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.
How to Grow More Vegetables: and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine. John Jeavons. 10 Speed Press.
This is not a new book, but given that it is the time of year when your thoughts may well be turning to gardening, I thought it might be useful for me to wax lyrical about what might lay claim to being one of the greatest gardening books of all time. ‘How to Grow More Vegetables’ wears its heart firmly on its sleeve, and sets out to teach you to do exactly what the title suggests. It has been my gardening bible for the last 10 years, and as you can see (left), my copy is well loved, covered in muddy thumbprints, having regularly accompanied me into the garden.
Shaun Chamberlin’s masterwork, ‘The Transition Timeline’, is now complete and available for order. As someone who has been intimately involved in its conception and its production, I don’t think that a review from me would be of much use. It is of course brilliant, I love it. It is a powerful and vital addition to the Transition literature, and it deserves to be a best-seller. You can pre-order your copy here, and be the first person on your street to own one (we get the actual copies in a few days). The book will have two launches, one at the Kingston screening of the Age of Stupid on Sunday March 15th, and one at the Totnes Bookshop at 7pm on Wednesday 1st April. In the meantime, here is the foreword I wrote for the book.
The 2009 Transition Network Conference (theme: ‘Transition Everywhere’) will be held at the Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, London, SW11 5TN. It will run from noon on Friday 22-May through to 14:30 on Sunday 24-May.This is the main event in the annual Transition calendar and is the opportunity to immerse yourself in what is happening in Transition initiatives around the world. The 2009 conference will be our biggest yet, keeping the best of what has gone before and adding many new and exciting special attractions!
Many of you enjoyed Matt Harvey’s piece about Transition that was on BBC South West recently, but a good few people outside the UK complained they were unable to see it on the iPlayer. So here it is, recently uploaded onto YouTube, featuring me looking quite unnecessarily smart… I hope you enjoy it….
Here are two very interesting concepts I’ve come across recently that feel worth sharing. One is Julie Brown of Growing Communities’ ‘Food Zones’ idea, and the other is that of the ‘Foodshed’ or ‘Foodshed Analysis’. Both hold key pieces of the Energy Descent Pathways jigsaw, and we are actively looking at how to make best use of them in the Totnes EDAP process. Clearly the Transition movement has developed a strong ethic that increasing the resilience of a settlement necessitates, among other things, a food system that grows as much food as close to home as possible. But what might that actually look like?
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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How to Grow More Vegetables: and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine. John Jeavons. 10 Speed Press.
