Green Shoots of Sustainability

A new research document called Green Shoots of Sustainability is available from the Transition Culture network.

This paper is truly interesting, it provides a fascinating snapshot of the Transition movement, and reveals a great deal about the character, origins, objectives, achievements, obstacles and more of the Transition groups working with this initiative.

A few excerpts from its introduction:

“The first UK Transition Town was Totnes, formed in autumn 2006 and by February 2009 there were 94 Transition Towns, Villages, Cities and Islands in the UK and a further 40 around the world, principally in Australia, New Zealand and the USA (ibid). The Transition movement has to date been very successful at replicating its model of community-led initiatives (Hopkins, 2008). In addition, Transition Network Ltd is a formally-constituted body which supports and coordinates activities among local groups (Hopkins and Lipman, 2009).

“Yet despite this phenomenal growth and the wave of positive publicity the movement has received, there has to date been very little empirical research into the development and character of these initiatives, or the impacts they have achieved and the barriers to be overcome. This information is vital for the continuing development of the movement, both for local Initiatives and for the Network and the movement as a whole. To address this need for knowledge, this report presents new empirical findings from the first survey of UK Transition Initiatives. It was a short survey which used open- and closed-ended questions to collect basic information about the origins, development, character and activities of the UK’s Transition Initiatives. The online survey was conducted during February 2009, with email invitations sent to coordinators of all 94 Transition initiatives in the UK. Two follow-up reminders were sent, and a total of 74 responses were attained (an outstanding response rate of 78.7%).”

The survey reveals several basic information about the movement, such as:
1. the main people and organizations involved in forming these Transition groups,
2. the diverse range of issued that are addressed by the transition initiatives,
3. the level of development and area of achievement of these initiatives, this is according to the 12 step guidelines provided by Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook,
4. the challenges they have faced

There is no doubt that the Transition Towns movement has become a major force for change to Resilience around the world. We just read in the past week that even the UK government has revealed their UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, where they talk about the Transition Towns movement.

To read and download this important document, visit the website:

http://transitionculture.org/2009/07/21/the-2009-transition-movement-survey-essential-reading/

Transition to Local Resilience

The Transition Towns initiative from Ireland is currently one of the most important worldwide movements towards resilience. This initiative was created by Rob Hopkins in 2005 when he was teaching Permaculture in Kinsale a small Irish town, and asked his students to draft an Energy Descent Plan (EDAP).

An EDAP is a local plan for dealing with the period leading up to and following Peak Oil. It is not a plan for how to live in a sustainable world. It is a plan for the transitional period of decreasing energy — how to get to that sustainable world. It goes well beyond issues of energy supply, to look at across-the-board creative adaptations in the realms of health, education, economy and much more. An EDAP is a way to think ahead, to plan in an integrated, multidisciplinary way, to provide direction to local government, decision makers, groups and individuals with an interest in making the place they live into a vibrant and viable community in a post-carbon era.

Hopkins continued developing this idea and became the Transition Towns initiative. He wrote “The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to Local Resilience”, he created the Transition Culture website at http://transitionculture.org/ and the rest is history.

His site has many important articles on different transition projects from all over the world. A good set they have post in the past few weeks comes from the town of Totnes, on their Insights on Resilience from the History of Totnes. These are the links to the series:

1. Back garden on food production
http://transitionculture.org/2009/07/07/insights-on-resilience-from-the-recent-history-of-totnes-1-back-garden-food-production/

2. The Market Gardens
http://transitionculture.org/2009/07/08/insights-on-resilience-from-the-recent-history-of-totnes-2-the-market-gardens/

3. Local Farmers and the Town's Markets
http://transitionculture.org/2009/07/08/insights-on-resilience-from-the-recent-history-of-totnes-3local-farmers-and-the-towns-markets/

4. Shopping
http://transitionculture.org/2009/07/10/insights-on-resilience-from-the-recent-history-of-totnes-4-shopping/

Also from Totnes, they have a new report entitled "Can Totnes and District Feed Itself: Exploring the practicalities of food relocalisation"
http://transitionculture.org/2009/07/10/announcing-the-release-of-can-totnes-and-district-feed-itself/ Quite interesting !

