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.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
21 Jul 2009
About 2 years ago, in Totnes, Dairy Crest, the major employer in the town, closed, with the loss of 160 jobs. The site on which it was based, 8 acres adjoining the railway station and running down to the river, now stands derelict. Although most of the buildings are unspectacular steel factory buildings, it is also home to a building built by Brunel for an experimental approach to running the UK’s railway system that never took off, atmospheric railway, and also to a landmark tall chimney. A number of local groups, including Transition Town Totnes, have got together and are proposing to bring the site into community ownership and to create an visionary development that embodies the principles and opportunities of Transition. A new masterplanning document for the site has just been published, which we think is rather wonderful and exemplary, which we thought you might like to see. You can download it here.
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20 Jul 2009
You may remember the piece I wrote a while ago about my plans to build a chicken greenhouse, and my realisation that, in spite of my having spent years teaching this design classic on permaculture courses, nobody I had spoken to had actually seen one. The comments that followed were fascinating, although mostly they concurred, or mentioned ones that people may have glimpsed some time ago, somewhere or other. Well, although I still don’t yet have a functioning chicken house, or even any chickens for that matter, things have moved along a bit, and I thought this would be a good time to bring you up to date with developments at the cutting edge of chicken/greenhouse research.
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20 Jul 2009
It is with great sadness that I report the passing, last week, of Dr Brian Goodwin, of Schumacher College and also Trustee of Transition Network. Originally from Canada, he spent his career working in biology and mathematics, and was very involved in the Open University. Upon his retirement in 1992 he became one of the founding members of Schumacher College, where he was able to focus on his passions, morphogenesis, evolution and complexity. It was through Schumacher College that I first met Brian. He always had a twinkle in his eye, a passion for learning and knowledge and for new ideas. He was a passionate supporter of the Transition movement, serving as a Trustee from the outset, seeing it as the practical manifestation of complexity thinking in practice. You can read an interview I did with him shortly after I arrived in Totnes here, and a great article he wrote about Transition published shortly before his death, entitled ‘Resilience’, which looked at the Transition movement.
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17 Jul 2009
After many months of Ed Milliband putting himself out there are a Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change that actually gets climate change, finally his big Plan, the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan was unveiled on Wednesday, in a speech in the House of Commons that namechecked Transition Towns and which is the boldest national vision for a low carbon society yet seen. Many others have since pitched in with their thoughts, I thought it might be useful here to offer an analysis from a Transition perspective. In his speech, Milliband said “we know from the Transition Towns movement the power of community action to motivate people..”, clearly an outcome of his attendance as a ‘Keynote Listener’ at the Transition Network conference in May. So how does the Plan measure up, and does it actually advance what Transition initiatives and the wider relocalisation movement are doing?
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16 Jul 2009
Have spent the day writing a ‘Transition Take on the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan’, which I will post soon. One of the things it commits the Government to is a five-fold expansion of wind power over the next 10 years. We have reported on many of the more colourful reasons people give for an expansion of wind generation being a bad idea, from the danger to them from flying cows and UFOs to the danger from terrorist attack. A piece over at New York Times online, reporting on the UK government’s plan, produced a comment so astonishingly stupid that it ranks now even above those previously mentioned.
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About 2 years ago, in Totnes, Dairy Crest, the major employer in the town, closed, with the loss of 160 jobs. The site on which it was based, 8 acres adjoining the railway station and running down to the river, now stands derelict. Although most of the buildings are unspectacular steel factory buildings, it is also home to a building built by Brunel for an experimental approach to running the UK’s railway system that never took off, atmospheric railway, and also to a landmark tall chimney. A number of local groups, including Transition Town Totnes, have got together and are proposing to bring the site into community ownership and to create an visionary development that embodies the principles and opportunities of Transition. A new masterplanning document for the site has just been published, which we think is rather wonderful and exemplary, which we thought you might like to see. You can download it here.
