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 now I was in London for the launch of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment’s ‘Building a New Green Economy’ conference, where I was a speaker alongside Tim Jackson, David Orr and Stewart Brand. You can read about the event here, and films of our talks will be posted soon. I mention it today because I want to draw your attention to the report launched at the conference, Sustainable Supply Chains that Support Local Economic Development, available to download here. As someone who has, for many years, been fascinated by local, natural building materials, this is a fascinating piece of research, one of the first things I have seen which starts trying to calculate the financial benefits to an area of moving towards more locally-sourced building materials.
A fabulous piece by Richard Heinberg. Great to read him being optimistic, well. in a Heinbergy kind of way. I also read this piece as an early, brief version of the history of the peak oil/relocalisation/Transition movement that someone will inevitably write one day…. One correction though, ‘Transition Handbook’ wasn’t my PhD, unfortunely I am still flogging away at that!!
In 2008 the U.S. economy tripped down a steep, rocky slope. Employment levels plummeted; so did purchases of autos and other consumer goods. Property values crashed; foreclosure and bankruptcy rates bled. For states, counties, cities, and towns; for manufacturers, retailers, and middle- and low-income families, the consequences were—and continue to be—catastrophic. Other nations were soon caught up in the undertow.
Here is another great short film by the nu-project folks, this time documenting the recent Seedy Saturday event that took place in Totnes, a fantastic event. Enjoy!
I was disappointed to read Mark Lynas’s piece in New Statesman, “Why We Greens Keep Getting It Wrong”. The piece builds on Lynas’s previous much publicised conversion to nuclear power, arguing that if we are to apply the scientific rigour that underpins climate science to all other areas of life, in the same way that nuclear power is supported by the science, so is GM. While I strongly disagree with him on both, I want here to challenge Lynas’s conversion to GM, and the belief that if we are serious about climate change, we have no option other than to embrace GM.
While Chris Martenson was in the UK recently, Peter Lipman and myself did an interview with him, which was fascinating and wonderful, but the memory chip it was on just got corrupted before I could download it and it is lost. Gah. As a meagre way of overcoming the profound sense of trauma I am left with (I will try and do it again via. skype sometime soon), here is a film of the talk he did later that day in the Grand Committee Room at the Houses of Parliament for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas. For now, you’ll just have to imagine how brilliant our interview was.
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 now I was in London for the launch of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment’s ‘Building a New Green Economy’ conference, where I was a speaker alongside Tim Jackson, David Orr and Stewart Brand. You can read about the event here, and films of our talks will be posted soon. I mention it today because I want to draw your attention to the report launched at the conference, Sustainable Supply Chains that Support Local Economic Development, available to download here. As someone who has, for many years, been fascinated by local, natural building materials, this is a fascinating piece of research, one of the first things I have seen which starts trying to calculate the financial benefits to an area of moving towards more locally-sourced building materials. 
