Personal transition

Thought it would be good to make some notes about the personal transition journey that Geoff and I've been on. Where we are and how we got here.

Where we are now

• Choosing seasonal produce over forced - locally produced if it's energy efficient, going without things if they are only available from a very long distance out of season - such as apples from NZ, SA etc during the British summer
  
• Getting our fruit and veg from a local organic farmer who comes to our 2-weekly farmers market and an organic veg box scheme
• Growing our own veg in our garden and allotment
• Re-using everything that's possible
  
• Composting food waste
  
• Buying local and, if possible organic, meat (and eating only a little meat)
• Buying grains and other 'staple' goods from a wholefoods cooperative which delivers to a fairly local shop
• Walking if possible
• Trying to move from a 2-car household to 1 car
• Car sharing where possible
• Having a water meter fitted (we're renting a friend's house)
• Reducing our water wastage
• Keeping down our electricity usage
• Buying second hand items from charity shops
• Buying/obtaining 'rubbish' from the local refuse centres
• Baking and cooking if we can avoid buying things
• Buying fairly traded goods

How did we get here

We've taken more than a year to get to this stage. I've been on this path for some years now, starting with footwear and clothing (sweatshops etc). The food side of things has taken me quite a long time to work up to.

It started with fast food (Hamburger Nation anyone?) and then meat - I was vegetarian for humanitarian reasons for 4 years or so and 'fell off the wagon' because I like meat.

I never felt particularly good about it and ate a mostly vegetarian diet anyway. However, I do like meat... and started choosing organic meat where I could. But it was SO expensive. Or so I thought at the time. This was when I was still shopping in the major big supermarkets. I wasn't really paying attention to where the meat was from either. Although I had been looking at where the supermarket veg I was buying came from and only buying European (or close to) produce for a while.

I'd been reading a few 'political' books and I'd had "Shopped" by Joanna Blythman on the shelf for a while. Then I read it and it was like a watershed.

My conscience would no longer permit shopping in the large supermarkets. We started using the farmer's market and gradually stopped buying from the supermarket, ordered the veg box and here we are.

I started reading wider and deeper in the areas of local, organic etc etc and that led me to read about permaculture and then I found a Permaculture magazine, I'd already discovered The Ecologist.

Permaculture mag had an article about the Transition Initiative and then a whole new area of reading (and doing) opened up....

Where are we going next

We don't really know, we feel we're still on a path to a lower energy lifestyle. We've done a lot of things and can see the need for some significant changes in the way everyone lives. However we can also see that what we're doing doesn't necessarily scale up... not to the scale that's required.

Next for us - Transition Towns

During the course of the campaign against the expansion we were talking about the Transition Towns Initiative.

To cut a number of long stories short we decided to start an initiative in Wolverton.

I'll post descriptions, discussions etc on this in later posts....

The campaing against the planned Tesco expansion

So we and some others in the town started Big Enough Already - the campaign to stop the expansion of Tesco in Wolverton.

Wolverton is an old Victorian town in the north west of Milton Keynes. It mainly consists of worker cottages built by the railway works (Wolverton was a major and prestigious railway building town). The houses are mainly terraces with narrow streets etc.

Tesco wants to expand their store in this town, making it more than twice as big. This will require demolishing the current store and building a new one on stilts. They have a store of the same format in the south east of Milton Keynes, Kingston, which is surrounded by dual carriageways (grid roads, for those of you who know Milton Keynes). The Kingston complex is large and always busy even though it is surrounded by grid roads.

We thought that the intention to build a similar sized store in a small market town with Victorian infrastructure was ridiculous.

We (the Big Enough Already team - 5 of us: me, my boyfriend Geoff a local business owner and 3 other residents) set to work on a campaign to get people to raise objections to the expansion. We designed, printed and delivered a leaflet detailing the planned store size and the impact we saw that it would have, on it we provided the contact details of the government officials to write to.

