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
Monthly archive for January 2007
Showing results 6 - 10 of 23 for the month of January, 2007.
29 Jan 2007
BBC Radio 4’s **Farming Today** on Saturday explored some of the issues raised by the Soil Association conference in Cardiff. In an excellent programme, it looked at the role of supermarkets in a post-peak society and whether, indeed, they will actually have one. It included interviews with Green MEP Caroline Lucas and a walk around Totnes with **Transition Culture**’s own Rob Hopkins. It will be featured on the Listen Again section of the “R4”) section of the Radio 4 website until late Friday. Look for the link to ‘Farming Today This Week’.
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25 Jan 2007
West Cork in Ireland is a hotbed of permaculture projects, natural buildings and people who have spent years developing pieces of land in experimental ways. This summer a 10 day intensive permaculture course will offer an immersion in both permaculture design principles and approaches and also in the numerous projects in the area that have employed them. The course even has its own website where you can find out more about it. Permaculture principes are the most powerful tools you can have for the design of a post-peak future for yourself and your community. The course comes highly recommended…
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24 Jan 2007
Today’s Guardian featured an excellent piece by Jonathan Porritt on food and farming and the implications of peak oil on both. It picks up on many of the issues that will be explored at the Soil Association conference beginning tomorrow. I was particularly taken with his call for productive land to be put at the centre of planning for the future, and that it should be in what he calls ‘good nick’, as well as for his call for sufficient well-trained farmers, a theme Richard Heinberg will pick up at the conference. The article appears below;
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24 Jan 2007
This final one won’t take long, as it is really pretty straightforward, requiring very little elucidation. In essence, although you may start out developing your Transition Town process with a clear idea of where it will go, it will inevitably go elsewhere. You need to be open to it going where the energy of those who get involved want to take it. If you try and hold onto the idea that it will be a certain way it will, after a while, begin to sap the energy that is building to do certain things. It is what is so exciting about the whole thing, seeing what emerges.
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23 Jan 2007
For those of us born in the 1960s when the cheap oil party was in full swing, it is very hard to relate the idea of life with less oil with our own personal experience. Every year of my life (the oil crises of the 70s excepted) has been underpinned by more and more energy. I have no idea of what a more localised society looked like in the UK, the closest I have is how towns were in rural Ireland when I moved there in 1996, the shops all owned by families, the most memorable ones slightly damp smelling with wooden floorboards that sold the most unusual combinations of things (paraffin lamps, boxes of biscuits and aprons) generally run by a couple in their late 60s. There is a great deal that we can learn from those who directly remember the transition to the age of cheap oil, especially the period between 1930 and 1960.
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BBC Radio 4’s **Farming Today** on Saturday explored some of the issues raised by the Soil Association conference in Cardiff. In an excellent programme, it looked at the role of supermarkets in a post-peak society and whether, indeed, they will actually have one. It included interviews with Green MEP Caroline Lucas and a walk around Totnes with **Transition Culture**’s own Rob Hopkins. It will be featured on the Listen Again section of the “R4”) section of the Radio 4 website until late Friday. Look for the link to ‘Farming Today This Week’. 
