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.
As regular readers may know, I am somewhat of a book-collector, and the amount of books in my house threatens the whole place with subsidence. I am particularly infatuated with a series of books that Batsford produced in the 1930s and 40s which captured various aspects of life in the UK at the time, many of which are now lost, the ‘Country Life’ series. I have a few of them, and they are an amazing combination of text, beautiful black and white plate photographs and exquisite line drawings, mostly of old buildings.
Let’s start this month’s round up in Australia. Transition Sydney also recently held an event about social enterprise and reviving local economies through resilience-building, entitled the ‘Living Economies Forum’, with a great range of speakers. Here is the poster. One of them was Michael Shuman, and here is his excellent talk, called “Building Resilient Local Economies through Local Investment”:
At the 2012 Degrowth conference in Venice one of the highlights for me was the talk by Arturo Escobar (my notes from which can be found here). He is the author of Encountering Development and Territories of Difference, among others. His talk looked at how Transition might look in the context of the Global South, and held many fascinating insights. Here is the interview I did with him, first as an audio file, and below as a transcript.
Beautiful ancient carved doors on the Battistero in Parma.
The next day began with a walk around the city of Ferrara. The core of the city is medieval, and contains some beautiful architecture. One of the things that is initially most striking about Ferrara is the number of bicycles, and the diversity of the people riding bicycles. Ferrara is famous for the levels of cycling. This is aided by the fact that it is a very flat city, but as Pierre told me, also by the fact that cyclists are treated, as he put it, “like sacred cows are in India”, that is, drivers expect them to go anywhere, and do anything, at any time, and so afford them to necessary space on the road. There are no formal cycle lanes so far as I could see, but somehow it all works.
Sunday began early, going to meet around 25 members of Transition Italia and of different Italian groups on the harbourside on the outskirts of Venice. There we got on a boat that they had booked to take us all to Ferrara. The boat was called ‘Nena’, an original Venezian ‘vaporetto’, the boats particular to Venice that are used to ferry passengers and goods around the smaller waterways. It was owned by a family who had lovingly restored it and it was a beautiful boat, and they were our hosts for the day. It was to turn out to be one of the most beautiful Transition-related days I have ever had the fortune to experience.
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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As regular readers may know, I am somewhat of a book-collector, and the amount of books in my house threatens the whole place with subsidence. I am particularly infatuated with a series of books that Batsford produced in the 1930s and 40s which captured various aspects of life in the UK at the time, many of which are now lost, the ‘Country Life’ series. I have a few of them, and they are an amazing combination of text, beautiful black and white plate photographs and exquisite line drawings, mostly of old buildings. 
Let’s start this month’s round up in Australia. Transition Sydney also recently held an event about social enterprise and reviving local economies through resilience-building, entitled the 
