Ted Trainer
10.4.2019
To review, The Simpler Way Transition Theory article argued that:
- The global predicament cannot be solved unless there is an enormous shift to a very different kind of society, one in which material living standards have been cut to around 10% of those in rich countries today.
- This cannot be done unless there is radical change in ideas, values and dispositions, to happy acceptance of frugal, cooperative, self-governing communities, lifestyles and systems.
- Thus, the key to the transition is radical change in “culture”. The world view driving humans must come to be about enjoying life in communities that are stable, collectivist, caring, socially planned and run via participatory democratic processes, and not acquisitive. Only movement in this direction can enable the required changes in the economy, political systems, international arrangements, finance, and the geography of settlements.
This task is so huge that its achievement is not likely. It involves contradicting and turning back some of the main values and ideas that have driven Western society for over two hundred years, especially to do with “progress” and the good life. But we have no choice; we have to work hard at trying to increase the numbers who realize that the old “growth and affluence” path has to be abandoned and that a far better way exists.
The TSW: Transition document argues that our society is not capable of rationally facing up to its situation and implementing the required changes. We are likely to descend into a severe depression or worse. We have to hope that it will be a “Goldilocks” depression, not so savage as to destroy the prospects for restructuring but severe enough to get people to see that they must take the Simpler Way.
But regardless of how bad the coming time of troubles turns out to be, what we must focus on here and now is clear. It is working on how to raise awareness of the need to shift from the growth and affluence path to some kind of Simpler Way.
Following are thoughts on what this might mean for the practical actions ordinary people can take on. Much depends on one’s situation. Ideally there will be initiatives already underway nearby that one can join but the following discussion begins with situations in which a very few want to get something going where there are no existing projects.
1. What to do at the Individual and Tiny Group Level.
By far the most important thing everyone can do is to constantly raise the issues:
Our most important strategy is simply talking. Take opportunities to mention the issues in everyday conversation. Watch for reference to something connected with global sustainability issues and move the conversation in our direction.
It can be a good idea to pick up on personal and family discontents and problems and concerns. Some possible trigger themes:
- The struggle to get by; i.e. insecurity, fear of unemployment, small business failure, poor provision for old age, violence on the streets.
- The fact that the pace is too fast, and large numbers of people are stressed and depressed. Most of that would be avoided in a society that allowed us to just produce as much as we need for comfort and that provided for everyone.
- The fact that we work perhaps three times too hard. People complain about not having enough time.
- The cost of housing, and the fact that many cannot expect to own a house.
- Teenagers, the worries parents have, kids and computers, spending all that time in front of a screen, no social role or contribution for young people to make.
- Kids and career; the problem of grinding up through schooling to get into a good career.
- Urban restructuring and decay – what’s happening to our town? Overdevelopment, traffic congestion, high rise, the death of the high street and the country town – all taking place because neo-liberal doctrine says there must be freedom of enterprise, meaning that giant corporations can take all the business and destroy little shops and whole communities and drive urban sprawl.
- The occurrence of unemployment, which is hugely damaging, avoidable and inexcusable.
- Discontent with government; but governments cannot solve the problems consumer-capitalist society is generating, they can only “manage” them.
- Social breakdown, drug addiction, homeless people, suicide, depression, domestic violence, eating disorders, insecurity on the streets, pub violence. These are largely consequences of a competitive individualistic society that dumps many who can’t compete against the fittest. A good society would provide for all, i.e., make sure all had a livelihood.
Have on hand literature and links that can be suggested, so that you don’t feel you have to have master the arguments yourself. You probably won’t see any effect but everything you say will help to get the issues on the public agenda that little bit more.
This area includes the opportunities some of us have to write, including letters to local papers. Watch for ways of connecting our messages to issues that pop up in the media.
Form a local group:
It is important to work with like-minded and supportive friends. Invite a few people to a meeting to see if some would be interested in forming an occasional discussion group hoping to explore global issues and what these might mean for your locality. Members might undertake reading up on key topics and listing valuable material for others. Compile a collection of impressive facts and figures, and links to examples that can be used to send to contacts and to enable researching for your campaigns.
