Originally published in the June 2012 issue of Transition Free Press
A full online version of that issue can be read here. This interview appears on pages 8-9
In the first in our series of conversations with key thinkers and activists within the Transition movement, Charlotte Du Cann talks with Shaun Chamberlin about cultural stories, collaboration and the future.
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In 2000 Shaun Chamberlin, a student of philosophy, received an email from his father out of the blue. By the way that future you were expecting is not going to happen. Here’s a link showing how the next decade is going to be all about resource wars and energy depletion. Just thought you ought to know, hope you are well…
It was, he said, his ‘peak oil moment’. The moment he started to immerse himself in what was then an obscure subject and that led him six years later to a course at Schumacher College called Life After Oil. Here he met the environmental and alternative economics thinker, David Fleming, whom he would work alongside until Fleming’s death in 2010. He also met Rob Hopkins, who soon commissioned him to write a report on the UK climate/energy crisis that became the book, The Transition Timeline.
“Many communities were finding it difficult to produce their local Energy Descent Action Plan (on which Transition is based),” he told me in a conversation we held on Skype, speaking from his home town of Kingston. “They knew about their local resources and skills, but needed help understanding the big scale things that were likely to affect them, such as climate change or UK food supply or national policy. How can we plan for our communities if we don’t know the context we are moving into? Without the bigger picture how can we know what we are grappling with?”
Three years ago most Transition initiatives were immersed in practical issues like alternative energy or awareness raising. The one change we had not anticipated was the way we would think and speak about the world:
“What ties everything together and makes meaning are our cultural stories. For the book I talked to hundreds of people and found that the dominant narratives of our future fell into three categories: business as usual (nothing really changes), doom of one kind of another (our time is up) and the myth of progress (we are the most advanced society ever known and our manifest destiny leads to some perfect Star Trek future).
“It’s easy to see why people are most drawn to this last story, Technotopia. The problem is the reality doesn’t bear it out. This Most Advanced Culture Ever has higher levels of depression and inequality than ever and is destroying the ecological systems that support everything that is alive on the planet, so it’s hard to justify the idea we are moving towards a better future.
“So we thought what we needed was another positive narrative about the future which is just as embedded as the other stories in our everyday culture, but one that reflects scientific evidence and the reality of what is happening in our world. A Transition vision. That’s what the book is about.”
Much of Shaun’s own story is set within this fourth narrative. As well as co-founding Transition Town Kingston (TTK), he has contributed chapters to several books, served as an advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, co-authored the latest report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas, and helped both edit Mark Boyle’s upcoming The Moneyless Manifesto and bring David Fleming’s encyclopedic Lean Logic into print.
Fleming also invented a system known as Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), a rationing scheme that works to ensure energy for all in times of scarcity. Subtle and clever in its design, Shaun explained, but easy to use (much like an Oyster card).
“It would guarantee that we meet our emission reductions and most importantly support the active co-operation of all the energy users in a society in rapidly reducing their reliance on fossil fuels. David once said: large scale problems like climate change and peak oil do not require large scale solutions; they require small scale solutions within a large scale framework. Emissions ultimately come from people’s lifestyles, so you could have a perfect global agreement, but if no one actually acted on the local level, nothing would happen. What you need is a framework that stimulates and supports that local action in a fair way. TEQs provides that framework and sense of common purpose.”
I’m aware the conversation has shifted radically since I first met Shaun when he was the key speaker at an event organised by our local Transition group in Suffolk. We are now talking far more about the collective picture: the economic system, activist movements that work alongside Transition, like Occupy, and land rights co-operatives. But most of all about how this shift brings us all together as people:
“Robert Newman, the comic, once told me that the worst possible thing is feeling alone with the apocalypse. It causes you to doubt your sanity and slip into a doom mindset. As soon as you start actually doing something and facing reality, you realise you are not alone and there are people working world-wide for a better future.
“Transition doesn’t work in isolation. It’s part of an enormous movement that Paul Hawken once described as the earth’s immune system rising up to protect itself. What Transition does uniquely well within that is its outreach role, the way it can share that fourth, hopeful, narrative. It meets people where they are at and exposes them to ideas that maybe they haven’t come across before.
“One thing we need to challenge is the idealisation of financial independence in our culture. You are never truly independent, because your food and your services are still produced by someone, it’s just someone you don’t meet or care about. The Green Movement has its own version of this idealised independence, called self-sufficiency.
“What makes us happy though is interdependence, and the loneliness that pervades modern culture is in great part because people are ‘financially independent’. If they fall out with someone they can just pay someone else instead. It’s why community building often fails: we think if we go along every Tuesday at 7pm and do community it will create one. It doesn’t work like that.”
So our conversation centred on what interdependence might look like, what TTK has achieved in the last 5 years, but mostly about the future. “What is the ultimate time line?” I asked him. Shaun laughed. “I guess there a difference between what I see is the most likely scenario and the one I’m working for.
“As Hawken said, ‘If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.’
“I think that sums it up: scientifically speaking, it’s not pretty, but if you look at the response of that ‘immune system’ it is deeply inspiring. Spiritually speaking, I believe I chose on some level to come into history at this particular juncture, to be what I believe in, to try and make things better, and be the most loving, hopeful and inspiring I can be and ultimately none of the stuff that is going on in the world stops me doing that, so in that way it’s a wonderful time to be alive.”
That’s dark optimism for you.
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Charlotte Du Cann is the Editor of Transition Free Press. A writer and community activist, involved with both Sustainable Bungay and Transition Norwich, she has also been the driving force behind the Transition Social Reporters Project.