7 Dec 2006
Skilling Up For Powerdown Course Notes – online until January 1st.
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I recently finished teaching a 10 week evening class called **Skilling Up for Powerdown** in Totnes. The course will run again in January and is already nearly full. To accompany the course I prepared each week a collection of materials to accompany the course, from weblinks and books, to notes and presentations. You might be interested to have a look. At New Year I will be taking it down, so that when the course starts again it will build week-by-week again, as the course unfolds. Any of you involved in education around energy descent/powerdown stuff might find it useful. I plan in the new year to write it up in more detail, as a course facilitator’s resource guide, but for now, I hope you find this interesting.
Kathy Mcmahon
8 Dec 12:41pm
Rob,
Thank you so much for posting this great resource. I’m looking forward to reading it and following the links…
Jennifer
8 Dec 4:49pm
Ditto on the thanks. This is a great compilation of important info.
Can you tell me how you figured out (in week 6) how much water went to what purpose in your home? I’d like to figure it out for my house.
Rob
8 Dec 5:44pm
Hi Jennifer,
Those figures come from Patrick Whitelfield’s ‘Earth Care Manual’. I took them as they were as gospel! Glad you found it useful.
All the best
Rob
Davie
9 Dec 5:43pm
Thanks for sharing this Rob. This week we just finished our four week introduction to Community Powerdown here at the Cultivate Centre in Dublin which was oversubscribed, and the next 6 week course which starts in January is almost sold out. There is such a hunger for this sort of information right now. This course was a pilot for the 10 week course that we are developing a CD ROM learning Resource to support. This CD and training for trainers will be available from April. The resource contains video clips, audio files, readings, course plans, games and whatever else we can find to help communicate the issues. We will be sharing the resources used on the Powerdown pages on http://www.sustainable.ie and look forward to working with you and all your readers to further awareness and get people ready to make a response to peak oil and climate change in their own communities. Keep up the great work everyone.
Albert Bates
10 Dec 2:31pm
You have provided an essential resource, and those of us who have been offering courses and introductions to this subject are in your debt now. We have been giving 2-week courses in Peak Oil preparedness at the Ecovillage Training Center in Tennessee since 2005 and our own manuals pale in comparison. This is an evolving curriculum, however, so improvements will pour in from everywhere.
I am only slightly sad that my own book, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, reached you too late to be included. Perhaps it will make it into the next edition.
Good job.
Rob
10 Dec 9:53pm
Indeed it will. In fact, plug plug, I would even suggest that alongside Patrick Whitefield’s book, Albert’s Post Petroleum Survival Guide is the essential course companion.
Albert, in an article a few years ago, coined the term I use now when people ask me the eternally tricky question “so what do you do?”. I reply “I’m a postpetroleumologist”. Neat.