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.
Last Saturday was the final day of the River Cottage/British Gas Energyshare vote, an innovative approach to raising awareness for, and supporting, community renewables. When voting closed, at 5pm, the winners were, in the large category, Hexham River Hydro, in the medium category, the Portobello and Leith community wind energy project, and in the small category, the North Devon Hospice and the Shrewsbury Hydro. Three of the four are Transition initiatives. There were also Transition groups who didn’t win, and also quite a few who didn’t make it through to the final vote (the many fantastic projects in the vote gave a sense of the huge hunger out there for community renewables). I talked to each of the 3 Transition winners, Portobello (here‘s a piece from their local paper), Shrewsbury and Tynedale about the Energyshare process, how they rustled up enough votes, how the last hours before the vote closed were spent, and how being winners makes a difference to their project. This short podcast captures their stories:
And here is the moment where Portobello and Hexham found out they had won:
Last week, on a rather soggy, windswept London evening, members of Transitions Belsize, Bethnal Green, Brentford, Brixton, Crouch End, Crystal Palace, Finsbury Park, Hackney, Highbury, Kensal to Kilburn, Kentish Town, Lewisham, Peckham, Stoke Newington, Tooting, Tufnell Park, Walthamstow, Wandsworth, Wanstead, Westcombe, Willesden and Wimbledon (and probably a few more besides), as well as members of the public, gathered at the GLA building in London, to help celebrate Transition in London, and the launch of ‘The Transition Companion’.
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,
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.
