Transition Culture

8 Jan 2008

Ted Trainer’s Q&A Part Four.

**7. How conscious are participants of the crucial need for frugality, that a sustainable and just world cannot have affluent lifestyles, that sufficiency must be the concern…and that living frugally and self-sufficiently can be highly satisfying? I think this is the most difficult problem here; there is no sign whatsoever that the squandering affluent way needs to be questioned. Maybe the best way to make a difference is to begin with the reality of peak oil, and soon people will realise that the affluence will go with the oil??**

Indeed. I think peak oil is a very powerful tool for putting a mirror up to communities to ask, “where has the resilience in this community gone?”, and for focusing the mind on how vulnerable we have become. It is my experience that there is little mileage in telling people that they will need to live more frugally, but that what is much more powerful is to take people through a thinking process where they arrive at that conclusion themselves, which is one of the key aspects of what Transition Intiatives do.

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19 Dec 2007

Can Poetry Save the Planet?

I wouldn’t know the answer to that question, but I certainly feel more open to the possibility following an event organised recently by the Transition Town Totnes Heart and Soul group called **Poetry in Motion** (“an evening of words to move, inspire and uplift”) which featured Drew Dellinger, one of the most respected and admired performers in the field of deep ecology / awakening / planetary work, and local Totnes poet Matt Harvey, who recently also performed at the TTT first birthday party. The event was a huge success, and I had the huge frustration of already being committed to teaching my evening class in the room next door, and being able to hear the laughter and applause through the wall but needing to focus instead on teaching about varieties of walnut and forest garden design. I thought I would never be able to hear the event.. but it turns out I can….

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18 Dec 2007

New 2008 Transition Town Totnes Programme Launched.

It’s here, after many late nights editing, and a raft of last minute changes… It once again gives me great pleasure to unveil the new Transition Town Totnes programme, for January to March 2008. It represents our intention to begin to move the project away from high profile speakers and towards events which are more practical and focused and engage people in doing things. We think it is our strongest programme yet. It also contains a number of events intended to seed some new directions and ventures for TTT in the programme after this one. You can see the pdf. copies of the programme here (inner) and here (outer).

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11 Dec 2007

Ted Trainer’s Transition Q&A Part One.

**Ted Trainer** is author of the essential Renewable Energy Cannot Power a Consumer Society, which is one of the best arguments for the inevitability of energy descent yet to appear. He has spent many years arguing for localisation, reduced consumption and the end of affluence. He recently received the Transition Primer, and was highly enthused by the whole concept. He sent me a list of 17 questions about it all, which my crap typing has thus far prevented me from launching into. Given the assumption (which I have observed repeatedly as a teacher) that if one person has a question, it is usually the case that it is also a question that lots of other people would like to ask too, and given also that they are great questions, I am going to work my way through them, 2 a day, here at **Transition Culture**. It is also an opportunity for readers who are involved in Transition Initiatives elsewhere to chip in their thoughts, and perhaps how they might have answered the questions, thereby offering a snapshot of the Transition movement in relation to these questions. So, here we go, Question One…

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6 Dec 2007

Transition Bristol’s BIG Event.

In Wayne’s World 2 (“you’ll laugh again, you’ll cry again, you’ll hurl again”), the two hapless heroes Wayne and Garth, decide they want to run a rock festival. They book Aerosmith to come and play, but are aware that they don’t have any money to pay them. They are constantly reassured by a series of Castaneda-like visions of Jim Morrison in a desert not to worry; “book them and they will come”, he tells them. In the run up to Transition Bristol’s BIG Event it was an analogy I told the organisers a few times as the scale of what they had planned dawned on them. This was indeed a big event. Hosted in Bristol City Council’s City Hall, this was a big leap of faith for the Transition group which only began less than a year ago. As it turned out, people came, and the event was a huge success (lucky I hadn’t told them that as far as I remember, in Wayne’s World 2, nobody actually does turn up).

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