Watch this place
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 1 » Features » Watch this placeNew Zealand’s small towns have some big ideas. Determined to wean themselves off oil, communities are coming together to plan for more sustainable futures. Andy Kenworthy visits one of our Transition Towns.
Above: James Samuel and daughter Zuva at home on Waiheke Island. Photograph by Andy Kenworthy
When I was a snotty-nosed 10-year-old in the mid-1980s, my school teacher gave out a booklet. It described how by the year 2000 we would commute by jet-pack from the roofs of our air-conditioned living pods over green fields to gleaming cities of sky-scraping steel and glass.
There, we would do a squeaky-clean 20-hour work week, while the machines and robots did the hard yards. Leisure would be the largest industry; our biggest problem would be working out what to do with all our spare money and free time.
The pamphlet didn’t mention that this kind of future would only ever be available for a tiny minority of super-rich people, at the expense of everybody else. It left out the limits of global resource use, peak oil and climate change.
“How each of us copes with this reality, how we re-imagine and re-engineer our future and build new dreams with this knowledge, is the greatest and most exciting challenge humanity currently faces.”
Fast forward to now. Surprise! It turns out The Jetsons was a cartoon after all. The jet-packs ain’t comin’, and the future is going to be one in which we consume dramatically less energy than we do currently.
How each of us copes with this reality, how we re-imagine and re-engineer our future and build new dreams with this knowledge, is the greatest and most exciting challenge humanity currently faces. Most of our communities, towns and regions, not to mention individuals like me, are terribly ill-prepared. But if we give ourselves enough time and enough creativity, we can create a better, more vibrant future than the life we are currently living.
So-called “Transition Towns” are one way in which people are coming together to prepare for this new, low-energy future.
It’s happening here
James Samuel, New Zealand’s national co-ordinator for the international Transition Towns project, is smiling from his sun-bleached shed/office, perched over Waiheke’s idyllic Oneroa Bay. With his athletic build, twinkling eyes and deeply relaxed composure, he doesn’t seem like a 50-year-old who has been on a computer all night.
“I took a Skype call at 2am about sales on our latest book,” he explains. “Then at 3am I got involved in a web training seminar with the UK, then another call came in at 5:30am with the feedback from another workshop being held over there. It was great.”
So, Transition Towns isn’t some doomsday Luddite anti-technology cult. I may not get my jet-pack, but I won’t get in trouble for bringing my laptop.
Nobody can question James’s commitment. He has spent most of his savings while working 50 wildly irregular hours a week for the past five months, for which he has managed to get $3,500 in funds. He says this doesn’t worry him.
“I will never be homeless on this island, and never without food,” he says. “I don’t own my own home, but I have a lot of social capital built up here.”
The first perma-town
The concept of Transition Towns began life just about when I was due to start jetting off my garage, by another seaside in Kinsale, Ireland. It grew—you might say organically—from its originator Rob Hopkins’ study and practice of permaculture, which he’d been pursuing for more than a decade.
Permaculture—from ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’—is a design approach that aims to provide for all our needs in a sustainable way. Permaculture gardens, lakes, ponds, rivers, fields, forests and buildings are designed or reshaped with the intention of being as diverse, stable and resilient as nature itself.
Applying these principles to Kinsale, Rob began to develop ways in which the community could prepare for the approaching realities of peak oil and climate change. The result was the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan, which was adopted by the local town council.
“I called the first Transition Waiheke meeting, inviting 20 people, and 24 came, which was encouraging. I soon realised that people already knew about peak oil and climate change, they wanted to talk about the process, about what to do.”
The plan was essentially aimed at creating a vision of what a happy, healthy, thriving, post-peak oil, climate change-savvy Kinsale might look like, and then charting out the steps aimed at getting there. Or, as Rob describes it: “It was the first, as far as we know, attempt at designing a timetabled strategy for weaning a town off fossil fuels.”
Importantly, the plan was informed by community discussions and input from a wide range of local people—an approach that became a foundation of the Transition Towns project.
Becoming a Transition Town isn’t about politicians or experts telling people what they should or shouldn’t do, and it’s not about waiting for someone else to do something. It’s more like an open invitation for everyone to play a part in creating a tight-knit, focused and inspired community.
