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.
Totnes Civic Hall, now graced with 75 photovoltaic panels...
On Saturday Transition Town Totnes held one of those events that feels really celebratory and somehow like it marks a significant step forward in the whole Transition process (well, in Totnes anyway…). The Transition Streets Energy Fair was designed to celebrate the new photovoltaic installation on the Civic Hall, to inspire a new round of recruitment for Transition Streets, to provide the public with access to a range of renewable energy installers and information, and to raise the whole profile of renewables and energy conservation. It did all of these, and more, in a very well-attended day with a great buzz.
I have referred to Stroudco here before, the innovative ‘food hub’ project in Stroud which aims to “provide local people with a new way of linking with local producers to buy good food and drink at fair prices for consumers and producers”, to “make a real connection between consumers and farms and other local places producing food and drink” and to provide everyone involved with “control, understanding, awareness, education, social links, nourishment and fun”. It has been running for a few months now, so how’s it going? Here’s a short film that provides a fascinating update on Stroudco….
It is time to announce the results of the fiendishly puzzling ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ competition. Oh dear people, it turned out to be the competition which generated the lowest correct answers to number of entries ratio of any competition I have ever run. The correct answers, the two local building materials/techniques which I had made up, were ‘rumpletumping’ (which is not a term from the Midlands used to describe picking through building stones), and ‘grot-stock’ (which is not the application of bovine snot to wallpaper application, described by entrant Andy Brewin as “a truly horrid thought”). A few astute readers questioned exactly how one would actually harvest cows’ snot, a fair question probably best not dwelt on for too long. Rex Brangwyn accused me of running a trick competition, in which all the responses were actually real, and Angie Corbet wrote ” ‘rumpletumping’ sounds just a bit too much like what small boys get up to just before bedtime, and my mother, a Kentish Maid born & bred many years ago, has never heard of “Grot-stock” so I’ll hazard a guess at those two!” Unfortunately however, such elegant prose failed to mean she ended up among the winners…those 5 noble souls were: Marcus Perrin, Michelle Bastain, Rachel Roddam, Amanda and Charlie Stephenson. Well done all. The other 8 terms are all real. Isn’t English a beautiful language? It is positively frightening just how much you can learn here at Transition Culture.
Last weekend I was at Embercombe, about 20 minutes drive from Totnes, for the West Country Storytelling Festival. Embercombe is a fascinating evolving project, describing itself as “a charity and social enterprise established to champion a way of living that celebrates the opportunities inherent in this challenging time and that inspires people to energetically contribute towards the emergence of a socially just, environmentally sustainable and spiritually fulfilling human presence on earth”. It is also a stunning place, a mix of woodlands and fields. Food production is becoming a key part of its work, and it now has a wonderful vegetable garden, orchards, field scale veg and, of particular interest to me, some small scale cereals production. The day I was there, they were threshing (or attempting to thresh) some of what they had grown, and I thought I would share some of the conversations that took place by the threshing machine.
It’s competition time here again at Transition Culture! You can win a copy of Chris Bird’s just-about-to-be-published book ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ (I have 5 copies to give away) by telling me the answer to the following before midday this Thursday (9th September). Please email your answer to rob (at) transitionculture.org (do not post as a comment). Which two of the following ten local natural building materials or related terms is merely a product of my fevered imagination?
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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