We attended the public consultation meetings and handed out these leaflets - we produced and delivered 2 leaflets, one before and at each public consultation meeting. A member of the group spoke at the meetings, putting forward our views and position on the proposed expansion.

This took place over the course of a few months and we then got to the position of Tesco submitting the traffic and retail impact assessment reports that their consultants had prepared.

The Council's consultants reviewed them and said - not enough info and sent them back.

That's where things got up to.

Localising our shopping

Even before I read the book I'd been questioning where my foodstuffs came from.

And once we started to question where one thing, e.g. our meat was coming from we were compelled to question where our veg was coming from - fish, other groceries etc?

What supply chain had these things been through, had someone been exploited in producing it?

We questioned everything we bought. Once we started thinking about it in this way it was impossible not to.

Did someone suffer to provide these goods to the supermarket? Did a regional or national farmer get squeezed or forced into a non-negotiable contract that works in the buyer's favour? Did a regional or national farmer get pushed out in favour of an international one that can provide goods cheaper?

The scale of the questioning grew and it was not possible to apply this line to one thing but not another.

So there it was, and there we were - in a supermarket and unable to justify buying anything in there.

We were very lucky to be living in a town where there's a farmer's market twice a month, less than 10 minutes walk away from our house. We started relying on that for our veg - and our meat. This meant that we drastically reduced our consumption of meat.

It was expensive - compared to what you could get in the supermarket. This was around the time of the £5 chicken in Tesco... you could get a packet of 10 chicken thighs for around £3.50.

We were looking at chickens that cost £8 and small joints of beef that cost £7 - £10 and a 200g (roughly) packet of stewing beef that cost £3 or more and beef burgers that were £1.80 for 2 instead of £1.80 for 4 etc etc

This was our 1st experience of seeing meat at its true cost.

We started to get a feeling then, that we needed to shop in local places before there were none left to shop in. Our exercise in not using the large supermarket down the road just showed us how difficult it already is to do that.

And then the large supermarket (Tesco) put in a planning application to expand its store.

Localisation

Last year Geoff and I started doing something different. Well a lot of things really. It sort of germinated in us for a while and then I read a book I'd had on the shelf for some time but wasn't ready for.

Shopped, by Joanna Blythman.

It spurred me into action.

We stopped using our local Tesco supermarket, we stopped using all large supermarkets. In fact, we stopped using a supermarket at all for a time.

This was no small task and not easy.

First we couldn't think where to go to get things from in the first place if we didn't go there. Thoughts like 'well, I know that the butcher would sell meat if we had one in the town, but who traditionally sells bun cases?' were common (we ate cake instead and didn't complain, at least we had the means to make cakes).

There were a lot of questions in this process and I'd like to write about them... but it's late so it'll have to wait until later...

A bit random

I've been toying with the idea of blogging about this stuff for some time. So I'm going to just start saying something and go a bit random.

Peak oil, localisation, climate change, dwindling energy supplies, the end of cheap energy, learning to grow food...

That's what I want to talk about.

Pushing cars in the cold

What an experience. Geoff's car was stuck at the garage 6 miles away. I towed it home today. It was a bit scary. My poor little car, I'm so proud of it.

My little 1993 Polo has a fuel leak, an oil leak, a loose exhaust (new) and over 130,000 miles on the clock. It cost me £380 and I've managed to get it through 2 MOTs!

Today I managed to tow Geoff's car , a 1998 Skoda Felicia diesel. The poor Skoda has a broken injector pump and either won't start or starts but won't go anywhere!

Towing it was fun and then we had to try and get it into the garage by pushing it. After emptying the garage and spending an hour pushing (and shunting with my car) we realised it just would not go (Like Lee Evans's hair styling sketch). The back alley is so narrow it just wasn't possible to manouevre it up the little ramp and round the corner...

This was all made the more enjoyable by the temperature being 2 degrees.

I'm going to bed.