Hello, dear Friends and Family,
The image below is of one set of the new ponds on the village garden area, with the beginning of tilling for Spring planting on the slopes to the right.
These are hopeful, encouraging things, but my mood has been one of unease, as you will see below.

Our personal life continues to be very pleasant, apart from missing beloved people. Jack works on the village, I work on the Transition Towns endeavour and preparing a course on Peace Psychology.
Yesterday, the architects who specialize in 'green' buildings met at our house to discuss the design of the first houses. And last night we spent with a small group of friends planning the first large public meeting for Transition Town Motueka. First all five of us went to a film in 'The Gecko', a tiny movie theatre. We saw 'Grow Your Own', a British comedy I recommend to all. It's about healing through gardening and the acceptance of refugees in a community - delightful film. We walked a few steps to a pizzeria which we often use as a meeting venue and began our planning over pizzas. When the pizzeria was ready to close, we moved back to the movie theatre and occupied one of the small theatres with permission from the very friendly guy running the place. We completed our planning there. This kind of informality is one of the delights of a small town.

I hope you're sitting comfortably with a cup of tea or coffee by your side for the next bit. I see darkness and fog out there.

The unravelling has begun

A few weeks ago I made a presentation to Tasman District Council, as part of a public consultation process about their annual plan. My purpose was to get them to factor oil scarcity and climate change into their planning. I led with the point that the plan was based on a stated assumption that oil cost $60 a barrel and would remain at that price for the year. As we all know, this assumption is laughable. I pointed out that their vehicles would be able to travel only half as far as planned on the budgeted fuel and that they would be able to build or repair only half the road kilometers planned. I went on to discuss climate change impact. At least four other people presented on closely related topics to the council.

They listened most politely. A week or so later, the mayor mentioned to me in conversation that he was considering joining the Communities for Climate Change Protection, as he had found it didn’t bind him to any difficult commitments. Several of my colleagues had made this specific request. This is, without doubt, a good thing, and I will certainly want to convey this to the Council if they go ahead and do it. But what about this extraordinary budget discrepancy? What do they think is going to happen? I assume they think, along with many others, that the price of oil and food is a temporary ‘spike’, to use the term commonly applied. (Of course if oil ‘spikes’ at $120 for half the year, it will need to be totally free of cost for the other half if it is going to average $60, but this absurdity hasn’t occurred to the planners, it seems.) I don’t think so. I think this is the lower slope of an ongoing upward trend in prices, inevitable on the other side of Peak Oil. It will never be the same again.

There is nothing unusual about the people on this Council. It’s very hard for all of us to get our heads around this shocking fact. And there’s lots of noise to help us deny it. Price-gouging by Big Oil, excessive government taxes, intransigence of Middle East oil sheiks, too little investment in oil infrastructure, pesky environmentalists stopping drilling in national parks…. And above all, the faith-based mantras, the market will take care of it, and new technology will save the day.

Coal (climate change disaster), biofuels (human hunger disaster) and nuclear energy (ecological, economic and security disaster) are the immediate solutions being sold. Some assume that energy from wind and sunshine will fill the gap, not realizing that it will take decades and lots of scarce oil to build their infrastructure, and the amount of energy to be hoped for from these sources will not come near that available from cheap oil in the near future.


While wishful thinking and bad solutions hold sway, airlines are going broke, cutting staff, routes and passenger space, merging and grounding planes. Automobile companies are closing plants. Food is increasing in price, affecting the poor in rich countries and the masses in poor ones, refugees dependent on food aid perhaps most of all. Here’s a cheerful datum: in the US there’s less car use and fewer car accidents. Urban houses are diminishing in value. Economic recession seems about to hit everywhere in the globalized economic system. Recession? How about collapse - slow or fast ?

We are not ready for this!!

A friend who works for the Department of Conservation here remarked cheerfully over lunch last weekend that we had better prepare ourselves for when the DoC is unable to continue its pest control functions. DoC is a heavy user of helicopters, aeroplanes and four-wheel drives to keep habitat and agriculture-destroying pests under control. ‘We’ll be overrun by possums, pigs, rabbits, weasels, stoats and goats,’ she said. (I thought of our orchardist neighbour whose eyes light up with joy at the thought of a pig to hunt.)

I am not ready for this!!

But we are trying to prepare ourselves. We have largely stopped eating fossil-fuel dependent food that gets to us by fossil-fuelled transport over long distances. We’re working on our own transport modes, using bicycles more and sharing a car. I’ve even had one pleasant experience hitch-hiking, which I definitely will try again soon. I have a substantial store of staples in case supermarket supply chains should be suddenly cut. We are trying to build a community that will incorporate people with many skills contributing to self-sufficiency. We are learning from experienced gardeners how we can together grow much of what we need. We are trying to work out what we need to get that might be hard to find in the future, or unaffordable – solar panels, for example.

It’s very clear that governments will not lead in these areas, as my above example with our municipal government shows. Our former municipality, Hamilton, Ontario, was worse. Here the Green Party, from whom we might expect most, has made a conscious decision that it will not talk about consuming less, or about the problems of a growth-based economy, because it will lose seats if it does. That’s a pretty dismal state of affairs. (I must add that the Maori Party does address these issues, thank goodness.) In both NZ and in Canada, government will not lead in these issues. We are on our own with the unravelling of the infrastructure of our society and our economy.


Energy supports complexity of society. We can expect a less complex society as available energy diminishes. Highly elaborate divisions of function will diminish. To avoid collapse, we must plan intelligently for devolution of complexity, evolution of human-scale communities with appropriate technology not available to human-scale communities 200 years ago before fossil fuel energy spike, for example, modern windmills, large windows for passive solar architecture..


We need planning at a global level for fair distribution of the remaining oil, with steady cuts in use. If this doesn’t happen, poor countries will be totally unable to buy oil at all and their slender essential industries and services will grind to an early halt before they have had time to make an adequate adjustment. We need measures to promote food self-sufficiency in poor countries – trade rules to prevent dumping, support of small-holder, organic farming.

We need planning at a national level for the priority use of oil. We should assign a very high priority to building infrastructure for the post-carbon society - erecting windmills and making photovoltaic panels, rebuilding the rail network, expanding public transport, retrofitting buildings, supporting changes in agriculture towards sustainability.

We need planning at the municipal level for public transport, for assistance to local food production like farmers’ markets, community gardens. We need changes in land zoning, the retrofitting of existing buildings to use less energy, requirements for new buildings to be passive solar, support of small-holder organic gardening.

We need planning at the personal level - engagement with others to form communities and plan self-sufficiency with backyard food production, Community-Supported Agriculture, food co-ops, protection of peri-urban rural land, forming one or two-child families, giving up the car for alternative transport. Readers of this blog know the rest of this list. But let me add water care, composting, vegetarianism, jobs near work, jobs that make sense with future projections of a less complex society, more time gardening for food production, and time to push governments to do the planning at the level only they can do.

We are not ready. It is very difficult to prepare in the face of such uncertainty. Might we overprepare? What if the unraveling is not as bad as predicted? Wouldn’t we look silly? Maybe, but not nearly as silly as we’ll look when our children and grandchildren wonder why we didn’t begin the work of an easy energy descent and prevent enormous misery for them.

Well, dear ones, that's my mood for the Winter Solstice.
I send you all the warmest wishes,
Joanna

Food

The first image here is tonight's dinner for us. The second is one of the sketches of Jacques, the land manager, for food growing areas of the village we're building.

Dear Friends,

Food is on my mind a great deal as item after item crosses my screen on rising food prices and shortages. More people are hungry, more kids are malnourished. I want to share some thoughts on this, but first...

Personal update:

The month has been a fairly hard one for Jack, taking over the general manager's tasks while Jurgen (co-director and general manager) visits his parents in Germany, and coping with expectable bumps in the road of this innovative project. He has stayed sane and fit by running on the beach, swimming and taking a pick to cut a bike path across the land so we can cycle up the steep hill. He spends a fair bit of time in meetings. Mondays Jack cycles into Motueka for a general management meeting with the now 7 employed people and with various consultants.

We spend a fair bit of leisure time with other people, particularly those involved with the village. The four young guys lacked a kitchen until a few days ago, so we had them up for dinner several times. We sit around with others discussing the fascinating aspects of building a village like what mudbrick-making machine to buy, should we get a grain-mill, how to make houses affordable, how to get heritage apple seeds, how to make arbours and where the walking paths will go.

Since coming to live at Te Mara (the house lower on the ridge), five-year-old home-schooled Lucien has decided I'm part of his daily routine, so makes the long hard climb up the ridge to see me. We spin stories, draw, make music (broadly defined), and act a little crazy.

