Chewing the fat

Seemorerocks, Juanita and Pam 

– a freeranging discussion

On a rainy afternoon three of us got together for a cup of coffee and an exhange of ideas.  

We decided to switch the microphone on and see where the conversation would go.

We talked about our feelings about Transition Towns and how we have evolved, abrupt climate change and its denial, our inspirations and fears.

My two co-conversationalists are:

Juanita McKenzie who inspired and kept the local Transition Towns going over several years.  

Without Juanita I might not be sitting here today. 

Four years she asked me to right down some goals.

One was to get Michael Ruppert interviewed on Radio New Zealand.

The other was to start this blog.

The other is Pam Crisp, my partner and soulmate of 25 years, passionate conservationist and advoacate of environmental education.

Without her I certainly wouldn't be sitting here today doing what I am doing.

Thank you Pam and Juanita!

Reflections on the transition movement

I have recently re-established contact with "Kevthefarmer" (who is no longer a farmer because his farm was sold from under him. We both share the same disillusionment with the "transition movement".

Looking back at this article very little has changed.

On the surface we were wrong about imminent collapse and how Peak Oil would play out, but in fact very little has changed.

In fact in 2011 the first signs of positive feedbacks in the climate were being observed,so our attention was elsewhere. Now we have all the signs of runaway, catastrophic climate change while the world looks like going to war to distribute the last scraps of easily-available energy.

Now we are looking at 'transition' to a world of extreme weather and food scarcity, or we might have to adapt to near-term extinction

‘We May Have to Adapt Very Quickly': Reflections on Transition Towns and Collapse

Seemorerocks

12 July, 2011

In recent weeks and months I have had to re-evaluate things.

I have had to re-evaluate the way in which I live my life and how I use my energy; - what is most important for me.

I have also had to re-evaluate my ideas, which may be characterised as liberal and left-wing.

I have had to recognise that most of these ideas that I have cherished throughout my life have become rendered as redundant as capitalism.

The reason for this is that any idea, whether it is liberalism, capitalism or socialism is predicated upon infinite growth and the existance of an abundant source of raw materials and also credit to fund this growth.

What I am seeing instead is that this growth has well-and-truly reached its limits due to an increased population that cannot be sustained by resources that have, or soon are to peak.

What wealth that is produced cannot or is not distributed because of a moribund and corrupt political and economic system that may be called a ‘kleptocracy’W that caters to the interests of a tiny, super-rich elite.

Concepts like democracy have become perverted over recent years (since September 11, 2001, but also before that), and basics rights to determine what we eat, how we medicate ourselves and now our rights to barter seeds or food may well be threatened.

What this brings up for me during this period of collapse is that of cherishing the idea of bringing about positive change through the political system may be redundant.

This may have implied rebellion or revolution in the past. But no longer.

Now it is simply that the answers cannot be found in the political system and there is nothing that can be done about collapse - by getting rid of the Nats, voting Green or even Labour.

It becomes more a situation of what we can do with collapse.

Transition Towns

As someone who has always liked a central idea to organise my thoughts and actions around I have always found the Transition Towns movement frustrating.(at least where I am, which is New Zealand).

For a start it seems to be very middle-class and mostly populated by people that could be described as ‘leftie-liberal’.

For me, you cannot start with a vague concept of vision. First we need to recognise what is and then on that basis build up a plan of individual and community response.

There has to be a recognition that the political system, the media and the vast majority of society is in total and abject denial of what faces us - which is no less than the collapse of ‘business as usual’, of infinite growth - ultimately of society as we now know it.

People in Transition Towns are generally good at looking at alternative technologies, sustainable living, conflict resolution etc., just as people in the Green Party have excellent values of socal and ecological justice or reaching decisions by consensus.

Sometimes there seems to be a lack of robustness in thinking which is demonstated by a comment I heard recently - that very few people have in fact read the Transition Handbook.

Perhaps it is a reflection of my own lack of patience, but I also see few signs of a recognition that things are changing very quickly and we may have to adapt very quickly.

It is not just a matter of growing vegetables or riding an electric bicycle in a future oil crunch (perhaps with the emphasis on ‘future’), but actually making preparations on the level of the personal and your most immediate social group to survive changes which may manifest not as a shortage of petrol at the pump, but as the complete and rapid collapse of the financial system.

