Transition Culture

An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent

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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.

Archive for “Transition Initiatives” category

Showing results 51 - 55 of 578 for the category: Transition Initiatives.


28 Sep 2012

‘Alternatives to development’: an interview with Arturo Escobar

At the 2012 Degrowth conference in Venice one of the highlights for me was the talk by Arturo Escobar (my notes from which can be found here). He is the author of Encountering Development and Territories of Difference, among others.  His talk looked at how Transition might look in the context of the Global South, and held many fascinating insights.  Here is the interview I did with him, first as an audio file, and below as a transcript.

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27 Sep 2012

Dave Chapman’s ‘No-Nonsense Guide to Localism’

One of my highlights of the 2012 Transition Network conference was Dave Chapman’s presentation on the new powers that the recent Localism Act and the changes to the planning system in England and Wales potentially give to Transition initiatives.  I mentioned it in my conference round-up, but Dave has since sent me his slides, so you can download them (Locality No Nonsense Guide to Localism) and listen to the audio below, which Dave has re-recorded since the conference to get the most up-to-date version possible.   If you live outside England and Wales this probably won’t be that interesting, but if you do, this is pretty much essential listening. My thanks to Dave for his slides.

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25 Sep 2012

From Venice to Ferrara, to be greeted by a brass band!

Sunday began early, going to meet around 25 members of Transition Italia and of different Italian groups on the harbourside on the outskirts of Venice.  There we got on a boat that they had booked to take us all to Ferrara.  The boat was called ‘Nena’, an original Venezian ‘vaporetto’, the boats particular to Venice that are used to ferry passengers and goods around the smaller waterways.  It was owned by a family who had lovingly restored it and it was a beautiful boat, and they were our hosts for the day.  It was to turn out to be one of the most beautiful Transition-related days I have ever had the fortune to experience.

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20 Sep 2012

Day two at the Degrowth conference in Venice: Degrowth, or alternatives to development?

The theme of the first full day of ‘The Third International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity’ in Venice was ‘Commons’.  For me there were a couple of key highlights of the day, so I will give a thumbnail of all the talks today, but more detail on the highlights.  As with my notes from yesterday, the following is compiled from my notes, and so are entirely fallible.  Apologies to any of the speakers if I have got their message wrong.  The first speaker was Gianni Tamino of the University of Padova who argued that in the context of depleting resources, the commons are essential for living, we can’t postpone the end of growth.

 

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19 Sep 2012

A write-up of the 2012 Transition Network conference. The best yet.

Transition folks from around the world gathered last weekend at Battersea Arts Centre for the 6th annual Transition Network conference.  In a week when the Arctic ice reached its smallest ever extent, scientists warned that the world’s weather could be on the verge of running amok and it was suggested that Saudi Arabia, always meant to be the ‘swing producer’ on whom the rest of the world could depend for reliable oil supplies, may become a net importer of oil by 2030, the theme of the conference was, appropriately, ‘Building resilience in extraordinary times’.  Unlike previous conferences which had spanned two, perhaps three days, this was, in effect, a 6 day ‘Festival of Transition’, and it turned out to be an extraordinary event which deeply affected those attending.

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