An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent
Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
I read Michael Brownlee’s recent piece ‘The Evolution of Transition in the US‘, with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of “Transition, nice idea, but it isn’t [ … ] enough”. So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn’t technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn’t politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of ‘premature triumphalism’, for Ted Trainer it isn’t sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the ‘Sacred’ at the heart of what it does.
Members of Transition Town Barcelona head off on their 'Caminata'
In Europe, exciting news from Ferney-Voltaire, which has decided to become a Transition Town and they’ve just started their awareness raising activities, so welcome to them. SQYenTransition in France have this great project with the lovely name of verger dans ma ville…an orchard in my city. And for an idea worth sharing, have a look at Transition Town Barcelona’s La Caminata, or Transition Walkabout…a nice idea that helps you get to know your town and community more, and helps them to get to know about you too.
Well now here’s something wonderful from Transition York Region in Canada. I won’t say much about it, just sit back and enjoy… can’t help wishing they might perhaps move around a bit more though…
In June 2008, David Fleming was in Totnes to teach on the ‘Life After Oil’ course at Schumacher College, along with Richard Heinberg, myself and others. One afternoon, David and I slipped away so I could interview him for this website. In memory of his passing away this week, I am reprinting it here. We discussed peak oil and Tradable Energy Quotas, among other things. It was a joy.
How do you see the unfolding events of the past few weeks? (ie. the runaway price and it starting to make the price of petrol/diesel rise, with the impacts being felt acutely by those on lower incomes and in rural areas)?
Well, this is the beginning of the breakdown of the energy market. High prices are a sign that some people are having to forgo some or all of the oil which they would have expected to buy. In some cases, those purchases are absolutely essential to their livelihoods, and if they are priced out of the market in the oil auction, they will not be able to do really fundamental things like buying the kerosene they need to power their irrigation pumps. So far, most of those who have been affected to this extent are the poor – third world farmers, for instance. But it is coming our way.
Well, today has been one of those days. The plan was that I was meant to be speaking at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s event on ‘closed loop economies’ at Bradford University which looked like it was going to be great, and then going on to give a talk for Transition Hebden Bridge before heading home again. I was really looking forward to both. I didn’t reckon though on the wild wintery weather affecting the north, south-east and east of the UK. The whole thing went rather pear-shaped in the end, and meant I spent about 13 hours today on trains!
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
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I read Michael Brownlee’s recent piece ‘The Evolution of Transition in the US‘, with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of “Transition, nice idea, but it isn’t [ … ] enough”. So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn’t technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn’t politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of ‘premature triumphalism’, for Ted Trainer it isn’t sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the ‘Sacred’ at the heart of what it does.
