Of meetings, sustainability, and awkward questions

Okay, so. It's odd, but since I've had more time to write I actually seem to be doing less of it than previously - instead I find myself trying to undo the evils wrought by five years of not having time to finish anything, ever. I'm answering e-mails, filing paperwork, posting seeds to people, and generally Catching Up. This can by definition only be a temporary state of affairs, unless I move seamlessly onto Taking Too Much On again, which is always a possibility. Last night was a case in point.

Last night was, in fact, a fairly large county-wide meeting concerning a new piece of UK legislation, the Sustainable Communities Act. This has two prongs; the first is that it forces Whitehall (the seat of our hideously powerful, permanent and unelected Civil Service) to publish details of what exactly it spends our money on, broken down into areas. This starts in April, and it's going to be one of those things that would be funny if only it wasn't so damned serious.

The second prong is that Citizens' Panels get to look at this information, and propose changes to the particularly nutty pieces of the fruit cake. That's not new of course; the new bit is that the local authorities have to reach agreement with the panels about these proposals, and then central government has to reach agreement with the local authorities. Government can get off the hook using various arguments, but the more local authorities are pressing them on a particular issue the more embarrassing and damaging this will be. There's the theory, as I understand it. It could be tremendously useful for the Transition movement, but as Whitehall will drag its feet over things and anyway there's no extra money to fund any of this, it's likely to be something of a slow-burning fuse.

The reason I mention all this is that, owing to my not stepping back smartly enough when volunteers were called for, I ended up being the token local celebrity at the event and had to make a short speech (The Transition Economy at the Level of a Radish). I'm not used to public speaking but I did OK, and the diarrhoea has nearly stopped now so thanks for asking. What I hadn't been warned about was that I'd actually be nailed to a podium with the head of the County Council, a local MP, and the head of Local Works who helped to draft the Act. In other words, three chaps who understood what was going on a hell of a lot better than I did. And then people asked us questions for an hour. The next time anyone uses the word panel I will know exactly what it means.

Things went swimmingly for a while as I simply kept my mouth shut, but inevitably questions started to come up that none of the others fancied, so guess who got them? Bingo. Then came a doozie.

"What is the panel's idea of Utopia?"

A microphone appeared in my hand and I gazed at it stupidly for a moment. "Er..."

Of course, now I realise that I should have just turned the question back on itself. What my idea of Utopia was didn't matter a damn - it was the questioner's idea of Utopia that was relevant to the question. I should have just asked him what it was, and then the question would have been useful. But I didn't think of that at the time - my mind was a blur featuring hammocks, organic fields as far as the eye could see, eternal summer and Scottish fudge. Hey, he asked.

My mouth opened, and then I closed it again. It had been about to say "I strongly suspect that what's coming will be no-one's vision of Utopia", but my mouth has a very long history of saying things that I haven't told it to, and this simply wasn't the time or place to bring people down. Instead I opined that we couldn't just try to turn the clocks back to 1930 but we were going to have to bring parts of that era back, and mentioned working horses as an example. Some of the audience looked baffled.

But I think this may be true. In Cuba's 'special period', where they had to reduce their fuel usage in a big hurry because the Soviet Union was no longer exporting to them, they found that tractors quickly became too unreliable for many uses. The problem wasn't fuelling them - you can reserve fuel for that - it was that when they suffered a minor breakdown you had to wait a hell of a long time for parts to be found and shipped to where they were needed. You can't reserve fuel for that sort of contingency, you see, and you can't have a time-critical crop like wheat depending on a machine that only works when it feels like it.

This is only one example, and it may take a long time for it to happen, but the reaction of the audience told me that there's still a lot of work for the Transition Network to do. The people in that hall were there to discuss an Act which has come into being because our way of life is unsustainable, but a few of them didn't really seem to grasp that unsustainable actually means 'not possible to continue' or 'doomed in its present form'.

Interesting times, indeed.