Davie Philip on Transition and The Good Life 2.0 February 11, 2010
Posted by Graham in : Transition Towns, community , add a commentMy long-time Permaculture and peak oil colleague Davie Philip gave an inspirational talk for Feasta in Dublin last summer.
He includes a nice account of the origins of the Transition movement in Kinsale with the Energy Descent Plan by Rob and his Permaculture students, and his own personal journey with Peak Oil which started even before with the Feasta conference in 2000;the influence on his thinking before that even of John Seymour; then following the story of Rob’s moving to Totnes and the movement starting in earnest from there, bringing us up to now with a discussion of some of the issues now facing Transition.
Took me back to those heady days of the first viewings of The End of Suburbia and flickerings of an awareness of oil depletion.
Davie Philip – Developing a transition mindset to overcome the inertia of the familiar from Feasta on Vimeo.
Cuban Ambassador visits Cloughjordan September 5, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Courses, Peak Oil, Permaculture, community , add a commentOn Saturday 29th August the village of Cloughjordan was visited by the Cuban Amabassador, Noel Carillo
Thia was the first visit of an ambassador to the village, and came about through a Cuban connection between a family member of one of the founders of the Cloughjordan Eco-village. The Ambassador had been intrigued by the eco-village and paid a visit there to see if links could be made with similar projects in Cuba.
The Ambassador gives an address after planting a pear tree
The visit was especially appropriate as it took place at the end of our Permaculture Design Course. A short reception on the village green with the Mayor and other local dignitaries was followed by a tour of the new eco-village development and a tree planting ceremony; later the film The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak oil was shown and a panel discussion followed with Albert Bates- one of the tutors on the permaculture course; Michelline Sheehy Skeffington, a botanist from NUI Galway; and professor Peadar Kirby of the University of Limerick, hosted by Iva Peacock of Coughjordan Eco-village.
Left to Right: Professor Peadar Kirby; Ambassador Noel Carillo; Iva Pocock; Michelline Sheehy; Albert Bates
In the panel discussion, a common theme was that Cuba was no garden of Eden.
Michelline, who has been in Cuba for several visits and worked on a voluntary basis in the National Botanic Gardens in Havana on the fruit tree project in 2001, pointed out that most Cuban will drop the bicycle as soon as they have a little money to use a car, and also told us how, despite the extensive market gardens that are shown so well in the film, she actually found that they were given very little vegetables at meals- the Cubans prefer meat! She also asked the question, could the Cubans have managed so well as they did during the Special Period were it not for the socialist system, particularly with its emphasis on education?
Albert Bates has not actually visited Cuba but has worked with many Cuban Eco-villagers in the United States.
He began his talk by saying that there are parallels between the island nations of Cuba and Ireland- an island nation will have in innate awareness of natural limits. He also called for a campaign in the US and internationally to end the US trade embargo and sanctions against Cuba.
Cuba was the first Latin American country visited by Peadar Kirby, in 1979, and he also paid tribute to the country which had survived so well through hardship and its people who had managed to forge a future despite the US making life as hard as possible for them. He raised a huge laugh by claiming Cuba as being the only country in the world he has visited where the poeple will spontaneously come up to you and tell you how much the government means to them!
The Ambassador made quite an impression and came over as a very personable character, and echoed the comments of the previosu speakers: Cuba is no paradise on earth. It continues to be a struggle for the Cuban people, and although he knows they have to work it out for themseleves, he also wants to make links with the eco-village in Cloughjordan.
Cuba, he told us, had made a lot of mistakes. During the Soviet era it was just too easy to take the fossil energy from their allies and trade with Eastern Europe. Twenty years ago they were importing 13million tonnes of energy every year. They had serious pollution problems because of their industrial model, and had become very lazy. At the same time, they had been just as keen as the west to develop consumer lifestyles, an ideology that had been deeply rooted in their minds after being taught for 60 years by the Americans!
Once the Soviet block collapsed, Cuba found itself with no assets, and only itself to blame for its dependency.
I found this an interesting point, the complete lack of resilience in the system up to that point.
He spoke of how hard it was still to make links internationally- for example it had been practically impossible to make links with irish companies becasue oif their US connections.
He echoed Michelline’s comments about Cuban dietary preference, raising quite a few laughs with his frankness about the downsides of Cuban life and culture, telling us that, like many Cubans, he doesnt like vegetables! “I know they are good for you but we Cubans want to eat beef!” He also stressed that for most ordinary Cubans, the “organoponic” farms are preferred just because they are cheaper. The more sustainable lifestyle portrayed in the film have been adopted only because of necessity.
VIVA LA REVOLUCION -Albert Bates and myself pose by the Ambassadors’ car
They are still hugely dependent on imports of a lot of their food, in particular more than 2/3 of their milk is imported despite being strictly rationed within the country. (Apparently they used to buy from Ireland but now find milk cheaper from New Zealand!)