Mike Ruppert said recently he had been contemplating the question he is often asked - how long before it happens? What is ‘it’? he asked. It, he decided, was when the only thing you knew about what was happening is within a five-mile radius of where you live.

There seems to be an in idea in NZ that ‘it won’t happen here’. I think it can and I think it will. When and how we don’t know; but soon.

The ‘Lifeboat movement’ as a model?

Since becoming acquainted with the work of Michael Ruppert and Collapse Net I have quite liked the concept of a ‘lifeboat movement’

It comes ofcourse, from Ruppert’s analogy of the various reactions of passengers on the Titanic, so immediately carries the idea of a lifeboat as something that can carry those of similar intent to safety. Inherent in this is that society is in decline and headed for collapse so that people should come together to form the communities that are necessary to survive the transition to a post-carbon world.

Collapse Net has a lifeboat hub - maps which locate members (there are just below 5,000 in 63 countries); so that it is possible to contact lifeboat members in the same locality and to use the software to invite them to be friends (as in Facebook).

There is also a Lifeboat Directory - which is a directory of goods and services offered by members.

Through Transition Towns my partner and I have recently built up a small community of people within a reasonable radius that share a vision with us, and I am sure this will act as the basis for mutual support when times get harder.

However, this has taken some time and has depended on building up an informal network. There has been little in Transition Towns that has actually helped this process.

Perhaps there are some things to ponder and reflect on.

In the meantime I should get my own copy of the Transition Handbook.

….

TT, as a non-membership non-organisation is inevitably going to have a make-up (can't really call it structure, can we?) where the greatest number are the least committed and the most committed will be the smallest handful. That is the nature of any movement that comes into being on such a broad base. TT can only really act as a consciousness raising endeavour. Any attempt to actually push forward a practical agenda for survival at a pace that gives even the remotest possibility of success requires that all parties agree to obey a central command whether or not they agree with every decision made by the command. The command can be democratic or autocratic, actually it makes not much difference practically. For an example of democratic centralism I would give the Bolsheviks, for autocratic centralism I would give the Nazis. This is not the modern way, not the liberal way, not the Kiwi way, but it is the only way to effect rapid transformation.

I would hazard a guess that most of the most prepared have a small or zero presence on this site- these are the lifeboat builders. some will be gun-toting survivalists, others will be established farmers in remote areas planning to bring their extended families home when the crisis hits hard. A few will be "people just like us" only better organised. The Koanga lot over at Hawkes Bay would be in that category. They have had a presence on the TT website, but by their own admission they are not TTers. They believe its too little too late. I tend to agree.

A common thread is that they are more or less secretive. Their greatest fear is of their lifeboats being sunk by the burden of too many fellow travellers. Koanga actively sought out a site far away from a major city, ostensibly to discourage members from taking paid jobs rather than commit wholeheartedly to the project. I am sure they realised that it would also put them far away from a major source of would-be fellow travellers when the crisis comes.

Ironically, those who have tried to build lifeboats have struggled. I know of three groups personally, one started thirty years ago, one fifteen and the other five years ago. They all failed to find a crew for their lifeboat. People came and looked, told them what a great idea it was, but they decided they would rather be captain of their own lifeboat than first officer training for joint command of someone elses. Of course the vast majority of these didn't actually get to build a lifeboat of their own at all. The lot that started thirty years ago just sold their lifeboat because they were too old to sail it. To the very end they failed to find a crew.

Me? I think that if things get that bad it won't be the would-be fellow travellers that swamp the boats, it will be the government, or what's left of it, will torpedo the lifeboats to punish the lifeboaters for daring to think up such an audacious scheme, and to enable the common herd to each have a tiny piece of driftwood to clutch for comfort as they drown anyway. To that end, I refuse to keep my lifeboat a secret.

From “Richard”

Terms like “collapse” and “lifeboats” are negatives. As Rob Hopkins says in the Transition Handbook (and yes I have read it), we in the environmental movement have got the psychology around facilitating change soooo wrong over the last 30 years. Instead of scaring the shit out of people with pictures of how bad the world will be if we don’t act, we should be talking up just how we fantastic the world could be if we collectively created a more sustainable future. (Which by the way is what Rob was trying to do with TT). By viewing the future as a positive, it allows you to see the wealth of opportunities for community and the environment to take advantage of as global events unfold.