The group might give itself a name that can become known and attached to all its activities, such as “Towards a More Sustainable Smithtown”. Set it up as a website with the information and contacts, and in time the events list and invitations.
Think about possible things you can do in your locality:
One is to set up an information table in the centre of town or at the local market day backed by a big map that has restructured the town, digging up many roads and replacing them with gardens, animal pens, orchards, ponds, woodlots etc. That will lead people to ask what on earth is going on, and then you can pounce.
Consider organizing occasional public meetings, inviting people to come and chat over concerns about their town and the wider economy and possible improvements. Offer short talks to local schools and clubs. It is obviously important not to scare the horses, so radical ideas might best be added in small doses, as themes some are saying we will eventually have to take seriously.
Explore the possibility of getting some things going among neighbours, such as planting public spaces with herbs and flowers, swapping and sharing surplus clothes etc., organizing a tool library, having a weekly community afternoon tea.
Organise occasional gatherings, picnics, visits to thriving backyard or community gardens, local hobby craft producers, recycling centres, film and discussion nights, guest speakers.
Of special importance at some stage is establishing community working bees, occasional at first but in time regular. These should mostly be intended to introduce some degree of local productive self-sufficiency, especially regarding food, leisure resources and “services”. When the community garden and workshop site is set up working bees will play a major role. Even if at first only a tiny group potters around conspicuously this will introduce the idea to the locality. Passers by will ask about our sign.[1]
These activities assert the importance of community, commons and cooperation for the common good. They visibly contradict the typical suburban ethos of private individuals looking after their own self-interest with no involvement in the locality.
Door knock “research”:
Knock on the door and announce that you are from a group investigating the “progress” of the suburb etc. See if people can be engaged in discussion, firstly so that you can get clearer about the way people are thinking and their potential interest in our themes, and secondly so that you can inform them about our world view and project. We can test ideas; what do they think of organising working bees to improve the neighbourhood. In the process leave a pamphlet and add some names to your email lists for invitations to later events. Later this approach can unearth resources we can start using; someone has a spare shed, a utility or tools they would lend, spare time. Especially important will be using this approach to list people who know how to knit, bake a dinner, fix bikes, grow vegies and fruit, look after poultry or fish, do carpentry. In time these people will be our “skill banks”, teaching others how to do these things.
It can be important to distinguish between people’s thoughts on social issues “out there”, and on their own situation. There is a tendency for people to express considerable concern about their society, e.g., drugs, kids, homeless people, but to say that they themselves are doing OK. Admitting to having problems or an unsatisfactory life can seem like admitting failure, so the best format could be “What do you think people around here would say about…”
Organise a sustainable alternatives tour:
We work on making various things that illustrate alternative ways, within each of our houses or back yards. At Fred’s place we might make a mud brick dog kennel and an earth oven and put together a set of impressive pictures of earth building. At Mary’s place we might build the chicken and rabbit pen, compost heap and gardens, and elaborate display boards explaining the scope for urban food production, nutrient recycling and footprint reduction. Alice might have room for the diorama of the new suburban geography. Tom’s garage workshop with sturdy furniture and toys all around might illustrate the joys of making things with hand tools. Pat has a pantry stocked with preserves from her garden and that of friends and neighbours, enabling her to detail the monetary savings and the footprint implications.
In other words, we do not need much on the ground to be able to put on an interesting and informative tour. That dog kennel and pictures enables us to drive home the enormous benefits of earth building; we don’t need to have a whole house to do that. So, these items are the pretexts; the illustrative devices we use to explain in detail far beyond them. We stack each site with lots of display boards, and we work out a sequence that will best present our world view convincingly.
We organise walking tours around these sites, followed by a picnic. We get local teachers to bring their classes. We develop and improve our presentation all the time, and before long we are hosting visits from other suburbs and making electronic versions of the tour available.
We door knock to find people who could help elaborate the tour, especially older people with skills such as how to bake a dinner, knit, grow things, graft, produce fish, and do various arts and crafts, and who might have tools, bits of machinery and sheds that we can add to the tour. We invite them to join the venture.
