Transition Culture

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.

Archive for “Transition Initiatives” category

Showing results 71 - 75 of 578 for the category: Transition Initiatives.


26 Jun 2012

The power of “why not?”: an interview on Marlow FM

Had great fun the other day doing an interview with Dave Hampton, ‘The Carbon Coach’, for his ‘Watt Next Show’ on Marlow FM. It went out last night, and here it is for your listening pleasure.

Here is Part One:

… and Part Two …

Here is the track that played at the end of Part 1 in case you wondered.  Thanks Dave…

Read more»


20 Jun 2012

“Why not?” indeed: breathing power into possibilities

Early morning sun welcoming the '24 Hours of Possibilities' into the world

The centre of Manchester, where I spent last weekend, doesn’t feature a diversity of small, medium and large hotels and hostels in the same way that, say, Paris does.  So far as I could tell, there are just several huge Premier Inns, and huge Travelodges, massive, soul-less tower blocks with massive soul-less logos down the side.  As well as that, in the centre, virtually every shop is a huge chain, you know the ones, they now dominate every city centre in the country.  It’s like an episode of Dr Who, where the place has been taken over by huge leeches, sucking the financial lifeblood out of the city, what Andrew Simms recently called “extractive industries”, funnelling money to distant shareholders.  There are endless hideous new ‘iconic’ buildings, massive corporate egos in built form, usually home to just one organisation (such as the hideous gravity-defying monster below, surely a contender for James Howard Kunstler’s ‘Eyesore of the Month’?).  But on this day when many are celebrating ’24 Hours of Possibility’ (have a look, there’s loads going on!), how might it be possible to see beyond all that to something that actually nourishes us as individuals, communities and local economies?

Read more»


15 Jun 2012

An inspiring overview of Brazilian Transition at Brazil’s TEDx

We’ve had a couple of posts this week that are frankly not much use to my English-speaking readers, but which are great stuff nonetheless.  Today we have a TEDx talk from TEDxValedosVinhedos by Zaida Amaral about Transition in Brazil.  I don’t speak a word of Portugese, but her presentation is so passionate and fantastic that I was gripped from start to finish.  Brasiliandia, which featured in a video I posted earlier this week, also appeared this week on Globo TV, Brazil’s biggest TV station, in a piece that also featured Totnes and presented Transition in the run-up to Rio+20.

Read more»


14 Jun 2012

A day at Bristol Big Green Week (with presentations by Tim Smit, Kevin McCloud and Rob Hopkins)

I spent a very enjoyable day at Bristol Green Week yesterday. Green Week is a celebration of green ideas and thinking in Bristol, which has featured a wildly eclectic mix of talks, workshops, music, comedy, films, walks and much more. I arrived midway through the week’s festivities, to participate in two events. The first was a screening of ‘In Transition 2.0’, shown as the third in a series of films under the somewhat uninspiring banner of ‘Documentary Evidence’. Apparently Monday’s had attracted 30 people, and Tuesday’s just 4, so it was suggested that I might want to temper my expectations in terms of attendance. In the end over 40 people came, and the whole thing went really well.

Read more»


12 Jun 2012

Vegbox – a new social enterprise emerging out of Transition Kentish Town, and how you can do it too

[A guest post by Tom Allen  of Transition Kentish Town in London].

Vegbox management committee at one of our meetings holding potato superheroes! (potatoes from Ripple Farm!)

Here in Transition Kentish Town we’ve been running events and projects for two and a bit years. We have a steering group, a food group, two gardening groups of one kind or another, an energy group. For year or so we had a pop up shop. And we’ve made a lot of chutney along the way.  As always with voluntary groups, the active people come and go and we work with this ebb and flow. We try to make sure we’re enjoying ourselves so active people will return. And we often come back to our early insight that as a Transition Initiative we want to remain informal and voluntary, independent of the council and grant givers, and rooted in friendship, family and community.  Vegbox has emerged out of a desire to set up a something more formal alongside this: a social enterprise. 

Read more»

Discussion: Comments Off on Vegbox – a new social enterprise emerging out of Transition Kentish Town, and how you can do it too

Categories: Community Involvement, Education for Sustainability, Food, Great Reskilling, Localisation, Resilience, Social enterprise, Transition Initiatives