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.
The theme of the first full day of ‘The Third International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity’ in Venice was ‘Commons’. For me there were a couple of key highlights of the day, so I will give a thumbnail of all the talks today, but more detail on the highlights. As with my notes from yesterday, the following is compiled from my notes, and so are entirely fallible. Apologies to any of the speakers if I have got their message wrong. The first speaker was Gianni Tamino of the University of Padova who argued that in the context of depleting resources, the commons are essential for living, we can’t postpone the end of growth.
I’m in Venice at the 2012 Degrowth conference. I’ve never been to Venice before, it is really quite an extraordinary place. Even in the rain. It took me 17 bleary hours on various trains, but that was time well spent. This is the third Degrowth conference, and it has brought together people from far and wide, with its theme of ‘The Great Transition: degrowth as a passage of civilisation’. The conference started this afternoon, in the Teatro Malibran, a beautiful old theatre.
One of the workshops in the Saturday morning workshops session is called ‘Should we be reshaping Transition for times of austerity?’, and will feature Filipa Pimental, International Coordinator of the Transition National Hubs, Juan del Rio from the Spanish National Hub, and will be chaired by Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins. The workshop will aim to explore how Transition is emerging differently in places where the economic crisis is impacting severely, and in places where its impacts are yet to be strongly felt. In the former, Transition is emerging more along the Gift Economy kind of model, in the latter the REconomy approach is felt to be most suitable. How do those two sit alongside each other, and what does this mean for the role of Transition Network? Expect discussion, debate and dialogue. The three presenters recently joined by Skype to discuss their plans for the workshop:
This month’s round up covers two months, because this time last month half of the team that lovingly create these round ups was away when they should have been producing this. As a result it’s a bit of a whopper. The latest Transition Bristol newsletter begins “In this issue…. The Bristol Pound is coming, the Bristol Pound is coming, oh, and lots of other stuff too! Read on”. That seemed like a good way for us to start too. The Bristol Pound, the vastly exciting imminent launch of a city-wide currency that is creating a frenzy of media interest, is nearly here. Here is a short film about it:
Fiona Ward (far right) with members of Transition Town Lewes’ Enterprise group and a few visitors from Brighton.
Fiona Ward of the REconomy Project recently visited a number of Transition initiatives to find out how their work creating a new economy for their community is going. As the REconomy Day (on the Friday before the Transition Network conference) continues to fill up (over 100 people at last count), I spoke to her, and asked her about her trip:
She has also written a fantastic blog about the key learnings from the trip, as well as reports from each place she visited, which are essential reading in terms of the current state of play of emerging Transition social enterprises. She introduces her blog thus:
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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