Transition Culture

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.

Archive for “Localisation” category

Showing results 406 - 410 of 684 for the category: Localisation.


19 Sep 2008

A Great Transition Event at Conway Hall, London: hope springs forth in the cities

Attended a wonderful event in London on Tuesday night, organised by Wise Women, called “Transition Towns Come to London”.  It took place in Conway Hall, and was, I realised when I got there, the first actual public talk I have ever given in London.  A few people have asked for the presentation I gave, you can download it here, but as usual with my presentations, it probably doesn’t make much sense without notes as to what I actually said.  Mike Grenville started the evening with a powerful overview of peak oil and peak water, and of the need to act.  Then I gave my talk about Transition, during which I read out a rather wonderful quote by Brian Eno about the power of visioning given to me by Lucy Neal of Transition Town Tooting just before the talk.  I think I’ll go on to use it regularly…  A few people asked me for it, so here it is…

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18 Sep 2008

Albert Bates on peak oil, relocalisation and why the hippys were right all along

In Totnes, one sometimes hears the term ‘old hippy’ used as a term of abuse.  Last week in Totnes, Albert Bates, an old hippy of the highest order, thrilled a full house at the Methodist Hall with the story of the Farm Ecovillage in Tennessee. It was a delight for me, as I first heard Albert speaking in 1995, when I was a fresh-faced, just qualified permaculturist who was lucky enough to get a bursary to attend the ‘Eco-Villages and Sustainable Communities’ conference at Findhorn.  The speech Albert gave there, one long evening, was a life changing moment. 

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12 Sep 2008

Transition Makes the Pages of the Christian Science Monitor

Communities plan for a low-energy future

‘Transition initiatives,’ begun in Britain, aim to empower people to tackle effects of climate change and decline of oil.
By Judith D. Schwartz
|The Christian Science Monitor/ September 11, 2008 edition

A year ago, Pat Proulx-Lough felt so overwhelmed by reports about climate change that she couldn’t even listen to the news. “My husband was finishing a dissertation on water resources, and I became hopeless and fearful,” says Ms. Proulx-Lough, a therapist in Portland, Maine.

Fast-forward to summer ’08 and Proulx-Lough is not just hopeful, but excited about the future. What happened? She tapped into the Transition movement.

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11 Sep 2008

‘A Peak into the future’, from yesterday’s Guardian

A peak into the future.
Described as ‘a social experiment on a massive scale’, the Transition Town movement offers positive ideas for low-carbon living

Sarah Lewis, The Guardian, Wednesday September 10 2008

When Waterstone’s recently asked 150 MPs about their favourite summer reads, number five on the list was a book from an environment group that only two years ago almost no one had heard of. But in that time, the Transition Town movement has grown from a classroom idea to a sprawling international network, which many think holds some of the answers to our environmental problems.

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5 Sep 2008

Responding to Various Critiques of Transition

Critiques of Transition come in all shapes and sizes, and are often fascinating.  In the US, Robin Mills recently described it as “mistaken, appalling and dangerous” (one of my favourites) and Jim O’Neill, Chief Economist at Goldman Sachs, recently said on the Business Daily Show on BBC World Service that he had just read a book by a Californian with no geological or economic background (that’s me apparently…) calling for Transition economies, and stated that he had never read such rubbish!  It has been intriguing in recent weeks to follow the various, and largely more coherent debates and discussions that have emerged in the wake of the Climate Camp, and also as the discussions about Transition that the Trapese Collective’s ‘Rocky Road’ document stimulated have rumbled on.

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