Jack and I are using our bicycles more, and I'm very impressed that the battery can get us up the very steep climb of the ridge. We can get to town in 35 minutes and home in 40, so we do this for day-time journeys.

I continue to be impressed at the cultural life available. I've been recently to a string quartet performance and one of baroque harp, and I've joined a group singing for pleasure. The skilled director, one of the treasures of the old community of Riverside (she may have been born there), has us singing in 3 and 4 part harmony with ease.

Once I found that my sewing machine worked with the transformer dealing with the voltage difference between North America and NZ, I rediscovered the pleasure to be derived from making garments this way. I made Jack a black polar fleece, hooded dressing gown. He looks like a character from Star Wars in it.

Atamai Village:

While Jack sits at a desk and works at a marketing plan and what covenants will apply to purchases of lots, Gil, the engineer has been operating a digger and has dug five ponds for irrigation. Jacques has tilled graceful curves of garden over the hillside of Te Mara to be ready for Spring planting. The young guys Nick and Nigel have constructed a big shade house for new plants, a new guy, Johnnie is taking care of the orchards, and another new guy, Bomun has created a woodwork shop in the garage of Te Mara and will begin constructing cold frames, etc.. The ponds are filling already, and astonishingly, Gil has seen eels in them.

We are resuming our monthly potluck seminars, with the next being on food preserving and storage.

Motueka and region:

A group is forming around the idea of Transition Towns (Google it), a concept that began in the UK and has now been picked up in a few dozen towns in NZ. It concerns how a built urban settlement can respond to peak oil and climate change in areas such as transport, land use, domestic heating, insulation, water provision, local food provision, and so on. We have made brief presentations at the Council meeting, at the Community Board (the Council includes several small towns, the Community Board is the Motueka representation), and on radio.

Global:

Besides the food issue, another one that has aroused me in the last month has been further attempts to silence criticism of human rights infringements by Israel against the Palestinians by labelling such criticism anti-Semitism. This is a sneaky ad hominem argument, and when made recently by Stephen Harper, Canada's Prime Minister, had to be strenuously resisted. I wrote to Harper and to the Ottawa Citizen on this.

Now, Food.

It's no news to any readers of this blog that more people are hungry, that there are food riots in Africa, Asia and South America. If it's not crossing your screen with at least an article a day, you're catching it in the mainstream media, where, after a lag-time of a few years, it's beginning to appear. How is the average person to understand this, and how is the average person to respond? As a non-expert in any relevant area, here is how I understand what is happening in terms of predisposing structural vulnerabilities and precipitating events.

Predisposing vulnerabilities:

• 
  Land tenure: Highest productivity from agricultural land, other factors being held equal, is from small-holder or cooperative structures. Comparisons have been made in China, where there are diverse structures of land ownership. Large industrial holdings and communal holdings are less productive. Over the last several centuries the trend has been towards larger industrial agricultural holdings, with the former peasants who lost their land to this process working as labourers on the properties or migrating to city slums. The global economic institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have pushed this change strenuously. Some call it the 'depeasantization' of global agriculture.Most remarkably, recently the heads of these three institutions have made a statement saying that what is needed to deal with global hunger now is a return to small-holder farming. Oxfam has echoed this. The UN statement on food and agriculture agrees, and adds that there is a need to turn from industrial agriculture with oil-based inputs, to organic methods. The western writers who talk about response to peak oil and climate change speak of the need for 'reruralization' of the countryside, which has been extensively depopulated by industrial agriculture. It will need to be repopulated to provide a more productive and more labour-intensive agriculture.


• Closely related to the above point about the relationship between land tenure structures and land productivity is the kind of farming done and the kind of food produced. WTO, WB and IMF pushed indebted poor countries into what is known as 'structural adjustment', which among other things, meant that regional agricultural arrangements that produced for local consumption and a degree of food self-sufficiency were shifted to industrial agriculture producing food for export, such as tea and coffee, and non-food products, such as flowers for western markets. Countries such as Haiti, which were once self-sufficient in staples like rice, quickly became net importers of these staple foods. New Zealand, which some describe as 'one big farm', exports huge amounts of food all over the world. Does it feed itself? No. Half of what NZers eat is imported. This dependency on oil-based agriculture for exports to get the cash to pay for imported food brought in with oil-based transport is catastrophic for a country like Haiti, where the rise in food prices immediately bites as worsening hunger.


• Population increase. Up until recently, most of the literature dealing with feeding the world insisted that there was no problem producing enough food to feed all the people in the world. The problem was one of distribution - the poor didn't have the money to buy the food available. There was much evidence to show that famines in various parts of the world were caused or exacerbated by political decisions, and would have been averted under democratic functioning.

Now we must consisder that the population that can be supported sustainably depends on the kind of technology being used and the throughput of materials and energy. I don't see anyone asserting now that we can grow enough food for a world of 9 billion people insisting on the lavish use of energy, some of which will be biofuel.

Precipitating factors:

• Climate change has affected food availablity in several ways. Drought causes crop failure; most outstandingly the years of Australian drought had a major effect on global wheat production. Some query use of the word 'drought' as meaning a time limited condition, being convinced that the change is permanent. Climate change also causes increased number and severity of cyclones and floods which destroy crops.


• Oil scarcity. My reading of this is that we are on the plateau of global production while global demand is swinging sharply up. This leads to high prices of fuel and other agricultural commodities (especially fertilizer, which has more than tripled), which leads to higher food prices. It actually leads to some land going out of production when farmers cannot afford the fertilizer on which they are dependent in the system of modernized agriculture.


• Oil scarcity leads to biofuel production, causing agricultural products to be diverted from food to fuel production, and increasing food prices.


• The increased global demand for meat leads to diversion of grain to feed animals and away from feeding hungry people. Of 2.3 billion tons of grain produced in 2007, less than half went to feed people. The rest went to feed animals and biofuel production.
  

The enormous global speculative market. Speculators buy up what is scarce. Food is scarce, so speculators are buying it, increasing prices for hungry people. This has been called a criminal activity. In recent months I've read, mainly from US newspapers, several informative analyses of the food problem, ending with advice on how to make money out of it.

Of all of these factors, my reading of the situation suggests that high oil prices, biofuel production and speculation on food commodities top the list for pushing hunger to present levels. As I write, the radio tells me that 6 million Ethiopian children are malnourished, 60,000 of them so ill they require specialist feeding, because of drought and high food prices. Aid money to alleviate the problem is scarce because people are giving to Burma and China.

What's to be done?

Global measures:

• A global moratorium on biofuel production would help. A possible form for this would be a change in the requirement many governments have made for inclusion of a percentage of biofuels with fossil fuel petroleum. This would increase global availability of grain and lower prices. It might allow restoration of the depleted global grain reserves. It would contribute to lowering carbon emissions and require rich country populations to face the necessity of adapting to lower energy use patterns. The claim that there are no problems in using non-food plants for biofuel requires careful examination. Whatever plant material is used, organic material is extracted from soil or water, depleting the ecosystem from which it comes, and leaving it less able to keep producing.


• Support food sovereignty for nations. Economic globalization of food provision needs to be reversed to national or regional food self-sufficiency. The transition in agriculture is likely to need state support, and to require economic instruments to protect it. Trade in non-essential food items is desirable, but the capacity of regions to feed themselves needs to be restored, after having been systematically and deliberately destroyed. This will increase food production and the problematic level of nutrition in many areas. It will increase employment.


• Support land reform. This is a notoriously difficult area politically. However there are few measures with such a dramatic effect on food production and population health.


• Support organic agriculture. Techniques of organic agriculture have benefitted from global knowledge growth. Permaculture principles are recognized widely as maximizing productivity, diversity and resilience of food production. Not only is more food produced, less fossil fuel is used and more carbon is sequestered with these methods of agriculture.


• Take food commodities out of the speculation market.
• Support the discussion of population policies, which have largely been an unmentionable topic in discourses like this one.
  

What can we do ourselves?

Right now, as usual, the adversities of hunger are affecting mainly developing countries and not most readers of this blog. This may not continue. The factors listed above that will not change in the near future are oil scarcity, climate instability, population growth. They will all get worse, of course. We don't know how they'll affect us in the lucky countries. It will be increasingly difficult to import food and to keep growing it with oil-dependent methods.

• Grow your own food to the extent possible.


• Join or create a community garden if you haven't land to plant.


• Get your food from a Community-supported Agriculture farm (CSA) This is likely to be organically produced, and is, of course, local.


