(Naresh Giangrande recently returned from a Transition Training tour of Sweden, here is a short report about his trip).
I spent a intensely satisfying afternoon with the students of a Folks school in Gotenberg exploring how to tell positive stories of the future especially around climate change. We explored topics like how to tell stories that changed peoples heart and mind, how to tell stories about systems, resilience, and my favourite ‘how do you tell stories about the future’. They invited me to join them because the course tutor had heard of my visit and she thought that having someone from a positive movement about climate action would stimulate and inspire students. It certainly inspired me to work with switched on and passionate teenagers!
A WHILE AGO, I heard an American scientist address an audience in Oxford, England, about his work on the climate crisis. He was precise, unemotional, rigorous, and impersonal: all strengths of a scientist. The next day, talking informally to a small group, he pulled out of his wallet a much-loved photo of his thirteen-year-old son. He spoke as carefully as he had before, but this time his voice was sad, worried, and fatherly. His son, he said, had become so frightened about climate change that he was debilitated, depressed, and disturbed. Some might have suggested therapy, Prozac, or baseball for the child. But in this group one voice said gently, “What about the Transition Initiative?”
The Cultivate Centre in Dublin have just produced a fabulous resource that all Transition groups will find invaluable, the Powerdown Show. This series of 10 20 minute programmes explore many aspects of the Transition movement in a humorous, accessible and inspiring way. Those interviewed in the series include George Monbiot, Paul Allen, Richard Douthwaite, Megan Bachman Quinn, Daniel Lerch, Duncan Stewart, myself and many more. Episode 8 is called ‘Transition Towns and Energy Descent Pathways’ and you can now see it online as a taster for the wonders this DVD contains….
Manawatu Gorge Windfarm with Naresh and interested looking sheep
We are staying up the Pohangina river valley with my sister and family. They live in the rich, rural heartland of the North Island of New Zealand. They have a small holding; 5 acres and run a few lambs and a couple of beef cattle and have a small vege garden and horses for the kids. It’s potentially very resilient and has the makings of a sustainable lifestyle if the rest of their lives weren’t so resource hungry. Like most Kiwis they live a normal unsustainable life amidst a potentially easily sustainable and resilient land, a real contradiction to my eyes.
The most controversial part of the course remains the inner worlds talk – linking the personal psyche with the shape of the society we have created and naming some of the patterns that arise from what is generally unconscious for people in Industrial Growth cultures. We use a model adapted from psychosynthesis, which describes both painful wounding experiences and the healthy potential states whose loss the wounds relate to as being kept out of consciousness to some extent for most individuals in our culture. The place we operate from is a place of learnt adaptation to the world around us – particularly the world of our early childhood where our first experiences of the world, of other, and of life create lasting impressions and shape our worldview.
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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