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.
There are, as Andrew Simms points out in his most recent blog, two narratives about our economic choices moving forward from here, growth or austerity. Some argue we need austerity in order to get growth, others that we can just cut straight to the growth by printing or borrowing more money. The government recently announced a “massive push for growth“, with £950m being recently allocated for the ‘Regional Growth Fund’ (out of what is expected to be £1.4bn in total), in spite of the fact that money spent so far through the RGF was recently criticised for spending as much as £200,000 to create a single job. One of the key channels for distributing and allocating RGF funds is the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). According to my big-green-book-of-localism the government kindly sent me last year, LEPs are “locally-owned partnerships between local authorities and businesses which will play a central role in determining economic priorities, undertaking activities to drive economic growth and the creation of local jobs”. Yet on closer inspection, LEPs would appear to embody everything that is bereft of vision, imagination and indeed of any of the kind of creativity and thinking that these times demand.
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.
I wrote a while ago about the Festival of Transition, and in particular the 24 Hours of Possibility event taking place on the first day of Rio+20 (June 20th). I thought that perhaps to inspire your thinking about what you might do where you are, I might share Transition Town Totnes’ emerging plan for the day. Everywhere will do very different things, and already some places have set out what they are going to do, but here are Totnes’ plans… as you’ll see it is quite tentative, but it is starting to take shape:
Here, as a stand-alone film clip which you might hopefully put on your Facebook pages, email to everyone you know and generally share in the many ways we now can, is the much-celebrated ‘Leaky Bucket’ animation from ‘In Transition 2.0’. Check out the film’s dedicated website for DVD ordering information and much more. Enjoy.
I am reading Jorgen Randers’ new book ‘2052: a global forecast for the next forty years’, due for publication next month. Imagine a ‘Limits to Growth’ for the next 40 years, a presentation of Randers’ best guess as to how the world will pan out between now and 2052. As you can imagine, it’s not an uplifting read, but it is often illuminating, even though I disagree with some of his findings. Surprisingly, the most challenging bit comes at the end of the book, after all the graphs and charts, and talk about 2 degrees of climate change, of our inevitable mega-urbanisation and so on. It will hopefully prove to be the spark for a fascinating discussion here.
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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