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Editorial: Eventually the media's current narrative for society will become obsolete. For 20 years now, Positive News has been building a new one

Through sustainable farming, business, innovation and making the most of its as yet largely untapped natural resources, Iceland has the potential to become a completely sustainable nation from which others can learn. Lucy Purdy reports from Reykjavík

Iceland was the epicentre of the 2008 financial crisis that rocked the world. Five years on, after letting its banks fail, things are looking different. Ben Whitford investigates

Iceland produces more energy than it can use, but thanks to advances in technology, the UK could soon be on hand to help out

A groundbreaking social project is using the art of capoeira to coax shell-shocked and vulnerable children out from behind their painful memories and towards empowerment and hope

China could set an upper limit for its carbon emissions for the first time, with plans drawn up for the cap to be in place from 2016

A crowdfunding campaign in the US is attempting to raise $660m to buy The Tribune Company, which owns publications including the LA Times, in order to prevent it from being taken over by media conglomerates

Nine in ten people accept that Britain is now a multicultural country and 70% are in favour of multiculturalism, according to a recent poll.

By Rob Hopkins, posted Jun 12, 2013:

 

If there was one picture that captured the times we are living through it is this.  It appeared on the BBC website recently with the following caption: Kevin McGuire walks his dog past a vacant shop in Belcoo, Northern Ireland.  The empty shop is one of a number that have had graphics placed on the windows to make them look like working shops ahead of the G8 summit which takes place nearby later this month.   Let’s take that a bit more slowly.  Here is a shop, one of many that has gone out of business due, among other things, to the growth-fixated policies of the G8, situated in a place G8 ministers will be driven pasten route to their summit.  Rather than their being able to see how things are actually unfolding in the real world, the division and misery being caused by their approach to the economy, the windows have been plastered with stickers that present it as a fully-stocked, thriving shop.  As singer/comic Mitch Benn put it on BBC Radio 4′s The Now Show on Friday,  ”the last thing you’d want would be for a bunch of people meeting to fix the economy to see how bad the economy’s got”.  The BBC reported the story, giving a bit more information about it: County Fermanagh’s district council sanctioned the fake retail units as part of a £1m makeover before it hosts the G8 summit. The event takes place on 17 and 18 June at the Lough Erne golf resort near Enniskillen.  The chief executive of Fermanagh District Council has defended the optical illusion.   “It was aimed at undeveloped sites at the entrance to the town and then right throughout the county in terms of the other towns and villages, looking at those vacant properties and really just trying to make them look better and more aesthetically pleasing,” says Brendan Hegarty Here’s the thing that fascinated me most though.  It’s the kind of shop they chose to portray it as.  They didn’t print up large stickers that would present the shop as being a Tesco Metro, a Sainsbury’s Local, an Aldi perhaps, or even branch of one of the banks that contributed significantly to our getting into this mess in the first place.  They didn’t make one huge sticker, one false façade, that showed a new shopping precinct, glittering with all the usual chain stores that dominate every such precinct.  Or a Travelodge perhaps.  Rather they set out deliberately and in considerable detail to portray the kind of vibrant, local, independent business that has either become extinct, or which survives in spite of, rather than because of, the policies of the G8.  Here’s another one… The windows are hung with delicious-looking hams, the display features meats and a whole range of delicious local produce, beautifully arranged.  Although the cut-and-paste nature of the graphic design rather gives the game away (the same arrangements of hams appear two or three times), what they are trying to portray here is that most endangered of species, the local, independent butcher.   In the mid-1990s there were 22,000 butchers in the UK, by 2010 there were just 6,553.  The independent butcher is making something of a spirited fightback though, although certainly not aided, in any sense, by the G8.  The butcher that would have occupied that shop no longer exists, most likely because a supermarket opened nearby and completely shifted the balance of the Belcoo economy (any readers from Belcoo who might like to write in and tell us what led to this shop’s demise would be most welcome).   The other day I spoke to Nick Sherwood of REconomy Herefordshire, who has co-ordinated theHerefordshire Economic Evaluation (the second such piece of work, the Totnes one already being published, and Brixton’s coming soon).  Our conversation will be published here soon, but one of the things that really struck me was the following: We estimate that the top five major supermarkets in Herefordshire account for between 71% – 83% of all household expenditure on ‘brought home’ food and drink, or up to £180m annually. In addition, around £30m per year is spent in the smaller ‘chain’ supermarkets. Their conclusion is that the true ‘local spend’ figure, i.e through local, independent businesses in Herefordshire, could be around 16% of the total.  In terms of a national version of that figure, the best I can find is the figure from the Portas Review that states that 8,000 supermarkets now account for over 97% of all UK grocery sales.  