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 small group of us have spent the last few weeks working on what will become a booklet for Transition initiatives, which will help with the setting up of community grillings of our political candidates, allowing constituents to assess the degree of resilience thinking in their policies. It could provide the basis for an event, co-run with a range of other similar local organisations. It sets out how to do hustings, a guide to what resilience means, and also 10 Frequently Asked Questions that might arise. We are now throwing the draft over to you for your thoughts and consideration. We hope you find this useful, and look forward to your thoughts.
The Western Morning News is a daily paper that covers the South West of England. Often its editorials denounce the idea of windfarms, and its letter pages are often full of climate sceptics. All the more heartening that the following editorial appeared in today’s paper, alongside a very good news piece about TTT’s DECC award. An editorial like this would have been unimaginable a couple of years ago, it is fascinating how fast things are moving. I must say though that I have lived in Totnes for nearly 5 years now, and have yet to see a carved bar of soap (see below)!
“The South Devon town of Totnes has come in for a fair bit of criticism over the years as the South West capital of the ‘alternative culture’. Listen to the jeers of its critics and you would think the average resident of the TQ9 postcode was a sandal-wearing, crystal-gazing soap carver subsisting entirely on brown rice and organic parsnips.
So Copenhagen has been and gone, with no meaningful agreement being reached, and now the politicians and lobbyists have headed home having failed to do anything meaningful to address this staggeringly pressing challenge. Hugo Chavez came up with the quote of the fortnight when he observed “if the climate was a bank, they would already have saved it”. The gathering of the environmental/climate change movement in the Klimaforum with its dedicated bringing together of green luminaries and activists failed to have any meaningful impact on the proceedings, as did the mass street protests, designed to shame delegates into meaningful action and to draw a line in the sand. In short, the responses that the alternative movement/protest culture/social justice movement usually rolls into action when such events take place, didn’t work. So, might we do things differently next time?
Thought you might like to see this short film of the TTT Christmas party, which shows the moment when we were able to tell everyone about the success of our Low Carbon Communities Challenge application.
The TTT Christmas party just after the news was announced on Friday night
I am delighted to be able to announce that Transition Town Totnes has been selected as one of 10 ‘first movers’ in the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s ‘Low Carbon Communities Challenge’, which I introduced here when it was launched in late September. The scheme was run on incredibly tight timeframes, as any of the many other Transition initiatives who applied will attest, and it was a miracle, given the timeframes, that anyone got any bids together at all. The ‘second movers’ will be announced in January.
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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A small group of us have spent the last few weeks working on what will become a booklet for Transition initiatives, which will help with the setting up of community grillings of our political candidates, allowing constituents to assess the degree of resilience thinking in their policies. It could provide the basis for an event, co-run with a range of other similar local organisations. It sets out how to do hustings, a guide to what resilience means, and also 10 Frequently Asked Questions that might arise. We are now throwing the draft over to you for your thoughts and consideration. We hope you find this useful, and look forward to your thoughts. 
