Reading (UK) – A Town in Transition, and Local Community Resilience.

 Credit: Karen Blakeman.

Reading, Transition, and Transition Town Reading.

A large town, not yet a city, Reading (UK) is typically seen as a commuter hub, with thousands travelling into London every day to get to work. Reading itself may seem unexceptional, even bland, with not much going on there. But, on looking a little closer, Reading has real community, a group of local people who are coming together to create real change.

While many of our problems are global – e.g. the climate and biodiversity emergency, declining fossil fuels, dwindling resources, pollution, overconsumption, food insecurity, inequality – there is much we can do at the local level to make things better. This is what the Transition Town movement is about: a group of local communities that are reimagining our world at the local level.

These communities foster grassroots projects that focus on increased self-sufficiency, through relocalisation, especially in terms of local food growing and energy use, minimising unnecessary consumption and waste, and building strong, resilient communities, where neighbours know each other and act together to make things happen.

Transition is based more on envisaging a “better world” rather than “fear”. It focuses on positive outcomes, rather than doom and gloom – carrots not sticks.

An essential feature of this approach is to imagine how “the world we want” might look, sound, feel, smell, taste. Then work backwards, from a given future date to the present, to figure out the necessary steps to take, in order to make it happen. This is called “backcasting”.

The first Transition Town was founded in Totnes, in 2006, and became an inspiration for other groups to be created. The Transition Network charity was set up in early 2007, to support these initiatives. The movement has become global, with thousands of communities now involved in Transition initiatives in over 50 different countries. While the overall aims are closely aligned, the specific approaches of each group may vary, according to particular features of its local area.

Transition Town Reading began in May 2009, when Pete Wheat met Colin Pearson in the Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC), having made contact through a “register of interest” action advertised on the Transition Network website. Dave Allen was on board with TTR by September of that year, and hosted the group at Reading University. Essentially, TTR then grew by people in Reading gravitating toward the central idea of Transition. TTR screened the film “In Transition 1.0” in 2010, and by that stage its numbers had grown to about 25-30 active members.

Many projects have spun out from the original TTR group, based around energy, reducing waste, local food growing, and nurturing nature. In only the last 3 years, we have seen the establishment of Reading Hydro (a microhydro electricity generating station) on Caversham Weir, the further development of Reading Repair Cafe, the Reading Library of Things, and the Reading Community Energy Society (which puts solar panels on roofs of buildings, including schools and churches across Reading), and we connect with other Transition groups, e.g. Incredible Edible Reading has formed a collaboration with one based in Englefield Green, Surrey, and they have been awarded a “partnership” grant from the Transition Network to support this.

TTR also works with the local borough council through the Reading Climate Change Partnership/Reading Climate Action Network, and has forged links with the University of Reading in regard to soil health and renewable energy projects. More of Reading's citizens are now engaged with Transition activities, including energy saving, local energy generation, reducing overall resource use, curbing waste, and local food growing. The award of grants, some from the Transition Network and from the National Lottery, has enabled us to expand awareness and practical action in all these areas. We also now feel more connected with the broader Transition Network.

The DraughtBusters project has helped dozens of families across the town to reduce their energy bills and emissions by properly insulating their homes. Incredible Edible Reading and the Reading Food Growing Network (along with its “seed swap”) have encouraged and helped families to grow their own food, in collaboration with Reading Food4Families, and to reduce food costs. Some TTR members are highly active in outreach and explaining issues of climate change, peak oil and energy, to broaden awareness of the fundamental challenges confronting us, and where changes can best be made.

Reading Repair Cafe helps local people to learn about repairing items rather than just throwing them out, while the Reading Library of Things lends tools and other items within the community, thus avoiding the need for lots of people to buy the same devices, but which they may rarely use, individually. TTR’s connection with Reading Borough Council (RBC) enables us to make positive inputs to how things are run here, in regard to reducing emissions and resource use, supporting biodiversity, social equality, and in building community resilience.

 

Other great things happening in Reading....

The spirit of local community connection and involvement extends widely across many of the town’s activities:

Thus, Ethical Reading helps organisations in Reading to do the right thing by each other, the wider community and the environment and to thrive in the process. It is also a key player in planting trees across Reading, so expanding its green space.

