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.
I am writing this as I travel back from a great trip to the beautiful city of Lancaster. The reason for the trip was two-fold, firstly to co-present a workshop to the City Council, and secondly for that evening’s Unleashing of Transition City Lancaster (TCL). I arrived off the train in Lancaster at about 2pm, and met Alexis Rowell, Camden’s eco-councillor and author of the forthcoming Transition Books tome on how to work with your local Council, as well as Steve and Rob of TCL. We headed over to the Council offices to set up the workshop we were doing there for Council officers and members.
Last week none of us had ever heard of an Icelandic volcano called Eyjafjallajokull, and still even now, very few of us can actually pronounce its name. The volcanic dust spewn forth across Europe as a result of its spectacular eruption has had a remarkable effect, leading to, among other things, the total grounding of the UK’s aviation fleet for several days until this morning. The headline on Metro, the free newspaper the person next to me on the train is reading as I write this, is “Fly, fly again”. It will take days to clear the backlog and to get things back to normal, but let us not pass up this opportunity to meditate on vulnerability and resilience, which led to major disruption to the air freighting of produce from Kenya and other places, thousands of people stuck in their Easter holiday destinations, and Liverpool Football Club having to travel to its Europa League fixture with Athletico Madrid on public transport . But perhaps rather than seeing it as the ‘misery’ most news broadcasts labelled it as, we might see it as good practice for the near future.
Here’s a great short film about Transition Town Kingston, created for their Unleashing, which took place on Saturday. Wonderful when initiatives document their work like this. Not quite sure what’s going on with Shaun Chamberlin and the phone box… looks like he has wrestled it to the ground….
Recently I mentioned the Prince’s Foundation event ‘Building: a new green economy’ held in early February at St. James’s Palace, which looked at the role of green building, particularly focusing on the role local building materials might play, and the benefits they would bring. I mentioned that the talks were filmed, and they have now been posted online. So here they are, starting with my one (with thanks to Jeff Rubin for the ‘afford to burn’ line I used….), and followed by all the other speakers too….
From time to time I hear about people doing Book Clubs based around the Transition Handbook. Thankfully, and entirely in a self-organising “wouldn’t-it-be-great-if-there-was-a-study-guide” kind of way, Joann Kerr, Susan Gregory, and Leo Brodie of Sustainable NE Seattle (the 19th officially-recognized Transition Initiative in the United States), decided to take matters into their own hands and create one. Rather wonderful it is too, packed with activities and exercises to do with a group of people, it is quite special to think that my humble lil’ ole Transition Handbook would enthuse people sufficiently to create such a great resource. Download it here, take it, use it, let them know how it went….
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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I am writing this as I travel back from a great trip to the beautiful city of Lancaster. The reason for the trip was two-fold, firstly to co-present a workshop to the City Council, and secondly for that evening’s Unleashing of Transition City Lancaster (TCL). I arrived off the train in Lancaster at about 2pm, and met Alexis Rowell, Camden’s eco-councillor and author of the forthcoming Transition Books tome on how to work with your local Council, as well as Steve and Rob of TCL. We headed over to the Council offices to set up the workshop we were doing there for Council officers and members.
