Transition Culture

2 Feb 2007

Using Visioning as a Powerful Protest Tool.

If a developer wants to take perfectly good light industrial area and replace it with a new urban centre, on a floodplain, with buildings up to 6 stories high, on average 4 stories, with 750 residential units, a shopping centre, cinema complex and so on, how should the community respond? They could write angry letters, organise a protest, rally people to fight against it. Or, perhaps, there might be another way to approach it. This is happening in Lewes, and people are not happy about it. The Transition Town Lewes group have come up with a great way of responding to this, with a positive vision of how the site could be. Based on Tom Atlee’s idea of a Futures Gazette, they have written a newspaper article (by the brilliantly named journalist ‘Mavis Happen’) from an edition of the local paper in 2017. Read on…

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11 Jan 2007

10 First Steps for a Transition Town Initiative #2. Lay the Foundations.

It is extremely unlikely that you will be starting a **Transition Town** project in a place where absolutely no environmental initiatives have ever happened before (although it is possible that such places exist: if you are in such a place it might be worth contemplating why…). Within the community there will be people who are just finding out about environmental ideas, people who have been familiar with the intellectual side of it for years but haven’t done much practical action, those who are gardeners, growers and builders, and people who are burnt out from doing all this stuff for years while no-one listened.

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13 Dec 2006

Mourning the Passing of Pinochet.

So one of modern history’s great murderous fascists has shuffled off this mortal coil, having successfully spent his final years avoiding justice. Margaret Thatcher’s courting of and support for Pinochet was yet another thing to add to her dreadful legacy, and as ever, who better to document both his passing and the Great White Witch’s role in his Presidency that the great Steve Bell. This is one of his simplest, most powerful and somehow, most furious, cartoons.

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12 Dec 2006

Review – New Peak Oil Film “Crude Impact”.

Last week I watched the new peak oil film, **Crude Impact**, produced by Vista Clara films, which has just emerged on DVD. It describes itself as “a film about how energy use, particularly fossil fuels, has impacted the earth, mankind and other species”, and is one of a couple of new peak oil films coming out over the next few months. I had been looking forward to seeing it for some time, and I found it to be an extremely well-made film which clearly and passionately presents the argument that we are at or near the peak, which will be a transition of historic importance.

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21 Nov 2006

Exclusive to Transition Culture! An Interview with Michael Meacher MP on peak oil and relocalisation.

**An Interview with Michael Meacher MP, Schumacher College, Dartington, Devon, 18th November 2006.**

**Michael Meacher** has been Labour Member of Parliament for Oldham West and Royton since 1970. He was Minister of State for the Environment between May 1997 and June 2003, and has been very outspoken on issues of peak oil and climate change. I managed to grab a short interview with him while he was eating his lunch at Schumacher College during his one day visit to the Life After Oil course and ask him for his thoughts on peak oil and localisation.

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