Our personal lives can sometimes imitate what is happening in the wider world to an alarming extent.On Friday morning I sat down at my computer to write you a very amusing piece about olive oil (which you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for…), only to find that my computer had seized up, and refused to start.The Microsoft Windows Screen of Death (left) loomed large.I dashed to my local computer repair man, whose first question, on noting the symptoms, was “have you got everything backed up?”Ah. Hum.
It’s very rare that someone comes up with a genuinely new idea, but the concept of Transition Initiatives is one such. Transition aims to confront the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil at the level of the community – whether town, village, district or city – and for the initiative to come from the people themselves. Rob Hopkins is both the person who invented the idea and the author of this book.
A while ago in Totnes we ran a course on sock darning. It felt to us like a very important skill to start retraining people in, and one of the many useful things the older generation could pass on to the younger. Although some people thought it a great idea, I did get a lot of ribbing about it (if you’ll excuse the knitting pun). However, in the subsequent months, sock darning has started to catch on. It’s the new salsa.
Our local wonderful organic clothing company, Greenfibres, recently put a great film about sock darning on YouTube (see below), which demystifies this most basic of arts so rapidly being consigned to the dustbin of history.
The Isles of Scilly recently became the third Transition Islands, after the Isle of Man and the Isle of Wight. I visited for a couple of days over the recent school holidays at their invitation, to give a couple of talks and to also have a few days there. It is interesting to see the challenges that islands face in preparing for Transition, and the particular challenges and opportunities they throw up.
On the final day of the Positive Energy conference, I took some time out with Joanna to do a short interview for Transition Culture. She has kindly gone through this transcript and corrected any mistakes I have made, so I hope it represents an accurate record. The night before the interview she had had a sleepless night, something she refers to in the interview. In most things I read by Joanna there are sentences that jump out at me and which I then go on to quote at length. Here, I love her reference to the need to become “freed from continually computing our chances of success”…
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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Our personal lives can sometimes imitate what is happening in the wider world to an alarming extent. On Friday morning I sat down at my computer to write you a very amusing piece about olive oil (which you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for…), only to find that my computer had seized up, and refused to start. The Microsoft Windows Screen of Death (left) loomed large. I dashed to my local computer repair man, whose first question, on noting the symptoms, was “have you got everything backed up?” Ah. Hum. 
It’s very rare that someone comes up with a genuinely new idea, but the concept of Transition Initiatives is one such. Transition aims to confront the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil at the level of the community – whether town, village, district or city – and for the initiative to come from the people themselves. Rob Hopkins is both the person who invented the idea and the author of this book.
