I walked past a Poundland store this morning, and they have a whole 99p range of Jubilee souvenirs, and that reminded me of the artwork that appeared on the side of a Poundland this week:

Having turned up on monday night, this image was all over the papers and the internet yesterday. Most of the comment seemed to be speculation over whether or not it was Banksy or an imitator, rather than about the content of the image.

It’s a shame, because it makes a good point. Just like the Olympics, the wave of tacky Jubilee merchandise engulfing our high streets is from sweatshops in poorer countries. Our consumerist celebration is at their expense.

The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew yōbhēl, the ram’s horn that was blown to announce the year of Jubilee. According to the law of Moses, every fifty years would be a year of celebration. Slaves would go free. Land that had been sold would be returned to its original owner. Debts would be cancelled, and even the land itself would lie fallow for the year. It was a year for social justice and a fresh start, as well as a big national celebration. We need that kind of jubilee more than ever, and with no concern for anyone but ourselves, ours is a rather empty occasion by comparison.

Today sees the start of the Festival of Transition, “an invitation to think positively about how our lives could change as we adapt to the end of cheap fossil fuels, address the threat of runaway climate change and fix our broken financial system.”

The organisers share my belief that ‘there is no alternative’ is a load of nonsense, and that there are “endless examples” of how things can be different and better. The festival will explore and celebrate some of those ways, through a series of events, walks and social experiments. On June 20^th the festival will mark 24 hours of possibility, when people will be encouraged to try something different for the day.

The list of partners in the festival includes plenty of familiar faces – the New Economics Foundation, the Transition Network, Streetbank, and the Move Your Money campaign among them.

To see what’s happening near you and see how you can get involved, visit the website.

At face value, yes, renewable energy is expensive. It represents an up-front cost at a time when budgets are constrained. This is not a reason not to abandon it. Like any investment, that up-front capital is repaid. And right now, renewable energy is a very good investment. The sector has increased in value by 11% in the last three years, against an economy that has grown by 1.4% in the same time.

It’s the relative price of renewable energy that is most important. Right now, energy from clean sources is more expensive than fossil fuel energy. However, the cost of most forms of renewable energy has been dropping, some of them quite dramatically. Clean Edge reports that the cost of solar PV has fallen by 50% in the last five years. At the same time, the cost of fossil fuels has been rising as global demand increases. Both trends are likely to continue. Wind power is already at grid parity in some parts of the world and as global gas prices rise, it will become increasingly competitive. Renewable energy will eclipse fossil fuel energy in due course, and those countries that are investing now will be better placed to manage the transition.

That’s the key thing that needs to be communicated here: renewable energy is expensive now, but it means lower bills in future. If it leaves us dependent on ever more expensive gas, it is ultimately more expensive not to invest.

There are other benefits too. The Renewable Energy Association calculates that by 2020 renewables will have displaced £60 billion of spending on fossil fuels. We’re increasingly a net importer of natural gas, so that is money spent elsewhere and leaving the economy. With the right support now, we can ensure that most of that £60 billion can be spent in the UK, creating jobs and balancing out our massive trade deficit.

What kind of support are we talking about? Winding down the subsidies that support fossil fuels might be a good start, with the money saved used as start-up funding for domestic renewable energy companies. For all the tabloid whining about green taxes, we spend more considerably more subsidising fossil fuels than we do supporting clean energy. In 2010 Britain spent £3.63 billion on subsidies to fossil fuels, and £1.4 billion on renewable energy subsidies, according to OECD figures. Most of those fossil fuel subsidies are in the form of reduced VAT rates on household bills. There would be an outcry if those were removed, but they could be changed rather than scrapped. The reduced rate could be variable and linked to the percentage of clean energy in the fuel mix of the tariff. That way, consumers would have an incentive to switch to greener tariffs, and energy companies were encouraged to invest more in renewable energy.

What else can we do? We need to hold our nerve on the feed-in tariff and renewable heat incentives, encouraging the sector to grow but without creating a bubble. A government procurement strategy would support smaller scale renewables and spread jobs around the country, retrofitting every school, hospital or council building. The government’s proposed energy bill is a perfect opportunity to get us on the right path.

