Reflections

DESPAIR INTO POWER

Adrienne Campbell lives in Lewes in the south of England where she was the co founder and manager for the first five years of the successful Lewes New School. In this article she describes how her attention turned to environmental issues and how she became involved in the Transition Towns movement which aims to prepare towns for issues which will have to be faced now and in the future such as the running out of the oil supply. She is trained as a science journalist. Click on the hyperlinks in blue for more information on the subjects referred to.

This is the story of how one community has started to prepare for radical change in light of the ‘greatest threat to humanity’. It’s the story of my part in it; I am one of many voices telling the story as it unfolds in the years to come.

Eighteen months ago (Sept 2006) I started to realise that life on earth was going down the tube. It probably started with seeing the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth.

As I read the science and spoke to experts (I was once a science journalist) the shock set in: that not only climate change but also depletion of many resources such as oil, topsoil, ocean fertility and clean water, as well as population growth, were accelerating like a train careering out of control. And the drivers of the train – our leaders – appeared not to have the vision or courage needed to stop the train before the crash.

The shock of this realisation lasted for most of 2007. What could I do in the face of all that? I strongly believed we can and do change the world – together – so I set about carrying out an experiment in our own household and wrote about it for the local weekly online magazine Viva Lewes.

I wrote about all the things I’d been doing for some time, such as getting locally grown food from vegetable boxes and spending time in nature. I then started to push my comfort boundaries: we gave away our minibus on Freecycle and started the Baked Bean car club with some Subud friends.

I pretty much stopped buying new things. Oh and we gave up flying, which was hard, because I love it and three of my siblings and many Subud friends live overseas. Yet I started to feel a delightful sense of freedom and resilience, and we were saving loads of money.

Peak Oil

Around the same time I came across Peak Oil – the idea that we are nearing the end of the age of cheap oil and reaching a point where demand outstrips supply – after which energy prices will rise rapidly and terminally.

Oil is in almost everything our civilisation is based on, from flying to food, with 1 calorie of food requiring 10 calories of oil to farm, fertilise, transport, package, store and cook it. Peak oil highlights our vulnerability and the need to build resilience into our communities, such as feeding ourselves locally.

Something became very clear to me: humanity has to make a managed move away from our overdependence on fossil fuels, (which produce most of the CO2), which are depleting anyway, and which are increasingly fuelling wars.

There is an international approach called Contraction and Convergence that proposes this, but planned reduction needs also to be done at a grassroots level, individually and in small groups. This will transform society from an industrial growth society to a life sustaining civilisation.

Transition Towns

I heard about peak oil because of the Transition Towns movement. Around that time I came across the Transition Towns movement, which started in Totnes, Devon with a young man called Rob Hopkins (I interviewed him at the Lewes Subud House here). His idea was that our collective ingenuity would get us down the other side of the oil peak and our overdependence on oil, and that we needed to start to imagine and have a vision for a life with much less oil.

Not only that, but this kind of life could well be happier, healthier and more connected with each other and the earth than our current life which, many agree, has become dysfunctional (that’s the Anyway Clause).

The heart of the Transition Town approach is an Energy Descent Action Plan (‘the Plan’), which is a vision for a future with far less oil, plus a year-by-year pathway in every sector of life, mapping out positive actions that will take us there. It’s part storytelling, part technical handbook. When I heard about Rob’s work from a friend, I knew the finger of destiny was also pointing at me.

The idea of engaging a whole community of 17,000 people was way too massive for me (especially as I’d just unravelled myself from Lewes New School), so I ‘awaited instructions’.

Then, a few weeks later, in the worried discussion after a talk by Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees, I mentioned the Transition Town idea, and the deputy chair of the District Council, a special man, grabbed me and set up a meeting inviting all the great and good of Lewes to kick start the process. So from the outset, this project was never about me; I only had the vision and willingness to help it happen.

We formed a core group, then ran an awareness raising programme of two high profile speakers and two films about Peak Oil over a few months. We then pulled off our unforgettable Official Unleashing in April 2007 – at which 400 people attended including the mayor and most of the Town Council.

Now an Active Group

That was 14 months ago. Now we have an active group of 120 people, with 580 subscribing to our news bulletin. At the Unleashing, groups started to form around areas such as Transport, Food, Housing and Arts; there are now 20 groups all meeting and planning for life after oil.

On any one night, Lewes’s favourite pub has several huddles of Transition Town Lewes discussions. And it’s not just meetings; we’ve been doing too. In 10 months:

The energy group has set up the Ouse Valley Energy Services Company (Ovesco), which is distributing Lewes District Council’s energy savings grants. The energy group aims to supply all the bioregion’s electricity renewably by 2050.
The textiles group has produced two editions of Lewes Community Bag – Love Lewes, Shop Local fair-trade cotton bags sold at £3 in 32 shops
The business group has launched a website for businesses to access information on how to reduce their energy bills and increase their resilience.
The Heart and Soul Group (with Subud members, in the Subud House) is running monthly Oekos meetings to help people share support each other in facing the coming transition
Schools workshops – Moving Sounds has worked with 1000 year 5/6 children in all primary schools in and around Lewes
Heat More Greens! A Lewes Householders’ Initiative to block-buy and install solar panels - up to 30 installations already started
Transition Town Lewes: The Movie – a YouTube film (a must-see!) about Climate Change and Peak Oil that has been widely seen locally
The Great Reskilling has involved about 100 people over the last two months in courses such as Bicycle Maintenance, Basket Making, Food Growing and Food Foraging.
We are in the middle of our third programme of inspiring talks, films and workshops, and have documented almost everything, with photos, films, transcripts, etc, on our collaborative wiki website.
The waste group has identified that the ‘gap’ in the waste stream is catering food waste and is investigating a Rocket Composter, in partnership with East Sussex County Council and Furniture Now, a local charity.
The food group is holding a conference this summer called ‘Feeding Lewes Locally’ for local landowners and farmers, with Richard Heinberg from the US as main speaker.
The food group has started a Garden Buddies initiative to help local gardeners to help each other out in growing.
The transport group is producing a Cycle Map and walking map of Lewes and is conducting a feasibility study for a Lewes-wide car club run by the community for the community.
We’ve worked closely with a number of other groups working to a similar aim, and increasingly are working with the local councils, who are increasingly being mandated to both plan for preventing climate change and engage the community in doing so.
We’ve just started writing the 20 year Energy Descent Plan, which will be a creative, compelling, year by year pathway describing the many actions we can take to make the transition away from fossil fuels, and generating renewable energy locally.

