Transition Culture

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.

Archive for “General” category

Showing results 131 - 135 of 506 for the category: General.


3 Jun 2011

Bart Anderson on Transition

Here’s a short interview I just came across of an interview with Bart Anderson, editor of the wonderful EnergyBulletin, speaking about Transition and his involvement in it… something nice and gentle for a Friday morning….

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1 Jun 2011

A tantalising glimpse of pre-oil age football

The Fox pub's football team, circa 1911. Apologies for the quality of the photo, Peter Cross took it on his phone!

My thanks to Peter Cross for sending this in.  Here is a fascinating taste of how football worked before the age of cheap oil. Football today is hard to imagine without its huge carbon footprint and its dependence on dazzlingly sophisticated communications technology.  Man Utd’s climate change-aware defender Rio Ferdinand, recently said “we travel week in week out. We’re in France one week, Spain the next. How do you get around that? I’m yet to be told – unless you can enlighten me?”  Well here’s a story that could contribute to that conversation.

This is a picture of the football team of the Fox public house in Felpham near Bognor Regis, in West Sussex in 1911.  In front of the team is a football on top of a box.  The box was used to transport a pigeon to away matches.  According to Peter, at the end of the game the result was written on a small piece of paper and sent by pigeon to the Bognor Regis Observer.  A strategy that Rio might like to adopt as he attempts to interest Man Utd in reducing their carbon footprint?

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Discussion: 2 Comments

Categories: General


30 May 2011

Transition and activism: a response

This post is a response to Charlotte DuCann’s beautiful and heartfelt post over on the Transition Norwich blog arguing that Transition needs to more explicitly embrace activism.  It is wonderful to see, whether through that blog, through Transition Voice, or through the emerging social reporting project, new voices coming through in the Transition blogosphere.  Charlotte speaks powerfully to the split that some of those engaged in Transition feel, that they almost need to keep their activism ‘in the closet’ in order to remain engaged.  She states that she sees her post as a ‘working document’, and invites reflections, so here are a few of mine.

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30 May 2011

A May Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition

Gathering for the Unleashing of Transition Albany in the US. Pic: Dorothy Brown.

Welcome to the May monthly roundup of what’s happening in the world of Transition. We hope this issue will lift your spirits and inspire you to continue working within your communities – wherever they may be!  We start with Kinsale in Ireland which was the first ever Transition Town in the world! Kinsale’s plans for a bio-waste project is leading the way for Ireland’s first community run, eco-friendly anaerobic digester (AD). The project has recently been boosted by a grant of €37,500 from the Department of the Environment under its Rethink, Recycle, Remake (Rx3).

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Categories: Climate Change, Community Involvement, Culture, Education for Sustainability, General, Great Reskilling, Local Currencies, Localisation, Storytelling, Transition Initiatives


26 May 2011

Transition’s life as a straw man

I am currently reading Carl Sagan’s excellent book ‘The Demon-haunted World: science as a candle in the dark’, which I picked up for a song in a second hand bookshop when I was last in London.  Although published in 1996, it is as relevant to today as when it was published.  Its focus is on the need for critical thinking and for a grounding in science, and it contains a great chapter called ‘The Fine Art of Baloney Detection’.  Here he sets out what not to do when trying to assess the validity of an argument, and common ways that people make flawed arguments.  One of those is creating a straw man, which he defines as “caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack “.  Having spent Monday morning debating on ABC Radio in Australia with someone who has done just this, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on being a straw man.

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