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.
Early morning sun welcoming the '24 Hours of Possibilities' into the world
The centre of Manchester, where I spent last weekend, doesn’t feature a diversity of small, medium and large hotels and hostels in the same way that, say, Paris does. So far as I could tell, there are just several huge Premier Inns, and huge Travelodges, massive, soul-less tower blocks with massive soul-less logos down the side. As well as that, in the centre, virtually every shop is a huge chain, you know the ones, they now dominate every city centre in the country. It’s like an episode of Dr Who, where the place has been taken over by huge leeches, sucking the financial lifeblood out of the city, what Andrew Simms recently called “extractive industries”, funnelling money to distant shareholders. There are endless hideous new ‘iconic’ buildings, massive corporate egos in built form, usually home to just one organisation (such as the hideous gravity-defying monster below, surely a contender for James Howard Kunstler’s ‘Eyesore of the Month’?). But on this day when many are celebrating ’24 Hours of Possibility’ (have a look, there’s loads going on!), how might it be possible to see beyond all that to something that actually nourishes us as individuals, communities and local economies?
I spent a very enjoyable day at Bristol Green Week yesterday. Green Week is a celebration of green ideas and thinking in Bristol, which has featured a wildly eclectic mix of talks, workshops, music, comedy, films, walks and much more. I arrived midway through the week’s festivities, to participate in two events. The first was a screening of ‘In Transition 2.0’, shown as the third in a series of films under the somewhat uninspiring banner of ‘Documentary Evidence’. Apparently Monday’s had attracted 30 people, and Tuesday’s just 4, so it was suggested that I might want to temper my expectations in terms of attendance. In the end over 40 people came, and the whole thing went really well.
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:
I wrote a while ago about the Festival of Transition, and in particular the 24 Hours of Possibility event taking place on the first day of Rio+20 (June 20th). I thought that perhaps to inspire your thinking about what you might do where you are, I might share Transition Town Totnes’ emerging plan for the day. Everywhere will do very different things, and already some places have set out what they are going to do, but here are Totnes’ plans… as you’ll see it is quite tentative, but it is starting to take shape:
I am reading Jorgen Randers’ new book ‘2052: a global forecast for the next forty years’, due for publication next month. Imagine a ‘Limits to Growth’ for the next 40 years, a presentation of Randers’ best guess as to how the world will pan out between now and 2052. As you can imagine, it’s not an uplifting read, but it is often illuminating, even though I disagree with some of his findings. Surprisingly, the most challenging bit comes at the end of the book, after all the graphs and charts, and talk about 2 degrees of climate change, of our inevitable mega-urbanisation and so on. It will hopefully prove to be the spark for a fascinating discussion here.
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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