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.
Jim and Mary Beth Heddle of the EON, the Ecological Options Network, have just posted on YouTube the film they made when they were in Totnes during the winter, which consists largely of the interviews we already posted the transcripts of, interspersed with little vignettes of me walking around the town. As a single film that covers the broad territory of the Transition concept, it is one of the best that we have. Have a look. It does fail to answer the question though, that why it is that every time a film crew or radio reporter comes to Totnes it pours with rain…. (as you might have noticed in the Radio Scotland piece posted yesterday).
On Monday morning, one of the best pieces of radio journalism about Transition Initiatives, and about Totnes in particular, was broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland’s **The Investigation** programme. The reporter, Mark Stephen, had travelled to Totnes a couple of months ago, and done a wide range of interviews, which are woven into the piece.
Just back from the wonderful **Big Green Gathering**, so many things to write about and share, but I’ll start with one of the things that really impressed me, the Eco Ark (alternatively the Junk Boat). One of the wonderful things about festivals such as the BGG is the creativity they unleash, people who put a huge amount of time into creating things that just exist during the festival. On the Friday night I was walking back to my tent in the early hours, and came across a boat, complete with sails and rigging, sat in the field, full of people sitting chatting by candlelight. I passed by and went to bed that night, my mind racing with thoughts about how anyone got a boat to Cheddar, why on earth would they, and what an extraordinary thing it was to do. The next day I inspected it closer.
I was fascinated to see that Totnes MP Anthony Steen raised both Transition Town Totnes and the Totnes Pound in a question in the House of Commons a couple of weeks ago. This is in the wake of the piece he wrote in the local papers, waxing lyrical about TTT. In Questions on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on the subject of local food production, he managed, in one question, to cover peak oil, the fragility of import dependency, the role of local currencies and the Transition concept, not bad! The exchange ran as follows;
I am off tomorrow to the Big Green Gathering, near Cheddar in Somerset, so tomorrow morning’s post will be the last until Monday. Thankfully the weather forecast looks good and like it won’t be the Big Brown Gathering which a week or so ago it looked like it might be. The BGG is rather wonderful, and is Europe’s biggest Green event, 5 days of talks, music, workshops, films, food, and all sorts of wonderful things, all powered by renewable energy. If you are going and are interested in such things, I am giving two talks in the Permaculture area, one on Friday at 4pm, and one on Sunday at 12.15pm. See you there!
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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