Transition Culture

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.

Archive for “Technology” category

Showing results 6 - 10 of 87 for the category: Technology.


17 Oct 2012

New paper identifies the networking impact of Transition Network in the community energy field

In the context of the fascinating week of posts looking discussing Transition Network over at the Social Reporters’ blog, it was fascinating to read an important new study by Gill Seyfang, Jung Jin Park and Adrian Smith from University of East Anglia about community energy.  ‘Community Energy in the UK’ is the first independent UK-wide survey of community energy projects (you can download it here).  One of the most interesting things to emerge from the paper is the role Transition Network plays in the field, in spite of being a very small organisation, and it offers some insights into why that might be.  

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28 Sep 2012

‘Alternatives to development’: an interview with Arturo Escobar

At the 2012 Degrowth conference in Venice one of the highlights for me was the talk by Arturo Escobar (my notes from which can be found here). He is the author of Encountering Development and Territories of Difference, among others.  His talk looked at how Transition might look in the context of the Global South, and held many fascinating insights.  Here is the interview I did with him, first as an audio file, and below as a transcript.

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17 Aug 2012

An interview with Jorgen Randers: ‘2052’ – “It’s the story of humanity not rising to the occasion”

Jorgen Randers is professor of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and among many other things, was coauthor of The Limits to Growth in 1972, Beyond the Limits in 1992, and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update in 2004 (you can read his full biog here).  He has recently published ‘2052: a global forecast for the next forty years‘.  You can see a film of him discussing the book at its launch here.  I had the great honour of interviewing Jorgen recently, via Skype from his study at his home in Norway.  You can hear the audio of our interview below, or read the transcript.  ‘2052’ is available here if you’re in the US, or here in the UK.

The first question I wanted to ask you is what your aim was when you sat down to write ‘2052’?

I’m 67 years old, I’ve spent 40 years of my life working in vain for sustainability and I finally decided that it would be interesting to find out whether I really needed to be continually worrying about the future as I have over the last 40 years because I have now only 20 to 25 years left to live.  I thought it would be interesting to try to find out what will actually happen over those 40 years.

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14 Jun 2012

A day at Bristol Big Green Week (with presentations by Tim Smit, Kevin McCloud and Rob Hopkins)

I spent a very enjoyable day at Bristol Green Week yesterday. Green Week is a celebration of green ideas and thinking in Bristol, which has featured a wildly eclectic mix of talks, workshops, music, comedy, films, walks and much more. I arrived midway through the week’s festivities, to participate in two events. The first was a screening of ‘In Transition 2.0’, shown as the third in a series of films under the somewhat uninspiring banner of ‘Documentary Evidence’. Apparently Monday’s had attracted 30 people, and Tuesday’s just 4, so it was suggested that I might want to temper my expectations in terms of attendance. In the end over 40 people came, and the whole thing went really well.

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22 May 2012

Randers: “Don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Discuss

I am reading Jorgen Randers’ new book ‘2052: a global forecast for the next forty years’, due for publication next month.  Imagine a ‘Limits to Growth’ for the next 40 years, a presentation of Randers’ best guess as to how the world will pan out between now and 2052.  As you can imagine, it’s not an uplifting read, but it is often illuminating, even though I disagree with some of his findings.  Surprisingly, the most challenging bit comes at the end of the book, after all the graphs and charts, and talk about 2 degrees of climate change, of our inevitable mega-urbanisation and so on.  It will hopefully prove to be the spark for a fascinating discussion here.

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