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
11 Jan 2008
Good morning. I thought you might be interested to know firstly that on **BBC One’s ‘The One Show’** tonight, Lucy Siegle will be presenting a piece about Transition Town Totnes. She came down before Christmas with a crew and filmed some interviews, as well as going off round town spending Totnes Pounds. It’ll be interesting to see how the piece turns out. BBC One. 7pm.
**UPDATE** Apparently, despite it being trailed on the website, *(Lucy Siegle is in the green haven that is Totnes in Devon, to find out about locals’ latest eco-mission – to cut down their reliance on oil)* the piece about Totnes wasn’t actually shown tonight. I’ll investigate on Monday and update you.
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10 Jan 2008
**Review of ‘Eco-House Manual: how to carry out environmentally friendly improvements to your home’ by Nigel Griffiths.**
This Christmas, for those of my family who would appreciate such things, I either gave vouchers for nut trees that will be planted in Totnes in February, or copies of the Eco-House Manual. Although most books in the green building library focus on new build, there are a few books on what to do with the millions of buildings we already have, but many of those that I have read tend to be quite superficial.
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9 Jan 2008
In an episode of the Alan Partridge radio show, one of his guests is a Lord, who had just written his autobiography (Partridge: “you’ve just published your autobiography. What’s that about?”). The statesman in question has a strong reputation for being outspoken and outrageous, and he ends up having a heart attack and dying live on the show. During the interview, Partridge asks him why he has always been such an outspoken advocate for pornography. The Lord replies “what a man chooses to do, in the privacy of his own attic, is his concern and no-one else’s”. Over the last few days of the Christmas break, I spent a few days in my loft, but for far more laudable motives. I did however experience the strangely delightful solitary pleasure that can only be achieved by insulating one’s own loft.
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8 Jan 2008
**7. How conscious are participants of the crucial need for frugality, that a sustainable and just world cannot have affluent lifestyles, that sufficiency must be the concern…and that living frugally and self-sufficiently can be highly satisfying? I think this is the most difficult problem here; there is no sign whatsoever that the squandering affluent way needs to be questioned. Maybe the best way to make a difference is to begin with the reality of peak oil, and soon people will realise that the affluence will go with the oil??**
Indeed. I think peak oil is a very powerful tool for putting a mirror up to communities to ask, “where has the resilience in this community gone?”, and for focusing the mind on how vulnerable we have become. It is my experience that there is little mileage in telling people that they will need to live more frugally, but that what is much more powerful is to take people through a thinking process where they arrive at that conclusion themselves, which is one of the key aspects of what Transition Intiatives do.
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7 Jan 2008
Happy New Year folks and welcome back to Transition Culture. The final touches are being put to what is now definitely called **The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience**, and I can now give you an advance taste of the wonder that it will be. On the right you can see the cover, and by clicking here you can download what’s called the blad. A blad (blad stands for Book Layout and Design) is a sample of the book that is produced for distributors, bookshops and salespeople to give them a flavour of it. Until the full book emerges late February, this’ll give you a sense of what’s coming…
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