Although clearly other smaller supermarkets account for some of the remaining sales, let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that nationally, 3% of what we spend on groceries goes out through local and independent businesses.   I would imagine that everyone seeks an economy that is able to provide jobs, economic activity, stronger and happier communities and community resilience, while also skilfully reducing its carbon emissions on the scale required.  The question of our times though, as far as I’m concerned, is whether that is best achieved by expanding the 97% of our economy currently dominated by huge supermarkets, the kinds of enterprise that the UK government and the G8 see as leading the push for growth, or protecting and enhancing the 3%?   It’s a vital question, because at the moment the push to eradicate the 3% altogether, or at least squeeze it a lot harder, continues apace.  Yet that 3% is better suited to meeting those core needs of ours.  As the recent report by Localise West Midlands on ‘community economic development’ states: Our research has found strong evidence that local economies with higher levels of SMEs and local ownership perform better in terms of employment growth (especially disadvantaged and peripheral areas), the local multiplier effect, social and economic inclusion, income redistribution, health, civic engagement and well-being than places heavily reliant on inward investment where there are fewer, larger, remotely owned employers. A study focusing on New Orleans compared 179,000 square feet of retail space that is home to 100 independent businesses to the same-sized space that is home to a single supermarket. The former generated $105 million in sales with $34 million staying in the local economy, while the latter generated $50 million in sales with just $8 million staying locally, and necessitated 300,000 square feet of parking space (see graphic below). Santander’s ‘Market of Hope’ which I wrote about here last year is a great example of how a city can be fed by looking at large retail spaces in such a way that they boost and support the local independent economy rather than undermine it. When Sir Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, was asked whether there was any alternative to supermarkets, replied: “… queueing at one store than trudging down Watford High Street in the rain to another shop … is this what people actually want to go back to?” But no, it’s not about “going back”, rather about going forward in a way that meets our needs rather than those of the City of London.  What we now know is that even G8 ministers would rather pass through High Streets populated with small, independent butchers, bakers, grocers, would rather see shop windows overflowing with delicious food,  trusting that the relationship they have built up with the shopkeeper over many years will mean that he/she stocks the best produce they can find.  It feels right.  It’s human scale.  It makes sense.  It’s an economy that is ours, it belongs to local people, to the local economy.  Even G8 ministers would now appear to prefer a shopping experience that actually involves interacting with other human beings rather than wandering anonymously around a superstore and then cashing yourself out at the end.   The core argument of The Power of Just Doing Stuff, published on Friday, is that if we really want to achieve our goals of jobs, economic activity, stronger and happier communities and community resilience, while also skilfully reducing our carbon emissions on the scale required, we’d be better off focusing on growing the 3% rather than the 97%.  It’s a pretty simple idea, and, to me at least, a blindingly obvious one, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.   However, the experience is that this fightback has already begun.  The explosion of new bakeries, pop-up shops, community renewable energy projects, craft breweries, independent record shops, complementary currencies and communities acquiring their own assets is already happening around us, but it needs us to get behind it, to put our shoulders, our spending power, our sheer bloody will, to making it 10%, 30% 70%.  If we want a stable climate, reduced energy vulnerability, economic stability, and a healthy human culture, we really have no choice.  As Maria van der Hoeven of the IEA said recently at the launch of a World Energy Outlook Special Report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map, ”the path we are currently on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 °C and 5.3 °C”.   Fortunately, it’s a push that is life-enhancing, thrill-generating and in which we discover a resourcefulness, a kindness and a passion in ourselves that we may have forgotten was there.  I’ll leave you with a quote from the book, from Helen Cunningham of DE4 Food, a social enterprise food hub in Derbyshire that grew out of Transition Matlock.  The project grew from helping a local farmer with lambing and has grown into an innovative new business: “Never in my life did I imagine that I’d be able to bring lambs into the world! It wasn’t a skill I ever expected to have. It was such a different thing from what we were doing in the rest of our lives, and I think from then we’ve all thought “OK, we can learn these new skills, we can learn how to lamb, we can learn how to grow vegetables and learn how to do Excel Profit and Loss sheets and whatever.” I think we all just really wanted to change the way we live, and change our own personal lives and to change things and live different lives ourselves as well as a different life in our community”. You can pre-order your copy of The Power of Just Doing Stuff here.     Originally published at Transition Culture.

