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.
Early morning sun welcoming the '24 Hours of Possibilities' into the world
The centre of Manchester, where I spent last weekend, doesn’t feature a diversity of small, medium and large hotels and hostels in the same way that, say, Paris does. So far as I could tell, there are just several huge Premier Inns, and huge Travelodges, massive, soul-less tower blocks with massive soul-less logos down the side. As well as that, in the centre, virtually every shop is a huge chain, you know the ones, they now dominate every city centre in the country. It’s like an episode of Dr Who, where the place has been taken over by huge leeches, sucking the financial lifeblood out of the city, what Andrew Simms recently called “extractive industries”, funnelling money to distant shareholders. There are endless hideous new ‘iconic’ buildings, massive corporate egos in built form, usually home to just one organisation (such as the hideous gravity-defying monster below, surely a contender for James Howard Kunstler’s ‘Eyesore of the Month’?). But on this day when many are celebrating ’24 Hours of Possibility’ (have a look, there’s loads going on!), how might it be possible to see beyond all that to something that actually nourishes us as individuals, communities and local economies?
We’ve had a couple of posts this week that are frankly not much use to my English-speaking readers, but which are great stuff nonetheless. Today we have a TEDx talk from TEDxValedosVinhedos by Zaida Amaral about Transition in Brazil. I don’t speak a word of Portugese, but her presentation is so passionate and fantastic that I was gripped from start to finish. Brasiliandia, which featured in a video I posted earlier this week, also appeared this week on Globo TV, Brazil’s biggest TV station, in a piece that also featured Totnes and presented Transition in the run-up to Rio+20.
I spent a very enjoyable day at Bristol Green Week yesterday. Green Week is a celebration of green ideas and thinking in Bristol, which has featured a wildly eclectic mix of talks, workshops, music, comedy, films, walks and much more. I arrived midway through the week’s festivities, to participate in two events. The first was a screening of ‘In Transition 2.0’, shown as the third in a series of films under the somewhat uninspiring banner of ‘Documentary Evidence’. Apparently Monday’s had attracted 30 people, and Tuesday’s just 4, so it was suggested that I might want to temper my expectations in terms of attendance. In the end over 40 people came, and the whole thing went really well.
Vegbox management committee at one of our meetings holding potato superheroes! (potatoes from Ripple Farm!)
Here in Transition Kentish Town we’ve been running events and projects for two and a bit years. We have a steering group, a food group, two gardening groups of one kind or another, an energy group. For year or so we had a pop up shop. And we’ve made a lot of chutney along the way. As always with voluntary groups, the active people come and go and we work with this ebb and flow. We try to make sure we’re enjoying ourselves so active people will return. And we often come back to our early insight that as a Transition Initiative we want to remain informal and voluntary, independent of the council and grant givers, and rooted in friendship, family and community. Vegbox has emerged out of a desire to set up a something more formal alongside this: a social enterprise.
I’ve written before here at Transition Culture about Transition in Brasilandia in Sao Paolo in Brazil. There is some fascinating stuff happening there (as elsewhere in Brazil), which is starting to attract attention with the media in the country. We recently had a news crew from Brazil’s Globo TV visit us at Transition Network to do an interview for a forthcoming piece, also about Transition Brasilandia. That hasn’t emerged yet, but here is a piece called ‘Pra Você Ver from TVT in Brazil that gives a good sense of it (in 3 parts, speaking Portugese helps…).
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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