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.
[A guest post from Naresh Giangrande and Mandy Dean] “Other Transition groups would give their right arm to have something like this”. Those were some of my first words to Peterborough in Transition as I rounded the corner and stepped off a busy city road and found myself in an urban oasis, bounded by the East Coast line on one side, and KFC on the other! The culture shock of coming from Switzerland; the orderliness, the way in which everything in Switzerland is just so, took a while to recover from. From a world of order- (did I say that already?), planning, government targets, suits, and a business like approach to the natural ‘chaos’ of Permaculture, doing things on no budget, begging, borrowing and liberating what you need and running on good will and instinct was more than a physical journey.
In Transition 2.0 is being shown all over the place and getting great responses. For example, it’s being shown at Big Green Week in Bristol on Wednesday 13th June (I’ll be introducing it), in Avalon NSW in Australia on June 24th, in Newcastle (Australia) on the 26th, in Honiton on June 20th, in Nuneaton on June 19th, in Highgate on June 19th, Berkhamsted on 27th June and at Transition Heathrow tonight, which producer Emma Goude will be attending. We’d love to hear your stories about your screenings and how they went (you could leave a comment below). Here is one of two Sneak Peeks from the film (available on DVD here), telling the stories of the Green Valley Grocer and the Handmade Bakery in Slaithwaite.
Also, here is a random selection of posters from screenings of the film around the world:
I was at the Hay Literary Festival over the weekend, and while I was there I caught up with Andrew Simms of New Economics Foundation, and in the light of the campaign afoot in Totnes to try and stop the opening of a Costa Coffee outlet in the town, I asked him “why should Totnes (or anywhere else for that matter) say no to Costa?” Here’s the audio file, followed by the transcript:
“Chain stores, of whatever variety, whether they are selling mobile phones, or whether they are selling coffee, or whether they are selling doughy torpedo-shaped sandwiches, are a way of doing business that carries with them a particular DNA for the society and the local economy which grows up around them.
Welcome to the monthly round-up of what people are up to doing Transition around the world. Let’s start this month in Spain. Spain recently held its first national Transition conference, which you can read more about here, and you can see Juan del Río’s reflections on it here. Here is a great film about the event which gives a great sense of the energy and dynamism that it tapped into:
Here is a great new development, the first edition of a Brazilian Transition magazine, ‘Em Transição’. Very exciting. I can’t tell you much more about it other than to say have a look at it below. It has a recipe for a soup with chives in, and all kinds of great stuff by the looks of it, congratulations to all involved.
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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