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
12 Dec 2005
**Lesson 1 – Avoiding ‘Them and Us”.**
With the successful week that the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan (KEDAP) has just had, this feels like a good time to take a look back over the process and try and identify and draw out any lessons that can be learnt from the process with a wider applicability for those of you planning to develop a similar approach elsewhere. In today’s posting I am going to present the background to the KEDAP process, and outline the first principle. Over the next few days I will add more principles, as well as exploring what perhaps has not worked so well with it, and aim to pull it all together at the end. I am publishing it like this by way of a two way dialogue, please feel free to
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12 Dec 2005
Part of preparing for oil peak and relocalisation is learning about plants that will grow in the gardens we should be starting to put in place now. One interesting and useful plant is the **Jerusalem Artichoke**. They have no connection to Jerusalem at all, actually originating in North America. The name is a corruption of ‘girasole’, from the Italian ‘sunroot’, due to their resemblance to sunflowers, to which they are related. They can be used to make sugar, and have been considered as a replacement for sugar beet. They are a very easy-to-grow garden vegetable, great for novice gardeners, but are also being researched as a source of biodiesel, to be grown on an industrial scale to fuel the nearly 30 million cars on the UK’s roads. And therein lies a dilemma.
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9 Dec 2005
Last night in Cork city, the **Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan** was awarded Cork Environmental Forum’s prestigious Roll of Honour Award. The award was presented by the Mayor of Kinsale, Cllr. Tomas O’Brien to the Principal of Kinsale Further Education College, Mr. John Thuillier. The event was attended by many people, including Practical Sustainability students past and present. I will post a more detailed account of the evening when I receive one, but for now here are some photos, taken by Graham Strouts (thanks Graham!) and from the CEF press release.
Mr. John Thuillier recieves the award from Kinsale Mayor, Cllr. Tomas O’Brian at the Firkin Crane Theatre, Cork.
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9 Dec 2005
As someone currently studying a PhD in a mainstream University after many years teaching using creative methods, I am only too aware of its shortcomings. The teaching is quite formal, and the emphasis is purely on the academic, not on rooting any of it in daily life. Sustainability and talk of education for life beyond oil is almost non-existant. The **Practical Sustainability** course I created in Kinsale was as close as I could get to the permaculture course I would always like to have done myself. In the context of mainstream Irish education it took many risks and broke much new ground, and its success far exceeded any expectations we may have had at the outset.
Imagine though, a University that you would study with anywhere in the world, that supported activists and earth-repairers, was able to issue Batchelors and Masters level degrees, and was built on principles of permaculture and the manifestation of a post-carbon world.
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8 Dec 2005
In recent posts I have been chewing over the idea of visioning, and its central importance to Energy Descent work. As part of a presentation I am preparing for a talk next week, I hunted down various images from the 1930s of how people then thought we would be living today. One of the best is a character called **Captain Future.**
Captain Future (Wizard of Science) is clearly a guy you don’t want to mess with. He’s powerful and strong, with a funny gun thing that hopefully for him, given all the aliens he has to deal with, is more powerful than it looks, especially compared to things in films nowadays, such as the Men in Black’s guns which I suspect I would probably struggle to lift off the floor. He has some great clunky space boots which presumably allow him to fly. He has
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With the successful week that the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan (KEDAP) has just had, this feels like a good time to take a look back over the process and try and identify and draw out any lessons that can be learnt from the process with a wider applicability for those of you planning to develop a similar approach elsewhere. In today’s posting I am going to present the background to the KEDAP process, and outline the first principle. Over the next few days I will add more principles, as well as exploring what perhaps has not worked so well with it, and aim to pull it all together at the end. I am publishing it like this by way of a two way dialogue, please feel free to 
