Transition Poole

TT Poole – Energy Group

Meeting was held at 7:30 pm Tuesd 24th Nov at Andy’s House

Brendan, Mark, Garry, Harriet, Simon and Andy

Lots of interesting and often parallel conversations.

Discussed the relative merits of different suppliers. Simon changed about 6 months ago, recalled a site that summarised green credentials.  Main 3 are Ecotricity, Good Energy and Green Energy. 3 members of the group keen to look again. The green electricity comparison website  http://www.whichgreen.org/ turned out to be an Ecotricity site – need an independant review, this compared capital investments, whereas the others buy green energy produced by others (including community projects).

It would be useful to havesomething comparing tarrifs, and investment, and carbon reduction/efficiency measures. Average miles between production and consumption would be interesting in respect of waste in transmission cables.

Interesting to know the proportions of energy use, and what to tackle.  For example 1% of total UK energy is used in purifying water and sanitising the waste.

Critique of Andy’s house. Old, drafty, single glazed, with some secondary double glazing. Big windows, had a very high quote for double glazing. Underfloor insulation. Stopping draughts probably the biggest single cheapest step.

Group set out to do the www.imeasure.org.uk with a Transition Town Poole Carbon Club.

David Holmes talks about mapping energy, working on the easiest steps to reduce.

Different Carbon Calculators – overall footprint
Resurgence http://www.resurgence.org/resources/carbon-calculator.html
CAT Carbon Gym http://carbongym.cat.org.uk/carbongym/

Utilities
DEAC http://www.deac.co.uk/Editor/Files/Dorset-Climate-Change-Coalition-Co…
Act on CO2 – government http://www.direct.gov.uk/actonco2
WWF – http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/

We also ought to look at the Transition Together energy workbook

Rocket Stoves – self build – http://www.rocketstove.org/

The Dorchester group are looking to set up a community based wind generation facility – where could we do that in or around Poole ? Could prove difficult.

Talked about building Solar water panels from scratch. Brendan wants to build a tracking PV unit. We didn’t get further than express general enthusiasm at this stage.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make  them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind

The guides,  for her, are stories. Reading and chatting about stories together can be a way to make friends, learn new ideas, share experiences and imagine  our own lives.

A reading group needs a place to meet (front room, church, synagogue or mosque,  cafe or pub, community centre), a group of people (who might you like to get to know better?) and some ideas of what to read.  Here are a few you could use as a starting point. If you have others you’d like to recommend, please let us know!

Some fiction about people taking on climate change:

• Somerset writer Helen Moore’s trilogy of children’s books focus on a young girl named Hope. In Hope and the Magic Martian (2008),  10 year-old Hope is keen to meet a Martian and a Martian boy with a big heart wants to know why Earth’s polar caps are melting. At the North Pole, the new friends hear the Arctic animals’ stories about their warming world. What can Hope do? At a time when the future can seem uncertain, this modern fable offers a loving vision of how we can all change the story that shapes our world. In the sequal, Hope and the Super Green Highway (2009), when Hope finds a stowaway from the Costa Rican rainforests lurking in her bananas, it sparks an Internet connection with a boy there searching for the Golden Toad. Through him she’s inspired to help the woodland creatures on her doorstep, who are trapped by roads and affected by climate change, and soon Hope’s vision of a Super Green Highway starts to take shape. The final book in the trilogy is currently being written.  http://www.lollypoppublishing.co.uk/
• Hot and other stories, by Elizabeth Carola
  Ten stories set in Hackney. Ten intertwined lives. A dole officer learns how to poach rabbits. A banker’s devotion to his allotment threatens his day job. An advice worker wrestles with parasites. A jilted lover speculates on the nature of torture. A teacher meets a mysterious stranger. A group of climate activists fail to organise a piss up in the brewery of (very) late capitalism. How we live now. http://sirenpress.wordpress.com/
• Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series encompasses three novels: Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). This series explores the consequences of global warming, both on a global level and as it affects the main characters—several employees of the National Science Foundation and those close to them. A recurring theme of Robinson’s is that of Buddhist philosophy, which is represented in the series by the agency of ambassadors from Khembalung, a fictional Buddhist micro-state located on an offshore island in the Ganges delta. Their state is threatened by rising sea levels, and the reaction of the Khembalis is compared to that of the Washingtonians.