Positive vision also breeds enthusiasm, which breeds action, which breeds positive experience which breeds enthusiasm and so on. This is the energy social movements need to succeed and force change. The Berlin Wall did not fall because everyone was shit scared they would get shot. The Wall fell because people made a collective positivist stand against that exact form of negativity.

I do not deny that we face a challenging future which is why I was once quite active on this site but what we need is TRANSITION (hence the name Transition Towns) not simply lifeboats.

I am of the firm belief that our current post- modern globalised system is a lot more resilient than most commentators make it out. As Heinberg said in End of Suburbia, you will see a crunch, followed by recession, followed by a short upward trend, followed by another crunch, followed by another recession and so on. In other words a slow wind down, not collapse. Even, Kunstler before he turned into a complete ranting shock jock wrote a book called “The Long Emergency”, with the emphasis on ‘long”. It wasn’t called the “Immediate and Spontaneous Collapse of the World as We Know it.

So to the doomers and the lifeboaters out there I say this. Be careful what you wish for, because while you are earnestly waiting for Rome to burn, planning your exit strategy and setting up your lifejacket, you could have spent your time actually helping to create the world we should have.

From “Kevthefarmer”

Heinberg, Hopkins, Kunstler et.al. were writing before the events of 2008 demonstrated that the fragility of the global economy (debt bubble) will be the leading factor in impending events rather than environmental and resource depletion issues. To consider their writing to be permanent works like the Ten Commandments is to do a disservice to the authors themselves. Even the Transition Towns movement itself is not some church with an established Creed and Litany. Transition from what? The start point is now, and where we are now depends on our personal circumstances and changes on an almost daily basis in a manner that is almost completely outside our control. To what? Some want socialist utopia, others prefer libertarian freedoms, some might see a clan or tribal system as a desired outcome.

Do you even realise that today the US is only two weeks away from sovereign debt default without a Plan B? You have no idea of the global shockwave that will produce. If they manage to cobble together a rescue plan how long do you think it will work until they need a Plan C? QE1 cost the US taxpayer 70 billion dollars and has staved off collapse for two years. Yes- I said collapse, not crisis. Crisis is what they (which means "we" effectively in a globalised world) have already.

The reason Kunstler turned into a "ranting shock jock" is the realisation of the above facts. Are you one of those who still believe that peak oil and subsequent decline will cause the global economy to shrink 7% year-on-year? That's so old-school,-it was a best-case scenario. That's what would have happened if the global economy was fundamentally sound in all other respects. It turns out that since bank deregulation in the Reagan-Thatcher-Douglas era the jokers have created a house of cards(derivatives bubble)to inflate their own wealth with no underlying real asset value. The politicians could tear it down (mark banks "assets" to market value = almost worthless) if they wished, but they don't wish, because the politicians belong to the bankers (in NZ, it seems, they often are bankers!), bought and paid-for. Then we would be back to the managable 7% year-on-year decline that is the basis upon which a broad-based Transition programme might just enable us to avert civil chaos.

As it is, a disruptive global economic event will result in the investment required to extract the remaining resources even at the rate required for "only" a 7% year-on-year decline not being made. The situation will not be recoverable becaused the resultant decline in economic activity will result in fewer current resources being able to be bought to bear to extract the required future resources. Thus instead of the lovely peak, descending ramp and soft landing we see in conventional peak oil curves, we will see a nosedive. This is collapse. Go and find Joseph Tainter on Wikipedia. this guy is a heavyweight (but eminently readable) academic, not some "raving shock-jock doomer". He was writing well before peak oil awareness became mainstream and certainly well before the financial events of 2008 so this is not "cleverness with the benefit of hindsight". There is a book called "The Collapse of Complex Societies" but there are links to free papers at Wiki- check out his CV too whilst you are there.

Richard, have you ever heard the saying "hope for the best but prepare for the worst" this is such a truism it exists in every culture. Transition Towners and Lifeboaters may not be exactly the same thing, but neither are they mutually exclusive or in conflict. I really don't see what your problem is with us and why you consider lifeboaters are gleefully awaiting Armageddon or are doing anything that actually conflicts with the interests of Transition Towns. We actually are creating the world that we should have. Creating. Not "helping", actually flogging our guts sixteen hours a day doing. I'm sorry if we got bored waiting for the rest of you to get your finger out and actually take personal responsibility for your future well-being, but we are not going to let ourselves and our families suffer just so we can say "oh, we may be completely completely shafted but at least we didn't break with the concensus of the lowest common denominator".