A new online exhibition aims to share and amplify the voices, stories and art of Muslim women around the world

The European Environment Agency says the UK is on track to hit important recycling directives by 2017

Kristina Georgiou signs up for sunshine and good times as a citizen of the ‘festival micronation’

New technology, which involves patients simply spitting into a cup, could vastly reduce waiting times for TB diagnosis

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations we're conducting a reader survey to get your views on how we should develop Positive News over the next 20 years!

By Sandra Postel, posted Jun 7, 2013:

Numerous species of fish and other life forms face extinction due to human actions in this planetary time scientists propose to call the Anthropocene. Missions Media/National Geographic

In late May, 500 scientists from around the world gathered in Bonn, Germany, to converse about the global dimensions of water in the so-called Anthropocene – the proposed name for a new geologic epoch in which humans are a dominant driver of planetary systems and processes.   Without question, the scholarly evidence for massive human disruption of climate, water and other global systems is robust and growing.   Our changing of Earth’s climate has diminished snow cover and sea ice, intensified the water cycle, and altered patterns of rainfall and river flow.  Human actions have acidified the oceans, altered the nitrogen cycle, drained half the world’s wetlands, trapped behind dams 100 billion tons of sediment that would otherwise replenish coastlines, and diverted major rivers to the point where they no longer reach the sea.   Perhaps most importantly, biological extinction rates are now 100-1000 times background levels – due largely to habitat destruction, pollution and other human activities.   In convening a meeting in 2011 to discuss the merits of designating a new epoch called the Anthropocene – anthropo, for “man,” and cene, for “new” – the Geological Society of London, noted: “In the blink of a geological eye, through our need for energy, food, water, minerals, for space in which to live and play, we have wrought changes to Earth’s environment and life that are as significant as any known in the geological record.”   That we humans are now a force of geologic proportions is indisputable.  That we have entered a new age on earth of our own making seems certain.  But apart from the difficulty, at this moment, of deciding in a scientifically sound way when that age began, does it make sense to name it after us?   Leaving the science aside for a moment, what are the philosophical, psychological and technological implications and consequences of such a human-centered designation of planetary time?   During the last 10,000-years, when human societies developed agriculture, writing, cities, telecommunications and long-distance travel, the Earth’s climate has been remarkably stable and warm – a long summer, as some have called it.  For sure, it was punctuated by epic droughts and cool periods, but by and large this epoch, called the Holocene, has proved highly conducive to the growth and flourishing of human civilization.   Many scientists that favor designating a new epoch and calling it the Anthropocene are clear that the human-created disruptions of planetary systems that are its hallmark  pose enormous risks to human civilization.   In an excellent TEDx talk on the subject, Will Steffen, of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute, reminds us that there’s “no guarantee civilization lasts forever.”   “The Romans aren’t around, nor are the Mayans,” Steffen said, “and we might not be either unless we start thinking globally as well as locally.”.   Steffen and others propose the demarcation of “planetary boundaries” for such processes and cycles as carbon, water, nitrogen, and biodiversity loss in order to frame the “safe operating space” within which civilization can thrive.   While a laudable and theoretically useful endeavor, to date the human enterprise has ignored warnings about the dire consequences of ecological disruption (the dangers of ozone-depleting substances being a notable exception) and gone merrily on its way to initiate more of it.   Indeed, we have already overshot at least three of the proposed nine planetary boundaries.   There is power in a name.  The term Anthropocene seems likely to expand our hubris rather than inspire the humility we need to pull ourselves back from the brink of planetary transgressions that could well be our undoing.   The very notion of the Anthropocene encourages the risky belief that if we humans are now the dominant force of nature – the god species – then nature can’t hurt us.   We’re in the driver’s seat, and we hold the keys to power.   But unfortunately, while we’ve revved up the planet’s engines and shot some metrics off the charts, we have no GPS system to guide us through the unfamiliar terrain of this journey.   We may be in the driver’s seat, but we have no idea where we’re going.   The water scientists recently gathered in Bonn, for example, issued a stark warning about the dangers of billions of people “living under the handicap of severe pressure on fresh water.” But their recommendations – mostly for more interdisciplinary research, study and training of young scientists, along with consideration of more ecosystem-friendly solutions to water problems – fell frightfully short of what’s needed.   Perhaps most importantly, the Anthropocene perpetuates the dichotomy between we humans and the web of life that sustains us.  As I write, the planet’s armies of microorganisms are no doubt gearing up for the massive planetary shifts ahead.  They will surely influence us as much as we influence them.   It’s worth remembering that perhaps the greatest pollution incident in Earth history was brought about some 2.4 billion years ago by tiny aquatic organisms called cyanobacteria.  Through the chemical reactions of photosynthesis, they released massive quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere, driving then-abundant anaerobic organisms toward extinction and completely altering the conditions for life on Earth.   Were it not for the cyanobacteria, which have existed for at least 3.5 billion years and co-exist with us today, we would not be here.   Without question, humanity is now an agent of change of geologic proportions.  But we would be wise to broaden the conversation about what to call the new phase we have unleashed, lest we initiate solutions with as much hubris and disregard for the interconnectedness of life as characterized the actions that got us into this mess.   Originally published at National Geographic