Note the idea of not needing land or premises, because many things can be located in separate backyards and brought to the display days and lectures, or the tours can be taken around those backyards. A related theme is “gleaning”. Our entire neighbourhood orchard could be made up of a few lemon trees in Mary’s backyard, a few apples in Pete and Henry’s back yards, and we arrange to harvest the surpluses they can’t use and distribute them. The principle can apply to many other products, notably fish. We might help a family keen on fish farming to set up maybe a three cubic metre tank in their backyard (connected to aquaponic trays for producing greens from the nutrient rich waste water.) Neighbours can be on rosters to help with poultry, fish, rabbit etc. maintenance.
“Sniping”, picking off likely converts:
Keep an eye open for someone in an influential position, a columnist or talk-back radio personality, who might be persuaded to our view, and work on him/her over time. Form a sub-group to frame an approach, organise letters of phone calls, and deal with responses.
Some important points to keep in mind in the early stages:
It all adds up, although you probably can’t see this happening. Every time a Simpler Way message is delivered it reinforces the theme in someone’s mind, or someone is hearing it for the first time. This is how the Berlin Wall was brought down! Extreme and surprising changes are usually the result of a long process of slowly accumulating rethinking and increasing desire for change, which can be invisible until the last minute, but when it reaches a critical level everything flips over.
We must be very patient and not expect to see much if anything for our efforts but be consoled by the probability that the few words we exchanged with the butcher this morning has added to the accumulating climate of opinion. The concern must be to just keep plodding away, seeing little for our efforts but knowing that we are contributing the crucial level of understanding and opinion, without which nothing can be achieved.
There is a great deal of discontent out there, and of recognition that the consumer-capitalist system is fundamentally unsatisfactory. Some surveys find that most people are worried about where we are heading, and even in the US support for some kind of “socialism” is considerable. No significant system change can possibly occur until and unless there is widespread desire for it and contributing to this is what most needs to be done. Our main task is to help people to see that there are very satisfactory alternatives.
What we are doing in these early stages is contributing to the development of a new mentality. Almost everyone lives in a suburb or town where individuals and families are focused on their own welfare or indeed survival, where there is no concept of community let alone cooperating with local people to work for the benefit of the community, and where all functions are left to some agency such as the council to attend to. There is no concept of people coming together to do important things for the community, let alone take some control over the way the locality functions. The dominant orientation is about privacy and self-interest. This is not to blame people; this is just the way our society has been constructed. In an individualistic competitive society, you have to cope as a fairly isolated individual or family. But the sheer existence of our group asserts a totally different outlook and set of values. We are practicing and making visible activities intended to benefit our community, to build community and public spirit and empowerment.
One theme we should stress is that when one is contributing to the public good one is increasing one’s own welfare. We have to help people to see that the quality of their own life will be significantly improved if we make our neighbourhood or town better, work to fix neglected problems, beautify the landscape, get rid of homelessness, organize festivals and concerts. In the alternative society we are building it will be clear that individual wealth will be of little or no value; the richness of your life will depend on the quality of your community.
2. Becoming more elaborate: From Community Gardens Towards Transition Towns.
Ideally the little group we formed to start doing these things eventually grows to become the Community Development Co-operative that builds and runs the new Economy B of our suburb. This gathers strength under/beside the normal market economy to do things that are necessary but neglected. Over time the CDC will become the (thoroughly participatory) town “government”, with many committees, operations, community properties, and town meetings.[2]
If this revolution succeeds it will be via the Transition Towns movement, which has been growing impressively for two decades. It is working towards the establishment of the kind of settlements that the new society must have, and it is providing us with the most effective devices for raising awareness about their existence and merits. So, it is of great importance for us to try to move our suburbs and towns in this direction. Following is an indication of the steps that might be taken.
