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.
**The Totnes Pound** pilot drew to a close a couple of days ago, and since then, the amount of press interest has been amazing. There was a piece on the local BBC TV news, and a piece on their website, where you will find a link that allows you to watch the TV news piece. That then stimulated requests for interviews from Radio 5 Live, a range of local BBC stations, and even some overseas media. I did a short piece for the Stuart Maconie show yesterday afternoon. People are genuinely fascinated by the idea, and keen to find out more about the planned relaunch, set for sometime in the next couple of weeks.
When I was in Lewes for their Official Unleashing, I was interviewed by Adrienne Campbell of TTL. The interview looked at the Transition concept in depth, as well as the practical manifestations in the various towns, in particular Totnes. Some of this interview has now been uploaded to YouTube, question by question. At the same time, Adrienne interviewed Dr Chris Johnstone, author of ‘Find Your Power’, I think some clips from that will be uploaded soon too.
Representatives from 35 communities up and down the UK crammed into the beautiful surroundings of Ruskin Mill, in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, on Thursday 31st May for the Inaugural Conference of the Transition Network. The event was both an opportunity to network the many Transition Initiatives springing up around the UK and also an opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary momentum that the concept is generating. Despite the occasionally cramped nature of the space due to its being filled to its capacity (many more people were unable to come due to lack of spaces), it was an amazing day, full of energy, hope and possibility.
**’Wattle and Daub’ by Paula Sunshine. Shire Books. 2006. pp40.**
There is something very nourishing about the process of rediscovering the building materials of our ancestors. I often remark when teaching people about cob building that in the UK we have an earth building gene, that deep inside ourselves, once we start to handle these materials we find instinctively that we know what we are doing, they feel right in our hands, we feel at home with them. The first time I made a wattle and daub panel, we just decided we wanted to do one, and we used a book and made it up as we went along. We didn’t have great clay, we put the wattles too close together and didn’t use enough straw in the mix. It worked, but only just.
It’s not every day that Transition Towns stuff is translated into Italian, but with the recent coverage in the Guardian, foreign papers are getting in touch and running articles. Here is one, in Italian, and seemingly quite balanced. They aren’t all quite so rational. A few weeks ago a Mexican reporter rang me up, and the main thrust of her interview, in not very good English, was to what extent Transition Towns was like John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (an exceptionally odd question). She sounded positively disappointed when I told her that I had grown up drawing far more inspiration from the Buzzcocks than ‘Imagine’. The final article turned up the other day, all in Spanish so I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but bizzarely the article’s lone illustration was of a caravan park, which we are positive is nowhere near Totnes. Ah, tis a wonderful world.
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»
**The Totnes Pound** pilot drew to a close a couple of days ago, and since then, the amount of press interest has been amazing. There was a piece on the local BBC TV news, and a piece on their website, where you will find a link that allows you to watch the TV news piece. That then stimulated requests for interviews from Radio 5 Live, a range of local BBC stations, and even some overseas media. I did a short piece for the Stuart Maconie show yesterday afternoon. People are genuinely fascinated by the idea, and keen to find out more about the planned relaunch, set for sometime in the next couple of weeks.