It seems to me that in our present difficult times, making a transition to local resilience is becoming a matter of survival for many small towns and cities around the world and the Transition Town model is a good one to follow.

Portraits of Resilience

Now that climate change is causing severe damages to many cities and communities around the world, the concepts of resilience, vulnerability and adaptation are more important than ever. Many organizations are working in helping people in dealing with these threats.

The most disturbing thing is that climate change is already causing severe damage to poor and vulnerable people, who have the fewest resources to prepare and plan for the impacts, and have very few resources to respond and adapt. Several of them are already climate refugees.

Here in Canada, we have no idea how fortunate we are in this perspective. Our main environmental worries seem so trivial when we compare them against the impacts on those poor countries.

There are many groups and organizations reporting on how climate change is already affecting critical areas like agriculture, food security, health, housing around the world. The main focus for respond to climate change is now adaptation.

For instance, check this news on what is happening in Bangladesh:
http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0902/full/climate.2009.3.html

And check these groups working on these matters:

The Rockefeller Foundation : Climate Changer Resilience:
http://www.rockfound.org/initiatives/climate/climate_change.shtml

Climate Resilient Cities:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/0,,contentMDK:21845641~pagePK:146736~piPK:226340~theSitePK:226301,00.html"

Resilience Alliance, Resilience Assessment:
http://www.resalliance.org/3871.php

The Coastal Community Resilience Guide (particularly important !)
http://www.crc.uri.edu/download/CCRGuide/lowres.pdf

Community and Regional Resilience Institute:
http://www.resilientus.org/publications/reports.html

Resilience in British Columbia, Canada

After the recent provincial elections we had in BC, I am afraid we are really heading towards major problems of unsustainability. The Liberal party was re-elected, their main goal is keep the unlimited economic growing. No matter what.

Since the term sustainable development was coined more than 30 years ago, our culture has become anything but sustainable. It seems like on purpose we have gone exactly in the opposite way. I have said before that we, as a culture, have failed to understand and to practice sustainability. This term was coined in the 1987 Our Common Future report as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

I think the fundamental mistake was we misread needs for wants. The situation in BC, and mainly with the Liberal party, is exactly the same as with their unlimited economic growth mantra. This is a recipe for systemic failure; its unavoidable consequences are resource depletion, production of waste, pollution, ecological collapse, climate change; it is destroying many BC ecosystems and it is making the whole province highly vulnerable.

Sustainable economic growth is an oxymoron. It implies maintaining the same growth, without change. Something that is entirely impossible. In a sense, it seems we humans fear change, without realizing that life itself is a continuous change, but we choose to pursue an impossible static state. Life and all ecosystems are in a endless adapting cycle: growth, collapse (change), adaptation, renovation and back to growth.

This is where Resilience enters. Resilience accepts that change is a given. Resilience is about continuous renewal: in our behaviours, in our homes, in our communities. Resilience is about being able to understand and adapt to the never ending changing cycles of life. Everything is always changing: the food, water, forests, air, climate systems.

For instance, because of the changes in climate, food systems are facing constant changes through droughts, floods, disease. Having a resilient food system will include growing diverse local food, supporting our local growers, adjusting our diet for seasonal, local foods.

Similar situation exists to have a resilient water system. In the case of island communities, first of all, we need to know how much groundwater we have; we need to plan for collecting rainwater; we need to set gray water treatment systems; we need to ensure our wells are protected against saltwater intrusion. At the same time, we need to evaluate the level of vulnerability from coastal hazards like sea level rising, storms, coastal erosion and more.

A few characteristics of a resilient water system would be:

Diversity. We need different systems. We should not rely on a single source for freshwater. A single system is a point of failure and makes us very vulnerable.

Redundancy. Besides diversity, it is necessary to have backup systems. For instance if we are only depending on groundwater, when our wells go dry, or when we have a major power failure, we are out of luck.

