CTBlog

July 13^th 2010 saw the first Show, Share & Tell session in Zero Degrees, Cardiff’s microbrewery on Westgate St. The event, coordinated by the Cardiff Transition Project (CTP), attracted nearly 50 people who came to hear about a wide variety of projects that are helping transform Cardiff into a sustainable city.

Those who attended heard about Friends of Insole Court, Canton Carbon Cutters, Taff’s Well Community Garden, Co-housing Cymru, Food Fight and Feed the 5000, ARK, Friends of Clare Gardens, Orchard Cardiff and Cardiff Civic Society. Several non-speakers also circulated information about their own events too, like the Taff Tidy event due to take place in September. Participants also had the opportunity to discuss how these projects contribute to make Cardiff more sustainable and resilient and how these contributions could be amplified.

As well as future Show, Share & Tell events, Cardiff Transition Project plan to organise Give & Take events (G&T) which will be more informal, Green Drinks-styled discussions around sustainable and transition themes or issues he people of Cardiff are keen to find out more about. Any suggestions or requests for discussion topics will be welcome, to the CTP coordinator.

You can listen to streamed audio versions of the presentations from the evening below. Contact details for the organizers of the various projects are available from the main Cardiff Transition Project website here.

Friends of Insole Court:

Originally known as ‘The Insole Court Action Group’ in 1988 and reconstituted in 1993 as ‘The Friends of Insole Court’, the Friends campaign to retain the Court as an asset for the whole of Cardiff and as Llandaff’s only publicly owned local community facility. Click the ‘play’ button below to learn more.

Taff’s Well Community Garden:

Set up in October 2009 to provide opportunities to get involved with growing your own in Taff’s Well.

Canton Carbon Cutters:

Supported by the Energy Saving Trust, a group which encourages as many households as possible to consider their carbon footprint and implement energy efficiency measures.

Cardiff Cohousing:

Set up to promote a new model of housing, involving ecologically sustainable homes, a mix of people of all ages living in a supportive and friendly environment, a balance of private spaces for living, and communal spaces for shared activities, and a high degree of self-sufficiency in the production of food and energy.

Cardiff Food Fight/Feed the 5000:

Events to highlight the problem of food waste and the hidden connections between our food chain and climate change.

Riverside Community Garden:
In 2006, RCMA helped establish a food co-op in the Riverside area. As well as providing low cost fresh produce, the Coop helps create strong social links between the diverse communities of Riverside.

Friends of Clare Gardens:

Have set up a community garden in the Gardens in Grangetown.

ThinkARK:

ARK are a group of people from diverse backgrounds, who are interested in using design thinking to respond to social issues in our community. They aim to work with the public, organisations and education establishments, using social design* to encourage discourse and response to social issues.

Cardiff Civic Society:

A membership organisation and charity that aims to conserve, sustain and develop the natural and built environment of the city for the benefit of current and future generations.

Promoted by Cardiff Transition, September 21 saw Cardiff’s Queen Street mobbed to draw attention to December’s Copenhagen Summit, and to put pressure on politicians to work towards an effective, just and credible settlement to reduce emissions, build resilience and tackle climate change.

The action was part of a global Wake-Up Call campaign orchestrated by avaaz.org

Back to the Temple of Peace last night amidst the March drizzle for the much-anticipated talk by Rob Hopkins, leading light of Transition, about the principles, ideas and practices which are making TT such a timely phenomenon.

It’s more evident than ever, perhaps, that it’s people at the grassroots level who are going to have to lead the kind of change that will be necessary to place our societies on the footing they’ll need to face a post-carbon future. Rob pointed out that the Westminster Government still – officially at least – sees peak oil as something they might have to think about in 2030, even though even industry organisations like the International Energy Agency suspect that it’s time now to start clearing up after the big fossil fuel party that’s kept the neighbours awake for the last 150 years. Nicholas Stern followed his keynote speech yesterday at the climate conference in Copenhagen by berating governments for failing to take climate change seriously. In an environment where Westminster justifies a third runway at Heathrow with figures based on the assumption that the price of oil in ten years will be, at most, $136 a barrel, it can be expected that it’s going to take a while to change official thinking on peak oil too.

But focusing on what government isn’t doing is just liable to make you feel like there’s no point doing anything. When in fact, as Rob pointed out, the essence of Transition is to prompt us all to get together and see if we can’t surprise ourselves at what we can do collectively, independently of the malfunctioning mechanisms of government.

What he had to say on this topic reminded me of Jonathan Schell’s book The Unconquerable World, which is to be recommended. Schell writes here about the nature and advantages of non-violent resistance to power, and on the way has some interesting things to say about how resistance to Eastern European government in the 70s and 80s evolved. His point is that - as with Gandhi’s resistance to British rule – what the civil society movements in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere did was simply to disavow what had become a non-functioning State, one that no longer responded to the true needs of the people, and just get on with building an alternative civil society within the hollowed out remains of the old structures. Schell quotes Jacek Kuron, an advisor to Solidarity, saying “Don’t burn down Party Committee Headquarters, found your own”.

The impulse behind Transition – whilst not being necessarily political in the way that the Eastern European movements were – shares something with them. Is it advisable to spend time lobbying government to wield the blunt instruments of governance to change people’s behaviour, or is it better to go ahead and build examples of how to live differently?

Maybe this is why people find TT so exciting: it cuts against the grain of expectations about what can be done and who is best placed to do it, and locates in a moment of deep crisis an exciting opportunity to experiment, to play.

Given the substantial turn-out last night, and the enthusiastic grouping-together of people from different areas of Cardiff at the end to discuss the next steps for Transition in the city, it seems that this view might be widely shared.

On the 30th January, the Temple of Peace in Cathays played host to the Community Climate Exchange event, at which CTP had a stall. The idea behind the event, which ran for most of the day, was to provide Cardiff folk with an opportunity to find out a great deal of useful information about local environmental and community initiatives , as well as to help them with thinking about what they themselves could do to take part in reducing energy use, expanding local veg and fruit growing, helping avoid resource wastage, and many other ways of getting involved with the Cardiff green agenda.

Workshops and film screenings throughout the day supplemented the somewhat village fete-like atmosphere in the main hall (enhanced by the excellent organic nosh on sale by the entrance), while the CTP stall played host to a steady stream of passers-by throughout the day, interested in finding out more about Transition in the city.

Many left behind a little piece of themselves in the form of post-it notes recording the things about life in Cardiff that made them either hopeful or fearful about the future Traffic was a major concern, reflecting perhaps the need to make transport a more prominent focus for Transition in the city.

Some personal highlights: Rick Wilson, from Community Lives Consortium in Swansea had some interesting things to say about how social care needs to change to reflect two major elements of the Transition agenda - making communities more resilient through encouraging participation, and making vital activities (like social care) less dependent on oil consumption. CLC’s move towards a model of care in which communities are enlisted in provision was particularly encouraging, as was their recognition of how reliance on a small group of “experts” to deliver care makes their work much more resource-intensive, particularly in terms of car-use.

Also enjoyed Talybont-on-Usk Energy’s stall - addressing the issue of energy production is something that Transition groups around the country no doubt see as a major priority, and also - given that it can’t be addressed without a good deal of commitment, expertise and resources - a major difficulty. Learning about what’s been done up at Talybont was pretty inspiring.