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Natural born survivors. The Guardian. Friday 2nd May. Original here.
Rising oil prices, global food shortages and the economic crisis are proof for many survivalists that society is on the brink of meltdown. But are their predictions all gloom and doom - or a chance to create new communities? Harriet Green reports.
TheTransition storyline in the Archers continues to evolve, leading many out there in Archersland to ask “what is a Transition Village anyway?” The Archers website this week offers a very useful and concise overview of what a Transition Initiative is, and it is quite a thorough overview.
This week, Pat is visiting Stroud in Gloucestershire to research her idea that Ambridge should become a “transition community”. But what would this process involve, and why?
It’s very rare that someone comes up with a genuinely new idea, but the concept of Transition Initiatives is one such. Transition aims to confront the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil at the level of the community - whether town, village, district or city - and for the initiative to come from the people themselves. Rob Hopkins is both the person who invented the idea and the author of this book.
A while ago in Totnes we ran a course on sock darning. It felt to us like a very important skill to start retraining people in, and one of the many useful things the older generation could pass on to the younger. Although some people thought it a great idea, I did get a lot of ribbing about it (if you’ll excuse the knitting pun). However, in the subsequent months, sock darning has started to catch on. It’s the new salsa.
Our local wonderful organic clothing company, Greenfibres, recently put a great film about sock darning on YouTube (see below), which demystifies this most basic of arts so rapidly being consigned to the dustbin of history.
In last night’s Archers, Pat Archer took another step towards setting up Transition Ambridge, as she prepared for a fact-finding trip to Stroud. The reference at the beginning to ‘King Cups’ is, I think, the name of one of their fields. Anyway, in this episode, she is talking to her husband Tony, about how her Transition research is going, and about her trip.
Pat. Do you want a hand with the milking Tony?
