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.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
We have talked at Transition Culture before about how we might harness the power of advertising to engage people in Transition. There are some great ads coming out of Ken Livingston’s London Assembly as part of their strategy of taking cars out of London and getting more bikes and public transport on the road. Anyway, before you look at those, best place to start is with this simple awareness test…
Here is something you might enjoy. I am often asked what students from the Kinsale permaculture course have done in their post-course lives. Did they go off and set up hemp building companies or become comfrey millionaires, or did a career in telesales beckon? It is hard to keep tabs on where people go and what they do (although I often hear rumours of great projects), although the Permies Portal site set up by students, a kind of PermiesReunited, is a great resource for that. I do know though what Nadia Hillman, now resident of Bristol is doing, and its rather wonderful. Have a look at the film below, about her project, Grofun.
Concepts like ‘climate change’ and ‘peak oil’ can cause us to feel confronted by something overwhelmingly huge that we cannot do anything about. The central message of the this book is that “this state of mind is not the place to start from if we want to achieve something, do something or create something.” Indeed, by shifting our mind-set we can actually recognise the coming post-cheap oil era as an opportunity rather than a threat, and design our future low energy societies to be thriving, resilient and abundant – somewhere much better to live than our current alienated consumer culture based on greed, war and the myth of perpetual growth.
A film screening is much more than just an opportunity to sit a load of people in front of a screen. Likewise, a talk is more than just the chance to hear the musings of a well-known thinker on a particular subject. Both are opportunities to get people talking to each other, networking, building social connections. Indeed, one might argue that these are far more important than the film itself; they could, after all, just borrow the DVD and stay at home. It is also important that you work into these events what we might call “digestion time”, that is, time to chew over what people have heard, rather than just dumping information on them and then ending them out, blinking and bewildered, into the world. Here are some of the things you might expect at the average Transition Initiative film screening or talk:
“Since its inception just two years ago, the Transition movement has grown with a surprising rapidity. There are now nearly 40 official Transition Initiatives around the UK and some 600 at more formative stages around the globe. Put simply, the idea is that the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change mean we will be living lives that are less energy intense and much more local in the near future. Rather than impoverishing us, this change will actually lead to better well-being and more fulfilled lives. But we must start to design the change for ourselves now rather than waiting for the current system to collapse.