• Move towards vegetarianism.


• Consider joining a sustainable village, which will enable you to move further in the direction of low-energy self-sufficiency and provide a greater range of food and other products locally grown.


• Help your town or neighourhood make these transitions by organizing under the Transition town, Natural Step or Post-Carbon Cities frameworks. The first began in the UK, the second in Sweden, and the third in North America. All are now global, and aim to enable a broad range of adaptations to peak oil and climate change, beyond food self-sufficiency. (See http://www.transitionculture.org/ , http://www.naturalstep.org/ , http://www.postcarboncities.net/ )


• As part of such moves, the need to adapt to lower energy use is central, shifting away from the maladaptive move to replace oil with biofuels.


• Make sure none of your invested money is going to food speculation.
  

Some of the readers of this blog may have insights that will deepen my understanding of this complex issue. Please consider posting comments that may help us all.

Warmest wishes to all,

Joanna

Transition Towns

Greetings, dear Friends and Family.

A little on our lives

The photos are of Jack having an early morning consultation with Jacques (Belgian-French land manager) and Gil (Tahitian engineer) on building new structures in the village; and of me watering our little kitchen garden.

The unpromising shed-like structure with the glorious view has been converted into a home now. We've had old friends Ed and Maxine Crispin to stay en route from the IPPNW Congress in New Delhi, and now there is a flow of young people coming to see what we are doing here. The house is so small that guests sleep in the living room, so we are discussing adding a room.

Friends drop in. Yesterday, Jacques and his wife and son came by to drop off Sid, the sheep-dog, at the end of the day. Lucien, five years old, said, 'I wonder if you're going to invite us in for a cup of tea and cookies as you usually do.' And, indeed, that is becoming a pleasant pattern, particularly at the end of the week.

We've taken a bit more time for leisure in recent weeks. There are surprising cultural offerings - tonight a Tibetan instrumentalist performs at the cultural centre of the nearby long-established community of Riverside. We'll dine with Gil and his wife before going.

Jack is extremely busy. There are now two directors of the project, the third having dropped out. Jurgen, the other one, is away for two months visiting aging parents in Japan (his wife's) and Germany (his). So Jack is carrying the development of the village. There are five people on staff, Gil and Jacques in the photo above, an admin assistant in the office, and two young guys, Nick and Nigel, who do a lot of the physical labour. Right now, Jack is slashing bush to make a cycle track, as a form of exercise.

Attention has shifted away from care of the 7000 trees since a drip irrigation system was established, relieving the need to manually water them. Now the focus is on establishing a plant nursery, identifying and buying trees to plant on the garden property, Te Mara, for both orchard and shelter belt purposes. Vegetable oil, I gather, will be from walnuts. Olive trees are expected to do well. (It's easy to buy olive oil grown within a few km of here.) Currently there are 15 cows grazing on the land, but they are visitors, paying rent. Jacques plans to have sheep and is especially keen on a small breed called Jacob's sheep, whose fleece comes in many colours. (Sid will be very happy when this occurs.)

This reminds me of a delightful visit I made a few weeks ago to a sheep farm to buy some newly shorn lamb's wool, which I hoped to use to stuff cushions. The farm had sheep of every colour you can imagine sheep to be, and beautiful displays of raw fleece, carded wool, spun wool and knitted garments - a feast for anyone who loves textiles. I bought a large bag of wool. When it is teased, it's excellent for stuffing cushions. The teasing is both time-consuming and sensually pleasant. I began teasing as I chatted with Jacques, Cheryl and Lucien over tea and cookies yesterday. Before long, everyone was teasing. Jacques, who often seems to know just about everything, told me that having built spinning wheels in the past, he has decided that the world's best spinning wheel is a Louet (or Louette), a Canadian wheel. He also remarked that, while he regards a frig as an optional extra in life, he sees a sewing machine as an absolute essential. Having admired the knit tops the family of three wears, I told Jack I thought they must be imported from France. I later found that Jacques makes them himself.

I occupy myself in various ways. I had an article on Canada's role in Afghanistan published in the online Globe and Mail last week. Today I finished a book review of three books dealing with the transition of towns and cities to adapt with the need for sustainability, energy decline and climate change. I'll append this to this blog. My colleague, Neil Arya and I are doing the last bits and pieces on our Peace through Health book. Seems to me I've said that before; surely these really are the last! I've started designing a display for Transition Towns (see review below) for a Motueka festival in a few weeks' time. I hope this helps me identify folk who are interested in doing something about the issues.

Just came back from the Motueka Sunday morning market. I stopped at my favourite spray-free vegetable stall and filled my bag with aubergine, broccoli, beans, peppers and potatoes. I handed the bag to the farmer so he could add the bill, but he smiled and said, 'That's $12.50. I watched you put them in.' My friend, Margot the dancer, at the Riverside stall had me taste some wonderful apple juice from their orchard. Irresistible!

Very, very much love to all my dear friends,

Joanna

HOW SHOULD WE LIVE?

Book Review:
The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, by Rob Hopkins (Totnes, UK: Green Books, 2008).

Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, by Daniel Lerch (Sebastopol, USA: Post Carbon Press, 2007).

The Natural Step for Communities: How Cities and Towns can Change to Sustainable Practices, by Sarah James and Torbjorn Lahti (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2004).

Joanna Santa Barbara
Atamai Village Council, Motueka



Are you looking for inspiration and ideas to transform your town, city, neighbourhood into a vital community, producing its own nutritious food, supplying its own energy, resilient to expected shocks of climate change and energy depletion? All three of these books offer therapy for those suffering from ‘post-petroleum stress disorder’, to use Rob Hopkins’s apt phrase, or from climate-change catatonia.

There is no doubt that a soul can get shaken to the core by facing the realities of the multiple ecological crises facing our planet, together with descent from ‘peak oil’ production, and now also threats to global financial stability. Facing uncertainty in many dimensions, a very strong argument can be developed for a risk management approach. The potential gains are greater and losses are fewer in preparing for the worst than by hoping that life will proceed as usual indefinitely.

But what does such preparation look like? Some folk are electing to start ‘from scratch’ to build the infrastructure of communities that can work in a post-carbon, climate-unstable future – the sustainable villages movement. Others start where they are, planning to convert both structure and function of their towns, cities, islands and regions in the direction of sustainability and resilience to shocks. These initiatives will all surely complement and aid each other. These three books are about the conversion of existing urban areas. The difference between the books is that Rob Hopkins (UK) describes the movement from below, the grassroots, the people’s initiative; Daniel Lerch (North America) directs his recommendations to local governments, that is, to city councillors and town planners; James and Lahti (Sweden) begin with local authorities and move to a democratic community development process. The three books fit very neatly together. Their visions are strongly compatible. Their approaches are sufficiently different to make reading all three worthwhile.

The UK and North American books begin with an overview of the problems of ‘peak oil’ and climate change. The Swedish book begins with an explanation of the Natural Step – four principles of sustainability which will be applied to the structure and function of towns and cities. These are: In the sustainable society, Nature is not subject to systematically increasing:
1. concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust
2. concentrations of substances produced by society
3. degradation by physical means
and in that society,
4. human needs are met world-wide.

It can be readily seen that such principles lead directly to limiting fossil fuel use (responding to both ‘peak oil’ and climate change issues), use of natural materials, organic agriculture, systematic protection of all ecosystems, as well as attention to justice and equity. These fundamental markers of sustainability underlie and guide a great range of derived principles and strategies.

Community resilience is an organizing principle of Rob Hopkins’s thinking about Transition Initiatives. He foresees shocks to human settlements from oil decline and climate change and asserts that the features that enable resilience of a system to shocks are diversity, modularity and ‘tight feedbacks’. Diversity refers to kinds of people, connexions between them, kinds of land use, kinds of economic activity. Modularity refers to the capacity of parts of the system to self-organize in the event of a crisis. Tightness of feedback concerns how easily the system registers when things are going wrong or right. A resilient community will be self-reliant for basic needs, although it may benefit from trade relationships for nonessentials. The community will be capable of feeding itself, providing its own energy and water. It will build with local materials and have a strong local economy, possibly with a local currency. There is therefore a focus on smaller-scale communities – town or neighbourhood-sized.

