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.
Paul from Transition Town Deventer in the Netherlands just sent me the link to this. Paul describes it as “a slide show of announcements, programs, photos etcetera of our activities in the first year of TT Deventer. Even though most of the visitors of Transitionculture.org won’t be able to understand Dutch, it still might be a nice illustration of what a starting Transition initiative can do”. During 2009, they held over 60 different events and activities, engaging over 2300 people. Impressive stuff….
I read with interest John Michael Greer’s recent post, The Costs of Community, and then Sharon Astyk’s response, On the Problem of Community and I wanted to add some thoughts to the flow. Here is a very quick summary of the debate thus far… Greer’s basic argument is that the way politics used to work was that citizens formed themselves into groups and those groups into movements and that was what brought the pressure to bear to make things happen. Today, we are so atomised and isolated that this doesn’t happen, due, in part, to our preciously-guarded sense of autonomy, our lack of time, and our lack of enthusiasm for putting in the work that actually building communities entails. Rebuilding community, he argues, “requires “sacrificing some of the autonomy so many Americans guard jealously”.
A small group of us have spent the last few weeks working on what will become a booklet for Transition initiatives, which will help with the setting up of community grillings of our political candidates, allowing constituents to assess the degree of resilience thinking in their policies. It could provide the basis for an event, co-run with a range of other similar local organisations. It sets out how to do hustings, a guide to what resilience means, and also 10 Frequently Asked Questions that might arise. We are now throwing the draft over to you for your thoughts and consideration. We hope you find this useful, and look forward to your thoughts.
Been a fascinating few days here in the UK in terms of the weather. It was only a few weeks ago everyone was talking longingly about whether there was going to be a white Christmas, sending each other cards with pictures of snowy scenes, putting batteries in their rocking/singing snowmen things, and spraying fake, out of a can snow in their windows. It had been so long since we actually had a really actual snowy winter that thick snow has become the stuff of legend, banished to Doctor Who Christmas Specials and the top of Christmas cakes. Then it snowed, and boy did it snow, and almost immediately all the headlines were of ‘misery’ and ‘chaos’. One could forgive the snow for feeling somewhat unappreciated, like an old, much reminisced about old school friend, rediscovered through Facebook and invited to stay, who turns out to be hugely unpleasant. I have to say though, in spite of cancelled engagements, burst pipes and a very cold house, I’ll rather miss it when it’s gone.
So Copenhagen has been and gone, with no meaningful agreement being reached, and now the politicians and lobbyists have headed home having failed to do anything meaningful to address this staggeringly pressing challenge. Hugo Chavez came up with the quote of the fortnight when he observed “if the climate was a bank, they would already have saved it”. The gathering of the environmental/climate change movement in the Klimaforum with its dedicated bringing together of green luminaries and activists failed to have any meaningful impact on the proceedings, as did the mass street protests, designed to shame delegates into meaningful action and to draw a line in the sand. In short, the responses that the alternative movement/protest culture/social justice movement usually rolls into action when such events take place, didn’t work. So, might we do things differently next time?
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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