The goal is to help a community identify what it needs to become stronger and more resilient to change. Anything goes, from coffee mornings and yoga classes to intensive permaculture design courses and even setting up a local currency. Anything that binds the community together is thrown into the mix. The Transition Town group’s job is just to keep stirring.
After his success in Kinsale, Rob moved on to Devon and began work on a plan for Totnes. There are now ten working groups there, pushing forward with 20 projects: matching unused garden space with people who wish to get growing, providing local businesses with free energy efficiency advice, a Transition Tales storytelling scheme for children, and supporting the development of a local rickshaw company. They’ve even managed to get a Transition Town storyline into rural England’s favourite radio soap opera, The Archers.
Over to you
Word is spreading. What has become the Transition Network has forged links with similar worldwide movements. Today there are 35 full-scale Transition Town projects in the UK, one in Australia, and three in New Zealand.
This is where James came in, in the middle of 2007, bringing his eclectic background as farmer, woodworker, traveller, paragliding instructor and facilitator. When he first heard of Transition Towns last year, he’d already been working hard at bringing his own community together. He’d been manager of the local cinema, ensuring that films covering peak oil and climate change were screened. He also helped to establish community gardens, the local farmer’s market and even a new primary school.
“I called the first Transition Waiheke meeting, inviting 20 people, and 24 came, which was encouraging,” he says. “I soon realised that people already knew about peak oil and climate change, they wanted to talk about the process, about what to do.”
As an island community beside an island nation, with a warm climate and abundant water supplies, Waiheke is fertile ground to test the Transition Town idea. And because New Zealand does not produce large amounts of oil and is a long way from the key oil producing parts of the world, it is likely that energy descent here will be quite sudden.
Transition Waiheke is co-ordinated by a core team of six, with many others on the island playing varying roles in a multitude of activities. Their current priorities include looking at ways to reduce food imports to the island, working with Meridian to reduce power consumption, planning a new sustainable public transport system, encouraging house builders to use local materials, and sharing skills like woodworking and blacksmithing.
“We have to keep learning from each other,” says James. “When people come up with something really creative, everyone can benefit.”
There are glimpses of the Transition Towns push in neat little ideas all over the island, like the veggie swap stall at the local market, where surplus fruit and vegetables from people’s gardens changes hands instead of money. Or the ‘fabulous fruit tree’ project, which aims to plant 20,000 fruit trees in public spaces on the island by 2014.
These are what James refers to as ‘baby steps’, which get people used to the idea of growing, gathering and sharing natural resources. They also provide fresh opportunities for people to get to know each other.
Rosie Walford, a core member of the Transition Waiheke team, says it’s this meeting of like minds that encourages her. “The positivity, the possibility of a better rather than grimmer future, makes me think we have a chance.”
“The idea is to keep the energy going,” says James. “Find great people and make them as effective as possible, so that everyone can focus on what they have a passion for.”
“People want to feel that it is doable, that we can start now.”
In New Zealand all Transition Town activities are undertaken by volunteers. The number of people involved ebbs and flows, but momentum is growing.
“Things are moving at a phenomenal pace,” says James. “The last film showing we had was on a really sunny Saturday afternoon on which there was a load of other stuff happening on the island. We still filled the auditorium and had people sitting in the aisles.”
There have been national speaking tours, too, with recent visits by peak oil educator Richard Heinberg, permaculture co-creator David Holmgren, and Cuban biologist Roberto Perez, who spoke about how his country survived and thrived while oil was scarce because of the US blockade (see box below).
Orewa and Kapiti have now begun the process of registering formally with the international Transition Network. More than 30 other areas in New Zealand have expressed an interest, and are using Transition Town techniques to bring people together. Chances are, there’s one near you (check the list opposite). If not, James suggests you get in touch.
“It is an amazing, exciting, encouraging, growing thing and I don’t see that stopping,” James says.
“When a community comes together as a Transition Town they are saying ‘we have started’ which means they have already succeeded, not in some future moment. It is a movement and evolution which begins now.”
Been there, done that
What Cuba can teach Kiwi towns about getting over oil.
In September 1994, I found myself in Cuba. I was on my way to London via Mexico, but too much tequila and a late night plan led me to catch a plane to Havana with a Spanish-speaking friend. With no knowledge of Cuba’s political situation, I spent five days wandering around, wondering why there was no food in the shops and the cars didn’t move.
