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.
On Wednesday I handed the CD containing the first completed draft of ‘The Transition Companion’ over the Green Books for the editing process to begin. Phew! Been quite a mission (due out in September). Anyway, one of the things that runs through the books is ‘Transition in Action’ sections, drawing together inspiring stories from Transition groups of some of their projects. I’ll post a few of them, starting with this one, from Transition Taunton Deane, written by Chrissy Godfrey… have a good weekend.
“Taunton Transition Town ran an exemplary visioning exercise with their local borough council between July and September 2009, at the request of the council’s strategic director. It brought together almost all the council’s 375 employees, from senior management to plumbers, plus over half of the council’s elected members, to create a vision for a post-oil Taunton Deane.
One of the things with climate change as an issue is that when you’re trying to work out what your position is on climate change, there is a scientific consensus and there’s a body of research there – there’s certain criteria you can use when you come to it to work out if this is valid or not. In terms of economics it’s a grey area, in that there’s so much opinion – so for those of us who are coming through the work that you’ve been doing to trying to get our heads around what’s happening on a global scale, what should be the criteria be, do you think, that we should use when looking at different people’s takes on the economy, as to whether they’re valid or not? What was the criteria that you used when researching on the book?
That’s an interesting question; that’s a very good question.
On Richard Heinberg’s recent visit to Totnes, which included a talk on ‘The End of Growth‘, myself, Ben Brangwyn of Transition Network (BB) and Frances Northrop of Transition Town Totnes (FN) did an interview with Richard. Part 2 will appear here tomorrow….
Welcome to Totnes, lovely to have you here again! The first question is: your new book is about economics and the book before was looking at coal….but in terms of the peak oil question that underpinned your previous books, what’s your assessment of where we are now? Is it still as much a part of your overall analysis as it was….?
Oh yes, very much so. The new book, The End of Growth makes the case that world economic growth is effectively at an end, both for reasons internal to the world financial monetary system and also for reasons external to the world financial monetary system and the primary factor outside the monetary system is oil.
A week ago today, Richard Heinberg gave a stunning talk in Totnes on ‘The End of Growth’. Thanks to our dear friends at nuproject, I can now unveil the film of his talk. Enjoy… .
You win some, you lose some. In July 2008, Somerset County Council, then a Liberal Democrat-controlled council, passed a resolution supporting its local Transition initiatives. It was much lauded as a visionary piece of policy-making, a council noting the vibrant activity of Transition groups within the county and deciding to honour that and to begin seriously to explore with them the potential overlaps and interfaces between those two ‘tiers’ in the community. However, it has become clear that what started so boldly and with such great promise has since fallen away. In the spirit of learning from such reversals, this piece explores what we can learn from recent developments in Somerset, and also what we might draw from them in relation to the government’s current ‘localism’ agenda.
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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“Taunton Transition Town ran an exemplary visioning exercise with their local borough council between July and September 2009, at the request of the council’s strategic director. It brought together almost all the council’s 375 employees, from senior management to plumbers, plus over half of the council’s elected members, to create a vision for a post-oil Taunton Deane. 
