Transition Culture

An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent

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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.

Archive for “Localisation” category

Showing results 276 - 280 of 684 for the category: Localisation.


2 Sep 2010

An Interview with Chris Bird, author of ‘Local Sustainable Homes’

In advance of the publication next week of Chris Bird’s Transition Book ‘Local Sustainable Homes’, I spoke to Chris about the book, and about what he set out to achieve in writing it.  The book will be available to order here at Transition Culture from next Thursday (the 9th).

So Chris, how does ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ differ from all the other green building books out there?

You could fill a bookshop with volumes on green building. There are so many works on sustainable design and construction and green materials that choosing what to read has become almost as difficult as deciding which spectacle frames to wear! But this book is different because it concentrates on how individuals, groups and communities are making it happen. Okay, I admit that in places the book does drift into looking at materials and construction methods but the bread and butter of the text deals with examples from around the country of how people are making sustainable homes a concrete reality – but without the concrete!

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1 Sep 2010

My Foreword to ‘Local Sustainable Homes’

Next week sees the publication of the next book in the Transition Books series, ‘Local Sustainable Homes: how to make them happen in your community’ by Chris Bird.  More details to follow (including how to order your copy), but as a taster, here is my foreword to the book:

In The Pattern of English Building, his seminal review of vernacular English construction techniques and the wide range of building materials that have defined English architecture – from flint and chalk to clay, oak and straw – Alec Clifton-Taylor wrote:

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31 Aug 2010

Why ‘Green Wizards’ Get Us Nowhere New…

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

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30 Jul 2010

‘Localism’ or ‘Localisation’? Defining our terms

There is often confusion within the peak oil/Transition movement about the distinction between the terms ‘localism‘ and ‘localisation‘.  On Energy Bulletin yesterday, Richard Moore’s piece, ‘The Emergence of Localism” was actually referring, I would argue, to localisation, not localism.  In the UK, in the context of the government’s Big Society agenda, the two definitely mean very different things.  Here is section from my forthcoming thesis which explores this distinction. 

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Discussion: 8 Comments

Categories: Economics, General, Localisation, Politics


27 Jul 2010

Local Food and Relocalisation: a Totnes case study: a section from my forthcoming thesis…

I am hopefully now only days from handing in the PhD I have been doing, the closing stages of a gruelling marathon.  I posted a couple of weeks ago the contents and the layout of the thesis, which is called ‘Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level:  the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)’.  I thought you might like to see a section of it, to give you a flavour.  Apologies to regular readers that this is written in a far more academic style than you might be used to here, but hopefully you will find it useful and relevant.  It comes from a section looking at the relocalisation of food, and draws from the different research I did.  I am importing this from Word, so some of the formatting might go a little wierd….

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