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.
Special Royal Wedding packs of Top Trumps available for sale on Paddington Station yesterday
I spent the day yesterday in London. I arrived thinking it was going to be packed with people, but actually it was remarkable how few people there were. I’ve never seen Paddington station so empty. The London underground was positively spacious. Where was everybody? I did see one plastic Union Jack hat, but that was about it. Anyway, here’s a rather entertaining story from the day…. I met Peter Lipman (Chair of Transition Network) and we headed over to Ladbroke Grove for a meeting we were having there. We had about 20 minutes before the meeting, so went round the corner from the meeting venue and sat on a wall to catch up about this and that.
Transition Bath recently posted this film of an excellent talk they hosted from an event called ‘How Can We Grow More Food Locally?’ (which had a great poster – see left). The talk was part of a wider series of ‘Transition Talks’, the next one being called ‘Does money make the world go round?’ which features Mark Boyle (‘the Moneyless Man’) and Molly Scott Cato. Here’s the talk…. very inspiring.
A few weeks ago, photojournalist Ed Thompson came to Totnes to take photos of the town and about different aspects of Transition underway here. His pictures are a quirky and colourful take on the place and on some of the people involved, and you can see a selection of the pictures he took here…
The other week I did a chat with Karen Rybold Chin for ‘The Nation’ as the final part of a thirteen-part series called “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate”. Here it is….
Following it, Walter Haugen at Local Harvest wrote a post questioning my “1 litre of oil equals 35 days of human work” figure. My source for that was from the end of a report done by FEASTA a few years ago which concluded that “a 40 litre fill-up at a petrol station is the equivalent of about four years of human manual work”. Walter’s calculations, which argue that my figure “overstates the energy value of a liter of petrol by almost a factor of four” are here. Be great to hear your thoughts on this. Not being a mathematician or an engineer myself I’d value your thoughts/analysis….
We are now in editing mode for ‘The Transition Companion’ (out in September). The draft is way too long, so some bits are being cut. The following piece has been cut way down, so I wanted to post it in full here, as I rather liked it (!). First there is the piece from the book, and then the interview I did with Justin Bere, in full, a riot of delights for passivhaus/local building materials fans out there….
The 'Larch House' in Ebbw Vale, Wales.
The ‘holy grail’ in terms of the construction of new sustainable buildings is homes that reach the highest level of energy efficiency, whilst also using as high a proportion of locally sourced materials as possible, what we might call ‘The Local Passivhaus’. Two buildings, recently completed in Ebbw Vale, known as ‘The Lime House’ and ‘The Larch House’ have moved this concept forward significantly.
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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