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.
How might one introduce peak oil and the concept of Transition to young people? What follows is a collection of tools that were developed for working with students at King Edward VI Community College in Totnes, as part of the Transition Tales project. These were developed for working with Year 9 students, and we are presently developing an adaptation for Year 7, which I will let you know about in a couple of months. The tools set out below are still being developed but I hope you will find them useful.
Last Thursday in Bristol saw the formal launch of The Transition Handbook, at an event that was also Green Books‘ 21st birthday party. Before I spoke, a DVD was shown of a presentation that Caroline Lucas MEP had sent as she was unable to make it in person. In it she describes the Transition movement as “the most exciting, most hopeful, most inspirational movement happening in Britain today”.
The Transition Handbook is available to order here.
This is a visioning exercise, one I use most often on permaculture courses when teaching about urban permaculture, usually about two-thirds of the way through the course. The scenario is that it is 2030, and that the town/city/village you are in successfully made the Transition to a lower energy, more localised model. As such, it is now an exemplar for the rest of the world similarly engaged in this process. People come from far and wide to draw inspiration from what has been achieved. Their job is to act as tour guides.
The Board Game is a great tool for the identification and design of a project’s many stages, developed by John Croft of the Gaia Foundation of Western Australia. It also creates a checklist to which one can return as the project progresses, to get a sense of how it is progressing. At an early stage in the Transition Initiative, the initial group of people who are passionate about the process comes together.
This activity evolved from an exercise called ‘bunyips’ in Skye and Robin Clayfield’s Manual of Teaching Permaculture Creatively, but is an evolution of my own devising. It is a powerful tool for giving people permission to explore how they might set about lessening their oil dependency. I have found it to be very effective with many different groups.
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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How might one introduce peak oil and the concept of Transition to young people? What follows is a collection of tools that were developed for working with students at King Edward VI Community College in Totnes, as part of the Transition Tales project. These were developed for working with Year 9 students, and we are presently developing an adaptation for Year 7, which I will let you know about in a couple of months. The tools set out below are still being developed but I hope you will find them useful.
