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
15 Feb 2007
**Aubrey Meyer** runs the Global Commons Institute and is the creator of the approach to climate change known as Contraction and Convergence. While he was in Totnes, teaching on Schumacher College’s Climate Change course, he gave a well-attended talk for Transition Town Totnes, where as well as speaking he treated the audience to some virtuouso violin playing. Prior to that I interviewed him at length about C&C and its relation to peak oil. Here is an extract from that, which explores the link between peak oil and climate change.
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14 Feb 2007
An excellent programme was broadcast on Monday on BBC Radio Wales as part of a series called **’Wales@Work’**. It explored the idea of Lampeter becoming a Transition Town, and was part of the lead-in to a talk I will be giving there soon. Entitled The Oil-Free Revolution?, it features a number of people, including Patrick Holden of the Soil Association, discussing how peak oil might affect the fabric of rural Wales, and how a Transition Town initiative could be the solution for that. You can hear the programme at the website for the next few days. Very much recommended listening.
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14 Feb 2007
This post might be a bit lost on our overseas readers, but it appears that a case of Post-Petroleum Stress Disorder (or something rather like it…) has broken out in Ambridge. Ambridge is the fictitious village which is the home of BBC Radio 4’s long-running soap opera The Archers, an unfortunate addiction passed on to me by my parents many years ago. While the storylines are usually focused on fairly mundane tales of everyday rural lives, (escaping sheep, droopy wheat and bell ringing practice) sometimes it rises above that to embrace topical issues of the day. It did after all originate during World War 2 as a vehicle for getting ideas and information to the farming community. On last night’s programme, however, one of it’s main characters, Nigel Pargeter (played by Graham Seed, below), ‘got’ climate change, and underwent his dark night of the soul, in what was quite a powerful piece of radio.
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13 Feb 2007
**Dr Vandana Shiva** is one of the most inspirational and powerful speakers you will ever hear. Her closing lecture to the Soil Association conference (you can hear the podcast here was electrifying, passionate and sobering. Entitled ‘Taking the Oil Out of Agriculture’ she argued that sustainable agriculture and *”working for a living, working with the land, working with the soil, could actually be the most evolved status of being human, not something that should disappear in history and will be put into a dustbin. That’s our common future, everywhere”.* We are hoping to be able to include a talk by Vandana in the next Transition Town Totnes programme. Until then, read and enjoy.
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12 Feb 2007
**Rocket Mass Heaters – Super efficient Woodstoves you can build (and snuggle up to).
Ianto Evans & Leslie Jackson. Cob Cottage Publications 2006. 100pp.**
**Reviewed by Graham Strouts.**
Ianto Evans, ecologist, architect, writer and inventor, presents a revolutionary stove design of his own invention, the rocket mass heater or “Rocket Stove
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**Aubrey Meyer** runs the Global Commons Institute and is the creator of the approach to climate change known as Contraction and Convergence. While he was in Totnes, teaching on Schumacher College’s Climate Change course, he gave a well-attended talk for Transition Town Totnes, where as well as speaking he treated the audience to some virtuouso violin playing. Prior to that I interviewed him at length about C&C and its relation to peak oil. Here is an extract from that, which explores the link between peak oil and climate change.
