Here’s what we did yesterday. A very amazing day. Very amazing people.

I thought it time I’d better start getting on with this 10:10 thing. So here’s my first step this year. Bottling my own water. At source.

Cian’s 10:10 Summer Tip: Source your water from Cian O’Donovan on Vimeo.

Every day on planet Earth we burn a whole gulf load of oil up to make plastic bottles so firstworlders like myself can drink water just about anywhere we fancy. No longer!

Cross-posted from 1010uk.org.
10:10's Lighter Later campaign held a day of high-profile activity on Monday, the summer solstice, including a specially organised conference for MPs, peers and policy makers in Portcullis House, Westminster.

The event, on the lightest evening of the year, saw energy academics, road safety campaigners, representatives from the tourism industry and experts on crime and other social research areas come together to press the case for a change to the UK's clocks to GMT+2 in summer and GMT+1 in winter.

This weekend just gone, 10:10 launched quite possibly the most unique and inspirational climate change campaign the UK has seen for many many years; Lighter Later. Okay, I would say that, but think about it. By focusing solely on making life noticeably better for the vast majority of the UK’s citizens, 10:10 has taken the climate change debate to a whole new dimension. So pay close attention. The idea is ingenious in its simplicity. We shift our clocks to match better the hours we work. Wintertime in the UK would now run at BST, or GMT +1. And Summertime would be an hour ahead, GMT +2. So we would still change the clocks twice per year but it would mean that we’d spend more of our day in light, in evening sunshine in fact. Right now as you can see from these graphs we “waste” a lot of that light by sleeping right through it.

Here are the numbers and reasons just why this is such a good move (there are some more at LeftFootForward):

1. Cut at least 447,000 tonnes of CO2 pollution – equivalent to more than 50,000 cars driving all the way around the world – each year [1]
2. Save 100 lives each year and prevent hundreds of serious injuries by making the roads safer [2]
3. Lower our electricity bills by maximising the available daylight and reducing peak power demand [3]
4. Create 60,000–80,000 new jobs in leisure and tourism, bringing an extra £2.5–3.5 billion into the economy each year [4]
5. Reduce crime and the fear of crime [5]
6. Help make people healthier and tackle obesity by giving people more time to exercise and play sport outside in the evening [6]
7. Save the NHS around £138 million a year through reducing road casualties [7]
8. Improve quality of life for older people [8]
9. Make the nation happier – including reducing the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder [9]
10. Demonstrate that dealing with climate change can be good for the economy, good for people and good for society as a whole

Full list of references for the above are here http://www.lighterlater.org/benefits.html.

In much of his work (certainly in World at Risk, 2007) Ulrich Beck discusses the the need for civil society organisations to start working together in a genuinely constructive manner in order to tackle some of the planet’s major risks, climate change paramount amongst the usual lineup of global terror, GM and nuclear. At Christmas I wrote of what I thought was the most exciting and progressive aspect of the 10:10 campaign, its intention to do just that. To work with already existing organisations in society, from the bastions of neo-liberal capital such as Sony and Microsoft, to traditional CSOs like Action Aid and People and Planet. Here then is the perfect example of that strategy in action. Incidentally, Beck writes also of the importance of the relations of definition. These relations play a crucial role in the ultimate success or failure of a campaign like Lighter Later, one could argue that the campaign is in fact solely about these relations, but that’s a much longer post, perhaps for a night with a little more light.

Amongst a host of partners, 10:10 is working with RoSPA, the royal society for the prevention of accidents. Has a climate change campaign ever before worked like this with what is primarily a road and society safety group in this manner? Unlikely. But why wouldn’t we work with as many different CSOs as possible, the co-benefits of the switch to a low carbon economy are simply too big to keep to a single climate change campaign.

I’m just back from a talk with Jonathon Porritt, at a BrighterFuture event in London.  Porritt gets it. The time for positive messages, for societal change that uses a carrot, not a stick, is now he stated. The time for the likes of 10:10 and Transitions Towns to get out on the ground, keep an eye on the big picture but all the time keeping two eyes on local, immediate, tangible action has come. Whether you agree with Porritt that all three mainstream parties in the UK are institutionally incapable now of adhering to that most basic of sustainability tenets, the notion of inter-generational equity, is irrelevant. If coalitions of societal groups like the one Lighter Later is building can be intelligently consolidated, around issues that are important, and importantly, tangible, then we have a chance.

So if you back one campaign this year, ask one request of your politician as she or he canvasses on the streets of the UK in the coming weeks, make it an ask for evenings that are Lighter, Later.

Oh, and join the facebook.com/lighterlater group right here. That would make me very happy.

Ah yes, Spring is in the air, and it may even be found in the step of keepfaking.it right now. We wrote up this short piece on Guerrilla Gardening for 1010uk.org on Friday, but wanted to re-publish the interview with Richard Reynolds here as he was such an inspirational gent. A man with 110% the right idea.