Decentralization. One central system is vulnerable for failure and it affects everyone depending on that system. A system with multiple, diverse, sources of freshwater is much more resilient.

Transparency. Do not make our systems a secret. Transparency will make it easier to find out where a problem may lie. Sharing our plans makes an open system.

Flexibility. Be ready to change the system when things are not working the way we expected. All systems should be nimble, easy to repair, and to improve.

Foresight. We cannot predict the future. But we can see the signs when a system may have problems. It is required to have good problem determination procedures to facilitate repairs.

In our current times of so many rapid changes, to our social systems, our ecological systems and our economic systems, resilience will help us to deal with these changes, to adjust to them, and in many cases, even to learn and co-evolve with them.

We need to accept that unlimited economic growth will only make things worse, much worse. We need to think, and practice, resilience.

Chasing sustainability has become a fool's errand

The following text is from a lecture that Ian Gill gave to the UBC Sauder School of Business' "Chasing Sustainability Conference" on March 12, 2009, in Vancouver.

March 13, 2009

"Sustainability has become a largely meaningless idea," Ecotrust Canada President Ian Gill tells a UBC Sauder School of Business conference, "and chasing it has become a fool’s errand." Given recent catastrophic events, we should reframe the debate around resilience.

According to Wikipedia, “sustainability has become a complex term that can be applied to almost every facet of life on Earth” – which is a problem. It has mostly lost its meaning.

Twenty years ago, in 1989, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

I think a more useful framework to use is a definition of resilience.

Like sustainability, there are lots of those, but the one I like most is one that Thomas Homer-Dixon used at a conference in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. He said:

Resilience is the capability to withstand shock without catastrophic failure.
That’s something that seems rather more pertinent to our times than “sustainability.”

With all due respect to our conference sponsors, I would suggest that the world has been “chasing sustainability” for 20 years at least, since the Brundtland Commission, and in some cases long before that – and we have mostly been chasing our tails. Sustainability has become a largely meaningless idea, and chasing it has become a fool’s errand.

Instead, I would argue that like it or not, we are now challenged with discovering resilience. Where are we going to find, or rediscover, the capability to withstand shock without catastrophic failure? Rediscover, because I would submit that First Nations communities that have weathered the shocks of the past 150 years can teach us a great deal about resilience.

So, where are we going to find the capacity for resilience? Other than in First Nations, I’m not actually sure where to look but I know where not to look: on Wall Street, Bay Street, or Howe Street. In Washington, in Ottawa, in Victoria. The fact is that the world is undergoing a spectacular system failure right now, because we became so enthralled by a system, an economy, that was ever more distant from the natural economy – that we overshot.

On almost every measure we can muster, we have overshot. Consumption. Debt. Resource extraction. Debt. Population. Debt. Pollution. Debt. Sprawl. Debt. Emissions. Debt. Bailouts. Debt. Debt. Debt.

I believe we are now in a sort of global debtor’s prison. Nature didn’t put us there. We did. Governments did. Corporations did. Hundreds of thousands of people in North America alone have lost their jobs in the first quarter of 2009. Why? Is the world, is the Earth, is Nature really physically that much different than in was in the first quarter of 2008? Is there that much less soil to be tilled or oil to be spilled? Of course not.

The natural system hasn’t changed much in the past year – but the social systems have. We’ve stopped believing in one of our own creations – the economy.

So, if we have lost faith in the casino economy, let’s use our human ingenuity to build a conservation economy. This is the underlying idea of Ecotrust. We believe in information democracy, the democratization of credit, creating jobs and protecting the environment, new triple-bottom line financial institutions like Chicago’s Shorebank and our own Ecotrust Canada Capital, which has lent $12 million and leveraged another $38 million for BC businesses. We are looking at new ways of valuing ecosystems beyond cutting trees. How do we monetize the natural economy in a way that recognizes complexity, and doesn’t reduce it to simplistic commodities?

Let me return to the theme of debt for a moment. Debt is not all bad.

