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.
Am home for a couple of days, and spotted that some of the TED talks have started going up. Here, as a sort of Transition Culture Summer Homework, is Paul Romer’s talk on ‘Charter Cities’ which I was so critical about in my write up. It offers a fascinating taste of unbridled human hubris, of an economist with no sense of economic or resource constraints, no sense of living within our means or of peak anything, no sense that perhaps unbridled neo-liberal free trade economics have been anything other than to the dazzling wellbeing of everyone. Have a look. Be fascinated to hear your thoughts on it. My two highlights are his raising the question as to why no-one else has thought of building cities in deserts, and the bit near the end where he says …“there is no roadblock, there is no impediment, other than a failure of imagination that will keep us from delivering on a truly global win win solution”. See what you think.
I’ve written about the Lewes Pound here before, but here is a piece by Adrienne Campbell about the recent launch of the new notes, which are absolutely gorgeous. It is fascinating to see how this initiative continues to develop and to innovate. Congratulations all.
“The Lewes Pound was relaunched by Transition Town Lewes at a celebration on Friday 3 July. The new notes, designed by people from the Lewes community, include higher denominations of Five, Ten and a Twenty One Lewes Pound note.
After many months of Ed Milliband putting himself out there are a Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change that actually gets climate change, finally his big Plan, the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan was unveiled on Wednesday, in a speech in the House of Commons that namechecked Transition Towns and which is the boldest national vision for a low carbon society yet seen. Many others have since pitched in with their thoughts, I thought it might be useful here to offer an analysis from a Transition perspective. In his speech, Milliband said “we know from the Transition Towns movement the power of community action to motivate people..”, clearly an outcome of his attendance as a ‘Keynote Listener’ at the Transition Network conference in May. So how does the Plan measure up, and does it actually advance what Transition initiatives and the wider relocalisation movement are doing?
I went to my younger 2 kids’ school play last night. They did ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, a wonderful celebration of children singing, acting, forgetting their lines and generally making every parent in the house go ‘aah’ and all watery-eyed on regular occasions. Wonderful. I did think, as I cycled home, about the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Roald Dahl was a master of creating wonderful characters and fantastic situations. Although it has nothing to do with the usual subject matter covered here at Transition Culture, the thoughts I thunked did make me smile as I pedalled through the damp Devon evening, so I thought I would share them with you.
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….”
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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