For other posts SEE HERE

The transition movement loses its relevance

This article makes me very sad.

All I can say is that wishful thinking never saved the world. Why is this wishful thinking? It can be summed up thus:

• Nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima and the problem of what to do with 200+ nuclear power stations when the power goes off;

• Runaway climate change leading to a habitat that will no longer support life.

There is no doubt that the Transition movement, as well as the Green movement continue to play an important role. When we are faced with total coilapse of what goes for human “civiliation” and near-term extinction the building up of community and practising of permaculture is a positive response.

But if this comes with wishful thinking and cognitive dissonance it is quite a different matter.  There is much danger in staying with ideas that were new and revolutionary ten years ago: the world today has moved on and bears no relation with today.

The transition movement may well be losing its relevance.

---Seemorerocks

“The Transition Movement, helpful as it was years ago, has failed to grow and adapt with the times. They are much-less influential than they once were and many who were formerly affiliated with the movement have dropped the name altogether to create distance. They remind me of the hollow shell the Pacifica Radio Network has become while PRN has exploded in size and reach. That's because we deal with things that matter, things that are important and pressing. It's no big loss. They'll atrophy and fade. Too bad Nafeez chose to run with this. He's out of touch and we hope he gets it back.' “

---Mike Ruppert

The crisis of civilisation is an unprecedented opportunity

Converging climate, energy, and economic crises signal the potential to transition to a prosperous post-carbon era

the Guardian,

26 January, 2013

Earlier this month, I had the honour of being interviewed by Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Towns movement and co-founder of the Transition Network. In an interview with the Guardian back in June, Hopkins explained his inspiring vision for how small-scale actions at a community level could change the world.

In our conversation, Hopkins was keen to explore my take on these issues as a journalist and academic. He quizzed me about my take on the scale of the environmental, energy and economic challenges we face this century, and the potential for solving them. It was a wide-ranging and lengthy conversation covering some of the issues I've covered in this blog and beyond, the gist of which was that the various crises we face today - from climate change to the economy - are not separate, distinct crises, but rather facets of a wider crisis of industrial civilisation in its current form. The crisis, fundamentally, is linked to our dependence on fossil fuels; but the reality is that whichever way one looks at it, optimistically or pessimistically, this century signals the end of the age of fossil fuels.

Importantly, that's not to say that we're all doomed. Far from it: while the crisis of civilisation shows that business-as-usual is not sustainable - and could at worst lead to an uninhabitable planet by the end of this century based on the consensus science projections - I've argued that we are already in the midst of a process of civilisational transition which offers unprecedented opportunities to re-envision new forms of prosperity that can function in harmony with our environment, rather than in conflict with it.

Below, I've put together a few snippets from our conversation, but you can read the whole transcript here, and also listen to it here.

Rob: You've written a lot recently about how gas fracking is being hugely over-hyped and how we may well be looking at 'peak uranium' by 2015, and a study that said don't do any more nuclear whatever you do. You've written about peak oil. When you look at all those things coming together, you analysis is increasingly at odds with what we encounter in the mainstream media, this bullish optimism that a new 'golden age of fossil fuels' is waiting round the corner. What's your take on the tension between those two analyses and where we find ourselves as a civilisation?

Me: There's a lot of hype in a lot of these industries. A lot of what my reporting has focused on recently is trying to distinguish between the hype and the facts, and how we square up the reality of the actual costs of energy these days and the fact that energy is a lot more expensive. 
The reports I was looking at on shale gas were from a lot of very credible sources. You had a guy, David Hughes, who used to work for the Canadian government, assessing Canada's national oil and gas supplies for about 30 years. Another was by Deborah Rogers who is an advisor to the US government, on the problems with fracking. She's actually an advisor to the US Department of the Interior. Also there was a report from the Energy Watch Group based in Germany which was authored by a physicist. The Energy Watch Group is a network of European scientists who have been looking at these issues for a while.

The overall result of the research that these guys put out was that if you take into account these overestimations and underestimations, the picture you come away with is actually quite worrying, to the extent that we're looking at the idea that shale gas could really just be a Ponzi scheme. This is industry just keeping things afloat but it's not really going to solve our energy problem in the long run.

