ABOVE: Paul & Ivana Barclay's cob house.
I went to Totnes in January... so I am a bit behind in posting this. You can also listen to a documentary version of this story on Dispatches, March 23.
When you dream of the future, do you see Mad Max, The Jetsons, or something else entirely?
People in Totnes, England, spend a lot of time on that dream, and they see all kinds of things. Here are a few of the dreams I encountered on my trip to the town: vegetarian totalitarianism, alternative power for rock bands, shark attacks in English rivers, food shortages, water wars, and petroleum driven cars being preserved as monuments.
Three years ago, a guy named Rob Hopkins returned to Totnes, his hometown, in order to put his latest idea to the test. He had been living in Ireland and teaching a course on permaculture when someone handed him a copy of a film called, “The End of Suburbia.”
It’s an apocalyptic look at what happens to suburban life when there’s no more gas for the SUV, never mind the trucks and planes that ship food from other continents.
In his rural existence, growing all his own food, Rob figured he was safe from the fate of suburbanites.
“Then it dawned on me—I was living in suburbia, it just didn’t look the same! I had to drive from where I was to go to socialize, go to shops, to take my kids anywhere… it came as a big shock to my system.”
He took the film into class and made a project out of how to solve the problem of oil dependency. The result was the “Transition Town”—a concept that harnessed the creative energy of a community to create an “energy descent” roadmap.
When Rob made his return to Totnes a short time later, he started knocking on doors and talking to people he thought might be interested in the idea. He started hosting talks and film nights about peak oil and climate change, holding brainstorming sessions and workshops…
“When it started out, we had a few ideas,” Rob told me, “We put those out to people and they then went off and played around, added things, took things away, the model keeps being changed all the time. It’s something that learns from its successes and its failures all the time.”
So three years-in, there are some 300 people on board in the Totnes Transition Town project. They’ve established a local currency, a garden share project, a local food directory, and are working on a multitude of others.
A word that gets tossed around a lot in transition circles is “resilience.” Rob says it’s a word he prefers over sustainability.
“Sustainability implies that you can keep everything going as it is at the moment in a kind of globalized economic model,” he says, “You just run the car on hydrogen and you stick a solar panel on the top and everything else is just exactly the same.”
When it comes to big, global systems, problems are easy to ignore. By the time they’re obvious, they’re enormous, and seemingly out of control. Localized systems bring problems closer to home and down to scale.
In his book, Rob acknowledges the struggles and hardships that existed in before highways and shopping malls, but I can’t help but agree with him in the belief that there might be a lot to learn from that era.
He quotes a passage from Great Expectations that describes the outskirts of London around 1870:
Wemmick's house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like battery mounted with guns…
“At the back, there's a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you'll judge at supper what sort of salad I can raise. So, sir," said Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “ If you can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions."
Then he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth. Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet.
"I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades…”
Wemmick’s got a pride in his home that can’t be bought at Ikea, or secured by a low-interest mortgage (which we don’t need to worry about any more).
I encountered a similar kind of pride when I met Paul and Ivana Barclay, who are in the midst of building their family home in the town of Dartington—just next to Totnes.
Paul used to work in IT for a telephone company, and until he and Ivana decided to build this house… he’d never worked with his hands before.
The house, by the way, is made of cob—earth from a hole in the yard has been mixed with straw from a nearby field to make the walls. The roof is thatched, and stuffed with recycled sheep’s wool for insulation. Ninety percent of the materials used to build this house have been imported from no more than 10 kilometers away.
Ivana says that while the house may fall in-line with many ecologically-sound principles—that’s not their motivation for building it. She says she wanted a house that tied her family to their forefathers—and this is very much like the houses that would have been built in this part of England before energy sucking steam engines.
Paul told me that before starting, he was intimidated by the idea of building his own house.
“But this is doable for anyone,” he told me, “And I can’t wait to build another.”
Paul says the family should be able to move into the house by summertime.
Paul and Ivana don't even consider themselves a part of Transition Town Totnes, but by opening up their home to curious passers-by, and using local resources, skills and support for their personal project--they definitely are. They're work proves what's possible, and that dreams can actually come true.
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