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.
Here are the notes of the talk I gave that went out just now on Radio 4’s ‘Four Thought’ programme. You can download the podcast of the programme here (which also includes the Q&A that followed as a bonus feature). I hope you enjoy(ed) it.
“It’s generally considered unwise to use props when speaking on radio, especially on your first appearance on Radio 4. However, this talk will contain two props, and here’s the first. It’s a £10 note from Brixton in London, but it’s a Brixton Pound. Rather than the Queen’s head, it features David Bowie’s. I’ll tell you more about it later, but it matters because it leads us into what I want to discuss this evening, the question of resilience.
Let’s start this month’s round up in Derbyshire, where Melbourne Area Transition have received planning permission to install 48 PV panels on the roof of their local 12th century church, and there they now sit, in their energy-generating splendour. Here’s a short film made by Chris Bird (author of the Transition book ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ who blogs here) where MAT’s Graham Truscott gives him a tour of the roof.
Here is the January Transition podcast, lovingly spliced together in order to offer a more in depth look at three of the stories from last month’s round-up. You’ll hear about how Transition Chesham’s local produce market was recently voted the greenest market in Britain, how Transition Town Whitehead are planning to plant 60,000 trees over the next few weeks, and how Transition Town Shrewsbury stepped in when the local council announced that it was stopping collecting cardboard for recycling, and did it themselves. I hope you enjoy it, and do let us know what you think.
Today I’d like to share a map with you (click on it and it will magically fill your screen), and I’m hugely grateful to Geri Smyth for giving me this. It is a map of the town of Guildford (or Guldeford as it was then) in 1793. Regular readers will know I love a good map, and I have spent a fair while poring over this one. There are a couple of things I love about it. Firstly, it is the most amazing piece of draughtsmanship. It is a thing of extraordinary beauty in a way that Googlemaps can only dream of. The way its laid out, the calligraphy, the attention to detail, are beautiful in a way very few people could recreate today. But what is so extraordinary, upon closer inspection, is how it captures what it looks like when food grows everywhere. Think of it, if you like, as Incredible Edible Guildford, circa. 1739.
Here’s a great article from the latest edition (‘The Green Issue’) of Norwich magazine, to whom I am very grateful for permission to republish in full. You can also download the pdf of the article here with more of Tony Buckingham’s excellent photos here.
Close to home
In November, Transition Norwich celebrated its third birthday. Sabine Virani investigates a green initiative that is part of a global movement yet focuses on local need, local interest and local resources.
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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