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.
What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century? While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site. However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it). The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself. As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.
The last Transition round-up featured the film of Lee Brain’s testimony at the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel in Prince Rupert, which has already been watched nearly 45,000 times. In the last part of my interview with Lee, I wanted to know how that had come about, what had happened since, and whether the response to it had taken him by surprise.
Today we come to the last in the series of ‘A Story of Transition in 10 Objects’ films, produced by the wonderful Emilio Mula at nuproject. Thanks also to Sharpham House for letting us film there, the closest thing to the British Museum that we could find! I hope you have enjoyed them. We go out in style, presenting our final object, a bottle of beer with a tale to tell…
Last Saturday was the final day of the River Cottage/British Gas Energyshare vote, an innovative approach to raising awareness for, and supporting, community renewables. When voting closed, at 5pm, the winners were, in the large category, Hexham River Hydro, in the medium category, the Portobello and Leith community wind energy project, and in the small category, the North Devon Hospice and the Shrewsbury Hydro. Three of the four are Transition initiatives. There were also Transition groups who didn’t win, and also quite a few who didn’t make it through to the final vote (the many fantastic projects in the vote gave a sense of the huge hunger out there for community renewables). I talked to each of the 3 Transition winners, Portobello (here‘s a piece from their local paper), Shrewsbury and Tynedale about the Energyshare process, how they rustled up enough votes, how the last hours before the vote closed were spent, and how being winners makes a difference to their project. This short podcast captures their stories:
And here is the moment where Portobello and Hexham found out they had won:
Here is a guest post from Michaela, Rob & Dinky of Transition Cowbridge, telling the story of their Transition initiative’s role in fighting a proposed gas fracking site.
Thursday 20 October 2011 was a landmark day in the Vale of Glamorgan and one that will have a knock-on effect around the country and hopefully beyond. It was a day where community power helped to bring about a unanimous decision by the local county council to deny Coastal Oil & Gas the right to test for shale gas at an industrial estate on the outskirts of the village of Llandow.
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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