Set up a community garden and workshop:
Even if only on a very small scale these quickly establish the capacity to grow and make many important things participants need. While it might be decided to also enable individuals to garden their own private plots within the site, the central function must be to organise a cooperative venture in which people can work together to produce things they all need. This enables working bees to get the site into shape and to share the thinking, the expertise and research, and the “work” and to share the produce. It also means that if only one person knows how to grow good vegies, we can all have good vegies.
The garden should also have a basic workshop, where things can be made and repaired and useful materials recycled. Now we have the means to begin providing for those many people dumped by the conventional economy. We make it possible for local people who are unemployed, homeless, convalescent or retired to join us in productive activity, working to start supplying vegetables, repairs, toys etc. for ourselves and each other. And the site is a friendly gathering place, where regular dinners and events can be held.
Here’s how the garden can be the beginning of our new monetary system, which will be a major element in our new economy. We record time inputs to the cooperative with a view to sharing output in proportion to these contributions. Thus, someone who can only come along occasionally can be part of the team. This is a simple LETS system whereby we have created a new currency that like giving IOUs instead of dollars and keeping the number given for goods in balance with the number received for things you have “sold”. So, we have started to “print” our own money, which enables economic activity, working, earning, spending, trading among people who have no normal money.
Every carrot we produce in the community garden represents a saving of scarce money that participants now do not have to spend at the supermarket. More importantly we have begun to create livelihoods, purposes, community and cooperative skills, leisure resources, a cooperative climate – and a new economy.
What else can we do?
The CDC would then look for other activities to take up. What else could we produce for ourselves, cooperatively and without much capital? Bread is an obvious early possibility. We could research and build an earth oven, buy a bag of flour, and organise a weekly bake-up to churn out stacks of irresistible hot bread, pizzas, pies, biscuits and cakes. Baking day would then become the beginning of the weekly community working bee, business meeting, banquet and concert.
Of course, all the way we will be publicising and recruiting, knocking on doors to explain what’s going on and to invite people to join us. Remember our primary objective is not to build things, it is to develop in people the consciousness that will lead them to see the desirability of a Simpler Way vision and eventually to support huge structural change.
Our working bees will make the benches, seats and shade houses, and landscape the garden and the workshop site. We will find out who can play musical instruments, tell stories, act and sing, and we will then organises the first concert. We will celebrate our productivity and power and take pride in the way we are providing for each other. We are not just producing vegies and bread; we are creating solidarity and the satisfaction that comes from knowing we are creating a supportive community.
What about food processing, such as buying bulk fruit and bottling or drying, making juices, fruit wines and cider? What then to do with the peelings? Of course, feed them to the newly acquired rabbits and poultry, which we will locate in pens the working bees will build and which will become vegie patches when the animals have cleared them up and fertilized them. The duck ponds will produce large volumes of rich sludge for the gardens. We will plant the communal herb patches, fruit trees, and in time make the fish ponds and the sheds for the beekeeping equipment. Meanwhile sub-groups will research all this and set up committees to look after the fish, rabbits, ducks, chickens, fruit trees, herb patches and bees.
We will organise to buy things in bulk, setting up sub-committees to find the best places to get flour, jars, nuts and bolts. We will scrounge the treasure thrown out on council clean up days, to accumulate the wood and iron we can use in the workshop, and the bikes and appliances we can fix to use or sell.
It is difficult to understand why so few charitable agencies, especially churches, have not set up ventures like this. An inspiring example is The Homeless Garden Project based in California. The standard charitable organization confines itself to merely giving things to “disadvantaged” people, especially money so they can buy more from supermarkets. Consider the typical old person’s “home” where expensive buildings and staff tend to people who have almost nothing to do all day, when they could be contributing to or at least observing a thriving mixed garden with animals and busy people right in their midst, while the institution’s food bill was being reduced. It is no surprise that in Holland such gardens have been found to have beneficial effects on dementia sufferers.
After we get our operations at the garden and workshop site and in the backyards of participants under way, we can explore harnessing other resources in the neighbourhood and taking on other activities there. Are there sheds and trucks, tools, machinery and waste products we can get access to, especially bits of land on which we might plant commons? Are there spaces where we can put in small dams and ponds for water plants and fish, develop pits for clay and earth for building? Can we stack some areas with edible herbs? Can we arrange with councils how to get access to the vast amount of treasure that goes into waste tips, especially the building and craft materials, the appliances and bikes we can repair (eventually we will operate these salvage and recycling depots.)