Cuba, I found out later, was a country in transition. Three years previously, the fall of the Soviet Union had cut them off from 85 percent of their oil imports.
Cuban permaculturist Roberto Perez was one of the people who helped his country adapt to a life without fuel. I met him when he was in New Zealand earlier this year sharing his knowledge with communities like Waiheke.
“1994 was actually the worst time,” Roberto tells me. “All our agricultural machinery was run on petrol. We had more tractors per hectare than the US and no fuel.” There were no fertilisers either: 1.3 million tonnes of petrochemical fertilisers a year were lost.
“We needed to re-invent ourselves, and find a different way to produce food.”
The solution came in the form of urban organic agriculture, or organoponicos. As people got hungrier—the average Cuban lost 11 kilograms during this time—they started to dig up the empty plots around the city and plant food.
“It was a spontaneous, grassroots movement which the government lent their support to. Instead of renting plots of land to people, they let them just take over. Horticulture clubs started up where people shared tools and seeds.”
As more food was needed, they converted parking spaces into community gardens.
“At first, people were worried about robbery and kept the gardens locked,” says Roberto, ”but they soon realised that instead of stealing food they could simply grow it, so they joined in.”
The experience changed Cuban society in many ways. It started conversations between generations, as older folk taught younger people how to grow food. The lack of imported pharmaceuticals led the Cubans to rely on their immigrant population for alternative medicines too. Chinese elders administered acupuncture during operations as there was no anaesthetic.
The population were forced onto public transport and bicycles. I remember seeing crowds teeming on and off the buses. Roberto says he cycled 26 kilometres a day to get to work. Cubans went from eating a lot of meat to a more plant-based, healthier diet. Out of necessity came a positive blueprint for their future.
“This solution was created by many little neighbourhoods working together,” says Roberto.
“Havana City Province has two million people. To solve the problem for that many people just seemed too big, but trying to find a solution for a neighbourhood block was possible.”
Roberto believes there are many similarities between Cuba and New Zealand. “Living on an island, you are limited, so you need to learn to live within these limits. Like Cuba, New Zealand is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for machinery and for the transport of your food.
“You need to start being more self-reliant—looking for produce in local places. People need to get closer to nature and enforce a sense of community. You need to adapt, to be prepared.”
As apocalyptic as it sounds, my memories of Cuba weren’t of a spartan, unhappy place. There was economic hardship, certainly, but we were welcomed into homes where people had time to talk. We were shown around gardens where they grew avocados the size of small melons and danced till dawn in the sweatiest, most vibrant nightclub I’ve ever squeezed myself into.
Peak oil is a concept that scares us all, but if we start the transition process now, we might find that life on the other side ain’t so bad.
– Francesca Price
What is peak oil?
‘Peak oil’ will occur when the rate of global oil production reaches a maximum, after which it will steadily decline.
Once oil production peaks, the likely result is that the price of oil—and everything that uses oil in its production and transport – will steadily increase, unless a reliable alternative to oil is found. The concern is that high prices will disrupt national and international economic systems, cause shortages and spark wars over the remaining supplies.
The peak theory was first proposed in 1956 by geophysicist Marion King Hubbert, whose studies correctly predicted the peak of oil production within the United States in 1970. Hubbert’s theory is based on the observation that in oil extraction the first half tends to be the easiest and least expensive to complete, with the highest quality results.
Peak oil does not mean the world is running out of oil: it means we are running out of the cheap, easily extracted oil that has fuelled the economic development of the 20th century.
Because of the complexities of accurately measuring oil reserves and predicting future demand, it is likely that peak oil will only be pinpointed after it has occurred. These complexities are compounded by the enormous vested interests involved in controlling this information, and the oil itself.
Amid an extremely heated debate, a growing number of analysts and observers believe we are either very close to peak oil production, or we have already passed it.
What is certain is that oil prices are currently rising steeply. The price of a barrel of oil broke the US$100 barrier for the first time in history in January. By May, oil prices hovered near US$125 a barrel, double the cost of a barrel in January 2007 and more than five times as expensive as during a low in 2002. While oil price is dependant on many factors (the weakening US dollar has a strong impact), many industry analysts expect oil to remain over US$100 a barrel; some predict spikes of up to US$200 a barrel.
