"Living differently"

Molly Scott Cato MEP came hotfoot from a sitting of the European Parliament in Strasbourg to address the United Nations Association Gloucestershire County branch this evening. She addressed a packed Friends Meeting House on United Nations Day on the theme chosen for One World Week this year, "Living differently", and answered all the many questions her speech raised - and more besides.

It was an appropriate theme, she reflected, as "people in the South-West are already living differently" to those in other parts of the UK. More energy from wind power is generated in the South-West than in the whole of the rest of England put together, for instance. And the wish of so many to come here and to live more in harmony with nature was the likely reason she had been elected as an MEP in May this year, the first ever for the Green Party in this region.

While working in Brussels and Strasbourg for further harmony, Molly was deeply suspicious of the move towards "harmonisation" of regulation - and the fact this was being considered in secrecy. The proposed free trade agreement between the EU and the United States ("the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership") would, she thought, serve to emphasise the power of corporations over that of citizens: a combined effort was needed to prevent it coming into force, but it worried her, how few of the 751 MEPs truly "represented" the interests of those who had elected them.

Having been thrown in at the deep end in this Summer of conflicts (in Ukraine and elsewhere), she felt that, as a delegate to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly, she could make a positive contribution from her academic background. "We need to learn from the South," she maintained, warning that our imposition of carbon limits upon the poorest countries was seen as "neo-colonialist: we need to start with ourselves, and ask how we can share technologies and change our lifestyles." After all, it’s only in recent years that our (UK) total historic carbon contribution has been outstripped by that of the USA.

She ended by quoting Nelson Mandela, "To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." 

Professor Malcolm Evans OBE, chair of the UNA Gloucestershire, chaired the meeting and proposed the vote of thanks. A stimulating evening.

I wrote this for the Gloucestershire Echo, but they published instead one submitted on behalf of Transition Town Cheltenham. Fair enough, though I would have preferred to see a report on the “normal” news pages to one pigeon-holed in the paper’s green corner.

Kilcot

We drove to Kilcot on a garden visit this evening by the scenic route - Tirley, Hartpury, Kent's Green, Clifford's Mesne. It all looked very beautiful in the very warm late afternoon sunshine: you wouldn't want to rush. (Even on our way home much later, it was 22 degrees outside.)

We ate our picnic above Aston Ingham, just North of May Hill: our host at the nearby garden to which GOGG were invited had today received a load of wood from the trees being felled on its top. "What they should replace them with," he reflected, "is 100 wind turbines: it would become the most famous windfarm in the world."

Ken ran a successful garden centre business for many years: on selling it, like many in the same position, his emphasis switched from commerce to the environment. Besides making their own garden into a model of resilience, he and Ann, his wife, are powers behind Transition Newent. They are in the process of building an outside bread/pizza oven, intended to become a focus for weekly local community gatherings.

The pond is a bit small for a boat, but Ann recently made a coracle: it's covered with cowhide (and the cow's tail is preserved intact - like a bendy rudder).

Though he confessed to a sinful greenhouse full of non-organically grown tomatoes, Ken more than balances  things out with his composting, coppicing and comfrey: there's water harvesting, a willow temple and a meditation garden (with suitably restrained colour pallet). The wildflower meadow contains 57 species to the square metre. Onions and potatoes are on a four-year rotation - "no dig" in the larger section of the vegetable garden.

The last, Ken shares with the lovely Clare, a biodiversity expert with Natural England: her house lies adjacent.

An inspiring evening.

Thermal imaging

With the thermometer hovering around freezing, today was deemed a good day to try out Transition Town Cheltenham's new thermal imaging camera on our house. We therefore had the benefit of Matthew and Mike's expertise for two hours or more, while they pointed the lens this way and that, showing up where our warm air was disappearing faster than it should.

Tips we particularly noted: secondary glazing is more cost effective than brush strips around the sash windows. And we should put a silver foil panel behind our one radiator which is on an outside wall.

Ida enjoyed seeing the chickens photographed by the infrared camera!

Transition Town Cheltenham

I photographed this "Compassion" rose a month ago, and it's still blooming merrily, as it has been since the end of May - not just on and off, but continuously, or so it seems. Moreover, the raspberries are also still worth picking, just: we don't often have those till so late in the year. Certainly we have a mild spell just now: I've been planting broad beans today, without a coat on. St Martin's Little Summer?

This evening, I have been at the newly-refurbished Footsteps Café, watching some of the films made by our local Transition group, including the one about the edible garden just off the London Road: it has won prizes, I was pleased to learn, and there are plans to expand it for the 2013 season.

