The New Road: Charting Scotland’s Inspirational Communities

This book does what it says on the cover!

by Alf Young and Ewan Young, Argyll Publishing

This is a truly encouraging book, delightfully written, in the form of a one-week rail and road trip around Scotland, seeing what’s new and working well in raising community resilience. It has just the right amount of practical detail and atmospheric colour.

I also appreciated the way this book has a light touch on editorial, and mostly lets the people and their projects do the talking. The overall picture that emerges has been an important part of my conclusions about how the community resilience sector works in the UK currently. Here are some of my key conclusions, which this book supports:

Transition Town, Forres

·      - There are good working examples of raising resilience in most key aspects (e.g. food, energy, employment), but… these are rarely replicated.

·      - They usually involve an innovative, practical initiative in a physical local community, with a lot of human interaction, and they have deepened the quality of community in that locality.

·      - They were led by and for local people, but mostly initiated and driven along by one or a few superhuman people, pioneers who persisted despite huge obstacles.

·      They often depended on unusual funding sources - for example, raising funds from the community itself, even poor ones, or a brief window when grant funds were available.

·      They managed to engage the hearts, fire up the motivation, overcome the scepticism, of many people in their local community, and gain fairly widespread support and active involvement.

Here are a few of the authors’ perspectives:

Gal Gael, Govan

“For communities to take more responsibility for their own destinies requires an unbelievable amount of hard work...Not just ...the small numbers of people trusts can afford to employ.  Especially from the countless volunteers...”.

“it often feels as if each community setting foot on this new road has to redraw, from scratch, the map that will shape its journey.”

“to prosper in the long-term, we believe all trusts may have to turn themselves into social enterprises of genuine scale”.

Here are some of the specific projects featured in the book:

Dunbar: Artisan bakery, community owned and funded.  The umbrella organisation is a Community Development Trust, which grew out of a local consultation.

Twechar: A rundown former mining village took over the leisure centre from the local authority when it was due for closure, and has made it a real community hub.

Burntisland: Mike Small and the Fife Diet.  It started with communal meals of local produced in the village hall.  Funded by the Climate Challenge Fund.

Fintry, nr Stirling: Development Trust raised funds (from 50% of all local adults) to invest in part of a local commercial wind farm: after 2022 when capital repaid should generate £0.5m annual income.  Also car club and many other community facilities.

Govan, Gal Gael: Centred on a workshop teaching physical skills, eg building traditional boats.  Pioneered a 12 week programme for local young people, ‘Navigate Life’: craft skills and field trips into nature. Thursday evenings open house: music, food, company.

Neilston, south of Glasgow: Development Trust led by a dynamicc local woman: created a Town Charter with 44 project aims by 2030.  Funding a key issue - the 44 would cost £15m or more.  Raised money to buy a share of a local windfarm, will bring in £0.5m per annum from 2018.

Renton, West Dumbartonshire: locals created a Community Housing Association: has refurbished rundown social housing, built mixed tenure new homes, and created a new, 40-apartment, extra care facility for local older people.  It has also created, rented, then sold a successful 3000 square feet retail unit, and has built a new Healthy Living Centre, and a community centre (cafe, sports, meeting rooms).

Comrie, Perthshire: Set up a development trust, bought a redundant military camp with 96 acres - now includes food growing by local people, small business spaces, sports etc.

Forres: Transition Town Forres: Carin Schwartz, ex-Findhorn, a prime mover.  Innovative community allotment.

Sleat, Skye: Sleat Community Trust: took over the petrol station after it shut down, it’s now also the local post office and visitor info centre.  SCT has also bought the 1000 acre Tormore Forest nearby: provides a long-term revenue flow.  The purchase was backed by Highlands & Islands Enterprise Trust, and Triodos Bank.

Eigg: The islanders bought the island.  Have set up their own energy supply company, 90% renewable sources.  It also has a forest business, and a 24-bed luxury hostel and outdoor centre.

Cancel The Apocalypse: book by Andrew Simms Useful, informative and sometimes annoying...

In the Smart Thinking section of a Waterstones, this is one of numerous large, mostly worrying books about the future. I was persuaded to buy this one by its optimistic title, and my good opinion of the author. Andrew Simms is a Fellow of the new economics foundation who has contributed to some good innovative thinking over the past twenty years.

This book has a lot of useful information, insights and piercing statistics about why things are as bad as they are, on many fronts: world economics, banking, food, and lots more. Simms is familiar with a lot of good research and resources, which are well referenced here. But he also rambles and digresses: the 250-page version of this book would be more readable and useful than the actual 474 pages. Some of the many useful insights in the book include:

• Wellbeing vs. Materialism: Simms cites extensive research on the qualities that give most people a sense of wellbeing, alongside depressing evidence that the most materialistic don’t have these qualities, and many systems in developed societies push against them.
• Finance: He explains recent meltdowns clearly, tries applying a natural systems analogy to world finances, and describes a few smaller-scale alternatives.
• Food: He provides strong evidence for the vulnerability of food and fuel supply chains, highlights the role of speculation in driving up consumer prices even further, and provides evidence that food production could be organised to feed the world, given numerous radical changes. He quotes strong evidence to support his doubts about GM, and comments that ‘other non-GM techniques look set to bring dramatic crop improvements.’
• Pay, performance and inequality: Simms adds to the conclusions in the book The Spirit Level that societies with more unequal incomes have many related problems, and even the rich are less happy. He adds some interesting points to this: for example, a wide-ranging research survey which found no evidence that higher pay engenders higher performance, and in fact suggests it can be counterproductive. He also points out that employment is one of the primary drivers of inequality in societies like the UK.
• Advertising: The section on advertising is incisive, with quotes from industry gurus stating that the basic purpose of all this spending is to undermine people’s confidence and independence, and goad them into consumption.
• Cooperation: Simms is eloquent on the many benefits of more cooperative and egalitarian societies, and believes that it’s in human nature to be like this – the problem is simply that our dominant global systems all push in the wrong direction.
• Poverty: His assessment is pretty depressing: for example, if one takes China out of the figures, there has been no reduction in the numbers of global poor from 1980 to 2010. He also points out that the level of trickle-down from world economic growth to those in absolute poverty is tiny and shrinking: from $2.20 per $100 of global economic growth in the 1980s, to $0.60 in the 1990s.

I found it annoying that over 90% of this book is devoted to a range of specific issues, in which the problems are described at length, along with a variety of potential solutions, but mostly potential ones: to be more specific, he quotes details of positive initiatives which are working well somewhere, or bright ideas, but gives very little clue on how all this could be propagated in the mainstream. I became increasingly curious as to what the pivotal final chapter would contain.

Sadly, as with many of these books, Simms has little that’s new or convincing to say about how the large-scale economic, political and social structures of the world or the UK could be transformed into the more localised, collaborative, human approaches which he advocates. His suggestion that we all try to re-invent our sense of place and of time is a good start, but inspiring more than a small minority to do even this seems hard to imagine...

The Great Disruption: Book by Paul Gilding. A useful guide to constructive pessimism

The key message of The Great Disruption that although the world’s eco-systems (and hence economies) are going down the tubes rapidly, the crisis can be resolved if radical, concerted action is taken within the next few years, as Gilding believes it will be. 

Paul Gilding comes with impressive credentials: he has been executive director of Greenpeace Australia and International, and later worked as a consultant with large multinational businesses.  His book is generally well-argued and well-researched, but with a few blindspots: see more later.  Gilding says that, “Every major grouping of qualified scientists that has analysed the issue comes to the same conclusion” regarding climate change: that we are in a major crisis, which can only be resolved by dramatic cuts in human pollution. 

He draws a useful distinction between focussing on what is necessary  to resolve a problem, not what is politically possible; and he makes a strong case that what is really needed is to limit global temperature rise to 1^o C above pre-industrial levels. 

Gilding explains that he got much more attention from business audiences when he spoke about economic impacts, not environmental.  The global economy already puts more demands on the planet than it can sustain, and this is continually exacerbated by population growth: hence he believes the world has to face a fundamental crisis soon that continued economic growth is simply not sustainable.  We have to readjust to a steady state economy.

Gilding points to 2008 as an example of how this will happen in practise: in that year, economic growth led to resource shortages in food, energy and commodities, which produced big price rises, which then deflated the economy.  He expects this cycle to continue until fundamental systemic changes are made.

Whereas many experts, such as James Lovelock and Richard Heinberg, believe the global eco-system is broken beyond repair, Gilding disagrees, and his book includes modelling which he undertook with Professor Jorgen Randers to model how climate change could be pulled back to a one degree rise.  He believes this would require a war footing, with radical initiatives by the governments of major countries around the world, and he quotes World War II as a relevant precedent.  For example, his model includes rationing electricity, forced reductions in air travel, limiting use of gas-guzzling cars, and massive investments in renewable energy.  His model assumes that the ‘One Degree War’ starts in 2018, and that by then, climate changes impacts will become so severe that they force a tipping point in public opinion and government action.  I really hope he is right.

In a chapter titled ‘Are we finished?’, he says, “The attitude we adopt...hope versus despair – is perhaps the most profound issue we will face.  I think it will be more influential on our future than technology, politics or markets.”  He believes that a key to getting beyond denial of a problem is belief that a solution is possible.  Whilst his book helps somewhat, it leaves lots of questions unanswered, and I believe there is huge work urgently needed both to figure out in detail how solutions could work, and then to publicise this. 

Gilding sees two main phases in the big changes ahead.  The first will be government-directed, focussed on climate change.  The second phase is where the end of economic growth will be confronted.  Gilding quotes the book The Spirit Level and other surveys which show that average annual incomes above $15,000 per year do little to increase happiness, and that even the richest people are happier in societies with smaller income differentials. 

In the latter sections of his book, I find numerous blindspots and Utopian thinking: for example the belief that because of this research, governments worldwide will reduce differentials and both nationally and internationally, thus ending world poverty almost at a stroke.  Although the global economy may become steady state, differentials between countries will continue to change, and these tensions are not considered.  Gilding assumes that declining average incomes will be handled smoothly by everyone working part-time, which looks naively optimistic.

The Great Disruption, the One Degree War, and whatever follows it will have absolutely massive impacts socially and economically, which are hardly touched on in this book.  It would be good to see much more detailed consideration of the adverse impacts and how to mitigate them, and with the positive impacts, and how to encourage and accelerate these.  Gilding observes that the skills of personal and community resilience are now urgently needed, and this book gives at least brief glimpses of the impacts those skills will have to cope with.