There is still a huge amount of unused land in Cuba, but apparently land will be given freely to anyone who wants to start growing food- a scheme that caught the attention of several of the permaculture students there!
Leon also told us how they had reduced energy demand by a government scheme that simply gave everyone a free fluorescent lightbulb in exchange for an old incandescent one; and how they operate a decentralized grid with over 200 mini power stations throughout the country.
Most tellingly of all, the Ambassador told us that, although he thought he would be killed for saying this in his own country, he hoped that they never find oil in Cuba- it would always place them under US scrutiny and control if they did.
Afterwards I managed to get in a couple of questions about Cuba and the Special Period, and how he thought Ireland might cope under similar circumstances, before he was lead away to watch a display of hurling on the GAA pitch. I hope to post this interview as a podcast at a later date, once I have mastered the technology.
Davie Philip lowers the Cuban Flag at the end of the day
The Transition Timeline June 29, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Health, Peak Oil, Population, Powerdown, Science and Rationaltiy, Transition Towns, book review, climate change, community , 6comments
Book Review:
The Transition Timeline
for a local, resilient future
Shaun Chamberlin
Forward by Rob Hopkins
190 pp pbk
Chelsea Green 2009
The follow-up to Rob Hopkins’ seminal The Transition Handbook uses the method of “backcasting” from an envisioned future from which we create a timeline of how the transition to a more local, resilient world unfolded.
The first part goes through four different scenarios presented as “cultural stories” roughly along the same lines as the scenarios we are familiar with from Holmgren’s Future Scenarios, this time under the headings:
-Denial
-Hitting the Wall
-The Impossible Dream
-The Transition Vision
The transition approach is to look at these possible futures in terms of the cultural stories that we tell ourselves, the idea being that we have the power to make our own cultural stories and thereby empower ouselves to guide the future to a more desirable outcome:
Human Nature is the ability to choose our own path
The second part of the book takes a deeper look at the Transition Vision in the five areas of population and demographics; Food and Water; Electricity and Energy; travel and transport; Health and Medicine.
Each of these sections presents a thorough and well-researched overview of the current situation, ending with a Timeline of how we reached a more desirable situation by 2027.
At the back of the book Chamberlin states that “This book has not attempted to quantify the energy/emissions footprint of each aspect of the Transition Vision, but this represents a critical avenue for further work.”
Unfortunatley, this lack of analysis seriously compromises the usefulness of the book, as the projected scenarios may be widely implausible or purely aspirational. (more…)
Permaculture at The Village June 10, 2009
Posted by Graham in : General, Permaculture, Powerdown, community , add a commentLast weekend saw 17 participants attend a 2-day Introduction to permaculture course I gave at The Village in Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary.
Workshop participants practice forest garden design…
…now they are planting and mulching for real…
It was a great weekend, despite the truly wintry weather on the Saturday, and a great opportunity to see how the Village project is progressing, with three houses currently under construction.
The next permaculture course here will be a Full 10-day Permaculture Certificate Design Course August 21st-30th. Please see “courses for 2009” page for details.
This course will also include a complete Powerdown Toolkit Training.
Tutors include: Graham Strouts, Davie Philip of the Irish Transition Network, Albert Bates of the Farm, Tenessee.
many thanks to Davie Philip for organising the event, and for all the great participants for taking part and making it possible, and most of all for staying awake through a whole day of classroom activities on the wet Saturday despite a very late campfire session Friday night!!
Powerdown Toolkit #10: Communicating Transition May 29, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Powerdown, Transition Towns, community , add a commentWhere do we go from here? Communicating Transition
by Graham Strouts and Davie Philip
This is the introduction to the 10th and final episode of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
On sale Now! The Powerdown TV show featuring the 10 TV shows to accompany the introductions serialized here on zone5 over the past few weeks, with interviews with Rob Hopkins, Richard Douthwaite, Megan Quinn, Peader Kirby and many others.
A free preview of Episode 8: Energy Descent Pathways can be viewed here.
When we try to communicate the ideas being explored in the Powerdown Toolkit we run into what might be called “the environmentalists dilemma”- we are trying to get over a message few people want to hear- if they did, the world would be a very different place- it would already be in transition!
In thinking about this issue let us consider the spectrum of responses, from the “cornucopians” who believe the markets will resolve everything as price spikes send a signal to put more investment into renewables; to the “doomers” who see Peak oil as heralding in a collapse of civilisation.
Somehow we need to bridge the gap between the two: the “cornucopians” need to be challenged because the evidence we have looked at does not support their case: the flow of cheap energy will surely decline and with it the “business as usual” scenarios we have become accustomed to over the past couple of generations, with its implicit faith in technological progress and ever-increasing prosperity.
The “doomer” stance on the other hand, while providing a valuable balance to the complacency of doing nothing, may lead to paralysis and fear that “there is nothing we can do”.
