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.
About 4 weeks ago, I had the honour of interviewing Charles Eisenstein, author of ‘Sacred Economics’ while he was in the UK visiting Schumacher College to teach a course there for a week. I had to admit before we began the interview that I have yet to read his book, in spite of the number of people I know who have insisted that I really ought to. I decided to see this as an opportunity though, given that most people who will be reading this won’t have read it either, thereby sharing my starting point of near-complete ignorance. I think it kind of works. He was charming and thoughtful, and you can either hear the podcast of the interview below, or read the transcript below that.
[A guest post from Naresh Giangrande and Mandy Dean] “Other Transition groups would give their right arm to have something like this”. Those were some of my first words to Peterborough in Transition as I rounded the corner and stepped off a busy city road and found myself in an urban oasis, bounded by the East Coast line on one side, and KFC on the other! The culture shock of coming from Switzerland; the orderliness, the way in which everything in Switzerland is just so, took a while to recover from. From a world of order- (did I say that already?), planning, government targets, suits, and a business like approach to the natural ‘chaos’ of Permaculture, doing things on no budget, begging, borrowing and liberating what you need and running on good will and instinct was more than a physical journey.
I am really pleased today to be able to share with you some of the key outputs from Transition Streets, which I have written about here before. Let’s start, for people who are new to the concept, with this short video which beautifully captures how Transition Streets worked in Totnes:
Here’s a great short film about ‘A Little Patch of Ground’, a wonderful project run by Encounters Arts in Hackney, London and in Dartington, Devon. A very heartwarming way to spend 8 minutes on a Wednesday morning.
I was reminded by this recent piece by Dr Chris Johnstone over at ClimateCodeRed of the meeting that he and I held in June 2006 with Dr Stephen Rollnick. This was back when I was researching the Transition Handbook, and we met for a day to discuss how insights from the psychology of health behaviour change might be helpful when tackling environmental issues like climate change and peak oil. It was fascinating, and I realised as I read Chris’ article that I had never posted the transcript of that conversation here yet. So here it is, slightly dated, but hopefully containing some insights you will find useful (it’s quite long!). My thanks to Chris and Stephen for a fascinating day (nearly 6 years ago!).
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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