Quick Book Notes – Charles Eisenstein: The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible

This book is a sort of guide to the New Story: not what it is but, a clear, compassionate process of how to move into it.  He illuminates the personal and societal habits and mindsets holding us back, and their benign successors.

He sums up the New Story as “the story of Interbeing, the Age of Reunion... the world of the gift.”  Whereas, “More than anything external, it is our own habits that draw us back into the old story... habits of scarcity,...judgement, and... struggle.”  But as he points out, giving attention to a habit and the feelings underlying it weaken its addictive power.

Since the New Story is about interconnection, he warns against its advocates feeling righteous, which perpetuates separation and alienates others.  “Today, our economic environment screams at us, “Scarcity!” ... political... “Us versus them”, ... medical... “Be afraid!”  Together they keep us alone and scared to change.”  Whereas in truth “fundamentally we are the same being looking out at the world through many sets of eyes”.

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...

Can Britain feed itself?

A community market garden in Bridport

Rising world population, switch to Western diets by the affluent and developing countries, increasing climate change impacts causing major crop failures: these are three of the major factors which have driven substantial, real price increases in most foodstuffs in recent years, all pressures which are likely to intensify in future.  If you couple this with Britain’s poor economic and employment situation, you’d think that increasing our food self-sufficiency would be a no-brainer.

As far as I know, there’s not much current debate on this topic, especially in the mainstream.  So I’m pleased to report some useful insights from The Land Magazine, a really useful twice-yearly publication giving insights into farming, planning, and many other land-related issues: I highly recommend subscribing to it: you can see more at www.thelandmagazine.org.uk.

The latest issue has a 5-page article on this topic, with helpful quantitative analyses and references.  This quotes data from DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs), who calculate the percentage of foodstuffs that could be grown in the UK, which actually are.  This ratio has been declining every year since 1988, and reached an all time low of 71.7% in 2009, recovering slightly in 2010 to 74.4%.

Ed Hamer’s article provides two detailed calculations of how Britain could be largely self-sufficient in food production.  The first scenario draws on an earlier article in The Land by Simon Fairlie, called Can Britain Feed Itself, published Winter 2007-8.  Key to Simon’s scenario is a significant change in diet, to a more (but not entirely by any means) vegetarian diet.  In particular, pig and poultry production is taken out, but beef and sheep production actually increases.  Assuming current, conventional farming methods and yield per acre, this scenario shows that we do have the land area to feed a population of 62.3 million people. 

This article also references a useful publication by Vicki Hird, published by The Food and Environment Alliance, London: Double Yield, Jobs and Sustainable Food Production, which covers similar ground, with similar conclusions.

The second scenario takes largely the same diet and production requirements, and explores whether these could be provided by entirely organic methods. The yields, labour requirements, etc come from sources which should be reliable, eg DEFRA and Soil Association Studies.  They show that all this could be produced organically on 16.7 million hectares, which compares to the current agricultural land area in the UK of 18.2 million.  The biggest difference is in the labour requirement: around 330,000 people, compared to around 159,000 currently.  This is a great example of a figure which could be good news or bad, depending how you look at it. 

Given current levels of unemployment, and the hidden costs (pollution, land degradation, etc) of conventional farming, I see this as an exciting possibility.  Yes, it does imply that food prices would be somewhat higher, but they will be anyway given the trend in world prices, not to mention the costs of oil and therefore fertilisers and pesticides.  There are also various creative ways to keep the cost of this additional labour modest.  Quite a lot of the production may come from community market gardens, volunteers, trainees, horticultural therapy and more.

How long will it be until we get an informed debate about these possibilities?

FutureScapes: Scenarios for 2025. Technology, sustainability, virtuality ...

FutureScapes is a recent collaboration of Forum for the Future, a leading UK sustainability charity, and Sony.  Their late 2011 report is available as a free download, but is work in progress, with public and organisations invited to join in its future evolution.

This work is not a prediction, but it is an interesting set of speculations, and they are built from four Climate Futures scenarios, helped by experts from academia and think tanks, as well as Forum and Sony.

Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller... Peak oil is more real and alarming than you want to think!

Jeff Rubin's book

This 2009 book is by Jeff Rubin, who is apparently an independent authority on the oil industry.  He was Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets (a North American investment bank), who is consulted by oil producers, ie he’s not a greenie or militant.

Rubin is readable, clear and convincing.  He provides a lot of info I did not know before, to show why Peak Oil is here, and worse than most of us realise.  The biggest surprises for me were not about the lack of supply, but about the factors propelling continued growth in demand.

But let’s start with supply.  Rubin explains that oil producers, both sovereign states and organisations, have motives to overstate their reserves, as that boosts their prestige and bargaining power.  However, he broadly accepts the Hubbert Curve forecasts, and offers plenty of evidence to support them.  For example, he explains that in depleted oilfields, the output ratio of natural gas to oil rises, and this is now true in Saudi Arabia.

He is horribly interesting when explaining what economists call the rebound effect.  This means that a big rise in oil prices typically leads to rises in efficiency of use, but these lower the real cost (of car or air travel, for example) which then actually stimulates consumption.

Whilst oil consumption per dollar of GDP in OECD countries has reduced impressively, Rubin gives some big and alarming reasons why the growth elsewhere in the world is growing rapidly:

• Most oil producing countries are committed to providing unlimited cheap oil to their own population, meaning US$ 0.25 per gallon!
• These low oil prices are also applied to electric power generation, desalination plants, petrochemicals and more, which further boosts demand growth in oil producers.
• China and India, two huge and fast-growing economies, are heavily subsidising their domestic petrol prices at below world price levels to assist economic growth.

Jeff Rubin

The disappointing part of Rubin’s book is about the consequences.  He’s convincing that rapid oil price rises are unavoidable, and he expects economies to become more localised as transport costs rise.  As he says, this implies serious economic contraction for many developing countries which have depended on cheap oil.  He comments, ‘How all this will affect our culture is a topic for others to explore in depth’… Let’s hope those others speak out soon.