This century is the end of the age of fossil fuels and it doesn't matter which way you look at it, even if you look at it from an optimistic perspective, you're still looking at declining and depleting during the first quarter of this century.

You're looking at us running pretty low, costs getting high, and that impacting the economy, impacting our contemporary industrial way of life and causing a lot of problems if we don't make those choices now to change the way we do things. People get very bogged down with the detail of whether we're going to peak in 2015 or if we're going to peak in 2020 or 2035. For me, the peak in 2025 or 2030 is bad enough. We need to start preparing for these issues now.

If we are looking at the end of the age of fossil fuels for a variety of reasons this century, then what does the alternative look like and how do we get there?

Rob: What do you think the convergence of the challenges that you identify and the things that you write about mean for economic growth, what are the implications for economic growth?

Me: At the moment we face such an amazing convergence of different challenges, with environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and these are obviously affecting our societies here and now. People talk about what's going to happen in the future but we're already seeing the impact on our societies in terms of food production, in terms of challenges to the way in which our societies are able to live and source their general industrial production.

We're now moving into the age of very expensive energy, whichever way you look at it. Our complete and utter dependence on cheap fossil fuels to basically do everything means that as we enter this age of more expensive forms of energy we're facing this fundamental baseline problem, which is undermining the ability of industrial civilisation to do the things that it is used to doing at the cost at which it is used to doing them.

Of course, people often talk about debt and the problem of debt. But missing from mainstream analyses is the extent to which the growth that we've had since the Second World War, astronomical levels of growth, have been correlated with two things. One, the exploitation of energy, cheap fossil fuels. And two, they've also been correlated with the expansion of debt. What's interesting really about this period is that, especially since the 1970s, when the economic system began to face certain challenges, rates of profit were declining. There was an effort to outsource manufacturing to poorer developed countries to keep costs down and to maintain higher profits. All of that stopped working.

What happened is, banks and investors turned towards financialisation. They realised that actually you can make huge amounts of profit by lending. The more you lend to people, the more they have to pay you back and you can get a return on your interest. That's an amazing way of making profits. This is no secret, it's actually a well-known reality and in fact mainstream economists often see debt and the creation of credit as a good thing. They recognise that there's a link between higher levels of growth and higher levels of credit and debt in the economy.

Where obviously it falls apart is that none of these economists anticipated how these things would converge and lead to the collapse of the banking system in 2008 and the ongoing recession that we're seeing now. There's no sign of it abating. In fact, all the recent statistics that have emerged in this last six months up to now, from the World Bank, from the IMF, from various ratings agencies and major banks, all of them are saying all our growth forecasts have to be slashed, that we were over-optimistic again.

All the growth in emerging markets that we were banking on to keep the global economy chugging along, it's actually not going to happen in the way that we originally thought it was going to happen. So once again we've realised that these models that we're relying on are unable to keep up with reality. I think that's because they've failed to realise that this acceleration of debt and credit and the ability to actually service that debt has been premised on this abundant availability of cheap fossil fuels.

This was challenged when we saw the peak in conventional oil production and the plateau in conventional oil production from about 2005 onwards. When suddenly conventional oil production was not able to keep up with demand so we had rocketing oil prices which fed into everything else. A number of economists have pointed out that this massive impact on the cost of living is really what has led to people being unable to service their debt. People were suddenly not able to afford their basic expenses, and unable to afford to pay back those debts. The house of cards that we created over the past 30-40 years, this bonanza of virtual growth just collapsed like a bubble.

I think that's where we're at now, we've got this choice ahead of us. Governments at the moment are still ostrich-like, thinking, lets just go back to the same old ways of printing money, lots of quantitative easing. Kickstart lending again to get capital flowing. People will be able to borrow again, people will be able to buy things again. It's all going to be fine. But it's not going to work. We are already quite over-leveraged and if you look at the levels of debt, we haven't actually solved that problem at all.

We recognise that material accumulation has played a role in giving us certain amazing technologies and the ability to do things, and obviously there's scientific innovation. None of those things are in themselves bad things, but they've also come at a cost. I think we're at a point now where we can make that choice, to say maybe we can harness the positives that we've developed with industrial civilisation and develop something new, a post-growth, post-industrial form of civilisation that doesn't reject science and technology but recognises that ultimately you have to be living within the limits of your environmental systems.

