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 Story of Transition Tales by Simon Robinson (MSc student at Schumacher College).
This is the story of Transition Tales, a small group within Transition Town Totnes. One of the aims of this project is to raise awareness within Primary and Secondary School children of the transition solution of community led response to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change by creating positive stories. This is done in partnership with local schools in the Totnes area, either as part of class time, or in after-school clubs. In writing up their story, I hope to highlight many successes, challenges and issues that will be of interest to those who wish to set up a Transition Tales initiative within their own Transition Town or Transition Network project.
You may remember from a previous Transition Culture post that last September Michael Portillo passed through Totnes as part of filming for his new series of ‘Great British Railway Journeys’. The resultant programme, in which he gets a ride in a biodiesel rickshaw, spends Totnes Pounds and hangs out with me in the graveyard, will be shown on this Wednesday on BBC2 at 6.30pm. Speculation is rife as to whether or not the final sequence will include Pete Ryland, founder of the Totnes Rickshaw Company and his driver for the day, telling Portillo “I’ve had far more famous people than you in the back of this rickshaw Michael”! If you miss the programme, you’ll be able to see it on BBC iPlayer for the next 7 days.
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?
A Copenhagen Christmas Present: December 15th 2009. Copenhagen.
Coca Cola ads on billboards around Copenhagen
As many have now written, the Cop15 conference, which is focussed on creating a treaty that will prevent our climate from undergoing a systems state change and re-establishing itself in a new stable state that much less conductive to human survival, seems certain to fall far short of what is needed or fail completely. In describing what the treaty has to do I am calling attention to the meta narrative in the story of these negotiations. That is we have a self referential system, our economic and politic systems which takes little account of the ecology of our planet. We think in terms that ignore the basis of life.
Transition Town Tooting recently held their fantastic ‘Foodival‘ event. Rather than me write reams about it, check out the film below which offers a great record of the day.
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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