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.
We start this month’s round-up in Tooting in London. Transition Town Tooting recently posted this film about their Foodival last year. Foodival is an annual event which celebrates what local food means in this diverse urban context:
The festival day where Crystal Palace Transition Town’s Westow Park Community Garden was first unveiled to the public.
Here’s a great story about the power of just doing stuff, from Crystal Palace in London. I heard recently that Crystal Palace Transition Town (CPTT) had won the People’s Food Garden Award in the Capital Growth Grow For Gold awards late last year, and I was intrigued to know more about their Westow Park Community Garden and how it came about. I spoke to Rachel DeThample, who had kicked the project off. She told me that the original impetus for the garden came from wanted to leave London and move to Dorset in order to grow food. Unfortunately, as she put it, “my husband was having none of it”, so instead she set herself the challenge to grow her family’s Christmas dinner within London.
December is one of the quieter times for Transition initiatives, but even so, we’ve quite a packed December round-up for you. We start, seasonally, with two Winterfests, a seasonal opportunity to celebrate and reflect on what a Transition group is up to. We’ll start in Stroud, with this short film of the Transition Stroud Winterfest:
In his recent piece on climate change on the network, Jo Confino wrote of the dark place he found himself in after a few weeks immersed in the latest news on sustainability – his climate change “dark night of the soul” if you like. For the past six years I have been part of an experiment known as Transition, which encourages people to do just what Confino suggests: to sit with the pain of this awareness, while also pointing to a path beyond it.
Let’s start this month in Japan, and this wonderful article that appeared on Our World 2.0 called Transition Town Fujino goes for local energy independence. It included the gem that “as of July 2012, one transition town starts up every week”, and also this beautiful paragraph:
“Transition Towns in Japan identify themselves with the initials “TT”, which also stand for the Japanese words tanoshiku and tsunagaru, meaning “having fun” and “networking”. True to these words, people involved in Transition Fujino work towards transition while making it a point to enjoy life and avoid overworking. A resilient, secure and happy way of life is reinforced by the warm connections between local people that are nurtured by the Transition Town movement”.
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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