Welcome to the world of guerrilla gardening, where just about any patch of soil in a lay-by or traffic island can become a prime spot to grow some veg.

Guerrilla gardening has sprung up in cities around the world over the last decade, and has turned out to be one of the few things that anarchists and Sunday Telegraph readers can agree on. Sounds good to us.

To get started all you need is a patch disused land, some seeds or bulbs and a fertile imagination. But if you need a bit of advice or even some experienced guerrilla gardeners for your first dig, help is at hand. Guerrillagardening.org is a favourite resource and one of the original catalysts for the trend in the UK. On it you’ll find plenty of community advice on what to grow, where to grow it with and invitations to join existing digs that are planned for the coming months. They even have instructions on how to make your own seed bombs, a must-have in any guerrilla gardener’s arsenal. We interviewed founder Richard Reynolds on Twitter this afternoon, you can see the transcript below.

Pictures tell the story of Guerrilla Gardening better than we possibly could so here’s a selection from the Pimp Your Pavement Flickr group.

Here’s the transcript of our Twitter interview with Guerrillagardening.org founder Richard Reynolds.

Re-photo (cc) Anthony Mayfield

Within the climate change mitigation discourse, a war effort is often called for. WWII is cited by some as the only time during the history of industrialization that a societal/productivity shift of the order of magnitude now required has happened. But we want to look at a slightly different point in history. Just like post-punk was an altogether better sound than punk itself, the post-war effort (in both Germany and Japan) has plenty of interesting lessons for us when it comes to the subject of societal change.

Let us consider for a brief moment the issue of social capital in post-war Germany and Japan. These countries had just been whooped ten shades of blue, millions dead, and in Japan, two nuclear craters. Understandable if the local populaces felt a bit put out and distrustful of the Allies restructuring plans. Yet the economic turnaround in each country was nothing short of miraculous. Now, we’re not going to get totally reductionist on this, there are plenty of reasons, common and independent, why the original Axis of Evil managed to get back on its feet, but one nugget provided here by Francis Fukuyama stands out in this decade old paper originally written for those friendly folk at the IMF.

Apart from religion, shared historical experience can shape informal norms and produce social capital. Both Germany and Japan experienced considerable labor unrest and conflict between workers, managers, and the state in the 1920s and 30s. The Nazis and Japan’s military rulers ultimately suppressed independent labor unions and replaced them with “yellow” ones. After their defeat in World War II, the democratic successor regimes opted for a much more consensual approach to management-labor relations that produced Germany’s postwar Sozialmarktwirtschaft and Japan’s lifetime employment system. Whatever their current dysfunctions, these institutions played a critical role in allowing the two societies to return to growth after the war, and constituted a form of social capital.

What did these institutions do? They bound society. They allowed trust to develop, crucially between workers, so that an honest day’s pay was not going to be wiped out by either hyper-inflation or schemes dreamt up by the occupying powers. An honest day’s work was rewarded and society could get back to rescuing cats from trees and whatever else they do on the banks of the Rhine.

Of course that’s not all Frankie has to say but he goes and ruins his nice ideas with a little apology for Globalisation right at the end, that’s to be expected we suppose. And while we’re on the subject, it’s 2010 and you know what, we’re still not at the end of history buddy!

Back to climate change. Post COP15, there’s a big argument that with the failure of our governments, it is time civil society, and business, stepped up to the mitigation plate. The job they have to do is huge and in order to do it they’re going to have to create even more social capital than was mobilized during the late forties and fifties in Germany and Japan, for without this social capital, the job for CSOs will be next to impossible. But the great thing about social capital is that much like economic capital (i.e. cash), surplus capital can be banked and transferred to those that need it most. Think about a trusted NGO. Let’s say the Red Cross. Over the last century the Red Cross has done a big job in warzones and natural catastrophe areas. On a whole, the world trusts them. When they come looking for money (and trust) in times of peace we happily supply. And when the shit hits the fan they’re ready financially, and in terms of trust, to get to the heart of the action.

Enter the likes of 10:10, a concept keepfakingit endorses so much we went and joined the company. If civil society organisations like 10:10 are to win the day in this battle, you had better believe they are going to have to become the Goldman Sachs of social capital, using every trick in the book to first-off generate that capital, then bank it, and have it spent in the most efficient way possible to cut emissions. Organisations are going to have to work together, and use additively created radii of trust to bring more and more people under their umbrellas of social action. This means building layers and layers of trust (thus social capital) across real life social networks, both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally from nuclear family to nuclear family, through communities, schools, businesses and clubs. Vertically through neighbourhood watch schemes, councils, religious orders and up and over international borders.
This is hugely ambitious, it has to be. And here at keepfakingit we think there’s a chance it may work.