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.
This, the penultimate Transition object in our series of short films telling some of the stories from The Transition Companion, presents a bowl of topsoil from a field just outside Norwich. It looks at the work happening there around local food, offering a great example of strategic thinking in practice. You can download the flyer for Norwich Farmshare, one of the initiatives discussed in this film here, and they will also feature in next week’s December Transition podcast.
Transition Training has developed a new 2-day course for Transition initiatives who have been going for some time, called ‘Transition: Thrive’. It had its first pilot a couple of weeks ago, and in this guest post, trainer Naresh Giangrande reflects on how it went, and what learnings are helping to shape its further evolution.
How well is Transition going in the UK? Is it succeeding, failing or something in between? Is there anything we can do about it when it isn’t going well? How can we help functional Transition initiatives take their next steps in a training? Last weekend, twenty six dedicated pioneers took the plunge, confronted their inner daemons and came along for a roller coaster ride of a weekend in Totnes, UK.
In the UK, the main Transition-related story to make the national news over the past month was the suggestion by Ian Jones, CEO of Volunteer Cornwall, that Cornwall should set up its own currency, the ‘Cornwall Pound’. The story made the national news and many references were made to the local currencies already in existence via Transition Towns Totnes (Devon), Lewes (Sussex) and Brixton (London). Jones told the Daily Telegraph “It’s no good if we endlessly talk about our problems, we need to start doing something positive now if we are to avoid being at the mercy of the global storm which is currently raging.”
While there has been much discussion in terms of Transition and diversity over the past few years, little has been said about the issue of age. It’s not something we’ve explored here at Transition Culture in the past. Sometimes it is suggested that Transition only appeals to older people, whereas Occupy, for example, tends to attract more younger people. But is that the case? Is it that straightforward? How might Transition best serve people at the different stages in their lives, and what might they, in turn, bring to it? What are the things that attract people of different ages and what do they hope to get out of their engagement? I ask these questions by way of stimulating discussion, and thought a useful framing might be William Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man (with apologies to female readers for Shakespeare’s gender focus), from ‘As You Like It’. It begins:
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,
I already posted a clever thing here that mixed the slides and the audio from a talk I gave the RESOLVE conference in May, well here now is the film of the talk, in case you’re interested…
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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This, the penultimate Transition object in our series of short films telling some of the stories from The Transition Companion, presents a bowl of topsoil from a field just outside Norwich. It looks at the work happening there around local food, offering a great example of strategic thinking in practice. You can download the flyer for Norwich Farmshare, one of the initiatives discussed in this film here, and they will also feature in next week’s December Transition podcast.
