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 second half of the oil age will be very, very different from the first half. It is truly, to coin the term usually used to describe football, “a game of two halves”. The first half was awash with cheap, easy-to-find and easy-to-produce oil and gas. The second half will be the story of expensive-to-produce hydrocarbons, from increasingly inaccessible places, with a rapidly falling energy return on investment and an increasing impact, both environmentally and in terms of carbon emissions. It will be (unless we are able to break our addiction to hydrocarbons sooner rather than later) a wretched and increasingly desperate time of squeezing fuel out of anything we can. It will be the societal scraping of the barrel. If you want to know what that looks like, ‘Gasland’ offers a powerful, chilling, and enraging insight. Here is the trailer:
‘In Transition1.0’ was a huge success. Shown thousands of times around the world, the film has done a huge amount to support initiatives and give them a good “so this is what Transition is” resource. Things have moved on a lot since then, so we are going to make a second one… provisionally titled (imaginatively) “In Transition 2.0”. Emma Goude (see below right), who directed the first one, is back at the helm, so here is her first guest blog setting out her plans for the new film…
“In Transition 2.0 is underway. Transition Network have green lighted the budget and formed a dream team to make it happen: Emma Goude, Beccy Strong and Emilio Mula.
It’s the end of the month again, which means it’s time to bring you a taste of the wonderful Transitioney things that have been going on around the world. We’ll start in South America with some very exciting news from Colombia where they recently held their first three Transition Trainings, and here’s a report with a few pictures. And then there’s news of Chile’s first Transition Town at El Manzano in the BíoBío Region, started by three brothers who also established the Ecoescuela where they teach sustainable lifestyles.
Just back from a fascinating couple of days away. I went to an Ashoka Fellows retreat in the beautiful village of Great Missenden (home to the Roald Dahl Museum and many beautiful half-timbered houses), which brought all the UK Ashoka Fellows together to meet each other and for an intensive session of workshops. The distance I had to travel meant that I arrived half way through the first day, but there were some great workshops on, among other things, social franchising, communications and recruitment. Also got to meet some of the new Ashoka fellows, some amazing people doing remarkable work.
The concept of localisation is one increasingly being discussed as the debt-based, high carbon, energy vulnerable model of economic globalisation increasingly comes apart at the seams. A recent conference run by Transition Colorado had the subtitle “food relocalisation as economic development”. I think we might argue for localisation in general, not just in terms of food, being seen now as a key strategy of economic development. ‘The Economics of Happiness’, as a film that argues that “’going local’ is the way to repair our fractured world – our ecosystems, our societies and our selves” has therefore arrived at the right time, but is it the convincing, accessible and rousing film about localisation that we need in order to raise the issue to the next level of the debate? Here is the trailer:
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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The second half of the oil age will be very, very different from the first half. It is truly, to coin the term usually used to describe football, “a game of two halves”. The first half was awash with cheap, easy-to-find and easy-to-produce oil and gas. The second half will be the story of expensive-to-produce hydrocarbons, from increasingly inaccessible places, with a rapidly falling energy return on investment and an increasing impact, both environmentally and in terms of carbon emissions. It will be (unless we are able to break our addiction to hydrocarbons sooner rather than later) a wretched and increasingly desperate time of squeezing fuel out of anything we can. It will be the societal scraping of the barrel. If you want to know what that looks like, ‘Gasland’ offers a powerful, chilling, and enraging insight. Here is the trailer:
