Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

22 Jun 2011
Why localisation is a key part of the answer. An article from today’s 
Guardian online…
http://transitionculture.org/2011/06/22/why-localisation-is-a-large-part-of-the-answer-an-article-from-todays-guardian-online/
Transition Network empowers local groups to promote sustainable issues by Rob 
Hopkins

Last week it emerged that the Department of Energy and Climate Change, whose 
official position remains that “we do not have any contingency plans specific 
to a peak in oil production”, was actually stating in internal documents 
released under the Freedom of Information Act that “it is not possible to 
predict with any accuracy exactly when or why oil production will peak”.

Energy bills are going nowhere other than up, with knock-on effects across 
the economy. The fossil fuels of the future will be dirtier, more expensive 
and from less accessible places. At the same time, the need to decarbonise is 
urgent. The world’s carbon emissions increased in 2010 by a record amount, in 
spite of many of the world’s economies being in recession, and 19 countries 
recorded their hottest ever temperatures.

In March, Mervyn King, Governor Bank of England, said: “This is not like an 
ordinary recession where you lose output and get it back quickly. You may not 
get it back for many years, if ever, and that is a big, long-run loss of 
living standards for all people in this country.” When something isn’t 
working, it behoves us to question whether a different approach might be more 
appropriate.

One such approach, spreading around the world with great vigour, is the 
Transition movement. It suggests that within the challenges of peak oil, 
climate change, and our economic troubles lies a huge opportunity. In the 
same way that vast amounts of cheap fossil fuels made globalisation possible, 
the end of the age of cheap oil will inevitably put globalisation into 
reverse.

Yet, at a time where most communities across the country are scratching their 
heads and wondering where the economic development of the future is going to 
come from, it is argued that a significant and meaningful shift to thinking 
in terms of localisation contains a large part of the answer.

While the government speaks of localism, a devolution of power to local 
government or local communities, Transition focuses on localisation, on 
meeting more core local needs from things produced more locally, and on 
increased local ownership. Perhaps, Transition argues, we need to start 
thinking of localisation as economic development.

“Localisation as economic development.” It’s a phrase that contains a very 
big idea. At present, our local economies function like leaky buckets, into 
which pour wages, salaries, pensions and so on, but most of it pours back out 
again, through chain stores, supermarkets and so on, and its potential to 
make things happen is lost. Yet every outpouring is a potential local 
livelihood, local business, training opportunity. “Plugging the leaks”, as 
the New Economics Foundation calls it, has huge potential for economic 
regeneration, as well as for making communities more resilient in 
increasingly uncertain times.

So what are Transition groups doing on the ground in 2011 to make this 
happen? Lewes recently raised £307,000 from a community share launch which 
will create the UK’s first community solar-power station on the roof of a 
local brewery. Transition Town Kingston has set up a new food co-op 
delivering vegetable boxes to local households. Transition Norwich is 
building a new flour mill and new community farms, having carried out a 
strategic study called “Can Norwich feed itself?”

Transition Town Totnes, through its Transition Streets project, recently 
helped 500 local households reduce their carbon emissions by 1.5 tonnes each 
and build new social connections with neighbours, a project that was 
recognised with an Ashden Award last week. In Malvern, a Transition group 
known as the Gasketeers, is retrofitting the town’s historic gas lamps so 
they use 84% less gas, create no light pollution and need a fraction of the 
maintenance. The group plans next to set up an an anaerobic digestion scheme 
and run the lamps from local food waste. Portobello Transition Town (Pedal) 
in Edinburgh has set up a new Farmers’ Market and is planning the UK’s first 
community-owned urban wind turbine.

Ten Transition initiatives are now part of REconomy, a scheme run by 
Transition Network which offers them support to turn ideas into viable new 
social enterprises. This identifying of the new economic opportunities 
presented by localisation is seen as where all Transition initiatives go 
next. What would it look like if meaningful investment were to be brought in 
to support these emergent enterprises? If, as in San Francisco, urban 
planning regulations were changed to recognise intensive urban food 
production as being as valid a form of urban land use as, say, car parking or 
housing? How would the world around us start to change?

A short film soon to be released by Transition City Lancaster opens with a 
slow pan around the landscape of the city, with a commentary by a woman who 
talks from 2030 about living in the powered-down Lancaster of the future. 
“Work started this week removing the motorway” she reports. “The county 
council said ‘demolishing the M6 link will create thousands of jobs, return 
much-needed land to agriculture and improve food security and climate 
safety’.” While we may be sometime from the UK’s motorways being broken up to 
reclaim much-needed farmland, it beautifully captures how the decisionmaking 
and the everyday decisions of what Michael Klare calls “The Age of Extreme 
Energy” will be profoundly different from the age of cheap and easy energy 
that has shaped our lives.

The Transition movement is clearly not the only thing we need but, in 
acknowledging peak oil as a reality and designing and getting on with 
bottom-up solutions to it, it is way ahead of central government, whose 
official position is that we need not even start worrying for another 15-20 
years. A more localised future may feel like a huge shift, and indeed one 
might question whether it is even possible. However, as events accelerate 
ahead of us and our dependency on the cheap fuels that enable globalisation 
becomes a key vulnerability, it may well prove to be our most promising 
strategy.