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.
Shaun Chamberlin’s masterwork, ‘The Transition Timeline’, is now complete and available for order. As someone who has been intimately involved in its conception and its production, I don’t think that a review from me would be of much use. It is of course brilliant, I love it. It is a powerful and vital addition to the Transition literature, and it deserves to be a best-seller. You can pre-order your copy here, and be the first person on your street to own one (we get the actual copies in a few days). The book will have two launches, one at the Kingston screening of the Age of Stupid on Sunday March 15th, and one at the Totnes Bookshop at 7pm on Wednesday 1st April. In the meantime, here is the foreword I wrote for the book.
Many of you enjoyed Matt Harvey’s piece about Transition that was on BBC South West recently, but a good few people outside the UK complained they were unable to see it on the iPlayer. So here it is, recently uploaded onto YouTube, featuring me looking quite unnecessarily smart… I hope you enjoy it….
Here are two very interesting concepts I’ve come across recently that feel worth sharing. One is Julie Brown of Growing Communities’ ‘Food Zones’ idea, and the other is that of the ‘Foodshed’ or ‘Foodshed Analysis’. Both hold key pieces of the Energy Descent Pathways jigsaw, and we are actively looking at how to make best use of them in the Totnes EDAP process. Clearly the Transition movement has developed a strong ethic that increasing the resilience of a settlement necessitates, among other things, a food system that grows as much food as close to home as possible. But what might that actually look like?
There won’t be a great deal posted here over the rest of this week, as I am away (a talk for Transition Chepstow and meetings in London) and also because my computer has come over all poorly and needs to go and see the doctor. Interesting things in my world over the past few days? The new Agroforestry News journal (excellent as ever), the first chapters of Michael Pollan’s fascinating ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’, first crocus in my garden is out (see right), the paper I am writing based on the ‘Can Totnes (and district) Feed Itself’ meeting we had last week with Simon Fairlie and Mark Thurstain-Goodwin (more to follow on that), …
I attended a great event yesterday at the Royal Agricultural College near Cirencester, organised by South West Rural Update looking at rural responses to peak oil and climate change. One of the first speakers was Nigel Curry (Director of the Countryside and Community Research Institute), who was asked, in 5 minutes, to respond to the question “can we live better and consume less?” His response was that consuming less is in fact the only way to live better, and to illustrate his point, he set out 9 tips for societal and individual happiness. Given that part of the purpose of Transition is “building resiIience and happiness”, I thought they were really useful, so I scrawled them down and offer them to you here this morning (I hope I’ve got them right, he did speak very fast).
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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