I am hopefully now only days from handing in the PhD I have been doing, the closing stages of a gruelling marathon. I posted a couple of weeks ago the contents and the layout of the thesis, which is called ‘Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)’. I thought you might like to see a section of it, to give you a flavour. Apologies to regular readers that this is written in a far more academic style than you might be used to here, but hopefully you will find it useful and relevant. It comes from a section looking at the relocalisation of food, and draws from the different research I did. I am importing this from Word, so some of the formatting might go a little wierd….
Totnes legend poet Matt Harvey has just posted, as part of his occasional ‘mattmail’ email newsletter (which you can subscribe to on his website), a rather wonderful poem about slugs. Matt is an old friend of Transition, and did the equally wonderful piece for BBC Devon about TTT a while ago. Given that slugs are an oft-discussed subject here at Transition Culture, I thought you would enjoy this…. Matt is the Wimbledon Tennis Championships’ official ‘Poet-in-Residence’, so expect to hear more from Totnes’s favourite export in coming weeks. I love slugs being referred to as “bold-as-brass brassica editors”…
The Ministry of Food: thrifty wartime ways to feed your family today. Jane Fearnley Whittingstall. (2010) Hodder & Stoughton and the Imperial War Museum.
I hadn’t heard of this until a couple of weeks ago, when a group of folks visiting from the US dropped by, en route from London, where they had visited an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum called ‘The Ministry of Food’ (which runs until January 3rd 2011), gave me their copy of this book. Having read this book, I will definitely make a point of going to see the exhibition next time I am in London. The book is the exhibition catalogue, but it is also a superb stand-alone publication, offering many useful insights on how the British people managed during the war, how the Ministry of Food successfully promoted the Dig for Victory/Kitchen Front campaigns which kept the country from starvation, and, ironically, led to the healthiest population in the country’s recent history.
Ian and Margaret Campbell of Transition Town West Kirby recently researched and published, together with the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners (NSALG), a report called ‘Allotment Waiting Lists in England 2010′. The report, which you can download in full here, is an up-to-date detailed look at what is happening in terms of allotment provision. They found that waiting lists have grown 20% just in the last year, and that in some parts of the UK, some people will need to wait as much as 40 years for an allotment, but the average wait is 3 years. They estimate that nationally, 180,000 people are waiting for allotments, and that while Councils have a statutory duty to provide allotments, most are failing to do so. Publication of the report generated a lot of press coverage, including this piece in the Telegraph, and pieces in the Sun, Mirror (see top left) and the Express. A fantastic piece of work, and great to see Transition initiatives getting this kind of coverage.
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
Read more»
I am hopefully now only days from handing in the PhD I have been doing, the closing stages of a gruelling marathon. I posted a couple of weeks ago the contents and the layout of the thesis, which is called ‘Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)’. I thought you might like to see a section of it, to give you a flavour. Apologies to regular readers that this is written in a far more academic style than you might be used to here, but hopefully you will find it useful and relevant. It comes from a section looking at the relocalisation of food, and draws from the different research I did. I am importing this from Word, so some of the formatting might go a little wierd…. 
Totnes legend poet Matt Harvey has just posted, as part of his occasional ‘mattmail’ email newsletter (which you can subscribe to on 
