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 we published here a draft guide for Transition initiatives wanting to hold Transition hustings with their local election candidates, in particular to explore themes around resilience. Thanks to everyone who sent in comments and changes, and I am delighted to announce that the final document is available now to download here. It runs over 8 pages, so in theory it should be able to print out as a rather nice A5 booklet. The first such husting to have reached our ears was held on 25th February by Transition Luton. You can read a detailed report of the event here, including their reflections on how to do it better if they did it again and a rather ropey film that gives a flavour of the event. Do let me know (rob (at) transitionculture.org) any stories of hustings you hold, and we’ll report them here.
Those good folks at the nu-project are going great guns, acting as ’embedded film-makers’ in Totnes… I just wish we had had them around from the very start, what an amazing record it would have been… anyway, here is their latest, a short film about the nut tree plantings that have been taking place in Totnes this winter….
What can local government do to promote those four things because clearly in our consumer society people tend to feel less safe and are becoming less and less competent? Relatedness is breaking down and people feel they have less control over the democratic process.
I’m not a political scientist, I’m a psychologist, but my sense is that what has to be developed are structures in the political economy and in the social system and the way that decisions are made that ask people what are the things in our community right now which are barriers to the satisfaction of these psychological needs and I’d imagine that different communities are going to have different barriers, but somebody there in your community knows the answer and if they can say what it is and put their finger on it, probably other people are going to say yes, and add to it.
Here is the first part (Part Two to follow tomorrow) of an interview I did with Tim Kasser a couple of weeks ago while he was at Schumacher College. He is a psychologist, author of the seminal High Price of Materialism, as well as other useful writings such as a great chapter in the State of the World Report 2009 about consumerism and climate change. The interview raises some fascinating areas for research and thoughts about Transition and psychology, and I think you’re going to enjoy this one….
Amazing times. Last week’s headline of one of the papers I saw at the station was that the UK’s national debt is now worse than that of Greece. On Tuesday I spent the morning with Chris ‘Crash Course’ Martenson, whose view is that last year’s ‘banking crisis’ was just the first of many, which will get steadily worse. The interview I did with him will be posted next week. Then yesterday morning, in the middle of a piece on Radio 4’s Today Programme about immigrant workers and why so few unemployed people here want any of those jobs in spite of rising unemployment, enter Frank Field, Labour MP, who delivered a verdict on the state of Britain’s economic health so withering that it made Martenson’s predictions look positively rosy. Rarely do I hear politicians on the radio and feel the need to transcribe every word, but here it is. After my meeting with him, Martenson went to give a talk for the All Party Parliamentary Working Group on Peak Oil and Gas at the Commons… I wonder if Frank Field happened to wander in on Chris’s session?
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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A while ago we published here a draft guide for Transition initiatives wanting to hold Transition hustings with their local election candidates, in particular to explore themes around resilience. Thanks to everyone who sent in comments and changes, and I am delighted to announce that the final document is available now to download here. It runs over 8 pages, so in theory it should be able to print out as a rather nice A5 booklet. The first such husting to have reached our ears was held on 25th February by Transition Luton. You can read a detailed report of the event here, including their reflections on how to do it better if they did it again and a rather ropey film that gives a flavour of the event. Do let me know (rob (at) transitionculture.org) any stories of hustings you hold, and we’ll report them here.
