Something good is happening (slowly): my 10:10 story so far

I wrote this post when on holiday a couple of weeks ago. Am just getting round to posting it thanks to the fantastic innovation of my new flexi-time half-day which I am dedicating to time-banking and Transition stuff. Best decision I’ve made in ages.

Nearly eight months ago Oliver and I travelled by train from London to Copenhagen. On the return journey, inspired by the conversations we had had and the people we had met, I made ten pledges for 10:10 which I posted on this blog. Since the spring I have been very quiet on this site. There are two main reasons for this. One is that I increasingly find that away from my job I derive more and more pleasure from activities that do not tie me to screen: working outside, making and repairing things, cycling, meeting and talking to people. The second is that when I am at my computer I tend to have a long list of other tasks to do, many arising from the pledges, and the blog rarely receives my attention.

But now I am on another train, this time cutting right across the south of France, and with five hours to kill and no access to Internet this seems like a good time to take stock.

We are en route from Agen to Marseille, from one half of Oliver’s family to the other. As I write we are just coming into Carcassone. The Atlantic clouds are starting to lift and we have just passed an impressive array of wind turbines spinning in the sunlight on the rocky horizon. It is a couple of years since I have spent any time in the south-west of France and in a number of respects there are some very positive signs. All along the roadsides adverts are starting to appear for solar-thermal water-heating (a no-brainer in this part of the world), wood-fired heating and improved insulation. Indeed the green economy seems to be putting down roots across the region: Port Sainte-Marie, the village closest to Oliver’s grandmother’s house, now sports a ‘bio-coop’ (a large organic food distribution warehouse), in the pharmacy adverts are appearing for lessons in vegan cookery and ‘mieux-être’ (not well-being but better-being), a small miracle in the home of foie-gras and confit de canard, and links are beginning to emerge between local produce and sustainable tourism, with marchés nocturnes drawing visitors and providing new outlets for local producers.

Only a few years ago big agri-business looked set to see off the small producers of the Garonne valley, much as the overuse of pesticides had silenced the birds. But according to more seasoned observers than me, over the last decade or so the birds have begun to return and this year for the first time our vegetables, including a number of traditional varieties, came direct from a thriving farm shop. There is still a long way to go. As in many rural areas the car is still king (although the concept of co-voiturage – car-sharing – appears to be becoming more mainstream), and a canoe trip we took down the valley of the river Célé in the neighbouring department of the Lot was the amongst the first permitted after the temporary closure of the river following a pollution ‘incident’ higher upstream; our canoe paddles left a trail of stiff yellowish bubbles in their wake and on a 15km stretch of clear water we spotted only one fish. In general, I suspect the driving force for the changes is as much a desire for greater economic independence and a more resilient local economy than any change in political outlook or environmental awareness. But some grounds for optimism, nevertheless.

So what of my pledges? What changes have I made in the last eight months?

1. Get involved with a local campaigning group

Tick. An occasional participant in Highbury Transition Town activities before this calendar year, since January I have become a regular, making contacts, sharing ideas and taking on responsibility for the skills-sharing aspect of the group. My energies in this respect have mostly been directed towards the setting up of a Time Bank for  Highbury but I am hopeful that come September it will be possible to put together a programme of skills-sharing events with a more obvious transition focus. For example I am keen to make sure that we do something for the 10:10 work day in October. More generally there is still a lot of work to do to really place the Time Bank on a sustainable footing, and in particular we need to work hard to set out a strategy and identify some funding. To this end I have for now changed my working hours to a compressed week (the same number of hours, spread over 4.5 days) and whilst there are some real challenges ahead, including on a personal note making sure I make the most effective use of this time, I think we’ve made a good start.

In addition, I am finding ways to take a role in the local community. If all goes to plan from September I will be taking on a new role as a local school governor and I recently attended the first meting on the council’s very interesting new ‘fairness commission’, to which I also submitted written evidence about the importance of placing sustainability at the heart of the fairness agenda.

