This chapter is taken from the 2012 book What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto, published by Pluto Press. For more information: http://www.darkoptimism.org/books.html# WhatWeAreFightingFor The struggle for meaning Humanity has dramatically changed our world, causing soil fertility depletion, fish depletion, fresh water depletion, climate change, ocean acidification, peak oil, chemical pollution, biodiversity devastation, inequity and war, among other crises. In the face of all this, we are left with what John Holloway memorably characterised as “the great anguish of ‘what can we do?’” (Holloway 2010 p.10) Suggestions abound, yet somehow it seems that the solutions we choose always cause more problems. Why is this? I suggest that it is because of something fundamental underlying our choices - our stories. The importance of stories Throughout human history, stories have defined our identity and shaped our actions. We use fairy stories to educate our children, politicians vie to present both positive and negative visions and narratives, and advertisers pay extraordinary sums to present 1 their creations. You can see why – it only takes an hour to learn how to plant a tree, but it could take a lifetime to see why you might want to. In the Western capitalist culture in which I was raised, the story that humanity exists only to consume the fruits of a world laid out for our convenience retains great influence. As does the story of ‘progress’ — that we live in the most advanced civilisation the world has ever known, and are advancing further and faster all the time. If this is ‘business as usual’, why would we not wish to continue? And, perhaps most influential of all, our governments entrust key decisions to economic theories which tell stories of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, which calmly allocates resources and energy in the best possible way through the divine conjunction of competition, supply and demand and self-interest. It seems unbelievable that such stories still hold sway, given the ever more damning scientific understanding of humanity’s global impacts, but psychologists have long known that our stories are highly resistant to evidence that challenges our world-view and identity (e.g. Sherman & Cohen 2006, pp.3–6). We have so much invested in our stories that it is as though our very self-worth is under threat (‘is my chosen lifestyle, or my belief-system, really contributing to the death of our world?’), and we muster an arsenal of psychological responses to such threats, reinforced by the relentless, overwhelming normality of the mainstream culture all around us. Of course, viewed in a historical context, our modern way of life is anything but typical, but for many of us it is all we have known, and even if we are not comfortable with it, the powerful cultural story that ‘real change is impossible’ (despite all evidence to the contrary) urges us to accept things as they are. Here, then, lies our fundamental challenge – changing the stories that define identity, meaning and success in our culture. Fortunately, we are not alone. There is a vast, diverse upwelling of people, organisations and communities who are acutely aware of the evidence painstakingly collected by the scientists, and are forging new stories that might better serve our collective future. Paul Hawken (Hawken 2008 p.141) characterised this selforganising human response as part of the Earth’s own immune system, working to counter the very real threat to life on the planet (to us). The mainstream media chooses not to tell us much about these groups, preferring to champion consumerism, 2 but where would any of us be if our own body’s immune system got distracted seeking its personal fortune, say, or pursuing hedonistic diversions? The truth is that we are part of the largest movement in the world, which has grown up without name or solid structure, simply as a response to very human desires for access to safe water and food, to justice, to diversity and to health. Above all, to a future. Local community action – The Transition Movement The strand of this movement that I have been most involved with is the Transition Towns, a loose network of thousands of communities (ranging from favelas in Brazil to Japanese towns, from rural villages in England to Transition Los Angeles) unified in their drive to devise and implement positive solutions that build local resilience and reduce fossil fuel dependency. Transition acts on the understanding expressed by one of its key influences, the late Dr David Fleming, ‘Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.’ (quoted Hopkins 2006) The practical manifestations of this relocalisation drive are as diverse as the communities that give birth to them, ranging from food cooperatives, local currencies, skill-sharing sessions and renewable energy projects to Transition Universities, arts projects, the occupation of unused buildings and land, and Energy Descent Action Plans for entire regions, endorsed by local government. But perhaps most importantly, these practical projects grow from a new story of how we should respond to radically changing times. Mainstream culture generally offers two ways of responding to crises – individual action like changing light bulbs or reduced driving, and political lobbying of those in power to get changes made. Yet individual action can feel insignificant in the face of global challenges, and political lobbying is often simply ignored. With these the only apparent options, it is easy to see why many become disheartened with activism. 