30 Jul 2008
Most of us live in houses built before there was any awareness of energy efficiency, and consequently most of us live in houses that are insufficiently insulated, excessively draughty, poorly oriented and costly to heat. While we may dream of strawbale passive houses, the reality is that most of us will spend the rest of our lives in these houses. As we plunge headlong into a world of soaring energy prices (the average family expected to spend £1000 on gas by the end of the year) we can no longer afford to, in effect, heat the skies above our homes. So what to do? On Saturday 5th July, TTT held an event that visited 3 very different houses in Totnes to look at the challenges particular to them.
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28 Jul 2008
Last week, Somerset County Council voted unanimously to endorse a motion that they become the UK’s first ‘Transition Local Authority’. What is means is that SCC could start taking an integrated approach to its planning processes, putting peak oil and climate change at the heart of its forward planning. It may well also unlock funds for the many Transition initiatives emerging across Somerset. The proposal put before the Council ran as follows;
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25 Jul 2008
I spent a couple of days last week attending the Green New Deal think-tank type event in London, and at one point we were asked to speak about what we thought we would see in the world in 50 months from now (late 2012). One of the things I came up with was “the first World Cup Finals to be cancelled because no-one could get to them”. While football isn’t a subject often touched on here at Transition Culture, I have to confess I love it, and am fascinated by what we might come to call ‘peak football’. Football is not immune to the credit crunch nor to rising fuel prices, and in this age of ridiculous salaries being given to top players and insane transfer fees, something, at some point, has to give, and it looks like it might be starting to happen as we speak.
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23 Jul 2008
Last Saturday we had Starhawk in Totnes giving a talk as part of Transition Town Totnes‘ programme of talks. Her talk was excellent, very inspiring (and she kept it all together even when one woman in the audience collapsed and had to be taken off in an ambulance), and at the end she did a guided visualisation thing which I thought was a very useful tool for helping people to start visualising a powered-down future. You might like to try it out with your Transition group if it feels useful… I can see places where it might come in useful, although I often avoid the term ‘visualisation’ as it can press some peoples’ woo-woo buttons… I tend to call it ‘an imagination exercise’, or somesuch…. anyway, it went something like this….
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23 Jul 2008
The day after Starhawk’s talk in Totnes, she visited my house so that we could do a short interview. It was a gloriously sunny day, and after we had concluded the interview, I gave her a tour of my garden (well, my raised beds at least). The interview ranged across Transition work, managing grief, activism, permaculture and much more…
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Most of us live in houses built before there was any awareness of energy efficiency, and consequently most of us live in houses that are insufficiently insulated, excessively draughty, poorly oriented and costly to heat. While we may dream of strawbale passive houses, the reality is that most of us will spend the rest of our lives in these houses. As we plunge headlong into a world of soaring energy prices (the average family expected to spend £1000 on gas by the end of the year) we can no longer afford to, in effect, heat the skies above our homes. So what to do? On Saturday 5th July, TTT held an event that visited 3 very different houses in Totnes to look at the challenges particular to them. 
