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
12 Dec 2006
Last week I watched the new peak oil film, **Crude Impact**, produced by Vista Clara films, which has just emerged on DVD. It describes itself as “a film about how energy use, particularly fossil fuels, has impacted the earth, mankind and other species”, and is one of a couple of new peak oil films coming out over the next few months. I had been looking forward to seeing it for some time, and I found it to be an extremely well-made film which clearly and passionately presents the argument that we are at or near the peak, which will be a transition of historic importance.
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11 Dec 2006
**Plant trees, disband the army, work together: the Tuscan way of surviving collapse by Ugo Bardi.**
**Ugo Bardi** is a Professor at the Dipartimento di Chimica at Università di Firenze in Italy, and is also President of [ASPO Italy](www.aspoitalia.net”ASPOIT”), who so ably hosted ASPO5 in Pisa earlier this year. In this article, Ugo delves back into the history of his region of Italy, Tuscany, and identifies strategies and lessons of relevance to societies in their attempts to respond to peak oil. Having lived in Tuscany myself for a couple of years, it is a part of the world I am very fond of, so here is an article which mixes post-peak solutions and Tuscan history, and offers some very useful points in so doing.
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7 Dec 2006
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I recently finished teaching a 10 week evening class called **Skilling Up for Powerdown** in Totnes. The course will run again in January and is already nearly full. To accompany the course I prepared each week a collection of materials to accompany the course, from weblinks and books, to notes and presentations. You might be interested to have a look. At New Year I will be taking it down, so that when the course starts again it will build week-by-week again, as the course unfolds. Any of you involved in education around energy descent/powerdown stuff might find it useful. I plan in the new year to write it up in more detail, as a course facilitator’s resource guide, but for now, I hope you find this interesting.
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6 Dec 2006
Tony Blair, despite talking about climate change as being the greatest threat facing humanity, has just announced that he intends to renew the UK’s Trident missile capability, at a cost of £20 billion. Good move. Of course we could have spent the money on a huge programme of energy efficiency and building of local food and energy infrastructure which would have made us less oil dependent and thereby less of a target but no, Trident it is. Among all the column inches on this subject, my favourite is a letter in today’s Guardian from David Collins. *”Why all this fuss about the need for a new Trident? We haven’t used the old ones yet”*.
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5 Dec 2006
I want to share an exercise with you that I did with my students on the **Skilling Up For Powerdown** evening course that I’ve been teaching in Totnes. I offer it in the hope that you might find it to be of use to you adapted to your own situation. It emerges from the work I have been doing exploring the connection between our collective relationship with oil and addiction, as laid out in Energy Descent Pathways. The aim of the exercise is to get people to really engage in creative thinking around the issues of how their lives rely on energy, and to think about how they might try to deal with that.
Read more»
Last week I watched the new peak oil film, **Crude Impact**, produced by Vista Clara films, which has just emerged on DVD. It describes itself as “a film about how energy use, particularly fossil fuels, has impacted the earth, mankind and other species”, and is one of a couple of new peak oil films coming out over the next few months. I had been looking forward to seeing it for some time, and I found it to be an extremely well-made film which clearly and passionately presents the argument that we are at or near the peak, which will be a transition of historic importance.
