Transition Culture will be closing down for most of August as I stop work and take time out with my family, sit on a beach in Cornwall for a while, visit family, leave my laptop at home, and try not to think about Transition very much (well I can try). The last few days has been a wrapping up of various things, including the thesis I have been doing for the last 3 years (alongside everything else…) which (pause for fireworks, dancing elephants and great plumes of multi-coloured bunting) I handed in today (see left). Don’t have to even think about it once for the next 2 months. Thanks everyone for all your comments and support over the year so far, much appreciated. Have a good few weeks, normal service will be resumed here first week of September, when we’ll be into full-on Pattern Language writing mode, and other exciting new developments to be revealed when activities resume!
As a follow-up to the previous post, here is a short film that was made for the event that announced the 20 winners of the Low Carbon Communities Challenge, which features Transition Streets among the winners.
‘Transition Together’, the street-by-street behaviour change programme developed by Transition Town Totnes and now being piloted in 10 other communities, has just completed analysing the data that has come back from the first 4 groups, comprising 32 households in Totnes. They have completed all 7 of the sessions set out in the workbook, and the data offers a fascinating first look at whether the process works or not. The results from the other 31 groups currently underway are expected this Autumn. Here, Fiona Ward of Transition Together shares the results that have emerged.
There is often confusion within the peak oil/Transition movement about the distinction between the terms ‘localism‘ and ‘localisation‘. On Energy Bulletin yesterday, Richard Moore’s piece, ‘The Emergence of Localism” was actually referring, I would argue, to localisation, not localism. In the UK, in the context of the government’s Big Society agenda, the two definitely mean very different things. Here is section from my forthcoming thesis which explores this distinction.
Fred Pearce (2010) The Climate Files: the battle for the truth about global warming. Guardian Books.
The saga of the hacked, or leaked, emails from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) has gone on to become known, predictably, as ‘Climategate’. This release of thousands of emails and documents, sceptics argued, proved that climate science was fabricated and fraudulent, and showed scientists deliberately falsifying data. The release of the emails just days before the Copenhagen climate talks couldn’t have been worse timed, and they were dissected endlessly online, often by people with little understanding of the science, selected quotes being used to dismiss climate science in its entirety as a wicked scam (here‘s one more lurid example of this). In this, the first book to look in depth at Climategate, Pearce offers a remarkably well balanced and up-to-date account of what really happened, what it all means and where climate science finds itself in the wake of the whole sorry saga.
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
Read more»
Transition Culture will be closing down for most of August as I stop work and take time out with my family, sit on a beach in Cornwall for a while, visit family, leave my laptop at home, and try not to think about Transition very much (well I can try). The last few days has been a wrapping up of various things, including the thesis I have been doing for the last 3 years (alongside everything else…) which (pause for fireworks, dancing elephants and great plumes of multi-coloured bunting) I handed in today (see left). Don’t have to even think about it once for the next 2 months. Thanks everyone for all your comments and support over the year so far, much appreciated. Have a good few weeks, normal service will be resumed here first week of September, when we’ll be into full-on Pattern Language writing mode, and other exciting new developments to be revealed when activities resume!
