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.
A few weeks ago I attended the West Country Storytelling Festival at Embercombe. A remarkable event, the highlight for me was hearing Dr Martin Shaw speaking at several events. Martin is a painter, mythologist and wilderness teacher, and author of ‘A Branch from the Lightening Tree”. Sometimes I hear someone speak and think “that person is holding an important part of all this”. I was especially touched by one thing he said in a workshop about the relationship between storytelling and sustainability:
“I have not a clue whether we humans will live for another 100 or 10,000 years. We can’t be sure. What matters to me is the fact we have fallen out of a very ancient love affair – a kind of dream tangle, with the earth itself. If, through our own mess, that relationship is about to end, then we need to scatter as much beauty around us as we possibly can, to send a voice, to attempt some kind of repair. I think of it as a kind of courting – a very old idea. This isn’t about statistical hysteria, it’s about personal style. Any other response is just not cool”.
Intrigued, I met him the following week for an interview that covered storytelling, myth, and what it might all mean for Transition. Here is the audio if you’d rather listen to it, or the transcript is below:
So, it’s bag-packing time as I get ready to set off to Battersea for the Transition Network conference. There probably won’t be much activity on these web pages over the duration of the conference as it tends to be hectic bonkers from start to finish and little time to sit and blog. However, there will be lots of Social Reporters activity going on on the Transition Network’s Conference 2012 blog, with audio files, photos, blogs, tweets and whatever, all lovingly collated here. Several people have asked if there will be a live streaming for those who can’t make it. There won’t, and the simple reason is that it’s not that kind of conference. There aren’t presentations to the whole conference, rather lots of workshops, breakouts, Open Spaces and so on.
The Social Reporters will be trying to capture what they can, but by its nature it’s a hard one to document in the traditional fashion (if you are attending, and would like to be part of this, please chat to the lovely Social Reporters). Last year lots of people got in touch who had followed it remotely to say how well it worked, so let’s hope it works as well this year. Likelihood is I’ll be mostly Tweeting (@robintransition) using the hashtag #tnconf2012. So, see you on the other side…
I wrote a couple of days ago about the recent Atmos Totnes event when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was unveiled as a new Patron of the community’s attempt to bring the former Dairy Crest site into community ownership. Here’s a great short film of the event made by Chris Watson of Smith & Watson.
At the Transition Cabaret on Saturday evening, to be hosted by Matt Harvey, James Marriott from pioneering arts and activism organisation Platform will be one of the performers, telling stories from his recent experiences walking the oil pipeline that brings oil from the Caspian Sea to Northern Europe. We asked him, via the wonders of Skype, to tell us more:
Suzanne Dennis will be running, along with Lyndsey Stewart, a workshop at the 2012 Transition Network conference on the role of mentoring in Transition as a way of avoiding burnout and building personal resilience. I asked her more about what the workshop would cover and what participants might expect to get out of it:
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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