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 am really pleased today to be able to share with you some of the key outputs from Transition Streets, which I have written about here before. Let’s start, for people who are new to the concept, with this short video which beautifully captures how Transition Streets worked in Totnes:
“We’re on a mission here now with this group. We all are co-ordinated and there’s something powerful about having fifteen people completely dedicated to the degree where we all know we’re going to do absolutely what it takes to make this happen in our community”.
Transition Prince Rupert, in British Columbia, Canada, launches its website today. Nothing extraordinary about that you might say. But the process that led to it, and its contents, are a story worth telling. The interview I did recently with Lee Brain, a young man who is one of the group’s founders, was one of the most inspiring I have yet published here at Transition Culture. So inspiring in fact that it is, in effect, this month’s Transition podcast. In today’s installment, he gives a fascinating taste of what it looks like when an emerging Transition group gives over some time to getting the foundations of its work as solid as possible before proceeding any further. Here is the interview:
Here’s a great short film about ‘A Little Patch of Ground’, a wonderful project run by Encounters Arts in Hackney, London and in Dartington, Devon. A very heartwarming way to spend 8 minutes on a Wednesday morning.
Here are the notes of the talk I gave that went out just now on Radio 4’s ‘Four Thought’ programme. You can download the podcast of the programme here (which also includes the Q&A that followed as a bonus feature). I hope you enjoy(ed) it.
“It’s generally considered unwise to use props when speaking on radio, especially on your first appearance on Radio 4. However, this talk will contain two props, and here’s the first. It’s a £10 note from Brixton in London, but it’s a Brixton Pound. Rather than the Queen’s head, it features David Bowie’s. I’ll tell you more about it later, but it matters because it leads us into what I want to discuss this evening, the question of resilience.
Tonight, on BBC Radio 4 at 8.45pm, you can hear the talk I gave for their ‘Four Thought’ series. Here’s how the BBC website describes it:
“Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Culture movement, believes that “engaged optimism” is the best way to face the global challenges of the future, be it climate change, oil supplies running out or the economic downturn. He believes initiatives enabling people to produce their own goods and services locally – from solar powered bottled beer to micro currencies like the Brixton pound – are the best way to build community resilience. Four Thought is a series of talks in which speakers give a personal viewpoint recorded in front of an audience at the RSA in London”.
I hope you enjoy it. I’ll post the text of it tomorrow…
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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