Rob: Our theme for July at TransitionNetwork.org was The Power of Just Doing Stuff and looking from different perspectives at this idea of the power that sits, particularly in the context you set out earlier in this interview, in terms of those really big global challenges that we face. What do you think is the power that arises from people just getting on and finding they want to be part of the solution?

Me: I think fundamentally it changes the whole paradigm of how a society should run and what is the driving force of a society, what is the driving force of politics. At the moment our economy is caught up in a political system which is very hierarchical, counter democratic, where we've seen an erosion of democracy for a whole range of reasons. It's linked up with the nature of capitalism, we've already seen the scandal of Lynton Crosby and the link to fossil fuels in Australia, the link to dodgy private companies trying to take over the NHS, and tobacco companies. That's the story of politics at the moment.

As for the democratic system. It's great that we have one and in many ways is better than other things out there, but it's a broken system. I think the idea of people just getting up there and saying "now wait a minute, shall I just wait for government to fail at the next negotiating table for climate change, shall I wait or push government to do this, push government to do that? Or can I do something that will tangibly affect my life, the lives of my family and friends, the lives of the whole community in which I'm living?" ... that could eventually transform not just local politics, but in the long run it could actually have a national impact.

I think that's the potential of people just getting up and saying enough is enough, I don't need to wait for someone else, for my representatives to do something for me or for us, I can do it myself and start moving towards that. It might not be everything that I might hope to see, but if I don't do that now, then in a way I'm allowing, conceding power to these other entities whereas if I just take that step forward and take action now, I'm actually taking control and taking ownership.

But at the same time I would like to see people who are involved in direct action and things like that actually taking the ideas of Transition for example and saying "well I might not just want to occupy a public space, I might want to occupy a public space and grow some food. I might want to occupy a public space and start having workshops around what this alternative society should look like and actually start creating it here and now. How can we create a new method of exchange? How can we change the nature of our local economy? How can we help our council estates work towards a vision where they're relying on clean energy which could benefit our local community and contribute to dealing with some of the problems that our young people are facing? Let's empower and enfranchise our young people".

We need to have more of that catalysing of cross-fertilisation of these discussions across our different groups in order to have a more systemic and more holistic conversation towards what is the vision we would like to see, how can we collectively begin exploring different pathways to doing that. I think if we did that, and we are doing that, there are these seeds now being planted, but if we started moving towards this more assertively in our different communities, I think it would have a potentially really amazing impact on the national story. It could change it.

Ultimately, that choice of what the world is going to look like is really down to us, and the future is quite open. If you're going to say we're all doomed and there's no point in doing anything, you become part of the problem and create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and are no longer basically of any use to humanity because you've just said this is how it's going to be and have now disempowered yourself.

But if you remain open to the possibility of change, even if it's a slim possibility, even if we recognise that it's a small probability, if you remain open to that probability and fight for it then you become part of the shift towards that. And then you remain open to the reality that there is a possibility and we could create that.

People are really hungry actually for answers, hungry for solutions, hungry for alternatives, so really this is actually an unprecedented opportunity. It's an unprecedented crisis but it's also an opportunity to dream-weave and say "well actually everything is going to go to pot over the next 20-30 years if we don't change, so here's an opportunity to think outside the box."

Personal reflections

I have just returned from a visit back to Christchurch, the city where I grew up and left 30 years ago.

Here are my impressions

Revisiting Christchurch

by Seemorerocks

Some time after the February earthquake in Christchurch I wrote an article for CollapseNet in which I expressed the opinion that there there would be no reconstruction of Christchurch.  One person, a "prepper" living in Canterbury took offence.  

Of course Christchurch would be rebuilt!

Perhaps I should have added the phrase "in a meaningful way". 

Today, when I look back, although I wasn't exactly right, I wasn't exactly wrong either.

Going back to Christchurch over two years after the devastating February quake that killed 185 people, and coming up to the third anniversary of the first, September quake, it seems that part from the wholesale demolition of the CBD little has happened to rebuild the city.

For many people in the city life is the same, if not worse, than it was after the quake.

Revisiting Christchurch

On the urging of my partner I agreed to revisit Christchurch.  

It was a chance to catch up with people I have not seen for 2 years or so, and in one case to catch up with a good, childhood friend whom I have not seen in years.

It was one rich in memories of times past as well as one of grieving for what has passed.

It was also a chance to see the city at a time when, for the first time since the quake the Red Zone was opened up and it was possible to walk around the ruins of the central city, including Cathedral Square, the hub of the city.

