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.
David Gershon‘s book ‘Social Change 2.0’ has been one that quite a few people involved in Transition have found useful and insightful, so I was delighted to be able to have a conversation with him recently. My discussion with him will be spread over 2 posts, one today and the second part on Monday.
David, thank you very much for joining us. I wondered if we could start by you just introducing yourself and saying a bit about who you are and what you do?
I have been a change agent, I guess you would say, for at least 30 years. My work has been around an idea called empowerment, in particular, ‘second order change’, which is another way of describing transformative social change. I have engaged in a number of initiatives of different sizes and scales from the household and block level up to the global level, and I’ve also applied this to working with organisations that want to engage.
Transition initiatives have spawned a number of fascinating new enterprises, and in today’s post we’ll be looking at one of them you may not have come across yet, Hodmedod’s Great British Beans, which has emerged from work of Transition City Norwich and East Anglia Food Link. What follows is an interview with one of its founders, Josiah Meldrum. The beans project was first mentioned in an interview I did with Josiah for a Transition Podcast a year ago, and is now at the commercial stage. Below you will find the audio of our interview which you can either play or download to listen to while you are planting out your garlic, the transcript, and, at the end, a competition to win some, and a code to buy some at a discount. What a treat. You’re going to enjoy this. I love the bit when Josiah says:
“we discovered was that there was an assumption that no-one would want to eat the beans, but no-one had bothered asking anyone whether they wanted to eat the beans”.
Mallika Bhattacharya, a student at Oxford Brookes University, has recently published a research paper called “An Investigation of the Transition Movement as a Model for Sustainable Development: ‘Haddenham in Transition’” (click on the link to download). Haddenham is a village in Buckinghamshire of about 8,000 residents, about 16 miles from Oxford. The research looked at the group’s work, and the level of awareness of its work across the community. The study aims to find out how aware and involved Haddenham residents are with Transition activities, what their priorities are for the village and what changes they would like to see, the Transition group’s current and planned activities and successes and issues within the initiative. It’s a very useful piece of research with some useful insights for other initiatives.
December is one of the quieter times for Transition initiatives, but even so, we’ve quite a packed December round-up for you. We start, seasonally, with two Winterfests, a seasonal opportunity to celebrate and reflect on what a Transition group is up to. We’ll start in Stroud, with this short film of the Transition Stroud Winterfest:
As I enter the final stages of editing the new book I have been working on, provisionally titled ‘The power of just doing stuff‘ (more information to follow), I am at the stage of, for one reason or another, cutting out perfectly good stuff that just doesn’t fit anymore (it’s a small book). Seems a shame to waste them, so I’ll be posting a few here. Here’s the first, which expands on something that got a mention in the video I posted here last week, the concept of thinking of Transition, and how it spreads, as being like mycorrhizal fungi.
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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