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.
Transition Town Totnes has been running now for just over 4 years, and recently a group of us sat down to try and capture what has actually been achieved by the process. It has been a very illuminating process, one that is very useful to do in terms of being able to get a sense of what has actually been achieved on the ground (I highly recommend it). The name of the report, ‘So, what does Transition Town Totnes actually do?‘, comes from the question often asked by visitors to the town who come to see a Transition town, wander round the High Street and wonder why there are still cars and not windmills everywhere. This report is designed to explain all that is going on below the surface (as well as on top of it…).
While I was Tadelakting my bathroom last Saturday, something far more interesting was happening in Totnes town, the annual TTT Winterfest. Sara and Emilio of nu-project were there, and have done this great film of the event, giving a flavour of the different initiatives underway and of what the day was like.
Here is a section from my recently completed thesis, which is available here, which looks at the potential of local building materials in the relocalisation process.
“The process of building with bales includes the possibility of making a profound change in the fabric of human societies around the world. In fact this vision is not exclusively a matter of straw bales: the questions we are trying to pose…. are basic: how do we build, and how does that process occur in relation to the community and to the life around us? Straw bales happen to be the material that has inspired many to look at the process of building in a different light”. (Steen et al.1994: xvi).
In the same way the local food movement shifts its focus from out-of-season, long supply chain, high embodied energy foods towards more locally sourced, low impact foods rooted in the local region or ‘foodshed’ (Kloppenberg et al. 1996), an emerging branch of architecture and construction examine similar transitions with building materials.
Here is a great short film made by Harvest Creative for EMSSE (East Midlands School for Social Entrepreneurs) about the exciting overlaps between Transition and social enterprise, which will be a core theme of the second edition of the Transition Handbook. Excellent stuff…
My section of Post Carbon Institute’s ‘Post Carbon Reader: managing the 21st century’s sustainability crises’, due out in October, has just been published online. You can download the pdf of my part here, and can see all the previous pdfs that have been published so far here. For a sense of the final book, you can see the contents page here. It’s going to be a great book. Here is an short extract of my piece:
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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Transition Town Totnes has been running now for just over 4 years, and recently a group of us sat down to try and capture what has actually been achieved by the process. It has been a very illuminating process, one that is very useful to do in terms of being able to get a sense of what has actually been achieved on the ground (I highly recommend it). The name of the report, ‘So, what does Transition Town Totnes actually do?‘, comes from the question often asked by visitors to the town who come to see a Transition town, wander round the High Street and wonder why there are still cars and not windmills everywhere. This report is designed to explain all that is going on below the surface (as well as on top of it…).
In the same way the local food movement shifts its focus from out-of-season, long supply chain, high embodied energy foods towards more locally sourced, low impact foods rooted in the local region or ‘foodshed’ (Kloppenberg et al. 1996), an emerging branch of architecture and construction examine similar transitions with building materials. 