A strong feature of Rob Hopkins’s book is his inclusion of many ‘tools for transition’, teaching devices and exercises for groups working in this direction. Both his book and the James and Lahti book deal with the psychology of change, recognizing that the change in values and attitudes required to build resilient, sustainable communities in harmony with the biosphere requires major shifts for most people. Those who want to move to action on transition in their own communities will find the pathway mapped by Rob Hopkins extremely helpful, even though it is recognized that each community will tread a unique route. To whet the activist appetite, his suggested twelve-step programme is:
1. Set up a steering group and design its demise from the outset.
2. Raise awareness.
3. Lay the foundations by networking with pre-existing groups and activists.
4. Organize a ‘Great Unleashing’, an inaugural event.
5. Form groups around major theme areas, for example, food, retrofitting houses, energy, land use.
6. Use meeting strategies that maximize inclusion of the ideas of many people, and release creativity, such as ‘Open Space Technology.’
7. Develop visible practical manifestations of the project, such as a community garden or a structure built with local materials.
8. Facilitate the ‘Great Reskilling’, recovering dwindling skills for survival in a low-energy future, for example, food preserving, composting, scything, tree grafting.
9. Build a bridge to local government.
10. Honour the elders, who have experience in living at lower energy and material consumption levels.
11. Let it go where it wants to go.
12. Create an Energy Descent Action Plan.

One might add to the latter step, create a plan that also includes adaptation to climate change, water problems, and sea level rise if that is relevant to the site.

All three books agree on the sectors of needed action, although each has different emphases. Lerch, writing for city councils, begins with urging cities to join global networks of other municipalities working in the same direction and to sign the Oil Depletion Protocol as a city, in order to reduce vulnerability. He goes on to say, ‘Deal with transportation and land use (or you might as well stop now)’. He charges city councils with responsibility to encourage energy conservation in private use, assertively engaging the business community ‘to reinvent the local economy for a post-carbon world’. His slogan is ‘Reduce consumption and produce locally.’ He cites several case examples of cities on the way to adaptation to a post-carbon world.

The Swedish book by James and Lahti is organized by sectors of action: renewable energy, transportation, housing, green businesses, ‘eco-economic development’, ecological schools and education, sustainable agriculture, waste, land use and planning. The book is rich with case studies. The approach is being used in scores of towns and cities around the world, including the city of Christchurch, and is also applied by businesses. It is perhaps the most extensively applied of the three approaches.

While Rob Hopkins’s book focusses primarily on the process of change. he does examine specifically the envisioned sectoral changes in food and farming (with emphasis on the merits of Permaculture), medicine and health, education, economy (with emphasis on the merits of local currencies), transport, energy, housing. There are several case studies of Transition Towns in progress, and many examples of creative ‘visioning’, as recommended by the writer.

The Transition Towns approach is being rapidly adopted by scores of UK towns and about 35 New Zealand towns.

I found all three books to be potent sources of learning and will return to them many times in the future. I have a couple of criticisms.. The first is a failure of the Hopkins and Lerch books to place their creative recommendations in the very big picture of inquiring about the scale of human impact on the region or bioregion of interest: ‘How much human economic activity, of what kind, can this segment of the biosphere cope with without degradation? How many humans, at what levels of consumption, can it support?’ It is possible that we may reduce consumption significantly and still continue to degrade the place we live in, though at a slower rate. The answers to these questions are not easy to come by, but we need to know. Secondly, we need to get our minds around working out an economy with a steady-state material through-put, that is, no material growth in the economy. This idea clashes seriously with the prevailing assumptions. All the more reason it needs to be incorporated into our ideas of envisioning and moving towards future resilient, sustainable communities.

That said, all three of these books provide a feast for those wanting to take action on these issues. Judging by the entries on the Transition Towns website, this group of folk and the list of towns in which they live are multiplying by the day. Networks of interest are:
New Zealand Transition Towns http://www.transitiontowns.org.nz/
Living Economies, Aotearoa/New Zealand http://www.le.org.nz/

How to feed people and conserve soil

Dear Friends,

The previous blog on Permaculture led to an interesting conversation with an old and treasured friend, Herb Jenkins, professor-emeritus from McMaster University. When Herb's enquiring mind played on the issues of our present endeavour, I knew we were in for an interesting conversation. This blog will reproduce part of it, with Herb's permission. I'll begin, however, with

What's happening to us.

Jack and I have moved to a house we'll be in for some time, ending our nomadic phase. This house was already on part of the village land and has no aesthetic or ecological merits, having been built with a permit for a shed! It is redeemed by the marvellous views of ocean and mountains, sunrises and sunsets. Our goods arrived and, amazingly, have made it feel something like a home. We even have a temporary dog. Sid, a working sheep dog, arrived with his owner who became the project's land manager. There is no other convenient place for him to stay, and I enjoy having him.

Jack has been working hard on the necessary planning to get Regional Council approval. He and I worked on the section on Recreation and Conservation, in both of which areas the village provisions far exceed Council requirements. The conservation measures planned are quite extensive, especially with respect to native forest.

Jack has just attended the board meeeting of the International Forum on Globalization in San Francisco. He presented a discussion paper on the population issue, a delicate one for any organization. The IFG Board is strong on Third World representation, which ensures a wide range of views on this issue. Energy issues was another area in which Jack had particular interests and responsibilities.

He has gone from there to have an immersion experience in frolicking with the two grandchildren in Troy, southern Ontario, and is hoping that the third, due any day now, arrives while he is there.

Last month I spent some time at workshops on democratic functioning - seeing this as very relevant to developing a well-functioning community. It was more experiential than any learning I've ever undertaken, and I think has added to my understanding and skills. These were held at Riverside, the established community I've mentioned - a great asset to the region.

Now to the conversation with Herb.

Discussion of how to feed people and conserve soil.

Herb's letter:

Hi Joanna,
We have read your blogs with great interest. The one on the idea of a village was very provocative. I was struck by the boldness of what I take to be the major claim behind village based permaculture; namely, that living in major urban concentrations dependent on distant sources of food produced by large scale specialized food production is not sustainable. Urban depopulation, rural repopulation, and ecologically sensitive, science based, smaller scale, village based, agricultural production could be sustainable.
The prescription appears to go against the view that we need residential intensification to contain or reverse the environmentally costly, land gobbling, urban/suburban sprawl. But maybe it doesn’t really go against that view since residential intensification is talked about in the context of agriculturally non productive land use. But are you worried that if the village-permaculture movement became widespread, it might entail the conversion of much undeveloped land to habitation and mixed agricultural production? Does village permaculture lead to low density sprawl?
A major part of the argument for village based permaculture is that the combination of a big reduction in food transportation costs and more ecologically sensitive agricultural methods means that village permaculture is more conserving and less polluting than our present system. I have the impression that the assessment of net environmental cost of different systems is complex and in many cases uncertain. The present system in industrialized countries is highly specialized. Large areas are planted in one crop, or in the production of one kind of farm animal. Isn’t this specialization efficient? If so, might the gain in efficiency in production balance the environmental cost of transportation?
I understand that there is also the argument that permaculture conserves the soil and other land based resources. But is it not possible to go some distance toward a more soil and water conserving agriculture without giving up on large scale specialized production? It seems to me that is also an important goal because large cities dependent on distant food production are going to be with us for a long time (if there is a long time).
I recognize that village permaculture has appealing values quite aside from its possible role in moving the planet toward a sustainable way of living. What I am questioning is its potential for increasing the chances of the survival of a planet with, say, 10 billion people on it.
I think that what you and Jack are doing is really admirable. You have the courage of your convictions, a rare and wonderful thing. I can see that the enterprise is totally engaging and exciting. I trust that you will take my questions as an attempt to understand, not to undermine.
With all best wishes, Herb

Our responses:

Joanna:
Dear Herb,
You are the very model of a modern inquiring mind; you asked great questions - thanks.

I'll have a go at answering your questions and send my effort to Jack and others for more comments. Here's my best for now:

You wonder if current agricultural practices, often referred to as 'industrial agriculture' (see second photo above), may be the most efficient way of producing food for Earth's population now, and in the future as we increase to the projected 10 billion. You recognize the fossil fuel emissions involved in the global network of food transportation, but ask if this might be balanced by the efficiency of the process. You wonder if industrial agriculture could be modified to improve soil and water conservation.
You ask if reruralization may incur the array of ecological problems of suburban sprawl.

Current agricultural practices are not sustainable. They contribute a very substantial proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions. They do this through the use of agricultural machinery, through the heavy application of fertilizers necessitated by depletion of soil nutrients, the application of herbicides and pesticides necessitated by monoculture practices, and by the huge amount of oil-fuelled transport the system involves.. In addition, heavy tillage of soil releases carbon to the atmosphere. (No-till systems sequester it.) We must find ways to grow food that restore the carbon-sequestering property of soil, the fertility of soil, that do not contribute to gg emissions and that are minimally dependent on oil. These things must be done for two reasons - to mitigate global warming in the long run and to avoid potentially grave effects of peak oil in the short run.

