Transition Culture

31 Aug 2010

Why ‘Green Wizards’ Get Us Nowhere New…

Transition Culture is back!  After a month of Cornish beaches, hemp lime plastering, wood store-building, cinema visits, catching up with friends, storytelling festivals, campfires and wrestling with cabbage white caterpillars, normal service is resumed.  Nice to see you again, you’re looking well.  I’m kicking off again with some reflections on John Michael Greer’s ‘green wizardry’ concept, which he calls “the current Archdruid Report project”, which will no doubt generate some interesting debate.  Greer, for those who don’t know, is a blogger and author whose work I usually admire greatly, whose excellent blog can be found here. 

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30 Jul 2010

First Results from Transition Together evaluation

‘Transition Together’, the street-by-street behaviour change programme developed by Transition Town Totnes and now being piloted in 10 other communities, has just completed analysing the data that has come back from the first 4 groups, comprising 32 households in Totnes.  They have completed all 7 of the sessions set out in the workbook, and the data offers a fascinating first look at whether the process works or not.  The results from the other 31 groups currently underway are expected this Autumn.  Here, Fiona Ward of Transition Together shares the results that have emerged. 

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14 Jul 2010

‘Transition Towns: Local Networking for Global Sustainability?’: a dissertation

Another piece of high quality research has just been produced, this time by Jonathan Balls of the University of Cambridge, entitled ‘Transition Towns: Local Networking for Global Sustainability?’

It is a very insightful and useful addition to the research literature about Transition.  One of his conclusions is: “I argue that it is the structure of Transition that is crucial to grassroots support.  As a brand and umbrella organisation, Transition is able to facilitate and foster networking potential and collective resources, which encourages participation in the model.  Yet equally important, the self‐organising nature of the model is a key attraction to people and places joining Transition.  This dual structure enables the establishment of a diverse discourse coalition, incorporated through a holistic approach to sustainability”.

You can download the document in full here.

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8 Jul 2010

Why Transition Culture has been a bit quiet lately…

I am feeling very guilty about the infrequency of posts here, dear Transition Culture reader, and so wanted to explain my lack of regular blogging activity.  I am very close to finishing the PhD I have been doing over the last 3 years (alongside everything else), which is entitled “Localisation and resilience at the local level: the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)”.    A PhD, I am rapidly, and wearily, discovering, is rather like building a house.  When you build a house, you reach a stage where you think you are 90% done, walls up, all the slating done on the roof, windows in.  You soon find out though that you are only about halfway there, that all the fiddly bits and finishing things off take an inordinate amount of time.  So it is with a PhD.  I am aiming to hand it in by the end of this month, so am flat out tweaking, editing, cross-checking, throwing my hands up and wondering why I ever started it in the first place… .  It will be more widely available from mid-Autumn, but I thought for now you might at least like to see the Contents, to give you a taster of what’s to come (click ‘Read More’ to see it).  I do hope it will be something that you will all find useful… Right, back to it…

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