Most importantly perhaps, the conversation needs to change.  ‘Green taxes’ are not the reason why our fuel bills are so high, and renewable energy is not uneconomic when understood in the context of energy trends. Politicians need to commit, and stop sending mixed signals to those businesses wanting to expand. The renewable energy revolution is happening, and the more we drag our feet about it the higher our fuel bills will be in ten years time.

• The small print to running the Olympics fills 33 manuals on four feet of bookshelf space and makes the IOC sound like fascists.

• Remember the UNICEF brick idea? How about a Heineken bottle brick instead?

• Beyond Kony 2012: Atrocity, Awareness and Activism in the Internet Age is a new ebook on the man in question and this year’s campaign, for anyone inspired/frustrated/perplexed by the Kony phenomenon. It includes a number of local voices and it’s available on a donation basis.

All across the US, development has been patterned around traffic. Roads are wide, buildings are set back from them with parking lots in the middle. Zoning laws keep residential areas and commercial districts separate.  Density guidelines leave big gaps between buildings. Rental housing, multi-occupancy housing and larger houses are all built independently.

All of this affects the way that people live in those places. You have to drive, as walking is impossible even where there is a sidewalk. Nobody hangs out of the street and there are no useful public spaces, so there is no sense of community or place. Because richer families live in entirely separate districts to single people or poorer families, people never interact with other sectors of society. Main streets wither as shoppers drive out to out-of-town malls. Democracy, community, culture and the environment all suffer, and people live in soulless “places not worth caring about”.

It doesn’t have to be like that of course. Despite the name ‘new urbanism’, there’s nothing new about livable towns. That’s how they used to be built and the movement might have fewer opponents if it was called ‘old urbanism’. Mixed use developments, intersecting streets, shops with apartments above them, garages in alleys to keep cars from dominating residential streets, on-street parking to create a buffer between pedestrians and the road and avoid large parking lots, these are all hallmarks of some of America’s most treasured small towns. “The pattern that the New Urbanism models is not the urban slum, but the traditional American town. This is not a pattern of life that should frighten reasonable people. Millions pays forty dollars a day to walk through a grossly oversimplified version of it at Disney World.”

There are techniques for building good towns, and Home from Nowhere has lots of line drawings showing ideal road widths, building heights, walkable neighbourhoods. Kunstler argues with surprising passion that vertical windows are more dignified than horizontal ones. Architecture matters as much as planning. Ugly buildings devalue public space, because they don’t care about those outside them. They are selfish, only serving the occupants. Good architecture recognises that buildings shape the neighbourhood.

Behind all of this are more philosophical questions. We will build things that serve our vision of a good life. If we have a consumerist, individualist notion of personal success, then plastic McMansions is what will get built. Good towns need a deeper understanding of what makes life worth living, development that values society, culture and beauty. Kunstler insists that these are moral questions and can’t be ignored, whatever the planning department might say.

And therein lies a tale or two. Much of the book is given over to real world examples of developers trying to do something different. Many of their projects stall simply because local zoning laws make it illegal to build in a sustainable fashion. Mixed use neighbourhoods are forbidden. If you can get round the zoning laws, there are local residents who see all development as hostile, even though a well planned development can re-invigorate a town. Fortunately, there are success stories too, and there are plenty of great projects and inspirational people. The book was written in 1996, and an updated version would have many more to choose from.

Britain has less space than the US and our land use policies never got so extreme, but we still have a sprawl problem. This is a book that raises a host of important questions about why we build what we build, and it does so with eloquence, humour, anger and hope.

I’m a big fan of proper bread, and I like what the Real Bread Campaign do. But the reason I’m writing about it today is that what happened to bread over the last 50 years is both an interesting story, and a good case study in the mixed blessings of industrialisation.

Food in Britain has gone through some dramatic changes in the last century, and some of the biggest changes were a result of the Second World War. We weren’t growing enough of our own food at the start of the war, and one of Germany’s strategies was to cut off imports. I’ve written about the Home Front before, and how the Ministry of Food responded. Food production became centrally planned, with rationing carried over well after the war, and price controls on certain foods to try and encourage production and keep prices down.

