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.
The other day my wife sent me a text while I was at work. “Get some broccoli”. During my lunch break, I duly headed out into Totnes in pursuit of the afore-mentioned brassica. I started out by visiting all the places that might sell local, organic broccoli, but they were all out, one telling me “it’s like gold dust mate, you’d be lucky”. I then tried the places that would stock non-organic, non-local broccoli, but they were out too. All of a sudden it transpired that I lived in a broccoli desert. Turns out it’s not just Totnes, the crappest summer the UK has ever faced has hit UK farming hard. It has also led me, I must confess, for the first time, to abandon my garden to an unprecedentedly vast slug population.
[Here is a press release just put out by Atmos Totnes] When it comes to building houses, which offers the best return to a local economy, concrete blocks or straw bales? Gypsum or clay plasters? Imported timber or local timber? Atmos Totnes today announces the release of a ground-breaking new paper, ‘Can Totnes build itself?’ (a kind of successor to 2009’s ‘Can Totnes and district feed itself?’ study), which looks at the local building materials potentially available for the construction of the Atmos Totnes development.
Let’s start this month’s round-up in the UK, in Cheltenham. Transition Town Cheltenham have been making some gorgeous short films recently. In the last roundup we shared the one about Ken and his allotment. This month, firstly, Ivor, Remi and Leon talk us through the chickens in their garden, and their 8-person cargo bike:
… and secondly, a short film about In Stitches, who held their The Big Knit event at the Global Footsteps Cafe. A beautiful film about the power of knitting to build community:
George Monbiot announced in the Guardian on Monday “We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all“, an article which concluded “peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a very long time”. Several people have written, and even stopped me while I’ve been out shopping, to ask for my take on his piece, so here it is. It has been a tricky thing to write, as in the time it took me to compose it, so many other interesting analyses of it have been posted, many of which I have tried to reference here. In a nutshell, I think Monbiot’s piece swallows an over-optimistic take on peak oil, and there are things in his piece that I disagree with and things that I agree with, although I don’t for a moment consider myself a peak oil expert. What he does prompt is a rethink in terms of how we present peak oil. Let’s start with the things I disagree with.
The Centre for Alternative Technology has just published a new book called ‘The Home Energy Handbook: a guide to saving and generating energy in your home and community’. It is a great resource for Transition groups, and Transition features strongly through the book. It is available here. I spoke to Allan Shepherd, one of the book’s authors/editors, and asked him to tell us more about the book. Here is the audio, transcript below:
Can you tell us where the idea for the book came from?
It started from the Zero Carbon Britain 2030 project really, because that was aimed at policy makers and government. What we wanted to do was take the concept that was developed in ZCB, which was the ‘Power down’ and the ‘Power up’ concept.
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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