Monthly archive for November 2010
Showing results 16 - 20 of 29 for the month of November, 2010.
12 Nov 2010
Many of you who attended or followed the 2010 Transition Network conference will have either been to, or have subsequently listened to Stoneleigh’s presentation, which led to the coining of the term ‘The Stoneleigh Effect’, which generally consists of rather glazed eyes, sweaty palms and a look of distinct panic. Well, in a few weeks, Stoneleigh is back in the UK to do a short series of talks (I will let you know the itinerary when I have it), and Peter Lipman and myself, the Paxman and Dimbleby of Transition, will be interviewing Stoneleigh for this very website. We’d love to know what questions you would like to ask her, and we’ll take as many of your questions as we can along to the interview. Do post any questions you have in the comments below…. Thanks.
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12 Nov 2010
Preparing vegetable boxes at Growing Communities, a local food social enterprise in Hackney.
Context
Your ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN (5.1) (if you do one) will identify a range of key catalysts for the creation of STRATEGIC LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE (5.5), and will stimulate thinking about SCALING UP (5.3) your initiative to take a greater role in making that happen. Also, as a range of PRACTICAL MANIFESTATIONS (3.9) start to emerge, and the need for FINANCING YOUR WORK (3.3) in the current funding-starved environment, it makes sense to start looking WORKING WITH LOCAL BUSINESSES (3.12) and also to thinking about what new enterprises can be created from what your initiative is doing.
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11 Nov 2010
Continuing this process of asking for your experience and stories as part of creating these ‘ingredients’ of Transition for the new book, I would today like to ask for your thoughts about financing your Transition initiative. How do you fund your work? From events? Benefactors? Crowd funding? Pledgebank? Sitting in baths of cold baked beans or shaving your beards off? Any innovative approaches you have developed that you would like to share? Or perhaps you have evolved a model that requires not a cent in order to function…. any thoughts very welcome on this soggy Thursday afternoon….
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11 Nov 2010
Transition Cakes (clockwise from top left): Kingston, Brixton, Bro Ddyfi, Totnes.
Context
At key points of your AWARENESS RAISING (2.9) programme, such as your UNLEASHING (3.14) or times especially worthy of CELEBRATING (3.4), someone often makes an amazing cake…
(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).
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9 Nov 2010
Here is a section from my recently completed thesis, which is available here, which looks at the potential of local building materials in the relocalisation process.
“The process of building with bales includes the possibility of making a profound change in the fabric of human societies around the world. In fact this vision is not exclusively a matter of straw bales: the questions we are trying to pose…. are basic: how do we build, and how does that process occur in relation to the community and to the life around us? Straw bales happen to be the material that has inspired many to look at the process of building in a different light”. (Steen et al.1994: xvi).
In the same way the local food movement shifts its focus from out-of-season, long supply chain, high embodied energy foods towards more locally sourced, low impact foods rooted in the local region or ‘foodshed’ (Kloppenberg et al. 1996), an emerging branch of architecture and construction examine similar transitions with building materials.
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