Incredible edible - 2

In the two months since my first visit to Transition Town Cheltenham's garden project in Sandford Park, things have happened - as can be seen from the photographs. Not only are the four beds full of useful produce - we are encouraged to help ourselves! - but they also look extremely attractive. And people were definitely interested - several stopped whilst I was there.

"Tactile Love Propaganda"

Artist Kate Lepper gave this title to her residency at Meantime, which Caroline and I visited this morning. The words of her beautifully assembled work are "There Is A Cure For Capitalism Inside Your Imagination That Wants To Get Out."

We were glad to have Kate to ourselves for some "capitalism" discussion up in the gallery - and glad also to meet Chie Konishi, who has written - perceptively - about Kate's project.

Meantime represents something very valuable for Cheltenham - including an escape from the link that binds art to money. (It's a nice irony that it butts up against that symbol of Cheltenham materialism, the Brewery complex, whose jobsworth minion prevented us parking our bikes on its precious private pavement!) The question is, how to get more people to engage with Meantime's challenges. Is there, I wonder, potential synergy between its commitment to art for the community and Transition Cheltenham's vision of a resilient town, with renewed heart and soul?

Global Footsteps

I went to the plant sale at the FootSteps Cafe this morning. The cafe is part of the Rendezvous Society charity, which encourages inter-cultural understanding and sustainable living: it's flourished in Cheltenham for more than 25 years now. This wind and rain has wrought havoc with our roses, and the damp weather generally seems to have done for our beans, hardly any of which have come up. (Next year, I shall revert to planting them under glass, rather than direct into the open.) I half thought I might find some replacement bean plants, but came away only with a few items for Caroline's border - all healthy-looking specimens, unlike some of those to be found in commercial garden centres. The High Street gives the Cafe a good shop window, but in due course it will be moving back to its less well-positioned home in Portland Street. Meanwhile, the coffee is excellent; and good for Lorraine and other Transtion-ers for organising a successful plant sale!

Incredible edible

Malcolm was watering the new Transition Town Cheltenham garden in Sandford Park when I biked past this lunchtime. After only a short while, it's looking good, and people were pausing to look at Jacqui's boards whilst I talked to Malcolm. As it fills out, more people will take notice - and (let's hope) be inspired to think of growing some vegetables of their own. I gather the original request to the Council was for some space in Imperial Gardens, which would have given the project a rather higher profile; but this spot isn't at all a bad one, being just off the High Street. It's good there's water close at hand. Monday evenings are the time to go down there to help, if you have any spare time then.

In Transit

I did a double take when sighting this unattended Transitional form of transport in Cheltenham's High Street yesterday, its trailer sporting a pile of old newspapers, a rope, a model car, a bucket, a petrol can, a sheepskin...

The Low Energy Show

The title of this event, held yesterday, took on another meaning as I surveyed the relative emptiness of our Town Hall's Pillar Room. One or two of us eco-diehards drifted around the stalls, but where were the punters? Is there really such general apathy about the need for carbon reduction - or even just plain money-saving - within our local community?

I found it a useful exhibition: it helped me get to grips with LED lighting for instance. But the question shouldn't just be, how can we secure the survival of the retro-fittest? Rather, how can we ensure that retro-fitting becomes the norm - most obviously, when an older property changes hands? For major retro-fits can only be carried out satisfactorily when a property is empty.

Energy Performance Certificates have been with us now for nearly five years, but mostly only lip-service is paid to them. They distinguish between current energy efficiency ratings, and potential. Could estate agents not somehow be incentivised, to seize upon that potential for energy (and cost) saving, as part of their sales pitch?

Heart & Soul

Our Cheltenham Town Transition Heart & Soul Group met this morning: we had a good discussion about consumerism. Energy supplies came up, all obviously agreeing that renewables were "a good thing"; but what about "the fifth fuel" - energy efficiency? Consuming less should be seen to be a main pillar of any seriously green-thinking government's strategy. But is it?

One idea (Arran Stibbe's): nationalise the energy industry; and let the state give the power companies a per capita grant - the same for each customer. Then the state charges customers according to consumption. The result? Energy suppliers are motivated, big time, to get customers to reduce their consumption.

Energy Champions

Wasteful though I am in so many ways, I have signed up to be one of Cheltenham's Energy Champions. Our trainers yesterday evening (this is one) assured us that we didn't have to be experts - only know where to go for help. The Energy Saving Trust hotline was a good start. The big idea is to get Cheltenham to reduce its overall domestic (and other) energy demands, in line with our much-needed Transition to a more sustainable future. 20 of us met up for this training, which surely qualifies us as having done something significantly out of the ordinary to commemorate Leap Year Day.

