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Archive for “The ‘Heart’ of Energy Descent” category
Showing results 136 - 140 of 230 for the category: The ‘Heart’ of Energy Descent.
2 Feb 2007
If a developer wants to take perfectly good light industrial area and replace it with a new urban centre, on a floodplain, with buildings up to 6 stories high, on average 4 stories, with 750 residential units, a shopping centre, cinema complex and so on, how should the community respond? They could write angry letters, organise a protest, rally people to fight against it. Or, perhaps, there might be another way to approach it. This is happening in Lewes, and people are not happy about it. The Transition Town Lewes group have come up with a great way of responding to this, with a positive vision of how the site could be. Based on Tom Atlee’s idea of a Futures Gazette, they have written a newspaper article (by the brilliantly named journalist ‘Mavis Happen’) from an edition of the local paper in 2017. Read on…
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31 Jan 2007
At great risk of opening up the whole issue again, I wanted to share a quote with you from Vandana’s talk at the Soil Association conference that for me summed up the whole doomer/powerdown debate that was flying around on **Transition Culture**, the ever-indispensible Energy Bulletin and other places recently. In response to a question during the debate of which she was a part, she said **”the uncertainty of our times is no reason to be certain about hopelessness”**. I think that in those thirteen words she summarised everything I had been trying to say in the various pieces I wrote on the subject. I’ll leave it at that. Just for the record, if I have a headstone when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I would like that written on it.
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19 Jan 2007
Last Wednesday the writer and physicist **Peter Russell** gave a talk at St. John’s Church in Totnes as part of the TTT programme called **’Time to Wake Up!’** It was attended by about 270 people and was a great evening. I didn’t take any notes or anything useful or intelligent like that, but what I wanted to share with you was the poem that he recited at the end of the talk. The following day I did an interview with him which I will post here once I have transcribed it, but for now I just want to share the poem with you.
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17 Jan 2007
It is easy to come up with ideas, harder to get practical things happening on the ground. It is essential that you avoid any sense that your project is just a talking shop where people sit around and draw up wish lists. Your project needs, from an early stage, to begin to create practical manifestations in the town, high visibility signals that it means business. The power that doing this has in how it affects both people’s perceptions of the project and also in people’s willingness to engage is huge.
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15 Jan 2007
You can’t do this on your own. Part of the process of developing an Energy Descent Action Plan is that of tapping into the collective genius of the community. One of the most effective ways to do this is to set up a number of smaller groups to focus on specific aspects of the process. Each of these groups will develop their own ways of working and their own activities, but will all fall under the umbrella of the project as a whole.
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If a developer wants to take perfectly good light industrial area and replace it with a new urban centre, on a floodplain, with buildings up to 6 stories high, on average 4 stories, with 750 residential units, a shopping centre, cinema complex and so on, how should the community respond? They could write angry letters, organise a protest, rally people to fight against it. Or, perhaps, there might be another way to approach it. This is happening in Lewes, and people are not happy about it. The Transition Town Lewes group have come up with a great way of responding to this, with a positive vision of how the site could be. Based on Tom Atlee’s idea of a Futures Gazette, they have written a newspaper article (by the brilliantly named journalist ‘Mavis Happen’) from an edition of the local paper in 2017. Read on…
