at Transition Culture.