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.
Last Saturday, in spite of the atrocious weather, 55 people from 19 Transition initiatives across the east of England gathered in Diss in Norfolk for the second meeting of Transition East. Transition East is made up of Transition groups in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. In honour of the event, Charlotte Du Cann and Josiah Meldrum pulled together a really quite extraordinary document, “Transition in the East: co-operation, collaboration, support and influence”, which you can download here. It offers an extraordinary insight into what is happening there, the range of groups and what they are up to. It also includes a brilliant section on ‘Troubleshooting’, or as they put it, “everything you wanted to know about Transition but were too correct to ask…”, which looks at some of the common problems they are running into. It is an exemplary look at the spread of Transition on a regional scale.
Oh these mad Devon-to-London-and-back-in-a-day trips, I really must learn not to do them. I’m writing this on the train home after the train was stuck for half an hour at Pewsey due to a failed signal, which the driver waited for and then, it would appear, noted that it wasn’t working and just thought “sod it”, and carried on through it. Not sure if that’s standard procedure, anyway, at least we’re moving again. So, this is a write up of the ‘Future of Food’ event organised by the Soil Association, its International Conference, which was the cause of my early rising and late return home.
Here’s an excellent short talk from TED, exploring in a very visual way the impact that oil production has had on the world. It was also great that I wasn’t the only speaker who talked about peak oil!
LOCAL FOOD: How To Make It Happen In Your Community. Tamzin Pinkerton & Rob Hopkins. Green Books, 2009. 220 x 220mm, 216pp. £12.95
As the twin issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change become more widely discussed, more people become interested in prom-oting local food as one of the steps towards self-reliance. But how do you go about it, and what do you do if there is no local food to promote? The decades of industrialised agriculture have seen local food links wither and orchards grubbed up. Local Food, the latest book in the Transition series, aims to help local communities rediscover their food culture and in doing so rediscover community itself.
Gah. I feel a rant coming on. Here’s a crap idea for you. The BBC announced today the idea of ‘The Cloud’, a new hideous construction to grace the city’s skyline in time for the 2012 Olympics. It would take the form of a “giant cloud” that would “float” above the city skyline (well, at nighttime anyway, during the day it would merely look like the ugly and ridiculous construction it actually is). The structure, tall mesh towers with ethylene tetrafluoroethylene ‘bubbles’ on top, would reach 120 metres into the London skyline, where it would be used to project “weather information, spectator numbers, race results” and so on.
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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Last Saturday, in spite of the atrocious weather, 55 people from 19 Transition initiatives across the east of England gathered in Diss in Norfolk for the second meeting of Transition East. Transition East is made up of Transition groups in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. In honour of the event, Charlotte Du Cann and Josiah Meldrum pulled together a really quite extraordinary document, “Transition in the East: co-operation, collaboration, support and influence”, which you can download here. It offers an extraordinary insight into what is happening there, the range of groups and what they are up to. It also includes a brilliant section on ‘Troubleshooting’, or as they put it, “everything you wanted to know about Transition but were too correct to ask…”, which looks at some of the common problems they are running into. It is an exemplary look at the spread of Transition on a regional scale.