We needn't have worried about the weather, Christchurch put on its best weather with beautiful sunshine.

Many parts of the city are scarcely recognisable. Most of the old landmarks have gone, most of its tall buildings.  What marks Christchurch, despite the destruction is the river Avon and the gardens and the trees.

The trees are the heroes of the city.

A tour around the post-quake city

Let's have a brief look with the way Christchurch looks today, starting with Cathedral Square.

This is Cathedral Square looking for all the world like some socialist, Eastern European city.  The building in the background, largely demolished is the BNZ centre which when I was growing up in the 60's, was the tallest building in the city.

An artist has built  a memorial of flowers in front of what remains of Christ Church cathedral to commemorate the reopening of the Red Zone.

This photo is taken near the Square (only recognisable because of the tram lines) - what remains of a line of shops.

This is typical of what is left in the centre - the odd building remaining (but empty), otherwise lots of space. Your guess of where this is, is as good as mine - somewhere east of the Square.

Looking back towards the Square - the building on left background was one of the old landmarks

Demolition going on in Hereford Street

Taking in the wholesale destruction of Manchester and High Streets

This view is across Colombo St towards what used to be Beaths, one of the city's old department stores

Cashel Mall, one of the CBD's main shopping streets has been open for a while to provide a shopping experience in premises made from old shipping containers.

Sunday morning on Cashel Mall

Looking along the Avon from Oxford Tce in an area that was once one of the most picturesque and quaint areas of the city.  Now, almost nothing remains.

For me my Christchurch, the one that I grew up with and could identify with - the old Victorian shop buildings of High Street, the neo-Gothic buildings - has disappeared.

When I look at the photos it all looks more like a mid-sized Soviet city than Christchurch, the 'garden city'.

Prior to the quake much of Christchurch was laid waste by corporate vandalism - the jackhammers of developers.

What they couldn't achieve was completed by the quake.

Many of the heritage buildings were beyond hope of repair but others have been pulled down at the behest of the dictator of Christchurch, minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery, Gerry Brownlee. 

'Old dungers' he calls them.

We have left perhaps one street in the whole of the city that remains largely untouched.

What remains are nondescript modern commercial buildings, so loved by minister Brownlee.

A Glimpse of pre-quake Christchurch

A view of pre-quake Cathedral Square

This is a view from the cathedral of life on the square before the quake

Here is a travelogue of Christchurch from a bygone era - 1952 - before I was born. 

I would say that 90% of the buildings that feature in this were, if not demolished prior, were destroyed after the quake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8PVvm71DPk


Making do in the midst of destruction

So many houses and blocks of flats were damaged. Others seemed to be OK, but were boarded up. Other houses were empty.

In the midst of empty houses there would be signs of life and the residents, frequently elderly, would be continuing to make do as best as they could, living in houses with cracks in them that were impossible to heat - living with cold, damp and mould.

We have one good friend, C, who is living near Lyttelton and trying to make do in a house that she has been told is too dangerous for inspection.

Previously a professional life wasn't easy but since the quake C has no paid work (but does a lot of voluntary work).  She is living still, after 2 years, in a house without hot water, with cracks such that some days it is 2C (36F) inside the house.  The old car she has been driving has finally given up the ghost.

This is the way that people are flipped out of the middle class and into a fairly desperate existence.

This is collapse working itself out.

I have another friend, S,  who was a successful airline pilot who lived in one of the leafy, better-off suburbs.  This changes when he suffered a devastating stroke nine years ago. Add to that being disinherited and cut-off by a dysfunctional family.

They realised that they couldn't continue to live in Merivale so sold and moved into a house  in the inner city.

Now S is a regular at the Beat Street Cafe that acts as a hub for the community, providing free coffees for those in need and, reportedly, feeding some of those sleeping rough in the city.

the Beat Street Cafe, Barbadoes Street

As a regular he is the beneficiary of others' largesse as he can no longer afford to buy a regular cup for himself.

I am sure that these are not isolated stories.

Building community

People are starting to realise that they cannot rely on the government to help them, so they have to work as a community to help themselves.

There are many shining examples of communities coming together, right from the Beat Street cafe, to the Time Bank in Lyttelton, which already knew who the vulnerable people were when the quake hit.