It is not surprising that we experience the present system as efficient; global food prices have been steadily decreasing, at least since after WWII, and until 2005. (Now they are increasing, because of the impact of global warming on agriculture, the steady rise in the price of oil and because food, and food-producing land is being used to produce ethanol. This increase is haing serious effects on some populations.) Oil-fuelled farm machinery has replaced human labour, reducing production costs and depopulating farmland. Oil-based inputs to agriculture have replaced the need to take care of soil. This 'efficiency' in producing food is theft from those who come after us, and must deal with global warming and depleted soil. A related problem is the reduction of genetic diversity caused by industrial agriculture, with loss of many species and variants of such things as potatoes and rice, reducing resilience conferred by diversity.

Jack: One way of understanding the inefficiencies ( and thus unsustainability) of current agricultural industrial practices is to look at the net energy return of the food produced. I don’t have the reference handy, but the calculations show that for every calorie produced by these methods, it takes at least 10 – 15 calories of inputs. This is the very definition of unsustainability – take away the high energy inputs and you can no longer produce the outputs. We are about to lose the inputs with peak oil and peak natural gas. We are also fouling the water required, and the levels of phosphorus are declining. The pulse in food production (and population) created by the introduction of fossil fuels into agriculture over the last century and a half cannot be repeated ( at least I know of no reasonable hypothesis of how it can).

Another perspective on industrial agriculture has to do with the introduction of genetically modified organism – eg to grow in saline soil (created by poor irrigation practices), and other high tech solutions. These approaches which interfere with the natural flow of ecosystems and their slow evolution will undoubtedly have unintended consequences we cannot begin to appreciate ( note the unintended consequences of both CFCs for refrigeration and the extensive use of fossil fuels). Nature is the way nature is because it is the most efficient way of creating biomass and protecting living organisms. I suggest that as a species we are much better off trying to understand the complexities involved and working with these natural processes rather than attempting to “improve” them for our short term benefit.

I have my doubts that the human population will ever reach 10 billion because of the vulnerability of our food system. But I also believe that more people will receive adequate nourishment if industrial agriculture ( and a host of other energy intensive practices that are unsustainable and essentially unhealthy for people and the planet eg mining, warfare, etc) are abandoned and we base our food system on local production with permaculture and related food production practices.

Just a few days ago we had a small workshop here at Te Mara to plan for food production on the land here and for the village. The first stage will be to prepare a little more than 1 Ha of land for crop rotation. With two full time people and two part time, we expect to be able to feed about 20 people from this parcel – with a surplus. We will use a combination of permaculture and French intensive gardening. The process grows soil as well as crops, insuring the sustainability of the practice. We will use some fossil fuels to begin preparing the land ( and we will try to measure these inputs so we can establish a baseline and reduce it in the future) as a temporary measure. The objective is to move quickly to a fossil fuel free system and we believe this can be done in just a few years.


Joanna:
Permaculture (see first hoto above) and other organic agricultural practices counter these problems. I understand they can restore depleted soil, minimize external inputs, and minimize tillage. I also understand that the food production per hectare is greater in total than in monoculture, the product comprising many diverse foods rather than one. The implication of this is that a change to this for of agriculture would have a better chance of feeding human populations than would industrial monocultureagriculture. Organic practices involve small scale monocultures, are strong on nurturing soil, and are labour intensive. Permaculture practices, I'm told, after achievement of a mature garden, involve rather little labour input, mostly focussing on perennial plants. But the permaculturist must live in their garden to observe and make adjustments.

It would seem possible to apply such agricultural practices to urban centres up to a certain size. This happened successfully in Cuba after their sudden loss of Soviet oil in the 1990s. They implemented multiple adaptations,including input from Australian permaculturists, intensive urban gardening, use of draft animals for agricultural energy input and a science-based approach. I understand that Havana was able to supply 80% of its food from within a 5-10 km radius of the city centre, and smaller towns were able to grow 100%. I imagine this meant people moving out of the city into the near countryside.


Jack: see above. I would also add that I think cities will and must shrink in population. Sustainable agricultural practices will require more people on the land and involved in food production. Reruralization is needed. See the writing of Richard Register for the thinking of an architect who has been looking at these issues for some time, and who has useful ideas about how to transform cities into a system of villages.

Keep in mind that cities also now contain a lot of people who are essentially unproductive from the perspective of meeting basic human needs - think of people in the financial services, insurance, advertising, PR, even the food and trucking industries, etc. Many of these jobs could go without too many people really missing the services provided (aside from those whose jobs might be lost). A return to localization of the economy, especially regarding basic services ( food, shelter, education, health care, culture, etc) will create a much more efficient system and allow many more people to survive.


Joanna:
Does this mean worse urban sprawl?
Not in the form of settlement we're working on. The problem with urban sprawl is that water, sewage and electricity and roads must be supplied over a huge area of urban infrastructure at great expense, and then people must travel long distances to work and education. Also there is likely no meaningful community in their settlement area, and certainly little economic interdependence. In the form of settlement we are developing, water, sewage and energy will be taken care of in the village, food will be grown in the village area, and there will be a strong effort to have as many jobs as possible based in the village. Some of these may depend on internet (while this technology is available), and it is recognized that some people will need to work in the nearby town or city. Transport will be shared. Houses are to be built on the less productive land, usually rather steep slopes.

Jack: Much of current “development” takes place on green fields ie agricultural land ( this is one of the big issues about the expansion of an industrial park around the Hamilton airport). It takes productive farm land out of production and transforms it to a use that requires ever more energy and material inputs. No matter how “efficient” this process becomes, it is inherently unsustainable on the scale it is now occurring (and perhaps at any scale).

Several of your questions talk about improved efficiencies. I have two comments: Jevon’s Paradox needs to be considered – whenever there is an increase in efficiency there is also an increase in total material throughput – when things are more efficient we use more of them. Secondly, being efficient at the wrong thing cannot be sustainable. We have become increasingly efficient at creating unsustainable practices and are approaching “peak everything” ( a recent book by Richard Heinberg – recommended). A basic principle of ecological economics is – frugality first ( set limits to ensure we stay within the capacities of natural systems to regenerate) and then be concerned with doing that efficiently.

One of the things that really excites me about the project we are doing is that we are taking marginal land (only good for grazing sheep at best – which NZ has too many of anyway) and turning it into productive land thru permaculture, making it visually attractive (again via permaculture), and providing basic services for people (water, waste water management, energy, food) from the land itself. We will require almost nothing from the district council in terms of services ( in fact, I can think of none). Even the materials for the homes will largely come from materials on the land itself. I am hoping we can do a materials and energy audit of both the construction and operating phases to learn more about what we are actually doing and to learn how this can be improved.


Joanna:
Can this form of settlement pattern take care of the needs of 10 billion people? I don't know and I have doubts that it can, despite the claims of higher productivity in Permaculture. While I have seen predictions that the present form of agriculture can feed 10 billion, these projections take into account none of the problems of GHG emissions and peak oil. The recent notes on rising food prices and diminishing grain reserves suggest that we are running into problems of food supply (rather than only food distribution) right now. I am very interested in understanding more about how many humans can live sustainably on the Earth.

Jack: Again, see my comments above. When I hear questions like this, the I = P X A X T formula comes to mind. We cannot separate the population (P) question from consumption ( A for Affluence) and technology ( T). Clearly, the total impact we have on ecosystems that support and maintain us ( and everyone living thing) is a complex function of P, A and T. We tend to focus on improving T ( because we have some much excess energy with fossil fuels),and generally avoid looking at A and P. But there are three parameters we have to work with, and if we are going to be losing the unrepeatable energy services of fossil fuels( which has made the incredible T we have possible) then we had best learn to deal with both the A and the P. The real goal is reducing our I ( impact on ecosystems), and we will need to radically alter all three parameters – making technologies more efficient and focused on doing the basic tasks, learn to live more frugally ( which is totally consistent with high levels of both human satisfaction and well being – objectively measured), and reduce our population. Ultimately, it is the I ( for Impact) that counts.

