Transition Culture is back! After a month of Cornish beaches, hemp lime plastering, wood store-building, cinema visits, catching up with friends, storytelling festivals, campfires and wrestling with cabbage white caterpillars, normal service is resumed. Nice to see you again, you’re looking well. I’m kicking off again with some reflections on John Michael Greer’s ‘green wizardry’ concept, which he calls “the current Archdruid Report project”, which will no doubt generate some interesting debate. Greer, for those who don’t know, is a blogger and author whose work I usually admire greatly, whose excellent blog can be found here.
Transition Culture will be closing down for most of August as I stop work and take time out with my family, sit on a beach in Cornwall for a while, visit family, leave my laptop at home, and try not to think about Transition very much (well I can try). The last few days has been a wrapping up of various things, including the thesis I have been doing for the last 3 years (alongside everything else…) which (pause for fireworks, dancing elephants and great plumes of multi-coloured bunting) I handed in today (see left). Don’t have to even think about it once for the next 2 months. Thanks everyone for all your comments and support over the year so far, much appreciated. Have a good few weeks, normal service will be resumed here first week of September, when we’ll be into full-on Pattern Language writing mode, and other exciting new developments to be revealed when activities resume!
As a follow-up to the previous post, here is a short film that was made for the event that announced the 20 winners of the Low Carbon Communities Challenge, which features Transition Streets among the winners.
‘Transition Together’, the street-by-street behaviour change programme developed by Transition Town Totnes and now being piloted in 10 other communities, has just completed analysing the data that has come back from the first 4 groups, comprising 32 households in Totnes. They have completed all 7 of the sessions set out in the workbook, and the data offers a fascinating first look at whether the process works or not. The results from the other 31 groups currently underway are expected this Autumn. Here, Fiona Ward of Transition Together shares the results that have emerged.
There is often confusion within the peak oil/Transition movement about the distinction between the terms ‘localism‘ and ‘localisation‘. On Energy Bulletin yesterday, Richard Moore’s piece, ‘The Emergence of Localism” was actually referring, I would argue, to localisation, not localism. In the UK, in the context of the government’s Big Society agenda, the two definitely mean very different things. Here is section from my forthcoming thesis which explores this distinction.
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»