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.
In March, at the Findhorn Positive Energy conference, I was asked, when I arrived, to screw up the talk I had prepared and come up with something that reflected the rest of the conference. Here is the talk I ended up giving, complete with exuberant introduction. It was a talk I really enjoyed…
I had the privilege last week to attend a kind of think tank thing organised by Colin Hines, which preceded the release today of the Green New Deal Group’s report, which I think is something that all of you involved in Transition work will find extremely useful. The Group has been meeting since early 2007, consisting of Larry Elliot, Colin Hines, Tony Juniper, Jeremy Leggett, Caroline Lucas MEP, Richard Murphy, Ann Pettifor, Charles Secrett and Andrew Simms. The opening paragraph of the report runs as follows;
“The global economy is facing a ‘triple crunch’. It is a combination of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and soaring energy prices underpinned by an encroaching peak in oil production. These three overlapping events threaten to develop into a perfect storm, the like of which has not been seen since the Great Depression. To help prevent this from happening we are proposing a Green New Deal”.
Today’s post is going to be mainly visual.I popped round the other day to my friends Paul and Ivana’s house, a new thatched cob house just round the corner from where I live, which you read more about at their building blog.They are using lath and plaster for all the walls and ceilings upstairs and have reached the stage where they have pretty much finished and are preparing for plastering. It is a stunning sight, as you will see, indeed most people I know who have used laths have toyed with the idea of not plastering it at all, given the it is so attractive.What follows are some photos of a walk around the upstairs of their house.
Once again the pile of books by my bed is reaching heights that are beginning to verge on the life threatening.I am developing the terrible habit of starting several books at once, and so I have about 10 books on the go at the moment (don’t try this at home kids) all of which are wonderful and insightful in their own ways. I’ve done this listing-of-useful-books thing before, and it seemed to go down well, so here it is again….
This is a wonderful clip. Matt Simmons is the author of ‘Twighlight in the Desert’, is a leading US investment banker, and a long-term advocate of the peak oil argument. When he was asked to go on CNBC’s ‘Fast Money’ to discuss the high oil prices, he clearly stunned the presenters with his forthright analysis of society’s current perilous situation. When asked if $147 a barrel is a ‘wake up call’ he replied “yes, but we’re not having a wake up call, we’re having a witch hunt for who got us here”, a succinct analysis of the current world situation. What was especially fascinating to watch was when he was asked for his prognosis of the near future.
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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