Councils are likely to give us permission to do at least some planting and maintaining of small herb patches, bush tucker, bee hives, bamboos, fruit and nut groves and timber trees on public land. Much can be done without their approval or knowledge though. In some cities “green guerrillas” just plant on vacant land.
Sometimes our gardens can be located a long way away, for instance when we find a farmer willing to let us grow on his land, or become one of our contributors, or to set up a formal lease for one of our subgroups to establish our own mini-farm. Eventually our farms become leisure and holiday assets, enabling extremely low-cost outings and more lengthy stays.
Setting up small family firms and co-ops:
If the CDC’s bee keeping operation goes well, and Fred’s family really enjoys running it, we might set it up as a fairly independent mini-firm “leased” to Fred. Thus, the CDC is in a position to create firms and livelihoods. It can give people the satisfaction of running their own little enterprise, enjoying making a valued contribution to the community. Our power to do these things derives from the fact that we have working bees, community expertise, our own bank (below) and buying power. Our working bees can quickly build the sheds and rustic shop fronts. We would be keen to buy from Fred rather than the supermarket even if the cost was higher.
It should be apparent to all involved that the whole approach must be basically collectivist. Although small privately-owned firms might make up the biggest sector of the new economy, especially family businesses and farms, the project cannot be got going or kept in good shape unless it is guided by concern to work out and set up what is in the best interests of the town. Many crucial functions must be organised, planned, coordinated, monitored, regulated, revised etc. by the town. This could not happen in an economy made up of competing private firms. In conditions of serious scarcity that would quickly lead to a few most “efficient” winning and driving the rest out of business, and out of town, resulting before long in the deterioration of the town.
One problem here is that councils and other agencies have unnecessarily expensive standards, especially regarding house construction. For instance, their room sizes, ceiling heights, and materials rules help to make a house cost far more than it should. Councils also often have silly rules inhibiting the keeping of poultry and animals in suburban areas, recycling of grey water, food processing and cooperative projects. However, as the time of troubles impacts most of these rules will be swept away as everyone realises that it is essential to facilitate the maximum amount of local productive activity.
The significance of beginning our tiny CDC and the garden and the little productive enterprises and the working bees and commons cannot be exaggerated. To start doing these things even in the humblest way is to have begun to develop totally different economic, political, social, geographical and cultural systems. These activities, no matter how small in scale at first, contradict and spurn the acquisitiveness, competition, individualism, power, greed, affluence and growth that drive the normal economy. Just to have got the CDC going is to have put in place revolutionary new social forms. All that remains to be done is extend it to include the town, then the region, then.
Go out into the locality and start doing something for it:
It is symbolically important at some early stage for us to find some need in the locality that might not affect the CDC’s welfare but which we can act on. Maybe it’s assisting a youth group, or a struggling family, or some homeless people. This is our first step towards taking responsibility for and control over our town. We are not going to leave that problem to the officials, who aren’t dealing with it anyway. We will go over there and see what we can do about it. This is the stroppy attitude that will drive the new economy – this is our town and it’s our business what’s going on here and we want to know what problems there are around here so we can try to fix them. The suggestion here is that it would be good for us to take on a task of this kind early on, to assert that this is the kind of thing we are out to do, and to start getting the hang of such action and building our confidence about it.
This should be easy to do by connecting with existing volunteer and charity agencies, the churches, welfare agencies, aged people’s homes, Lions and Rotary service clubs, farmers markets, youth-off-the-street initiatives, indigenous groups, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, parole support, slow food, Men’s Shed movement. Many of these would be happy to have us help on the problems they are concerned about.
These projects out in the community will be powerful educational devices, enabling us to explain our world view to people. We will publicise the up-coming working bees and identify them not as owned by the CDC but as town events in which all are invited to contribute. It is probable that for a long time we will be regarded as somewhat curious and maybe misguided ignorable do-gooders. The challenge will be to hang in there for the long haul; people will slowly see the significance of what we are doing – as the robots take their jobs and the price of energy rises.
