Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
‘Daring to dream’ is the fifth and final Transition ingredient, and far from being as whimsical as the title suggests, it actually refers to imagining what Transition would look like if it were implemented nationally, enabled by government and council policy and invested in properly. It is also a look at how Transition initiatives can learn from one another and deepen through our national and global network.
If you’ve ever found yourself on the phone with a customer service representative telling you it would cost more to fix your electric tea kettle than to just buy a new one, you are well acquainted with the concept of "planned obsolescence." The good news is that people across the world are getting wise to the intentional design flaws hoisted upon us by clever manufacturers eager to sell more products, and are coming up with new and creative ways to salvage perfectly usable things.
On the night of the 19th (2001) while the news was on television and the middle class was at home watching, seeing people from the most humble sectors crying, women crying in front of supermarkets, begging for or taking food, and the State of Siege was declared, then and there began the sound of the cacerola (the banging of pots and pans.) In one window, and then another window, in one house and then another house, and soon, there was the noise of the cacerola … The first person began to bang a pot and saw her neighbor across the street banging a pot, and the one downstairs too, and soon there were four, five, fifteen, twenty, and people moved to their doorways and saw other people banging pots in their doorways and saw on television that this was happening in another neighborhood, and another neighborhood … and hundreds of people gathered banging pots until at a certain moment the people banging pots began to walk.
Aaron Peters and Tony Curzon Price, in their important exchange about workfare, both seem to accept a basically techno-utopian view of the future of hyper-automation. But this view ignores two crucial factors which make the fundamental picture much less rosy: the environmental constraint and global-scale immiseration on a global scale. Ivan Illich’s ‘Energy & Equity’ (1973) is still the right place to start to understand the nexus involved.
In a standard test of reasoning, you are given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches. Your task is to attach the candle to the wall so that it does not drip onto the table below. I thought about how to melt the wax and use it to stick the candle to the wall. What would you do? This challenge is designed to reveal functional fixedness, mental blocks against using objects in a new way. The experience that comes with age is a disadvantage here because it leads to thinking of the normal use of the box as a container for tacks. People who have never seen a tack box are less likely to have that preconception and are therefore more likely to see that the box can be emptied, tacked to the wall, and used as a support for the candle. This is why 5-year-olds do better than adults on the test.
The West from a Car Window is the title of one of the 19th century books on my bookshelf. The “car” in question is a railway car, not that insubstantial quadricycle, the automobile. If you had asked a 19th century visitor how he traveled, he would have replied not “on the train” but “on the cars.” In early January, I journeyed up the West Coast, from LA to Seattle, by train and other public transportation. Here are a few observations from that trip.
The Eco-Sense House is alive! From dream (see episode 103) to reality. Its curving cob walls embrace Ann and Gord Baird’s three-generation family. A living roof offers summer cooling and filters winter rains stored for garden water. The composting toilet provides rich soil for the veggie gardens, which supply much of the family’s food. This “net zero energy” house uses the sun for electricity, hot water, and warm floors. Tour this small-footprint house, designed as part of the ecosystem surrounding it.
Over the nearly seven years I’ve spent blogging on The Archdruid Report, the themes of my weekly posts have veered back and forth between pragmatic ways to deal with the crisis of our time and the landscape of ideas that give those steps their meaning. That’s been unavoidable, since what I’ve been trying to communicate here is as much a way of looking at the world as it is a set of practices that unfold from that viewpoint, and a set of habits of observation that focus attention on details most people these days tend to ignore.
This tale illustrates what I suspect are at least two different assumptions about the amount of process time people are willing to put into community. And these two assumptions, I suspect, are themselves based on deeper, possibly unconscious, assumptions about why people join community in the first place. Assumption A: We’re willing to put in a lot of emotional process time because the main reason most of us live in community is for a deeper connection with others. Processing emotions in a group is one way to feel connected. Assumption B: We don’t want much process time. Most of us live in community for neighborliness, sustainability/ecological values, and/or changing the wider culture. Some of us may want more emotional closeness with others (and are fine with a lot of process time) but most of us don’t.
A year ago, slightly by accident, Anita Gracie – a member of the Islington Master Gardeners – came to do a workshop in Transition Dartmouth Park’s new food growing space at Highgate Newtown Community Centre. We were holding our first Seedy Saturday event which we hoped to use to generate interest in the project, but one of our workshops is cancelled at the last minute, and Anita kindly agrees to step in and fill the gap. Her ‘gardener’s question time’ proves to be one of the great highlights of the day, with people crowding into the sunny garden over lunch to draw on her expertise and ask question after question. The allotted twenty minutes turns into an hour, and at the end we invite her to come back when we actually start growing, to see how we were doing and give us advice for the next season.
It’s a fascinating thought experiment, and for many of the Vermonters whose essays are collected in Most Likely to Secede, it’s a viable and urgent project: Why, how, and with what beneficial impact could Vermont secede from the United States, and become a radically local, largely self-sustaining democracy?
So I tried to explain how it is in Transition that a lot of the learning and teaching we do is not that formal. As we sat by Nick’s fire with tea and hot cross buns, we talked about skill-share and seed-swaps, plant walks and bee talks, Trade Schools and Green Drinks, it struck me that there was a time when I didn’t know about any of this knowledge-sharing, workshop-giving world either. I didn’t know what a facilitator was, or a go-round, or people who said it is not in my remit, or wave their hands in the air and bring lunch to share. There was a time when checking in had to do with the hotel, rather than a circle of strangers in some dusty church hall.