Joanna:
Well, dear Herb, that's it for me now.Warmest wishes to you and Adair,
Joanna

Further comments: I read the following account the other day: When the massive exodus of Tibetans flowed into India, they were given land in various parts of India and began agriculture. This was in the hey-day of the green revolution and the adopted its methods. Much later it was realized that the soil had become sterile, devoid of all the living matter that makes up healthy soil, due to these methods. the dalai Lama pointed out that the infrastructure of all Tibetan settlements must be nonviolent. Agriculture changed to organic methods and productivity improved. (Chris Turner. The Geography of Hope, 2007 )

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Alternative Currency

One friend, commenting on previous blogs, noted that nothing has been said about a complementary local money system (like the Toronto dollar). I had been imagining that this would be worked out at a later stage. However, some more recent reading, stimulated by Joy Kogawa who was instrumental in the Toronto Dollar system, suggests to me that sooner rather than later should be considered. I was very happy to find that our ecologist, Helle Janssen, has past experience in establishing alternatie currencies. I'm sure to return to this topic.

Warmest wishes to the enduring souls who have read all of this.

Joanna

Permaculture

Dear Family and Friends,

In this blog, I'll try to convey something about the systems of agriculture to be used in Atamai, the village project we're working on. The aim is to achieve a high degree of food self-sufficiency (but not complete self-reliance), to do this with minimal fossil fuel input and efficient use of human labour among other energy inputs. The potential of growing plants for other uses is also of interest - fibre, fuel, medicinal purposes, for example. The images above represent a New Zealand Permaculture garden (not ours) and a Permaculture map or land plan, which looks rather like the maps that appear at the meetings we have on this issue.

Permaculture is one of the forms of food-growing that will characterize this project. It is particularly relevant to the use of somewhat degraded land for production, or for steep or marginally fertile land. The best land in the village area will likely be cultivated by French Intensive gardening methods, which has in common with Permaculture very close attention to the health of the soil, and differs in that plants are grown in beds, and these plants are mainly annuals.

Permaculture is a contraction of 'permanent agriculture' and focusses on the development of a complex, very diverse, designed system of mainly perennial food plants. It originated in Australia in the 1970s with founding thinkers Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. They describe Permaculture as 'an integrated and evolving system of perennial or self-peretuating plant and animal species useful to man....a philosophy of working with rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour, and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating an area as a single product system. '

Permaculture has since been adopted in many places across the globe, with research being done on most continents. Australian Permaculture experts helped Cuba reorganize its agriculture during the 'special period' after Cuba lost its source of oil when the Soviet Union dissolved. It makes the assumption that food security requires sustainable agriculture, and that the high degree of dependence of industrial agriculture on oil to restore nutrients to dead soil, to provide herbicides and pesticides to pest-attracting monocultures and to fuel soil-compacting farm implements, is not sustainable. In addition, the destruction of diversity of strains of plants useful to humankind, such as has occurred in rice in industrial monocultures, threatens the resilience of food-growing systems to challenges such as climate change.

In Permaculture there is minimum tillage, fertilization and weeding and no use of chemicals for insects and other pests. Its proponents claim that the amount of food (of many varieties) produced per hectare is greater than in industrial monoculture. There is a role for animals in a Permaculture system; however a diet based on Permaculture would likely derive most nutrients from plants, and include fewer grains than a current western diet.

A Permaculture garden has plantings in 'zones', starting at the kitchen door, based on the frequency of need for humans to visit that part of the garden or of elements of the garden to require human attention. Culinary herbs, salad greens and citrus trees should be reachable without getting your slippers wet. The chickens should be not too far off; vegetable gardens and orchards are next in priority. Grains and forest are further off. Outside that, ideally, is wilderness.

Fruit and nut trees are of major importance in the system. The first element in the design of Atamai, after terracing of the steepest hillsides, was the planting of 7000 fruit, nut and forest trees of considerable diversity. There has been much attention to agricultural water, with a visit from an Australian expert in 'keylining', a system of making the most of scarce agricultural water. We may require energy input (oil-based) to dig ponds and contour some parts of the land. Soil has been tested. 'Terra preta' (an Amazonian agricultural method of returning carbon to the soil) has been prepared. Tools have been purchased. There is a small team of young people working on a variety of tasks, such as caring for the tree plantings. Road layout for agricultural purposes has been planned. In a few weeks, an exerienced land manager will begin work to implement an overall plan of work. A yield is expected next season.

Finally, it is important to remind ourselves that about a third of greenhouse gases contributing to climate change are the result of current agricultural methods, with tillage being part of the problem picture. It is a matter of urgency to change these methods globally in the direction being developed in Atamai and other such experiments. These will reverse carbon emission from soil to carbon sequestration in soil.

Notes on ourselves: Some of you kind enough to take an interest in these issues have said you'd welcome a few notes at a more personal level, to tell you how we ourselves are getting on. Glad to oblige!

We're both very well. Jack is slender and fit and succeeds most days in prodding me to walk or cycle.

For a few weeks we have actually been living on the land, in a pre-existing house which we share with a young family. The property is called Te Mara, Maori for garden, orchard, cultivation, as it is destined to be all of these. Living here is very pleasant. The little kids of 5 and 3 are delightful, and help to soothe our deprivation of grandchildren (of the same ages, as it happens.) They bring me loquats and strawberries they find growing here, and decorate my computer keyboard with nasturtiums and bracken. Who could fail to be inspired when working at a flower-bedecked keyboard! It does have an effect on work output though. Yesterday I sat on the floor (we have very little furniture) to read about Permaculture; within a minute I had small people sitting either side of me, and we were reading 'Froggy Went A'Courtin'' instead.

We have hens, a rooster, a duck and a bantam, all of whom came with the property. The lay astonishingly large brown eggs which we greatly enjoy. The children and their Mum walk down the road to feed them and put them in their coop every evening.

Cycling to get groceries certainly satisfies requirements of a daily work-out. The families share a car and other resources. Jack and I are waiting for our ship to come in, bringing our household stuff. We will then move to another pre-existing house on the land. I'll be sorry to move away from this family; we will get more work done, though, and it's only an 8 minute walk (at a 45 degree angle, no kidding) up or down the ridge to visit.

Jack spends most of his time on this project. The other thing he's doing is to work on a discussion paper on population issues for a meeting of the International Forum on Globalization in February in San Francisco. I've helped with this in a minor way. I've continued with some of my work by e-mail, relating to students in Canada and elsewhere, helping a bit with the Afghanistan work. I'm also trying to catch up on some broad learning in relation to the project. It's very stimulating to sit in on meetings dealing with such things as Water (last Saturday's topic) and listen to a pretty high degree of expertise on the subject. Last week I attended a 3-day workshop on 'Practising Democracy'. which seemed relevant both to this stage of many work-meetings, and to the subsequent social organization of the village. It was entirely experiential, a novel educational experience for me; I learned useful things about consensus -seeking and relating to authority. It was held at a nearby community, Riverside, established over 60 years ago by Christian pacifists. The community is no longer Christian, but continues as a very interesting group of people.

I visited my Australian family over Christmas, and was able to spend a good deal of time with my mother and my siblings and their families, watching in my last few hours there, the magnificent Sydney Harbour fireworks display to welcome the New Year.

I recently read former NZ prime minister David Lange's account of how New Zealand adopted its nuclear-free policy, and will try to write a review on this soon. I think there's a useful analogy to explore in NZ's relationship to the ANZUS treaty and Canada's to NATO.

I send my heartfelt love to the many dear people who read this blog.

Joanna

Sources:

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren (1978) Permaculture One - a Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. Tagari Publications.

Bill Mollison (1979) Permaculture Two - Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture. Tagari Publications.

David Holmgren (2002 )Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability.

Atamai Village

Dear Family and Friends,

I hope the warm seasonal gatherings of this time of year have brought you much joy, and I send you my best wishes for 2008.

On January 2nd, I'll return from my visit to Australia to live in the house you might dimly discern in the centre of the second photo. Jack is already there, together with a young family with whom we'll share the dwelling. The fields you see here will begin to be cultivated over the coming year and will eventually be an important component of the food supply for Atamai Village. This part of the village lands is known as Te Mara - Maori for 'the garden, orchard, cultivation'. The first photo is of the very pretty stream at Te Mara.

The pine woods you see here are also part of the village lands. They are a Pinus radiata plantation. They are non-native, bad for the soil and do not sequester carbon. They will slowly be replaced by native forest trees and bushes and ferns.

Over the ridge of the pine forest is more village land - a fairly steep bowl of former grazing land. Most of the dwellings will be built in this bowl, including the village centre complex. Some of it has been terraced and much of it has been planted with 7000 fruit, nut and forest trees.

