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.
Vegbox management committee at one of our meetings holding potato superheroes! (potatoes from Ripple Farm!)
Here in Transition Kentish Town we’ve been running events and projects for two and a bit years. We have a steering group, a food group, two gardening groups of one kind or another, an energy group. For year or so we had a pop up shop. And we’ve made a lot of chutney along the way. As always with voluntary groups, the active people come and go and we work with this ebb and flow. We try to make sure we’re enjoying ourselves so active people will return. And we often come back to our early insight that as a Transition Initiative we want to remain informal and voluntary, independent of the council and grant givers, and rooted in friendship, family and community. Vegbox has emerged out of a desire to set up a something more formal alongside this: a social enterprise.
Welcome to the monthly round-up of what people are up to doing Transition around the world. Let’s start this month in Spain. Spain recently held its first national Transition conference, which you can read more about here, and you can see Juan del Río’s reflections on it here. Here is a great film about the event which gives a great sense of the energy and dynamism that it tapped into:
Here is a list of the books I am working my way through at the moment or have recently finished, I hope they might point you to some recently published books you may find useful and interesting. So, in no particular order:
Michael Mann (2012) The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: dispatches from the front lines. Columbia University Press.
Michael Mann is the principal creator of the (in)famous ‘Hockey Stick’ graph which showed that the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100 years is in excess of historic warming, and clearly linked to increased CO2 emissions. The graph achieved great prominence, as a result of which he became a target of the fossil fuel industry, in particular during the co-ordinated assault on climate science known as ‘Climate Gate’, where emails, including his, were hacked from the University of East Anglia.
In this month’s Transition podcast, we go into more depth with three of the stories from this month’s Transition round-up. We hear about Transition Guelph‘s recent ‘Resilience Festival’, what Marsden and Slaithwaite Transition Towns did with their LEAF funding, and what happened when Transition Belper suggested turning a local car park into a vegetable garden. The last one of these podcasts has already been listened to over 1000 times. Do note that you can embed it on your own website, and that it is now available on iTunes.
This was included in yesterday’s round up, but I think it deserves a post all to itself. The other day, through the marvel of Twitter, I received a message “Dear Robin. In the South of Chile, The Pucón Iniciative of Transition made a Film!!!” (my Twitter account is @robintransition). The link took me to this wonderful film. One of the great joys of Transition is hearing stories of it popping up in unexpected places. This film is a joy.
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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