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.
This month we’re starting off with Brazil and some very exciting news for the New Year, because, as reported here at Transition Culture yesterday, the first ever Transition favela initiative has just held it’s Unleashing!… Wonderful news indeed! Here are some great pics of the event. The community has been very busy indeed. 85 community members have participated in Transition Training and they’ve implemented all sorts of wonderful activities. Community gardens are being created in seven abandoned spaces, and a ‘Become our own Media’ team has been created which has registered all their events and has just completed a film aimed at reviving the region’s oral tradition, which was screened at the Unleashing.
Welcome back to Transition Culture… You’re looking well, I hope you had a good break. We start with a warm sunny story to bring a smile on these chilly winter days, kindly penned by May East about the Unleashing, just before Christmas, of the first Transition Favela, in Brazil.
It was a sizzling Saturday morning in December when members of the low low-income Brasilândia community of 247.000 people in São Paulo, gathered with great expectancy for the official unleashing of ‘Transixion’ Brasilândia. Led by the initiating group created earlier in May by members of the Stickel Foundation, with representatives from the arts community, environmental groups, health workers, educators, local authority the first part of the morning was dedicated to celebrate a remarkable chain of achievements.
A fantastic evening last night at the South Bank Centre in London, organised by Transition Finsbury Park. The event was a sell-out, and proved to be an inspirational coming together of London Transition initiatives, under the title “Confronting Change”. Polly Higgins, a barrister and author of ‘Eradicating Ecocide’ was the host and got the evening underway. She had recently returned from the COP16 negotiations at Cancun, and talked about what had happened there.
I read Michael Brownlee’s recent piece ‘The Evolution of Transition in the US‘, with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of “Transition, nice idea, but it isn’t [ … ] enough”. So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn’t technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn’t politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of ‘premature triumphalism’, for Ted Trainer it isn’t sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the ‘Sacred’ at the heart of what it does.
Well now here’s something wonderful from Transition York Region in Canada. I won’t say much about it, just sit back and enjoy… can’t help wishing they might perhaps move around a bit more though…
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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This month we’re starting off with Brazil and some very exciting news for the New Year, because, as reported here at Transition Culture yesterday, the first ever Transition favela initiative has just held it’s Unleashing!… Wonderful news indeed! Here are some great pics of the event. The community has been very busy indeed. 85 community members have participated in Transition Training and they’ve implemented all sorts of wonderful activities. Community gardens are being created in seven abandoned spaces, and a ‘Become our own Media’ team has been created which has registered all their events and has just completed a film aimed at reviving the region’s oral tradition, which was screened at the Unleashing.