3 Transition offers one meaningful alternative, which may help explain its ongoing rapid growth. To borrow a phrase from the actor and activist John O’Neal, it is throwing an anchor into the future we want to build, and pulling ourselves along by the chain; taking direct action at the community scale allows us to achieve more than we could alone, yet at a scale where our individual input remains valued and significant. Perhaps most meaningful of all is the realisation that in acting together communities truly become communities again, rather than just groups of independent individuals. We come to rely on each other again for some of our needs, rather than on money and the complex systems of the global economy. We get to know each other’s strengths and limitations, understand each other’s characters, and learn to cocreate. So many attempts at recapturing our lost ‘community spirit’ believe that getting together every Tuesday evening is enough, but it is not. The basis of community is not simply meeting up and being nice to each other, it is truly depending on each other for something that matters. I have been involved with the Transition movement for five years, as one of the cofounders of Transition Town Kingston, and my book, The Transition Timeline (Chamberlin 2009), developed the theme of Transition’s role as storyteller. The heart of the book is a fleshing out of what we call the ‘Transition Vision’, which was developed in collaboration with a wide cross-section of Transitioners and others. This presents a response to the despair widespread among those who perceive the severe troubles facing our world, and taps into the powerful motivation that lurks hidden within hopelessness; if despair is perceiving an undesirable future as inevitable, one glimpse of a realistic alternative transforms our despondency into a massive drive to work towards that alternative. The Transition Vision, then, is of a future in which we create a resilient, more localised society which avoids the worst potential of environmental catastrophe through building thriving lower-energy communities teeming with satisfying lifestyles and fulfilled people. In the book this vision is tracked through a ‘history of the next twenty years,’ and set alongside three other possible futures based on different stories of our place in the world. Some of these might be grounds for despair, if they were our only option. 4 How can local solutions scale up to address global problems? I believe that the Transition movement represents a powerful force for a better future, as part of the wider movement for a long-term future that is swelling all around us. But we must also recognise that many of our problems are of a global nature, and that such local solutions are necessary but insufficient. Small-scale solutions can struggle to match up to large-scale problems. With this in mind, Fleming formulated an important principle, ‘Large scale problems do not require large-scale solutions – they require smallscale solutions within a large-scale framework.’ (Fleming 2007 p.39) This reflects the fact that large-scale solutions too face an inherent problem – that of disconnectedness. For example, while it is tempting to think of hard-won political agreement on a tightening global cap on emissions as a solution to climate change, such a cap is meaningless without on-the-ground solutions at the local and individual levels. This is, after all, where those emissions are generated. The true challenge lies not in the essential process of agreeing a cap, but in transforming our society so that it can thrive within this limit. If we fail in this, the pressure to loosen or abandon any cap will become irresistible – ‘enough talk of future generations, my children are hungry today.’ It is clear that we need the kind of global agreement on climate change put forward in schemes like Contraction and Convergence or Greenhouse Development Rights, which would assign clear national carbon budgets within an adequate global response. And it is clear that we need local responses of the kind that Transition is exploring. Both tasks are the focus of huge energy and determination. What is missing is the bridge between the two. A framework that can encourage and harness those humanscale changes, and ensure that they are adequate to meeting national commitments to reduced emissions. Of course the UK Government (in common with others around the world) has started thinking about this challenge. Indeed, at present it has over a hundred policies that impact on emissions levels. But it has produced, in the words of its own Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee, ‘A confusing framework that cannot be said to promote effective action on climate change.’ (Environmental Audit Committee 2007) 5 TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas) One alternative that could provide the necessary cohesive framework is Fleming’s TEQs scheme. He first published on the idea in 1996, and it has been the subject of Parliamentary interest since 2004, with a scoping study (2006) and pre-feasibility study (2008) followed by a detailed report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil (2011). In essence, TEQs is a national energy rationing system which would provide a means to guarantee the achievement of national emissions targets while ensuring fair access to energy and supporting local initiatives like those of the Transition movement. The carbon-rated energy rations would be distributed free-of charge to every individual, on an equal per capita basis, and the energy-thrifty would be able to benefit from selling their surplus to heavier users. Organisations, the government and all other energy users would buy the units they need to cover their energy purchases at a weekly auction. As a national scheme, it would operate as the smaller-scale system within a larger (global) framework for addressing climate change, while itself providing the larger framework for smaller-scale (local) energy descent plans. It could provide the bridge that we are lacking between local solutions and global problems. Rationing is seen by many as a dirty word due to its association with shortage, yet it is a response to shortage, not the cause of it. Combining the necessary reductions in the use of high-carbon fuel with the depletion of global energy resources is sure to put increased pressure on energy supplies, and in times of scarcity we cry out for guaranteed fair shares. As the Chairman of the UK Environment Agency has acknowledged, “rationing is the fairest and most effective way of meeting Britain’s legally binding targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions”(Webster 2009). The purpose of TEQs would be to share out fairly the shrinking energy/carbon budget, while allowing maximum freedom of choice over energy use. The alternative is continuing the present arrangement of ‘rationing by price’ (i.e. the richest get whatever is in short supply), which brings only inequity, suffering and resentment. Importantly, TEQs is also built around the principle that we need to move away from a money-focused approach to problems that are not really about money. Our culture’s 6 belief in the omniscience of markets has led to a