Transition Tales in Totnes: Imagining A Positive Low-Energy Future

Transition Town Totnes, in the south of England, has also hitched story to imagination in an effort to change the course of their community’s future.  Seeking creative ways of coping with the twin specters of peak oil and climate change, they have hosted a series of storytelling workshops with adults and children both in schools and in the community.  At these workshops, participants are aided in imagining a future in which the challenges posed by peak oil and climate change are being successfully met.  Participants then write, tell or act out stories about specific people set in this future.

Rob Hopkins, in The Transition Handbook, describes the use of Transition Tales and provides examples of stories people have written such as a 2014 article about the success of a local hemp building materials business and a 2029 story about Victoria and David Beckham moving into their cob retirement house to pursue their hobby of growing heirloom vegetables.

Since The Transition Handbook was published, The Totnes Transition Tales project has expanded their work.  Now, they even have a channel on YouTube, where you can watch newscasts from Totnes in 2030 AD put together by Year 7 students from King Edward VI Community College.  (To give you a sense of what they’ve achieved, I’ve embedded one of their videos above.)

The Transition Tales re-storying process provides individuals and the community with a positive view of a low-energy future to work towards.  The process of creating stories also helps people to deal with the feelings they have in the present about the prospect of peak oil and climate change.

As Richard Heinberg says in the forward to the Transition Handbook, if it is to be successful the transtion movement needs to be “more like a party than a protest march.”  In Totnes, Transition Tales have been a key part of this party.

For further information and up-to-date news please check out the Transition Tales Project website.

Re-storying the Middle East: Starhawk’s Plea in Dark Times

dovesStarhawk blends spirituality, story and activism in a completely grounded way. I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop with her in Montreal during the lead up to the Quebec City Protests of 2001. I was impressed by her presence, her compassion, her insight and her commitment. I highly recommend taking one of her trainings if you have the opportunity.

I have read many of her books and the rest are on my “must read” list (which is admittedly a very long list.) The Twelve Wild Swans is particularly relevant to this website as it is structured around the fairytale of, you guessed it, the wild swans. Starhawk retells the story in an earth-centred women-empowering way and then provides twelve chapters of exercises to help groups and individuals re-story their selves and their actions in the world in relation to the tale. It is a book for people who want to deepen their spiritual connection to the earth, their knowledge of their selves, and their commitment to activism. It is a book that makes good use of story.

Besides books, Starhawk has many writings available for free on the web, you can begin by perusing her home page.  You can also subscribe to her list to receive her periodic essays. The latest one, sent out December 30th is a plea for an end to violence in Gaza. I am posting on it here because in it Starhawk calls attention to the power of national myths to shape the actions taken in the world. In order for healing to happen, she argues that a new story must be shaped and told about the nation of Israel, one that includes the Palestinian people.

Starhawk on Gaza, December 30th 2008

Re-storying Cities: the Glasgow 2020 Project

glasgow200

What can be learned by inviting citizens to re-story their cities?  This was a question posed by Demos, a British think tank for “everyday democracy.”  From my perspective, the most interesting finding to come out of the experiment was the utility of the re-storying process itself.  By engaging citizens in creative ways, a diversity of alternate futures to the official bland government and corporate sanctioned ones were developed and fleshed out.  It’s a project I’d love to see taken to other cities in the world.

In 2005, Demos published a book titled Scotland 2020 that took as its premise that stories can influence peoples’ thinking about the future.  The book contains 5 specially commissioned short stories that aim to inject hope into imagined futures for Scotland.

Whereas, Scotland 2020 features 5 “leading Scottish fiction writers”, Glasgow 2020 aimed to harness the imaginative power of everyday citizens.  The project ended in 2006 but the website, www.glasgow2020.co.uk, is still up and running offering tantalizing glimpses of the range of activities undertaken.  Demos have also published a book about the project, The Dreaming City, which can be downloaded for free from their website.

Glasgow 2020 aimed to “open up” the future of Glasgow by inviting all of its citizens, including those who had been forced to leave for economic reasons, to imagine what the city could be like in the year 2020.  The idea was to get away from the dominance of official speak and top-down future management and engage the masses in acts of imagination and hope.  To bring some democracy to futures literacy.

The Dreaming City includes some background to the project– including a brief overview of supporting literature from the area of storytelling in business and organizations–a collection of stories written by citizens, and a set of more policy-oriented outcomes from the project.  While all of this is quite inspiring, I was frustrated by the lack of detailed information on the hows of the project.  As someone interested in using the concept of re-storying places to aid social change, I was hoping to find detailed information on how Demos went about facilitating these acts of mass imagination.

From the book, the website and a short podcast, I was able to determine that Demos and their partners held a series of workshops with various groups in Glasgow and elsewhere.  They held a storywriting competition; some stories submitted to it are still available online, the winning stories are included in the book.  They collected wishes for Glasgow and ranked them through a voting process.  They held storytelling workshops with many different groups of Glaswegians, faciltitated chatter groups at local cafes, held arts community gatherings, and even relocated offices to a boat on the Clyde.  Some of these workshops aimed at developing characters that were then given to writers to bring to life, while others involved imagining a future, populating it and storying it.  The Northern Lites event was an example of the latter sort of workshop (it’s web write-up is one of the most detailed reports on events and is well worth looking over.)

Overall, a really exciting project with a lot of potential to re-story cities around the world.