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 Culture is back! After a month of Cornish beaches, hemp lime plastering, wood store-building, cinema visits, catching up with friends, storytelling festivals, campfires and wrestling with cabbage white caterpillars, normal service is resumed. Nice to see you again, you’re looking well. I’m kicking off again with some reflections on John Michael Greer’s ‘green wizardry’ concept, which he calls “the current Archdruid Report project”, which will no doubt generate some interesting debate. Greer, for those who don’t know, is a blogger and author whose work I usually admire greatly, whose excellent blog can be found here.
Here is a fascinating short film about Transition Heathrow, which has emerged from the proposed (and now scrapped) Third Runway at Heathrow Airport, and is now focused around a community garden project called ‘Grow Heathrow’, a wonderful reclaiming of a derelict market garden site. It will hopefully spark an interesting discussion here about how Transition and activism come together … thanks to the JustDoIt people for making the film…
Now I’ve been to some Unleashings in my time, but last night’s Unleashing of Transition Malvern Hills (TMH) was a stunner. Unleashings are designed to be the launch event which, historically, people look back to as the point when a Transition process arrived, a celebration of a place and its culture, a big push for wider engagement, and a statement of collective intent. I have been to Unleashings before with music, but not one with three choirs, to Unleashings with input from young people, but not one with such inspiring young people speaking, and to Unleashings with input from other local organisations, but not one with the level of affirmation from a wide range of local organisations, including the local MP. In short, it was an extraordinary event.
The Ministry of Food: thrifty wartime ways to feed your family today. Jane Fearnley Whittingstall. (2010) Hodder & Stoughton and the Imperial War Museum.
I hadn’t heard of this until a couple of weeks ago, when a group of folks visiting from the US dropped by, en route from London, where they had visited an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum called ‘The Ministry of Food’ (which runs until January 3rd 2011), gave me their copy of this book. Having read this book, I will definitely make a point of going to see the exhibition next time I am in London. The book is the exhibition catalogue, but it is also a superb stand-alone publication, offering many useful insights on how the British people managed during the war, how the Ministry of Food successfully promoted the Dig for Victory/Kitchen Front campaigns which kept the country from starvation, and, ironically, led to the healthiest population in the country’s recent history.
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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