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.
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…).
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:
Here is a great new development, the first edition of a Brazilian Transition magazine, ‘Em Transição’. Very exciting. I can’t tell you much more about it other than to say have a look at it below. It has a recipe for a soup with chives in, and all kinds of great stuff by the looks of it, congratulations to all involved.
There are, as Andrew Simms points out in his most recent blog, two narratives about our economic choices moving forward from here, growth or austerity. Some argue we need austerity in order to get growth, others that we can just cut straight to the growth by printing or borrowing more money. The government recently announced a “massive push for growth“, with £950m being recently allocated for the ‘Regional Growth Fund’ (out of what is expected to be £1.4bn in total), in spite of the fact that money spent so far through the RGF was recently criticised for spending as much as £200,000 to create a single job. One of the key channels for distributing and allocating RGF funds is the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). According to my big-green-book-of-localism the government kindly sent me last year, LEPs are “locally-owned partnerships between local authorities and businesses which will play a central role in determining economic priorities, undertaking activities to drive economic growth and the creation of local jobs”. Yet on closer inspection, LEPs would appear to embody everything that is bereft of vision, imagination and indeed of any of the kind of creativity and thinking that these times demand.
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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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…).
