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
17 May 2007
**’Wattle and Daub’ by Paula Sunshine. Shire Books. 2006. pp40.**
There is something very nourishing about the process of rediscovering the building materials of our ancestors. I often remark when teaching people about cob building that in the UK we have an earth building gene, that deep inside ourselves, once we start to handle these materials we find instinctively that we know what we are doing, they feel right in our hands, we feel at home with them. The first time I made a wattle and daub panel, we just decided we wanted to do one, and we used a book and made it up as we went along. We didn’t have great clay, we put the wattles too close together and didn’t use enough straw in the mix. It worked, but only just.
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16 May 2007
It’s not every day that Transition Towns stuff is translated into Italian, but with the recent coverage in the Guardian, foreign papers are getting in touch and running articles. Here is one, in Italian, and seemingly quite balanced. They aren’t all quite so rational. A few weeks ago a Mexican reporter rang me up, and the main thrust of her interview, in not very good English, was to what extent Transition Towns was like John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (an exceptionally odd question). She sounded positively disappointed when I told her that I had grown up drawing far more inspiration from the Buzzcocks than ‘Imagine’. The final article turned up the other day, all in Spanish so I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but bizzarely the article’s lone illustration was of a caravan park, which we are positive is nowhere near Totnes. Ah, tis a wonderful world.
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15 May 2007
**A Review: from** Transition City Bristol’s **website**.
“Over 200 people packed the Trinity Centre on Tuesday night to hear Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement. With towns and now cities across the UK taking up the Transition challenge the experiment has left the laboratory and is going viral in the wild. Soil Association director Patrick Holden introduced Rob, reliving the point in history when he first heard Rob speak and the massive impact on his life, farming and work that it had.
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14 May 2007
A couple of weeks ago in Totnes, as part of the Great Reskilling programme, we held a workshop with Keith Ellis from Transition Town Lewes called **A Hands-on Introduction to YouTube Video Activism**, which aimed to teach people how to make short films just using a digital camera and a laptop, and to transfer them onto sites such as YouTube and VideoGoogle, a cheap and very powerful way of communicating ideas of transition and energy descent. The course was a great success, with about 15 people with widely varying experience of making films spending the day filming and editing a number of short films.
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11 May 2007
I don’t read Building for a Future magazine anywhere near as often as I ought to, but recently I picked up a copy and read an excellent article by Simon Fairlie, drawing a new angle on the zero-energy buildings debate. I have been a huge admirer of Simon’s work for years, in particular his work on rural planning through the campaign group Chapter 7, and always enjoy reading his work. This article has a particularly important take, I think, on the dangers of blindly putting cutting carbon emissions above the creation of resilience and the rebuilding of a rural economy.
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There is something very nourishing about the process of rediscovering the building materials of our ancestors. I often remark when teaching people about cob building that in the UK we have an earth building gene, that deep inside ourselves, once we start to handle these materials we find instinctively that we know what we are doing, they feel right in our hands, we feel at home with them. The first time I made a wattle and daub panel, we just decided we wanted to do one, and we used a book and made it up as we went along. We didn’t have great clay, we put the wattles too close together and didn’t use enough straw in the mix. It worked, but only just.
