Eva, tell me a little about yourself.  How did it all begin?

For the last few years I’ve been trying to take action, meaningful action on Climate Change. For some year’s I’d had the feeling of concern about the environment and the impact our culture in the West is having on it.

As I grew up more and more information became available about how bad things were and I just felt overwhelmed. I went into despair because I hadn’t learnt to take action and for me that’s what makes the difference.

I think that if you ‘take on’ the situation with the environment without also taking action it gets very depressing.

It was actually reading an article in The Ecologist, where the whole magazine was devoted to Climate Change .That made me realise this really was the most important thing. So I started to get involved but couldn’t do much as I was in the middle of having children. I tried to set up meetings in my community for people to come and talk about Climate Change but there was no interest. This was about four, five years ago when it hadn’t yet hit the headlines. It was all considered rather fringe, a bit bonkers.

But then I read an article by Rob Hopkins ( from  Kinsale, Ireland) who had just finished running a  two year project with his students where they’d come up with the idea of an Energy Descent Action Plan for their Community.

Can you explain?

Well, as we are moving towards what is called “ Peak Oil”, less and less oil costing more and more. This presents a huge challenge to society and our way of life. But for Hopkins and his students, the idea of Energy Descent is “ that each step down the hill could be a step towards sanity, towards wholeness. A coming back to who we really are. It’s about re- energising  communities  and culture. It’s the key to our embracing the possibilities of our situation rather than being overwhelmed by their challenges.”

For me this was like a light switch. I thought. That’s fantastic. That’s exactly what I’d like to do here. If you just say to people  ‘let’s look at Climate Change people don’t get it. But if we say’ let’s look at food’ that’s so much more accessible to people. It was about the same time our community in Portobello ( Edinburgh  district) just won a big battle against the  proposed Superstore at the end of our High Street.

 We were successful in the end. Then we thought we could really use the energy descent  ideas in our community . The organisers of the Superstore campaign were very keen. So we were ‘up’, basically without a real clue of how to do it. About seventy people turned up for the first meeting and we began to develop our own energy descent action plan.

Is this happening elsewhere in Scotland ?

There are about 70 communities involved in Scotland, that I am aware of.  Well, Transition initiatives, at the moment, are very new and they tend to involve smallish groups of individuals who have an idea for their community. It’s all so inspiring and exciting.

When we started getting active in Portobello about three to four years ago there was no one else in Scotland doing this. When I asked Ben Brangwyn the English Co-ordinator to come up and give a number of talks around Scotland there was a great interest. There was almost always more people attending than expected.

Several of those groups have now gone on and become official Transition Groups.

What would you say to people who argue that ok the economy is in a bad way. We have problems with rising oil prices and climate change. But it will all sort itself out, in time. The politicians and the scientists will come up with an answer. There’s not much we can do.

Well to some extent it’s personal preference. If you don’t feel the need to get involved in something like this there’s nothing to say that you have to be. But a lot of people do find it very interesting, exciting and empowering. I do think that, over time, people have lost the sense that they can have much of an impact on their local communities. So even if it’s just the discovery that you can make an impression that you can change things. You may not be able to instantly change the government but you could set up a community orchard without too much bother. That’s a very positive feeling I also believe that one of the core principles in transition is about building resilience. Resilience in a community is the ability to resist shocks from outside. Communities as a whole are not very resilient.

They have become very vulnerable to shocks from outside. If something happened now like it did in the nineteen eighties, with the oil scarcity and truckers blockading the oil refineries. How would we fare? At that time supermarkets were within hours of not having food on the shelves.

 I don’t know what people would have done. In a situation like that it’s easy to just capitulate.

But if we were facing a different kind of threat. Our food system, in particular, is extremely vulnerable. . In some places there is about four days of food circulating and that’s quite good. In some major cities it’s more like four hours. With four hours of trucks not running  food is going to start running out. Politicians are actually now acknowledging this and saying that we are now looking at the end of cheap energy, that’s going to have a knock on effect on all areas of life it’s all very sensible really. If  we are going to have to start paying more and more for our food it makes sense to grow more locally. You wont have transport costs. All you’re paying for is your seeds and if you save your seeds all you have is your own labour.

How do you see the future?

I have mixed feelings. I feel very concerned when I think about the future. I feel very concerned when I think about climate change and the speed at which it’s outgrowing all the predictions and always seems to be worse than everybody thought. And I do feel concerned about the impact of peak oil and how that will affect people, particularly people on low incomes who are already really, really struggling. On the other hand people are very creative and I think that for a long time we’ve been really damped down, deadened and not encouraged to be and express the amount of community power that exists. So, if people get in touch with that creativity through movements like transition and others, then I believe there’s hope for us again. 

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