A confession. I’m a kind of wannabe-banker. I get to hang out with them sometimes. We have partnered with Shorebank whose mission is social advancement in marginalized inner city neighbourhoods. I’m also a director on the board of Vancity. We specialize in debt. But not debt at any cost.

Vancity is a credit union. A cooperative. Here’s what consumer advocate Ralph Nader recently had to say about credit unions in the United States:

While the reckless giant banks are shattering like an over-heated glacier day by day, the nation's credit unions are a relative island of calm largely apart from the vortex of casino capitalism.

Eighty five million Americans belong to credit unions which are not-for-profit cooperatives owned by their members who are depositors and borrowers. Your neighborhood or workplace credit union did not invest in these notorious speculative derivatives nor did they offer people "teaser rates" to sign on for a home mortgage they could not afford. Credit Unions have no shareholders nor stock nor stock options; they are responsible to their owner-members who are their customers. According to Mike Schenk, an economist with the Credit Union National Association, credit unions are ‘portfolio lenders. That means they hold in their portfolios most of the loans they originate instead of selling them to investors, so they care about the financial performance of those loans.’

The cooperative model, whether in finance, food, housing or any other sector of the economy, does best when the owner-cooperators are active in the general operations and directions of their co-op.

There are very contemporary lessons to be learned from the successes of the credit union model such as being responsive to consumer loan needs and down to earth with their portfolios. Yet in all the massive media coverage of the Wall Street barons and their lethal financial escapades, crimes and frauds, little is being written about how the regulation, philosophy and behavior of the credit unions largely escaped this catastrophe.

So we can learn from alternative economic models like credit unions and cooperatives. But we also need to learn from the past. From Aboriginal communities, in terms of resilience. And, from our mistakes.

Ronald Wright is the author of A Short History of Progress. He points out that while we are descendants of apes, in the past three million years we have been shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. And that’s not such a good thing:

We have become experimental creatures of our own making. This experiment has never been tried before. And we, its unwitting authors, have never controlled it. The experiment is now moving very quickly and on a colossal scale. Since the early 1900s, the world’s population has multiplied by four and its economy – a rough measure of the human load on nature – by more than forty. We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control … it is entirely up to us. If we fail – if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us – nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting the apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.

Consider the words of George Monbiot in The Guardian:

“Without radical action, we will be the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?”

Or finally, the words of that other guy, Ian Gill:

“Without radical action, will we – will you – be the generation that chased sustainability, and yet threw away the key to the debtor’s prison that you inherited, because with all your education and ingenuity, it’s a prison you never figured out how to escape from?”

Source is from www.ecotrust.ca/chasingsustainability

Resilient Community Economics

It is very interesting to notice the shift in the news about the economic crisis and climate change. More and more, people are talking about finding ways of adapting to all the changes already happening, instead of talking about preventing these crises, or preventing and fixing them with pipe dream repairs.

This tells me that we are finally accepting that many of our current systems are vulnerable and are failing, that we cannot continue living the same way, that we need to change.

Of course, there are still many people that keep on ignoring this reality and prefer the illusion that everything is all right. Eventually, those people will have to face reality and they may suffer much more, because they will be ill-prepared for it.

The idea of adapting ourselves, our cities, our communities for these imminent changes is nothing else but building our resilience.

Home-grown or community economics provides alternatives to help with building local resilience in small communities. For instance:

1. Local bartering and local currencies. This is not a new idea. Many cities in Switzerland, USA, Britain, Argentina, Brazil have their own local currencies, accepted by banks and businesses. Even in Canada, there are a few examples in BC. Actually, the now famous LETS, Local Employment Trading System, was first developed in the Comox Valley by Michael Linton in early 1983. He designed a simple accounting system whereby account holders could purchase goods and services, in whole or in part, by transferring accounting points from their account into that of the seller. Linton labelled the accounting points "green dollars" after his vision of the environmental and social benefits that would follow general use of the system. More than 3,000 communities around the world are now using LETS.

2. Co-ops. All sort of co-ops have been working with tremendous success for many years around the world and they are now becoming popular at a local level. From car co-ops to food co-ops and farmer markets to housing and more.

