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An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent


20 Jan 2012

It’s the January podcast – award winning markets, 60,000 trees and cardboard cafes!

Here is the January Transition podcast, lovingly spliced together in order to offer a more in depth look at three of the stories from last month’s round-up.  You’ll hear about how Transition Chesham’s local produce market was recently voted the greenest market in Britain, how Transition Town Whitehead are planning to plant 60,000 trees over the next few weeks, and how Transition Town Shrewsbury stepped in when the local council announced that it was stopping collecting cardboard for recycling, and did it themselves.  I hope you enjoy it, and do let us know what you think.

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13 Jan 2012

What it looks like when food grows everywhere

Today I’d like to share a map with you (click on it and it will magically fill your screen), and I’m hugely grateful to Geri Smyth for giving me this.  It is a map of the town of Guildford (or Guldeford as it was then) in 1793.  Regular readers will know I love a good map, and I have spent a fair while poring over this one.  There are a couple of things I love about it.  Firstly, it is the most amazing piece of draughtsmanship.  It is a thing of extraordinary beauty in a way that Googlemaps can only dream of.  The way its laid out, the calligraphy, the attention to detail, are beautiful in a way very few people could recreate today.  But what is so extraordinary, upon closer inspection, is how it captures what it looks like when food grows everywhere. Think of it, if you like, as Incredible Edible Guildford, circa. 1739.  

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9 Jan 2012

Film review: Why ‘Thrive’ is best avoided

What do you do when you are the heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and you have spent years surrounding yourself with new agey thinking and conspiracy theories?  You make a film like ‘Thrive‘, the latest conspiracy theory movie that is popping up all over the place.  I’ve lost count of the number of people who have asked me “have you seen ‘Thrive’?”  Well I have now, and, to be frank, it’s dangerous tosh which deserves little other than our derision.  It is also a very useful opportunity to look at a worldview which, according to Georgia Kelly writing at Huffington Post, masks “a reactionary, libertarian political agenda that stands in jarring contrast with the soothing tone of the presentation”.  

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9 Jan 2012

From Norwich magazine: Transition Norwich, three years on…

Here’s a great article from the latest edition (‘The Green Issue’) of Norwich magazine, to whom I am very grateful for permission to republish in full.  You can also download the pdf of the article here with more of Tony Buckingham’s excellent photos here. 

Close to home

In November, Transition Norwich celebrated its third birthday. Sabine Virani investigates a green initiative that is part of a global movement yet focuses on local need, local interest and local resources.

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6 Jan 2012

Everything you could possibly want to know about ‘In Transition 2.0′

‘In Transition 2.0′ is nearly ready to be unveiled to the world!  We are very excited about this inspiring reweaving of the Transition story, and want to tell you more about it here, and about how it will be rolled out over the coming months.  To get us started, because we are so excited about sharing this with you, here is the film’s trailer, completed just yesterday, directed by Caspar Walsh.

Hopefully that has sufficiently whet your appetite for what is a remarkable film.  

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