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 late September 2009 in Amsterdam, at an event called Picnic ’09, Oliver Dudok van Heel of the Lewes Pound CIC gave a talk about Transition and the role of local currencies. It was beautifully filmed, and an excellent talk. Thanks to Oliver, and to the organisers for making this available. Good to see that the guy at 6:08 is paying attention…
Paul from Transition Town Deventer in the Netherlands just sent me the link to this. Paul describes it as “a slide show of announcements, programs, photos etcetera of our activities in the first year of TT Deventer. Even though most of the visitors of Transitionculture.org won’t be able to understand Dutch, it still might be a nice illustration of what a starting Transition initiative can do”. During 2009, they held over 60 different events and activities, engaging over 2300 people. Impressive stuff….
It’s not surprising the first documentary is already here on the Transition Movement, given the speed at which initiatives are springing up around the world. Emma Goude’s superb “In Transition 1.0″ should only add fuel to the spreading fire. While the film touches on Transition efforts worldwide, this is a Brit production through and through. It seems they have taken off the training wheels.
You may remember from a previous Transition Culture post that last September Michael Portillo passed through Totnes as part of filming for his new series of ‘Great British Railway Journeys’. The resultant programme, in which he gets a ride in a biodiesel rickshaw, spends Totnes Pounds and hangs out with me in the graveyard, will be shown on this Wednesday on BBC2 at 6.30pm. Speculation is rife as to whether or not the final sequence will include Pete Ryland, founder of the Totnes Rickshaw Company and his driver for the day, telling Portillo “I’ve had far more famous people than you in the back of this rickshaw Michael”! If you miss the programme, you’ll be able to see it on BBC iPlayer for the next 7 days.
I read with interest John Michael Greer’s recent post, The Costs of Community, and then Sharon Astyk’s response, On the Problem of Community and I wanted to add some thoughts to the flow. Here is a very quick summary of the debate thus far… Greer’s basic argument is that the way politics used to work was that citizens formed themselves into groups and those groups into movements and that was what brought the pressure to bear to make things happen. Today, we are so atomised and isolated that this doesn’t happen, due, in part, to our preciously-guarded sense of autonomy, our lack of time, and our lack of enthusiasm for putting in the work that actually building communities entails. Rebuilding community, he argues, “requires “sacrificing some of the autonomy so many Americans guard jealously”.
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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