The “RISC roof garden” is a permaculture forest garden, growing in just 30 cm of soil, actually on the roof of the RISC building in the centre of Reading. It serves both to insulate the roof, and hosts a huge range of biodiversity, among the 120 or so different species of perennial plants from around the world that grow there, including a few full sized trees! It is also highly educational, showing how space that we don’t normally think of using, can be made “green” and used for growing food and other plants, many with multiple uses, e.g. for medicine, fuel, fibre, construction, dyes, scents.

Nature Nurture focuses on the health and community benefits of spending time in nature, “Green social prescribing”, and also conservation with Eco-net, connecting the community with nature, school programmes, developing new waymarked walking trails with the community.

“The Marshians” are a large number of people taking action to expand the biodiversity of the largest undeveloped area in Reading (The Kennett flood meadows – Fobney Marsh). This also helps to protect Reading from being flooded during periods of very heavy rainfall, of which we can expect much more as the climate changes.

The artwork on the Reading Hydro turbine house and by the Holy Brook Nook (where Nature Nurture holds events, and there are also raised beds, with herbs and vegetables for anyone to help themselves to, although they are also encouraged to join in with the growing) was painted by Commando Jugendstil (with help from local volunteers), who also received a grant from the Transition Network to produce a book “The Town that Could Be”, based on an imagined “Transitioned” vision of Reading in 2045, aimed to backcast from so it can be made real.

TTR also collaborates with the local independent cinema (“Reading Biscuit Factory”) to show films with Transition themes, which so far include: “Six Inches of Soil”, “Wilding”, “The Sequel”, “Living the Change”, and some locally produced films. TTR has also actually commissioned a new film, currently being produced (more details to follow), which we intend to screen there, as part of an event to stimulate further action in Reading’s Transition journey.

“Refill Reading” is a grassroots campaign started by TTR. It aims to reduce the number of disposable coffee cups going to landfill (2.5 billion per year, just in the U.K.) by encouraging people to use reusable cups instead of disposable ones. This project has the support of the Reading Borough Council.

Lavender Place Community Gardens (a space set free by the demolition of the old RBC “civic centre” offices) was temporarily turned into a community garden by Food4Families (F4F), in partnership with Thames Valley Police, and later joined by members of the Forgotten British Gurkhas community. The F4F volunteers (at Lavender Place and in many of Reading's other community gardens) supplied fruit and vegetables to local organisations for food parcels and free meals during (and after) the pandemic. [In fact, they still do from Craven Road, Ardler Road and Southcote GrowAllot, amongst others]. F4F volunteers also look after the raised vegetable and herb beds at Holy Brook Nook. 

Health and environmental challenges for minoritised communities in Reading, including those from Nepal, are a focus of the Integrated Research and Development Centre (IRDC), while Reading HongKongers CIC was founded in 2022 to support Hong Kong nationals who have settled in the Berkshire, providing them with a diaspora network and helping them to integrate into the local community. Both groups have woven their activities around local food growing and wellbeing.

British Islamic Gardens (BIG) is based in Reading, and run solely by volunteers, to create garden spaces around mosques that grow in harmony with the environment, encouraging community cohesion without compromising on sustainability.

There is very much more happening in Reading, and the above merely provides a flavour of it all. For example, there is  the Reading Voluntary Action (RVA) website, which lists (under "Directory") all kinds of community and other local organisations that are looking for volunteers.


Relocalisation and community are the foundations of the future.

Resources are precious, and we can use them much better. We can become far less dependent on supply chains spanning the world, often to buy things we don’t really need. We can be more self-sufficient, and produce more energy and food locally, while wasting less of what we have. We can nurture nature, so she can nurture us. We can strengthen our communities.

Undoubtedly, we face many interconnected and systemic challenges, but it appears sage to plan away from the proverbial global village, and more toward a globe of villages. Thus, although Transition Towns thinking was initiated primarily from considerations about peak oil, it has been stressed that:

“All essential efforts toward re-localisation and community resilience may provide the strongest available single buffer against the many storms that are likely to prevail upon us.”

Reading is a town in Transition, and has its own character. The things we’ve managed to achieve here can be built on to become a place where we love to live, and the whole community of living beings thrives.

