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.
I have written several times here about ‘Transition Streets’, the street-by-street behaviour change model created by Transition Town Totnes which was the winner of the 2011 Ashden Award for behaviour change. There is a good evidence base now, showing how it enables a Transition (or other) group to reach the parts that other community engagement projects may not, becoming ‘green by accident’ by having a good time. It is an approach to change which is self-propelling with tea. It embodies the Transition commitment to self-organisation, the groups managing themselves and determining themselves once the project has been set running. Here is a short video about it:
What I am delighted to announce today is that now Transition Streets (also known as ‘Streets-Wise’) is available for any group to run, anywhere.
In the context of the fascinating week of posts looking discussing Transition Network over at the Social Reporters’ blog, it was fascinating to read an important new study by Gill Seyfang, Jung Jin Park and Adrian Smith from University of East Anglia about community energy. ‘Community Energy in the UK’ is the first independent UK-wide survey of community energy projects (you can download it here). One of the most interesting things to emerge from the paper is the role Transition Network plays in the field, in spite of being a very small organisation, and it offers some insights into why that might be.
As regular readers may know, I am somewhat of a book-collector, and the amount of books in my house threatens the whole place with subsidence. I am particularly infatuated with a series of books that Batsford produced in the 1930s and 40s which captured various aspects of life in the UK at the time, many of which are now lost, the ‘Country Life’ series. I have a few of them, and they are an amazing combination of text, beautiful black and white plate photographs and exquisite line drawings, mostly of old buildings.
The question of what a top-down response to peak oil, climate change and economic contraction, and the regional rolling out of resilience, might look like, has been often discussed since the early days of the Transition movement. There was the short-lived Somerset experiment, there’s been interesting work in Stroud, Bristol, Nottingham and various other places, but nothing yet that is especially coherent and integrated. So it was with that in mind that I was really fascinated to be asked to go to Lille to speak at a one-day conference called ‘Assises de la Transformation Ecologique et Sociale’ organised by the Conseil Regional Nord –Pas de Calais, the regional authority for the Nord- Pas de Calais region.
As mentioned previously, during the 2012 Transition Network conference I spoke at the TEDx Madrid event by Skype, being joined at the end by Juan del Rio. The film of that has now been posted online, and so here it is.
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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