3. Micro-financing. People-to-people lending and microfinance projects are booming in many countries. For instance, Women's World Banking, Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, now emulated in many countries, FINCA and ACCION in Latin America. Credit unions in Canada are becoming more proactive by helping poor people, lending to small businesses and social enterprises which meet social needs while making modest profits.

4. Time-banking. Time banking, a brainchild of Edgar Cahn in the USA is now helping local people connect and share services in Japan, Europe and other countries. Economist Hazel Henderson says: “Neighbours contact each other via a local "time banker" to provide meals and help for shut-ins, baby-sit each other's children, watch over property, mow lawns and share appliances. Car-sharing has now spawned many new companies such as Zip Car in the USA and others in Canada and Europe where people can make ride arrangements rapidly on Blackberrys and laptops.”

The majority of these community economics alternatives are not based on a monetary system. The most important goal is to bypass the greedy banking system and find ways to become resilient by ourselves. Henderson again: “In rural areas in Florida, radio stations have call-in programs where farmers can say ‘I have spare time on my tractor to exchange for fertilizer or pepper, melon, eggplant seeds. The farmer gives her phone number and the trades are exchanged off-line.”

The most important thing about the above alternatives is that they are already working in many places. They are not pipe dream fixes, nor they are depending on governments to lead the way. They are community-based solutions; it is confirmed they work, and yes, they will help in building our community resilience.


Next time: building resilience to climate change!

What a Resilient World Might Look Like

I am afraid we don’t have a good understanding of what a resilient world would look. We talk about the need to slow economic growth, to recognize natural limits, to re-localize ourselves, to reduce our overall consumerism and more, in order to be resilient, to be sustainable. But overall, it is difficult to picture a resilient world.

Brian Walker, author of “Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World“, offers the following visions or values for what a resilient world might look like:

1. DIVERSITY. A resilient world would promote biological, landscape, social and economic diversity. Diversity is a major source of future options and of a system's capacity to respond to change.

2. ECOLOGICAL VARIABILITY. A resilient world would embrace and work with ecological variability (rather than attempting to control and reduce it). A forest that is never allowed to burn loses its fire-resistant species and becomes very vulnerable to fire.

3. MODULARITY. A resilient world consists of modular components. When over-connected, shocks are rapidly transmitted through the system - as a forest connected by logging roads can allow a wild fire to spread wider than it would otherwise.

4. ACKNOWLEDGING SLOW VARIABLES. A resilient world would have a policy that focus on “slow,” controlling variables associated with thresholds. By focusing on the key slow variables that configure a social-ecological system, and the thresholds that lie along them, we have a greater capacity to manage the resilience of a system.

5. TIGHT FEEDBACKS. A resilient world possesses tight feedbacks (but not too tight). Feedbacks allow us to detect thresholds before we cross them. Globalization is leading to delayed feedbacks that were once tighter. For example, people of the developed world receive weak feedback signals about the consequences of their consumption.

6. SOCIAL CAPITAL. A resilient world promotes trust, well developed social networks and leadership (adaptability). Individually, these attributes contribute to what is generally termed "social capital," but they need to act in concert to effect adaptability - the capacity to respond to change and disturbance.

7. INNOVATION. A resilient world places an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules, and embracing change. When rigid connections and behaviors are broken, new opportunities open up and new resources are made available for growth.

8. OVERLAP IN GOVERNANCE. A resilient world has institutions that include "redundancy" in their governance structures and a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights. Redundancy in institutions increases the diversity of responses and the flexibility of a system. Because access and property rights lie at the heart of many resource-use tragedies, overlapping rights and a mix of common and private property rights can enhance the resilience of linked social-ecological systems.

9. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES. A resilient world would include all the unpriced ecosystem services – such as carbon storage, water filtration and so on - in development proposals and assessments. These services are often the ones that change in a regime shift – and are often only recognized and appreciated when they are lost.

We can use the above vision to start drafting our own version of such a world. It shouldn’t be that difficult. And for our own sake, and for the future of our children and grandchildren, we better start working on building such a resilient world.