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
Visioning is a core activity that will run through all the activities of your Transition initiative. It will be most obviously a key aspect of creating ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLANS, itself an exercise in collective visioning, but will also underpin your initiative’s STRATEGIC THINKING.
The arts are a vital part of HOW OTHERS SEE US / HOW WE COMMUNICATE, and can make a great difference in terms of how an initiative is perceived. They play a key part in AWARENESS RAISING from the very first events onwards. They also play a key part in the ROLE OF STORYTELLING and producing MEANINGFUL MAPS.
As someone who was just weeks away from installing a woodstove into my house, I was fascinated, as well as somewhat horrified, to read an excellent paper by Nick Grant and Alan Clarke called ‘Biomass – a burning issue’, published by the Association of Environment Conscious Builders (AECB). Their arguments are convincing. They open with a quote from David Olivier, who writes that “biomass boilers are an expensive way to make climate change worse and reverse over a century of public health improvements”. Strong words. The writers, both of whom heat their homes using wood, set out to investigate whether Olivier was right, rather, I sense, hoping he wasn’t. “It would have been much easier not to write this”, they state, but on balance, I am deeply grateful that they did, as it is a fascinating and very important piece of work.
An Unleashing is the culmination of your initiative’s AWARENESS RAISING work, offering the opportunity for CELEBRATING what it has already achieved, where it might go, as well as the culture of the place. As you start BUILDING STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS an Unleashing can be a powerful way of publicising those new connections.
Adrienne Campbell from Transition Town Lewes checks the email in their office...
As I am working on drafting these various patterns, or ingredients, of Transition, I will no doubt from time to time chuck questions at you… today I would love to know whether your Transition initiative has an office, or whether it even wants one. Does your initiative run from a collection of virtually-linked kitchen tables? Have you deliberately decided to remain light and nimble and officeless? Or do you have an office, or some other space from which you operate? If so, how do you fund it? What happens in it? What benefits has it brought? Please share your stories, I can’t guarantee they’ll all end up in the final document, but I’ll try my best! Thanks folks….