Art of Transition

What is left of the once celebrated Cheltenham School of Art (founded over 150 years ago) is now located in the University of Gloucestershire's Hardwick Campus. I went there for the first time yesterday: Transition Town Cheltenham's Heart and Soul Group were running an Art of Transition course there. It was well subscribed, the keynote speech being by the University's Arran Stibbe, assisted by his five-year-old son. Arran's theme was that images - not necessarily artistic - can help to point the way towards a new lifestyle for communities.

This made sense to me, as a Christian member of the Group - rather like religious images as an aid to prayer. Yet, as Sara Maitland points out in a thoughtful article in this week’s Tablet, “Our God creates by speaking and most usually communicates with that Creation through words and songs – rather than direct visual appearances.”

Arran's is, furthermore, art as function, not for art's sake; though perhaps our problem is that we lose sight of things for their own sake. Certainly, it's difficult to avoid putting a price on everything: free entry to the Heart and Soul group's "heartening" event - complementary biscuits and juices into the bargain - no doubt helped those attending (myself included) to feel they were walking the talk.

The photograph shows local graphic designer, Jacqui Brown's practical art workshop: she had raided the marvellous Gloucester Scrapstore for our benefit. (On Thursday, the Gloucestershire Churches Environmental Justice Network heard Richard Walter of the local Community Energy Co-operative talk about the huge PV array recently-installed on the Scrapstore roof: it should yield £1800 a month in Summertime!)

Besides Jacqui's workshop, Pat Dannahy ran a session on The art of Communication, and Lesley O'Neill a workshop on the Artist's Way.
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Transition Festival

Today, a week-long Transition Town Cheltenham residency began at our local Gardens Gallery. The different action groups each had a display.

This morning, I took along various photographs for the Heart & Soul board: we went back this evening, for the opening party, and admired all the work that had been put in to enliven the building. We learnt that 80 people had been through the Gallery during the first day. The question is, for how many of them was "transition" a new concept?

Heart & Soul have an open space session as part of the Festival from 5 to 6.30pm next Sunday 27th November - "Faith in Transition: what do faith communities have to offer?" At a time when one or two church leaders are questioning the science upon which Transition is founded, it seems to me more than ever important that Christians should witness - alongside other people of faith - to what their belief in creation implies.

edible open gardens

John and his wife Ann have lived, these past six years, on the side of one of those steep valleys near Stroud. Their back garden rises vertiginously to way above the level of their chimney pots, with narrow tiers of productive level ground carved out as you ascend. They fight the good fight against the woodland scrub that encroaches from above, and the badgers which lumber destructively, right down as far as the bird feeders by the back door of the house. And they seem to be winning: seldom have I seen so much cultivation within such a small area, with 30 fruit trees, a greenhouse and a polytunnel all loaded and stuffed with produce. When if ever can they go on holiday I wonder? It certainly makes me feel inadequate, achieving so little, on our flat, badger-free patch.

The garden we visited is one of 37 open this weekend under a scheme devised by Transition Stroud: only by chance did I hear about it on Thursday, via the Gloucestershire Churches Environmental Justice Network.

Transition lunch

It was thirty years or more ago that Caroline and I first visited St George's Association, situated down a long drive just off Junction 13 of the M5. A delightful Sister Pauline Mary ran it - a home for educationally less able girls, who had by then become middle aged women. The huge range of buildings, complete with caged birds, was quite inappropriate for so small a community, and shortly afterwards it moved to a house in Lansdown here in Cheltenham.

The work of St George's has now changed and expanded, to include a café in the town centre, where our friend Malcolm has recently taken over as chef. Enterprisingly, he organised a special lunch today for the Transition Town Cheltenham network: a good time was had by all, and Malcolm catered for a full house.

Heart and Soul

James Naughtie and Boris Johnson discussed where to build new airport capacity this morning, with not a mention of climate change. It's this dislocation between business as usual and long-term realities that so distresses the environmentally-minded.

One network I find particularly helpful in coping with this is the CELprayer group. A passage, written by Henri Nouwen was recently posted here, as follows:

Building Inner Bridges

Prayer is the bridge between our conscious and unconscious
lives. Often there is a large abyss between our thoughts,
words, and actions, and the many images that emerge in our
daydreams and night dreams. To pray is to connect these two
sides of our lives by going to the place where God dwells.
Prayer is "soul work" because our souls are those sacred
centres where all is one and where God is with us in the
most intimate way.

Thus, we must pray without ceasing so that we can become
truly whole and holy.