wide range of market-based approaches to addressing climate challenge, based on raising the price of carbon, but this has led to policy working against itself in trying to fulfil the inherently contradictory aims of raising the carbon price and keeping energy prices low. Unsurprisingly, it has also proved hard to gain popular support for increasing the cost of fossil fuels, since people rightly perceive that this increases their cost of living. TEQs offer a fundamentally different approach. Rather than raising the price of carbon/energy and hoping that this reduces demand sufficiently, TEQs constrain the markets within a strict quantity-based carbon budget and allow price to find its level within that. This restores straightforward motivation for individuals, organisations and nations; once you guarantee people a fair entitlement to energy, in line with a declining cap, society can then collectively focus its attention on finding ways to thrive on reduced demand, and thus keep the price of energy/carbon as low as possible. This is a simply-understood task that everyone can buy into with enthusiasm, and would also resolve the problem that within current economic structures, reducing demand for fossil fuels locally, or even nationally, tends only to reduce the price of these fuels, and thus encourage greater consumption elsewhere. The essence of TEQs, though, is that it provides a large-scale framework to encourage and empower those local-scale solutions. It effectively converts the national carbon budget into a personal energy budget for everyone, with the clear recognition that this budget will be decreasing year on year. With supply thus fixed, lower national demand leads directly to lower prices for all, making it transparently in the collective interest to work together to find ingenious ways to increase low-carbon energy supplies and reduce demand. This cooperation is essential, since the transformation in infrastructures necessitated by climate change requires collaboration between the different sectors of society, united in a single scheme easily understood by all. Policy must encourage constructive interaction between households, businesses, local authorities, transport providers, national government, and so on. In short, TEQs is explicitly designed to stimulate common purpose in a nation, with the rises and falls in the single national price of the rations providing a clear indicator of how successfully the country is moving towards the shared goal of living happily within our energy and emissions constraints. Additionally, the substantial income from the 7 auction of units to organisations would be accessible to communities to fund the building of new local infrastructure or otherwise support their energy transition. We may sometimes be tempted to hold fossil-fuel companies and governments responsible for all our ills, but it must be recognised that even if they wished to they could not solve our energy problems without the engagement of the wider public. Our individual and community lifestyles need transformation too, and this cannot be done for us. No system can ever relieve us of our personal responsibility, and it is essential that we all recognise the need to change the way we live. The stories our struggle tells So while Transition transforms individuals’ solitude and despair into communal action, TEQs could combine those community initiatives into an empowered — and sufficient — wave of change at the national level, ready to fulfil global agreements and resolve global challenges. Crucially, neither TEQs nor Transition take the topdown approach of laying out some master-plan that must then be implemented and enforced over any local objections. Both frameworks enable and support creative self-expression and cooperation, but they do not attempt to direct it. As such, they express and support a very different story of our relationship with each other and with our world; a story for which Charles Eisenstein provides a beautiful name. We often speak of ‘Mother Earth’, and have treated her much as a young child treats its mother – as someone that we can take and take from without consideration for how much she can give. Yet we now know that if this relationship is to be sustained, we must learn to respond to our planet’s needs and limits. Eisenstein suggests that we are ready to grow into the story of ‘Lover Earth’, ‘The relationship to a lover is different: to a lover we desire to give as well as to receive, and we desire to create together, each offering our gifts toward a purpose transcending each of us, so that our union becomes greater than the sum of our individuality.’ (Eisenstein 2009) Perhaps this is the only story that has a future at all. Even if so, this still provides no guarantee that it will come to be told and retold, but as we struggle for meaning in 8 these turbulent times, we must each choose the stories that will be told through our lives and our actions. Let us choose those which make hope possible. Bibliography Chamberlin, S. (2009) The Transition Timeline: for a local, resilient future, Green Books, U.K. http://www.darkoptimism.org/book.html Eisenstein, C. (2009) ‘Rituals for Lover Earth,’ Dark Optimism. http://www.darkoptimism.org/2009/10/16/rituals-for-lover-earth/ Environmental Audit Committee (2007) Environmental Audit Committee Ninth Report, House of Commons Parliamentary Press, U.K. http://is.gd/AXuxGr Fleming, D. (2007) Energy and the Common Purpose, 3rd ed., The Lean Economy Connection. http://www.teqs.net/downloads.html Fleming, D. and Chamberlin, S. (2011) TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas): A Policy Framework for Peak Oil and Climate Change, London: All-Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil, and The Lean Economy Connection. http://www.teqs.net/ Hawken, P. (2008) Blessed Unrest: how the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming, Viking, U.S. Holloway, J (2010) Crack Capitalism, Pluto Press, London Hopkins, R. (2006) ‘Building Miles,’ Resurgence, 236. http://is.gd/LivC6H Sherman, D.K. and Cohen, G.L. (2006) ‘The psychology of self-defence: selfaffirmation theory.’ http://is.gd/SsG8hM —, Zanna, M.P.(ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Vol. 38 (pp. 183– 242), CA: Elsevier. Webster, M. (2009) ‘Carbon ration account for all proposed by Environment Agency,’ The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6909046.ece 9