Taking a look back at how it all began and discovering their ambitions for the future, Lucy Purdy talks to the people behind the newspaper that’s redefining the news altogether

"Rob Hopkins has done more to change the way that we live in the past 10 years than any one else in Britain. because he has given people the tools create change for themselves. It is beautifully simple and incredibly powerful."

Monty Don, gardener, writer and broadcaster

It's been a while in the gestating, but Rob Hopkins' new book The Power of Just Doing Stuff: how local action can change the world is here. Rather than being about how to do Transition, it focuses on why doing Transition is thrilling and the sense of power and possibility it can bring about. Illustrated with stories from around the world, it really captures how international Transition has become, the impact it is starting to have, and how, in the current economic malaise, it represents a bold new idea for our economic future. So here is everything you need to know about what's happening over the next couple of weeks to accompany its arrival:

read more

"Rob Hopkins has done more to change the way that we live in the past 10 years than any one else in Britain. because he has given people the tools create change for themselves. It is beautifully simple and incredibly powerful."

Monty Don, gardener, writer and broadcaster

It's been a while in the gestating, but Rob Hopkins' new book The Power of Just Doing Stuff: how local action can change the world is here. Rather than being about how to do Transition, it focuses on why doing Transition is thrilling and the sense of power and possibility it can bring about. Illustrated with stories from around the world, it really captures how international Transition has become, the impact it is starting to have, and how, in the current economic malaise, it represents a bold new idea for our economic future. So here is everything you need to know about what's happening over the next couple of weeks to accompany its arrival:

read more

"Rob Hopkins has done more to change the way that we live in the past 10 years than any one else in Britain. because he has given people the tools create change for themselves. It is beautifully simple and incredibly powerful."

Monty Don, gardener, writer and broadcaster

It's been a while in the gestating, but Rob Hopkins' new book The Power of Just Doing Stuff: how local action can change the world is here. Rather than being about how to do Transition, it focuses on why doing Transition is thrilling and the sense of power and possibility it can bring about. Illustrated with stories from around the world, it really captures how international Transition has become, the impact it is starting to have, and how, in the current economic malaise, it represents a bold new idea for our economic future. So here is everything you need to know about what's happening over the next couple of weeks to accompany its arrival:

read more

"Rob Hopkins has done more to change the way that we live in the past 10 years than any one else in Britain. because he has given people the tools create change for themselves. It is beautifully simple and incredibly powerful."

Monty Don, gardener, writer and broadcaster

It's been a while in the gestating, but Rob Hopkins' new book The Power of Just Doing Stuff: how local action can change the world is here. Rather than being about how to do Transition, it focuses on why doing Transition is thrilling and the sense of power and possibility it can bring about. Illustrated with stories from around the world, it really captures how international Transition has become, the impact it is starting to have, and how, in the current economic malaise, it represents a bold new idea for our economic future. So here is everything you need to know about what's happening over the next couple of weeks to accompany its arrival:

read more