This struck a chord with me following the initial gathering of the Transition Town Cheltenham Heart and Soul Group last Saturday: 13 of us turned up for what was an exhilarating meeting. Christians being, I would guess, in the minority, we have much to learn from those of another spirituality; and likewise much to share about our own tradition with those of different or no faith, but who are walking the same path as we are towards what we each know will be a very different future. (A mind map has now arrived with me, putting down some of our areas of concern.) Incidentally, Transition Town Cheltenham is the 349th official Transition initiative - and the 187th in the UK.

Along similar lines to our Heart and Soul discussions, I have recently admired this post by George Marshall, on the theme of the ingenious ways we avoid believing in climate change. (The videos are also available on YouTube.)

From our Camino: 12th April

We are now back on schedule, having arrived here in Torremejia before lunch.  We used our day in hand to make a slight detour to the city of Almendralejo, so as to give ourselves two shorter days instead of one longer one.  It would have been too long: this has been the most unchanging and relentless stage of our journey so far.

The tracks, mainly sand-surfaced, are straight and level, all footprints pointing in one direction, between huge vineyards and olive groves.  There is no sign of habitation between the places where we stay, and the only other humans we have seen have been burly, raisin-faced Spaniards on their little tractors, either kicking up the dust on our track, or beavering away, harrowing the soil between their rows of vines.  Even from early yesterday (Sunday) they went to work.

On neither day did we have a sight of any other pilgrims, which made it seem more than ever a cultivated but elemental desert.  The contrast when we arrived suddenly in Almendralejo yesterday was remarkable. As Caroline put it, this is a very grown up place: population, more than 23,000, with some fine public buildings, and literally dozens of shops exhibiting a variety of exotic fashion items - Spanish and beyond.  We had seen nothing like it since Seville.

Shaking the dust of Almendralejo off our feet at sunrise this morning, we wondered how a Transition Almendralejo might start to get off the ground: it seems everything arrives there (or leaves it, in the case of wine) in a huge trailer truck: all the lorry and car drivers chuck their rubbish out into the roadside: buildings no longer needed for some industrial purpose are merely abandoned. The motorway rushes past the outskirts.

"Paths are made by those who walk on them" was the title of an early essay by Fr. Thomas Cullinan, and these are the luxurious thoughts of a couple pounding the Via de la Plata and so keeping open an historic route to a long-treasured spiritual centre: its values seem more than ever needed in a world like that of Almendralejo.

"In Transition"

Cheltenham Connect arranged a screening of "In Transition" this evening. A wonderfully positive film, about what - or rather who - makes up the fast-growing Transition Culture.

The film shows people of all ages doing their bit in samplings of 100 Transition communities world-wide. Alas, the audience in Bethesda Church was pretty uniformly made up of 50+s.

On Tuesday we went to the Open West show at Pittville. Last year was exhilarating: this year less so - too much of the "shock of the new" perhaps, such as this confection: named "Roll up a forest" I felt that its creator, Louise Sayarer, might have been better off donating both bikes and organic matter to Cheltenham Connect's Go Green group.

Talking the talk

Over the past 48 hours, I've attended three meetings where sustainability or resiliance have been the watchwords. On Tuesday afternoon, there was quite a heated discussion in the RCE Severn Steering Committee about the extent to which we needed to sock it to our stakeholders. Should our working groups challenge businesses' CSR policies, and challenge too the whole notion of the sustainability of continuing economic growth, given Peak Oil and that we are already in ecological debt? Are children being equipped by our schools for a society based on the realities of resource depletion and global warming? What is our positive vision of a low-carbon, steady state economy or our plan for energy descent?

Some of these questions were addressed by Ben Brangwyn of the Transition Network at the University of Gloucestershire's IRIS Seminar that evening. Ben's "excited by local currencies," he tells us - not as a replacement for the pound sterling, but as a complementary process. And he's big on visioning: "Where will we need to be in 20 years' time? How do we get from here to there - year by year?" "We don't know," he stressed, "if this Transition thing is going to work: it's an experiment; but we cannot sit around and wait for someone to do a pilot." And he cautions, "complex systems can never return to a prior state." Sustainable Bungay was an example of what could be achieved with faith-based communities heavily involved. Or, talking of adaptation, what about Cheltenham becoming a City of Sanctuary? (There's a challenge!)

My photograph was taken at the well-attended meeting of the Gloucestershire Churches Environmental Justice Network yesterday, where Professor Daniella Tilbury spoke of the UoG's work in the sustainability field. What is it about our lives that has got us to where we are, was the question she posed. Not, "Who dropped that plastic wrapper?" but, "What sort of society makes it necessary to have such wrappers?" Strategies to change behaviours don't work: the consumer culture is here to stay. How do we influence without preaching? "The biggest problem we have in this institution [the UoG] is students."