Somewhere in between we have Transition: (more…)
Powerdown Toolkit #7: Shelter April 16, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Green Building, Peak Oil, Powerdown, community , add a commentShelter- Future Proofing Our Homes and Buildings
This is the introduction to week seven of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
Energy and the Household
Recent increases in energy costs have spawned a huge increase in interest in “sustainable” housing with considerable improvements in some aspects of house design and construction. With a plethora of new building products and systems emerging from the industry on one hand and a burgeoning interest in natural building materials such as cob and strawbale, housing has been one of the most intensely scrutinised areas in terms of energy conservation and use. The industrial revolution that downgraded the household to the edge of economic life; the time has come now for it to reclaim its place. David Holmgren has described how this might occur for many over the first years of energy descent in his paper Retrofitting the Suburbs.
In the future, the great challenge will be to retrofit the existing housing stock to be more energy efficient. New builds will decline to a fraction of what they have been during the years and decades of industrial growth. (more…)
Powerdown Toolkit #4: Rethinking Energy March 2, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Peak Oil, Powerdown, Renewable Energy, community , 1 comment so farThis is the introduction to week four of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Centre in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
Rethinking Energy: Conservation, Curtailment, Efficiency and Appropriate Technology
by David Fleming and Graham Strouts
Energy is first and foremost a demand issue- how much do we need and for what ?- and yet the majority of public debate on the issue is to do with finding new sources of supply so as to allow industrial growth to continue.
Community Powerdown is concerned with redesigning our living arrangements as far as possible so as to reduce demand. We need to reduce drastically both per capita energy consumption as well as total world energy use.
This is an essential point to understand because simply making energy use more efficient, or even reducing per capita consumption, will not be sufficient if total demand is still increasing- for example, driven by rising population.
This means that we will sometimes have to make hard decisions about what we use energy for. Energy is fundamental but one of the challenges of understanding energy in today’s’ world is that we are so unaware of how much we use or what the impacts of its use are. Taking more responsibility for how we use energy is the starting point.
In order to understand better our use of energy it is useful to consider the laws of thermodynamics, and how they impose absolute limits on energy consumption in society. By understanding this we will be able to make better choices about the use of energy in society. (more…)
Powerdown Toolkit #3: It’s All Connected February 16, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Permaculture, Powerdown, community , 1 comment so farThis is the introduction to the third week of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Centre in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
It’s All Connected: Whole Systems Thinking and Permaculture
Systems theory is an interdisciplinary theory of how we can understand the world in terms of the dynamics of a system: a network of interrelating parts which themselves can also be seen as parts.
This idea of “parts within parts” has been referred to as a “holarchy”- a nested series of systems, one within the other like Russian dolls.
Thus, an atom is part of a molecule which is part of a cell which is part of an organ which is part of a body. As a formal branch of science, systems theory emerged first within the ecological sciences, but has been perhaps most influential in the development of computers. Since the 1960s, its use in the understanding of humans interconnectedness with the rest of nature in the “web of life” has been a compelling and powerful motivation for the sustainability movement. (more…)
Powerdown Toolkit # 2: The Power of Community- Social Capital, Resilience and the Local Community February 5, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Peak Oil, Powerdown, Transition Towns, community , add a commentThis is the introduction to the second week of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Centre in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
Subject: “Community powerdown”.
“Community” is often dismissed as a romantic notion, “harking back a golden age that never existed”. Traditional rural communities tended to be held together by the absence of choice: you were your mother’s daughter or your father’s son, and the range of possible futures – opportunities for travel, education, and employment- were limited.
From an ecological perspective, such opportunities were limited essentially by the availability of energy. This may have lead to a sense of being stifled by the conservative norms of the community, and their parochial and sometimes oppressive nature. The community became something to escape from once the opportunity arose. (more…)
Powerdown Toolkit January 22, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Peak Oil, Powerdown, Transition Towns, climate change, community , add a comment
Over the past year or so I have been working with Davie Philip of Cultivate on the Skilling Up for Powerdown program, a learning resource in support of Transition Initiatives in Ireland.
The course has been run in Dublin and Kinsale a few times already and will be available as a community learning course throughout Ireland. In conjunction with this course, a series of 10 TV shows have been made for Dublin Community TV which are due to be aired starting next month.
Over the next few weeks I will post up the 10 Introductions for the course which I have co-written with David Fleming and edited.
Below is the general introduction.
Cultivate Community Powerdown Energy Use, Carbon Reduction and Resilience
The Cultivate Community Powerdown Toolkit is designed to support communities in their responses to the converging crises of the 21st Century: Climate change and Peak Oil; global social justice and equity; resource wars and development; loss of biodiversity and pollution. As we shall see, many if not all of these issues stem from our use and abuse of non-renewable fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. While Peak Oil concerns the availability of energy and how we will adjust to a decline in supply after a century and a half of growth, climate change is being caused by pollution from this energy-intensive lifestyle in the form of greenhouse gas emissions. (more…)
