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.
As I mentioned in my write up of the TED Talks, the two most extraordinary presentations I saw there were Itay Talgam (whose talk is not yet posted) and Emmanuel Jal. Emmanuel’s talk was extraordinary, uplifting, sobering and inspirational. By the end there was not a dry eye in the house. It has just been posted by TED, so here it is.
I spent a few days last week at the Sunrise Off the Grid Festival near Shepton Mallet. I had been invited to go and give a talk, and went along with the Hopkins family en masse. It was a small and intimate affair, with some great things; the Transition area in the Tin Village was fantastic, the talk I gave went fine, the weather was mostly kind, and it was all quite relaxed and pleasant. I haven’t been at a festival since 2007’s Big Green Gathering, and there was one key thing I noticed that has changed since then, and which left me feeling very uneasy and with a profound sense of disquiet, so I wanted to give it some attention here. It was the alarming rise of the 2012 doomsters….
Clearly the markets weren’t the only source of food. The High Street contained a far higher proportion of shops selling food than today. The way the shops were run was very different to today. ML describes a trip to the shops in the early 1950s;
“I used to go to the grocers and I could sit down, lovely. They’d go through your list and say, “yes, yes, we’ve some new whatever it is, would you like to taste some?” You’d have a little snippet of cheese or something, “great, yes, we’ll have that”. “Now we’ve got a tin of broken biscuits, but they’re not too bad (half price you see), would you like them?” As soon as you put a biscuit in your mouth it’s broken isn’t it! Then they’d say “now Mrs. L, you’re going to the butchers, yes, yes, and going to get some fish? Yes, yes, and paraffin? Yes, yes… and they used to say to me now bring any parcels in, we’ll put it in the box with your groceries and bring the lot up for you. And they did. They’d come and deliver and you’d go through it and say that’s fine and would you like a cup of tea….”
Roving Transition reporter and publisher of Transition Network News Mike Grenville sent the following report from an awards event in London at which Transition Town Tooting found out that they had been one of four projects selected from 178 applications to recieve funding for projects that bring art and responses to climate change together. The result is a great boost to Transition, and to Transition Town Tooting, who are doing hugely innovative and important work embedding Transition principles in the urban context…. congratulations all… and thanks Mike for the following report.
I was in the beautiful city of Bath on Saturday, and saw a guy busking with a sort of 19th century American karaoke machine. In a mastery of technology akin to putting a man on the moon, I actually managed to film it with my phone and put it on YouTube for your viewing delight. I had never seen one of these before, it is quite brilliant….
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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