Among the victims of this process was traditional cheese. To streamline supplies and use milk efficiently, the government banned all varieties except ‘government cheddar‘ in 1945. The ban lasted for nine years, and at the end of it the number of cheese manufacturers had gone from 3,500 to a mere 100. It still hasn’t recovered.

Bread was also under tight restrictions. Bakers were considered important enough to be exempt from military duties during the war, but their products were restricted – no more white bread, just the ‘national loaf’. It was a brown loaf, to reduce our dependency on white flour imported from America, and this was the underlying problem. Britain grew a lot of wheat, but it was low protein varieties – good for biscuits or pastry, but not for bread. To reduce our dependency on imports and lower the price of bread for ordinary people, what the nation needed was a way to make bread out of British wheat.

The government set up the British Baking Industries Research Association, and by 1961 they had cracked it. The result was the Chorleywood Bread Process. You could use lower protein British wheat, but it wasn’t easy. You needed various additives such as emulsifiers and oxidisers, along with more salt, more yeast and more fat. You needed whiteners to stop it looking grey. Since it wouldn’t rise in the same way as traditional dough, high speed industrial mixers were used to create air bubbles.

CBP bread was also less nutritious, less digestible, and lacking in flavour. But it was fast and cheap to produce, and lasted for a week without going hard. It helped our wheat farmers, opened up new possibilities for industrial baking, and suited the new supermarkets. People wanted cheaper bread and processed foods were exciting at the time. There was a novelty factor to this new and softer bread. We made the switch and never looked back.

We all know what CBP bread looks and tastes like. It’s the soft, flannelly bread sold pre-sliced in plastic bags. It is stacked high in the aisles of every supermarket and cornershop in the land. It’s very cheap, reaching its cheapest in 1999 when a supermarket price war brought the cost of Tesco’s basic white loaf down to a tiny 7p.

Today, 80% of Britain’s bread is made using the Chorleywood Bread Process, and almost all of it comes from just two major corporations. Associated British Foods owns Kingsmill, Sunblest, Burgen and Allinson (ABF also owns Twinings, Patak’s and the clothing retailer Primark). The other big player is Premier Foods, which owns Hovis and Mother’s Pride, along with Lyon’s, Mr Kipling and dozens of other brands. It also provides own-brand supermarket bread.

Writing in 2003 in her book Not on the Label, Felicity Lawrence observed that 80% of our bread was made in just 11 factories. A further 17% was baked in-store in supermarkets. Just 2% came from artisan bakers. There were 3,500 independent bakeries operating in Britain, while France had 35,000.

I hope the balance is swinging back the other way a little now. It’s certainly easier to find better bread in the shops and there is a renewed interest in artisan foods of all kinds. Breadmakers have made it easy for the clumsiest of home bakers to produce a great loaf at home. British wheat varieties have improved considerably since the 1950s, and people are more concerned about additives and fat and salt content. Perhaps it’s time we reclaimed bread from the scientists and the corporations.

CBP bread is the classic industrial compromise – valuing price over nutrition and convenience over flavour. It destroys jobs in high-street bakeries and creates jobs in factories. It takes power from family businesses and hands it to corporations. It replaces craft and tradition with chemistry and machinery. Is the compromise worth it? I suppose it was in 1961. I don’t think it is now, and I wish the Real Bread Campaign the best of luck. Support the campaign by seeking out a real bread maker this week – visit a local bakery, or bake your own at home.

I wrote two years ago that the recovery wasn’t as secure as we seemed to expect, that growth in 2011 was likely to be flat, and that we may be in for a longer, Japan-style plateau. Looking back at those posts, the situation is pretty much unchanged. Growth is still extremely unlikely. Why? Because our main avenues of growth are now closed.

Last year the financial services company Tullett Prebon released a rather radical report called Thinking the Unthinkable. It examines the composition of the British economy and where any future growth might come from. It’s not a pretty picture. Almost two fifths of the economy is made up of financial services, real estate and construction. The last decade’s growth in all three of those turned out to be a speculative bubble. The banks are now recapitalising, house prices are still too high, and nobody wants to risk construction projects in a downturn. So that’s 40% of the economy on ice.

