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.
I remember going to Chepstow last year for their Official Unleashing, and being told that they had nearly put out a press release about a project of theirs, which proclaimed that they wanted to make Chepstow “the most insulted town in Wales”, rather than insulated, spotting the typo just in time. Regular readers will have been following my ongoing attempts to retrofit my 1963 dormer bungalow. I have insulated the loft, crawled under the floors insulating between the joists, hemp and lime plastered my kitchen. Over the summer, we also insulated the trickier parts of our upstairs rooms with Pavatherm boards, and took up the floorboards in the rest of the downstairs and insulated under them, and put thicker carpets down. Yesterday however, we came up against a ghastly Catch 22 situation, and, dear reader, I have to say I am stumped, and feeling more insulted than insulated, and asking for any brilliant solutions the collective Transition Culture readership might have.
Transition Culture now gets lovingly picked up, wrapped in bits of cloth and old newspapers and put into a snuggly little box in the cupboard under the stairs in order to hibernate peacefully for a couple of weeks while I do family Christmas things and New Year things and generally take a break. Normal service (whatever that is) will be resumed on Monday January 4th. Have a great break yourselves, and thanks for your company here over the last year.
In order to completely contradict my previous post, here is a panel discussion from the Klimaforum, chaired by Naresh Giangrande, with May East, Jonathan Dawson, Sophy Banks and Miguel Valencia. Thanks to YourClimate.tv for making this available.
So Copenhagen has been and gone, with no meaningful agreement being reached, and now the politicians and lobbyists have headed home having failed to do anything meaningful to address this staggeringly pressing challenge. Hugo Chavez came up with the quote of the fortnight when he observed “if the climate was a bank, they would already have saved it”. The gathering of the environmental/climate change movement in the Klimaforum with its dedicated bringing together of green luminaries and activists failed to have any meaningful impact on the proceedings, as did the mass street protests, designed to shame delegates into meaningful action and to draw a line in the sand. In short, the responses that the alternative movement/protest culture/social justice movement usually rolls into action when such events take place, didn’t work. So, might we do things differently next time?
The TTT Christmas party just after the news was announced on Friday night
I am delighted to be able to announce that Transition Town Totnes has been selected as one of 10 ‘first movers’ in the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s ‘Low Carbon Communities Challenge’, which I introduced here when it was launched in late September. The scheme was run on incredibly tight timeframes, as any of the many other Transition initiatives who applied will attest, and it was a miracle, given the timeframes, that anyone got any bids together at all. The ‘second movers’ will be announced in January.
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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I remember going to Chepstow last year for their Official Unleashing, and being told that they had nearly put out a press release about a project of theirs, which proclaimed that they wanted to make Chepstow “the most insulted town in Wales”, rather than insulated, spotting the typo just in time. Regular readers will have been following my ongoing attempts to retrofit my 1963 dormer bungalow. I have insulated the loft, crawled under the floors insulating between the joists, hemp and lime plastered my kitchen. Over the summer, we also insulated the trickier parts of our upstairs rooms with Pavatherm boards, and took up the floorboards in the rest of the downstairs and insulated under them, and put thicker carpets down. Yesterday however, we came up against a ghastly Catch 22 situation, and, dear reader, I have to say I am stumped, and feeling more insulted than insulated, and asking for any brilliant solutions the collective Transition Culture readership might have.
