Act: Inspiration

First results from Transition Together evaluation

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“Transition Together”, the street-by-street behaviour change programme developed by Transition Town Totnes and now being piloted in 10 other communities, has just completed analysing the data that has come back from the first 4 groups, comprising 32 households in Totnes. They have completed all 7 of the sessions set out in the workbook, and the data offers a fascinating first look at whether the process works or not. The results from the other 31 groups currently underway are expected this Autumn. Here, Fiona Ward of Transition Together shares the results that have emerged.

Peak Moment 175: Time’s up! an uncivilized solution (with transcript)

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What kind of life do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it? Keith Farnish, author of Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, sees industrial civilization as the most destructive way of living yet devised by humans. And it’s over: environmental degradation and depletion tell us it can’t continue. The system has myriad ways to make us believe we can’t live without it. But Keith believes we can – there are countless ways to move forward into contented, happy, and full lives. We can “disengage” and reconnect with the natural world, ourselves, and others.

Something told the wild geese: Feeling winter in summer

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And like the wild geese in my oldest, Eli’s favorite poem, I can feel the tang of winter coming. When you live on a farm, and when you eat with the seasons, winter is always coming in a way – I order my Thanksgiving turkey in February, order the seeds potatoes for my Chanukah latkes just a month or so after we finish eating them, thin our autumn’s apples in June, plant the beets and kale we’ll eat in December in July.

The emergence of localism

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Our global society is in crisis, and the core of the crisis seems to be about resources: resource limits, overuse and misuse of resources, resource-related conflicts, and the resulting destruction of our natural life-support systems. The crisis is at an extreme stage, as we are approaching the final hard limits of a finite earth. This is all the more frightening because our governments seem powerless to respond effectively to the crisis. We can all see the rocks ahead, and yet the crew steams straight on, as the ship-of-state carries us toward destruction.

Kentucky’s Community Farm Alliance: From growing tobacco to building the good L.I.F.E.

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In 1998, tobacco was Kentucky’s top cash crop…Major changes swept over the tobacco industry that year when it was pressured to compensate states for the public health costs associated with smoking as part of the National Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. Kentucky received a payout of $3 billion over a 25-year period…Kentucky leaders opted to allocate $1.7 billion of its $3 billion share to agricultural development, and much of it went to support small-sized farms. This was thanks to a small but highly effective grassroots organization of family farmers and their allies, the Community Farm Alliance (CFA), which helped to ensure that much of the money devoted annually to agriculture would benefit small-sized farms directly…

Local Food and Relocalisation: a Totnes case study: a section from my forthcoming thesis…

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I am hopefully now only days from handing in the PhD I have been doing, the closing stages of a gruelling marathon. I posted a couple of weeks ago the contents and the layout of the thesis, which is called Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK). I thought you might like to see a section of it, to give you a flavour. Apologies to regular readers that this is written in a far more academic style than you might be used to here, but hopefully you will find it useful and relevant. It comes from a section looking at the relocalisation of food, and draws from the different research I did.

What Now? Redux

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Back in December in blisteringly cold Copenhagen, tens of thousands of activists, government workers, lobbyists, and world leaders came together for what many hoped would be a diplomatic breakthrough. Though the weather was cold, conditions seemed ripe: Environmental groups across the globe had worked hard to generate a strong display of public will, culminating in 350.org’s Day of Action earlier in October, which CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history." Bolstered by the announcement that President Obama would attend the talks personally, hopes were high for meaningful engagement on the part of the United States after more than a decade of inaction.

A snatch of old song

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Ten days ago I spent a weekend in the northern rain teaching people how to mow grass with a scythe. I’ve been using a scythe for four or five years, though it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve got any good at it. I began using one because I wanted to cut the grass in my orchard without using smelly, noisy, petrolly power tools, and also because I had come across the great Simon Fairlie and his persuasive addiction to these ancient and mesmerising tools.