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[Here's a great story from Portugal. My thanks to Isabel and Luis for sending it in]. Hello everyone. We are Isabel and Luis, from Cascais, in Portugal. We have lived here (in Cascais) for the last 15 years, with the blue sea and fabulous sand beaches nearby, on one way and amazing mountain sides on the other, sensing the earth and the sea …
I posted the video of this a couple of weeks ago, but I am deeply grateful to Vanessa Kroll who has transcribed it, in case such a thing would be of interest/use to anyone. Here it is:
“Hello. I want to tell you a story which pulls together a lot of what we’ve heard already and looks at what that might look like in the context of one place. And it’s a story which I think can change the world. It’s a story which already is changing the world. It’s the story of my town, Totnes, in Devon. A town of about 8,500 people, midway between Exeter and Plymouth. But before I can tell you the story what I really want to tell you about Totnes, I have to get another one out of the way first.
Here is some updated information on the Festival of Transition:
The nationwide ‘Festival of Transition’, coordinated by nef (the new economics foundation) and the Transition Network, has begun, running until 20th June, the first day of the 20th UN Earth Summit in Rio. Instead of flying to Brazil, the Festival gives people the opportunity to do something positive about climate change and the economic crisis in their own communities.
What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century? While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site. However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it). The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself. As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.
One of the key outputs from the creation of ‘The Transition Companion’ was the ingredients card game which was launched last October. Each card represents a different ingredient, a different aspect of the process of creating Transition in your community. We have had good feedback from different events where people have used them, and so I was very interested to see this short film of their being used at Transition Town Cheltenham‘s recent AGM:
What they do is to allow a group to celebrate the things it has already done, and to reflect on possible parts of the process that it hasn’t got round to. They can be used to lay them out to tell the story of the initiative so far, with reflection on the cards left unused. They also get away from the idea that Transition is a linear, prescribed process, rather an organic, place-specific assembling of ingredients. What has been your experience with the cards? The activities we have come up with so far can be downloaded here … have you developed any other ones? My thanks to Transition Town Cheltenham for sharing their reflections.
