'A Zero Growth Economics?' - the follow-up weekend at Woodbrooke

Six weeks after the day conference in London, we held the follow-up weekend at Woodbrooke, 30 October to 1 November. It was a mammoth event, stretching Woodbrooke’s space to its limits, but it all worked, assisted by the enthusiasm and commitment of the participants. We had over 90 present, including Area Meeting representatives, QPSW staff and central committee people, and Woodbrooke staff, workshop leaders, Turning the Tide Facilitators, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who chaired our London conference day.

We started on Friday evening with Jocelyn reminding us of what we had heard in London, and then we split up into groups to talk about what we had each got from the day. Suzanne Ismail, from QPSW, then introduced the ‘talking wall’ to continue conversations that would inform the work of Economic Issues Group. The ‘wall’ was very well-used during the weekend! Anne Wilkinson from QPSW reminded us that the purpose of this weekend was to plan for practical local work that Friends to initiate or be engaged in.

On Saturday morning the conference split into choices of option groups, everyone being able to attend two different groups. This was an opportunity to hear about examples of local action that had been tried and tested – hopefully to be inspirational.

Caz and Tom Ingall, from Canalside Community Food, talked about their initiative creating a Community Supported Agriculture project on their farm in Warwickshire. They started full scale vegetable production from Spring 2007, and are now producing weekly shares of seasonal veg for over 90 local households.

Laurie Michaelis gave his groups a way into the kind of work promoted and enabled by the Living Witness Project (LWP), which aims to support the development of Quaker corporate witness to sustainable living and explore ways of taking it to the wider community in Britain and elsewhere.

Jan Copley invited Friends to think about how they make choices about spending their money and the wider social and community impacts of that, in addition to the economic effects.

Roger Sawtell with a long history in the co-operatives movement, led his groups to look at co-operatives as an alternative economic model to the dominant shareholder/employee paradigm.

Gwen Prince led a groups sharing their experience of Transition Town and allied activities. Gwen and another Friend from Llanidloes Quaker Meeting started LLES ( Llanidloes Energy Solutions). Llanidloes has currently been designated a 'Green Town', part of a Low Carbon Communities Project which though not part of the Transition network is working towards similar aims.

Ian Care led a group looking at how to run local community businesses – an idea suddenly topical for Archers listeners, who will know that this is a new story-line in the saga of Ambridge! You can find out about community shops from the Plunkett Foundation.

Tony Weekes ran groups on LETS and other Local Currency schemes. While Tony was a research fellow at Woodbrooke he wrote a pamphlet called The Economic Crisis: a Quaker response (Woodbrooke Journal no. 24, Spring 2009). You can buy the printed version from Woodbrooke, price £4.50 (phone 0121 472 5171), or obtain a pay-for-download PDF version direct from the website, price £2.50.

After lunch on Saturday there was free time or a choice of two activities (plus participant-organised discussion groups). We set up a Skype link to Canada, to interact with Geoff Garver, one of the authors of Right Relationship: building a whole earth economy published by Quaker Institute for the Future (this is a link to their blog – the link to their homepage seems to be broken at the moment). Geoff talked with us (and we asked questions of him), and he gave a powerpoint presentation which you can view on the Friends House web pages.

The parallel activity was a chance to view two videos – The Power of Community: how Cuba overcame peak oil (53 mins – you can buy the DVD from the Green Shopping Catalogue); and Annie Leonard’s wonderful animated film The Story of Stuff (20 mins) – you can watch this online. Independent viewing of other DVDs we’d made available included A Farm for the Future (changing a farm over to permaculture) – made as a BBC documentary and now watchable online in five parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.

From Saturday afternoon, Turning the Tide facilitators divided the conference into six smaller groups, and took them through a process of identifying real, practical on-the-ground changes that could be made by, or in relation to, our local meetings.

In the closing plenary, we identified a desire for more technical-but-accessible input on economics for non-economists. Don’t forget the Quakernomics blog.

You might also like to find out about FEASTA (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability). Additionally, in the ‘Very Short Introductions’ series, there is Economics: A Very Short Introduction by Partha Dasgupta.

Also, if you read a newspaper (online or on paper) it’s worth not just ignoring the financial pages. For instance, on the day following our weekend, The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, had a very interesting piece on what’s happening now, in the wake of the recession. His Monday editorial articles are always interesting and accessible to the non-specialist. This one is called, ‘Painful death of the American dream: mesmerised by big finance, policymakers are sowing the seeds of a new crisis’.

Coincidentally, for us, George Monbiot’s weekly column the following day looked at some of the psychological issues behind consumption and climate change denial. It makes sobering reading: scepticism about human-induced climate change is increasing, not decreasing; people over 65 are proportionately more likely to be ‘deniers’; there is already experimental evidence that ‘some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption.’ The whole article is worth reading.

And on the same day, a piece about the sacking of David Nutt (until then chair of the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs) asked questions about government’s attitudes to scientific advice – a problem that is equally intractable in relation to climate change.

So there is lots going on in the world around us that reinforces the importance of what we were doing at the weekend, and makes sure that these issues will be with us for some time to come. And as I was writing this report, a phone call came in from Eoin McCarthy from Quakers and Business Group, telling me that:

On 24th April 2010, Quakers and Business Group's Spring Gathering is scheduled to be held at Redland Friends Meeting House, Bristol. On the day, we hope to address ourselves to: Prosperity v Growth in the context of the limitations of democratically elected government and the possibilities for financial reform.