Transition Culture

24 Feb 2006

BeyondPeak.com Announces Peak Oil Scenario Competition

As regular visitors will know, **TransitionCulture** is fascinated with the visioning of peak oil scenarios, helping people to replace their default nightmare scenarios with positive visions of how a peak oil world could be. We need to have a clear vision of where we are going in order to be able to embark on the journey, in the same way that if we are trying to entice a reluctant friend to come on holiday with us we will need to tell him about how wonderful the place we are going is, the great food, the scenery, the relaxing beaches. We are therefore delighted to be able to help promote **BeyondOil.com**’s First Annual “Who Knows? Things Might Get Better

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24 Feb 2006

Reflections on EcoBuild at Earl’s Court 2.

EcoBuild is the biggest green building exhibition in the UK, and ran over 2 days, 22nd and 23rd February. I went up for the first day, to give a talk called ‘Designing for Transition’. The event was in a huge hall and was very well attended. There were hundreds of stalls, everything from Government Agencies to community development groups and from architects to solar energy companies. It was great to see that the mainstream is starting to take the concept of more sustainable building seriously, and that so many people from within the industry attended. It was heartening to observe the diversity of people who attended, and the degree to which people were aware of the need for changing current practices. There were some wonderful things, some of which I’ll touch on over the next few days, but in this post I want to touch on one of the things that struck me most, the prolific abuse, in my eyes, of the word sustainable.

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23 Feb 2006

Clay Plastering in Charing Cross Tube Station

I was up in London over the last couple of days (hence the lack of posts…) to attend the **EcoBuild** conference (I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow) where I was to give a talk. On my way there I passed through Charing Cross underground station, which is decorated with beautiful floor to ceiling panels of old woodcuts showing medieval folks building houses. It shows people gathering coppice timber and building stone walls, but my natural builder’s eye was drawn to one that showed people preparing clay plasters.

That looks very familiar I thought, and was cast back to

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21 Feb 2006

‘Cancel That Apocalypse’ – Delusional peak oil nonsense from Bloomberg.

I wrote last week about peak oil denial, and the many forms it takes. **Bloomberg.com** recently published a staggeringly ill-informed piece by Matthew Lynn called Cancel That Apocalypse – The Oil Crisis Is Over which begins *”forget that order for a funny- looking electric car. Take the solar panels off the roof. Don’t worry about hoarding tinned food for the long economic slump that is about to engulf the world. Why? Because the oil crisis we were all concerned about less than a year ago is quietly going away”*. Hmmm. I sense a case of peak oil denial…

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20 Feb 2006

New Permaculture Activist focuses on Peak Oil

The ever-wonderful **Permaculture Activist** magazine focuses on a particular aspect of permaculture in each issue. The latest edition, No. 59, focuses on peak oil. It contains a wealth of interesting material, some of which, such as Lisa Rayner’s article on Trauma Theory and my piece on Designing Energy Descent Pathways will already be familiar to TransitionCulture regulars, while there are many other insightful pieces such as Thom Hartmann’s exploration of the ‘something will save us’ mindset, and a very good piece on the lessons we can learn from Cuba. If you are interested in TransitionCulture-type stuff and don’t already subscribe to the Activist, do yourself a favour, you can do so either here or here.

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