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.
I have referred to Stroudco here before, the innovative ‘food hub’ project in Stroud which aims to “provide local people with a new way of linking with local producers to buy good food and drink at fair prices for consumers and producers”, to “make a real connection between consumers and farms and other local places producing food and drink” and to provide everyone involved with “control, understanding, awareness, education, social links, nourishment and fun”. It has been running for a few months now, so how’s it going? Here’s a short film that provides a fascinating update on Stroudco….
Last weekend I was at Embercombe, about 20 minutes drive from Totnes, for the West Country Storytelling Festival. Embercombe is a fascinating evolving project, describing itself as “a charity and social enterprise established to champion a way of living that celebrates the opportunities inherent in this challenging time and that inspires people to energetically contribute towards the emergence of a socially just, environmentally sustainable and spiritually fulfilling human presence on earth”. It is also a stunning place, a mix of woodlands and fields. Food production is becoming a key part of its work, and it now has a wonderful vegetable garden, orchards, field scale veg and, of particular interest to me, some small scale cereals production. The day I was there, they were threshing (or attempting to thresh) some of what they had grown, and I thought I would share some of the conversations that took place by the threshing machine.
Here’s a short treat for a Friday afternoon, a good way to sign off for the week, a trailer for a film being made by Milpa Films called ‘Voices of the Transition’. Looks like it is going to be rather good….
https://vimeo.com/12408171
Here’s what Nils Aguilar of Milpa Films told us about the production: “it is totally independent, non commercial, passion driven and collective (as far as it is possible to involve different actors in the production process).
Two months’ worth of round up in quick succession… normal service will be resumed next month. So, let’s start this roundup in Europe, with an interview with Ellen Bermann of Transition Italia, sat on a terrazza somewhere with a rather nice view (understanding Italian an advantage…).
Transition in Germany is going on well, with another successful training and a further one coming up on 9 October in Bielefeld, so if you’re interested do get in touch with them. There are also lots of new registered users for their German-speaking Transition Network, as well as meetings with key players in German peak oil organisations, and increasing interest from the media as more articles appear in German publications. And congratulations to TT Bielefeld as they celebrate their first year! Thanks to Gerd for this update. Here is a film of him giving a presentation about Transition (understanding German will help considerably.)….
I am hopefully now only days from handing in the PhD I have been doing, the closing stages of a gruelling marathon. I posted a couple of weeks ago the contents and the layout of the thesis, which is called ‘Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)’. I thought you might like to see a section of it, to give you a flavour. Apologies to regular readers that this is written in a far more academic style than you might be used to here, but hopefully you will find it useful and relevant. It comes from a section looking at the relocalisation of food, and draws from the different research I did. I am importing this from Word, so some of the formatting might go a little wierd….
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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