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 236 - 240 of 578 for the category: Transition Initiatives.


6 Jan 2011

Unleashing of the First Transition Favela with Rap and Samba

Welcome back to Transition Culture…  You’re looking well, I hope you had a good break.  We start with a warm sunny story to bring a smile on these chilly winter days, kindly penned by May East about the Unleashing, just before Christmas, of the first Transition Favela, in Brazil.

It was a sizzling Saturday morning in December when members of the low low-income Brasilândia community of 247.000 people in São Paulo, gathered with great expectancy for the official unleashing of ‘Transixion’ Brasilândia. Led by the initiating group created earlier in May by members of the Stickel Foundation, with representatives from the arts community, environmental groups, health workers, educators, local authority the first part of the morning was dedicated to celebrate a remarkable chain of achievements.

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23 Dec 2010

Exclusive to Transition Culture! An interview with Christopher Alexander

I know that I have officially signed off for Christmas, but I can’t resist the temptation to post this now, think of it as my Christmas gift.  About 3 weeks ago, I travelled to a snow-covered West Sussex to meet one of my heroes.  Christopher Alexander, architect, thinker, designer, author of the seminal ‘A Pattern Language’ and of the more recent extraordinary ‘The Nature of Order’ series of books, has long been someone whose work I have admired greatly.  It is sometimes said that it is generally best not to meet your heroes as they usually disappoint, but that wasn’t the case here.  I met Chris and his wife Maggie in their beautiful old home (I’m starting to sound like a writer for Hello! magazine), and after lunch and a general chat about the Transition approach (about which Chris knew very little in advance of our conversation), we did the following interview.  I am deeply grateful to them both for a fascinating and illuminating afternoon.

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20 Dec 2010

Needing your thoughts for a ‘Transition Enabling Act’

Well now, here’s an idea.  At last week’s ‘Confronting Change’ event in London (see left), a question was asked about politics, and how Transition might be accelerated in terms of mainstream politics.  Polly Higgins, who is a barrister, and who is promoting the idea of international legislation to outlaw ‘ecocide’, suggested that, in the same way that certain key pieces of enabling legislation have led to great advances in the past, perhaps the time is right for a Transition Enabling Act, designed not to ban lots of things, but positive legislation that enables all that needs to happen in order for Transition to scale up rapidly over the next 5 years.  This was met with much excitement, with Michael Meacher MP saying that were such legislation to exist, he would be happy to help drive it through the House of Commons.  So, how about it?  What we need now is your input, debate and discussion…. (read on…)

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17 Dec 2010

‘Confronting Change’ at London’s South Bank Centre

A fantastic evening last night at the South Bank Centre in London, organised by Transition Finsbury Park.  The event was a sell-out, and proved to be an inspirational coming together of London Transition initiatives, under the title “Confronting Change”.  Polly Higgins, a barrister and author of ‘Eradicating Ecocide’ was the host and got the evening underway.  She had recently returned from the COP16 negotiations at Cancun, and talked about what had happened there.

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14 Dec 2010

On being interviewed up a tree….

I do quite a lot of interviews, but nothing like the one I did with Henrik G. Dahle (see left).  He calls himself “a writer, artist, director of theatre and film, anxty environmentalist and social engineer”, and he is currently doing a project called UpTrees, where every day for a year he is climbing a different tree and interviewing someone.  He has climbed trees in 8 countries now, and talked to a fascinating diversity of people.  He came to Totnes, we went to Vire Island and climbed a tree and chatted for an hour.  It was all quite random (at one point my son and his new girlfriend walked by and, understandably, asked “Dad, what are you doing in that tree?”) and getting down again was much harder than getting up, but you might enjoy the transcript of our chat which is here.

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