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.
Evening sun lights up the cathedral in the old quarter of Deventer, Holland.
How’s this for an interesting sign of the times? I travel to Brussels on Eurostar, I arrive and write a tweet saying “just travelled to Brussels on Eurostar, very nice it was too”, and almost immediately get a tweet back from them saying “glad you enjoyed the journey”! Didn’t expect that one. That’s either really great or a bit scary, I haven’t decided yet. Anyway, I am just back from a mad-dash tour of Belgium and Holland. It was fascinating to see the level of interest in Transition in those places and to meet some of the people involved.
I loved Ed Mitchell’s post over on the Transition Network site as part of the ‘fantastic ‘social reporters’ project. There are 12 ‘social reporters’ around the UK who will be blogging in a rota, producing one blog post every day, on a subject set by a guest editor at the beginning of the week. Ed’s was called “A liminal song of thanks”, and in it he wrote:
“That’s why we’re staying up late, working on personal time, finding friends who don’t want to support this future, even though it seems unavoidable, and jamming with them, making it up as we go, sharing our personal stories, openly, our successes, our failures, our hopes, our dreams, our loves. Our vegetables. Wrestling with content management systems that aren’t as perfect as our hopes”.
Beautiful. No mention of making your own paint out of cheese though. So I thought I’d better put that right this morning.
As part of last weekend’s Transition Town Totnes Open Eco-Homes weekend, I visited a house in Lower Allerton that was built in the 16th century, and which has recently been making many changes to reduce its environmental impact. As regular readers will know, I have done a fair bit of cob building in my time, and have often had to deal with the question “won’t it just wash away in the rain”, a question as infuriating to cob builders as Three Little Pigs jokes are to straw bale builders. The highlight for me, therefore, of the visit to Lower Allerton, was the 500 year-old cob walls.
Here is the third film in the ‘Story of Transition in 10 objects’ series, this time looking at a part from an old Victorian gas lamp from Malvern. You will be able to read more about this, and many other Transition stories, in the forthcoming ‘The Transition Companion’.
Here, thanks to those good people over at PermanentCultureNow, is a film of the talk I gave at this summer’s Sunrise Off Grid Festival in Somerset. Part 3 also includes the ‘milling’ exercise with the ingredients cards which will be available to download and use on October 27th, the official launch date of The Transition Companion.
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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