Changing the dream
Looking ahead is a strange thing to do. We simply can’t know what is to come. Who would have foreseen everything that happened in 2011 this time last year? So many people started to stand up for what we wanted. Transition Town Lewes’s Ovesco pulled off Britain’s first solar power station. So who can imagine the details of 2012, the year to come?
When we started Transition in Lewes it was as though we were part of a small, isolated club of futurists, often in a weird space as global, corporate, business as usual was the dominant paradigm. Our transition started with lots of drum banging and excitement, as though to wake people up to the tipping points of no return ahead.
In April it’ll be five years since our Official Unleashing at Lewes Town Hall. I interviewed Rob on video that day; he spoke so personally about his reasons for initiating the transition movement (which at the time was a few towns). Lots has happened since then. The tipping points remain and we’ve gone over the cusp both physically and psychologically. Though we don’t know the details, we do broadly know we're heading for local and the media is catching up at last.
At our monthly steering group meeting recently we talked about our plans for the year ahead. We’re showing films and improving our website. And we’re planning our five year celebration. Ovesco has just got two grants to grow more. But that kind of planning is, to me, all a bit – Yawn. As one of the catalysts in the group I enjoy spotting opportunities and galvanising energy around them, and dreaming the dreams.
2012… what would be my dream? My fiery dream would be that the allotments working group on the Town Council would find land to double the allotments. A group of young people in Lewes gets motivated to share freegan meals, bread ovens, music and local occupation – they would get so much support. And that we wake up to the potential for local enterprise and micro-enterprise. Maybe this will be the year the Penny Drops, when people start to desert our town's supermarkets en masse and put their hearts into the local food system, when all the chain shops go deadly quiet and the locally owned cafes and shops are heaving. My personal ultimate dream is for a mass awakening this year (though this decade would do).
Photo: Tom Paine on the Lewes Pound note: 'We have it in our power to build the world anew' credit Viva Lewes
Your dream
18 January 2012 - 3:21pm — Caroline JacksonCongratulations on getting this blog up so speedily!
I love the dream of the young people getting together to share meals and music - so simple but yet so powerful if you can get it off the ground. Maybe that is something we have to learn, to dream first of people sitting down together in a new relationship and to see what power comes from that simple act.
Certainly more fun than all those bids and plans, necessary as they are.
daring to dream
18 January 2012 - 5:42pm — Adrienne CampbellThanks Caroline, lovely to see you yesterday. Mark was right, and I was up half the night trying to write something sensical for this morning. The dream of the young people actually came from Owen, a young man who lives in Lewes and who's passionate about transition (he's a brilliant breadmaker). He was in Australia last year and one of the Transition groups there was slow and struggling. Owen said he and a couple of other young people just started making meals from skipped food and showing films and before long the group had grown to several dozen. I was inspired by this story and want to invite him to do similar stuff here . He's fired up about young people getting liveilihoods off the ground locally.