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.
Vegbox management committee at one of our meetings holding potato superheroes! (potatoes from Ripple Farm!)
Here in Transition Kentish Town we’ve been running events and projects for two and a bit years. We have a steering group, a food group, two gardening groups of one kind or another, an energy group. For year or so we had a pop up shop. And we’ve made a lot of chutney along the way. As always with voluntary groups, the active people come and go and we work with this ebb and flow. We try to make sure we’re enjoying ourselves so active people will return. And we often come back to our early insight that as a Transition Initiative we want to remain informal and voluntary, independent of the council and grant givers, and rooted in friendship, family and community. Vegbox has emerged out of a desire to set up a something more formal alongside this: a social enterprise.
I’ve written before here at Transition Culture about Transition in Brasilandia in Sao Paolo in Brazil. There is some fascinating stuff happening there (as elsewhere in Brazil), which is starting to attract attention with the media in the country. We recently had a news crew from Brazil’s Globo TV visit us at Transition Network to do an interview for a forthcoming piece, also about Transition Brasilandia. That hasn’t emerged yet, but here is a piece called ‘Pra Você Ver from TVT in Brazil that gives a good sense of it (in 3 parts, speaking Portugese helps…).
[A guest post from Naresh Giangrande and Mandy Dean] “Other Transition groups would give their right arm to have something like this”. Those were some of my first words to Peterborough in Transition as I rounded the corner and stepped off a busy city road and found myself in an urban oasis, bounded by the East Coast line on one side, and KFC on the other! The culture shock of coming from Switzerland; the orderliness, the way in which everything in Switzerland is just so, took a while to recover from. From a world of order- (did I say that already?), planning, government targets, suits, and a business like approach to the natural ‘chaos’ of Permaculture, doing things on no budget, begging, borrowing and liberating what you need and running on good will and instinct was more than a physical journey.
I was at the Hay Literary Festival over the weekend, and while I was there I caught up with Andrew Simms of New Economics Foundation, and in the light of the campaign afoot in Totnes to try and stop the opening of a Costa Coffee outlet in the town, I asked him “why should Totnes (or anywhere else for that matter) say no to Costa?” Here’s the audio file, followed by the transcript:
“Chain stores, of whatever variety, whether they are selling mobile phones, or whether they are selling coffee, or whether they are selling doughy torpedo-shaped sandwiches, are a way of doing business that carries with them a particular DNA for the society and the local economy which grows up around them.
Welcome to the monthly round-up of what people are up to doing Transition around the world. Let’s start this month in Spain. Spain recently held its first national Transition conference, which you can read more about here, and you can see Juan del Río’s reflections on it here. Here is a great film about the event which gives a great sense of the energy and dynamism that it tapped into:
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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