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.
Here’s a fantastic video from DW (“Germany’s International Broadcaster”) about Transition in South Africa. It is a clip from a longer programme called ‘Global 3000: The Globalisation Program’, and it looks at the work of Transition Town Greyton in South Africa. It is a fascinating response to the question of “what does Transition look like beyond Europe and the US?” It may well become one of my favourite videos about Transition:
Here is a beautiful short film, which will brighten any Thursday morning, about Transition in Brazil. It looks at what Transition looks like in 2 different communities there, Brasilandia in Sao Paolo, and Granja Viana. Made by the Permacyclists, it is an uplifting glimpse of how Transition is taking root there. I love the quote at the end: “A movement which brings sadness and suffering isn’t sustainable”.
Transition initiatives have spawned a number of fascinating new enterprises, and in today’s post we’ll be looking at one of them you may not have come across yet, Hodmedod’s Great British Beans, which has emerged from work of Transition City Norwich and East Anglia Food Link. What follows is an interview with one of its founders, Josiah Meldrum. The beans project was first mentioned in an interview I did with Josiah for a Transition Podcast a year ago, and is now at the commercial stage. Below you will find the audio of our interview which you can either play or download to listen to while you are planting out your garlic, the transcript, and, at the end, a competition to win some, and a code to buy some at a discount. What a treat. You’re going to enjoy this. I love the bit when Josiah says:
“we discovered was that there was an assumption that no-one would want to eat the beans, but no-one had bothered asking anyone whether they wanted to eat the beans”.
It’s fantastic. Get a copy. It made me wonder whether the recent revival of independent record shops have a few things to teach us more generally about vibrant local economies? As a vinyl junkie and as someone who grew up in independent record shops, I wanted to explore some of the issues in the film in more depth. I was therefore delighted to be able to start out by interviewing Graham Jones, author of ‘Last Shop Standing’ and presenter of the film. As lovers of music, vinyl and independent shops we could have talked all day, but luckily for you we kept it brief.
At the 2012 Degrowth conference in Venice one of the highlights for me was the talk by Arturo Escobar (my notes from which can be found here). He is the author of Encountering Development and Territories of Difference, among others. His talk looked at how Transition might look in the context of the Global South, and held many fascinating insights. Here is the interview I did with him, first as an audio file, and below as a transcript.
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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