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.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Archive for “The ‘Heart’ of Energy Descent” category
Showing results 226 - 230 of 230 for the category: The ‘Heart’ of Energy Descent.
12 Dec 2005
**Lesson 1 – Avoiding ‘Them and Us”.**
With the successful week that the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan (KEDAP) has just had, this feels like a good time to take a look back over the process and try and identify and draw out any lessons that can be learnt from the process with a wider applicability for those of you planning to develop a similar approach elsewhere. In today’s posting I am going to present the background to the KEDAP process, and outline the first principle. Over the next few days I will add more principles, as well as exploring what perhaps has not worked so well with it, and aim to pull it all together at the end. I am publishing it like this by way of a two way dialogue, please feel free to
Read more»
9 Dec 2005
As someone currently studying a PhD in a mainstream University after many years teaching using creative methods, I am only too aware of its shortcomings. The teaching is quite formal, and the emphasis is purely on the academic, not on rooting any of it in daily life. Sustainability and talk of education for life beyond oil is almost non-existant. The **Practical Sustainability** course I created in Kinsale was as close as I could get to the permaculture course I would always like to have done myself. In the context of mainstream Irish education it took many risks and broke much new ground, and its success far exceeded any expectations we may have had at the outset.
Imagine though, a University that you would study with anywhere in the world, that supported activists and earth-repairers, was able to issue Batchelors and Masters level degrees, and was built on principles of permaculture and the manifestation of a post-carbon world.
Read more»
8 Dec 2005
In recent posts I have been chewing over the idea of visioning, and its central importance to Energy Descent work. As part of a presentation I am preparing for a talk next week, I hunted down various images from the 1930s of how people then thought we would be living today. One of the best is a character called **Captain Future.**
Captain Future (Wizard of Science) is clearly a guy you don’t want to mess with. He’s powerful and strong, with a funny gun thing that hopefully for him, given all the aliens he has to deal with, is more powerful than it looks, especially compared to things in films nowadays, such as the Men in Black’s guns which I suspect I would probably struggle to lift off the floor. He has some great clunky space boots which presumably allow him to fly. He has
Read more»
7 Dec 2005
Here is an exercise that I do with students on permaculture courses. I always thought that it came from Skye and Robin Clanfield’s indispensable book ‘The Manual of Teaching Permaculture Creatively’, but just looking for it now I can’t find it. I alway find it a very powerful exercise. It comes at the end of a session on urban sustainability that will have looked at a range of strategies for making the town more sustainable and is called **’Urban Tour Guides”**. I take the students to a housing estate somewhere near the college, or more specifically to a crossroads between a few different areas of housing. I divide the group into smaller groups of 4-6, and give each group a topic, such as waste, water, energy, food, community or building.
Read more»
7 Dec 2005
It was only a matter of time really. We’ve had the Climate Change Movie, The Day After Tomorrow, and now here come the Peak Oil movies. Thanks to the excellent Powering Down blog site for drawing my attention to three forthcoming movies, due for release either on US television or cinemas. I wrote in an earlier blog about our collective inability to vision the kind of future we actually want, and so end up stumbling blindly forward into whatever we get. Watch the trailers for these three films and have a think about it. To what extent is this a self fulfilling prophecy?
Read more»
With the successful week that the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan (KEDAP) has just had, this feels like a good time to take a look back over the process and try and identify and draw out any lessons that can be learnt from the process with a wider applicability for those of you planning to develop a similar approach elsewhere. In today’s posting I am going to present the background to the KEDAP process, and outline the first principle. Over the next few days I will add more principles, as well as exploring what perhaps has not worked so well with it, and aim to pull it all together at the end. I am publishing it like this by way of a two way dialogue, please feel free to 