Going Viral

Transition Towns are now going viral around the world; as I write there are now 40 Transition communities in Britain, including cities such as Brighton and Bristol, as well as islands and hamlets. 400 more are ‘mulling’. Recently, New Zealand, Australia and the US have started to plan their transition approach; there’s probably one starting up near you. For me an inspiring aspect of Transition Towns is that nobody is in charge and there is no template – whoever turns up creates what happens; nobody is telling anyone else what to do but we invite widely and creatively to find solutions together.

All of what I describe above is what has happened outwardly. But the impetus for this has been a transformation of despair into power, a kind of changing of consciousness. I don’t know how the others in Lewes have experienced this inner aspect so I’ll just describe my own path.

The Latihan in All This

I’ve been helped enormously through this by the latihan, which I now see as a gifted experience that helps get us on track with our purpose. After the last world congress I started to move away from experiencing God as transcendent and towards a more earth-based communion, a sort of ‘joining with what is’. I started to feel more like ‘an original person’ both in latihan and the way I perceived the world, especially the natural world.

When I had that massive shock I described earlier I started to see a possible future for humanity that was very dark and I became very afraid. This continued for many months, during which I cried a lot in latihan.

I also experienced powerful altered states, both in and out of latihan, especially in nature and also outside time. At times I went over the edge into what felt like madness but it seems that’s a hazard of being willing to have vision. I’ve calmed down now and seem to have come through with more determination. I’ve been helped greatly by a group of Subud women who meet monthly to do latihan and talk about our lives.

I’ve found it’s been really important for me to have the courage to feel the feelings – though not indulge them - and not do a spiritual shortcut to avoid emotions, which is something I used to do before I realised that was depriving me from fully experiencing life.

Largely what has happened has not been about me. I was just fairly willing to be useful and let life live me, so to speak. The project was given abundant invisible help through seamless serendipitous channels. Loads of us, not just people following a specific spiritual path, have experienced this aspect.

At all times I’ve felt supported and guided, though at times I felt swept up with an intensity like that of giving birth. I’ve gone right through my pain boundaries and comfort zones and a lot of ego stuff.

Mostly I am ever more amazed by the elegance of the possibility given to humans to co-create this beautiful world. I felt it at Lewes New School and it’s getting stronger, and I sense others are experiencing this too, though it’s hard to talk about without sounding bigheaded. I wonder whether our destiny as human beings is to work in partnership with the Great Life Force.

Denial

I do find it strange that some Subud people’s response is various kinds of what I call denial, but which could more kindly be called a self-cushioning from a scary reality. They range from ‘Just Trust in God’ to ‘Some new kind of technology will be invented – you wait!’ I don’t know if you realise, but most of you reading this, including me, have giant ecological footprints.

We are the ones who have caused the most damage to the earth, as it takes between 3 (UK) and 8 (US) planets to provide what we consider basic needs; our impact is measurable. Everyday choices such as flying, driving, what we eat and wear and where we bank are essentially moral choices; we are so unaware of that.

It’s not a comfortable feeling to realise that it’s our everyday choices that have made our planet start to go into systems failure and is already causing some great suffering of the most vulnerable people and other created beings – for example the third of the world’s people who depend on rapidly disappearing glacial meltwater.

Perhaps it’s not possible for all of us to bear this knowledge, to move through what it brings up and to move swiftly through guilt into effective action. My greatest hope is that the scientists are wrong, but we should anyway apply the precautionary principle here – ‘just in case’ they are right, we’d better start dealing with this immediately!

Trust and Acceptance

I do think that trust and acceptance become hugely important in the context of this situation that is already starting to affect us all. Trusting in God – while tying up our camel - is a great antidote to the fear that is already an unspoken undercurrent. But it’s an active trust, and it helps me engage with my full being when I go over my comfort zones.

A saying I like to use is The World is a Safe Learning Environment. In other words, no matter what happens to me, even pain and death, I am safe. The same with acceptance, the understanding of which has recently deepened.

For all of 2007 I was saying, ‘I cannot accept what we are doing to ourselves, I cannot accept the suffering ahead.’ But then I found a place where I can accept it, even though I don’t like it, and it has made me more available.

Last week I finished handing over the (until now voluntary) facilitator role of Transition Town Lewes to someone I raised funds for. I’ll remain involved in specific aspects of the project and am coordinating the launch of a complementary currency in Lewes around April 2008.

I’m a great fan of Joanna Macy, deep ecologist, who says that it is not clear whether we are attendants at the deathbed of humanity or helping birth a new consciousness. She says we are privileged to be living in extraordinary times, which she calls The Great Turning; some people would say that it’s not by chance that we’ve each chosen to be alive now.

Adrienne Campbell
Adrienne.campbell@dsl.pipex.com
Lewes, Sussex, England, Feb 2008

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