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.
While Chris Martenson was in the UK recently, Peter Lipman and myself did an interview with him, which was fascinating and wonderful, but the memory chip it was on just got corrupted before I could download it and it is lost. Gah. As a meagre way of overcoming the profound sense of trauma I am left with (I will try and do it again via. skype sometime soon), here is a film of the talk he did later that day in the Grand Committee Room at the Houses of Parliament for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas. For now, you’ll just have to imagine how brilliant our interview was.
There have been critiques of Transition in the past, such as the Trapese Collective’s one, or other more ranty online versions, usually from the very deep green Left, who argue that unless it can get rid of capitalism/economic growth [insert personal pet political issue here] first then it is unforgivably naive. It was interesting therefore, at EcoBuild 2010 at Earl’s Court on Tuesday, as part of a session called ‘Sustaining Transition Initiatives’, to hear a talk by Alastair Brown of mantownhuman give a talk attempting to put the intellectual boot into Transition. It was coherent, articulate, well illustrated … and utterly mistaken.
What can local government do to promote those four things because clearly in our consumer society people tend to feel less safe and are becoming less and less competent? Relatedness is breaking down and people feel they have less control over the democratic process.
I’m not a political scientist, I’m a psychologist, but my sense is that what has to be developed are structures in the political economy and in the social system and the way that decisions are made that ask people what are the things in our community right now which are barriers to the satisfaction of these psychological needs and I’d imagine that different communities are going to have different barriers, but somebody there in your community knows the answer and if they can say what it is and put their finger on it, probably other people are going to say yes, and add to it.
Amazing times. Last week’s headline of one of the papers I saw at the station was that the UK’s national debt is now worse than that of Greece. On Tuesday I spent the morning with Chris ‘Crash Course’ Martenson, whose view is that last year’s ‘banking crisis’ was just the first of many, which will get steadily worse. The interview I did with him will be posted next week. Then yesterday morning, in the middle of a piece on Radio 4’s Today Programme about immigrant workers and why so few unemployed people here want any of those jobs in spite of rising unemployment, enter Frank Field, Labour MP, who delivered a verdict on the state of Britain’s economic health so withering that it made Martenson’s predictions look positively rosy. Rarely do I hear politicians on the radio and feel the need to transcribe every word, but here it is. After my meeting with him, Martenson went to give a talk for the All Party Parliamentary Working Group on Peak Oil and Gas at the Commons… I wonder if Frank Field happened to wander in on Chris’s session?
In late September 2009 in Amsterdam, at an event called Picnic ’09, Oliver Dudok van Heel of the Lewes Pound CIC gave a talk about Transition and the role of local currencies. It was beautifully filmed, and an excellent talk. Thanks to Oliver, and to the organisers for making this available. Good to see that the guy at 6:08 is paying attention…
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
Read more»
