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.
It’s less than a week to go until ‘In Transition 2.0’ is previewed in each of the places whose stories appear in the film. For example, it will be previewed in a fire station in Moss Side in Manchester, a community centre in Lyttelton in New Zealand that was one of only a few buildings there to survive the earthquake (their screening starts at 9am), a Hindu temple in Tooting in London, a ‘Cinema Paradiso’ in a village in rural India, and in a village hall in Japan (see here for the full list of previews). I caught up with producer Emma Goude to ask her 5 quick questions about the film.
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.
What do you do when you are the heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and you have spent years surrounding yourself with new agey thinking and conspiracy theories? You make a film like ‘Thrive‘, the latest conspiracy theory movie that is popping up all over the place. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have asked me “have you seen ‘Thrive’?” Well I have now, and, to be frank, it’s dangerous tosh which deserves little other than our derision. It is also a very useful opportunity to look at a worldview which, according to Georgia Kelly writing at Huffington Post, masks “a reactionary, libertarian political agenda that stands in jarring contrast with the soothing tone of the presentation”.
‘In Transition 2.0’ is nearly ready to be unveiled to the world! We are very excited about this inspiring reweaving of the Transition story, and want to tell you more about it here, and about how it will be rolled out over the coming months. To get us started, because we are so excited about sharing this with you, here is the film’s trailer, completed just yesterday, directed by Caspar Walsh.
Hopefully that has sufficiently whet your appetite for what is a remarkable film.
Welcome back to Transition Culture, and a Happy New Year to you. We’ll kick off with our round-up of Transition for December. We’ll start with a few stories of Transition groups working on energy efficiency and fuel poverty which, even though this has been the UK’s mildest winter for many many years, is still a big concern for many people, especially as energy prices continue to rise. TT High Wycombe have created a Warm Homes Team (see right) who have taken to the streets with their council loaned thermal imaging equipment to address winter fuel poverty.
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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