We’ve got so many wonderfully diverse and inspiring activities to show you this month…ideas for getting people involved and having fun! And they’re here for the sharing…
In the UK, TT Luton is organising a series of Grow Your Own events to relocalise food production and consumption, with discussions and a quiz to encourage people to grow their own fruit and vegetables, while Southend-on-Sea in Transition organised a day’s introduction to Permaculture with more events lined up that you’re invited to get involved with. TT Leek is getting hold of allotments and orchards so they can plant more trees and increase production of native British apple varieties, while TT Nailsea is sharing its gardening skills with other local people to increase self-sufficiency in food production, strengthen local resilience and encourage people to think more about their carbon footprints.
One of Totnes’s best kept secrets is cartoonist Simon French (who, trivia fans, is the son of the head of Sixth Form from when I was at school). Every week his column ‘Two Knights in the Castle’, based around two knights sitting on the walls of Totnes Castle, grows more surreal and ploughs its own furrow. I love it. Here is the latest one, which you might enjoy (click on it to see it in its full glory). You can check out his work at his blog, although I think it might be temporarily down.
Tim Kasser was recently in Totnes giving a talk, and the good folks at nu-project were there with their cameras. While Tim was in Totnes I also did an interview with him which I will be posting here over the next couple of days.
At the recent Soil Association conference in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago I cornered Mike Small of the Fife Diet and asked him a few questions about what is happening in Fife. Their work has huge implications for Transition, as well as offering some fascinating insights into the practicalities of the relocalisation of the food system. I started by asking Mike how the Fife Diet got started.
“So we launched at the Big Tent Festival. It was a rainy day and we got people together in a tent talking about local food. I suggested this and people thought it was a good idea. So we tried to do it for a year, almost a hundred per cent. So for example, we allowed ourselves to drink coffee, but other than that all our food was sourced from Fife.
“Christian Ecology Link have launched a support network for “Churches in Transition”, part of the Transition Towns movement, and has held a major national conference on the transition to low carbon lives. At their bi-annual gathering in Scarborough this weekend, 50 participants from across the Christian spectrum came together to explore the implications of climate change and ‘peak oil’.
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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