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
17 Apr 2007
Over the Easter break I went to Bradford-on-Avon near Bath, a beautiful place, blessed with a fine canal and some beautiful old buildings. I am always drawn to old buildings. There is something about them that is hard to define, what Christopher Alexander called The Timeless Way of Building. Hydrocarbon man has often vilified the buildings of our ancestors as basic and backward, but very often the common sense and practical ingenuity they contain is something we can only admire. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin summed up for me what is so powerful about old buildings when he wrote;
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16 Apr 2007
I appreciate that reviews of films that don’t contain the word “Crude” or “Peak” in the title are somewhat unusual at **Transition Culture**. I also appreciate that I am rarely a member of the cinema-going public, and usually only get to see films when they emerge on DVD. However, recently I saw the recently-out-on-DVD film Little Miss Sunshine which was so wonderful and which, in unexpected ways, overlaps with many of the themes explored here.
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13 Apr 2007
You might want to put the following event in your diary now, it promises to be one of the highlights of 2008. The Findhorn Foundation in Scotland has decided to do its Spring conference on community responses to peak oil and climate change, with the title **Positive Energy – going carbon neutral**. Speakers will include Joanna Macey, Richard Heinberg, Megan Quinn, Jonathan Dawson and myself. While the conference is still at the very early planning stages, here is the information such as it as at the moment.
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12 Apr 2007
I was in Teignmouth in Devon the other day enjoying this glorious summer we’re having, and passing by a shop window I saw the bottles you’ll see to your left. I had to take a picture of them, as they reminded me of a story I haven’t told you yet. When I was living in Ireland, I once had a conversation with an elderly man in a pub, which I was under the impression was about peak oil. I talked about my understanding of the concept and he interrupted occasionally with fairly innocuous interjections, and I thought the conversation was getting somewhere interesting. At the end though, he said, by way of a closing flourish, “yes, I used some of that on a table once, came up lovely
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11 Apr 2007
A bit like buses, Transition Town projects flyers don’t come along for months, and then three come along at once. Last week you’ll have seen the Transition Town Totnes and Transition Town Lewes flyers, today it is the turn of Transition Penwith. Things are continuing to grow well there, and the programme is a confirmation of that. You can download the pdf of the inside here and the outside here.
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Over the Easter break I went to Bradford-on-Avon near Bath, a beautiful place, blessed with a fine canal and some beautiful old buildings. I am always drawn to old buildings. There is something about them that is hard to define, what Christopher Alexander called The Timeless Way of Building. Hydrocarbon man has often vilified the buildings of our ancestors as basic and backward, but very often the common sense and practical ingenuity they contain is something we can only admire. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin summed up for me what is so powerful about old buildings when he wrote;
