If we had £100m we could do an awful lot of excellent projects. The idea that we should not want money to make the transition vision happen is just a little bonkers. People are bankrupting themselves to try and this off the ground – from my experience this is a common state for environmental activists. Doing this work just does not pay the bills (especially in places with poverty issues). To pretend that we do not need money is hopelessly naive. We need to build capacity to look after the people who are making transition happen, and to do this we need to take money into account.

Manoel is also right regarding the need for media to spread transition. But perhaps even more important in getting the transition concepts to other audiences on a grassroots level. By other audiences I mean others aside from the middle class white people who are the standard transitioners.

We need to start thinking much more seriously about the financial realities of how we are going to make the transition happen. I for one, would like to say that if anyone wants to give the Transition Network £100m, please ignore Naresh. Allow transitioners with some financial acumen make practical plans on how to turn this transition concept into a reality. The troops in the fields need to be fed!

Nowadays society is a media-controled society. And with money you can enter the mass media to spread the Transition (healthy) virus. And when I say “media” I think about the Internet as well. A lot of viral marketing could be done with money, believe me… Money gives time to people and is useful to buy time of their media attention, also.

Though I chose to be ruled by nature’s seasons and timings, rather than Modern Society ones, and they said to my Celtic Galician ancestors that the New Year started on Hallowe’en (Samhain)… Happy Transitional New Year!

Thanks for this update. I particularly liked your quote “Low energy houses have a special quality, they are so comfortable and have a connection to life that ordinary houses don’t have.” I kind of know what you mean, and I wonder why it is… Probably it is about a number of different things…

But I was less sure about the answer you gave to your favourite question, “What would Transition do with $100m?” I don’t understand why we wouldn’t want it.

Ok, I kind of understand what I think you mean — that Transition is about people becoming resilient and that is about choosing to do it for ourselves. So being given a pile of cash just wouldn’t work because once the cash has run out then nothing else has changed.

But surely if Transition had $100m then there are ways we could use it to accelerate the changes that we seek? So that more people decide to become resilient sooner, and it takes less time to reach the point where everyone is living in a low energy house?

I realise that if we tried to pay for house insulation, or solar panels, or land to grow food then $100m wouldn’t go very far. We still need to do all those things for ourselves, matching local needs and circumstances.

But couldn’t we use the $100m to pay for twenty more Nareshes and Sophys to travel the world delivering transition training? That would help more people decide to change faster. Or we could extend the training to cover more of the new skills we are all going to need. And we could get better and faster at sharing and developing the best practices that independent Transition Groups are already developing around the world.

We could even use some of the money to help set up new businesses that make and sell the new “powerdown technologies” we are all going to need in the future — things like ‘hand grain mills’ for example — which the existing system has no interest in developing.

There are probably other things we could do as well, and I just don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to do them.

Best regards, and Happy New Year in the snow!
Finn