Let me describe in more detail the intentions for this village. You already know that designs for the village have grown out of a need to respond to the threats of climate change, oil and other resource depletion. It is intended to provide for the growth of a settlement that will:

• show that 'living sustainably within our means' on Earth is both feasible and attractive



• contribute to ongoing learning about how this can be done



• withstand possible coming economic and resource shocks, and demonstrate to others how this can be done

Planners work with the idea that settlements evolve in response to their environment and to changing human needs and that, in the words of a scholar of settlements, Christopher Mare, 'A truly sustainable village must be skilfully designed to create itself.' It will need to be revised and changed over time, yet should be built to last centuries.

Atamai Village can be considered in relation to the following dimensions:

Scale: Optimal scale is a tension between two needs:

• big enough to have a complex economy with specialization of function, enabling a high degree of self-reliance in basic needs



• small enough that everyone knows everyone else, more or less, enabling safety, accountability, and increasing moral responsibility for the common good.

Atamai can grow to a population of several hundred people. It may be too small. Many writers suggest that 500-5000 is optimal.

Food provision: An experienced UK organic gardener and an experienced French land manager are involved in this group. They consider that Atamai can produce a food surplus beyond its own needs before long. There will be communal fields on the land you see above, private gardens around dwellings and the food-bearing trees planted all over the property. Domestic animals may be involved. (We already have some resident chickens at Te Mara.) The above folk, Adrian and Jacques, will soon produce a land management plan for agriculture. Permaculture and French intensive gardening methods will predominate. Both methods pay close attention to soil. The 'terra preta' system of soil enrichment is already in use with the recent tree plantings, and will continue. This may evolve into a small business providing for other regional farmers and gardeners.

Water, waste and sewage: Water will be from rainwater collection and from wells. Gravity will be used as much as possible in water arrangements eg tanks from house above supply house below and so on. Composting toilets will mean no so-called 'blackwater' to take care of. 'Grey water' from household use will be used for garden irrigation. There will be an effort to move towards a 'no waste' economy of materials.

Health: I anticipate that people will be healthier. They will be doing more physical activity (walking, cycling, digging, hoeing) and they will eat better. A village structure as described fosters healthy human relationships - people cooperating in common endeavours and caring for each other. This fosters good mental health.

Forest: Another person associated with the project is Helle, an expert on regeneration of New Zealand native forests. He will produce a plan for conversion of the pine forest to native forest, outlining (I hope) the uses of the pinewood eg construction and fuel.

Dwellings: A team of architects, green builders and designers is working on plans for construction of some dwellings in the early New Year. There will be some mandatory specifications - limit on size, use of locally available building materials (clay, mud straw, stone, wood), passive solar design to minimize heating costs, rainwater collection, composting toilets, possibly wood stoves, photovoltaic panels. The houses will be aesthetically pleasing. Some of us hope for designs that intrude minimally on the landscape. There need to be family homes, space for extended family, eg aging parents, rental accommodation, places for people in the WWOOFer system (travelling organic farm helpers), places for seasonal workers, possibly co-housing areas with some shared facilities. Diversity of design will be encouraged; aesthetic unity will be imposed by the local construction materials. It is hoped that villagers will learn to construct and repair their own houses

It is expected that many houses will have their own food gardens. Common areas will be landscaped for beauty as well as productivity.

Village Centre: This may comprise a meeting hall, performance area, AV facilities, central laundry, restaurant and bakery, perhaps a centre for spiritual activities. Some houses and workshops will be clustered in this area.

Transport: Private cars will be discouraged; there is no provision for them in the settlement arrangement. Much movement will be by foot and bicycle. There will be a system of paths throughout the village, and electric vehicles available when needed. A small company will operate a shared car system, and possibly provide regular trips to Motueka (the town 6 minutes away) and Nelson (the city 45 minutes away). The bike trip to Motueka was timed by Jack the other day - 30 minutes. Soon we'll have our electric battery-assisted bikes to help with the hills. (Jack and I haven't had a car of our own since leaving Canada.)

Economy: It is hoped that from an early stage at least half of Atamai Villagers will find employment in the village. The community will own the infrastructure; some livelihoods will be directed to village maintenance, and some to goods and services beyond the village. Other people may earn their livelihood in the local town or nearby city, but it is hoped this will not be a general pattern. It may be that a local currency system will evolve.

Child development and education: There is a considerable focus on having the village be a safe, loving and stimulating place for children to grow up. With no cars, children should be able to move freely throughout the village, to enjoy and learn from many people. There will be many economic activities proceeding, involving skills that children could acquire. Some children will be home-schooled. Others may go to the local school.

Lifelong learning and research: In the shift from our highly consuming, fossil fuel-dependent way of life to the way of life described here, there is an enormous amount of learning to be done. The group designing this village already has been holding potluck dinner-seminars and workshops. The group includes experts in a range of areas. We are eager to learn from each other, from an abundant literature and from the experience of other similar efforts. Subsequently we hope to engage in research relevant to the village and to contribute to the learning of others. This latter function will be carried out by a planned Bioregional Institute, which we hope will serve settlements in this region and others.

Arts: Arts are seen as an important aspect of village life and will be encouraged. There is an aspiration to have occasional artists in residence. There will be a performance space and audiovisual facilities.

Leisure: Much leisure equipment can be shared eg kayaks, camping equipment. This has to do with a value held in this group to minimize material acquisitions, but maximize quality of life.

Values: The above value is part of attempting to live with minimal harm to the Earth and within the biophysical limits of the planet. Nonviolence to both people and Earth is a paramount value. Sharing, cooperating, helping each other, caring for the less able, respect for persons and for diversity; organizational values of honesty, transparency and accountability are all held to be important. It is not supposed that those who join this endeavour will be unusually highly moral or spiritual people. The hope is to create a social structure which will foster the good inherent in everyone and minimize the potential for bad behaviour.

Social structure and governance: This must ultimately evolve with those who live in the village and cannot be designed or prescribed. Those currently involved value participatory democracy with consensus decision-making and close attention to dealing constructively with conflicts.

Process: The group working on the village shares an understanding that supporting the process of village evolution is important, rather than having a clear vision of the final form. Living organisms are self-organizing; a village will be so. It is hoped that Atamai will be the first of many. Each will be different and will learn from and support the others.

As you can imagine, dear friends, this is an enormously interesting project, and the people involved are for the most part, delightful to work with. Jack's business skills give him an instant niche to fit into. My skills are more in the social area; my role hasn't crystallized yet. That's OK for now. I'm grateful to be working with people with high degrees of knowledge and expertise on a project that offers hope for human survival and thriving.

Warmest wishes to all,

Joanna

Parihaka - a nonviolent village

Dearest Family and Friends,



I was in the middle of doing some research for a blog on the concept of the village, when the remarkable evening Jack and I spent last night demanded that I devote a blog to it. The focus is the history of Maori nonviolent action, but it is also the story of a village. The images above are firstly, the village event of Parihaka's men returning from years in gaol, in 1898, and secondly, an artist's collage of many aspects of this history. (They should be reversed, but my blog skills grow only in tiny increments.)


Last night, Jack and I drove the short distance to Riverside Community, a 65 year-old settlement founded by Christian pacifists. It is no longer Christian, but maintains a strong peace culture. Members of the community had worked with local Maori to produce this event. It took place in a beautiful hall which once was the Methodist Church for the Riverside Community. The event began with a calling into the hall by conch horn. The 100 or so people who moved into the hall spanned infancy to advanced age. The narrative was told in Maori and English, in voice, dance and song, very movingly. Then four community members rotated to the four quadrants of the room, speaking simultaneously quotations of key figures on nonviolence. A Maori Anglican priest spoke, then went to the courtyard to bless the ample and delicious potluck dinner.


Over dinner Jack and I conversed with a Maori public health worker who wants to move forward with plans for a Maori village, and is interested in what we're doing, as we are in what she's doing. We'll have dinner with her next week.


Then there was another 'coming together' of people in the hall, singing a most beautiful Maori song, which seemed known to many folk there, including nonMaori. A young Maori spoke spontaneously of the importance of the occasion, and of unity between peoples. He said that in Maori gatherings a speech to the community was followed by a song. He would play one on the flute about All-encompassing Love. Even the little kids listened quietly.


Then, astonishingly, seven giant marimbas were carried in and set up, and the place erupted in Zimbabwean music played by 9 local (white) people. Everyone, of all ages, was bouncing with joy. You can't imagine how loud seven giant marimbas could be. I never saw Jack dance so happily and for so long. There was a pause while the players reminded us that Zimbabweans weren't themselves having much fin these days...we noted, and then bounced on. How is it, I ask, that this little town (popn. 6000) has such a group? I was told that another little town over the mountain pass in Golden Bay, has an even bigger Zimbabwean marimba group.



