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 while ago, Transition Network held a ‘Thinky Day’ around the Big Society and how Transition might best respond to that. These bringings together of people to explore the ‘edge’ of Transition are very useful, and yesterday saw the next one, entitled ‘Peak Money and Economic Resilience: a Transition Network one-day conversation’, held at the offices of Calouste Gulbenkian in London. About 50 people came together to explore the scale of the economic challenges we are facing, what Transition is already doing to respond to that, and what else it might do, or how it might adapt what it does to be more appropriate to these fast-changing times. I will attempt here to provide a record of the day and of the key discussion points that emerged. Any misrepresentations due to my note-taking are entirely my own doing…
I am really pleased today to be able to share with you some of the key outputs from Transition Streets, which I have written about here before. Let’s start, for people who are new to the concept, with this short video which beautifully captures how Transition Streets worked in Totnes:
Our thanks to Gerd Wessling, co-ordinator of the German hub, for the following story from Germany:
“Sunday May 13th 2012 will be declared “In Transition 2.0 film and information day” in Germany, Austria and Switzerland! We kindly ask all German, Swiss & Austrian Transition initiatives to self-organize screenings of the movie at that date in their regions/towns/cities. More info for the organizers (in German) & about the coordination here.
A screening in Bielefeld is already fixed; see details here. We would love to generate a lot of broad, positive reviews and excitement about the movie and Transition in general at that date in the German-speaking region(s) of the world”.
The last leg of my week of dashing to various places (Dublin and London) took me to Glasgow for the Social Enterprise Exchange, the world’s biggest social enterprise event. It was huge, loads of events with speakers such as Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, Nick Hurd MP, Minister for Civic Society and Chuka Umunna, Shadow Business Secretary. There were over 150 stalls from various organisations, including Transition Network’s REconomy stand which proved very popular (see below), and all in all the day was a huge statement of intent about the scale and ambition of the social enterprise sector.
I couldn’t stay all day unfortunately, but after the opening session, I took part in one called “More, better, faster – how can social enterprise grow?” It was chaired by Susan Aktemel of Impact Arts, and featured myself along with Jim Mullan of KibbleWorks and Karen Lynch of Belu. It was a very interesting session, here is the talk I gave at it:
I wrote a while ago about a whistle-stop tour I did of Belgium and the Netherlands a few months ago. Transition Towns Nederland have just posted the film of the first talk I gave there, entitled ‘Where Transition comes from and where it’s going…’ which focused in particular on how Transition groups are working with local councils. After I tweeted yesterday that it was now online, a few people asked me for the slides that accompany it, so here they are.
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
Read more»
