Community Powerdown April 25, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Peak Oil , trackbackI visited the Cultivate Centre in Dublin last weekend for the Sustainable Community Conference, part of the 12th Convergence Festival, which carried the theme:
“How can our towns, villages and even our cities transition to economically localised communities? Using the example of processes begun in Totnes, Kinsale and Cloughjordan this dynamic event will look at steps that communities can take to prepare themselves for living with less fossil fuel.”
This event brought together some of the localisation groups around Ireland from around Ireland that have formed over the past year, including Transition Towns Kinsale, FADA from Newbridge, and The Village in Cloughjordan, and others in the Powerdown Community.
The keynote speaker was Dr. David Fleming, who had already presented some of his ideas on preperations for the coming energy crises the night before .
David is the author of Tradeable Energy Quotas and the as-yet-unpublished Lean Logic. He has the ability to explain a huge number of concepts and ideas intelligibly while at the same time presenting a very straight-talking analyses of what we are soon going to have to deal with:
“It’s going to fall to bits” he had told us, referring to the market economy- a result of the double-whammy of peak Oil and Climate Change.
His presentation on “Community Transition” covered a lot of ground, and touched on some aspects of the transtion that are not often discussed.
The three tasks of community, he argued, are: -to provide reciprocity; -to cope with conflict; and thirdly, to avoid boredom. Fleming recognises that one of the challenging aspects of re-localising the community in a democratic fashion is to both adapt to the reduction in choice, as we learn to get on with a perhaps less diverse lifestyle with reduced mobility and the soetimes mundane or routine tasks of feeding ourselves and surviving; as well as the tedium of dealing with conflict which he sees as intrinsic to community. He also pointed out that the Peak Oil/Localisatiion movement is not immune to the well-known tendency of environmental groups to divide into factions.
David discussed many other issues that will face communities, including scale, reciprocity, having a common purpose, identity, and the need to accept what he calls “ironic space”- where we encounter and learn to live with “wicked problems” for which there is no solution. Presumably, the combination of crises humanity is facing may furnish some examples of these phenomena.
Like a forest that will go through different stages of succession from mature forest, to fire, to savannah and then regenrates to forest again while remaining a system at each of these stages, human society is will revert to an earlier stage. Fleming listed some of the “resilience conditions” required to sustain this transformation, including diversity, capability and conserved inheritence.
Above all, Fleming emphasised the extreme difficulties we will encounter as we try to build resilience into our communities There will be conflict, at times demorilisation, and a sense of betrayal. We will need to develop rigorous thinking tools and processes for conflict resolution. And we will need to work hard to develop solidarity.
The next speaker was Davie Philip of Cultivate who talked about The Village as an example of low-carbon integrated design. Davie is a co-founder of Cultivate where and tells me he has organised over 1000 events over the last 10 years. He emphasised how Peak Oil and Climate Change provide unprecedented catalysts for the environmental movement to move towards sustainability.
I was next, giving an outline of some of the key issues I believe we need to try to communicate in motivating change (which I will go into more in a later post) and an outline of David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles and how they will be relevant for the Powerdown Community. John Harrington, who has studied with Tobjorn Latte in Sweden, gave an introduction to the Natural Step for Communities, giving a clear, compelling, science-based definition of sustainability and a practical strategic planning framework to help communities move towards a successful and sustainable future.
Next we were treated to a virtual presentation by Rob Hopkins - his inspirational presentation from the recent Soil Association conference in Cardiff on Creating Energy Descent Plans;
Jackson Moulding gave a presentation on Ashley Vale which is an inner-city community project in Bristol demonstrating self-build and environmentally-sensitive construction;
Alicia Falvey spoke about her experiences of living in Dutch Community Eva Lanxmeer in Holland, an inspiring place demonstrating community living, Permaculture and sustainable building, water and energy use.
Last but not least, Eamonn Parker from Newbridge gave a fascinatingaccount of the rapid progress and activities of the FADA (means “Long” or “Enduring”) group in Newbridge.
I first got to know Eamonn a few years ago through a common interest in Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy and it was really interesting to see his application of Spiral Dynamics in the community work that FADA is engaged with.
This small gathering of the Powerdown Community was hopefully the first of many networking events between localisation and Powerdown groups across Ireland, which are will surely only multiply as the reality of energy depletion, economic collapse and climate change becomes unavoidable.
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