Transition Culture

5 Oct 2006

An Enticing Taste of Albert Bates

I was fortunate enough the other day to get my eager sweaty paws on the nearly finished draft of Albert Bates’ forthcoming masterpiece, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook – Recipes for Changing Times. It is really the book you’ve been waiting for, a practical, optimistic guide to life beyond the peak. It is due to hit the shelves in early October, and it is really worth waiting for. It will be reviewed at **Transition Culture** nearer the time (once I’ve finished George Monbiot’s new book). In the meantime as a taster, you might enjoy a great interview with Albert Bates that was broadcast on Nashville’s Liberadio. In it he gives a very good introduction to peak oil for beginners, what he calls ‘Peak Oil lite’. Hopefully it will leave you eager to get your hands on the book when it emerges.

Read more»

4 Oct 2006

Transition Town Totnes – The Story So Far by Naresh Giangrande.

*My TTT colleague and fellow peak oil activist Naresh Giangrande wrote this piece as notes for a talk he gave to Totnes Friends of the Earth last night, and I felt it gave such a good overview of the project and what it is doing that I asked him if I could post it here. Naresh runs Living on the Cusp, and runs workshops around the country on preparing for peak oil.*

Transition Town Totnes began the with understanding that we are facing imminent social collapse. Not the slow but steady social collapse that FOE, Greenpeace, the Club of Rome, and others have been warning about for decades now,

Read more»

3 Oct 2006

Communities, Refuges, and Refuge-Communities – a Survivalist Response by Zachary Nowak.

*My response to Zachary’s recent article generated more comments than any other previous piece on **Transition Culture**. I will write something about all that soon, but in the meantime, he has written a thoughtful piece restating his thoughts and his position on all this. I am delighted that he has chosen this as the venue to publish it. It is a very honest piece, and one which, if the last one is anything to go by, you will enjoy commenting on!*

Read more»

2 Oct 2006

Always Read the Small Print…. Especially Chevron’s.

You should always read the small print. A friend of mine recently bid on Ebay and won what he thought was a Playstation portable thing (also known as a PS2 apparently) for his son for £40. What actually arrived in the post was a piece of paper featuring a list of auctions where such a thing could be bought. Ebay is full of this particular scam. My son recently tried to convince me to buy a quad bike for £5, until I pointed out the small print; like my friend, what we would actually be buying was a piece of paper with some nonsense about quad bikes on it. When it comes to large oil corporations, a closer read of their small print can also prove illuminating.

Read more»

27 Sep 2006

Three Great Articles by Other People #3. The Oil Drum on the Gulf of Mexico ‘Discoveries’.

Over the last few weeks the newspapers have been full of stories about the supposed huge find of new oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, “between 3 and 15 billion barrels” (that’s quite a range…), most of them informing us that peak oil is now officially nonsense, and that we can all roll over and go back to sleep. The story is taken to show that there are still vast untapped reserves out there, that the peak oil ‘doomsters’ are wrong, and look, here in the Gulf of Mexico is the proof of that.

Read more»