Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Over 40 people came together in Bristol on Wednesday to explore what the government’s Big Society agenda might mean for Transition initiatives. What follows is my attempt to produce a clear record of the event, the ideas and the debates, as well as the suggestions for where this might go next.
– The Rise of the New Power Co-Op Movement
– Transitioners: Leading the Way to a Smarter Future
– Skill Up, Party Down
– Transition in Scotland
– In U.S. Transition Towns, the Big Challenge is Bringing People Together
– Resilient Nonprofits
Gardens replace driveways, a chicken coop replaces a garage, and personal relationships are deepening. Meet the residents of three adjoining houses, who removed the fences and talk about shared projects (and their one auto!), meals together, ecological living, and treasured conviviality. This idea could transform urban and suburban neighborhood life anywhere.
The idea of this patterns business is that, rather than the linear process suggested by the Transition Handbook’s ‘12 Steps’, (first do this, then do that etc…) what we see actually happening in Transition initiatives in practice is something much more organic, dynamic and self-organising, arranged in different ways in different places according to circumstances, interests and what is appropriate.
What could Life After Oil possibly be like for our local area? That’s the question nearly 50 people in Los Angeles studied this past weekend at a one-day mini-conference hosted by Transition Los Angeles.
We in rich contries have almost lost the ability to supply our own needs through local manufacturing and agriculture–or even to extend the life of products through reuse, repair and repurposing. We rely on others, and on a system lubricated by cheap oil, to meet our needs as well as our wants.
The food crisis of 2008 never really ended, it was ignored and forgotten. The rich and powerful are well fed; they had no food crisis, no shortage, so in the West, it was little more than a short lived sound bite, tragic but forgettable. To the poor in the developing world, whose ability to afford food is no better now than in 2008, the hunger continues.
With small-scale forestry, subsistence farmers can unlock the potential of their otherwise unproductive, fallow land.
Berry didn’t want to talk about “the environment,” though he mentioned it; he wanted to talk about the natural environment of Kentucky, the place he’s knows best.
Given the prevalence of high quality content and thought of a few years ago, the blending and parroting of the major themes that a casual perusal of the resource/energy/finance blogosphere reveals today reminds one of the time shift in the movie Idiocracy. A psychiatrist might label this phenomenon ‘information anhedonia’. An economist would say we’ve reached ‘decreasing informational returns from the marginal blog entry’. I’ll just call it ‘clown-fest’.
Transition was no longer a local initiative or a movement — it had become a way of life. The world had become much smaller again, as globalization abruptly ended and society once again began to revolve around local communities. We had prepared. We lived in a paradise. We were small enough to be agile. We had an exceptional citizenry, with extraordinary talents, knowledge and creativity. And we had each other.
“Wouldn’t economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?”
-Dan Ariely, in Predictably Irrational (HarperCollins), p. 239.