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So, what's the story of Parihaka?


It's set in the mid- to late 19th century, when land developers were encouraging European immigrants to come to New Zealand, and attempting to take over Maori land for that purpose. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, but in this shameful phase of NZ history, was flagrantly ignored. The NZ government supported this surge of land acquisition and European settlement, desiring the tax revenues that would accrue. Worse still, there was an influential group of landowners, known as 'the Mob', profoundly racist, who actively desired war with the Maori, expecting and hoping to exterminate them. They were supported by some New Zealand newspapers. War erupted in 1860 and after stalemate and truce, flared again as settlers moved in and took over Maori lands. In the south-west of the North Island, in the shadow of beautiful Mount Taranaki, lay the lands of a people headed by two men generally referred to as 'prophets' -- Te Whiti (pronounced 'te fiti') and Tohu. Together they generated a philosophy of radical nonviolence in response to this situation and strategies to implement it. Te Whiti was described as the greatest orator in New Zealand at that time; Tohu was more retiring.


Prior to incursion on their land, Te Whiti and Tohu had shown the utmost friendliness to pakeha (Europeans), speaking repeatedly of the need to share the land, and expressing willingness to give up some of it for European settlement. 'Enough blood has been shed for that land. Let no more be shed.' They founded a new village at Parihaka. On the 17th of every month, the anniversary of the beginning of the wars, thousands of people came to Parihaka to hear Te Whiti speak. The two men were known by all as a peacemakers. Their village was known as a model village.

Certain elements of the government were determined to provoke a war. Surveyors were sent in to the cultivated areas around Parihaka to mark settler holdings. They cut through gardens and trampled crops. The villagers quietly removed their pegs overnight. Eventually, on Te Whiti's orders, the Maori in the area surrounded the surveyors, packed them, their instruments and their camping equipment on to carts, and conveyed them all out of the area.


When settlers came to take up their holdings, teams of ploughmen were sent out by Te Whiti and Tohu. With their horses, they began before dawn and ploughed until dusk, conveying symbolically that this was their land for cultivation. They were described as 'very civil and dignified' and no settler was ever threatened. Te Whiti said, ' I am cutting a furrow to the Governor's heart.' Two hundred ploughmen were arrested. the government passed a bill allowing Maori prisoners to be held without trial. The government collapsed; Te Whiti ordered the ploughing to cease.


The new Native Minister was John Bryce, whose answer to the problem of disputed Maori land was to take it all by force. He moved hundreds of troops to the area on the pretext of repairing the roads. 'Even though the bayonets of the soldiers blind your eyes with their brightness, do not flinch,' Te Whiti told his people at Parihaka. Te Whiti announced that he wanted the road repaired and sent several cartloads of food to the soldiers working on it. In return, the army band performed for them.This was not at all what Bryce had in mind.

The chief surveyor changed the course of the road and drove it through the Parihaka gardens, breaking down the fences around them. In the morning the army returned and found the fences repaired and the road blocked. They broke them down again and the Maori rebuilt them again and again.The colonel in charge telegrammed Bryce to say that the Parihaka men were very reasonable and wanted gates across gaps in the fences. Bryce refused to authorize gates and ordered the fencers arrested. Day after day Te Whiti sent new teams to repair fences after each team was arrested. This was played out 40 or 50 times. Some prepared themselves for arrest by wearing their best clothes and holding out their hands for the handcuffs. At one point, 300 men and boys descended on the roadline, dug up the road, sowed it with wheat and put up a fence. Bryce introduced more legislation to make erecting a fence punishable with two years' hard labour. Hundreds of Maori from the area received this sentence. As the men dwindled in numbers old men and children carried on the demonstrations, the singing children known as tatarakihi - cicadas. The government had had enough. Bryce was ordered to stop taking prisoners. He resigned as Native Minister.


But the land confiscations did not stop. Te Whiti's thousands of acres of mountain forest, plains and beach was to be reduced to an inland town, its inhabitants living on handouts and surrounded by white farms. An armed force was sent to amass outside Parihaka. Te Whiti never wavered in his attempts to accomplish 'an extraordinary political feat - to forge a permanent and not merely an expedient peace between two of the most bellicose peoples in the world, the English and the Maori' (Walker).


It is not right that fear of war, or imprisonment, should be made master of the world, and that the great and strong, by coercion, should become masters of creation. It is not right that the men of the island should be made slaves to fear of war, anger and vexation or that the land should be relinquished from that cause. If it happened to be the case that the world had been created in a feeling of anger and vexation, then it would be right that these moods should continue to rule the world, and conclude all things. But no, the world was created through love and all things made upon the face of the earth were created out of affection and love. Therefore I say, since things commenced with love, our affairs should continue by love, through to the end. (Te Whiti)



Then Bryce, back in power, unleashed the dogs of war. Volunteer whites streamed into the area. The army was ready to strike. Te Whiti gave a last address to 2500 to 3000 people, including many pakeha.

The canoe by which we are to be saved is forbearance. Let us abide calmly on the land...Be firm, that the world might be informed and hear the good word.

Tohu said:

I shall place no weapons in your hands. You were imprisoned for ploughing and fencing, but there is no imprisonment for what we are now doing. I will not take you away from death or from the mouth of the guns; I will thrust you into the mouth of the guns and on the point of the sword.
"I will not save you or give you any means of escape. If any warlike man among you ask me what is to be done I will not answer him ... I have no place to hide you except in this marae, and we cannot be overcome ... Those who flee from the guns will fall by them. If you are overwhelmed in this day be patient ... have faith ..."

A Maori policeman was sent out to invite Bryce and his escort into town. Bryce declined. Bryce had imposed a news blackout, but five journalists sneaked by the patrols, were welcomed by Tohu, hid in the cookhouse, saw and recorded everything. The thousands of people of the town sat quietly on the marae, the forecourt of the great meeting house. One of the journalists described 'a prevailing sadness, as though they felt a great calamity were approaching...It was saddening in the extreme; it was an industrious, law-abiding, moral and hospitable community calmly waiting the approach of men sent to rob them...'

The army advanced. 'At the first sight of the soldiers, a great cheer rose from the gates of Parihaka. Two hundred children, the cicadas, ran out to meet the soldiers. The boys began to sing and perform action dances. Behind them were girls with skipping ropes and 500 loaves of bread that had been baked during the night for the soldiers.
The advance guard marched on the children and wheeled away at the last minute, unsure of how to proceed. Bryce then ordered a cavalry charge, but the tatarakihi sang on as the horses thundered towards them. "Even when a mounted officer galloped up and pulled his horse up so short that the dirt from its forefeet spattered the children, they still went on chanting, perfectly oblivious, apparently, to the pakeha,' one old soldier recalled...' (Walker) He described how he found his way blocked by skipping parties. When he grabbed a skipping rope, he suffered a rope burn. He picked up one girl and carried her to the side of the road. He looked back to see his men grinning at the ridiculous sight.

Officers went to the packed marae and read the Riot Act. The crowd did not acknowledge them and kept their eyes fixed on Te Whiti. Tohu spoke briefly:

Let the man who has raised the war finish his work this day. We will wait where we are...Even if the bayonet be put to your breasts, do not resist...'

For an hour, nothing happened. Then Te Whiti and Tohu were arrested. As they were led away, both spoke words of encouragement to the assembly and urged them to remain steadfast in peace.
A woman began to cry. Another said to her, 'Why are you sorry? Look! He's laughing as he goes away with the pakehas.' The people remained on the marae all day until darkness fell. The next day the town was destroyed and the people dispersed.

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Parihaka was rebuilt by Te Whiti when he was released from prison. Today it is the site of an annual international peace festival.

Several more things were said in the oral narrative we heard on Monday night. One was that the children born of rape after the destruction of Parihaka were accepted and loved by their communities. Another was that Gandhi heard the story of Parihaka in South Africa. I am immensely moved and inspired by this story. The captain of the arresting party said that if one rifle had gone off by accident among the Maori, there would have been a mass slaughter. No one was killed. (One officer suffered skipping rope burn!)

For a long time, I've been told, Parihaka Day, November 5th, was commemorated in the mood of 'Look what they did to us.' Now the mood is 'Look what we, the Maoris, invented in the 1880s in response to the brutal colonial treatment. We have a message for the world.'

Love to all my family and friends,
Joanna

Sources:
Walker, Peter. The Fox Boy: the story of an abducted child. Bloomsbury, 2001.
Oral narrative of Parihaka Peace Gathering, Riverside Community, 2007.