Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I have written several times here about ‘Transition Streets’, the street-by-street behaviour change model created by Transition Town Totnes which was the winner of the 2011 Ashden Award for behaviour change. I am delighted to announce today is that now Transition Streets (also known as ‘Streets-Wise’) is available for any group to run, anywhere.
I was asked this by a friend recently, and it has been stuck in my head (even though the whole idea requires an egomaniacal suspension of disbelief). "If you could sit down to dinner with the people you think see the world we’re in most clearly and spend dinner working on how to change things and be ready for a crisis, who would you invite to eat with you?" He added the caveat that I can have as many people as I want, and no, I don’t have to cook and clean up.
Ever since we first got together my husband and I have talked about how to respond to one of our key shared interests — peak oil.
In Extraenvironmentalist #51 we speak with Stephen Jenkinson about our cultural difficulty with death. Stephen draws on lessons learned from decades of working with death to describe how we can frame our civilization’s trajectory.
The wealth gap in this country is huge and growing larger. What surprises me is that we’re not looking more deeply into the issue. We don’t really understand how big the wealth gap is and what wealth inequality does to us.
“We had no idea what was going on in Chicago; were we laggards or social and environmental innovators? So we decided to find out.”
“If still more education is to save us, it would have to be education of a different kind: an education that takes us into the depth of things.” E.F. Schumacher
The three sovereign entities in the United States are the federal government, the states and indigenous tribes, but according to Bill Tripp, a member of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, many people are unaware of both the sovereign nature of tribes and the wisdom they possess when it comes to issues of climate change and natural resource management.
The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine — progressives, especially activists — to make this goal one of your priorities during this period.
My name is Charlotte and I am in Transition. Maybe I should rephrase that and say I’m in the Transition movement, or the Transition network (small n).
Kropotkin worked within the framework of 19th century natural science, but his results are just as relevant today as they were then. Moreover, the accuracy of his insights is vindicated by the latest research into complexity theory. Geoffrey West, who was a practicing particle physicist for forty years and is now distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, has achieved some stunning breakthroughs in complexity theory and the mathematical characterization of scaling of biological systems….The growth of every animal is characterized by a bounded, sigmoidal curve: growth accelerates at first, then slows down, reaching a steady state as the animal matures.
Like Heineken you might hope that the Transition Network refreshes the parts others cannot reach.
