We live on planet bliss

I have a keen sense of smell. As I walked through Lewes last night I smelled at least five wood fires. I have a woodburning stove, installed by Home Heat last month and partly funded by a grant from Lewes District Council. It’s a British stove, a Dovre, and it’s specified for smokeless zones. It gives off a glowing sort of heat that gently seeps up the house. I have a woodland near Laughton where I go once a week in the community car. Sometimes I stay the night in a bender. I love the woodland, wholeheartedly; I keep bees there. And there are rare colonies of Pearl Bordered Fritillary butterflies so I’m helping support them and the other insects by gently clearing a heathy glade in the young oaks. A forester called Harvey Malthouse is coppicing the overstood chestnut this week with a grant from the Forestry Commission and I plan to form a group of people in Lewes with woodburning stoves to log together the coppiced wood. I have a life of beauty. Dirk and I started to realise a while ago that we humans are co-creating our lives, with the help of the Great Life Force, in a miraculous way we cannot really understand. And that life, especially nature, reflects it all back. My friends Alinah and Leo have this on their fridge: ‘Who you are in the present is given by the future you are living into.’ I am living into a future when we have all realised that we are living on planet bliss.

Soil Association on message

I’ve just returned from the Soil Association Annual Conference, to which I was invited to speak about Transition Town Lewes. (I also showed Keith’s short film of Lewes people and our oil dependence). The conference was called ‘Preparing for a post-peak oil food and farming future’, and it was an urgent call to action to farmers nationally to look at a very different reality. It brought home just how dependent we are on farmers for our survival. Growing your own is a skilled job - believe me, I’ve tried it.

Our current culture has made us massively de-skilled and vulnerable, in the face of great uncertainties. We’re also dependent on transport and supermarkets. Remember the lorry strikes of 2000: the supermarket shelves started to empty after two days and within a week, local food supply would have dried up completely. Our leaders are talking, theoretically at least, about a 70% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and unless we segue to nuclear, this means a crash diet from oil use. What on earth will that entail? It’s encouraging that a major body such as the Soil Association is starting to look this issue in the eye. If we are to eat in the coming decades, and in order to stop the planet burning, we will need a massive shift in habits. One speaker said up to 20% of the population will take up farming. There was a strange sense of optimism at the end of the conference. Are we ready to let go of our addictions? There’s everything to lose. Listen to keynote conference speaker Vadana Shiva

Vision or business as usual?

According to Einstein, intuition is the most important thing. Sometimes you just know. Like Virgin airline boss Richard Branson offering a $25 million prize for the first scientist to come up with a technology that removes carbon from the air. That’s just wrong. Intuitively, morally - are they the same? Like our District Council’s planning department last Friday putting Angel Properties together with 19 stakeholders who without exception are people the developer has consulted, and calling it a Visioning for the North Street area. That’s just wrong, isn’t it?

Apart from anything else I’m disappointed with our elected officers for hijacking the precious V word. I could lobby, protest and write things like this, but I don’t want to. Having paddled in the waters of spin, greed and denial the last few weeks, I’ve decided that this is not my bag. It’s there; it runs the show. For now. But what I’m most interested in is the twin sister. Hope, truth, honesty. Intuition. Vision.

Real vision is what I experienced at the first event of Transition Town Lewes last Sunday. End of Suburbia was documentary film about a post-peak oil future that was both shocking and strangely encouraging. Afterwards, the 81 people who attended stuck up post-it notes: ‘One step I can take’, ‘One step Lewes can take’, ‘One step government can take’. The intentions, collated and emailed back to the filmgoers and now on the Transition Town Wiki page, are beautiful, juicy with personal vision and hope. That’s the reality I choose.