** Note: the salary for this post has now increased from £22,000 pro rata to £28,500 pro rata. **
Transition Network is looking for a part time fundraiser to join its team. The function of the post is “to help fulfil Transition Network’s objective of supporting community-led responses to peak oil and climate change through building resilience and happiness, by maximising the short and long-term income for core and project costs”. You can read the job description and other information here. To apply, send a CV and covering letter to Jo Coish at Transition Network, 43 Fore Street, Totnes, Devon. TQ9 5HN by Wednesday September 23rd.
September 17th sees the release of the first in a series of ‘how to’ books published under the imprint of ‘Transition Books’ (due soon, guides to money, working with local government and cities). Entitled ‘Local Food: how to make it happen in your community’ it is the work mainly of Tamzin Pinkerton (who was recently interviewed here at Transition Culture) with bits from me, and it is really quite brilliant. Rather than being an intellectual exercise, it is really about the nitty gritty of setting up local food projects, drawing largely (but by no means exclusively) from the successes and failures of Transition initiatives around the world. It is packed with examples, tips, links, ideas and inspiration for rebuilding food resilience where you live. ‘Local Food’ is available from Transition Culture (and elsewhere) from September 17th, but you can preorder it now, and be among the first people to get a copy! To give you a taste, here, in full, is my introduction to the book. There will be two book launches, one in Totnes on October 1st, and another in London, to be confirmed. I’ll keep you posted.
As I mentioned in my write up of the TED Talks, the two most extraordinary presentations I saw there were Itay Talgam (whose talk is not yet posted) and Emmanuel Jal. Emmanuel’s talk was extraordinary, uplifting, sobering and inspirational. By the end there was not a dry eye in the house. It has just been posted by TED, so here it is.
Today is a bit of a Transition Culture landmark. Extraordinarily, this is the 1000th post I have put up here. Since the dim and distant early days of this site in November 2005, I have been leaping out of bed bright and early every morning to bring colour and vim to your lives, thrilling you with tales of compost loos, odd things you can make out of potatoes and the Alberta Tar Sands. I thought long and hard as to how best to mark this momentous moment, and despite expending a great deal of mental energy on the question, have come up with… nothing. Your suggestions for how best to mark it would be much appreciated. In the end, I decided to celebrate by offering a quote from ‘Comet in Moominland’, which I am reading with my 7 year old at the moment, and which we both love. It is a quote which perhaps describes what the Transition process should be like better than anything else I have read (or written during those 1000 posts).
I spent a few days last week at the Sunrise Off the Grid Festival near Shepton Mallet. I had been invited to go and give a talk, and went along with the Hopkins family en masse. It was a small and intimate affair, with some great things; the Transition area in the Tin Village was fantastic, the talk I gave went fine, the weather was mostly kind, and it was all quite relaxed and pleasant. I haven’t been at a festival since 2007’s Big Green Gathering, and there was one key thing I noticed that has changed since then, and which left me feeling very uneasy and with a profound sense of disquiet, so I wanted to give it some attention here. It was the alarming rise of the 2012 doomsters….
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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September 17th sees the release of the first in a series of ‘how to’ books published under the imprint of ‘Transition Books’ (due soon, guides to money, working with local government and cities). Entitled ‘Local Food: how to make it happen in your community’ it is the work mainly of Tamzin Pinkerton (who was 