Market day:
We will set up a regular market day so that people can exchange their garden and craft produce with each other (mostly recording trades in our new currency) and sell surpluses to the townspeople. This will help to connect our new economy with the old one, earn us more normal money, and spread awareness of our project to more people. Our market will only sell important items, not trinkets, and only items made locally, not imports. Market day has very important social, political and educational functions. It gives us the opportunity to discuss issues and work towards consensus decisions about what is best for the project and the town.
Remember again: the most important work we are doing is not feeding ourselves or providing livelihoods or community. It is educating the town, increasing the numbers who understand our perspective and who will join us; if not now, then when the global crunches begin to impact. Nothing will be more effective in this campaign than real life visible activities whereby we can be seen practicing the new ways. In the middle of the garden will be that big map of the town as it could be restructured, with many streets converted to gardens and commons.
Leisure, entertainment, celebrations, festivals and culture:
A committee will focus on the possibilities for providing local and free entertainment, eventually including regular concerts, dances, visiting speakers, local artists willing to teach their skills, craft and produce shows, art galleries, discussion groups, book clubs, picnic days and festivals. Can we form a drama club, a comedy group, a choir, a gym display troupe? After the Saturday morning market, we might have an afternoon working bee followed by a town meeting, games, evening meal, party and performances of some sort? What regular celebrations, rituals and festivals can be organised? Can we get a group to work on the local history, museum, culture and folklore? Eventually we will think about ways in which the town centre could be made into a more convivial space that will facilitate informal meeting, discussion and leisure activities? Of course, it is not that these are novel ideas. Many country towns are well aware of the importance of these sorts of activities and projects for cohesion and most councils engage in some of them.
Connecting with the normal/old town economy:
So far the discussion has been about starting to create a new economy operating beside or under the old one, mostly involving people excluded from the old one. Right from the beginning this new Economy B can achieve miracles but there will be many things we can’t produce, and which can only be obtained from the old/normal economy. The wider economy has many things such as radios and bicycles and boots that we will want to use. How then can we who have little or no normal money begin to trade with the normal economy?
The core and obvious point here is that we cannot get things from the old economy unless we can sell things to it. The CDC therefore has to begin researching and consulting in order to find items that it can begin selling to firms in the old/normal economy. A likely beginning point might be to trade vegetables, fish, fruit and poultry with the town restaurant in exchange for meals we can buy from it, using our currency.
The restaurant would be very happy to trade with us, because we represent a large amount of potential demand for meals which previously the restaurant was not able to sell.
Set up our own bank and business incubator:
In general, very little capital will be needed to get the new local economy going because the main enterprises are mostly humble and labour-intensive and do not need elaborate premises or expensive machinery. The CDC can organise campaigns to accumulate voluntary donations of capital for particularly important development projects. Some communities have low or zero interest town development accounts into which those who are willing and able deposit some of their savings because they wish to support desirable local development. On some communes only those who want to see a particular project undertaken contribute capital to it. The CDC can also operate voluntary taxation schemes.
However, the town or region should at some stage establish its own bank or credit union. Normal banks take our savings and lend some of them to corporations far away. Our town bank should have as one of its rules that the savings of local people will only be lent for projects within the region and that top priority will go to borrowers who intend to develop the town in desirable ways. Because the bank gives low or zero interest loans to worthwhile ventures and does not make the highest returns on all loans it will probably not be able to offer to its depositor’s interest rates as high as they could get from banks that are only concerned with making as much money as possible. Again, this is a price we will be willing to pay in order to make sure that (some of) our savings go into developments that will improve our town. (Eventually, in a zero-growth economy, there will be no interest payments.) However, our bank will not be drained by outrageous executive salaries and bonuses or shareholder dividends, and you will have a say in its lending and investment decisions. All its officers might be elected and unpaid volunteers. Our bank can “cross subsidise”, i.e., use income from loans to successful businesses to contribute to important operations that are struggling
Along with the bank we will form a business incubator, to give new little firms assistance with accounting and tax advice, access to computers, perhaps free or low rent premises, and especially expertise from our panel of the town’s most experienced business people. Along with our bank this will put us in a powerful position to take more control over our own economic development. We can set up the firms we want, even if they might not be profitable, create jobs and livelihoods, cut town imports, and reduce dependence on the global economy and on oil.