Another fifth of the economy is public spending, which is in rapid retreat. The government’s austerity plans are only getting started, so that’s 20% of the economy ruled out. Retail accounts for another 10%, and that is slowing as wages fail to keep up with inflation. Take all this together, and 70% of the economy is more or less incapable of contributing to further growth.

So what have we got left? Well, perhaps we should make something and sell it to someone. Perhaps aware of the above, this was George Osborne’s original plan – a recovery ‘borne aloft on the march of the makers’. But even if our manufacturers find niches where they can compete with Chinese wages, and even if they can find export markets to sell to in a time of global uncertainty, manufacturing is only 10% of the economy. It is unlikely to be able offset the declines elsewhere. To borrow the ONS’s term, the outlook for Britain’s growth is therefore, ‘flattish’.

Today, David Cameron and Nick Clegg appear to be finally admitting that they’ve not understood the extent of the problem. “Here is the unvarnished truth” says the former. “The damage done by the crisis was greater than anyone thought.”

“Our economy has undergone a massive trauma,” echoes Mr Clegg, “the depth and nature of which we are only beginning to fully grasp.”

Indeed. Our politicians aren’t any better at predicting double-dip recessions than our economists.

So what should we do? Stop panicking – that would be a good start. We can’t assume that growth will return and that’s not the end of the world. We should be learning to live without it anyway, what with climate change, resource depletion and a rising global population.

Instead, we should be pursuing qualitative growth instead of quantitative – including greater equality, a healthier democracy, stronger communities, and more resilient ways of life.

Here’s the trailer:

Today is International Permaculture Day. It’s the first one, an extension of Australia’s national permaculture day which has been running for three years. Australia is the spiritual home of permaculture, developed as it was by two Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Or at least they came up with the name. What they were essentially doing is observing ancient and sustainable ways of living, and codifying the rules that made them work. In Mollison’s words, “Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted & thoughtless action.”

The result is a set of ecological design principles for creating sustainable systems. Those principles include zero waste, observation, conserving energy, minimum intervention, and valuing diversity, among various others. They are often considered in the context of agriculture, but they can be applied to anything from urban planning to organising your sock drawer, should you be so inclined. The Transition Towns movement is inspired by permaculture, applying it to energy, transport and economics as well as growing food.

Our current way of life depletes the soil, pollutes the air, and results in ever decreasing resources. It’s not so much a way of life as a way of death. If future generations are to flourish, we need to re-invent our systems with a long-term view, and permaculture is a toolbox for doing just that. If you’ve never looked into it, perhaps today would be a good day to start.

• International Permaculture Day
• The urban permaculture guild
• The permaculture institute
• Permaculture on Wikipedia
• Previous posts on permaculture

Personally, I’m a bit conflicted about the term and I can’t quite put my finger on why it makes me uncomfortable. There’s something self-congratulatory about it, putting ourselves at the centre and defining everything else around us. It gives us the illusion of power over the planet, when we are clearly out of control. The fancy name also hides the fact that our impact is overwhelmingly negative. Given that our planetary tinkering is pretty much a slow and complicated form of collective self-destruction, shouldn’t we speak as plainly about it as we can? And given how long the earth’s cycles run for, it may be a little premature to be calling the next one ours so soon. Maybe be should wait another 10,000 years to be sure.

On the other hand, there’s no denying that humanity is having a massive impact on our homeworld. I still regularly hear people deny that, and suggest that it is arrogant to suggest that we could change the planet. Science says otherwise. You don’t have to know much chemistry to know that small changes can have a big impact. Some pesticides can kill fish at concentrations of 0.04 parts per million. It’s not so crazy to suggest that changing the CO2 content of the atmosphere by a matter of hundreds of parts per million could be significant. Planetary systems are held in a fine balance and we have shown that we’re capable of altering them. In which case we might as well acknowledge the changes, and naming them might be a good way of owning up to it – like Bill McKibben’s somewhat clunky renaming of the planet, Eaarth.

If the idea of the anthropocene makes us face up to our responsibilities, then I suppose it’s useful. But I’m not sure if I like it.