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.
We’ve got so many wonderfully diverse and inspiring activities to show you this month…ideas for getting people involved and having fun! And they’re here for the sharing…
In the UK, TT Luton is organising a series of Grow Your Own events to relocalise food production and consumption, with discussions and a quiz to encourage people to grow their own fruit and vegetables, while Southend-on-Sea in Transition organised a day’s introduction to Permaculture with more events lined up that you’re invited to get involved with. TT Leek is getting hold of allotments and orchards so they can plant more trees and increase production of native British apple varieties, while TT Nailsea is sharing its gardening skills with other local people to increase self-sufficiency in food production, strengthen local resilience and encourage people to think more about their carbon footprints.
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.
Paul from Transition Town Deventer in the Netherlands just sent me the link to this. Paul describes it as “a slide show of announcements, programs, photos etcetera of our activities in the first year of TT Deventer. Even though most of the visitors of Transitionculture.org won’t be able to understand Dutch, it still might be a nice illustration of what a starting Transition initiative can do”. During 2009, they held over 60 different events and activities, engaging over 2300 people. Impressive stuff….
A small group of us have spent the last few weeks working on what will become a booklet for Transition initiatives, which will help with the setting up of community grillings of our political candidates, allowing constituents to assess the degree of resilience thinking in their policies. It could provide the basis for an event, co-run with a range of other similar local organisations. It sets out how to do hustings, a guide to what resilience means, and also 10 Frequently Asked Questions that might arise. We are now throwing the draft over to you for your thoughts and consideration. We hope you find this useful, and look forward to your thoughts.
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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