These institutions, the cooperatives, working bees, town banks and business incubators, and town meetings, give us the power to take control over the development of our town and its capacity to meet needs. We can begin to eliminate unemployment and poverty and homelessness in our town and provide livelihoods and security to all. We have not waited for government or the economy to provide for us, we just got out there and did it for ourselves. Do we have lonely old people or bored youth around here – well let’s just see what we can organise to get rid of or at least reduce these problems.
Much of this is simply organizing to connect existing but idle productive capacities, such as unemployed people, to existing unmet needs, such as the need those people have for incomes and goods. It is absurd that millions of people are idle when they could be “working” to produce some of the things they need. The CDC just organizes this.
The significance of this attitude could not be exaggerated. Although for a long time we might not have the capacity to exercise much control over anything important, that’s the goal we must be clearly determined to achieve from the start. So our orientation will not be centred on encouraging little entrepreneurs to set up, or households to take up gardening, or the town to plant an orchard within the old framework of individuals and groups functioning in a town that’s part of consumer-capitalist society and whose fate is mostly left to global market forces and officials from the council and the state. What we are about is gradually taking cooperative responsibility and control over our town and taking it out of consumer-capitalist society and running it to meet our needs.
The centrality of the commons:
Our community garden is the first of the many commons we will establish, community owned and run spaces, orchards, ponds, forests, sheds, businesses, buildings, housing, systems and services. The neoliberals have been determined to “privatize” anything publicly owned; they want everything to be the property of some private firm and operated to maximize profits for a few. We are going to reverse that and eventually have landscapes that contain many productive arrangements which we own and run cooperatively for the public good. However, some of our property such as dwellings and little firms and farms could be run by cooperatives or leased as family businesses. Especially important will be community services as these often do not require much property, premises or capital. For instance, the Catalan Integral Cooperative runs various “welfare” services, including an employment agency which involves little more than volunteers.
Monitoring:
One of the many concerns of the CDC will be to develop (or find) good indices of important factors such as per capita ecological footprint, energy use, dependence on imports, the quality of life, and social cohesion and social wealth; e.g., how well the working bees and town meetings are attended, how many people feel excluded or stressed, how the old and the young are faring. Right from the earliest days some of these measures will be valuable educational devices, for example having a town footprint figure prominently displayed on the big noticeboard outside the garden.
Relations with the official town council:
Councils are strongly locked into thinking that progress can only mean more investment and sales and “development”, but they do make assistance available to “community development”, youth and aged groups etc. Our task is to see what resources we might be able to tap into without scaring them off by revealing too much about our ultimate aims. Especially important here is seeking land for the establishment of the community garden.
The foregoing discussion has assumed that we have had to do these things on our own, with no connection with or assistance from the local council. But we should explore the extent to which they would be willing to assist us. Some councils within the UK Transition Towns movement have been remarkable facilitators of local initiatives. Councils are in an especially powerful position with respect to their capacity to allocate funds, or, more importantly, to create new forms of money for our purposes. For instance, it was explained above that by creating a LETS currency as a device for recording the contributions to the community garden we can enable employment and incomes among people who have no normal money and are otherwise idle. Similarly, a council can print some new money, use it to pay people to build a market place or tool library or community workshop or swimming pool, and allow people to pay their council rates in this currency. Thus, they can eventually get all the printed money back, and burn it if they wish. (Not all the necessary inputs can be paid for this way, but many can). Many socially desirable developments have been funded in ways like this.
One common mistake is where people buy new money with old money and use that to buy from participating stores. This creates no new economic activity, does not employ any idle people or build anything new. It is important to set up a system wherein the money can enable previously neglected needs to be met.
Again, it is unfortunate that councils have to attend primarily to town survival within the market economy, so they are under great pressure to enable more business turnover within the normal economy and they will be reluctant to provide scarce funds to assist us. They will tend to see the solution to the town’s problems in terms of cranking up more investment and sales. However, they will change their tune as conditions in the global economy deteriorate and their constituents start demanding more land for community gardens etc.
The research task:
There are many branches of academia concerned with the themes discussed above, and it is important that they should give more attention to research clarifying some of the crucial questions. There is a great deal we need to know about the best technical ways to restructure settlements, what kinds of arrangements work best for the management of commons and the organization of working bees and town meetings, etc.
At present we have very little hard evidence on these kinds of questions. An impressive example is Lockyer’s (2017) study of the Dancing Rabbit eco-village in Missouri, which found that per capita figures for consumption of energy, travel, car ownership, garbage thrown out, and water use had been reduced to around 5 – 10% of the US national average – while yielding a very high quality of life. The study by Trainer, Malik and Lenzen (2018) found that the dollar and energy costs for eggs supplied via the normal commercial-industrial-supermarket path were around fifty to two hundred times those from backyard and local cooperatives. We need this kind of research to be able to convince people that alternative ways are highly effective for achieving sustainability goals.
But most important in the short run is research on how best to bring about change in ideas and values – that is, to increase awareness of and commitment to the Simpler Way perspective. We need studies concerned to find out what kinds of messages are most effective (e.g., scary or optimistic), what aspects of the new do people find least plausible or attractive, is the problem primarily about lack of awareness or lack of interest or lack of opportunity to go local?
Finally we need many groups in suburbs and towns to take on the project outlined above, working to establish a CDC and to build it towards a town-wide movement, keeping in close contact with each other to share experience and findings, so that we gradually work out what is the most effective way of transitioning a town.
References:
Lockyer, J., (2017), “Community, commons, and De-growth at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage”, Political Ecology, 24, 519-542.
Remaking Settlements, thesimplerway.info/RemakingSettements.htm
The Catalan Integral Cooperative. thesimplerway.info/CATALAN.htm
Trainer, T., A. Malik and M. Lenzen, (In press), “Comparing the monetary, resource and ecological costs of industrial and Simpler Way local production: Consider egg supply.”
[1] In the Remaking Settlements study (Trainer, 2019) it was pointed out that if all those old enough in the Sydney suburb of East Hills gave only one hour a week to community working bees then an area less than two km across would get 2,500 person hours of work done each week, equivalent to having 60+ full time Council workers constantly working to improve the suburb and running many gardens, workshops, coops etc.
[2] A most impressive example of what a CDC can become is given by The Catalan Cooperative in Spain. See thesimplerway.info/CATALAN.htm.
Nowhere are the radical and coercive implications of the limits to growth more profound than with respect to the transition process. The Simpler Way argument is that the severity of the limits to affluence and growth mean the transition must be to far simpler lifestyles and systems than we have now, and that makes this revolution unlike any ever before. It is different in its goals and in its means; it is not about an affluent industrialised society and its transition strategy does not focus on confronting the ruling class, taking state power or resorting to physical force. These are not options; they are unavoidable and necessary conditions. This revolution is primarily a cultural problem. The enormous changes in politics and the economy (and many other factors such as agriculture and settlement geography) can only be achieved after successful cultural revolution. Thus a very different “theory of revolution” is involved, one that contradicts conventional, Marxist and “green” views.
The basic global sustainability problem involves two gigantic mistakes, the first is to do with the fact that this society involves levels of production and consumption that cannot be kept up much longer let alone be spread to all people, and the second with an economic system based on growth and the market mechanism. When the magnitude of the overshoot is understood it is clear that the problems cannot be solved unless there is enormous de-growth down to perhaps 10% of present economic output and per capital resource consumption. This cannot be done unless enough people a) understand that it must be done, and b) want to do it. This sets the action tasks and the kinds of research needed by people who understand the predicament.
Ted Trainer
worldwide primary energy
politicsofsimplicity 