One shining example featured in the Press the weekend we were there. The article Helping People to Help Themselves  discusses Addington Action which has recognised that help is not going to come from on high and that "we're not going to do things for people. We're going to do it with them'  They have organised themselves to fix up people's quake-damaged homes and to bring in retired builders from other parts of the South Island to help. 

Mike Peters of Addington Action with a model of the organisation's new warehouse to be built in Garlands Rd

Really it is just as much about repairing a community's broken spirit as repairing houses.
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A housing bubble

While many people quietly suffer in their quake-damaged homes  in areas that show no signs of recovery like the eastern suburbs, Sumner and the central city the city is expanding towards the north and west.

In Halswell, a suburb on the edge of the city where I lived as a youngster, was semi-rural -  I used to ride my pony along the roads.

Now this semi-rural area has been replaced by huge, soul-less housing estates, (mostly in the last 3 years), with houses that are selling for prices that are unaffordable to most working New Zealanders.

This is part of a huge housing bubble.

The government paints it as a housing shortage, and what is needed to bring housing prices down is more and more (and more) building.

Expand the economy, increase the population, keep the Ponzi scheme going, at all costs.

And the costs are considerable.

There is a serious lack of rental accommodation for those that remain and cannot afford to buy a house that costs half-a-million dollars.

This is made worse by houses that have been damaged beyond repair by the quake and the extra demand for workers coming into the city to be employed on demolition and building.

There were several workers like this living at the backpackers hostel where we stayed.

He told me the rents were unaffordable and the bonds required by landlords exorbitant.

On the very morning I returned home there was a report on Radio New Zealand on the rental situation in Christchurch.  It is worth listening to.

Rents have increased 25 percent in this last year,

Tenants have been moved to short-term contracts and live in seriously substandard accommodation. If they complain they are evicted because there are plenty to take their place, often outsiders involved in the rebuild, who can afford to pay still higher rents.

Landlords put up rents because they can.

Credit Crunch

While we were down in Christchurch there was a thorough report on the question of debt in Christchurch.

Of the 5 billion dollar cost for the central city and 'horizontal infrastructure' rebuilding costs the Council will pay $1.9 billion - the rest is covered by central government.

This will lead to a huge ballooning of debt in a city that previously maintained its social spending and raised funds by issuing bonds .

Christchurch had a far lower debt burden than almost any city in New Zealand.

As the article points out, Christchurch's credit card has been 'maxed out'

If we take an optimistic, 'business-as-usual' approach to this it is going to saddle this generation and the next with debt.

It is predicated on high growth levels (7 per cent per annum projected over 10 years) and population growth. "Christchurch now needs a population strategy and, more than that, a jobs strategy"

Much of this is being pushed by the this National government that is pushing major projects like building a new sports stadium, a convention centre, an arts centre and a cricket stadium in the city's beautiful Hagley Park.

The struggle for the Council in its relationship with central government has been to avoid "being treated as an open chequebook, taking on debt in the ratepayers' name for projects that might be mostly required by the Government's national economic objectives"

A view of the the plan for a stadium

It is hard to imagine that the present housing bubble and rates of unsustainable growth are going to last for long.

It only takes a real slow down, increased  interest rates and the city (indeed, the country is in deep doodah.

What if there is another disaster?  The coffers nationally, are well and truly empty.

As my friend S said, "heaven help us if there is another disaster".

There are people in Christchurch who are worried by the direction Christchurch is taking.

One is Vicky Buck, former mayor who is standing for council again. She has some insight when  she says that "This is going to be a century of great environmental and economic challenges" and that "flexibility may be what is most important for the city"...."If a developed country like Greece can have a 50 per cent youth unemployment or New York is worrying about getting washed away by climate change, you want to have the feeling that you've got choices. So as a community, high levels of debt are quite a concern"

Thank goodness there is someone in the public arena with some sense!

Denial

Getting back to my friends, M expressed thinking at the time that Christchurch was the worst place to have an earthquake in.

What she meant by that was that one side,at least of the social divide, was repressed and valued above all the stoicism, the stiff upper lip.

While in many aspects the community has opened up and has started talking to each other, there is still an inability to acknowledge what has really happened and to acknowledge the grief as to what has been lost.

In a way this resembles the inability to acknowledge death.

Like the inability to acknowledge the possibility of the collapse of the world as we have known it, even our own extinction as a species.

Living in denial.