Transition Culture

15 May 2007

A Talk for Transition City Bristol. 1st May 2007.

**A Review: from** Transition City Bristol’s **website**.

“Over 200 people packed the Trinity Centre on Tuesday night to hear Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement. With towns and now cities across the UK taking up the Transition challenge the experiment has left the laboratory and is going viral in the wild. Soil Association director Patrick Holden introduced Rob, reliving the point in history when he first heard Rob speak and the massive impact on his life, farming and work that it had.

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10 May 2007

Inaugural Transition Network conference – 31st May 2007.

**Inaugural Transition Network conference with Richard Heinberg and Rob Hopkins – May 31st.**

We’re setting up a Transition Network conference for 31st May 2007 in Nailsworth, near Stroud, Gloucestershire, at [Ruskin Mill]((www.rmet.co.uk/rmc/rmc_menu1.htm). The purpose of the event is to add momentum to existing Transition Towns (and cities/districts/villages), increase the connections between them. We’re also hoping to be able to encourage others to embark on their own voyage of self-determined energy descent.

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8 May 2007

Transition Towns – Local Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Change. An Interview: Part 2.

**Retrofitting Suburbia**

EON: David Holmgren, the co-originator with Bill Mollison of Permaculture, doesn’t agree that peak oil spells the ‘end of suburbia.’ He envisions using all that lawn space to grow food. Do you agree with catastrophic expectations for suburbia?

RH: Well, I think although “The End of Suburbia

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7 May 2007

Transition Towns – Local Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Change. An Interview: Part 1.

A month or so ago,
Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle of the Ecological Options Network visited Totnes to do an interview with me about Transition Towns. We also wandered around Totnes in the rain (anyone remember rain?) and filmed bits in different places for a film they were making. Anyway, my memory of the interview we did was that it was quite brief, but they just sent me the transcript of it and it goes on and on! Here it is, it covers a lot of ground, and gives quite a nice overview of the Transition Towns idea and much else besides. Many thanks to Mary Beth and James for allowing me to reproduce it here.

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30 Apr 2007

The Future of Biodiesel, or not.

I travelled back from Lewes on the train last week, and was really struck by the amount of yellow fields I could see from the window as I passed. There is a lot of money going into the creation of a UK biodiesel sector, with very favourable subsidies, and the English countryside is becoming increasingly yellow. The farming press is abuzz with regular talk of the glittering potential future in biodiesel, and refineries are being built. It is a great green illusion (or delusion), although there are many others who can argue the case against biofuels far better than I can. David Strahan sums up the case against biofuels in his new book The Last Oil Shock (review pending) when he writes that they offer the prospect of “starving to death in a traffic jam”.

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