We hope that some of what we have done in Reading lights the way for others to see what they might also do in their own town, their village, their street.

It is members of the community, people, who are the force of change. By our own hands, hearts and minds, we make things happen. We can begin to shape our future, ourselves, and not just accept what governments may decide for us, or the prevailing paradigm throws our way.

Transition needs local people to get involved, lots of us – we can all help to build the story of our future, then act together to make it real. We do this for ourselves, for our children, and for our children’s children, who will inherit our Earth.

Only So Much Oil in the Ground... or Gas for that Matter.

“Only So Much Oil in the Ground”, so sang the band, Tower of Power, in the titular track on their album “Urban Renewal”, which was released in 1975. Following closely on the heels of the first of the oil shocks in 1973, its lyrics sounded a strident warning about the limits of natural resources. Fifty years later, with well in excess of half of the oil and gas ever produced  having been exhumed and burned, and as viewed on an unpredictably flexing global geopolitical stage, it appears apposite to observe the way different countries are currently shifting their sources of imported oil and gas. Hence, an effective competition is underway for whatever remains, and by all trying to grab the same fossil resources, the exercise is akin to moving around the proverbial deckchairs on the Titanic, until it collides with an inevitable iceberg of depletion and begins to sink. The course of techno-industrial civilization needs to be changed, while there is still some leeway left to do so.

The energy infrastructure in the North Sea is complex and vulnerable.  The effect of a major undersea disruptive event – of either human or natural cause – could be catastrophic. In any case, the reserves of oil and gas are limited, with about a decade’s worth each of proven oil left for Norway and the UK, and enough gas for 14 years and 5 years, respectively. 

[The above resource lifetimes are estimated on the basis of the reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio, which is the ratio of the size of the reserve base to the annual rate of production: thus, for example, a 100,000 tonne reserve produced from at 1,000 tonnes per year should last for 100 years. This is, of course, a naive piece of arithmetic, since no material can be produced at a constant rate, right up to the bitter end, and instead, a production peak is to be expected, as the quality of particular deposits/ores declines, and the energy input, per tonne of a material recovered, increases relentlessly - eventually to the point that further extraction from a particular source is no longer worthwhile. The concept of the “burn-off time” has been introduced, which has the same formal definition as the R/P ratio; however, it has been emphasised that, while this is applicable in a stagnant economy (constant production rate), in a growing economy it overestimates the production lifetime].

Since Russian gas supplies have been attenuated as a result of the Ukraine conflict, Germany, along with Italy, is now importing more gas from Norway. In consequence of such increased demand, Norway has ramped up its gas production, the majority of which goes for export, to a record 124 billion cubic metres in 2024, a strategy which must use up its reserves even faster. In contrast, Norwegian oil production was down in 2024 over 2023, mainly because few fields came onstream and most of those already in production are in their decline phase.

The Troll Field holds 40% of Norway’s gas, and accounts for 32.5% of its gas production. Its reserve is reckoned at 606 bcm, down from an original 1436.6 bcm, and which at a sustained 42.5 pa, as was produced in 2024, amounts to 14 years worth. Since Troll is the current cornerstone of Europe’s gas supply, meeting 11% of total consumption, this is significant.

[Norwegian gas production in 2035 had been estimated in 2017 at 90 bcm, but this depended on 30 bcm coming from undiscovered fields]. 

The situation will be worsened by the rapidly declining Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for gas and oil liquids which will result in “energy cannibalism”, with less net energy being available for society, as more is consumed by the production of harder to get, diminishing resources.

An inexorable decline in North Sea production has also been highlighted by the collapse of the Dutch gas fields, and in trying to secure future gas supplies, it is likely that Europe overall will deepen its dependence on liquefied natural gas (LNG), including from Russia. The prospect of fracking as a means for securing gas supplies in Germany, banned since 2017, remains very uncertain and would not happen soon enough to help with the current energy crisis, even if qualms over environmental impacts could be abated. 

