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.
The question of what a top-down response to peak oil, climate change and economic contraction, and the regional rolling out of resilience, might look like, has been often discussed since the early days of the Transition movement. There was the short-lived Somerset experiment, there’s been interesting work in Stroud, Bristol, Nottingham and various other places, but nothing yet that is especially coherent and integrated. So it was with that in mind that I was really fascinated to be asked to go to Lille to speak at a one-day conference called ‘Assises de la Transformation Ecologique et Sociale’ organised by the Conseil Regional Nord –Pas de Calais, the regional authority for the Nord- Pas de Calais region.
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”:
The other interview I did at the Degrowth conference in Venice recently was with Silke Helfrich, one of the editors (along with David Bollier) of the excellent recently-published book ‘The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State‘, a collection of 73 articles by activists, academics and project leaders (I wrote one on resilience) on the theme of the commons. I recommend it. Silke gave a fascinating presentation at Degrowth 2012, so one day, after lunch, I caught up with her and asked to her to tell me more. Here, as usual, is the audio should you wish to listen to it, followed by the transcript.
New Economics Foundation’s ‘100 Months’ campaign today reaches its midway point. It was launched in August 2008 based on the understanding that the time that remains to us to avoid the likelihood of runaway climate change is limited, and based on the science at the time, there was closing window of opportunity to do something meaningful about it. 50 people were asked to write, in 50 words, their response to the question “so what needs to be done in the time we have left?” Here’s mine:
“As well as international/national action, we also need to put strategic economic localisation at the heart of national economic policy, making local food, community-owned energy, genuine local democracy, a culture of entrepreneurship and local investment for local benefit the foundation of a low-carbon, resilient economy. And it should be thrilling”.
Here is the video of the event on the opening evening of Degrowth 2012 in Venezia (which I have blogged about extensively in previous posts), when I shared the stage with Serge Latouche, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Veronica Bennholdt-Thomas among others. My talk starts at 1:48:20:
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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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 
