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.
I spoke at the Hay Festival last week, a very well-attended and enjoyable session. Every day during the Festival, the Daily Telegraph produces ‘The Hayley Telegraph’, a free magazine given away at the Festival, which includes articles by, or about, some of that day’s speakers. Here is the article I wrote for the edition published the day I spoke.
The new economic frontier is a chance for community resilience
There’s a TV advert I remember from the 1980s that has stuck with me. It features a recently unemployed man telling his wife that he and his friend are “going it alone”, that “the bank says yes”, and that they are going to set up their own business. I think the ad was for a car or something. It captured the spirit prevalent during that decade, where business was the new frontier, anything was possible, and there were no limits.
I was at Hay Festival last week and had the pleasure of spending an hour listening to one of my great heroes, the illustrator, Sir Quentin Blake. His lecture was entitled In and out of the book – the uses of illustration (you can see the transcript of his talk here). The first part of his talk looked at the role of illustration in bringing stories to life and in introducing children to the joys of reading. It was the second half of the talk though which I found most fascinating. He talked about the work he has been doing most recently in hospitals, and the power of illustration to help people in a variety of therapeutic situations and life transitions. It really got me thinking about what role illustration could play in Transition in its widest sense.
We are currently making a short film to promote The Power of Just Doing Stuff in advance of its publication next month. And we really need your help. We need short clips of you, or anyone, saying what the Power of Just Doing Stuff means to you/them. You could film it on your phone, or any kind of video camera, but what we’re after is what you get out of doing practical projects rather than just sitting watching passively as the world unravels around you? What kind of power do you feel you reclaim or discover through it? Just one sentence, speaking to the camera, would be brilliant. “Doing stuff makes me feel like we can change the world”, “doing stuff brings the world around me to life”, “doing stuff is far more fun than dusting my collection of celebrity thimbles” … things like that.
We need them by Tuesday next week (May 21st). Please contact Emma Goude (emmagoude (at) hotmail.com) and she can give you details of the DropBox account to upload it to. We want to capture passion, spirit, vision. Please help! There, and you were just wondering how you were going to spend your weekend … thanks!
In November 2006, I sat at the back of the Barn Cinema, Dartington, and watched ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘. It had such an impact on me that by the time it ended, I had decided that I couldn’t just leave the cinema without marking the event by making some kind of change in my life. I decided that evening not to fly again, and I haven’t flown since. I have played an active part in supporting the growth of an international movement in 40 countries since then, participating in countless workshops, and discussing Transition internationally through Skype and pre-recorded talks, most of which I begin with how much carbon I have saved by not travelling in person. However, I recently watched the film ‘Chasing Ice’, and it had, if anything, a more visceral impact than ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. My resolution at the end of watching it, re-enforced by the recent passing, for the first time, of 400 ppm of C02 in the atmosphere, was that it was time to get back on a plane, and I want to use this post to tell you why.
Sunday May 5th was International Permaculture Day. All sorts of things happened all over the world in a synchronised riot of permaculture goodness. Part of the day was a series of video presentations and interviews with permaculture activists around the world. You can see the whole menu here, I would really recommend taking some time to sit and go through some of them. Rich pickings indeed. Anyway, here is mine, filmed in my greenhouse early in the morning, talking on the event’s theme, ‘Grow Local’. I hope you enjoy it.
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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