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.
Here is a really well made film from Holland about Transition Town Deventer. I can’t understand a word of it, but it looks great! If you speak Dutch, I do hope you enjoy it….
We often say that failures in Transition are just as important as our successes, that Transition is an iterative process where what matters is that we learn from honest assessments of what we have tried. In that spirit, today’s post offers a fascinating and illuminating case study of a Transition initiative stalling. We are deeply grateful to members of the steering group of the now-dormant (hopefully temporarily) Transition Oxford group for so honestly and openly sharing their thoughts as to why things have reached the stage they have. Their reflections are largely unedited, and have been left anonymous. My thanks to Jo Hamilton for collating them.
There really was nowhere else to be last night. Given the amazing amount of press coverage and the fact that this was the first urban complementary currency specific to an urban neighbourhood, Lambeth Town Hall was the place to be for the launch of the Brixton Pound. I arrived after a day of giving a talk at Google’s London offices, visiting Transition Tooting for a chat and a look around the place (thanks folks), and made it to the Hall for 6.30pm. The event started at about 7.40, having been warmed up by some singing local teenagers and a small steel band. Then, with the hall full to capacity, and hundreds of people crammed in around the walls, the event was underway.
This weekend saw the launch of the Stroud Pound. Four denominations have been published, and over at Josef Coates-Davis’s blog, he tells the story of the design of the notes.
“The notes, designed by local artist Ronan Schoemaker and produced by local currency collector Steve Charlwood, are like miniature histories of the economic and cultural life of the Five Valleys. The most prominent local celebrity to feature is Laurie Lee, author of Cider with Rosie, who was born in Stroud and is buried in the Slad Valley. Local wildlife is represented by the rare Adonis Blue butterfly found on Minchinhampton Common. Stroud’s economic heritage is commemorated by the teazle itself, while the lawnmower, invented in Stroud, the green felt cloth that is still made in the town and Thomas the Tank Engine also feature”.
Here is the response to the previous post. These are offered in the hope that they inspire some kind of a discussion/debate around this. Please feel free to contribute and share your thoughts. In case you missed it in yesterday’s post, you can read the MoU document that is the subject of all this conversation 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
Read more»