NINETY SEVEN per cent of all sales of groceries go through 8,000 supermarkets in England, the founder of Transition Town told a packed public meeting in the Grape and Grain pub on Tuesday evening.
Rob Hopkins chose Crystal Palace to launch his new book - The Power of Just Doing Stuff - – which includes two and a half pages on Crystal Palace Transition Town.
Before listing a variety of Transition Town schemes across the globe Mr Hopkins – who wrote the Transition Handbook and The Transition Companion, the two books at the core of creating Transition Towns all over the world - showed a news photo of a shop in Belcoo, Co Fermanagh close to the Northern Ireland border where the G8 summit took place and which looked like a well-stocked shop.
The reality: a photographic montage had been pasted onto two shops in Belcoo which were both lying vacant.
He warned of a potential financial problem with carbon which many banks and financial organisations were basing their future on. “We can’t burn four-fifths of the carbon we’ve got now – if it’s going to be exploited we’ve got a big financial bubble coming in terms of that.”
Continuing the carbon theme he told an audience of more than 150 people: “Transition starts if you want to reduce people’s energy use. “You get them together – invite six to ten neighbours to meet in each others homes.” Mr Hopkins said that, on average, a family reduces their carbon footprint by 103 tonnes and saves themselves £600 as a result of these get-togethers.
“But when they talk about it later they don’t talk about the carbon – what they talk about is how fantastic it is to feel connected to the people around. “And then there are the spin-offs like a community cinema.” The cinema is in Totnes, Devon – Mr Hopkins’ home town - as a follow on from the Transition Streets initiative there.
“There’s something we can do about this – it’s not about waiting for permission. “There’s an incredible opportunity to do something historic.” He then highlighted some Transition Town schemes across the globe – and one similar scheme which dates back more than a century:
“There’s something we can do about this – it’s not about waiting for permission. “There’s an incredible opportunity to do something historic.” He then highlighted some Transition Town schemes across the globe – and one similar scheme which dates back more than a century:
SANTANDER (Spain) The Market of Hope. Running since 1904 A supermarket on two floors covering the same acreage as a UK supermarket – with 120 families keeping it local “and not taking it away offshore and not paying taxation.”
NEW ORLEANS (USA) 100 different independent businesses which returned three times more to the local economy.
Mr Hopkins said Transition for him was like bits of the jigsaw that make the whole puzzle come together. “It’s what you can do when you get together with the people around us – and I’ve seen examples of this walking around Crystal Palace.”
He then painted a picture of how people could pull this together in three stages.
Stage one:
PORTALEGRE (Portugal) People turned a space into a food garden and planted basil, tomatoes etc. He told the meeting: “One woman said she had been living in Portalegre for 37 years ‘and felt her community and city crumble. ‘The community garden we created tells me it’s possible to do things with other people. ‘We need to wake up again’,.”
Mr Hopkins said there are now 1,500 people in Portalegre doing things around the idea of the gift economy. (Gift exchange is a mode of exchange where valuables are given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards in contrast to a barter economy or a market economy.)
SARATOGA (USA) People who went to a local farm where food, which was unprofitable to harvest, was harvested and taken into the local Foodbank.
TOOTING, LONDON (ENGLAND) Opened up a shop named ‘The shop with nothing on sale but lots to offer’ for nine days.
SEATTLE (USA) People who had lots of tools lying around in their sheds started a tool library – it now has 1,300 tools.
Stage two:
How do you take that and build an economy for the place where you live?” he asked.
DUNBAR (SCOTLAND) A community bakery raised £15,000 in shares from local people and employs five.
SLAITHWAITE (YORKSHIRE) The community came together, took over a shop, and run it as a co-operative. “That’s also become a catalyst for other things. “They realised that when you buy garlic wholesale it all comes from China. “On the counter people were given cloves of garlic, told to take them home and grow them and the shop would buy the garlic off the customers.”
MATLOCK (DERBYSHIRE) “A group of women who’d never run a business before, never grown anything had this mad idea they wanted to start their own food business. “A farmer said to them ‘if you some along and help me with the lambing, I’ll give you half the lambs.” The lambs were slaughtered and the meat distributed through a community-supported meat scheme. Mr Hopkins said the women also realised the best place to grow vegetables in what is hilly country was in back gardens.
BRISTOL (ENGLAND) The Mayor of Bristol takes his full salary of £51,000 in Bristol pounds. (a form of local alternative currency launched in Bristol, UK in September 2012, it’s objective is to encourage people to spend their money with local Bristol businesses.)
MALVERN (ENGLAND) The town’s 104 old Victorian gas lamps, which inspired author CS Lewis to write ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ used to cost £450 each to maintain annually. So the ‘Malvern Gasketeers’ came together and rewired all the lamps, reducing carbon emissions by 90 per cent. All the lamps are maintained by one woman who is the first fully qualified gas lamp technician. And the Malvern Gasketeers are now carrying out similar projects for local authorities around the country…..
Stage three:
“How do we turn our ideas into enterprise?”
In Totnes, Devon £22 million of £30 million goes through two supermarkets “running through our fingers like sand”. That could be staying locally, declared Mr Hopkins. “If we could just shift 10 per cent of that – skills , buying power, hospital buying power – that’s £2 million in our local economy.
NOTTINGHAM (ENGLAND) A hospital decided to shift where they buy their fruit and vegetables to within the 30 miles of the hospital – a move which has injected £2 million into the local economy there. “If you can use a blueprint like that to match the potential maybe you can bring in some. ”We’ve lots of trusts and financial organisations – maybe that could come into driving projects like that. “It starts with the people coming together and starting these projects off.
VANCOUVER (CANADA) “One of the dangers about doing this is about something happening in a place you never expected. “A woman asked if she could sum up Transition. “She replied: ‘Talk to your neighbours – see what happens.’,”
“Which I thought was a lovely mantra for this kind of thing.”
COMMUNITY DRAGONS ( a sort of community version of TV’s ‘Dragon’s Den’) In Totnes four people with ideas ‘pitched’ to the community. “The community could ask them questions. “It was people saying ‘I’ll give you £100′, ‘I’ll give you £50′, ‘I’ve got a field you can use’ ‘I’ll give you a shed’. “One little girl said ‘I’ll give you a pound of my pocket money.’”
“What you’ve got was a sense of people getting behind their entrepreneurs. “You might find that a useful tool to add to your Transition tool box.”
(IF you ‘Google’ “‘The Power of just doing stuff’” transitionculture.org/category/power-of-just-doing-stuff/ you’ll find a video record of the meeting)
PALACE POWER
PEOPLE LIVING in the Crystal Palace area are spending about £37 million a year* on energy – most of which “goes down the hill to central London to the offices of the really big electricity companies.”
But if just THREE per cent of that energy was switched to locally funded, locally produced electricity, that would benefit the local economy by £1 million – not from taxes but from re-directing the money that’s already there., Esther Stoakes of Crystal Palace Transition Town’s Palace Power group told the meeting.
“She said that as well as looking for investors in Palace Power they needed people who could give them skill time – legal, planning, marketing and professional, support – and a big roof.
(At their annual meeting in May Esther said Crystal Palace Transition Town were looking to establish a co-operative and inviting local people and others to invest money which will be used to buy a solar panel as part of a community energy project.
The panel – which generates electricity – would then be put on a large south-facing roof with the electricity it produces then sold to the building’s owner.)
*Figures based on 32,000 households in five council wards covering the Crystal Palace area with each household each paying an average of £1,100.
(See also: May 10 – ‘PALACE POWER! Renewable energy scheme planned.’ Contains a report of Crystal Palace Transition Town’s annual meeting).
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