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.
One of Saturday’s workshops at the 2012 Transition Network conference is called ‘Bringing power to the people’, and it looks at community energy companies and their potential. It will feature four presenters, Allan Shepherd, author of the recently published ‘Home Energy Handbook’ (who we interviewed recently here), Mark Shorrock of Inazin, Chris Rowland of OVESCO, and Peter Capener of Bath and West Community Energy. I asked Peter what he was planning to talk about, how BWCE is going, and what it is that he looks forward to at Transition Network conferences.
[A guest post from Naresh Giangrande and Mandy Dean] “Other Transition groups would give their right arm to have something like this”. Those were some of my first words to Peterborough in Transition as I rounded the corner and stepped off a busy city road and found myself in an urban oasis, bounded by the East Coast line on one side, and KFC on the other! The culture shock of coming from Switzerland; the orderliness, the way in which everything in Switzerland is just so, took a while to recover from. From a world of order- (did I say that already?), planning, government targets, suits, and a business like approach to the natural ‘chaos’ of Permaculture, doing things on no budget, begging, borrowing and liberating what you need and running on good will and instinct was more than a physical journey.
Welcome to the monthly round-up of what people are up to doing Transition around the world. Let’s start this month in Spain. Spain recently held its first national Transition conference, which you can read more about here, and you can see Juan del Río’s reflections on it here. Here is a great film about the event which gives a great sense of the energy and dynamism that it tapped into:
This month’s podcast goes into more depth on three of the stories from the April round-up of what’s happening in Transition. We hear from the High School Joan Segura i Valls in Santa Coloma de Queralt (in Catalonia, Spain) who have just completed a big project about Transition, from Transition Oamaru and Waitaki District in New Zealand about their Sustainable Skills School, and we hear from Tooting about their Treasuring Tooting event that took place last weekend. Do note that you can embed it on your own website, and that it is also now available on iTunes.
A while ago here we posted the video to Rebecca Mayes’ song ‘The Lights’, her beautiful song written for the closing credits of ‘In Transition 2.0’ (the one everyone goes out after the film singing). I am delighted to announce that the song is today released as a single, and is now available via. iTunes. Here is what Rebecca says about it: “I’ve registered it with the UK charts so if enough of us buy it this week we’ll get into the top 40! If you’re outside the UK try and buy it through a UK distributor so it will count towards the charts. All proceeds go to the Transition Network. Tell your friends, family and local radio stations! Thanks so much for watching the video which has had over 3,000 hits – if you missed it first time you can check it out below.
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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