Imagining Ecological Societies:

• Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1975) by Ernest Callenbach. The citizens of Ecotopia shared a common aim: they were looking for a balance between themselves and nature. They were “literally sick of bad air, chemicalized food, and lunatic advertising. They turned to politics because it was finally the only route to self-preservation .” In the mid-20th century as “firms grew in size and complexity citizens needed to know the market would still serve the interests for those it claimed to exist”. Callenbach’s Ecotopia targets the fact that many people did not feel that the market and the government were serving them in the way they wanted them to. This book was “a protest against consumerism and materialism, among other aspects of American life”.
• Always Coming Home (1985) by Ursula K. Le Guin.  This novel is about a cultural group of humans—the Kesh—who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.” (p. i) Part novel, part textbook, part anthropologist’s record, Always Coming Home beautifully describes the life and sustainable culture of the Kesh people.
• Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy. This now classic novel brings a woman out of her present, hellish existance in New York City into a possible future utopia where everyone is valued and contributing to a joyful and sustainable society. This future is not guaranteed, however, and Connie (the woman on the edge oft ime) is asked to do what she can in her time to help bring about this ecological future.
• The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) by Starhawk describes a world set in the year 2048 after a catastrophe which has fractured the United States into several nations. The protagonists live in San Francisco and have evolved in the direction of Ecotopia, reverting to a sustainable economy, using wind power, local agriculture, and the like. To the south, though, an overtly-theocratic Christian fundamentalist nation has evolved and plans to wage war against the San Franciscans. The novel explores the events before and during the ensuing struggle between the two nations, pitting utopia and dystopia against each other.
• Octavia E. Butler’s  The Parable Series.  Set in a dystopian future, Parable of the Sower (1994) centers on a young woman who possesses what Butler dubbed as hyperempathy – the ability to feel the perceived pain and other sensations of others – who develops a benign philosophical and religious system during her childhood in the remnants of a gated community in Los Angeles. Civil society is near collapse due to resource scarcity and poverty. When the community’s security is compromised, her home is destroyed and her family murdered. She travels north with some survivors to try to start a community where her religion, called Earthseed, can grow.  The sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998)  tells the story of how, as the U.S. continues to fall apart, the protagonist’s community is attacked and taken over by a bloc of religious fanatics who inflict brutal atrocities. The novel is a harsh indictment of religious fundamentalism, and has been compared in that respect to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Many more reading ideas at

• http://librarybooklists.org/fiction/adult/ecofiction.htm

• http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/582.Eco_Fiction
• http://www.kpl.org/books_more/booklists/eco.html
• http://www.picnet.org/node/1649 (teen focus)

Tues 17th Nov 7:30 pm – 9:30pm at the Grasshopper, Bournemouth Road

Facilitated by Gwyn (Jacki was en La France)

(Was 10th, moved to avoid clash with the Wimborne Climate Change talk)

Notes by Harriet

I’m sure that Gwyn (who was facilitating) will be sending some notes in due course, including the visions we jotted on post-its, but in the mean time I can give you my impression. I thought it was a happy
occasion. Usual suspects plus a few new faces. We had discussion of  next year’s Ashley Cross Little Green Sunday event, food group, plans for Transition Together, energy group then broke into smaller groups to come up with our visions for a better, brighter Poole.

On the down side it was difficult to hear against the background pub noise when we were trying to hold a discussion between all 20(?) people there. We’re perhaps in danger of growing out of the Grasshopper?