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.
A few weeks ago I attended the West Country Storytelling Festival at Embercombe. A remarkable event, the highlight for me was hearing Dr Martin Shaw speaking at several events. Martin is a painter, mythologist and wilderness teacher, and author of ‘A Branch from the Lightening Tree”. Sometimes I hear someone speak and think “that person is holding an important part of all this”. I was especially touched by one thing he said in a workshop about the relationship between storytelling and sustainability:
“I have not a clue whether we humans will live for another 100 or 10,000 years. We can’t be sure. What matters to me is the fact we have fallen out of a very ancient love affair – a kind of dream tangle, with the earth itself. If, through our own mess, that relationship is about to end, then we need to scatter as much beauty around us as we possibly can, to send a voice, to attempt some kind of repair. I think of it as a kind of courting – a very old idea. This isn’t about statistical hysteria, it’s about personal style. Any other response is just not cool”.
Intrigued, I met him the following week for an interview that covered storytelling, myth, and what it might all mean for Transition. Here is the audio if you’d rather listen to it, or the transcript is below:
At the World Student Environmental Summit at Université de Lausanne on Sep. 6th, 2012, a whole session was dedicated to Transition, and I beamed in for a Skype Q&A near the end. It’s a great overview and introduction to Transition:
The workshop called “What happens when Transition says no?” will bring together Joe Ryle and Rose Music from Transition Heathrow, Holly Tiffen from Totnes’ ‘NoToCosta’ campaign, and Michaela Richter and Rob McGhee (see above, Michaela couldn’t make the photo-taking) from Transition Cowbridge in South Wales to explore this important question. I asked Michaela and Rob to tell the story they’ll be bringing to the conference and what they hope people will get out of the workshop:
Discussion: Comments Off on Transition Network conference 2012 preview: No:17 – Michaela Richter and Rob McGhee on “What happens when Transition says no?’
One of the workshops in the Saturday morning workshops session is called ‘Should we be reshaping Transition for times of austerity?’, and will feature Filipa Pimental, International Coordinator of the Transition National Hubs, Juan del Rio from the Spanish National Hub, and will be chaired by Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins. The workshop will aim to explore how Transition is emerging differently in places where the economic crisis is impacting severely, and in places where its impacts are yet to be strongly felt. In the former, Transition is emerging more along the Gift Economy kind of model, in the latter the REconomy approach is felt to be most suitable. How do those two sit alongside each other, and what does this mean for the role of Transition Network? Expect discussion, debate and dialogue. The three presenters recently joined by Skype to discuss their plans for the workshop:
One of the key workshops at the conference will be ‘The Potential of Localism to Unlock Transition’, which will explore the new tools now available to communities due to the localism agenda and what could be done with them. It will be chaired by Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins and will include Frances Northrop from Transition Town Totnes and Philip Revell from Sustaining Dunbar. It will begin with a crash course in localism, everything you could want to know about it and how it works, from Dave Chapman, Head of Social Action at Locality (formerly the Development Trust Association and BASSAC), and will include plenty of time for discussion and questions. We asked Dave to tell us more about what he’s planning to say at the workshop:
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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