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.
‘In Transition 2.0’ is nearly ready to be unveiled to the world! We are very excited about this inspiring reweaving of the Transition story, and want to tell you more about it here, and about how it will be rolled out over the coming months. To get us started, because we are so excited about sharing this with you, here is the film’s trailer, completed just yesterday, directed by Caspar Walsh.
Hopefully that has sufficiently whet your appetite for what is a remarkable film.
Hi this is Nick Osborne here from the REconomy team. If you haven’t heard of us, REconomy is a project being run through Transition Training & Consulting, to support people in building new kinds of local economies. Next month we are releasing a website jam-packed with tools, resources, links and information to support people in doing this. Here’s a taste of what’s to come:
Welcome back to Transition Culture, and a Happy New Year to you. We’ll kick off with our round-up of Transition for December. We’ll start with a few stories of Transition groups working on energy efficiency and fuel poverty which, even though this has been the UK’s mildest winter for many many years, is still a big concern for many people, especially as energy prices continue to rise. TT High Wycombe have created a Warm Homes Team (see right) who have taken to the streets with their council loaned thermal imaging equipment to address winter fuel poverty.
Surely in our present and unfolding predicament, to recalibrate our economy as a Steady State economy requires an enormous amount of infrastructure, investment and maybe we don’t have that kind of resource any more. Might the kind of more localised world that Transition is talking about be what we get by default rather than by design?
There are many possible futures out there. I think that what I see is a huge amount of resources in our economy, both in terms of capital equipment, intellectual effort, finance, being directed towards the growth agenda. A different agenda, a different ambition for our society and our economy away from the pursuit of growth, would automatically free up, at least in principle, a lot of these resources.
I had the privilege recently of speaking with Peter Victor, Professor in Environmental Studies at York University and author of ‘Managing without growth’ (you can see his full bio here). At a time when the obsession with making our economies grow again is close to hysteria, Peter’s work asks the question as to whether economic growth is the best way to achieve what we want from a society; employment, happiness, good public services, increased equality and so on, and concludes we could have an economy that isn’t growing, but which is actually better at those things. Having read his fascinating book, it felt like a good time to give him a call (I will break this into 2 posts, one today and one tomorrow).
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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