Verdict: doing well, but a lot of work to do to make real change.

1. Get more involved with a national campaigning group

Tricky. National campaigning groups, like Friends of the Earth for example, have explicit political agendas and I’m still struggling to work out the boundaries my professional activity as a civil servant places on my engagement with such organisations. I continue to make donations, but have still not managed to get my act together to boost the value of my charitable contribution by, where possible, taking donations out of my salary pre-tax. The form has been sitting on my desk since January.

Of course, 10:10 itself could be considered a national campaigning group, and work itself has provided some opportunities to get involved here, through the my organisation’s ‘environmental champions network’ whose aims include supporting my organisation to meet its commitments. In this capacity I have acquired a reputation as the team nag, sending regular reminders about reducing waste and energy consumption and also led our participation in TfL’s June ‘Cycle Challenge’ (21 participants (not great), 5581 miles cycled (better), 1.45 tonnes of CO2 saved (according to TfL – good news!)).

Verdict: not doing badly, given the challenging circumstances, but could again make more of an impact.

1. Take at least one action to improve the sustainability of our block

Mixed. The triumph of the keys (reported here back in January) turned out to be hollow: the keys I was issued didn’t in fact open the door to the garden and, what’s more, it took me until June to figure this out, by which stage I was too embarrassed to go back to the Homes for Islington official I’d been haranguing to admit that I had only just got round to testing them. More encouragingly, changes are being proposed to the whole entry system, and hopefully new keys for the front door will mean a new system for the back too. Sustainability isn’t just about environmental sustainability but also about increasing social capital; I did also organise a give-and-take event, attracting about 50 people to come and swap unwanted items. So a partial success, but I’d still really like to get a small gardening group going and address the issue of lighting in the block (why does it sometimes seem to be on all day long on the outside corridors?).

Verdict: some progress, but again a long way to go.

1. Communicate and connect

Part of this was about writing the blog… More positively, I have got to know a lot of people this year with sustainability interests and that’s a tremendous asset and been very exciting. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’ve got any better at preaching to the unconverted. Sustainability is still often seen by some of my friends and acquaintance as one of my personality quirks: I don’t eat meat, I eat seasonally, I cycle and record my weekly energy consumption in the same way as other people collect jazz records, run marathons or enjoy cooking Chinese food. But mine are not just lifestyle choices, they are political decisions and behaviours which I am convinced need to be far more widely adopted if we are to prosper collectively in the future. It’s not enough for people to tolerate them sympathetically in me, especially in a context where confidence in/awareness of climate science is falling (MORI polling), and I’m by no means sure that trying to lead by example is enough.

Verdict: could do more to promote my sustainability interests and share the things I learn – and the aspects of my lifestyle I most enjoy – with a wider audience.

1. Get knowledgeable: read more and write about it

Again, I struggle to do this outside of work. This is partly laziness – it’s not necessarily a lack of time – and it’s perhaps also an ongoing reaction to the years of academic work. I’m keen to learn more through practice rather than theory. But on the other hand when I do get to the theory I am often motivated and inspired. This year I have read a couple of things from the New Economics Foundation (including The New Economics and The Great Transition), The Spirit Level and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. Not really very impressive. Of course, the great barrier to reading is the bicycle… A lot of Londoners do a lot of their reading on public transport. There is also of course the wealth of resources and thought-pieces out there on the Internet but I’m still not really keeping up with this as I’d like. I need to reorganise my web feeds, and select a few key blogs I want to keep up with. But this requires the kind of online housekeeping I’m not very good at prioritising.

Verdict: underwhelming.

