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.
The piece I mentioned before that was going to appear on BBC1’s The One Show about Transition Town Totnes, has, according to the show’s website been rescheduled for tonight. People who tuned in last time talked of a feature about swans that just went on too long, and something about Lenny Henry, which meant that they ran out of time for the Totnes piece, so fingers crossed that tonight is the night. If you miss it, you will be able to watch it for the next 7 days on the BBC I-Player.
It was fascinating to read Rupert Read’s recent article posted both on his website and reproduced in the Green Party magazine Green World entitled *‘Peak Oil’ only makes the Green Party message more urgent”*, in which he sets about the Transition movement for being naive and even potentially harmful. *”Next time you hear a Transition Town aficionado peaking about how Peak Oil renders ordinary politics irrelevant, please beg to differ”*, he writes. However, Read’s piece betrays such a profound misunderstanding of where the Transition movement is coming from that I feel duty bound to respond.
A while ago I wrote here about the presentation I gave at the International Forum on Globalisation despite staying at home, sending a DVD and thereby saving 2,788kgs of carbon dioxide in the process. The response to that was very good, and as a dedicated no-flyer, I am always interested in other people who do the same. Prince Charles saw off all competition in this department recently by having himself beamed, 3D, in a Star Trek style, into a recent energy conference in Abu Dhabi (see below).
This whole question of how to attend conferences without travelling is a huge challenge, as the film above discusses, and
**Sonya Wallace** in Sunshine Coast in Australia (Australia’s first Transition Town) just sent me a link to an interview that she did on Wonderful World Media Network which explores the relocalisation process happening there, and how their Energy Descent Plan process is going. The quality of the recording isn’t that great, indeed it does sound rather like listening into the Apollo landings at a time when the conversation moved away from booster rockets to peak oil and local currencies, but it is well worth a listen. Great to hear what people are up to there.
Here is an entertaining story from one of our local papers, the Herald Express, about the **Totnes Pound**. Colourworks are our wonderful local printers, who have worked incredibly hard reducing the footprint of their business, and who are altogether charming people too. They do all Transition Town Totnes’s printing, and when they printed the second Totnes Pound, we asked them if they would be happy to take payment in them, which they did without batting an eyelid, thereby setting the record for the largest single payment in Totnes Pounds that we know of. The article also touches on the Oil Vulnerability Audit we did for them.
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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