Despite claims that granting licenses for oil and gas extraction by the UK government will increase our energy security, most of the North Sea oil is not available for use in the UK because it is extracted by private companies, who sell it on the open international market, rather than necessarily to the UK. For this reason - and because the UK lacks facilities to refine some kinds of oil - around 80% of the oil produced in the North Sea is exported. In contrast, most of the gas is pumped directly into the UK network, although some of this is piped to Europe, in part to fill gas storage reservoirs. Of the gas used in the UK, 46% is imported, 90% by pipeline from Norway, along with LNG, increasingly from the US and less from Qatar 

Business leaders have urged “full-throated support” from both Westminster and Holyrood governments for oil and gas from the North Sea, a sentiment accorded with by newly elected second-time president Donald Trump, who also says that he will push shale producers in the US to ramp up output even if it means they “drill themselves out of business”, i.e. no holds barred, “drill, baby, drill”, having signed an order directing withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, also for the second time.

However, whether or not this production bonanza will actually materialise is a moot point, and depends on financial aspects being favourable. Meanwhile, shale gas plays may have begun to decline, even as the U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas and its greatest LNG exporter. 

The word Dunkelflaute is one of those uniquely German appellations, translating to (something like) "dark wind lull" or "dark doldrums, and describes a period when there is little to no wind or sunlight, thus limiting the amount of energy that might be generated from renewable sources. At such times, in the UK, 70% of our electricity may be generated using gas, with just 7% from wind plus solar combined: 

Overall, gas provides around 37% of the UK’s primary energy, about the same as oil, with almost half of each being imported. Clearly, in addition to climate change issues, we have to find alternative energy sources, and get away from our acute dependence on dwindling oil and gas supplies. As Fatih Birol neatly summed up the situation:

 “One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day. The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously.” 

So, what about renewables? We have already mentioned dunkelfluate, but to cope with the variability of wind and solar at a full scale, in the absence of fossil fuel backup, will surely need considerable storage capacity, and materials to build this. According to a recent study, based on battery storage, the requirements depend markedly on the time length factored in for the buffer, and so the demands increase from 6 hours onward to 12 weeks. However, even at 6 hrs, a massive necessary production expansion is indicated for Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt, Graphite, over 2019 levels. The rare earth elements show a similar huge production increase to be necessary. It appears that there is insufficient Lithium and Cobalt (based on 2022 reserves) to build a completely Fossil Fuel free, renewable energy system. If the price of these went up, more would become available (pass from resources to reserves), but still the mining and production would need to expand appreciably. Progressing onward to 48 hours + storage, having enough copper begins to become a potential problem, but the main issue seems to be over Ni, Li, Co, Graphite, which are all used in Lithium ion batteries, with huge production increases necessary for all of them.

Other kinds of batteries, e.g. sodium, or those based on other earth abundant elements, might offset this, but mining/production increases would have to happen there too. The study is based on a full replacement of FF by RE by 2050. To bring this forward to an earlier date (e.g. 2030), the mining/production increases for materials to build the new RE system would be greater still, and any new battery technologies brought to reality and at massive scale very fast indeed. Of course, other (non-battery) storage devices are possible and might offset demand for some materials. 

However, without the expansion of such energy sources (including with sufficient buffer capacity), it is difficult to see how “Peak Oil Demand” can be achieved, i.e. using less oil and gas by choosing alternatives, rather than by their depletion (“peak oil”).

A critical component strategy for creating a viable future energy system and addressing climate change, must surely be energy demand reduction (minimisation), e.g. through relocalisation, retrofitting buildings, local food growing, and reducing waste, to curb the size of resource [very much plural] demands, get us below overshoot and avoid collapse (if we can). Human behavioural change is a necessary and major driver of these changes.

Even apart from climate change/emissions considerations, it would make sense to save oil and gas for those specific future uses (including as manufacturing feedstocks) where substitution will prove difficult or impossible. On the immediate human timescale we have but a one off bestowal of them. Currently, fossil fuels are needed to install renewable energy capture devices, and even if the new energy system grows large enough to feed back sufficient energy for its own fabrication and maintenance, oil, gas and coal will still be needed for mining and processing raw materials for some time to come. Nonetheless, falling EROI for oil liquids may well set a limit to a rapid and global low-carbon energy transition.

Meanwhile, the hourglass drains, while transient resources ebb away.