1. Improve our water efficiency

This was the biggest concrete change we were able to identify to reduce our domestic energy consumption. And it’s done! Earlier this year we replaced our bathroom, using mostly appliances identified from B&Q’s One Planet range (certified by Bio-regional, the people behind Bed-Zed). So we have an aerating low-flow shower (which also doesn’t drip unlike its predecessor), a water-efficient toilet and a slightly unusual basin tap that clicks when you’re using more water than necessary. We freecycled the old appliances, where useable, and also retained the old bath, so that we didn’t unnecessarily send a huge chunk of metal to landfill. We did re-tile, since mould had conquered almost all the gaps between our predecessor’s hastily installed mosaic tiles, but we used tiles made of recycled materials for this (also from B&Q). There’s still no way to capture rainwater for the plants on the balcony (more thought required) but overall I think this counts as a success. And, hopefully, a success that will be passed on to our successors in the flat, since we’ve tried to do everything in a neutral style that no one is likely to want to rip out.

Verdict: pretty well there.

1. Measure my carbon footprint

I haven’t been able to use the app I originally had in mind – it still doesn’t seem to be up and running – but I have been regularly recording my energy consumption, since March. And it’s had an effect: both our gas and energy consumption have dropped by at least 10%, mainly as a consequence of constant monitoring and thoughtfulness. On the rare occasions where we fail to turn everything off we notice the different. On the other hand, we have also acquired a number of new appliances: I’ve got a shiny new mobile phone, I bought a digital projector (admittedly second-hand and reconditioned) and we’re toying with the idea of (whisper it) buying a dishwasher. This might actually reduce our water consumption (and certainly buy us more time) but it’s not likely to help our overall carbon emissions and I do question how it sits with the wider transition agenda. We’ll have to get one that’s built to last.

Verdict: done – more or less – but measuring isn’t the same as keeping it down.

1. Trial carbon rationing

We keep meaning to start this, and then not doing it. Perhaps it’s because the system’s a bit complicated, or perhaps it’s because we know we’re likely to fail. This trip to France, for example, would probably eat our travel rations for the best part of a year if not more, despite the fact that we haven’t flown. But it’s still worth an experimental go. I think for rationing to work for us for real we’d have to go for a gradually falling ceiling (the 10% year-on-year approach) rather than the sudden drop the ration book would entail.

Verdict: A voir.

1. Organise a sustainability social event

At the back of my mind when I first came up with this was some sort of swing-dancing event. But I’m not the world’s most natural party organiser, and anyway I think this box has been ticked by the give-and-take event and the Big Lunch in the garden of our flats. (Even if in the event it was a rather small lunch). Arguably also, although it’s not until next year, our wedding is an attempt to do this on a grander scale….

Verdict: Yup.

1. Grow more veg – especially herbs

All sorts of good intentions here, but I still struggle to make it work. We have the problem in our flat of no rainfall (the balcony is covered), so everything has to be watered. And things die on me: this year’s victims include our courgettes and all of our runner beans.  Even the radishes failed, despite the fact that these are supposed to be easy enough for a small child. The real problem is pest control; I’m not about to give up so I think next year we need to think more carefully about flowers as well as edibles, in order to attract a wider range of insects and develop a proper system of companion planting. Also, starting to grow my own veg has made me more aware of how much of the gardening industry based on disposability. It seems strange to me to throw away plants every year and lots of flowers seem to require this. I think, to be honest, I need a bit more help, but I’m also learning by experience. I’ve never really believed, incidentally, that with our 3 square metres of concrete we were likely to make much of an impact on our carbon footprint. But it’s more about being part of a culture change, and of encouraging everyone to see outside space as spaces for growing and nurturing useful plants, and not merely as purely decorative extensions to living rooms.

Verdict: room for improvement…

My measures of success are my own of course, and I have a habit of setting high standards for myself. I’m doing OK, I think, and importantly, enjoying the way my life is changing, as I get to know more people locally. I strongly believe that thriving local communities are the key to greater sustainability and also, however hackneyed a phrase it may be, in being the change you want to see in the world. I’d like my world to be composed of a bit less talk and a bit more action, better relations between local people, a bit more greenery, and better informed lifestyle and choices. I’ll see how I’m doing at the end of the year.